by Daniel Marks
“That was …,” he began, mouth hanging open. Still staring.
“Awesome?” Logan offered.
“Skillful. And/or brilliant?” Quentin shined his fist against his chest.
Luisa clucked her tongue and began to wander off toward the stamp shop.
Nick shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “Wait. What was that?” he shouted. “What the hell was all that?”
“Oh, Christ,” Velvet said. “You act like you’ve never seen flies dispatch a ghost before.”
She peeked back into the shop and, hearing the stirrings of Madame Despot’s recovery—mostly grunts and gurgles and moans—shut the door as quietly as she could into its buckled, broken frame.
Chapter 9
Velvet took in the street with a dull interest. It was even more abandoned than when they’d crossed over, deader than a skinhead at a 50 Cent show. No cabs in sight, no bums snoring off cheap wine, and thankfully no more banshees swiping souls.
It was a good night in that respect.
Nick trudged along behind her, nearly clipping her heels, yammering and looking unreasonably hot, which should have been much more annoying. But Velvet was tired and more than a little high from the beating they’d delivered to the villain du jour to worry about the hint of attraction creeping through her brain.
“Wow,” he said, his tone far less broody and angst-filled than a newly dead kid had any right to be. “That was mad crazy.”
“Right?” Luisa nodded, grinning.
“That, son,” Quentin bragged, slapping the new guy on the back, “is what separates the undertakers from the regular run-of-the-mill body thieves.” He winked at Velvet.
“Yeah, yeah,” Velvet turned and strode off ahead of the group.
“Mad crazy,” Nick mumbled again. “Where we headed?”
“Home, I guess,” Velvet said. “After a while.”
“Home?” Nick seemed to think about that. “Like the place you’re all haunting or something?”
Velvet stopped dead and spun on him. “Don’t you ever say that!” She pressed her hand to the very edge of the borrowed body’s skin. The nurse’s hand would pass right through Nick, but hers wouldn’t. She gave him a forceful shove, and he toppled over onto his ass, astonished.
“I wouldn’t do something like that ever,” she continued. The lie fell so easily off her tongue, it surprised her, but she had to make her point. “None of us would. That’s station rule. No haunting ever.”
“Well, what were you just doing in there?” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the shop. “That in there with Madame Despot?”
“That!” She got up in his face. “That was our assignment. That was an operation. That … was us saving your lousy butt.” She pivoted and stomped off.
She heard a defeated sigh, but before long the boy was scrambling up behind her again.
“Hey. How could I know?”
Velvet shot him a cruel glowering stare, before realizing he was absolutely right. She hated to admit it, but she was being a bitch again … unintentionally. She must have been tired. Exhausted, even.
“I mean, I’m sorry,” he said finally, those sad eyes doing the puppy dog thing.
She slowed down, her face softening a bit. “Fine. You’re new. It’s okay. It can’t have been easy being trapped in that crystal ball for however long you’ve been in there. I’m the one who should be sorry for yelling at you.” She gave him a reassuring smile and patted him on the shoulder … or right about where his shoulder would have been had he not been see-through, you understand.
“So why …,” he began another question.
Maybe the guy just had a naturally curious personality—those could keep a person talking long after they’d found out something really horrible—or maybe he just liked to hear himself speak. There were certainly plenty of boys who wouldn’t shut up, despite being told directly to do so. The boy’s eyes were still saucers, wild and darting from one image to the next and then back to the nurse’s face as though she were the only real thing. Shock. Had to be.
Whatever. It was getting on her nerves.
“No more questions,” she snapped.
The clinic loomed ahead of them, two stories of stark white brick, with windows as glassy-eyed as her fifty-seventh soul extraction. An ambulance idled on the curb, its back doors open and its tailpipe blowing smoke rings that clung to the chilly air like fat sticky doughnuts. A young woman in scrubs hugged herself, outside the swinging doors, rubbing heat into her arms and peering out into the silent night. As they approached, she squinted.
