by A. J. Aalto
“If you get her into danger, she needs you, but blames you. If you get her out of danger, she no longer needs you. If you work with her, you cannot have her. If you do not work with her, you cannot see her. Therein lies the rub.”
“Harry, stop,” I said flatly, digging for the second bullet a little less carefully than the first. Foam rose from the wound as the silver in the slug reacted with Harry's pale blue blood. Chapel was pretending to ignore us again, but his shoulders bunched and he looked uncomfortable.
“I'd never do anything to put her at risk,” Batten said angrily. “And the fact that she needs you is the only reason you're not a pile of ash.”
Harry considered for a moment, then nodded slowly in acquiescence. The second bullet hit the coffee table with a metallic clunk, and Harry folded out of his chair like nothing had happened. He stubbed out his cigarette butt.
“I will give you this, Agent Batten. You endure torment with a brand of patience I have only ever seen in my own kind. You've got bottle, sir.” He rose nimbly and Batten jerked again. After a wide, cocky smile, Harry padded barefoot from the room in a very human strut, not bothering to pull out the dizzying slip-glide of the old ones. Guess he figured he'd riled the Fed enough.
“Is bottle a compliment?” Batten asked me, settling onto the couch.
I shrugged. “Hell if I know. That's a new one on me.” I glanced at Harry's book: Bed and Breakfast Ownership. Talk about your bad ideas. I tossed it into the woodstove and watched it catch.
“I could take him.”
It was one of the more childish things I'd ever heard come out of Batten's mouth, so ridiculous and so unlike him that it hurt my brain. I felt my eyebrows pucker.
“Sure. And Agent Chapel here could last three rounds of Ultimate Fighting in the octagon with Chuck “the Iceman” Liddell.” I rolled my eyes grandly. “Wait, lemme call my bookie and put some money on it.”
“Don't think that's a fair comparison,” Batten said.
“You're right. Because Chuck Liddell can't gnaw open people's chest cavities to eat their hearts, last I checked. I mean, get real, Batten. Harry's been amassing preternatural clout for four centuries, and you're only human. If he wanted you dead, you'd last one eighth of a second.”
“You see him kill someone before?”
I had, but there was no way I trusted Batten enough to share. I blocked the memory completely so the answer wouldn't show on my face and said, “Don't be an ass-hat.”
Unhappily, I perched on the chair that Harry had vacated, scooting it a bit further back from the woodstove so I wouldn't get quite the same blasting of heat. Quiet layered disquiet in the room until it was a veritable discomfort lasagna without the yummy ricotta. It was late and I was hungry. I had the lens of the murdered girl's sunglasses(or the murderer's, maybe) in my bedside table drawer, hiding under an old issue of Cosmo that I kept for the 50 new ways to blow your lover's mind! article. I hadn't completely given up hope that someday I might have a lover whose mind needed to be blown.
Batten's eyes were veiled again, his cop face, and he avoided looking at me. I wondered what he was thinking as he stared gloomily at the small square window of the woodstove, flames licking sooty glass. There was a long silence filled only with Chapel's fingers tapping on his keyboard. No one had made a move to clean up the ghoul's rampage, and I sure as hell didn't want to do it. I hadn't asked for any of this. I wondered if I could get Harry to hire a cleaning service tomorrow. Did Molly Maid know how to get ghoul-stink out of carpets? Could I live with goo overnight, or should I get a pail and soap?
I curled up in Harry's oxblood Cetus leather wingback chair and laid my head in the crook of my arm, curling my gloved hands into loose fists. Harry came back fully dressed, in his fine grey flannel trousers and a proper white dress shirt, rolled up to the elbows to expose my name tattooed on his wrist.
“I trust you gentlemen are staying the night.”
I moaned into the crook of my elbow, “They're not staying.”
“Thank you,” Batten confirmed, to the revenant not me.
“Why do you need to be here? I'm home. I don't need you to watch Harry.” And I sure didn't want Kill-Notch Batten around my baby brother right now.
“Someone's trying to kill you. A ghoul has been through here looking for her other eye, and we don't know whether either or both will come back,” he said flatly.
