Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  The daylight poured into the car, making her skin prickle. She kept eyeing the backs of her hands as they clutched the steering wheel, looking for quick-blooming melanomas. She’d seen more than a few vampires die of sunlight poisoning— not a pretty sight. Their skin would quickly become covered in blisters that swelled and swelled until they finally ruptured, and then they simply withered away, like earthworms on a hot sidewalk. It only took a couple of minutes—three, tops—for a dead boy to bust n’ bake. And if they were particularly old—say, over a hundred or so—they’d spontaneously combust.

  The clipping she’d received had identified Shirley Thorne as being admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital, the same hospital where Denise had been born. Sonja parked in the deck attached to the hospital and then made her way to the information desk. An older nun wearing bifocals looked up from a computer monitor as she approached.

  “Can I be of some assistance, young lady?” she asked politely, yet firmly, eyeing Sonja’s leather jacket.

  “I’m looking for a relative who was admitted here. Her name’s Shirley Thorne?”

  The nun turned to consult her computer terminal. She clucked her tongue and shook her head. “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid Mrs. Thorne is no longer with us.”

  “You mean she’s been released?”

  “No, I’m afraid she passed away yesterday afternoon,” the receptionist replied. “There’s a notation that she was claimed by the Bester-Williamson Funeral Home.” She pursed her lips and offered Sonja a sympathetic smile. “I’m dreadfully sorry. Was she someone close to you?”

  Sonja shook her head. “No,” she muttered. “I barely knew her.”

  Back in the car, Sonja called the funeral home on her cell phone and was told that the late Mrs. Thorne’s memorial was scheduled for the very next day and that the graveside service was to be held at Rolling Lawn Cemetery. Sonja didn’t have to ask its location as it was the same graveyard that housed Claude Hagerty, as well as Chaz.

  Once she got off the phone with the funeral home, she drove the rental car out to a crowded suburban shopping mall and crawled inside the trunk via the rear seat access. It was dark and stiflingly warm, and smelled of gasoline from the fuel tank, but she didn’t care. She curled up in the fetal position surrendered herself to what passed for sleep.

  She was fairly sure whatever went on inside her head when she was unconscious did not qualify as dreaming. Often she found herself travelling haphazardly through the dreams and nightmares of strangers, like an insomniac flipping through TV channels. She was uncertain whether she sought out the dreamers, or if they were attracted to her, but in any case she had yet to walk into a pleasant one.

  This time she found herself in a dreamscape made of dripping moss and rotten lace. A woman dressed in a white bridal gown sat on a canopy bed with satin draperies coated with mildew, nervously adjusting her dress. As Sonja drew closer, the bride looked up, like a startled fawn, her face obscured by the heavy veil. When she spoke, her voice was that of a five-year-old girl.

  He made me dirty.

  Sonja looked down at the woman’s lap, expecting to see a bouquet of flowers. Instead, she saw the woman’s hands clawing at her crotch with hideous witch’s fingers. The material of the gown was torn away, exposing withered thighs and her bloodied, wrinkled sex.

  He made me dirty.

  When she awoke, the car was in motion. She pressed her ear to the dividing wall that separated the back seat from the trunk and heard the rhythmic thump of hip-hop, mixed with male laughter. She concentrated harder, tuning out the intrusive music and background noise, focusing on their conversation.

  “The Chopper will pay five, six bills for this bitch.”

  “What about the Red? He ships cars over to the Russian black market.”

  “He only takes Japanese and Euro shit. This thing’s American.”

  “Fuck! There’s no point in lettin’ the Chopper get everything. Maybe there’s something in the trunk we can fence, huh?”

  The car slid off the road onto gravel, causing Sonja to bounce around for a few more minutes more until everything came to a stop. The car doors slammed , and she heard two pairs of shoes crunch on the gravel.

  “Think there’s anything back there?”

  “Who knows? Could be just a spare tire and some jumper cables, or maybe some bitch left her shopping bags from Nordstrom’s in there?”