“Is that you, Antoinette?” the girl ventured.
“Sure is, hon!” Velvet waved at the girl and spun back toward Nick to hiss, “Stay put.”
She jogged the short distance, clogs clopping on the concrete, and snatched the nurse’s pack of cigarettes from her uniform’s front pocket. Velvet shook a cigarette up through the opening and fished it out with her lips. Then she lit it and inhaled deeply. Despite never having picked up a cigarette while she was alive—the very thought of it had grossed her out—when it was someone else’s lungs, and in particular someone who smoked, Velvet couldn’t resist taking a drag. She supposed it was like eating. Souls were deprived of that, too.
She tilted her head back and exhaled.
“You don’t have time for a smoke, Toni!” An accusation worked its way into the girl’s expression. “Delores …” The girl’s eyes skittered toward the crack between the doors as though an ogre were about to burst through and devour them at any moment. “Delores is pissed. Seriously. She’s about to crap crepe-soled shoes or something. I’d get back in there if I were you. And I’d have a good excuse when I did.”
Velvet raised the nurse’s eyebrow at the girl and took another drag. She couldn’t contain a slight giggle when the young nurse spun on her heels and marched back inside—probably to alert the aforementioned ogre, Delores, of Nurse Antoinette’s clear disdain for clinic politics.
“Enough of this bullshit,” Velvet muttered.
Across the street, four ghosts waited not so patiently, two expressing a pretty clear annoyance. Logan wore a sneer, shaking his hand as though throwing dice … or, rather, Velvet hoped that’s what he was indicating. Knowing him, he was late for some late-night alley gambling. Luisa, meanwhile, was likely ready to get back to her reading. She tapped her foot so brutally that Velvet could actually hear the blatant accusation in the tip-tapping of her shoes, the sound echoing across the street like exclamation marks. Quentin stood apart from the others, aloofly staring at the moon, likely deep in impure thoughts about Shandie and her Afro Puffs of Wonderment. But it was Nick who commanded Velvet’s attention.
He stood halfway across the street, stone-still and staring at her intently, a glowing statue of Adonis in a basketball tank and long satiny shorts as though he were just coming from a game. There was something about his face, intense and open at the same time, his eyes focused on her every movement.
She felt the unwelcome niggling of attraction rise, and she became instantly furious.
Nick undoubtedly had the same effect on all the girls in his life.
Velvet wasn’t having it. She didn’t have time for anything more than a casual admiration. She could look, but she wouldn’t touch. Distractions were the enemy.
Nick was the enemy.
Besides, she was busy unloading a body. Dispossessing without getting the person into too much trouble wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Antoinette had played such an invaluable role in saving purgatory tonight, and she didn’t even know it.
So selfless. So innocent.
A tickle traveled up the back of the body’s throat, followed by a terrible niggling thought.
So possibly cancerous.
Velvet’s borrowed lungs heaved just then, sputtering phlegm up into the woman’s mouth. She spat and tamped out the cigarette on the white wall, leaving a slash of black and a shower of glowing embers. She crushed the nearly full pack in her fist
as another cough rattled through the body with such force, Velvet felt herself slipping out, her head nodding past the mask of the nurse’s face. When it did, she saw Nick approaching, head tilted to the side and a look of redundant confusion on his face. Trying to figure out what exactly he was looking at.
He’d know soon enough, she thought.
The swinging clinic doors banged open, and a very sturdy nurse emerged, her hands planted on her hips and more hair on her upper lip than on her thinning scalp. Her eyes were ringed red. Her cracked lips twisted in a grimace. Delores, undoubtedly.
“Antoinette!” she hollered.
Velvet eased the woman’s body backward toward the wall, sinking into a squat. Uncoiling her thoughts from around the mental box containing Antoinette’s consciousness, she stepped away from the possession. As she did, the nurse slid down the wall and onto her butt with a thud. The woman groaned and sputtered little saliva bubbles, her limbs slack and askew. Generally and obviously incapacitated.
