by A. J. Aalto
“If you know stuff just by touching things, doesn't that get a little…busy in your head?”
Relief—validation perhaps—flooded me; for a second I thought I might embarrass myself by welling-up. I showed him my bare hands. “Usually I wear gloves all day, inside and out, to block influxes of information. Leather works best.”
“We didn't find any gloves at the scene.” So he'd been to the scene, check. I wondered if Harry's motorcycle was in evidence also. Boy, would he be ticked.
“Maybe she took them?” Like she took my hair. And very nearly my life. “I took them off. They were on the floor beside the bed last I saw.” Or did Harry take them? I had a vague feeling he might have, but it all seemed foggy.
“Can't you “tell” where they are?” He wiggled his fingers mysteriously.
I shrugged. “I might be able to link to and trace my own possessions. I've never tried it. What I can't do is pull visions out of thin air. That's a clairvoyant. I have to touch something, or feel someone's changes in emotions. I can tell when I'm being lied-to, ninety-nine percent of the time. She fooled me. No, that's not entirely true: I knew she was pissed off. I misread the depth of her hatred, and I believed she had information, and that she was truly in trouble. Being fooled by a successful liar bothers me like I can't even describe. No one should be able to fool me.”
Hood's lips twitched. “Ever thought of becoming a cop?”
“Criminals give me the wobbly-knees.” I shook my head. “I do like the law. The law is one of the few things that make me feel stable. Boundaries are good when the rest of you feels ready to fly apart.”
Hood gave another unexpectedly understanding nod, and I tried to probe at his aura and see if he was faking the sympathy. I couldn't feel him. Lord and Lady, what the hell had I done to myself? Meanwhile he was watching expectantly, pen poised.
“Thanks to my partner, I've developed a strong sense of smell. I bet you didn't know that tulips have what revenants call an under-scent. It's mild, kind of citrusy. I also like over-cooked roast beef, sun-warmed Key limes and Canadians.”
“Canadians in general, or just the way they smell?”
“Canadians smell fantastic,” I deadpanned. Hood half-smiled; I don't think he wanted to like me but I was winning him over. “I drink more espresso than is healthy and will undoubtedly die, Balzac-like, of caffeine poisoning. I cannot say no to a cookie. Sometimes when I'm alone I sing old Monty Python songs in the bath. And at the moment, I have titanium staples where my belly button used to be.” I shook my head. “But you don't need to know any of this. You don't need to know about my irregular periods or my crush on Wil Wheaton. So why don't you tell me what you're looking for?”
“You were injured in Buffalo on your first official FBI case.” He watched me without blinking. “Gun shot wounds. The reports said you were shot by a vampire serial killer named Jeremiah Prost while you were working as a ‘preternatural forensic consultant’ for the PCU. How did he escape?”
“Everyone's got theories on my failure. Why ask me?”
“Maybe I like the sound of your voice. Besides, I didn't say it was your failure; you were one of many on that team, correct?”
My shoulders fell. I told him a concise version of what happened, in Buffalo and at the Ten Springs Motor Inn, including the FBI but leaving out the sex and the vomit. Then I added the vomit, because I was pretty sure he'd seen that at the scene. I left Batten's name out of it, and implied that Danika was resentful of me but left it at professional jealousy. I hoped he bought it.
He didn't appear to buy a single word of it.
“Let's see if I wrote this down correctly,” Hood said. The smile was gone and I didn't like his tone anymore, but I guess that was fair. Probably he didn't like my story much. “You're a witch. And a psychic.”
“Specifically, an ex-forensic psychometrist with secondary clairempathy who used to work for Gold-Drake & Cross. Third Floor, retrocognition.”
He clarified, “And you live with a vampire.”
“A revenant. There's no such thing as a human psychic who isn't DaySitting an immortal. The source of the Blue Sense is the revenant. You wield psi through the revenant. That's the only way it works. Where have you been living?”
