Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  I'd tried a couple times to link to Danika Sherlock through the lens. Each time, I felt pushed back, shoved out by the murky protective shelter around her, a psychic bitch-slap. Maybe this time I was burnt-out enough to really not care at all, drumming up that gossamer wisp that was psi?

  Here? I laid in bed, my body screaming yes, just lay here. Please? Sooo, sooo tired. But I had no protection in my bedroom, no supplies, few candles. Like Harry always says, if you're going to do magic, do it right…only when he says it, he uses big antique words that hurt my head.

  I dragged myself out of bed, opening my door a crack. The kitchen was blessedly empty now, quiet. I could feel Harry nearby, the inexplicable push of the otherworldly. I slipped the lens in the waistband of my pajamas, near the bandages I probably didn't need any more, while another yawn rocked my face. I attempted to tip toe past the living room.

  A glance told me Harry was deeply engrossed in a big leather-bound tome; I was guessing Chaucer rather than Shakespeare, but I was wrong. It was a book of poetry, entitled A Suite Burlesque. A quick peek at the author revealed him as one G.S Nazaire. The fire was high in the woodstove, and his lap was covered with a blanket. I'm sure he heard, felt and smelled me pass by, but he never turned his head.

  In the office, I clicked on the banker's lamp by my laptop. The room stank of scorched wood but at least it didn't reek of ghoul goo. Since it usually smelled like vanilla scented candles, it drove home the reality that someone had actually tried to smoke us out, armed with the tools to get the job done. A man, Harry had said. A man? Maybe Sherlock had employed an Igor-type? As if I didn't have enough to worry about.

  I opened the cabinet and reached for my dried lavender but hesitated, the Blue Sense flaring hot under my bare palm. Something was wrong. My fingers hung over the sackcloth pouch, itching with suspicion. I grabbed a pencil from the desk, one of the few that survived the fire, and used the tip to open the lavender pouch.

  Monkshood. Holy flaming shitballs. I narrowed my eyes. Bitch put monkshood in my lavender sack? Aconite poisoning through my skin would have been nasty. I poked around with the pencil and also identified wormwood and a poppet meant to represent me. It had short blonde hair shorn in a jagged edge. I squinted at it as though it had personally offended me.

  “That's fine,” I told it, keeping my voice low. “Do your worst, Skanky McTwatwaffle. I'm done playing.”

  I ran my hands out into the space around me, palms questing, tasting the region of my herbs and candles. My fingers shook and then steadied, nice and calm. Everything else was untouched by the intruder's taint. Rosemary, chamomile, several white candles collected, I shuffled through my gemstones to find blue lace agate for easy energy flow and peridot for improved clarity. I set them on a far edge of my desk and moved the rug aside with a nudge of my foot.

  My gentle pentagram had been vigorously desecrated with slashed black symbols. Struggling to read along one line, I realized it wasn't a language still spoken just before my eyes crossed and fluttered. I nearly fell forward into the circle but caught myself with one palm on the desk.

  “Well, fuckanut,” I barely breathed out. Grabbing white chalk from the cabinet, I stepped out of my pajamas and drew a hurried makeshift circle on the desk top, filling it with a perfect star. I tried not to think of the cursed ugliness splattered across the owls my sister had painted.

  I climbed up naked on the desk, and knelt in the circle, pulling my things in with me. Making quiet invitations to the Watchtower, I did deep-breathing exercises while I waited for them to respond. As the worry and stress seeped out of my bare shoulders, they went limp, and a serene smile crept onto my lips. Unable to comprehend the shift in my feelings, I let my fingertips trace my mouth, following the curve up at the corners; yep, I was okay, not crazy, only bordering on happy. Just checking.

  Starting with praise helped lift my heavy heart, and as my breath came quicker and stronger, the smell of burnt wood around me no longer seemed a slap in the face; it seemed a victory, a line in the sand. Yes, I had been attacked, more than once.

  But this is my place. Here I stay.

  “Holy Mother, I remain/ All that serve shall rise again/Vengeance shall not from me flow/From above nor from below.” I breathed in sweet, clean air and the smell of wood freshened, like I was walking in the forest out back, and with each imaginary step I took, the ground became softer, until it was springy like root-bound ground. I paused in my journey of the mind, traced back into my unclothed body, brought the lens before me, lit the candles.

