Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  “I'm off to casket, love.”

  “Without a feeding?”

  “You're exhausted. T-minus 25…”

  I made an affirmative noise and watched him sway elegantly out of the room. I finished my cold coffee, yawned again. My imagination tripped up the stairs to where Batten was still in bed, crept in under the door and slipped under the covers for a peek at his sleeping attire. Damn my creeping imagination. Conveniently, said creeping imagination doesn't like underwear and is under the delusion that hot guys are, as a subspecies, breathtakingly stiff 24/7. I didn't need to close my eyes to picture every masculine curve and hard line of his glorious body. I just needed to access the distracting memories of my quicksilver tongue flickering in heart-pounding, light-headed exploration, my hands eagerly cupping his tight, heavy–

  “You alive in there?”

  I jerked to crisp attention. “What! No I didn't. When?”

  My brain came into focus. Hot-cheeked, I wondered how long Batten had been standing there, watching me glazed-over and dizzy with desire and mentally undressing the living room wall with bedroom eyes. Holy hell, was I drooling into the couch cushion?

  “You can't prove anything,” I huffed, getting to my feet and wiping cookie crumbs off the front of my shirt. His gaze traced the path of my fingertips across my breasts. I wish it hadn't. My nipples contracted in almost painful need of his attention.

  He blinked at me. “I'm sorry?”

  “You should be.” For even considering Michigan. And for not going sooner…“Asshole.”

  I brushed past him, leaving him in baffled silence.

  FORTY

  I drove past the Ten Springs Motor Inn, reluctantly slowing. As luck would have it there was an eighteen-wheeler behind me, closing in fast on the no-pass two-lane blacktop, a fantastic excuse to return to Grope Room 4 later. At least, that's what I told my chicken-livered self as I sped on by. The minute I passed the driveway, the knot in my gut relaxed and I felt a bit lighter. I thought, do the easy part first, and head for Ruby's.

  I swung into Boulder going precisely the speed limit, clutching the steering wheel with my gloved hands, singing to keep myself awake. Pixie Lott's “Here We Go Again” was on repeat in my CD deck, and my head grooved along with it. Other drivers snickered as I mouthed the words but they didn't know how lucky they were: they didn't have to hear my off-key singing. I didn't have to hear it either; I had the volume up just enough so that I could pretend my voice matched hers.

  I cruised a quarter mile past the University of Colorado campus area and eventually found three open parking spaces near the Pearl Street Mall so I'd have room to park the Buick without crunching anyone's wee eco-pod car. The thoroughfare was pedestrian-only, but hoofing-it was not a problem. I had plenty of caffeine humming in my veins now, and my navy Keds on for walking comfort. The street was heavily salted and slip-free. I put Harry's favorite herringbone tweed coat over my black cable-knit sweater, the coat that he wore most often, and nestled my nose into the collar for the smell of his smoke and cologne and his body. It instantly made me think of long evenings by a cheery fire, pressed safe, warm and snug against his well-fed midriff; tension I hadn't known I was carrying eased out of my shoulders. Funny how the smell of him could do that. I took my aqua blue mini Moleskine out of the glove box and wrote this down with a smiley-face after it, then tucked the notebook and worn-down golf pencil in his pocket and pulled my froggy-trimmed gloves back on.

  I hesitated about the Beretta, uncertain. Is it bad manners to ask for help when you're secretly armed? Probably I'd make a better impression if I didn't mosey on in there with the gun on my hip like a Wild West gunslinger. Leaving it behind has gotten me in trouble before. Then again, bringing it has also not worked out so well. I should have taken it into the Ten Springs Motor Inn to face Danicka. It didn't do dick-all at the funeral home, either, since Jerkface took it away from me. There was a tiny chance that I was a crack shot and could totally handle it if I had to shoot somebody. Then again, there was a huge chance I was a mighty bad shot and would blow a hole in my own kneecap somehow.

  Since there wasn't likely to be a stab-happy psychic or a flesh-dripping ghoul in the old lady's friendly, brightly-lit shop, my instinct was to toss it under the passenger seat and lock the Buick's doors. That instinct won out.

