Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  Through whipping snow and the bare trees thrashing in the wind and sprawling branches of cedar and pine, red and blue spinning lights flared off the cabin's frosted windows. (“You had what's mine. Gonna have what's yours.”) My throat constricted. The first car I saw, a Ford Explorer parked asked in the middle of the road with one door cranked open to the snow, said SHERIFF across the side in big black lettering.

  THIRTEEN

  I tumbled from the car in a mad panic while it was still in motion. Stumbled, skinned my knees on the icy gravel but launched back to full-on sprint feeling no pain at all. There were too many men in my way—deputies, firemen, EMS, the siren of my brain screamed—too many obstacles to dodge. Plunging through them, their orders ignored, I pelted past the fire truck toward the porch, a quarterback with the barest of padding, clutching one arm across my bandages. Batten's bellowed command sounded miles away. My boots slid on the snow, plunging me to the ground again. I rolled once and vaulted to my feet.

  I couldn't breathe. The world spun and I rocketed through it. A deputy with a roll of that damn yellow tape. Someone shouting about a civilian. I ducked a swinging arm, propelled into an EMS guy, put my shoulder in him, bashing him into the wall. Steel clattered, rubber tubing snake-coiled like spilled entrails, packs of gauze fluttered madly to the floor. The hallway swam. I threw my gloved hands and caught a wall to slide-run along it while my vision slid sideways. There was a gurney half-in half-out of my office. My voice sounded impossibly small, as I called out Harry's name over and over.

  Another medic knelt in front of my kitchen table. A strange man sat there before him, a dark-haired doppelganger of Richard Belzer whose face didn't compute. Lingering in the threshold of the pantry, Harry stood in morning dress: dove grey flannel trousers, white shirt and a red apron, grey felt spats over his patent Oxfords. His ankles were crossed casually and his face was calm, but one of his suspenders had fallen off his shoulder and he didn't seem to notice. His hair stuck up at the front. I took two running steps towards him and he seized me by the biceps, holding me at arm's length.

  Choked with relief, no one else mattering, I reached out to touch him, to check him: face, chest, shoulders, intact, uninjured. I patted him until he shook me.

  “Stop,” he said. “Settle down. You're going to injure yourself.”

  “You're alive! What happened? What…who?” I couldn't see everything in the kitchen at once or get my breath. Harry took my elbow and wheeled me into the bedroom like you'd take aside a misbehaving child, smiling an apology to the injured stranger at my kitchen table as he shut the bedroom door.

  “Do sit. Let me see your bandages.”

  “Harry, please.” I sat obediently. “You're okay, right?”

  “I smell blood. You've gone and buggered something up. What have you done, here?” He knelt before the bed, his eyes shuttered. “May I have my face back? I would appreciate it if you would please stop pawing me.”

  The collective emotions in the house from so many people on alert made my throat squeeze, and my usually limp empathic powers surged. My stomach did a sluggish twist like an old-fashioned wringer washer.

  “Someone's hurt.” My brain reported Chapel's hurt, but that didn't make sense, was obviously wrong, so I ignored it.

  “Deputy Dunnachie was bitten by a necrophile beetle, but he'll be off to the hospital directly for antivenom and a round of IV-antibiotics.”

  Harry read my wordless confusion loud and clear, but was in no hurry to explain. He yanked at the heels of my boots.

  “But necro-beetles only show up for dead things,” I said, stupidly. “You weren't at rest with the local cops here, right?”

  “You trod snow and slush into my kitchen,” he informed me coolly. “This rug shall need washing, as well.” My socks came off next, and my toes curled from the chill touch of his fingers. “Clearly I should not have let Agent Batten pack your clothing. These boots are wholly unsuitable to the weather. They are dress boots, not meant for—”

  “Holy rolling shitballs, Batface, just spill it!” I exploded.

  His gaze crept up to mine. Under his curved and thrice-pierced brow, I watched the unhurried, unnerving liquid-mercury shift as his irises bled to platinum around pinprick black pupils. I was more than a little surprised to find this display was still capable of silencing me after all these years. I squelched a shudder.

