by Anton Strout
I had no clue who this Jeremy was, but I did what kept me alive most days—I winged it.
“Yep, it’s me,” I said, not sure if I should be trying to disguise my voice or not. “Good old Jeremy.”
The woman cocked her head to the other side. “Where have you been, Jeremy? You sound so. . . different.” She took a few shambling steps toward me.
I circled around behind the chair, putting it between the two of us. Sure, she could probably walk right through it if she wanted, but it felt safer to me anyway. Her spirit slid itself into the barber’s chair, her hands clutching the arms of it possessively.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m getting over a cold. I’ve missed you, too.” I needed more information if I was going to fulfill Aidan’s request and rid the shop of its unwanted ghost. I stripped off one of my gloves and pressed my hand against the cool leather back of the chair. I pushed my psychometry into it, feeling the power roll down my arm until I felt it snap in connection with the chair itself, and then my mind’s eye pressed into the history of the chair, feeling for significant moments in it. As the past snapped into fullcolor resolution, a piece of the woman’s story unfolded to me.
The barber chair sat in the middle of a dimly lit tattoo shop after hours. A pixie-cut blonde with a lot of curves and barely enough clothes to cover them was leaning over a ratty-looking dark-haired hipster boy I assumed was Jeremy. She crawled up onto his lap, straddling him before kissing his neck. There was really nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy my psychometric equivalent of Skinemax.
Just as it was getting good, the shop door flew open. The blonde sat up, startled, nearly falling out of the chair as she pushed herself up off of Jeremy.
Before she could get off of him completely, the tattooed woman stormed across the shop and grabbed fistfuls of Pixie Cut’s short blond hair before slamming her to the floor.
“Bitch,” she hissed, and turned back to Jeremy. “Not in my store and definitely not with her.”
Jeremy pushed himself back into the chair like he was trying to escape through it. My powers meant that I felt her deep love and, much worse, her deeper pain at his betrayal. The tattooist pounded rageful fists against him over and over. Jeremy took it, too stunned to move, until the tattooist went for a shot at the family jewels, shaking him out of his dazed stupor. He pushed her away, standing up. “Get the hell off me, Cassie.”
The violence in his voice stopped the tattooist in her tracks. The anger melted away from her face. Jeremy didn’t care, pushing past her and moving to help the blonde up off the floor.
“You’re going to help her?” Cassie shouted. This set off a new fire in her eyes and she leaned over the barber chair, snatching up one of the tattoo guns. She stepped on the foot pedal and fired up the needle on its piston. She engaged the pedal’s lock with a flick of the toe of her boot, and then turned and lunged at Jeremy.
Pixie Cut screamed. Jeremy spun, barely having time to put his hands up to guard his face from the blow. The shriek of the machine sounded like a jigsaw revving as the needle darted in and out at lightning speed. The woman was out to maim.
Thankfully, the cord of the tattooing device was shorter than the distance to her boyfriend, and it pulled free from the wall. The rhythm of the machine slowed, but not before the woman landed a solid hit against Jeremy’s arm, drawing blood as well as a jagged black line of ink. Jeremy grabbed crazed Cassie’s arms and forced them down to her sides. She struggled, but her histrionics were draining her, leaving her powerless.
Jeremy stared at her in disbelief, and only after she had stopped struggling completely did he let go of her. He backed away slowly, the blonde rushing to his side and throwing her arms protectively around him.
The tattooist stood there in shock. Her pain in the moment was a thick swirl of mad emotions coursing through me. Tears flowed hot down her face. . . There was a mania in her head that made it hard to keep myself separate from her jumble of irrational thoughts. Her fingers ached from clutching the powerless tattoo gun. She looked down at it, and then dove for the outlet where the cord had pulled from the wall. It roared to life and she stared down at the pulsating needle, before raising it to her face. Whatever she was going to do next, I couldn’t watch. I pulled my mind’s eye back to the present.
