When she stepped back, she looked almost confused.
“Hm,” she said. “I’m going to have to keep thinking about that.”
Then she slammed back into the driver’s seat, started up, and drove away, leaving him choking on exhaust and unexpected signals.
He didn’t remember much about waiting for the bus. He supposed he must have sat there for the hour or so before it came. He must have gotten on, picked a seat, stowed his stuff. Mostly, he remembered thinking.
He had thought about Mara before, about being with her. He had only been in love once, and he knew whatever he felt for Mara did not feel like that, but it had been too many years since Kate, and he did wonder sometimes whether it was time to just let her go. But mourning had become a part of him, like a bad habit, and though the agony was past, the habit stuck around. He knew he couldn’t fall in love again if he was still in love with a ghost.
He cycled through the old standbys.
They were friends. He didn’t want to risk that.
They were colleagues. He didn’t want to risk that, either.
He loved her, and he was pretty sure she loved him back, but there was no way for him to say whether he could ever be in love with her. Kate was still in the way.
Mara was beautiful. He had always thought so, but he had never been and would never be attracted to her. He couldn’t be, not in that way. It wasn’t in his nature.
And that brought him to the last point.
No one had ever stared at him in horror and breathlessly demanded to know what he was. It never happened like that. He hated having that conversation, though, so he usually made sure it took place over a cup of coffee and tried not to stutter too badly.
“Even though I am one of the weeniest guys you’ll ever meet, some of my quirks aren’t actually the result of neuroses, like everyone assumes. It’s not that I don’t eat in public because I can’t stand being watched; I actually don’t eat at all. I guess I could, physically, but it makes me sick. Not going near the river? Yeah, I don’t really like running water, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to cross it. Playing catch-and-release with the spiders? You would, too, if you could feel them die.”
He muttered it under his breath and grimaced. Words were not his forte.
The full answer to that question had two parts, and while neither was particularly complicated, the two came together to make something tricky.
Most people were usually looking for the fact that he was dead. More specifically, undead. That had never really bothered him, but it bothered other people, sometimes a lot, so most of the time he let people assume he was completely spastic. Mara didn’t mind a spastic. That was one of the reasons he loved her.
The second part, the tricky part, was that he was a medium. He saw ghosts, but it was more than that. The clue was in the word itself. A medium was something – someone – in the middle, something between. Between two worlds, between alive and dead. Even when he was alive, part of him had been dead, and once his body died, he was – paradoxically – still alive. It made sense to him, but it was impossible to articulate, so he usually explained what he could do and left it at that. His superpowers, he called it, though only with irony. When they needed it, he could help ghosts to cross over. He had to.
It was tricky because he also felt death. There were varying degrees of awfulness, and he felt terrible for saying that some deaths hurt him less than others, but it was true. He found it easiest to handle little things, like when someone stepped on an ant. Murder hurt as though he were the one dying. A medium cannot kill, so a medium who ended up as a vampire was pretty much just a joke. He had never wanted to kill, but sometimes he wished he could have been dangerous. Danger was impressive; Lenny was not.
Mara wasn’t the kind to freak out, though. He knew her well enough that he wasn’t worried about frightening her. More likely, she would call him a liar. That could potentially be either better or worse.
They kicked him off the bus in Austin just in time to prevent him from having a nervous attack. He forced his brain out of high gear long enough to call a cab and check in at the hotel. There was just enough time for him to dump his stuff on the bed, change clothes, and run to the ballroom for the first-night mixer.
There are more male science teachers than other kinds of teachers, but the hall was still a swimming pool of estrogen. Lenny huddled in the corner with the shyer members of his sex and thought about Mara.
Teachers’ conferences are draining. He didn’t like sleeping in a strange place, trying to make small talk with a lot of people he didn’t know, with every third one of them offering him unwanted advice to help with his stutter. He had done speech therapy. Tea didn’t help. Talking with a mouthful of marbles didn’t help. Repeating lines from movies didn’t help. He didn’t like listening to them complain about work and about their colleagues. Teachers are wonderful people, on the whole, but put a bunch of them in a room together, and they turn into a bunch of chickens, squawking and pecking each other to death. He hated listening to them talk about progress, and how the only thing anyone can learn from the way things have always been done is how not to do them.
