Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (16 page)

I told Batten quietly, “I don't trust you for a second not to hurt Harry. That's enough of a reason to dislike you.”

“Didn't touch a hair on his head,” he assured me, his voice still gruffly intimate in the front seat. “Could have. He gave me plenty of opportunity.”

My breath caught in my throat. I wasn't remotely convinced by Gary Chapel's new show of focus on his Blackberry, so I lowered my voice. “You snuck into Harry's room?”

“Invited,” he replied.

“Big veep hunter accepted an invitation down into an immortal's private lair? Aren't you brave.” I shifted to get more comfortable.

There was a heartbeat of quiet, during which I figured he was searching for a non-jerky thing to say. Finally, he offered: “It has a real theatrical flair for decorating.”

I felt my lips tug up reluctantly. “His nod to Poe and Wilde.”

“Hence the two-faced portrait of perfect Harry and rotten Harry above the fake fireplace? The bust of Pallas above the door? The
stuffed raven?” When I nodded he mirrored it. “I dig the bumper stickers inside the lid of its coffin, especially: What happens in the casket stays in the casket.”

“You weren't in there when Harry was resting, though. Right?”

“We took turns every afternoon, watching it.”

“Watching.” My head was starting to throb. Since I couldn't go back in time and make sure they didn't do it, I could only make sure it didn't happen again. “You do know that ‘watching’ isn't a literal requirement? You can watch him just fine from upstairs. It's mostly just making sure critters don't get at him. Or hunters.”

A slow smile began to spread over his lips. I didn't get the joke. He shook his head with a surprised chuckle. “Harry said flat-out it was our job to sit in the chair by the casket, like bodyguards. ‘Sentinels’ was his word.”

I was about to scoff but then thought it sounded like classic Harry manipulation. What else had he done to amuse himself in my absence?

“So you sat there.”

“I sat there.”

“For hours. Literally watching him.”

“Figured if I didn't do a good job, you'd get pissy.”

“Since when do you care how I feel?” He didn't answer. “You weren't tempted to drive a stake between his ribs?” No reply. “You just sat there.”

“I drank beer and played its video games. Old school Mario.”

I tried to get a mental picture of Batten sitting in Harry's black leather video game chair, not ten feet from an immortal lying prone and vulnerable in his casket, and Batten just…being there. If body snatchers hadn't replaced the real Mark with an alien duplicate, I had no other explanation.

“I don't know what to say,” I told him, meaning it. I wasn't used to feeling gratitude toward the hunter. I glanced in the makeup mirror. Chapel was still pretending not to listen to us. “Thank you, Mark.”

“You're welcome, Marnie,” he said easily.

“Now if only we could stop you calling him an it.”

“Never gonna happen.”

We drove on in silence, Batten pushing the car with his usual heavy-footed management but taking the corners with far more prudence than I'd witnessed him use in the past. The bridge at Lambert's Crossing was a death trap. Only wide enough for one-way traffic, in the best of times it was tricky to stop on the downward curve or take turns when the road before and following it was glittery with black ice. When we whipped past Askant Mill on Catawampus Creek, the traffic thinned considerably and the incline of the road made the car struggle between gears. Batten gunned it through Ten Springs while I stared at the dashboard, avoiding the bright lights outside the Ten Springs Motor Inn. A flash of flapping yellow in my peripheral told me the police tape was still up around Room 4. Batten's eyes slid sideways past me, and his jaw did that clenchy thing before his gaze returned grimly to the road.

Close to an hour later we were slowing to round the curve at Shaw's Fist, a mountain lake so small it looked like the Green Man had hocked a loogie. The lake was ringed by a huddling cluster of eighteen summer cottages, most of which were closed up until spring. Since I bought the cabin from my sister Carrie in October, I hadn't had a chance to meet the couple of neighbors who had winterized their cabins to live there year-round. I wasn't sure I needed to. Maybe my life would be a whole lot easier if it didn't have any people in it. Maybe Harry and I should just get forty-five cats and call it a day.

My phone went off in the trunk, muffled. I had finally changed it from Harry's idea of a joke; it now played the Inspector Gadget theme song.