“Toni!” Delores swept in beside the prone form of her employee and snatched up her wrist, trying for a pulse. She patted the woman on the cheek rapidly, but Antoinette was, as so often was the case, completely unconscious.
A medical emergency was like a get-out-of-jail-free card. And Delores, despite her villainous, dramatic entrance, had crumbled into maternal fear for her worker.
Well done, Velvet thought.
She crossed to the center of the road, Nick’s eyes following her every movement. And she realized he was truly seeing her for the first time. He shook his head, the realization parsing itself in small bits rather than all at once—
Velvet was a body thief like the spirit who had been inside Madame Despot … only cuter, obviously—how could she not be, in the black retro dress she wore as a ghost, shredded satin skirt floating in tatters around her favorite pair of Fluevogs.
“You’re a—you’re a …,” he stuttered.
“Yep. You got it.”
He sucked back the ridiculous question and thrust out his hand.
Velvet glanced down and, finally, gripped his hand with her much more petite fingers.
“Big mitts,” she said as they shook.
“I’m Nick,” he said. “Nick Russell.”
“Yeah. I know.” She raised an eyebrow suspiciously and strode past him. “We’ve met. I was just engineering the nurse over there when we did.” She pointed back toward the commotion in front of the clinic and began to walk away.
He trotted up behind her, matched her pace. “Engineered? Between what I just saw and seeing those flies take out that smoke thing, I’m thinking that’s kinda like a possession. Emily Rose or some shit?”
She shook her head. “Totally. I’m your friendly neighborhood demon, Nick. Except I don’t think anyone would call me friendly, and if my head spins around and the green spew starts, you should be scared.”
“No doubt.” He chuckled nervously. “But I figure you wouldn’t have come to save me if you meant to mess me up.”
She looked at him and laughed, a sweet chirping sound she didn’t expect to come from her own mouth. It was mildly embarrassing. It probably would have caused her to blush, if Velvet didn’t thoroughly expect to dump this guy off at the station and never see him again. “No. I guess not. But there’s still time for me to change my mind.”
The boy grimaced.
“Settle down there, Nick. I’m just kidding. I’m not going to go all Regan on you. I’m just an average everyday body thief. Well …” She reconsidered, glancing toward Quentin. His smirk was back. “Above average.”
“Body thief, huh? So what’s that make the ghost kids? Luisa?”
“She’s an old soul,” Velvet cut in. The girl was stomping off ahead of them, just turning the corner toward the blue car, the cat, and the mound of sodden newspaper. “Older than either of us, just not … grown up. Souls get kind of stuck, so she still looks like a kid. Watch how you talk to her; she’ll cut you.”
He nodded stoically. “Got it. Watch out for the little one. She’s stabby.”
Velvet couldn’t conceal her smile. “Riiight,” she said. “We got a lot to cover tonight before we can get home.”
“So you’ve said before. And I’m really hoping it means you’re getting me back to midtown.”
Midtown? Manhattan? The banshee had wrangled Nick a long way from New York. Velvet wondered if there was something special about the boy. Why had he been chosen? Or had his imprisonment been merely a convenience?
“Manhattan?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, suddenly excited and talking with his hands. “Me and my mom got this boxy midtown apartment. Rackety radiator, too hot in the summer, not hot enough in the winter, and the pipes groan like a submarine in those World War II movies, like any minute, the walls are gonna explode and drown us in rusty water. My mom insists it’s full of ‘vitamins.’ Or used to …” His voice trailed off, eyes darting to the transparency of his fingers.
“Yeah, about that?” Velvet reached out and pushed his hand back down to his side. “Home is a little more complicated now. Where we’re going is a million miles away from here, or just over there.” She pointed at a bench bolted into a foundation of cement.
Nick shook his head.
Velvet tossed her hair over her shoulder. “It’s really hard to explain. It’s just easier to show you.”
