Out of Body

by Stella Cameron

  Weak but definite, he smelled traces of an unforgettable odor, the one that faded slowly after Marley’s encounter at River Road. The same one that hung around Shirley Cooper’s body.

  He deliberately looked ahead, past Nat and Bucky and the bevy of uniforms waiting for instructions.

  The first face he recognized was the gouge-cheeked pale one belonging to Dr. Blades. Gray’s stomach turned over. Blades was a man who considered himself too important to get down in the trenches, at least until initial dirty work was done. Since Blades had to be all of seven feet tall he’d be hard to miss in any crowd, but standing back from everyone else, staring straight ahead and completely immobile, he was as out of place in the teeming club as the Eiffel Tower would be in the middle of a school yard recess.

  “That stench again,” Nat said abruptly, putting his hand to his nose. “It’s different from a decomposing body, but it’s filthy. It was around Shirley Cooper the first time I saw her body, too.”

  Desperation rattled Gray. “I could still smell it today.” With every passing hour he was more convinced that Marley was marked for attack by a maniac.

  Chief Beauchamp was the next unwelcome surprise. He saw Nat and approached, head slightly down like a bull coming in for a charge. “Interrupt your tanning session, did I?” he said when Nat got close enough. He showed no sign of noticing how inappropriate his comment was.

  Gray saw her.

  Crime scene spotlights glared on the first of the two suspended cages. Inside, her back to Gray, her wrists taped to the uppermost bars, hung a woman partially covered by strips of torn clothing.

  Cameras clacked, technicians moving rapidly but precisely to get every angle of a scene worthy of a horror movie.

  He recognized Bernie Bois, the club manager, his rangy body sprawled in a chair, his hands covering his face.

  “Who is she?” Nat asked Beauchamp.

  The older man ran a hand over his sweating head and hair. “I’ll settle for who she isn’t,” he said. “Some guy from Scully’s is being tracked down to take a look.”

  “Danny Summit,” Nat said.

  Beauchamp grunted. “The last missing female’s father is being brought over, poor bastard. I’m talking about the one that went missing—supposedly—in the warehouse on—”

  Gray cut him off. “It’s not Pearl Brite,” he said.

  Beauchamp slowly looked in his direction. “Fisher? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I thought I’d pop in for a pick-me-up.”

  “Funny. You heard the question.” Beauchamp’s face plumped up and got shinier. “Why are you here?”

  “He came with me,” Nat said. “He’s been giving us a hand. Knows some of the singers.”

  “Yeah?” Beauchamp’s deep-set eyes were very close to the bridge of his nose. They turned crafty. “How come?”

  “I was writing about them,” Gray said wearily.

  “Oh, yeah. You quit the force to be a reporter.”

  Why bother to explain himself? “Right.”

  “Take a look then,” Beauchamp said.

  Nat and Bucky fell in with Gray when he approached the cage and the cameras were quiet.

  “She’s stacked,” Beauchamp said in a loud voice.

  Gray resisted an urge to turn back and punch the guy out. He didn’t miss some snickers, but there were more muffled exclamations of disgust.

  “There was no hurry to cut her down,” a tech said to Nat. “The photos could be invaluable, sir.”

  The woman was obviously as dead as she would get. “Yeah,” Nat said.

  “There was a bag over her head,” the same tech said. “We cut it off, so we could see…”

  “Her face,” Nat said.

  “What’s left of it,” Gray said.

  He stood close enough to the cage to touch it if he wanted to. The woman might as well be naked. She had been reduced to a crude parody of sadistic sexuality, her dress torn from her shoulders to reveal naked breasts cross-hatched with welts. Blood had dried—a long time ago—on her belly and thighs. The patterns resembled those on Shirley Cooper’s body.

  Slowly, Gray looked past a sizable puncture wound in her neck, and back at her face. Where her eyes should have been, two holes gaped. Her cheekbones and nose were crushed and black hair stuck to wounds in the skin.

