Date: 2014-06-06 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Urban Fantasy; Vampires; Paranormal; Fantasy; Romance; Mystery; Magic; Fiction; Adult; Supernatural
Description: When an FBI Internal Affairs investigation lands the Preternatural Crimes Unit in a bureaucratic spank-fest, it feels like the perfect time for Marnie Baranuik to skip town and lend her expertise to a bear-sized Canadian cop who doesn’t want her help with his case, his love life, or his car stereo. Back in her childhood stomping grounds, Marnie leaps into action, facing an exorcist in skinny jeans, a slap-happy specter, and an old friend up to new tricks. Are ghosts behind a string of unusual deaths? Why didn’t her revenant companion, Lord Harry Dreppenstedt, tell her he had a Combat Butler? C
Publisher: Booktrope

LAST IMPRESSIONS

THE MARNIE BARANUIK FILES,

BOOK THREE

A.J. AALTO

Booktrope Editions

Seattle, WA 2014

COPYRIGHT 2014 A.J. AALTO

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Inquiries about additional permissions
should be directed to: info@booktrope.com

Cover Design by Greg Simanson

Edited by Rafe Brox

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-434-2

EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-424-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910391

CONTENTS

COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
MORE FROM A.J. AALTO & BOOKTROPE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This time, I am totally not letting my editor write this for me, because he'll make me dedicate it to Tim Horton's and Fireball whiskey and the company that makes all my sex toys, and I will die of embarrassment so completely that I won't be able to show my face in a coffee house or sex emporium again. And then I will be bereft of both caffeine and orgasms, and will want to die for realsie-reals. (Author’s note: obviously, my editor DID write that bit, because everyone knows I wouldn’t use a highfalutin word like “bereft.”)

I’d like to thank my future Chief Science Officer, Gordon Bonnett of Skeptophilia fame, who is always there to inspire me when I need him, and to answer my hey-this-isn’t-quite-science-but-what-if questions like an open-minded pro. Someday, when I rule the galaxy, your giant brain is gonna come in real handy, Gordon; I should maybe keep it in the freezer until then.

I owe a huge thanks to Constable Jack Sawatsky of the Peel Regional Police for walking me through Canadian police procedures and investigative techniques. Sorry I got you stabbed on our first hike, Jack. Thanks for tolerating my ditzy research questions about the law, life, and death; for letting me drag you from abandoned graveyard to canal to “crime scene” to haunted tunnel, and for never asking, “You wanna go where, now?”; for never saying “no,” even when the timing sucked or the weather was hideous or the path was inaccessible, and for always insisting on going first wherever the terrain was iffy. Finally, even though I’m fairly certain you’re Batman, if you don’t stop flicking salt on the table, I will spin-kick your ass through a window. Hey, check me out, threatening a cop in writing. So much sass.

Last but never least, I’d like to thank my long-suffering editor Rafe Brox, who probably still has a sprained face from all the eye-rolling I’ve caused. For your patience, insight, fortitude, and sense of humor, thank you a million-billion times, Rafe. You are completely irreplaceable… so don’t croak yet, eh?

[Ribbit. Soorry. - Ed.]

For Jennifer

My dark angel, my outlier, my rule breaker, my heart.

CHAPTER 1

MY SHADOW STEPPED on Sheriff Rob Hood’s all the way across the parking lot, slicing a mismatched but merciful pair of respites from the glittering mica underfoot. Though it was November and bone-bitingly cold, snow had yet to fall; the asphalt was gritty but dry. I found I was anxious for the crackle of ice underfoot, the same way I’m always restless for the first wild thunderstorms of spring. The wind whisked away my breath in ragged clouds, and the chill seeped through two pairs of socks and my navy blue Keds to curl my toes, the skin on my thighs chilled and taut right through my jeans and a pair of silk and cashmere long-johns. There might have been a boogercicle forming at the tip of my nose, but it had already gone numb.

“It’s only four and the sun’s weakening,” I said. “It’ll be dark before supper.”

My companion liked to walk in silence. In fact, the sheriff of Lambert County could sit on my couch for hours and say nothing at all, and often did. That was okay with me. After all the shit I’d been through, his familiar presence — non-threatening, yet capable and generally good-natured — was a comfort. Fortunately for him, there were few calls for serious sheriffing, so he could usually get away with doing it as much as he did; today, he hadn't.

“That’s the least depressing thing I’ve heard all day,” Hood muttered uncharacteristically. More than the swirling red and blue lights of the patrol cars or the sight of his haphazardly-parked olive drab Hummer H1, the tone of his voice put me on edge.

“What have you got here, anyway?” I asked.

“There was a standoff. The driver of the truck shot himself point-blank in the face.”

“Gross. Why’d you call me?”

“It grew back.”

My Keds came to a crunching halt, and I gave him my best hairy eyeball. I'd been practicing it in my bathroom mirror, along with several other facial expressions inspired by Special Agent Heather Golden and her attitude problem. I arched an eyebrow, too. I knew it was an awesome arch. Totally skeptical and challenging and dubious of his authority. Unfortunately, it went unnoticed underneath my dark grey knit hat with its chorus line of frogs around the trim.

A white and blue eighteen-wheeler was half-jackknifed across the road by the tunnel's entrance, its rear axles slewed onto the soft shoulder with barely five feet of rocky grit between two-lane hardtop and a thirty-foot drop into the winding Redfern River.

“And when, exactly, were you planning on telling me about that little trick?” I asked. “Is the driver alive?”

“You’re the expert, Mars,” Hood grumbled.

At some point in Hood’s timeline of affection I had earned the dubiously-convivial nickname, “Mars.” It was cute, but I was wary; it’d be far too easy for the tiny romantic hitchhiker in my brain to believe a nickname meant something more than it actually did. I forced myself not to think about it.

“So, where's the not-so-stiff?”

Hood grimaced and indicated an SUV belonging to the State patrol. In the back seat was a young man with a head of floppy blond hair with a pronounced pink stain and a left cheek like chipped beef.

“Well, he’s not a revenant,” I said. “It might not be middle-of-summer bright, but it’s not late enough for the undead to be driving around with confidence unless he's got painted-over windows and a periscope. One break in the overcast and poof.”

Hood’s Stetson bobbed. “What are the other options?”

“Based on the speed of his recuperation, some form of lycanthrope, I’m guessing.”

“Don’t guess,” Hood said in a very unfriendly flavor of Cop Voice, the one I forgot he could pull off because he was so perpetually amiable. “We can’t afford to guess. Lycanthropy can be contagious depending on the phase of the moon.”

Point: Hood. I was impressed that he knew that, but let him finish.

“I’ve got splatter everywhere, both in the cab and on the road.”

Numbered yellow markers pointed out the globs. I picked out the familiar form of my sometimes partner, Agent Elian de Cabrera of the FBI’s Preternatural Crimes Unit, stepping carefully to one side of the carnage as he came to fall into step beside us.

“Hey, Baranuik. About time you showed,” de Cabrera said, jerking his chin at me. “What kept you?”

“Cut me some slack, Cuban. I was on a date,” I said.

He barked a laugh, which Hood worked hard at not echoing. “Good one,” de Cabrera said.

“I know, right? What’s a date?” I agreed. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“Wait, like a real date? With a man?” he amended, bending to hear me over the squawk of radios. “A living, breathing man?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, one of those strange creatures. You should try it yourself. Seduce him with your coffee and dance moves and biker booty. Whatever. He was nice, too.” That was a lie. My date was a total dickweasel; I’d rather stick a lit match in my eye than suffer through another meal with Richard Binswanger. He’d ordered for me without asking what I liked and spent most of the meal droning on about what a drag it was that people envied him so much. I envied the people who were at every other table, and who could escape their lunches without faking epic menstrual cramps or food poisoning. I had already mentally recited half the script of Spaceballs by the time Hood’s call came in.

“Does, uh, anyone else know about this date?” de Cabrera asked carefully, wary of Hood’s looming presence over my shoulder.

What he wanted to ask was: Does Batten know? But I was fighting my not-so-secret addiction to Special Agent Mark “Kill-Notch” Batten with impressive fortitude lately. Batten and I had been working on a system of trying not to hate-fuck each other to death. So far, that required an aggressive regimen of rubber-band snapping against my wrist, and a total hands-off approach. The ol' Nookie Cold Turkey, or “NCT” as I dubbed it in my new Moleskine diary – this one sporting a totally unsexy orange cover. Batten and I had no viable future, other than the occasional, breathless, wall-shaking tryst, and I was trying to forget those and get on with my life so I could keep my job and my sanity.

“Don’t figure my love life is anyone’s business but mine.” And Harry’s, I thought. If it doesn’t bother Harry, then everyone else can suck it. That jogged my memory about something else I needed to excise from my sex life; the bond of my long-suffering dhaugir. “Where’s Chapel?”

Hood spoke up, following close. “He was unavailable.”

I stopped with a squawk. “So was I! I was very unavailable. I was, like, maybe an hour away from getting lucky.”

“What can I say, Baranuik? He’s the boss.” Hood shrugged.

Supervisory Special Agent Gary Chapel was technically my boss, not Hood’s, but pointing that out would change nothing about my current situation. I inhaled deeply and let the air out the side of my mouth in several cheeky duck noises to express my unhappiness.

De Cabrera added, “Assistant Director Johnston’s in town.” Ah; the boss’s boss.

“Don’t worry. Batten’s on his way,” Hood said.

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I asked.

Hood elbowed me and ducked his head closer to my ear. “Go on, you love the abuse. He’s five minutes out.”

“Goody gumdrops.” I marched to the back bumper, ignoring the new hot roar in my veins. I pictured battle-hardened Batten in his worn Wranglers and reached down under the cuff of my parka to snap the elastic band against my wrist to distract myself with the sting. “I’ll try to contain my bliss. Is the victim human?”

The Sheriff stared at my wrist for a second, was kind enough not to react to my negative reinforcement strategy, and gestured for me to take a look underneath the truck. “No. We need you to tell us what it is, since we know what it isn't.”

“You want me to look?” I felt my upper lip curl. “What am I, some kind of monster expert?” I looked at the gaggle of state troopers who had stopped what they were doing to stare me down. “Oh. Right.” Then, under my breath, “Balls.”

De Cabrera cleared his throat and gave me the stink-eye. He’d been trying to encourage me to develop the power of positive thinking since he’d got wound up by some self-help book a year or so before. He was the type who learned a new buzzword and then had to teach everyone else about it or he'd explode from having nobody to annoy. It was easier not to fight him on it, and I thought I was handling the lessons quite nicely.

I told him, “This positively sucks balls.”

His answer was a snort.

When I lowered myself next to the truck the frigid grit dug into the knees of my jeans and to my gloved palms, stones scuffing leather. I turned my face to look under the truck, not really wanting to see, knowing it was my job. My stupid, stupid job.

As Hood had said on the phone, the body had been chained by the neck to the back of the semi's frame and dragged along beneath the trailer. Flesh and bone and viscera had been abraded nearly as far up as the rib cage, and I had to stifle an unladylike urge to vomit at the thought of what kind of person would do that to someone else, followed by a competing urge to take Hood's gun and try to do the driver better than he'd done himself, and I was pretty sure Hood kept a clip loaded with sliver rounds handy. Where the remains now lay, it looked like a horror movie prop boy had tripped with a Bucket o’ Guts, wasting a whole day’s budget. Despite the gory mess, there was a thing or two that were not quite right.

Without looking up I told de Cabrera, “When Batten gets here, tell him I quit.”

“When’s the last time you quit?”

“Yesterday,” I said. “Noonish.”

“Think he’ll ever buy it?”

“Hey, a girl can dream.” And, in some cases, have job-related nightmares, whether she was awake or not. Was this really better than an awkward, stilted lunch with a self-centered blowhard? I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against a clean patch of asphalt, and admitted the truth. Yeah, it probably was. No wonder I couldn't get a date; I thought half of a degloved corpse was more attractive than a forty-dollar dessert crepe.

De Cabrera held a hand down as if anticipating my answer before he asked, “Want your biohazard bins?”

“My trunk, thanks.” I handed the keys to the new-to-me Buick back at him. “Better get me two or three, and some neoprene gloves. I’m not mucking up my leather with this shit. Where’s Golden?”

De Cabrera played with the keys until he found the right one. “Still off sick.”

“Think I should make her some soup?”

“Can you cook?”

“Not remotely.”

“You don’t want to kill off the only female friend you’ve got here,” he advised.

“Hey!” I objected, though his assessment was unfortunately dead-on. There had been the older woman who lived in the cabin next to mine, but her and her Labradoodles had become zombies and tried to eat me, so that’s not chummy. There was Claire, the proprietress of the Early Bird coffee shop in Ten Springs, but even I would be hard-pressed to call “hasn't tried to poison me yet” friendship.

De Cabrera marched away from us in the direction of my car, and Hood took his place. I squinted up at him against the glare as the sun slipped below the edge of the cloud cover.

“The driver’s definitely not a revenant,” he said. “Getting sun now. No poof.”

I nodded, not really that surprised, and tried to figure out what was hinky about the partial corpse that hung like a pathetic, broken toy off the silvery chain that bound it.

“There’s about two miles of gore behind the truck.” He planted both hands on his athletic thighs and squatted beside me fluidly, bouncing slightly; always ready for action, though there seemed no danger. “A motorist noticed a pile of intestines fly out from under the truck, thought it looked too big to be roadkill, and called 911.”

Good call, innocent bystander. “Where’s he?”

“Ambulance, chest pains. Need to see him?”

I shook my head; the ever-patient Agent Chapel didn’t like me using my psychic Talents on witnesses without him first approving it. I’d been both an Empath and a Psychometrist ever since becoming a DaySitter when I was seventeen, and had been using my Talents to help law enforcement for the last few years. It’s not nearly as glamorous as it sounds; most of the time, it’s downright awful. If Chapel didn’t need my Talents, I didn’t volunteer them. I stuck to the business of preternatural science, and the occasional corpse-ogling under a truck. Like you do.

“First cop on the scene thought it must have been an elk until he saw the hand half a mile back.” Hood’s exhale fogged. “It’s been bagged and tagged. I can get it for you, if you need it.”

I breathed in through my nostrils so I didn’t yurp up all over the crime scene. “Gee, that’s quite all right,” I smiled tightly.

“Cavalry’s here,” Hood reported, meaning the tires crunching in the distance must belong to an FBI SUV.

“Is it Batten?” I asked him, ignoring a hopelessly aroused flutter in my stomach. I snapped my wrist-elastic. “Tell me he brought coffee, keeping in mind I’ll die if you say no.”

Hood made a non-committal noise. “I’ll find you some. Anything else you need?”

Willpower? Booze? A good shrink and a new job? I shook my head, studying the remaining entrails. Something about the color seemed wrong. Greenish. Like the insides of a lifelong alcoholic, pickled. When Hood’s footsteps receded and a second, louder set took their place, I closed one eye against the glare of the winter sun and peered up.

Batten moved to shadow my face. He was pure manly perfection, from the tips of his oddly beautiful feet, all the way to his deep lake-water blue eyes framed strikingly by lush, black lashes and playful eyebrows prone to darting upward at my antics. I knew firsthand that his body was a hard, muscular six-foot journey of the most heavenly delights known to womankind. His only flaw was a tendency to be an asshole, but even that had no power to cool my hormones most days, and most nights I had impure fantasies about him being an even bigger jerk in just the right way. I had not forgotten how delicious forbidden sex was; it was especially hard to ignore when it was standing right in front of me. Clean-shaven, he was a knockout. With a goatee, he was soul-crushingly sexy.

Today, alas, he was sporting the early signs of a push-broom style mustache. Faced with Charlie Chaplin, I expected ragtime piano music to start any second, and my libido mercifully snuffed out like a cheap candle.

“Wow,” I noted, crinkling my nose, taking my gloved fingers off my wrist-elastic. “Thanks for the comic relief, Groucho.”

He wilted. “It’s Movember. I take it you disapprove.”

“Was it your intention to morph from MegaHunk to Manstrosity? Ooh, I bet that's SyFy's next dating show!” I could see the terrible CGI intro graphics already.

Batten glared down at me, hands on hips. The hands and hips and everything in between still looked rock-hard and sexy as ever, but there was no way I'd be turning down the chance to mock him.

“Is it real?” I asked.

“Of course it’s—” He sputtered into silence, eyes seeking patience in the distance before returning to me. “As opposed to what?”

“Maybe you had a tragic accident with a toothbrush and some bootblack.”

His jaw did a clench-unclench dance, muscles rippling with displeasure.

“Is it a stick-on? It looks like a stick-on,” I said helpfully.

“It’s not a stick-on. Stop saying stick-on,” he ordered.

“You look like the dude from Jeopardy,” I continued. “There’s grey in it.”

“I’m almost forty,” he said through his teeth. “What’s the goddamned case?”

“I’ll take What’s Under The Truck for five hundred, Alex.” I crooked one finger toward the shaded body. “Careful getting under here, old-timer. I hear a hip replacement’s costly.”

He hunkered next to me with a feral, vital fluidity that almost made me forget his ridiculous facial accoutrement, but I saw the flinch around his eyes as his knees popped.

“It’s awesome, truly,” I assured him. “For the first time in my life, I feel hotter than you.”

“Please,” he muttered. “Grasp reality with both hands firmly.”

Reality is not being allowed to grasp Kill-Notch firmly with both hands, my brain taunted. “Reality and I aren’t on speaking terms at the moment. We’ve got half a corpse under here.”

“What the—” He made a grab at my ass, and if I hadn’t rolled to one side, he would have had my Beretta mini Cougar. “How many times have I told you, you do not need a gun?”

“Think I’ll keep it, Wyatt Earp. I wanna live. It’s this new thing I’m trying.” I waited until I was sure he wasn’t going to grab for it again before shimmying closer to the body under the truck. “Besides, Chapel said I’m allowed. Got my papers and everything, so you can stop trying to ineptly cop a feel any time now.” I shot him a warning look, because that was the extent of self-control I had.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to carry anything more dangerous than a feather duster.”

My eyes narrowed further. “Are you picturing me in a French maid’s outfit?”

He surprised me with a twitch-smile of admission and got down on his knees beside me to look under the truck. His humor promptly dissolved as he considered the scene for a moment, then popped to his feet with easy agility and went back to walk the gore trail along the markers, placing his boots carefully, eyes sharp, his darting gaze missing nothing. He crooked a finger at me and, feeling a bit like an obedient pet, I rose and went to his side.

“What’s that?” He stabbed a finger at an organic smear.

“Blue gunk.”

“Thank you, Doctor Baranuik.”

“It appears to be…” I took a deep sniff, leaning over and wiggling my nose bunny-style. The smell didn’t make sense at first, that warm stink of molasses swimming up from the streaks of ink-blue goop. I lowered myself down on the asphalt once more and got my face near it, one gloved hand keeping my hair up out of the mess. “Revenant nectar.”

“Vampire blood,” he translated, using the V-word, whether for his own comfort or to annoy me, I could never tell.

It wasn’t until I heard the winch on the jumbo-size tow truck that I put it together. Batten was two steps ahead of me.

“No, no, no!” I bolted back to the truck. “Don’t move the truck! Don’t touch that body!”

Batten sprinted ahead, hollering “Hold up!” over the squeal of the winch.

“What’s wrong?” Hood said, waving the activity to full stop. “The medical examiner is waiting.”

I shoved past him and flung myself to ground, belly hitting gravel. I elbow-crawled beneath the trailer as far as I dared. There, where the shade of the truck made the road dark, was a yawning emptiness I recognized now, as the revenant’s VK-Delta sleep lightened and he began to stir. Batten must have noted some movement; he flinched, and his hand sank to his ankle, where I knew he’d have a sheathed rowan wood stake.

“Down, hunter,” I said. “He’s the victim here, remember?”

“Is he?” Batten breathed down the back of my neck. “Maybe the driver will tell a different story.”

“He’s got half a body, Kill-Notch. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to lunge out from under the truck and eat our faces, so back down, fuck-knuckle.”

Hood crouched with us. “What’s going on?”

“Vic’s a revenant. If you pull him out before sundown, you’ll dust him.”

“But he’s dead,” Hood said.

“He’s not, or he’d already be ash,” I pointed out, adding the mental facepalm I’d earned for not recognizing the pattern the little details made immediately: the faintest scent of burning molasses, the greenish organs, the finger of light blue nectar trickling from opened, blood-fattened veins. Some preternatural expert I was. “He’s got a chance. He’s grounded by the sun now, but once it’s fully dark, we can pull him out and help him. Maybe.”

Batten did a double-take but said nothing. His scrunched eyebrows said it for him.

I offered, “He may be able to regenerate this much damage. We don’t know how old he is.” Ancient revenants could, with just an infusion of fresh blood, revive from years of desiccated torpor and recover their superhuman strength almost immediately. Harry, at four hundred and change, could be up and dancing not long after having his throat slit. On the other hand, my brother, Wesley, had taken a flask of holy water to the kisser mere months after turning, and was still attempting to mend the scars. I'd stopped calling him Harvey Dent after he'd developed an altogether too-good ability to laugh like The Joker at his most deranged.

“Organs?” Hood asked me.

“Don’t know. If the gastrosanguinem is intact, he might have a chance. It must be partially present or he'd already be gone.”

“Bone?” Hood boggled. “It’s all gone below the waist.” There was a definite waft of discomfort coming from Hood, and as the Blue Sense did a metaphysical yawn-and-stretch, my empathy offered a glimpse of his uneasiness. I wouldn't have expected him to be rock solid in the face of a frankly gruesome torture-and-hate buffet like we had here, but there was something deep in him that was quailing at the notion of being permanently disabled. I supposed I understood; he was healthy and active and had to be to do his job, but this was deeper than that.

“If it can’t regenerate?” Batten asked, ignoring a beep from his cell phone.

I heard the “it” but let it go. When my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket to indicate a text, I ignored mine, too.

“If he can’t regenerate, we might have to put him down,” I acknowledged, “as a kindness.”

“Like when a dog is hit by a car,” Batten said.

I stared him down, hoping my displeasure would make him look away. He didn’t even blink.

“No,” I said. “Not at all like a dog hit by a car. This is a man.” I gave him space to be a jerk, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he seemed to be assessing whatever was showing on my face. “Immortal, yes, but still a man. He should be given the opportunity to try to recover. Darkness, blood, time. If we can get an ID, we could contact his DaySitter, if he has one.”

“He can’t live, not like that. He’s …” Hood lost words, and a lick of hopeless despair hit me. I didn’t blame him. It was hard to imagine anything walking away from that kind of trauma. Especially without legs. That would definitely make the walking part tricky.

“Give him a shot at it,” I said firmly, “or at least let him end with some dignity, cast no shadow on his own terms.”

“Mars—“

“This is me, refusing to back down,” I told them, wriggling a gloved finger at my Serious Business face. “If he can’t manage it, and he asks, I’ll stake him myself.”

Batten made a low, unhappy noise and rubbed the back of his neck. “No, you won’t.”

“I can,” I said, knowing damn well I probably couldn’t.

“Did you bring a cookie jar to keep the ashes in?” Batten said knowingly, ignoring another beep on his phone.

My temper had finally had enough. “Don't take this the wrong way, but go fuck yourself with a turnip.”

There was movement in the shade of the truck, and Batten and I shut up abruptly in unison.

The head rolled slightly to face us, if you can “face” someone without much of a face to speak of. Sandpapered cheekbone showed in rough patches through bright flesh speckled with road grit. Light, inky blue nectar rushed visibly through exposed veins and filled one eyeball almost completely; the revenant had apparently fed well before going to rest. Under mangled strips of what had once been his lips, broken shards of teeth were like half-eaten Chiclets. I tried not to stare; it was harder than it should have been, considering I didn’t want to look.

The victim grimaced, or I think that’s what he did. It was hard to tell.

“Can I get a moment of privacy here, gentlemen?” I said over my shoulder, but didn’t wait for them to back away before I started inching further under the truck. Hood crunched away. Batten didn’t budge.

Surrounded by metal and blood and a fresh spark of burnt sugar, I fought a moment of dizziness under the truck, not at all reassured by the stubborn presence of Kill-Notch Batten, super-pro vampire hunter. For a moment, I had a perfectly reasonable vision of this revenant striking like a cobra and tearing out my throat before Batten could flinch.

“Hail, glorious Elder,” I said softly, conscious of the fact that the damage to his head may be causing extraordinary pain. “Death Rejoices, cherished master of the grave, keeper of the gift of immortality.”

Recognition flickered through the eye that wasn’t shot-through with inky swirls. “Hail, honored DaySitter,” he rasped with grateful formality, his accent an interesting blend of New York City and something redolent of eastern Europe; maybe Czech or Romanian. “Centuries untold celebrate your gift of submission.”

“Yeah, well, don’t celebrate my submission too soon, sweetheart. You’re in no fuckin’ condition to get your feed on.”

“Bold are you with your words,” he said. “Unfettered is your tongue.”

Batten chuckled knowingly behind me. Jerk. Sexy jerky-jerkface. I filed that chuckle away for future personal use, because my libido is a jerk, too.

“I’m not a fetters kinda girl.” Oh, you are such a liar, Harry's voice coiled up from my crowded libido's repertoire, and I heard the clank of iron and the whisper of silk and—Nope! Faceless revenant under a truck, Marnie. Focus. “I spit the bit. Say, why are you chained up under a truck? Did you hurt the nice little werewolf?”

His face peeled back in a horror-trope snarl that cold-cocked me right in the fear nodes. It took me a second to realize that he was smiling. “I made love with his wife.”

Batten muttered, “Should’ve hit it and quit it before Wolf Boy got home.”

I shot Kill-Notch a glare over my shoulder, then asked the revenant, “How did a lycanthrope get you into chains? You could have easily overpowered him.”

“I slept.”

“Was she worth it?” I asked, pure curiosity. “Could anyone be worth this?”

The revenant closed his eyelids and let out a long sigh. It was full of bliss, and was as good an answer as any. I wondered if I’d risk being dragged to death for a chance at boffing Batten one more time. The warm quiver of lust in my belly warned that I couldn’t handle the answer, so I shut my brain up, resolved to see a sex therapist, snapped my elastic, and crept back out from under the truck. When I got to my feet, Hood returned, de Cabrera following him. I reminded myself to get on Elian's ass about punctuality, because my car wasn't that fucking far away, and I'd been under the truck, crawling in revenant scrapings, twice already.

Batten was standing too close and staring too hard. I side-stepped closer to Hood and stuffed my hands in my pockets, avoiding his gaze by studying my Keds and taking my Tyvek bunny suit and neoprene gloves from de Cabrera with a scowl.

Hood crossed his arms across his chest and asked us. “Guidance?”

I shook my head sadly. “Messy. Legally, revenants are dead; in this country the living dead have no rights under current laws. Lycanthropes are humans with a disability as far as the courts are concerned, and trump revenants on all legal matters. If the driver claims that this revenant assaulted him first, he won’t even have to prove it; the revenant has to be staked. Has he said anything of the sort?”

Hood grimaced thoughtfully to keep from letting an unprofessional grin slip through. “He hasn’t said a thing. I’m not sure his mouth is completely re-grown.”

Blerg. “The best you can do, besides the weapons charges, is cite the guy for driving around with a corpse under his truck. Transporting a biohazard or something. Gotta be at least littering, right?”

Hood’s face crumpled like he had a mouthful of bad shellfish. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. Where is my coffee?” I glared at the men in front of me, and then gave up hope for caffeine before returning home, where I’d do things to my espresso maker that would make Mister Coffee blush. “We need to remove the chains from the revenant. My guess is they’ll have silver content and he won’t be able to touch them with his bare hands. Er…” I thought of the evidence bags in Hood’s Hummer. “Hand, singular.”

“Unchain him and then what?” Hood asked.

“Then someone will stay with him until sundown.” I slipped my gloves off so I could call Harry. “I’m guessing you’ll want that someone to be me, though I'm positive Agent de Cabrera could use the experience.” He blanched visibly and faded back a step, but I wasn't letting him escape. “C'mon, Cuban. Golden took a zombie spider to the face; Batten's been pimp-slapped by ancient revenants; the least you can do is play blood-bag barista. Monster-wrangling builds character.” I slapped him on the shoulder and favored him with the biggest, fakest grin I could muster.

De Cabrera muttered something that probably wasn’t English and definitely wouldn’t fall under the umbrella of positive thinking, but nodded. Batten stepped away to finally answer his ever-beeping phone, his responses curt and clipped. Whatever the other person on the line was saying carved big worry lines in Batten’s forehead, and his grip on the phone tightened. I watched him with one eye while thumbing Harry’s number.

When my Cold Company’s ultra-polite message picked up, I said, “Harry, I’m just past Lambert’s Crossing outside Ten Springs at a crime scene. There's a badly-injured but fairly civil and lucid revenant here. I need at least four pints of O-neg, thawed and toasty, as soon as possible after dusk.” I thought for a second. “And espresso. And a cookie. Please.” Then, to cover all my bases, “Thank you, your Lordship.”

Batten crammed his phone into his back pocket, grunted something at Hood, and started away from us, head down, shoulders forward like a charging bull.

“Hey, whoa.” I pointed after him. “Where does Weekend At Bernie’s think he’s going?”

Hood touched my shoulder with unexpected hesitancy. “Mars.”

I shook him off, not liking the sudden warning sign from the circle of cops, the palpable shift in mood, from serious to downright grim. The Blue Sense stirred deep in my belly and caused a flush of anxiety in my veins, coming from Hood. I moved to follow Batten to his SUV, determined to catch him before he hit the gas, but Hood put his body in my path, squaring his shoulders at me.

He shook his head. “Don’t. Just let him go.”

“What’s going on?”

He turned his face up to the sky and sighed heavily. “Sorry, Mars, you're off the case.”

“What? Why?” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “I just called in a take-out order for Sir Missenguts over there.”

“The FBI is suspending Gary Chapel and the PCU.”

CHAPTER 2

“VACATION?” I SPUTTERED into the phone. “Bossman, what are you even talking about? How can the entire preternatural crimes unit go on vacation?”

I had completely forgotten about my need for caffeine, or how good Batten had looked in his FBI jacket; funny, I never thought a conversation with Chapel could disperse thoughts of my favorite things. I was pacing back and forth in my home office, watching the first faint snowflakes of winter dust the dark window, blurring my view of the moon above the aspens. My cat, Bob, laid in a proud ginger and cream sprawl across the papers on my desk, a furry emperor on his divan waiting to be hand-fed, giving precisely zero fucks about my agitation or its source. Chapel spoke calmly in my ear, but I didn’t hear half of it; we were all being suspended, pending an investigation of our conduct by the FBI’s Internal Affairs Division. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in trouble, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but it felt like shit all the same.

When wicked-looking headlights pierced the gloom at the road and swung into my stone driveway, I sighed; Batten pulled his Bugatti Veyron in behind my dusty Buick Enclave.

On the other end of the phone, SSA Chapel, as unflappable as always, said, “Geoff just wants us to shut down until Internal Affairs is done their inquiry.”

Assistant Director Geoff Johnston was a major thorn in Chapel’s side, a bored paperpusher who apparently had nothing better to do than keep us under his magnifying glass, and was a pernicious stickler when it came to rules and regulations. I’d have bet my favorite frog-print undies that he alphabetized his socks by manufacturer, sorted his shirts by thread count, and got off watching C-SPAN.

“Geoff is a dick-fingering ass-monkey,” I said frankly, knowing Chapel would pretend he hadn’t heard it. The fact that all the calls on the PCU's phones were recorded didn't mean two happy penguin shits to me, and I hoped whoever got stuck listening to our conversation ruined their keyboard with some nasty, government-issue coffee. Or maybe they'd forward the recording to Johnston, so he'd have a legitimate reason to have his junk all up in our business.

Our last case had involved some vigorous rule bending and a fairly liberal interpretation of the ones we had (more or less) observed in order to contain what came far too close to becoming a nationwide zombie outbreak. I thought our justifications were entirely reasonable, all things considered. I was still waiting for a thank-you card and my likeness on a statue in the town square. I didn't even get to keep the assistant I'd had on the case; he'd fucked off with an ancient revenant to work out his daddy issues. All I'd ended up with was his iPad full of half-baked theories and a pleasantly robust collection of Irish traditional MP3s.

“Mark will be on call in case of emergencies, and he can fill you in on the progress of the inquiries. Is he there?” Chapel asked. “He hasn’t been answering his cell.”

I watched Batten vault out of the Bugatti with his grandfather’s vampire hunting kit in hand, saw the fight in his strut, and dropped the blinds on the window so I didn’t have to watch his approach. “Just got here. Want to talk to him?”

There was a moment of thoughtful silence. “No, I guess not. Just tell him I’ll be back next Friday. Marnie, there’s also the small matter of…”

Chapel left his hanging, but I knew what he was referring to. Okay, so I failed at not having dirty thoughts. During my second case, Chapel had, in a moment of poorly thought-out generosity, arranged for Harry to link us metaphysically through a bond known as the dhaugir, so that Chapel could bear the brunt of my physical pain. Handy, that. I would have liked to keep it indefinitely, especially on bikini wax day, but it just wasn’t fair to Chapel. In trying to fix it the first time, I had botched the spell with an errant elbow and a bottle of medication, and now Chapel was feeling my pleasure instead. This was wildly uncomfortable for both of us, what with my incessant lusting for Batten, and the fact that Harry and I had a sometimes-sex life which wasn't exactly limited to candlelight dinners and fields full of wildflowers.

“I’ll have time to look into dissolving that properly, since I’m on forced vacation,” I said. I waited for him to suggest a more exciting way for me to fill my time off. When he didn’t, I sighed. “I’ll get right on it,” I promised, and when Chapel said his polite good-byes and hung up, I tucked my phone into my front pocket, pulled my leather gloves on, and went to open the front door before Batten could get to it, in case he was thinking of kicking it down.

I’d forgotten all about the mustache; probably, I was trying to build a mental block around it. Unfortunately, as he unzipped his jacket, I could see that it was now joined by a wild Hawaiian-print shirt — blue and yellow flowers on an orange backdrop. In my overactive imagination, the shirt generated enough power to light up the whole front yard like Klieg lights.

“Satan’s sack!” I yelped, throwing an arm in front of my face to ward off the assault. “You should warn people before you leave the house wearing something like that.” I've seen a rock-monster's taint and a demon in a micro-kilt made of something that I doubted was leather; my standards for Do Not Want are really impressive. Batten's shirt was worse than both, because it was not only produced, it was apparently sold for real, actual money.

Swooping in like an irritated hawk, Batten invaded my space, but his glare quickly slid off and weariness replaced frustration. “I’m on quote-unquote vacation,” he said, pushing past me into the cabin without an invitation. His standard-issue boots clumped loudly in the small space. “This is my I’m-On-Quote-Unquote-Vacation shirt.”

“Okay, weirdo,” I said, shutting the door on the night. “Just be prepared for Harry to mock you.”

“Where is Short, Limp, and Pasty? Don’t see the Ferrari.”

“He’s still with de Cabrera, assisting the revenant who was under the truck,” I said, ignoring the blatant pigtail-pull. “He told me his name is Krystof Duchoslav, a recent transplant from New York.” I eyeballed him as he removed his leather jacket and tossed it at the coat rack, missing it completely. I scooped the crumpled coat off the floor and placed it on a peg. “Have you noticed the influx of revenants from the Northeast? Something’s goin’ on up there.”

Batten’s answer was a grunt and a one-shouldered shrug as he kicked off his boots.

I said, “There's apt to be more trouble between the newcomers and the more territorial local residents. Harry’s the eldest in this territory, since Malas fucked off with Declan, but we can’t have him leaping to the rescue at every single interaction.” Though nothing would please the old bugger more than this deranged June Cleaver welcoming committee shit. “And you’re welcome for that, by the way.”

“Because I give a crap about what happens to half a vampire?”

I heard the V-word and the insensitivity, opened my mouth to fight with him, and then recognized the set of his jaw: tight lips thinned and pale against his teeth. This conversation had nothing to do with revenants – Batten was worried about Chapel and the integrity of the PCU, and he was spoiling for a fight. I had two choices: give him one, or continue to ignore his digs and wait for him to get tired. The latter didn’t sound particularly enjoyable, which meant it was probably the right thing to do. Marnie Baranuik, reporting for emotional punching-bag duty, Sir! The situation would be a lot less fun if his rage didn’t turn me on; which reminded me that I really, really, really needed to let Chapel off the dhaugir hook.

Technically, Batten and I are still coworkers, or did the fraternization rules get suspended along with our jobs? That was an altogether dangerous line of thinking. I snapped the elastic band on my wrist twice and followed him into my kitchen, smelling his watered-down Brut cologne, highly aware of his body in a way that no elastic-snap could cure. He dropped his kit on the Formica table, right in the middle, a murderous display that served no plausible purpose beyond annoying me.

What I wanted to say was, Let’s rumble, hot stuff! Instead, I pointed at the kill kit and asked, “Is that necessary?”

“Are you?”

I fought not to smile at that, folded my arms, and watched him help himself to a Left Hand beer from my fridge. I’d have been irritated at his presumption if I didn’t keep a six pack there solely for him. Harry didn't drink directly, and my tastes ran towards the liquor cabinet, except for whisky, which I was never, ever, touching again, because it made me think of Declan Edgar, and of sea shanties and shitty hotel rooms and the worst seduction attempt of my life.

“You care too much about dead guys,” Batten said.

I felt my eyebrows dance upward. “You let me worry about what or whom I choose to care about. That’s my problem, not yours.” Neither of us wanted to touch our feelings for the other without a HAZMAT suit and a set of radiation-shielded waldos, like the dudes who refueled nuclear reactors. I wondered if Harry would buy me one of those bomb-detonation remote-control robots if I asked nicely, and told him I'd use it for grabbing Batten's junk.

“A lot of energy wasted, is all I’m saying.”

“You want to see a waste of energy?” I pointed back and forth between us. “This, here, this is a giant waste of my energy.”

He leaned back in the chair with far too much familiarity. “Easy fix. Quit your job.”

“I tried that a bunch of times already, for all the good it did me,” I reminded him. I’d quit after Buffalo after the Jeremiah Prost fiasco, where I’d taken bullets in the shoulder and back, and my heart had been trampled. Eight months later, Chapel and Batten had charged back into my life. “I quit just about every day. Nobody listens. I keep getting pulled in.” I was tempted to do my impression of Al Pacino in The Godfather, but he’d already heard it and I like to keep things fresh. “You people don't seem to understand the concept of 'fuck off.' Especially you.”

He pointed with the beer bottle at my empty demitasse cup. “We got problems with Internal Affairs and our UnBio expert is taking High fucking Tea?”

“Internal Affairs are boring,” I said. “Next time you wanna drag my attention away from my espresso, show up with an erection.”

He dropped his voice to barely above mutter and swung into a seat. He settled into the chair with a long groan. “You’re an enormous pain in my ass.”

I nodded. “I certainly hope so. That’s part of my job description. I’d hate to be a slack-ass.”

“Could you dial it down to minor irritant?” Batten asked, flicking the bottle cap across the table in my direction. It clipped the chrome edge and sailed towards my espresso. I caught it in my free hand and fired it back at him with a complete lack of my usual klutziness. He batted it aside and it hit the floor. Neither of us moved to fetch it.

I shrugged. “Megabitch is much easier to maintain. You know, I don’t even know why we’re being suspended,” I said, plopping myself down in a chair opposite him. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

He stopped in the act of taking his first swig, beer bottle an inch from his bottom lip. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not at all.”

“Let’s start with the oil tank.” He mimed writing on an invisible scoreboard; Marcel Mo-Fo, the world's hunkiest, most jerktastic mime.

“What oil tank?”

“The one that exploded in Ruby Valli’s magic shop, flattening the building.”

“She did that. I didn’t do it.”

