Blightmare (The Marnie Baranuik Files Book 5)

by A. J. Aalto

  “Could you add a ‘may I’?” I snapped, and shrugged at the weight of his arm meaningfully.

  He snorted and said quietly, “Just giving your ex-boyfriend a bigger target for his irritation.”

  “Wrong type of stalker,” I said. “Not an ex-boyfriend. Ex-cop gone rogue. Man, that actually sounds pretty bad-ass, now that I’ve said it out loud.” I sulked. “I wish I was an ex-cop gone rogue.”

  Morgan’s arm disappeared back to his personal space where it belonged. “You’re more of a semi-retired investigative consultant. The only way that sounds scary is if you were that lady from Murder She Wrote, because people died all the time around her.”

  People die all the time around me, too, I thought sourly.

  The chief deputy took off his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose as though he were getting a headache. “You wanna explain this stalker guy?”

  “He thinks I’m responsible for his friend’s murder.”

  “Out of curiosity,” he said, “and keeping in mind that I’m an officer of the law, are you responsible?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, so I was grateful when the waiter brought the coffee so I could busy my mouth with that for a minute. Morgan Sally was very easy to be near; like Chapel, he gave the impression of solid dependability and authority with only the slightest indication of bossiness. He wasn’t a steamroller like Batten, but he also didn’t have Hood’s skeptical sympathy or Chapel’s carefully crafted illusion of mild-mannered agreeableness. The Blue Sense confirmed that Sally was exactly what he showed people: confident, curious, capable, and not afraid to call bullshit or put his foot down.

  Finally, I said, “If I hadn’t given him access to the place he died, he probably wouldn’t have died the way he did.”

  “And who’s this ‘he’ you’re talking about?” Sally asked, though I got the impression he already knew the answer to that. I would have had a hard time believing that no one had spoken of the local FBI agent’s and vampire hunter’s death-by-fang, so the chance of him not knowing the name seemed unlikely.

  I took out my phone and flipped to my only picture of Batten, an intense and angry profile; he’d been shouting at some incompetent boob from the health department during a zombie problem at the lake, and for reasons that still escaped me, I’d felt the need to capture the moment. Despite my grief and my anger, the sight of Mark’s rage-face made my lips do a little rueful twist upward. I heard myself whisper wistfully before I knew I was going to speak, “He was such a jerk. He really was.”

  Morgan studied the picture and my reaction to it. “And that was a good thing,” he confirmed.

  “I wanted to punch him and smooch him at the same time,” I admitted. “And by smooch, I mean of course nasty-bang.”

  I glanced at the last text Batten had sent me. I’m out. Tilting the phone so Morgan Sally could look, I considered deleting it once and for all. I’d only looked at it about a million times, torturing myself with what might have been. How it had gone down. What had been going through his mind. If he had even for a minute considered not being a dunce.

  “So you’re one of those I-use-humor-to-hide-my-feelings people, huh?” Sally noted.

  “Feelings are for suckers,” I told him seriously, and when the food came, I smiled up at the waiter; he was giving me the I-hope-you-like-it eyes, and I’m far too Canadian to insult someone by not trying their food, so I popped a piece of something reddish-brown in my mouth with a polite I’m-sure-it’s-delicious nod at him. The heat was a surprising whip-crack against my tongue and tears sprang into my widening eyes before I could get a whimper out.

  “I think you might be having a feeling,” the deputy informed me.

  My reply was a whispery moan. I was having one, and it was of being set on fire, tongue-first. This is what blowing Asmodeus is probably like, my brain supplied unhelpfully.

  That can be arranged, Toots, a voice curled up from deep in a direction I couldn't have pointed to, and I'd have gasped if it didn't mean dying of capsaicin and tofu inhalation.

  Morgan promptly busted a gut. He and the waiter laughed and laughed. Judging by the deep lines around his eyes, I had a feeling this waiter did a lot of laughing at unprepared customers.

  “I am regretting my decision,” I choked out, reaching for the naan and ripping off a hunk. “I make bad life choices.”

  “Who’s the sucker now, sucker?” Morgan asked.