  I called Batten. When he answered, I said, “Sorry about calling you an asshole.”

  “Is this your way of telling me you're pinned under a transport truck, about to die?”

  “I don't have to be on my deathbed to apologize,” I assured him with a sniff. “It's rare, granted, and it's usually followed by me asking for a favor.”

  He made a gruff noise of acknowledgment. “What do you want?”

  You. Naked. Strapped to my bed for about a month.

  I opened my mouth and then smartly snapped it shut like a trap. “Could you, pretty please with sugar on top, check in on my brother?”

  “I'm looking at him right now.”

  “He's up? About time. Tell him I'll be back in about an hour and a half, and there's another delivery from Shield coming at around ten thirty…”

  “He's not up,” Batten interrupted. “I'm on duty, here.”

  I caught my breath, tried not to picture young Wesley laying prone and completely at the mercy of my houseguests. I shouldn't have left. God, what was I thinking? I saw Wes too pale and far too thin, his features delicate, dead to the world in Harry's casket, his big ugly ropes of blond hair tangled across Harry's white satin pillow, with Kill-Notch Batten looming over him, threat and menace the hunter's natural aura. Batten out-weighed Wes by a good fifty pounds of rock-solid muscle, not that it mattered. It only took a few pounds of pressure to drive rowan wood between ribs and into the heart muscle of a revenant who wasn't conscious to put up a fight.

  My family disliked me as it was; when they found out I'd let Mom's perfect angel get undead then dead-dead, they were going to put a price on my head.

  “Define duty, as it relates to your daily schedule?” I asked, my voice small and pleading.

  “Wow,” he said, his voice softly teasing. “That's the first time I've ever heard you sound afraid of me.”

  Don't get used to it, dipshit, I chewed back, my irritation flaring. I breathed deep and waited until I was sure I wasn't going to lip off. “Where's Harry?”

  “They're both at rest, Baranuik. That's what you guys call it, right? ‘At rest’, not dead?”

  “Uh hunh,” I said carefully, though the revenants were dead-like, except for what we call VK-delta brain waves, those most like human deep sleep. You could not wake an immortal once he had sunk into VK-delta, even if you had a jackhammer to their chest. It might be a brief state (an hour or two at most between two periods of lighter H-delta or human-delta) but VK-delta was as close to death as one could get without the soul fleeing the body. It was when revenants were most vulnerable.

  I swallowed reflexively. “Where might Chapel be?” You know, your boss, the guy who's supposed to keep your bad ass in check?

  “You might want to pick up some beer on the way home.” As if he didn't hear me.

  I went with it, feigning casual. “I'll buy Coors Light. You look like you need to cut back on the calories.”

  “I'm hanging up now,” he said with a chuckle. There was no threat in it. I clung to that, trying to imagine I really could trust him.

  It wasn't like he hadn't watched Harry before, when I was in the hospital, but Wes was there now and he was new dead. The new dead are not the best at resisting the lure of a hot pulse close by, a warm vein, the regular thud of a human heartbeat or the quickening beat of a frightened heart. Not to mention Wes had a temper that tended to explode after little provocation. What if…

  “Out of curiosity, Batten, where's your kit?”

  “I'm hanging up now,” he repeated, but made no move to actually do so. This time, his voice was a growl.

  “Testy. I'm just asking a question.”

  “
It's upstairs.”

  I nodded, and realized he couldn't see me over the phone. “Whose idea was it to bring it into the house, yours or Chapel's?”

  “Your brother is new dead.”

  “So, your idea.”

  “No offense, but the new dead tend to be unreliable.”

  “I didn't say you were wrong.” I couldn't believe I was going to say this. “Maybe your kit should be with you, in Harry's room. Just in case.”

  There was silence on the other end that stretched so long I thought I'd lost my cell signal. I checked the bars then heard him clear his throat.

  “Think so?” His cautious voice, like he didn't know what to expect.