He sat quietly and pretended to pay attention while he played out scenes with Mara in his head. The words had to be just right, and he would need to know them beforehand, or else he would ramble, and she would never understand.
Suddenly, he realized that the applause was just a little bit more heartfelt than it had been, and the speakers overhead were blasting Texas, Our Texas, and everyone stood, and then it was over. A few people hurried to find friends they had made. Some exchanged business cards or telephone numbers. Most just made for the doors. Lenny sat still waited for the tide to pass him by, then rode out on the back end of the wave. It deposited him at the hotel bar, which seemed like as good a destination as any. Such a long weekend deserved a beer. He already knew that he would be sleeping for most of the bus ride back home, so a tiny hangover wouldn’t hurt anything.
He unpinned his name tag and stuck it in his pocket, shuffled into the smoky room, and went to get himself a drink.
Chapter 2
THE MAN SEEMED nice at first. At least, comparatively. Lenny was aware of him as soon as he walked in, pulled by a strange attraction that left him both disoriented and disconcerted. There was really only one likely reason for someone like that to be in a bar so early in the evening, and he seemed to think that Lenny’s reason for being there was the same as his. He snagged the barstool next to Lenny’s and shoved his glass across the counter, asking for “One more, please.” Lenny knew immediately what he was, just like the man had known him from across the room, and he silently prepared his polite apologies.
“You’re new around here.” He did not make it a question, but his voice rose slightly at the end, giving Lenny room to reply.
“Only for the w-weekend. I’m leaving t-t-tomorrow.” Lenny sincerely hoped the man would understand that he wasn’t trying to trespass on his territory. A glance to the side through the smoky light showed him an enormous shoulder, and beyond that a head of close-cropped black hair. He couldn’t see much of the face, except that it seemed to be very smooth, angular. There was something familiar as well, though Lenny could not quite place it.
“Oh, shame. Thought I might’ve finally had a neighbor.” There was a pause. “Wanna go do something anyway? I could show you my side of Austin.”
Lenny knew exactly what sort of something the man had in mind and tried not to sound as nervous as he felt. “No, thanks. I’m g-going to want a full night’s sleep. Still haven’t p-packed or anything.” It was a true excuse, at least. Even if his idea of fun had gone in that direction, he really did have other things to do. The man caught on and didn’t press, and Lenny was grateful for that.
“Where are you going back to?”
Lenny finished off his drink, making the ice in the bottom rattle against the glass. “Abilene. I’m Lenny, by the way.”
“Sebastian. And I’m from�
� – he gestured vaguely with his beer – “over there. A couple of blocks down. If you’re interested.”
It occurred to Lenny at that point that he might have miscalculated. It sounded almost as though he was being hit on. It was uncomfortable, even if it was theoretically flattering. “L-look, I really, really h-have to-”
“No, that’s fine. I get it. You have to pack.” Sebastian’s voice was disappointed, lonely.
Lenny felt for him, but hardly enough to agree to a hookup, or whatever it was Sebastian wanted. He knew what loneliness was like, though. He knew what it was to be surrounded by people who had no idea, who couldn’t share his experience, and he knew that if Sebastian was a killer, it was only because he could not help himself.
They talked. Sebastian was from Spain. He’d been in Austin for a couple of decades, and Mexico City before that. He was making a living in hypnotherapy, making sad people stop smoking.
“I’m good at it,” he said. He winked at Lenny, in case there had been some chance he had not been understood. Lenny did understand.
“I bet,” he said. “Me, I’ve never been g-good at that. I’m in town for the conference. Texas Science T-t-t-t-teachers’ Association. It’s a good job, steady, if you lay low. Anyway, hitting the seminar c-came with a little raise, so I figured...”
