by A. J. Aalto
My cheeks flamed anew. Harry, with his exceptional preternatural hearing, had heard every word my sister said, and his attention was again pulled from the TV to check my face curiously.
“I'm not going to discuss cases with you, Carrie,” I said carefully. “It's unprofessional and probably illegal.”
On TV, a journalist in navy pencil skirt and wildly impractical high heels was talking to a vaguely familiar public relations guy at Gold-Drake & Cross about the spare office beside my former secretary John's desk. The cameraman took a long shot of a door that still bore my nameplate in silver and then for some reason went to black and white like some old detective show. I half-expected the score for Dragnet to start up. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true…” The door swung shut. The producers were creating some theatrical metaphor for my career and didn't even realize. If I dared to look at anyone else in the room now, I'd collapse into a smoldering ruin of shame.
“Why this particular psychic?” the journalist wanted to know.
Public Relations smiled his promotion grin: conservative estimated orthodontic cost, eight thousand dollars. “It's the girl-next-door phenomenon. She's an everyday person, relatable, touchable.”
“Hear that?” Carrie teased. “You're touchable. Like quilted toilet paper.”
“Splendid,” I said sourly. “Must be why the world wipes its ass with me.”
Carrie groaned at the public relations guy's expanding on my popularity, and I wasn't sure which made me cringe more: his flattery or my sister's disgust. “Your first and only case ended with you getting shot and a vampire serial killer in the wind,” she said, as if I needed a reminder. “He's somewhere draining more kids because when it came time to take action, you choked.”
I'd said much worse about my own self, but to hear it from Carrie… I know she thought I agreed. We'd discussed how I felt about it. It didn't make it any easier to hear her flippant remarks. I stiffened defensively and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry sit up. I felt my jaws doing the Mark Batten Angry Dance while I chewed back comments I'd surely regret saying to the only quasi-friendly sibling I had left.
“As you know, Nancy,” PR guy said on TV, “I can't discuss the details of open investigations with you, or reveal any personal medical information. What I can tell you is that our star psychic will have a ton of fan mail to go through when she returns to us.”
He touched open the door of the spare office, the paint a soothing blue-green. The mail was unbelievable, postcards and envelopes spilling from boxes and plastic shopping bags, propped in the chairs, covering an old unused desk. Parcels were kicked under chairs, stacked in piles on a window ledge. Flowers, teddy bears, cards of condolence. Even jewelry. Public Relations displayed in his palm a necklace with a big heart locket encrusted with blood-red garnets, bearing the sepia-toned picture of the gift-giver inside—a gothed-up young man who couldn't have been more than sixteen with black lipstick and a severely staged-debonair facial expression. The dude had drawn a bleeding heart in the corner in what I sincerely hoped was red marker. I reeled back a step with a horrified urk!
Carrie made a snort of disgust. “Look, that punk is infatuated with you. He wants to be your little fake-vamp love-bunny.”
Harry startled into a hoot of delighted laughter that made Batten and Chapel jolt with alarm. Harry doubled over in the chair, clutching his sides. I'd never seen him laugh so hard; I thought he might actually be breathing. He had to set his goblet down on the coffee table.
For some reason, the music CDs bothered me the most.
“Jeez, mixed CDs. I wonder what's on them. Oh that's right, laugh it up, Dreppenstedt!” I picked up a throw cushion from the couch and whipped it at him.
When Harry tried to stop, a ludicrous snort-laugh combo escaped him, setting Batten off at last. Laughing at me in unison: a baby step up from wanting to murder each other.
I cut my eyes to Chapel warningly, but he was keeping a straight face. Good ole Gary Unflappable Chapel, always under complete control. He had his Blackberry out and was thumbing furiously, hazel eyes darting behind his glasses.
I said tersely, “Maybe all psychics get fan mail, ever think of that?”
“Jesus, Marnie.” The laughter had left Carrie's voice and now her tone held something entirely new. The antagonism was gone. It wasn't envy. It wasn't worry. I couldn't diagnose the remarkable sound in my sister's voice. I slipped off my lambskin gloves and tossed them on the coffee table so I could fold my bare fingers around the phone.
