by A. J. Aalto
I stopped on the porch, looking down the length of the drive at the mailbox. It had always seemed charming before, listing slightly off center, dented in the back as though the mailman woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and punched into it. Now it seemed like a time bomb, ticking off the seconds before it went off. I felt Harry's cool presence return, an icy ward that had the opposite effect on my shoulders than the cold air did. I felt the muscles melt, and knew Harry was pushing his feelings of comfort and confidence through the Bond at me, either to buck me up for the job ahead, or for his own agenda. I couldn't tell which.
“Better to think of it as an it and not a she,” Batten advised at my shoulder. It wasn't the first time he'd given me that advice, I thought, rather miserably. It might not be the last, and the trepidation of seeing a wasted life again hung its hooks in my heart, dragging me down.
“If Ms. Sherlock is out there, you had best not stand so close to my DaySitter, Agent Batten,” Harry said from the safety of the shaded hallway, and touched the door further closed, so that it blocked more of the late afternoon sun.
“Let her see,” Batten growled. “I don't give a shit what she wants. Or what you want, vampire.”
It dawned on me that Batten was playing pretty fast and loose with what was still my life. I wasn't about to play worm on a hook. I'd seen Danika Sherlock's snarling hate enough for one lifetime.
“I give a shit,” I hissed at him. “Let's not jerk her around more than we need to. Stand away from me, Agent Batten. And when I go to the mailbox, you stay here.”
He crammed his hands in his pockets and shuffled aside with an impatient sigh. I took one step forward and my heel hit ice. It slid out from me too fast, but Harry had me under the armpits before I knew what had happened.
Apparently Batten hadn't seen him move; he grunted with surprise. I straightened while Harry melted back into the hallway, and adjusted my coat with a proud jerk. My companion gave the Fed a sweeping frown of disgust, as if he'd expected Batten's reflexes to be better.
Rather than sort out their brewing tiff, I focused on the mailbox. Avoiding all the eyes that followed my determined approach, wishing I'd spruced myself up a bit so at least I'd have the armor of desirability on my side to offset the shitstorm of doubt. Bravely to the police do-not-cross tape I marched. Aspare yellow vein in the otherwise colorless yard, fluttering in the cold wind around the ramshackle fence by the mailbox. Psychically pummeled by their qualms, buffeted by their distaste, I pulled up my chin, alert so as not to trip over my feet, not wanting to glance around and see derisive sneers or rolling eyes or silent laughter. There were few things I find more degrading than the blatant disbelief of men I admire: cops, firemen, medics, they're all heroes to me, doing brave work. I know they don't feel the same about me, and sometimes it made me wonder why I bothered. Even if I was successful with this effort, I couldn't prove what I saw. No one had to believe me.
Oh well, screw it. I'd do this, and we'd solve the case, and everyone would go away, right? Riiight. I could keep telling myself that. But I was sorely convinced that Batten was determined to be a part of my life, even as he railed against the science of psi, even as he disapproved of my living situation and my Talents. Even if he thought my having a gun was amusing at best and tragedy-in-waiting at worst.
I unclenched my teeth long enough to mutter under my breath, “Jerk”, putting them all out of my mind. Nothing mattered now but the head in my mailbox, its original owner, and the person who put it there; this was my task. Finding out what it felt like to be decapitated ranked real low on my list of Things to Do, but maybe nailing Sherlock's ass would balance it out? I ducked under the tape line with my shoulders scrinched up around my neck in anticipation.
Maybe it was the cold that took my breath away. By the time I rounded the box I could barely draw air. My other artsy sister, Claire, had painted for Carrie morning glory flowers creeping up the sides of the box, heather-blue cupped blossoms open to greet the sun. The lid was down. The cheerful bright red flag was up. Delivery! it proclaimed cheerily. The thought of trying to cleanse the death out of this box seemed about as possible as reaching up and caressing the moon's big round bottom. I'd need bleach and lavender, a full roll of paper towels, rubber gloves, a HAZMAT suit, and in the end a new mailbox, because there was just no way I'd ever be able to make it feel clean. Maybe I should consider a tidy slot in my storm door…so Danika can slip severed body parts directly into the hallway? Okay, maybe not.
