Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  “You are truly terrifying. I must of course submit to your will,” he answered, putting his hands on my hips with familiar affection.

  “Damn straight. And if I ever catch you doing that to Gary again—”

  “Catch him doing what to Gary?”

  I craned my neck slowly to see Batten on the cellar stairs, ducking under a low beam.

  Harry exhaled cigarette smoke noisily and said under his breath, “Bloody hell, MJ.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  My big mouth had very effectively derailed our work session. At least I was good at something. I'd never met a situation yet that I didn't manage to destroy. I was the Godzilla of paranormal law enforcement, guaranteed to tromp all over the Tokyo of your investigation! I wondered how much it would cost to get a big ass trophy made: World's Best Fucker-Upper.

  Strained silence followed a brief, explosive fight where Brains admitted to Brawn he had a private “issue” with the revenants he was working through, and that it was personal. Every bit as personal, Brains stressed, as Brawn's sexual infatuation with a certain co-worker that would go politely unnamed. I squirmed in my office chair and pretended to study the white board, where pictures of Ten Springs Motor Inn's Room 4 in all its bloody glory were safer to look at.

  We did a quick review, the men barely speaking and even then, through their teeth. I didn't know which one worried me more. I didn't enjoy seeing Batten flushed and irritated, but when wasn't he? In fact, it was his standard mode when working with me. But Chapel's loss of control was a different animal. His hands shook as he typed. Sweat had dampened the armpits of his shirt; his crisp ocean-scent deodorant smelled nice, even though the rest of him disgusted me. How could he have done this behind my back? I had suspected, but I wish I'd never seen it with my own eyes. I couldn't look at his face. At the same time I couldn't un-see it, him laying prone, legs dangling, feet splayed, either exhausted or completely relaxed. At least I didn't recall a tent in the front of his pants.

  His neck tie was missing again. Now I knew why. How many were lying on Harry's plush-carpeted floor, abandoned beside the couch or under the edge of the bed skirt? And why? What were his reasons? I respected that Harry wouldn't tell me but I didn't like it. I deserved an explanation but didn't think it was going to happen any time soon.

  The discussion of why Dead Kristin hadn't come to reclaim her eye made me go stiff and squinky. She hadn't come because I hadn't made her eye accessible. It was still locked in my gun safe with the stolen sunglass lens belonging to Patrick Laurier Nazaire, deceased, and the mad psychic's daughter Danika Sherlock, sorta-deceased. Revenants and precogs and clairvoyants, oh my! I penciled in my Moleskine: witch-walking and flesh magic and Ruby's grimoire, the last being off-limits for me to even consider touching. Harry would have a fit if he caught me fingering through a black witch's notes.

  My gaze fell on the froggy pencil holder that held my No. 2s, the one Batten had drawn black fangs on with permanent marker. I turned it around on the desk to face the Feds.

  “Do we have the Davis family's permission to destroy the ghoul?” I asked.

  Batten brought his dark blue eyes up from the pencil holder with the tiniest bit of playfulness around his eyes, hiding his mouth from Chapel behind his fist. An admission. Not that I needed one.

  “Do we need it?” he asked without a trace of humor.

  “Well, she was their daughter,” I told them. “Unless Ruby releases the demon who's holding Kristin's spirit hostage, we have only one other option: burn Kristin's body to a crisp. Pretty sure we should get written consent before we try that.”

  “Is that standard?” Batten asked, looking between Chapel and me.

  I shrugged. “My first ghoul slaying, sorry. The law's probably fuzzy on ghoul slaying, if it exists at all.” Chapel was typing, but he had no answer after a few minutes and I continued, “We should also get permission from Danika's next of kin, if we can find anyone other than her charming mother. I don't know for sure that Danika would come here. But Ruby's demon is controlling her, too, so there's no telling.”

  “What about this witch-walking you said Ruby and her daughter could do?” Chapel said. “Is it only in effect while Kristin's blind eye is still here?”

  “Unless she's gone and plucked out some more blind eyeballs and planted them around my cabin. Oh,” I rubbed my sore head. “I just scared the crap out of myself again.”

