I shrug. “In some ways, I see myself as a blessing and a curse here, and the few others who actually know about me feel the same way, I’m sure. “ I know the words are wrong as soon as they break free of my lips.
“Know about you? The house you run, or what you are?” His words are as biting as his gaze.
“Both.” My only hope now was to tear through this as fast as I can. “Of course, the city leaders would condemn me and my house publicly, but quite a few of them have found their way to my back door in the wee hours of the morning.”
Leaving the lights and buildings of the city behind, we were now entering a more rural landscape. Now I am free. I open up my senses fully again. He could feel me spreading out to fill my surroundings. I could tell he was impressed, slightly, but not enough to outweigh his disappointment.
“They have regular girls or boys, and a few of them are actually my regulars personally. It’s a wonderful side effect of taking what I need from them that they only seem to remember the blissful high of being ‘entertained’ and nothing else. I mean, what would they think if they knew that I’d been draining more than just their pockets for years?”
“Who knows about what you are?”
“Frank, Julie, and Leslie. They’re my staff.”
He sighs deeply and shakes his head. “I know I taught you better.”
“And Lucy.” I have to get it out there; it’s too much a part of why I needed him here to prolong my admission. “Lucy knows what I am. She knows almost everything about me.”
“Lucy is?” His tone is soft and even, but his disappointment hits me like bricks.
“The breathers call her ‘Mama Maiden.’ She died back in the 1800’s. She kinda looks after the weak, ya know? The street people and the working girls. Like a guardian angel.”
“You mean a phantom, a spirit?” He almost loses his anger. I can see it flash in him. “Why would you be dealing with a spirit? We’ve discussed this before. How many times?”
“It goes beyond that. There’s something larger at play here. The spirits know about it, and it’s had an effect on our kind too. I think Rachel is the key to figuring out what’s going on, and stopping it if we can, but I can’t do it alone.”
My words hang there in the space between us, waiting for him.
“Rachel is the spirit child?”
“Yes! She was taken, and…” I have to slow down. If I’m overly emotional, I don’t even want to know what he’ll think, what he’ll do. ”Jules, my house was set on fire. There have been grave robbers and rituals. There’s a hit out on me, and a warrant for my arrest. Even Jacobi, who was our eldest here, has disappeared. That’s why I called you. My dealings with spirits didn’t bring this trouble; it just made me notice more of what was going on.”
Dead silence. Pulsating tendrils of his conscious will are moving through my mind. I can feel him sorting through my emotions, wordlessly, as the cool night wind swims past us.
I am all too aware of each second. They pass like their own lifetimes. I’m almost to my house. We are both only listening to the engine of the Charger as I strain it to its breaking point. We can’t arrive soon enough.
I whip into the driveway too fast, accompanied by the smell of burning brakes. I’m out of the car before the engine has completely died. His bag is in my hand and the trunk lid is closing when I notice he’s already standing at the door. I don’t even have time to put the top up.
This would be so much easier if he loved me like I loved him and didn’t see me as a child he was responsible to care for. Or am I projecting again? Why did I ever think that psychological help was a good idea? It only made me question more.
I open the front door and walk briskly down the hall. Gesturing to the open door of the room that was his for so many years, I expect a reaction that doesn’t come. He looks inside, and I set his bag at the foot of the bed. Turning to see him, he’s already gone.
I find him in the living room. He’s standing in front of the window with a knife in his hand. It’s the one I keep in the case on the table by the door. The one he gave me to protect myself, before he made me what I am.
He turns from the window and puts the blade back, glancing up at me. I look at the floor, out of instinct and shame.
Finally, he speaks to me.
“I need you to explain the details of your current situation. Leave nothing out. I have to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”
He’s going to ride my memories. I can do that too, but not as well as he can. He’s the one who taught me all I know about how to manipulate the mind. He wants me to explain so that I’ll remember and he can feel those memories first hand. I really didn’t think he’d let me off with just a simple explanation.
I suppose it’s better this way. I won’t have as much of an urge to defend myself, and he can just experience for himself what I’ve been dealing with.
“I don’t even know where to begin. So much has happened in such a short time. Things spiraled out of control so quickly —”
He cuts me off with a glance.
Jules walks across the room to the bar and pours himself a drink. The attitude he gives off is so powerful. As though there were no problems in the world he couldn’t handle and I’m no more than an annoyance he happens to be entertaining as a guest in his home. He returns to where I’m standing staring at him, and selects a dark brown oversized chair.
He moves a hand, motioning me to sit across from him. I really don’t even have time to think as my body responds to his will. As strong as I’ve gotten over these years we’ve spent apart, he can still bend my will to his as easily as a flick of his wrist.
He sits down slowly, settles back, and I lose myself envisioning him as a medieval conqueror; my knight in black shining leather.
“You should start from where you first encountered this spirit child you told me about. That seems to be about where your trouble begins. Her name is Rachel?”
CHAPTER 3
“RACHEL WAS JUST TOO PRETTY. She was so ideal that it defied reality. A china doll brought to life. I think that’s likely what gave her away to me first.” As I say it, Jules pulls the memory vividly to the front of my thoughts, forcing me to focus just so I can keep speaking.