The ghost woman—Cassie—was still sitting right in front of me in her tattooing chair, her head craned up to look at me. Her face was still half-hidden by the sunglasses. I could guess why.
“What did you do to yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.
The tattooist gave me a wide, grim smile. “I couldn’t bear to see him with another woman,” she said, “so I didn’t want to see him at all. But you’re not him. You’re not Jeremy.”
Residual sensations of her anger and jealousy forced themselves on me, the tattooist’s raw emotions overpowering my own. The return of a person’s psychometric emotional state was such an unfamiliar and unbidden force, so violating, that I staggered, grabbing for the barber’s chair.
“Look out!” Jane shouted. The floating structure overhead shifted and faltered. It continued to whirl around, but with the woman’s growing agitation, it jerked unsteadily in its course above us. Standing under it didn’t strike me as the smartest idea right now, either, and I backed away from the chair as bits of glass started falling from the unstable array of floating lamps above.
The woman cocked her head off in the direction Jane had spoken from. “Is she here, too?” the woman said, the rising anger in her voice cutting into my ears like glass. “Your little blond friend?”
Although Jane wasn’t Pixie Cut, and I wasn’t Jeremy, it really didn’t matter. All that mattered was that crazy Cassie had switched her focus to my girlfriend.
“Jane!” I shouted over the falling debris from the structure above. “Run!”
Jane stepped out from behind the armoire that hid her, moving for the aisle, but her footfalls echoed out as she did so. The tattooed woman flicked her wrist and several floor lamps tore themselves free of the structure and flew through the air toward Jane. Two of them smashed into armoires near her, but one found its mark and tangled itself between Jane’s legs, sending her tumbling.
“Crap!” I yelled. I didn’t wait to see where Jane landed. I was already running off in her direction, seeking cover as I went.
Lamps of every size flew past me as I ran. The dull thump against my leather jacket from two smaller ones pushed me forward, but I kept running and dove for the safety of a large chest of drawers. Jane’s looked out from beneath one of the nearby beds. When I hit the floor, there was a crunch of broken glass under my coat, and I rolled toward Jane as she pulled me under the bed.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Oh, you know,” she said, with a nervous smile. “Just busy cowering.”
“Mind if I join you in a quick cower?”
Jane laughed, letting out some of her nerves. “Be my guest.”
I took a moment to catch my breath, and then rolled onto my stomach, putting my back against the bottom of the sturdy old bed frame. “We stay here too long, I think we’re going to die.”
I pressed up on the bed, driving the headboard down into the ground and lifting the feet of it.
“I hate antiques,” Jane said, grunting as she joined me in pushing up the bed. “So damned heavy.”
“But sturdy,” I reminded her, hoisting the bed into a protective wall position with one last burst of survival adrenaline. “Good for cover. Good for living.” I quickly told Jane everything about the lovers’ triangle I had witnessed in my vision.
“Maybe the haunting is totemistic,” Jane offered when I was done.
I looked over at her, the word barely registering in my mind.
Jane shrugged. “I’ve been reading up on totems in Arcana,” she said. “Objects embedded with ritualistic properties. Think about it. You got your reading off the energy imbued in that chair, hon. Her pain is wrapped up in that. What if the chair is the object holding he
r here?”
It made sense, and I could have kissed her for suggesting it. Destroy the chair, release the spirit. I felt around my inside coat pocket, searching for something but coming up empty-handed.
“Damn,” I said. “No good. Most of my tricks are in my regular work coat.”
I looked down at the bag Jane wore strapped over one of her shoulders. “Please tell me you have more than makeup in there?”
Jane nodded. “I still have some bits of my D.E.A. welcome kit in my purse,” she said. She pulled out three self-unraveling Mummy Fingers bandages, six rune stones, and a stoppered vial, the same kind Connor used all the time to coerce spirits into submission.
“Perfect,” I said, pointing to the vial. “Run for the chair. Coat the damned thing with it.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do what I do best,” I said, “and see how much damage I can take.”
