Out of Body coa-1

by Stella Cameron

  Who did she mean, “anyone who can harm us?”

  She wasn’t asking any questions, Marley decided. If there was any chance, she would do everything in her power to stop more carnage…and the madness. That was the duty she’d taken on from Belle.

  “Now,” Eric said. “Let me show you why you’re going to do everything you can to help us.”

  He dragged her across the dirty concrete floor to the locker in the corner of the room.

  Marley visualized the inside of the dollhouse, the pipes she had seen that would be beneath this very floor.

  All around her the walls sweated, and the ceiling. Rivulets of grimy moisture trickled down—the same as on her other visits.

  Eric hauled open the heavy locker door and pulled Marley inside after him. Icy vapor roiled around them. She glanced back and saw the other two women follow.

  Again Marley remembered the grids under the floor. Were they some sort of freezing system? Not that it mattered anymore.

  The line of white, oblong containers, like top-opening ice boxes, stretched in front of them.

  “See this?” Eric said, pointing out a red lever on a wall. “All I have to do is turn this and the air in here freezes within minutes. If you’re unfortunate enough to be locked in here, it freezes your lungs.”

  “Did you design all this?” Marley asked. “It’s brilliant.” Flattery pleased a lot of people.

  “This was done by my…my guide,” he said, the corners of his mouth jerking down.

  He threw open the first box. “They’re in order by date of death,” he said. “We’re very organized here.”

  Marley looked down on a woman she recognized without knowing why. She was older and perfectly preserved—and perfectly dead. Marley held her breath. She didn’t have time to get emotional or sick.

  The woman had been in that room where she’d seen Erin in the dream. The hat the woman had worn rested on her chest. Her head was twisted at an unnatural angle.

  “Meet Selma,” Eric said.

  Marley recoiled. “I thought Selma was your mother. I thought you were going to take me to meet her.”

  “I have,” he said and giggled like a schoolgirl. “And here’s Eustace.”

  The man had been bulky with a thick head of gray hair. His eyes were open and Marley had to look away.

  “Not our parents. That’s just a convenient story. These two used to own the house but they were empties. Made no impression on anyone, so when they disappeared no one noticed. A new family lived here instead. Us!”

  “How old are you?” Marley asked impulsively.

  “We reach our perfect age within days of our birth,” Eric said. “We never change after that. That’s how old we are.”

  This time it was Sidney who laughed. She pointed upward where Marley didn’t want to look. “You’ll like them,” she said. “You really will. Look.”

  Unwillingly, Marley followed Sidney’s pointing finger.

  “They’re next,” Sidney said. “We’re keeping them alive until they’re going to be left in the Quarter. That way they’re fresher—and they get plenty of time to consider what’s happening to them. Torture is good for the backbone, and fun to watch.”

  Eric said, “Liza had already frozen before we dropped her off for her show.” He laughed. “The police could get really curious about the condition of the body, if they’ve got enough gray cells between them to notice.”

  “Amber’s next,” Sidney said. “She won’t use me again.”

  Marley did look up then and slammed her hands over her mouth to hold in a scream. Side by side, Amber and Pearl Brite, swathed from their feet to their necks in plastic bags and suspended in harnesses, swung gently from overhead hooks. Both were gagged.

  Marley wanted to rush and get them down. Both women stared at her with terrified eyes.

  “More of the same here,” Eric said, walking beside the ice boxes and flipping open lids, waiting for Marley to draw level, and closing them again. The only male had been Eustace, the rest were young women—when they were still recognizable. Signs of the “hunger” Eric mentioned were everywhere.

  “We’ve got to go,” Sidney said. “Hurry up.”

  “Mother’s gone,” Eric said to his sister, completely confusing Marley. “She wasn’t in her body when I thought I killed her. Bummer. Now we’ll always have to be on the watch for the old bat.”

  “How could you make a mistake like that?” Sidney said.