“Lucy hoped by sending her here from the street I’d just take her in without really questioning. She should have known better.”
***
“Why are you laying on my porch?”
I’m shocked to find the tiny person flat under my swing, playing with a large brass key, as I arrive at the Jefferson House at a little past three in the morning.
“It was raining. I didn’t want to get wet, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
The words could be a total crock, but the sincerity in her eyes tells me that I’d have to be a really real monster, not just a chick with fangs, to make her go out in the storm. I squat down in front of her gritting my teeth as I try to fake a smile. She doesn’t even meet my eyes.
“Why don’t you get up and come inside with me?”
As she pockets the key I offer her my hand to help her up and she’s an ice sculpture, not a child. Utterly fragile and cold. “Would you like something warm to eat?”
“No thank you, ma’am. I’m fine,” she says in a meek tone, shaking her raven ringlets slightly.
My mind screams out ‘red flag!’, but at this point, I‘m committed. I’ll see how this plays out.
I walk her through a tour of the downstairs rooms that aren’t used for business and make sure she knows what areas are off limits. I then park her on a comfortable sofa in front of a television and go to the basement where my office and suite are. Suddenly, it dawns on me that despite the deluge outside, this girl’s pleats aren’t even the slightest bit wet. Again, ‘red flag!’
My plan to watch her on the closed circuit security monitors quickly proves to be unfruitful. I know she’s there where I left her. I can feel her thoughts, her emotions, in that spot, yet she doesn’t appear on the screen.
/> I go back upstairs and find myself sitting quietly next to her as she watches an unhealthy dose of late night adult cartoons. I’m trying to read deeper into her. Her thoughts are distant and hard to grasp, like trying to read covers on a newsstand from an airplane.
This goes on for as long as I can take before I finally blurt out, “Who sent you here?”
“Mama.” She doesn’t even glance in my direction.
“Mama Maiden? The Lady in White? Lucy?” I slide onto the floor on my knees in front of her, my interest piqued.
She seems a little put off, or frightened; I’m not sure. Looking hard at the scuff marks on her Mary Janes, she nods slowly. “She said I shouldn’t talk about her until we knew each other better.”
Manipulative bitch. Playing off my weaknesses.
“Did she tell you why you should be here?”
“She said I would be safer here. Hidden from the ones who killed me, until she found out why they did that.”
She’s talking about her own murder so flatly I wonder if she might still be in shock over it. Then it occurs to me – how would the ones who killed her be able to find her after death unless…
“Who killed you, um, you got a name?”
“Rachel Kathleen Gregory. Pleasure to meet you.” She accompanies the stilted words with a well-trained head nod. “The shadow people killed me. Mean spirits. Mama says they work for someone, and she wants to find out who.”
“Why did they kill you? Do you know?”
I’m screaming in my head not to ask any more questions. I really shouldn’t want to know the answers, but I can’t stop myself.
“I don’t know. My daddy died before I can really remember, and my mommy died in the hospital last year. I was living with my Aunt Becky, but she works at the strip club and didn’t always come home. Then there was the fire. Mama said that made me ‘emotionally ripe’, whatever that means.”
I know exactly what it means. It means she had enough psychic energy, built up from emotional trauma, to make her a potent Spirit. It also means, stop asking questions.
“How old are you?”
She looks up at me and the corner of her mouth turns up slightly. “I’ll be nine next week.” Her gaze drops back to the floor and her shoulders slump. It never occurred to me that a dead heart could break until right now.
Damn it! Lucy knew this was a dirty thing to do to me. She knew better. This was intentional.
I reach out to put my hand on her shoulder and find it instead sitting on the seat, having passed right through her. I pull back slowly and bend lower to catch her eyes again.
Don’t do it! I’m jumping up and down and screaming my head off on the inside.
“You can stay here as long as you like, Rachel. This can be your home now.”
She looks up at me, nervous at first, and then beaming, “You mean it, ma’am?”
“Yes. Of course I do.” I conjure my best smile for her. “Call me V.”
Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, before I see Lucy again. She has things of her own to run, with the spirits she’s a matron for, and I know that. I think it’s more likely though that she’s making sure I have plenty of time to become overly attached to Rachel.
When she does show up, I can’t bring myself to have contempt for her. We discuss the bizarre circumstances surrounding Rachel’s death, and the fact she still has no real leads or explanations. She’s heard of no other example of spirits killing the living, unless that living soul had done something to the spirit in their life. The ones who killed our Rachel were too many in number and too great in power for that to apply. She was only an eight year old girl.
Lucy tells me that the investigation on her side is ongoing. For me it’s business as usual. Clients in, clients out. I’m taking care of my girls and now a little dead one as well.
Rachel’s living in the basement and we are spending a lot more time together watching cable, reading together, or playing cards.
Lucy comes to check in on us and even teaches her, over time, to hold a substantial form for longer periods. Eventually, she learns to hold things and move things like a proper haunting spirit.