  “Hail Hecate, Eyes of Night/Blade and chalice, dark and light/Lady serve me in this hour/to call upon Thy Ancient Power/That I might have clarity of mind/with truest sight now entwined.”

  Harry's snap-spark of burning molasses played under my nostrils, scorching sugar, atop my own weaker version of the sugarburn. As our Bond deepened over the years, it would increase in strength like my psychometric power would. The empathic side of our Bond would as well, and possibly let me feel humans as effortlessly as Harry could. I mean, living humans. Until then, I borrowed from him, and knew that he felt me drawing upon the intimidating well of his seemingly infinite power.

  I felt no resistance; from the next room, Harry let me have all I could manage in a steady unfaltering stream. As the cool touch of his undead Talent thickened me like a sponge dropped in a full sink, the delicate touch of the Goddess’ blessing also brushed across the bare skin of my forehead, travelled down across the bridge of my nose like a feather. I heard a hush, a gentle exhale, and wondered if it was me, Harry or something other.

  Quivering with power, I brought the stolen lens back into my palm and visualized Harry's influence rising black and cold like a laser beam from a mausoleum. All the little hairs at the nape of my neck pricked up; I sensed Harry hovering just outside the office door now, curious but maintaining his distance.

  I looked past Danika Sherlock in the lens, behind her, around her, side-stepping past the blurry, semi-blocked image of her, completely ignoring the pollution of her on the plastic. Taking the back door in, I tried to link to the person who owned the sunglasses before Danika.

  The Blue Sense ripped into being like a puma spilling down out of the trees onto prey below; my head rocked back. If my hair wasn't already a spiky ruin, it would have stood on end with crackling energy. The vision was brilliant, sparkling and mind-searing, but I didn't back down. I pulled more from Harry and his immortal clout responded enthusiastically, awash with cold heat. Again, he worked at relaxing his hold to feed me another length of power.

  My lips started moving, and blindly I groped for the chalk. Hand moving across the desk top on its own, I linked to the owner of the lens and wrote his name. His name, I boggled. His old name, and his new name. Patrick Laurier. Patrick Laurier Nazaire.

  Revenant.

  The good news was that it wasn't either of my revenants. I stroked the lens and let it pour forth its secrets; “I can't let her…” I didn't so much hear Patrick's words as see them forming across the matter of my mind. “She can't have access…without the element of…to add a dimension…”

  Access to what, I wondered. An element of what? What could terrify an immortal so much that he'd be… I stopped. He had to prevent… my mind skipped backward and then forward three steps; psychometry is about as straight and clear as a bowl of scrambled eggs. At some point in the near past, Danika Sherlock had tried to force the Bond on this young revenant, was possibly still trying. He was refusing. Why would he resist?

  I rubbed a thumb across the plastic. So hungry. They hadn't fed him in weeks, but there had been blood in the room, blood in his face, blood lashed on dirty grey cement. Blood at the drain. Blood on the baskets. Blood in the circle. They? I frowned in thought. Who were they? What room? What circle?

  “Where are you Patrick?” I murmured, sending a tendril of my mind out, opening myself fully to receive the flavor of him. “Where did you come from?”

  And then I was assaulted with an erotic scene: D
anika strokinghim, her small hand firm and insistent on his cock, trying to get Patrick hard for her; since he had been refused blood, this was impossible. She spit on her palm and tried again. He laughed at her, a laugh that said finally, hopelessly, I'm going to die but heyfuckYOUbitch. I saw what he feared the most, as Danika tried with cold, malignant determination to beat him into some form of erection: the rowan wood stake in her left hand. And then I saw something worse. Danika was petrified, because if she failed…

  The lens practically jumped in my hand and suddenly it was hers, her sunglasses, and Patrick was gone, I couldn't reach him, he was just gone. Danika tilted the sunglasses back onto her glossy strawberry blond hair, driving. Glad to be away from the storeroom (what storeroom?) and away from the revenants (more than one, how many?) and hurting. Hurting so badly. Searing pain down her right arm, ending in a hot, severing edge. A needing, hungry emptiness, almost vampiric itself in its intensity. I'd never felt a human with such a gaping maw of need and loneliness before. Fraught with anxiety of a magnitude that was driving her unavoidably insane, she was resolute even in her psychosis. “I'm gonna get one. That's the promise.”