“In my own quiet corner of this great state,” he replied, and I picked up the undertone: where there are no monsters. I got a brief flash of understanding. Hood had left Denver for some small town serenity, and he wasn't too impressed that I was slamming it from wall to wall. “So this, uh, revenant buddy of yours, he's four hundred-years-old?”
“Approximately. You don't ask an immortal how old he is. It's bad form, and could get you backhanded through a wall.”
He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, and I thought ginger dragon. I bet he wished he'd sent a deputy to answer this call. “At one thirty P.M. you were called by another psychic named Danika Sherlock.” He tapped his pen. “As in Sherlock Holmes?”
“I didn't pick the crazy twat's name,” I sighed. “And coming from a man named Robin Hood, I should think you'd understand. Sometimes bad names just fucking happen.”
A flinch around his eyes told me that even if I was wrong, his parents had done him no favors; he'd heard it ten thousand times. “I didn't tell you my first name,” he said. “And Rob's short for Robert.”
I offered him my open hand, as though for a handshake. He hesitated only for a second before laying his own huge paw in my small one. The skin between our palms crawled instantaneously as the spark of psi awoke to my command.
“Which is a partial lie,” I announced flatly. “Your name was Robin. Your father had a closeted homoerotic crush on Errol Flynn, though it was no secret to your immediate family. It made you feel squinky, so you legally changed your name to Robert in 1997. April.” I smiled at him. “A Tuesday. It was raining. And while I just made you feel violated right down to your toenails, you will successfully not show it on your face.”
A thoroughbred version of spooked excitement thundered through him. I broke contact, laid my hands in my lap, and continued, “Look, I'm the stab-ee here, not the stabber. Why are you giving me a hard time?”
“I'm not trying to give you a hard time, Mrs.—”
“Miss.” Why make that correction?
“You arrived at the Ten Springs Motor Inn at,” he consulted his notes, unnecessarily, possibly to humor me. “Approximately 2 pm. At which point she invited you into Room 4 and stabbed you in the back, causing you to drop your coffee.”
“And now she owes me two bucks.”
“You were both helping the FBI work on a murder case in Lower Downtown? Why are the FBI involved?”
“It's a suspected preternatural crime, and the PCU was called in from Quantico. I only looked at a few pictures. She was assisting SSA Gary Chapel and Special Agent Mark Batten, who may or may not show up here any minute.”
I didn't know whether they would or not. Last time I'd been injured, Chapel came every other day until my release. Batten hadn't shown. Considering this time it was his fiancée who stabbed me, and she was pissed because of his cock's activities, I thought the least he could do is put in a few minutes at my bedside. Did Hallmark make a “sorry my Love Muffin stabbed you repeatedly until she thought you were dead” card? On second thought, maybe I didn't want to see him.
I realized that Sheriff Hood was reading the whole story as it crossed my face.
“Ok, fine! I nailed her man, OK?” I threw my hands up. “I'm a disgrace to society! Are you writing this down, word for word? Bowlegged slut can't keep her knees together. Go ahead. Write it!”
He leaned back slightly, letting surprise flood his face. Big shoulders shook under taupe nylon; I realized he was trying not to laugh. He didn't write a word. He just bounced his knee some more and gave me space to ramble.
“So she found out, and decided I was the worst person on Earth. I get that, I do. Hate my guts, fine, but don't stab them.”
He waited, face gone cop-blank again.
“Agent Jerkface is…”
“Ah, fuck,” I straw-stirred the ice in angry circles in my big plastic cup. “Agent Batten. I know it's wrong. We worked together. Briefly. We don't even like each other. I'm not his type. Hel-lo! Do I look like a Barbie doll?” I sulked, stabbed at the ice chips with my bendy straw. He was staring curiously at my forehead. I wondered what the hell he was looking at. “I don't even know why it happened. We were under a lot of stress, and he didn't like needing to use my Talents and I didn't like his attitude. Which, by the way, is as close to asshole as you can get without actually being a sphincter. And we were stuck in a car on stake-outs for hours, then stuck in a cramped motel room in bloody Cheektowaga for days, overtired, keyed up, always fighting…” I drifted off helplessly.
