He spun away from me, the warmth of him replaced by a gust of cool night air against my cheeks.
“Let’s just get you to the infirmary. Do you have your watch at least?”
The realization I hadn’t checked hit me hard. I touched the pocket sewn into my jacket, the heavy weight of my watch still there. “Yes, still there.”
“Is it intact?”
I pulled the chain and lifted the gold filigree fob watch out to inspect. The warm metal, as familiar as my own reflection, felt unmarred under my probing fingertips. “Yes, fine.”
“Then let’s go.”
We’d go to the clinic. I’d get checked out, then be assigned a desk. Once you lose a soul, you could get another one, but it wouldn’t be the same one, and it wouldn’t bring back my vision. I’d get one and only case, one and only patrol, and one and only partner. No. And so I said it. “No.”
The swirl of his coat against his legs registered in mind before he shuffled back to stand inches away. “Did you just say, ‘No’?”
I put my hands on my hips and held my ground. “I’m not going to the clinic. This, right here, is my one chance to fulfill my dreams. After I go there, I’ll be put on a desk, or in janitorial, and never chase a perp, or watch you hunt down a criminal. I won’t ever get the satisfaction of saving a life or helping someone in need.
He swallowed heavily, I could hear the sharpness of the movements. Without my vision my sense of hearing had heightened exponentially.
“I could just throw you over my shoulder and drag you there.”
I jerked my knife free from its sheath and crouched, preparing for a fight. “You can try.”
“So what exactly do you want here?”
“I want to find the bastard who just killed me and bring him to justice. You said something about a gun and I think I saw it in your memory. I think we learned about them in school. Weapons outlawed after the third World War.”
“Yes. What we heard tonight was a gunshot. What I want to know is how anyone got a gun in this day and age.”
The curiosity in his tone told me I’d won this round so I slipped my knife back in place and crossed my arms under my chest. “Okay, partner, where do we start?”
His sigh of impatience brushed against my skin like a shower of hot sparks. “We have to see a man about a car.”
2
For all my bravado, I had no idea how we would actually be able to get to our destination. The mute leading the blind. Terror had begun to eat away at my heart but determination solidified what was left. I wouldn’t be a complete failure. All that training wouldn’t be for nothing.
Harley knocked against a door. The beat of his fist hitting the steel rang in my ears. I pulled my arm from where he’d wrapped it around his forearm to cover them, as he pounded once more. Then the squeal of the door sliding along a track ushered in the scent of decay and dirt. Whoever we came to meet was not a good person. The knowledge sat there in my gut without preamble.
The scratch of a notebook and pencil crept in past the scent and the realization that Harley didn’t want in this man’s mind only solidified my character assessment of the stranger.
“I didn’t sell no car downtown. I wouldn’t do business so near the Church.”
More scratching on paper.
“I promise, Harley, man—” I noted a new scent. A whiff of something burning. I tried to figure out the source but everything my senses gave me told me it came from the man Harley questioned.
Speak of the devil. His voice drifted in my head. “Step up and play good cop here. Put your hand on my arm and pull me back. He’ll break, if only because you’re beautiful.”
The knowledge he considered me beautiful sunk in and delayed my action. The sound of the man’s back hitting a wall told me I needed to move quick.
“Hey, Harley, come on. Let me give it a try, see if we can take it easier.”
Harley dropped him, the long slide of his body down the wall in a heap let me know to crouch down, my muscles protesting from their repeated meetings with concrete.
“Listen, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. But I don’t want to see Harley decimate what’s left of your souls. It’s a waste really. All we need to know is if you sold a car recently. Any car at all. There can’t be a huge market considering how hard battery cells are to come by these days.”
Harley cut into my mind. “Do that eyelash thing and push your hair behind your ears.”
Anger rose, and I hoped he could feel it, never letting it show on my face. With admittedly practiced ease I lowered my lashes and glanced up at him from under the fringe, or so I hoped, while pushing my hair back with a flip of my fingers. “I’m cold, I just want to go home. Do you think you can help a girl out?”
“Got him,” Harley intoned.
“Listen, I sold a car a month ago. One of my regular buyers came by with a stack of cash, some watches, and told me he needed a vehicle.”
“Do you know his name or where he might be located?”
“I had the car delivered to a warehouse on Fourth Street. I promise that’s all I know.”
I gave him a soft smile and stood, brushing my pants straight.
“Nice work,” Harley said, tucking my arm in his again to lead me down the stairs. The strange thing though, I could almost feel where the stairs where. By the sound of his feet, the scent of the refuse piles on the edges. Like my other senses were trying to surpass my lack of vision.
The happy realization didn’t keep me from gripping his arm hard in mine. “Don’t patronize me. I know how to question a source.”
“You may know how, but you can’t see him so you can’t pick up the cues.”
“Next time you can use your feminine wiles to get information.”
“Deal.”
As he led me back toward the warehouse district it occurred to me I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Or maybe nothing worse could happen to me, so fear didn’t matter.
