by A. J. Aalto
“You would prefer to be wooed in secret, then,” Harry confirmed. “I have long suspected this to be the case.”
I was about to indelicately expound on exactly how little sex I was having when Declan interrupted. “Lord Dreppenstedt,” he said, covering his mouth with his fist to clear his throat, though I thought I also saw a brief smirk. “While I'm sure your DaySitter has many admirable qualities, I am not interested in pursuing her romantically.”
Harry's calculating gaze weighed the assertion; he looked no happier, and resumed his slow tread towards the stranger. “How can I imagine this to be the truth?”
“I'm only here to learn,” Declan said. “At your age, you could certainly tell if I were lying to you.”
Harry didn't look convinced. “Are you otherwise romantically involved, doctor?”
Declan took a single step back toward the door, cautious as opposed to afraid, as a lion handler might be in the presence of a big cat with a thorn in its paw, knowing and seeing the danger but not unaccustomed to it. “I don't think that's any of your concern.”
Point: Declan for bravery, but courage never kept a dead guy warm at his funeral. Harry circled around Declan's back, his luminous eyes radiating indignation. Sweet malice poured off him like corn syrup, thick and slow and deceptively saccharine.
“This is my home,” Harry said. “And in my home, everything is my concern.”
I unlocked my jaw to tell Harry to can it, when Declan surprised me, his words coming quick and excited. “I don't suggest we share your wealth by the rule of thumb, Lord Dreppenstedt, nor share the human bounty which you currently enjoy. I'm on a mere quest for knowledge, and the devil have done with the rest, my Lord, dead and be damned.”
“Flames and ether,” Harry swore. “What I will share with you is the back of my hand, should you go much further.”
I spoke up. “Would one of you speak plain English, please? I can't mock you if I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”
“If you'd open your intimate powers more completely to your companion,” Declan clipped, “you'd never have reason to be so insecure, as I'm sure you've been advised before now. However, since you are determined to play the cuckold, I offer you the reminder.”
The giant, jolly green balls on this guy. I wondered how many pieces Harry was about to tear Declan into. I wondered if I could hide behind the refrigerator. I wondered how much blood I'd have to scrub off the ceiling.
The kitchen fell silent. Wesley's eyelids flew wide in response to Harry's bristling will, and his irises became an eerie, wilted violet, sickly unnatural. Wes’ hand curled on the edge of the table and a low snarl snagged in the back of his throat. I opened my mouth to tell Wes to go downstairs, but my new assistant had other plans.
Declan's flat palm shot out and hit the kitchen table; the dishes jumped, startling me and bringing Wes to his feet with a growl.
“Hush, young one,” Declan barked at Wes.
Wes hushed. The little bastard never hushed for me, dammit. It was like watching a misbehaving pit bull shrivel back from a dog trainer. Warring scents filled the small kitchen, two opposing storm clouds, a warm front meeting cold. Wesley moved forward an inch, testing his ground, no longer looking at all familiar, his mortal face spirited away by the wan and wary monster that replaced him. Astonishment stole my words, my mouth impotently ajar; and my hand felt behind me for the solidity of the fridge door, as though it could be used as a weapon. Against whom, I didn't know. I didn't think anybody was interested in a snack, whether it was cold cuts or a bag of O-neg.
Declan noted Wes’ second attempt to step forward with a surprised blink. “I see your infant was born with teeth, Lord Dreppenstedt.”
I found my voice. “Wesley's not Harry's Younger. Harry's not old enough to turn people.”
Harry slid one more graceful step towards Declan, and suddenly Declan had two revenants flanking him.
“You are unmarried, unattached, and stink of arousal, Dr. Edgar,” Harry accused. “You follow my Bonded partner into my home without my permission, without invitation, your heart racing eagerly toward this very confrontation. What should a gentleman think of that?”
Confrontation? Yes, I thought, not the compassion of a new acquaintance, but eagerness for confrontation. This confrontation, to be exact.
Harry continued, “That makes you, sir, a cad of substantial proportions.”
“And it is well known in our circles that you do not share full intimacy with your DaySitter, sir, rendering her weak, vulnerable, and ineffective. So I ask you, my Lord, what does that make you?”