  The waiter must have figured that my reaction meant the food was perfect, so off he toddled. Deputy Sally chortled through his entire meal, and he ate without complaint. He chewed smugly, as though his ability to handle spice and heat somehow made him a superior human. Maybe it did. My nose was still leaking when he finished his third dish without so much as needing to dab sweat off his forehead or from his goatee.

  When I leaned back in the booth and took a quick glance at the silver truck, My Buddy was still pretending not to take pictures of us. This didn't concern me as much as it might have if Mitch Dunlop had been a journalist instead of an ex-cop.

  “Lemme pick your brain for a second,” I said to Sally, who munched on something and nodded, wiping his fingertips and mouth on a napkin. I almost picked up a fork to help him with the last dish, but remembered the spicy heat and decided on sipping a diet Pepsi instead. “I’ve got an angry client searching for his ex because he thinks she’s a danger to society at large. Specifically, a monster. But he seems fishy to me, and his story is... well, pretty out there, even compared to the other cases I usually work. And this ex-con I spoke with today also pegged him as having ‘just lost his peels,’ which sounds bad.”

  “Peels are orange prison jumpsuits,” Morgan filled in between mouthfuls.

  A-ha. “What would you do next, if you were me?”

  “If I were you?” he started, and I cut him off.

  “Be nice!” I elbowed him and he elbowed back with a snort-laugh. “Seriously.”

  “You’ve been hired to find this woman because she’s a monster?”

  I replied carefully, “Sorta.”

  “How realistic is it?” He didn’t look as doubtful as a total unbeliever.

  “Dude seemed genuinely freaked out.”

  “I’d be careful about sharing the information once you get it,” he said, “in case this fellow isn’t on the up-and-up. I’d look into it, but he wouldn’t be the first stalker to hire a private eye to find his ex or victim once she’d escaped him.”

  “Man, stalkers are everywhere these days,” I complained. “Obsess much? Can’t people just butt out and go about their lives anymore?” He made a good point, though. Beau had felt off, not to just to me but to Mr. Footer, formerly of Riker’s Island. And he wasn’t using his real name. He was spinning quite the monster story, and it had elicited the reaction he’d wanted — I was rushing in to rescue and defend him — but how much of it was true? How much of it was warped perception, or wishful thinking, or borne of a snubbed sort of vengeance? I had no idea. Was his dream lady actually tracking him for nefarious reasons, or was he projecting? Was he in fact tracking her for nefarious reasons? Was he the monster? I tried to remember if I knew of any monsters with a peanut butter addiction.

  “I’ve made you think,” Sally said, pleased. “In the private detective business, never assume.”

  “I know,” I bluffed. “I’m a damn good detective, I’ll have you know.”

  “You’ve been open how long?”

  I sucked my teeth at him. “I detected stuff before that.”

  “Uh huh. So, a few months?”

  “Years,” I scoffed. “Years of detecting. Some of it was even for cases.”

  Sally grinned around one last sip from his straw. “Good for you. Your friend is gone.”

  I glanced out the window at the empty parking space. “I already knew that way before you did,” I lied. “I should teach you how to know things.”

  “Uh huh,” he said pleasantly. “Where you headed now?”

  “Provided I’ve
bored him enough for one day? The spa. I need a pedicure.”

  “I was going to offer back-up, but ain’t nobody touching my feet,” he said, stretching out from behind the table like an octopus squeezing its way out of a bottle. “You call if you need anything, yeah?”

  “Slow day?” I asked.

  “I have a feeling every day is a slow day in Ten Springs,” he said, not entirely unhappy about it from what the Blue Sense was telling me.

  We exchanged cell numbers and the Blue Sense reassured me there was no romantic strangeness going on with the deputy; the new guy was just doing his job. That was good. I was in no place to be chasing the ol’ humpty hump. Besides, Maim would, uh, maim me if she thought he was as hot as Sally apparently found her.

  A quiet, peaceful spa visit was just what the doctor ordered, in this crazy world where people didn’t want me to work too hard or drink too much. A nice, relaxing pedicure in my favorite little corner spot where I could just slip in incognito and unwind for a bit. Breathe some aromatics, indulge in some moisturizers, maybe splurge and get a hot stone treatment. My toes were already un-clenching in anticipation.

