by C. L. Bevill
“Why did you do that?” Nica asked. He released her and it was obvious that it was reluctantly. His hands trailed down her sides and across her thighs before drawing away from her completely. He leaned back into the pew and, if she wasn’t mistaken, a hint of a blush coursed over his cheekbones. “Why did you kiss me?” he asked, sounding like a man much younger than he was.
“I wanted to kiss you,” Tavie said honestly. She smiled with amusement. “Haven’t you ever wanted a kiss from someone?”
“Of course I have,” Nica said. “I just told you how I erred in kissing a woman when I had promised things to another.”
“Have you promised anything to anyone else right now?” Tavie asked. “Or do your promises to Tsura still count?”
“No, Tsura’s passed onto where her beliefs sent her. My obligation to her ended two centuries ago.”
“There. No laws broken.”
Nica stared at her. He touched his mouth. “I haven’t kissed a woman since…”
Tavie stared back. “Since when? Since you kissed the gadji?” She blinked. “In all this time, you haven’t been with a woman? I’ve seen the deadies in Deadsville. Sex isn’t something they had to give up along with television and Xbox.”
His chest moved in a great sigh. Tavie had an idea that he didn’t really know what to feel or not to feel. He had said something along the effect that he had been a reaper for the last two hundred or so years. That was a very long time not to have human contact.
“Were you obligated not to touch anyone?” she asked politely.
Nica shook his head. “I’m a reaper. I’m one of hundreds of reapers in the world of the dead. Most people flee from my very appearance. If they feel the hand it is the bones of the skeleton they are touched with and nothing more.”
“But you’re not a reaper now,” Tavie said. “And I’ve seen you walking around as a regular deadie. You were at the crime scenes.”
“I was following you.”
“And I’ve got an after death stalker,” Tavie said.
“I’m not a stalker,” Nica said. “A stalker is a creepy pervert. I’m not completely ignorant of the cultural meanings. I’ve watched the Discovery Channel. And you don’t want to know what the Roma would have done to such a person.”
“But you’re following me around Deadsville,” Tavie said. “Are you neglecting your reaper duties?”
Nica grimaced. “I might be skirting the edge of trouble,” he admitted. “It seemed more important that…”
“That?” she prompted.
Nica shut his mouth. Then he touched it again with his hand. “Why did you kiss me?” he asked after a moment.
“Why did you bring my dog to me?” she asked promptly. Nica’s expression closed off and Tavie knew it was a time to be serious. “I like you,” she said. “You’ve got a strength in there somewhere. You wouldn’t be a reaper if you didn’t have it. You’ve paid your dues. I believe in second chances for most people.”
Nica continued to look at her. “For most people,” he repeated, picking up on the hidden message.
“Some people don’t deserve to live,” she said and even she heard the bitterness in her tone. “And that’s the price I’m going to have to pay.”
“And now? What do you want now?”
“I want to get some answers,” Tavie said firmly.
“Yes, I’m free on Friday night,” Nica said and a suddenly smile changed his expression completely. “Also Saturday. Hell, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but Thursdays I help out at the soup kitchen in Skokie.”
Tavie’s mouth opened. Then she asked, “You just made a joke, didn’t you?”
Nica shrugged. “I’m out of practice.”
“Do you really help out at a soup kitchen in the Chicago area?”
“They need volunteers.”
“Do you do it because of Tsura?”
“No, I do it because they really need volunteers.”
“You said you could take me where I need to be,” Tavie said.
Nica immediately frowned.
“I need to see Thana,” she said firmly. “It’s time.”
* * *
“It isn’t going to be easy,” Nica said.
“I’ve discovered that things rarely are easy after I died,” Tavie said. “They weren’t easy before I died, either, but for a whole other set of reasons.”
“Have you thought about waiting in this place until the person who put you here comes back?” Nica asked.
“I have thought about it,” Tavie said. “But that doesn’t seem likely, does it? He thought I wouldn’t go anywhere.”
“He left the lantern,” Nica said thoughtfully, pointing at the bluish ecto light.