Harry drew himself up to full height, and though he was not much taller than Declan, he seemed to tower, his immortal clout dominating the space. The scents mingled again, Harry's burnt sugar and something greener, earthier. Licorice? I wanted to step between them, but uncertainty kept my feet rooted.
“You truly are on broken ground here, human,” Harry said, his voice even softer than before, ratcheting up the strain in my shoulders. “This show of testicular fortitude will get you nowhere with me.”
“Be that as it may,” Declan said resolutely, “I will not discuss my private romantic life with you, Lord Dreppenstedt, unless you are willing to discuss yours with me. Now, if Wednesday night works for you, I can return for a full discussion of the matter, beginning with your first love.”
Harry flinched. If I'd have blinked, I'd have missed it, though there was no way I could've missed the unhappiness that spilled across our Bond. Nursing a strike that had drawn blood, Harry turned on me with unexpected humor.
“This man has all the excitability of a parsnip, ducky, and his single-mindedness is most vexing. Is he perchance related to Agent Chapel?”
A quirk of a smile; Harry was teasing now. The fight was over, just like that, and Harry had withdrawn, but not without reestablishing the mood of his choice. As though he couldn't possibly care less about the doctor now, he let the tension shrug away. The menace faded, and I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding, unclenching my gloved fists. My palm throbbed where I'd been gripping the refrigerator door.
“Dr. Edgar is trying to help me, temporarily,” I said heavily, newly exhausted. “We rushed back to make sure Viktor hadn't—” I bit the comment off.
“Yes?” Harry's eyebrow rings twitched. “Do finish that sentence, ducky.”
“The Organization sent him. I thought that would be safe. I suppose it was …” My empathy flared to life without my drawing it open, and Harry's distress spread an oily kind of fear through my veins. “Did he hurt you? I didn't know he was sick. I'll never trust them again, I swear.”
“And now, a second stranger in my home. At least, my pet, I am awake to greet this one.” His tone stung me as intended. Without any further discussion, Harry withdrew to the pantry. The quick, angry tread of his Oxfords down the stairs made my shoulders hunch unhappily.
CHAPTER 14
DECLAN CLEARED HIS THROAT. “Perhaps I should talk to him alone,” he suggested.
“Are you nuts? That's one crankyass revenant.”
“He was awakened before he went fully to VK-Delta rest. By a strange ogre. That would make anyone cranky,” Declan explained. “It would be best if I apologize.”
“Apologize? Didn't you see his fangs?” I asked. “Chew your face right open.”
“I'm not concerned about fangs, but if you think he'd be keener to speak later, I'll return then.”
“Not concerned about fangs?” I repeated, wondering how that was possible.
He collected his bag, checking to make sure nothing was broken. He didn't bother trying to hide the objects he shuffled through: Wolfsbane, Datura, moth wings, bone dust, each bottle meticulously labeled by hand and sealed with creamy, pale green wax.
I showed him out, not saying much besides a polite goodbye. He'd handled my revenant with surprising poise. He'd witnessed my inability to provide comfort and protection, my failure as a DaySitter. Not that that was news to any
one. After he fetched my file folder for me from the front seat, I waved and watched him drive away, his coveted Buick pulling carefully past the overpriced sports car and my new tank-like Hummer until it had vanished among the web-strewn trees at the border of the property. The forest looked like someone had run through it with a massive bolt of pink cotton candy. I rolled my eyes and returned to the kitchen to find comfort; if not in my brother's company, then at least with a brownie and some espresso. It was not to be.
Wes watched me set down the PCU folder. “I couldn't read him,” he said. “Telepathically, I mean.”
I shrugged and said distractedly, “Probably just a null for you.”
“Harry says revenants don't have psychic nulls.”
“Harry says a lot of things, most of it archaic gibberish,” I replied, but he was right. It was odd.
“Harry woke up with the ogre licking him.” We both shuddered. “His jolt woke me, too. I smacked my head on the inside of my casket.”
“I'm sorry.” I paced, not knowing what else to say. The mental image of yet another creepy tongue doing disturbing things at least kept me from giggling, imagining Wes’ reverse face-plant.