  “I'm assuming you've hunted revenants when they're awake? Not just the prone ones? Unless those muscles are just for show.” I didn't wait for his reply. “You know they're a hell of a lot faster than humans. If there was a problem, you'd never make it upstairs. Blink and you might find jaws at your throat. The kit stays at your side from now on.”

  “Gee, Baranuik, if I didn't know better I'd think you cared.”

  “Get your kit, or go stay in a hotel. I hear they got plenty of space at the Ten Springs Motor Inn lately.” Just don't pick Room 4.

  “Wondered how long it would take you. You wanna sneak around behind Chapel's back like we did in Cheektowaga.” It wasn't a question.

  “Don't flatter yourself, Kill-Notch,” I said, a secret smile blossoming despite my words. “I just don't look forward to the day I have to clean your twice-chewed guts off my nice clean floors.”

  The sound of his knowing laugh vibrated pleasure down my spine and twitched my quickly-warming nether regions.

  “Is that the sweetest thing I'm ever going to hear out of your mouth?” he asked.

  I shuffled one toe in the snow, kicked my tires, glanced around at the parking area. Don't flirt with Jerkface! What are you doing?

  “I've said some relatively flattering things to you in the past,” I reminded him. I wasn't sure he'd remember my enthusiastic moaning and breathless praise in Buffalo but it only took him a quicksilver second.

  “Between that reminder and the apology, I must be doing something right today,” he said, and his voice dropped to husky, almost purring in my ear. Again my nether regions got a jolt. He dared me to tell him, “What is it?”

  I bit my bottom lip and took a nervous look over my shoulder, as though Straight-Tie Chapel would be there, frowning disapprovingly and reminding me about fraternization rules, about Michigan, about not being a self-interested cock-tease. Uh oh. Shouldn't have thought about Batten's teased cock, which was probably stirring into a delightfully thick gift to womanhood right about now. That tended to end with my logic, self-restraint and intelligence (what little I could proudly claim, anyway) jettisoned from my hard head and into a mixed puddle of brain-brine by my Keds.

  How about a radical idea? The truth. For a change. While I could still speak English.

  “I like having you there,” I admitted. “And I know you've got my back. I trust you. More than… well, more than almost anyone. I also know you can't stay. But while you're here for me, I don't entirely hate having you.”

  The silence he showed me then was a cautious one, full of unspoken words. There were a ton of serious talks he and I had avoided; the Danika misunderstanding, the forever-Harry thing, the “how the hell could we work together without strangling or stripping each other” thing. Ignoring it and hoping it would all work out by itself was taking a toll, but when we talked things had a way of blowing up. One of us always took offense. It would help if I could Grope past his wall and see the undeclared truth of what he was feeling, whatever it might be. I closed my eyes and pulled at the ethereal wisp of psi, but as always Batten was a mystery to me, largely unavailable to both my Talents.

  “Not entirely being hated by you is a lot better than the alternative,” he said finally. The warmth in his voice remained, much to my relief. I was afraid that bringing up his “can't stay” status had damaged our tenuous truce, had put an unspoken stop sign on the rocky road of our non-relationship.

  “Don't kill anyone unless you have to, today, yes?” I confirmed.

  “Is your gun at home, unloaded, in the safe in your office?”

  Next to Dead Kristin's squished eyeball and the stolen sunglass lens, and not under the seat of my Buick? “Of course.”

  “Liar. Batten, out.” He hung up on me, knowing the conversation could go no further without it turning sour.

  FORTY-ONE

  Boulder has a hippie vibe, young and liberal and fresh-spirited. I figured it rubbed off from the couch surfing white-water rafters who lingered all summer long. Harry likened it to Amsterdam, but since I'd never been there, I had to take his word for it. We had scoured Carrie's brochures and dreamed together, planned our upcoming springtime while lingering by our merry winter fires. During the summer months, when the farmer's market was open long into the soft dark evenings, the two of us were going to wander 13th Street between Arapahoe and Canyon on a Friday night, browsing, spending money willy-nilly, like we used to do at the Saturday market in Portland. Or maybe we'd catch an evening performance of Hamlet at the University of Colorado. That was the plan, anyway.