  There was a scraping sound as one of the car thieves worked at the lock with a screwdriver. Probably the same one he’d used to force the door, open the ignition cowl, and start the car. Now that she thought about it, she was pretty damn hungry. She hadn’t eaten in over forty-eight hours, and it was making her irritable. The lock gave way with a loud pop, and the trunk swung open.

  They were young, and their surprise and fear made them seem even younger. They were suburban white boys with bad haircuts, dressed in clothes four sizes too big for them, wearing their hats sideways. One of them had a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants.

  She grabbed the one with the weapon first, taking him to the ground hard enough to break his back. His scream was high and pure as she tore into his throat. The other one companion shouted and drove a six-inch screwdriver into her back, sliding between her ribs and puncturing a lung, forcing her to look up from her feeding. She hissed at him like an angry cat, displaying her fangs. The kid let go of the handle of the screwdriver, which was still stuck in her back, and turned to flee, but she pouched on him like a panther taking down a deer, snapping his neck in less than a second.

  She stood up and groped for the handle of the screwdriver jutting from her back, yanking it free with a grimace. She could feel her left lung deflating like a punctured party balloon, but it was nothing that a little blood wouldn’t fix. She returned to the first youth, draining him completely dry, then took as much as she could stomach from the second. She then dragged their emptied bodies into a nearby ditch. How thoughtful of them to pick a nice, secluded spot, in the middle of an abandoned construction site, for their own disposal.

  The ignition completely jacked, so she had to hot-wire the car to get to start. The rental company would not be pleased when ‘Sophia Cyan’ turned it back in. Now that the sun was down , and she was up, she decided to cruise the old hometown, to see if anything else might kick a memory out of what was left of Denise Thorne. It worried Sonja, at times that she no longer felt her previous self’s pain like she used to.

  Denise had once been a larger part of her personality, but over the last decade or so her voice had grown gradually weaker, drowned out by the increasingly strident Other. Maybe a visual cue would spark an emotion that went with the dry and flavorless memories in her head. Because without those flashes of sentiment, it was as meaningful as watching someone else’s old home movies.

  Suddenly, before she knew it, the gates were in the headlights of the car, throwing up striated shadows. The twelve-foot brick walls that screened the estate from the road were overgrown with creeping ivy and covered with graffiti, and there was a heavy chain coiled around the gate like a chrome python, secured by a padlock the size of a baby’s head. A metal sign read: “No Trespassing. Violators Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of the Law.’

  She blinked and looked around, uncertain how she’d gotten there. Had she deliberately driven in this direction, or was something else besides her subconscious involved? She killed the engine and slid out from behind the wheel of the car.

  She hefted the lock, judging its weight, and then yanked it open as it was made of tin foil, the chain unspooling at her feet. With a single push of her hand, the gates of the Wheele Estate swung inward with a rusty squeal.

  She walked up the overgrown driveway in the direction of where the mansion once stood. Outside of the graffiti on the walls, she was surprised that there were no other signs of vandalism or squatters. Although the abandoned five-acre estate was perfect for suburban youth to practice drinking, drugs and sex, it was completely deserted. As she neared the charred
remains of the Wheele mansion, she soon realized why no one was using it as a clandestine party central.

  The place was haunted Big time.

  Even though the place had burned to the ground years ago, she could still smell the stink of smoke. There wasn’t a lot left of the house— she’d made sure of that when she set it on fire after killing everyone inside it. She also unintentionally killed a lot of people in the surrounding area. It wasn’t her fault—it was the Wheele bitch who’d set the ball rolling by kidnapping her and keeping her locked up in that insane asylum. Yes, Wheele was the one who started it, but she had been the one to finish it, by damn. She told herself that the psychic shock wave she’d released that night only affected those with true darkness in their souls, ones already on their way to madness and murder. At least, that’s what she desperately needed to believe.