  Only the mouth, slack but untouched, was as Gray remembered it, that and a small black birthmark just above the right side of the upper lip.

  Nat touched his arm. “It’s—”

  “Liza Soaper,” Gray said. “She was special. She could belt out a foot-stomping number or sing lyrics that made you want to cry, and she was decent. I’m going to find the bastard who did that to her and—”

  Bucky whistled loudly, drowning out the rest of Gray’s sentence.

  Nat waited until he could be heard and said, “I’ll help you.”

  “A word?” Dr. Blades sidled near and kept on moving toward the front of the building.

  Nat and Gray glanced at one another and followed quickly and quietly.

  Blades left the club and walked to the opposite side of the street.

  “You aren’t leaving now, are you?” Nat said. “Won’t you stick around until she’s taken down?”

  “Yes,” Blades said shortly. “I don’t want to talk in that zoo. I’ll go back after we’ve spoken. She’s been kept frozen.”

  Gray stared at the man.

  “She’s still fairly solid so it’ll make establishing time of death more difficult,” Blades continued. “That much I’ll share with that fool, Beauchamp.”

  “What won’t you share with him?” Nat bounced onto his toes.

  “Did you notice the stench?” Blades asked.

  “Yes,” Nat and Gray said in unison.

  “Shirley Cooper’s body has the same odor—although it’s faded a lot.”

  “We noticed.” Gray shoved his hands into his pockets and kept his peace.

  “We jumped to conclusions about this thing being some sort of alligatorlike monster,” Blades said.

  “But from another planet,” Nat said, perfectly serious.

  “From somewhere we’ve never been,” Blades said. “I’ve got to get back now, but did you notice there are scratches and bites—it’s the bites that drew blood. I did the sniff test, and that’s also where the smell of very old rotting flesh is hanging around. Not the scratches. It’s the teeth that do the real damage.”

  Gray swallowed.

  “Okay,” Nat said slowly.

  “I think our particular monster may be a pretty impressive copy of something we know all about these days. Except for the obvious differences. Varanus komodoensis.”

  Gray shrugged and shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Or me,” Nat said.

  Blades nodded. “I don’t have time for a lecture now. Take a look at what the experts say about the Komodo dragon.”

  44

  Gray watched Nat follow Blades back across the street. Agitation pounded at his nerves. He glanced around, expecting to find onlookers staring at him.

  “Hey, Gray,” Nat called to him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Nah. I think I’ll go catch up on a few things.”

  Nat raised his brows questioningly, then shrugged and carried on toward the club.

  Gray hovered, thinking his way through his next steps and trying to order the sensations battering at his brain. He tried to quiet down. Marley had communicated with him before. True, they had been in the same place, but he didn’t know if she might be able to reach him from just about anywhere by now. He had felt their connection getting stronger.

  Royal Street was the only place he could go. He was panicking for no reason. She was the kind of woman who got immersed in her work and probably turned her phone off.

  She was there.

  “Remember me, Gray?” Sykes Millet seemed to appear from nowhere, just to loom up in front of Gray. “We met here once before and—”

  �
��I remember you. Have you seen Marley recently?”

  The man’s face went still, except for his intensely blue eyes. They changed shades and expressions, and Gray didn’t like any of what he saw there. Sykes was unsettled.

  “Just answer a few questions for me,” Sykes said. “No, no, don’t try to interrupt. We don’t have time.”

  Gray scrubbed at his forehead. “Ask.”

  “Do you know anything about a book? I think it’s called The Book of Way. That doesn’t have to be the actual title but I think it is.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The guy turned heads. You couldn’t avoid looking at him, but apart from the good looks even Gray could appreciate there was some undefinable quality about him.

  “Why are you asking me?” Gray said.

  Sykes didn’t flinch or blink. He gave Gray a long dark blue stare, an unnerving stare. “I think you’re mentioned in the book.”

  “What book?”

  Sykes made an impatient sound. “Just call it the book of the Millets’ lives. Our history—and to some degree, our future. At least, that’s what I think it is. I haven’t actually…I’ve only seen it, not touched it.”

