Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) (6 page)

I opened my mouth to protest but Eve cut me off. “Don’t be shy, sugar. Charlie likes an audience.” He blushed deeper. “Humiliation is his thing.”

Then she smacked him. The air was static with its echo. My hand instinctively reached out but I retracted once I saw his face. His eyes glazed into an expression that I could only describe as calm ecstasy.

“Ain’t that right, baby?” Eve asked him and ruffled his hair. He smiled and gave a soft nod. She hit him again and he was in heaven.

Turned out, all of Eve’s clients had their own thing. The few I thought most interesting:

“It needs to be about ten inches longer. See? Like in this picture.”

“Put on this hat. I’ll be the boat.”

“Just take a deep breath and then we’ll try to fold it the other way.”

“Meow. Purr.” (Yes, like a cat. Repeated in accompaniment with only cat-related noises for about 45 minutes.)

No matter how many toys she pulled from the mysterious black bag—gels, handcuffs, nipple clamps, ball gags, collars, whips, harnesses, butt plugs, dildos, CDs for the black radio in the corner armoire—there seemed an unending reservoir of more. Like a clown car. She didn’t always have sex. Interestingly enough, it was rare. When she did, I took to distracting myself. I’d stare out the window, use the bathroom or try to fix the crooked bedside lamp. It just wouldn’t sit right for some reason.

Things in the hotel room got real interesting when Eve’s last client showed up. Just before 2:00 P.M., Mr. Brad Cestrum walked through the door. I have to say, Eve looked upset to see him.

Though she’d introduced me, she didn’t make up a story this time. This was a surprise given the fact that in the last six hours I’d been a voyeur, a sex worker in training, a social psychologist, and her parole officer.

He was disturbingly average. I couldn’t identify one distinguishing feature that would make him noticeable in a crowd.

Eve had her shirt undone and hair down and Mr. Cestrum wasted no time in bending her over the bed. Her skirt lay flipped up and rested on her back. From what I’d discerned from infrequent peeks this morning, this was about as average as sex got for Eve. Vanilla as it was, I still blushed when my eyes caught a glimpse of the long curve of her hip and exposed thigh.

In the sudden awkwardness of the situation, it occurred to me she might not even die in this room. She could get attacked on the street or hit by a car or something, and I would’ve had to watch all this for nothing. Who has sex all day anyway? Okay, most of this wasn’t about sex, but wasn’t she hungry? Didn’t she want a cupcake or something? I wanted food. And I wasn’t even the one getting the workout.

When I checked the clock at 2:28 P.M, my head felt swimmy. Anxiety slid over my chest like a second skin. A draft of cold air swept the room, which to a replacement agent, meant that Death, knocking the door wide, had just entered and announced itself.

I turned around to check on my charge and found Brad choking her. Her face was already a red-purple-blue color, so I had a decision to make. I tried to pull Brad off of her but she croaked, “Don’t.”

“You want him to do this to you?” I just couldn’t believe it.

She sort of nodded despite the hands on her throat, and reached out for my hand.

This is a test. To see how far you’ll go.

Every bit of training that Brinkley gave me over the years pulled itself into play. It’s important to understand that death was, by nature, precarious. Death-replacing was not the same as preventing an accident and a good agent was required to keep this in mind.

This is why I was forced to let Brad choke Eve instead of choking him to see how he liked it. The only choice I had, according to Brinkley’s rules, was to give Eve my hand and replace her when the time came, if this is what was going to kill her. But to jump in and change the situation, changed the AMP prediction. After all, I’d never been part of Eve’s life before this. And if I changed it, I changed her reading.

I had an FRBD contract saying I couldn’t do anything to change the circumstances of a replacement.

So I offered Eve my hand.

Brad reached out as if it were myself I offered. It had not been the first time today I’d had such offers. I told Brad—as I told the others—that I was here for her, not him. I slipped my hand into hers and let her squeeze the hell out of it.

But this just seemed so wrong. Being choked in a hotel room was too easy, so preventable. I’ve had to catch people falling off buildings. Wrap my arms around people as the sound of metal crunched around us in brutal car wrecks. I even had to replace a baby that would have died in childbirth while it was still inside the mother. But this?

Surely this wasn’t how Eve would die.

It just didn’t feel right. Why hadn’t my eyes changed to their weird zombie vision? Infrared, x-ray, or whatever all that sparky electric stuff that happens to me when I replaced someone—the weird shit that makes me sound much more like a freak than an unfortunate person with a neurological disorder.

I thought of Lane and Ally. They were nice and comfy out in the hall, while I was in here struggling against the burning pain in my chest. I gagged, but no air came in or out of my lungs. At least I recognized this as sympathetic damage, something my body experienced because Eve experienced it. I was certain that if I’d held a mirror to my face, I’d see every little vein in it bulge, blistered at the surface. I didn’t let go of her hand, though I wanted to clutch my own throat and try to pull free whatever was suffocating me.

The pulse in my ears drowned out their noises, the furious slap and squish of their bodies colliding, faster now and in time with the protests of the groaning bed. The pounding in my chest was so hard that either my heart was going to smash through its bone casing or my lungs wouldn’t survive this thrashing. It’d be a tossup as to what organ would survive.

I was losing consciousness. The room reduced itself to spots, the usual lack of oxygen kind, not zombie vision, as I crumpled to the floor. When my face hit the carpet, I wasn’t sure if I still held Eve’s hand or not.

Instead, I paid attention to the one physical sensation I associated most with death: the stomach tug. Every time I died this happened. There’d be a tug through my abdomen as if a string were tied around my waist and through my belly button.

I focused on the tug and the growing sense of separation, fascinated and lulled by it. The ceiling above me went in and out of focus, but there was no vortex, no black hole of death, no—

Then something happened—something bad.