Agent Chapel's Blackberry summoned almost simultaneously. I checked the state of my lip gloss in the make-up mirror so I could see him glance at the text display. His mouth fell open ever so slightly and his professional calm faltered. Seconds later, Batten's went off. He slipped it off his waistband and glanced down at it, then hurriedly shoved it in his pocket. The car lurched forward down the last few miles of road, plunging off the paved section and onto snow-packed grit and gravel.

Uncertainty stole my words. Instead of asking, I ate at the inside of my cheeks. (“You and me. We finish it. Together.”) Probably they had to drop me off and rush to some far-off emergency. Right?

Through whipping snow and the bare trees thrashing in the wind and sprawling branches of cedar and pine, red and blue spinning lights flared off the cabin's frosted windows. (“You had what's mine. Gonna have what's yours.”) My throat constricted. The first car I saw, a Ford Explorer parked asked in the middle of the road with one door cranked open to the snow, said SHERIFF across the side in big black lettering.

THIRTEEN

I tumbled from the car in a mad panic while it was still in motion. Stumbled, skinned my knees on the icy gravel but launched back to full-on sprint feeling no pain at all. There were too many men in my way—deputies, firemen, EMS, the siren of my brain screamed—too many obstacles to dodge. Plunging through them, their orders ignored, I pelted past the fire truck toward the porch, a quarterback with the barest of padding, clutching one arm across my bandages. Batten's bellowed command sounded miles away. My boots slid on the snow, plunging me to the ground again. I rolled once and vaulted to my feet.

I couldn't breathe. The world spun and I rocketed through it. A deputy with a roll of that damn yellow tape. Someone shouting about a civilian. I ducked a swinging arm, propelled into an EMS guy, put my shoulder in him, bashing him into the wall. Steel clattered, rubber tubing snake-coiled like spilled entrails, packs of gauze fluttered madly to the floor. The hallway swam. I threw my gloved hands and caught a wall to slide-run along it while my vision slid sideways. There was a gurney half-in half-out of my office. My voice sounded impossibly small, as I called out Harry's name over and over.

Another medic knelt in front of my kitchen table. A strange man sat there before him, a dark-haired doppelganger of Richard Belzer whose face didn't compute. Lingering in the threshold of the pantry, Harry stood in morning dress: dove grey flannel trousers, white shirt and a red apron, grey felt spats over his patent Oxfords. His ankles were crossed casually and his face was calm, but one of his suspenders had fallen off his shoulder and he didn't seem to notice. His hair stuck up at the front. I took two running steps towards him and he seized me by the biceps, holding me at arm's length.

Choked with relief, no one else mattering, I reached out to touch him, to check him: face, chest, shoulders, intact, uninjured. I patted him until he shook me.

“Stop,” he said. “Settle down. You're going to injure yourself.”

“You're alive! What happened? What…who?” I couldn't see everything in the kitchen at once or get my breath. Harry took my elbow and wheeled me into the bedroom like you'd take aside a misbehaving child, smiling an apology to the injured stranger at my kitchen table as he shut the bedroom door.

“Do sit. Let me see your bandages.”

“Harry, please.” I sat obediently. “You're okay, right?”

“I smell blood. You've gone and buggered something up. What have you done, here?” He knelt before the bed, his eyes shuttered. “May I have my face back? I would appreciate it if you would please stop pawing me.”

The collective emotions in the house from so many people on alert made my throat squeeze, and my usually limp empathic powers surged. My stomach did a sluggish twist like an old-fashioned wringer washer.

“Someone's hurt.” My brain reported Chapel's hurt, but that didn't make sense, was obviously wrong, so I ignored it.

“Deputy Dunnachie was bitten by a necrophile beetle, but he'll be off to the hospital directly for antivenom and a round of IV-antibiotics.”

Harry read my wordless confusion loud and clear, but was in no hurry to explain. He yanked at the heels of my boots.

“But necro-beetles only show up for dead things,” I said, stupidly. “You weren't at rest with the local cops here, right?”

“You trod snow and slush into my kitchen,” he informed me coolly. “This rug shall need washing, as well.” My socks came off next, and my toes curled from the chill touch of his fingers. “Clearly I should not have let Agent Batten pack your clothing. These boots are wholly unsuitable to the weather. They are dress boots, not meant for—”

“Holy rolling shitballs, Batface, just spill it!” I exploded.