  “You know Belle,” Eric said. “She always liked those little travels of hers. So she just traveled when I locked her in the box to suffocate.”

  “Her body—”

  “Gone,” Eric said. “I’m sure she thinks she’s very clever.”

  Eric looked at Marley with a knowing grin. “Our father isn’t human, only Belle. But she’s supposed to be dead and she doesn’t count anyway. Bolivar is our father, not our grandfather.”

  He used a heavy metal ring to pull a stone flag out of the floor. “Down,” he said, giving Marley a shove.

  She calculated her chances of disabling him and managing to deal with Sidney at the same time. She could do it, but best wait and keep looking for the best opportunity.

  Soon the four of them bent over to walk along a tunnel with gravel beneath their feet.

  Eric went ahead of Marley. As he passed, he grinned. “Don’t feel bad. We’ll make sure you come back to your friends.”

  Her skin felt several sizes too small for her body.

  “Marley?”

  She almost stopped walking. Gray’s voice came to her again. She answered. “Where are you?” and willed him to hear her. “I’m coming. Where are you?”

  “The Garden District…” She felt them separate and wanted to shout out for him to come back. They had communicated. She would keep working at it.

  “Come on,” Eric said. He was really hurrying now.

  Marley considered calling for Sykes. But if he came—and he sometimes dropped from the system—and stopped the Fourniers now they might miss finding other victims still alive. And she didn’t have Pipes’s little girl yet. Sykes was pretty cool, but she had also seen him lose it when he was really angry.

  “Gray. I’m under the Fourniers’ house in a tunnel. I think we’re walking away from the house.”

  She focused on the center of her mind, but Gray didn’t answer.

  A gust of air whipped along the tunnel into her face and she turned her head aside. The disgusting odor she’d smelled on that creature was carried on that air—coming from the direction in which they were headed.

  Pipes began to cry again.

  They reached the end and Eric said, “Keep Pipes here, Sidney. And don’t touch her.”

  He held Marley’s arm and pushed her ahead of him up several steps to a door. A small, mostly white building stood there, its door recessed. There were no windows that Marley could see.

  Eric reached past her, brought his face so close to hers, their skin touched. She shivered and he laughed—and slipped his tongue along her jaw.

  Marley straightened her back and looked straight ahead.

  He knocked on the door and a noise came from inside. One push and the door swung inward.

  Eric had to force her to keep moving. She tried to whirl around in his arms, but he had her wrapped tight. His strength was a shock. Up they went to a raised room with silk-covered divans on all sides and lush hangings—and a table like an altar on a raised area in the center. An elaborate casket stood there, large and with the front open to show black velvet inside.

  Marley stared. She saw an image hovering there, an image of the chinoiserie house. It faded, only to return with varying amounts of strength. It was like a hologram, not at all real.

  “We have work to do, you and I.”

  She stood quite still while, from behind one of the hangings, a distorted shape swathed in a hooded cloak appeared.

  “Wait outside, whelp,” it hissed at Eric who scurried from the room and shut the door.

&
nbsp; Marley’s fingers stiffened. She felt what she had been told she would if she was ever mortally threatened—but only if her death was imminent.

  This was it, then. She flexed her hands, widened her stance and allowed her entire being to come to full alert. If there was to be a fight, she must be ready, watchful, able to find the points that could disable her foe.

  “You have what’s mine,” the thing said. It pointed a long, curved talon toward the shivering image of the red house. “You have that. Now you will take me to it.”

  She stared, uncomprehending.

  “You could invade my secrecy through what you stole, and then return to it. This time you will take me there.”

  Marley knew that if she would ever consider taking this creature to Royal Street and into the place where her family was, she could not.

  “Come,” he said. “Take my hand.”

  She swallowed to stop herself from retching at the sight of the repulsive claw held out to her.

  And she didn’t move. Couldn’t move.

  “Do as you’re told,” he thundered.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can and you will. You did it when you wanted it for your own purposes, now do it for mine.”