When Eve climbed on top of my dying body still collapsed on the floor, I was forced to accept that something was definitely wrong with this replacement, and I was in big trouble for it. Her hair was down and in disarray. Her shirt had been left unbuttoned and the white lace of her bra peeked through either side. At least her skirt was back to where it should be.

But then she settled her weight against my chest, reached under the bed, between the mattress and box spring and pulled out a large kitchen knife—the kind Ally used to chop zucchini.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. Followed closely by, God I hope you’re wearing your underwear.

She pinned me to the floor with her knees as if I could actually go anywhere even if I tried. I barely kept my eyes open despite the desperate urge to see what the hell she was going to do.

My eyes were closed when the knife first pressed to my throat and I tried my damnedest to open them. They fluttered enough to see her crying. For a moment, her hands relaxed as if she wouldn’t do it. Then a deep voice spoke somewhere out of sight, in a tone used to issue a command or a threat.

Her resolve returned.

“I’m so sorry,” she said and broke the skin with a burning slice. “I have to.”

Before I could really freak out about what was happening, or even consider the fact that I couldn’t resurrect if decapitated, the tug through my abdomen gave a final jerk.

Then I felt nothing at all.

Chapter 5

I
was somewhere quiet and clean. Clean because of the strong smell of antiseptics and lemons. Warm hands were on me, adjusting me, molding my body against a mound of pillowy softness. Someone kept saying my name.

Brinkley stood in the doorway, a stark contrast to the interior of the simple room: one bed, one lamp, and a curtain-drawn window for the sake of my burning eyes. I’d woken up at the funeral home before, waiting for Brinkley to pick me up just like now, so why did this feel different?

“I’m cold,” I told Brinkley, feeling again the warm hands on me though he remained in the doorway, me in the bed. “I hurt
everywhere
.”

“Walk with me,” he said. Just like that we were in a cemetery as old as Nashville itself. He was forced to angle his body and squeeze between the close set of the headstones. The ancient monuments leaned toward one another confidingly as we approached.

“I worry what he’ll do to you, once he realizes what you are.”

“Who?” I asked. I scanned the headstones and the cemetery. We were alone and it was strange to see so much stationary space. There was always someone here, at Mount Olivet’s, black knee-length coats, flowers wrapped in cellophane or tissue paper. Now, there were only us, the headstones, and the trees, which stretched their bony branches down over us, protecting us. The landscape was too still, too silent. Except for
da dum da dum da dum
pulsating, where was that coming from?

Stone angels and hollowed trees bent easily in the wind, everything was so cold.
Da dum da dum da dum
. I put my hands in my pockets. Had I been wearing this jacket before? Where did this sudden press of heavy fabric come from? The wind in my hair still moved like warm hands.

Brinkley wavered as if made of water. “Do you remember him?”

“Who?” I asked. I watched horrified as his face began to melt.

He wasn’t Brinkley anymore. Not really. “Know thy enemy. Know thyself.”

“Who are you?” I asked and took a step back, but I didn’t really move. I couldn’t.

“I’m your friend,” he replied as if it was true. But he wasn’t Brinkley. Brinkley didn’t have green eyes or a wide-set, full mouth like that. Whoever this was wore Brinkley like a suit.

Still my body refused to move. “Where is Brinkley?”

Jesse. Can you hear me? Don’t you give up on us, damnit.

I turned around at the sound of my name but didn’t see anyone, only the little black bird from before perched on a tombstone in the distance.

“Listen to me.” Brinkley’s voice echoed through the cemetery but when I looked back, I didn’t see him anywhere. He’d disappeared, leaving me alone in the chilly cemetery with that bird, his voice carrying on the wind.

“Listen, listen,” the bird said. Opening and closing its beak like a crude puppet. “Listen.”

The one bird became three. Three became nine until a multitude of birds filled the cemetery. They screamed and flapped from narrow branches, cold stones, listen, cawing from the wings of poised angels, to drown out the echo of Brinkley’s voice. A horde of them like black blisters bubbled on the surface of the cemetery’s dying lawn.

“Brinkley,” I yelled, scared. “Brinkley, where are you?”

The birds melded together as a single black wall. This wall drew itself up, up even higher than the tallest oaks. It cast a shadow over the cemetery, over Nashville’s cityscape behind me, and washed out the last bit of sunlight. The skyscrapers too, with their eyes of glittering glass, watched from the distance until the shadow obscured the windowpanes with smoke.

And for just a moment I saw a face in the black mass. Like a face from a half-recalled memory, soft around the edges.

I stumbled backwards away from the dark wall of birds, but caught my ankle on something. I tripped. The sinking sensation in my guts rose and I jerked, scared to be falling.

“Brinkley!” I screamed, still hoping he’d come to my rescue. My throat vibrated for the first time, giving weight to the word. It burned like hell. There was too much light suddenly and the echoing
da dum da dum
I’d been hearing became my wailing heartbeat amplified through the monitor attached to my finger by a tiny cuff. “Brinkley?”

“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay,” Ally squeezed my hand. “We’re at the hospital.”

Eve—on my chest with the knife—right. The world shifted, coming into focus, yet Brinkley lingered. The smell of him, something like cinnamon and aftershave, tied me to the dream. “She was crying.”

I tried to sit up. Ally helped me by positioning the pillows. She spoke a mile a minute, but I was still half-lost in the cemetery—trying to remember that face I saw for just a moment, bubble up in the blackness before fading again. Did I know that face? “Wait. What?”

“Lane hid the camera inside the lamp,” she repeated. “It’s a good thing too because if he hadn’t we wouldn’t have seen her try to cut off your head.”

She gave some brief explanation about using the hotel’s wireless signal through his laptop, that these cameras were like the ones he’d installed at work,
blah, blah blah
.

“How long was I out?”