“A uniform reported that 'the witch yelled, “fire!” just before the whole place went up in flames.'”

“That was a warning to Harry. I can’t set things on fire just by saying the word. If I could, your ass would be in constant danger of charring. Like, now, for instance.”

“Fine.” He used his finger to chalk up another invisible mark against me. “Let’s talk about the incident at Pennywick Funeral Home.”

“I chased that ghoul off.” I used my sleeve to mock-rub his pretend-scribbles off the invisible score board, trying not to remember the ghastly toe-cheese smell of Dead Kristin’s ghoul scum under my fingernails. “That’s a good thing.”

He cuffed my hand away with his and made exaggerated I’m-writing-in-this-airspace motions. We degenerated into a minute-long mid-air slap fight, me flailing at him and him deflecting shots with one hard forearm, before he gave up with a snarl. I may have copped a feel of his bicep. Or three. It was as meaty and delicious as I remembered.

“You raised a girl from the dead at her own funeral,” he said, pointing in the vicinity of where the imaginary score was, indicating he was still counting it whether I’d fake-erased or not.

“How was I supposed to know I had her eyeball in my pocket?” I slouched in my chair. “Technically, Ruby raised her, and the eyeball just jump-started it. Not my fault there, either.”

“You released an ancient, bloodthirsty vampire from Ruby's basement.”

Batten finally had a valid point, and I had to concede, “Nobody innocent died. Except for the revenant. Doesn't that count in my favor, even with you?”

He looked at me levelly, and didn't speak until taking two more swallows from his beer, either deciding it wasn't worth giving me points for or arguing about. “A short time later, you blew up Chief Deputy Neil Dunnachie with a propane tank.”

“One, he started it by firebombing my house,” I aimed a thumb at the scorch marks on the linoleum that I hadn't yet replaced. “Two, he was a fucking zombie at the time. Three, he was trying to eat me. That gun you loaned me wasn't doing dick-all to stop him, and I have strong feelings about being eaten by the undead.” I smirked. “You know, without my consent.”

“You melted Cosmo Winkle into the asphalt outside the Starlight Dreams motel.”

“You were there, you cock-witted jackass; Cosmo was also a zombie. And when I grounded him, who did that bother, really? A few hookers and a pair of businessmen with their dicks out. And a couple of cats who really needed their litter changed, anyway. I should have called the goddamned animal services department on the manager and reported him for neglect. That was disgusting.” I made sure Bob the Cat's boxes (there were three) got scooped every day. Hurling a tray laden with a month's worth of kitty bombs made a big impression on my views towards litter box maintenance.

Batten settled back in the vinyl-and-chrome chair, letting his knees fall apart, tipping the beer bottle to drain the last of it before dropping his final strike. “Did you or did you not summon a three-headed Demon King to the fine state of Colorado from the second circle of Hell?”

I didn't even know how he'd found out about Asmodeus' showing up on my porch, looking like the world's gnarliest Cutco salesman. “Pretty sure I didn't summon Him. Pretty sure He just shows up whenever He wants, being a Demon King and all. Was I supposed to fill out a requisition for visitation form before doing that? I don’t remember reading that in the employee manual. That was mostly a lot of boring shit about health insurance, dress code, and not fucking your coworkers, remember?”

Batten narrowed his eyes and strode across the kitchen to take another beer out of the fridge. I very pointedly did not check out his ass and the broad spread of his shoulders as he did so. His flamboyant shirt was doing wonders for my self-control.

“I once tracked you down using nothing more than a spork, a bowl of chili, and some fancy words, pal. I’m capable of some freaky-ass shit. Might wanna keep that in mind.” I gave him my best warning point. “I’m on vacation, too, so don’t drop dead fish into my pool of light and goodness.”

He exhaled long and steady through his mouth, rolled one shoulder like the tension was causing him pain, and repeated, “Vacation.”

“Does it bother you that much?” I asked.

“That you’re a walking disaster?” He sighed, returning to his chair. “I try to work through the pain.”

“Va-ca-tion,” I said, monitoring the tension disappearing around his eyes, the way his shoulders were softening. He might be null to my empathic Talents, but I could see the fight leaving him. Mission accomplished. “And hey, how about not taking this out on me? It’s not my fau—Well, it’s not all my fault.”

He just stared at me. There was a long moment of silence, during which our unspoken words played back and forth in twitches around the eyes and lip tension. He opened his mouth, and I was sure I was about to get a second dressing-down, when the front door opened with a hard gust of winter air, accompanied by Harry’s haughty, vexed gasp.

“'Tis frigid as the depths of — oh!” Harry had one arm out of his overcoat when he spotted Batten at the kitchen table, and the sight stopped him cold. “Oh, my God, Magnum.” His Higgins impression was, of course, impeccable. The worry in his cashmere grey eyes shifted to abrupt delight.

“Hullo, Harry,” I greeted, instantly cheered by the influx of his amusement, which spilled through our Bond like a cascade of fresh fruit in an oversaturated produce commercial. He, in turn, was warmed by the presence of his DaySitter, and the pleasure of this caused delight to pinball through us both.

“Good evening, ducky. Fully clothed, I see? Could it be that your elastics are working?” Harry smirked and ignored my desperate attempt to shush him with the power of panic-wide eyes. “Bully for you. If you don’t mind terribly, you might tear yourself away from your verbal sparring and foreplay to attend to a small matter at the door, my chirping cricket.”

Hmmm. A noisy insect. Not the best compliment, but a lot better than what I was getting from Kill-Notch, so I’d take it. I lifted from my seat and went to the hall. Upon hearing Harry’s voice, Bob the Cat hurried from the office with an excited brrrrip; I had to do some nifty footwork to dodge the furry missile underfoot. Harry finished removing his coat, hung it on the coat rack, took a moment to brush a speck of lint off the tweed, then bent to scoop the kitty up and cradle him like a baby. Bob attempted to purr and nibble Harry's caressing fingertips simultaneously. I couldn't blame him; that was always a good time.

“Your invitations are needed, love,” Harry said.

He wore one of his many impeccable dark suits, looking like he’d just arrived home from the Oscars but for the smudge of road grit on one knee. I looked past his dark shoulder at the front door, propped open to the cold night. Two unhappy paramedics waited with an unzipped black body bag on a stretcher. An ambulance sat quietly in the yard behind them. The dark-haired paramedic couldn’t meet my eyes. The other, a blond with a tight military buzz cut and tighter lips, had a glare that was sliding from hurry-the-hell-up to get-me-out-of-here.

“Oh, Harry.” My shoulders fell. “I hate when you bring work home.”

Harry’s chin lifted, and he wiggled some fingertips at me as if to show me how clean they were. “I am a gentleman, young lady; this is the first night I’ve had to work in three centuries. Besides, this began as your work, not mine.”

I whispered, “Tell me there’s not half a revenant in that bag.”

“Such a fuss you make,” he said. “You have already met our guest-to-be, Krystof Duchoslav, no middle name. Please do get on with it. I’m certain our medic friends would like to flee as soon as possible.” I opened my mouth to argue and Harry cut me off, prompting, “Krystof Duchoslav, you are…?”

“Yes, I know how it goes,” I snapped. “What do you suggest we do with him?”

“Wesley will care for Mr. Duchoslav during his recovery from this terrible incident,” Harry scolded, as though I were suggesting we dump him out back in the lake to sink or swim. “It will take your brother’s mind off his own injury.”

“I—it’s just…” I floundered, and finally settled on, “Krystof Duchoslav, you are welcome in my home.”

“Very nice, ducky.” Harry turned on the medics suddenly, who flinched at his eye-blurring speed. “Gentlemen, if you will kindly follow me into the basement.”

Both paramedics stalled, and the Blue Sense opened to reveal a quiver of uncertainty tilting toward perfectly normal mortal fear. I’m sure that was Harry’s intention, and from the amused twinkle in his eye, he was enjoying toying with them. Harry stroked the kitten’s fuzzy belly and swept past me with a wink, Oxfords padding linoleum softly, leaving a lemony waft of 4711 cologne in his wake.

I waved the paramedics in with a smile. “It’s okay, he’s just teasing; he won’t hurt you,” I assured them. “Thank you for bringing Mr. Duchoslav to Marnie’s All Night Vamp Camp cum Blood and Breakfast. I promise I almost never get people killed.” The Blue Sense reported that the humor wasn’t working. I spread my gloved hands as if to say no-weapons-for-realsies, although I’m sure it wasn’t me making them wary. “If it makes you feel safer, the guy at my kitchen table who looks like he’s auditioning for a porn reboot of Magnum P.I. is actually an FBI agent and vampire hunter.”

The glaring blond in the rear got impatient and shoved the stretcher forward, bumping the guy who still wouldn’t look at me. Once in motion, they didn’t slow down. They hauled the stretcher past me into the pantry, where the door to Harry’s basement bedchamber was, and while they clattered down the stairs, pausing to lift the stretcher higher, and I returned to the kitchen to stare down Batten.

He smirked around the mouth of his beer bottle, not bothering to hide his amusement.

“Don’t even say a word,” I warned him. “I want to hear no words coming out of your blurt-hole right now, Pornstache McFucknoodle.”

He shrugged mutely, but his smile grew. He drank, smacked his lips with satisfaction, and put the second bottle down next to his empty. He was silent through the exodus of men from the cellar. Ever the psychic null for me, he gave away no hints of his feelings, but I didn’t need any psychic Talents to pick up how hilarious he thought this development was. Apparently, I was running a hospice for wounded dead guys. Agent de Cabrera would encourage me to see the positives. I took a second to scrounge for some positivity. I came up with tax break for turning half my cabin into a mortuary and I certainly won’t be lonely at night, and gave myself two points for effort.

“My heavens, Mr. Batten,” Harry exclaimed upon returning. “Firstly, I’ll thank you to remove that valise of murder and mayhem from my nice, clean table.” He stroked the cat’s belly then indicated with the same elegant brush of his hand at Batten’s hunting kit and his mustache. “Secondly, this follicular mockery of masculinity absolutely must not stand.”

“I’ve been telling him it looks ridiculous,” I said, reclaiming my seat. I needed some espresso and a cookie, but no longer had the energy to fetch either. “Short of that, I can’t do anything about it.”

“Nake the blade, Dearheart,” Harry advised, his solemnity negated somewhat by the subsequent diddling with Bobcat’s air-paddling paws, “and your agent shall pay the healsfang for his transgressions.”

“Totally what I was planning next.” I nodded. “What does it mean?”

“Never you mind. There is too much on the line here to entrust it to the likes of you. I’ll play the scaredevil for you, shall I?”

I shifted my squint from Harry to Batten uncertainly. “Are we still talking about Batten’s face?”

Harry huffed his displeasure at me.

“Harry, your upper lip!”

His pale hand flew to it.

“Dear God, man, it’s not stiff!” I teased.

“My cherub, I am an Englishman,” he chided, setting the kitten down. “Stiffness is not hard to come by.”

“Too many jokes,” I choked, clutching the edge of the table. “Must…resist…”

Harry touched my hair as he passed me on his way to the espresso machine, and gave me a gentle pat. A push of his tolerant sarcasm licked at me through the Bond. “Oh, how your comedy does share the bite of the Silver Maiden, my goose. Ripping good stuff.”

I shrugged. “It was the best I could do this late.”

“Should you require additional caffeine by cock-shut time, it is certainly not occasioned by any sort of neglect on my part.” When I opened my mouth to comment on cock-shut, he placed a single finger to his lips and shook his head. “Nevertheless, I shall be pleased to attend your needs whilst you explain this tomfoolery to me. Why is there a scruffy-lipped jingle-brains sitting at my kitchen table with murder in his gaze?”

“Why is there a badly wounded revenant in my basement?” I volleyed.

“Mr. Duchoslav lives without a DaySitter, love. Would you have me leave him to the ministrations of the sun?” Harry’s voice softened. “We may find that it would have been a kinder fate, in the end, to let him cast a final shadow, but your good sheriff said that you insisted quite fixedly upon saving Mr. Duchoslav, if possible. Only, I wonder if that was before you thought the life-saving might inconvenience you.”

The worm of guilt squirmed in my belly; there wasn’t any reply I could give that wouldn’t make me sound like a total jerk, and Harry knew it.

“Observe, won’t you, Mr. Batten, the generosity of my companion. A genuine angel of mercy,” Harry declared with satisfaction, and I knew the matter had been settled. Duchoslav was here until he recovered, or didn’t. “Now, kindly explain this situation.” Harry aimed a finicky grimace at Batten. “Shruff and cinders, it’s enough to curl one’s liver.”

Batten looked at me for a translation. I mouthed curl one’s liver? with a baffled shrug.

“The PCU is on forced vacation, Harry. As you can see,” I shook a leather-gloved thumb at Kill-Notch’s wild shirt and hairy mouth. “Batten’s more vacated than I am.”

Harry’s thrice-pierced eyebrow inquired for him while he whisked the cinnamon duster from the cupboard and pulled fresh espresso into my demitasse cup. While Batten tucked his kit under his chair, I gave Harry a brief and fairly defensive explanation of Assistant Director Johnston’s concerns and the investigation of Internal Affairs, which degenerated quickly into F-bombs and enthusiastic arm-waving, with a moistly vigorous raspberry as an exclamation point. Batten and Harry exchanged a quiet moment of barely tolerant eye contact, during which they came to some agreement.

“She has no idea how broken she is, does she?” Batten asked Harry.

“Yes, I do,” I shot back.

“One might suggest that it is her absolute lack of self-awareness which provides the comic fodder,” Harry said, placing the newly-filled mug in my hand.

“I’m agreeing with a vampire,” Batten said, casually dropping the V-word again and helping himself to yet another beer. “There’s a first time for everything.” He tipped the beer toward Harry, who put one hand up to refuse the offer.

“Thank you, no.” His eyes shifted subtly from cashmere grey to chrome and he eyeballed my throat. “I prefer a warmer libation.”

Batten took his seat with a thud and a wince.

“Don’t taunt the vampire hunter, Harry,” I said. “We were all getting along so nicely.”

“Do forgive my behavior, Mr. Batten. How ungentlemanly of me,” he said without a trace of sincerity. “Now, dearest chickadee, I trust you had the opportunity to conclude your romantic pursuits to a satisfactory end?”

I froze, wide-eyed, with my espresso at my mouth, and when I tried to answer it came out as, “Erp.”

Batten cut his stormy blue eyes at me. Was it my imagination, or were they twinkling? “A date?” One corner of his lips twitched. “With a man?”

I mumbled something to Harry about it being cut short, but he shushed me and leaned bodily toward Batten to report his gossip in an eager, conspiratorial rush.

“Not a man. A lawyer.”

Batten choked on his beer and had to put the bottle down to wipe foam off his retina-injuring Hawaiian shirt.

Harry agreed with Batten’s unspoken assessment with a curt nod. “A solicitor,” he repeated. “Bezonter me! Who could have imagined a bootless jackleg sporting ivory at my darling minion over oysters?”

“Bootless jackleg?” Batten said, looking at me for translation.

I shrugged and added, “Sporting ivory?” to our mutual need-to-know list. I thought that might be a dick joke, but Binswanger hadn't been sporting anything elephantine as far as I'd been able to spot, except for his ego.

“A lawyer,” Harry huffed again, in no mood to fill us in. “Which of course renders him unsuitable to kiss a whore, never mind my precious DaySitter.”

“Harry!”

“I cry you mercy, my love,” Harry said, working himself into a true drama king froth that really belonged on stage. “Oh, tell me that you did not allow him to press his poisonous lips to my pet’s sweet honey bud.”

“Whoa! That better mean ‘mouth’, buster.”

“My Own,” he said, clutching at his chest, where there was no beating heart to ache. “I could not bear the thought.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, letting my scowl answer for me. Through the Bond, I felt only Harry’s glee; confident in his role as my forever companion, he wasn’t the tiniest bit jealous, and was, in fact, delighted with the opportunity to tease me while baiting Batten. My Cold Company knew the lawyer wouldn’t last. He was allowing what he no doubt considered a harmless, dead-end dalliance until it was time to pounce and end it, like a tiger putting a gimpy antelope out of its misery with a final crunch.

“A dreadful man,” Harry continued, “with all the warmth and sensitivity of a crocodile. I swear he files his teeth to points.”

“He does not,” I cried. “Dick’s very clever. If not for him, I might have had to buy Le Pique Consolidated a brand new excavator.”

Batten’s upper lip curled. “Not Binswanger?”

“I do not question your need for good legal counsel on a continuous basis, my doe, no indeed,” Harry talked over him vehemently, “but why you thought it necessary to share lunch with such a man is beyond me. Can you understand it, Mr. Batten, truly?”

Batten’s brow sank and he looked like he was lost in thought for a moment, staring directly at Harry. Harry looked back benignly, monitoring Batten’s shifting moods with an immortal’s experience and an empathic revenant’s effortless probing. I wished I could read Batten as easily as Harry did, but as always, Batten was a null for my psychic Talents. I wondered if Batten could feel the press of Harry’s mind upon his; if he could, he didn’t let it show.

Finally, Batten inquired, “How’s his wardrobe outside of court?”

“I prefer yours,” Harry replied, “and that includes today’s vulgar approach to fashion.”

“That bad, huh?” Batten’s dark eyes glinted. “Good looking?”

Harry drew an unnecessary breath, held it while he examined the ceiling as though the answer was written there, and then puffed out. “Not especially, no.”

I stewed in my seat, wishing I could Stooge-clonk their heads together like Moe. “Looks aren’t everything,” I said, knowing it would go unheard.

“Finances?” Batten asked.

“Not unhealthy,” Harry admitted. “Six figures.”

“Personality?”

“Perfectly appalling. Of course, we must allow that there is the slimmest of possibilities that, being no jobbernowl, he is just the draught-horse capable of bearing this senticous burden,” Harry noted, tipping his head toward me to indicate something.

“Who’s a what, now?” I demanded.

Batten leaned his chair back and balanced it on two legs. “Full name?”

“Richard Alexander Binswanger,” Harry said with distaste. “Dickie.”

Batten met my gaze. “I’ll run him through the system.”

“No you won’t, chucklehead!” I said, slapping the table.

They did a fair job of keeping straight faces until the table slap. Their in-unison giggles at the apparently hilarious state of my dating life were a vast improvement over their mutual animosity of the past, but it was still damn annoying, coming, as it was, at my expense.

The land line rang in the living room, and I swung out of my chair eager to be away from them, taking my hot espresso with me.

Unfortunately, both chuckleheads followed.

CHAPTER 3

I SNATCHED THE phone up. “Marnie Baranuik, UnBio; you trap ‘em, we zap ‘em.”

The person on the other end of the line wasted no time reacting to what I had said. He began smoothly, “Sorry, I won’t take up much of your time, Ms. Baranuik. My name is Constable Patrick Schenk, and I’m calling from Niagara—”

“Home?” I nearly dropped my cup, but managed to set it on the coffee table before curling up on the couch. Then I pulled off my gloves and tossed them beside the cup. “You’re calling from home? Wow, hi. How’s the weather? I hear it’s been brutal. Early blizzards?”

“I just have a few questions for you regarding Britney Wyatt.”

Right to business, not a small talk kind of guy. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I know that name.”

“She had your business card in her wallet.”

“I have business cards?” I thought about it, glancing up at Harry, who was settling his lithe form into his favorite chair beside the wood stove with a graceful sweep. Harry nodded. “Wait, I did have business cards about ten years ago, when I worked for myself, but I can’t imagine anyone would still have one.”

“She didn’t call you?”

“No, sorry. The number on it probably isn’t even in service.”

“It isn’t,” he confirmed.

“If you’re looking through her wallet, is it safe to assume she’s missing? Dead? Incarcerated?” I watched Batten crouch in front of the wood stove to start building a fire. His ass looked absurdly delicious and I did my best to pretend not to see it. “Did she get frustrated by an asshole and shoot him in his jerky jerkface?”

A throat-clear. “Erm, no.”

“How about his butt?” I asked. “Did she shoot him in the butt?”

“Sorry, Ms. Baranuik, I thought you were psychic.”

“I’m not the kind of psychic who can pull answers out of the ether,” I said, and though I’d heard the skeptical tone slip into his voice, the Blue Sense did not report any malice. “Distant event viewing is the work of a clairvoyant, a Watcher. Unless they’re looking at the future. That’s a precognitive, a Seer.”

“What kind of psychic are you?”

“The kind that does not mess up FBI investigations by blowing stuff up.” I shot Batten a look that he ignored; over the phone, I was met with doubtful silence. “I’m dual-Talented. Firstly, I am a clairempath, a Feeler. That means I can tell how people are feeling, even the stuff they try to hide. I’m also psychometric, which is a fancy word for someone capable of token-object reading, getting vibes and visions off inanimate objects.” A Groper, to those in the psychic circuit, but we Gropers didn’t like our slang to leave the office, for obvious reasons.

I could hear a distant taptaptap, rhythmic, wood-on-metal. Constable Schenk cleared his throat, and there was the sound of paper flipping. I felt the weight of Harry’s focus, and knew he was hearing every word with his preternaturally acute ears.

“Any idea why she’d want to consult you?” Schenk asked. “What Ms. Wyatt might want to discuss with you?”

“No. I’d be useless long distance,” I admitted, noting Batten’s lip twitch into a smirk; I glared at the side of his face, daring him to comment. “I’d have to see this person in the flesh to help her with anything.”

“I see. Not a 1-900 psychic help line, eh?”

I let that go because it lacked undertones of nastiness. “People used to get my help on missing persons cases, constable. Sometimes they’d mail me objects to touch, and once in a while I’d get impressions off the items that would be helpful. Maybe she’s looking for someone?”

“Did you work independently for very long?”

“Not hardly. Long enough to get some cheap business cards, register with the government for tax purposes, and set up a phone number. Then I closed up shop to go work for Gold-Drake & Cross,” I said, suspecting he already knew this. “So what happened with this Britney chick?”

Schenk hesitated, and I didn’t expect him to answer. In my experience when cops are focused on harvesting and filtering your answers, they rarely share their own. I was accustomed to Mark “Info-Hoarding” Batten never sharing a thing with me that he didn’t have to.

Schenk surprised me. “You said you’re from the Niagara region, yes?” When I made an affirmative murmur, he said, “She went into the Welland Canal last night at Lock One and didn’t come up.”

The idea chilled me instantly. Harry looked up sharply with his own immediate discomfort and pushed a dollop of reassurance through the Bond. “It’s November,” I said. “The canal would be freezing cold.”

I heard more tapping. Taptaptap.

“The canal is dangerous,” I continued. “My mum always said that there were whirlpools near the bottom that would suck you down and hold you there while you drowned.”

Schenk made a non-committal noise. “Not the best place for a swim on a winter night, no.”

“That water is so… dark,” I said.

He murmured thoughtfully.

“My dad said there are eels,” I said. “Is that true? Are there eels? Or did he just say that to keep me out of the canal?”

“Britney Wyatt never made any attempt to contact you?”

I curled my feet up under me, half-noticing Harry rise from his chair and circle around the back of the couch. I felt the blanket drape my lap before I saw his pale hands tucking it around me. I flicked a glance at Batten, who watched us with an unreadable expression.

“No. I’m sorry,” I told Schenk, meaning it. “I hope you find her, though.”

“Anything else you can think of that might be helpful?”

There wasn’t, and I felt useless. “I wish I could be more help.”

“Thanks for your time, eh?” he said, and I heard the disappointment, felt it come across the line clearly. Before he hung up I distinctly heard that taptaptap again. I put the phone aside and slid my gloves back on.

“Dearheart, if you’re going home you’ll need to pack your boots,” Harry said. “Not the dress boots, mind. The lace-ups are far more practical for the snow and ice.”

Batten’s face was half lit by firelight. “You’re going home?”

“I’m not going home,” I said firmly, though certainly the urge to help was nagging in my belly. I had investigatory blue-balls because Hood yanked me unceremoniously away from the crime scene that afternoon, and they were churning for an outlet, making me antsy.

“What was that charming name you had for them?” Harry drummed his bottom lip with one pale forefinger, pacing back to his chair, then changing his mind and choosing to roam the room. “Your ‘shit-kickers?’”

He was talking about my indestructible Doc Martens; I’d had them forever, and they were still in excellent condition.

“‘Tis a perfect shame that I cannot accompany you,” Harry continued, “as an attempt to mend fences with your family is long overdue. Alas, your brother could not travel in the state he’s in; neither could our Mr. Duchoslav be left alone while he is in such a vulnerable state.”

When not lurking around and whining about how much he missed pizza and cheeseburgers, my brother Wesley spent most of his days as a bat, curled up in one of my bedroom slippers, which also happened to be how he conducted his sex life. Baranuiks: not lucky in love. Yucky in love, maybe.

“I’m not going home, Harry.”

“Might as well,” Batten told me. “You’re on vacation.”

“I don’t want to be on vacation,” I reminded him. “Neither do you.”

“Don’t forget your passport,” Harry said, ignoring us. He left the room, an elegant glide of immortal grace that demanded human attention. With a sigh I tossed aside my afghan and chased him into my room.

“Harry,” I repeated, “I am not going home. My family lives at home. Remember them? The people who don’t like me, but who would never let me live it down if I didn’t visit while I was in town, but would also make such a visit impossible, what with them not letting me in the fucking house? I am not going to Canada.”

“Well, of course you are. I knew it the minute the nice policeman called. You cannot resist.”

“I can resist,” I lied. “Just because this Britney girl might have had a problem that I might have been able to help with and now she might be missing doesn’t mean I have to know what happened.” But what happened? And what did she need me for? And where did she get my old business card?

“Good heavens, such a fuss you make.” Harry whisked open my bedroom closet and stood there contemplating my wardrobe with a discontented air, then fished out my go-bag. “Pack your vitamins. Warm socks. Extra gloves. One never does know what sort of calamity you’ll run into.”

Batten leaned a hip against the bedroom door. “Lot of snow this year,” he said. “Better wear your long underwear.”

I fired a pair of balled socks at his sassy mustache. “Who asked you, Smokey and the Bandit? You shouldn't even be thinking about my underwear.”

“Perhaps you should bring the ring our Infernal Master chose to give you,” Harry said, still off in his thoughts. His pale hand drifted to my jewelry box, which was really just a wicker bowl containing some costume beads and the ring of Asmodeus, wrapped in one of Harry’s monogrammed handkerchiefs.

“I highly doubt I’ll be tainting my soul by summoning a three-headed demon king to claim any stray spirits this week, dude.”

Batten made an unhappy noise. “You can still do that? Why don’t you get rid of that thing?”

“Because it would be a very bad thing if it fell into the wrong hands,” I said. Batten’s lips did a slow curl and I knew what he was thinking. It’s already in the wrong hands.

“Very well, ducky,” Harry said. “At least pack some decent clothing for a change.” He winced at my current fashion choices: grey track pants, a faded khaki M*A*S*H t-shirt, and slouchy wool socks.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “On second thought, gimme that ring. Gonna summon Him up to get you right now.”

Harry made a stern cluck of his tongue and slipped the ring in his pocket, giving it a safety pat to reassure himself that it stayed put.

“Go with her, Harry. I could babysit the dead guys,” Batten offered, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

My jaw dropped. I worked it, but nothing came out. I don't think I'd have been more surprised if he’d said he was proposing to Chapel.

Harry stopped packing my socks with a wide smile, no hint of fang. “Why, Mark, you surprise me,” he said warmly.

“Half-a-Vamp can’t be left alone,” Batten reasoned.

“Don’t call him that,” I said, and it would have come out much sterner had I not noticed Harry calling Batten by his first name, a rare thing indeed.

“But neither can she,” Batten finished, tossing a smirk in my direction. “You’d better go with her.”

“I could not agree more,” Harry said, “and we thank you. This is a kind answer to a question I dared not ask.”

I waved my gloved hands at them. “Where am I? What universe did I trip into? Am I even here? Can you see me?”

Batten shrugged it off. “Watched revenants before, remember?”

He had watched both Harry and my brother Wesley during the investigation following my being stabbed by psycho hose-beast Danika Sherlock, and he had managed not to stake either of them.

“Besides,” Batten continued, “I’m on vacation but on call; I have to stay in town. Chapel’s off. You’re leaving.”

“I’m not leaving!” I repeated, upping my volume in case they were both going deaf.

Batten continued, “You’re uncomfortable using Viktor.”

Viktor Moldovan Domitrovich was an eight-foot-tall, undead Chukotka ogre from the Zone of Absolute Discomfort in the far north of Russia, sent by the Association, a multipurpose service for revenants. He was an excellent — if completely creepy — guardian for the dead guys, but I didn’t like to have him in my home any more than necessary on account of his necrophilia. I didn't even want to think of him licking the open, abraded wreck of Duchoslav's torso, much less what else he might do to it. Entrail-humping was a bridge or three too far.

“Harry, you don’t trust Batten to guard Wes, do you? I’m not even sure I trust him to feed the cat and water the orchids.”

“I regret to say, last year I would not have trusted your carrion hunter in the smallest degree. However, he has proven himself a stalwart companion of late.” His smile broadened. “I daresay this impromptu arrangement with your agent sounds not entirely unsatisfactory.”

“As a sentinel?” Batten suggested, their inside joke; last time he’d played bodyguard, Harry had tricked him into sitting by the casket for hours like a sentry.

Harry had the grace to look sheepish. “Why, this feels like the beginning of a marvelous friendship, Mr. Batten.”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Batten said.

Harry shrugged easily. “Who can say?”

I struggled to compute. “Can it with the bromance, you two. It’s freaking me out. I can’t go to Canada, even if I do want to, which I am absolutely not admitting to.”

They craned in unison to blink meaningfully at me. Since Harry did not require the act of blinking, I took it for the insult it was.

“I haven’t been invited to help,” I said. “I don’t just barge into active criminal investigations and push my—”

The rest of my argument was drowned out by another chorus of guffaws. I let my head fall back and stared at the ceiling as their shared humor washed over me. How I had gone from hermit slacker to pushy investigator, I’ll never know, but lying about my wants and needs to these two was pointless. I did need to know why Britney Wyatt had my decade-old business card, and what she needed me for, and where she’d gone, and why she’d taken a winter swan dive, and if I could help. I certainly wanted to solve those mysteries more than I wanted to sit here listening to these two numbskulls giggling like little boys who’ve traded potty talk. Harry’s elbow hit the dresser as he struggled to remain upright, doubled over by the force of his merriment. Batten fairly wheezed with laughter. That beautiful face I usually wanted to smooch all over was turning pink, and his hairy mocking grin made me itch to slap him.

“Oh, fuck off into a basket of pig shit, the both of you.” I grabbed my favorite black cable-knit sweater off the hanger and chucked it at my go-bag. “I liked you guys a lot better when you hated each other. I'm going to my office to get Chapel off the dhaugir hook, now that I'm so pissed off I can't screw it up.”

And, amazingly enough, that's exactly how it went. A candle, his picture, a pinch of this and a sprig of that, and Gary was free. Harry and I were in the car on the way to the airport less than an hour later.

CHAPTER 4

THE OVERNIGHT FLIGHT from Denver to Toronto’s Pearson International was uneventful, unless you counted the fact that Harry had replaced half the songs on my iPod with a subliminal recording entitled, “Self Restraint for Compulsives: Your Graceful Nature”. I spent the first chunk of the flight trying to figure out when the hell I’d put an hour of ocean sound effects in between Tom Waits and the Beatles. Sure, they were soothing, and I managed to pass on the cocktail service when the stewardess offered it, but I was left with the urge to thunder-punch a cheeky dead guy in the sockstuffer.

Filling out the Customs forms had been an adventure, especially when Harry piped up from within his casket to complain that “undead English sassmouth” was both inaccurate and impertinent; one of the porters who had been carrying his casket let out an indelicate shriek and nearly dropped his end. I bit the bullet and put down “family visit”, as the reason for travel, but I sincerely hoped that if Harry chose to see them, he wouldn’t insist I join him.

My best friend in the whole world, Ellie Meath, was due to meet me at the arrivals area. I had convinced Harry to pack relatively light, fitting everything I thought I needed for a short stay into a single, albeit lumpy and heavy, carry-on bag. For ease of travel I’d left both my gun and Mr. Buzz, my favorite vibrator, behind. I figured if I couldn’t live without either for a couple days, I had bigger problems than I thought.

Harry, on the other hand, had packed for himself like he was Celine Dion on a cross-country tour. As the porters took his casket beyond customs, I tried not to think how much extra he’d paid for the luggage charges, not to mention the price of hauling his casket, with him in it. When we traveled, infrequently though it was, we usually did so in a private jet or chartered bus for exactly these reasons.

I spotted Ellie’s chic, platinum-blonde pixie cut in the crowd, bobbing and weaving a good foot below everyone else’s heads; Ellie’s short like me, and kind of quirky in a dry, reserved way. I hadn’t seen her in four years, since the last time she’d popped out west to visit me when I'd still been with GD&C. When she found me she shot me a two fingered salute off her brow. There was no smile, but thanks to the Blue Sense, I knew she was glowing on the inside. Between us, I was the sunny one.

I bounded over to her and tried to give her a hug. She sighed and tolerated it, arms limp at her sides. “Yes, yes, hi,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Must we be melodramatic?”

I backed up and grinned at her chest. “What’s with the tits?” I jumped at my own loud voice, and looked around to see if I’d been overheard. Several curious passersby looked at Ellie’s chest. I whispered, “Hello, new boobs?”

“Oh!” she said as though she’d completely forgotten. She passed a hand over her modest beige silk blouse. “They’re new. Like them?”

“Expensive?”

“What do I care?” she asked. “It’s Fred’s money.”

“Do you like them?”

She frowned at me like she didn’t understand the question. “Get real. They’re plastic toys for Freddie.” She left out that she’d do anything and everything for Fred, but I knew it to be true. He had been in and out of hospital as long as I’d known him, and needed full-time care at home. When Ellie wasn’t at work, she was caring for Freddie. The deadpan humor and flat stare didn’t fool me; Ellie was a total softy on the inside. Apparently, that softness extended to body reconstruction.

She gave me a critical once-over. “You’re not getting laid.”

“Hey, sometimes I—” I smiled again, noting the hint of teasing in her eye. “Maybe I should get a set.”

“Would Harry like that?”

I laughed. Unlike my sisters, Ellie didn’t say Harry in audible air quotes, like it maybe wasn’t his real name, or draw it out like it was a dirty word. She wasn’t thrilled with my living as a DaySitter, or pleased with the effect it had had on my relationship with my family and most of my old friends, but she wasn’t unhappy about Harry as a person; she didn’t like him being undead, but being a wealthy English gentleman scored him some major points. I think her family coming from a corner of the English aristocracy and being raised with the same sense of refinement and dignity had a lot to do with it. Harry’s disdain for most of my behavior tickled Ellie’s funny bone. On more than one occasion they had happily compared notes on my lack of poise for hours over tea and watercress sandwiches while I played video games and flipped them both off.

I thought about her query and realized I had no idea what Harry would think about fake boobs. Probably something with way too many antiquated syllables, regardless of which way his needle pointed. Batten, for his part, was an avowed ass man. “I missed you,” I offered to change the subject.

“You and your sloppy sentimentality,” she said, but the set of her shoulders softened. For a moment she looked like she wanted to tell me something important, but it disappeared as quickly as it had materialized. She zipped her coat up. “You must need caffeine. Come on. Your car is waiting out front and your man is fetching the luggage.”

My car? My man? I allowed her to take my go-bag off my shoulder, because with Ellie, I pick my battles. If she wants to do something nice for you, Dark Lady help you if you try to resist. We hit the Tim Horton’s and scooped a couple of coffees. I boggled at the extra-large size but said nothing, as I was coming from America, land of super-size, high-test everything.

“He’s a little stuffy,” Ellie was saying, giving me her humorless smile, like she hadn't expected “him,” whoever he was, to be any different. I didn’t have a clue which “him” she was talking about, as Harry was still in his casket. She nodded at my pink leather gloves approvingly. She’d seen me wear gloves for the last decade, quite accustomed to my habits as a Groper. “Got a hat?”

“What car? I didn't book a rental,” I said, fishing my knit cap out of my pocket and plunking it on my head. The hat was Kelly green and shaped like a cartoon frog, with bulging white eyes on top and nifty kiddy-ties that I fastened under my chin. Ellie held my coffee for me while I zipped up my puffy pink parka, then I followed her toward the exit doors, sipping cautiously and blowing into the little hole in the brown plastic lid. “And who’s stuffy? Harry? Constable Schenk?”

She shook her head no. “Did this cop invite you to help on his case,” she asked, “or are you butting in like always?”

“Since when do I butt-in without being invited? I usually try to butt out, but nobody lets me.”

“You hate an unsolved mystery.” She had me there, but I was going to keep practicing my denial skills. Or maybe just reheat my sarcasm.

“I absolutely, positively love not knowing what’s going on,” I scoffed. “I spend ninety percent of my day not knowing what the fuck is going on.”

“That, I don’t doubt,” Ellie said. “You're going to see that horde you call family while you’re in town, aren’t you?”

I snorted. “I’d rather freeze to death and be eaten by wolves, not necessarily in that order.”

We pushed out of the airport doors. The blast of winter air hit me directly in the face, nearly freezing my eyeballs open on contact. They watered instantly. We both stopped with matching expressions of agony. My shoulders shot up to offer some protection to the nape of my neck. I made an involuntary little whooping noise and chased Ellie’s quick footfalls to the right, hugging my coffee cup to my chest, not that it offered any warmth through my parka, but at least it wasn't going to be blown clean out of my hands. The snow slanted nearly horizontally, slick white streaks in the near-light of the creeping dawn. There was a crowd of porters and curious travelers gathering at the curb. We lurched through the sea of gawkers, using them as a human wind break, and ran aground against a vintage Bentley hearse. A short, lean, white-haired man of indeterminate age who looked like he might have an iron rod in his spine directed the porters loading Harry’s casket. He wore a black suit under a long wool coat that swirled around his polished boots in a way that reminded me of Harry’s opera cloaks. The gentleman took my bag from Ellie swiftly to stow it.

“I am Byron Merritt, madam,” he told me, bowing his head slightly into the fierce wind. “Everything is ready for you.”

“See? I don’t know what the fuck is going on, and I love it. For realsies.” I looked to Ellie for help. She shrugged. “You’re who, now?”

“Byron Merritt, madam. Lord Dreppenstedt’s butler and valet for North House,” he said.

“North House,” I repeated.

“Lord Dreppenstedt’s residence in Niagara-On-The-Lake,” he said over the noise of idling cars and clattering luggage.

“You’re kidding,” I gaped. “Harry has a butler? Why don’t I have a goddamn butler?”

“You do, madam,” he said, smoothly. “I shall be pleased to serve you for the duration of your stay.”

That was the best news ever. I could already picture the old guy serving me espresso in the bath while Harry read to me from the newspaper. I felt my lips curl up in a smile. “Fuckin’ A. My name’s Marnie, but you can call me the Great White Shark. Or the Psychic Crusader. Or sweet-cheeks. I like sweet-cheeks the best.”

Ellie coughed into her hand.

“Begging your pardon, madam,” Mr. Merritt said, “but I am fairly certain I shall not be calling you that.”

“I don’t need you to; it’s on my organ donor card.” I eyed the hearse. “Nice wheels. They Harry’s?”

“The car belongs to Lord Dreppenstedt, yes.” He held the passenger door open for Ellie and me. “Please do get in, it’s terribly cold.”

We slid across the cushy leather bench seat and let the blasting heat thaw our faces. I put my coffee in the cup holder, removed my gloves, and rubbed my cheeks.