  We discussed Neil Dunnachie next, and while they danced around the subject of where the missing deputy might be, and whether or not he was responsible for fire-bombing my home, I focused on the white board and the pictures some clever cop had snapped on his cell phone of Ruby's basement before the oil tank blew. Pictures of empty caskets, three of them. Three? Silver chains. Crosses. My gloves in a basket. Firemen fighting a blank spot in the images that must have been Patrick Laurier Nazaire. The firemen had tried to get him off the wall and then gave up and evacuated before the whole thing came down.

  Without knowing I was going to say it, I heard, “Canon 5.”

  Their conversation drifted to a questioning quiet and they waited for me to speak again. I had to pause and figure out where my brain was trying to lead me.

  “Canon 5 states: the DaySitter shall incur a measure of the revenant's pleasure and pain, for they are inexorably linked through the Bond.” Part of me jumped on this. How could we use it against Ruby? She'd still been feeding Gregori, as the strength of her power attested. Her Bond may have been weakened, busted, but was there enough left to hurt her through Gregori Nazaire? Was that even possible? And could I injure an innocent revenant just to draw Ruby out? That didn't sound quite right. Could I pleasure him to draw Ruby out? Eeeeuuuuww. But those were my choices, pleasure and pain.

  Another part of my mind burbled with confusion. Harry had been shot twice with a .45 at the funeral home. But I didn't feel a thing. My half of our Bond, the psychic bit, was broken but his was intact. Should I not have physically felt his pain? The Feds were waiting for me to explain, but I didn't have answers, only more questions. That was pretty much the last thing we needed. And then my brain skittered elsewhere, somewhere ugly.

  Harry had said something as he crumpled to the floor. He had pointed, and said something about “her” but pointed directly at Chapel. Memories flickered, coyly danced away, stripped one shoulder and winked at me, then sunk back into shadow. Whatever it was, my brain wasn't getting the whole picture. The fan dancer had covered up and gone home.

  A soft knock interrupted my brain-wracking, and Wesley poked his head in. “Marnie. Harry's asking for you. Downstairs. Code 9?”

  “Gents, if you'll excuse me.”

  Wesley scratched his nose meaningfully at me. I cleared my throat, wondering exactly what sort of libidinous thoughts Batten was having about me that Wesley was trying to relay. I tossed my Visa on the desk.

  “Order up some pizza for us, pineapple for me. I'll be back. Don't let Wes eat any.” I avoided Chapel's face, but caught the slight unconscious folding on his wrist where Wes had fed.

  Batten stood and followed me out of the office, grabbing me by the elbow.

  “Don't suppose you'd like to explain Code 9?”

  Code 9 meant I had a very hungry revenant who couldn't, and wouldn't, wait patiently a minute longer. “Not especially.”

  For a minute his cop-face went up. I couldn't penetrate it, and I sure as hell couldn't sense him. “Marnie, I need to know something.”

  “Oh dude, there's so many, many things you need to know. How'd you narrow it down?”

  “Are you in love with Harry?”

  I blinked at him and burst into laughter. “Are you on crack?”

  “That's neither a yes nor a no.”

  I chose my words carefully. “Love is for the living. The dead aren't capable of it, any more than sociopaths are capable of mercy or remorse. There's just a certain part of their brain that no longer works that way.”

  “What part of the brain?”

  I flounder
ed. “Hell, I don't know.”

  “Don't you have a doctorate in preternatural biology?”

  “No one knows, that's my point. It's as of yet undiscovered. Happy?”

  “Are you?” His face was dead serious. “Happy, I mean?”

  “I have the odd moment of contentment,” I said, feeling defensive. “I'm not always this crabby. It's you. You bring out the worst in me.”

  “And what does Harry bring out in you?” He chewed inside his mouth. “What does Harry offer?”

  “He's devoted and loyal. But no, he doesn't love me. Couldn't. Even if he wanted to. And that's why I can't love him back.”

  Batten was shaking his head. “I don't believe that. And deep down, Marnie, neither do you.”

  I looked past him to the pantry. “Do me a favor?”

  This seemed to take Batten off-guard; he waited for the fuck off that didn't come, then nodded.