  “Okay, revenant, I'm suitably intimidated.” I hurried him on with hand motions. “Come on.”

  “When you are calm,” he promised.

  “I am calm, see?” I said, breathing deliberately slow to show him. Funny thing, it convinced me too. I wasn't sure whether it was his solid presence, or the hushed familiarity of my bedroom, or the measured breathing, but it was better. My hammering heart slowed, the room stopped buzzing, sounds started to filter back in as adrenalin fled. I realized that under the collective murmur of male voices and the scuffle-thud of big boots on my weathered linoleum floors, something was playing on the CD player on the kitchen counter. A real big band. Someone crooning, the song I knew but the smooth voice one I didn't recognize.

  “I'm better. What beetle? What happened? You're sure you're not hurt?”

  “One question at a time please,” he sang. “Now, are you going to vomit?”

  I blinked, not understanding. “Why would I…” Then I thought about it, shaking badly, my gut in knots. Now that he mentioned it, I might just. Swallowing hard, I slowed my breathing further through pursed lips, nice and deep. “I don't think so. But answers would help.”

  “When you are truly calm,” he repeated tolerantly. “And I have made perfectly sure that you've not cocked up your stitches. The abdomen is fine. Let me check your lower back. Something is bleeding.”

  “Probably it's just old blood on the bandage.”

  “Please.” He sounded offended. “One smells nothing like the other.” When he finished his inspection, he nodded once and shuffled two knee-steps to Carrie's old hand-me-down cedar dresser to rummage. He fished out my softest angora socks and came back.

  “It is just weeping, it should stop. The music is Michael Bublé doing ‘I've Got You Under My Skin’. What do you think?” He went to grab my ankle.

  “I think I can put on my own damn socks.”

  He laid them across my lap. “By all means.”

  I drew my knee up and bent over. The staples in my stomach yanked and I let out a hiss. I wasn't the only one in pain; in the kitchen, someone (I assumed it was Dunnachie) groaned loudly and then threw up, hopefully in the sink. Harry started to hum along with the song, tapping his fingers on his knee, watching my progress with an astute lift of eyebrows.

  “Michael Bublé, hunh? He's good.” I tried again and failed. “Uh, can you gimme a hand?”

  “How inconsiderate of me not to have offered, my darling.” He placed one of my feet on his bent knee and worked the sock on. “You owe Agent Chapel an apology; you have cut him to the quick.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  Harry opened his mouth and then shut it again like a trap. Then he said, “Only, your ridiculous banshee hollering frightened him. He is one who is not accustomed to being so badly startled out of his emotional restraint. He must be growing attached to you.”

  My companion allowed himself a private self-satisfied smile and I wondered what the hell it meant.

  “I didn't mean to be overdramatic,” I said. “I thought you were dust.”

  “If you'd kept a calm head and thought about it, you would have felt me in here, safe and sound and entertained by all the action.”

  Entertained? “Well, I'm glad my shooting, my stalker and my stab wounds are as much fun for you as they've been for me, Lord Dreppenstedt. I dig when we can share stuff, ya know?”

  “Oh, MJ, I am hardly the heartless cad you take me for.” His chuckle turned into a frown that matched mine. “You can feel that, my love? That I am teasing you?”

  I shook my head. “I can't feel anything right now. Or,
it's more like I can feel a jumble of everything, but no one stronger than another. I'm not sure there's anything I'm not feeling, but no, I can't focus on you. Guess I'm too wired.”

  “Wired or not, you should still be able to filter them out and focus on me,” he said sternly. “We are inexorably linked by our Bond. Beloved, I have my hands on your bare skin.” He demonstrated by moving his hand to my cheek, cupping my chin and stroking one thumb along my jaw to the length of my throat. If he could have avoided stroking atop my jugular, he would have, but his hand moved without his permission and he was forced to swallow hard. “I can feel your distress. Can you not sense what I am feeling?”

  “No. But I think it's normal for me to be a bit scrambled, Harry. We wouldn't know, because last time I was this traumatized you were in Portland and I was in Buffalo.” He flinched, and I hurried to explain. “What I mean is, we couldn't have experienced this kind of disconnect due to stress before. We're just noticing it now because we're together.”