“She didn't get the eye. She'll come back. Fat lot of good you'll be when she does,” I said under my breath, punctuated by Harry's disapproving teeth-suck.
Chapel said from behind his keyboard, “Mark and I accepted Harry's invitation earlier, Marnie; we'll be here until this business is sorted.” There was steel in his voice, like he was telling me, not asking me. For once, Chapel did not sound polite. I didn't particularly like it, but I respected it.
Batten cut his deep blue eyes to me with a look that shot hot flutters into my belly: he has intentions. I didn't know what intentions (to talk? to argue? to fuck me senseless?) but it came across clearly that he was planning something.
“Well now, since we have guests, I should get busy in the kitchen,” Harry suggested.
“Don't go to any trouble, Lord Dreppenstedt.”
Harry held up a hand. “Don't be ridiculous, Agent Chapel, it's no trouble at all. I've already defrosted my loin for you.”
My head came up to witness Chapel's blush. He touched his throat for reassurance but the necktie was missing.
“Pork loin,” I amended. “Harry, don't tease.”
“Moi? Tease? I never tease.” Harry frowned as though he couldn't comprehend what I was saying. He smiled pleasantly as he watched Chapel leave the room. “I am afraid I do not have any beer left, Agent Batten, but if you're off-duty could I offer you some spirits?”
“Gin, if you have it.” Batten was still drilling me with his gaze like he was trying to send me telepathic signals or something; it was starting to rub against the grain.
“Ah,” Harry recalled wistfully. “I remember three pennies for a glass of gin in East end of London back when Saucy Jack was gutting prossies in Whitechapel. Now killers take the heads of little girls clean off and gin's five whole dollars a bottle. What is the world coming to?”
“Harry, what the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Being a good host, ducky. You should perhaps try it sometime. So, Agent Batten, how do you keep life interesting while you are on the job? I mean, other than incessantly trying to plant yourself between my DaySitter's lovely thighs.”
“Harry!” I wadded up a napkin and fired it at his head. It bounced off ineffectually. Harry ignored it.
Batten parried, “The job's interesting enough.”
“Oh yes,” Harry said. “Ghouls, goblins and goetic magic. I am curious, when first you came to Denver, what exactly were your expectations?”
My stomach did a sick flip-flop. I wished I had gone to bed early. I wished Harry had lost his tongue months ago in a tragic bloodsucking accident. I wished Kristin Davis’ ghoul would crash through the kitchen window this instant and give us all a gooey, snarly reason to drop it.
Batten's face was unreadable as he pressed his broad back into the couch, staring at the coffee table as though the right answer was written on the bullets in Harry's blue blood. Finally, he looked up at the revenant and said, “There's no such thing as goblins.”
“I believe it is time for you to face an unpleasant truth, Agent Batten. In the empire of her heart the rest of you, you mere mortals, are but court jesters for her temporary amusement. There can be only one king, and I am he.” His eyes gleamed, luminous, as he summoned his unearthliness to underline his point. “Ask her. She will say as much, I promise you.”
Batten put his elbow on the back of the couch, a seemingly casual gesture. “You seem pretty sure of yourself, bloodsucker.”
“Play with her if you must. Pleasure her to your heart's content, and to hers. You have my permission.”
“Oh?” Batten's smile w
as fleeting, tinged with incredulity. “Do I? How generous.”
“Uh, pardon me while I put these bullets back in,” I said, grabbing the pliers and waving them in Harry's direction.
Harry ignored me. “It worries me not, Agent Batten, for you are inconsequential, and her interest in you is transitory. I am forever.”
Would he feel this strongly about every man, or did Batten make him bluff and bluster this way? I looked at Harry and knew then that he had put his foot down in a most final way. I would never be married. I would never have children. Vi had been allowed these things, but something had changed in Harry since then. Maybe he saw mistakes in hindsight. This time, his DaySitter would be his alone. There would be no room for any other man, not seriously, not permanently. I had given my only oath, my only vows, my last commitment.
Batten must have seen something in my face. “Marnie?”
