by A. J. Aalto
I could never get enough of watching the revenant move, his stride easy and nimble, his tread a light and effortless invasion of the preternatural through mundane space. A body that lithe could never stomp or charge; his sinuous advance was a shadow falling across the moonlit parking lot. Life, in all its forms, scattered out of his way as if sensing the void. Even the wind seemed to fall silent at his approach.
Halfway to Harry's motorcycle, I became aware of a prickly feeling between my shoulder blades, as if someone had painted a bull's-eye on my spine and was whipping darts at it. My heart gave a solid thud of warning before stuttering into a canter. In a split second I was on full-blown high alert. If a tiger had pounced out of the brush to crouch on the pavement I wouldn't have missed a beat: pumped-up, I clenched, ready to give danger a flying elbow to the forehead. More likely, I'd break my neck tripping over the curb, but at least I'd do it in an adrenalin-charged lunge.
I cut my eyes quickly from side to side, looking for the source of the threat, something which I should never attempt while walking. Harry pulled up short at the Kawasaki and I barreled face-first into his back. It was like head-butting an iceberg, and drew from me a soft dunf.
“Is there a reason you're heading into panic-mode, my fluttering dove?” he asked placidly, handing me my helmet.
“I feel like we're being watched.”
Harry focused on his helmet, avoiding my eyes. He made a quiet affirmative noise, but when I pressed him to explain, he made busy with a cigarette, pinching it in his lips, letting smoke stream out of his nostrils, a pale dragon of the grave. “We should get home.”
“Is something out there, Harry?”
“Don't be preposterous, ducky, there is always something out there. Safety first.” He took the helmet back from my hands, plunking it on my head.
“Human? Not-so-human?”
His eyes adopted a far-away look while he dragged deep on the cigarette, darting back and forth as though he were reading a list of all things, living and inanimate, in the immediate area. “Strap in and let us be away from this place.”
“This isn't the first time I've felt something watching me in the past two weeks, Harry,” I told him. “I thought at first it was imagination, anxiety from missing you. I always feel safe when you're near me, but it didn't take long for that safe feeling to vanish once your plane took off.”
“You should have said.” Harry's concern washed over me with his smoky exhale. For a moment, he drew up his own aura of menace to dissuade anything out there that might be measuring him.
I stepped closer to him. “That girl who died tonight. You knew her.”
Harry gave no outward indication of the sadness I felt seeping through our Bond. “I knew who and what she was. The Grand Priory of the Knightly Order of St. John is a group that broke from the Knights Templar after the Crusades, to fight the greater evil they had discovered. After a brief collapse, they reestablished in Paris in 1785 under a man who called himself a paladin, a Holy Knight of Christ, to fight the Great Adversary's minions in all their forms. And one of those forms, my darling, would be revenants. We'd heard rumors that, along with a small group of Priors, John Spicer the Bavarian vampire tracker had surfaced in the New World.”
“Guess that's a bit different than a Bavarian cream pie?”
“Quite a bit. Your Agent Batten could take lessons. Mister Spicer does not waste his time with Youngers. He takes out the heads of lines, the Masters.”
“Kill the Master, destroy his whole bloodline, all the Youngers in one fell swoop,” I said, suddenly hoping that Prince Dreppenstedt was still safe. “Why tracker, not hunter?”
“Because John Spicer does not kill revenants. He collects them. You might imagine what the other Priors think of this scandalously brazen behavior.”
“How the hell do you collect a revenant?”
Harry's lips pressed in an unhappy shrug. “Very carefully, one should think; Mr. Spicer battles insuperable odds, yet has never failed.”
If Christina the pink kitty had been after Malas, could her father have been far behind? Was Malas still in danger? Were there other Priors in the state? I studied Harry's face for the answer. “Dare I ask what he does with them after he collects them?”
“He delivers them to the hands of the Grand Prior, George Ansell.”
“And Georgie-boy kills the revenants?”
“Killing is too tidy a word for what the Grand Prior does to them. Mr. Ansell believes he must cleanse a revenant body of the taint of Hell,” he corrected. “John Spicer is the only man who supplies him with opportunities to do so.”
