by A. J. Aalto
Without warning, the Blue Sense roared open like a hungry dragon in the front of my skull, and I staggered, throwing out a bare hand for balance. Harry’s cupping hand took my elbow, and his tsk in my ear soothed as it scolded.
“Steady as she goes, ducky,” he murmured, and then evenly to Wes, “Between, lad, not on top of. Mustn’t overwhelm.”
I ignored the smudge of doubt coming from the cops at my unintentional swoon; to the uninitiated, it probably did look like I was hamming it up for my audience, but if I tamed my initial reactions, I could close my mind off to impressions, too.
There were warring emotional remnants in the apartment, but all pointed to the same thing: this woman had been living on edge. Constant fear, anger, and paranoia made a pungent mélange that stung my psychic senses. Caring less about what the cops thought of me and focusing on Rachel, I glanced at the front door as Percy swung it shut, noting the clutter of multiple locks and deadbolts.
I said, “You didn’t tell me your missing girl had already been the victim of a crime, Constable Percy.”
The officer did not reply.
“You also didn’t mention that her name isn’t Rachel Houseton; it’s Paula McKnight. You also failed to mention that she’s been living in Witness Protection.”
Again, Percy was silent. I’d run into this hoarding of information before; it wasn’t helpful to me, and it was certainly a waste of time when dealing with a forensic psychic, but telling her things she already knew did help me gain credibility with the woman hovering by the front door.
“Where would you like us?” Fryfogle asked me.
“I’m going to start in the bedroom,” I answered. “You guys are welcome to come, as long as you’re quiet.”
Harry shed his coat, laid it over one arm, and swept ahead of me, his cloak of cold air purling along behind him in the hallway. Wes went with him, keeping his hat tilted down over his face. I shrugged out of my parka, took off my knit cap, and followed.
The bedroom was spotless: the dark, restful den of a minimalist. Harry flicked on the overhead light, a multi-armed chandelier with only one bulb. My focus zeroed in on the alarm clock on the nightstand and I glanced at Harry. He nodded once, approving. I’d try Groping without Wesley’s telepathic input first, to test the waters. I moved to brush the plastic buttons with a bare fingertip.
McKnight started the morning the way she always did; the safety went on the gun before she turned off the alarm clock; the sheathed hunting knife came out from under her pillow; with it held in her lap, she switched the answering machine back on before turning on the ringer on the phone. Shaking two Lorazepam and three Vicodin from the pill bottles on her nightstand, she slid them past her chattering teeth to dry-swallow and, shoving her legs in an old pair of sweats, went through her Start the Day mantra: He will not confine me to one room. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never again. Five repetitions, seven, ten, until she almost believed it.
I mouthed her mantra silently, trying to see who she was afraid of, but that impression wouldn’t come. I willed myself deeper into the vision, drawing on Harry's cool power through the Bond and steering well clear of the trickle of deep, dangerous heat beneath it.
After spending a couple minutes sharpening the gut hook on her knife with a round whetstone, Paula felt ready to leave the bedroom, but upon finally placing her hand on the knob, her mouth went dry.
I moved to put my bare hand on the doorknob, where hers had been only the day before. I felt the ripple of fear and irritation that went through her, and close behind it, an ounce of strength.
Harry’s voice pushed against my ear, breaking into the vision. “Very nice, pet, but you must tell your officers what you’re getting.”
What was I getting, exactly?
New strength. This was fresh, this anger-fed strength; Paula had battled a long time to recoup it. I could see her using her forefinger to punch the alarm panel, turning off the motion sensor in the hallway. She didn’t just open the door; she wrenched it open with force and determination.
“At seven-fifteen, Paula woke up, took her medication, and got dressed. She was armed with a hunting knife and a gun. I like her style. I should do the same thing when my asshole physical fitness instructor shows up too damn early in the morning.”
Wisely ignoring the indignities of my personal life, Percy said, “We didn’t find a gun.”
“She owned one.”
