Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  “Get off me, you big stupid ogre.”

  “Get the fuck up those stairs,” he hollered, but hesitated. Concern for Harry? That I understood, but not coming from him. “Go.”

  “What's that, smoke?” I said, lifting my face.

  One of the cops shouted down at us: “Owner set her furnace room on fire then vanished. Get out, get out!”

  I shrieked over my shoulder, “Harry! CODE 6!”

  Batten had his big shoulder wedged under my armpit before I knew what he was doing. It made for awkward running. Noises behind us. I dug my hand into Batten's bicep and whirled him behind the cash counter where Ruby had stashed her knitting. We went down in a body-pile. Weapons. I eyed the knitting needles when my eyes fell on a huge automatic gun with weird, lumpy attachments. I scrambled over Batten's angry, wrestling form and grabbed for it, whirled around and aimed it at the banging boot-steps. Chapel.

  “Out, out,” Chapel commanded.

  Batten grabbed my shirt and it tore in his fist. He hustled me back to my feet and yelled, “What the fuck are you thinking, gogogo.”

  I shouted, “The book! I need her book!” and broke away from him, my knees like rubber but desperation steeling my spine.

  Batten cried, “MJ for fuck's sake!”

  I grabbed the grimoire in one hand, the gun in the other. The book's cover was disgusting to the touch, squirmy almost, seemingly alive under my fingertips, and I nearly dropped it, held it out ahead of me with a grimace.

  Someone screamed, “OIL TA—” as an explosion rocked the back room. Flames belched into the store and the blast made a gigantic splinter in the dome overhead. A split second of ominous silence filled with our furtive scrambling for the door. Every hair on my head prickled with dreadful understanding. The dome shattered, and deafening shards of broken glass rained down on our heads.

  I shoved the book over my head and ran like hell.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The ride home was done in that total wordless silence that followed any major disaster. The local pop station played songs that none of us actually heard. Talk radio would have been more useful, because at least then somebody would be having a conversation. The windshield wipers ticked and patted rhythmically back and forth, making mechanical music while headlights tunneled through a light snow, washing out everything to a jittery black and white picture show.

  Ruby had disappeared during the explosion, literally disappeared, in front of several sets of mundane human eyes that would never see the world the same way again. Gregori Nazaire and Harry shared the sudden instinctual need to flee upon my bawling “Code 6” followed by the warning stench of smoke. My revenant had followed the elder into a room filled with old caskets to leap up through a cellar window and out into the fresh evening air. The explosion and rushing human activity had scattered them apart, their fight abandoned, at least temporarily. I wondered what would become of Gregori Nazaire, a starving ancient revenant released upon the world.

  Harry said tightly, “Did you have a terribly nice visit with Ms. Valli?”

  “Ruby isn't a very good hostess,” I answered. “She didn't serve cookies with the tea. Also, instead of sugar cubes, she used roofies. At least I got a trophy.” I held up the gun. “I think it's an Uzi. You know, for Israeli commandos.”

  Batten said, “That's a paintball gun.”

  “A paintball gun for Israeli commandos,” I tried.

  Batten whipped his sunshield down to glare at me in the mirror. I was not in the mood for his reflected evil eye, so I focused on watching the red rocks whiz by out the window. “It'll come in handy, you'll see,” I muttered, plunking my temple with my forefinger. “Method to my madness.”

  In the driver's seat, Chapel's Blackberry summoned. He let it ring eight times, maybe in too much of a daze to hear it. When he answered, his conversation was brief. He then told Batten, “Firemen recovered Danika Sherlock's body.”

  Batten nodded. “Good.”

  “It got up, bit a hunk out of the chief's forearm and ran off, leaving half her face behind.”

  “Not good,” I breathed. A second ghoul. Fuck me. “Harry, you don't happen to have a cookie in your pocket?”

  Harry massaged his eyebrow with his fingertips around and around as though his headache could be cured by playing with his piercings. No one spoke while Chapel drove in grim silence. I used Harry's handkerchief and spit to try cleaning the remainder of Danika Sherlock's blood off my shirt front.

