Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (51 page)

I watched his stumbling progression with reluctant concern. “Gary, if you're well enough to excuse us, I think my Cold Company and I need to have a chat.”

Chapel looked, for once, unsure. His fingers fumbled at the buttons on his pale blue shirt. Business casual for feeding someone else's companion behind their back. “Should I be apologizing right now?”

Harry cut me off mid-inhale, answering for me: “Of course not, Agent Chapel. You've done absolutely nothing wrong.”

“Nothing wro—” The insistent glare from Harry's ice-shard eyes took the words out of my mouth. “Just go please. Wait, where do you think you're going?” I stabbed a finger at Wesley as he inched to his feet. “My advice to you, little brother, is that you'd better sit the fuck down.”

“Think you should be talking to two immortals in that tone of voice?” Wesley said boldly, but when I jammed my hands on my hips he backed down, looked away.

“Oh is that what you think, Wesley? You're a badass revenant now, you can do whatever you want? Read my mind: am I scared of you?” I threw thoughts of rowan wood spikes at him and he flinched, hurt flickering in his sickly violet eyes.

When Chapel was gone, I whirled on Harry. “You snake. How long has this been going on behind my back?”

Harry pulled his legs up onto the casket lid with the rest of his body, folding them into a flexible cross. “It has not been going on behind your back, my love. You were well aware that I would be feeding while you were incapable.”

“You said you had O-negative in the freezer. That was a barefaced lie.”

“I think you'll find that Agent Chapel's blood type is in fact o-negative.” Harry made a show of licking it off his lips, slowly, his platinum eyes daring me to argue. I wanted to slap him hard, but slapping a revenant is akin to suicide by cop. “He might not be in my freezer, exactly—”

“Harry!” It came out as a pitiful wail, which wasn't my intention. The sorrow just sort of leaked out.

Harry's face went through a prompt rotation of surprise, concern and distress. “You're heart-broken by this. Why is this so?”

“Look at yourself!” I said hotly. “Did he undress you?”

Harry laughed with surprise. “No, my love. Agent Chapel is not a bender.”

I made a stab at translating, for clarity. “Gary's not gay?”

Wes laughed sharply. “The amount of times he's pictured bending you over your desk and givin’ it to you up the—”

“Wesley!” I yelped, shrinking in my clothes with embarrassment. “Need to know basis!”

Harry sucked his fangs in condemnation in Wesley's direction. “You simply must use discretion, young one, as we have discussed at length.” He cocked his head at me. “Your brother needed to learn how to feed properly from a willing partner. And Agent Chapel, for personal reasons, needed to know about the process as well.”

“Personal reasons?” I repeated.

“As I have said.”

“How many times did he need to know?” I snapped. “And why is it his ‘need to know’ extends to the state of your rippling abs?”

Harry's eyebrows crept upward as though he were channeling Agent Batten's. It furthered my irritation in a way I couldn't describe.

“Rippling…” he said in flattered wonder, running a hand over his midsection. He was pleased and he let it show. Under the flickering light of his mock-candle wall sconces, his gold court ring drew attention to the faint flush of life he'd acquired from the feed. Though his hunger roared sudden and fierce in my own veins, the call to feed him strong; he had taken a bare minimum from Chapel. “Wesley, I would speak to your sister alone now, if you will excuse us.”

Wesley frowned at the older revenant, considering. His gaze washed across Harry's face, a violet searchlight. After a moment, Wesley's spare and diminutive shoulders fell. He touched the front of his faded blue-on-grey plaid t-shirt, fingers feeling, maybe for the tell-tale dampness of a bloodstain. Then he nodded once and darted up the stairs.

Harry motioned to a tidy pile of clothing draped on the couch, the white dress shirt hung in such a way on the corner so as not to require ironing. “I merely removed my morning jacket so that it would not get spotted. And the shirt was brand new, love. It soon followed.”

“I want to know everything.”

“A bold request. I do not, in faith, know everything.”

“Don't fuck with me Harry, you know what I mean.”

He put a hand up to soothe me, nodding. “Agent Chapel has private, personal reasons, my love, for making such a request of me. I would not betray his confidence.” He shrugged, as though this was not his fault. “Understand ducky, he has never had the opportunity to pick the brains of the living dead of a…” he searched for a word and settled on: “Friendly sort.”