“Our folks are right. This is no way for you to live.”
“I don't always have perverted ogres in my house.”
“All of it, Marnie. All of it. Getting shot and stabbed and torching ghouls, dressing up like a squirrel and screwing dead men.”
“I don't screw Harry in the squirrel suit! It seems to be common fucking knowledge that we rarely screw at all.”
“Would if you could,” he shot back.
I couldn't deny that. “Where is this dead-bashing coming from? Wes, you're undead, too.”
“And it's not right!” he shouted, pounding the table. “It's horrible, Marnie. I'm cold and empty inside, all the time, and all I have to look forward to is more cold and more emptiness. It's forever, Marnie! Forever! It was a stupid mistake, and I'm sorry, but I can't fix it. This, here, this is all I am, and all I'll ever be. I am everlastingly, perpetually, and undyingly undead!” Immortal master of the obvious. My brother, the eternally-beautiful moron.
The part of me that was horrified and irritated sidestepped to allow the part of me that loved vocabulary, the part of me that grew up with Roget's thesaurus on dad's coffee table to pounce on Wesley's wordplay. For one terribly unfair heartbeat, I almost smiled in the face of his distress; I loved him a little more in that moment, as if I'd forgotten he was my family until I heard that household-familiar rope of words played atop one another in a twist.
Harry was right, though. Wesley was miserable. Revenants who get miserable tend to self-destruct. Before I could put comforting words together, Wes stood, shoving his chair out with the back of his legs.
“Don't bother.”
“Wes—”
“Naked undead ogre.” He enunciated each word hotly, pointing in my face. “Worst. Alarm clock. Ever.”
“Did he touch you?” I cried. “Wes? Wes!” The back of Wes’ head didn't answer as he stomped downstairs, slamming the pantry door behind him. Had Viktor, been naked, too? Blerg.
“Shit,” I breathed. Harry didn't even like it when I crawled uninvited into bed with him during his rest, never mind a stranger, worse yet an unfamiliar, undead, half-breed ogre. A revenant in VK-delta sleep was as vulnerable as a dead body, unable to wake before the rest lightened, unable to defend himself. As soon as VK-delta lightened, it was dreadfully easy to disturb them too early, and an early-risen revenant was unpredictable; a heterosexual revenant raised early by the fat, lapping tongue of a male ogre was a ball game from a whole different planet. I wondered if Viktor Domitrovich had even made it out of the cabin, or whether he was submerged deep beneath Shaw's Fist like Neil Dunnachie.
I conducted a fruitless, ten-minute search for brownies, but they'd been wiped out by a ravenous (and not too bright) revenant. I settled on a diet Dr. Pepper and a spoon swiped through a can of vanilla frosting. Flipping open the PCU file, I re-read the initial autopsy report and scanned the pictures. A splotch on the last one caught my eye.
The spoon dropped out of my mouth to clatter, temporarily forgotten, on the table, as I peered closely at the splotch, got up, took the file with me to my office, and clicked on the barrister's lamp to get a better look at it. There was an old-fashioned magnifying glass in my drawer; but it was hardly necessary. I knew necrosis when I saw it.
I had been wrong; there was something preternatural at work here.
Despite preliminary reports, our victim appeared to have one of the undead plagues, the most likely culprit being crypt plague, since the others were so rare. Crypt plague, caused by the bacteria yersinia sanguinaria, was spread by revenants. Would a revenant really dig their fangs in and gobble up someone's soft, sloppy organs? I'd seen more revenant victims than I cared to count: pale and bloodless, yes, but never emptied-out like Cosmo Winkle and his screaming belly wound.
My fears bickered with my logic, and my science was disturbingly quiet. Could a revenant from Shaw's Fist have done this? Harry? Hardly. He'd been in London. Had he? Revenants don't do this. Do they? Wesley was certainly hungry enough to slurp up just about anything. Or anyone? I had to push that thought down pretty far into my mental locker before it stopped showing its teeth.