  “I can’t, I tell you.”

  He swung toward her, grasped her wrist in cold, thorny, yellow-gray talons and pulled her closer.

  The stench weakened her knees.

  “What is it?” he said as he must have seen her expression of horror.

  “Nothing,” she choked out.

  He made a wailing noise, clutched at his body and convulsed, but gripped her arm tighter. And the cloak slipped to the floor.

  Chapter 48

  He had to get inside the Fournier house.

  A yellow sheen showed through a gap in draperies at a side window. Hunched over, Gray crept up the sloping lawn and peered in. The light came through an open door from somewhere deeper in the house. This was what he preferred. If possible he would always choose to go from dark to light areas to give his eyes time to adjust.

  The windows were the sash kind that opened from top to bottom—and they were locked, dammit.

  He grasped the top of a frame and pulled, and the entire window lifted away effortlessly.

  Gray frowned. It shouldn’t have been that easy, but he put the window aside, hauled himself up and inside the room.

  He’d been there before—on the occasion when he’d entered through the front door.

  Quickly, he crossed the room, making sure no one passing outside would see him.

  His spine tightened, not in the way it did when Marley was near, or a premonition started, but an old-fashioned sensation of being watched. He turned around slowly.

  A bamboo screen behind one of the purple chairs wobbled ever so slightly.

  Gray pulled his gun and dropped into a crouch. “Come on out,” he said quietly.

  The screen wobbled again.

  “Now!”

  A wave of sniffles erupted. Gray took a second to realize his enemy wasn’t a big, bad guy and rushed the screen. He snatched up a small girl huddled there, put a hand over her mouth—as gently as possible—and lifted her out.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re fine. Safe, honey, you’re safe. Are you Erin Dupuis?”

  Very carefully he took his hand an inch away from her face.

  “Of course I am,” she whispered with a fierce frown. “Who do you think I am?”

  Gray tried a little grin and shrugged. “Of course. I should have known.”

  Her body shook. The sharp comeback had to be a reaction to fear. The kid would do well. “Who are you?” she said. “You’re big.”

  “I’m Gray,” he said, seeing no reason to lie. “And big is good when you need to get some things done.”

  She considered that. “I can’t find my mom,” she said very quietly. “I can’t find anyone. Guess how I got out of that room?”

  “What room?”

  She tutted. “The one way upstairs where they locked me up, silly.”

  “Of course,” Gray said. “How’d you get out?”

  “Picked the lock.” She smirked a little. “Licorice taught me. He’s in the band at the Cage, but he used to help people when they got locked out of their houses.”

  Sure he did. “Good for you, kid. I want you to do exactly what I tell you. You’re going to let me put you out through the window, then you go hide behind the bushes by the gate and you just wait there. Can you do that?”

  “My mom’s here,” she said. “Somewhere.”

  “And I’m going to find her,” he told her, hoping he was right. “Now, do what I’ve told you to do—fast—so I can get on with it.”

  He lifted her, but when he went to put her through the window, she clung to his neck. Gray wasn’t used to children, but he didn’t dislike the feel of the trusting little arms. “What is it?”

  “I think they’re down in that place. In the place under the floors. I saw the stairs in the pantry.”

  He thought so, too, but reinforcement didn’t hurt. Gray hugged Erin, lifted her outside and leaned to set her on the ground. “The only people you come out of hiding for are me or the police. Got it?”

  “Got it,” she said and immediately scurried off into the darkness.

  “Gutsy kid,” he murmured and wasted no more time finding his way into the hall, behind the left staircase and along a corridor toward where he figured the kitchen must be. He didn’t hear a sound or see any evidence of another soul.

  Finally he paused and pulled out his cell phone. He couldn’t risk talking but he could text. The message he sent was to Nat Archer and it was specific enough that he knew his old friend would grind his teeth to nubs with rage. And later he, Gray, would suffer. But he had to do this his way.