“Nice of Harry to warn me about this little surprise,” I said, watching Mr. Merritt circling behind the hearse to monitor the porters struggling to load Harry and his casket like pallbearers. The crowd craned and tried to be coy about staring, casting wide-eyed glances and then looking away like they didn’t care. Several camera phones blinked their flashes; luckily for their owners, Harry's being ensconced within prevented the digital imaging bits from shorting out. A businessman sipping a hot drink plowed into an older woman who had stopped in her tracks to witness the proceedings, and both of them began rapidly apologizing and wiping tea off her coat sleeve as a team: ah, Canadians. I felt the warm push of Harry’s awareness through the Bond and knew he was, for the moment, still wide awake and highly amused by the swirl of mortal attention. I sighed. “Guess we won’t be staying at the Lovesley Inn.”

“Are you surprised?” Ellie asked.

“A little,” I said, blowing into my fists. “Harry loves a good bed and breakfast.”

“I think he’ll be getting both, don’t you?” Ellie sipped her coffee. “Mr. Merritt surprised me, too, when I was getting into my car to come get you. Thought I was being kidnapped by a little old funeral director.”

“Or a ninja,” I said. “Doesn’t he sidle up like a ninja?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s a ninja,” Ellie said, happy to play along with a nod. The Blue Sense tingled a weird warning at me: Ellie was relieved that I was focusing on goofy stuff. I was right; she was definitely hiding something.

“Probably he’s a mixed martial arts master,” I suggested, rolling with it to put her at ease and stifling a sigh.

“How old do you figure he is?”

“Fifty-five? Seventy?”

“A hundred?” Ellie said.

“Hundred-year-old ninja,” I agreed. “Combat Butler for the win.”

Mr. Merritt opened the driver’s side door with an invasion of Arctic wind. He removed his coat, folded it tidily, got in, lay the coat beside me, shut the door, and put on his seatbelt.

“Pretty fuckin’ swanky getaway car, Jeeves,” I said.

“Do you swear in each and every sentence, madam?” he asked, adjusting the rearview mirror. “It seems a shame for a charming young lady to be afflicted with such an unfortunate compulsion.”

“I have way more unfortunate compulsions. And I don’t have to swear,” I assured him. “I could totally stop if I wanted to.”

I could see Mr. Merritt’s right cheek dimple as his lips clamped down around the beginnings of a doubtful smile. I wondered how many years it had been since he’d allowed himself a good, impudent smirk. “Could you indeed?”

Ellie made the slightest uncertain noise.

“Sure I could,” I told them both. I gave Ellie my hey-have-faith-in-me eyes. She rolled hers in a way only a best friend could get away with: loving disgust.

“I am most happy to take your word for it, madam,” Mr. Merritt said, pulling smoothly into the airport traffic and onto the highway. When we started toward Niagara my tummy gave a flutter. Going home, for better or worse. Easier to banter about swearing, or probe Ellie’s odd, secretive concern.

“I’ll prove it to you,” I told Mr. Merritt.

“Uh oh,” Ellie said, pressing back into the leather seat with a knowing grimace.

“I’ll make you a bet, Mr. Merritt,” I said, ignoring Ellie’s throat-clearing and ankle- kicking. “I bet I can resist the urge to swear the entire time I’m in Canada. If I can’t do it, I’ll give you a thousand bucks for every swear word that slips out. But if I can refrain, then on my last day, you’ll swear in every sentence you say to me.”

Ellie gave my ankle a final kick, but she had given up on the enthusiastic warning. I wondered if I had enough money in my account to cover the check I was going to have to write.

The butler managed to resist an eye roll of his own as he merged into heavier traffic. “How perfectly ambitious of you, madam. I’m certain that, were he listening, Lord Dreppenstedt would beam with pride.”

“Listen, you century-old bag of sass, do we have a deal or what?”

“If it amuses you, madam,” Mr. Merritt said, “we most certainly have a deal.”

“Okay, okay, but wait, hold on,” I said, panting, working myself up to it. “Cuntnugget! Douchetarp! Fucksack! Fanny-ramming, bitch-sucking, chunkass, jizz-flapping shitdong! There. No, wait!” I thought about it. “Twatwaffle! I love twatwaffle. And cocksplurt! Okay, I’ll be all right. Starting now!”

Mr. Merritt’s eyes went back to their normal size eventually. He was quiet for quite some time, and we listened to talk radio all the way to the rusty shipwreck at Jordon Harbor. “Am I bringing you to North House with Lord Dreppenstedt after I drop Miss Ellie at work?”

“Nope. Drop me at the north end of St. Catharines. Port Weller. Lock One.” I rubbed my hands together. “I’ve got an officer to stalk.”

Ellie recovered from her mortification to whisper, “What’s a jizz-flap?”

“I have no idea,” I whispered back. Just another mystery I'd need to solve. Politely.

CHAPTER 5

MOST PEOPLE WOULD be alarmed if a stranger pounced into the passenger seat of their car without invitation and made themselves comfortable. Constable Schenk didn’t even blink… or at least that’s who I assumed he was when I climbed in. I could get used to being back in Canada if people weren't constantly going to be raising their eyebrows and wanting to point guns at me.

The traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way had been slow because of a heavy snow dump; at a little after eight A.M., we’d dropped Ellie at the hospice where she was a palliative care nurse. Then Mr. Merritt took me all the way to the Lake Ontario end of the Welland Canal. There was one car, a midnight blue Sonata, parked in the weak morning sun at a perfect right angle to the dirty, pothole-ridden road at the end of Lock One. When I hopped out of the hearse and waved an uncertain Mr. Merritt away to take Harry to the house, the man in the Sonata noted my arrival with that I-see-everything-but-am-feigning-disinterest look that cops develop. He went back to his notes, pretending to ignore my approach. The car wasn’t running when I heaved open the passenger door and popped in, but the windows were faintly fogged by the residual warmth inside. About half a foot of snow tumbled off his roof and some of it accompanied me into the car in a swirling white puff.

He slid me an expectant look with slate-hard eyes that reminded me a lot of Rob Hood’s, a blend of grey and green, calculating, not missing a thing. He said nothing. There was a trim goatee softening a chin that might have been sharper in his youth, and the hard angle of his jaw reminded me a bit of Batten, though Schenk had at least five years on Kill-Notch. I doubted that they had been five years of killing monsters, not here in Southern Ontario, but they had been no less difficult, and had left their mark. This man was accustomed to shouldering the kind of human-on-human horrors that would make normal people run screaming in the opposite direction. The Blue Sense stirred to life to report his reaction to my sudden appearance: a calm curiosity, but oddly, no surprise, and certainly no anxiety.

I whipped off my froggy hat, ran a gloved hand over my blonde mop of static, and showed him a toothy grin. “Hey,” I exclaimed with a pleased sniff. “You smell just like I imagine Wayne Gretzky does. Expensive cologne and maple syrup and hockey pucks.”

He opened his mouth, snapped it shut, and then tried again. “It’s not that expensive.”

“Sure it is, you’re single,” I guessed, noting the chic hand-knitted scarf in various autumnal shades, the tasteful leather jacket, and the Italian leather shoes. In the decade I’d been with Harry I’d learned to recognize a man who chose to wear the armor of style. “Smart single guys splurge on cologne because women have a strong sense of smell. You’re built like a linebacker, and you’ve got a scary face — scary-intimidating, not scary-ugly — so you’d be wise to wear a scent that puts girls at ease, something familiar that gives them the impression that you’re trustworthy. An older classic, not some young and aggressive one. Maybe cologne their grandfather would have worn to church.”

“Scary-intimidating, eh?” He cleared his throat unhappily. The Blue Sense offered me a glimpse of self-critical uncertainty behind the mask of his confidence.

“The bottle caught your eye, right?” I nodded sympathetically. “Black glass. Ego-stroking name. Rookie mistake.”

“Your theories on male shopping behavior are fascinating.”

And often wrong, but not in this case. “Aren’t you gonna ask who I am and why I’m here?” I asked. “Are you at least dazzled by my powers of deduction and observation?”

“I know why you’re here, Miss Baranuik.”

Point: Schenk. “Because you’re a hot shot detective?”

“Because I got a call from your mother.”

I jolted upright in the seat and my cheeks heated. “She knows I’m in the country? Holy hell, does she have my passport flagged or something?” Oh Goddess, they know I’m here. And they called to warn the cops?

“Now that we got that settled,” he grumbled, “have a nice day, eh?”

I sighed. “Don’t be hasty, Schenk. I’m extending professional courtesy, here.”

“Advising me on my personal scent catalogue?”

“The fact that you used the phrase ‘personal scent catalogue’ tells me you need more help than I thought,” I confided. “Also, I’m offering to help find Britney Wyatt.”

“And I thought you were a civilian.”

“As far as you know, I am.”

“Sorry. I can’t discuss case matters with a civvie.”

“Oh. Right.” I picked up his Tim Horton’s cup and shook it to judge its fullness. “Well then, I’m not.”

That earned me half a smirk. “Can’t imagine what you think you’re doing here.”

“Drinking the last of your coffee and sticking my nose in your case.”

He took the cup out of my gloved hand gently, and I let him, noting mitts that fairly dwarfed my own, paws that looked capable of crushing my entire face in one pop. “In what capacity?”

“Uh…” I wrinkled my nose at him. “Visiting dignitary?”

“Try again.”

“Psychic informant?”

“If I had a nickel for every psychic…”

“Paranormal expert!” I exclaimed with a glove-muffled clap.

“Christ, I’ll be laughed out of the briefing tomorrow.”

“What if I had FBI credentials?”

“You don’t have FBI credentials.”

“You don’t know,” I squawked. “I could have Fed-cred up the ying-yang.”

Constable Schenk stretched his neck from one side to the other, rolling his broad shoulders to release the tension. “Do you have FBI credentials?”

“Kinda.” I said defensively. “Sorta.”

“I’m gonna have to see these kinda-sorta credentials.”

“Left ‘em with the butler.”

“Butler,” he said. “Jesus.”

“No, Jeeves. Actually, Mr. Merritt; his first name is Byron, which is awesome, but not as awesome as Jeeves. Who am I kidding, I’m going to call him Jeeves no matter what his real name is,” I said. “I do have FBI credentials, though.”

“Where are they?”

“At North House. Oh, shitfritters, I forgot to ask Mr. Merritt the address. I don’t even know where I’m staying.”

“A psychic who gets lost in the city where she grew up,” he observed. “Your so-called powers are not doing much for your chances of being useful.”

“I'm not lost. I just have no idea where I'm going. Important distinction, constable,” I pointed out with an imperious wag of my finger, which felt damn good. “North House is somewhere in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Guess I’ll just look for the hearse. Oh balls, I said shitfritters. I owe Combat Butler three thousand swear-dollars and it’s not even breakfast yet.” Something occurred to me. “Fuck, does 'balls' count, too?”

Schenk looked at me like I'd just scraped dog shit off my shoe with the lid of his coffee cup. So much for that good feeling. “Yes. And don’t swear in my fucking car. So it's five thousand.”

“You just said ‘fucking.’”

“It’s my car. And that's six,” he said, pointing to the cup holder, where there were a pile of Loonies and Toonies (or, as I like to call them, Doubloonies) for the drive thru. “And six thousand dollars for my Swear Jar.”

“Nuh uh, I didn't bet you, I bet Jeeves. What’s with you guys, anyway? When did Canada become a no-swearing zone?”

He started the car without bothering to answer; the heater and radio both blasted on full. While he turned the volume down, I took the opportunity to slip my sock-feet out of my boots and tuck them near the vent to defrost my frigid toes.

“Feet off my dash,” he said.

“No way, man.”

Schenk’s eyes slunk sideways at me, and I complied immediately with a shuffle. He watched me do it, nodded once, and said, “Nice socks. Were those frogs on the ankles?”

“Yep.”

“Cute.” He put his notes away, leaned one long arm into the back seat to set his folder back there neatly. “I knew when I spoke to you that you were going to show up.”

“Then it’s unanimous,” I said. “Everyone knew before I did.”

“You strike me as nosy and stubborn.”

“Completely untrue,” I said. “For the most part I am disinterested and flaky.” He didn't appear to be buying it, despite the mounting evidence that I was flakier than a stale croissant. I wondered if he knew where North House might be, and whether I could sponge a ride. “I’m not stooging around here for kicks. I’m here to help if I can. And that’s not a promise, it’s a hope.” I looked past the dashboard at the Welland Canal. The water was so dark blue that it was nearly black, even with the morning sun on it. Usually, it was business water, a mode of transportation and nothing more. Today, it was hungry water, foreboding and sentient, though I couldn’t have said why. “No one should have to disappear here.”

Schenk made an incomprehensible noise. His pencil hand started moving, and the pencil went taptaptap on the steering wheel. I wondered if he even knew he was doing it.

“I take it she hasn’t been found,” I said.

Schenk stared over the dashboard, too, and said nothing.

“I take it you don’t think she will be found?” I asked.

“You ever seen a corpse after it’s been in the water a while?”

I thought about altogether too many autopsy photos I’d seen; the surprise package in my mailbox that had turned out to be the head of twelve year old Kristin Davis; the drooling ghouls I’d battled; the rotting zombies I’d dodged, exploded, and melted; the possessed, exsanguinated body of a woman who'd tried to kill me; the scarred, slipper-humping vermin that used to be my brother; and the comprehensively flensed revenant in my house right this second. “I’m a forensic psychic and a preternatural biologist, officer. I’ve seen a lot of things I wish I’d never seen. Frankly, a waterlogged body doesn't even make my top ten list.”

That didn’t seem to impress him. It wasn’t what he was waiting to hear. I added, “I’ll be okay. By all rights, I shouldn’t still be sane, but here I am.”

“I don’t have the time or patience to hold your hand,” he warned, and the Blue Sense reported he was fibbing; Schenk had a natural protective streak a mile wide.

“And I don’t have the time or patience to let you,” I volleyed.

“Why should I humor you, Miss Baranuik?”

I let the Blue Sense rise until the psi in the car made the skin under my gloved palms twitchy. It reported his feelings of dedication, his unwillingness to let anyone distract him unless that distraction was going to pay off for his victim.

I said, “There are five pictures of Britney Wyatt in the car with us.”

He retrieved his folio again, flipped open the notes, took a paper clip off the inner pocket, and fanned two photographs for me. One was a picture of three young people, two male, one female. The girl in the middle had a brilliant smile and a heart-shaped face, long dark hair with a thick shock of turquoise painted across the brow, and a silver nose ring. The other picture was a college graduation picture, between her parents. Same dark hair, lacking mermaid colors.

“Two,” he said.

I flipped the sun shield down above his head and a picture was tucked there, stuck with a piece of medical tape. Britney Wyatt, solo, posed with one fist under her chin, a professional picture with fair lighting, taken by a chain department store photographer.

“Three,” he conceded. “Lucky guess.”

“There’s an official print-out with her picture in your briefcase. Four.”

He nodded, unimpressed. “Paperwork. You’ve worked with cops before.”

I smiled and took off a glove. I reached for his jacket. He let me. The inside pocket above his heart yielded to my questing fingers the rough corner of photo paper. I flicked it around to look at it; a snapshot of Britney, not looking at the camera, holding something that looked like a digital voice recorder. The photo was dark and grainy, but she was stunning, a flash of ghostly beauty lit only by the moon, pale and delicate, the set of her brow serious. Another shock of color at her brow, but the night and the poor picture quality washed it out, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was blue or purple. I showed Schenk the picture and said, “Five.”

His slate eyes considered me for a long moment before he took the picture back and tucked it away in his jacket. We listened to the car idle, warm air blowing softly from the vents.

“This might get cold and ugly.”

“Like the last guy I dated,” I said, cramming my froggy hat back on. “Awesome.”

“You let me know when you start regretting this.” He stretched an arm behind me to put his folio in the back seat.

“Eleven o'clock last night,” I said, putting my glove back on. “But that won't do Britney Wyatt much good. I'm here, and I'm tenacious, and I’m tough like a cinder block.”

“Of course you are.” Schenk nodded like he believed me, but his lips did a little yeah-right pucker. “All right, you’re on a one-day trial. Buckle up, Miss Cinderblock.”

CHAPTER 6

ON THE OTHER side of the canal, a few locks up, was a dirt lot speckled with cars and trucks and factory workers smoking on their breaks. Schenk pulled into what could have been a giant pot hole in the far corner of the lot. Under a slick layer of black ice dusted with snow, broken asphalt heaved and buckled. I held onto the car getting out, scuffing my Doc Martens to get a good idea what I was walking on.

Schenk unfolded impossibly long legs and got out of the Sonata, giving me the first real sense of his size: I pegged him at about six-eight, and nearly three hundred hard-hitting pounds. At five-zilch, I should have been intimidated; I wasn’t. In fact, standing in the wind break at his right side, I felt sheltered.

When we walked into the Oh Yeah! Café, Schenk had to duck. What was going to be so exciting about diner eats? Maybe they put something fun in the eggs. After removing my frog hat, I ran my gloved hand over my hair to smooth the fly-aways. That was the theory. In practice, not so much.

The interior of the café was older than I was; the tables and chairs were pine, the floor, ceiling, and walls were covered with wide, knotty paneling. When we seated ourselves, both chairs creaked loudly enough to announce their retirement.

Schenk set his leather folio on the table and his pencil reappeared as if he'd conjured it from thin air. He lifted his face to the air and I thought he looked hungry; if he had a well-honed cop face like Hood or Batten, he wasn’t bothering to use it. The smell in the café was a perfect blend of bacon, coffee, toast, and something sweet that might have been cherry Danish. The thickly-laminated menu was small and simple, and the food was cheap. Schenk didn’t have to look at the choices, and the waitress knew to bring him coffee immediately. A regular. I turned my cup up for some, and before I could try it, he grunted.

“You’re gonna want something in that.”

I placed my order for scrambled eggs and French toast, smiled the waitress away, and checked out his cup. “You took yours black.”

“I’ve been drinking it for a decade,” he said. “No taste buds left.”

I took an experimental sip and my sight blurred with tears. Schenk slid two cream cups and the sugar canister across the table. I thought his lips twitched, but it might have been my eyes doing the twitching.

I went on the offensive while I doctored my drink, interrupting myself with occasional sips to see if it had attained palatability. “The coffee’s bad, the waitress looks like someone exhumed Bea Arthur, the décor is late-60’s fishing cabin, and this place is nowhere near the cop shop. Why do you come here? Are the eggs that good?” Four creamers and enough sugar to make a small plate of cookies later, I could finally stop grimacing when the coffee met my lips.

Schenk braced himself, sipped his coffee, and gave me a long stare. “You tell me. You’re the Big City Psychic.”

“I told you, I’m not that kind of…” I broke off, seeing another test written across his face. He was still wary about believing in my Talents, but I sensed he wanted to believe. “Fine. You wanna play, Constable Cynic? Let’s play.” I slipped off a glove and tentatively poked the table.

The pine under my finger tingled as the Blue Sense stirred to life at my request. Empathically, I felt a wash of interest from the big cop across the table, a nice sort of open-minded inquisitiveness mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism and reservation. Not the sort of openly rejecting doubt I usually got from the law; this one was willing to give me a chance. The pictures had given me a foot in the door. If I wanted that door to remain open, I had a shot, maybe only one, to peel away that layer of resistance. Grateful for the opportunity, I laid my hand flat, opening myself completely to whatever vision might slap my brain.

Like a spotlight hitting a stage, the Blue Sense spiraled opened in the front of my skull, parting the darkness to give me hints about the people who had left any residual impressions at this spot. Unlike psychometric visions from crime scenes, which are always chaotic and violating, several gentle images flickered onto that stage, the coy tease of a fan dancer. I was vaguely aware that the waitress had returned with our food; I smelled the cinnamon and maple syrup, but focused on the vision, blocking the input of her curiosity.

The man who sat here last was also a cop. In uniform. Young. He worked traffic and enjoyed it. His thought processes tended to black-and-white when it came to the law, and traffic suited him well. For him (Ben something, but his friends still call him Bubba because he used to be chubby, the Blue Sense reported), there was no mystery involved; he already knew you broke the law, he saw it happen. His job was to make you pay for it, and he thrived on two things: keeping his streets safe and setting things capital-R Right.

The vision flicked to black like the cable had gone out. I focused deeper, reaching for impressions buried under others, digging for clarity, sifting through half-ideas and broken pieces to find a solid handle. For a moment, the intrusion of empathic sensation overwhelmed the token-object reading; Schenk vibrated on the edge of excitement. This was no skeptic; this was a closet believer, secretly thrilled by the possibility of proof right in front of him. If I opened my eyes, I’d see it in his face, but I pushed that urge away and focused on the table.

The other person to have left a recent impression on the wood beneath my hand was a woman: Detective Sergeant Nicole Malashock, Constable Schenk’s superior. I’d met her once before, in April, another missing person case; one where I had been invited to consult. Malashock was a no-nonsense woman whose position had hardened her irrevocably in ways that made her undeniably coarse. When she’d sat here last, she’d been lonely, borderline depressed with her lot in life, feeling like no matter what she did, it wasn’t good enough. Malashock hated the coffee here, too, just like Ben. (Bubba Osterhout, the Blue Sense piped up. And Malashock has called him that by accident. He was neither amused to hear it nor able to hide his irritation, and Malashock had felt a jolt of guilt.) Malashock didn’t like the décor in the Oh Yeah! either, but she kept coming back because she craved connection with other cops, though she rarely found it here, even though…

When I looked up with a sad smile, Schenk was dipping the corner of his rye toast in egg yolk and waiting to hear my report. The waitress was still hovering. My clairempathy was jittering around the room, collecting impressions of feelings from every table, and the waitress felt uncertain, nosy, skeptical. She asked if we needed anything else.

Schenk and I said in chorus, “Hot sauce.”

Then he asked me, “Well?”

“Does Bubba Osterhout have a bit of OCD, do you think?”

Schenk’s toast paused halfway into his mouth, but his face did not betray surprise. Aha! There’s the cop face I was waiting to see: jaw relaxed, eyes unimpressed, expression guarded. Taking information in and revealing little, his hand gave him away as he placed the egg-soaked bread in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, wiped his fingertips on his napkin, and then casually asked, “Who?”

Point: Marnie. Yay, me!

“Constable Benjamin Osterhout. His rigid thinking patterns suggest that he does. Not a serious case, I don't think, but he’s very black-and-white. Might be why he loves his spot in traffic, eh? I mean, you’re either speeding or you’re not, the numbers don’t lie.”

“I don’t think he likes being called Bubba,” Schenk said.

“He doesn’t mind so much if it’s coming from a friend. He really didn’t like it when Malashock said it, though. Not one bit.” I frowned. “So the owner of the Oh Yeah! is an ex-cop, eh? Retired. Didn’t get a name. That’s why you police types hang out here.”

Schenk put his fork down with a clunk and pressed the meat of his back into the chair. It cracked a warning, and he readjusted his legs on either side to compensate. “Got all that from molesting the tabletop?”

“Groping,” I corrected with a snort-laugh. “I’m a Groper, not a molester.” I filed that away for later, though, so I could tell Batten. “And yes. I saw them both, and her reason for coming, although she’d rather hit a Starbucks, frankly.”

“Saw?”

“More of an impression, really,” I explained, pulling my glove back on. “I didn’t get a lot of physical details about either, except that she felt like a brunette. To be fair, I knew that already. I’ve met her before.”

“What does a brunette feel like?”

“I should have a cheeky answer to that, but I don’t. I also sensed she was wearing a really snazzy red leather jacket.” And that she has no friends.

Schenk digested this. He dipped some more toast in egg yolk. Then he wiped his hands on a napkin without eating more, drained his coffee, and waved the waitress over for a refill. She was happy to oblige. One of the women from the next table used the waitress’s motion as an excuse to glance at Schenk; she took him in from head to toe with an appreciative but subtle ogle, decided he was doable, and went back to her pancakes. Schenk didn’t seem to have any idea he’d just passed a visual inspection. The woman saw me staring, and I gave her a he’s-not-remotely-mine eyebrow-and-lip signal, an unspoken go-ahead. She smiled down into her coffee, embarrassed. The Blue Sense reported she’d never have the nerve to approach him, but if he struck up a conversation, she’d have to work hard not to swoon right out of her seat. I wondered how many opportunities this man was missing out on because he had no idea he was being checked out.

Schenk dropped his voice. “Are you finished making friends across the aisle, or should I wait?”

I hid my mouth behind my napkin. “I’m trying to get you laid, dude. You’re welcome.”

He thumped his file hard with one thick finger, but his eyes said he knew exactly what was going on at the next table. Well, well, I thought. Can’t slip anything past this one.

“According to the statement we got from her boyfriend, Simon Hiscott, he and Ms. Wyatt walked through the gap in the chain link toward the sand piles,” Schenk said, opening the file to scan his notes and pictures, “at approximately nine o’clock. At which point, Ms. Wyatt turned away from Mr. Hiscott, stared into the canal, and then jumped into the water.”

Thinking of the ice, snow, and slush piled at that end of the canal, I asked, “Jumped, not slipped?”

“Jumped.”

“Just like that? Mid-winter swan dive?”

“According to him, she went underwater head-first, arms at her side. And didn’t come back up. We’re in the process of getting video from the Seaway.”

“When you do, can I see it?”

“Possibly,” he said noncommittally.

“Marks on him?” I asked.

“None.” He sipped black coffee, putting his pencil between middle and forefinger like a cigarette. I wondered if he was an ex-smoker.

“Is Simon Hiscott alive?”

“As opposed to?”

“Dead?” I shrugged, thinking revenant. “Undead, maybe?”

“Living, breathing human.”

“I’m going to ask you something,” I said, pointing at him with a crispy strip of bacon, “and I want you to keep an open mind.”

“Hooboy.” The pencil began to taptaptap softly on his files, and when his brows knit, his lips did that doubtful pucker again, like brows and lips were attached by the same drawstring. “Can’t wait to hear this.”

“If there was some form of mind control involved, do you like him for it?”

“He had an engagement ring in his pocket with their names engraved on it. He was waiting for the right moment and says he’d just about worked up the nerve.”

“That’s sad, if it’s genuine,” I murmured, and comforted myself by wolfing the rest of my bacon.

“If,” he repeated, not a question. The pencil paused in its tapping.

“Well, yeah. It’s also a good cover story. If you were gonna murder your girlfriend, buying an engagement ring a few days before is a good way to demonstrate you planned on keeping her around, yes? Having it engraved furthers that display.”

“That’s fairly cynical.”

“You disagree?”

“Didn’t say that.”

My phone buzzed against my butt cheek to indicate a text and I dug it out to peek at it. Carrie, the only member of my family, other than Wes, who still spoke to me. Come see me tonight at mom’s. You can tell me about this date with a lawyer. And then, a second later: What’s with you and soulless bloodsuckers?

I sighed and put the phone face down on the table. How did she know about that? How did my family always know every move I made? Wes was a bat, but I didn't take Harry for a rat. For people who wanted to have nothing to do with me they sure couldn’t stay away. She wanted me to see her at my mother’s house? Was she out of her mind? “I need an espresso.”

Schenk indicated my empty mug. “Want me to flag down some more bad coffee?”

I considered this, feeling drained by my travels, using half my brainpower to figure out how to dodge my family for the next few days, and the other half to remember where the nearest Tim Horton’s was, and shook my head. “Divers searched the canal for her body?”

“And out into the lake by Municipal Beach. A shoe surfaced near the coast guard station, a few scraps of what might have been the blue coat she was wearing caught up against the wall on the east side of the canal.”

“What kind of shoe?”

I expected a Batten-like “what the fuck does that matter?” but Schenk flipped a page over and said, “Brown leather half-boot.”

I drummed my thumb on the side of the table. “Real leather or some cheap alternative?”

This time, he looked like he wanted to ask, but answered, “Real leather.”

I filed that away in case it became important.

An older man in a vivid yellow golf shirt with a drum belly trapped behind a black apron brought the next pot of coffee, and offered Schenk a sunny smile. It was thirty degrees below zero outside, but this guy was wearing short sleeves. His forehead was sweaty. I was still bundled in my parka and dreaming of a hot bath.

“Longshanks,” Yellow Shirt greeted. “Haven’t seen you in a few weeks. Welcome back.”

Schenk gave him a fond return smile, watched him tend to the other patrons like a bumblebee settling from one flower to the next, contentedly busy.

Knee-jerk, I opened my mouth to mock the apt nickname, but heard Harry in my head advising against it. Keeping my teeth together was the hardest thing I’d done all day, but I reminded myself I was there on a trial basis. Self-restraint, me? Point: Marnie.

Schenk let me sift through his files and photos, pictures of the crowd taken during the search and rescue attempt. I could see a bunch of nosy citizens behind the yellow tape up the road, a gaggle of cops near the ambulances and shiny white police cars, reporters with cameras and video cameras and microphones. There was one guy standing apart from the others, one boot propped on a pile of hard-packed frozen slush, one pale hand on the chain link fence between the Welland Canal and the stretch of road heading north.

“Who’s this dude in black?” My gloved pointer hovered over his picture.

“Why finger him instead of anyone else in that crowd?”

“He looks like a creep. Or a rock star. Or a creepy rock star.”

Schenk’s pencil resumed its drumming, this time on his denim-clad thigh. “Ren Scarrow.”

“He must weigh about as much as my left thigh.”

“So, two pounds?”

“Funny. Look at him. He’s built like a praying mantis. Or maybe that’s an illusion caused by the skinny jeans.” I squinted. “Who is he?”

“Exorcist, or so he says.”

“Amateur or professional?”

A blink. “Is that a serious question?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” I peeked across the imposing bulk of his left forearm where it blocked part of his notes, and he moved the arm to give me access. “Renfield Aquinas Thackeray Scarrow. I’m going to want to see his Red Flag.”

“His what?”

“Exorcists licensed to speak with demons on behalf of the Church carry a kit, including their Red Flag. Exorcists licensed by the government also carry a kit and a different Red Flag.” I tapped my right biceps with a gloved forefinger. “They sometimes wear it here on their sleeve. It’s more of a patch, really, but Red Patch doesn’t sound very bad-ass.”

“Exorcists and psychics,” Schenk said; it sounded like he was trying to soothe himself so I didn’t interrupt. I really wanted to add, “... and stiffs, oh my,” but I was winning in the self-control department, today. Point, Marnie.

When his lament did not continue, I squinted at the picture. “What’s that he’s holding?”

“A pair of leashes.”

“Um, ew?” I said, and felt my shoulders squinch up. “What kind of pervert walks around with leashes at a crime scene?”

“Day job. He trains cadaver dogs for the Ontario Canine Forensics Association at his place on,” he paused, thinking, “Seaway Haulage Road.”

But where are the dogs? “There are houses at this end of the Haulage?”

“Just his.” His big finger hit a map he’d sketched. “It’s a converted church and parish hall; he lives in the church bit, works out of the hall.”

“Graveyard still there?”

“Moved about five years back,” Schenk supplied.

“Moved the stones, or all of it?”

“Not sure. Why?”

“Morbid curiosity,” I admitted. “The Haulage, eh? That’s just on the other side of the canal.”

Schenk murmured thoughtfully but noncommittally and tossed his pencil on the table, busying his hand with stirring a spoon in his cup, although there was nothing in it but black coffee. Maybe he was seeing if it would dissolve the spoon. “Practically his back-fucking-yard.”

“That makes the canal a real convenient dump site,” I suggested, “if you wanted to revisit your crimes, say.”

Schenk was silent on this, but I thought his eyes agreed with me. I sat back in the chair. Mine creaked, too.

“Exorcist?” I asked. “You talked to him. Him, out of that whole crowd. Why him?”

“He looks like a creepy rock star?” He made it a question, and I smiled.

“Does he think a demon is responsible?”

“Not his theory, no.” The spoon tapped on the cup, taptaptap, before he laid it aside on a napkin. “He believes this is the work of a ghost.”

His calculating green eyes cut to mine to judge my reaction; what he must have seen was my is-he-an-actual-idiot face, because that’s how I felt.

“Uh, no,” I said with a disappointed little laugh. I dumped a bunch of sugar in my coffee and gave it a noisy stir. “No, no, no.”

“So, ‘no’ then?”

I added more heavy cream. “Not possible.”

Schenk’s eyebrows did a slow rise. “You’re telling me, as a self-proclaimed preternatural expert—”

“Hey,” I said with an indignant sniff, “I’m not self-proclaimed. Other people proclaim that about me.”

The yeah-right lip pucker re-appeared, but this time it was tinged with a bit of friendly teasing. “Sure. So, you’re saying, in your sorta-expert opinion, the answer is not ‘a ghost did it.’”

“I’m telling you that Creepy Leash Dude is either lying, or he’s a full-on dumbass,” I said firmly. “Ghosts cannot affect the physical realm. They’re lost souls who are, generally speaking, unaware of human existence. Theirs is a struggle toward paradise and eternal rest, or rebirth, which is an even more difficult journey. We’re not even a blip on their radar. Even the rare ones who do notice us certainly can’t summon the enormous energy it would require to manifest, communicate with the living, or affect people or objects.”

Something nagged me about that, having said it. I was repeating word-for-word what the science told me… but hadn’t I just finished writing a paper for Fast Science Quarterly on zombie anatomy and the complete breakdown of the headshot theory? I had discovered, by neatly blowing most of Zombie Dunnachie’s brains out, that as long as the brain stem was intact, that sucker can keep on coming. I’d been fielding calls from preternatural biology students wanting to do thesis work on this development since August. Preternatural biology is a young field of study, and prevailing theories were being disproven all the time. So why was I so sure of myself on the matter of ghosts?

Schenk’s spoon clunking pointless circles in his mug again drew my focus back. “His theory is that a ghost is luring people into the water and drowning them.”

“People, plural?” I asked. “Has there been more than one disappearance?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“And for what reason would this supposed ghost do such a thing?”

“He wasn’t real clear on that,” Schenk said.

“Well, ghosts are a fun theory if you’re writing a scary movie, but you can't fantasize an explanation for what's happened,” I said. “That's not science. Maybe he should stick to training his puppies.” I frowned at myself. “Did that sound overly bitchy, or just bitchy enough? Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell. Either way, he’s dead wrong.”

Schenk finished mopping up the yolk with his last crust of rye toast, ate it, wiped his mouth, put away his notes, and stowed the pencil. “I’m glad to hear you say that. Wanna go talk to him with me?”

Score. I might have liked to find Mr. Merritt, North House, and a hot bath, but it was just before noon and the obliging detective was still in detecting mode; I nodded. “It would be my pleasure, Longshanks.”

Schenk shook his head at me, but the Blue Sense reported a wash of grudging acceptance. He snagged the bill before it hit the table, told me to shut up when I offered to pay my half, and off we went.

CHAPTER 7

THE COVERED PORCH of the rectory smelled pungently of damp wool, mothballs, mildewed laundry, old boots, and wet dog. There was a rack full of leashes above a half-filled shoe tree, with a row of salt-encrusted hiking boots lined up toe-to-wall like bodyguards on either side of a single pair of black, pointy-toed dress shoes. I’d had a brief glimpse of Scarrow in person when he peeked through the inched-open door to greet us, which he'd pulled closed again to secure his dogs.

While we waited I texted the number Mr. Merritt had given me to check on Harry. It was unlike me to trust anyone with Harry’s well-being without more assurance of competence (unless it's with a corpse-licking ogre or a vampire hunter with a hundred and five hash marks on his sexy, sexy chest? my guilty conscience taunted), but the fact that Harry trusted Mr. Merritt enough to hire him and keep him on retainer gave me some comfort; Harry was not one to let me shirk my duties unless he was in safe hands. It hadn’t occurred to me until now to be insulted about the fact that Harry passed his care to Mr. Merritt’s without the slightest fuss. Within moments my phone buzzed with a reply: Lord D. is well and secure.

My next idea was to text Batten under the pretense of checking on Wesley and Mr. Duchoslav. When the thought of contacting Batten made something flutter low in my belly, I reconsidered; maybe the time away from Batten would be healthy for me. After all, I was moving on. I was dating. Sort of. Not that any of the men in my life seemed to take that seriously. Harry viewed it as a pointless, distracting hobby I’d taken up. Batten apparently found it straight-up hilarious. What’s up with that? I wondered if Batten was dating; the thought made me want to vomit up my toenails. I shoved the phone in my back pocket and pulled my gloves on.

“Everything okay?” Schenk asked.

I didn’t think Schenk needed to hear about my pathetic excuse for a love life, which consisted mostly of sexual jealousy and a jumbo pack of batteries. “Why the pencil?”

Schenk didn’t seem to be paying attention to me, but I’d been around enough cops to know that he was seeing every detail around him. We had a great view of the rectory’s office through the screen door, and I'd have bet my favorite pair of frog-bedecked panties his seemingly-casual inspection was anything but. I’d even wager plain old cash that he also hadn’t missed my text from his elevated viewpoint, nor my momentary hesitation to send another.

“The pencil,” I repeated. It was again pinched between his fingers like a cigarette. I pointed to it helpfully. “Why not a pen?”

“It’s thirty below zero,” he said. “Ink freezes.”

“Lead breaks,” I pointed out. “Are you carrying a concealed pencil sharpener?”

“I’ll never tell.”

I pointed to his side. “Well, there’s something in your pocket.” I didn't even sound salacious when I said it, which was probably the surest sign that I was mentally off-balance.

Schenk gave me a who-can-say shrug. I opened my mouth to retort when Mr. Scarrow returned.

He was a scrawny little dude, way too old to be wearing skinny jeans but pulling the look off with a poised insouciance that reminded me of Harry, an unflinching denim fuck-you to fashion propriety. He was still (again?) clad in black-on-black, a turtleneck cupping his pale, pointy chin. His dark hair was getting a little long, and looked like he styled it by running his hands through it all day long when he wasn’t out in the wind with his dogs. Many secrets to a man’s personality can be revealed by the state of his hands, so I took a quick peek at them. Maybe he sensed my inspection; they disappeared into his pants pockets, but not before I saw smallish fingers with bony knuckles and the hint of calluses, thin but powerful. I got the impression he’d have no trouble handling leashes, or reins, or any other method of controlling various beasts. I wasn’t entirely sure that didn’t turn me on and scare me at the same time. I swallowed hard, and glanced up at Schenk for reassurance against some nervous giggles that began to well up inside me.

During brief introductions Scarrow doled out the bulk of his attention to the cop, allowing a minute or so for my dissecting eyes to take a second pass. Multiple earring holes, closed over, but not long enough to remove all traces. Narrow hips, square shoulders, lacking the solid muscle of the cop between us; I wasn’t foolish enough to think that would make him any less dangerous in a confrontation. What Schenk’s photos hadn’t captured was the sunken, wary hardness in Scarrow’s eyes; this was a man who had seen some shit, handled that shit, only to be handed more shit. He fully expected the fecal deluge to continue, and welcomed the opportunity to whip that shit into submission. He might not initiate the shit-flinging, but it looked like the fucks stopped here.

I was keenly glad that Mr. Merritt wasn't totting up my losses based on the run of my thoughts.

The Blue Sense flickered to life with some uncomfortable warnings: Ren Scarrow felt like a man who viewed the world from behind a cynic’s lens, with a cynic’s expectation that something bad would always be followed by something worse. Rather than avoiding trouble, however, he chased it, comfortably certain he could dominate it. Furthermore, the Blue Sense reported, Scarrow had decided I was something bad, or possibly something worse. This man was used to being in control, and, like a cheetah picking out the weak gazelle, he’d instantly marked me as someone he could (and maybe should) take down. I’d been filed under “Prey”. Instinct told me that, matched against the vital, wiry old bastard, my survival might depend on his good graces. Whether or not he had any to depend upon was still a question. I didn't really want to have to find out.

I clenched my fists, felt the leather creak, and contemplated taking off my gloves to do some Groping around the room a bit to judge if I was, indeed, in any immediate danger. The old me would have thought stick close to Schenk, but I was running Marnie three-point-oh up in this bitch, and the fact that Scarrow intimidated me dialed my mood to show no fear, bordering on the temptation to prove his predatory ass wrong. I was a gazelle who wanted to show off her middle hoof, though I was pretty sure that violated ungulate anatomy.