I was utterly seized by Harry's eyes; they were very human grey now, like lead shavings on cashmere, soft and pliable. But beneath that was a solid, immovable thing—a thing, not a person, I knew—the limits of its power unknowable. It was the first time I'd ever caught myself thinking of my Cold Company as a monster, more than a man and not at all human. I felt myself nodding.
“Harry knows he's my number one. I'm not going anywhere,” I said in a daze. It sounded like conviction but felt like defeat.
“Why don't you just put her in shackles and a chastity belt,” Batten said grimly.
“She chose to spend time with you, however briefly,” Harry reminded him. “She chooses to stay with me.”
“So this territorial pissing is for my benefit? Because it feels like you're telling her, not me.”
“Revenants don't urinate,” Harry said for the second time tonight, and brought his gaze back to me. He smiled benevolently.
I did my best to muster up a smile for him in return.
THIRTY-TWO
Changing a subject usually requires a clever segue, or at least some understated wordplay. I had neither. Chapel would have been a help, but he had disappeared upstairs without saying good night following Harry's defrosted loins comment. Maybe his nausea had come back. Mine sure had.
Facing off across the coffee table, Harry on his home turf and Batten the invading force. They looked like a biology grad's interpretation of male-male competition for a thesis paper on Cro-Magnon sexual rivalry; neither moved, but both measured, calculated, estimated, subtly without words now, both of them sure they were the superior choice. Since neither of them was an ideal “mate” by any stretch of the imagination, I wasn't sure what the hell we three were doing. Whatever it was, it was damn uncomfortable.
“Sooooo, my brother's undead,” I said.
Neither blinked, but I thought Batten's face shaded with a measure of amusement.
“I don't know how he's gonna eat. I mean I can't feed him, that's like incest, it's disgusting, it's revolting. I won't even consider it. I can't even—won't try to—imagine, it's a big fat no, ugh, yuck.” I heard myself babbling but couldn't stop. “So how about Dunnachie shooting you, hunh Harry? Bet you didn't see that coming. I didn't. For a cop, he's either got really bad nerves, a happy trigger finger, or a hefty dislike of revenants. Probably the last. Man, that's one cop who will never set foot in this house again. First the revenant, then zombie beetles biting him, then the ghoul…not to mention he saw the giant pentagram painted on the floor of my office.”
Batten blinked first, and the knot in my gut uncoiled a bit. “Dunnachie said he'd stepped into the devil's whorehouse, here.” He held up his hands in case he'd offended me. “His words, not mine.”
I laughed tiredly, relieved. “He actually said ‘devil's whorehouse’?”
Harry said tightly, “Satan does not run a bordello. A gambling house in the Court of Hell, yes, but no bordello.”
“You'd know,” Batten said.
Chapel came downstairs, checking his Windsor knot with one hand; the tie had made a reappearance. So had the laptop. “We may be wrong about tying Danika Sherlock to the murder of Kristin Davis.”
“Right, what do I know? I'm not psychic,” I sighed. “I'm fake like Sherlock's tits.”
Chapel put his hand flat on the table. “What we need is proof.”
“Want me to prove I'm psychic?” I made a quick grab for Gary's forearm with my bare hand open wide. He lurched away from me so hard I thought he was going to rocket out of his chair. His tie flew over his shoulder. “No? You don't want me to Grope and tell you what I see, Agent Chapel?”
“I didn't mean proof of your Talent, Marnie,” he said reassuringly. His voice was ever steady but some of the self-assurance had fled his eyes. He smoothed his tie. “Gold-Drake & Cross tests you every year.”
Not anymore, they don't. “I don't read what people are trying to put out there.” I read what they're not trying to put out there. Feelings, emotions, desires. What they're driven to. There's no hiding the impulses of the old brain. There's no subtlety there; it wants what it wants, and it fears what it fears, and I Grope it all.”
“And what does Danika Sherlock want?”
I went momentarily silent. “Harry.”
“Then why kill us all with a ghoul?”
“Because she can't have Harry.”
Harry lectured, “It's a hateful act, the mystic's equivalent of shooting a cop with his own gun.”
I swear the revenant's grey eyes brightened at the thought only for the space of a heartbeat, as his gaze dropped slightly below Mark's arm to where he had hung his holster on the corner of the couch.
