Authors: A.J. Aalto
And then I saw it, the
coup de grâce
. “Oooh,” I murmured appreciatively, pointing. “What is
that
?”
Both men turned their heads to the vehicle I was pointing at; lurking in the shadows like the Hulk in a bad mood, olive drab and
chrome, it looked like it should only be owned by a badass, and, boy, did I want to be that badass. Harry did a double take at me; thanks to our Bond, I picked up a wave of dismayed horror… and just a hint of admiration.
He whispered, “Monstrous.”
“No, it's a lovely choice,” Ted assured Harry, who didn't hide his uncertainty. “Hummer H1, bulletproofed by Texas Armoring. It's a few years old and previously owned by a certain musician I'm not at liberty to name. Immaculate, only driven twice.” He proceeded to do his sales pitch, not rushed and pushy like the used car guys I'd been secretly courting during Harry's holiday, but suave and assured of a sale. At two hundred thousand, it was much more reasonable, or less insane, although nowhere near the fifteen thousand I'd had in mind for a half-used Buick.
In the end, I got an approving nod from my revenant; it mollified Harry that I had at least chosen the luxury aftermarket upgrade package. I'd high-five myself in the mirror later. The numbers now marching across the inside of my thrifty little skull were interrupted by the trilling of my cell phone, and I stepped into the shadows by the Porsches to take the call.
“Baranuik, forensic psychometry — you rope ’em, we Grope ’em.” My greeting was met by silence; I assumed it was one of my bosses trying to figure out how best to chide me. I strained to listen, and was promptly sorry I did. What came over the line was a barely audible gurgle that rattled all the little nerves in my chest and ballooned my heart with anxiety.
“Hello?” I said, ignoring Harry's inquisitive glance. “Who is this?”
A slightly familiar voice, tinged with an unfamiliar accent. “Mêle-toi de tes affai—
Gluck. Gurk!”
“Sir? You're breaking up. Can you say again?” I dug out my Moleskine and No. 2 and scribbled phonetically what I heard, including the choking noises. “Is that French? Sir, I don't speak French.”
Was there an app for that? I quickly thumbed through the options and found a cheap translator that came with helpful emoticons.
“
Graaaaaaw
—ne monte pas sur mon ananas!”
“Relax dude,” I appeased. “I'm not gonna punt your banana, or whatever the hell you just said.”
He insisted, “Ne monte par sur mon ananas!
Gak!
” After a second, the translator reported stormily:
Do not mount my pineapple
. I scowled at it.
“Mêle-toi de ton Maquereau,” he said.
The translator's emoticon changed to a bright smile with toothy grin and informed me:
Mind your own mackerel
.
“I don't…” I shook the phone as though it were a misbehaving Magic 8 Ball. “I don't like fish. What are you—”
“Toute la nuit! Toute la nuit!” Again, an angry elephant gargle. “Tu baigne mon caniche!” The translator made bedroom eyes at me and reported:
All night, all night, you bathe my poodle
.
“I do not!” I squawked. I had to write pretty fast to get it all down, and by the time I was writing the last word, the person on the other end of the phone was spitting mad, gasping and coughing. The Blue Sense blasted me in the ear with the caller's rage and frustration and I had to hold the phone away from my head.
“Okay, wow. Is this about dry cleaning the squirrel suit? Send me the bill, care of the Boulder FBI field office—”
The gurgling went silent abruptly, and I hung up too. Harry was at my shoulder.
“Who might that have been, angel?”
“Some pissed-off, kinky French dude. Who do I know who speaks French, other than you?”
Malas
, my brain piped up. But the caller wasn't raspy. My pesky grey cells were only too happy to supply an impossible alternative:
Gregori.
“Doesn't matter. Wrong number. Let's just pay and get out of here.” Harry looked at me doubtfully but didn't press.
After tallying up all the accessories, taxes, and delivery costs, we left Rocky Mountain Luxury Automobiles more than a million dollars lighter. I tried not to dwell on it, but I was pretty sure I was getting very expensive hives.
The night sky had deepened and cleared to reveal an abyssal ceiling full of summer stars and cool planetary bodies. Around the parking lot in the well-trimmed hedge and wildflowers, crickets and noctivagant insects trilled in the warm air. I snuck a sideways peek at my Cold Company.