It was awe. From thousands of miles away, I felt it as crisply as if she was standing in front of me, looking at me like a scientist discovering a new species of insect. She had made a discovery, and it quickened in her chest. Like a gold miner polishing a solid clump of mud and finding a nugget of possibility. Carrie was for the first time wondering if maybe I was special after all.
My sister believed.
TWENTY
My throat was thick. “Who else is seeing this? Is dad…”
“Dad's sick in bed,” Carrie said. Translation: he's off the wagon, barfing his guts out. I didn't wanna deal with that, so I didn't ask. Avoidance, thy name is Marnie. “Margot's in Paris, big surprise. Rena is back up north, hunting. Wes is…Wes.” I could hear the shrug over the phone line; my baby brother was migratory, never in one place long. We never knew where he was until he popped up asking for money. “The rest of the Baranuik clan is probably choking on their Sunday night chicken carbonara.”
“Can I call you back later?”
“On one condition,” Carrie sighed. “I want every single dirty detail about Delicious Hard-bodied Hottie. In exchange, I won't tell mom about any of this. Deal?”
Harry's eyes were laser beams burning a hole through the side of my face. I said, “You win. I'll email you later, ok?”
“If you have any explicit pictures of his—”
I hung up on my sister before she could finish the sentiment. Harry wasted no time; though his giggle-fit had settled, he barely hid his teasing grin behind the rim of his goblet.
“My pet, it seems you are universally adored as the darling psychic of this generation. I had no idea.” He sat forward, his lips still twitching. Something illicit swam behind his platinum gaze. “You have suitors a’ courting. I am duly enraged.”
“You're anything but.” I rolled my eyes. “I'd like to know what changed. When did they give me an office full of fan mail? I don't even work there anymore.”
Batten steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “A gamble. GD&C were willing to go with the subterfuge. For your part, you've got to keep it up.”
“You did this.” At least the fake fan mail made sense now. “I shouldn't be surprised.”
“I am more astonished that the lad knows a full-sized word like subterfuge,” Harry said.
Agent Chapel clearly had no idea what was going on. “Mark?”
Batten explained, “To pressure Sherlock out of the woodwork, I leaked to some contacts in the press that the Great White Shark was back to work. With the Davis family's permission, I revealed that we've retained the nation's “star psychic” to assist the FBI with the Davis case. The PCU's official comment on this is: “Marnie Baranuik is the best choice for the job, and we have complete confidence in her ability to help us solve it.””
I winced. “Jeez, why don't you just publically cockslap Sherlock in the face?”
“Always a lady,” Harry observed wryly.
“So you're using me as bait to draw a lunatic out of hiding?”
“We didn't discuss this…” Chapel's fingers were poised over his keyboard looking twitchy, like he needed to find a solution but couldn't think of how to begin. “Marnie, I apologize. I'd never have approved this.”
“Which is why I didn't run it by you,” Batten defended. “This had to be done.”
Harry sat forward. “Are you so blind to the peril inherent in taunting a deranged maniac who has terrorized my DaySitter?”
Batten sat back in his chair, his knees falling open. “That's all you.”
“How long have you been receiving fan mail?” Chapel asked.
“I got one letter, one…” I wracked my brain. “Eight months ago? Way before Buffalo. I did a missing person's case in Florida. Nothing preternatural about it. Parental abduction. I wasn't much help. The kid was recovered because of an amber alert and solid police work, not because of what I did. When I got back to Oregon, the fan letter arrived. It seemed ridiculous, so I told John to put it somewhere. I guess he kept it.”
“And all that followed. That's what he told reporters the last time they ran a clip about Gold-Drake & Cross,” Chapel swung his laptop around to show us streaming footage of a news cast about the Jeremiah Prost case as it was going kablooie. The same spare office behind his desk, and the same bags of mail waiting for me. The date was October 13, 2009. The day Batten and I nearly ruined a motel bathroom door with our heaving naked bodies, and four days before I was shot.
