I was juggling shopping bags as I let myself into the vestibule, and my mind was on my mailbox—specifically, whether I wanted to put all my bags down to unlock it, or make an extra trip up and down the stairs—when I realized I wasn’t alone.
On the landing above me, my upstairs neighbor was fumbling at my door, and not for the first time. They don’t call him Drunk Tony for nothing. “Wrong door,” I called out. “Keep going.”
He spun around to face me, and two things occurred to me. One, he was a lot quicker on his feet than usual. And two…it wasn’t Tony.
Luckily I was only a few steps up the stairwell when he came bounding down two by two. He gave me a hard shove as he passed, and I managed to pivot so I smacked the railing instead of toppling over backward. Shopping bags dropped and split, and my treasures spilled down the grimy steps. The outer door banged open, and the guy was gone before I even registered what was happening. He’d knocked the wind out of me, but I was more startled than scared.
At least until I got a look at my shop’s front door. The paint around the strike plate was so dinged and chipped, I’d bet that asshole must’ve been hacking away at it for a good long while. What if I’d been home while it happened? What if he’d sunk his rusty screwdriver into more than just my woodwork? As I gathered up my stuff, noting several of my skin care items had ruptured or shattered, I saw my hands were shaking. More from adrenaline than fear, but even so. It hardly seemed fair. Couldn’t I catch a break on my own damn birthday?
Thankfully, the inside of the store looked just like I’d left it, and my cashbox was intact. Hadn’t bothered making a deposit since there wasn’t all that much money on the premises—though it would’ve really stung to lose what little was there, so I should probably reconsider the frequency of my drop-offs. Once I turned on every last one of my lights and triple-checked that the guy didn’t have an accomplice lurking among my shelves, I locked back up and headed downstairs to check on my friend.
“You’re worried about me?” Lydia said. “Aww, that’s sweet.” She hustled me into her tiny kitchen, sat me down, and poured me a shot of birthday cake vodka. How apropos. “You must’ve been targeted because you were closed on an oddball day, so he figured nobody was home.” We downed our vanilla fire water, then she said, “What’s with that face, you’re surprised someone tried to rob you? Stop clutching your pearls, it comes with the territory.”
“It’s not that. Not…exactly.” I considered refusing the second shot. Lydia poured. I drank. Then I steeled myself and asked, “Is it me? I’m a good person. Fair. Truthful. But then I draw someone like that into my life and I can’t help but wonder…”
“Stop dwelling on it. You’re fine. Besides, what do I always tell you? It ain’t over till it’s over. It’s useless to take one event in isolation and try to assign it some grand meaning. Everything turns out for the best if you wait long enough to take stock. Everything’s evolving.”
Maybe so. But as much as I thought Julia the Racist Astrologer was full of shit, her predictions of hardship and failure had left a pall on my mood. “What’s your take on astrology?”
“It’s more interesting than the advice columns these days, and just about as useful. Why?”
“Apparently my Saturn is fucked.”
“And you wish it was Uranus?” Lydia barked out a laugh and slopped some vodka over the side of her glass, and I couldn’t help but smile….even if I was annoyed that I hadn’t been the one to come up with that remark and throw it in Julia’s face. “Look, kiddo, everyone’s got a Saturn in their chart. Not just you. So tell me what’s really bugging you.”
That I was worried the whole father-figure business might hold a grain of truth? Obviously I’d showed up for my special day with one parent, not two. It didn’t take a fifth-level fraudster to surmise something was up with my dad. “An ugly blast from the past is all, coupled with some asshole fucking up my door.”
“And both of them have run their course. Sayonara, good riddance, and here’s to a fresh start.”
We chatted long into the night, the two of us. While doctors and priests are ethically bound to keep their clients’ confidence, psychics have no such moral obligation. Lydia distracted me with juicy stories until the backs of my teeth could no longer stand her cloying vodka, and I headed upstairs to hit the sack. But all the vanilla booze in the world couldn’t dull the sight of my door. The Sultry Amethyst might’ve been a ripoff at forty bucks a gallon, but it always reminded me of painting the stairwell with Maxine. And now the purple doorframe looked like someone had taken an axe to it. A very dull axe.
