by A. J. Aalto
Wherever my tangled locks hung out of my cap, they were coated with hoary, frost-hard tips, and when the wind blew the wrong way, they whipped across my face, poking my eyes and tickling my sweaty brow. My nostrils started to burn and I wondered if I was going to get chapped red, and wouldn't that be oh-so-attractive if Jerkface returned, smelling like a blend of watered-down Brut cologne (which Harry found absolutely hilarious) and body-warmed leather…
I stopped my fantasizing abruptly with a self-loathing scowl and went back to shoveling.
Why had I ever thought that working with the FBI would be fun? There had never been a single fun thing about it. Just a grim, never-ending line of wee bloodless bodies smelling of open abdominal cavities and, depending on freshness, putrescine and cadaverine, two scents I wish I wasn't familiar with.
The sun peeked above briefly, winking out when the heavy clouds trundled on stage left. Lovely of me to be thinking of rotting corpses when a perfectly healthy dead guy had finally wandered off to his bedroom in the basement. I felt his weariness, that slow progression of my Bonded partner as he approached his daily reprieve.
The cell phone in my back pocket matched the one tucked under the satin pillow in his casket. Only three people had my number: Harry, SSA Chapel, and Jerkface. When it started trilling Taco's version of “Putting on the Ritz” I didn't have to wonder who changed my ringtone.
“Yes, Lord Fancy Pants?”
“Are you going out?”
I'd planned on curling up on the couch to cheer myself up with the newest Janet Evanovich mystery and some Oreos, and I was going to chomp about twenty of them (like a Great White Shark, maybe?) but when your companion has needs… “What do you want, Harry?”
“May I issue a warning, ducky? I hate to, but may I?”
“Must you?” I replied.
“I must,” he continued, clearly missing the testy tone of my voice. “For I suspect you'd fancy a wee drive into town, where you would no doubt get on Agent Batten's wick. To be sure, that can only end in disaster.”
“On Batten's wick” sure sounded like a coy euphemism to me. Leaning against the snow shovel, I peered up at the gloomy skies and wondered if the sun was direct enough through those clouds to dust my smart-assed housemate.
“I used to own a crucifix,” I mused. “Solid silver, blessed by a Roman Catholic archbishop. Wonder where it got to?”
“They probably revoked it from your heathen arse when you went witchy.” I could picture him wiggling his fingers mysteriously the way he did.
“Rest in peace, Harry.”
“T-minus five, my pet.” He sucked wind before he hung up on me and I knew he was finishing up a menthol cigarette in his casket again. Embers in an enclosed wooden box with a highly flammable revenant? Shaking my head, I filled in the four, three, two, one… I clutched the shovel handle in anticipation, but it didn't help much.
The loss of Harry as he settled to rest was always like having my entrails jerked out, leaving a yawning chasm in my lower belly. I heard someone moan and knew it was me. It took a few deep breaths, Lamaze-style, through pursed lips before the immediate effects faded, and then I was okay. Not great, but okay.
I scanned the yard, paying close attention to any hint of new movement in the pale white expanse spread before me; the wind flicked crystal ice from the trees, evergreen boughs brushed side to side, my eyes were kept busy as I went back to shoveling. With my Cold Company technically dead for a few hours, I was on deck. There was a .45 Beretta mini Cougar, a powerful little hand-cannon suited for my diminutive grip size, tucked in an innerpants holster at the small of my back. Even still, being in charge is never a good place for me; it's no secret I tend to spaz under pressure.
An expected dark shape passed overhead casting a shadow that skimmed the glittering landscape and settled in a nearby tree. I craned up, narrowing my eyes against the gritty snow pelting down; this was no ordinary bird.
They called them debitum naturae, from the Latin, debt of nature: the debt vulture. Every revenant had one, a specific bird who shadowed his steps, forever waiting, forever watching through the centuries, confused by the walking carrion that would not lie down to be eaten. Its cry was a haunting shrill of eternal frustration. The debt vulture was immortal, God's answer to the demonic promise of eternal life, a subtle living reminder of the way the food chain should work. Fixed to Harry's personal mark, it would follow him everywhere, and appeared from hiding soon after Harry went to casket, as though it sensed Harry's death on the air the same way I did.
