by Gary Jonas
“Kelly Chan.”
I stopped at the sound of my name. Each echoing syllable seemed to come from a different shadow.
“That’s me. Who has a death wish?”
“You won’t kill me. You can’t. You agreed.” The words circled around me; the final one came from the shadows under my own truck.
“Right. Come out and I’ll show you how quickly I can, and will.”
A scraping, metallic noise followed by a bang made me turn around. The lid to a Dumpster hit the steakhouse wall. A filthy man clambered out clutching a long package to his chest. He hunkered down next to the Dumpster and quickly unwrapped whatever it was. Then he raised it, darkness keeping it obscured, but the way it bent and tilted was not a good sign. I pulled a knife to throw before he could fire the rifle at me.
And then he took a bite out of it.
It wasn’t a rifle. I stepped closer and squinted into the shadows. It was a human arm.
“Not here. Later.” The voice faded out along with the feeling of being watched.
The filthy man saw me looking at him and jumped up. Clutching the arm to his chest, he darted across the parking lot toward Belleview. I threw my knife and nailed him between the shoulder blades. That should have dropped him, but he kept running. I sprinted after him and we crossed the busy road. I vaulted a Beemer and he dodged a Dodge. He stopped when he got to the other side and staggered a little. He looked back to see how close I was, then turned and disappeared into the greenery beside a bank. I lost him there.
But I had what I needed. When he turned, I saw an orange sheen to his eyes that had nothing to do with the streetlights. It was dirty ghoul. Question was, who did the arm belong to and how did it end up in a Dumpster outside the restaurant?
I was glad I hadn’t ordered the ribs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I called Amanda from my truck and asked her to meet me at Jessica’s apartment building. I wanted to look around again, but with a fresh pair of eyes, magical ones. I briefed Amanda on my dinner with Victor and the entertaining floor show after, without sharing Victor’s doubts about her.
“I’ll meet you at your dojo instead,” Amanda said. “We’ll take my car from there. If someone’s watching her apartment, they might recognize your truck from the other day.”
“I don’t want to ride in your car. It’s a piece of shit.”
“It is not a piece of shit. It’s my Cecil. He’s magical.”
“He’s duct tape and Bondo that’s held together by a little bit of car.”
“You’re just jealous because your truck doesn’t have a name and isn’t magical.”
“My truck does too have a name.”
“What is it?”
“Um. Truck?”
I hung up on Amanda laughing at me and headed for my dojo.
***
“You really do have a crush on Bourdain!”
While waiting for Amanda, I changed clothes and then YouTube’ed the segment on the knife made from a meteorite. She caught me five minutes into the third viewing. I found the show soothing, and Anthony funnier each time.
“It’s not about Anthony, it’s about the blade.”
“Oh, it’s Anthony now? Anthony and his blade?”
I ignored the bait and turned off my computer. “Why’d it take you so long to get here?”
“I was explaining to Chaz the finer points of why a matchup between Wolverine and Magneto wouldn’t be a fair fight.”
“You were not. You were having sexy times.”
‘Yeah, okay, we were having sexy times. See what a good friend I am, coming out here to help you?”
“You’re the best. But we’re still not taking your car.”
So, we took Amanda’s car to Jessica’s apartment. As soon as Amanda started the engine, the radio came on and the opening notes of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” hit my ears.
“Wasn’t this playing the last time I was in your car?” I punched the scan button on the radio and it tuned to KBCO. Which was playing the part of the song where the cook tells the crew, hey, it’s been swell, but we’re all gonna die now.
Thing is, KBCO never plays Gordon Lightfoot. Neither does 107.5, home of my buddy Snoop Dogg, but by the time the radio got there, the families of the lost sailors were gathered in a dusty hall to mourn them. I checked to see if maybe she had a CD in, but the slot was empty. I shut off the radio, but the song started over. Louder.
Amanda just drove, a slight, amused smile on her face.