  I tried to maintain the link to Danika but it slipped away as though I were waking from a light sleep. (“That's the promise.”) Clutching the lens in one hand and the blue lace agate in the other helped to briefly stutter the vision back into being, but all it showed me was black… black… black… and a strange purple light.

  “That's the promise,” I said aloud, my brain churning, chewing at something that I couldn't bring forward.

  When Harry touched the office door open, his silhouette marked the heartbeats in silence before he ventured in. “Do not let Agent Chapel catch you with that item,” he said, his voice very low and unhappy. “If he thinks you a common thimble-twister, he will never trust you again.”

  I scratched an irritated itch in the center of my forehead. “Before I take offense to that, does thimble-twister mean thief?” At his slow meaningful blink, I moved off my knees to the floor to retrieve my pajamas. “Well, if the thimble fits…”

  His face became blank, inscrutable. “I fed you more than I felt necessary, but you were quite apt in your juggling. You have a most agile mind, my pet. ‘Tis rather a nice change to be proud of you.”

  I smiled wanly. “Thanks, Harry.” I think. “The original owner of the sunglasses was a revenant named Patrick Laurier. Mean anything to you?”

  “I'm afraid it does not.” A casual shrug. “Perhaps he is young.”

  Harry's idea of young varied greatly from mine. Harry thought any revenant under three hundred was a veritable puppy. I nodded, thinking I had heard the surname Nazaire before; Ruby Valli's companion, Gregori Nazaire, was over fourteen hundred-years-old. Certainly old enough to be making little puppy revenants, and a revenant almost always took the surname of his maker. I wondered if Gregori kept in touch with any of his Youngers, namely Patrick Laurier. Harry was watching me steadily.

  “You are done in and dog-tired, my love,” he said. “Will you sleep now?”

  “Soon,” I promised. He took the hint and excused himself. I locked the lens with the Beretta and the eyeball in the gun safe under my desk, then turned to purse my lips at the pentagram.

  “Hestia of House and Home/Banish the foul dark ‘ere it roam!”

  I tipped one of the white candles on its side and watched the hot wax spill down from desk level and hit the painted owls. In a sour green swirling cloud, it consumed whatever foul magic lay there in Latin, and the fire sputtered to an unhealthy end. I blew with pursed lips to dissipate the curse. Then, because I was feeling cheeky, I blew it a kiss and a wink.

  “Toodle-oo, sucker.”

  I grabbed the pencil and my tan Moleskine from the desk drawer, and wrote: Patrick Laurier, revenant. Nazaire master. Would Gregori Nazaire know what had happened to Patrick? And how would I get Ruby's permission to talk to Gregori, to ask? This might be tricky. It would take careful wording and social graces: so not my strong suits.

  I wrote: Danika tried to Bond Patrick, he resisted. “She can't have access…” That phrase worried me more than the unsuccessful hand job and the sudden disappearance of the link to Patrick. Why was he resisting so strongly? Was it just that she was unsavory? Or that he was unwilling, or not enamored? What did he not want Sherlock having access to, through him? Was his Talent dangerous? Perhaps Patrick Laurier was pyrokinetic. I'd always thought that would be the most kick-ass superpower to possess, a Talent I categorically did not want Danika Sherlock to seize. As I wrote this possibility down, the lead of my pencil broke and I reached towards the ceramic froggy pencil holder to get another.

  And that's when I saw them.

  Tiny little black fangs, scribbled on my froggy pencil holder. Ink. Rats! I squinted at it, licked my thumb and rubbed them. Permanent ink! Double-rats! Did Danika do this? Did the mysterious hunter do it? Did the mischievous glove thief do this? I stopped my bare spit-covered thumb's rubbing and pressed hard, opening my mind again to Grope.

  An impish, lopsided grin. A twinkling glitter of wickedness in those lake-bottom blue eyes, his handsome face crinkling with smile lines. A black marker in his tanned, calloused hand.

  My jaw dropped. I struggled between outrage and a reluctant smile, felt my eyes narrow down to mere slivers even as my lips twitched upward.