“It's not your brains I'm worried about. I'm tempted to take a pickaxe to them myself at the moment.”

Harry's eyes widened slightly.

“Jealousy,” he whispered, so low I couldn't imagine it was meant for me to hear. He scanned me with an intensity that was downright uncomfortable. “This is new.”

Frustrated, I blew my breath out slowly. “You're saying this was all Chapel's idea?”

He wiggled his fingers at me, and I turned to see a pack of menthols on the side table. I handed them to him. “Splendid, thank you.”

I watched him pinch a cigarette between his lips and light it. I told him, “I haven't seen any marks on him.”

“Nor should you. I'm hardly new-turned,” Harry sniffed disdainfully. He drew his legs up and refolded them lotus-style. Putting his elbows on his knees, he steepled his fingers and drew on the cigarette, making the end burn a brighter orange. He hadn't fed enough to kick-start his lungs but inhaled deeply on the drag and exhaled curls of smoke in my direction.

“Batten could have you arrested and staked for this,” I hissed, glancing over my shoulder. “He'd say you coerced Chapel, and push for a warrant.”

“Don't pitch your knickers, love. He would never do such a thing.”

“Oh yes he would.”

“And risk Chapel retaliating with news to the authorities of his fraternizing with a well-known forensic psychic consultant from Gold-Drake & Cross? They've both broken rules, love. It is the way of men to break rules when it suits their desires. Besides, do you think me so trusting?” He exhaled slowly through his nose, trailing smoke like a drowsy dragon. “I had Agent Chapel write a full disclaimer before I allowed him the honor, signed and dated, to protect myself legally.”

“I want to know Chapel's so-called personal reasons.”

“Please do not be cross with me, ducky, you know I am hardly so boorish as to betray a confidence.”

Anger and betrayal was still filtering hotly into my gut.

“Seeing its effect on you, perhaps I shouldn't have given in to him this evening.” He studied me unhappily. “I was confident you knew.”

“But then you also knew it bothered me. I've been stressing for days. Empathically, through our Bond, you felt I was sick with worry and confusion,” I said plainly, smacking the back of the chair. It occurred to me at the same time as he looked perplexed at something that was flittering through his head. “You liked that I was upset.”

“Yes,” he said, bemused. “I think that may be a fair statement.”

“But why? What did I do to deserv—” I broke off, drawing a deep breath. “This is about Batten.”

He cut his eyes to the far side of the room. “I quite hardly think it is.”

“Is so. You're jealous of him.”

Harry's laugh was a sudden delighted eruption that tickled down my spine and prickled my skin. When his face came up, his eyes were sparkling.

“Oh, my love. You know I am a thousand times more magnificent than he.” He hopped off the casket. “Even if we turned him, and he were in the same preternatural league as myself… darling, he would be centuries behind me in polish and sophistication.”

“And lacking your buckets of modesty,” I groaned. “Fine, if you're not jealous of Mark then what is it? Why do you want me to feel all squinky? Especially seeing I'm at wits end with everything else that's been going on. I mean, that's borderline crap-weasel of you.”

He agreed with a thoughtful nod. “It is a petty streak that I am disappointed to discover in myself. Perhaps…” He came to offer me one of his hands. “Perhaps I needed to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you still want me. Your possessiveness was refreshing. Sometimes I feel that you view me with the barest of patience. That I am a nuisance. An inconvenient, sucking parasite. That you regret ever…”

Stunned, I took a running leap at him and threw my arms around his neck. He fumbled with the cigarette, dropping it.

“You silly, stupid creature.” I squeezed him hard, grasping hard muscle under my hands, pulling him as close as possible, wedging my face into the fragrant hollow in his neck. “I don't regret it for a second. The day you came into my life was the day I started living.”

“Do not think me so foolish that I cannot perceive that my arrival prevented you from having a normal life.”

“Who the hell said I want a ‘normal’ life?”

“You do, every crudding day,” he said sadly against my hair. “How you want to be left alone, how you hate the psychic nonsense, how you do not want to work or leave the house or see anybody. This is all my fault, of course, and I encourage it, because at least inside you are safe and out of harm's way.”

“My being a bitch has nothing to do with you.”

