Velveteen (42 page)

“And mute?” Nick offered, shaking his head to indicate that it didn’t seem very likely.

And of course, it wasn’t.

They passed through the tape, across the lawn pocked with dandelions, and into the house.

What they saw there filled them with the cold chill of realization.

Several men and women—way more than ten—filled the living and dining rooms of Bonesaw’s farmhouse, and they were as still as the people in the Quickie Teriyaki. These people had been shot, though. Blood gurgled from their mouths in pink bubbles, and the carpet was soaked with the stuff. Some were dead, Velvet was sure, but others still clung to life. A policewoman clutched the cabinet the TV sat atop, still struggling to reach her gun, smoke rising from its barrel a few feet away. Another officer, no more than a few years out of high school, held a sopping red couch pillow to his gut and shivered as though feverish.

“Holy crap,” Nick said. “I thought for sure we’d at least disabled Bonesaw. The way he dropped like that, like a sack of potatoes. I thought he was down for the count.”

“Apparently not.” Velvet pressed forward, searching through the two small bedrooms, both as pristine as hotel rooms, sheets tight on the beds like shrink-wrap. He wasn’t in the bathroom, with its encyclopedia-of-sushi-motif shower curtain and jars full of motel soaps still in their paper
wrappers. She did notice that the edge of his toilet paper was folded into a polite triangle, though she doubted it was for his guest’s convenience. Bonesaw had only one kind of guest out to the house.

And they generally ended up dead.

But not always.

Velvet and Nick stepped though the wall from the hallway into the kitchen, where a moaning sheriff sat in a chair, holding a rag to a deep gushing wound in his thigh. Another cop, who appeared to be uninjured, knelt before him, shaking his head and whispering, “I think it’s the femoral artery. You gotta hold that tight, man. Hold it real tight.”

Just like Bonesaw
, Velvet thought.
Did he hold it real tight?

But the man’s words went unheeded, and the sheriff, a mustached man with crinkled eyelids and sandy blond hair, went slack in the chair. His arm dropped away from the rag, and a ton of blood leaked onto the floor.

Velvet couldn’t take any more of it.

The pain of all these injured and dead people hit her suddenly. She dove into the body of the young officer and quickly wrestled his mind into submission. For him this day would be over in a minute, and at the very least he wouldn’t have to deal with the fear and anxiety that these people were in further danger.

Velvet would see to that.
Into your box
.

Then “Follow me,” she said to Nick, the man’s voice foreign in her throat.

The minivan sat in its regular spot, so unless Bonesaw had swiped a cop car to get out of there, she was pretty sure he
was still around. And not just him, either. He’d be filled to the brim with that douche bag, Clay, and neither would be at all pleased to see her and Nick.

They were halfway to the shed when Velvet heard a voice.

“Officer?” High and a bit whiny.

Velvet directed the cop’s body toward the sound, her hand settling on the handle of his gun cradled in its holster. A young woman in navy slacks, an official-looking badge on her hip, and an awkward smile on her pointy face approached wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses, despite a complete lack of sun or any glare, for that matter.

Why was Velvet not surprised? The revolutionaries must all have taken their fashion cues from the Big Book of Possession Clichés.

“Get into the shed,” she whispered to Nick out of the corner of the man’s mouth.

Nick stumbled toward the scene of the earlier bloodshed.

Velvet needed to lure the spirit out of the woman’s body, but she needed confirmation of possession. She needed to get it to reveal itself with some incorrect response. “We’re conducting an investigation here, miss,” she said.

The badge on the woman’s belt loop glinted against the lunar rays.
She should lambast me with official fervor for such a demeaning comment
, Velvet thought,
if she is in fact a detective
, and Velvet was pretty sure the body was.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said, and grinned, still approaching.

Velvet stepped back. There was something familiar about the smile. Something that reminded her of long afternoons
talking about film and watching a certain soul folding and folding and folding.

“I just saw all the cars and thought …”

“Thought you’d just see what you could do to help out, huh?” Velvet glanced at the woman’s pants legs, wet with something that turned the navy into a slick jet-black. She didn’t even have to think about it. Not for a second.

Blood. The woman had been wading in the stuff.