Jane gave me an unsure smile. “Is this something they teach you in Distractions 101?”
“Just make sure you get to the chair,” I said.
Jane nodded, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me. While it was much appreciated, I felt a weird surge of rage and realized that the tattooist’s anger and jealousy were still in control of me, running strong in my head, to the point where Jane’s kiss almost tasted like the betrayal Cassie had caught Jeremy in. I eased Jane back away from me, trying not to push.
Jane didn’t seem to notice, gave me a thumbs-up, and ran off along the outside edge of the room.
I pulled out my retractable bat before running back toward the outer edge of the circle where all the action was taking place. As I went, I made as much noise as I could, slamming my bat into anything and everything. It hurt my soul to bash away at antiques like this, but let’s face it—the room was already half-destroyed from Cassie’s lamp carnage.
The tattooist followed the sound of my progress with her ear cocked, sending more and more lampish destruction my way.
“Go ahead,” I said, stopping at a spot on the edge of the circle opposite the chair. I readied my bat. “Let it all out. I can take it.”
“Oh, can you?” she said, raising her arms up. The woman’s body was shaking now, her chest rising and falling like she had just run a marathon. Her hair rose up in snakelike waves all around her, floating in the air like she was underwater. The tattooist unleashed her full fury at me. Stained glass panels and bulbs shattered all around me. Like mighty Casey at the bat, I swung to deflect each and every item the woman launched at me, but my arms were already tiring.
Across the room, I still didn’t see Jane, but what I did see was a set of drawers moving out toward the old barber’s chair. The hint of a blond ponytail stuck up behind the unit and the sound of my bat crashing away masked its movement. When the drawer was in place, Jane popped up, unstoppered the vial, and coated the chair.
“Step away,” I called out to Jane and ran for the chair. The tattooist followed the sound of me scrabbling across the broken glass and sent her assault after me, which was what I wanted. As I slipped behind the chair, one of the Tiffany floor lamps headed straight for me and I brought my bat down hard on its still-glowing light. It smashed apart, the red-hot filament falling into the chair, which in turn ignited the liquid. The chair went up like a dried-out Christmas tree mid-February.
“No!” the tattooist screamed out, all of her focus turning from me back to the chair. She ran to the already burning mess and threw herself into it, the flames rising up all around her, not even affecting her ghostly form.
A wave of heat washed over me, forcing me to back away. The tattooist raised her arms, crying out as her chair went up in flames. Her cries echoed out, and then faded as her spirit did the same. The second she vanished, the sound of wrenching metal came from above and the entire floating structure came crashing down on top of me, the room going dark except for several small fires that broke out from the fall. There wasn’t time to move or dive for cover and I was driven to the ground, the thunder of it all deafening me.
As I lay pinned on the floor, the store’s sprinkler system kicked and I welcomed the coolness. It was actually refreshing as I spent the next few minutes watching the room descend back into darkness and figuring out how to untangle myself from the treacherous twists of metal and shards of glass. When I finally was able to stand, the pile of broken lamps was waist deep.
Jane groaned nearby.
“You okay?” I called out.
“My hair is full of broken glass,” Jane said somewhere off to my left, “but other than that, yeah. I feel like fiberglass insulation.” The sounds of her freeing herself filled the room with a metallic clatter and more crunching of broken glass.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I took in all the carnage around me while I tried to calm my racing heart, but then I realized I wasn’t calming. Part of me was still full of the tattooist’s anger and jealousy. It wouldn’t shake off, clouding my mind instead.
Jane knocked on something wooden, hollow, but I was too caught up in trying to recover myself that I didn’t bother to look over at her. I assumed she was still behind the dresser that she had snuck out behind before everything fell on us.
“Not only is it sturdy for defense against Tiffany lamps,” she said, “but it would look lovely in your bedroom, just underneath the windows along the left side. Don’t you think?”