  He didn't look at all mollified by that. “No, I was correct when I presumed that your half of our Bond is damaged. We must remedy this.”

  “After you tell me what happened?” I pressed.

  He gave me an impatient flutter of sandy lashes. “The sheriff and his somber chief deputy accepted my invitation to tea. I sent your agents away on chauffeur duty.”

  “That was bonehead-stupid.”

  “I was bored stiff by the agents’ company. Despite what your badge bunny hormones may mislead you to believe, officers of the law are dreadfully dull. Why, even your much-ballyhooed hunter induced yawns. I am afraid his reputation may, in fact, be based on rumor and innuendo,” he said innocently.

  I chewed back an angry accusation: he'd been hoping someone would challenge him. Batten hadn't lived up to Harry's expectations, I guess. Neither had the local cops.

  “We were having a pleasant chat when the mail truck arrived. Deputy Dunnachie asked if I cared to pause our question-and-answer period so I might fetch the mail. I explained that I rarely went out during the afternoon. Deputy Dunnachie wondered aloud, with a marked degree of audacity, if I was indeed capable of venturing out of doors during the afternoon. Naturally, I was inclined to demonstrate.”

  “Naturally,” I deadpanned.

  “We went out together, and while I waited under the shelter of the weeping cedar by the end of the drive, Deputy Dunnachie went to the fence to fetch the mail.”

  “And then of course…” I felt my forehead pinch. “There were corpse beetles in my mailbox?”

  Harry smiled, but it was unpleasant; I braced for it even as he hesitated. “I expect the beetles were attracted to the severed human head secreted within.”

  I stared until my eyes felt dry. Then I remembered to blink. Harry seemed perfectly content to wait while the gears in my skull ground to a halt and caught once again. “A head.”

  “A head, Dearheart.”

  “Like, a skull? A dry, dug-up, formerly gross but now completely clean and polished…no? How about a plaster cast? A medical school learning tool skull? That kind of head?” Harry was shaking his head slowly back and forth. “So an actual…with flesh and hair and…brains and… I should sit down.”

  “You are sitting down, my love.”

  “Oh, good. I'll have less distance to fall when I pass out. Whose head is it?” Don't say Kristin Davis. Don't say Kristin Davis.

  “That which at one time belonged to a young lady. It may possibly be the one your FBI gents are missing.”

  “Why my mailbox?” I cried. Unless Davis’ murderer was Sherlock, and she wanted to congratulate my narrowly escaping death by delivering hacked up body parts. I stood. “I guess they need my help.”

  His lips crooked into a half-smile and he made a soothing noise with them, part way between a shush and a cluck. “In your current mental condition that is neither sensible nor prudent.”

  “Mental condition!” I huffed, but it was sort of silly to argue since I'd just thrown a major snit-fit in front of twenty or so strangers. “Did you see it?”

  “But of course. I rushed forward to help the deputy and…” He displayed his hand, upon which a big red welt was swelling between thumb and forefinger. “I was forced to kill the poor, faultless creatures.”

  “You rushed into the sun?” I grabbed for his hand and he dropped it out of my reach. “They bit you. You're lucky they didn't get to an orifice, or you'd be short a few million brain cells.”

  “It is of no consequence, as I explained to the medics. You know I am neither vulnerable to crypt plague nor to the venom in their bite.” He shrugged with a lopsided, self-deprecating smile. “I feel far worse for the beetles. We disturbed them from their feast.”

  Feast. Blerg. “What about the head?”

  “The head has been left in situ, right where the deputy discovered it.”

  “Crammed atop my Christmas cards?”

  “Who sends a witch Christmas cards?” Harry cocked his head in consideration. “Perhaps the head was an early holiday gift?”

  “Drooling semi-digested grey matter on my gas bill and attracting brain-eating zombie beetles, some gift.” I wondered how much the average flamethrower cost, and if I could find one on EBay. “You know what follows necrophila noveboracensis, Harry, if they don't clear them all out before the adults lay their larvae.” The larvae of the necrophile beetle had only one known natural predator: spitting carrion spiders. “Scytodes rugulosum are the rabbits of the spider world. We'll have eight million of the little fuckers before you know it.”