Scarrow invited Schenk, by name and title, down the hall and into his office. He didn’t mention me, so I hung back, watching the two of them, diametric opposites but for the self-assurance they shared. When I made no move to join them, Scarrow was finally forced to acknowledge me, but he only did so with his eyes, which said, Do you need an engraved invitation, or do I drag you in by your ears? Awfully cheeky for a stranger. I stood my ground until he returned to the hall. It was only two steps, but I counted them as a minor victory. I waited until Schenk was deep into the office before I spoke, keeping my voice at a lower and more intimate volume.

“Renfield Aquinas Thackeray Scarrow,” I said. “Your initials spell—”

“Say that word and I rip off your nipples.” Was that a smile? And why did the threatened body parts seem into that? My nipples are assholes.

I blinked once, and heard words sliding out of my mouth on an exhale. “I like ‘em where they are, thanks.”

Scarrow eyed my chest. “So do I. May I take your gloves?”

“Um, no, thank you.” I plunged my fists into the pockets of my parka. “I’ll keep them on.”

He looked at my pockets. “May I take your coat?”

“Nah. Bit chilly.” And I need to protect my nipples from all that ripping business, Mr. Rats.

“May I take your gun?”

I don’t have one. Probably should. “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Scarrow.”

“How about the hat?” He smiled up at it. “Cute. My five-year-old nephew has one just like it.”

I whipped it off, shoved it in my pocket, and glared at him from beneath my static-frizzed blonde mop. For a moment the Blue Sense warred with my self-destructive need to tell him off, and then something else rushed in to crowd both of those feelings out: the ridiculous need to laugh. And not just laugh as though someone told a mildly amusing joke, no. I clamped my teeth together against an inexplicable and ill-timed wave of what threatened to become a belly-juddering gigglefest. Was the church itself to blame? I’d never been the child to giggle during a service; as the oldest daughter, I’d been in charge of keeping the littler ones quiet as they sat wriggling, bookended between my mother and me on the pew. Now, I was the one trying desperately to squelch some unnamed, mischievous mirth, and with every breath the urge to burst out into merry giggles continued.

Father Skinny Jeans missed it, thankfully, while he indicated that I should join Schenk in the office. I had to pass the dogs’ rooms to get there, and did so while mentally scolding myself to keep it together. Big black noses snuffled the closed doors as I passed, and one of the dogs let out a yip; I knew they could smell Harry’s indelible mark on me, my Bond with an immortal, the faint hint of burnt sugar.

“Interesting place,” Schenk said as we joined him, now openly admiring the spacious room.

“A little ghoulish, if you ask me,” I said, watching Schenk stroll from one window to the next. I knew what he was looking for: did Scarrow’s office have a view of the canal? The yard seemed fairly deep; I wondered how far you’d have to walk to get there.

I checked out the exorcist’s old-timey record player and collection of vinyl in a rack by the desk. His tastes ran from Rush to Uriah Heap to Neil Young, with enough old Brit-punk thrown in to quirk my eyebrow. On the back desk there was an old, battered, single-ball bowling bag, navy blue leather with a sporty stripe that might have at one time been white but had aged to the yellow of smokers’ teeth. There was a little blue sticky note on the desktop, face down, that looked like it had lost its stick and fallen off the bag.

I asked, “What kind of whackaloon wants to live on an old cemetery plot, Mr. Scarrow?”

“I bought this land knowing what was once here,” Scarrow said. “I train my dogs here, and breed them especially for the purpose.”

My belly quivered with the inexplicable need to laugh again. “To sniff out corpses?” That’s not funny at all, Marnie, what the blooming fuck?

“Those are the cadaver dogs,” Scarrow answered; his eyes narrowed, and I hoped he wasn’t noticing my internal struggle. “I train dogs to track ghosts.”

I blinked. “The graveyard is gone, but you’re saying there are ghosts on this property?”

“Oh, dozens. This was not just any burial ground, Miss…?”

“Baranuik.”

He made an affirmative noise, like I’d cleared up some mystery, or checked something off an internal list he'd been tallying. He folded his hands loosely in front of his flat belly. “This was the final resting place of several soldiers from the War of 1812, men who died horribly, and who remain to this day. They’re lost, but relatively harmless; there’s only one resident who ever enters the rectory itself.”

“'Resident,'” I repeated, looking around the room, wondering how quickly Harry’s skin would break out in an abandoned church and rectory, not to mention the clangor and clamor he'd hear if it was, in fact, home to the unquiet spirits Scarrow said it was. “Why would they haunt the cemetery and not the battlefield where they fell?”

“Fell,” Scarrow repeated, losing his calm for a split second of acid contempt that I didn't need the Blue Sense to catch.

“Died,” I corrected, noting the silent cop moving around the room behind me but saying nothing. I wasn’t accustomed to a cop giving me free reign or room to move, and certainly Batten never let me take the lead. “Does it bother you when I call it that?”

“Fell is too soft a word for how their life ended,” Scarrow said, but he regained his composure with the easy mask-switch of your average salesman. “And these spirits do not haunt. Haunting is a malicious act. The spirits on this property are not malicious.”

“But they’re here and not on the battleground?”

“As I said,” Scarrow said.

“Why?”

“Maybe they like my cologne,” Scarrow said pleasantly, and my urge to giggle returned. I clamped down on it hard, increasingly baffled. “They are indeed sentient. To interact with me and the dogs is their choice.”

“You realize that the established science disagrees with everything you just said.”

He leaned against his desk and crossed one ankle over the other. “You might be surprised how often science has disagreed with me, Miss Baranuik, and how infrequently that stalls my work.” He gave me a funny little smile, almost wistful. “If science disagreed with your findings, would you dismiss them?”

Touché. Point: Scarrow. I'd just sent in an article for publication where my findings represented a gigantic, shambling middle finger to the established science, so I decided to approach on another front. “You train dogs to track ghosts?”

“Only the two German Shepherds.”

“To what end?” I asked.

For a moment he looked confused. “To save them, of course. To release them to heaven and to perfect peace, if I can. ‘Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord,’ Second Corinthians, five-eight.” Looking past me to study Schenk’s wandering path, he said, “If you’d like to check out the yard, constable, be my guest.”

Schenk glanced at me and hesitated.

“She’s safe here without you,” Scarrow said.

“I don’t doubt that,” Schenk said (lied, my empathy reported, he doesn’t believe you’re safe).

He didn’t make a move to go until I shooed him out with a scowl and a heartfelt, “Piss off, eh?” Oh, Goddess, I'm turning back into a Canadian.

Once Schenk was outside and ambling across the yard, Scarrow closed the door to his office and visibly relaxed. He strolled back to his desk, placing its heavy walnut bulk between us.

“You’re no cop,” he said.

“Nope,” I answered. “Different kind of pro.”

He looked uncertain, which was fair, I suppose, considering I was wearing jeans with a little bouquet of skulls embroidered on one thigh, and he’d met me in a hat with big, googly frog eyes. Belatedly, I realized what I'd said; who knows, maybe Sesame Street had started featuring a friendly neighborhood hooker as part of their human cast.

“Well,” I said, a little defensively, “you believe in homicidal ghosts and quote the bible. What’s up with that?”

“As I tried to explain to Constable Schenk, shortly before the millennium, prize-winning physicist Dr. Levi Uri's Greenwade Experiment demonstrated repeatedly that, upon death, the energy released from the victim of a violent end can linger outside the body. Laymen might call this bundle of energy a ghost, but in my field, we call it an incorporeal human entity, or IHE.”

“I’m not disputing Uri’s findings,” I said patiently. “Though he was a sick, sadistic maniac completely lacking any ethics at all, he was still a top-notch scientist.”

Scarrow’s eyelids fluttered rapidly with surprise. “Agreed.”

“I mean, sure, he tortured three generations of the Greenwade family to death to find out if a bad end made a spirit linger, but nobody’s perfect.” I tapped my temple with a gloved finger. “He had an IQ of one-ninety. People that smart are rarely sane.”

Scarrow looked profoundly uneasy with the direction our discussion had taken, and the Blue Sense reported that he was disappointed. By what, I wasn’t sure. Disappointed in Uri’s choices? Disappointed that I knew this sort of thing? Disappointed in my lack of innocence, perhaps. I looked down at the files and pictures spread on his desk. His was a scattered kind of organization, with piles and tabs and clips and highlighters, nothing at right angles. I suspected SSA Chapel would have been deeply uncomfortable at such a desk. There were grave rubbings, black and white photographs, newer pictures of blurry patches of fog, weird lights under water, and local maps.

“The salient portion of Dr. Uri’s findings, to whatever's going on here,” I continued, “is that they do not support the claim that a ghost can manipulate the physical realm or affect the living in any bodily way. The energy is released, it can linger, it can unbalance local temperature on a tiny, measurable scale, and that’s about it. So unless Britney Wyatt took a swan dive to counteract a spontaneous case of chilly nipples, I think you're full of sh—enanigans.”

One of his eyebrows went up but he didn't comment. “I’ve found that’s not true.”

“I bet it is. You're probably packed to the rafters with shenanigans.” Is that what was giving me the chuckles? Nothing here is funny, Marnie; stop it with the fucking giggles. “As far as spirit/body interactions, there’s never been any evidence—“

“Personal observation. I have hundreds of EVP recordings.”

“Would you like me to debunk those for you?” I offered. “I’ll have time after this missing girl is found.”

“Murdered,” Scarrow said softly. “And I assure you, this is a case of a poltergeist.”

“You sound pretty sure, but I'm pretty not sure that the law can convict the dead of murder. And by 'poltergeist,' you mean a spirit held on Earth by manipulation by a demon?”

“No.”

“That’s what a poltergeist is, Mr. Scarrow.”

“Not always. In this case, by poltergeist, I mean an IHE showing independence, remaining by choice, for malicious purposes.”

I didn't feel like debating terms of art with this stubborn dick. “Malicious purposes?”

“The murder of Britney Wyatt.”

I felt my own kneejerk, stubborn certainty, the certainty of a scientist holding to current theories, and tried hard to keep an open mind. “I see. How do you imagine a spirit could have summoned the kind of energy required to actually murder someone? And under whose direction? By your own logic, this spirit is its own murder weapon.”

“Under normal circumstances, I completely concur that we could rule out classic haunting,” Scarrow said, “especially in the winter. But I’m willing to bet our wandering constable has neglected to mention to you the rather unusual meteorological conditions on the night of the murder. We had thunder-snow.”

In the next room the dogs started a high-pitched yapping, their noise muffled by old plaster walls. Scarrow’s head turned; a frown dipped his brows for a moment, but he apparently wanted to hear my reaction to the weather.

“Thunder-snow is awesome,” I conceded, “and he totally should have mentioned it, but what does the weather have to do with ghosts? Unless they're dead meteorology buffs, why would they give a da– rn?”

The dogs’ barking became more frantic, and one of them started loudly digging at a door, rattling the door in its frame as it scratched. “Ionized air during a lightning storm offers more energy for the incorporeal human entity to draw upon. November fourth’s—”

There were clumping noises in the front hall seconds before the office door banged open and a young man stumbled into the room with an anguished cry. Scarrow vaulted toward him, and at first his arms reached out to catch the man, should he fall. The Blue Sense woke with a roar and I felt my feet launch into motion, too. Coming around behind the desk, I stubbed my boot hard on something that rolled heavily and noisily away. Bowling ball? When the gun came out from behind the young man’s back, Scarrow and I froze. The throb in my toe disappeared like magic. So did my bizarre case of the giggles.

“Simon,” Scarrow gasped, “what in God’s name are you doing?”

“Where is she?” His voice was ragged, squeezed through a windpipe tight with emotion. He shook the gun as though that would get him answers. “I need to know. You tell me right now!”

I recognized him from Schenk’s notes and photos: Britney Wyatt’s boyfriend, Simon Hiscott. He was not dressed for the weather, wearing only socks on his feet, no boots or shoes, just a mismatched pair of argyles, and they were soaking wet, clumped with chunks of dirty snow. His boxy torso was squeezed into what I assumed was his girlfriend’s princess-pink ABBA t-shirt, like too much sausage in a pastel casing.

Scarrow’s voice sank to a soothing low. “Simon… I’m afraid Britney has passed on.”

“You fraud. Phony. Con artist,” he said, hitting each word with more and more force until he was frothing. “I’ll expose you.”

“Simon, please calm down. We can talk about this. I’m here to help you.”

“Heaven or Hell?” Simon performed a funny, desperate burp-sob combination that was more terrifying than it should have been. “Tell me where she is, priest!”

Priest? I craned to gape at Scarrow, who gave me a little shrug with his palms up, as if to say whoops, did I neglect to mention?

Damn it. I couldn’t let a holy man die on my watch, even if he was a smug, know-it-all exorcist in skinny jeans. I would have preferred to dive bodily through the window behind me and log roll to safety under a big evergreen bush, but instead, I side-stepped in front of the priest as a Marnie meat-shield. In my head I imagined Harry’s crisp, bleating admonishments, and what would come out of Batten as a disgusted groan. I ignored my too-honest imagination and swallowed hard.

“You should have helped her,” Simon demanded, trying to see past me like I was an inanimate obstruction. Then he focused on me, noticed I had human shape and a face, and scowled. “You should have helped her, too,” he told me, like I was in some grand conspiracy with Scarrow. “Now it’s too late. I need…” He looked around the office helplessly, panting, and then roared his frustration. “I need to fix it. I need her things. Give me back her things.” He did a double take at me, although he’d already noticed me once. “Hey,” he said angrily. “Who the hell are you?”

“Is that a real gun?” I asked the bleary-eyed man.

Simon fired off a round into Scarrow’s stereo, causing an impressive show of sparks and a bang-crack of metal through plastic.

“Now we can’t listen to ABBA, dingbat,” I said.

“Fu—fucking funny.” He slurred it together as one word: fufuckinfunny. He belched, sending a waft of booze breath my way. The muzzle of the gun shifted towards the priest over my shoulder, then back to me, weaving and bobbing.

“This escalated quickly,” Father Scarrow whispered, looking out the window, probably hoping to see Schenk. He touched my elbow, thinking to move me aside, but I shrugged him off.

“Who are you?” Simon slurred at me.

“Someone who really shouldn’t be standing this close to a man of the cloth,” I muttered, scratching an itch on my lower back, wondering if I was going to get a rash.

“You kinda look like that one chick from ABBA,” Simon told me, and pointed helpfully at the washed-out face on his left pectoral.

“I am that one chick from ABBA.”

“Oh yeah? What’s your name?”

I squinted, which helps me think sometimes. “Olga … Yorsenflorgen.”

“I don’t think that’s right.”

“Hey!” I slammed my hands on my hips. “Don’t you tell me who I am, you festering dongbasket. I think I know whether or not I was in ABBA.”

“Mary, mother of Christ,” the priest whispered against the back of my head and tried again to take my elbow.

“Prove it,” Simon said, and his other hand cupped the gun to steady it.

Schenk had to have heard the shot. Stall! Stall! “I can.”

“So do it.”

“I will!” I started to shimmy shake my booty, but couldn’t remember the words to Dancing Queen, so just hummed the first part.

“That’s not how ya sing a song, Yorsenflorgen!” he roared, and fired off another round. It thumped into the wall between me and Scarrow.

The priest swallowed audibly, and when I glanced at him his wide eyes demanded I do better.

Over Simon’s shoulder, I saw a shadow inch across the floor by the door. A tall shadow. A tall, big-shouldered shadow. It was too quiet in the silence following the shot. I had to keep Simon’s focus.

“Fine, this is how we did it, back in the day.” I flung my parka off my shoulders and whipped my sweater off over my head, belting out ABBA like my life depended on it. “My-my! At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender!” I swung the sweater over my head before flinging it to my audience of one man. One very drunk, unimpressed man. I added a sassy boob shake and gave Father Scarrow the you-strip-too eyes, but he just stood there looking horrified.

I began an enthusiastic Can-Can and clapping routine. “Waterloo! Promise to love me forever more! Wait, is that ‘forever more?’ Or ‘for evermore?’”

“Don’t stop to analyze,” Father Scarrow advised, motioning with short jerks of his head to the dude holding the gun.

“Right.” I switched to the only dance I’m really good at, the Funky Chicken, happy to blame my choices on the hostage situation.

Simon’s lips pinched, and to my alarm, tears sprang from his eyes. “Waterloo’s her favorite.”

I pointed at him and used my gloved left hand to hold an invisible microphone, switching songs immediately to prevent the waterworks. “Knowing me, knowing you! (uh huuuuuh). There is nothing we can do! Knowing me, knowing you! We just have to face it this tiiiiime weeeee’re throoooough! (this time we’re through, we’re really through).”

Simon dropped his gun arm to his side, and the gun fell to the floor. Schenk inched one step into the room, and I could see him hesitating to put his own gun away.

Simon let out a sob and sank to his knees in defeat, a great blubbering child, pulling at the front of his t-shirt as though the fabric touching him was adding to his agony in a way he could no longer abide. Father Scarrow bolted forward to kick the gun away, while Schenk rushed in from behind and scooped Simon’s arms in some funky, yanking submission hold. Schenk repeated over and over some commands that sounded super serious; I didn’t hear them, as I was still singing pretty loud. Seemed wrong to stop before the chorus. Simon didn’t fight Schenk. Simon’s fight had gone bye-bye. ABBA had been a better weapon than the deadly combination of booze and firearms.

“You knew all the words,” Schenk said, whipping out his handcuffs and snapping them on Simon’s waifish wrists.

“One of my lesser-known talents,” I said. “Figured it would save my life someday. Like if I got kidnapped by a backwoods Swedophile cult.”

“Yes. Then,” Father Scarrow deadpanned.

Suddenly aware that I was in only my tank top, I turned on the priest with a demanding scowl. “What I wanna know is, how come I’m the only one stripping to ABBA?”

“Hard to believe,” Father Scarrow said.

“You sang both the male and female parts,” Schenk noted.

“Like a boss,” I added.

“Like a lunatic,” Schenk said, and offered me his leather jacket to temporarily cover up with. It fell to my knees and swaddled me in body-warmed leather-scented goodness that smelled faintly of beer and maple syrup, although that was probably my imagination. “Nicely done, Cinderblock. Next time, maybe don’t flail around directly in front of a disturbed gunman. Gonna get yourself killed.”

“You’d rather I let Skinny Jeans here get shot?” I challenged. “I was covering his ass. If anyone’s going to hurt Ren Scarrow, constable, it’s going to be me.”

“I’m right here, Ms. Yorsenflorgen,” Scarrow drawled. “I can hear you.”

“You okay?” Schenk frowned down at me. “When the paramedics get here, I’d like to have them check you out.” His accent thickened as the tension of the standoff abated, and his out sounded like oot, though I doubted he noticed.

“They can diagnose mental illness, now?” Scarrow marveled, and went to check the dogs, which were still going ape-shit in their rooms. I gave his retreating back a sour look, and bent to fetch my sweater.

“I’m gonna deck a priest,” I told Schenk, returning his jacket by passing it over the sobbing lump on the floor that was Britney Wyatt’s boyfriend. I pulled my sweater back on. “Wanna watch?”

“Nah, I’ll read about it in the police report.” He hauled Simon to his feet and led him to the front door.

Out front an ambulance was pulling up with a patrol car right behind it. Dark Lady bless first responders. Schenk marched Simon out. A car that hadn’t been there when Schenk and I first arrived, some silver sedan, was buried nose deep in a snow bank, and I chalked a drunk driving violation up on Simon’s future rap sheet.

As the adrenalin began to drain from my system, the Blue Sense rode the fading waves to slap me in the face with Simon Hiscott’s agony. He didn’t care about being in cuffs, or being hauled out by his armpits, or going to jail. He didn’t care about anything, anymore. He could have killed us all and not blinked, could have blown up the entire world with the force of his anger and frustration. Simon had never been a violent man, but felt like he had nothing left to keep him anchored, and the dark wolf that lives inside us all had completely overrun him; black hatred and desperation surged through every unexplored hallway in Simon’s mind, chewing open doorways to boiling rooms of rage and heartache. The love of his life had disappeared into the cold, dark canal, and with her, everything he cared about.

Blocking that level of misery was a struggle for me, and for a moment I swayed back on my heels, physically repelled. Schenk glanced back at me, almost like he’d felt it, too.

The paramedics and the uniformed cops took over care of the sobbing mess in the sock feet and the ABBA shirt. Scarrow returned with my parka, and I took it from the priest’s outstretched hand.

“So,” Father Scarrow said companionably, “how long have you been rubbing shoulders with demons?”

“I do not,” I hissed, watching Schenk in the distance as he filled the uniforms in on the situation, “and I’ll thank you not to say that again.”

The priest’s dark eyebrow crooked up.

“I avoid demons,” I reaffirmed. And I hardly ever summon them. And we totally never rub shoulders when I do, anyways.

Ren motioned to my wrist. “May I?”

Curious, I gave it to him. I shouldn’t have. With his left hand he took my gloved hand, turned it palm-up, pushed up the cuff of my coat to expose the skin of my inner wrist. With his right hand he made the sign of the cross in front of himself, and then waved that palm in front of my face before laying it on my inner wrist. I felt nothing peculiar, only the mundane touch of soft, masculine hand, but when he removed it, my wrist was speckled with an unhappy rash.

“Thou shalt not lie, minion,” he said, but his lips curled into a frankly devious smirk. “I know demon bait when I see it.”

“Since when does the Church hire guys like you?”

“Guys like what?”

I whisked my wrist out of his grasp and he let go with an easy smile. “You’re a far cry from saintly.”

“I could say the same to you, Ms. Baranuik,” he said, and indicated with his left hand to where Schenk was waving me over. “Your ride is ready.”

I studied him for a long moment. “I’m going to want to talk to you again.”

“Of course you will.” The sardonic smile returned. “And I’ll even let you.”

Gee, thanks. “What did Simon want from you? How did he know you?”

“I took his confession once.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. “I think you’re lying to me. What kind of priest lies?”

He just shrugged with that infuriating smile. The wind tousled his hair back from his face, and he noticed me noticing, which further irritated me.

“Had you met Simon before Britney went missing?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s it? Just yes? Would you care to expand on that?”

“You’re not a cop.”

“I’m not a cop,” I agreed. “I’m a paranormal investigator. And you’re an exorcist, apparently. Got your Red Flag?”

“Why?” His eyes gleamed, and the Blue Sense reported that he liked me a whole lot more than I was comfortable with. “Are we playing bullfighter and angry bull later?”

“Don’t flirt with me, priest.”

“I’m not flirting,” he said, “I’m suggesting we fuck.”

My mouth popped open in a perfect O. “Holy crap! What kind of priest--? Are you off your--?” I struggled for more words and the urge to giggle returned full force. I pinched my lips together hard until it settled enough to talk. “You know, life isn’t all about divin’ in the muff.”

His smile tilted toward lewd. “Oh, I beg to differ.”

“You might be the worst priest ever,” I told him.

“Is that why you’re laughing inside?”

“You don’t know what’s going on inside me.”

“Yet,” he said. “But I could certainly make some suggestions on what goes there.”

“Holy motherfluffer! You’re filthier than me.”

“And none of what you just said qualifies as a no, so I guess I’ll be seeing you later,” he said. “Bring wine. We’ll get drunk and naked and discuss the afterlife.”

I stammered around a million replies. “I can’t fuck a priest, I’ll go to hell! And if that trick with my wrist is any indication, I'd be arriving with the worst rash ever.”

“Without my help, sweetheart, you’re already going to hell,” he assured me, and dropped a wink before shutting the door in my face.

***

I stomped to Schenk's car, not bothering with anyone else’s foot tracks and leaving a fresh trail through new snow up to my shins. Just my luck; finally offered free, weird sex and it was by a freaky-ass priest. Dude wanted to save me… with dick. Was this a joke? Was the Green Man enjoying Himself up there, having a good laugh at my expense? I was stuck imagining the rash I’d get you-know-where if I tried getting naked with him, which I totally wasn’t picturing. Besides, how would I get him out of those skinny jeans? No, wait! I wouldn’t! Would I? No! My instincts told me he was dangerous, my personal life told me he was absolutely off-limits, and everything else inside me said Fiddle-dee-dee! Apparently, everything else inside me had gone clownshit crazy. I gave the sky my serious-est stink-eye, hoping the Dark Lady and her oh-so-funny Consort were watching, and muttered at Them, “Hysterical. Soooooo funny.”

Still, I had to admit, I felt like I’d just gone for a vitamin B shot; lightened, refreshed, with a bounce in my grudging stomp. I should have felt drained, what with the brush with death and all, and reluctantly equated my surge of stamina with the aftereffects of Father Scarrow’s semi-holy presence. I snapped the elastic band around my wrist, brushed the snow off my calves, and stamped my feet before getting into the Sonata.

“Wait.” As I buckled up, Schenk held his fingertips to his temple. “I must be getting psychic. I can read your mind.”

Fuck, I hope not. “Dazzle me, copper.”

“You’re going to say ‘Time for a Timmy’s run.’”

“Fancy-brains detective.” I almost melted with relief, grateful that he was way off. “Think you’re so smart.”

Schenk had his casebook out and was scribbling notes. “I bet you also owe more money to the swear jar.”

I scowled and did some mental arithmetic, sighing inwardly. “That guy’s a priest,” I said. “Did you know that?”

His reply was a grunt.

“That’s your ‘I’m not sharing all my info with you’ grunt.”

Grunt.

“No, I was wrong,” I said. “That’s your ‘I’m hungry’ grunt.”

Snort-laugh.

“And that’s your ‘stay out of my head, weirdo’ snort. See? I’ve got you all figured out, too, Longshanks.”

“Fancy-brains psychic, eh?”

While Schenk scribbled his notes, I took out my mini Moleskine diary and a golf pencil, and pretended to write while I read aloud, “Dear Diary: Constable Schenk is a big ol’ doody head. Also, I don’t like his tie. And his accent is starting to make me want to go oot and aboot for some poutine.”

“I’m not wearing a tie.”

“Dear Diary doesn’t know that.” I scribbled some more. “Dear Diary: Constable Schenk thinks it’s too soon for me to sass him like we’re old friends, but Constable Schenk is wrong. Sass, sass, sass.”

“Must you, while I’m trying to think?”

“I’m not going to comment about how hard it must be for you to think at the best of times, so you’re welcome.” I played with the aim of the heating vents. “Did you feel anything weird in that rectory?”

“Weird how?”

“You know when you’re at a funeral, or you’re sitting in church and the minister starts talking about something super serious, and you know it’s the worst time to laugh, and you’re not even thinking about anything funny, but it just bubbles up in your throat and you have to slap your hands over your mouth?”

“I thought you had to pee,” he said, shooting me a smirk. “Wriggling and fidgeting the way you were.”

“Hey, I was subtle,” I said.

His lips did that yeah, right pucker. “You’re saying Father Scarrow gives you the giggles? Is this going to be a problem?”

“I’m sure it was the building, not the man,” I said, not entirely sure of that at all. I changed the subject, fiddling with the radio station and various dashboard buttons. “What’s going to happen to Simon Hiscott now?”

“Don’t push my buttons.”

“Your buttons or the car’s buttons?”

“Yes,” he said distractedly, and his pencil went taptaptap on the steering wheel as he paused to think. “Either. Both.”

His clock started flashing at me, blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, and a digital voice reported pleasantly, “Twelve.”

Schenk paused in his writing to sigh. “What did you just do?”

“Your clock tells you the time out loud?”

“Well, now it does,” he said, whacking my gloved hand away from the dash. “Don’t fiddle.”

“I wasn’t fiddling,” I said, “I was mucking about. There’s a difference.”

“Well, fix it.”

“Don’t harass me,” I grumbled, scratching at a spot on my wrist. “I just had a gun shoved in my face and I’m fairly certain the exorcist gave me a rash. Is that a bump? That looks like a bump.”

Schenk squinted at my wrist. “Nothing there.”

I pulled my wrist up to my face. The rash was already gone.

“Twelve,” the car said.

“Shit,” I said, punching random buttons. “How do you put it back to the way it was?”

“I don’t know,” Schenk said low, swatting me away again to stab at it randomly himself. “Do the opposite of what you did to fuck it up in the first place.”

“That almost never works,” I told him.

“Twelve.”

“Take your gloves off before you push my buttons. You probably pushed a combination of things that we’ll never figure out without the manual.”

“I can’t take my gloves off! I’m a Groper, and this is a cop’s car. Do you have any idea what images probably lurk on your dashboard? It'll be all bad lies, alibis, and donuts.” I tried to open his glove box but it was locked. “Where’s your manual?”

“Twelve.”

“Bought the car used, the manual was long gone.”

I pinched my lips together and shot him a look to judge his level of irritation. It was hard to tell; maybe he wanted to toss me out of his car on my ear, maybe he just wanted to clobber me. The Blue Sense suggested it was a toss-up. “And you never bothered to look for a replacement. Typical caveman. Thag know car things.”

“Thag knows it's a long-ass walk to anywhere you want to go, unless it's back to quote-unquote talk to Scarrow.”

“Twelve.”

I ignored my instinct to defend my motives, and instead asked, “Does Bad Habits still have the best wings in the city?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s hit that sh—not.”

“Shnot?” Schenk shook his head. “You’re bad at not swearing, eh?”

“Twelve oh one,” the clock agreed.

CHAPTER 8

BAD HABITS HAD always been my favorite restaurant in St. Catharines; laid back atmosphere, cheap beer, fast lunches, dark corners, clean bathrooms, and music that wasn’t too intrusive. A back booth was open, and Schenk made sure I grabbed it before he headed off through the crowd to the bathrooms.

I shoved my frog hat in the pocket of my parka, thinking it was more a nuisance than anything, ordered a root beer from a cute redhead, changed my order to include a shot of vanilla vodka, and tried to relax. It’s not every day I have a gun shoved in my face. It made me think of all the things I’d miss most, and maybe I was being stupid and proud and stubborn about most of those things, including the yummiest one.

There was only one picture of Mark Batten in my phone’s photo album and the urge to peek at it was too strong to resist; seeing his face was reassuring. I allowed myself a single soft sigh under cover of the noise of the lunch crowd, and tilted my phone close to my face so no one would see.

It was a quick shot, in profile, taken on impulse on a hot, sunny morning late in August, after our last big case. He’d been yelling at some schmuck from the CDC about zombies and head shots, and I had thought, at the time, that the intensity in his face was so kneecappingly delicious that I had to capture it for later enjoyment. The picture was fantastically crisp; I could see the gleam in his eye and some nifty fury froth in the corner of his mouth. Fighting with Batten was always arousing. Probably, that made me a weirdo. The heat he stirred in me was a sick fever, but one I craved. One I was craving badly, now, in the aftermath of a brush with death. Kill-Notch made me feel alive.

Unexpectedly, Simon Hiscott’s sad, desperate longing for Britney returned like a calving iceberg, weighing down my shoulders. Life’s so short; Simon thought they had all the time in the world, and they should have. Schenk’s grim concern for his missing person, bordering on the hopelessness that came from experience, rushed in to join the party. Father Scarrow’s desire to dominate me, whether it was to swat or fuck me, came tumbling soon after to add some confusion. My coat seemed to suddenly weigh a hundred pounds and I shrugged out of it, letting it fall behind me on the seat like a blanket for my bum. The waitress brought my drink and I ordered another before she could escape into the push of bodies.

Fighting with Batten was always a great way to deflect and blow off steam. I really wished he was here. I wondered how he was, how Wes was, how Harry was faring at North House, though it was still daylight and certainly he was at rest. I glanced again at Batten’s picture and considered texting him.

Heavy boots thumped hardwood behind me, Schenk’s even stride. I put my phone face down on the table before he swooped into the bench opposite me, but not fast enough.

“Something you don’t want me to see?”

“I don’t like to get caught mooning over some jackass like a school girl with her first crush, is all,” I said. “I have my pride.”

He didn’t argue that, which I appreciated. “So who is he? She? It?”

“He’s nobody special,” I lied.

He flipped open a menu. “Love him, eh?”

“Nosy,” I said. He didn’t look up from the menu, giving me just enough freedom from his inspecting gaze to admit, “Trying real hard not to.”

He nodded like he completely understood. “Too scared?”

“Too smart.”

“What do you want?”

“Wings, nachos, and privacy. Not necessarily in that order.”

“Honey garlic?” When I nodded, he asked, “Nachos with the works?” After my second nod, he asked, “What do you want where he’s concerned?”

I thought about that. “The freedom to love him like he’s never hurt me. But I’m not that stupid.”

He looked up from his menu. “Maybe he won’t hurt you again.”

I showed him my as-if face. “He’s got all the emotional sensitivity of a pile of rocks.” That wasn’t entirely accurate, or entirely fair, since I had the approximate emotional maturity of a three-year-old.

“If he’s a shit, why do you like him?”

I dropped my menu. “You know how when you pull out of the gas station on Glendale, and you pass the ice cream shop at the plaza, and the flutter in your belly goes ‘gimme gimme gimme,’ and your brain goes ‘we don’t need that, we came for gas,’ and then the flutter wins and you find yourself at the counter fogging up the glass in front of the cheesecake ice cream?”

“So he’s beefcake ice cream?”

I gave him a knowing chuckle of agreement. I steadfastly did not picture Batten's ass covered in hot fudge and sprinkles. Just a little whipped cream. “Sad, eh?”

“Sure that’s all he is?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded, and stabbed my ice cubes with my straw. “Of course.”

“Well,” he allowed, “we all have our weaknesses.”

I turned my head so I could give him a proper side-eye. “Big tough guy like you has a weakness?”

“Yup.” He looked up as the waitress approached, ordered enough wings and nachos for two, and handed her the menus. “Golddiggers with pretty toes.”

I chuckled. “A foot fetish?”

“I don’t knit ladies’ socks for nothin’. But your weirdo psychic powers already told you that.”

What the—a sock knitter? I couldn’t keep my bemusement off my face. “Not even a little.”

“Damn, confessed for nothing.”

“This just became fun. Got anything else to confess?”

“Nothing at all,” he lied smoothly.

“Aw come on… I’ll be your best friend. I’ll let you make me socks.” I showed him my heavy Doc Martens.

“Fuckin’ boots.” He shook his head and looked out the window. “Winter’s a total cockblock.”

My jaw dropped and I erupted into a full belly laugh. Schenk seemed surprised at what had come out of his mouth and joined me in the laugh. Heads turned. Apparently, something hilarious was happening at our table, and people always want to be a part of that if they can. The Blue Sense reported a polite, reserved brand of curiosity that felt classically Canadian, and for a moment, I was very glad to be home.

“Golddiggers, eh?” I smirked. “Out of curiosity, do you carry your gold in ingots, or old-school nuggets like the panhandlers did?”

He dug in his jacket pocket and came up with a guitar pick, a handful of nickels, and a snack-sized Twix bar. “Neither.”

“Looks like you might need to revise your fetish downward to nickel-diggers.”

“Now that we have the future of my love life established,” he said, opening his folio and taking up his pencil, he slid out a business card, offering it to me. It was one of mine. It looked brand new, crisp, and hardly touched at all. “This was in Britney Wyatt’s wallet. She left her purse in the boyfriend’s car while they went for a walk along the canal.”

“Why the hell would they be walking there at nine o’clock on such a horridly cold winter night?”

“Hiscott said it was a walk they did often. Gut feeling, though? I think there’s something else he’s not telling me. Once he dries out, he'll have a lot of questions to answer.”

I removed my gloves to take my business card in hand. It was cool and smooth and gave me no flickers at all, not even a minor impression from the big, troubled cop who handed it to me. “This card must have been in a box for the last ten years to still look so new. Maybe one of my sisters still had some?” Or Ellie, my brain piped up, but how would Ellie know Britney Wyatt? And if she had, she’d have mentioned it when she found out why I was here, right? “Where did Britney get this card?”

“Hiscott didn’t say, but again, there’s a lot he’s not telling me.”

“You a mind reader, now?”

“I’ve been a cop for twenty years.”

“So, yes.”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Hiscott says he doesn’t know why Britney would need a psychic, and that doesn’t sit right, either.”

“She was obviously going to contact me,” I said, not really a question.

“Wanna hear the funny thing? Scarrow had your card, too.”

I felt my mouth drop open. “So, wait, Father Frisky already knew who I was?” That hurt my head. “He acted like he was just figuring me out, being all Mr. Mysterioso. Why would he need to talk to me? You know, I don’t think I trust him very much.”

“He’s an ex-priest, what’s not to trust?”

“Ex,” I repeated, leaning forward, ignoring the waitress as she brought our food. “Why ‘ex’? And how 'ex,' exactly? Did he leave the church, or did they boot him?”

Schenk sat back and looked at the food. He settled on eating instead of talking for the moment. While he decided whether or not to discuss Scarrow with me, I told him, “That guy thinks I’m something that needs to be put in its place.”

Schenk sucked honey garlic wing sauce off his thumb. “What did he say to you before you left the rectory?”

I felt a guilty jolt and then remembered that, for a change, I hadn’t been the one to be inappropriate. I took a healthy pull of my drink, got a mouthful of ice, and crunched. “He made a sexual suggestion.”

“Want me to shoot him?” Schenk offered.

I choke-laughed on my ice chips. “That won’t be necessary, but can I borrow your handcuffs?”

“Gonna get kinky?”

“I just want to make sure I know where his hands are next time I question him.” I tasted the nachos. They were even better than I remembered, and I was suddenly famished. “Make no mistake; we’re not done with that priest. Ex-priest. Exorcist Ghost Hunting Dog Trainer Guy. Whatever he is. His bowling ball wasn’t in his bag.”

“Is that like ‘his cheese has slipped off his cracker?’”

“That, too. But literally, the ball was behind his desk on the floor. I stubbed my toe on it. That’s a clue.”

“It sure sounds like one, Velma. Try the wings,” Schenk said, pushing the platter closer to me.

“Wait, you agree with me?” I frowned. “Cops almost never agree with me. Agent Batten mocks ninety percent of what comes out of my face.”

“Yeah, I could see that.” He shrugged out of his jacket and got more comfortable in his seat, letting one of his long legs stretch out under the table alongside my chair. “Bowling ball on the floor, bag on the table. What’s in the bag?”

“Maybe it was empty.”

Schenk’s lips did half of a pucker with a twist, this time; I interpreted this as a firm nope.

“Would you need a warrant to look at it if he didn’t wanna show you?”

His chin dipped and he grunted affirmative. “Get anything off the business card?” He made epic magical finger motions at me. I followed his fingers in the air with a return of my bemused smile, like his fingertips had bewitched and befuddled me. He swooped and swirled that hand and ended with his middle finger standing up. I shook my head at him.

“Nope, but Bad Habits is a lot louder and busier than the Oh Yeah! was. Can I keep it? I can Grope it later.”

“I probably shouldn’t let you molest the evidence out of my sight.”

I gave him a sour smile at “molest” and handed the card back to him. “Fine, we’ll do this when we get some space. You don’t think it’s weird that Scarrow didn’t bother to mention that he knew Simon and Britney, or that he knew who I was?”

“I think he’s as sketchy as Walt Disney's pocket protector,” Schenk said, “but that doesn’t always add up to guilt. He was excommunicated from the church for challenging their beliefs about demons, ghosts, and poltergeists.”

I let that settle in. “But he still calls himself an exorcist.” I left my glove off so I could eat finger foods easier, and chewed some more nachos, stealing most of the hot peppers. Schenk took up a chip and battled me for the remaining pepper. I let him have it. “Why would Britney and Simon go see an ex-priest working with ghost hunting dogs who bills himself as an exorcist, and want to talk to me?”

“Maybe one or both of them felt they were being haunted?”