  “Hilarious,” I drawled, standing to make for the door. “Cheeky-ass hunter thinks he's funny. And you!” Against the wall: the froggy doorstop had big pointy black ink fangs. Likewise, the stuffed frog in the chair with the surprised expression. “Oh he's so gonna get it.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The ceiling creaked and a door overhead shut with an audible click. That's the blessing of living in an old, ill-made cabin: lots of noise. I considered the situation as I flossed with Harry's cinnamon wax: upstairs, directly above my bedroom, Batten the frog-vandal was still awake and moving around. Maybe undressing, my cruel imagination suggested, that powerful, limber body reflected in the tarnished mirror above the guest room dresser. Lucky fucking mirror. Was the overhead light on, or just the bedside lamp, casting half of him in shadow? Was his shirt off, revealing the hard abs and broad shoulders that made me hungry like a carnivorous castaway on veggie island? Were his boxers off yet, or would he sleep in them? Since he was so fond of secretive forbidden sex, I could go up and find out for myself…but would Harry be as tolerant, now that we had come to a “someday more” understanding? I was already amazed that he tolerated Batten as well as he did.

  Looking down at the claw foot tub, still filled with cooled water, I worried about my companion, and about Wes. The water would stay in the tub tonight, I decided, in case another Molotov attack caused someone to need a dunk. Or in case I needed to cool off to save myself from crawling up the stairs and begging Batten to please put me out of my sex-starved misery.

  What the hell was wrong with me? Jerkface defaced my frogs, and here I was thinking about molesting him? Some punishment! Calling myself half a dozen versions of stupid, I kicked out of my socks and crawled into my cool, creaky bed. When my head tucked down, I slid so rapidly into a half-sleep that I almost didn't have the time or stamina to turn my face into the pillow. As my energy systems shut down, I kept a comforting hold on my awareness of Harry in the next room, wrapping the feel of the revenant's solid presence around me like a security blanket until the very last moment.

  * * *

  I knew right away I was dreaming; someone's mouth slowly teased its way up the soft, yielding inside of my thigh, and that almost never happens. Their hot, moist exhale had me shivering with delight, and when the long lick of their tongue flicked out, my toes curled in anticipation. I writhed as my unknown lover teased me in just the right way, intuiting exactly what I wanted and when; that also almost never happens. It was like the head between my legs must be my own, somehow, so well did this lover know my needs.

  Then there was the soft press of teeth, gently at first and then nipping. I
jumped a little, surprised, thinking naturally of Harry, though he had never fed from the fat superior vena cava running down near my groin. As the mystery lover nipped again, harder this time, I tried to ask them to knock it off, but my voice wouldn't come, and though I knew that this was one of those dreams where you need to speak up and can't, I tried again. Regardless of how easily I tell people off in waking life, in my dream I was struck mute, and perhaps deaf too, because I heard nothing from below, no breathing or noises, no dirty talk. When I tried to lift my head off the pillow to look at my lover, it seemed to weigh ten times what it should; my neck was limp spaghetti, my head a cement block. I was lucid enough in the dream to think that was kind of funny.

  Then with over-eager abruptness, the face pressed against me and his tongue, far longer than it should be, plunged inside, invaded deeply, explored but not gently, and not pleasantly. I wriggled and tried again to cry out, to look. My subconscious didn't want me to speak, but it hadn't taken my sight, I thought, so why can't I look down at my lover?

  The ghoul's face shot up from between my legs; though rotted by heat and putrefaction, this ghoul's face was instantly recognizable as Mark Batten. His broad chest was pale and discolored, greenly terrible; gone was the dark splotch of chest hair I'd once curled my fingers into. A yawning hole flapped over his left pectoral, empty of its beating organ, as if it had pressed the emergency eject button.

  He stuck out his too-long tongue, slurping at me in the air. The connective tissue in the back of his throat gave way. Let loose, the slab of tongue fell onto my bare belly with a sick plop. I tried to scream and bat it away, but couldn't. My jaw worked, sound trapped in a dumb void. Rotting ghoul hands pressed my hips to the bed, palms slippery with gelid scum, pinning me in place. Vividly, I could feel the unstable flesh moving across the hard immovable bones of his hands, threatening to rub off. I bucked to get away but his arms were like iron bars. It's not a dream, my alarm bells clanged. Something's wrong, it's not a dream!