  “So how do you know what’s in it?”

  Sykes took a while to say, “The pages have turned in my mind.”

  Gray kept on watching the other man’s face.

  “Willow told me to come to you. She’s our sister the skeptic, but I couldn’t find anyone else to ask and she said you know things if you want to share.”

  “I don’t know,” Gray said.

  They were jostled by passersby trying to get a better look at Caged Birds.

  Gray moved nearer to the buildings leaving the sidewalk for the gawkers, and Sykes followed him. “Did Willow say why she thought you should talk to me?”

  “I read a page in The Book of Way. It tells of a man harmed on the inside where most can’t see. He’s a man sent to slay dragons.”

  “Slay dragons?” Gray felt the need to move, fast, only he didn’t know where to go. “If you couldn’t touch the book, how could you read so much?”

  “I told you. The pages were turned for me. I saw them in my mind.” Sykes raised his hands and they were curled into fists. “If you understand at all, let go of unbelief and tell me. I have to find the book, but that can wait. It has already waited for centuries. Now I have to find Marley.”

  “Dragons,” Gray said softly, hearing Blades’s detached Komodo Dragon announcement. “They kill with their teeth.”

  “You do know something,” Sykes said, taking him by the shoulders. “Help me to help her.”

  “I can’t. I have to follow where I’m led.” He wasn’t sure where his words came from.

  Looking at the sidewalk, Gray seemed to see small sparks fire. A force field closed around him, closed him in with Sykes. “She’s in danger,” he said.

  “You are Bonded to her?”

  He raised his face and nodded. “Yes.”

  “When you—touch—you are energized?”

  “If that’s all you can call it, yes.”

  Sykes gave a thin smile. “And the marks Willow spoke of? On the inside?”

  “They’re there.”

  “Do you know the reason for them?” Sykes asked.

  “To punish me. To teach me obedience when I was a child. I don’t know anything else except that I must have had powers I was afraid to use afterward and I forced them from my mind. I’ve been trying to touch Marley, to bring her to me, but she doesn’t answer. I’m too new at this to know what I’m doing.”

  “You are returning to your true self. Do you believe you are part of a world very few come to know?”

  Gray said, “Yes,” surprising himself with his rapid response. “Marley and I have been able to communicate…without speaking aloud. And I’ve seen things she’s seen. I believe I was meant to be with her.”

  “Good.” A pleased smile gave Sykes a piratical air of satisfaction. “Welcome.”

  “Thanks.” It seemed the only thing to say.

  “Pascal, my uncle, asked me to find her, but she’s being closed off from me,” Sykes said. “That should be impossible…unless she’s a party to it.”

  “You mean she could be choosing to stop us from getting to her.”

  Sykes nodded slowly.

  “Is it possible for someone else to shut her away?” Gray asked.

  Sykes jaw clenched. “Anything is possible.”

  “The mentor would know,” Gray said quietly.

  Gasping, Sykes took a step backward. “What do you know about the Mentor?”

  Gray hoped he hadn’t done the wrong thing in mentioning the shadowy man. “I have seen him. He has spoken to me.”

  “Impossible. We don’t even know if he exists.”

  “He exists. Not the way we do, but he’s here when he wants to be.”

  Excitement raised Sykes’s color. “You were sent to Marley,” he said.

  “Should I try to ask the Mentor for help?”

  “It’s our way to deal with our own problems. We have never asked for help.”

  “But he came to me.” He thought better of saying he found the Millets hardheaded.

  “Perhaps he’ll come to you again,” Sykes said, and Gray didn’t miss the hopeful note. “He must have made a decision he struggled with. You are Bonded to Marley, but you are not a Millet. He showed himself to you for his own special reasons.”

  “To help me help Marley,” Gray said. “He bent his own rules.”

  Sykes gave the ghost of a smile.

  “You were at Royal Street?” Gray asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we start there.”