The debt vulture (which we named Ajax) could hardly eat Harry when he was locked in his casket, safely indoors. I was more worried about the things the vulture often attracted, unnatural things that used debt vultures to track their favorite snack. Carrion beetles were the most common, but not the regular sort: necrophila noveboracensis were brain-eating, crypt-plague-spreading beetles that found a juicy orifice and shot up through flesh, organ and cartilage to get to their prize. Called zombie beetles by laymen, they didn't care whether their meal was alive, dead or undead; they'd eat just about anything if they got hungry enough. They travelled in swarms called draughts, as many as a thousand bugs per, meaty little morsels with wings for short bursts of flight and meat-shredding pincers for burrowing.
Why anything would think a dead man might be tasty was beyond me, but it's my job to make sure nothing got a nibble. It had taken about two weeks after our move from Portland for Ajax to locate Harry here in Colorado. Any time now, the beetles would show. They didn't just give me the willies; they made me want to run away like the Stooges, complete with whooping cries and flailing limbs.
I was subjected to Taco again, muffled within my pocket. It could only be the FBI. Probably, I'd been wretched enough to scare off Agent Chapel for the day. That meant Jerkface was on my phone. Something instinctual intoned, don't answer. Dread curled through my belly to combat the floundering, helpless arousal there. Wishing I could resist the urge to hear his voice again, even if it was just to fight with him, I breathed out two misty trails from my nostrils, hating myself, before answering:
“Cram it, fucksock, I'm busy.”
“Oh! Oh, my.” It was a woman's voice, soft and lilting in an accent I didn't immediately recognize. “Miss Baranuik?”
My brain scrambled for recognition and came up with nil. “Uh, possibly?”
“This is Danika Sherlock.”
FIVE
“I got your number from Special Agent Mark Batten,” Danika purred in my ear, “of the FBI? Quantico? Virginia?”
Like I'd never heard of such an agency. Or such a person. When my jaw snapped shut I bit my tongue; my eyes instantly watered.
“I'm sorry to call your unlisted number. I know how much we in the industry depend on our privacy and I totally understand that you're retired and I shouldn't even be calling, except that I really need your help.” She tripped over her tongue long enough to catch a breath. “Like, really-really need your help.”
“Like, totally really-really?” I couldn't help it. It just slipped out. I pinched my lips together to squelch a giggle. Marnie Baranuik (the Great White Shark, uber-serious) most certainly did not giggle. Ever. My only excuse was the cocktail Harry had served me in the bath. My stomach squeezed down around tumbling butterflies spitting fire into a churning void; I didn't know whether to laugh or throw up, and prayed I wouldn't do either.
“Miss Baranuik,” she said softly, the hurt in her cute Midwestern voice vibrating down the line. “Are you making fun of me? Because I assure you, I am in some seriously fucked-up trouble. God, why else would I be calling you unless I absolutely had nowhere else to fucking turn?”
I was gob smacked; I didn't know which surprised me more, the profanity spoken in that dainty, babydoll voice, or the way she implied she'd rather be talking to Lucifer Himself than me. Had Mark… no, he wouldn't have told her about what happened in Buffalo. But he wouldn't have to, would he? She's clairvoyant. Did she know? If she did, she wouldn't be
asking me for help, would she? Well, shit. My brain reeled and the snow shovel, forgotten, clattered from my hands to the frozen ground.
I looked around as though the answers to my problems were to be found in the ice clinging to the Aspens. Ajax the vulture watched me intently, bald head cocked, dusted ruff stirring in the snow fall.
“Let me just get inside, you've caught me at a bad time. Hold on.”
I threw my parka off in the door, kicked off my squeaking Keds and nearly ran to my espresso machine, skidding in cold, damp sock feet. I had a feeling more caffeine was needed, big time. Not tossing the phone in the sink in a jealous, chickening-out fit was the bravest thing I'd done in a while.
Since I didn't hang up on her, she took that as an invitation to blather, and her words ran together the way they will when someone's out of their mind with worry. I pulled three shots into a regular-sized mug hand-painted with a cartoon frog tap dancing on a log, doctored it super-sweet, and tried to make sense of what she was saying.
