Velveteen (8 page)

“Knock it off, dork!” Luisa swatted him in the back of his head, and a puff of ashen powder exploded from his dark hair. “It’s not a sacrifice.”

“It could be.” Logan’s mouth scrunched up hatefully. “You don’t know.”

“I do know,” she said. “This isn’t the Dark Ages. There aren’t any magicians performing weird rituals out there. Don’t you remember last time?”

He shrugged. When it came to his sister, Logan did a lot of shrugging.

Everyone remembered the last one. Dr. Hazel Perkins.

A self-described medium and the host of her own moderately successful cable-access TV talk show, Hazel had
chanced upon a cell—an orb filled with a stolen soul. They still didn’t know how that had happened. She’d planned to use it to conjure up images of people’s loved ones and “give their tortured minds some relief.” Unfortunately for them, on the night her show featured the act, their relief was purgatory’s torture. They lost three whole buildings that day, disintegrated down to rubble and spirals of twisted metal—not that the buildings in the City of the Dead were all that well constructed. After all, the people that threw them up weren’t necessarily builders or carpenters. They were more likely accountants, prostitutes, and children, which was probably why some of the buildings looked more like patchwork quilts than actual domiciles.

“Over here!” a breathy voice called.

Manny, their station agent, broke through a ragged group of refugees, waving cheerily. Platinum-haired and busty, Manny had been a film actress before a tragic car accident had left her with an even more tragic severed head to deal with. Though none of the Salvagers could remember her from the movies, the boys were nonetheless mesmerized by her every movement.

Like that was a surprise.

She was slick and graceful, with slender fingers and a shrewd strength flickering in her eyes that belied her bombshell exterior.

The group followed as Manny turned and stalked off toward a tall gate, her heels clicking as she widened the gap between them. Beyond the black wrought iron lay a darkened cavern.

The Shattered Hall.

“Your crew has its work cut out for it on this one,” Manny said.

“Looks like it!” Velvet jogged to keep up.

“I’ve isolated the epicenter of the disturbance to a fortune-teller’s shop in Philadelphia. The details I’ve conjured will place each of you within a few blocks. Though this insertion will be a little different, you’ll be scattered where you need to be. The cemetery is not reasonably close, so I’m opting for a morgue.”

“Tricky.” Velvet glanced behind her to find the twins straggling and Quentin walking backward, still gawking at the mass of souls in the hub.

Manny and Velvet came up to the tall gates, and the rest of the group crowded in behind them. Velvet cringed. She hated this part. Manny waved her hands in front of a huge spiral locking mechanism embedded in a solid block of metal, and then stepped away. The coil retracted like a screw pulling out of cork, scraping against the insides of the block. The sound was nails dragging across a chalkboard, or rather, a big metal lawn rake dragging across a chalkboard.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The crowds of people behind them in the hub turned en masse toward the squelch, clapping their hands over their ears and grimacing, a wail of general complaint issuing from their gaping mouths. Velvet was right there with them, keeping out as much of the sound as she could before it got a chance to crawl up under her skin and start a different kind of quaking up her spine.

The sharp end of the coil slid from the block, and Velvet watched with amazement as the metal sealed itself, healing, as though it had never been pierced to begin with.

“No matter how many times I see that, I think the same thing. Genius, doll!” Logan’s mouth lolled, and his tongue protruded from his lips. He always tried to figure out the process, to see if it were a trick of light or some magical illusion the station agent was pulling. It was as if he were convinced it was an earthly sort of magic, one he could learn. He was determined to dissect her movements. But after the process was complete and there was nothing else to examine other than the gates swinging into the darkened passage, he exhaled heavily and shrugged it off.

Velvet admired perseverance and recognized it immediately in the kid. He’d never give up. Never stop wondering about the mechanism, and never veer from completing his poltergeisting. They were alike, the two of them, though she hoped her face never twisted up the way his did while he was concentrating.

Super crazy-looking.

They followed the click of Manny’s high heels into the darkness, and stopped before a barely visible stone wall, itself the color of coal.

