Shadows and Stars
Page 89
“I don’t expect you to understand, but cases with kids are different.” He raked his fingers through his hair again, somehow managing not to disrupt its messy style. “I need your help.”
I tried not to take his words personally, but they still stung. What did that say about Reapers? About me? That he thought it wouldn’t matter the souls of children were involved. Of course, it mattered. Children rarely have a say in what happens to them. Adults turn a blind eye to the obvious, ignoring the cries for help. Which pretty much explained how Apollyon became my custodian. No one bothered to stop my mother from bartering her unborn daughter.
And there it was, the real reason I tracked down Smithie, the real reason I wanted the case. I had mommy issues.
“Tell you what, if I hear anything worth sharing about the fi-follet, I’ll call you. All right?” It was the best I could offer. I hadn’t even scratched the surface yet, but something about this case felt off. Working it with someone sounded like a good idea, but avoiding Big A sounded like a better one.
Jackson sighed with relief, a weight visibly lifted from his shoulders. He reached into his coat pocket, and I instinctively tensed, relaxing only when I realized it was to retrieve a business card.
“Call me if you hear anything.” He took my hand, placing the business card in my palm. His thumb grazed the top of my hand, fingers lingering a little too long for casual touch. “I don’t care how small a detail or irrelevant you think it might be.”
I pulled my hand from him, ignoring the way he moved to brush the hair from my eyes before hesitating and then pulling away. Uncomfortable with what felt like intimate contact and the way it made me feel, I resolved to take Smithie’s advice from the other night and get out more.
Clearing my throat, I told Jackson to do the same while looking at his card. “1-800-4UR-SINS?” I didn’t bother hiding my amusement.
“Take it up with marketing. That’s not my department.” He started to walk away, looking back over his shoulder one last time. “Keep in touch.”
“You too.” Realizing I hadn’t given him my number, I called after him. “Hey, I need to give you my…”
“I know how to find you.” He didn’t turn around, just kept walking until he disappeared from my sight.
That he did. Something I’d have to ask him about the next time our paths crossed. I told myself it was just about the case when I caught myself hoping that happened sooner rather than later.
FOUR
THREE MORE FILES from my ever-growing pile were closed before I called it a night and headed home. My stomach growled with the promise of leftover vegetable lo mein straight from the carton. Having skipped breakfast and lunch, by the time I hit the sidewalk outside the entrance to my apartment my mouth was watering.
My neighbor’s lights were still on, the neon flashing hand and a sign proclaiming palm and card readings inside beckoned me. Dinner would have to wait a little longer. As if in protest, my body slowed down, reminding me that it did, in fact, work for food. Swearing on a stack of brimstone rocks that nutrients were my next priority, I forced my body into cooperating and stepped into Hester’s shop.
“I knew you’d come.” Hester’s slipper-clad feet shuffled across the protective all-weather floor runner she’d laid down over the carpet, the sound a plastic version of corduroy pant legs rubbing together. “Lock the door behind you. Hungry?” She pointed to a plate of baklava next to the coffee pot on a bookshelf behind the table where she did her readings.
My stomach rumbled in response to her offer of the flaky pastry layered with nuts and honey. She held out the coffee cup in her hands, its steaming black contents clearly for me. Hester took her coffee laden with milk and sugar to the point where the coffee itself became an indiscernible ingredient.
“I saw the light on.” Taking the mug from her, I smiled at the phrase Bitter Like My Personality stamped across the front of it. Another sign the cup had been poured for me. “Thanks.” Without heeding the steam’s warning of the coffee’s temperature, I gulped down a third of the mug’s contents. My sigh of gratitude was twofold, one for my ability to do so without scalding my throat and two for the caffeine. I decided to stop ignoring my need for some sort of food before the acid in the coffee and the acid in my stomach joined forces and burned their way free of my body. After shoving the first bite-sized pastry into my mouth and licking the honey from my fingers, I knew acidity or not, I would have a stomach ache before I left Hester’s place.