Mr. Fassbinder—Clay—had possession of her,
and
he was clearly a sexist. He hadn’t even bothered to notice that the woman was an official. Her outfit was exactly the kind of thing those women wore on those serial killer shows. Not to mention the damn badge.

Velvet shuddered, stumbled backward.

She glanced back over her shoulder at the tiny shed. Visions of her killer’s spirit, fighting the dark light of hell and grappling with Nick inside, flooded her mind. She had to get a grip.

“What’s wrong?” The woman’s head tilted slowly to the side, examining her. “I only want to help. There’s no need to be afraid, Velvet.”

There were no words to describe how hearing her own name gripped her heart at that moment.

“Why, Mr. Fassbinder?” she mumbled. “Why did you do it? Why here?”

“Why? Oh, Velvet, do we need to have that conversation? You interest me. We’re friends, and I like to know all about my friends.”

The words spun about in Velvet’s head. Fassbinder’s tone
was seriously grossing her out. It was too familiar, too pleasant. She guessed having a conversation wasn’t really a good idea after all.

But even as the voice came from the woman’s mouth, she was reaching behind her, into the waistband of her pants.

A gun!

Velvet had to protect the body she was in. She scrambled toward the shed, nearly tripping out of the officer entirely, before snagging his mind again and maneuvering the door between him and the approaching figure. There was a loud crack, and a bullet tore through the wood as Velvet slammed the door closed behind her and latched it shut.

She scrambled over to the workbench and crouched down, the officer’s body panting from the workout. Velvet turned to see a nightmare come to life.

Bonesaw.

Gray and slack-jawed, her murderer limped across the floor toward her, his hair matted with cobwebs and gore. She screamed, a deep terror escaping her throat.

He lunged, arms fumbling and reaching for her, his face shaking left to right. A word played on his lips, stuttering there like a digital satellite TV feed in a rainstorm.

Bullets pounded the shed from outside, and one tore through Bonesaw’s abdomen, sending a spasm through him that should have knocked him to the ground. But instead he heaved forward, pressing his face tight against a knot in the shed door, peering outside as bullets pinged and thunked all around them. He squatted and slipped in beside her, cowering under the workbench.

“So you noticed the detective was wearing sunglasses at night?” he asked, shrugging when she didn’t respond. “What’s the matter with you, Velvet?”

Nick
. Velvet sagged with relief.

But she still couldn’t look at him, couldn’t rationalize the fact that it was her love’s voice coming from the man who’d killed her. She didn’t want to put that together. Better to pretend it wasn’t happening at all. She shook off the disturbing image and looked away.

“Yeah, I saw the sunglasses,” she said. “Not sure how many bullets Clay has, but I’m not going to have the death of another person on my head. Not when I don’t have to.”

“What are we going to do?”

Shivers ran up her chosen body’s back with every word Nick drew from Bonesaw’s vocal cords. She could barely process the words, let alone come up with a plan.

She pounded her fist against her legs and winced, focused on the pain and not the horror whispering inside the shed.

Get it together, girl
, she thought. Velvet knew what they were up against and almost regretted shelving Luisa and Logan from the mission. Their role was instrumental in relieving a spirit from the body the spirit had possessed. There had to be something else that would work. Some way to capture Clay or Fassbinder or whoever the hell was inside Agent Scully and keep that spirit until Nick could do the old fly trick.

And then it came to her. Suddenly. The irony of it made her smile.

They were going to need a crystal ball of their very own.

“We’re going to need a vessel to trap him in. We’ve already got a body,” she said, and jabbed a thumb in his direction.

He shook his head. “You mean the fly thing?” He paused. “I don’t really know how I did that. What if it was a fluke?”

She ducked a fresh round of bullets, this time from the tiny window.

“Oh? Now you don’t know how you did it? What was with the big victory dance, then?”

Bonesaw shrugged.

Velvet desperately wished the twins would magically appear to tackle the spirit out of the detective like they always did. It’d take all her strength to wrestle the bastard, and she didn’t relish getting that close to him again. And she didn’t see much point in the flies taking him, actually. Especially when there wasn’t a plan for him to return to the Cellars. Not again and not with the prison in the shambles it was in.

