“Hey, you! Legolas! Yeah! You! Why don’t you breed with your own kind?” A middle-aged man heckled Qyll, who ignored him. “What, you’re too good to answer me? You effing Fairy.” Qyll didn’t even tense, just kept walking, gently pulling me beside him.
There are all kinds of stories about Dark Elves being promiscuous and seductive and luring people away from their spouses or families to live out lives of hedonism in Otherwhere. Like all dumb racist rumors and stereotypes, they’re dumb and racist.
As we stepped down onto the parking lot, I was (again) distracted by the crowd. Which is why I didn’t notice the Fervor pushing through like a creepy steamroller.
Somehow they surrounded me, neatly cordoning me from everyone else, even Qyll, although we still held hands, with their bodies. The last thing I remember is a colorless face and her words, raspy and low, “He comes for you, Witch. He’s already been in your house. The sin-finder.” Then, I felt something sharp on the back of my head. Pain descended lightning-fast down my spine and spread through my cranium. The next thing I knew, my cheek was flat on the pavement. Women screamed, there were bright lights, but it all seemed very far away and through water.
After that, I had the sensation of floating and then dim coolness.
“Tessa? Can you hear me?”
I pried my eyelids open to see Qyll. “Hi, handsome,” I croaked. Pryam’s face swam into view behind him.
“Tessa,” she said loudly and slowly. “You were hit on the head with a rock. By those damn zealots.”
“Mmmmmph. I like rocks.” Everything felt swimmy and hot, then swimmy and cold. I didn’t want to move at all, my blood sluggish, like concrete.
Voices talked some more.
Somebody shined a light in my face.
Possibly, maybe, they moved me.
When I came to, I was in bed in my apartment, Dorcha next to me, hovering like a vulture. When I opened my eyes, she very seriously licked my face from chin to forehead, and then she stretched out with her back along my leg.
“Owch, you goof,” I mumbled. Qyll came in with a tray.
“Ah. You’re awake. Excellent.” His voice was soothing. “We had you checked by one of the forensics doctors at the office. You are going to be fine. No concussion, just a nasty bruise.”
“Don’t they do forensics on dead people?” I felt the lump on the side of my head.
“Here, eat this.” He set the tray down as I struggled to sit up. There was toast with peanut butter and honey, and hot tea. I nibbled on the toast.
“What happened? I’m not really… clear.”
“When we left, the Fervor took an intense interest in you. One of them brained you with a rather hefty piece of garden rock.”
“She said something to me. Something about… I don’t remember.”
“They’re not thinking rationally any longer, Tessa. I told you. It doesn’t matter. They’re all nonsense. That said, this will be investigated by the local police as assault. I don’t imagine much will come of it, seeing as though interviewing the Fervor is akin to teaching a cat to play the piano.”
I finished eating and realized I was still bone tired. Qyll was talking but I dozed. The comforter had been tucked in around me and the room quieted.
It was dark when I woke up, and my phone was ringing.
“Tessa? It’s Heather. Heather Mumford. I need to talk to you.” Her voice was high and tight, as though she was trying to sound calm but failing spectacularly.
I sat there dumbly, not quite able to get all the hamsters in my head to run together on the wheel.
“Hello?” she barked.
“I’m here. Yeah. Um… sorry. Can you come to my house?” My voice was coarse.
She agreed to arrive in an hour.
I got out of bed and saw Qyll had cleaned my apartment and done some laundry, and I was now wearing soft pajamas. The thought of my FBI partner seeing my nether regions sent a squirmy tingle up my back and a warm flush through my pink bits.
The note on the table read:
I will come to check in on you in the morn. Do rest, won’t you?―Q
Dorcha padded along behind me. “I’m just going to the bathroom, ‘k? I need to pee and get some aspirin.” She glared reproachfully at me. “Okay, I’ll leave the door open.”
As I was finishing up, there was a knock. I was beginning to really hate people knocking. “Wow, that was fast, Heather,” I muttered, pulling on a worn plaid robe.
It was Mark Tabler. He looked a little sheepish and swayed on his feet. “Hi, Tessa.”
“Hey there, Mark.”
He stood. He swayed some more. A rush of wind blew in, ruffling the bit of his dark hair that was still dry.
“I was at Dark Star with some friends, having some drinks, and I thought I’d stop by. Since you’re so close.”
Ah. This was like the in-person version of drunk-dialing.
“Did you drive?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just to the bar. I walked here, scouts honor.” He held a hand up in the scout salute and hiccupped.
“Well, come on in out of the rain.” It had begun to pour in earnest. “Okay, what are you doing here, and why do you have a big old wooden box? Gah, that thing is filthy.” He put it on the floor in the kitchen. Dorcha was busy smelling him from head to toe, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“It was by the door when I got here. Were you expecting anything?”
I couldn’t remember. “Um… I don’t think so, but… maybe.” I flipped on the kitchen light. He was wearing trendy dark jeans and a dark green sweater under a gray corduroy jacket. Between the fancy togs and the obvious product in his hair, I’d say he was coming home from a date. “So…”
“I was in the neighborhood. Saw your light on. Thought I’d stop by, maybe see if you had anything interesting going on.” His eyes were shiny with drink. “Maybe we can just talk. You have a really interesting history. I’d love to hear more about it.” He had a ridiculous goofy smile on his face.