“There are worse things than losing your eyesight,” he whispered softly in mind. “There are even worse things than death.”
I swallowed my retort as a cold chill skittered down my spine. Keeping silent seemed like the best plan. Besides, I was trying to orient myself to my surroundings in the city. Distance seemed like nothing more than a human construct when faced with no guideposts to base it on. It felt like we walked forever until we stopped and he released me.
I reached out trying to find something to hold on to. My hands met brick and I used the wall to prop myself up.
“Do you hear anything?” Harley asked.
I took a deep breath and focused on my surroundings. The screech of a bat from far away. Metal grating against metal. “Nothing I can use to identify anything in particular. Is there something specific I should listen for?”
He didn’t answer but the shuffle of his boots against the sidewalk was loud enough. “You recall I can’t see your head move, even if you answer me.”
“Oh, sorry. Nothing specific I’m just trying to come up with a game plan.”
My impatience with him was reaching its boiling point. “I’m not a complete invalid. I can help.”
He jolted to a stop in the sidewalk and the air constricted around me as he entered my personal space. It was an intimidation tactic that lost some of its edge when one couldn’t actually see those midnight eyes scowling down at you.
“You are nothing more than a child dressed up to play detective. Why I was assigned to you I have no idea, but if you think I’m going to let you—who already died once tonight, might I remind you—walk in there without a solid plan, you lost your sanity along with your soul.”
I pushed off the brick to stand with him chest to chest—or, well, chest to abdomen in his case. As a small woman, I knew I’d never have the intimidation factor of any of the reapers or half of the detectives, but I had other skills. “We’ve spent, what, four hours together? Don’t think you know me.”
He leaned down and his warm breath, tinged
slightly with peppermint, fanned against my lips and cheeks. “You forget. You let me inside your mind. I can see everything in there. Not just the petty surface stuff like your pride or your ego. I see the shame, and the fear. I see...”
I cut him off with a smack across his cheek. The surprise of actually making contact with him hit me harder than actually striking him. “I did not give you permission to riffle through my mind. I gave you permission to speak to me. Digging through my thoughts is a gross miscarriage of your abilities and I do not appreciate it.”
Silence stretched heavy between us without even the sound of the bat to break up the tension.
“You will not hit me again.”
“Then stop being a jerk and I won’t.”
Lightning fast, he grabbed my wrists, one in each hand, and pushed me toward the brick wall. The stone grated the exposed flesh not protected by the cuff of my sleeve. As I lifted a knee to pin his balls he shifted out of the way with his hips. “We seem to be at an impasse. You will release me now or I’ll find another way to strike out at you.”
His snort of disbelief only enraged me further. He leaned in and I didn’t even think about it so he wouldn’t have a moment to move. I smacked my forehead against his face. That did it. A litany of curses streamed into my mind. Some I’d never even heard before. I wondered if I could pinpoint his age with some of those.
“What is wrong with you, woman?”
“I told you to release me. You are an adult and capable of having a rational conversation without resorting to violence.”
“I’m a reaper. All we know is violence, remember?” The last came out defeated.
“While we are standing out here doing...whatever this is...the bad guys could be getting away. What if your source informed them we stopped by? Did you think of that? Or what about that gun? Not a good weapon to leave laying around the city.”
The air stirred again and I felt the pattern in it, the same as before, him lunging toward me. I stepped back out of the way.
“Look at you, learning to use your disability to your advantage.”
I shrugged. “I’m likely never going to see again so I’ll do what I have to do.”
The realization popped my anger like a bubble. I’d never see again. I took in a gust of air as what I was breathing before suddenly felt thin.
I’m never going to see again.
Leaning over, I dragged in more air, intent on steadying myself. I could accept this. Life is crap. Blindness was yet another bad turn in my life of crap turn after ever worse turns.
“You going to be able to do this? ’Cause I need you as top notch as you can get without vision. Have you discerned where we are in the city yet?”
I shook my head. “Midtown? East of the church?”
“Um no... try downtown. Can’t you smell the water?”
I took a giant inhale, dragging the refuse and stagnant air into my lungs. The tang of the water registered in the back. “Yes, I can.” I stood, a little more solid on the ground.
“If things go sideways use my phone and call Bishop.”
The name of the Reaper commander made me flinch. A man who carried doom and death around him like a mantle. “Fine.”
We entered the building through an ominously well maintained side door that didn’t so much as squeak when we slipped inside. I glued myself to the back of Harley as he became my eyes.
“Stairs,” he said, the word booming through my mind. I almost shushed him but then remembered his voice could only be heard in my head. I felt the snicker he coughed down through the lines of his body. He’d pay for that one later...if we got a later.
Harley made quick work of the stairs and I stopped him when we reached the landing. “I hear voices.”
“How many?”
“Three, or four?”
“Well, is it three or four? One extra guy can mean the difference between life and death.”