Sebastian tipped his head to one side and nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I could help you with that stutter. I do traditional, too. No tricks.”
And there it was.
He must have seen Lenny make a face, because he laughed and threw his hands up in a peace gesture, sliding back from the table they had taken over up against the window. His laugh was contagious. Lenny had to grin.
“Or not! Sorry, just, y’know, it’s what I do. Gotta be good at something, right?”
“It’s okay. Sorry, I’ve just g-gotten more advice than I ever wanted in the p-past three d-d-days. So you help people? That’s a little... unusual.” There was no way to make that sound inoffensive, but Lenny figured he would understand. It was unusual. He tried to quell the stutter, but it didn’t work.
Sebastian shrugged.
“Like I said, gotta be good at something. I do what I’m good at. It pays the bills, anyway. Well, some of them. Keeps me busy, too. You don’t know how boring it can get, with nothing to do. Anyway, it’s my thing.”
He leaned forward, propped his elbows on the table, and rested his chin on his fists, looking at Lenny curiously.
“What’s yours?”
“My...?”
“Your thing. There’s something different about you. It’s magnetic.”
Lenny remembered the moment from earlier, when it had almost sounded like Sebastian was trying to invite him back to his place. He tried hard to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound harsh and wouldn’t encourage him, either.
“Um, science t-teacher? Physics? Um... magnets, I mean? Heh? Get it? Science?”
Sebastian smirked, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. His eyes were brown, dark mahogany.
“I’m serious. I felt it as soon as you walked in here.”
Lenny didn’t really like having that conversation, either, the one where he explained that connection he had with dead things and how it really wasn’t as cool as it sounded. No one had ever described it as magnetic, before, but it was the same thing that had brought him to Kate all those years ago, and it seemed to kick in the most when the dead person really, really needed help. Another thing about being a medium – he had to help when he could. He didn’t have any choice. But there wasn’t much he could do about loneliness.
Lenny shook his head, and Sebastian sat back again, crossing his arms over his chest. His arms were huge. So was his chest.
“You mean you don’t know?” he asked. There was an edge in his voice. Not fear, exactly, but maybe nerves. He didn’t understand.
But there was no way Lenny was having that conversation in a crowded hotel bar with a stranger, even a stranger who needed help, so he smiled and shrugged.
Sebastian shrugged back, enormous shoulders rising once, and he grabbed his glass and stood up. He was big sitting, but he was even bigger standing.
“Refill?” he asked. “On me.”
“Thank you?”
Lenny watched him retreat back to the bar, and he thought about just leaving quietly. He hurt for Sebastian and his loneliness, he really did. But that strange thing the Spaniard felt and couldn’t understand... Lenny felt it too, when he took a moment to think around his two beers and a whiskey. The problem was that Lenny felt it from the other end of things. Sebastian was isolated, sinking, in desperate need of a hand to pull him back up; that was just a fact. He was also stained. Lenny could feel the faint echoes of every death he had caused, and in his whole life, he had never been in a room with someone who felt like that. Most vampires killed like animals – for food, for self-defense, for territory. Lenny didn’t like that, but he could deal with it. He didn’t really have another option but to deal with it. No one could call animals evil for killing things. Maybe Sebastian had his reasons. Maybe he’d had a lot of bad luck. Maybe it was cathartic, his way of dealing with his problems. Lenny doubted it, though. It was too much for an animal. Sebastian killed like a madman.
But madmen need help, sometimes, too. Lenny sat still and waited for him to come back, hoping he didn’t look as on edge as he was starting to feel. He may not have been exactly the standard model, but he was also not human. He and Sebastian were kindred. At least, in theory.
Sebastian set a glass in front of Lenny and sat back down. His expression was calm again, faintly smiling. He shot back half of his drink.
“You ever been to Amarillo?”
“C-couple of times.”
“You know Tony and Edith?”