I must have hit my head harder than I thought because this felt weird. “Look, I’ve had kind of a rough day. Some crazy Fervor chucked a rock at me, and I’m not exactly feeling really with it.”
Mark looked apologetic. “I heard there was a riot. It was on the news.” He slurred a little.
“It wasn’t a riot, exactly. More like a… kerfuffle.”
“Can I get you something to drink? Or eat?” He went to lean on the counter, but his elbow missed and he almost cracked his head on the formica.
“Steady as she blows, pardner. Come on. How about I make you some coffee?” I said. He followed me into the living room. “I have a visitor coming soon anyway.”
He looked mock-hurt. “You entertain gentleman callers besides me?”
I chuffed and set about making him the eternal elixir of sobriety. “No, Mark, you’re the only gentleman I entertain.”
“So, are you from Louisville?”
He was so genuine. Like a little nerd on a first date. Then, it dawned on me. He came over here to woo me. Put the moves on. Get some. Bow-chicka-bow-wow.
“Mark, listen.” I tried to sound very gentle. “You realize I’m almost old enough to be your mother? And you’re really sweet and all, but this?” I waved a hand in the air between us. “It’s not going to happen.”
His face turned tomato-red. “You thought I was coming on to you? Pssssssshhhhh.” He listed so far to the side, I thought he was going to fall over the couch. “Oh no. No, I mean, you’re hot and all, but no. I just thought we could be friends, professionally. Not professional friends, but I mean friends around our respective jobs, yours being a Supernormal Investigating Agent and mine being, ah, you know, supernormal blogger and reporter.”
I almost snickered. He so obviously came here thinking he was going to get his wand in my chalice. But I felt a little bad for him, and he is a pretty okay guy. I probably would have gone for him in my younger days.
“Sure, Mark. We can be friends.” I clicked on t
he TV. “I think there’s a ghost hunting show on. As your friend, I’m guessing it’s your cup of tea.”
“Har. Har.” Mark seemed a little more relaxed as he drank his coffee and we watched a show about some people investigating a haunted hotel. He pointed out all the little inconsistencies and how their equipment was really sub-par for a modern ghost hunter. On the downside, he did keep taking really long looks at my profile.
“So, really. Are you from here or what?”
I sighed. “Yep. I grew up in a house in Old Louisville. I went to Manual for high school.”
“Your parents are dead, right?”
“Listen, do you mind if we don’t talk about family?” I didn’t mean to sound as huffy as I did.
“Oh sure, sure,” he said hastily. “Ghosts. Let’s talk about ghosts. What was your first Rift experience?”
I smiled. “We had an infestation of akaname.”
“Excuse me? A what?”
“Akaname. They’re Japanese spirits that basically lick up dirt in bathrooms.”
Mark guffawed. “So you had Japanese ghosts in your dirty bathroom?”
I laughed too. “The bathroom wasn’t particularly dirty. I got up one night to, you know, go to the bathroom and I didn’t turn the light on. I was sitting there and something started licking my foot. I was mostly still asleep, right? And this thing is just… licking my foot. Felt like a big cat. So I reached down and grabbed it and turned on the light. There it was.”
Mark’s face was a mix of amusement, horror, and fascination. “That’s really disgusting. What do they look like?”
“About this big,” I held my hands about 16 inches apart. “Red skin like a lizard but blobby, not sleek. Sort of a sucker mouth with a long tongue. No eyes.”
“How’d it get there?”
“Little things like that just come on through. They’re not really anything, right? It’s easy for something that’s not really evil or really good to drift through. It’s just… supernormal. I don’t know how many dirty facilities they have in Otherwhere, so maybe it was a good career move. What was your first time?”
“My grandmother’s ghost. Wouldn’t leave her old bedroom. She didn’t know she was dead. In fact, she still might not know.”
Everybody has these stories. The Rift isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, and at first, the Others who were already here were the only ones. Then little things like the akaname, pixies, gnomes, Malakim, Bacchuses, Jezebels started sifting through. The veil is so thin here and there, I think they literally just went to sleep in Otherwhere and woke up in Earth. And some Humans did the same on the other side. Later, bigger things came through, like Vampires and the Turned, and lower-order Angels and Demons. Little by little, people realized it was less about the end of the world and more like a mass-immigration problem. And that’s how agencies like Supernormal Investigations got started.
“If you want something out of the kitchen, feel free,” I told Mark. “There’s not much, but you’re welcome to whatever is available.”
He nodded and got up. I heard him rummaging around in the cabinets and the clink of glassware. He came back with two glasses, water, and a tumbler of bourbon, which he handed to me. Man, the kid had done his homework. I set it aside for the moment.
“So, uh, what about that box in the kitchen?” He asked.
“Oh.” I got up and shuffled in to get it. It was fairly light, about the size of a bread box, and carved ornately. I brought it into the living room and put it on the coffee table.
“Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
I went to the library to get some tools. You don’t just go opening strange boxes without your salt and a good stethoscope and maybe a dagger or something.
As I dug through a trunkful of my stuff, a crash from the living room brought me short, followed by a fierce snarl from Dorcha. Grabbing up some things, I hustled back in to find Mark stumbling around the room. The big cat was balanced on the back of an armchair, poised to strike.
Up near the ceiling, on the wall, clung a gray shadow with extra fingers, very long toes, and spindly limbs. It hissed at us. There was a distinct odor of sulphur.
The box lay upended and open on the floor.
I gasped in spite of myself. “Mark, what have you done?”
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr. Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr. Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point!
From Ghostbusters, film, 1984, directed by Ivan Reitman
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ammit, Mark. Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to peek at other peoples’ birthday presents?”
The gray thing launched itself at Mark who jumped behind the couch, even as Dorcha leapt at the gray thing. Cat, man, couch, and shadow went tumbling. Something screeched.
“Dorcha! To me!” I wrestled with my salt container and a holy water bottle. “Mark, you too!” Mark crawled out from behind the couch, whimpering, his eyes huge. I couldn’t see where the spirit-thing had gone.
It literally came out of the woodwork before I got the salt circle closed. Cold bony fingers gripped my throat while feet with too many talons pushed at my chest, kind of like it was trying to yank my head off my body. My vision swam. I stared into rheumy lopsided eyes and a huge snapping mouth full of black teeth. I fell to my knees then flopped sideways to the floor, choking.
Remembering the tools I still clutched in my hands, I brought up the spray bottle and hoped to god it was set to STREAM and not OFF.
It was on stream.
The holy water laced with Elisha salt hit dead center of its nose-less, scaly face, right in the holes where a nose should have been. It reeled back, letting go of me, slapping at itself, but didn’t seem incapacitated, which meant one thing.
“It’s a Ghost, not a Demon. Ponderous.” I gasped and stood frowning at the thing as it hovered six feet in front of me, its head moving like a cobra about to strike. “How the hell did you get in here? I’ve got protective spells up!”
While my back was turned, Mark had scooted back toward the couch, messing up the salt circle.
That gave the spirit the perfect opportunity to dive into Mark’s chest. Then, everything stilled.
“Mark?” I craned my neck to see that he was still breathing shallowly.
All at once, he got up. I don’t mean he got to his feet. I mean his whole body lifted parallel to the floor, then upright, then it spun to face me, still three feet above the hardwood. His eyes had rolled back in his head.
The voice issuing from his mouth was not his. “Bad little witch,” he/it said. “It would be best if you stayed home and nursed your wounded head.”
“Who are you?” I demanded. I fixed the circle and enclosed myself and Dorcha in a protective little nook.
The Mark-thing laughed. “No one of consequence, just a lowly messenger, sent to tell you to mind your own business. You have enemies far and wide, traitorous bitch.” It hissed with relish.
My poor brain raced. What comes in a box and flies out to possess someone? A terrible riddle. I couldn’t break my salt circle until I had a plan to deal with this thing, and I couldn’t see the box well enough from where I was. Damn, damn, damn.
How was I going to get it out of Mark? Clearly, if I tried to kill it, it’d take Mark with it. I wasn’t even sure how to kill a Ghost. (Note to self: learn how to kill Ghosts should the need arise.)
I wasn’t sure if I could do an exorcism, but I sure as hell c
ouldn’t just stand around with my thumb up my ass. “Dorcha,” I said quietly. “Follow my lead.” Her long tail twitched in acknowledgement.
“What’s your name, spirit?” I called. The face hissed at me. “Speak your name.”
“Stop asking, I won’t tell,” it said through Mark’s mouth in a horrible singsong.
“Ah, well, tell me where you come from. I want to know who’s sending the order.”
As it rolled its hands over and around each other, considering my gambit, I brushed my bare foot through the salt, breaking the magic. Dorcha sprang forward in one of her typical impressive lunges and I made a break for the box.
Dorcha wrested Mark’s writhing form into the circle while the creature shrieked, holding it there with her massive jaws, and paws planted on its chest, while I poured more salt and hefted the box into the middle. We backed off as I said, “I call you, circle, now is the hour, hold this creature, with mighty power!”
The ghost screamed bloody murder, flipping upside down and every which way. “Who controls you?” I asked over its yowling.
Mark tore at his clothes, his tongue darting in and out, blank eyes wild. He crawled up my metaphysical wall, hanging like a grotesque bat. “I know not who summons me.”
Probably true. Ghosts are many things, and they are often liars. But whoever conjured this one could probably have done it without the thing knowing who did the honors. It’s certainly not unheard of.
“What’s your name?”
Ghost-Mark twisted and bucked in its salt circle prison.
Again, I hollered, “What’s your name?” Sometimes you can get a ghost to answer a question if you ask it three times. Especially, if it’s not a very smart spirit. Three truly is the magic number.
Muddy Waters (Otherwhere Book 1) Page 15