by A. J. Aalto
“One expects that you should.” He slid the gloves onto my hands one at a time then reached up to tuck hair away from my temple. “I suggest a haircut, and you make an appointment with Sweeny Todd.”
“Oh God, my hair!” I had forgotten completely. Batten hadn't said a thing about it. Neither had the sheriff. “Bad enough I'm stuck in this horrid hospital gown. What does it look like?”
“It does nothing to hide that the chill affects your nipples,” he said frowningly. “Did you not notice the hunter's iniquitous stare? Apparently discretion is a foreign notion to the scoundrel.”
“Harry,” I wailed. “My hair!”
“At least they washed the blood out of it, that looked perfectly frightful. I have seen soldiers in the trenches along the Swiss Frontier with the tops of their heads blown clean off who had less blood in their hair. Of course, you are such a fair and flaxen blonde…”
“Harry!” I slapped my hands to my head, feeling around. “What does it look like?!”
“Quite…” He wrinkled his nose. “Punk rock. If you had a stronger face, you could pull it off.” He scanned my head, disapproval playing across his tight lips as he tapped them with one forefinger. “No, upon consideration, I'm afraid you simply do not have the cheekbones for it. You have been eating far too many biscuits; it has softened the line of your jaw.” He reached out and chucked my chin with a cool finger. I swatted him away.
“Knock that off.”
“I know you prefer the truth.”
“Not the whole truth!” I tugged edges of my bangs down to peer up around my eyebrows at the jagged clumps. “It's that short?”
“Oh, ‘tis gone, love. You look like the young lady who sings that song you like, the one with the demonic clowns in the video? Pink?”
I stared at him with growing horror. “Sherlock gave me a faux-hawk?”
“I shouldn't like to call it that.” Harry cocked his head, peering at my skull. “Rather, it appears as though you have, perched atop your crown, an albino hedgehog afflicted with severe jaundice. As I have repeatedly advised, were you to buy shampoo of a better quality, the color would not be so dreadfully brassy. Furthermore, I fear it is time to have your highlights refreshed.”
I exhaled hard, slumping back into the pillows. My defeat was complete, a real trouncing, though I couldn't tell you who'd done more damage, Sherlock, or Harry and his nitpicking. “Sonnuva twatwaffle.”
“Always a lady,” Harry noted with a wry patience. “If you gel it down so it is not spiking up all over your head, you could hope to look like Twiggy. Only, it is pretty uneven on this side. I shall make you a proper hair appointment with Clarice for a fortnight this Friday, cut and color?”
“Tomorrow,” I corrected. “As soon as I leave, I'm fixing this.”
“You are not leaving tomorrow.” He chuckled disdainfully. “You have had your viscera stapled. I would wager you cannot walk the measure of the king's own arm without folding like a bad hand.”
“You always say, ‘Keep calm and carry on’. That's what I'll do.”
“It does not apply in the face of grievous injury. You're dreadfully compromised, my love.”
I stared at him knowingly. “You can't be alone in the cabin, Harry.”
“I shall be hosting your good man, Agent Chapel, indefinitely.”
“Which means Batten will be there too, because there's no way he'd trust you alone with Chapel. Batten thinks you're the frigid cross between the boogeyman and a man-eating lion.”
Harry smiled fiercely with pleasure, took a long moment to lick his teeth suggestively, teasing with the tip of his tongue the spot behind his canines where his fangs were retracted.
I shook my head. “It's your brilliant idea to be alone with two men without feeding for days on end?”
He nodded, becoming serious. “I have discussed it with Agent Chapel, and he has agreed to stand in as DaySitter while he is at the house, just,” He silenced my open-mouthed squawk of objection with a hand, “in the guardian sense: guns and brute strength and the like.”
I tried to picture impossibly tall, nerdy Gary Chapel being brutish and strong, and ended up with a mental image of him whapping necrophile beetles with his keyboard, whirling his mouse above-head like a Scottish mace. He must have passed FBI training courses and at one time been somewhat capable, right? Maybe he still was. Maybe he had kickass hidden skills. Maybe he was secretly a superhero or a ninja. My eyes accidentally rolled so far back that I could practically see my optic nerves.