“How was I supposed to escape?” Tavie asked. “It could be a serious amount of time before he, or she for that matter, comes back. They could kill again and I can’t afford to wait.”
Nica nodded. He pointed at the doors in the front of the church. “That way,” he said.
Tavie took a step toward the door, looking at her footing. Some of the hardwood floors of the church were warped. She thought to ask Nica a question. “How does this—” she started and turned her head to look at him.
It wasn’t Nica anymore; it was the reaper. All seven feet of him with his skeletal features stood there with his scythe in his skeletal hand and his burning eyes blazing red in the gloom.
Tavie jumped. “Little warning next time,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” Nica rumbled. “The portals are activated by reapers.”
Tavie stopped. “Does that mean the person who brought me here is a reaper?”
“Reapers and gods of the dead,” Nica amended. “Also a few other deadies who have a little extra. They generally don’t know what to do with it. Sometimes they go back to the living world.”
“As what? Ghosts?”
Nica made a face. It was a little strange that the skeletal face with the red glowing eyes grimaced uneasily, but there it was.
“That’s what ghosts are?” Tavie asked. “People who managed to find a way back to the living world?”
“But their living body is truly dead and rotting,” Nica said. “They cause more problems than they’re worth. Some of them are simply left to haunt wherever they’re attached to.”
Tavie sighed. “That explains some haunted places, doesn’t it?”
Nica shrugged. “Are you ready, Octavia Glynnis Stone?”
“Do you have to middle name me, Nica? I don’t even know what your middle name is. In fact, I don’t know what your last name is.”
“There is power in names.” Nica stepped to the door and tapped the scythe on the floor. The boom that it made shouldn’t have been so loud, but it reverberated through the building. The stained glass in the windows creaked and moaned. “Step through the door.”
Tavie stepped through the door and the church was gone.
* * *
The world was wind, dust, and the distant but disconcerting howl of an unknown entity as it made plain its discontent. Tavie’s hair whipped around her face and grit seemed to seep into her pores. She adjusted her jacket and peered into the murk. It wasn’t as dark as Deadsville or wherever the church was located. The sky was a muddy yellow, forever on the edge of changing into something else.
Tavie turned to say something to Nica. He towered over her and his unearthly visage was watching something far away. She looked back but could see nothing but the persistent swirl of air and dirt. “Is this where Thana is?”
“Not even close,” Nica said and there wasn’t even a hint of humor in his voice. “I told you it was going to be difficult.”
“No, you said it wasn’t going to be easy,” Tavie said. “That’s a whole different genie getting out of a kettle of worms.”
“It is what it is,” Nica said mysteriously.
“Is it a test, then?”
The winds began to scream at Tavie and she would have backed away but there was nowhere to back up. Invisible fingers grasped her jacket and
tugged at her. Claws that couldn’t be seen raked at her jean covered legs. Something tugged at her hair and jerked violently, pulling her halfway to the front.
Typically Tavie had been an unflappable kind of a woman. It was the best way to be when one was law enforcement. When the oversized, glow-in-the-dark, vibrating John Holmes Tool of Destruction was left in the on position in her top drawer on the first day in the violent crimes unit, she didn’t lose her composure. In fact, payback had been a bitch for several others that month. When a man had pulled out a sawed off shotgun and rested the barrel against the side of her head while flexing his index finger on the trigger, she hadn’t broken a sweat. (It had taken her nearly thirty minutes and the promise of ten Dum Dum Pops which had to be watermelon or blu raspberry flavored, but she had gotten the man to hand her the shotgun without any extra fanfare.) When an adult black bear had charged out of a dumpster at her, she hadn’t peed in her little girl panties. (Two seconds later the bear decided that it had enough of visiting the big city and hauled its butt off to less populated climes. She and the Maricopa County animal control officer had done tequila shots in celebration at the closest bar.)
However, undetectable things pushing and clawing at Tavie was different. She had a strong urge to pull out the Glock and see if she could make the entire 360 degree circle of bullet holes. Her belief was that she was bound to hit something.