“What the hell, Amanda?”
“Cecil’s magical, and all magic does have a cost.”
“So this is the cost? A cheesy seventies song about tragedy, over and over and over?”
“I haven’t filled the gas tank in eight years. And you’ve got to admit, Cecil’s a smooth ride.”
“I don’t have to admit a damn thing.” I sat back and plugged my ears, but it was too late. I’d be humming about Lake Gitchagoomy or whatever it was on and off for the next week.
It was a really smooth ride though.
“I used to love this song,” Amanda said.
***
By the time we got to Jessica’s, my head was pounding like a Nor’easter against a doomed freighter. I blamed the music. And I blamed the headache as the reason why I didn’t remember I never get headaches. How can anyone think with all that unpleasantness going on in their skull?
Amanda pulled into the parking lot and we saw furniture and boxes piled up on the sidewalk. We wouldn’t be searching Jessica’s apartment after all.
“That’s hers, isn’t it?” Amanda asked.
I nodded as I looked at the little kitchen table and chairs, the couch that folded out into a bed, the odds and ends that make up a single woman’s life, all laid out along the curb waiting for a donation truck or an urban scavenger, whichever came first.
“Her rent is what, a week late, and the bastards do this?” I picked through a box, but didn’t expect to find her purse, let alone her wallet. I found both though, minus the cash. Dirty, dirty bastards.
“Denver’s a hot market right now,” Amanda said. “Everyone’s moving here. You don’t pay rent, they’ve got twenty people lined up with cash in hand.”
She was right. Light shone through the sliding glass doors on the third floor.
“Probably lucky they didn’t rent the place as ‘furnished’ with her stuff.”
I pressed my fingers against my temples. “Now what?”
“Hey, don’t worry. This actually makes our job easier. I’ll cast a detection spell on her stuff and see what I can see.”
“I was hoping to get you into the apartment to see if anyone had used the shadows.”
“It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t have found anything. Traveling through shadows is a different type of magic than what I do. More of an innate ability.” Amanda rubbed her palms together briskly then held them out facing Jessica’s things. As she chanted, Jessica’s belongings began to glow with a pale pink light.
Amanda stopped chanting. “Okay. I’ve got her signature, so I’ll be able to separate any others out of it.”
The chanting began again and the pink light emanating from the back of a chair deepened to orange in the shape of a handprint. Another one appeared on the table, and a third on the kitchen waste can lid.
“Is that her kidnapper’s handprint?”
Amanda stopped again. “No, that’s from two days ago. Those are your handprints.”
“They can’t be. I wore gloves.”
“This isn’t like dusting for fingerprints, Kelly. This is magic. Ordinary gloves don’t do a thing to shield your touch from a spell like this.”
I made a mental note to upgrade my gloves. “Why aren’t there handprints from whoever moved her stuff out here?”
“Mundanes. Plain old humans with no magic in them, so no residue. You’re magically-engineered, so you show up.” Amanda rubbed her hands together again. “I’m going back a couple more days.”
; My prints faded out. This time, a sickening green differentiated itself from the pink – long trails of it covered the chairs and couch, as if someone had traced a finger all over Jessica’s furniture. The light made me nauseated. A little warning bell went off in my head. Nausea had gone the way of pain when DGI made me a warrior. But then I noticed even Amanda blanched at the light.
“What is it?”
“Slime trails.” Amanda shook her head. “Ghouls leave them behind.”
“Oh, no.” Ghouls are the garbage men of the supernatural world. Witches, vampires and anyone who wants an inconvenient corpse to disappear completely, hire them to come in after a nasty job and clean up. Think Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, only nowhere near as cool and respected. I thought of the ghoul I’d chased earlier. If a ghoul had been called to clean up Jessica’s apartment, she was dead, and I had a vampire to find.
And kill.
“I’m sorry, Kelly. It doesn’t look good.”