Harry assured me, “I rather fancy a nice long nap. Six, perhaps eight days. Hopefully the criminal stench of your hunter's drug store cologne will not keep me alert.”
I rolled my eyes. “You need a big feed before ‘napping’, which is an asinine thing to call it by the way.”
“What expression do you prefer?”
“Don't sugar coat, Harry. You're talking about dry hypothermia.”
“A perfectly ghastly term, not to mention medically inaccurate.”
“I'm not afraid to say the words. If you're going to spend the next week in wraith-state, you need a full belly.”
“How attentive of you, my pet; rest assured I have three bags of o-negative in the boathouse freezer and vow I shall drain each of them before I go to casket. Now, keep still a moment.” He produced a fingertip, upon which a pale blue bead of nectar, from a tiny poke in his skin, glimmered.
While he slipped his hand under my gown, under the bandage, and dabbed at the stapled wounds, I kept still and did a mental count of the stock in the freezer: steaks, ground beef, chicken drumsticks, a shrimp ring, my sister Carrie's homemade raspberry freezer jam… I didn't think we had blood, but maybe he'd been stockpiling for just such an occasion.
“You're sure, Harry?” I said uncertainly, wincing when he rubbed his numbing blood along a sore spot. “Chapel's been told about Ajax? And the bugs?”
Harry flashed his deep single dimple; that crater, in combination with the cute divot in his chin, totally blew any chance he had of looking fierce. Good thing he could usually keep a straight face when it was time to intimidate.
“Such a fuss you make,” he said, removing his healing fingers.
I patted his cheek with my gloved hand. “Fine. Go home to your new manpanions.”
He regarded me suspiciously. “That was too easy.”
“The last time I was away from home, you baked forty-three batches of Snickerdoodles in a nervous fit. I'm assuming I'll come home in a few days to find my Kermit the Frog cookie jar packed to the brim with macaroons.”
We had made certain concessions over the years, Harry and me. He didn't smoke in the living room and I didn't pester him to give up tobacco. I didn't sing Monty Python songs off-key in the bathtub anymore, and he entertained me tub-side by crooning lounge-singer love songs in deep baritone. I'd stopped fighting him on the issue of dancing lessons. I let him swing me around the living room and show me how to use my hips to follow his in stride. He baked cookies he couldn't eat, and every now and then I drank his favorite absinth cocktails or brandy in my espresso, so he could enjoy getting tipsy during his feed. I gave up on vocalizing my desire to have sex with him, and he kept his vintage bondage collection tucked out of sight in the cellar. Our life together worked. For two people so radically different, it seemed like life should be more difficult than it was; when it was just him and me, everything was peachy.
Harry was watching emotions cross my face. He sat and let them shower him in turn without seeking them more ardently with preternatural probing. His eyes were a steady, reassuring mortal grey, darker tonight, similar in shade to his cashmere scarf and glossy with the same sheen. I was so content to have him nearby, I could have ignored my wounds completely. It might have had something to do with the drugs. I should have expected him to pick up on that.
“What sort of medication did you say they gave you?”
“I didn't.” I crunched ice between my molars. “Probably you can't get any.”
“I've recovered your Beretta.”
“From the Buick? Are you out of your undead skull? Did you bring my gun here?”
He waved that away. “Guns and tranquilizers are not a wise pairing.”
“Better than guns and this espresso you brought me,” I suggested. “I'm going to be twitchy all night. You can stay, right?”
“Alas, a nurse fast approaches,” he confided, wiggling his eyebrows. “Her hips working under her uniform with the allure of fecundity.”
“Fecundity. Barf.” I grinned. Harry was an ass man.
“No doubt she means to remind me that visiting hours are long gone. I should be getting home to our fine, feathered roost and our nice…” A flash of teeth. “Warm-bodied guests.”
“Harry!” I said warningly.
His face was all innocence, eyes wide and glittering with humor. “Angelcakes?”
“Batten has a hundred and five black tattoos over his heart, one for every revenant he's dusted since he was a zitty preteen twerp riding around on the back of his grandfather's dirt bike. Don't you think he daydreams you're number one-oh-six?”