  “Uncle Pascal said she isn’t there.”

  “I think she is or that’s where we’ll find something to help us,” Gray said. “I know she was going. I drove her there. That’s where I’ll start looking for her.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Sykes said and Gray was glad.

  By foot was the fastest way to travel while the traffic was so snarled. They ran all the way, dodging and darting, bringing cars to a screeching halt, raising angry shouts from people who got in their path.

  The trip took longer than Gray wanted it to, but anything would have been too long. Finally he turned onto Royal Street and sprinted until a hot-dog cart stopped him.

  Sykes, with Gray thumping into him in the process, all but fell through the door at J. Claude Millet Antiques.

  They were met by a wildly barking Winnie, who jumped up and down on the ugly gold fainting couch.

  “Shh,” Willow said. She and Pascal faced the two newcomers as if they’d been waiting for them.

  “Anything?” Pascal said to Sykes.

  “Willow was right about him,” Sykes said, hooking a thumb in Gray’s direction. “There’s a Bonding.”

  Pascal Millet was a muscular, striking man who shaved his head and looked at the world with yet another pair of those extraordinary green Millet eyes. He assumed the expression of a watchful father looking over a teenage boy come to take his daughter to the prom.

  “I was sure there was,” Pascal said. “I felt it.”

  “So did I,” Willow said, and when they looked at her she pushed her mouth out in an O. “I mean, I sorta thought…”

  “You said what you meant,” Sykes said. “You are in tune just as the rest of us are. About time, too. We all have our jobs to do in this family.”

  “Except you,” Willow snapped back. “You think you can do what you like.”

  “That’s what you think,” Sykes said. “Enough squabbling, sis, we have to find Marley. Uncle, is my father back in London yet?”

  Gray frowned at him, not understanding.

  “Yes,” Pascal said. “He went straight back.”

  “You and I need to talk,” Sykes said. “And with him. Can we go to your flat?”

  Without a word, the two of them took off.

  Winnie ran back and forth to the foot of
the stairs.

  “What is it, girl?” Gray said. A sharp sting crossed his face, caught the corner of his eye and he winced.

  Gray kept his back to Willow. Horror choked him. He concentrated and felt drawn to Marley’s workroom.

  Winnie squeaked at him. She jumped up and down until Gray approached her. Off she went, up the stairs, looking like a mutant greyhound jumping fences.

  “Go with her,” Willow said.

  “Make sure your cell phone’s on,” Gray said.

  “I won’t need it.”

  He didn’t respond. Instead he vaulted, three steps at a time, up the three flights. Already hoping his tested methods would unlock the door, he reached for the deep colors of the leaded glass and grasped the handle.

  The door wasn’t even closed.

  Gray shot inside and shut the thing behind him, leaned on it, almost afraid to go farther into the room.

  Pressure held him, pummeled him. His ear drums hurt so badly he sank to his knees.

  Wet. Winnie licking his face with desperate fierceness focused him and he got to his feet. The whispering voices bombarded him, forcing themselves to find space, one over the other, vying for his attention.

  “I can’t understand you,” he said.

  The ceiling whirled with a kaleidoscope of colored lights, spun faster and faster. Gray forced himself to keep his eyes down and made his way through Marley’s projects to her bench.

  Curls of red lacquer littered the worktop as did pieces that seemed to be broken off the house. He picked up a piece. It was so hot he almost dropped it.

  He turned it over on the bench and saw it was the door that had been at one corner. The walls came together as if it had never been there now, except that rather than red, the finish was a dark salmon color, and painted to look rough. Like stucco.

  “You have to go.” This was no whisper. This was a clear voice and Gray saw what he expected, the ethereal image of the one who called himself the Mentor.

  “Go where?” he said. “Tell me. Quickly, please.”

  “Look at the house. It’s there. She told me it would be.”

  “Marley told you?” Gray said.

  “No.” The man sounded impatient. “The one who gave Marley the house for safekeeping. Belle came to me and said the house holds the key. Now get to work.”