“This is why she hates me.” I chewed the inside of my mouth. “She's the gorgeous reality star. She's spent Lord knows how much money and effort getting that way, but I'm the one with the office dedicated to fan mail. I'm surprised everyone at GD&C doesn't hate my guts.”
Chapel said, “I came across one of the earliest cases Sherlock assisted Gold-Drake & Cross with. It was a PCU case, in her home town of Stillwater, Oklahoma.”
Chapel pulled up a different video clip on his laptop. It showed an almost unrecognizable Danika Sherlock (then Danielle Smith-Watson) in shapeless denim coveralls and big rubber boots, baseball cap turned backwards, tracking through a field with a search party. Directly in front of her, leading the way, was a younger and less permanently-annoyed version of Batten with longer, fuller hair and a trim goatee. The look of puppy-dog adoration was naked on her face when he turned to point into a stand of tall grass and bark orders at her team. Ah, young Batten, that same wide-legged authoritative stance, the same hard ass, literally and figuratively. As the groups split off, young Danielle cast more than one glance over her shoulder to watch Batten walk away. Then she slipped on a pair of sunglasses and I thought, are they the same ones?
I slid my gloveless hand into the back of the waistband of my pants, reaching, fingering the stolen lens carefully. It slipped deeper and settled in the crack of my ass. Frig. Harry was watching my hand moving behind my back with subtle amusement.
On the couch, Batten cocked his head and studied the video. “I don't remember this.”
Chapel said, “May 1999. Missing persons case turned suspected lycanthrope kill. We lead three major search parties before we found the remains. Turned out the young man in question was the victim of a hate crime, not a werewolf.”
“1999,” I said, squirming, trying to skillfully dig the sunglass lens out of my panties without anyone becoming wiser. “GD&C let Ville Aaman go for conduct unbecoming and he'd started doing his freelance precognition seminars. A year and a half later, he'd blow the lid off the psychic-revenant connection and lay claim to coining the term DaySitter.”
“Vamps called you bleeders before,” Batten said low, without looking at either Harry or me.
“Uh, no. No revenant ever called their companion that. Bleeders is slang for bodies-for-hire, blood hookers; it was taken out of context and used by hunters to add credence their cause,” I said. “Back in 1999, GD&C was supplying psychic support to law enforcement but the laws were still fuzzy, and it was done quietly, without a lot of media promotion. They'd send out groups of them at a time, young psychics in training with a senior investigator.”
“Right. Stillwater,” Batten remarked, nodding. “Ruby Valli was our senior psychic investigator on the scene.”
I squinted at the video. Ruby Valli didn't look familiar, but then I'd never met her; she'd left GD&C by the time I was out of training.
Batten continued, “Precognitive. Ruby saw the location of the eventual arrest but couldn't identify the criminals. The vic was a transsexual, had his first operation. When we found the gouge marks on him, we thought werewolf. But some of the local punks had targeted him. Tied him to a fence and went at him with meat hooks.”
Harry murmured softly, “And you call me a monster.”
“You do realize that junior psychic in training behind the old lady is Danika Sherlock, pre-Hollywood,” I pointed out, glad both Feds were glued to the laptop as I wriggled against the lens in my panties. “And that she's majorly crushing on Bulletproof Batten.”
Batten didn't react, other than a slight tightening around the eyes.
The Blue Sense sputtered between my fingertips and the lens briefly, and then dissipated like smoke.
Harry supplied for me, “You do not seem to be paying the least bit of attention to young Ms. Watson, Agent Batten. You're almost pointedly ignoring her.”
“We had three psychics on loan from GD&C. I steered clear of them,” Batten told him. “Working part time hunting vamps, coordinating with search and rescue, I probably didn't even know she was one of the psychics. Didn't want to know. Didn't want to have anything to do with DaySitters or their vamps.”
“Did she start hating me before she had the crush on you, or after?” I wondered aloud. “Maybe this is about you, after all.”
“Are you sure the person you saw gouging the head was Danika Sherlock?” Chapel turned to me. “That she's involved in both your attack and the Davis murder?”