Of course, the niggling but came wiggling its way into her brain, a malignant bearer of doubt that wouldn’t go away. Shooting willy-nilly wouldn’t have done any good and Tavie knew it. She simply swatted unseen limbs away from her and planted her legs in solidly. She told herself, I’m already dead, how bad could it get?
“I’m stronger than this,” she muttered and willed herself to believe it. “I believe in myself.”
All at once the fingers and claws stopped attacking her. They vanished as if the huffing winds had blown them away.
“What are you afraid of, then?” a voice asked. Tavie knew it wasn’t Nica and she wouldn’t have been comforted if had been him.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” she said firmly and something treacherous popped into her head. She was afraid of something; it was something she hadn’t thought about in years.
The wind abruptly blew itself out, leaving a murky region full of gray and silence. Tavie could hear her breathing and she could feel her heart pounding via the constant throbbing of her veins.
Her eyes settled on a part of the grayness and stared at it. It was a lodestone. If Tavie could keep her eyes there, she wouldn’t fall, she wouldn’t succumb to the influences of this place.
Hell?
No, hell would be worse. They’d be playing repeats of Desperate Housewives, the popcorn would always be burned, and the creepy guy from vice with the tuna fish breath would be hitting on her no matter how many times she said no.
Tavie blinked and she wasn’t there anymore. Where she was, she didn’t know. The world had tilted and everything was now horizontal. She was lying along something cold and gritty. The smell was of musty dankness. It was a place under the ground, but there were a few beams of dusky light cutting through the black. She could hear something above her that sounded like someone murmuring. Then there were muffled booms as someone moved around above her; their footsteps were like heavy rocks dropping onto the floor.
For a moment, she thought she was in the grave, buried in the cemetery a few blocks from her parents’ house in Prescott. It was dark and underground, but there wouldn’t have been those isolated beams of light, showing her there was an outside somewhere the sun was still shining brightly.
Tavie tried to move but she was frozen in place. There was an exit nearby. The crawlspace of her grandmother’s house in Flagstaff was the best place to hide from her irritating cousins. One wanted to play dolls. The other wanted to braid Tavie’s hair. Tavie wanted to play cops and robbers, preferably if she was the cop, but upon occasion she would suffer through being the robber. Her cousins didn’t want to play any such “boy” game. Cousin Marlisa would also refuse to have anything to do with clowns, but that didn’t really matter to Tavie. Therefore hiding was an excellent solution to her dilemma.
The door to the crawlspace was easy to open. There was only a simple latch holding it shut, and she could crawl inside to keep away from the annoying girlish behavior of her two cousins. She wanted to play with her cousin, Peter, but Peter was twelve and he wanted nothing to do with a six year-old girl, even if she had a predilection for all things boyish. Peter had absconded for the house of a boy up the street and left Tavie to the puerile tutelage of his sisters.
If only Tavie had a flashlight and the latest edition of Green Lantern or possibly The Thing. She’d even settle for Batman. The problem with those was that Nana always took them away because she deemed them too adult for Tavie. However, Tavie knew exactly where Nana hid them.
Tavie was about to leave the crawlspace, carefully making her way out to the back of a great Lilac bush that concealed the entrance. However, she heard something else that made the goose bumps on her skin pop.
It was the dry sound of something moving across dirt and loose gravel, where the flesh was meeting something it didn’t exactly agree with. It went for a few seconds, paused, and then continued. The six-year-old Tavie twisted her head in order to try to see what was making the noise. She had an idea in her very young head and she didn’t like it. Nana had killed several of them before because they looked like rattlesnakes and she wasn’t sure if some of them hadn’t been. She told her grandchildren to be careful where they were stepping when they were outside and to make sure they made lots of noise before they pushed through bushes.
Tavie hadn’t given it much thought. After all, there were so many more fun things to do. She could be shooting a gun while catching a vile perpetrator, as Sonny Crockett might call them on TV. Well, not vile perhaps. Miami Vice was like the comics. She wasn’t supposed to watch it but her daddy loved the show and he wouldn’t tell her mommy when she stayed up to watch it with him while her mommy was having her weekly girl’s night out on Fridays.