Was my Saturn to blame?
I pulled up Twitter on my phone and shot a few messages over to Constantine in hopes of him setting me straight, but he must’ve been busy doing whatever it was he did that earned him those fat wads of cash. The last thing I remembered was snuggling up in my luxurious cashmere robe, swiping idly through Tanngo and enjoying my final smoke of the day…and then bolting awake to the stink of burning hair. How I’d managed to nod off, I’ll never know. Either I was worn out from a long day of running around, or Lydia’s awful booze packed one hell of a punch. Whatever the reason, I’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and christened my new robe with a giant scorch mark, right down the front.
“Fuckin’-A, Saturn. What’ve I ever done to you?”
Chapter 45
It’s been suggested that one way of encouraging yourself to stay on the smoke-free bandwagon is to buy yourself a little treat with the money you’ve saved. A nearby thrift store carried a fascinating array of vintage odds and ends, many of which were in the perfect price range. But I stopped bringing home knick-knacks after I found myself flinging wax fruit against the wall.
According to the various websites I consulted, it would take around three months for my brain to adjust to quitting. By the sultry height of August, I was seriously doubting that one more month could possibly make me feel like a human being again. Then I remembered how I’d nearly marked my three decades on the planet with human fireworks, and I shoved a piece of gum in my mouth and soldiered on.
When customers got on my very last nerve, I was inclined to chalk it up to nicotine withdrawal. Mostly, anyhow. There was a creep who rubbed me seriously wrong—and it had absolutely nothing to do with my shifting brain chemistry. Lately, his visits had become more and more frequent.
He said his name was Nietzsche, though I suspected if I ever got a look at his drivers license, it wouldn’t be anything nearly so cool. He paid with cash. And the things he bought formed a pattern that made me uneasy.
In this business, customers expect you to carry goods you might not be too keen on. Spells and charms aimed at changing the behavior of others are coercive, but I stock them. I draw the line at anything that’s just plain evil, though. Satanic stuff, curses, hexes, that kind of crap has no place in my store. Unfortunately, many of my herbs, stones and candles are simply tools, and I have no control over what they’re used for.
That day, Nietzsche had on his typical outfit of jeans, a stained T-shirt, and a secondhand suit jacket that was stiff, dirty, and frayed around the cuffs. His hair was so neglected it was hanging in mats, and the razor bumps on his neck looked red and inflamed, like he’d shaved dry with a cheap plastic razor. The mere sight of him creeping up and down my aisles made me itch for a cigarette, and I debated whether or not I should offer to help him find anything. I decided against it. He’d scoured every square inch of my retail space umpteen times. He probably knew my inventory better than I did. He’d been lurking around for nearly half an hour by the time he finally ponied up to the register with his typical purchase: charcoal, noxious weeds, and a handful of black candles. He smacked the candles down on the plexi, and said, “Don’t you have any more?”
I cut my eyes to the ginormous rack of brightly colored wax five feet away.
“I need black,” he said. Which I knew. Nietzsche burned through so many black candles, his shrine must look like a tar pit. And
while there was indeed more stock in my office, I had no desire to go fetch it.
I shrugged. “Oh well.”
“But I need them. So you should make sure you have enough.”
“Is that so?”
“When you claim yourself to be a vendor of ritual goods, you create a social contract where you’re obligated to provide what you’ve advertised.”
Oh, please. “Speaking of advertisements,” I nodded toward my Lucky Love and Money Mojo display. “Maybe it’s time to try another tack. Lose the doom and gloom. There’s enough bad juju floating around without you constantly adding to it.”
“Bad is nothing more than a value judgement, and I don’t subscribe to such pedestrian ideas.”