  “I'm starving. Where's Wes?” I asked wearily. “How'd you know to come to Ruby's to get me?”

  Gary took one hand off the steering wheel to point Batten to a bag in the front seat on the passenger side floor. Batten sorted through a grocery bag and handed me a bag of Cheez Doodles. The salty snack stung the deep fang wounds in my mouth; Gregori Nazaire hadn't been gentle, not like my Harry. Oddly enough, the not-gentle part of it had stirred something primal in me, some lizard-brain part of me that liked being taken by a forceful male. I wondered if that made me a bad feminist.

  Silence fell again, filled with my fishing around in the plastic bag. My crunching seemed ridiculously loud. The weight of their unknowable thoughts crowded me, pressed in on me, even as their distance made me feel hollow. It was an irritating blend, and one I needed to fix if I was going to start feeling some relief. My nerves were still jangling almost audibly inside me like the jingling of an old fashioned rotary telephone.

  “Well,” I said finally. “At least we know whodunit.”

  Harry's voice was low, and wounded. “Do you have any earthly idea what you have done?”

  I had some idea, but probably our versions were wildly different. “I escaped a crazy homicidal psychic for the second time in three weeks?”

  “As you will recall, your half of our Bond was damaged by your reckless necromimesis spell in the Ten Springs Motor Inn.”

  “Reckless is such a harsh word,” I smiled wanly.

  He did not turn to face me, just stared out the window at the night. With his preternatural acuity, he saw everything as well as I would at high noon. “We hadn't nearly repaired the Bond enough to withstand the mystic intrusion of your feeding another.”

  I swallowed a half-chewed Doodle. “Intrusion?”

  “Gregori Nazaire's Bond was also broken. And you offered him the gift of submission: of blood, hope, and life.” Harry refused to look at me. “You offered him everything.”

  Batten didn't turn around, which I appreciated. He left us in the privacy of the gloomy back seat as he asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “He has Bonded, for his part, with my DaySitter,” Harry clipped precisely, his roiling angry passion returning like a cold wave billowing across the bench seat. I pressed down on my thighs to try and stop them from quivering. “The revenant equivalent of infatuation, obsession. And it is entirely likely that a heart-broken, bitter, melancholy fourteen hundred-year-old Frenchman will haunt our steps evermore.”

  Batten said, “Do you really think—”

  “A Frenchman, for God's sake!” Harry exploded, as though the significance should be apparent to us. One of his hands clutched the bench seat, the other rolled into a ball and pressed into his stomach like he was in visceral pain.

  “Now you're being melodramatic,” I soothed. “I saved his life, and he appreciated it.”

  “You gave yourself to him.”

  “I didn't spread for him, for fuck's sake.”

  “That is all you think about, isn't it? Your cheap, prurient needs,” Harry accused. “He is not simply going to recover from this.”

  “Sure he will. After a few days of moping, he'll move on. It's just puppy love.”

  “Love is for the living,” Harry snapped. Usually when he said it, he tempered it with a sad smile. This time it was bitten off with his Arctic brand of temper.

  “Well, whatever it is, it's entirely one-sided.” I pointed a Cheez Doodle at him. “It's not like I promised to go steady with him or anything. Besides, I turned on him, to
fight him.”

  “An imprudent act that did not escape my notice,” Harry muttered.

  “Probably that means we're broken up.”

  “More likely, ‘twill enflame him to impress upon you until you are broken. It is with great consternation that I must inquire whether you called him Master.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Only as a sign of respect.”

  “And one wonders, where did you get the idea that calling an elder revenant ‘Master’ was a form of respect?” he asked tersely.

  “Back when you made me study sheets and sheets of notes for months on end, about revenant/DaySitter etiquette and lifestyle before we did our Bonding. All that formal speech, proper manner of approach, the wording of respect and honor, submission and devotion. The ‘Death Rejoices’ and the ‘honored elder’ and… oh.” I stared at the side of Harry's face. “That's only for Bonding.”

  Harry didn't answer me. Chapel didn't move a muscle that wasn't directly related to driving. Batten was rubbing a hand over his face and staring at the dash.