“I didn't see any face in relation to the head,” I said honestly, stroking the lens with my fingertips. “Because I couldn't see anything through Davis’ blind eyes. But I know what Sherlock's hands felt like on me, in violence. I think those hands were on Kristin Davis. I didn't get a whiff of a revenant. I think Sherlock faked bite marks on the body to get you PCU guys out, but there was a reason behind her choosing Kristin Davis specifically as a victim.”
Harry stared through the indigo glass, all laughter gone now.
“You're sure the bite marks are faked?” Chapel took off his tortoise rim glasses and squinted at them. He put them back on without cleaning them. “Could Sherlock be harboring a new companion?”
I asked Chapel, “Tox screen show any ms-lipotropin in Davis’ throat tissue?”
“No.”
“V-telomerase?”
“No. Nothing.” Chapel passed me the files once more, open to the toxicology report.
“How far apart were the so-called fangs?” I asked, scanning for the answer but knowing he'd have it.
“Quarter inch.”
“That's pretty close together,” I remarked, holding up an invisible ruler to my eye and imagining the space between. “Too close. Even for a new, small-bodied revenant, a turned adolescent.”
“I've never seen fangs less than two centimeters apart,” Harry offered. “It would be an exceptionally diminutive mouth.”
“Two centimeters is, what, almost three quarters of an inch? About the norm,” I said with a nod. “How wide were the fangs themselves? Pin pricks? Or did they have girth?”
“If they didn't have some girth, they would not be fang marks at all,” Harry reasoned. “Fangs are teeth, they are not needles. Teeth make irregular marks, not perfect circles, and there would be some tearing at the edges, no matter how small the fangs or how gentle the revenant.”
“What if it were a child vamp?” Batten said it.
“No such thing,” I brushed off.
“How can you be so sure?” Chapel wanted to know. Again his pen was poised, but his gaze settled on Harry, not me.
“It cannot be done,” Harry said. “There was a time, many centuries ago, when the blood of children was highly prized. “Love by the dram,” was the phrase bandied about in the darkest taverns of Amsterdam, where to this day an immortal can
find just about anything he fancies. These unfortunate partners were killed outright, even if their revenant was willing to try and turn them.”
“Partners,” Batten said contemptuously.
“Orphans, Agent Batten, in some cases sick children who would have otherwise been left to starve in the gutters by the humans around them. I do not defend the practice, nor have I ever indulged in such a loathsome act; I am only recounting the unfortunate facts.”
I interrupted, throwing a bucket of cool science on the fire. “There are limitations in the hypothalamus. Before puberty hits, the human body does not excrete enough human growth hormone to reactivate the vestigial organ that parcels out ingested blood, the gastrosanguinem, re-grown during the three-day period of transformation from alive to undead.”
“If you tried to turn a child,” Harry said, “by spending three days feeding that child the nectar of a revenant's veins, the only result would be the death of the child.”
Batten said, “You sound pretty sure about that.”
“Again, I've certainly never tried it myself,” Harry huffed, his eyes taking on a hurt sheen. “Nor would I, even if I were sufficiently old enough to turn humans with an assurance of success.”
“You're not?” Batten asked, giving Harry a thorough once-over, as though he'd never seen him before. “Thought all vamps could turn humans.”
“Your noob is showing, Kill-Notch,” I snort-laughed, shaking my head.
“So Kristin Davis’ head didn't move because she's been turned?” Chapel asked.
I gave Chapel a pointed look. “A moving revenant head? Impossible. If you decapitate a revenant, he's ash.”
Harry agreed. “I am surprised that your preternatural crimes unit does not already know this information. Are you not trained in such matters?”
“We do courses when budget allows,” Chapel said, a little defensively. I reached out my hand to touch Gary's forearm apologetically and felt an immediate flicker of annoyance wrapped in shame from his side of the couch, followed closely by hope and curiosity of an almost painful strain. Hope? There was one for my notebook. I broke contact quickly, pretending I'd sensed nothing, feeling embarrassed like I'd walked in on him in the bathroom.