I’m not sure what compelled me to be argumentative and finally call him out on what he was buying—nicotine withdrawal, or the fact that I was fed up with pretending that I didn’t know he was using things he’d bought from me to feed his ugly delusions. I snatched the black candles off my countertop and dropped them on the floor behind the register. “I’m not nearly as high-brow in my philosophies, but it’s true, I am the vendor. It’s my store. And I’m perfectly within my rights to tell you to take your black magic somewhere else.”
Unfortunately, my verbal smackdown didn’t have quite the effect I’d hoped it might. If my gut was anything to go by, Nietzsche was enjoying the conflict. No, even worse…he was Vibing on it.
“The Dark Arts are notoriously misunderstood,” he said, but I was only listening to his words with a fragment of my attention. Because I felt it before I saw it—he wasn’t reaching into his coat for a greasy wad of singles like he had every other time we’d transacted business.
He was going for a knife.
Not only did I feel his intention before the knife even cleared his pocket, but I felt the blade itself. Not cold metal, but warm, from nestling against his heart. And more than that, I felt his sickening anticipation, like the horrible glee Ralph had reveled in when he hammered me with the numbing condom—except this stick-in-the-guts would end with me bleeding out on the floor. There was only one word for it, and I couldn’t help but say it out loud. “Evil.”
“I don’t believe in evil,” Nietzsche philosophized, “not like Christians believe in evil. But there’s still darkness in the world. The type of actions that cling to your soul like a disease. Like a stain.” He turned to my latest newsletter display, where an absurd male underwear model stood with hips thrust forward, and wended the knife’s point down the model’s chest as if he was doodling on it with a marker. And he was getting aroused from the anticipation of doing the same to me. “It’s money—the stuff is corrupted. You shouldn’t be handling all that money, you’re too pure. I know. I’ve been watching you.” He dragged the blade across the countertop, trailing a delicate scratch behind it, then lifted it to point at my register. “Give it to me and I’ll get rid of it for you.”
I couldn’t pop open that register fast enough. Because if I was lucky, that was all he really wanted—the cash. But even as I handed over every last dollar in my drawer, I felt his energy intensify. “Wait a second,” he said, and I knew that no matter how much money I handed over, it wouldn’t have been enough. “You’re not holding out on me, are you?”
“No.” Damn it. My voice sounded so small.
“Don’t you know that lying blackens your soul? When you speak an untruth, the one you hurt the most is yourself.”
Take the money and go, you fucker. Take the fucking money.
I didn’t just think the words, I willed them at him with every fiber of my being. Too bad I wasn’t more of an empath—they bounced right off him with no effect at all. In fact, maybe they’d even made it worse, because after I thought them, he looked me right in the eye, smiled, and said, “Do you suck cock? You look like you’d be good at it.”
My thoughts ran a million miles an hour. Just blow him and get it over with, it’s not as if you’ve never had a dick in your mouth. But even forcing me to my knees would’ve been too vanilla for him, when what he really wanted was to see me bleed. “You’d hold back on that too,” he said, “wouldn’t you? You think you’re better than me?”
Even as I realized Nietzsche was ramping up to cut me open, I saw we weren’t the only ones in the store. Before my life could flash before my eyes, Victor Bayne slipped out neatly from behind a shelf, wrenched Nietzsche’s arm behind his back, and shoved him to the ground. He belatedly shouted, “Police—drop your weapon,” after the knife went skittering across the floor. It was over in half a second, and even though I’d been treated to a front row view, I could hardly make sense of what I’d seen. Vic was a total badass. He’d smacked down Nietzsche like he knew kung fu—movie kung fu. I’d suspect it wasn’t really Vic and just some bizarre pre-death hallucination if not for the look on his face, the same petulant scowl he gives me whenever I offer him a hand-job, a gemstone cleanse or a veggie burger.
He trussed up Nietzsche with a plastic tie while I stood there clutching the counter with my vision tunneling, then turned to me and demanded, “Are you okay? Did this asshole hurt you?”
If I wasn’t practically pissing myself, I would’ve made a remark about being surprised he was so incredibly butch. But I could only nod, since I didn’t trust my voice not to shake.