“I am afraid it has everything to do with me, love, and always has. My irritation becomes yours, my unease and displeasure. This is the way of the Empath and his companion. When added to your own unhappiness, it has made you the bundle of raw angst you are today.”

“Harry,” I drew back to look him in the eye. “I bitch and crab and whine, but I never mean for a second that I don't want you around, or that I'm unhappily stuck here with you. I'm not miserable for escape. I am profoundly honored to be your DaySitter. I want you for always. Okay?”

He released me so he could bend to pick up the cigarette from the cold stone tiles. He blew it clean and tucked it between his lips. For a moment, he studied me. “So I was wide of the mark?”

I assumed that meant “wrong” and said with a smile, “Brace yourself, your Lordship, it happens.”

One corner of his lips twitched up. “It still felt awfully good, after all these years, to have you crazy with possessiveness as though we were some newly bonded couple.”

“I wasn't crazy,” I gave him a swat. “I was…mildly perturbed.”

“Please, mon petit chou, you wanted to rip into Agent Chapel's thinning hair like a seedy vixen in a pay-per-view cat fight,” he teased.

“That's because you're mine!” I warned playfully, making a fist and shaking it in his face. Harry grinned in reply. “Mine, all mine. Got that, bloodsucker?”

“You are truly terrifying. I must of course submit to your will,” he answered, putting his hands on my hips with familiar affection.

“Damn straight. And if I ever catch you doing that to Gary again—”

“Catch him doing what to Gary?”

I craned my neck slowly to see Batten on the cellar stairs, ducking under a low beam.

Harry exhaled cigarette smoke noisily and said under his breath, “Bloody hell, MJ.”

FORTY-SEVEN

My big mouth had very effectively derailed our work session. At least I was good at something. I'd never met a situation yet that I didn't manage to destroy. I was the Godzilla of paranormal law enforcement, guaranteed to tromp all over the Tokyo of your investigation! I wondered how much it would cost to get a big ass trophy made: World's Best Fucker-Upper.

Strained silence followed a brief, explosive fight where Brains admitted to Brawn he had a private “issue” with the revenants he was working through, and that it was personal. Every bit as personal, Brains stressed, as Brawn's sexual infatuation with a certain co-worker that would go politely unnamed. I squirmed in my office chair and pretended to study the white board, where pictures of Ten Springs Motor Inn's Room 4 in all its bloody glory were safer to look at.

We did a quick review, the men barely speaking and even then, through their teeth. I didn't know which one worried me more. I didn't enjoy seeing Batten flushed and irritated, but when wasn't he? In fact, it was his standard mode when working with me. But Chapel's loss of control was a different animal. His hands shook as he typed. Sweat had dampened the armpits of his shirt; his crisp ocean-scent deodorant smelled nice, even though the rest of him disgusted me. How could he have done this behind my back? I had suspected, but I wish I'd never seen it with my own eyes. I couldn't look at his face. At the same time I couldn't un-see it, him laying prone, legs dangling, feet splayed, either exhausted or completely relaxed. At least I didn't recall a tent in the front of his pants.

His neck tie was missing again. Now I knew why. How many were lying on Harry's plush-carpeted floor, abandoned beside the
couch or under the edge of the bed skirt? And why? What were his reasons? I respected that Harry wouldn't tell me but I didn't like it. I deserved an explanation but didn't think it was going to happen any time soon.

The discussion of why Dead Kristin hadn't come to reclaim her eye made me go stiff and squinky. She hadn't come because I hadn't made her eye accessible. It was still locked in my gun safe with the stolen sunglass lens belonging to Patrick Laurier Nazaire, deceased, and the mad psychic's daughter Danika Sherlock, sorta-deceased. Revenants and precogs and clairvoyants, oh my! I penciled in my Moleskine: witch-walking and flesh magic and Ruby's grimoire, the last being off-limits for me to even consider touching. Harry would have a fit if he caught me fingering through a black witch's notes.

My gaze fell on the froggy pencil holder that held my No. 2s, the one Batten had drawn black fangs on with permanent marker. I turned it around on the desk to face the Feds.

“Do we have the Davis family's permission to destroy the ghoul?” I asked.

Batten brought his dark blue eyes up from the pencil holder with the tiniest bit of playfulness around his eyes, hiding his mouth from Chapel behind his fist. An admission. Not that I needed one.

“Do we need it?” he asked without a trace of humor.