Harry's laugh was merry, but there was a dark, cunning light in his eyes. “No doubt, my pet.”
“You don't actually trust him?”
“I am hardly so imprudent. However, I do very much trust your Agent Chapel and his ability to manage their affairs, both personal and professional.”
“You trust Chapel with your life?”
“As should you, my cherub. Agent Chapel is a formidable ally who keeps us secure inside the scope of his good graces.” My Cold Company stood. “Are you reconciled at last to be an active accomplice in Agent Batten's case?”
“Accomplice sounds shifty,” I groused. “I'm not reconciled to working with him. But I'll find Sherlock, and she better hope Batten finds her before I do. He won't hoof a woman in the taco. I will.”
He asked me. “I hardly think it is necessary to get your hands dirty, my doe, or your hooves as the case may be.” He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “If you would only permit me—”
“Down, boy,” I said, though the Dark Lady knew I was sorely tempted to take him up on it, to set him loose on the world, to let Colorado become a rancorous immortal's hunting ground.
Harry acquiesced with his usual gentility, performing for me another exquisite bow, deep and sweeping, his coat dusting the floor. “As my lady wishes. I bid you good night, my only love. I hope you will be home to me soon.”
I hoped so too. I watched him sway, pacing gracefully despite clunky motorcycle boots, across the glass-front of the ward. I watched nurses cast worried or perplexed glances at his back. The way they parted out of his path reminded me of spooked horses shuffling, restless to get going. The nurse with the matronly hips shivered. She caught the gaze of another nurse and they grimaced at one another in wordless understanding, shoulders up, a full-body yikes.
Though the room eventually warmed by a few degrees in Harry's absence, my heart did the opposite. The days were always long and much too quiet without him.
The nights here would be worse.
TWELVE
Five days. Five days without my espresso machine. Five days without my own roomy, soft bed. Five days without my Cold Company singing a capella in the kitchen with his iPod ear buds in, while I played Name That Tune. Over the past few decades he'd developed vocal magic, what we preternatural biologists called audiomancy. The revenant could adjust the tone of his voice to mimic just about any male singer, and if he turned it on you in just the right way, it tickled down your spine like a fistful of peacock feathers. Sometimes it sounded as though he had two distinct voices, a subtle harmony coming from deep in the throat, a trick of the old ones, like throwing his voice or sending it curling through my belly.
I wondered what treats he'd downloaded since I'd been gone. It could be anything; his taste in music ranged from Mozart to Metallica to Eminem. I secretly preferred when he did John Denver. I'd fallen asleep many a night to Back Home Again as he lingered in the next room, the sound of him shuffling books on our shelves accompanying his soft humming. Soon, I promised myself. Hey it's good to be back home again…
Every hour on the hour, I unofficially cursed Danika Sherlock's name, not with spells or hexes but with venomous thoughts. I knew better than to speak serious Words against her, but boy did I hope for some nasty cosmic justice to come her way, and may the universe have mercy on the fool who stood between my fist and her mouth. Impotent fantasies of revenge kept me awake long into the nights, and dreaming of the comforts of home and my Cold Company helped me finally get some sleep. I was jerked awake routinely by nightmares—flashing blades, wet fleshy slaps (“Don't you die yet, Marnie—don't you die on me yet, bitch!”) the stench, her vomit and my blood, old pennies and sour milk. Urgency, the urgency—gun, I have to get the—fumbling and failing, and then her hate-filled face coming at mine again and again in half-shadow.
I wanted strong espresso and homemade cookies warm from the oven, with a cube of soft caramel in the center the way Harry made them. I also wanted Danika Sherlock to choke on a sock full of razor blades while plunging headlong off a cliff into a vast ocean of hydrochloric acid. I wasn't going to get everything I wanted, but the cookies were a distinct possibility.
I was being released today. The phone message the nurse had relayed promised my ride was on its way. The staples had to stay in my stomach for a while yet, and I'd have to come back to have them taken out. As luck would have it, I'd be awake for that procedure. It's nice to have something fun to look forward to. The stitches would dissolve, the surgeon said, and I had to take showers instead of baths for a while. That was gonna suck. Lifting my leg to swing it into the old claw foot tub was going to hurt, just like a million little motions I made hurt now, thanks to injuries in mini-muscles I didn't even have names for. Harry's revenant blood had done wonders to speed my healing, but basically, in the necessary lull between painkillers, everything hurt, including just laying here.