“I can’t tell. One slurs so I can pick him out. One of them has a strange accent. The other one...no, it’s two. There are two of them.”
“Can you hear what they are saying?”
I strained my ears, willing my erratic heartbeat to calm and be quiet. “One of them, who I assume is in charge, is angry about something. Something going wrong.”
Harley flexed his shoulders and settled as I held onto his upper arm like a lifeboat. “What are you going to do?”
A deathly silence filled the air until he answered me. “My job.”
Three strangled cries came from the other room followed by three distinct thumps of fully grown men hitting the ground.
“Did you kill them?”
“No. I harvested their souls. They are alive but they will remain unconscious until they are tried. And from what I can see they deserved to hang.”
There was a tightness, a formality to his tone I hadn’t noticed before. “Are you alright?”
“Fine. These aren’t good men. Let’s leave it at that.”
I swallowed the joke I would have made to lighten the mood just as the door at the end of the landing opened, and smashed against the wall.
A new voice, chilly and unkind reached my ears. “Ah, I have company. Of course.”
I froze, gripping Harley as hard as possible. “Do you see it?”
“See what?”
“The light. That man has a glow. I can’t see anything but a sort of outline of light around him. What does that mean?”
Before he could answer a metallic taste coated my mouth and I got one last look at the glowing man before my knees hit the floor and darkness claimed me for the second time in one night.
3
“Char, you have to wake up. Wake up, please.”
An overwhelming sense of anxiety accompanied Harley’s pleading in my mind. He believed himself responsible for the loss of my eyesight and for our current situation. Wait, what current situation?
I opened my eyes, but like before, there was only darkness awaiting me. I tasted blood in my mouth, a scrape along the side of my tongue where I’d bitten in as I fell earlier. My knees throbbed in time with my heartbeat and my hands were covered in scratches and scrapes from the rugged concrete I’d landed on. The cold stone under my butt chilled my bones. It would seem our fortunes had not improved.
“You couldn’t have caught me?” I grumbled.
“Oh good, you’re awake.”
His nonchalance belied the relief I could feel wafting from him. “You do realize you can play the I don’t care card all you want, but now I can tell when you are lying.” As if a great vacuum sucked up all his emotional output, dragging it back into him, his responses were gone, just like that.
“My apologies. I didn’t realize my mental shields were so weak.”
“Or maybe this blindness is making mine stronger.”
A click of dress shoes cut through our conversation until the man with the light stood in front of me. “Who are you?” I asked.
“I could ask the same of you, Investigator.”
Even though I was currently tied up, held captive, blind, and soon to be disabled, it felt good to have someone call me that at least once in my life. Bad guy or not.
“My name is Detective Charity Walker and I am an Officer of the Church. You have no right to keep me and my partner here.”
The man shifted and crouched before Harley. “Your partner, huh?”
I was obviously missing something very important here. “What’s going on?” I pushed the thought toward Harley. The silence began to grate on me as much as the rope binding my hands. Finally, the man stood and headed across the room and Harley answered me. “How much do you know about reapers?”
“What I read in my manual.”
“Did you read about the differences between punished reapers and born reapers?”
I swallowed already starting to get where he was taking this. “That man you see is a born reaper.”
“Is there a way to tell the born from regular people?”
“Another re
aper could. Apparently you can, but regular humans, no. They appear the same in every way save the lack of extra souls.”
Footsteps scuffed across the stone toward us again and the man grabbed me by the armpits, hauling me to my feet. Under normal circumstances, I might have lashed out, but Harley twisted at my feet, his coat and body shuffling against the floor and my legs in his resistance. He distracted me enough that the man twisted my hands back to secure my wrists together with one large palm.
Harley’s voice cut through my mind. “Tell him I said to stop.”
“He says stop.”
With a jerk the stranger yanked me to him, roping his arm around my waist. His breath fanned my neck and I flinched away. “What else does he say?”
Harley answered through me. “He says, get your hands off her or I’ll rip your throat out and feed it to the hounds in hell.”
Our captor chuckled against my ear and whispered so only I could hear him. “You can call me Henry, by the way. Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are? I could use someone like you on my team.”
I swallowed, trying to remain calm as his hand flattened across the width of my abdomen. Feeling it was bad. If I’d had to watch it too I might have retched.
“So what am I to do with you?”
“I suppose letting me go wouldn’t be an option?”
He chuckled. “You have a smart mouth. I don’t like that in a woman.”
All at once, anger replaced my fear of him. I could see him. I might not be able to see anything else, but I could see him.
“Don’t,” Harley warned. I didn’t listen. Instead I slammed my head back into the creep’s face and was rewarded with a sickening crunch for my efforts. He released me instantly.
“You b—.” His words were muffled and I hoped I’d broken something.
“Beautiful human being? I know. I know.”
I squared off with him, hoping I could at least incapacitate him. Harley’s voice crashed into me, my ears ringing at the onslaught. “Stop. Tell him I know what he wants.”
Not Just Voodoo Page 29