“Well, so what? I told you: ghosts cannot affect the physical realm. A sighting can be a little upsetting, but there’s no reason to panic.” We thought about that in silence. I said, “And even if they were being haunted, why wouldn’t Simon just tell you that? Why pussyfoot around it? What’s the big deal? Scarrow says he believes a ghost dragged Britney Wyatt into the canal somehow, and drowned her, yes? So why doesn’t Simon concur?”

Schenk shook his head. “Maybe Hiscott isn’t the one who believed in ghosts. Maybe he only went with Britney to talk to Scarrow because he was humoring her.”

(“You should have helped her,” Simon had yelled. “Fraud. Phony. Con artist.”)

“Simon blames Scarrow,” I said, and picked up my phone. I texted Ellie about the business cards: Is there something you need to tell me? I knew I wouldn’t get a response while Ellie was at work. Ellie always put her phone in her purse and left it in her locker until the end of her shift so she could focus on her patients. I texted Mr. Merritt for directions to North House, and when I received them, I put my phone away, and pulled my glove back on. “When will you get a chance to speak to Simon?”

“Probably in the morning. Let him sweat a little overnight after he sleeps it off.”

“Can I come?”

“Considering he’s facing weapons charges for waving a loaded gun in your face and discharging that weapon twice? I don’t think so.”

“I’ll stand behind the whatchamacallit. The two-way mirror.”

He offered me the last chicken wing, and when I refused it, he said, “I’ll think about it.” The crease across his forehead was still saying no.

The waitress came by to see if we needed anything else, and Schenk shook his head.

“My treat” I said, reaching for the bill.

“Nope.”

I lunged for the check, but our hands got there at the same time. The paper trembled between our pinching fingers but we were both careful not to pull too hard. “You bought breakfast at the Oh Yeah!” I pointed out.

“So?”

“And you paid for Tim Horton’s,” I added.

Schenk looked decidedly uncomfortable, and his stubbornness made the Blue Sense yawn open, causing a spill of dizziness in the front of my skull. Some sort of macho obstinacy was preventing him from letting go, some vague, unnamed idea of who he should be, what sort of man he thought he was.

“Unhook your claws, weirdo,” he growled.

“Let me pay this time.”

“Let go.”

“Make me.”

“I’m the one with the gun.”

I huffed. “I could be armed.”

“You’re not that stupid.”

“You don’t know.”

Schenk’s lips curled to a smile. “Are you that stupid?”

“Fine.” I let go of the bill with a sigh. “What’s with you and paying for shit? Do you do this with everyone?” I knew the answer even as I asked it: he most certainly did. His pride demanded it.

Schenk tossed cash on the table and stood, unfolding those exceptionally long legs from under the table. He wrapped his scarf around his neck and zipped his leather jacket. I shoved my arms in my coat and plunked my hat back on, tying the strings with a jerk.

“It’s really aggravating,” I added.

“That so?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect.” He held the door for me. “Never met someone so easily irritated.”

I glared up at him as I passed under his arm and out the door, briefly considered a cheap shot to his exposed kidney, figured I’d end up in cuffs for my trouble, and refrained. People skills!

CHAPTER 9

SCHENK FOUND HARRY’S place with no trouble at all thanks to Mr. Merritt’s directions. Nestled below the street line on the river side of the Niagara Parkway just below Queenston Heights, hidden from view by a thick copse of evergreens, North House was a Georgian brick two story with black shutters on its eight front windows. The hearse sat in the driveway like a beacon. It was barely four o’clock, but the sky had grown dark, and as I climbed out of Schenk’s Sonata, I knew in my bones that Harry had already risen and was waiting for me. With a promise to contact me soon that sounded like a threat, Schenk left me to the cold evening, and I rang the doorbell, framed in the glow of a lighted Christmas wreath.

When Byron Merritt answered the door I was again struck by the easy silence of the old man. His every movement was economical; no flourishes or flouncing, no extraneous posing the way Harry tended to do; no clomping and stomping like Batten. His lip didn’t have to flap every time he went from one spot to another, like Wesley’s did, as though his tongue was attached to his feet. No, Mr. Merritt was a shadow stealing from place to place, accustomed to being overlooked, working in the background. I bet he’d never had paparazzi take his picture while he picked his nose. Probably he never picked his nose. I bet he’d never been in a newspaper with his mouth hanging open, or flipping a cheeky FBI agent the bird in a magazine article. There was a real possibility that, outside of a few friends and family, nobody knew much about Byron Merritt at all. Lucky bastard.

He held his hand out. I looked at it perplexedly. He inclined his head slightly. “I’ll take your coat for you, madam, if you no longer wish to wear it?”

“Oh. Um, thanks.” I wriggled out of my parka and handed it to him. He took my hat for me. “Sorry, I’m not used to having a servant. It’s really weird. Oh! Is ‘servant’ rude? Sh--sugar.”

“I am the help, madam,” he assured me dryly, “you may refer to me however you please. I assure you, it’s not my place to take offense.”

“Will you take offense if I say you look like a shrunken Jean-Luc Picard?”

“Of course I would not, madam.”

“Because you totally do.”

“Thank you, I’m sure,” Mr. Merritt said. “Lord Dreppenstedt awaits your company in the Winter Room. I would be pleased to serve you a nightcap in there.”

Coming down from my lunch buzz, I ventured, “Coffee?”

He glanced at his watch but said nothing about my late caffeine consumption. “Very good, madam.”

The hallway had wide planks of original, old-growth wood, plaster ceiling roses around the lights, and painted woods in subtle greens and browns. I scanned the open doorways off the hall. “And the Winter Room is where, exactly?”

“Right this way.” Mr. Merritt swept ahead of me down the hall, and I noticed the jacket of his uniform had tails. I wondered if this was Harry’s doing or his own. “It may interest you to know that the Norths were deeded this property in 1794. The family were some of the earliest United Empire Loyalists to settle in the area, and had close ties to Sir Isaac Brock. During the War of 1812, this structure served as a convalescent home for dozens of wounded soldiers.”

“Did the Norths serve in the War?” I looked up at old portraits of strangers in uniform lining the hallway as we passed through a low-ceilinged area beside the stairs, wondering why Harry kept the portraits of the former owners on the walls after he’d bought the place. A funny quirk of my Cold Company, I supposed; Harry had a strong attachment to the past.

“Doctor Edward North did not initially serve,” Mr. Merritt said, falling back to walk beside me while talking, “but his older brother, William, served until his death on July 25, 1814 at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. But when General Drummond filled the field the morning after, our young doctor was there in his brother’s bloodied uniform, ready to defend the position, and the Americans were forced to fall back to Fort Erie.”

He made it sound like Doctor North was the sole reason the Americans fled, and I wondered at the swell of pride I felt riding on a wave of psi in the hallway. I knew Lundy’s Lane to be one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812. The smoke from the cannons was supposed to have been so thick that soldiers couldn’t tell friend from foe right in front of their faces, and sometimes impaled their own men on their bayonets in the heat of battle. Cannoneers were faced with close-quarter fighting while in the act of loading their guns, with enemy muskets emerging from the smoke mere yards away.

“Wait a minute,” I said, coming to a full stop. The portraits left on the walls. The attachment. “Harry wasn’t here in 1812, was he?” I felt my eyes narrow. “Did he know the Norths? Did he serve with Edward North?” And if so, does he still have the uniform?

Mr. Merritt continued walking and didn’t look back at me, but the Blue Sense reported a little ripple of excitement in my wee butler. “I should think those would be questions best put to Lord Dreppenstedt himself, madam.”

We crossed to an irregularity in the architecture, jotting under the stairs, a two-turn wiggle where the old, original house had been added onto, and to my left I glimpsed a sprawling modern kitchen that had no flavor of the past in its gleaming white tile, stained glass in shades of red and copper, and polished stainless steel. A collection of smaller portraits hung in a group, here, one of which was a painting of the staff beside a handsome woman who stood apart.

“One of the Norths?” I guessed, pointing.

Mr. Merritt paused. “Yes, madam. That would be my great grandmother, Margaret, and her staff.”

“Margaret North was your great grandmother?”

“Yes, madam. Or, that is, she was Margaret North until she married my great grandfather—“

“William Hamilton Merritt!” I pounced, knowing the name from high school history classes.

Mr. Merritt laughed heartily, and it did wonderful things to his elderly face; smile lined carved deep trenches from the corners of his eyes half way down his cheeks. “Oh, no, madam, I’m not from that Merritt family. My family has been in service since time immemorial, following the Norths from their British home at Alderney. My great grandfather was called James, and he was a poet, the son of her father’s butler. The two eloped and ran away to New York.”

“Saucy,” I said, and he laughed again. “Would I have read any of his poetry?”

“I should hope not, madam,” Mr. Merritt said. “It was dreadful, stern stuff. But I understand he cut a dashing figure on horseback, and was quite the cook. He returned to service for the Norths to work in the kitchen for Margaret’s brother, William.”

Mr. Merritt opened a door off the hall just to the left of the kitchen, and held it for me as I entered.

Despite the opulence of the room, Harry was the first thing to draw the eye, and I had no doubt he’d planned it that way. He lounged in a high-backed leather wing chair in the far corner of a magnificent room done in chocolate velvet and cream fur, like the world's most decadent Hostess Cupcake. A massive velvet couch dominated the space in front of a huge fieldstone fireplace with a double-wide hearth. Any wall space not packed with glass-front bookshelves was papered in a storm grey, flocked print, subtle and modern, seeming to melt into the background. The windows were true leaded glass, rippling the moonlight. There was one source of light in the room other than the noisy fire popping at the hearth: a single lamp with an off-white shade, directly over Harry’s head, like a spotlight, putting him center stage.

And oh, how he thrived there, waiting to be noticed, watching my reaction, feeling my admiration of him through our Bond. He wore a soft-looking black sweater, grey flannel pants ironed to a sharp crease, argyle socks, and leather house slippers that should have belonged to someone Mr. Merritt’s age. What are you talking about, dummy? Mr. Merritt is seventy-ish and Harry is closing in on four hundred forty. In his hand Harry held a brandy snifter with a rich amber liquid in the bottom. He swirled it. I knew it was a prop, meant to finish his Gentleman Next to Fire outfit; Harry rarely drank alcohol that wasn’t already swimming in my veins.

Undeniably, this was the kind of room where a creature as elegant as Lord Guy Harrick Dreppenstedt belonged. My shabby little cabin seemed a poor substitute, seeing him in the alternative. I tried to picture him in the bright red uniform of a British dragoon, complete with pistol and sabre. Something in my brain went unf, quickly followed by a warming low in my belly, and he knew it instantly; his eyes flared with victory.

“Why thank you, my own darling,” he said, a little smile playing on his lips. “I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?”

My reply might have been words. They probably weren’t proper English. It took me a moment of rapid blinking to gather my senses. “Hiya, Harry. Lookin’ mighty fine, tonight. This room suits you.”

“How kind of you to notice.” He lifted his nose to the air and a little flicker of anxiety came through the Bond. “Where have you been, and what, pray tell, are you hiding from me?”

He smells the priest. “I’m just working the case,” I said quickly. “Boy, you sure look mighty handsome. Is that a new sweater?”

“Your feeble attempts to play upon my vanity as a distraction have won you a much needed respite from my prying. Huzzah,” he said, nailing me with his clever, argentine gaze. “Come to me, my pet. We have family matters to discuss.”

I sighed. “And suddenly, you are less attractive.”

“Do try not to be ridiculous,” he suggested, patting his lap. “We need to talk, you and I, about seeing your parents.”

“I’m not.”

“You will. If not for yourself, then for Wesley’s sake. Your brother's future happiness depends upon it.”

“He's fine with us.” I chose to perch on the edge of the couch nearest to me, less comfortable by the minute. “Wes doesn't need them.”

“You are shielding the lad from taking a step towards personal growth.”

“Getting rejected by his own parents is not going to do Wesley any good.” Trust me, I know.

Harry’s eyes softened and he inclined his head in a bob of recognition; he understood where I was coming from. “If there is a price to pay, then he must pay it.” I read between the lines: Wesley would face it and adjust, just as I had.

Harry continued, “Admitting what he has done, what he has become, on his own, as an adult who makes his own choices, is necessary before Wesley can completely heal. Your brother is in hiding with you; in truth, he is hiding from life itself. This can go on no longer.”

I heard life and didn’t touch it (wisely, I thought); Wesley no longer had life, and neither did Harry, but pointing it out wasn’t going to win me any prizes. “Do you have any idea what will happen if I go to my mother's house?”

“No, and neither do you. But we shall soon find out.”

Mr. Merritt appeared without sound behind me. “Madam, you have a call.”

“I do? Well, Mr. Merritt, if we can’t put our worries aside to politely answer a call in the course of an evening, then where are we?”

“Where indeed, madam,” Mr. Merritt agreed.

“Sorry, Harry, mustn’t be rude. Someone summons! See ya.” Thank Hestia. I got up and quickly followed Mr. Merritt’s silent footsteps upstairs, into the guest room, which had been made up for me. My deflated go-bag sat at the foot of the bed; I assumed my single change of clothes had been unpacked. A laptop was propped on a cherry wood vanity, an inbound Skype call awaiting answer. Mr. Merritt held the chair out for me, and murmured that he’d return directly with coffee and biscuits. I clicked to accept the call and was rewarded with, or punished by, the sight of a very hairy Kill-Notch.

Batten was sitting at my desk in my office like he owned the damn place, looking comfortable with a bottle of Left Hand beer in one hand and wearing another Hawaiian shirt, this one fuchsia with Cookie Monster blue flowers on it, half unbuttoned. His mustache had evolved to alarming fullness. Too much testosterone, my brain taunted. Batten was giving me a soft-eyed I miss you look. I expected something nice to come out of his mouth. Silly me.

“You look tired,” he said.

“You look like Freddie Mercury,” I replied.

“Careful,” he growled, “or I’ll show you something that’ll give you nightmares for a week.”

“Why, is it Movember in your pants as well? Did you shave a pube-stache?”

His dark eyes narrowed. “That’s it. You asked for it.” He plunked his finger in the air to indicate something over my shoulder.

Harry had changed. The first thing I saw was a snow white suit, complete with white cummerbund and white tie; it was like Tom Wolfe’s wicked, sartorial doppelganger had come to visit. Harry stayed far enough away so that he didn’t fry the webcam, but close enough to be seen in the back corner of the office.

There was a brand spanking new Snidely Whiplash mustache on Harry’s upper lip that hadn’t been there a minute ago. He had waxed the tips up. It had to be a wig, if an upper-lip wig is even a thing, because instantly growing facial hair was not a revenant power I’d ever heard of. Magic mustache, I thought. Beardomancy. I was used to his quick-change routines, even without Combat Butler assistance, but he was laying it on pretty damn thick.

I tried to pretend I didn’t see it. That lasted all of three seconds. “Why do you hate me?”

“Hate you? My muddled muttonhead, surely you must know how you electrify and disarm me,” Harry said, twirling his mustache tip like a cartoon villain.

“That so?”

“You are the vehicle of my urgent and unruly lust,” Harry declared, turning on the drama, though I suspected that was an act he put on for Batten’s sake. “The black pit where once my heart did beat is now a yawning chasm of doom ruled only by you.”

Oh my. “Doom chasm. Boy, that’s sexy.”

Batten cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to interrupt the romance, but I have business to discuss with Miss Doom Chasm.”

I sat up straight. “No no, that’s not happening, that’s not a nickname.”

“It’s perfect,” Batten said.

Harry made a pleased noise of accomplishment behind me and began rummaging in the closet for something. He hauled out a piece of his luggage and began piling neatly folded women’s clothing on the bed. I had packed none of it. In fact, not a stitch of it looked familiar. Harry had been shopping again.

I collected myself and stared Batten down in the monitor. “Did you call just to bother me with your face hair and your sass mouth? Or maybe you want to sell me oatmeal, since you're sporting some serious Wilford Brimley action there.”

“No,” Batten said. “Seems you put in a couple questionable requisition forms last week. Chapel asked me to check on them before Internal Affairs has a fit.”

I tapped my lips with a gloved forefinger and made a show of thinking hard. “Probably, he means the Desert Eagle.”

“Christ.”

“Is that the iffy one?” I shrugged. “Party poopers.”

His jaw did its clench/unclench dance, and this time, it made his Mario-and-Luigi mustache wiggle. “You’re not getting a Desert Eagle.”

“Well, of course not! That thing weighs five pounds. Look at my spindly arms. They’re like limp noodles.” I waved them up and down to demonstrate their pitiful size and general uselessness. “I can’t hold up a Desert Eagle straight and hit a target.”

Harry’s amused chuckle behind me said he agreed.

“Then why did you request one?” Batten demanded.

“Because I can. I work for the FBI. Who knows what they’ll give me? I won’t know if I don’t try.” I screwed my face up. “Is that the only one they had a problem with?”

Batten pinched his right earlobe and began pulling at it, while his left hand flapped a piece of paper at the screen. “Tell me you didn’t order a flamethrower.”

“Well, I’m not going to use it,” I said, leaving the duh implied. “A standard M2 Flamethrower weighs like seventy fucking pounds.”

Mr. Merritt cleared his throat and set down a coffee mug and a tiny almond cookie on a saucer. I sighed. “Harry, I owe Mr. Merritt another thousand dollars.”

“Mmhmm,” Harry said, taking down a hat box from the closet and paying me the barest minimum of attention.

I looked at the single cookie. “Are there any more cookies, Mr. Merritt?”

“Only as many as you might require, madam.” He cocked his head in question. “I’ll fetch several dozen, shall I?”

“Harry, your butler is the best man on the planet and I love him.”

“Hmmnn, yes,” Harry noted. “As always, your affections are quite easily purchased with a bit of sugar, flour, and butter, my fickle thing. Do take your vitamins. We don’t want an unexpected visit.”

Mr. Merritt excused himself to do a cookie run, and I took my pill bottle from Harry so I could take one of my little, white, not-exactly-vitamins with my coffee. The bremelanotide fiddled with my libido, and while that might make life more difficult for an already frisky gal such as me, it also fooled a certain three-headed demon king into thinking I was happily Bonding physically with my Companion on a regular basis. They weren't nearly as pleasant as what they were covering up for.

“Seriously,” I said, turning back to Batten, already finishing my first cookie, “can you see me running around from case to case heaving a flamethrower?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Those things run out of fuel in ten seconds and totally give away your position. Flamethrowers suck. Unless you’re torching nests of killer bees in China. Then, flamethrowers rule.”

Batten just stared. Then his lips curved into a smirk that hit me low in the belly, a strange smile full of surrender and mischief.

“What?” I said. “I’m super serious.”

Batten said, “You need to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“The weapons banter.”

“Why?”

“It’s turning me on.”

I blinked with surprise and was smiling, too. Before I knew better, I leaned closer to the webcam and said sultrily, “The Desert Eagle’s cockloads of recoil would knock me on my ass. That’s totally hot, right?”

He chuckled. “Using that image later.”

I got the implication and let out a shocked laugh. “Time and place for that show, please.”

Harry cleared his throat behind me to remind us of his presence. “I’m sure I would not like to discover Mr. Batten in a state of dishabille. I trust you will limit this behavior, or else one might be moved to toss that machine right out—“

“I’m kidding, Harry!” I said, and mouthed at the webcam I’m so not kidding. Batten’s leer said he knew it.

“Tramp,” Harry sighed.

“If I were capable of shame that assessment might embarrass me,” I agreed. I remembered the elastic band on my wrist and snapped it. It didn’t work, so I snapped it again, and then gave up.

“Never a classy moment with Marnie ‘Thousand Euphemisms for Penis’ Baranuik,” Batten said.

I scowled. “I was gonna say something else about dong, but you inferred I’m not a lady, so now I can’t. Fucker.”

“Way to prove me wrong.”

Mr. Merritt had silently returned with a plate of shortbread and cleared his throat once more with meaning.

“Harry, I owe the Combat Butler three thousand more dollars.”

“Well, do mind your tongue, darling. Despite what you might be tempted to believe, my funds are not infinite,” he said. “Perhaps you ought to pay your debt to Mr. Merritt from your FBI salary.”

“I can’t afford any swears on government pay!” I objected.

Harry swept closer to the webcam, as close as he dared, ignored my financial ju-jitsu, but did quirk an eyebrow at the tendril of playfulness that slipped through the Bond. “You may be pleased to note, Mr. Batten, that Miss Doom Chasm has given Mr. Binswanger his walking papers.”

“I what?” I munched a cookie furiously. “When did I do that?”

Harry tsked at me. “But, of course, I took care of the odious task on your behalf. I would not have my gentle lamb face such an unnecessarily unpleasant scene.”

“You broke up with a man for me?” I groaned. “I’m not dating anyone ever again. All my relationships end in the crap heap. Or maybe a creep heap.”

“Let me find my surprised face. I know I left it around here somewhere.” Batten began shuffling through the papers on my desk, like a sarcasm-dipped dick.

“Hey,” I said, “it's hard to find someone who’s man enough for this much woman. And stop rummaging in my things. There's stuff there you don't wanna see.”

“Hard to find a cleanup man for that much disaster, more like,” Batten said. “You need a whole crew.”

I gave a dreamy sigh and stared off into the ether. “A whole crew. That is what I need. Does the FBI have a requisition form for that? Are the specifications I can check off, for stuff like 'six-pack abs,' and 'prone to unbuttoning shirts,' and 'mute?’”

Harry gave a disapproving cluck of his tongue, and I snapped my wrist elastic again. “Has your officer welcomed you into the folds of his investigation, ducky?”

“He’s tolerating me,” I said.

Harry gave a surprised flutter of his lashes. “Is he, now? How unexpected. Only, how did you manage this?”

“He’s no idiot. He figures it’s better to humor you than have you raising a stink and stalking him,” Batten said. “He’s not wrong.”

I showed him my sourest smile and favorite middle finger, and told them about my meeting with Scarrow, leaving out anything to do with ABBA and playing human shield at Father Frisky’s church. I told them about the case, and the missing girl, and the devastated boyfriend, and the business cards, and the rumors of ghosts at the rectory. I left out my urge to giggle, since I couldn’t yet explain it, and any mention of his skinny jeans, because I didn’t think either of them would appreciate the mental image. “It just so happens that I’m going to be invaluable on this case, Smarmy McSmugpants.”

“Grope some evidence?” Batten asked.

“Not successfully.”

“Find a monster?”

“Well, no.”

“Psychically feel a bad guy’s guilt?”

“Uh, no.”

“So what good are you?”

“Hey! I’ve contributed lots so far. Ideas and such. Also, I’m on my way out now, to do all that stuff you just said.”

“That so?”

I glared at the Skype box, stuck my tongue out, and hung up on him. Presto! A Batten-Be-Gone button. It was immensely satisfying to see him disappear in a blink, and to know he would gripe about it, filling the silence in my little cabin with his grumbling.

“I’ll show him,” I told Harry.

Harry gave me a distracted and patronizing, “But of course you will, pet.”

I dug out my small diary and pencil and opened it to today’s date, writing: Dear Diary: I don’t like this place. It costs too much to swear. I thought about my next words, and then confided to the paper: Why do I work for the FBI when I can’t do any of the cool stuff I want to do? I should totally get the flamethrower. Am I supposed to sign this “love, Marnie?” Love, Marnie.

When Combat Butler returned, I put on my prettiest smile and handed him my empty cup. “Mr. Merritt, may I please borrow the Stiffmobile?”

CHAPTER 10

I DIDN'T GET to borrow the Stiffmobile.

Harry fussed excessively about its outdated safety features (it had a seatbelt, and that was it) and lamented the availability of replacement parts for both the Bentley and myself, so I ended up piloting a still-swanky BMW sedan instead, which was Buick-like enough to keep me from being too bummed about things. It also had really nice heated seats, so my butt was happy, at least until I got out of the car.

I stood on the frozen, hard-packed sand with my gloved fists on my hips, scowling out at the black, tossing surface of Lake Ontario. The night was clear, and across the lake I could see the lights of Toronto to the northwest, the CN Tower a bright, phallic spire. By my boots, there was a skein of churned ice and slush at the edge of the water. Every so often, it made a noise like bones cracking that made my shoulders tighten up around my ears. I could see marine rescue boats bobbing at the end of the cape where the canal opened into the lake. Someone had found another scrap of something, perhaps; the activity had shaken the bees’ nest of media attention. A news helicopter thumped in the air above me, spotlight swinging, searching in vain for that perfect, gruesome shot to headline the morning reports. Noisy vulture. Where was the suckered tentacle of the Kraken when you needed it? I sighed away my disgust and turned my wind-chapped face to the row of beach houses up the slight hill of sand that ran to snow-covered weed and grass before hitting a row of chain link fences clotted with chunks of ice.

The old summer cottage had been painted the cheerful, vibrant hue of dandelions by the original owners; it was now a chipped, yellowish mess, looking like a giant had carelessly spit out a tooth that was no longer cutting it. My sisters Claire and Rowena shared the rent, although, according to Carrie, Claire was studying marine biology in British Columbia for the year. Most of the other cottages had been renovated, not simply repainted, back in the eighties; Rowena’s was still a ramshackle dump. One of the back windows was boarded up and covered with heavy black plastic. The lights were all off in the house, except for a bare bulb over the back step. It swung back and forth in the vigorous wind, casting shadows haphazardly as it dodged the snatching limbs of the neighbor’s denuded willow tree.

I wondered if Rowena was home. I wondered if I’d be welcome. I wondered if she knew I was here, if the rest of the family had told her. I hadn’t seen Rowena since I left Virgil, Ontario for Seattle, when she told me she had no intention of contacting me ever again unless I was willing to “make things right” and give Harry over to Dad, as if Harry was some sort of preternatural prize and had no say in the matter. I didn’t, of course, and she’d kept her word. Two hundred feet of sand and a chain link fence separated us, but she may as well have been on the opposite side of the Niagara River gorge.

Batten had mentioned hunting a revenant in this area, when we'd shared a rare moment with our walls down. I stared back out at the lake to try and see it through his eyes. This was where he’d lost his grandfather, Colonel Jack Batten, in a raid on the lair of Aston Sarokhanian; it was no surprise he hated this place. To me it was a scene from childhood picnics by the lake in the summer, of walking along the sand in search of beach glass, and if the bacteria levels weren’t too high, wading in up to our knees and splashing about. I tried to imagine how cold the water was tonight, and the sound of the ice drove me away, back to the shelter of Mr. Merritt’s unassuming BMW sedan.

I popped back into the car, not bothering to turn on the heated seats, and cruised up by the pollution treatment plant, where I parked again and finished my coffee, because I am a total pro at choosing scenic tour destinations. Ellie had lived two streets over when we were kids, and we’d spent most of our youth goofing off in what we’d called “the Woods Way,” a seam of naturalized forest separating Port Weller from the Welland Canal, loping down the paths that weaved through the brush and trees; I'd told Sheriff Hood that I wasn't afraid of running through the darkened forest during our early-morning exercise sessions, and this strip of greensward was a big part of why. The two pathways that the public knew about were cordoned off by yellow tape, twisting gently in the night breeze, and the quiet community that lived here didn’t seem to notice. Porch lights were out. Curtains were closed against the night. The flickering blue glow of TV sets lit upper windows of bedrooms and dens. Here and there, chimneys leaked wood smoke.

When I got out of the car, bringing my little brown paper donut bag with me in case I needed a snack, I heard distant radio chatter to my right, and knew there was probably a uniform stationed near one of the paths. The trick would be choosing my route carefully, using the less-active trails to get through the small forest to the canal, paths known only to locals, which that didn’t look like much, and that, in summer, ended in thick, stinking bogs, and filled up with snow this time of year. They wouldn’t be impassable, but it wouldn’t be an easy trek. I used my iPhone's flashlight to lead the way as I cut through from the subdivision to the spot by the sand piles where Schenk had been parked earlier.

I glanced up the road. It was still blocked off, and two squad cars were sitting driver’s-to-driver’s side, in case the officers keeping warm inside wanted to chat, or pass a thermos or a smoke. They were too far away to notice little old me standing in the dark by the tree line. As long as I stayed out of the puddles of light offered by the street lights and kept my own light's visibility to a minimum, I probably wouldn't be noticed.

My Doc Martens crunched ice and ground grit, and I thought hadn’t I been waiting for this sound? Then: This sound is awful. I reached in and took a bite of my donut for comfort, then let it slide with a crinkle back into the bag. The wind had picked up, and was making a squeal-ting through the rigging of the tied-up boats, rocking the yachts at the pier on the other side of the canal. The sound of it made the skin at the nape of my neck crawl, and under my cheerful frog hat, my scalp prickled with goose bumps. My frozen bootlaces ticked against the leather. Despite the few empty trucks parked behind chain link fence just beyond the sand piles, and the cops just one loud bellow away, it felt lonely down here.

Except when I got closer to the canal, I no longer felt alone. Probably, that was my imagination. My stupid, stupid imagination.

From where I lurked, I could watch the black water in the canal move ever so slightly, more a shift than a ripple. At the lake the wind had bullied the water around, but here, in the shelter of trees, sand piles, and cement walls, the water in the canal was far less disturbed. The surface tension glittered in one spot, forming an imperfect, sparkling oval, a stick-figure head drawn by a child. I blinked and squeezed my eyes shut, sure they were playing tricks on me, while my imagination offered up a list of aquatic monsters that could have been displaced and living in the locks, munching unsuspecting swimmers: nymphs and naiads, sprites and sirens, mermaids, kelpie, selkies, Shellycoat, the Kraken… I had to venture out of the shadows to peer into the water. Two steps closer to the canal. Four steps. Five. I attempted to estimate the water’s depth with nothing to go on except the size of the ships that passed through. Deep enough to host Leviathan? Not likely; besides, the Keeper at the Hellmouth would have boiled the water.

Scraps of her shirt, Schenk had said. A leather shoe. That ruled out the kelpie, now that I thought about it. In my overdue expert opinion, a kelpie would have eaten the shoe. Kelpies love the taste of cured skins. I made a mental note to stock up on pork rinds if I ever had a case where one was in the vicinity.

Forgetting about cops and news helicopters for a moment, I looked again for the glittering ice sheet, but the water was only showing a uniform bed of ripples in the freshening wind. I had probably imagined the oblong surface disturbance.

Or maybe I hadn't. Two feet closer to me, a sheet of milky white crystals was breaking apart. A few feet to my right, another patch began to form before my eyes, crystallizing and then dissipating. It looked like an invisible ice dragon was leaving tip-toe footprints as it crept toward me on the surface of the water.

For a second I thought I saw a wiggling, teasing flicker, a white worm of light within the black depths. I leaned forward to squint past the reflection of the streetlight above, ignoring the new ice forming close to the edge, trying to see deeper into the water, thinking it was unlikely that any light source was down there, but holding my breath with genuine expectation of seeing it again. A diver’s helmet? No, marine rescue divers had finished with this area and were safely in a group at the lake-end. There couldn’t be anyone down there alone, right? Not anyone, my annoying brain piped up. Anything. No, there shouldn’t be anything either. But there was. Part of me was sure of it. I felt myself leaning further and further forward, as far as I dared, ready to dart backward if a hand or claw or tentacle lashed out at me.

That’s when I discovered that a scuffle behind me can make me squeal like a toddler on a kiddie coaster. I spun around, readying my fists of fury in case I had to fist and fury my way to freedom. My sudden spin caused my frog hat to flop forward into my eyes and I shoved it back desperately with the aforementioned furious fistitudes. Without punching myself squarely in the kisser, even.

Schenk stood there with his arms crossed, looking like an unimpressed but surprisingly well-groomed yeti. His eyes were calm and blank, but his lips wanted to do that upwards twist-pucker they did. This time, I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to mock me or demand answers. Probably both.

I slapped a gloved hand over my hammering heart and accused, “I thought you were a ghost.”

“Ghost, eh?” he repeated.

“Or an invisible ice dragon.”

“Ice dragon in a leather jacket?” he clarified.

“I know, right? How scary would that be?”

He shook his head. “You snuck onto an active crime scene without police authorization.”

“Well, erm…” I squinted up a foot and a half at him, and made it a question. “No?”

“How are you trying to pull off a ‘no’, eh? You’re here.” He demonstrated my here-ness by waving a hand in front of my face.

“Are you sure?” I stepped back two full steps. “Maybe you’re only imagining me here. You’re a man, you’ve probably imagined me all sorts of places: bed, shower, hockey rink—”

He interrupted me. “I caught you at my crime scene.”

“Caught is such a loaded word. How about 'bumped into' or 'joined'? It’s friendly to join. It’s also friendly to bring your cop a donut.” I held the brown paper bag up.

He gave me a withering glare. “I don’t eat donuts.”

I didn't even need the Blue Sense to call him a liar; nobody went to a donut shop and walked out with just their coffee every time, no matter how good the coffee might be. I just nodded solemnly, like he had me totally convinced.

“What kind?” he asked.

“Maple dip.”

“You’re a maple dip,” he told me as I handed up the bag. He looked into it. “There’s a bite out of it.”

“Ghost did it.”

“Mmhmm. Remind me why I put up with you?”

“Your boss said you had to?” I guessed, beaming him my best smile. “Malashock owes me one. Besides, she likes me.” I shrugged. “She doesn’t hate me, anyway.”

He rolled away the tension in his shoulder and studied the black water of the Welland canal. “Here to do your thing?”

I grimaced, and said reluctantly, “I was thinking about it, yeah.”

“This work the same as it did at the café?”

“Unfortunately for me, it’ll probably work better,” I said. “Impressions of violence stay pretty vibrant. You’ve got your scene reconstruction sketched out, right?”

Schenk made an affirmative noise but made no move to show or tell me anything. I nodded once; I preferred not to know any details before I started. In this case I knew a little, but it would have to do. I removed my gloves and stuffed them in my pocket. The night air nipped at my sensitive hands and I felt it right through my knuckles.

“Now I tell you how it really happened,” I promised.

“Not too close,” he growled, hooking me by the hood of my parka.

“Gotta go where she went, Constable FunTimes. Not all the way, but…” I shot him a look up over my shoulder. “I have to get close. That’s my job.”

He considered me for a long beat then released my hood. “I don’t want to fish you out of the drink.”

I looked at the canal where another icy patch was just breaking up. “Yeah, that’d be bad.”

He did something with his right hand; I didn’t realize what he was up to until the handcuff closed in on my right wrist. He linked the other end to his left wrist with a jingling click.

“You’re pretty quick with those things,” I said. “Is magic your hobby?”

“Nope. Told you, I knit.” He smirked liked he was joking, but the Blue Sense disagreed; there was a thread of the truth, there. Interesting. But I’d investigate that later. Horrible end-of-life stuff always comes first. Because that’s how awesome my life is. I'm handcuffed to a giant cop, and my libido has nothing to say about it. Now I've seen everything.

I took a moment to pull cold air deep into my lungs and relax. Until this moment I hadn’t given much thought to Britney Wyatt as a living, breathing person; I’m fairly good at staying emotionally detached during a case. I’d let my mind flit upon how cold her dive into the canal would be in November, especially this brutal November, but when the thoughts got too grim, I’d let my mind shy away and get clinical.

There would be no shrinking back, now. If the Groping worked as well as I was expecting, I’d share whatever happened to her just before she went into the drink. If her boyfriend shoved her, I’d share her surprise, confusion, sense of betrayal. If something snagged her, something unnatural, I’d share her terror, her desperation to escape it, her fight to live. I’d read disturbing things on objects many times before. I’d Groped the wedding ring of Chief Deputy Neil Dunnachie, who had been accidentally raised as a zombie; I’d felt his unholy hunger, his faint recollections of life, a bare trace of his own self remaining trapped under the strong urge to devour flesh, and his horrible, one-track thoughts (“Eat wife. Eat Paula.”). I’d Groped through the entire apartment of another Paula, Paula McKnight, survivor of a serial killer, to find her when she’d gone missing from witness protection. I’d felt panic and hatred and despair. This wasn’t going to be any better, I feared.

I stared down at the toes of my boots, stuck in some slush, covered in a white film of road salt. Harry would have a fit, the best part of that being that I was alive for him to yell at. Neil Dunnachie was not. Britney Wyatt was probably not.

The Blue Sense reported Schenk’s uncertainty at my side, and the longer I took to work up to the task before me, the more his mood swirled into a blend of impatience and concern. It was the concern that was unique to Schenk; I’d encountered sympathy from SSA Chapel and Sheriff Hood on more than one occasion, but unless you counted Batten’s angry-at-my-risk-taking attitude, I didn’t think anyone except Harry had been worried about my well-being like Schenk. I sensed an overprotective streak in him, which could have come with the responsibility inherent in his badge, but felt like it came naturally to a man his size, accustomed to being physically able to offer a wing to hide beneath to anyone in his circle of friends and family who might need him.

I waited a moment longer, curious to see if his patience had an end, and he’d prod me to hurry up. When he didn’t, I began an uncomfortable game of crouch-and-touch, putting my bare palm to the ground to find traces of Britney, moving a foot to one side or the other to touch again. It was awkward with the handcuffs. Schenk had to crouch with me, mirroring my movements. I’d seen the crime scene notes, but only briefly, and I hardly had a photographic memory. Standing here in person, it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where she and Simon had been. I tried to remember where the little yellow markers were in the photographs, pointing out footprints and tire tracks in the snow and grit. I was beginning to lose faith in my abilities when the first trace of her fluttered under my right hand. I stopped in a knee-straining crouch near the edge of the canal, willing the swell of psi to amplify any connection.

She was like a wisp, teasing at the very edge of my senses.

I took a long, deep calming breath, then motioned at Schenk to back off as much as the cuffs allowed. I clenched both hands, feeling my cold knuckles ache, promising myself I’d seek out more hot coffee as soon as I was done here, and blocked out the scree-ting from the boats. I dropped my palms to the asphalt.

Britney filled my mind’s eye, laughing, handling a clothes hanger with a white silk robe on it. A store. A friend with her. Holding up big pink satin granny panties. A lingerie store. Tiger print thongs. The vision started to fade and I clung to it, spreading my fingers to cast a wider net on the broken pavement, summoning more psi to do my bidding, cramming it down the pipeline of the Blue Sense, dragging Britney back to center stage. A close friend. Spritzing different perfumes, helping her pick one out. A special occasion coming. Some sort of… sexual celebration. Girl talk between racks of lace teddies and leather corsets. Private consultation in that hushed, out-of-the-corner-of-your-mouth voice used in public. Giggling, two heads bent together. My lips opened softly and I suggested quietly, so as to not break the spell, “She knew Simon was going to propose.”

Schenk said nothing, but I sensed his attention. He gave me the space to do my job.

They’d spotted Simon at the jewelry store, marked the place where he’d been talking to the salesman for so long. Ducked their heads together, whispering excitedly. Ordered frozen yogurt they never wanted, just to have an excuse to linger across the mall hallway and watch him. Hurried into the store after he left to check the glass case where he’d stood. Rings. Diamonds. Engagement rings. Two girlfriends, stunned by happiness. Linking arms and hurrying out to the parking lot. Jumping up and down. Celebratory hugs.

I shuffled forward. Schenk lurching awkwardly with me but not complaining. I could hear the water in the canal now. Britney walking on cloud nine. Too excited to feel the cold. The only things on her mind the young man strolling nervously on her left, and the new lace bra digging into her side. Simon. Broke and lovely. Moody and brilliant. An artist’s hands. Magic fingers. Simon and his guitar. His sweet voice, singing to her while they lay on the couch together, her head on his chest, his hands playing through her long hair. Now the ice crunching under his boots. Her heart soaring. Was it healthy to love someone this much? His hand in his pocket. She knew the ring was there. Waiting patiently, chewing her bottom lip.

Something intruded, and in the process of trying to trap Britney in my vision, I let out an involuntary noise. The Blue Sense swelled, and I knew that Schenk’s knee-jerk reaction was to reach out to me, but he wisely reined that in and waited.