I could never get enough of watching the revenant move, his stride easy and nimble, his tread a light and effortless invasion of the preternatural through mundane space. A body that lithe could never stomp or charge; his sinuous advance was a shadow falling across the moonlit parking lot. Life, in all its forms, scattered out of his way as if sensing the void. Even the wind seemed to fall silent at his approach.
Halfway to Harry's motorcycle, I became aware of a prickly feeling between my shoulder blades, as if someone had painted a bull's-eye on my spine and was whipping darts at it. My heart gave a solid thud of warning before stuttering into a canter. In a split second I was on full-blown high alert. If a tiger had pounced out of the brush to crouch on the pavement I wouldn't have missed a beat: pumped-up, I clenched, ready to give danger a flying elbow to the forehead. More likely, I'd break my neck tripping over the curb, but at least I'd do it in an adrenalin-charged lunge.
I cut my eyes quickly from side to side, looking for the source of the threat, something which I should never attempt while walking. Harry pulled up short at the Kawasaki and I barreled face-first into his back. It was like head-butting an iceberg, and drew from me a soft
dunf
.
“Is there a reason you're heading into panic-mode, my fluttering dove?” he asked placidly, handing me my helmet.
“I feel like we're being watched.”
Harry focused on his helmet, avoiding my eyes. He made a quiet affirmative noise, but when I pressed him to explain, he made busy with a cigarette, pinching it in his lips, letting smoke stream out of his nostrils, a pale dragon of the grave. “We should get home.”
“Is something out there, Harry?”
“Don't be preposterous, ducky, there is always something out there. Safety first.” He took the helmet back from my hands, plunking it on my head.
“Human? Not-so-human?”
His eyes adopted a far-away look while he dragged deep on the cigarette, darting back and forth as though he were reading a list of all things, living and inanimate, in the immediate area. “Strap in and let us be away from this place.”
“This isn't the first time I've felt something watching me in the past two weeks, Harry,” I told him. “I thought at first it was imagination, anxiety from missing you. I always feel safe when you're near me, but it didn't take long for that safe feeling to vanish once your plane took off.”
“You should have said.” Harry's concern washed over me with his smoky exhale. For a moment, he drew up his own aura of menace to dissuade anything out there that might be measuring him.
I stepped closer to him. “That girl who died tonight. You knew her.”
Harry gave no outward indication of the sadness I felt seeping through our Bond. “I knew who and what she was. The Grand Priory of the Knightly Order of St. John is a group that broke from the Knights Templar after the Crusades, to fight the greater evil they had discovered. After a brief collapse, they reestablished in Paris in 1785 under a man who called himself a paladin, a Holy Knight of Christ, to fight the Great Adversary's minions in all their forms. And one of those forms, my darling, would be revenants. We'd heard rumors that, along with a small group of Priors, John Spicer the Bavarian vampire tracker had surfaced in the New World.”
“Guess that's a bit different than a Bavarian cream pie?”
“Quite a bit. Your Agent Batten could take lessons. Mister Spicer does not waste his time with Youngers. He takes out the heads of lines, the Masters.”
“Kill the Master, destroy his whole bloodline, all the Youngers in one fell swoop,” I said, suddenly hoping that Prince Dreppenstedt was still safe. “Why tracker, not hunter?”
“Because John Spicer does not kill revenants. He collects them. You might imagine what the other Priors think of this scandalously brazen behavior.”
“How the hell do you
collect
a revenant?”
Harry's lips pressed in an unhappy shrug. “Very carefully, one should think; Mr. Spicer battles insuperable odds, yet has never failed.”
If Christina the pink kitty had been after Malas, could her father have been far behind? Was Malas still in danger? Were there other Priors in the state? I studied Harry's face for the answer. “Dare I ask what he does with them after he collects them?”
“He delivers them to the hands of the Grand Prior, George Ansell.”
“And Georgie-boy kills the revenants?”
“Killing is too tidy a word for what the Grand Prior does to them. Mr. Ansell believes he must cleanse a revenant body of the taint of Hell,” he corrected. “John Spicer is the only man who supplies him with opportunities to do so.”
I made a low noise of disgust.
“But I tire of such dreary talk, my darling,” Harry said. “It has been far too long since I saw your smile.” He chucked my chin with his cool forefinger, and I drummed one up for him; he
tsk
ed my lame-ass attempt.
“I'll smile harder when we're not about to be annihilated,” I promised.