“Hold on,” I repeated. “Say that last part again?”
“I'm positive a DaySitter and an elder revenant are responsible for the murder of Kristin Davis.”
Elder revenant. What Batten and the hunter lot would call an ancient vampire. I took a bag of Oreos out of the pantry and tossed them on my sister's old turquoise Formica kitchen table. Harry had bought me “reduced fat” Oreos again. Probably he had a death wish.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“Do you know what I do, Miss Baranuik?”
“You're Top Floor, a second degree clairvoyant in the forensic retrocognition department.” I politely avoided the subject of her companion or lack thereof. It would have been shamefully rude, like doing the Charleston on your mother-in-law's grave. “You're capable of perceiving objects or people at a distance. Second degree means you've completed training in DEV, distant event viewing; you get visions about events that have recently occurred by applying focus to psi. It's still inadmissible in court. GD&C are working on a way to properly test and regulate DEV so the results can be used as evidence in a criminal court case.”
“Just now, I was able to see Kristin's murder. I saw a revenant taking her head off with a big saw, with jagged teeth, like lumberjacks use? It was messy, so much blood. I saw Kristin in the alley…”
She was making it too personal by using the victim's name, an amateur mistake; I felt sorry for her. But a couple of things struck me as off. Firstly, there wasn't any blood in the pictures Chapel had shown me. There were bite marks, indicating that Davis had been probably drained completely. So if the head was taken afterward, it wouldn't have been messy, blood-wise. Maybe Danika's definition of messy was different than mine. Secondly, because it was such a busy area of LoDo, Chapel didn't believe the alley was the primary crime scene, just a dump site. Even if quietly done, draining someone of five to six quarts of blood does take time, even from the fattest arteries. Thirdly, I didn't think any revenant would have to use a saw, or any other cutting implement for that matter. Even the new undead have immortal strength, can tear a limb clean off just by twisting it. Since it only takes two pounds of pressure to break a human neck if you know how to do it, the saw was overkill.
“And then?” I prompted.
“He took it so he could have her eyes.”
I sat, hard. “Her eyes?” My already queasy stomach did an uncomfortable flip-roll. “Eyeballs have very little blood in them. They're made of mostly vitreous fluid, water mainly. A revenant would have no use for—”
“Miss Baranuik,” she interrupted. I heard her breathing shakily. “He took them for his DaySitter. In the vision, I saw them, both of them. The psychic was aware of me. I don't have a clue who they might be, I have faces but no names to go with them. Miss Baranuik…”
“If we're going to talk dirty like this, you might as well call me Marnie,” I tried to joke. It fell flat on both ends of the phone.
“He recognized me from television. He knows exactly who I am. It's no secret where I am. His revenant was…” Her words failed her, and I thought I heard her retch a little. More than her words, that made my eyes creep wide. “So terribly old. I felt him moving around their room, over the miles I could feel the burden of centuries of pent-up rage in him.”
Rage? What were we dealing with, another mental-case? She couldn't mean Jeremiah Prost. As far as I knew he was UnBonded and not much more than a century old.
“They'll come for me. And when they do…” She let out a sound of panic, a cross between a sob and a whinny. “Oh, Miss Baranuik, I'm royally fucked.”
I wanted to hate her guts, I really did. I wanted to hang up. She made me feel like an insignificant little bug, outshone me in every way. And she had the guy I lusted for. But worry trumped jealousy and I couldn't feel anything but her distress amplifying mine. She was right… she was royally fucked. Letting someone you dislike die when you could have helped is not exactly cool. I like to think when it comes down to it and things get dead serious, I always do the capital-R Right thing.
“Why does he want human eyes?”
“How the hell should I know?” she shouted.
I was tempted to quip, “cuz you're psychic?” but she was already losing it so I pinched it back. Point: Marnie. “You're safe until dark,” I reminded her. “And if you've paid for a bed and laid in it once, he can't come into your hotel room uninvited.”
“It's not the revenant I'm worried about, it's the Talent he's given his DaySitter; he's a ninth calibertelekinetic.”