  “In my bathroom linen closet, beside a red box, is a bottle of multivitamins. Little white ones. Got a lab nearby that can test them?”

  Batten was quiet for a moment. “Why would you—”

  “Yes or no,” I cut him off. “If no, fine. If yes, take a handful but not the bottle, and please, don't ask me any questions. Just want a chemical breakdown. Can you do that for me?”

  “Of course.” He gave me a look that said I should know better. “I'd do whatever you needed me to do, Marnie. You only have to ask.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The lights in the chamber were extinguished. Beside Harry's ostentatious four poster bed, taking up a grand amount of space in the very middle of the room, quivering candles had been set strategically on ornate floor stands. The casual observer might not have noticed the double-wide casket in the back of the shadow-curtained room but I didn't miss it. I'd been there on many a cold winter morning, warming Harry with my body heat, curled up with my face pressed to his chest. Both glossy halves of the cherry wood lid were flung up, and against the perfect white satin interior the bumper stickers were dark and unreadable. I knew them all by heart: all the places he'd been, little phrases that pleased him. “Heaven or bust”, “Devil's Playground, Mojave, California”, and my favorite: “What happens in the casket stays in the casket”. I had always wondered: would the same apply to Harry's bed?

  My companion stood just out of my line of sight behind the bed's white sheers, playing coy with eyes that had known four centuries of seduction, knowing his distance now would drive me bonkers. I caught a glimpse, the filmy impression of him shirtless in the well-warmed room, showing off the hard-won rewards of all that yoga in cut abs and hard angles. His preternatural power boiled in the air, a controlled simmer that vibrated under my skin, and nervous energy slithered down my spine. Was he nervous, or was I? I couldn't tell. Maybe both. My head was still thrumming with the need to feed him, the withdrawal heavy and urgent.

  The chamber door shut behind me with an audible click, though Harry hadn't come past me to touch it. I narrowed my eyes at the revenant as he came into full view with a smile, the perfect picture of courtly innocence.

  “Okay, spill. How'd you do that?” I demanded, felt my gloved hand go to the hollow of my throat almost protectively.

  His answer was a shallow bow, a slight graceful sweep of pale arm. “I can do a great many wondrous things, my love, as I am sure you are aware.”

  “I didn't know you could do that.”

  His pale grey eyes, by far his best feature, were backlit with a new dark light tonight, as though he were thinking wicked thoughts of honey, silk and a shameless loss of willpower. Oh boy. Inside my bra, my nipples tightened almost painfully.

  “Tonight I will show you countless tricks sure to…” His lips spread with promise and he licked them, a quick pink flash. “Amaze and delight.”

  Yikes! It occurred to me he had used Code 9 to mean a whole different kind of emergency, which kick-started a sexual stirring in my gut so frighteningly strong that I fought it down, shoved it away. A rare blush burned into my cheeks.

  Harry's forehead displayed a moment of confusion as the rush of my arousal hit him and just as quickly dissipated. He took a step back, tilting his head in question.

  “Too much?” he asked carefully.

  “Wouldn't say that, no.”

  If he'd been doing Mark Batten's frantic speed-of-light lovemaking, I wouldn't have time to feel edgy. No, this reminded me of the first time I'd fed Harry, not knowing what to expect, hesitant of imagined pain, honestly more than a little grossed-out at the prospect of a dead man touching me. The latter was no longer a problem, except a tiny mischievous part of my brain wanted to know if his dick would be cold like a cherry Popsicle inside me.

  His platinum eyebrow piercings twitched up in a playful arch as though he'd read my mind.

  “Sorry.” I swallowed hard. “I'm… nervous. Oddly enough.”

  “It is my place to remedy such an affliction, and remedy it I shall,” he soothed, letting one pale hand drift in my direction. An invitation. “Come now, ducky. It's only me.”

  “Only?” I choked. He made the room small with his presence, though he was not a large man and never had been. Ever before, his companionship had been the best I could have hoped for: comfortable, familiar. Now something else was up for grabs so to speak and I felt unworthy. His upright carriage and effortless poise made him seem too perfect, unreal, and even when I finally put my hand into his, he seemed to shift in and out of a lurid daydream.