Harry seemed to have no intention of staying to investigate whatever was lingering unseen; he knew the law as well as I did, and risking an altercation in public was unwise. He threw one lean leg over the bike, and started up the growling engine. Out of habit, I patted the front pocket of my jeans to check for my pencil and mini Moleskine, and found something else: a tiny lump like half a hard candy. I dug in and pulled it out between two gloved fingers.
The Waterloo tooth.
But this thing was in Harry's pocket
.
How did it…?
“Come, come, bird, don't lollygag,” Harry said quietly, purposefully dragging at the front of my brain with his preternaturally-vigorous voice.
I put it back in my pocket, straddled the Kawasaki behind him, settling my helmet. Harry flicked his cigarette butt to the ground and without a second's hesitation rocketed the rumbling bike into the headlight-dotted terrain of Denver's nighttime traffic. We left US-36 West on the Ten Springs exit and he cranked an energetic version of Tom Waits’ “Telephone Call from Istanbul” through the helmet speakers. When he leaned us into the curves, I held onto his hard body as lithe muscles flexed under the scratchy tweed of his overcoat. As my body began to warm his, I felt the first anticipatory stirrings of his hunger trickle through the Bond; he'd missed me, too.
When Waits grittily advised, “never drive a car when you're dead,” Harry's laughter rinsed down between my shoulder blades to erase the bull's-eye, and just like that, everything was okay again. This time, even obscured by my helmet, my smile was brilliant.
C
HAPTER
7
MORNINGS IN MY CABIN
are always rough; this should come as no surprise when both my Cold Company and idiot brother, our undead guest, aren't even alive until after sunset each night, and Harry unfailingly plays coy with his feed, sometimes waiting until long past eleven to slake his thirst. He says anticipation is a sensory delight in itself, and should be enjoyed as long as possible before one indulges. I'm more of an immediate gratification gal. If I pour on the charm or dance with him, I can push his feed up to ten o'clock, but even in a best-case scenario, when I've got him fed and tucked into his reading chair with some Middle English poetry, I'm rarely in bed before midnight.
That being said, I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. Any time before eight A.M., no amount of birds chirping, sun shining or caffeine will perk me, and the slightest irritation is met with the threat of bleary-eyed violence. A quiet grumbler, I am not.
So when Sheriff Rob Hood drummed his meaty fingertips on my bedroom window at just before six, I thought (as I did each morning when his hands played alarm clock) that today might be the day they arrest me for his murder. I wondered what time I'd have to get up in prison, then summoned the enormous effort necessary to peel myself out of bed and shuffled across the room to part the Irish lace curtains and glare, snuffling around clogged sinuses, out across the side yard.
Hood was a natural ginger; from his nearly-invisible eyebrows to the brush of soft red across his unshaven jaw line, he was one hundred percent home-grown red-headed country boy. My curiosity went south every time I saw him, but asking would have come across
as a come-on; handsome as he might be, I had zero intention of checking out the state of his crotch for myself, so I kept my mouth shut. Me, self-restraint?
Point: Marnie
. Freckles were spattered along the bridge of Hood's blunt nose, some of which were buried beneath a pair of black department-store sunglasses this morning.
He beckoned me outside with two fingers hooking the air. I showed him just one. He scowled and mouthed, “Don't make me come get you,” through the glass and tapped his no-nonsense Timex Ironman watch.
The last time I'd ignored him, he had hoisted himself through the bedroom window and tossed me out on my ass in the dew-soaked grass. Harry hadn't even lifted an eyebrow to help me. It was easier to nod a promise to join Hood in the yard than endure another humiliating failure to fend him off.
Motion behind him caught my eye. As the young sheriff started his warm-up stretches on the lawn, I squinted past him.
My cabin is bordered on south and west sides by a dense copse of trees, through which the driveway and two snowmobile trails cut. On the north side is the lake, Shaw's Fist, and the east is bordered by a boathouse that I haven't yet blown up, a rickety log fence crumbling to ruin, and thickets of wild yellow roses that I should prune back to something less enthusiastic than their current Triffid-esque sprawl. From this window, I could stare out to the shadow beyond the roses; barely visible behind their own thicket of trees, was my neighbor's cottage. It was one of those plywood-standing-on-brick constructions that someone's granddad built for fishing trips six decades ago and had never been improved-upon. It had been vacant since we'd taken up residence the previous November, its dark windows shuttered and driveway empty. Again, I felt the sensation of being watched, and while I didn't like it much, there was a wide-awake cop on my lawn, and that seemed to cancel out more than half my worry.