Jacob was right downstairs, and Lisa too, and they charged on up to make sure the situation was handled. Which was good, because my knees were so wobbly I was reeling like I’d just raided Lydia’s cake vodka stash. Vic was wearing jeans, Lisa was in a sundress and flip flops, and Jacob had on cargo shorts and a summery T-shirt. But the way they spoke, the way they stood—and particularly the way their eyes went flinty—all three of them looked like nothing other than cops.
True fear is a powerful thing. Not sure if I’d ever felt it. Not like I currently did, with a metallic taste at the back of my mouth and my pulse whooshing in my ears. And after the initial spike faded and my thoughts felt more like my thoughts, a cascade of disturbing things occurred to me. What if Vic hadn’t been halfway up the stairs already—would Nietzsche have been satisfied with stabbing me dead, or would hunks of my body have ended up in that freak’s black candle rituals? Who would find the aftermath, one of my cop friends, or my downstairs neighbor…who was nowhere near as tough as she made herself out to be. And worst of all, if I was murdered, what would it do to Maxine?
I’d known damn well that guy wasn’t right in the head. My gut had been pretty emphatic about it long before he perved out. I hadn’t listened. Just like I hadn’t listened about Ralph.
Whatever that government test said about my lack of empathic ability was bullshit. My days of talking myself out of my feelings were through.
Chapter 46
While I might’ve been single, I certainly wasn’t alone. Over the course of the next few days, my cop friends tag-teamed each other to make sure I didn’t end up as a statistic on the police blotter. I spent most of my time with Lisa. She was between jobs, between homes, and between men—and even worse, something freaky had happened to her out at PsyTrain that either she couldn’t quite articulate or she simply wanted to forget. Looking after me gave her something to do so she didn’t have to look too hard at her own affairs, but who was I to judge? Sometimes when your life goes from bad to worse, the only thing left to do is keep busy.
The store was open, but no customers graced the aisles. It wasn’t time yet to update my in-house marketing, but the Lucky Love and Money Mojo had gone straight in the trash once I realized how much it reminded me of Nietzsche. Fuck love and money. My next promo would be The Power of Protection.
Lisa was happy to help me put together the next collage. Give her a big stack of work and she’ll pick through it for hours. We’d gathered all the abandoned sales flyers from the vestibule and spread them across the countertop. I’d told her to cut out every human body part she could find, and her stack of heads and limbs was growing. My initial idea was to show psychic protection as a circle of arms. But n
ow it just looked like a bloodless dismemberment.
“You don’t have to babysit,” I told her. “I mean, so long as that creep isn’t running around loose.”
She checked with her sí-no in a pause so brief I wouldn’t have noticed it had I not known the source of her info. “He’s still in lockup. And you’d be fine if I left. But maybe I’m the one who wants the company.”
We were two peas in a pod, Lisa and me. I’d ignored the clear psychic message that my assailant was a twisted psycho. She’d known that fondling the shaman’s smudge stick was a phenomenally bad idea, and she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.
She sighed. “After everything that happened, sometimes I actually miss him. That’s messed up…right?”
“Certain people burrow under your skin and stay there like a stubborn case of scabies. Now and then I still catch myself daydreaming about the one who got away.”
“Jacob? No. Then who?”
“An old colleague who never gave me so much as a passing grope. Is forbidden fruit as sweet as it’s cracked up to be, or am I just too contrary to take anyone’s advice—including my own?”
The front door opened and the two of us snapped to—my attention went to a newly-installed fisheye mirror, Lisa’s to her sí-no—but it wasn’t another murderer coming to get me, or even a customer interrupting our chat. It was none other than Jacob.
Or, should I say Detective Marks? He was all business, from his suit, to his body language, to the psychic barriers at full tilt. This was the side of himself he didn’t like me to see, and frankly, shielding me from it hadn’t been a bad idea. If this aspect of him had been the one to greet me at the coffee shop, I would’ve turned around and walked right back out the door. Even if I hadn’t yet learned to listen to my gut.
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