A few of the Reapers I worked with packed lunches. Something I scoffed at until recently. Quasi-immortal or not, I couldn’t keep abusing my body and expect to succeed. Buying a lunchbox found its way on to my to-do list. Somewhere after finding and stopping the fi-follet.
Which Hester had information about; otherwise, her lights would have been turned off for the night.
“So, tall, dark and handsome? You saw him again tonight, yes?” The old psychic didn’t need or wait for me to answer. She just gave a knowing smile and beckoned me to join her at the table, a stack of cards waiting for us.
I followed, shaking my head in defiance of her insinuation. She’d been trying to sell Jackson Reed as the tall, dark and handsome for months now. Ever since his first attempt to poach one of my collections. Pointing out how generic and cliché her descriptions were did little to sway the old woman. After recent events, I was starting to suspect Hester was right. Just not for the reasons she’d assumed.
Romance wasn’t in the cards for Jackson and me. No matter how hard Hester pushed.
“You know I did.” I eyed her over the rim of my cup, my look a weird combination of wary and amused. “But I was hoping the cards were telling you more about my work life than my sex life.”
“What sex life? You have no boyfriend. No girlfriend. No friend.” She held out her hand, opening and closing it impatiently until my hand was in hers. “You don’t even have a cat. You need a cat to become a crazy cat lady.”
“I’m not trying to be the crazy cat lady.” I stopped short of arguing with her and rolled my eyes instead. Arguing with Hester was pointless. I never won. I doubt anyone ever did. “I need to know about a case.”
Her fingers traced the lines of my palm, tracking each little groove in the skin for some piece of hidden information about my future. Her eyes widened and then slammed shut, the rapid movement of her eyeball shifting side to side as she processed what she’d seen visible beneath the eyelid. I’d sat at her table at least a dozen times, probably more, and I still hadn’t gotten used to that.
I doubt I ever will.
“No.” Hester’s eyes remained closed even as she released her hand and fell back in her chair, the air whooshing out of her lungs from exhaustion.
“No? What do you mean no, Hester?” She’d never denied me before. From the moment she’d uncovered what I was she’d taken an interest in my life.
More than an interest.
Hester was off the grid. Nothing to stop her from folding up shop on a whim should she decide to return to her nomadic ways and travel again. We both knew she wasn’t going anywhere. Not anymore, not at her age. She’d laid roots. Just not deep enough to order cable or the internet. Before befriending me, she found me wholeheartedly entertaining. A living soap opera. The Days of Our Lives had nothing on a new Reaper as far as entertainment value went. But somewhere along the line, our relationship changed. We’d grown comfortable with each other, attached, and she’d taken to reading my fortune more to keep me safe than for laughs.
She’d never refused me.
“Hester?” Frazzled by her silence, I said her name again more forcefully than I’d intended. “Hester.”
She stood, walking away without meeting my eyes or saying a word, returning with the plate of baklava and the pot of coffee. Setting both on the table, she returned to her chair and pulled her knitted shawl tighter around her shoulders.
“Walk away from this one, Angelica.” The worry lines around her eyes deepened. “I was wrong.”
“So, what?” Her expression hardened, dark brown eyes daring me to argue with her.
You don’t last as long as I have as a Reaper by taking the bait. Unless that bait is dangling from a hook held by Jackson Reed. He’d baited me once when he’d cornered me at my car. Twice if you count trying to convince me to work with him to stop the fi-follet. He got me, hook, line and sinker, both times. His business card felt like a lodestone in my pocket.
I kept those thoughts to myself.
No use upsetting Hester more than she already was. The last time she thought I’d ignored her warnings she withheld her herb bundles for a month. Big A’s lackeys popped in and out of the building enough times to tread lightly where the old woman was concerned.
I had a terrible suspicion my immediate future involved demons hanging out in my apartment, hogging all my Wi-Fi and my couch while binge watching Netflix.