  So of course my mood was going to be unceremoniously fuckbadgered before I got my tootsies rubbed.

  Chapter 10

  Behind Bobbi-Sue’s Classi Hair was a door leading to a little spa called, appropriately, The Little Spa. There were four massive leather massaging chairs with the foot tubs and a bench where the gel nails were done. At the desk, three bored technicians gossiped over coffee from Claire’s. One of them, a Korean lady in her early twenties whose name I couldn’t immediately recall, was eating a microwavable lunch with a plastic fork that paused halfway to her mouth. The tallest was the owner, Nicky; dark-skinned with a square-shouldered build, she always smelled strongly of vanilla perfume oil and acetone.

  They shock-blinked at me in unison and my shoulders fell. “What now?” I asked.

  “Marnie!” Nicky greeted. “I, we, uh, it seemed like you weren’t coming back.”

  “Back from where?” I asked. “I’m still around.”

  “Clarice said that ghosts got all up in your hair, y’know?” Nicky indicated with a twirling finger the wild turquoise curl that had sprung out of my long, black braid yet again. “And then this bitch said she saw you jogging.”

  The lunch-eater corrected, “No, I saw you sprinting up 36. Sprinting. Like you were escaping the men with butterfly nets. Bobbi-Sue said she heard you were in rehab getting cured off the Jose Cuervo.”

  “I was not!” I objected. “I’ve been on a regimen.” Of booze and pills and beating people up. “The ghost thing is, um, kinda true, though.”

  Apparently, possessed hair didn't rate compared to impromptu exercise. She swirled her plastic fork with a judgmental little lip-moue and ate her diet spaghetti without pleasure. “I never saw you run before.”

  “I run now,” I said, like I was admitting a crime. “I also lift weights and shit. I’ve lost my damn mind.”

  “How come?” Nicky said, pointing at one of the chairs and wheeling over her plastic set of drawers containing various instruments of beauty torture. “Ghost hair?”

  “No,” I said, unlacing my boots. “Despite what Clarice might have you believe, the weirdo hair isn’t the worst of my problems. And I can't exactly run away from it, since it's stuck to my head.”

  “Oh, honey,” the third lady said on a sad exhale. Ruth, I remembered. Ruth was a matronly English woman with penciled-on eyebrows and red-dyed grey hair who immediately hurried to the back, where the staff’s little kitchenette was. I heard a microwave and a coffee machine go on. The Blue Sense popped up in my face to report that Ruth, the nurturer of the group, was less interested in the gossip and far more concerned with comforting whatever injury might have caused me to start — the horror — running.

  Spaghetti Twirler plunked herself in an empty massage chair next to me and set the chair rumbling to life beneath her. “You can’t be running on the busy streets like that. Gonna get hit by a truck.”

  “I already feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,” I grumbled, rolling my socks off and scooting my black jeans up past my knees before stepping into the hot, gurgling water of the foot bath and sitting in the massage chair waiting for me, sinking back into it with a sigh. I didn't have the heart to point out that what passed for “busy” in Ten Springs was five cars at a stoplight instead of two.

  “Ruthie, better sweeten her coffee,” Nicky called over her shoulder before turning back to me and making a sympathetic noise, but my Talents told me she was not at all sorry to hear about her client’s pain. She just wanted the Big Juicy News and knew feigning concern would elicit an information spill. It occurred to me that she thought of me as her most famous client. I had been shot and stabbed while working with the FBI, and I had been outed as a witch and a psychic. I lived with a real “live” revenant. I’d been in newspapers and magazines. People in Ten Springs knew who I was; they may not have liked me, but I was small-town newsworthy, and if she could get some sweet details about my agony, she would have something to spill to her other clients, who would lap it all up with wide eyes. Since no one gave a calf massage quite like Nicky, I decided not to mind all that. Why the fuck not? Give her what she wants to hear.