  There was a light moving amongst the ruins. It was a cold, unnatural luminescence, glowing greenish-white against the darkness. At first it was formless glob of pulsating light hovering amidst the collapsed timbers and fallen masonry of the destroyed house like a will-o’-the-wisp. Then it began to change, taking on the shape and substance of something that had once been a woman.

  The apparition had no eyes, no ears, and no tongue, its skin hanging from phantom bones like an empty sack. Although it possessed arms and an upper torso, its legs ended in glowing tatters at the knees. Even though the ghost had no eyes in its sockets, Sonja knew it could see her—and recognized her.

  “Hello, Catherine. It’s been a long time, girlfriend.”

  The specter of Catherine Wheele, televangelist and faith healer, raised its glowing arms and howled like a damned soul. Which was exactly what she was.

  “Can the spook routine, sister. It might work on teenagers looking for a place to screw and bums trying to find a place to take a dump, but it doesn’t scare me.”

  The ghost shrieked like an owl with its tail caught in a blender and swooped towards her, fingers crooked into claws.

  Sonja held up her right hand and a burst of electric-blue light flew from her palm, catching the ghost in the midsection. What had once been Catherine Wheele rolled up like a window shade, reverting to a pulsating ball of light.

  “You’re as stupid dead as you were when you were alive,” Sonja sighed. “And just because you’re dead doesn’t mean I can’t still kick your butt, lady.”

  Catherine Wheele grudgingly reassembled herself from the ball of ectoplasm, scowling at Sonja from across the Divide. Smaller, feebler lights began to appear as well, floating through the night air like fireflies. One of the ghostly balls unraveled itself, revealing itself to be what was left of Dr. Wexler, the corrupt psychiatrist who first steered Shirley Thorne into Catherine Wheele’s clutches, then agreed to keep Sonja locked up in his sanitarium. Sonja was glad to see he was being forced to spend his afterlife in the company of his former lover and blackmailer. The other, lesser lights took were no doubt the Wheelers, Catherine’s private cadre of religious fanatics, hired muscle, and sex-slaves.

  “It’s nice to see you’re not lonely,” she smirked, all the while carefully searching the wanly glowing collection of ghosts for one face in particular. She heaved a small sigh of relief when she did not see whom she was looking for and turned to go.

  As Sonja sauntered back to the car, the ghost of Catherine Wheele threw her mouth open so wide it struck her phantom breastbone, and issued an agonized shriek that suggested she better watch her ass come Halloween.

  Rolling Lawn Cemetery unlocked its gates at seven in the morning, by which time Sonja had been inside the grounds for a couple of hours, scouting out a suitable tomb to use as a crash pad. But before she turned in for the day, she had a couple of visits to make.

  She went to Chaz’s grave first.

  She wasn’t sorry she killed him. She might have felt a touch melancholy, but she never regretted it. Chaz was a dyed-in-the-wool bastard who had betrayed her for a suitcase full of money. Not that it did him any good in the end. Instead of running off to South America, like he’d always dreamed of, the idiot instead hung around town, frittering his fortune away on hard drugs and rough boys. It was like he was just killing time, waiting for her to escape and hunt him down.

  Much like how he was waiting for her perched atop his gravestone. The ghost was composed of a grayish purple fog, his eyes empty smudges and his nose no more than the hint of shadow. If she hadn’t known him so well in life, she would not have been able to identify him at all. He was still smoking, though. He remembered enough about his former life to cling to its habits, at least.

  “Hello, Chaz. You’re looking well,” she said with a humorless laugh. “Judd’s dead. But I guess you already know that, though.’

  She expected some sign of malevolent glee on the specter’s part, but instead he gestured dismissively with one hand, leaving trails of ectoplasm in its wake. He proved as ambivalent in death as he had in life.

  “Why haven’t you moved on?” She asked. “What holds you to this plane? Is it me?”

  Something flickered in the smudges that were once Chaz’s eyes. As Sonja looked at the tattered shadow, memories rose inside her. Memories of when they had been friends, of times when they had been lovers. She closed her eyes to ease their stinging, but she still couldn’t find it in herself to feel sorry for killing him.