For the second time today I took off my gloves and bared the fragile pale skin of my naked hand. It hurt, so unused to the fresh winter air was my flesh. I didn't let it show on my face. I glanced over the box to the porch. Batten stood with his arms crossed, his legs in a wide authoritative stance, the one that made his tight butt look fucking marvelous if memory served. He was surveying the men to make sure no one interfered. His jaw was doing its clench-unclench routine. I tried to mimic his confident body language, setting my shoulders back. Harry was barely visible over his shoulder, safely tucked in the dim hallway, one pale slender hand holding the door ajar. I could tell by the half turn of Batten's face that the hunter had the revenant guardedly locked in his peripheral vision.
The heavy weight of the Sun God's protective ward vibrated down my arm, strengthening my resolve. I made an experimental poke of the metal lid.
Images flashed immediately: the mailman's bare hand. Calluses, big knuckles, early rheumatoid pain. Attempting a psychic link to him as a warm up exercise, I caught a whiff of the pot he'd smoked with his wife that morning during breakfast of eggs and cheap side bacon. How he disliked cheap bacon streaked with too much fat and wished she'd buy the better, meatier stuff. Even when he gave her extra money for groceries she'd still buy the cheap stuff, but it was a minor thing. He was a mellow man who picked his battles prudently. He was a man who loved his wife, despite or even because of her thriftiness, and all her other faults. His name was Jacob. No one called him Jake, just Jacob.
I tried once more, rubbing the metal and closing my eyes. I saw him again, a slightly portly man in his early forties, those thick calluses from playing bass guitar, his habit of masturbating during his long drive out to Shaw's Fist. He'd pull off on one of the quieter roads and have what he considered a little “stress-busting tug”. Sometimes he didn't—couldn't really—wash his hands afterward. I felt myself blushing but didn't break the link. Inside the box, there were a lot worse things than a microscopic hint of residual semen from an otherwise happily-married man.
Thinking about that made the head a bit less ghastly when I finally opened the lid. Because out there, not everyone was off-their-tits crazy. Sometimes they were only mildly loopy. Maybe life with people in it wasn't all that bad. Maybe knowing something more about them made tolerating them easier, not harder. It was something I'd never considered, but the fact remained I was staring at this poor girl's head, and knowing the mailman masturbated in his truck so he wouldn't make his wife feel like she wasn't doing enough to please him made looking at the dead girl somehow less horrid. I couldn't have explained it. But there it was, and I was calm enough to notice details without barfing on my Keds in front of the cops. Always a plus.
The hair was brunette with soft natural hints of auburn. Her mouth was closed, which was good. I'd been to a crime scene where one of Jeremiah Prost's victims had died with a scream frozen on his jaw, his toddler mouth open in a silent wail. It had made the scene a hundred times worse, had kept drawing my eyes back in horror-struck, sympathetic wonder to the frail bloodless corpse forever crying out for his mother.
I closed my eyes, squeezed them to erase Jeremiah's history written across my memory banks then focused on Davis.
There were dark sunglasses propped on her… “it”, I corrected. I would be damned if I was going to touch them. I didn't want to see if her eyes were brown, blue or green, open, closed or missing. There were cotton plugs in her nostrils, shredded by beetle pincers and dangling, smudged with fluids.
>
There was a ripple of conversation between those watching me. Radios had been turned down slightly, enough so they could hear them and I could barely. I appreciated that. But their voices were distracting me from going deeper, and I jerked my chin at Batten in a summons.
He stalked across the snow-covered lawn like he was expecting a fight, brow lowered and shoulders forward.
“Chill out, Cro-Mag,” I said when he got close enough. “They've fallen back. That's great. But they're still making too much noise. If you can quiet them, I'll try again.”