Manny drew a matchstick from her sleeve and struck it against the wall. It spit to life and cast a living glow on the facade, revealing the appropriateness of the hall’s name. Fissures lined the wall; some split into the rock from floor to ceiling while others were mere scratches. The largest crack ran straight up the center, a foot wide and so deep that Velvet imagined it running straight through to the center of the
planet—if purgatory was even
on
the planet. A library ladder clung to a rail that ran the full length of the hall, however long that was. Velvet couldn’t remember ever seeing where it ended.

“And so it begins,” the station agent said.

She ran her slender finger along the sharp edges of the crack. It reacted to her flame, shimmering deep inside as though some treasure were sheltered in its depths, a thread of mother-of-pearl, opal. Something. No one was sure exactly how long ago the station’s foundation had been poured or how it had been done. Some speculated that the foundation was here before the first soul arrived, but that the station itself was constructed over time, as souls with the skills to construct it passed through. The final phase appeared to be turn-of-the-century work, but these halls, these walls and fractures, were old.

Ancient, even.

Not likely the work of human souls.

“Now,” Manny said, and gestured for Quentin to stand beside her. “One at a time. Like I said, this isn’t a routine extraction. And the location is not exactly conducive to plopping you down all in the same place.” She nodded in Velvet’s direction. “You’ll also have the late hour to deal with. It’s past two in the morning.”

Velvet sank. That would make things much more difficult.

“Remember,” Manny said in a stern voice. “Follow protocol, and everyone makes it back. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Velvet barked, and glanced around at her team.

“Yes, ma’am!” the other Salvagers shouted in unison.

Manny narrowed in on Velvet, a hint of playfulness in her eye. “I’ve been waiting to tick off your fifty-seventh soul for some time now, Velvet. I hope you won’t disappoint me.”

“No, ma’am.” Velvet suspected Manny had a bet going with some of the other station agents—nothing she could prove, but the thought kind of lingered like a bad headache. Regardless, the woman reminded her that she was staring down the elusive number fifty-seven.

A benchmark moment … like a centennial or a sweet sixteen.

“Did you get a clear view of the involved?” Velvet asked.

The station agent’s mouth tightened with distaste. “A medium. Madame Despot is her name.”

Velvet nodded.

With that, Manny leaned into Quentin and whispered. The boy nodded and moved to stand by the crack. She moved on to Logan and then Luisa and finally clutched Velvet around the shoulders and spoke softly into her ear.

“Where you’re going, there’s a blue car with a flat tire. The police have labeled it for towing with bright orange wax lettering, an
L
and a seven. A cat with one blue eye and one brown scratches itself beneath a lamppost; a tiny bell jingles around its neck from a red necklace of yarn. A stack of newspaper has turned into a mound of rotting pulp, but still visible in its center is the image of a fireman carrying a crying baby wrapped in a tartan.”

The pull-focus. Three details worked best.

The car. The cat. The newspaper.

Manny shook the flame off the long match, thrusting
them into dusky shadows. Then she stomped back toward the hub without another word.

Velvet spun around to inspect the faces of her Salvagers, which was much more difficult now in the absence of a flame. Logan’s lip curled in a sneer. He gnashed his teeth and pumped his fist in the air. Ready. Luisa had the steely eyes of a hawk that was prepared to hunt. Quentin … well, he was busy scraping a pebble from the sole of his shoe with a thin rod of metal. On the upside, he was very focused on it, and Velvet figured that was a good thing.

“Nice focus, Q,” she said.

“Tha-thanks, Velvet,” he stuttered.

She gave him a nod, and he mirrored her and gave her a thumbs-up, as though they shared some secret she wasn’t aware of. Velvet returned the gesture furtively.

“You’re welcome.” She turned toward the crack and began to strip off her clothes. “Pass me a box, will ya?”

One skittered across the floor and crashed into her leg.

“Ow!” she yelped.

“Sorry,” Quentin responded quickly. “Can’t see all that well in here, since there’s no light and all.”

She was sure he meant that he couldn’t see her, though she knew for a fact he could, but she merely turned her back, stripped out of her clothes, and stuffed them into the box. She pressed herself close to the wall so the others could have their privacy.

“Ready for number fifty-seven, Salvagers?” she asked, her voice echoing down the hall.

“Yeah!”