Fryfogle scanned his notes. “Not registered.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but it was hers, and she knew how to use it.”
I moved into the hallway and the cops sidestepped out of my way. I kicked off my Keds and then peeled off my socks so I could make bare-skin contact with the carpet. My main psychic Talent, psychometry – also known as token-object reading, or Groping – doesn’t work as well through my feet as it does through the palms of my hands, but every bit helps. Both cops watched, radiating the usual blend of skepticism and curiosity that I got from pretty much every law enforcement agent the first time they worked with me, but neither did so with the running, doubt-filled, spoken commentary I sometimes heard.
Once, Paula would have heard the sound of the TV drifting from the living room, the morning news set to turn on at the same time as her alarm clock; the morning she went missing she heard nothing but the quiet, steady huff of the heating system. As much as she loved the company of the meteorologist’s friendly prognostications, she could no longer afford to have that sunny rambling cover up the minute, stealthy sounds of someone moving through the apartment. Her life depended on silence; the innocuous background babble was just one more thing she’d been robbed of, one she never failed to notice. It was the sound of normalcy.
The hall had been dark, hushed, and blessedly empty. Every single morning for the last six months, Paula had entered it tense and ready, afraid it would frame the indistinct form that haunted her nightmares.
“Whose form, Paula?” I wondered aloud. Constable Percy cocked her head at me, but this time she said nothing. I squatted in place, letting my fingertips brush the carpet.
Paula didn’t know what he looked like. His face was a void. She had learned the pressure of his body and the contours of his dark soul from behind a sweaty, reeking blindfold. And every morning, she was so relieved to not see someone standing in the hall that her knees, the ones he had once shattered with a tire iron, went weak and began to throb. The pain served to remind her that she was still alive.
It had taken Paula six steps to reach the bathroom this morning; each stride was a throbbing feast of agony.
“Not a revenant attack,” I said softly, moving with the vision until I stood right where Paula had stood, touching the bathroom door.
Constable Percy shadowed me. “Oh?”
“Immortals don't usually hang out in the bathroom. This might sound counter-intuitive, given a revenant’s love of aromatherapy and bubble fights.”
“Are you ever serious?” she asked.
“Hardly ever, if I can help it. But right now? Yes. I’m very serious.” I stepped barefoot into the bathroom, padding on cool tile. “Can I have a minute alone in here?”
Constable Percy nodded, but Harry objected with a little cluck of his tongue. I rolled my eyes, made space for him and Wes to come through, and closed the door behind us.
“I do not like that woman,” Harry confided. “Her eyes are not pleasing, and in them one can observe a distinct lack of the warmth and nurturing that one hopes to see in the fairer sex.”
“You mean she isn’t hot for your bod,” I murmured knowingly, my eyes everywhere in the bathroom but on him. “Don’t you cluck your tongue at me. I know exactly what you’re feeling. She is trying to do her job, in case you hadn't noticed, your Lordship. Women do that this century.”
“Sassed by my very own darling, that is how I am feeling,” he said with feigned annoyance.
“Well, Groping evidence makes a darling oh-so-sassy,” I replied.
“Would you two stop?” Wesley g
rimaced, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “I know you're both into the kinky stuff back at the cabin, but, you know, this is kind of a crime scene, and I’m trying to focus. Plus, there’s a ten o’clock flight, and I want to be on it.”
“Okay, let's do my thing.” I agreed, and shot Harry a wink, mostly just to needle my brother.
Wesley squinched his eyes closed, turned his face to the ceiling, and groaned.
“Of course,” Harry acquiesced. “How perfectly selfish of me. Do carry on. I so enjoy watching you work, and had forgotten how much texture and flavor there is in the mundane things in life.”
I wasn't buying his veiled boredom act; he was enjoying letting the coiled tendrils of his Talents unfurl through me as I crouched and laid my bare hands palm-down on the bathroom tile near Wesley’s sneakers.
From behind the locked bathroom door, Paula had reset the motion detector in the hallway and turned on the shower. The gun went on the back of the toilet. The knife came into the tub with her; she tucked it behind the shampoo bottle.