His gaze crept up to mine. Under his curved and thrice-pierced brow, I watched the unhurried, unnerving liquid-mercury shift as
his irises bled to platinum around pinprick black pupils. I was more than a little surprised to find this display was still capable of silencing me after all these years. I squelched a shudder.

“Okay, revenant, I'm suitably intimidated.” I hurried him on with hand motions. “Come on.”

“When you are calm,” he promised.

“I am calm, see?” I said, breathing deliberately slow to show him. Funny thing, it convinced me too. I wasn't sure whether it was his solid presence, or the hushed familiarity of my bedroom, or the measured breathing, but it was better. My hammering heart slowed, the room stopped buzzing, sounds started to filter back in as adrenalin fled. I realized that under the collective murmur of male voices and the scuffle-thud of big boots on my weathered linoleum floors, something was playing on the CD player on the kitchen counter. A real big band. Someone crooning, the song I knew but the smooth voice one I didn't recognize.

“I'm better. What beetle? What happened? You're sure you're not hurt?”

“One question at a time please,” he sang. “Now, are you going to vomit?”

I blinked, not understanding. “Why would I…” Then I thought about it, shaking badly, my gut in knots. Now that he mentioned it, I might just. Swallowing hard, I slowed my breathing further through pursed lips, nice and deep. “I don't think so. But answers would help.”

“When you are truly calm,” he repeated tolerantly. “And I have made perfectly sure that you've not cocked up your stitches. The abdomen is fine. Let me check your lower back. Something is bleeding.”

“Probably it's just old blood on the bandage.”

“Please.” He sounded offended. “One smells nothing like the other.” When he finished his inspection, he nodded once and shuffled two knee-steps to Carrie's old hand-me-down cedar dresser to rummage. He fished out my softest angora socks and came back.

“It is just weeping, it should stop. The music is Michael Bublé doing ‘I've Got You Under My Skin’. What do you think?” He went to grab my ankle.

“I think I can put on my own damn socks.”

He laid them across my lap. “By all means.”

I drew my knee up and bent over. The staples in my stomach yanked and I let out a hiss. I wasn't the only one in pain; in the kitchen, someone (I assumed it was Dunnachie) groaned loudly and then threw up, hopefully in the sink. Harry started to hum along with the song, tapping his fingers on his knee, watching my progress with an astute lift of eyebrows.

“Michael Bublé, hunh? He's good.” I tried again and failed. “Uh, can you gimme a hand?”

“How inconsiderate of me not to have offered, my darling.” He placed one of my feet on his bent knee and worked the sock on. “You owe Agent Chapel an apology; you have cut him to the quick.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Harry opened his mouth and then shut it again like a trap. Then he said, “Only, your ridiculous banshee hollering frightened him. He is one who is not accustomed to being so badly startled out of his emotional restraint. He must be growing attached to you.”

My companion allowed himself a private self-satisfied smile and I wondered what the hell it meant.

“I didn't mean to be overdramatic,” I said. “I thought you were dust.”

“If you'd kept a calm head and thought about it, you would have felt me in here, safe and sound and entertained by all the action.”

Entertained? “Well, I'm glad my shooting, my stalker and my stab wounds are as much fun for you as they've been for me, Lord Dreppenstedt. I dig when we can share stuff, ya know?”

“Oh, MJ, I am hardly the heartless cad you take me for.” His chuckle turned into a frown that matched mine. “You can feel that, my love? That I am teasing you?”

I shook my head. “I can't feel anything right now. Or, it's more like I can feel a jumble of everything, but no one stronger than another. I'm not sure there's anything I'm not feeling, but no, I can't focus on you. Guess I'm too wired.”

“Wired or not, you should still be able to filter them out and focus on me,” he said sternly. “We are inexorably linked by our Bond. Beloved, I have my hands on your bare skin.” He demonstrated
by moving his hand to my cheek, cupping my chin and stroking one thumb along my jaw to the length of my throat. If he could have avoided stroking atop my jugular, he would have, but his hand moved without his permission and he was forced to swallow hard. “I can feel your distress. Can you not sense what I am feeling?”

“No. But I think it's normal for me to be a bit scrambled, Harry. We wouldn't know, because last time I was this traumatized you were in Portland and I was in Buffalo.” He flinched, and I hurried to explain. “What I mean is, we couldn't have experienced this kind of disconnect due to stress before. We're just noticing it now because we're together.”