Tavie began to panic. Something warm and dry slithered across her bare leg. She quickly rethought the shorts. She made a noise that was a muffled shriek and yanked her leg away. The snake came with her and fell across her arm and chest. There was a blistering explosion of pure terror that pushed everything else to the background.
A snake slid on top of Tavie. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, insistent and aggressive. She was going to be bitten. She was going to be eaten. No one would ever find her.
She opened her mouth to scream. In the living world, screaming was exactly what Tavie had done. The gopher snake was less happy about it than she had been and had fled like the black bear she’d seen decades later. But the young Tavie didn’t know that. The young Tavie had screamed until she had passed out. When she woke up she had been still under the house, with another snake coiled on top of her thigh. So she had screamed some more until someone crawled under the house to help her.
The dead Tavie caught herself before a sound exited her lips. She closed her eyes and took a breath. She took another. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “Maybe I should be, but I’m not. This isn’t what’s happening to me now.”
“Probably, babycakes,” said a familiar voice, “you should be.”
Chapter 17
When death is there, dying is over. – Russian Proverb
~
“What idjit said dying was easy?” – Octavia Stone
~
Tavie opened her eyes again. “I had nightmares about that for years,” she said indignantly. “Me and Indiana Jones are completely simpatico.”
“I know,” Thana said.
“Frickin’ years. I had to see a psychiatrist about it and he sent me to the reptile house at the zoo,” Tavie said curtly. “Now I hate zoos, too. Thank God there isn’t a Deadsville Zoo.”
“It’s how things work,” Thana said. She was still
short and plump with her long gray hair wrapped up in a bun. The jogging suit was navy blue, however. The t-shirt was a matching navy blue and said “Damn. It feels good to be a GANGSTA!” in large, white block letters.
Tavie was suddenly full of frustration. She took a moment to attempt calm. She looked around and found herself standing in the middle of a kitchen. It was all tans and browns. The fridge and oven were harvest gold. The floor was vinyl. It was something out of the seventies. Abruptly, Tavie realized it was her grandmother’s kitchen. There was even the sign over the door with all of her grandchildren’s handprints on it. Tavie’s was all the way to the right, the smallest at the time.
Thana poured herself a cup of coffee and tilted the vintage Presto Coffee Percolator at Tavie inquisitively. Tavie nodded, although she felt more like jerking the pot out of Thana’s hands and bashing her over the head with it. That wouldn’t have been good since the pot had been a wedding gift to Nana.
“That wouldn’t be very nice,” Thana admonished while she took a mug down from a cupboard. “And yes, I can read minds. I know what evil lurks in the heart of man and woman and sometimes in the hearts of dogs.” She pointedly looked at Pudd who sat on the floor next to Tavie’s feet. “And cats,” she added. A black feline jumped to the counter and trotted down the laminate top to where it could jump to the top of the fridge. Its yellow eyes glared down at Pudd, who steadfastly ignored it.
It made Tavie wonder if all the gods had an animal sidekick, and then she wondered what that made her with Pudd.
With a free hand, Thana opened a tooth-shaped cookie jar on the countertop and withdrew a large Milk Bone. Pudd made a happy noise and sat up straight. Thana put the mug down on the laminate countertop and tossed the Milk Bone to the dog, who caught it like Yogi Berra on his best day.
You suck, Tavie thought at Thana. Thana frowned.
“That kind of attitude isn’t going to help,” Thana observed. She poured coffee into the second mug and handed it to Tavie, who took it without thinking about it. “Sugar’s on the table.”
“I know where Nana’s sugar is,” Tavie snapped. She sat at the small aluminum table with its gold backed chairs and looked at the top of the table. In the middle was a matched set of salt and pepper shakers in the shape of teeth. A third, larger tooth had a little spoon in it. (Grandpa had been a dentist and there were lots of dentally inclined decorations in Nana’s house.)