“Ninth?” He wouldn't even have to come into her room to kill her, he could just thought-toss a Mack truck through the front window. We talked degrees of psychic strength, but when you got into kinetics (pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, sanguinetics) you spoke in rising calibers like you did with weapons. I'd never heard of a ninth caliber anything. There was a fifth-degree precognitive once in Belgium, but he went crazy in his early twenties and had to be locked up. Revenants had no such power limits, as far as I knew, but the human mind could only wield so much psi before it fried.
“What are we going to do?” she demanded, hyper. “Please hurry, Miss Baranuik, I need you. I don't want to die tonight.”
Wonka wha--was I going somewhere? I swallowed my too-hot espresso, choked on the burn. I didn't know how much protection I could offer, with my itty bitty gun (that I'd never actually fired at anyone) and my psychic Talents. I could tell her how the rogue DaySitter felt just before he killed us, though I failed to see how that would improve the situation. If I Groped him, I could tell her how he planned to slaughter us. That didn't sound particularly helpful either.
Besides, a ninth degree telekinetic wouldn't even be arrestable. How would you get him into handcuffs? How could you get him into the squad car without him throwing it on its side? He'd turn bullets mid-air and tear craters in asphalt. My brain tripped along this fantasy a bit while I thought of some way to get out of helping her. What would he need eyeballs for? Why get the revenant to steal them when a telekinetic of that magnitude could just thought-pluck them right out of your living head? That image made my tongue stutter into action.
“OK. We'll figure this out. There's got to be something that can be done. Where's Mar—Agent Batten?” Christ on a Cheez Nip, Marnie, he's just a coworker. Ex-coworker. Last name basis!
“We're staying at a little motel called the Ten Springs Motor Inn, just off—”
“I know where it is. Tell him to bring you here immediately, you'll be far safer at my place.”
“He's not here.”
“Why the hell not? Didn't you tell him?”
There was a long beat of silence, during which the nape of my neck crawled unpleasantly. This was not a good sign; why wouldn't someone call in Big Guns Batten and the monster killing guts of his kit? He was a gigantic jerkwad, but he was still the first person I'd call if the bad guys were on my ass, and she was his fiancée…something felt wrong.
I said tentatively, “Look, I'm retired. I really s
houldn't get involved in a federal case.” Especially since I told them to go take a flying leap only an hour ago. “You need to contact the PCU immediately.”
“You're just going to let me die?” she squawked.
“Of course not. Call Chapel, he'll bring you to me—”
“Bad cell phone reception, can't reach him.”
Grimacing, I slipped off my left glove and wrapped it around the receiver of the phone; it rarely worked unless the other person was really keyed-up, pouring out emotions in a palpable fashion, but it was easy this time: distrust, suspicion, fury, disgust, fear. Mostly fear. I was about to tell her I was on my way to pick her up when she snarled, literally snarled, and the feral sound of it stole my voice.
“You need to get here,” she ground out. “Now. I don't want cops. I don't want Mundanes. I want you.” Gone was the shaky voice. She didn't wait a beat for me to accept or refuse. “If I don't see your scrawny, bleached ass within the hour, I'm going to call Assistant Director Geoff Johnston at Quantico and tell him you screwed a PCU agent on the job. You'll never work for the FBI again.”
Bleached ass? I boggled at the phone, holding it away from my face as if gawking down the line at her. Who bleaches their ass? What does that even mean?
Laughing incredulously, I spluttered, “I'm retired. Why would I give a rat's left tit what anyone thinks of me?”
“You've got thirty minutes,” she shouted. “Or I make you sorry you ever entered the circuit!”
“I'm already sorry I ever worked the circuit!” I shouted back. “Look lady, I was fully prepared to drive out and help you, but I don't respond well to ultimatums. Tell Director Johnston I say howdy-doo!”
Her tone became frosty, enunciating each word clearly. “I'll tell Johnston that Special Agent Mark Batten compromised the Jeremiah Prost investigation and let a child killer escape because he was too busy fucking your brains out, and that SSA Gary Chapel knew and covered it up. Because of you, they'll both lose their jobs.”