  “You've been in my arms a thousand times or more,” he reminded me. He brushed my cheek with the back of his other hand, drawing me a step closer. My feet had forgotten how to work. It amused him, and he smiled knowingly, very aware of the effect he was having on me.

  “We should maybe talk about this, before we go any further,” I whispered. “A full-fledged official meeting. A pro-con list. I'll take notes…”

  One fine finger tilted my chin up and he captured my lips, quieting me with the tender press of his cool mouth. Not the invading Kill-Notch force I was accustomed to, Harry's lips were soft, hesitant, tasting mine like a bee to nectar as he moved in closer. His hand took the small of my back, cupped me as though we were dancing. I tried and failed to suppress a tremor of intense fascination that brought a deep chuckle from my revenant.

  “We certainly must talk,” he agreed. His unearthly-quick fingers slowed to unbutton my jeans with teasing, methodical care. “A serious talk is warranted.”

  My heart was crawling wild and untamed up the back of my throat, crowding me, making it hard to breathe past its crazy-wired thrumming.

  “A talk, yes, I can talk, assuming I can still breathe,” I managed, nodding like I was in a trance. “Talking I can do.”

  “For you need to understand…” The slow hand moved to crawl up the back of my t-shirt, inching up my spine. Taking a full handful of the fabric, he rushed it up over my head, pulling my arms up with it. “Exactly what you're getting into.”

  A bed? A casket? A gimp mask? My hazy brain tripped along dark and somewhat alarming possibilities while he considered me with a calculating gaze. I realized I had no idea what aroused Harry, none whatsoever, and maybe I should have given that some thought before now.

  “I have been intimate with all my prior DaySitters, you understand,” he confirmed, giving me a jealous jolt that wound me even tighter. The back of his hand brushed up my bare shoulder, raising all the little hairs with a tickling sweep of pleasure. “Each one promised they would not take the gift lightly. And yet…”

  I had to clear my throat to speak again around the heart slamming just below my voice box. “Gift?”

  “Making the Bond's most intimate aspect active opens the door to the Overlord, as he is the Prince of Lust. All that He has to offer would be yours,” Harry admitted reluctantly. “And they took it. They all take it, eventually. I cannot allow this to happen with you, my only love. You must understand the temptation, the ruin that could befall us both. The door will open, and once open, it shall never
close. Even so, you must forevermore refuse His constant offers of power. We have taken such pains to remain… pure. Risking that now, here, tonight, could cost us so very much indeed.”

  There was regret there, carefully set aside so it wouldn't show on his face. But I felt it on the undercurrent of our healing Bond and my brain squirreled away this walnut of truth, because surely it meant something. I couldn't fathom what at the moment. I was too busy looking down at Harry, wondering when he'd dropped to one knee to finish removing my jeans, which now lay in a denim pool at my ankles. His too-quick movement was unnerving at the best of times; when he was stripping me it was downright disquieting. I stepped out of the jeans, my skin so alive it sang in the chamber's always-warm air.

  “So that's why you haven't… we couldn't…” I stammered. “But now?”

  “We must,” he warned, his voice leaving no room for argument. “I will not allow Monsieur Nazaire an inch of room to maneuver in this matter. The Frenchman has already taken too much.”

  There was uncertainty in Harry's battleship grey eyes, but it fled quickly. There was no doubt, however, about his own allure; graceful as a cat and fully aware of it, moving as always with that indefinable elegance. He tossed aside his black and chestnut paisley bedspread. His was a lordly sway rather than a swagger, hips lean and cocky under deep black silk sleep trousers I'd never seen him wear before. Maybe he'd never worn them because he knew he'd be irresistible in them. A small smile returned to play on his lips as he let me watch him, enjoying the way my hungry gaze ate him up. He had given himself over to the inevitable and was determined to do this his way.

  Harry went to his knees beside his bed while I stood uncertainly alone in the center of the room, hugging my trembling middle, waiting, wondering what I should do next. In no-nonsense cotton bra and panties with the cartoon frog print, I wished I'd had the foresight to dress for the just-in-case. This was an occasion that called for sexy lace. I was so glad Harry refused to have mirrors in his chambers; I didn't want to see Plain Jane right now.