Nick planted his feet and refused to move another inch. “Maybe I don’t want to go! Maybe I want to get back to New York and be done with all this weird shit!”
Velvet didn’t turn back to look at him. Just stood there, glaring, waiting for him to finish with his tantrum.
“We all want to go home, Nick. Each and every one of us.” She glanced back over her shoulder, attempting to look sympathetic—and for all she knew, maybe she’d nailed it. “But we’re not going to. There’s no point.”
She drifted toward him. Her face softened, her posture slouched, aggressiveness melting away. “You’re not going home, either,” she said. “Even if you did, your mom wouldn’t be able to see you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
He shook his head.
She shrugged and threw up her hands. “You’re dead.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, and turned to leave.
“I’m not kidding, Nick,” she shouted after him. “I’m totally for real here. Welcome to the afterlife. How else do you explain being see-through? This doesn’t happen because you sweat too much or lose too much weight or something. This shit is permanent.”
He stopped still, and she watched as his gaze dropped away and down to his hands, past them. Through them. The flesh of his fingers and palms were reduced to a translucent glaze thinner than the sugary shimmer on a doughnut.
“Wait. Wait. Wait,” he repeated, backing away from her, from the moment, from everything.
Velvet folded her arms across her chest. It was bound to happen. “Freak-out in three, two …”
She couldn’t even hear her own voice finish the phrase. Nick was too busy freaking out.
He panted and mumbled. Velvet wasn’t even sure he meant her to hear it. She reached out and took his hand, dragging him around the corner while he continued to deny the obvious.
“Is this it?” Luisa called from where she stood next to the blue car, her finger pointing down at a crack in the sidewalk.
Velvet nodded and twisted to watch Nick deteriorate into the inevitable mass of quivering boy tears. It was never pretty, but when crying started, Velvet felt the curious need to suppress it, to tamp down his pain. Maybe it was her having a nervous breakdown, she thought.
Nick shook with such ferocity, he’d begun to blur, and Velvet sensed the very real possibility that he was going to bolt down the street and away from them, try to get back to his mother.
She had to put a stop to that. Her team had done their job. She wasn’t going to subject them to another manhunt, not at that late hour.
That
would just be cruel.
She reached out and grabbed him by the arm, pushing him backward toward a bench. He pinwheeled a moment as his expectation that he’d land in the seat, rather than move through it and onto the ground, slipped away and landed with a thud.
He peered up from the ground, his expression pained. Velvet flopped onto the wooden slats of the bench, expertly, crossing her legs and fixing the boy with a cold gaze.
“Let’s make this quick,” she said.
“Wha-what?”
“This!” She waved her arms about her, flailing. “The big crazy! We’ve got things to do and places to go. So you’re going to have to run through your grief stages pretty quick. Have you managed to burn through denial? That’s a tough one.”
Nick stared back at her blankly.
“Listen. You have every reason to be feeling all those weird emotions about dying, but really, we can cut to the chase. Grief is for the survivors, the family. What you need to accept is, you’ve just learned a very valuable truth. You’re the only one you know who’s clued in to the secret.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick lifted himself up onto his elbows.
“It’s real, obviously. There’s life after death.”
Nick shook his head, as thought trying to shake the words out of his skull. “You say it like you just told me aliens exist, like it makes it any better.”
“Yeah, but wait; it does. Because it’s just like aliens. Like what if a flying saucer landed right over there and no one saw it but us? You’d know it was real. You’d accept it.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you have to accept this. Check it out. You know how when someone dies, people are all sad and stuff?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, why are they sad?”
His face scrunched up quizzically and then brightened. “Because they won’t be able to see their loved ones again. They’ll miss them.”
“No!” she shouted, suddenly standing and pacing like a detective delivering the evidence to a room full of suspects. “It’s because they have to rely on faith that they will see that person again in heaven or …” Her eyes drifted toward the sky. “Wherever. When someone close to you dies, your faith is at its shakiest. Even if you’re an atheist.”