Harry went silently into the kitchen and returned with espresso. He knew the way Gary liked it, which needled me. Then he brought mine, topped with a dash of cinnamon and a drip of Tahitian vanilla.
Ok, I'm still spoiled rotten.
“Kristin Davis’ blindness is important, but I don't know why,” I said.
“Blind eyes,” Harry mused. “Les yeux de non vue.”
Usually when Harry slipped into French, I didn't tune in to the words so much as enjoyed the cadence of his voice. This time my skin prickled, but my brain skipped three or four steps ahead. “There aren't a lot of French witches, and a spell in French is rare. Very rare. But that phrase…I just don't know. Dammit, I used to know how to find the answers. I used to be something.”
“Still are,” Batten told me. I cut my eyes to him, to see if he was joking. He wasn't.
“It would take us a long time to solve this without you, Marnie,” Chapel said. “So if you know anything you're holding back…”
“I don't know shit. And if you're counting on my help, we're all screwed.”
“I don't know, you pulled a pretty impressive rabbit out of your hat back there at the funeral home,” Batten said.
“Oh, come on. I chased it away,” I rolled my eyes. “How many times can I do that? How many times can I run and hide? I'm so tired.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you but you're on deck, like it or not,” Batten said, his eyes boring into mine. “So batten down the hatches, Snickerdoodle.”
I knew damn well the best way to find Danika was to return to Room 4 of the Ten Springs Motor Inn and Grope my way around. It was probably a really bad idea, one I didn't offer out loud. They'd hate the idea and prevent me from going, or love the idea and force me to go. Either way, I wasn't sure I could handle being in that room again, so I held my tongue.
“I almost wish the ghoul would hurry up and get here. I can't bear the idea of it lingering over me when I sleep. Oh crap,” I ran a gloved hand over my face tiredly. “I think I just scared myself.”
Batten's lips twitched into an almost-smile in my direction. “So how did the head in the mailbox get reanimated?”
I had her punctured eye crammed in my front pocket.
“Were they two separate spells?” Batten probed.
“You guys saw Davis’ body the day before at the morgue, right? The head had stopped moving? The body wasn't moving by itself?”
“No, it wasn't,” Chapel's fingers deftly found the keys, paused while he thought, then typed some more. “It was like a dead body should be… quiet, and pale, and soft.”
Harry paused in his sipping, the goblet completely still in mid-air. “I say, what an awfully strange sentiment, Agent Chapel.”
I had to agree, though if Harry hadn't mentioned it, I probably would have let the comment go unnoticed.
“I didn't mean anything by it,” Chapel said, blinking rapidly. “I wasn't trying to offend, Lord Dreppenstedt.”
“Not at all,” Harry said lightly. “Most people wouldn't describe a dead body with such sympathy and sensitivity.”
“What you need is a better source,” Batten said without hiding his discomfort, effectively bringing the subject back in line. “Marnie,” he summoned, and I realized my eyes were drifting closed.
“Hunh? Oh, yes. A source of info. Books on flesh magic are going to be real hard to come by.” I finished my espresso and Harry whisked the empty cup out of my hands for a refill before I had it two inches from my mouth.
Chapel tracked Harry's movement. The immortal gave the barest look in return, but in that glance something deeper than polite acknowledgement passed between them.
Chapel, that dirty little nerd, I cursed inwardly. Could it really be true? He'd be the last person I'd have thought would be curious about Harry and the intimate nature of a feeding, but ever since I'd guessed at the possible relationship, I couldn't see past it. It was in their faces, a budding kind of rapport far different than that of two coworkers or casual acquaintances. I realized I was staring suspiciously at the side of Gary's face, and that he was noticing me stare with rising unease. I studied the frogs on my gloves instead. I had to be wrong. I was definitely paranoid. Wasn't I? I wondered where the fang marks were. They weren't on his carotid. That was even more disturbing.
When I looked up, Batten was staring at me trying not to stare at Chapel. I covered a yawn with my gloved hand.
“What was I saying? Yes, I have a few ideas where to start looking for books,” I promised him. “Tomorrow. First thing.”