Tiny pricks of light. Appearing only for a heartbeat. Britney pausing, her vision blurring slightly. Mind soft. Her heart tugging her back toward Simon, but her eyes… Tiny pricks of light. Drifting under the water. Skimming the surface, they wink at her and snuff out. Britney leaning closer. A face. It grips her.

COLD! COLD! COLD! A dark plunge. No control. Body heat fleeing quickly. The side of the canal, upside down, darker, darker, darker. Head down. Deeper. Must get out. Must get out. Deeper. So dark. SO COLD! Can’t move. Can’t breathe. COLD! SIMON! Don't breathe, don't, don't don't haveto... The pain, the pain, ohgodthepain — rocked me out of the vision and I gasped for breath, hauling air into my lungs loudly, falling out of my crouch to my backside.

I was about to tell Schenk what I saw when his wrist yanked me to my feet. I gaped up at him. He stared at the still, ebony canal water. When I scanned the canal with him, I saw them.

Tiny pricks of light.

Schenk moved to step closer to the edge and I slapped one hand around his arm. Our cuffs rattled. He paid me no mind.

“Where ya goin', Thag?”

He just stared at the water in an absent way that made my guts drop.

“Schenk?” I shook his arm a little. “Longshanks?”

His eyelids did a sleepy flutter. His body leaned toward the canal almost imperceptibly, but the movement made the nape of my neck prickle and I shook him more forcefully. Our cuffs rattled again. The wind picked up to shriek through the rigging on the boats, a somber refrain.

“Schenk!” I barked.

“Hunh?”

“Wake up.” I stepped between him and the edge of the canal, and used my iPhone flashlight app to shine light in one eye and then the other. His pupils were huge.

He blinked rapidly, frowned, and stared down at me. “Eh?”

“Sure you’re all right?”

Schenk frowned, squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them. “Tired,” he said.

Part of me knew that wasn’t entirely true. I glared at the seemingly-calm canal. “No. There’s something in there.”

“Something?”

I looked up at him again, unhappy with his single-word answers, even though he’d never been the chattiest guy in the world. “Yes. I’m sure of it. It wants you.”

“Wants?”

“Yeah,” I said, my tone warning. I shook his arm again; if he was going in the water, I was going with him, cuffed as we were. I wasn’t going to be strong enough to hold him back. He outweighed me by nearly two hundred pounds. “Let’s talk in your car. Where did you park?”

He had to think about this and closed his eyes. It took longer than it should have, and when he answered, his voice was groggy. “Behind your car. On Cumberland.”

Five words. Better. “I don’t know the way back,” I lied, watching the lack of reaction on his face. There should have been a yeah-right lip pucker. There wasn’t. “You’ll have to take me there.”

“Right,” he said, and turned away from the canal.

And stood there.

Back to the water. Boots in place. Not budging.

My breath left me in a punch of wind, and I felt my eyes grow large and darting.

“Patrick?” I whispered.

As though he was frozen everywhere but his eyes, his gaze slid down at me. I thought I saw fear in those slate-hard eyes.

“It’s okay,” I told him, not sure of that one bit. I peeled off his left glove. “It’s going to be fine. I’ve got you. Just don’t…”

He swung his gaze at the black water of the canal. His whole body rocked with a shudder.

“No, no,” I scolded, my panic ramping up. “Look at me, officer. Eyes forward. Right here. Chin forward.” I moved to stand on his toes, pointed at my face, waited for his eyes to join mine, and then took his left hand. It was wrapped in a hard fist and vibrating like he was holding a live wire. I tried to wriggle my fingers into his. It was a real battle, but finally they unclenched, and I dug my hand into his sweaty clutch, shook the hand, making a lot of noise with the cuffs. “Okay, take a step with me. Forward, not back. Don’t break this.” I used two fingers on my free hand to point between my eyes and his.

For a heart-strafing moment it looked like I might lose the battle, and all I could think about were Britney’s last moments (The pain, the pain, ohgodthepain--). Without thinking, I reached up with my free left hand and slapped him as hard as I could. It felt like hitting a frozen side of beef, and for a long moment, nothing happened. Then, mercifully, he began a slow shuffle forward, like a physiotherapy patient learning to walk again; I kept a tight hold on his hand, although it felt like his was crushing mine. I didn’t let up until we got to the tree line. His grip loosened enough for my pulse to roar back into my fingers. For a second his eyes rolled back, and then he shook his head. His pupils were big, to see in the darkness, but not spooky-huge like they'd been, and there was some calm awareness returning to them.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I need a high five. In the mouth. With a pie.”

When we got through the stand of trees and came out at the cars, he pointed at his to indicate I should get in. I did.

“What was that?” he asked, digging out the key to his cuffs and releasing us both.

I rubbed my wrist, and hurried to put my gloves back on. “How do you feel now?”

He stared at the steering wheel. “I heard your voice coming from the water.”

I felt my entire body go still, as if any movement would alert chaos and disaster to my presence and make me a target. While the defroster cleared the windshield, I stared at the side of Schenk’s face. “My voice?”

“Yeah,” he barely breathed, more exhale than speech. “The part of my brain that was telling me that you were still handcuffed at my side got real quiet. What the hell is that?”

Siren? my preternatural biology side suggested. Mermaid? “We’ll figure it out,” I promised. “We got you out of it, right? It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” he said.

“Good. Even if it is a ghost, it can’t hurt you.”

“Neither can your left hook, apparently.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “I had to do something, dude. You were all Easter Island, gazing stolidly into the watery abyss and whatnot. You gonna book me for assaulting an officer?”

He rolled his eyes and didn't dignify that with a response. Since he'd already un-cuffed me, I had my answer. After a moment of silent thought, he stuck his key in the ignition and turned the car on to warm up. “Can it feed off of fear?” he wondered. “Like in the movies?”

“No, that’s ridiculous. Fear isn’t a source of energy.” But thermal energy…

“Nine forty-eight.”

I let out an involuntary squeak and then took a shaky breath, glaring at the dash clock. This canal business had rattled me, and it shouldn’t have, damn it. Still pondering the possibility of thermal energy and ghosts, I let thermodynamics stew on the back burner and gave my focus to Schenk. “So, you can set the clock, but not shut it up? I'm only kinda-impressed here, Thag.”

He sighed heavily and remained on task. “When I don't have a ghost clouding my senses and conning me into thinking you’re in the canal, and that I should go in after you, yes, I'm smarter than the car.”

“A ghost can’t do that,” I said firmly. “It can’t mess with your head that much. But if you tell yourself that’s what it can do, you’re gonna fuck with your own mind.”

“Right,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He tried again, nodding this time. “Right. Thanks for snapping me out of it.”

“That was only part of what pulled you back. Whatever it is, a ghost can't force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Ghosts do not have mind control. Remember that. They're like hypnotherapists with lame hours and terrible ideas.”

“Don’t know the way back to Cumberland, eh?” I got Schenk’s version of the side-eye, complete with lip pucker. It cheered me to see it. Longshanks was himself again.

“It was plausible,” I said, working up half a smile for him. “There’s a lot of shit I should know but don’t.”

Schenk snort-laughed and turned the sound up on the radio. The Tragically Hip informed us that New Orleans was sinking. Longshanks didn’t want to hear it so he turned the dial until he found a sportscaster discussing the hockey game. The clock, thankfully, shut up when the radio was on, which was a small mercy.

“It’s late,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right. Tomorrow.”

I climbed out of the car, gave him a little wave, and went back to the BMW. I had to brush a dusting of snow off the windshield; Schenk stayed in his Sonata, pretending to amend his files while I did so. He waited until I pulled onto Grandview before shadowing me down Arthur Street to Lakeshore; he followed me across the bridge at Lock One before turning into a parking lot and doubling back into St. Catharines proper to go home. I smiled in the rearview mirror at his taillights and made my way towards the winter-quiet vineyards of Niagara-On-The-Lake.

CHAPTER 11

IT’S A WHOLE different world in the little room behind the two-way mirror, a secret, mysterious place where, not only could you eavesdrop, but you were expected to. And it was a place I truly wished I was in. I’d been in the little rooms before, in older precincts where space wasn’t yet a concern, and I’d felt like a spy lurking in the gloom, unseen. It made me want a slouchy hat, a cigarette, and a rumpled suit, so I could go all Mickey Spillane on a mook with some moxie. Or maybe I just needed to park my ass in front of the tube with a bucket of popcorn and watch Matlock and Columbo reruns.

Instead of standing behind Mirropane, I was crammed in Constable Schenk’s brightly-lit office, watching one of the two computer monitors. On the screen, Father Scarrow, in full black cassock, comforted a distraught Simon Hiscott in an interrogation room. The heat was oppressive, blasting audibly from the vent directly over the desk. I had my parka off and my frog hat sat discarded on Schenk’s desk. His space was crowded but organized, with papers sorted in neat piles next to labeled boxes and a desk caddy full of pencils. I could imagine him sitting in here with his taptaptapping like a clockwork drummer in a shop window.

The door opened and Schenk ducked in. “Thanks again for last night,” he said, putting a cup of coffee in my gloved hand. “Good thing you don’t respect police tape.”

I shook my head and tentatively tasted the coffee. Bitter, high-test brew, just as I expected. “Like I said, you had it under control. You didn’t need me. But you’re welcome.” I advised with a cheeky smile, “Next time, take me wherever you go. I’ll be your security guard, Tough Guy. I’m the muscle, eh?” I flexed.

He grunted at that without comment and pointed at the left-hand monitor. “Hiscott asked for a chance to see Father Scarrow. I wasn’t going to allow it, but the good father insisted ‘the boy be allowed the comfort of speaking to a priest during this difficult time.’” Schenk making air quotes looked like the Abominable Sloth-man.

“And you thought you'd give them a chance to work on their story?”

Schenk gave me a look that said I should know better. “Everything said in that room is being recorded, and they know it. Scarrow asked for the privacy of a confessional and I told him he’d have to get that elsewhere, on his own time, and he'd have to post Simon's bail to get him there.”

“I gotta say, this is some bullsh– rimp,” I said, displaying my unhappiness with the state of his office.

“What is?”

“Where’s the little room behind the two-way mirror? I want the little room. I love the little room!”

Schenk tapped a thumb on his desk, taptaptap, to emphasize his warning. “I could put you in a little padded room for a seventy-two hour hold if you’re not careful. You want to watch or not?”

“Send Scarrow in here when he’s done with Simon?” I suggested. “I’ll do some interrogating of my own.”

“I’d prefer to be present for that,” he said.

“I’ll be all casual and shit,” I promised, waving my iPhone at him. “Unofficial. Off the record. But, you know, I’ll record the whole conversation, just in case.”

After a moment’s consideration, he nodded. “You want to watch the security video from the canal. It’s loaded to play on the other monitor, there. Don’t touch the box.” He pointed at me. “What did I just say?”

“Watch the video, don’t touch the evidence.”

“I never said it was evidence.”

“I know an evidence box when I see one,” I said with a snort. “The scrap of tape on the side that says 'EVIDENCE – DO NOT TAMPER' was my first clue.”

“No sticky fingers.” He gave me a stern look, and I rolled my eyes.

“I know, I know. Chain of evidence. I won’t swipe anything.” He looked at me doubtfully. “I work for the bloody FBI; if you can’t trust me, who can you trust?”

He nodded and crossed the office in two long strides. “Coffee’s down the hall to the left, second door on your right. Back in a bit.”

Schenk left me in his office; a minute or so later, I saw him on the monitor as he popped into the interrogation room with his file folder in one hand. Scarrow reached across the table and took Simon's shoulders, patting them in an encouraging fashion. Then he stood in a brush of floor-length black robes, pushing back the chair. His movement from the room forced a memory of the minister at my Grandma Vi’s funeral, solemn and slow and sweeping; to distract myself, I poked at the lid of the evidence box. It slipped to one side and I eyeballed the contents, all separated into sealed, labeled bags: an olive green purse, a matching wallet, a tiger-stripe compact, a mauve lipstick and a peppermint Chapstick, a crystal vial on a necklace, an Android phone, a peanut butter protein bar wrapper, two pens with a black and white skull motif, and a round, pastel, multi-colored birth control pill dispenser.

As soon as the cop took the priest’s place, Simon began recounting for Schenk the events of November fourth, when his girlfriend apparently swan-dived into the canal for no reason. Simon had regained some composure; his hushed and urgent conversation with Father Scarrow had calmed him enough that the frightened vibrato had left his voice. There was a quiet, polite knock at the office door. I tried to slip the lid back on the box firmly before Scarrow came in, but it ended up a little crooked.

“So…,” Scarrow started, closing the door behind him with his elbow. He handed me a mug, and noticed I already had one beside the keyboard. "I made you a coffee."

“Just like you to poison an innocent woman,” I said, putting the new coffee aside for later, noticing the beginnings of a giggle building in my tummy already. Dammit. I swallowed my bizarre mirth and focused. “I already have one, roofie-free. I've learned my lesson about taking hot drinks from strangers.”

His mouth turned down at the corners. He had a can of root beer in his other hand, which he cracked open with a hiss. “I understand you’re coming in officially as a, what, exactly? Debunker?”

“Of course. But you knew that. You know exactly who I am.” I finished my first coffee and put the mug down in the one square inch of clear space left beside Schenk’s keyboard. “I'm a scientist first. A preternatural biologist. I take fact versus fiction very seriously. I agree that something fishy is going on at the canal, and it probably ain't the fish. Whether or not the data supports your hypothesis, that it's a ghost affecting the physical realm, remains to be seen.”

“You haven’t seen all the data yet,” he countered. “Jumping to conclusions isn’t very scientific.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “That’s fair. Make your case. Wow me with your findings, Professor von Pimpenstein. What kind of data have you been collecting?”

“Temperature drops,” he said.

“Temperature drops,” I repeated, trying not to sound too condescending, with only minimal success. “At the side of the canal.”

“Significant drops.”

“Significant temperature drops. Outside. In November. In Canada. You’re beside one of the Great Lakes, eh? Fluctuations in temperature are not supernatural. They are absolutely natural and to be expected.” My memory nagged at me with circles of ice floating on the surface of the canal, suddenly crystallizing atop that dark, murky water and then breaking apart.

Father Scarrow ticked off number two on his fingers. “Unexplained lights.”

I’d seen the underwater flickers he was talking about. I wasn’t prepared to concede they were anything unnatural, but I wanted to hear his explanation. “At night the water reflects all the lights from the street lights and ships,” I suggested, though I knew that wasn’t what he was getting at.

“I’ve seen them beneath the surface,” he said, “and have seen radiometric images of humanoid forms with a thermal imaging device.”

“Humanoid forms?” I winced. “We talking UFOs and aliens next?”

“No, I assure you, my sole interest is in ghosts and their remains.”

“Are you so married to your pet theory that you can't be swayed by doubt? Tsk, tsk, that's hardly scientific of you.” I said, digging out my mini Moleskine and pencil from my coat pocket. “Dear Diary: Today, I discussed light-emitting, frost-farting human remains with a ghost-hunting exorcist who was astonished that Canada gets cold in November. Obligatory ‘eh’ inserted here. Love, Marnie.”

“You work with the FBI, right? You could get us some equipment that I don’t have the budget for. A very nice thermal imaging rig runs about nineteen hundred dollars. Digital EMF and EVP voice recorder with a static energy proximity detector would be a good idea. There’s a place I need to run more accurate thermal sweeps for cold spots.”

“No way, man,” I said, “I’m already in deep sh– eepdip for the flamethrower.” I held up a shushing hand as Simon started to cry on the monitor, and turned up the sound.

Schenk waited out Simon’s tears in respectful silence across the table, and then made his next question gentler. “How do you know Renfield Scarrow?”

“Brit found him through some ghost hunting website. She was always scouring the internet for information. She called it her ‘research,’ but most of the time she was just reading ghost stories and posting on forums. When she found Father Scarrow, she said it was fate, since he was right in St. Catharines. She said that the fact he lived right by the canal was a sign.” He tried to make a mystical gesture, or maybe just air quotes, with his hands, but the five point restraints hindered his movement, so it looked more like he was making bunny puppets argue in his crotch.

“A sign of what?” Schenk asked.

“I dunno,” Simon said, hanging his head. “She was always going on about signs and destiny and messages from the other side. Ever since her folks died, she was all-in, you know? Obsessed with the occult. Especially ghosts.”

“You didn’t believe it?”

“I believed it made her happy to believe it.” Simon dried tears off his chin by rubbing it on his shoulder. “I don’t know anything about life after death. I just know mine sucks after hers.” His breath caught. “I just wanted her to be happy.”

Changing course for less troubled waters, Schenk asked, “Had you met Marnie Baranuik before yesterday?” When Simon shook his head, he asked, “Were you aware that Britney had Miss Baranuik’s business card?”

“No.”

“When did you first meet Renfield Scarrow?”

Simon thought about this. “Couple months ago. Britney had been dragging us to all these old graveyards and stuff to do readings and wanted to ask Father Scarrow about his dogs, and maybe have him come along.”

“Did he?” Schenk asked, while he wrote something in his notes.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He had his own stuff going on, you know? He didn’t have time for amateur ghost hunters, maybe. He struck me as real serious. Brit said he lectured her on the ethics of speaking with spirits.” Simon hesitated. “Then, a couple weeks ago, Brit had become positive she was being harassed by a spirit. A dark spirit, she said. It moved shit around, she said. I never saw it. She’d point out stuff in the bathroom and say it was in the medicine cabinet, then it was on the sink, then it was on the floor. Once, two light bulbs both blew at the same time, but I didn’t think that was weird. I mean, we put them in at the same time, so it made sense to me, but not to her. She went to see Father Scarrow again, to see if he could…” He tried to make another gesture and the cuffs clattered against the table. “Exorcise it, or whatever.”

“And did he?”

“He didn’t even try,” Simon cried, and gave Schenk an anguished, pleading stare.

“Were you there at the time?”

“No, but Britney told me he was really abrupt with her, sent her away, but—“ He shut up suddenly, and shook his head. “It’s just, maybe if he'd helped her then, you know, maybe she’d still be here.”

“Yesterday, when you were at Renfield Scarrow’s home, did you say, ‘I’ll expose you?’” When Simon nodded, Schenk asked, “What did you mean by that?”

“Just that a real priest would have helped her,” Simon said, “and Scarrow should have spent less time looking at Brit’s tits and more time listening to her words.”

I felt my eyebrows creep up and I shot Father Frisky a look.

“We need to talk,” Scarrow told me. “Alone.”

“We are alone,” I said, wary of the imminent return of the giggles.

“I’m serious.”

I gave him a doubly sour look. “If you’re going to save my soul, you’re about a decade too late. And if you're planning on looking at my tits, it won't take long, even if I don't pop you right in the yap. Why didn't you help her?”

“Miss Wyatt had no interest in saving souls,” Scarrow said. “She wanted to keep them here for her amusement, for entertainment.”

“Don’t you do the same thing? Keep them here to serve your purposes?”

“I release every spirit I can, and only train the dogs on the stubborn spirits who will not be persuaded to go.”

“Some exorcist you are, if you can’t be the anti-Pokemon and dispatch 'em all, if you ask me.” My sniggering was only partly due to the mental image of Scarrow stuffing Pikachu into his bowling bag, but most of it still seemed to be wafting around me like a cloud of pungent ridiculousness.

His serious look attempted to banish any doubts I had about that, but the doubt remained. “There are aspects of this case you will not be able to discuss with Constable Schenk.”

“Like your sleazebaggitude?” I made like I was playing with my iPhone pictures, and thumbed it to record. “Pretty sure he knows about that already. Can’t pull much over on the big guy.”

“He won’t accept a paranormal explanation.”

"There is no paranormal explanation. You're a perfectly normal sleazebag. Or at least, there's nothing supernatural about your bags of sleaze. Also, there’s nothing paranormal in the canal." Don’t be so sure, I thought, again thinking of Schenk’s blank stare at the underwater lights. “As far as the investigation goes, I don't see any reason to suspect the supernatural until the data supports it, either.”

“You are at least open to the possibilities. Schenk is not.”

“You can’t blame him for looking to the mundane first. Don’t sell him short. He’s not entirely close minded, like some other cops I’ve worked with.”

“In the end, Marnie,” he said, gazing at me a bit too intently, “it will be you and me.”

I quelled a shiver, because something told me he was right. I’m not precognitive, and I can’t see the future, but the gooseflesh on my arms said there would come a time, near the end of all this, that it would be just me and Scarrow. And maybe not in a good way. The silly, inappropriate giggles threatened to return full force and I tightened my guts to keep them at bay. “You think so?”

“The sooner you shut him out, the easier it will be to maneuver around him,” he advised smoothly. It made me think of the snake offering Eve an apple, and I didn’t like it at all; despite my attempts to keep that off my face, the priest must have seen a flicker of concern, and he rushed to explain.

“If you show him your cards, he won’t need you anymore, Marnie.”

Instinct told me to correct him, to maintain a wedge of distance. “Miss Baranuik.”

His eyes were hypnotizing, dark pools of salvation and sin, a cocktail of heavenly delights and devilish temptation. Soul savior, my mind teased. No rash today, eh, Marnie? “I need him to need you,” he said. “You’re my foot in the door. I need continued access. That means limiting his exposure to our work.”

Our work. “I see.”

“Do you, Marnie? This is a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore a real poltergeist.”

Right case, wrong problem. “Britney Wyatt is missing.”

“Britney Wyatt is already dead.”

“Can you save her?” I said, alarmed at how soft my voice had gone, as though he and I were sharing secrets in the little office. I cleared my throat and sat up straight. “Her soul, I mean?”

“I will try,” he promised. “But we must first release her from the clutches of the poltergeist.”

“Why would a poltergeist want Britney Wyatt dead?”

“That, you should ask Simon.”

I cast a pointed look at the monitor. “Schenk's asking Simon. I’m asking you.”

Uncertain thoughts marched behind his brown eyes in military fashion. I wanted to believe he was as he appeared, just an ex-holy man with a touch of kink, trying to do good deeds with the spirit world. “You understand, I cannot divulge what is told to me in confession.”

My guts were still doing a happy jig and the invigorating zing in my veins tried to persuade me. Was this the Blue Sense trying to tell me something in a new way? “You're so full of shit, you squeak going into a turn. Priests take confession, not ex-priests. Some defrocked quack doesn't get to invoke the sanctity of confessional privilege,” I challenged. “So, tell me something, Ren Scarrow.”

He leaned back, unruffled by my offensive. “Yes?”

“Why did the church really boot you? Because you’re a perv, eh?”

“I can’t save souls if I don’t know how,” he said. “The church does not want to learn and evolve. It does not want to challenge old beliefs. I was finding my research restricted, but I was willing to work together with them to find a middle ground. They were not.”

“Will you…” Save my soul, too? Wait! No! “Would you…” Get him alone, Marnie. “Wanna go bowling?”

His eyebrows twitched up together, soon followed by a curve of his lips. “Are you asking a priest on a date?”

“Ex-priest,” I said. “And it's bowling. Unless we're on an episode of Roseanne or you're secretly the Big Lebowski, I don't think this qualifies as a date. I'm just going to pump you for information and smack you with some ugly shoes.”

“I don’t bowl.” The Blue Sense caught the rank untruth, hitting me in the side of the brain the way a sour note on a violin hurts the ear.

“Liar,” I said. “I spent too long getting lied to by a frigging Leprechaun, and I'm not above taking it out on your skinny-jeaned butt. Besides, you gotta see me in a bowling alley, I’m totally awesome. We can do what you said before: get drunk and discuss the afterlife, minus the naked bit.”

“Fine. Tonight,” he said, moving to put his root beer can down.

His aim was bad; the can hit the full mug of coffee, slopping it off the desk and into my lap. I yelped and jumped out of the rolling chair, which didn’t go so well for me, since the wheels were locked. The chair started tipping, wheels clattering, and I abandoned ship in a flurry of reports, files, and matching airborne slashes of hot brown coffee and root beer foam. Scarrow was quick to rescue several items from the desk, turning to set them variously around the room in safe locations. I grabbed at the soggy papers and flapped them, more concerned with saving Schenk’s paperwork than the liquid seeping into the lap of my jeans.

Scarrow straightened and reached for a box of tissues on a filing cabinet. “Here. Sorry.”

“Well, aren't you slick.” I snatched the tissues from his hand and began cleaning up his mess. The Blue Sense reported a shutdown of feelings, a shielding measure like the pulling of drapes against the glare of the sun. For a moment, I caught he meant to do that, followed by, to cloud the investigation? But that didn’t feel quite right. I couldn’t quite get a handle on his motives.

“Slick as a handful of goobers,” I muttered, dabbing Schenk’s pencil work delicately, my giggle fit effectively squashed.

“Then we make a great pair. Tonight,” he said, backing toward the door, laying one hand on the doorknob. “My place first. Come alone.”

I didn’t agree, but he seemed to take my silence as acquiescence. He left, and I turned my focus back to cleaning up, half-listening to the voices coming from the left hand monitor. I bent to retrieve the evidence box from the dry spot on the floor where Scarrow had tucked it.

The lid was on. Of course it is. He just tidied it when he put it down. Did he? What do you think, he stole something? He’s a priest. Ex-priest. I peeked in the box. Everything seemed to be there. Purse, wallet, lipstick, junk. I put the lid back on, feeling stupid and paranoid, and hoisted it onto the desk, putting it kinda-exactly where it had been. I’d have to mention all this to Schenk, of course, and apologize for his messy papers. If he needed me to do data entry later, I’d volunteer, although to be fair, Father Scarrow should get his skinny butt back here to do it. He was the klutz this time, not me.

“I don’t know what else I can tell you,” Simon was saying in the interrogation room. Schenk’s ever-present pencil went taptaptap.

“Let’s go through it again, from the beginning.”

I sat back in Schenk’s damp swivel chair and sighed, tossing browned tissues in the garbage pail. It was going to be a very long morning, and I was going to have to let the wet spot on the crotch of my jeans dry before I snuck into the station’s lunch room for a refill. My gloves smelled like coffee and root beer.

I loaded up the Seaway’s security video on the second monitor, and watched on repeat, in grainy detail, as Britney Wyatt stepped away from her boyfriend. Over and over, I watched as she stared down at the water for a good two minutes, ignoring him as he tried to get her attention, before diving head-first into the cold, black depths of the Welland Canal. I must have watched the clip more than a dozen times, each time wishing for a different ending, a happy ending. A last-minute rescue. Even a tearful proposal while medics treated Britney for hypothermia would have been better than the real outcome. Each time I watched, of course, it concluded the same way. Simon Hiscott crumpled at the edge of the canal.

Britney Wyatt did not resurface.

CHAPTER 12

AFTER WHAT SEEMED like an endless session of looking through files, watching security videos, listening to Schenk grumble about the messy paperwork, and researching poltergeist theories and sightings, I went back to North House to try and relax. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Scarrow was hiding something more than a penchant for boinking short, dorky skeptics in funny hats.

I’d just removed my parka, handing it to Mr. Merritt, and had started untying my frog hat when Schenk’s call came.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I was considering a prolonged and shameless pursuit of hedonism,” I told him, smoothing my frizzy ponytail.

“Translation?”

“Pizza, porn, and Dr. Pepper,” I said. “Not diet. I don’t do diet pop anymore. Aspartame melts magic herb-encrusted zombie hybrids, so who the heck knows what it does inside the living?” I gave Mr. Merritt a wink at heck. He returned it with a tolerant smile.

Schenk silently digested this for a moment then asked, “This is your idea of an ideal afternoon?”

“It sure beats spelunking in the hoary pus caverns of Hell’s fifth circle.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” he said. “I need you at the Welland Canal Overflow Pond by the Twin Flight Locks. Park at New Red Hook Cemetery. Need directions?”

“Nope. I’ll be there, Longshanks.” I gave Mr. Merritt a long sigh and he held up my parka so I could put it right back on again.

“Before you go, madam, your boyfriend called again on Skype. I told him I’d let you know.”

“Whoa,” I said with a laugh, zipping my parka up to the neck. I gave the elastic on my wrist a preemptive snap. It didn’t work, and I allowed myself the briefest recollection of Batten’s long, deep, dizzying, après-sex kisses. “Agent Batten is not my boyfriend. As if Harry would let me have a real boyfriend.”

Mr. Merritt opened his mouth to say something, and then decided against it. I lifted my eyebrows to prompt him, and he said, “Begging your pardon if this is not my place to say, but Mrs. Santonen had many admirers.”

“Grandma Vi?” I felt my jaw hang open and snapped it shut. “Grandma was here? With Harry? And she had boyfriends? Didn’t it bother him?”

“It certainly never seemed to, madam, but I shouldn’t like to presume to know Lord Dreppenstedt’s thoughts on the matter,” he said, “nor am I an expert on the workings of his Lordship’s heart. I only mention it because it was a regular occurrence. Mrs. Santonen often visited with a beau on her arm. As a pair, they were very… laissez-faire about such things.” The Blue Sense did not pick up on any condemnation in the little old man, only affection tinged with nostalgia.

Damn. Grandma got her some. “I, uh…” I made sure my frog hat was tied up tight under my chin and reached for the doorknob. “I don’t know what to say about that. Thanks. For the info. Kinda blowing my mind, Combat Butler.”

“You have her spark,” he said warmly, “if you don’t mind me saying.”

Again surprised, I gave my head a dazed shake, waved at him, and hurried back out to the garage.

***

After a harrowing drive through increasingly strong and swirling winds — during which I had to contend with increasingly strong and swirling images of Batten as potential for-realsies boyfriend material — I reached the cemetery and parked behind a bunch of news vans. I took one last desperate slurp of my coffee, trying not to dump it down the front of my parka as I simultaneously lurched from the front seat and crammed the lid back on, leaving the empty husk in the console cup holder. The cops were vigilant at the perimeter, and had backed it off all the way to the entrance to the newer cemetery.

The former town of Red Hook, once settled between what was now Thorold and Niagara Falls, no longer existed, but the two cemeteries remained, new on the hill, and old down below close to the overflow pond, connected by a road long forgotten by maintenance crews. The two graveyards served as the final resting place of Lutherans and Anglicans for more than two hundred years. Headstones here still had familial ties to names I’d heard my whole life growing up in this region; the cemeteries were littered with wobbly, broken, moss-covered limestone headstones dating back to 1790. Epps, Stones, Steeles, Ridouts, McKenzies and McClintocks, Donnellys and Adsits, Bundells and Bowens, all lay with their names slowly eroding under tall, spreading maple trees, now bare branched and coated with ice that clicked with every frigid gust of wind. I tied the green chin straps of my frog hat tighter and tucked my mouth into the neckline of my parka to keep my chin warm. As long as a couple of Italian plumbers didn't come bounding across the graveyard to land on my head, I felt fairly safe.

A matching pair of Niagara Regional Policemen were maintaining the integrity of the scene, facing off against the media with stern faces. The Blue Sense stirred to the clamor of excitement in the reporters around me, buzzing like a swarm of blowflies on a corpse, voices lost in a chorus of questions and demands. The cops were carefully shuttered, hiding their tired frustration. It was easy to pick out Schenk’s towering form bobbing through the mess of officers inside the perimeter, headed in my direction. I didn’t move to meet up with him until he was at the yellow tape. He said something to one of the officers and they waved me through in unison.

“In case you were wondering, Longshanks,” I said, tucking my gloved hands under my armpits for warmth, “This is exactly how I like to spend my Fridays.”

“Hence my invitation,” he said. “Sorry to call you away from your hedonism. Let’s get away from the vermin.”

I cast a curious glance over my shoulder at the media surrounding the yellow tape, shoving their cameras at arm’s length over the barriers. Schenk’s irritation hit me loud and clear.

“I hate reporters,” I confided. And, oh boy, do they hate me. “I think it’s fun to give them the finger. Sometimes they print it, and sometimes they get in trouble.”

Schenk didn’t audibly agree, but I thought the set of his brow did. The Blue Sense warned me he wasn’t in the mood for witty banter. We struck out through the cemetery, passing massive chestnut trees, stripped of their leaves but still clutching spiked nut cases. Winding our way along the paths plowed for the emergency vehicles, we crossed through the older section of the graveyard. There, the flagpole vibrated; frozen ropes clattered and pinged against the metal.

I asked, “Found something down in the canal’s overflow pond?”

“You’re gonna tell me what you think this gunk stuff is before the lab guys get their hands on it,” Schenk said as we picked our way carefully through the churned snow path. Here utility vehicles had plowed a slushy rut through the snow, but it wasn't doing much beyond keeping us headed in the right direction. The ground took several terraced drops toward the pond, and while they were no doubt picturesque during the greener and autumn months, they were nothing but frost and treachery this time of year. Schenk indicated with a thumb over his shoulder that I should stay behind him and let him go first. I was tempted to just rappel down the embankment with my scarf thrown over his elbow, then remembered that the media horde could probably still see us, and I had a growing soft spot for Schenk's dignity.

“Yo, Thag, can I get a lift?” I arched my eyebrows and gestured towards one of his arms. He rolled his eyes and braced his feet, but as soon as I began twirling my scarf like a lasso he held up a hand that looked like it could stop a bus. When he was sure the footing was solid he offered his arm for me to steady myself against as I stepped down. I'm pretty sure I wasn't grinning, but my chin might have frozen to the inside of my collar. I put my scarf back on.

“So, Constable Clarity, ‘gunk stuff?’” I said. “Someone found something gooey and you thought, 'Hey, I should call Marnie'?” I stared up at the side of his face sourly. “Can’t tell you how flattered I am.”

“I can’t wait for crime scene tests,” he said. “That could take days. Weeks, depending on the backlog. If you can identify it by sight or touch, I can at least move forward.”

“Dear Diary: I got called on to I.D. and potentially fondle some gunk. Countdown to pudding boycott in T-minus five, four...”

Schenk was cat quiet as he we rounded a copse of snow-capped pine and walked toward an area of brightly lit activity, studying the ground on either side of the path, missing nothing in the storm-darkened evening. The crowd had thinned considerably by the time we reached the inner cordon; this perimeter had a single officer manning it, but after glancing at Schenk, he didn’t pay any attention to me.

“I like that you assume I’m an expert on ooze and slime,” I continued. “That means a lot to me.”

“You’re my weird stuff scientist, right?”

“Hell, yes.” I flexed my brain at him, but since that happened in my head, I’m fairly confident my powerful display went unnoticed. “Stand back. I’m about to science the pants off this case.”

“Did you just use science as a verb?”

“Don’t make me science you too, dude.” Again, I flexed my brain ominously but ineffectually at him. “I will Nye-DeGrasse-Sagan you like your momma never warned you about.”

He didn’t share my humor, and when we got closer to the warm, glaring ring of floodlights, I saw why. Schenk stopped to talk to one of the crime scene techs. I carried on without him, drawn forward by morbid curiosity, scanning the water with fascinated disgust.

Something that looked like a mannequin, but almost certainly wasn’t, lay covered in a filmy gossamer sheet, floating in the water at the shore. The back of its head was caught up between two rocks, mooring it to land. Its legs bobbed with the subtle undulations of the pond. Its arms hung down in the shallow black water, stirring up the soft muddy bottom. Tendrils of the diaphanous coating spread out like a hovering jellyfish. Every gust of wind made the silk ripple. A slimy edge had slipped up one pale, bloodless leg; the flesh looked like that of a frozen turkey, permanent goose bumps standing out in sharp relief. I’d seen a lot of bodies in my line of work, bodies that were down for the count and bodies that got up and walked again after death. I had never seen a frozen one covered in a blanket of gelid ooze before. If I hadn’t been cold before, I was now.

“I hate being the gunk expert,” I said sadly under my breath, mostly to myself.

Heavy boots crunched frosty gravel behind me; Schenk’s even stride. I waited until he got closer, then got out my mini Moleskine diary and read aloud as I wrote, “Dear Diary: I don’t like Canada anymore. I quit, eh.”

“Well, expert? What's this gunk stuff made of?”

“Silken ectoplasmic fibers,” I said. “It’s not dangerous by itself; it’s a harmless residue.”

He blinked. “Ectoplasm?”

“In this case, MUCE: micro-unified chain ectoplasm. Groovy.”

“So now you’re telling me this is the work of a ghost?”

I repeated my mantra. “Ghosts don’t kill. But…” I cocked my head and frowned at the silken sheet. “There’s obviously been an entity here. In fact… that’s an awful lot of ectoplasm for one ghost. Unless it was the ghost of a moose or a polar bear or something. You got any were-moose around here?”

The coroner’s assistant, a pale young woman with an old woman’s untroubled gaze and a whole lot of naturally-curly, Little Orphan Annie orange hair crammed under a black hat, triple-gloved and steadied her footing as she crouched on the slick rocks close to the head. Without pause or grimace, she peeled the corner of the silken residue off the body's face. It hung like thick phlegm and tried to escape through her fingers. She pinched with her other hand, using both of them to draw the sheet back for the coroner – a short, black man with a trim beard, whose close-cropped grey hair was frosted with both snow and age – as he stood nearby in a black suit and trench coat, reminding me of an old-timey undertaker. Schenk moved two steps closer, said something quietly to the coroner, and exhaled unhappily when the corpse’s face was finally revealed.

Pale, stiff skin looked a sickly periwinkle under the floodlights. Open eyes, clouded by death, stared up in shock at the darkening sky above. The mouth was still stretched too wide in a silent scream. Black hair fanned out in all directions, including a lock that spilled across much of the face and had gotten caught among broken teeth; the rest, including the turquoise streak, was matted in a messy snarl across the rocks under the MUCE and tangled in a dead branch that stuck up between the stones. The upper lip had been flayed open, probably by the same force that had shattered each and every front tooth. A pale blue peasant blouse was ripped open at the neck, revealing a pallid chest stilled by death’s hand. The cheeks and the flesh beneath the eyes appeared sunken, like something had stuck a straw in her and drained something essential from the body.

I asked the coroner’s assistant, “Can you lift her arm, please?”

She glanced at the coroner, who nodded as he started gloving up. The coroner’s assistant took hold of the body’s left hand and pulled it toward her gently. It didn’t want to move; the body was in full rigor. I moved along the shoreline a bit, wary of the icy rocks, so I could get a better view of the corpse’s lymph nodes. There was no discoloration or visible swelling.

“I’m not seeing any indication of crypt plague, doctor…?” I left it hanging, looking up at the coroner.

“Les Taylor,” he answered in a voice like gravel in a tin pan.

I nodded my hello and added, “I would suggest you run tissue and serology tests for ms-lipotropin and V-telomerase to rule out revenant involvement. I’d also run tests for batrachotoxins to test for mermaid activity, although if a mermaid were responsible for this we’d find multiple bite marks.” I considered the flickering lights we’d seen in the canal. “Check her eyes for severe damage to the macula from radiation possibly caused by Will-o’-the-Wisp, though I think it's unlikely. This canal isn’t bog-like enough for Wisps.” Finally, I looked forlornly at Constable Schenk. “In my considered, expert, and very, totally, for real certified as authoritative opinion, it completely sucks to be Britney Wyatt's corpse.” I’d run out of important sounding things to say.

“Mmhmm,” Schenk said.

“Your gunk expert has a request, constable,” I said reluctantly.

He made an inquiring noise.

“It’s time to call Father Scarrow.”

CHAPTER 13

“HE’S ON HIS way,” Schenk reported, putting his phone back in his pocket. I stepped back to let Dr. Taylor and the forensic team begin their collections. The floodlights' glare turned the pond to black glass. It was only six o’clock, but the early winter darkness made it feel like midnight. Behind us an ambulance was crunching cautiously along the path as close as it dared, but extraction of the body would have to wait.

“Tell me what you know about this place,” I said, putting my gloved hands in my pockets. It wasn’t enough to block the wind; I felt it right through the down of the parka, invading my bones. I tried crushing my arms against my torso to hold in my body heat. It didn’t work, so I side stepped to use Schenk’s bulk as a windbreak. A constant shivering had started high in my belly, causing my breath to quiver in and out.