  He kept moving all the way to the bottom of the steps into a concrete reinforced area camouflaged beneath the house and lawns. The silence gave him the creeps.

  Now where?

  “Go. Don’t wait. She needs you now.”

  He spun around, but didn’t see any ghostly face. What he heard was one of the whispery voices that had spoken to him in Marley’s workroom.

  “Go where?” he muttered.

  Whispers seeped in on all sides and rose to an ear-battering crescendo.

  “Speak one at a time,” he said, wincing.

  He saw the locker and ran to wrench open the door. Bright light hurt his eyes and he flinched at the sight of two bodies hanging from hooks. He stared, and saw living eyes looking back at him. As fast as he could, he cut harnesses suspending each of two women, lifted them down and tore off gags. He released them from plastic bags tied at their necks.

  “Thank you,” one of them croaked. An African-American with scratch marks on her lovely face, he recognized her as Pearl Brite.

  “I want you up those stairs and outside,” he said, taking his knife to the bonds at their wrists. “Pearl and…” He didn’t recognize the other woman.

  “Amber,” she said. “They went down there.” She pointed to a flagstone that had been removed from the floor at the far end of the room.

  “Okay,” he said. “Outside now. The police are on their way. Do not show them how to get down here. I can’t risk any slips.”

  He didn’t wait to watch them go or give more than a cursory glance at a precise row of what looked like white, top-loading ice boxes.

  The hole in the floor led to a tunnel where gravel had been spread underfoot. The tunnel only went in one direction and he ran, ignoring the sound his feet made—until Eric Fournier and Sidney came around a corner, their eyes staring. Eric dragged Pipes Dupuis behind him.

  “Get out of here,” Eric screamed. He looked wildly about and yelled, “No, no. Get down on your face and don’t move.”

  Gray looked at him steadily and broadened his stance.

  “On your face, punk,” Eric howled. “Get down.”

  Sidney flattened herself against a bricked-in wall. She breathed lo
udly through her open mouth.

  “You’re wasting my time,” Gray said.

  Eric released Pipes and fumbled with his jacket. He didn’t seem the type to have a gun but Gray wasn’t trusting that instinct.

  “Right,” he said. He gave Eric an openhanded blow to the face and caught him by the back of the collar as he went down, whimpering. “Pipes, get going. Erin’s safe.”

  “Oh, oh, no,” was the best Sidney could do as Pipes stumbled past Gray on her way out.

  Holding Eric a foot off the floor and at arm’s length, Gray spun Sidney around and picked her up the same way. He brought their heads together with a thwack and felt their bodies go limp.

  His own amazement seeped in. That kind of strength was nothing he’d ever thought of having. Dropping the unconscious brother and sister, he ran on with a vague thought for the way the window had shot from its tracks on the way in.

  Strength wasn’t something he’d ever questioned—he had it—but not like this.

  An image flashed, quickly, and was gone. The children in the foster home laughed when they were feeling bad because he, Gray, could make them laugh. The people supposedly caring for them hated it. They hurt the kids and Gray made them laugh.

  He did it by…telling them what they were thinking and being right. All these years and he hadn’t recalled that.

  And he was so strong for a little kid that the adults fought to get him on that kitchen table and tie him down before they took their knives, or whatever weapons they chose for the occasion, to a part of his body they could hide under his clothes.

  He’d reached the end of the tunnel and there were several steps up. He could see the sky far above, but at the top of the steps a white building picked up a sheen, even though he could see moss staining its walls.

  Without pausing, he reached the door and pushed gently. It swung inward slowly and he recoiled from a bestial, inhuman howling that burst over him.

  Moving as carefully as he could force himself to do, he hugged a wall and edged around until he saw the whole place. In truth he only saw Marley bent forward with an unspeakable creature attached to her back and shrieking at her.

  Long, covered with a spined yellow-gray hide that had torn free of underlying flesh in many places, the beast had its claws around Marley’s neck. The side of its belly had burst open and parts bulged through the hide.