“Totally!”

Velvet led the charge, pressing the tips of her fingers against the crack’s sharp edges, digging her nails in as far as she could. She felt for the energy there, the familiar suction, and was off.

M
oonlight flooded the deserted street in an eerie purple glow, casting bruised shadows on the rows of buildings. In the distance, Velvet could hear the low rumble of car engines but nearby, quiet had settled in for the night, until the sound of a tiny bell jingled and Manny’s tabby sprang up and pranced across the hood of the abandoned car—blue, of course. The cat stared at her, one blue eye and one brown, and hissed. Velvet backed away, sidestepping a soppy mound of newspapers, and darted down the street.

She peered in darkened windows as she hurried from shadow to shadow, frantically searching for a body to possess. Her mind reeled, recounting the events of her day. It seemed she’d been running from the minute she’d left Bonesaw’s shed. If one more thing went wrong, she swore she’d have an aneurysm or whatever the ghost equivalent was.

At the very least she’d scream.

The poltergeists would already be scouting out the source of the shadowquake, or hunkering down in the walls, or making ghost chains, or whatever it was they did to prep for their part in a mission. She kind of left it up to them. Logan and Luisa were damn good at their jobs, and if Velvet were the one to hold up the show, they’d never let her hear the end of it. She’d be witness to a near constant floor show of ridicule, and that was
not
something she was about to let happen.

Man
, she thought, searching frantically for a host body.
At this rate I’ll be lucky to beat Quentin to the perp
.

Fog crossed the next intersection looking exactly like a big fluffy semitrailer, but Velvet trudged through barely noticing, a rarity for her, as she loved nothing more than afternoon cloud identification … except for finding a body that worked well.

As she came out the back of the thick mist, she spotted the most likely candidate of the evening. Well … “likely” might have been an overstatement.

Smoke curled from the nurse’s wrinkled lips in greasy gray ribbons. It snaked around her sunken eyes and creased forehead before drifting up toward the glare of the streetlights in fluffy tufts. She slouched against the brick wall behind her, scraping her rubber clogs against the sidewalk and primping her silver hair, which was pinned back in an insane imitation of a pompadour. With each pat, a log of ash dropped from her cigarette, banked off her crisp teal scrubs, and exploded into tiny mushroom clouds as it struck the concrete.

A miserable sour-faced woman—probably in the last hours of a double shift at the hospital, muscles lagging with fatigue—not the best choice for the job at hand. But she was all Velvet had to work with, the street being as quiet as it was on that cold October night.

Velvet grumbled.

What I wouldn’t do for a healthy street kid
, she thought.

But she’d seen only two other people on the entire walk there.

The first was a total waste of her time, a gangly homeless man with a scraggly beard spotted with the remnants of several meals. He wore a puffy floor-length woman’s parka, stuffing falling out where the rats had been at it. The minute she’d jumped into the guy, she’d understood what pickles must go through in their vinegary brine. He was pirate drunk, which, everyone knows, is the drunkest you can get. Velvet couldn’t even begin to figure out what to do with his boozy frame. It wobbled and stumbled as she grappled for control. To make matters worse, when she finally dispossessed the guy, she felt a little tipsy herself. Took a few minutes just to shake off the contact buzz.

The second target was only slightly more amenable.

A small boy pulled a squat pug down the sidewalk, pleading for the dog to do its business and shut up its yipping. Velvet kept pace with the kid for half a block, drifting in and out of the dark places, noting that he had the same scrunched-up face as his dog and a nose running like a summer fire hydrant. But it was the dog that Velvet was worried about.

What would she have done with it? Tied it to a fence? Let it bark the neighbors awake and alert the kid’s parents to his absence? Nope. She had to move on.

“Why me?” Velvet lingered at the corner, just another wisp of fog, a stray curl of shadow with jet-black nails and a scowl.

She scanned the sidewalks and alleys for other options. The street was, of course, deathly quiet, and the fall chill hung in the air like smog. Not that she could feel it; she was just remembering is all.
It would be nice to feel
. Tendrils of night mist topped the streetlights in halos, and very few things moved behind the closed curtains or peered out from behind the many storefront Closed signs.