“So, now you don’t want me to talk to Jackson?” I feigned confusion to cover the frustration I really felt.
Hester sucked in a breath of air through her teeth making a hissing sound. “Jackson Reed.” She all but spat his name, muttering curses under her breath. “He brought this upon you.”
“Actually, Smithie did.” I gave a casual shrug of my shoulders while Hester clutched her chest. “He called me to the cemetery to talk about it. The Sin Eater showed up a few minutes later. Tailing me as usual, looking for scraps of information.”
“Will the Smith. I do not see him.” Hester paled. A fortune teller wasn’t fond of anything she couldn’t see.
“No one can. Not unless he wants them too.” I pulled the cooled lump of coal from my pocket and held it out on the palm of my hand. “Smithie started it. I don’t know why he didn’t take it up with Big A.”
The coal warmed in my hand, flaring to life at the mention of his name. Waves of heat and a pulsating orange glow radiated off the ember. Just like it had when Smithie held it hours before.
“Put it away. Get rid of it.” Hester moved to close my hand around the coal, jerking back when she felt its intense heat.
Smithie materialized in the middle of Hester’s shop, branding iron still in his hand.
“Well, that was unexpected.” I jumped out of my seat, rushing to Hester’s side. The poor woman looked like she was about to go into cardiac arrest.
“You summoned him? In my shop?” Hester’s Romani temper overrode her shock and fear.
“What? No, of course not.” Her accusations stung. “I didn’t even know that was possible.” Turning my attention to the hulking blacksmith who looked as out of place standing in the middle of a fortune teller’s shop as I would in the Middle Ages, I asked the obvious question. “You can be summoned? Like a demon?”
Apparently, Hester disagreed with my choice of obvious questions, because she asked one of her own. “What is he doing here?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” I pointed a finger in Smithie’s direction, unsure why she thought I’d have an answer to that one.
“Give me that.” Will the Smith stalked across the room. The purpose of Hester’s floor protectors utterly foreign to him, he made a straight line for me rather than follow the plastic path, leaving soot prints in his wake. He snatched the coal from my hands and met Hester’s glare with one of his own.
“I thought the only way for me to get in touch with you was by going to the marshes.” Bewildered barely scratched the surface of describing my emotional state.
They both turned, focusing their glares on me.
“Right, right. More pressing matters at hand.” Clearing my throat, I started again. “What are you doing here, Smithie?”
Incomprehensible growling was his only response, as he looked from the lump of coal in his hands to me and back again.
“I think it’s time for you to go.” Regaining some of her composure, Hester motioned toward the door. She added, “Both of you,” to be sure there wasn’t any confusion.
“That’s our cue to exit.” I looked at Smithie, nodding my head toward the door. Stepping back onto the plastic runner, I made my way out of her shop. Smithie fell into step beside me, rather than behind me, still tracking soot all over Hester’s floor. Her curses about the mess followed us out onto the sidewalk.
“Don’t do that again.” Smithie shook the lump of coal in my face. “And don’t mention this to anyone, got it?”
“I didn’t know I could do it in the first place.” Realizing that wasn’t the right answer as soon as the words left my mouth, I did a little backtracking. “Your secret is safe with me.”
And I meant it. If Reapers knew all it took to reach Will the Smith was to wrestle the coal from his hands, one of two things would happen. Smithie would wind up someone’s toady, and Smithie was nobody’s toady. Or, we’d be down a lot of Reapers.
I was betting on the latter.
“While you were chatting up your boyfriend, there was another one.” Smithie shoved his coal back into the pocket of his leather apron, before running a hand through his tangled black hair. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was his natural color or just centuries of soot buildup.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I shot back. What was it with everybody? Jackson Reed was an inconvenience at best.
“You could have fooled me. You could get rid of him if you wanted to.” Smithie’s biceps flexed as he crossed his arms over his chest, reminding me that if he ever got me in a headlock, he’d crush my skull like a melon.