“There was a town here once.” He pointed a thumb east, up the hill. “Built by United Empire Loyalists in the late 1700’s. You can find ruins in the forest there of the old mill wheel, a crumbled wall of a blacksmith. This spot was deeded to the Lutheran church that stood here for use as a burial ground.”

“Red Hook,” I said, nodding, orienting myself. “New Red Hook Cemetery up the hill, Old Red Hook Cemetery down here. Where, exactly?”

He drew out his phone again and pulled up the GPS coordinates and a satellite map. I was amused to see that the website he was using was a ghost hunter site. He must have noticed my smirk because he said, “Only good map of the old town available. Google said something was fucking up their surveillance vans, and it's not exactly prime spy satellite flyby territory here.”

I was too cold to appreciate his sardonic humor, so I grunted around chattering teeth.

“Right here.” He indicated with his left hand, pointing to the west. “About five acres. The first cemetery was here.”

I pointed behind us, at the bottom of the hill, where the few old stones jutted out of the snow like crooked teeth. “You mean right there.”

“No, that’s the Old Red Hook Cemetery. I’m talking about there…” He pointed ahead of us, at the overflow pond. “The older one. The original one.”

“Wait, you’re telling me there’s a third? An Older Old Red Hook Cemetery? I wonder if the dingleberry who named it is still haunting around here somewhere so I can get up in his ectoplasmic grill for being a clod.”

“It’s just called the Lutheran Cemetery; it was used long after the church was demolished to make room for the third Welland Canal, but abandoned in 1886.”

“Abandoned?” I studied the water. It didn’t look very deep near the edge; I wondered how deep it was further out, and whether there were a bunch of six-foot-deeper holes in the bottom.

“In 1928, a call went out in the newspapers to the ancestors of anyone buried here: remove your dead, or here they stay. A couple hundred graves were moved to either the Old Red Hook Cemetery or the new one they were building up the hill. A year later the pond was flooded.”

“How many graves were not moved from the original burial ground?”

He referred to the webpage he’d been consulting. “Six hundred sixty-three graves were unclaimed, according to this.”

I tried very hard to ignore the goose flesh crawling between my shoulder blades, but my mind hates me; it promptly offered visions of rotted caskets, forgotten and disrespected, a bunch of yawning, submerged graves, or, worse, occupied ones, the stained skeletons choked with stilled plants, long since denuded by decomposition and fish and leeches and other crawling things that inhabited lake muck. “You’re telling me the remains of over six hundred people are now submerged under the overflow pond,” I said. “Like, right in front of us. Now.” I may have been hyperventilating slightly, but the thought of it was giving me the serious creeps. “And have been for almost a hundred years? Right there. Just,” I flapped my hands weakly, trying to grasp the immensity of my disquiet, “left in the mud.”

“Six hundred sixty-four, if you count Britney Wyatt.”

“I don't; she wasn't buried there and her grave abandoned. She'll get a decent burial after the autopsy.” At least, if she stays dead. I didn't bring anything that would make her get up and dance with me in my pockets, right? My brain hoarked up something half forgotten from my childhood. ”They still drain the canal and pond after Christmas, right?”

“End of shipping season, they drain the locks and the water goes out of the pond,” Schenk confirmed.

“But clearly they haven’t done it yet.”

“Winter came early.”

“And when they empty it, the mud at the bottom of the pond freezes, shifts, and heaves.”

Schenk nodded. “A while back some local historian working on a book found human remains. He called the cops in, figuring it might have been a cold-case murder victim. The anthropologists from Hamilton decided they were from someone who had been interred here in the early eighteen-hundreds. They didn't say anything about foul play one way or the other, though.” So, Schenk had some snark in him after all; I was beginning to worry that he was a Boy Scout in a Godzilla suit.

I thought morosely about the hundreds of people abandoned under the cold, dark water as life carried on without them, as though they had never existed, or no longer mattered. The horror of that struck me in the chest, and I suddenly had trouble breathing. I turned away from Schenk, pretending to study an interesting buckthorn tree, poking at the berries frozen to one branch with one gloved finger while my mind chewed over this new information.

Scarrow had said that we had an angry ghost. If my remains were lost and uncared for, I’d be angry, too. Was that the problem? Had Britney gone snooping and disturbed a jealous spirit, a lost entity envious of her freedom and vitality? Had Britney said something disrespectful and awoken a bitter remnant of the past? Had she stepped on someone's incorporeal wang? Scarrow had also said Britney wanted to keep spirits around for her entertainment. How would she have been attempting that? And what would the aftermath be? I refused to glance over at the body; it was totally possible that I was turning my back on the aftermath. Something flickered in my peripheral vision, catching my eye from under the water.

Tiny flickers of light.

I turned to tap Schenk’s arm to tell him about it, but he was already squinting in the same spot. The Blue Sense sputtered awake to report Schenk’s quick, aggressive attention to detail, his remarkable ability to shove his feelings about the victim into a mental box and shut them away in a flexible, analytical mind. The Blue Sense dissipated almost immediately, snuffed by my own anxiety. I tried to relax and empathetically probe around him again, but I was standing fifteen feet from a corpse covered in ectoplasm, and the jitters had my Talents in a stranglehold. Schenk and I stepped closer to one another without really thinking about it, and the snow under our feet squeaked. My science fled, and my dark humor stepped up to the rescue with a hundred inappropriate things to say.

I said none of them. Instead, I asked, “Do you hear dogs?”

“Dear Diary: Who let the dogs out?” Schenk whispered. “Write that down.”

“Pretty sure that was the Baha Men,” I whispered back, so grateful for his humor that I could have thrown him a party.

Schenk said, “Your phone is buzzing.”

It was. It was on silent, but was vibrating like mad in my back pocket. How he'd heard it when I wasn’t even coherent enough to feel it was beyond me; maybe his eyes hadn't frozen as solidly as my butt had. That was some serious attention to detail; Batten would just have been checking out my ass and saying something annoyingly sexy. Point: Longshanks. I pulled off a glove, hissing when the too cold air hit my skin, and dug my phone out.

“Baranuik,” I said sharply.

Chapel’s voice was tentative. “Everything all right, Marnie?”

He was probably confused by the lack of cheeky repartee. I looked down at the body crew setting things up to move Britney Wyatt out of the water. “Things have been better, Agent Chapel. For instance, I really need a coffee and a cruller, and my chance of getting either doesn’t look good. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads up on a few changes as per the investigation by Internal Affairs.”

I bristled, but held my tongue in check. Point: Marnie. “I can handle change, boss man,” I lied. “Change and I are like this.” I held two crossed fingers up, not that he could see it through the phone. Schenk glanced at me curiously. To his credit, he kept his mouth shut, but his lips did that yeah right pucker.

Chapel said, “Great. Well, firstly, the zombie beetles had to go.”

“Fred and Wilma? For realsies?” I sucked my teeth. “They were plague free! I made sure.”

“Also, the investigators suggested that you refrain from using certain words in your reports.”

I sighed long, searching the sky above for patience. “Like what words?”

“I have a list,” he said helpfully.

“Of course you do,” I said under my breath, and shot Schenk a sour smile. I covered the phone with my hand and whispered, “Work call.”

Schenk nodded and indicated I should go ahead and take my time. A uniformed officer was escorting Father Scarrow down the road. Under a long, black wool coat, Scarrow was in his high-collared cassock again, but he didn’t move like a holy man. This guy had a swagger that couldn’t be hidden by a robe or blunted by the treacherous path; he moved with a liquid sensuality that bordered on wrong, given his former profession. Two German Shepherds strolled at his heel on red leashes. Those leashes were wrapped around one lean, capable, and conspicuously bare hand. The dogs constantly glanced up at him for guidance, ignoring all the people around them. What a field day the media must have had when he showed up this time. I had no doubt that when he’d lurked about at Lock One when Britney Wyatt went missing, the media didn’t notice him. Now, the priest and his dogs would be quite the spectacle.

I tuned back in to Chapel, who began reading from his list of no-no words. “Bitching, awesome, coolio, sweet-ass…”

“Oh, come on!” I exclaimed. “I know my higher-ups appreciate me injecting some color into what would otherwise be mind-numbingly dull reports.”

Considering that my only higher-up was Agent Chapel himself, this was his chance to disagree. I felt a mild press of amusement through the phone, warming my cheek. “Also, Marnie, in the reports on the zombie attacks, you referred to the reanimated remains of Deputy Neil Dunnachie as ‘that slug-rotten cocksplurt.’”

“Justifiably so. If someone tries to eat my face,” I said, “I can call them whatever I want. That’s a rule.”

Father Scarrow pulled up beside Schenk, and I was aware of a prickly heat under my parka; I didn’t know if it was another rash or some kind of sick arousal on my part, but either way, I was blaming the exorcist. Neither Scarrow nor Schenk made an effort to give me privacy for my phone call, especially after my last statement.

“Look,” I appealed to Chapel, “I know I’m a colorful employee, and kind of a handful. But I’m, like, a lovable scamp. Right? Can’t you tell them that?”

I could practically hear his smile over the phone. “I did, Marnie. Their recommendations came down through Assistant Director Johnston, and Geoff’s somewhat less forgiving than I am.” Gary didn't have to practice his people skills. He also didn't need to lay on the understatement with a dump truck like that.

“Okay,” I said. “This is me agreeing with you, Agent Chapel. I promise I’ll tone it down on the official reports. Will I get in trouble if I slip up on the rough copies?”

“You’re the only one who looks at those, Marnie.”

“Right. Bitchin’. Sweet-ass, even,” I said. Then, realizing I owed Jeeves another two grand, I dropped my voice. “You didn’t really tell Internal Affairs that I was a handful?”

“No,” he assured me, “but I did say ‘colorful employee and lovable scamp.’”

“Fibber,” I accused, trying not to chuckle at an active crime scene. “Is everything else okay at home?”

“Very quiet. I understand from Mark that your guest is convalescing peacefully alongside Wesley, and that Mark’s had no trouble, save a couple bad scratches he got from playing referee between Wesley in bat form and Bob the Cat.”

I smiled and wished him goodnight, putting my phone away, gladly pulling my glove back on my freezing hand. My knuckles ached from the cold, and I wondered if later Harry would massage my hands for me. The thought of my Cold Company rubbing my aches away with his comforting hands, warmed by the effects of a nice, deep feeding, provided a much needed moment of comfort. I was standing in the cold night next to a giggle-inducing exorcist who had no business being sexy at all, much less this close to a corpse, but I’d go home and escape these worries by spending some quality time with my Harry. Shored up by that thought, I turned to tune in to Scarrow’s lecture about ectoplasm.

“When MUCE-grade ectoplasm collides with water it builds up an electrical field, and given enough movement and friction, can release a spark similar to ball lightning.” Scarrow looked at me to include me in the conversation. “Poltergeist emissions of this sort are known to be igniparous. And by that, I mean—”

“Bringing forth the fire.” I nodded to show him I understood where he was going. I didn’t look at Schenk, but I felt him tense on my other side.

“Ghost lights. Spirit flame. Similar to Will-o’-the-Wisp, with the difference being poltergeist emissions are not a constant glow. Brief, rapid flashes,” Scarrow confirmed. “It may have been mesmerizing.”

“Are you suggesting it was purposefully mesmerizing?” I asked, remembering Schenk’s near-hypnotic state beside the canal; it seemed like forever ago, but had only been the previous night. I was already tired of ghosts and their nonsense.

“I wouldn’t be prepared to suggest malevolent sentience,” Scarrow said, “but I also wouldn’t discount the possibility, considering tonight’s discovery.”

“In your opinion, these MUCE-spreading ghosts may have bewitched Britney Wyatt and caused her to dive into the canal to her death?” I asked him.

Schenk shifted in his boots, likely to stir his circulation and get some blood moving to his cold toes. “But you said—“

Scarrow interjected, “Yes, there are ghosts here. Ghosts in the water. But no, these ghosts, the ones that left behind ectoplasm, did not kill her. I don’t believe that. She’s still here.”

I jolted unhappily. “Britney is?”

“And they’re here with her. Look at the dogs.”

Staring at the same spot in the water one started wagging his tail. The other flopped on his belly and let out a strange yip, bowing his muzzle into the slush and snuffling.

“They do not mean to hold her with them,” Scarrow posited as though he were thinking aloud. “I do not think the IHEs that left the ectoplasm are aware of her, any more than they are aware of one another.”

“I don’t understand,” I said with a long sigh. “Why would the ghosts of two hundred-year-old bones still be here after so long?” I noticed Schenk had a little flip-style notebook out, and a pencil. In want of something to go taptaptap on that wasn't one of our heads, I guessed he was going to take notes.

“They’re not still here.” Scarrow’s lips set in a grim line. I felt a chill, and saw my breath go out in a long fog trail. “This was church land, hallowed ground. The sanctity of these graves guaranteed their freedom from limbo. Anyone buried here who had died peacefully of natural causes, and passed quietly into the beyond, would not have remained in spirit form.”

One of my hands drifted sideways in Father Scarrow’s direction, to grab at his arm, needing to hold onto the solidity of the priest despite the fact that the contact with the holy man would likely cause a rash to prickle on my palms under my gloves. Though the invigorating zing of his presence warmed my veins, thankfully, the giggles hadn’t returned.

“You’re saying they’ve come back,” I said.

“Yes. They’re back.” He lifted his face like he smelled some faint perfume on the air, and for a moment I was reminded of Harry’s distant stares. “Hundreds of them. They’re all back.”

As though it had been waiting for a cue from some director off-stage, the wind picked up, blowing past him with such force as to snap the black fabric of his cassock noisily. It billowed out behind him with an appropriately dramatic flourish. He looked down at it with a glimmer of recognition, and glanced at me to see if I noted it, too. I grudgingly nodded. I tried again to relax enough for the Blue Sense to feel around and pick up some feelings and emotions, but it spluttered and spat like flame on a cheap candle wick, dying as soon as it swelled to any useful proportion. Frustrated, I rolled my left-hand glove off into my pocket and side stepped closer to the priest, preparing to “accidentally” brush his hand with mine to see if I could Grope some clarity out of him.

“Six hundred forlorn spirits, despairing,” he said. “Their final resting place has been disturbed, Ms. Baranuik.”

“By Britney?”

“By human hands, yes,” Scarrow said, “hers included. But it wasn’t the humans that brought these ghosts back.”

The wind groaned down low, seeming to vibrate through the air; my shoulders went up, and it wasn't all in response to his pretentious portentousness. Scarrow looked like he wanted to say more. His brown eyes gleamed with the need to unburden himself. When Schenk wasn’t looking, Scarrow’s eyes widened slightly, meaningfully. I nodded. We’d talk privately, later. Maybe it would be over beers and seven-ten splits, but I doubted it. I used our silent concurrence to move a final step closer, and brushed his cassock with my palm, seeking his hand. It wasn’t his hand I caught, but the lip of a pocket. Immediately, there was a jolt to my fingertips. Something important, very close, drawing me in, tickling like the aftereffects of an electric shock.

“Then who’s brought them here?” I asked, pretending not to know to keep him talking and distracted. “The poltergeist? How? Why?”

“I call bullshit,” Schenk interrupted. He started to scribble in one corner of his notes, a triangle outline that he rapidly shaded in, seeming very interested in it. He wasn’t fooling me; Schenk’s attention had been riveted to my creeping bare hand the minute it appeared, an incongruous detail he was not about to dismiss. “You’re saying there are six hundred killer ghosts here?”

“No.” Father Scarrow could not have said this with more certainty. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

He turned slightly toward the pond to gaze out across it, and I darted two bare fingers to quickly pinch whatever papery thing was damn near sizzling at my Groping hand in his pocket, sliding the paper into my own without looking at it, and giddy with a blend of proximity to Scarrow and my own audaciousness. I'd never been a pickpocket before. It was kind of nifty, except for that “totally being observed by a cop while perpetrating it” part. Once it was safely tucked away, I avoided Schenk’s cop glare and asked the exorcist, “Then what are you saying?”

“The spirit responsible for the murder of Britney Wyatt, the one responsible for pulling all these melancholy entities back to their graves to witness the state of their resting place… I don’t believe that spirit belongs here. He never did. He was not invited to hallowed, sacred ground. He is a trespasser, an interloper, invading this space, claiming what was never his.” He tightened his grip on the dogs’ leashes. “He is our poltergeist.”

My mouth went dry and I licked my lips, stinging a spot that was becoming chapped. “You know who he is, Father?”

“I’m afraid I may.” He gathered his hounds and they got to their feet, looking up at him obediently. “We should not speak of him here. I will not say his name in this place. To do so would be to invite his attentions. I will only discuss him in the parish hall. He’s not welcome there.”

“I’ve got time right now,” Schenk said. “I’ll follow you home.”

“Please understand, constable,” Scarrow said, “I am mourning the loss of this young woman, too, and need a chance to rest before I go into this mess again. Tomorrow, I will see you.” His eyes slid to the stretcher where the recovery team had placed Britney Wyatt's body. The dogs, now standing patiently at their master’s heel, didn’t so much as wiggle. They watched Father Scarrow for their cue to walk, and when he excused himself, they followed him away.

Schenk and I watched the three of them go. After a minute or so, Schenk indicated with a tip of his head that we should go back up the hill.

“Pick-pocketing a man of the cloth in front of a police officer? Really?”

“I know, right?” I shrank inside my parka, wishing the shivering would go away. “Ballsy.”

“Or stupid.”

“Or stupid-ballsy. Wait, that doesn’t sound better. Listen, it’s just a piece of paper,” I said, but that wasn’t entirely true. It was a laminated card – baseball, poker, or Pokemon, I couldn't tell – and I didn’t dare take it out yet. Not until Father Scarrow was safely away. “I think I need it.”

“Give him your phone number and decided to take it back, eh?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Trust your psychic sidekick?”

“Nope. But you’ll show me when you’re ready. You’re not keeping things from me, right?”

“I’d never.” That was completely true, and he read it on my face. I put my glove back on.

“Good. I’ll see you to your car,” Schenk said.

When we got closer to the yellow tape twisting in the wind, I felt the Blue Sense flare, and seconds later, absorbed a flicker of exhaustion from Schenk. I focused on the reporters, aiming my glare at them until I felt my own impressions match Schenk’s frustration. I pointed one of the reporters out. “That one. He’s your least favorite. Your personal thorn-in-the-paw.”

The curl of his lip said I was right. “Perceptive, Big City Psychic.”

“Does he always do that notice-me dance by the perimeter?” I mimed listening for music by cupping one hand to my ear. I started shaking my booty to mimic the reporter’s boogying. “Or are they playing What Does the Fox Say to give your team some cover to talk? Ah wah wah wah wah oooo!” I'm pretty sure foxes actually howl and yip, but they tended to steer clear of my property, probably due to the combination of revenant presence and, more pragmatically, the two (or three, by now, my brain reminded me; we have half a guest at the cabin) huge debt vultures that hulked in the trees.

Schenk made an indecipherable noise in the back of his throat and refrained from looking directly at the reporter.

“He looks like a coke-addled lemur being swarmed by fire ants,” I said.

Schenk snorted.

“You are a master of deep, meaningful conversation, Thag.”

He looked down at me and my relentless grooving.

“I’ve seen him on the news, right?” I asked. “What’s his stupid name again?”

At stupid name, Schenk’s eyes squeezed shut and he shook his head, like he couldn’t even bear to say it.

“Jerry something...,” I said. “Sounded like a porn actor's name. Foreskin? Foredick? Formick!”

This time his noise was an affirmative grunt. I mimed spiking the ball after scoring a winning touchdown. There may have been extra booty shaking and finger guns. There may also have been footage taken by the compadres of the object of our discussion. I'd have to ask Mr. Merritt to DVR it so I could share it with de Cabrera to show him how kickass my positivity was.

“Did you know that formic acid is the chemical in fire ant venom that makes their bites sting? He’s literally named after a pain in the ass.”

He searched my face for a degree of seriousness. “That a fact?”

“I’m chock full of facts,” I promised, “and I hardly ever invent chemicals to amuse people.”

As he trained his eyes over one impossibly-broad shoulder at the reporter, Schenk’s smile crooked up on one side and slid towards nasty. For once I was seeing behind his cop mask to the true feelings beneath, and he let his irritation show on his face. The Blue Sense sprang up to offer a whiff of his satisfaction.

I liked it. “What’s next?”

“Waiting,” he said. “Coroner’s report should clear some things up. You don’t buy this murdered-by-poltergeist thing, do you?”

“I want to say no,” I admitted. “My science tells me that this doesn’t happen. I need to hear what else Scarrow has to say about the so-called interloping poltergeist.” I thought about that for a second. “Interloping Poltergeist would make a great title for the research paper I’ll write if this murderous ghost thing disproves the idea that ghosts can’t affect the physical realm. Dear Diary: I’m going to be famous.” I stopped dancing to mime writing.

“Gonna keep it real and remember the little people?” Schenk asked.

I made an exaggerated boots-to-brows survey. “'Little people,' right. I’ll give you a signed copy of my autobiography.”

“Got a title for that, too?”

“I Only Cried Once: The Marnie Baranuik Story. It’s gonna be a big, big hit.”

“Bestseller.” Schenk gave a sarcastic little I-buy-that nod.

“I’d still really like to know what was in Scarrow’s bowling bag.”

“Is that why you asked him on a date to go bowling?”

“Oh, you heard about that, huh?”

“Mmhmm,” he murmured.

“Well, it’s not on account of his sparkling personality. Can I come see him with you tomorrow morning?”

“We’ll talk about it later tonight on the stakeout.”

I refrained for showing glee in front of the media buzzards who were still clicking pictures of me in my knitted, goggle-eyed froggy cap and bright pink parka, gloved hands in my pockets for warmth, craning way up at the mountain of a cop. I saved the cheering and clapping for inside my head. “We’re going to do a stakeout? Like, you, me, too much coffee and not enough sense?”

“Bet your ass.”

“Where? When?” And, most importantly, what do you hope to see? He'd banked those coals, so I was only able to get a trickle of expectancy through the Blue Sense.

Schenk adjusted his scarf to cover the hollow of his throat completely and started past the barricades and yellow tape toward the BMW. I poked a button on the key fob to unlock it, and Schenk opened the door for me while reporters made a crowded circle, pushing and asking questions, all of which the cop blatantly ignored with the ease that came from practice.

Schenk said, “I’ll text you details,” before striding off, motioning to someone who had just arrived on the scene: Detective Sergeant Malashock. I recognized her snazzy red leather jacket.

Before closing the door, I shouted, “Hey, Formick!” When he turned around, I shot him a grin and mimed his I-gotta-pee dance with my tongue sticking out. He paused, frowned, then aimed his camera and got a shot of me in a shimmy shake while shooting him a vigorous double-bird.

Mission accomplished, I closed the door and headed for North House and Harry.

CHAPTER 14

THERE HAD BEEN time for a quick bite to eat before my big stake-out adventure. I’d packed peanut butter sandwiches and Fig Newtons, and Mr. Merritt had filled a thermos for me. Now, sitting with Schenk as the last bit of heat faded from the van, I was glad for the hot beverage.

“Herbal tea?” Schenk said. “You? Seriously? If ever there was a time for coffee, it would be now.”

I blew into the travel mug. “That memo did not get through to my butler.”

“It’s so hard to find good help these days,” Schenk deadpanned.

I tried to rip a honey packet open with my teeth and it drooled down my chin and onto my parka.

“You’ve got goo on your chest, Cinderblock.”

“Honey,” I corrected.

“You’ve got goo on your chest, honey.”

I tried wiping it off with my napkin, but all that did was smear it around. Batten would have cocked an eyebrow and made my core flare with helpless heat; Hood would have blushed like a fire hydrant; And Harry? Harry would have put the honey in the tea for me in the first place or spread it on my skin intentionally, later. Schenk made jokes; I could get used to a dude who was just a normal human being.

We were parked in a white utility van close to the pond, next to some trucks and service vehicles used by the employees of the canal. A big chain link fence blocked the road, with security cameras and signs on every panel warning about trespassing and towing and criminal charges. The gates had been shoved open for us, just wide enough to walk through. The heat had been on for quite a while, but he’d switched the van off to save gas. Mr. Merritt had suggested that I bring an afghan for my lap, which had tickled Harry; my Cold Company had been oddly punchy ever since repeated calls to my family had ended in rejection, if by “rejection” you meant “swearing and a hang-up.”

I propped the laminated paper I’d pick-pocketed from Father Scarrow— which turned out to be an old-timey photograph — between the dash and the windshield. It was a portrait of three people: an elderly couple and an adult son in uniform. I couldn’t tell the color of his jacket as the picture was grainy, faded, and black and white. On the back I could barely make out someone’s handwriting; two scrawled illegible names, and John, and the date, which looked like 1364 but must have originally read 1864. It was a cool picture, but it raised more questions than it answered. Maybe Father Scarrow just carried an old picture around for luck, or maybe he kept it because he thought he’d need it, like me with my mini Moleskine. Groping the picture with my bare hands had told me squat, just like Groping my business card had told me nothing, and I knew if I was going to be productive I’d need to relax. Being in Canada had my Talents more than a little numbed; the underlying anxiety that came with pretending I wasn’t going to see my family, and the impending disaster that was my inevitable folding on the issue had my internal wiring buzzing with distraction. Maybe some soothing herbal tea was a good idea after all. I gave the tea a long sniff. Chamomile. Combat Butler was a wily genius, if totally lousy at stakeout etiquette.

I’d been on a lot of stakeouts in my life, some of which could have more accurately been categorized as “stalking,” since they weren’t exactly related to official investigations. The way I figured, if Agent Batten didn’t want me watching him undress in his apartment he should maybe get some blinds.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked, more to pass the time than anything else.

Schenk answered, “To see if something happens.”

“What if nothing happens?”

“Then we saw it.”

“The nothing.”

“Right.”

I grinned over at him. “You’re a lot of fun.”

“I’m not here for your entertainment.” He didn't look disgusted, or bored, or like he was actively avoiding a bit of perfectly set-up Godfather line quoting. His reserved professionalism was catnip I had to swat at.

“You’re totally here for my entertainment,” I disagreed, moving the thermal mug to swirl the honey into the tea. “Other than the foot fetish that you should never have admitted, since I’m not going to let it go, and the knitting, which you were probably joking about, tell me something weird about you.”

Schenk sipped his coffee, blew into the lid to disperse the steam. “Why?”

“What else are we gonna do while we wait to see the nothing?”

He stared out the window for a long time then gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I make a mean grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Oh, yeah?” I thought about the grilled cheese sandwiches my dad used to make for us on Sunday afternoons. The days when he was writing poetry in his office and I was doing projects for school on the side of his desk, we’d split a stack of them; just him and me, him with his fried onions and hot sauce, me with my ketchup blob for dipping. “With onions and stuff?”

“No, with fancy cheese.”

“Fancy like Swiss?”

He rolled his eyes. “Fancy like Fontina or Tallegio on hand-sliced ciabatta bread.”

I whistled low. “I don’t even know what those are, so they must be fancy.”

“The fanciest,” he said, playing along even though his focus was a hundred feet down the path where the police floodlight was still set up and a uniformed officer was patrolling, near the end of his shift.

“You're a cheese connoisseur? That’s a weird thing to be.”

“Means a lot coming from you.”

“What’s the most expensive cheese?

“Pule.”

I wrinkled my nose. “That’s really a gross word.”

“Worse than MUCE?”

“No, MUCE is the worst. Sounds like mucus, and mice, and puce — the ugliest color of all. It’s bad. It’s a bad acronym. What’s pule?”

“Donkey cheese made in the Balkans. But don’t get any ideas; you can’t have any.”

I lowered my tea from my mouth. “Why the hell not?”

“Because some tennis pro bought it all.”

“Why would someone do that?”

Schenk shrugged. “Because he can.”

“Well, now I’m just gonna be wishing I could have Balkan donkey cheese. Why'd you tell me that?”

“You asked.”

I faux-scowled at him in the dark. He didn’t seem to mind. I resolved to stay quiet on our stakeout from this point forward. That lasted all of two minutes. “I like stake-outing. It’s fun times. Tell me something else about you.”

“I don’t like your frog hat. It’s god-awful.”

“Is that the opinion of a man who knits socks, or the opinion of a man who makes grilled sandwiches out of fountain cheese on Chewbacca bread?”

Schenk sputtered a laugh. “Fontina cheese on Ciabata.”

“That’s what I said.” I pointed at my goggle-eyed frog hat. “This hat is awesome. The only hat better than this one is the one thingy wears on Firefly.”

“Jayne Cobb?” He nodded. “That hat is epic.”

“Yeah. It is.” We shared a chummy smile. “You know, you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Longshanks.”

“I’m hard on myself?”

“Yeah. Like right now, you’re thinking you’re a freakazoid, what with the knitting and the fussy cheeses and the foot fetish.”

“I wasn’t thinking any of that.”

“You should be.” I sucked honey off my thumb. “But you should also know: wherever you are, someone is thinking lovely things about you. It’s not me, though; I think you’re a dillhole.” I showed him a teasing grin. He threw a napkin at me. “Tell me something else. Are you married, single?”

“Divorced.”

“Because you’re a pervert, right?”

“I’m not a pervert.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.” I added more honey to my tea, and sipped. “It’s more fun if you’re a pervert.”

“Sorry to let you down. I’m a gentleman.”

“I’ve got a real problem with gentlemen,” I said.

“I don’t doubt that you do.”

“Divorced just the once?”

Schenk stared into the distance without comment, then shifted in his seat, then used his thumb to drum on the steering wheel, an ersatz pencil to go taptaptap.

“Twice? Four times? Six?” I goggled at him, sitting up straighter. “You’ve got six ex-wives on a cop’s salary?”

“Whoa, whoa. Slow your roll, there, kid. Only three.”

I patted his arm. “Only three so far. You’ve gotta think positively, constable. That’s what I’m learning. My partner, Elian, is teaching me the power of positive thinking. Like, I’m positive you’ll get married and divorced, and married and divorced again a whole bunch of times.”

“Thanks. That’s helpful.”

“Don't give up, Schenk. There are thousands more women out there waiting to screw you over.”

“Very reassuring,” he said, and gave a tired grunt. He opened the driver’s side door, and frigid air spilled in. “Let’s stretch our legs a bit.”

I left the old-timey picture and my tea in the van for safekeeping and joined him. We strolled past the uniform, nodding at him, checking in and hearing that next to nothing was going on, except he was pretty sure he heard a coyote in the thicket up the hill. He was hanging around until the officer who was replacing him for the rest of the night showed up, and he seemed anxious to go. I didn’t think that had anything to do with ghosts. The Blue Sense reported that he was bored, despite the grisly nature of the scene, and cold to the bone. As Officer in Charge on this case, Schenk relieved him, told him to go on up and wait for his replacement in his car where it was out of the bracing wind and he could turn on the heat.

I relaxed enough to let the Blue Sense swell, stirring like a lazy wind, rising to empathically search the area, specifically my co-stroller. Schenk scanned the water with trepidation that he hid well. He was expecting to find something; I knew he was looking for the flickers of light.

He didn’t slow as he approached the dump site, but his focus sharpened on it. I offered, “If Scarrow was right about a killer ghost, I suppose we’d see more overt signs, don’t you?”

“Unless it doesn’t want us.”

I shrugged, but he wasn’t looking at me so he missed it. “Why wouldn’t a killer ghost want us? Personally, I am highly stalkable. Everything wants me dead.”

“You haven’t ticked it off yet.”

“You say that like I’m going to.”

“I have met you.” He shot me a look and went back to inspecting the water.

“You’re thinking it wanted Britney Wyatt specifically? That maybe she ticked a ghost off?”

“If it wanted to kill just everyone, or anyone, then it’s had plenty of opportunities. It hasn’t shown itself. It hasn’t grabbed anyone. We’ve had people here all day and night.”

“Before I use you as ghost bait, I should ask, are you armed?”

“You sic a ghost on me, I’ll shoot you in the face,” he said, though the Blue Sense reported his teasing far better than his face did. I had to really look for the trace of a smile. The late hour, and the grim scene, had blunted what little humor he usually showed.

The crime scene investigators had set up a tent around the rocky shore where the body had been found. It was still uncertain how Britney’s body had appeared seven locks up the canal, against the natural flow of the water from Lake Erie down to Lake Ontario. There were no streetlights out here. To save on energy, only one of the floodlights had been left on, pointing to the cheerless, chilly spot where Britney's corpse had come to rest.

We passed the tent and the floodlight and continued to a little peninsula made of piled dirt punctuated by chunks of cement, long grasses that had dried in place and then frozen in clumps, and a plague of buckthorn trees snarled with stubborn vines. I tried to venture out on the peninsula and Schenk hooked me back with an arm so he could go first.

I watched him search the frozen cattails along the water’s edge, and the Blue Sense offered up another tidbit of interest about the big guy; here, on the hunt for truth, Patrick Schenk was in his element. He was warily optimistic, determined, and totally in the zone. I did not share his comfort level. He didn’t seem slowed by the weather, he wasn’t afraid of seeing what needed to be seen, and he wasn’t going to stop until he got to the bottom of this, like a goddamn harbinger of justice embodied. The Job was Longshank’s life. Furthermore, this was not a new development in Schenk; a pool of integrity this deep did not form overnight. The Job always took priority when there was a question that needed answering. He wasn’t reluctant to be out here; where I’d rather be curled up in bed with a book and a bag of Oreos, there was nowhere else he'd rather be. I understood completely how there were three former Mrs. Schenks, and couldn't find fault with their decision, though I hope it didn’t doom the big guy to a lifetime married to the badge.

Picking my path carefully behind him, I struck out to the side, catching a glimmer of something in the water, a flat circle of ice forming like a footprint and then breaking up. Hopeful of paranormal activity, I took my phone out and removed my glove so I could set the phone to camera mode and take a hundred and ten pictures of the same flat patch of water. Ghosts were always fascinating, but I was still unconvinced that one was responsible for taking a human life. The ice did not reform. Disappointed, I put my phone away, stuffed my glove back on, and shuffled closer for a better look, while Schenk circled behind me and to the right at a fair distance, investigating the slush at the waterline.

I was about to comment to Schenk how there was a whole lot of nothing in this pond when the heel of my boot hit a slick patch of frost on a wobbly rock. I felt the skid, my body tensing for the inevitable impact, my breath going out in an indelicate, “Whurp!”in anticipation of the fall, and prayed I didn’t go into the water. I only got as far as Dark Lady, don’t let me go in the—before I landed with a splash.

I flailed over to hands and knees, the icy water coming almost up to my chest as I scrambled to brace my hands in the cold grime at the bottom. It sloped away from the shore at an angle, slick and slippery, and sucked me deeper, away from the safety of dry, if frozen, land. Under a thin layer of algae and mud, my knee dug into a hard lump. It was smooth and round, just like my kneecap, and just as bony. My lips pinched together and I let out a breathy meep as my imagination offered up all sorts of suggestions for what it might be.

In my panic, I stopped the lunatic flailing and went motionless; I cast aside science, experience, common sense, and professionalism, speaking in a high-pitched, dry-mouthed voice. “Patrick?”

“Yes, Marnie?” Schenk was already picking his way down the churned, slushy rock slide where I’d just tumbled.

“I fell.”

“I see that. Y’okay?”

I shook my head no. “Patrick?”

“Mmhmm?”

“I fell in the dead people water.”

“Is that what it is?” he asked carefully.

I nodded rapidly, hating that tears were filling my eyes, but deeply and truly horrified. “It is. It’s dead people water.”

Schenk said, “Uh huh?” but I suspected it was not so much agreement as it was to keep me talking, distracted while he got closer.

“It’s cold, black, murky water full of corpses,” I said, panting with my need to escape, too afraid to move.

“I’m coming.” He picked his way past the wobbly rock I’d dislodged, finding better footing.

“Six hundred sixty-three corpses,” I squeaked. “If that’s not dead people water, I don’t know what is. This is the worst tea ever.”

He made an unexpectedly soothing noise, shaking his head reassuringly at me to dispel the dread I was projecting. “They’re long gone, Marnie, just dry old bones, they can’t hurt you.”

“They’re not dry bones, they’re wet bones. They’re slimy-wet bones. They’re ickygrossslimywet bones!” I tried to scold myself, to remind myself that I was a scientist, and a trained professional. I had FBI credentials. I’d battled zombies and ghouls and crazy witches bent on revenge. I staked a revenant once and got his dust up my nose. This was just water, damn it. Water. With skeletons in it. Skeletons that might or might not be up for a game of Graveyard Grab Ass. I was intimately familiar with far too many kinds of unquiet dead, which, while it should have been at least somewhat comforting, that comfort had shrunk and fled, as if hiding itself from the near-freezing water, too.

I felt myself starting to tip over into terror mode and forced myself to focus on the giant cop, whose body eclipsed the high-beam floodlight, blocking it for a heart-strafing moment, pitching me into shadow. He was getting closer, now.

“Whoa, there, Big City Psychic.” I heard the smile in his voice even though it was too dark to see it. He moved out of the light and the beam nearly seared my retinas. “Have you out of there in a second, just hold on. Come closer to the edge?”

I knee-shuffled experimentally, picking my shin up out of the sludge, feeling more hard things (sticks and rocks, Marnie) shifting under the mud beneath my knees, jostling with them as I surged toward the shore. Something hooked the shoelace of my right boot and tugged me back. I turned to pull my foot free from whatever (a stick, just a stick!) had me hooked.

“Something’s got me,” I peeped, hearing the little-girl alarm in my voice.

“Just a branch,” he said, echoing my wishful thinking. One massive hand was offered, but he was just out of reach.

I tried to kick away from the (branch, stick, corpse, it’s a corpse! It’s Night of the Living Dead!) thing that had my laces and finally summoned the nerve to reach down underwater with one gloved hand and shove frantically at whatever it was.

Freed of its decayed wrist joint and the tangle of my shoelace, a brown, skeletal hand bobbed to the surface.

I’ve seen bodies in all stages of decay, so I probably shouldn’t howl when I see one. I definitely shouldn’t have spazzed out at an active crime scene, or made a sound like a wounded cow. I absolutely shouldn’t have thrashed so hard in the dead people water that I soaked the cop, either, because I’m positive I scored no points with that smooth move. Dripping and sputtering, Schenk took one big step into the water, hooked me under the armpits and hauled me out kicking and braying.

“That was a hand,” I said.

“It was?”

“It was a skeleton hand. It was a grabby-grabby skeleton hand!”

“It was a branch. Look again.”

I looked again. He was right; my eyes had betrayed me into seeing the shape I was afraid of, instead of what was really there. A clump of tangled, browned vegetation, a nest of old, dried vine that had become waterlogged, bobbed in my wake.

“Well, it was really cold,” I breathed up at him, hearing the defensive tone of my own voice.

“I bet,” he said, nodding. He hurried me up away from the edge, probably afraid I’d pitch us back into the water together. Avoiding the sharp, reaching branches of the buckthorn trees, he got us back to the path without further injury and we started back to the van at a fast clip.

“Patrick?”

“Yes, Marnie?”

“The killer ghost didn’t show.”

“No,” he said, “it didn’t, did it?”

“Patrick?”

“Yes, Marnie?”

“Don’t tell anyone I fell in the dead people water, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. “Never happened.”

“And if it did, I absolutely did not make that wounded cow noise.”

“Nope,” he agreed, throwing his coat over my wet parka.

“Because I’m a scientist. A notfreakoutologist.”

He agreed with a nod. “You’re tough like a cinderblock.”

“When I get home,” I predicted, “I’m going to need to swear. A lot.”

“You’ll owe Mr. Merritt a million dollars,” he said, hurrying me faster as the van came into view. The new patrol officer had arrived, a K9 unit, and dog and man were sharing a snack preparing for their first out-of-car sweep. Schenk raised a hand at the new guy, who recognized him and waved back.