This was some serious post-traumatic stress. I tracked her into the shower stall, using my hands like a treasure hunter sweeping a beach with a metal detector.
They (I wondered who “they” were, but couldn’t Grope the answer) had brought her a conditioner she wouldn’t use; scented like Creamsicles, the smell brought back memories of him, of his cajoling murmur.
Wesley’s hand landed on my shoulder.
(“If you’re my good girl, I’ll get you some orange juice.”) I heard him as clearly as she had, and it gave me a nasty shock. It was Wesley’s voice, pushed into my head telepathically, but they were not his words or delivered in his cadence. The voice was colder, stiffer, inexorable. They were the words of Paula’s Faceless Man.
Orange juice. My mouth filled with saliva, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Harry cock his head at me curiously.
“Thirsty, love?”
I shook my head, focusing harder. Feeling the empathic impressions Paula had left in this room, and Groping her through the things she’d touched, I linked myself to her through the shampoo bottle. Wesley shadowed me, and the intrusion of his power, where usually only my own swelled, had my belly jittering.
Orange juice. The only thing he had fed Paula for six captive weeks. The sweet, frigid gift of life. But only if she was his good girl.
It made my stomach roll with a greasy kind of fear, and I tried to back away from it empathically. Wes took an insistent step forward, hand out, not quite touching me this time, drawing me deeper into his telepathic link. My breath caught in my throat.
“Wes,” was all I could get out, but he frowned that away, his one good eye staring me down. He was getting something very clearly, and he was going to share it whether I liked it or not; Baranuiks do not suffer alone. He practically shoved it into my head, and I staggered against the shower door, expecting Harry to step in a make my brother back down. He didn’t. Instead, Harry melted away from us, settling into the corner by a shelf full of towels and letting my brother take charge. For a moment, I felt like they were ganging up on me, and had to remember this was exactly what we’d come for: to read and hopefully find Paula McKnight.
Orange juice. Again, that craving punched me wet, sharp, and sweet on the taste buds.
She had craved the taste of that orange juice so badly while she showered that her tongue shook against the roof of her mouth and her throat cramped up. She’d turned her face up at the shower spray and opened her mouth, gulping hot water noisily through the chlorine mist. If only she could get warm. A bone-deep cold had settled in her and she could not shake it. When it came time to soap up, she forced herself not to avoid the thick twists of scar tissue that rolled across her midsection and puckered above her belly button; instead, she paid extra attention to each old wound, marked each memory, each slash on automatic replay.
(“If you’re my good girl, I’ll suture that. Are you my good girl?”)
And she’d said yes, God help her. What choice had he given her?
“She took a long time under the hot water that morning,” I told Harry, who silently absorbed this without asking any questions, letting me talk through it.
Before her captor had taken her, I got the impression Paula had been an in-and-out girl, spending only the minimum practical time on grooming. Not a linger-under-the-spray girl. Not a pamper, pluck, and polish girl. I would find no curling iron or mascara in Paula McKnight’s drawers. She’d always been eager to get to the library, finish that paper, get that lab report in, be off to the next project. Now she was a lingering girl, if not to chase the illusive comfort of warmth, but also because she had time to fill. I slid my hands to the bathroom counter, stroking the ersatz marble.
By the time she left the shower, ears perked as always for any unusual noises in the fresh and foggy silence, Paula was hungry for breakfast, roaringly hungry. She had planned to make eggs and ham and rye toast, and was determined to choke them down, even though her stomach still refused solids most days. Hunger, like pain, reminded her that she was alive, that she had survived, that she could fix her hunger without him, without the shivering and begging.
“The trauma is still fresh in her mind.”
Wes nodded. He didn’t have to ask if he was helping me; he could hear it rattling around in my mind. For Harry’s benefit, I said, “I can hear his voice through her. The damage runs deep. She’s always cold, now, Harry.”