  “I do so enjoy when you teach me lessons I learned centuries before your birth. It is indescribably endearing.”

  “Can the sarcasm. Once they get in, it's hell trying to clear them out. I'll have to re-caulk around all the windows to make sure they don't sneak inside and make a big ole web in your casket.”

  “Leave it all to the professionals, dearest philomel.” He put his hands on me, to ease me back to sitting. I fought it for a moment. His hands insisted.

  “Philo-what?”

  “You tried the forensic work and decided it was a one-time thing. Furthermore, no one is asking for your assist—”

  “Baranuik, I need you,” Batten called from the kitchen.

  Harry's lips tightened into a line. “Shruff and cinders, how I detest that man. Have I mentioned?”

  “I'll let you eat him later.”

  His eyes flashed. “Promise?”

  “Nah. But I will let you tell him about the spiders.” I grinned. “He's phobic.”

  “If you are prepared to dally with him, be off then. Your reckless, self-punishing determination to be close to that rodgering ne'er do well is most unfortunate. Let it be said, lest you've forgotten.” He pointed at the bedroom door, the back of which was decorated with a poster of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's profile against a backdrop of the Starship Enterprise. “That man makes you miserable more often than not.”

  “That's a terrible thing to say about Patrick Stewart,” I chided, laying a hand on Harry's cheek. I stroked him there, where his smooth cheek dotted with the barest of stubble around his dimple. It was a literary myth that a revenant's hair no longer grew. As long as they were well-fed, it was all systems a-go in many ways. Harry shaved every single evening. He swore he only used his straight-edge, but had a not-so-secret habit of swiping my Gillette Venus razors and apricot-scented shave gel. My eyes were drawn almost helplessly, just for a minute, to the forbidden curve of his lips.

  “Baranuik!” Batten barked again. I saw temptation flash across my companion's face like the warning flare of heat lightning.

  “Don't do it, Dreppenstedt,” I cautioned. “Whatever you're about to say, just don't.”

  “Would it kill him, then, to think the two of us were having a congenial personal reunion?”

  “If ‘congenial personal reunion’ means screwing, we don't. And even if we did, he might wonder why that occurred at the same time as the discovery of a severed head.” I felt my
eyebrows pucker together. “Hacked-up body parts should be a definite turn-off for any couple, Harry.”

  “I am already the penultimate evil in his books,” Harry said without expression. “Malevolence embodied, sin personified. It is perfectly likely that I am a suspect in this crime, and can do no worse in his eyes. I expect that Agent Batten will never think a fraction more highly of me, no matter how I attempt to redeem myself, therefore I do not intend to waste any concern as to what impression I make with that particular gent.”

  It was a sad but realistic assessment; Batten would be hard pressed to see Harry as anything but a fiend.

  “So you're just going to be yourself and if Batten doesn't like it he can go choke on a cockroach?”

  “Or something ever so slightly more delicately phrased.” Harry assented with the barest of nods. Then attentively: “Is Agent Batten truly afraid of spiders?”

  I winked at my Cold Company and whisked open the bedroom door.

  FOURTEEN

  The kitchen had emptied out. Something in the way Batten stood in the epicenter of the room, hip cocked, legs firmly planted, said he didn't like calling on me, or needing me, or needing anyone else for that matter. Tension quivered along the solid line of his shoulders, and his forearms, crossed over his chest, bulged like they were chiseled from rock. He was dying to act, needed to act, but had no one yet to stake. His kit was propped open on my table, exposing his weapons brazenly like a male stripper flashes cock for dollars. Rowan wood, hand carved, laced the inside of the lid. Four green bottles of Brut cologne stamped with a black cross atop red wax seals were strapped deep inside and I understood in a rush: Batten didn't wear watered-down cologne… he wore holy water that he just happened to keep in old Brut bottles. When he glared at me, it was clear he didn't want to ask for my help. Which was great, because I didn't particularly wanna give him any.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.