Lenny took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “Not well. I went through all the channels when I moved to T-texas. Met them once, then. They sent me a welcome b-basket.”
“No? Well, they don’t like me much.” He grinned. “You know anybody I might know? We gotta have some friends in common.”
Something about the tone of that question struck Lenny as a little bit off, but he shook his head again. “It’s just me in Abilene. I don’t t-travel much.”
“Oh...” His expression went blank for a moment, but then he raised an eyebrow. “That’s got to be boring. Who’s your progenitor?”
Lenny hated that word. It was a really gross word, and it sounded like something that would describe an amoeba better than it described a person. But there had never been enough vampires to make a significant impact on language evolution, and humans have never needed a better word for that particular concept.
“Kate Charles. She’s been g-g-gone a while.” He took a sip, then knocked the rest of it back. This felt like an interrogation, but he had no idea what Sebastian was getting at.
Sebastian made a face. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Guess you don’t get out much, huh?”
“I g-get out. I just like it when it’s t-t-time to go home.”
Sebastian leaned forward suddenly, elbows on the table, and Lenny looked up to find him well inside his personal space, the other man’s gaze fixed steadily on his face. His fingertips were numb.
“Come on,” Sebastian coaxed. His voice was low and slick. It vibrated too fast for Lenny to catch hold of his words. “What’s your deal? This is mine, so you know. I told you I was good at it.”
Nothing, he insisted, but what came out of his mouth was “Medium.” Sebastian’s eyes were stunning, figuratively and literally. Lenny felt frightened for a moment before he stopped feeling anything.
“Dead medium. That’s a new one.” Sebastian smiled, pressing steepled fingers against his lips.
The sound of his voice was enthralling. It had so many layers, so many other voices inside, making Lenny feel tiny. He knew what was happening, in a remote, detached way, and he tried to stop listening, to look away. But Sebastian was good at it, and the first thing the good ones do is make yo
u want to listen, make you want to get lost and listen, listen.
“Bet you could show me some fun tricks, huh? I’ve never had a medium, before. And just you in Abilene, all alone... No one to miss you.”
* * *
THE STAIRWELL SMELLED like marijuana, stale urine, and very old blood. Lenny had taught students from this kind of neighborhood back in Houston, and Albuquerque before that, and San Diego before that. Hard-eyed children who wore loose pants to hide the knives they brought to school and long sleeves to hide the bruises they got at home. There are poor neighborhoods, and then there are bad ones. This was a bad one. He could smell it rising up out of the stained concrete floors. The air there had gone dark and sour long before a murderer like Sebastian moved in.
There were ghosts in the walls, and some of them were Sebastian’s fault. A few of them reached out, but Lenny could not stop for them. He kept following the enormous back drifting down the hallway in front of him, even though he was not sure why. Sebastian’s steps were silent. Lenny’s shuffled. The one told the other once to be quiet, and he could not, but it did not matter, because there was no one near to hear them. The doors were closed and bolted.
Then they were inside, and that door was closed and bolted, too. Sebastian locked it. Three deadbolts. Two chains. Lenny’s brain wandered. He wondered whether this could possibly be where Sebastian saw his clients. It did not look like a professional’s office. It barely looked like an apartment. There was a couch and a chair and a table with a few tattered paperbacks – all Westerns, oddly enough – some eight-tracks, and a half-full coffee mug, white cream coagulated on the surface. That was the extent of the furniture. The kitchen off the main room looked as though it had been converted into storage. Lenny felt as though something was missing, but he could not put his finger on exactly what.
Somewhere on the next floor up, or maybe the next floor down, a boom box was spewing profanity.
A huge hand closed over his shoulder and steered him toward the chair. The wood creaked when the backs of his thighs hit it, and something popped inside his head. He could remember the stairs and the hall, but before that… nothing. There was a gaping hole between the hotel bar and this tenement complex. He could not even recall what the outside of the building looked like. They had been sitting at the table, finishing a last drink, and then... Then nothing. Nothing until this place.
Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More Page 387