Harry made a sympathetic noise; if anyone understood the discomfort of being always chilled, it was my Cold Company.
I moved to the bathroom mirror, and, laying one palm on the glass, got only brief impressions of crime scene analysts dusting for fingerprints. Even with Wesley’s amplification and the addition of Harry's powers, there was only the merest whiff of Paula in the glass, brushing her teeth. Not looking at herself, not wanting to see.
“All she wanted was her normal life back,” I said sadly.
“A normal life,” Harry said. “That sounds perfectly unappealing.”
“I dunno,” I said. “I could be content with a normal life.”
Harry stiffened. “Could you, indeed? Well, that’s enlightening.”
“Not what she meant,” Wesley offered.
“I meant, without this crime scene stuff or the FBI. Just us, somewhere relaxing.”
“’Tis quiet as the grave in Gothenburg this time of year,” Harry said.
“I was thinking more like Negril,” I said.
“Pish tosh,” Harry said. “Vampirism is illegal in Jamaica, your brother and I wouldn’t last a day, even if he hadn't shorn off those ridiculous dreadlocks he arrived with.”
I smirked at them briefly and touched the door of Paula’s medicine cabinet.
After rubbing topical analgesic into her knees, massaging it vigorously despite the throbbing, Paula got dressed in comfort clothes — t-shirt and sweat pants — and turned off the motion detectors, making the arduous journey from bathroom to living space. The front door was locked and chained, just as she’d left it.
Back in the hallway, I mentioned this to Percy, and then traced Paula’s steps through the living room with my undead conga line behind me. A cut-down hockey stick was wedged in the track of the sliding glass door to the balcony, and the vertical blinds were still closed behind substantial, room-darkening curtains.
Paula put the gun on the kitchen counter, jacked the apartment’s heat up another two degrees, and turned on the coffeemaker, longing again for the normalcy of news anchor banter in the dead quiet apartment that would never feel like home. Before it even finished brewing, while she waited for her toast to pop, the phone rang on the kitchen wall and she reluctantly faced the call display. The doorman, Will, one of the few calls she didn’t send to voice mail.
I asked, “Did you talk to the doorman?”
Percy confirmed, “William Gentry. Said there was a delivery of flowers about eight o’clock yesterday morning. He spoke to Ms. McKnight on the phone, and s
he asked to have them sent up by Dennis Bonnet, Mr. Gentry’s nephew.”
I didn’t think my next move through as well as I should have; I reached toward the kitchen wall and Groped the phone.
A sudden white spiral whipped like a weed trimmer in the front of my skull, and the Blue Sense scrambled to keep up with the multitude of visions that cascaded into my brain simultaneously. Wesley barked a sharp complaint, his hands flying to his forehead. Having lost my sense of order, time, and relevance, I slammed the phone back at cradle and missed, sending the phone smashing to the floor. The battery cover popped off and went skittering across the tile while images and feelings crashed and jostled for attention in my brain.
Harry’s hands brought Wesley and I back to the here-and-now with a single tap. I ignored my brother’s huffing and panting.
“A telephone receiver?” Wes growled.
Harry agreed, “Oh, dearheart, whatever were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Fuckin’ duh,” Wesley agreed.
But through the mess, I had divined Paula’s heart abandoning her through the soles of her feet. Flowers. Through her anxiety (and expectation, I noted with confusion) she’d nonetheless asked Will to have Dennis bring them up. I would have expected her to reject them. I didn’t risk another touch of the phone; too much interference. Instead, I crouched and Groped the floor in front of the phone where she would have stood. Wesley, reluctant this time, joined me in crouching.
As soon as Paula hung up, the phone rang again, and a glance at the display showed the number was blocked. She let it ring until it stopped. There was no message. It began again, four rings, five, until the generic voice mail message interrupted. Her machine played to the kitchen the nearly-empty message for two beats, during which she could hear sidewalk sounds, the noise of an urban morning: cars, a bus, muffled footsteps and strangers’ voices in the distance. The caller hung up and called again.