I looked up to see if he got what I meant. The keen glint in his eyes said he knew exactly how it must have happened. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“So anyways, about Room 4, I faked dead with a mimicry spell called necromimesis. When psychobeast left, I called 911. Harry showed first, and drove me to the hospital. We should have stayed, but I was afraid of the cops getting the wrong idea about the revenant and the blood if I passed out unable to explain. Besides, Harry drives much faster than an ambulance.”
“Go back to the faking dead part?”
“Bit of witchcraft involved. I'm not really sure how I pulled it off. Necromimesis is sort of out of my league.”
He looked at me doubtfully. “Could you do it right now, show me?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I couldn't. I don't have any of the stuff…”
Hood took a clear plastic evidence baggy out of his inside jacket pocket, dangling it. In it was my onyx. “This yours, then?”
“Yes. Still, even with that, the bark and herbs are just symbolic objects for focus. The kind of energy output required for that level of spell is only drummed up by someone like me during periods of extreme stress. Energy, focus, belief, will, those are the real ingredients. This level of magic leaves a taint on your aura. I wouldn't attempt it again, it's not exactly clean.”
Hardly a proud moment for a white witch, but death wasn't all black. It was the very definition of middle ground, the grey area, limbo, death being neither good nor evil. I'd only interrupted my own life, and I didn't think one emergency spell was crossing over to “official dabbling”.
There was a soft knock at the door and we both turned our attention to Agent Chapel's long-jawed Great Dane face peering in.
“Pardon me, sheriff. We'll just wait in the hall until you're done.”
We? My waffling heart flowed from boiling to frigid, flailed about like it was attempting a drunken River Dance under my ribcage, and then flushed back to hot, unable to decide between avid and avoidant. Probably my heart had finally lost its frigging mind. I no longer wanted to see Mark Batten walk through that door. There was a distinct chance that I was going to get blamed for this whole mess. It wasn't my fault, but since when did that matter?
“I'm about finished here.” Hood stood, pushing the stool away with the back of his thick legs.
When Chapel disappeared, Hood scratched at the back of his neck with the end of his pen, his eyes playing down the length of the sheet over my legs. I picked up subtle flickers of his curiosity. It was wildly inappropriate, but he didn't seem aware he was doing it so I let it go.
He said, “Have you ever taken any self-defense classes?”
“No, but I should,” I acknowledged. “Why do you ask?”
“Top of mind when I see an attack like this. Everyone should have at least some idea of how to fend an attacker off. I'm sort of biased,” he said, nodding. “I teach police defensive tactics.”
“Hence the hot bod,” came out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to say it. Horrified, I stuck my straw in my mouth and pretended great interest in my ice water so I didn't have to meet his eyes.
He was quiet for a moment, assessing. “So when you played dead on the floor, you're saying you somehow slowed your heartbeat and held your breath? Autogenic training, some Zen thing?”
“That's not at all what I said,” I looked up into his perfectly human eyes. We stared each other down for a minute, the witch and the skeptic.
“Just clarifying,” he said amiably. The smile made another appearance, at which point I could have sworn I melted and slid into a puddle of mush beside the bed; it lingered lightly on his lips, like he wasn't sure whether to call a shrink for me, or himself. He made to leave.
“And…” His boots scuffed the floor as he stopped suddenly. “When you called your revenant, did you do it with…” He made a wand-motion in the air that he must have seen Mickey Mouse make in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. “Mystical abilities?”
“No,” I said sourly. “I called his cell phone.”
“Right. Blackberry?”
“iPhone,” I sighed.
He nodded as though this made perfect sense, stroked his chin. “I'd like to speak to this Lord Dreppenstedt. Have him come into my little station in Ten Springs and make a statement. Or I could drop by your place?”
“Number one, on Shaw's Fist. It's the last cabin in the row, or the first, if you're one of those annoying glass-half-full types. It would be better to come after dark.”
“After dark,” he repeated. “Because your buddy's a real live vampire, right?”