It was chilly in the hospital, and the sheets they provided were light, crisp white things topped with scant blankets of bleached cotton. I hadn't slept well. I missed my cabin with its woodstove cranking out heat, big woolly Afghans heavily draped on my bed, fat cozy rag rugs strewn across the wood floors, throw pillows smelling of Harry's cologne that rubbed off the back of his neck. I missed the creak of his footstep up the pantry stairs when he woke for the evening, and the warm spill of contentment I felt when he stirred from his rest, and his weight shifting the deep couch cushions beside me.
Soon, I promised myself again. After I picked Sherlock's teeth out of my knuckles and the case was settled, I wasn't going to leave my home again, I resolved. Not for a long time, not for any reason. I was going to hole-up like a hermit ‘til the cookies ran out.
Around noon I saw movement across the big windows. Though I didn't look closely (one of the nurses had scored me an old celebrity rag-mag from the nursing station and thankfully I wasn't in it), I got the impression of wide shoulders under nylon jackets, office blues, no-nonsense strides. Only monsters, cops and well-armed thugs have that confident, top-of-the-food-chain strut. My ride was here.
Where Chapel's shoes made a stiff, business-like pace into the room that looked like it hurt when he moved, Batten's made more of an easy, soft-soled swagger. It's not like Batten's pants didn't fit, or his balls were too big (not the way I remembered them). It was the walk he did when he was pleased with something. The Blue Sense had been on overdrive all day, so it was no surprise that I felt Chapel's relief even before he came in the room. I felt nothing from Batten, but I suspected he might feel the same way about my release.
I, on the other hand, was anything but pleased to see two of them.
I slid off the bed. “You're both here. It's broad daylight. Where's Harry?”
“Home.” Batten hadn't shaved and his fingers played with the strangely demonic scruff on his chin. “Sheriff Hood dropped by with some questions and offer
ed to stay with him.”
Panic shot through my veins.
“You brainless twats!” I cried, grabbing the duffel bag from Chapel's hand. “You left Harry alone with a stranger? Was he resting?”
“Wide awake. He made scones.” Batten didn't bother hiding a smirk. Apparently Harry's baking was funny. “Lemon poppy seed.”
“They're not alone together, Marnie,” Chapel soothed. His hand fluttered up to smooth his necktie but it wasn't there. I'd never seen Chapel without one. “Hood brought his chief deputy.”
“How did either of you make it into the FBI when you're so obviously stupid?” I demanded, unzipping the bag vigorously and madly shaking the contents onto the bed. “I hate you both. I really, truly hate you both.”
“I see they've lightened up on your pain killers,” Batten noted.
“Plunge backward up your own ass, fucknugget!” I barked, fishing in the pile for matching socks, tossing bras and panties aside in a flurry. “At least I've met Hood. I don't even know this other clown!”
“Neil Dunnachie was a decorated homicide detective before coming out to the Lambert County Sheriff's Department last year, a twenty-year veteran of the Denver PD,” Chapel supplied.
“As if his damn name does me any good at this point,” I spat. “He could be a lunatic. He could be a pervert. How do I know I can trust him?”
“They were both former homicide detectives,” Batten said with the kind of patience one reserves for small children, senile seniors and mental patients. “They're not going to kill anybody.”
“You're right. Probably they're not going to kill a person.” I pointed at him with a pair of pink cotton underpants, flapping them at him. “What about a revenant?”
Batten blinked impassively.
“I understand your concern, Marnie,” Chapel said.
“Do you?” I demanded. “Really? Do you know that of the three so-called humanists who staked Danika's companion, two were cops? And not Podunk hotshots making their own rules in the backwoods, either. They were NYPD. They broke into her Manhattan apartment and staked him in broad daylight, for no reason other than he was a revenant. They thought they were doing the right thing. I bet they still think they did the right thing. In their minds, they killed a monster. But instead, they created one.”