I made a low noise of disgust.
“But I tire of such dreary talk, my darling,” Harry said. “It has been far too long since I saw your smile.” He chucked my chin with his cool forefinger, and I drummed one up for him; he tsked my lame-ass attempt.
“I'll smile harder when we're not about to be annihilated,” I promised.
Harry seemed to have no intention of staying to investigate whatever was lingering unseen; he knew the law as well as I did, and risking an altercation in public was unwise. He threw one lean leg over the bike, and started up the growling engine. Out of habit, I patted the front pocket of my jeans to check for my pencil and mini Moleskine, and found something else: a tiny lump like half a hard candy. I dug in and pulled it out between two gloved fingers.
The Waterloo tooth. But this thing was in Harry's pocket. How did it…?
“Come, come, bird, don't lollygag,” Harry said quietly, purposefully dragging at the front of my brain with his preternaturally-vigorous voice.
I put it back in my pocket, straddled the Kawasaki behind him, settling my helmet. Harry flicked his cigarette butt to the ground and without a second's hesitation rocketed the rumbling bike into the headlight-dotted terrain of Denver's nighttime traffic. We left US-36 West on the Ten Springs exit and he cranked an energetic version of Tom Waits’ “Telephone Call from Istanbul” through the helmet speakers. When he leaned us into the curves, I held onto his hard body as lithe muscles flexed under the scratchy tweed of his overcoat. As my body began to warm his, I felt the first anticipatory stirrings of his hunger trickle through the Bond; he'd missed me, too.
When Waits grittily advised, “never drive a car when you're dead,” Harry's laughter rinsed down between my shoulder blades to erase the bull's-eye, and just like that, everything was okay again. This time, even obscured by my helmet, my smile was brilliant.
CHAPTER 7
MORNINGS IN MY CABIN are always rough; this should come as no surprise when both my Cold Company and idiot brother, our undead guest, aren't even alive until after sunset each night, and Harry unfailingly plays coy with his feed, sometimes waiting until long past eleven to slake his thirst. He says anticipation is a sensory delight in itself, and should be enjoyed as long as possible before one indulges. I'm more of an immediate gratification gal. If I pour on the charm or dance with him, I can push his feed up to ten o'clock, but even in a best-case scenario, when I've got him fed and tucked into his reading chair with some Middle English poetry, I'm rarely in bed before midnight.
That being said, I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. Any time before eight A.M., no amount of birds chirping, sun shining or caffeine will perk me, and the slightest irritation is met with the threat of bleary-eyed violence. A quiet grumbler, I am not.
So when Sheriff Rob Hood drummed his meaty fingertips on my bedroom window at just before six, I thought (as I did each morning when his hands played alarm clock) that today might be the day they arrest me for his murder. I wondered what time I'd have to get up in prison, then summoned the enormous effort necessary to peel myself out of bed and shuffled across the room to part the Irish lace curtains and glare, snuffling around clogged sinuses, out across the side yard.
Hood was a natural ginger; from his nearly-invisible eyebrows to the brush of soft red across his unshaven jaw line, he was one hundred percent home-grown red-headed country b
oy. My curiosity went south every time I saw him, but asking would have come across as a come-on; handsome as he might be, I had zero intention of checking out the state of his crotch for myself, so I kept my mouth shut. Me, self-restraint? Point: Marnie. Freckles were spattered along the bridge of Hood's blunt nose, some of which were buried beneath a pair of black department-store sunglasses this morning.
He beckoned me outside with two fingers hooking the air. I showed him just one. He scowled and mouthed, “Don't make me come get you,” through the glass and tapped his no-nonsense Timex Ironman watch.
The last time I'd ignored him, he had hoisted himself through the bedroom window and tossed me out on my ass in the dew-soaked grass. Harry hadn't even lifted an eyebrow to help me. It was easier to nod a promise to join Hood in the yard than endure another humiliating failure to fend him off.
Motion behind him caught my eye. As the young sheriff started his warm-up stretches on the lawn, I squinted past him.