  “You don't really think he's going to come around to see me again?”

  “You heard him. ‘The bleeder is mine.’ ‘I accept.’ That means but one thing,” Harry said. “You have become his world.”

  Fuuuuuck that. “I already have two dead guys in my friggin’ house, only one of whom I invited to live with me.” When he didn't reply, I said, “He was just drunk off his first feed in ages. You know, like at college when Jimmy Ghirardelli got blitzed in the bar and swore he fell madly in love with me at first sight. Then after I slept with him, we both realized he was wildly exaggerating, and when he sobered up he didn't even call?”

  Harry's mouth tightened with displeasure but I thought I heard Batten softly snort a laugh in the front seat.

  Harry said carefully, “Revenants do not exaggerate, wildly or otherwise.”

  “But they do get drunk, my point there being, Ruby slipped something in my tea. Whatever Ruby gave me flowed into Gregori during his feed.”

  “His feed,” Harry lamented. Then, more possessively and with wide-eyed incredulity: “His.”

  “He was just stoned off his ass and talkin’ smack, Harry.”

  “The drugs which Ruby slipped you were tranquilizers, meant to pacify and sedate.” He leveled that ash grey gaze at me and watched as the realization hit me. “Yes, MJ, the creature that very nearly put me through a wall without effort on his part was significantly weakened by the drugs in your system and the fact that he'd only regained strength from a lengthy infirmity. Now imagine when those drugs wear off, and he, at full potency, returns to claim you from my possession.”

  “He was feeling threatened. Confused.” I attempted a smile. “He was bluffing.”

  “Revenants do not bluff.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Batten demanded, turning now in the front seat, fingering the volume dial on the radio down a notch. He aimed his question at the immortal. “You can't have him coming around all the time, trying to be with her.”

  Harry's eyes flicked knowingly at Batten. “A disquieting probability about which, I am sure, no one here would be very keen.”

  “Uh, least of all me,” I reminded them.

  “You can't legally stake him,” Chapel said quietly. “Technically Nazaire is a victim here. All he did was take an offered feed, and defend himself from an attack. We may be able to get a restraining order if he becomes a problem.”

  “A piece of paper can't protect you from a lovesick vamp any more than it can keep a human stalker at bay,” Batten said. “Harry, do you have any ideas about how to fix it?”

  Harry's gaze slid sideways at me and he gave a long drawn-out sigh of disgusted defeat. “In light of its obvious consequences, one must wonder if you have somehow masterminded this whole event to its unfortunate conclusion.”

  “I don't know what you're getting at, but it sounds like an accusation. Now what are we going to do about Gregori's little undead crush on me?”

  Harry settled his weight further into the leather seats, his coat bunching around his shoulders, his collar hiding his jaw.

  “You leave me with no other choice. In order to repair and cement our Bond,” he said with profound disapproval. “I shall have to make love to you, of course.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I choked on my Cheez Doodle and breathed in Doodle dust.

  Harry handed me a new handkerchief with a grand roll of his eyes. By the time we pulled onto the road at Shaw's Fist, I'd hacked up a lung and cleared the powdered cheese from my chest. When I handed him the handkerchief back, he put up a palm to decline, and the movement drew our attention to a flat square of white on the seat, wedged beneath Ruby's paintball gun.

  Neither one of us moved to touch the envelope. Ruby Valli's revolting grimoire was tucked under my Keds on the floor of the SUV in front of me. Maybe the envelope had fallen out of the book of shadows? But no, it hadn't been there a second ago. I was sure of it. Considering the dour contemplation on Harry's face, he was sure too.

  He plucked it up between two fine fingers, holding it up to the passing street lights. On the back of the envelope was a single word in thin gold ink. It read: Asmodeus.

  It's a good thing I'd finished the Cheez Doodles. They really are a choking hazard. I needed a Dr. Pepper something fierce; I could barely swallow. Harry was opening the envelope, the Feds none the wiser to what was going on in the back seat. Until of course the revenant's blasting English bellow rocked the car, and both agents jerked, the SUV swerving in response to Chapel's start.