I felt sick in my heart. DGI employs ghouls in their sanitation department. I remembered seeing one come into the gym after a couple of Sekutar-in-training battled to the death. The winner walked away while the ghoul disposed of the loser’s body. The thing devoured the whole body, then licked up the very last traces of DNA. That’s what made them indispensable. I looked over Jessica’s things, glowing pink with green tracings. The slime trails weren’t left by a ghoul’s finger, but by its tongue.
Amanda’s spell began to fade as she ended it.
“Wait!” I said. “Don’t power down yet. Go back a little more.”
“Why?”
“Because we haven’t found the killer’s prints yet. Ghouls get called in after murders. Their job is to clean up the dead, not kill people.”
Amanda glanced at me, and there was something to it, something that said, “That’s what you think.” A prickle at the back of my mind quickly came and went as she looked back at the furniture.
She resumed chanting and the pink grew brighter again. As the slime trails faded, I watched for prints. None arose. My headache worsened.
Amanda dropped her hands. Jessica’s furniture went dark. “That’s it. I even went back to Sunday, when she was still there. Nothing.”
“There’s got to be something. Unless… Do you think a vampire could have popped out of a shadow, grabbed her, popped back in and then sent a ghoul to remove any trace of him or her?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“It might mean she’s still alive somewhere.”
“It might.” Amanda yawned. “Sorry. I’m spent.”
“It’s okay. Thank you for coming out here tonight.”
“Come on, I’ll drive you back home.”
I looked at Jessica’s things. Whether she was dead or alive, it didn’t feel right to just leave them sitting out on the curb.
“You’re exhausted, Amanda. You go on. I still have stuff to do here.”
“Are you sure? How are you going to get home?” Amanda stifled another yawn.
I pulled out my phone. “Believe it or not, I’ve got other friends.”
“If you’re sure you’ll be all right.”
I laughed. “Are you joking? I think I can handle myself if someone tries to mess with me.”
“You know, you think like a guy sometimes, Kelly. You have no fear. None. I bet you’ve never walked to your truck alone at night and worried that you might not make it.”
I shrugged. “I can take on anyone, so of course I haven’t. But why does that mean I think like a guy?”
“Because you are the only woman on this planet who’s never had that fear.” Amanda shook her head. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. What I meant was, will you be all right by yourself thinking about what could have happened to Jessica?”
“Oh.” Her question caught me off-guard. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Besides, I can’t take one more round of Edmund Fitzgerald.”
As Amanda drove away, I made several phone calls. Within the hour, Monique, Brianne, and all the rest of Jessica’s classmates stood next to me. No one said anything at first.
Monique finally broke the silence. “They just threw out everything she owned like garbage.”
We took Jessica’s belongings away from the dump she had called home. They may have thrown her out, but we took in what was left.
CHAPTER NINE
It was so late it was early by the time I got home. Monique had given me a lift back to the dojo to pick up my truck. Now, I had a truck bed full of Jessica’s things, among them her couch with its fold-out bed. Just looking at the thing made me tired. What was wrong with me? I felt like I’d just battled a hundred vampires.
Tired or not, I still had to carry everything in. I’d parked my truck around the back of the building where there was a wide delivery door – the same one Floor Licker had used to make his escape. The more I thought about him, the more the whole episode felt like a dare, like counting coup.
I unlocked the delivery door, propped it open, then returned to my truck, lowered the tailgate and climbed up. I was hesitant to touch the couch now that I’d seen it covered in slime trails. I’d have to scrub down the whole truck bed when I was done. An image of Amanda mopping up after Floor Licker came to me. Would that slime trail still be on the floor if she cast a –
Wait. I was so tired, I was having trouble keeping up with my own brain, but it was chugging away, making connections without me. Floor Licker was a ghoul, of course. Ghouls were typically pale or gray-skinned, often bald, with an orange cast to their eyes and retractable fangs. If you’ve seen the old silent movie Nosferatu from the twenties, you know what I’m talking about. But Floor Licker was none of that. He was tan with bright blue eyes, both of which could be faked with a bit of tanning spray and colored contact lenses. Sure. That thought had crossed my mind the first time I looked in those baby blues.