A nod. He turned around to go talk to the clustered groups. I was drawn to the flicker of impatience from the coroner's attendants, who were sharing a lighter and having their third cigarette. The doctor had long gone and was waiting for them at the morgue in Denver with the rest of the body. The attendants couldn't leave without the head. It was their “property” technically, from now until the funeral home reclaimed it for the family after the autopsy. They were being good sports as a favor to the FBI but the attendants didn't appreciate having to wait. They figured they'd already waited in the cold too long. I tried to focus past their foot-shuffling irritation. Again the image of the mailman's sticky fingers teased the outer reaches of my awareness. I told myself, just because it was often on his hands doesn't mean it transferred to the metal. Besides, he kept Kleenex in his truck. In the glove box next to the well-read Busty Babes magazine.
I pinched my lips together to deny myself the outrageously inappropriate grin that tickled and threatened the corners of my mouth. No no no, I was not going to start giggling like a harebrained nutcase in front of the collective departments of sheriff, fire and rescue guys. Marnie Baranuik didn't giggle. Ever. Especially not when faced with gore. I succeeded in making it look like Serious Business instead of lunatic laughter by pulling down a dour grimace. Point: me.
Batten was getting heightened resistance, now. The coroner's attendants had had enough, and I couldn't blame them. I glanced at the porch and raised my eyebrows at Harry. He cocked his head in consideration, looking, as he often did, for my permission to step in. This time, I shrugged a why not in silent approval.
Harry never failed to make every motion appear salacious, and crooking one long finger seductively at the forest was no exception. His long fingers coiled and curled through the air as though he was weaving electric invitations through the atmosphere, lifting from his side toward the danger of the open yard, the setting sun, creeping in the direction of peril. I'd seen him do this before, still it had the power to take my breath away. I didn't think that anything could resist the lure of that invitation, not once they beheld the potent force of energy behind his luminous eyes. Even the inanimate craved his governance. Now, it hurried to obey.
As though she were a hesitant lover given over to wicked seduction, the woods offered up her darkest secrets to him in a rush. Filmy shade peeled out from under the trees, misting as it raced across the snow-covered lawn like an inky wave, picking up pricks of frost in its swift, slinking purl around him, shrouding the porch. He raised both hands only slightly, palms up, commanding the sanctuary of the shadows in an ever-growing spiral drawn up the length of him until it cloaked his head.
At first no one noticed the immortal on the covered veranda manipulating hundred-foot shadows clear across the yard. Then someone let out a guttural exclamation. Another cursed, drawing the attention of the rest. Nervous laughter punctuated by the backpedaling of heels on hard-packed snow, men putting space between themselves and what they were witnessing with well-wide eyes. Hood vaulted from his truck, rigid with attention while the K9 dog went bat-shit berserk, flipping out at the very end of his tether. Batten's stern decree ordered someone to put up his weapon, which meant a trigger-happy nincompoop was drawing down on my Cold Company. Dirty Harry vs. Dracula, I thought. Not that it would matter. Bullets couldn't kill a revenant unless you blew their entire head right off. These cops carried mostly standard issue Glock 9mm, and though bullets caused as much pain to revenants as it did to humans, their high-tech Tupperware wasn't likely to accomplish anything but slowing a revenant down or plain pissing him off.
The wind coughed, just enough to stir the hair from behind Harry's ears; it tousled from its perfect style. I knew that would bother him if he wasn't fully concentrating on marking each of his steps with deeper and deeper shadow, his asylum torn from the forest. He had made it all the way to the bottom step, shielding himself from the setting sun by sheer will, his power sizzling darkly within a sharply contained space. My own bravery wavered a moment and worry rattled through my jaw, making my teeth chatter. One slip of his focus and his shelter would whiff away, and the sun, full enough even though it was setting, would discharge him to ash in seconds.
One long finger pointed from beneath the cuff of Harry's wool coat and he rolled his voice at us across the lawn. Though he said it in flawless velvety French for effect, I knew it would stroke inside their ears in English. The marked disagreement between their ears and their brain would strip away any residual ballsy human folly.
“Silence enfants…maintenant.” Silence children…now.