“Revenant,” I reminded. “And I wouldn't call him live, exactly.”
Hood paused in the doorway, tucking his notebook away inside his jacket. “Are you actually bowlegged?”
“No, but it sounded good at the time,” I said miserably, sinking back into my pillows.
“Well, for what it's worth,” he started, and then apparently thought better of it. He had that charming redhead habit of turning helplessly pink when he was embarrassed and a blush crept up his throat. He smiled it away, full-beam this time; it was dizzying how gorgeous it made him. “I'll check back with you if I have any further questions.”
I found my voice by some miracle. “You do that, sheriff.”
TEN
There were so many things I should have seen looking back, proving once and for all that, as I suspected, I am an idiot. The phone call itself, for instance, of course neither Fed would have given out my private unlisted number. I hadn't yet figured out how she had it. Could a failing clairvoyant ferret out phone numbers, or did she have friends in low places?
That nonsense about no cell reception, what a crock. I'd gotten Harry's text message no problem. She certainly had no trouble calling my cell phone at Shaw's Fist. I managed to get Chapel on the line with no issues. That should have been a red flag. Stupid, Marnie, verrrrry stupid.
Her story about the elder revenant, feeling him moving in his room. Another clue that should have tipped me off, if I'd been thinking of anything other than Hardass Batten. Sherlock was a clairvoyant, a Witness, not a Feeler. Besides, even empaths didn't feel things over long distances. She could see things, no doubt, if she'd still had her power. Which she didn't, except for “tiny flickers”…
The eyeballs. I'd been mucking about with that damn jar, a baker's dozen of perfect, tiny newt eyeballs on and off all day. She'd plucked that scene out of my office, hadn't she, with her “flickers”? That's why she'd used the story about an eyeball-collecting DaySitter. Stealing eyeballs didn't sound too far-fetched to someone who had a whole jar of them.
Harry had gone home to check the cabin. Chapel and the sheriff were already there. There was a warrant out for Danika Sherlock's arrest, attempted murder. There were two bored plain clothes cops from the Boulder PD outside the door to the ward, and Batten had now settled into a sturdy plastic chair in the corner of my room, looking like he planned to stay there all night.
I took a deep breath. “So the wedding should be nice. June's
popular for weddings. I've always thought I'd pick April Fool's Day. Seems like that kind of monkey business would be cosmic good luck.”
He stared at me, his face unreadable. “What wedding are we talking about?”
I sucked my teeth. “Yours, jackass.”
“My wedding,” he clarified.
“Yeah, and hey, thanks for telling me you had a fiancée before we got naked. If I'd found out afterwards that might have been real awkward for me.” I grit my molars together.
“I'm not getting married.”
“Well, I guess not now, considering she's a nutbag. So when are you going to break it off with Sherlock? After sentencing?” I reached for my ice water and the movement yanked a staple in my stomach. I pressed my other hand to the wound, refusing to wince aloud. He must have seen something on my face regardless.
“You all right?”
“If you so much as reach a hand out to help me,” I warned, “I'll beat you like a rented mule.”
He steepled his fingers in silent consideration of my attitude, did his watching-crazy-person-until-he-was-sure-it-was-safe thing. Sadly, it was a look I was used to getting.
“Why would you think I'm engaged to Danika Sherlock?” he finally said.
“You're not?”
“No.”
“Were you ever?”
“No.”
I boggled, flabbergasted. “Then she's absolutely bat-shit crazy. Did you date her?”
He shook his head no. “Who told you we were engaged?” He leaned forward. “Was it Harry?”
“Harry never lies to me. Never,” I said absolutely. “Danika said it. In Buffalo, after the shooting, at the hospital.”
“That was seven, eight weeks ago?”
“Six weeks, two days.”
“I just met her. Mid-November. Three weeks ago.”
There was a confused twinge scrunching up the front of my brain. I put my ice water to my forehead and let the coolness from the plastic cup spread into my skin. “Okay, hold on. I'm missing something.”