I find myself being so proud of her, invested in her. I’m falling in love with this little girl who never had a chance at life.
***
It’s ten at night on a lazy Tuesday in the near Southside of Pekin. A semi truck pulling a twenty-eight-and-a-half-foot trailer creeps to a stop in front of a long since abandoned Masonic Lodge in the seediest neighborhood this town has to offer. The glossy black of truck and trailer reflect with a sheen of overstated anonymity. The local work-from-home chemical merchants and their overly protective ‘friends’ simply can’t help but take note and stare curiously from the front porches and picnic tables that line the street.
Several men in black clothes, who undoubtedly obliterated the inventory of a military surplus store somewhere, begin moving furniture and countless large crates into the condemned brick building with heroic swiftness.
Two black SUVs, each with a car hauling trailer in tow, park on the secondary street next to the lodge and spew forth even more men who enter and head for the basement. Noises and flashes of light begin to pour out into the stillness of the humid evening air.
In the corner of the basement, a scruffy lump of man stirs to consciousness from under a pile of cardboard. His eyes widen at all the activity around him.
His name is Shakes; he smells of urine and twitches and jerks from too many years of using automotive fluids to get high, and this has been his home for going on four years now, and no one has ever even set foot in this basement before tonight. Now, there are half a dozen men setting up a bank of generators against the far wall; he’s at a loss for what to do.
Finally, it’s just too much for him and he has to ask, “What are you guys doing down here?”
A dozen eyes lock on him at once with deadly focus. They move like lightning, snatching him up from the floor with his few meager belongings and begin dragging him toward the door. He yells and struggles for a moment, but it becomes painfully obvious there’s no stopping them. He slumps down, resigned to whatever fate they have for him, and becomes two hundred pounds of deadweight.
“Stop.” The order comes from a silhouetted form in the doorway. “Put him down.”
The men react immediately and Shakes crumples into a smelly heap on the floor. He flails around, pulling his bag and other treasures close to his body, before looking up to see the face of his would-be savior.
The man takes a few steps further into the room, letting the dim light in the room illuminate his face. He’s dressed in dirty ripped jeans, a white t-shirt, and a leather trench coat. If not for his well-trimmed facial hair, Shakes thought he could be the twin brother of the guy who lived in the dumpster behind the old grocery on Sixth Street.
Looking down at him more kindly than felt natural, the man asks, “Who are you?”
“They…they call me Shakes.” He points to the corner of the room. “I live here.”
“Then I’m you’re new landlord, Shakes. C’mon.” He offers a hand to help him up. “These men need to get back to work and I think we should get to know each other better. My name’s Garrett.”
***
The Jefferson House sits back from the street behind a row of evergreens that let only the third floor windows of the 1880’s Victorian look out over the worn-out west-end neighborhood. A hidden oasis of lush creature comforts that promised beautiful sights, intoxicating temptations, and of course, the most intense of physical pleasures seven nights a week. Soft light leaks from the stained-glass windows, and the delicate smell of Japanese incense drifts out like a spiritual invitation.
There really isn’t one true name for the place, but the Jefferson House is the most recognized title. It’s not as though I can really get a LLC in that name for the kind of business it is. Its name could be attributed to the fact that it’s on Jefferson Street. It could also be because, as far as anyone outs
ide the place is concerned, it’s run by Julie Jefferson. Either way, a name’s just a name. The place is what’s important.
Julie was the first girl I took in when I reopened the house in 2002. She was eighteen then and already working in the industry. I took her in to protect her but she has a good head on her shoulders that has proven to be more than worth my investment. With her looks and deviant personality, I’m really lucky she’s so loyal.
She was born Julia Elizabeth Jeffries, but who can’t use a good alias these days? Especially when you are working in a largely illegal trade in a small town in Middle America?
She manages my accounts and works with clients these days because she enjoys the job, the control and the feeling of superiority it gives her. Not because she has to. The financial perks for her aren’t bad either, I suppose, and I think she gets off on running the rest of the girls.
None of my girls work unless they want to, and they set their own rates, per client generally. Half of what they earn goes back into the house, which more than pays the bills. They know better than to lie to me about their income. Someone tried once. No one speaks about it. No one has to. I provide them with a stable home, legal and medical care, and safety with physical protection.
Julie has two ‘lieutenants’, Leslie and Piper. I’d call them assistants if I didn’t think they’d take it as an insult. She occasionally defers responsibility to them, and as long as everything runs smoothly, I trust Julie’s judgment.
Leslie is my favorite of the two. A tiny green-eyed girl with auburn curls and all the elegance and grace of a ballerina, with the attitude of a hungry Great White in chummed up water.
Piper is more demure, a tall thin ebony statue you’d expect to see on display in a museum. She’s calm and calculating; I’d almost say insidious. I like the things she’s done for the house, and by proxy done for me, but I trust her as far as an infant could toss a city bus.
Tonight, Julie has asked for some personal time. Her brother is in from Louisville, and she’s taking him out for dinner and drinks.
Blood & Spirits Page 3