  The one sitting beside me, though – Jacqueline, my memory finally provided — didn’t really care about me, either, and furthermore saw no value in learning the gossip. She pretended not to want me hit by a truck, but the truth is, it would make no difference to her at all. She didn’t like that I was semi-famous. It seemed to me that she had once been a popular girl, someone accustomed to getting a lot of attention herself. She didn't like that she had lost the spotlight with the passage of time, but the Blue Sense was clear about the fact that she didn’t want to use me to get any attention for herself. She’d prefer if everyone would just stop talking about me; she didn’t see my appeal, and on that, we agreed completely.

  Ruth banged back in from the kitchen, surrounded by a halo of delicious aromas and carrying a warmed-up brownie on a little paper plate and a cup of milky coffee with far too much sugar. I’d manage. I took a picture of the treats and sent it to Hood with a text saying, See? I eat.

  He texted back, You had one piece of butter chicken and choked on it. Sally said it wasn’t even spicy.

  Sally’s a chicken-choking, lava-licking freak of nature, I replied. You employ mutants and weirdos.

  Hood texted, I don't pay *you*.

  I thought for a moment, took a picture of myself flipping him off, and put my phone away in my jacket pocket, draping it over the back of the chair behind me. My shirt didn’t cover the bandage on my arm, and without my jacket on, the gauze around my throat was glaringly obvious. The ladies played it cool; even if I didn’t tell them what had caused the injuries, they could speculate like crazy once I was gone, and relay all this to other clients. I could almost hear the busy, small-town hum of gossip getting warmed up.

  “What color do we want to—oh my.” Nicky frowned at my toenails. “You have lost your mind. Would you look at your nails? When did you have these polished last?”

  I lifted one foot out of the bubbling water to check it out. She was right. I’d neglected my self-care quite a lot in the past few months. “I’ve lost myself,” I said softly, mostly just to me. The other ladies fell quiet for a second in case I said something to add.

  “Could be worse,” Ruth said, taking off her cardigan. “Remember that girl last week with the hooves?”

  My ears perked up, but I tried to keep the interest off my face. Hooves? Like, what Beau’s lady-horseman of the End of Days might have? It would take a delicate quid-pro-quo to extract the gossip; such was the way of the spa. “Let’s go with a pretty pink nail polish.”

  Nicky got up and went to her polish rack. “Bubblegum? Baby pink? Rose?”

  “Surprise me. Do whatever is newest and most funky in the world of nails,” I said, dangling a conversational carrot. “It’s not like anyone w
ill see them but me.”

  Jacqueline smiled around her fork as though this satisfied her. “Guy problems?”

  Oh, yeah. “You might say.”

  Nicky didn’t push, but Jacqueline stabbed at the single, sad meatball in her frozen dinner spaghetti trough and cleared her throat. I started telling the story of my latest trip to Norway, leaving out the stopover in Svikheimslending but adding in the Demon King and my quests to keep their interest.

  “And then,” I said while Nicky pumiced my heel roughly, “he sends me this.”

  I dug out my phone and showed them the I’m out text. The three ladies gasped in a horrified chorus. The Blue Sense walloped me with a prickling wave of shock and indignation.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” Jacqueline said, dropping her empty lunch plate in the trash with a huff, her sudden, sympathetic, sisterhood anger genuine, “that after Sex Night in the tent in Ireland, and after you jumped in front of a frickin’ bullet for him, he had the nerve to ditch you? And that’s how he told you? With a text? With that text?”

  I could practically see the skull-and-crossbones and flaming eggplant emojis she'd have sent in reply if that had been so unceremoniously delivered to her in my place, and stifled a grin.

  “Nope,” Nicky said, scrubbing and then putting my left foot back in the hot water and swooping up the right. “No. No he did not. No, no. Uh-unh. Fuck that guy.”

  Ruth clucked unhappily, but she surprised me by muttering, “Wanker.”

  “I haven’t even told you the worst part,” I assured them.

  Jacqueline held up a hand and made an unhappy groan. “No. It does not get worse.” She pointed one finger at me and it went tick-tock back and forth rapidly. “A two-word text breakup? Unless he sent you some crusty undies or a bag of doggy doo, I ain't hearing how that gets worse.”

  “It gets much worse,” I promised her.

  “Oh, fuck no,” Nicky said, and her scrubbing got harder. “Ruth, I’m going to need a Dr. Pepper now.”