“I’m a Reaper. Not a murderer.” Mimicking his pose and foul mood, I crossed my arms over my chest and gave him my best death glare before processing the important details of what he said. “Wait, another one? Another one what?”
“Another dead kid. Same marks as the others.” Smithie relaxed a little. “You want to stop this? Stop screwing around and start looking for the person controlling the fi-follet. There’s more than one of them loose in the city.”
“More than one? How can you tell?” Disbelief that at least two pissed off spirits were running around Baltimore whitewashed my irritation with a fresh coat of guilt. I should have stopped the first one before it could multiply.
“It doesn’t matter how, just that I can.” Smithie gave me the don’t press your luck look. I was quite familiar with that look, having seen it at least once during every conversation we’d ever had.
“Okay.” He wasn’t offering up anything on the how, but maybe I could get a little help with the where. “Do you know where he’s getting them from? The souls, I mean?”
“Check the obits.” Smithie turned his back on me, walking away to wherever it was he went when he wasn’t in the marshes.
“Hey, hang on a sec.” Jogging the few steps to catch up to him, I grabbed his shoulder. “The what?”
“Start with the obituaries, Angelica. Fi-follet are freshies. You can’t make them any other way.” He shook his head, no doubt in disappointment that the obvious had eluded me. “Apollyon better start giving me some credit for these cases if I’m going to be doing all the work.”
And then he was gone. A pile of soot on the sidewalk and ashes lingering in the air like snowflakes the only evidence he’d been there at all.
Being one of the last dinosaurs in the city still clinging to her print edition of the paper, I ran to my mailbox overflowing with flyers and other useless solicitations addressed to current resident and looked for the day’s paper.
FIVE
AFTER FUMBLING with the lock due to an armload of mail, I gave the door a nudge with my shoulder. I kicked the door closed behind me, leaving a trail of junk mail in my wake as I opened the paper and flipped to the obituaries.
“You’ve been busy, and yet your caseload looks the same.” Apollyon stepped out from my kitchen, a white chef’s apron tied around his waist.
The smell of bacon and eggs hit me shortly after the shock of finding
him in my apartment. It occurred to me that Big A doing something as mundane as cooking breakfast food in my kitchen was probably not a good sign. Feet firmly planted on the worn-out beige carpet covering my living room floor, I tried to meet his gaze without looking guilty.
It was obvious he knew about the fi-follet, about my reluctant agreement to share information with Jackson. Smithie had ratted me out, the bastard. If he knew what was good for him, he’d keep that lump of coal on lockdown.
“For every case I clear, four more take its place.” My arms instinctively wrapped around my middle to muffle the sound of my stomach growling.
“We’re in the soul-buying business and business is good.” He waved a spatula toward the kitchen. “Eggs are on the table. They’re getting cold.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. This was one order from Apollyon I could follow without argument. Making a beeline for my kitchen table, I squeezed past him and saddled up to the heaping plate of eggs, bacon, and toast. I’d assembled a makeshift breakfast sandwich before he had a chance to join me at the table.
“You saw the Sin Eater again. After I expressly forbade it.” He paused, motioning for me to continue eating when I’d pushed my plate aside. “You agreed to work with him.” Apollyon’s anger flashed in his eyes just long enough for me to see it and then it was gone, replaced by his usual cool demeanor. “Before you go blaming the blacksmith, you should know he didn’t give you up. I think he has a soft spot where you’re concerned.” I could tell he’d filed that little tidbit away for later.
“Are you…” I swallowed hard, forcing a mouthful of half-chewed food down my throat so I could respond. It was hard to sound angry around a jaw full of breakfast sandwich. “Are you following me?”
Apollyon couldn’t tell you where a Reaper was at any given moment. The only thing that he paid attention to where Reapers were concerned were the numbers coming out of our department. Like he said, we were in the soul-buying business, and he ran it like one.