I pushed the end of the couch out to the edge of the tailgate and jumped down. I turned around and pulled the couch forward until it tipped onto my back. It was heavy – hide-a-beds are even heavier than boxes of books – but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t manage. I carried the couch inside trying to decide where to keep everything.
Wow. I was thinking about long-term storage because I’d written Jessica off as dead.
No.
I couldn’t afford to think that way so I quickly switched gears. Why would a ghoul want to mess with me? Ghouls kept to themselves, slinking around the edges of society, both natural and supernatural, and did everything they could to go unnoticed. As far as supernatural creatures go, they were pretty innocuous despite their brute strength and unsavory dietary habits. Ghouls are the eaters of the dead. They don’t kill their food. And they don’t mess around with the likes of Sekutar warriors.
I finished bringing Jessica’s things inside and stacked most of them on the couch, which I’d put in a back storage room next to some broken equipment, cleaning supplies – and a box holding the champagne glasses and strings of lights from the party. I vowed that Jessica’s furniture wouldn’t stay there, that I’d find her and bring her home, safe and sound. She deserved no less.
My hands were dusty, so I wiped them on my shirt as I walked through the dojo to my office. The plan was to feed Jessica’s fish, then head upstairs to bed and crash for a couple hours.
Movement in the shadows caught my eye. My Sekutar senses went on full alert. A figure emerged and I expected to see Victor or even Floor Licker in all his spray-tan glory. Instead, I saw someone else I knew.
He looked familiar but I couldn’t place him at first. Middle-aged, dark hair going grey at the temples, nice suit. Very nice suit, on closer inspection. His eyes gleamed orange. But it was the bump just under his chin that triggered my memory.
I remembered him from a place called Tally’s, back when I’d gone to pick up Amanda’s sister, Chantelle, to put her in my protective custody. She’d been on the run from Victor at the time, or so it seemed. Tally’s was a kind of store off Colfax where you could g
et anything – and I mean anything, from dragon scales to a haunted RV. The guy who stood in front of me in line had wanted a whole fresh dead girl, but all Tally’s had was a girl in a box – some assembly required. He’d stormed out and that’s when I’d noticed his orange eyes and chin bump – a no-kill button usually reserved for the likes of rabid werewolves and young vampires not yet able to control their blood lust. If they bit into living flesh, the button had enough magical explosive in it to take the offender’s head off. They were one of Amanda’s specialties. It was the first time I’d ever seen one on a ghoul. I hadn’t thought about it at the time since I had bigger things to worry about. Now it looked like that incongruence had come to bite me.
“How’d you get in here? Never mind – you’re gonna wish that no-kill button had gone off the day you got it.” I pulled out a throwing star and aimed it at the nodule.
“Wait!” The ghoul held up his hands to show me he was unarmed. “You accepted the offer so you can’t hurt me.”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t seen you since Tally’s and I sure as hell didn’t accept anything from you there.”
“Not at Tally’s, at the restaurant. Tonight.”
“Wait. Was that…? Were you the one talking from the shadows?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“How? You’re a ghoul, not a vampire or a Watcher.”
He jabbed at his forehead several times. “Sekutar warriors, made for fighting but not so much for thinking. Newsflash – ghouls can use shadows with the best of ‘em.”
I pulled my arm back to throw the star.
“Shit! No, wait!” The ghoul put out one hand and shielded the nodule with the other. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? Kess is always telling me to watch my mouth. I’m the one with no brains here, right?”
“And you’re about to lose your head.”
“You can’t. I’ve got responsibilities.” The ghoul dropped to his knees. “Besides, you accepted the retainer fee. At least hear me out in return.”