  When she opened her eyes again, Chaz was gone.

  Her second stop was the grave of Claude Hagerty. The ghost of the orderly was nowhere to be found. For that, she was thankful. His death had been an unpleasant one, and often such traumas keep the dead tethered to the mortal plane for decades after their deaths. But it seemed Claude Hagerty had managed to slip his mortal bonds and move on to whatever it is that awaits humans when they die.

  The same could not be said for all of Rolling Lawn’s internees, whose after-selves flickered amidst the tombstones and vaults like fireflies, for those able to see such things.

  The sun would be rising soon. She went to the tomb she’d chosen as her crash space. The memorial sconces were empty , and cobwebs hung from the ceiling in delicate tatters, assuring her that she would not be stumbled upon by a grieving family member come to pay their respects. She curled up in the darkest corner, setting her cell phone alarm for four o’clock in the afternoon.

  As she drifted off into what passed for sleep amongst her kind, she realized for the first time that she had not thought about either Palmer or Lethe all night. She told herself that meant that they were okay.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Palmer couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a sober breath, shaved, or changed his clothes. He had been sitting at the kitchen table in nothing but a pair of khaki shorts for several days, but he wasn’t sure exactly how many.

  He staggered over to the calendar hanging next to the stove and squinted at it. He’d gotten it from a Pharmacia in Medina. The calendar showed a handsomely muscled Aztec warrior, garbed in brilliantly colored feathers and a skimpy loincloth, shooting a bow at the coming twilight while at his sandaled feet lay sprawled a voluptuous maiden, wrapped in a diaphanous robe. Palmer was unfamiliar with the myth the picture was supposed to represent. Was the warrior defending the fallen priestess, or was he the one responsible for her death? And what the hell was he shooting at, anyway? Thinking about the picture on the calendar made his head hurt, so he wobbled back to the kitchen table and sat down again with an explosive sigh. It took him a moment before he realized he’d forgotten to count how many days it’d been since Lethe disappeared into the cocoon and his life went into the crapper.

  He also wasn’t sure how long it had been since Sonja had left. He was far too drunk to cast his mind for her, but he doubted he would be able to reach her, even if he was sober. Besides, the possibility of accidentally locking horns with the Other again, no matter how distant, was enough to keep him from attempting such a connection. Palmer’s gaze dropped onto the black mask, still sitting atop a pile of unpaid bills and unfiled invoices. The empty
eyes stared up at him, the lips parted as if in anticipation of a kiss—or a bite. His head continued to throb, so he rested it on the table.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was dark.

  He grunted and jerked upright in his chair, knocking the tequila bottle onto the floor. It shattered, spraying his bare feet and legs with what little liquor remained inside it. The color of the tequila made him think of Lethe’s eyes—and the cocoon.

  He lurched to his feet and turned toward the doors that lead out onto the patio. He always checked the cocoon at night. Once the sun went down the weird glow that suffused the cocoon grew more intense, like a piece of amber held in front of a flashlight beam. Lethe—or whatever Lethe was becoming—seemed to be far more active at night, and sometimes he could see movement inside the chrysalis. It soothed him, somewhat, to know that Lethe was still alive somewhere inside that thing, even though he could no longer read her mind.

  Palmer opened the door and stepped out onto the patio, expecting to be greeted by the mellow glow from the cocoon. But instead, all he found was darkness. He stepped forward hesitantly, searching for Fido’s bulky figure in the shadows, but there was no sign of the seraph. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the night, he glimpsed something lying on the bricks of the patio. At first it looked like a large, deflated balloon, like the kind used by the weather service. It lay there, limp and forlorn, like an octopus cast up after a storm. As he moved closer, he could make out a faint, yellowish fluorescence radiating from it. He knelt and poked at the remains of the cocoon, which felt like a cross between a freshly shed snakeskin and a wet blanket.