My cabin is bordered on south and west sides by a dense copse of trees, through which the driveway and two snowmobile trails cut. On the north side is the lake, Shaw's Fist, and the east is bordered by a boathouse that I haven't yet blown up, a rickety log fence crumbling to ruin, and thickets of wild yellow roses that I should prune back to something less enthusiastic than their current Triffid-esque sprawl. From this window, I could stare out to the shadow beyond the roses; barely visible behind their own thicket of trees, was my neighbor's cottage. It was one of those plywood-standing-on-brick constructions that someone's granddad built for fishing trips six decades ago and had never been improved-upon. It had been vacant since we'd taken up residence the previous November, its dark windows shuttered and driveway empty. Again, I felt the sensation of being watched, and while I didn't like it much, there was a wide-awake cop on my lawn, and that seemed to cancel out more than half my worry.
I sighed and slogged to the bathroom to splash some cool water on my face, and was alarmed at what I saw: bags under my eyes, burnt nose and forehead from an unsuccessful tanning session, peeling skin along the edges. My bangs stood straight up and flopped sadly to the left. There were pillow creases on my cheek. Maybe pillow creases were sexy.
I lit a pink candle, closed my eyes, and told myself I was not only powerful and limber, but gorgeous. I asked the mirror to show me something fabulous. Sadly, I'm not easily duped, and the glamour spell failed spectacularly. The only thing staring out of my mirror was a tired nitwit with bad hair whose half-snarl reflected a serious attitude problem.
I did a quick make-up routine, a sweep of mascara and a dotting of lip gloss, fairly certain I was fooling no one but feeling slightly better. Harry's feed last night should have bolstered my immune system, but my cold was clinging like sick magic; I still felt drained, feverish, and weary, and in desperate need of caffeine and four more hours under the covers.
How was I going to survive Hood's evil training routine? I brushed my ash blonde hair and dragged it up into a high ponytail; my hair, once shorn too-short by a psycho hose-beast named Danika Sherlock, had finally grown long enough to be cut in a shoulder-length bob. It was still unruly most of the time. Sometime between an ill-conceived necromimesis spell and my being nearly ripped apart by ghouls, my hair had developed a kink in it that neither combing, nor mousse, nor flat iron could tame. Harry told me this was cosmic punishment for dabbling in off-white magic, tiptoeing on the left hand path. He suggested that next time it might be worse, like a bulging nose wart, or an un-pluckable black hair in an areola; I had given him a rude left-handed gesture and told him to shut his undead trap.
I flexed at the mirror, imagining I was Linda Hamilton in one of the Terminator flicks, visualizing badass muscles that weren't there. I aimed finger guns at the mirror and did a broad wink. That wasn't any better. The candle had left a pale pink blob of wax on the marble top of my vanity; after I blew it out, I had to use my thumbnail to scrape the evidence off so Harry wouldn't see. A tiny ivory shard caught my eye.
The Waterloo tooth sat on the counter top. It hadn't been there three minutes ago. I frowned at it and stomped over to toss it in my nightstand drawer. Then I shoved my legs into yoga pants, grabbed a faded black t-shirt (World of Warcraft, for the Horde!), hauled on a pair of pink leather gloves and my jogging shoes, and padded through the kitchen to the back door.
“Nice morning. Did you warm up?” Hood said, enjoying himself far too much considering the obscene hour. He gave me a once-over; because of his well-honed cop face, I couldn't tell what he thought. “Ready for a work out?”
My idea of a workout was having to get off the couch to fetch more Fig Newtons. Hood didn't wait for a reply. He tossed me a curt, “Keep up,” and took off.
I blinked at the sight of his tight tush jogging toward the road and, drawing a deep breath, started after him. My short legs had to pump twice as quickly to keep up with his long-legged strides. I matched him, though, determined not to let him keep his smug grin for long. My ponytail whipped from side to side as I found my sniffly-snuffling rhythm.
“Are you actually sick?” Hood asked. “I didn't believe your Tweet this morning.”
“My what?”
“I follow you on Twitter.”
“What? I don't have a Twitter account.”
“Sure you do.” He slowed to finger-brush his iPhone and flashed me a Twitter profile. The handle was @MBGrtWShark. The profile picture was me giving a camera the finger. Classy. The most recent Tweet said: Even superheroes get the #sniffles.