  When I got to Curiositatem, I saw that Ruby's premonition had been wrong: the magic shop hadn't burned to the ground. In the large round display window there were wrought iron fairy statues on glass shelves, skulls of colored crystal serving as candle holders, a wide array of incense and brass burners, and two handwritten signs in clear script. One read: It is illegal to feed deer and elk in Colorado. The other was bright yellow with black lettering that said: Mountain lion alert, PLEASE don't feed wildlife!

  Inside, Mrs. Valli's shop was a heady goulash of stereotypes. Curiositatem was once a small niche bookstore called Francine's serving specialty genres, murdered in its youth by the big box stores. She had left behind good bones: light alder wood shelving ran the length of her walls, and a glorious dome ceiling of glass and iron let in the sunlight. An odd place for a DaySitter to work, I thought; her revenant would never feel comfortable under this dome.

  In one corner perched more wrought iron garden fairies in various thoughtful poses. In another, bright glass garden gazing orbs reminiscent of mystical crystal balls, and fresh potted herbs to delight the kitchen witches. Glass and cherry wood display cases held kitschy things no modern witch would ever need or use, tucked beside genuine artifacts of such value that my fingers itched to grab my Visa. Mrs. Valli had set up a gemstone station, and somewhere under the soft New Age music humming in the store's speaker system, I could hear the dull rumble of a stone tumbler.

  Along the back wall marched an army of books, their titles tantalizing promises. An enormously fat grey and white cat with an orange splotch on her nose hunched in a sunspot above the shelves, her hair and dander filtering through the shafts of light and falling around the cash register. This was where Mrs. Valli sat, barely a snowy-haired head looking over the counter.

  “Oh, Marlene!” Her scratchy voice was pleased when she spotted me, and she gave me a grandmotherly smile that made me long for Vi. I didn't correct her on my name.

  When the smile touched the corners of her cloudy eyes it caused wonderfully deep lines, happy lines telling of a long life of laughter. She struggled to stand, leaning heavily on a wicker chair that gave a rickety protest. I quickened my pace, thinking to help her. She managed alone, and as I got closer to the counter I could see the little basket where she'd set her pale blue pile of knitting down. The knitting needles were an odd shape, long and off-white like old whale bone.

  Ruby toddled around from behind the counter, using the glass-topped structure for support. I wondered why she didn't own a cane, or where her walker was, and just how much Windex she needed to keep this place so sparkly clean, with all its glass, crystal and mirrors. From a rod around the cash area, tiny tinkling crystal wind chimes made an eerie, broken kind of music, setting my teeth on edge. I tried to igno
re it.

  “I was so hoping you'd drop in, Marlene,” she said kindly, smoothing the front of a patchwork skirt. “I'm afraid I was a little rude at the funeral home, dear. You must forgive an old woman for not being herself.”

  “No one's quite themselves at a funeral,” I agreed. Thinking of my slutty outfit, I added: “I know I wasn't.”

  Ruby was wearing big yellow floral Wellingtons, the rubber scuffed at the toe in black lines. They were otherwise clean as a whistle, and I wondered: why boots instead of shoes or slippers? But then, the floral pattern on them, orange and turquoise flowers, matched the faded hem of her skirt. She brought a pair of thick glasses with bright citrus orange rims up to the bridge of her nose and squinted through them. She was adorable.

  Ruby said, “I heard about the ghoul. Everyone has. Honey, you're in over your head, aren't you?”

  I laughed, weak with relief. “More than you know.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear.” She stopped abruptly in front of me and craned her chin up, and I was struck by the funny angle. I don't think I'd ever met anyone who had to look up at me. She must have only been four-ten, four-eleven. “I'd better make tea, Marlene. There's terrible trouble in your face.”

  “Trouble with Tribbles.”

  She brushed past me on her way to the door as though she either didn't hear me, didn't get the Star Trek reference, or didn't think it worthy of a response. “And while it's true that trouble teaches, sometimes the lesson isn't pleasant.”

  “Yeah, I hate learning,” I agreed. “My brain's already full. It hurts to stick more stuff in there.”