I fought to clear my head, focusing on the antiques all around the room to bring me back to reality. The damage around us was incalculable. I tried coming up with a number in my head to price it all, but I couldn’t even begin.
“Simon. . . ?”
Jane’s uncertain tone brought me out of my thoughts. I turned toward where she stood, still behind the low set of dark wooden drawers. Now that I had a moment to look them over, they were lovely with slim, tapered legs and a sleek, mid-Century Modern look to them.
“What?” I asked, perhaps too sharp, but I couldn’t help it with the distraction of Cassie’s raw anger and emotions upon me still.
Jane’s brow wrinkled at my tone. She hesitated before speaking, and when it came out, her voice was small. “I just thought this might be nice in your place,” she said. “You know, for me. To hold my stuff, rather than just that drawer you gave me in your dresser.”
“We’ll see,” I said, distracted. The image of the woman taking the tattoo gun to her own eyes danced across my mind and I shivered.
Jane gave a fake pout. “That sounded less than enthusiastic.”
I sighed. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, testiness thick in my voice. “I just watched a love-crazed woman gouge her own eyes out over a guy, so picking out furniture seems a little trivial to me right now.” Snapping at Jane was oh, so easy right now given all Cassie’s feelings of betrayal, vengeance, and jealousy flooding through me. Why couldn’t I shake it off? “We’ll discuss it later. Let’s just try to get out of here without severing a major artery. Step carefully.”
By the time we picked our way out of the debris, we were soaked through from the sprinkler system. As we approached the front door of the store, my phone vibrated. I checked the text message. DEA NOW PLS. SPCL ASGNMNT U & CONNOR. AQ.
“We have to go,” I said. “Downtown to the Lovecraft Café and the Department of Extraordinary Affairs.”
“Not back to bed?” Jane asked, looking even unhappier than she had a minute ago. “We’re not even on tonight. What’s wrong? Please tell me it’s not another zombie infestation.”
I pulled up the gate and held it for her. Jane’s face was a grim mask as she ducked under it. “Possibly,” I said. “I have to go in, anyway. A call came in, requesting Connor and me specifically.”
My stomach sank. Given the tattooist’s emotions still coursing through me, I was glad for the text, secretly hoping it was about a new zombie outbreak that needed dealing with. At least then I could get out some aggression with my retractable bat.
2
We stepped out of the an
tiques warehouse and back into what looked like an empty shopping mall. The space was cavernous and modern, and rose up several levels above us. Off in the distance floor-to-ceiling windows showed the traffic going around Columbus Circle.
“Very disorienting,” I said. “Coming out of that old antiques shop that feels like it’s down on the docks and back into the modernity of the Gibson-Case Center.” Cassie’s emotions faded as I took in sights other than the mess we had left behind in there.
“Surreal,” Jane added.
“What can I say?” a voice called out from off to our right. “Our kind does Old New York well.”
I turned and looked over at Aidan Christos as he walked toward us. The forty-year-old vampire looked all of eighteen in his skull and bones Hot Topic hoodie, his emo swoop of black hair hanging down into his eyes.
“I appreciate you stopping by,” he said, walking past us and off across the empty mall. When he moved, the steps from his Doc Martens didn’t even make a sound.
“Can you at least pretend to make footsteps?” I asked. “It’s creepy.”
Aidan sighed and clomped around in a slow, deliberate circle. “Better?” he asked, but before I could answer he stopped and stared at us. “You’re wet. Why are you two wet?”
I looked over at Jane and smiled. “That must be those keen vampiric powers of observation I keep hearing about.”
The vampire smiled from within the darkness of the hoodie he wore, the tips of his fangs the only thing visible on the teenage boy’s face. He stood there, glaring at me, and I felt a wave of terror project over me directly coming from him—an oldie but goodie that I was already familiar with in the vampire’s bag of tricks.
“Cut the crap,” I said, pushing past him into the darkened atrium of the Gibson-Case Center, the secret home of New York City’s greatest concentration of vampires. “I’m not in the mood, Aidan.”