She’d just have to trust that Rancho could handle it. That he had things under control. What choice did she have?

If her suspicions were right, the crystal balls would be nearby. Nine of them. Nick and Velvet could capture Clay and then shatter the magic that was imprisoning the souls, which would stop the shadowquakes. If only they could get a message back to Luisa and Logan, explain where they were.

She shook away the possibility. It wasn’t going to happen.

“I’m afraid we’re on our own.” She glanced in Nick’s direction and flinched, seeing Bonesaw’s corpse look at her with that kind of affection. She’d only ever seen his vicious dark intentions, the bizarre desire that had sparked within him when he’d cut her.

Wait.

Velvet remembered a time, near the end of her life, when her killer had brought the shiny metal urn into the shed, the one she’d always avoided on his mantel, his mother’s ashes. He’d smiled like that when he’d set them down on the workbench, like he’d needed his mother there to witness the killing blow, to approve of him, maybe. Sick.

But the urn.

“You’ve got to get into the house, Nick.” She said his name intentionally, tricking her mind into seeing the boy and not the dead monster before her. “There’s an urn, like the kind you keep ashes in.”

He nodded.

“It’s on the mantel in the living room. Grab it and bring it out here, and I’ll do the rest.”

Bonesaw rose and shambled toward the door, and Velvet rolled the officer’s body farther under the workbench, as tight into the corner as possible, readying herself to dispossess it. With as many bullets flying at the shed, she figured that once the officer was conscious again, he’d catch on and not try to get up anytime soon. As if to accentuate her point, Nick opened the shed door, turning into a silhouette of Bonesaw against the moonlight, and took several shots in the chest. Thick globs of black blood were flung across the interior of the shed as he spasmed, splattering the butcher’s diagram on the wall. He steadied the corpse and darted into the yard.

Outside, the woman belted laughter, though it sounded more like shrieking to Velvet’s ear.

Velvet watched the officer position herself between the shed and Bonesaw’s lumbering form, firing round after round into his back. The zombie shuddered and stumbled but kept moving. Velvet could only pray a bullet wouldn’t hit the zombie’s spine. Then they really would be up shit creek. But as Velvet slipped out of the officer’s body and onto the dusty floor, she could see Nick make his way to the house and into the kitchen.

Fassbinder chased after him, but as his stolen body approached the steps, Velvet shouted, “Aloysius Clay!”

The detective spun around and glowered, the sunglasses finally falling away. The stolen body’s eyes, Clay’s eyes, stared into the shadows of the shed, waiting for Velvet to make her official appearance, for the two of them to meet again without the pretense of Fassbinder between them.

“We know everything.” Velvet stepped out into the moonlight.

“Well,” the detective said, and grinned. “I doubt that. But it doesn’t much matter now. The departure is done. The crystal balls are of no use. The magic that holds them is fading.…”

“Where are the crystal balls, Clay? The stolen souls?”

“Doesn’t matter. As we speak, the disenfranchised of the Latin Quarter are flooding into the world and making my dream a reality. Imagine it, Velvet, a world free of fear. This time, we’ll simply occupy these mortal bodies without concern for sickness or cancer or violence. If something happens, we’ll just move on to the next like a new pair of shoes. A utopia!”

“It doesn’t make any sense, Clay. The living will fight you.
They
can do that. We can’t possess everybody—some resist.”

“That may be. But even now, it’s happening. And there won’t be enough resistance to warrant concern. If the revolution spreads, like I know it will, we’ll have the majority.” The detective’s eyebrows cocked menacingly. “And you know it.”

Velvet did know. Even if a minority of the dead took on Aloysius Clay’s cause, if news of this spread to other districts, that number would fill the world in a heartbeat. She glanced into the trees and thought she saw movement in the undergrowth. Dim glowing orbs floated in the darkness.

“Look.” Clay laughed. “Even now they’re surrounding us. Watching the end of all this. It’s my day, girl. It’s my achievement. And they want to applaud me. Come out!”

He shouted for the ghosts to come forward to show themselves. Velvet stewed; she felt as though she’d explode. Her world was falling apart in a way she’d never imagined. She focused on nine figures moving toward them. In their phantom hands the waning light glinted from the damned crystal balls.