Harry.
“To do: clock a dead guy with a sock full of pennies.” I rubbed my forehead. “Next you're gonna tell me I have a Facebook page.”
“If you don't, who's been playing Farmville with me?” He smiled and started up again at a healthy jog. “I never understood why they call you the Great White Shark?”
“The first case I worked on with the FBI involved hunting a sexually sadistic serial killing revenant who hunted kids. It was awful.”
“I remember that. Jeremiah Prost.”
“Yep. Forensic psychiatrists call serial sexual sadists the ‘great white sharks’ of the criminal world. Some idiot journalist figured the worst bad guy should be fought by the best good guy, and ran with that. Called me the Great White Shark of psychic investigations. It stuck. Little did they know, I'm so not the best good guy.”
“If you get winded, fall back.”
Pretending I wasn't, I panted behind him, “Pshaw.”
His body made it look easy as he drove his lean body forward along the road, his running shoes crunching gravel. The sheer physicality of him still took me by surprise, though it shouldn't have; I'd seen it every damn morning for the past two weeks.
“To the end of the road and back today,” he said easily, “I clocked it at a mile and a half. That okay with you?”
“Twice, if you like,” I bragged. “I don't get tired.”
This was a half-truth; Harry's resilience offered me a great deal of stamina. Though out of shape and wrestling with the head cold, I was still blessed with a touch of the unnatural. Sure, Hood could beat me in most things, hands-down, but if he was expecting me to collapse after a bit of jogging, he had no idea just how wrong he was.
We made it to the end, right up to the wooden barriers blocking the end of the road at the fishing camps, when he took a sideways jot and continued past them into the shade on a sun-dappled seasonal snowmobile track. I knew it eventually met up with the one that came around the side of my cabin. If we ran all the way around the lake, that was going to be a lot more than a mile and a half. Hood carried on, not taking his eyes off the forest, seeming to look far into the distance, through a stand of oak, red-berried Elder, false indigo, and late golden currant bushes at the upcoming curve, where, in rippling blue slashes, the lake showed through moisture-jeweled greenery.
Hood's voice was gruff but not out of breath. “You know, I've been a real dick to you.”
“I know, right? Six A.M. is bullshit.”
“I meant, a dick about Dunnachie.”
I blew my bangs out of my face with an upward puff. This was the first time since Dunnachie's disappearance that the sheriff had verbally brought him up, but I knew what he meant. He'd been tense with me, suspicious without asking outright, and every once in a while I caught him giving me the side-eye.
“It's been rough on you,” I allowed. “You lost your chief deputy, your friend.”
“Not your fault,” he said. “I treated you like it was. I think I'm here every morning more to punish you than to help Chapel.”
“Jogging around the lake with a hot cop isn't really punishment.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I know you didn't kill him.”
“I didn't,” I agreed, but the lump in my throat prevented me from saying anything else.
He slowed by a bunch of fallen logs, covered in twigs and time and moss, and then stopped. I didn't complain; my lungs were burning. Through the noise of my coughing, Hood stared up at the hints of early morning sun peeking through the canopy, then passed a hand over his face and stood looking down a tumble-down shoreline littered with rock and muck to gaze at the lake.
“Is he out there somewhere, Marnie?”
The question made me go still. I scanned his torso without success for the tell-tale bulge of a firearm, then felt silly and disloyal for doing it. “People don't just vanish.” I heard myself say, but thought of the late Ruby Valli, invisible witch-walking psycho-geezer, and added, “Generally speaking.”
“Look, if I hurt you during training, if I get too rough, it's just because I'm used to training full-grown men, and you're so small. You know that, right? It has nothing to do with Dunnachie.”
“You're just saying this so you can knock me around some more. What's it going to be today, cheap shot to the kidneys?” I asked, showing him a smile.
He echoed it, his lopsided, full of sheepishness. He'd already bruised me more than a little during our occasional sparring sessions. Well, they were supposed to be sparring sessions, but what they usually turned into was me flailing and swearing at him while he laughed and dropped me repeatedly on my butt in the yard while he shouted advice. The bruises mattered more to him than they did to me; I could take it.