  “MJ!” Harry exploded.

  “What now?” I belted back. “Whatever it is, I didn't do it!”

  The hand holding the envelope quivered as he read it again. “Do you mind then explaining why I am holding a response to an invitation that I do not recall giving you permission to extend? Explain to me, please, why the Overlord is giving serious consideration to your invitation and will make a resolution at His earliest convenience?”

  Oh. That. I scrinched my nose. “Because I thought I was gonna die and I was grasping at straws?” Infernally crispy straws? “I didn't think He really heard me. I mean, He heard me, but He didn't do anything to help me. Except tweak my nipples. And not in a good way.”

  Batten did a full body turn in the front seat, both eyebrows rocketing up. His mouth popped open but made no sound.

  Harry's did. Harry's made an angry, warning growl. “You made a plea to the Overlord?”

  “Just a teensy tiny experimental one.”

  “Aloud?” Harry thundered, seeming to loom in the back seat of the SUV, filling it with his unearthly presence, radiating cold heat. “Did you call out to Him aloud, by name?”

  “Well that's how you talk to demons. How's He supposed to know you're talking to Him specifically if you don't name names? Like during a spell when I call upon Aradia, I always say Her—”

  “Well, He may very well accept,” Harry cut me off, dropping the invitation with a tiny paper slap on the bench seat. “I hope you're happy.”

  “He can't come here!” I cried, flapping a hand. “Not to the cabin. I don't need Him now. He's too late. He'll have to go away!”

  “You cannot tell the Overlord to ‘go away’,” Harry sighed, retreating into his coat. We pulled into the driveway and he made a slow stream of soft shell-shocked expressions under his breath, like a man finally returning home from war.

  The wheels were turning in my head. “Suppose He did come.”

  “I would really rather not.” Harry closed his eyes.

  “Asmodeus could track Ruby Valli and punish her. He could find Dead Kristin and Dead Danika. He could find ole Gregori and talk some sense into him. Maybe a visit from the Overlord isn't the worst thing that could happen.”

  Three sets of incredulous eyes turned to me. I banged my door open and flung one leg out to the cold night air. “Then again, I've been wrong a coupla times…”

  * * *

  Wesley was waiting in the do
orway for us, his big hair cranked back in a guy-tail under a ball cap facing sideways. He'd draped Harry's black silk robe over his bony frame. If he wasn't wearing something under it, Harry was gonna plow him one. My brother's bright blue eyes were wide with anticipation. I didn't even ask. At this point, whatever his problem was, it was going to have to wait. It didn't even matter. I'd summoned the creator of the revenant lineage to some sort of soiree, and apparently the demon king was considering it. Yippee!

  On top of that, I had a crazy-ass old lady in the wind, but presumably still wanting me dead. Check that, an invisible crazy-ass old lady. Those were the best kind. I had not one ghoul, now, but two on the loose, with few ideas about how to catch them, or what to do with them once I did. I had a fourteen hundred-year-old French revenant (according to Harry, the Frenchness was the very worst part of it, though I wasn't sure why) infatuated with me. The hot guy I wanted to screw was moving to Michigan. My brother was undead. And I'm pretty sure I officially ruined my chances of having a steamy first sexual encounter with Harry. The weighty condemnation in his voice and the rolling of his eyes promised it would be brief and perfunctory, a wham-bam-thanks-for-the-Bond thing.

  I had to fix at least one of these problems before Asmodeus decided to drop in for milk and cookies.

  “Get out of my face, Wes, I swear,” I mumbled on my way to the fridge. I popped a Dr. Pepper. “You have no idea how bad I wanna punch someone right now.”

  “Actually, that's what I want to talk about,” Wes whispered, eyeballing the Feds out of the corner of his eye. “In private. Now.”

  “What, me punching you? We can do that here.” I chugged Dr. Pepper and coughed on the carbonation burn. The fang wounds in my tongue stung, making my eyes water. Harry moved past me to the pantry and slipped into the stairwell going down to his chambers, not speaking, not looking back.