If there was another revenant lurking around Shaw's Fist, surely we'd have spotted a tell-tale sign; a debt vulture is rarely inconspicuous. That detail should not have been missed. I scrounged for my phone and texted my fears to Chapel, backspacing over the expletives. He was my boss, and I was supposed to have people skills, and those probably included not calling my boss and new assistant inobservant dumbfucks.
When I exhaled hard through my nostrils, the folder fluttered closed and the light from the lamp illuminated SSA Chapel's firm all-caps handwriting: PCU22794 - cc:UnBio. I let my magnifying glass fall to the blotter with a thunk and went off in search of Tylenol.
CHAPTER 15
“The dead toss shadow-stories in our minds, the telling of which turn the living toward despair, yet while the Lost remain in shadow, the brightest form a heart-strong tether, sing for us a bridge. O, how Death Rejoices in His retelling.”
—First Canon, the Journal of Marie-Pierrette D'Elissalde
MARIE-PIERRETTE'S JOURNAL was meant for me, not for outside eyes; not for revenants, or other DaySitters, or even for Harry. Definitely not for my baby brother, who held it open on my bed while he skimmed it. I'd have called what he was doing “perusing”, but he wouldn't know what I was talking about.
“This is some sick shit,” he muttered at me, before reading the irritation fluttering through the back of my mind and slapping the book shut. “Sorry.”
“I thought you went downstairs to sulk.”
“I did, but Harry was thinking too loudly and I had to get out of there.”
I scrounged in my nightstand drawer for Tylenol, shook the jar. “You make me tired, Wes.” Oh, God, I sound like Mom. I shook another capsule into my hand.
“Yeah, about that… look, I'm sorry I yelled about the ogre, but Harry's not going to give you as much crap as you deserve. He never does.”
“My fault. Viktor could have killed you.”
Wes let out a sharp bark of amazement. “Oh, you're serious. No, sorry, he couldn't. I'm pretty badass.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “That so?”
He bobbed his head in reply.
“So, you're the shit, now? All-powerful and all-knowing?”
“That's right,” he said, folding his legs up under him. It made him look like the five-year-old Wes I remembered, building Lego dinosaurs on the kitchen floor while Mom tried to sweep around him. It made what I had to say all the more difficult.
“Wes, we need to talk.”
“You can't dump me, you're my sister,” he cautioned, trying out a teasing smile. When it wasn't reflected on my face, he wilted.
“If you know what I'm going to say, I shouldn't have to say it.”
“I want what Harry has.”
I frowned. “You just said my living with a corpse was wrong.”
“It is wrong. Wrong for you. And what kind of brother would I be if I didn't say it?” He glowered. “But it's not wrong for Harry. He's got it made in the shade. Me, I'm just a lost soul in a cold place. Fuck this undead bullshit.”
The Blue Sense roared open and his misery poured in to fill the stage in my mind, sucking the energy out of places I didn't even know I had. I felt like I was being turned inside-out and crammed full of dirty snow.
“Wes, can you…” I flapped my hand at his forehead, from where I assumed his Telepathy was pushing to make his point for him, “rein some of that in, please?”
“Don't know how.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Plus, I'm a Baranuik. Since when do we suffer alone? And that's kinda my point. Don't make me go. You make all this bearable.”
“You're feeding on us, Wes.”
“Bite me,” he said, without passion. “I never touched you.”
“Don't play coy. I know Harry explained it. You can feed off us without using your fangs. You're draining our energy. In a word, you suck.”
“I'm not doing it on purpose!” Have you ever heard a revenant whine? It's worse than a teenager.
“Just because I believe you doesn't make it any better for me and Harry, or make it any less true that you're still fucking doing it.” I watched unhappiness as it crossed his angelic features from the sad tilt to his eyes to the pale, down-turned lips. “Wes, I'm tired. Harry's exhausted. He's starting to get grouchy.”
“Starting?” We shared a knowing half-smile. “He wishes I hadn't come in the first place.”
That was probably true, so I didn't insult him by throwing up a mock defense.
“The truth is, I'm useless as a revenant.” He looked down at his hands. “I'm nothing but a drain on his resources, a drain on you. I get that.”
“Did you hear him think that?”
“Of course.”