I struggled to keep a straight face. Harry at his theatrical best, pulling out the Bela Lugosi eyebrow arch and everything. Oh, he was the perfect debonair Hollywood monster, his black coat stirring around his ankles suggesting an opera cape, his show-stopping eyes bright and flashing unnatural, lambent silver. Of course, the cops didn't notice him chewing Juicy Fruit, or see the square hint of the Nintendo DSI in his coat pocket. Probably would have ruined the effect.
Dead silence. Better. Point: Harry, to add to his total of eleventy-billion.
I snuck a peek at Batten, who was standing now with Chapel and Hood by the Explorer. I bet Batten noticed the gum. And the gaming system. And the platinum eyebrow rings that were the only indication that Harry wasn't lingering in a fantastic literary time warp.
Batten's color was high and mottled, his fists clenched. Tough titties. If he didn't want me to call out the big guns (or the weird guns anyway) then he should have done the job right. Pretty simple concept. If I wanted to track Sherlock and knock her teeth out, I was going to have to use what I had.
Harry looked at me expectantly. He snapped his Juicy Fruit.
I mouthed thank you, gratefully, as he retreated to safety indoors. It occurred to me for the first time that Harry and I made a pretty efficient pair, that perhaps he and I could solve this problem, or all problems, without the Feds.
I turned my attention back to the carefully-dressed head in my mailbox for second impressions. The cotton nose plugs were not a whim: this was something funereal, it had meaning to whoever tucked them there. The sunglasses were for shock value. I was supposed to whisk them away and be distraught by what I found, which told me her eyes were probably damaged or sewn shut or gone altogether. I really didn't want to be the one to find out which it was, but no one else had disturbed them yet.
I didn't have to touch it to know this head once belonged to Kristin Davis. There simply weren't that many missing heads to offer options in that department. What kind of nutcase would kill a twelve-year-old girl to put her head in my mailbox? Did said nutcase know her beforehand? How did the nutcase find Kristin, and was Kristin special for some reason, or just an opportunity that presented itself? Was the nutcase Danika Sherlock, or some other squirrel-brain?
I felt Batten closing in on my position as I reached out, my bare fingers inching towards the skin of her cheek. I brushed it softly, feeling the hard chill of frozen flesh just before the electric shock of the Blue Sense threw open a new window in my mind.
Everything went completely black. I inhaled sharply, jolted, but left my fingers stubbornly on the apple of her cheek. I saw nothing at all: not the lawn, or the head in the mailbox, or my own arm, or the winter-wrapped world that was my yard. I saw black.
“Blindfolded?” I asked myself. I tried to probe her last moments. “Are you blindfolded, honey?”
She didn't have a
nything to say to me. The dead never did, not in so many words. I can't see spirits in the Realm or talk to ghosts or loved ones long-passed: no human being can. Mediums are frauds. The ability to see and hear the dead, that ability belongs to the dead alone. No living person can pierce that veil. All revenants can, through the dead's natural affinity for the dead, but this was one Talent they could not share.
The memories, however, the unlocked secrets marked on her remains, were mine to shuffle through. Places, scenes and secrets that could not be hidden from me were disappearing like pencil marks being erased with each minute that went by. If she was hovering there now in spirit to tell me what happened, she could cry out, howl and beat her ethereal breast, but I'd never know it.
“She didn't know who was touching her, drawing her away, into a vehicle but she trusted…because she had an idea that it was someone who knew her?… she fought only when she sensed danger. By then it was too late and she knew it, was angry at herself for being trusting. She was too close to the curb when she started to put up a fight, and she stumbled, twisting her ankle badly. She was dragged into the car. Van, maybe? SUV? Higher than a car. I can't see. I can't see anything. The vehicle smells funny to her, spicy. No faces, no places. She knows which bus stop she's at, though.”
Batten was at my elbow. “Bus stop?”
“Coming home from school. Special bus stop, right outside of the building. That's significant, don't know why. She's so accustomed to it that she doesn't give it any thought, takes it for granted that they pick her up next to the front door. It's not a regular school. She was late. She was alone, none of the other students remained. She must be blindfolded, because all I see is black.”
“A hand over her face? A cloth? Enforced? Drugged?”
“I don't know, I don't know. It was all black before she was approached.” I couldn't see, I could only feel lost in the dark.