“Mr. Merritt won’t make me pay it,” I said, teeth chattering. “He’s a gentleman. Then again, I have a problem with gentlemen.”

“So you’ve said.”

“They don’t like me because I’m not a nice lady.” My whole body was shuddering hard, constantly, and though Schenk had me by the shoulders and was propelling me into the van at breakneck speed, I felt like I was still wading through the purl of icy water. “Even bad boys don’t like me, much. Certainly not as much as I like them. Agent Batten calls me Doom Chasm.”

That was the last straw for Schenk, whose ability to keep a straight face faltered. He belted a laugh from the belly, standing at the open passenger door to help me with my seatbelt, while I just blinked in disbelief at him, numb and stunned, feeling like a child. The Blue Sense flared hot against my side to report that laughter was rare for Schenk, a serious man who seldom let his defenses fall. For a second, the taciturn mask slipped, and his protective side took a softer approach. He helped me take my wet gloves off, wrung the moisture out of them on the icy ground, laid them across the hot air vent on the dash, and put my still-warm thermos in my hands.

No small amount of shame pinked my cheeks. “You didn’t panic. Of course you didn’t panic. You would never panic.” I looked up at the side of his face uncertainly. “I panicked.”

“Just a little,” he allowed.

“Promise you won’t tell?”

“I probably won’t tell,” he teased. “Let’s get you home and into dry clothes, eh? That’s enough ‘stake-outing’ for you.” He took a blanket out of the back, and took me home, shivering in shame, revulsion, and probably hypothermia, wrapped up like the world's lamest leftover burrito.

CHAPTER 15

NORTH HOUSE FELT empty, and Mr. Merritt’s silent, ghostly-pale appearance did nothing to dispel that sensation. I had really been hoping for Harry’s company, but he was gone, and Combat Butler was being annoyingly tight-lipped as to his whereabouts, deflecting my queries with fussily solicitous offers of a hot drink, dry clothes, and a piping-hot bath, all of which were awesome and necessary, but I was still chilled inside and out and didn't appreciate being treated like a wayward six year old. It was all I could do not to stick out my lip and pout, which probably wouldn't have helped my argument anyway.

I’d stripped out of most of my wet clothes immediately upon arriving home and thrown on one of Harry's long coats over my underthings like some half-drowned but classy flasher. Mr. Merritt had taken one horrified look at his sopping-wet charge and gone to work in the kitchen fetching warm things with which to nurture and coddle me, while I tromped upstairs to hang my wet clothes in the shared bathroom off the upstairs hall. I exchanged Harry's tweed cloak for a fairly decadent, fluffy, vanilla-beige bathrobe. Ellie would approve; Ellie loved beige. I was more of a black and blue girl, myself.

Even though my normal sanctuary of a nose-deep soak in a steaming bathtub topped with mounds of bubbles had been somewhat tainted by visions of diaphanous, grabby hands and questing, skeletal fingers, I thought a hot soak might be just what the doctor ordered.

Mr. Merritt's polite knock at the open bedroom door preceded his entry with the tea trolley, complete with silver tea service and a posy of yellow roses and orange Asiatic lilies. I thought that I might be too tired to eat or drink until he took the napkin off a golden scone and produced a demitasse cup.

“It’s terribly late.”

“I fell in dead people water,” I confessed, pulling on my back-up gloves; beige, suede, but most importantly, dry. “It’s officially too late for everything.”

“Shall I turn down your bed, madam?”

“Like in a swanky hotel, huh?” I asked. When I saw he was quite serious, I hid a smile. “Sure, knock yourself out. It’s after midnight.” I left that hanging and favored Mr. Merritt with a conspicuously pathetic that's your cue, dude look that I honestly didn't expect him to acknowledge any more now than he'd done downstairs. Apparently, seeing that his charge was now ensconed and no longer dripping, he could favor me with a straight answer.

“Lord Dreppenstedt went to Virgil, madam. He is due to return soon and asked me to tell you…” He cleared his throat.

“Not to spaz out like a du--llard?”

Mr. Merritt stuttered in an attempt not to chuckle. “No, madam.”

“Right, how silly of me. What’s the most archaic, highfalutin word in the English language for goober?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“Okay, what’s French for spazola?”

“I’m certain Master Dreppenstedt meant for you not to worry, is all,” he said, buttering a scone on the tea cart with important strokes of his knife, like it was imperative that he got it just right. I wondered if, to Harry, it was important that the butter was just right, which lead me to wonder how much Harry had to train this guy before he was so precise and excellent at each task… which, of course gave me insight into why Harry was so constantly frustrated with my refusal to accept any sort of training. He probably expected me to snap-to like Mr. Merritt; on the other hand, he chose me based on my sass-mouth and poor cooking skills, so I guess he got what he asked for. Mr. Merritt probably had pretty awesome scone-buttering skills to begin with, which is why Harry would have hired him in the first place. In fact, I'd have bet every dollar I owed the Combat Butler that Harry bought North House on the condition that Mr. Merritt remain with it, and would have kept house hunting until he'd found someone of equal caliber if Mr. Merritt hadn't been cool with revenants, or whatever the classy way of saying cool happened to be back in his day.

I parted the curtains to look out at the snow lashing across the window, and imagined my companion out in the miserable weather, then dropped them.

“He’s a very competent driver, madam,” Mr. Merritt said, but the Blue Sense reported a thread of fatherly worry that I found endearing, considering Harry was centuries older than his butler. “I’m sure Master Dreppenstedt will be fine.”

It wasn’t his driving skills I was worried about; my Cold Company had been driving since the invention of the car. He’d mounted and tamed wild horses, buzzed dangerous mountain roads on motorcycles, flown just about every type of airplane and helicopter in existence. If it moved, Harry had piloted it at unreasonable speeds. I wasn’t even worried about the weather, really, though the snow showed no signs of letting up; in Virgil, he faced a problem frostier than any blizzard on record, and while my nerves were raw with the urge to shield him from it, the thought of fetching him from my parents' doorstep made me cringe.

“He’s crazy,” I sighed. “You know where he’s gone, right? To have a door slammed in his face. Maybe repeatedly, because he’s a persistent bugger.” Picturing him on the porch, hat in his hands, out in the cold, while my family, Grandma Vi’s family, rejected him over and over, gave me a cramp of sadness in my chest. I didn’t even want to think of what words they’d use; in typical, cutting, Baranuik fashion, they'd try to hurt him enough to make him leave the doorstep. Oh, Harry, just come home. “They’ll never talk with him; they’ll hurl words in his face. They’re not going to invite him in. I don’t even know why he wants them to.”

“Begging your pardon, madam, but I believe he’s doing it for your sake,” Mr. Merritt said gently, turning down the covers on my bed. I watched him do it, uncomfortable as he fussed around turning off the overhead light, fetching my My Little Pony “Derpy Hooves” nightshirt, putting it on the bed under the warm glow of the bedside lamp.

“I can do all this myself, you know,” I said.

“There’s clearly nothing wrong with your arms,” Mr. Merritt agreed, unfazed, “but isn’t it nice, madam, to have someone to do it for you? This is the reason Master Dreppenstedt keeps me on.”

Begging your pardon, Mr. Merritt, but I believe he’s doing it for your sake, I thought, but carefully did not say aloud. “It makes me feel more lazy than fancy. I feel guilty.” I tried not to make a face as he put my bunny slippers beside the bed near my nightshirt. They looked super clean, but the memory of Wesley in bat form humping the left one while the fluffy ears rocked madly made me squirm. “Did those get washed again?”

“If I’m not mistaken, they’ve been replaced.” His lips clamped down on a smile that might have dimpled that elderly cheek had he let it out, and I knew Harry had shared the joke. “Shall I draw your bath now, madam?”

I frowned at the slippers and reconsidered my stance on immersion. “Uh, sure. Thanks.” I followed his light, quick steps into the en suite bathroom. There was a television mounted in the far corner of the room, opposite the bathtub. I turned it on and flipped channels until I settled on one of the more popular paranormal shows, the one with the ghost-hunting plumbers.

When Mr. Merritt bent over the tub to turn the water on, the sink faucet squeaked on behind me, and I whirled around.

I squinted suspiciously at it as it began to dribble. Mr. Merritt straightened immediately to frown at it. “That was odd.”

“I take it that doesn’t usually happen?”

“No, madam.”

“If the threads were loose the street pressure could turn a faucet on,” I reasoned, reaching one gloved hand toward it. I hesitated only a second before berating myself with a huff and turning it off. “Whew. Debunked.” The bathroom window rattled in its pane. “There’s no ghost in this house, right?”

“Of course not, madam.”

The window thumped hard enough to startle both of us, and we smiled nervously at one another. “Except that one?”

“Just the wind,” Mr. Merritt said with a nod. I nodded back.

“Hey, remember when my brain wasn't broken?” I asked. “A few days ago, I never would have imagined that it was anything other than wind. I’m still way too jumpy because of the grabby-grabby skeleton hand… which wasn’t a hand, it was a branch, but still, it was in the dead people water.” And it was scary, and now I’m babbling. I didn’t have to add that last bit; Combat Butler read it on my face and gave me an understanding nod.

The wind moaned.

Mr. Merritt smiled. “It’s a terrible night. I can’t believe that officer had you out in the cold for so long.”

His tone was accusatory, and I felt the need to defend Schenk. “To be fair, he probably didn’t want me there. And I doubt I’ll be invited back after flailing in the water and wailing like a banshee.”

“Your joints must be aching.”

“My knuckles feel like they’ve been squeezed in a vice. And I'm pretty sure my ladybits are never going to un-pucker.”

He looked nonplussed but still somehow sympathetic. “I’ll warm a heating pad for you and slip it into your bed, madam. There’s sports rub in the medicine cabinet. Will you be needing me further?”

“For what?” I took my suede gloves off and put them on the bathroom counter. “Gonna wash my back?”

Mr. Merritt looked alarmed for a moment until he saw the smirk I gave him in the mirror, and then the look of relief on his face was partly insulting, partly charming. “Good night, madam. If you do need me, the bell is on the wall by the bed.”

The bell. Lord and Lady. “I won’t ring for you, Mr. Merritt, trust me. I’m not harboring any Downton Abbey fantasies here.”

“But you may ring at any hour. Even if you just need someone to sit with you.”

“What about if I need someone to have a pillow fight with?”

He just blinked at me.

“When’s the last time you had a pillow fight, Mr. Merritt?”

“I may have been seven years old, perhaps eight.”

“So, like, ninety-five years ago, give or take?”

He did not confirm or deny my mischievous estimation of his age, but his labored inhale expressed impatience. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right, madam? Sometimes, when one has had a bad shock, one’s mouth does run on and on.”

Touché, Combat Butler. “Thanks, but I’m really okay. I’m not afraid. I’m super-pro, like them,” I said, pointing at the ghost hunters of TV, one of whom was running away from a spider. “You won’t find me stalking the halls tonight talking to dead air.” Dead air, Marnie? my brain taunted. Poor choice of words.

Mr. Merritt did not look overly convinced, but he had the grace not to disagree with me out loud. I waited for him to exit before untying the bathrobe. I closed the door most of the way, leaving a little slit so I could listen for Harry’s return. I found my iPhone and put it on the floor within arm’s reach of the tub. Steam rose as the water gurgled and drummed. I could feel my shoulders starting to release and relax a bit. Kind of. I wouldn’t truly relax until my Cold Company returned. Or maybe when we got back to Ten Springs.

I found some fancy, peach-scented bath bombs and dumped two in. The window rattled again, once. Hard. Then it said, “Leeeeeeeeavehim.”

I froze, and only my eyes shifted, cutting toward the window.

Leave him? Who, Mr. Merritt? Harry? I shook my head. Get a grip, Marnie, you didn’t really hear words.

The wind begged to differ, and repeated, “Leeeeeave.”

I found my voice. “Okay, since when does wind make consonants?”

A faint and fleshy sound, like fingertips on a foggy mirror, filled the room.

“Did someone follow me home?” I asked, forcing my voice to sound firm and not waver. “It was a stick, not a skeleton. I didn’t fall on you.” I thought about the dead people water. “In you. I didn’t fall in you. Through you? Did I? If I did, it was totally an accident. I don’t dive knee first into people on purpose, I swear.” My smacking Rob Hood right in the junk during one of our sparring sessions was more of a lucky shot. I'd never been able to duplicate it, and I'd really been trying, because only a sadist is as perky as he is at six in the morning.

The window rattled twice, but softly. Definitely wind. Or is it?

“I invite you to show yourself,” a lady on TV said, and I repeated it quietly to the empty bathroom, no longer a hundred percent sure I was alone.

Vaporous rings, like those from a cigar, puffed across the mirror. Steam, I told myself, watching it drift in irregular circles. Of course it’s steam. What the hell else would it be? Downshift, Marnie, pull it together.

There was a horrible, wavering squeal. A long streak appeared in the steam on the mirror. With a sharp intake of breath, I grabbed my phone and rang de Cabrera. When he picked up, I said, “Need some positivity, dude.”

Despite the late hour, he answered, “Rumi said, ‘When the world pushes you to your knees, you’re in the perfect position to pray.’”

“I’m pretty sure when the world has me on my knees, it’s about to blow its load in my face.”

“Well, then you’ll be right at home,” he said with a chuckle.

I managed half a smile. “You’re not helping.”

“Positivity,” he warned. “The best way to become more at ease with your fears is to spend time with them.”

Dude, they're fucking with my bathroom mirror right now. I thought about what de Cabrera had said. “Do what I’m afraid to do,” I paraphrased.

“Exactly,” he said. “Am I helping now?”

“Not really,” I admitted. The skin at the nape of my neck prickled unpleasantly. “I should have called Golden. She would have advised me to drink whiskey and soak in the tub.”

“There’s still time if you’d prefer her over me.”

“Nobody’s that crazy,” I assured him. I looked over my shoulder at the mirror, but nothing was written there now. The ghost was politely holding until my other call was finished. Nifty. It’s nice to have Caul Waiting.

I told de Cabrera good night and put my phone back on the floor next to the tub. It twitched a bit against the tiles and I frowned at it.

“You cannot affect the physical realm,” I whispered. “You might be here, but you can’t.“

The phone skittered away behind the toilet. There was a groan in the pipes. I cut my eyes to the claw foot tub, and reached out to touch the side of it.

Cold. No, I thought-corrected. Not just cold. Frigid. All that heat from the water, gone. I shuffled to the rear of the tub and felt the two exposed pipes, new and modern but designed to fit with the antique feel of the bath ensemble.

Warm, but not hot. I’d have to ask Mr. Merritt later if they had hot water on demand, or an old hot water tank that could run empty.

The phone was shoved again, this time halfway back to me.

“Neat trick,” I said breathlessly, truly impressed. I stayed in a crouch in my robe on the floor, but stretched out to retrieve my phone. I turned it over in my hand, looking for MUCE; it was clean and dry, with no trace of ectoplasm.

“Who are you?” I asked, and listened closely, but all I could hear was the water thumping into the half-filled tub and the fizz of the bath bombs dissolving. On the vanity something started ticking like a broken watch springing to life, but I had piled a bunch of oversized towels there and couldn’t see anything underneath. Furthermore, I was embarrassed to admit, I was afraid to move the towels and search for the source of the noise, since I was pretty sure there wasn’t a logical, mundane cause.

“Okay,” I barely breathed. “You have my attention. What do you want?”

I got up to turn off the tub and mute the TV, and listened again. I held my breath and strained to hear anything. There was a shushing noise, and the lights overhead flickered. My eyes skimmed from the vanity lights to the light switch, and I realized I really didn’t want the lights to go out while I was in this room alone. Senses on high alert, I was acutely aware of every creak and groan of the old house, each rustle of wind against the window, soft noises out in the bedroom. I jerked the ties on the robe tightly closed and put the phone on the tile counter, peering into the shadowy bedroom. From where I stood I could see most of the space, except the corner between the bed and the window. The tea trolley was still near the bed, but it seemed to have shifted. There was a scuff mark in the carpet by my slippers, and now one bunny head was under the bed, like it had been kicked. The closet door was closed, but as I watched, I was sure it would swing open and some eldritch horror would spiral out at my face. The bedroom door made a clicking noise, and my breath caught.

“Mr. Merritt? Is that you?” I said, and listened, wide-eyed, for someone to answer. Nobody did.

The water in the bathtub plipped and I spun around to stare at it. A drop from the faucet, surely nothing more than that. It burbled again, from the bottom of the tub this time, while I watched, and unless I was prepared to call my eyes liars, I couldn’t deny that there was something there. I inched closer to peer at it. The mostly-dissolved salts at the bottom of the tub began to stir counter-clockwise, like someone was playing in them with lazy fingers.

Just then, my phone went off loudly, rattling against the tile; Meredith Brooks cheerfully proclaiming her bitchitudinousness.

“Thunder-fucking cockrocket!” I muttered, answering with a swift thumb swipe. “This better be important, because I might've just met a ghost and you cost me two thousand bucks, Carrie.”

My sister, the only one who hadn’t disowned me. She wasted no time with pleasantries or small talk, either; that wasn’t Carrie’s way. “Speaking of dead stuff, Harry left Mom and Dad’s place about ten minutes ago.”

I leaned against the wall and tried to will my heart to stop pounding like a ninny in my chest. “I know. I wish he hadn’t bothered. Wait… Did they actually let him in?”

“Yeah, Margot said he talked at Dad for a while.”

Margot, my second youngest sister, was the one who sometimes stopped hating me long enough to paint things for me. “That wily old bugger got past the front door? How?”

“Dad invited him in,” she said.

“You’re kidding me,” I said, looking in the mirror to check my own facial expression. As I suspected, my jaw was hanging open. I blinked rapidly at my reflection. I was alone, which was a good start. No ghost. Also, no steam anymore. In fact, the room was gaining a chill. I tied my robe tighter and seriously considered skipping baths forever. “Well, I knew Harry was smooth, but damn. Hey, did you happen to give my business card to a girl named Britney Wyatt?”

“You have business cards?”

“So, that’s a no?”

“I want people to know we’re related?” She snorted. “Please.”

“So it must have been Ellie.”

“Ellie keeps everything. Ellie’s a hoarder. She’s got a thousand things in her house that she should get rid of, including her husband.”

I didn't agree, and it bothered me to hear her say that. We’d both known Fred long before he got sick. “That's pretty cold, Carrie.”

“Forget I said that. Let’s talk about this lawyer,” she said, emphasizing lawyer as if it was a problem I was having with a cockroach infestation.

“Richard,” I said. “And it’s not going to work out.”

“Why not? I’m sure you two make a cute couple. Wait, is he alive?” Carrie’s voice was roguish down the line. “So what’s going on with that Batten dude? You still doing him? I liked the sound of him. He seemed like a ‘spit on his dick and stick it in’ kinda guy.”

I felt one corner of my lips tug into a reluctant smile. “Am I supposed to disabuse you of that notion by filling in details?”

“I wish you would; I’ve only been asking for months,” she grumbled.

“I’m on a coitus hiatus,” I lied, glancing over my shoulder to look for eavesdropping, ninja-quiet butlers. “I can’t help you.”

“That’s depressing. Well, I'm dating a curvy. It's a nice size, but it's giving me vagina farts.”

“What the—“

“You know, gassing up the beaver boat. The ol' coughing canoe.”

“I don’t even know what you're talking about.”

“Queefing, for Chrissake. You aren't kidding about never getting laid.”

“I do so!” Once in a blue moon. “Is this the part where I point out that you’re not dating a penis, you’re dating an entire man?”

“Ugh, no. An entire man? That sounds like a lot of work.” She smacked her lips, working around crumbs in my ear. “These white chocolate chip cookies taste the way horses smell.”

I had no idea what to say to that. “Is this why you called me?”

“It's okay, I like horses. But you know what would be better? If they were regular chocolate chips.”

“Pretty sure they make those already, genius” I drawled.

“Smart ass,” Carrie said. “Don’t get excited. Why'd you call me if you’re in such a foul mood?”

“You called me,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t interrupt your important work to ask you about vagina farts and horse cookies.” I smiled. “So how curvy is this dick, anyway?”

“Good Lord, woman,” Harry gasped from the doorway, causing me to jerk with surprise.

“I need to go, Carrie, hard at work here!” I hung up and offered him my wrinkled-nose apology face. “Hullo, Harry. I don't really talk about cock that much. Wait, yes I do. Say, I thought you were out.”

“Clearly.” His stern reprimand melted sideways into reluctant acceptance. He stepped into the bathroom, the pad of his spotless Oxfords soft and deliberate. “I assume that was a family member on the phone, reporting to you my whereabouts this evening.”

“You startled me,” I side stepped. “My heart is going a mile a minute.”

He turned to me in the close space and his lips curved up wickedly. “Mmm, yes. This, I know.”

“I’m gonna get you a little bell, like we did for Bob.”

“I hardly think I’ll enjoy that.”

“Neither does the cat, but he doesn't have a choice.”

“Whereas I most assuredly do.” Harry’s nose came up, and he sniffed the air. “Did you have company whilst I was out, dear heart?”

“Just Mr. Merritt,” I said. “He refused to wash my back.”

Harry’s three platinum eyebrow rings twitched with amusement. “I sense someone else has been in this room, my demented harpy.”

“Harry, let me ask you a question: Why would a ghost come to see me?”

“Because you’re warm, of course.”

“That can’t be it,” I said. “Nobody ever says that.”

“Quite literally, darling, you leak energy.”

Fuckleduckle. “I don’t mean to be leaky. How do I make it stop?”

“What’s this?” Mr. Merritt had hung my parka up on the back of the bathroom door so that it could drip dry a bit on the tile before being washed and dried properly. If my fingers itched toward the picture when it was in Scarrow’s pocket, Harry’s were probably crawling. He shuffled through my coat pocket and brought out the laminated picture. “A carte de visite? This is new.”

“It’s pretty old, actually.” I looked around his shoulder. “Wait, what’s a carte de visite? Is that some kind of quaint-assed etiquette thing from when people refused to smile for pictures?”

He waved my babble away with the picture. “You nicked this from evidence.”

“Did not.” It hadn’t gotten as far as evidence yet.

“You pinched this,” he pressed, reading the answer on my face, not that he even needed to ask the question. My guilt spilled through the Bond like I was wearing a neon sign. “From where did you pilfer it?”

“Pinch? Nick? Are we in a 20’s gangster flick?”

“I must insist you be forthright about this, my pet.”

“All kidding about felonies aside, Mugsy, I borrowed it.”

Harry’s brow twitched from dismayed furrow in the direction of full glower.

“Okay, to be specific, I borrowed it from the pocket of an exorcist. It felt important. Is it?”

“It has a most unpleasant aura about it.”

“It’s just a picture, Harry,” I said, but glanced at the pink bath salts still settling in the bottom of the now-cold bath water. “I’ll give it back to the priest tomorrow when I go to see him.”

“A priest?” Harry gave a little sniff. “It’s a wonder you’re not covered in hives. Let me look at you, please.”

I surrendered in silence. He took the phone from my hand and put it, and the laminated card, on the bathroom counter. Then he pushed up the sleeves of my robe, one at a time, and made soft, concerned hmmmns over any little bump or red mark he saw, inspecting each carefully. When he looked up from his examination, his irises had sharpened in tone from ash grey to bright chrome.

“I should not be very happy if you were to seek out this polluted priest’s company again,” he advised. “My DaySitter is no exorcist’s plaything.”

“I—“ I blinked rapidly in surprise, wondering if Scarrow’s lust and my baffling reaction to it were written on my skin like a lewd brand. “Of course not, Harry. I won’t ever be alone with him.”

“See that you are not,” he said firmly, his London accent crisp.

“Constable Schenk is always with me.”

“You must not forget who you are, my Own,” he warned, and his voice fell to a hush. “Do not become too familiar with him. Do not be fooled by the raiment of his office or the facade of holy influence. Do not allow yourself to be swayed by his endowment. His taint is upon your flesh.”

“Uh, Harry,” I cracked a smile. “I promise I’m not the least bit impressed with Father Scarrow’s endowment, and want nothing to do with his taint.”

I wasn’t sure if Harry knew how we’d crossed words there, but the bubble of my humor seemed to put him at ease, and a wash of relief spilled through the Bond. “You’ve had a long day full of mischief and bedlam, but the day is done now, and it’s time to warm up in a hot shower and rest under the watchful shelter of your Companion.”

He left the uncomfortable little room quickly. I considered taking the plug out and letting the tub drain, but as I approached, the salt stirred once more, rocking toward me in the water. I stalled, and backed away, going instead to follow Harry down the hall to the next bedroom, tucking the card and my phone into the bathrobe's pockets.

Harry had slipped into the en suite master bath and started the shower running, and the sound of the water hissing against the glass surround began to soothe the knots in my belly. I passed through the dimly-lit bedroom toward the soft light of the bath, bare feet sinking into luxurious carpet. His shadow passed in front of the door as he fetched towels, and for a moment I thought of the possible ghost in my room, and then I heard Harry humming softly. It took me a moment to peg it as Sinatra's “I Won’t Dance”. While he gathered soaps from the cupboard I heard him tapping the floor with one Oxford, the soft pad a rhythmic counterpoint to his melody. If Harry wasn’t anxious about a ghost in the house, I shouldn’t be, right? He’d know that something was wrong long before I would.

Knowing that I had the equivalent of a paranormal alarm system soothed my nerves more than anything else could. Harry had had an emotionally difficult night, ending in what must have been a small victory, judging by his mood. I’d fallen in icy-cold dead people water, embarrassed myself at a crime scene, and maybe brought a ghost home with me. What I needed, what we needed, was to warm up and have some good, solid Bonding time; the sudden need to feed Harry surged through my core, causing an uncomfortable, craving pull.

Harry gave a startled chuckle from the next room. His tone was low and teasing when he called, “Come, goose. Your shower is hot.”

I went into the nearly-dark bathroom and heaved a big, long sigh. “I had a rough night, Harry.”

Harry made a sympathetic little coo. “Poor baby.”

“I made a fool of myself.”

“Of course you did, ducky,” he said soothingly, a warm dose of his intentions trickling through the Bond as he turned out the last of the lights. He didn't need them. He knew that keeping me in the dark as long as he could would heighten my other senses. Under the robe my nipples tingled and tightened at the thought of his feather light fingertips, but he was in no hurry; he slid the robe off my shoulder and nuzzled each bare inch of skin as it was revealed, finally letting the garment fall in to puddle at my feet.

“Into the spray with you,” he said, his voice so soft and husky that my pulse fluttered in response. I happily complied, stepping into the tile and letting the hot water beat down on me, sending the evening’s frozen memories away in a rush. A little sensor underfoot triggered low mood lighting above. I was surprised that music didn’t start playing, but the only sound was the patter of the shower against the glass enclosure, and the rasp and shuffle of Harry’s shoes as he took them off. I watched through the steam in impatient, anxious silence, anticipation thrumming through me; Harry took his time with one cuff link and then the other, setting them aside on the counter with deliberate care. He unbuttoned his shirt, folded it neatly, drawing out his actions to boost my craving. I felt a ribbon of mischief slip through the Bond, and knew he was enjoying my torment. He turned to face me, resting his hip on the counter and gazing at me while he undid the button on his trousers.

“Soap yourself for me, my sweet,” he said. “Heavens, but you are a marvelous sight.”

I took up the soap and wet it as the rasp of his zipper preceded the shedding of his pants. Standing naked before me, Harry drank me in, his battleship grey eyes tracking the path of my soapy hands as they slid and cupped and caressed. When they lathered the curve of my breast, his tongue came out to wet his lips. When they played up to the hollow of my throat, he could take no more, and joined me in the shower. With a hungry noise, he said, “Rinse, pet.”

I let my head fall back and the hot water coursed through my hair, over my face, down my neck. I heard Harry close the glass door and felt him brush against my hip; his hands took over the job of lathering, rinsing, caressing.

“My, my… someone’s a dirty girl.” One of his hands came up to pull through my damp hair, shaking out the tangles before tickling down my spine to squeeze my ass possessively.

“I fell in the dead people water,” I said with a pout. “Wait! That’s not sexy. I’m a dirty girl because of other stuff.”

Harry chuckled. “Other stuff.”

“Hubba hubba panty-dropping stuff.”

“Shhhh.” He silenced me with a long kiss. “Such a fuss you make. The only touch of death upon you, my pet, is my own. Here… and here…” His hand made the slippery journey down my waist to slide between my legs and gently explore that most sensitive bud. “And here…”

Unf. I whimpered and rested my head against the tiles, and heard myself beg, “Feed, Harry.” I had to swallow hard, urging, “Please. Now.”

Harry’s hand found a slow, steady rhythm, working me with centuries of experience until I ached and burned, his focus licking through the Bond to sense every tiny shift in my needs, adjusting his touch to match it. I felt his otherworldly lips land with a tentative kiss directly over my hammering pulse. For an agonizing moment, he made himself wait, fangs extended, smelling past soap and perfumes to catch his DaySitter’s scent. His free hand slapped the wet tile to steady himself before easing his fangs in until his mouth was flush with my skin, his tongue dancing around the exquisite points of pleasure.

He trembled once, hard, his whole body going taut as my hot blood hit his system. His feed became fevered and the pace of his stroking hand between my legs quickened, his fingers teasing along my throbbing clit then slipping inside me. Each pull of his sucking mouth threatened to spill me over the brink. I clawed at his back as his flesh warmed under my touch, my own blood stirring in his ancient veins. Desperate animal noises escaped from deep in my throat. I writhed and bucked against his hand; Harry responded with an eager groan.

Having satiated one hunger, he removed his mouth from my neck, nursing the wounds with a healing lick. Next, he removed his expert, strumming fingers as I throbbed, and replaced them with the promising brush of his cock. I longed to guide him, to wrap my small hand around his shaft, but Harry was too eager, and in one powerful surge, he buried himself inside me.

I gasped, “God, yes,” and wrapped one leg around him, spreading myself to the surging grind of his hips. As the shower drenched us, Harry pressed me against the steamy glass. His mouth dropped and his tongue teased one nipple then the other, sending bolts of pleasure rocking through my core. I wrapped my hand in his hair, mewling eagerly as the pace of his thrusting matched the beat of my body against his. Pleasure strained through my shaking thighs and quivering ass as each thrust took me closer and closer. I felt him lose control seconds before his lust plunged through the Bond to send me over the edge with a cry. His climax answered mine as he buried himself deep, over and over, wrung out, punctuated by a growl of relief and what sounded like an explosion of French cursing. That made me grin, and before I knew it I was laughing up against the shower’s spray, a wanton laugh that tumbled into the hot mist.

He had to hold me up as he rinsed me up and toweled me off, and he probably would have carried me to bed if I'd asked. I was absolutely, positively A-OK with letting him do whatever he wanted after that little performance.

Thus sated and wrapped in a soft towel, I gave a long yawn. “Will you rest with me a while, Harry? My brain is playing ghost tricks on me and I can’t stop thinking about that pond.”

“Have I ever been known to turn down a cuddle with my companion?” he asked, wrapping a towel around his waist.

“Thank you,” I said, following him back into my room, admiring the way the cotton cupped his lean backside. “I’ve got so much to tell you, I don’t even know where to start. Probably, I shouldn’t start with the corpse. Or the ectoplasm.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “you might start by introducing me to your guest?”

I saw nothing in the room that hadn’t been there before. I looked at Harry’s face, and followed the aim of his gaze to a blank spot in the corner, the shadowy part I hadn’t been able to see from my angle in the bathroom. “Guest?” I whispered. “A ghost? Like, you can see it?”

“Yes, a ghost, my love. The frightened chap crouching in the corner of the room.”

“Well, isn’t that a major junk-punch.”

“The lad seems to have followed you home.”

I remembered the young man pictured in the carte de visite. “Uniform, big ears, kinda goofy looking?”

“Yes, that’s the one. You might notice how much this displeases me, my pet.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I noticed.”

“I do wish he’d get off the floor. So undignified for a man in uniform to grovel like a wounded mutt under a table. Come, lad, out from there this instant. Stand up, sir, stand and be recognized.” The ghost must have flinched, because Harry let out an exasperated huff. “Well, I’m certainly not going to harm you, son, and she can’t even see you. On your feet, Blue Belly! Chop chop!”

“Blue Belly?” Why would a big, bad, homicidal poltergeist grovel and hide? “What does he want, Harry? Ask him if he’s seen Britney Wyatt.”

Harry’s bare shoulders fell. “I would have done, if you had but kept your teeth together a moment longer. You’ve scared him off.”

I went to the nightstand and grabbed my Moleskine. “Maybe you scared him off with your weirdo nickname.”

“That was nothing of the kind, ducky,” Harry admonished, going to the closet for a robe and slipping into it. “The lad was a Union solider during the Civil War, called Blue Bellies because of their blue uniforms.”

“You’re sure he’s gone?”

Harry made a thoughtful noise of acknowledgment, but something new had caught his attention, and he turned slowly to look at the bathroom. The way his elegant face hardened and his focus sharpened made my scalp prickle. Then he went to ring Mr. Merritt’s bell.

“Harry?” I found my pencil, and opened my diary to a fresh page.

Combat Butler appeared in black slippers and velvet robe, cocking his head questioningly.

“I do believe I will do my reading in this room tonight, Mr. Merritt, if you would kindly fetch my book and my pince-nez?”

“Very good, my lord.”

Harry staying to sit in my room while I slept should have been comforting. It wasn’t; Harry was newly concerned, and that meant something was wrong. His gaze had strayed to the bathroom again. His pupils were pinpricks in wide chrome rings. I slipped into my nightshirt, got into bed, and tried to snuggle in for the night. I was acutely grateful for the hot water bottle Mr. Merritt had tucked beneath the covers, because a chilly thread of my earlier unease was creeping back in like a trickle of cold air under an old door.

Dear Diary: It’s possible I’m wrong about the ghosts. Which means the whole preternatural science community is wrong about ghosts. Everything spooky is just happening so much. I can’t contain the happy. In case my diary didn’t get the sarcasm, I jotted: Psych! Love, Marnie.

“Sleep, pet,” Harry said, stroking my cheek tenderly, and, despite everything else, I did.

***

A few hours later, I jolted awake from a half-remembered dream about thrashing around in the murky canal with entirely too many eels and skeleton hands and ice dragons, like some kind of synchronized swim routine in my own personal hell. I found Harry sitting ramrod straight on the foot of the bed, staring at the dark doorway to the bathroom. It was still cute when Bob the Cat stared intently at things only he could see and attacked them in the middle of the night; when Harry was tensed to spring, it was decidedly more ominous. The only light in the room was coming from a blue ceramic canary night light, and Harry was facing away from me, but I knew his fangs were fully extended. Perfectly still, book open and ignored on his lap, Harry hummed with potential energy like a panther ready to pounce on an unsuspecting meal below its perch. His preternatural vision sought movement in the near-dark, while one of his cool hands drifted almost without thinking to smooth the blankets covering my foot. He patted me gently there. I reached for my pencil and saw that the Asiatic lilies on the tea trolley had blackened and curled.

Dear Diary: Having trouble sleeping. Ghosts are a pain in the bahookie. Love, Marnie. I put the diary and pencil back on the night stand and tried to get comfortable, cramming my face into my pillow and reminding myself it can’t hurt you. It felt like a lie.

“Mustn’t fuss,” Harry told me, his tone warmly reassuring. It made my eyelids heavy. The weight of Harry’s comfort settled in the front of my skull, lulling me deeper toward peace. “Sleep deeply now, my restless sprite.”

CHAPTER 16

WHEN MY PHONE started bopping the Inspector Gadget theme song at five-thirty in the morning I was alone again, and really glad I’d changed all my ring tones to reflect who was calling. I wouldn’t have even cracked an eyelid to pick up for Batten, but Schenk? That was safe enough. My arm flipped out from under the covers and snatched the phone up.

“Fnargh. Glerrr. Whaddayahuh?”

“Just about right.” Constable FunTimes didn’t sound like he’d slept yet. Either that or I was talking to a bear coming out of hibernation. “Can my psychic tell when someone’s lying?” he asked.

“Maybe, if they're really bad at it.” I dug sleep boogers out of my eye with a fingertip. “I’m not going to like where you’re going with this, am I?”

“Meet me out front of your place in ten.”

“What, now?” I groaned. “It’s ass o’clock in the morning.”

“Actually, it’s quarter past I’ll-Find-Another-Psychic.”

“We can’t work at…” I squinted at the alarm clock. “Five-thirty.”

“You can tell time,” he noted, as though impressed. “Lennie Epp, fifty-eight, local farmer, is available now. So, we go now.”

I didn’t so much jump out of bed as drool sideways, arm first to brace against the carpet, legs flopping as though boneless. Like a gymnast doing a cartwheel, if that gymnast had been sucking on roofies. I was, unofficially, the limpest gymnast ever. I tugged on my jeans while sitting bare-assed and listless on the carpet, pinching the cell phone between my ear and shoulder. “This Epp dude a witness to something?”

“Says he saw some kids messing around down by the pond about a month ago.”

“So? Aren’t there always kids messing around down there? It’s right near the Blue Ghost Tunnel.”

“Yeah, but this particular group had a metal detector. Our farmer says he’s seen them on more than one occasion, always at night, out there with headlamps.”

“Grave robbers?” I put the phone down to swap out my Derpy Hooves nightshirt for a black t-shirt and my favorite cable knit sweater, then picked it up again, wondering where I’d left my suede gloves.

“Wouldn’t jump to that,” Schenk was saying. “Probably just being kids. Making out, messing with stuff, snooping around for old casket handles at the pond or what have you.”

“You’re sure you need me for this?”

“Wouldn’t dream of going without you,” he said, heavy on the sarcasm. “From now on, where I go, you go.”

“Did Malashock say so?”

“I said so,” he said sharply.

“Sooooorr-eey,” I grumbled, but he’d already hung up. Belatedly I groaned at having reacquired my Canadian accent from hanging around with Schenk so much. I'd probably be taking responsibility for the weather and apologizing to inanimate objects when I bumped into them if I didn't get out of here soon.

I found my gloves in the bathroom, both pairs, and put the suede ones on. I wondered what was crawling in Schenk’s craw this morning; maybe he had developed a touch of Batten’s I-shouldn’t-need-you resistance. The fact that he’d summoned me just to question a local farmer, something he’d probably done a thousand times without the help of someone like me… I winced. No wonder he was cranky. I vowed to keep that in mind and not harp on the subject. People skills, me? Point: Marnie.

His Sonata was idling at the curb when I got downstairs, the exhaust fogging the frigid air. I’d borrowed Mr. Merritt’s wool scarf to keep my neck warm, but my cheeks nearly froze solid between my reluctantly leaving the house and wrenching open the passenger door to throw myself into the car.

“I don’t suppose I could implore you to drive thr—”

He interrupted with the point of one big finger at the console where two familiar brown paper cups of coffee leaked steam through the vents in their lids.

“Oh,” I said gratefully, “My hero. Hey, you look like roadkill, eh?” Okay, my people skills might have frozen off on the way to the car.

“I was feeling pretty today,” he deadpanned, “and you ruined it.”

I half-smiled at the sarcasm. “Seriously, you okay?”

“Just need coffee,” he sidestepped.

“Spill it, Tough Guy, what's the big secret?”

“Nightmare last night. Didn’t sleep well afterward.”

“Boy, you give up your secrets easy.”

He grunted. “Woke up aching, like I'd been swimming all night.”

Everything inside me went still and I flashed back on the chaotic dream of my own, half-remembered; drowning in the black water of the canal, swimming with a skeleton, an angry storm, a flash of light, thunder, eels, and the shrieking approach of some spectral terror, frost dragons circling overhead.

“Swimming?” I asked. “Why'd you say swimming? Why not running uphill, or boxing, or flying into a wall made of petrified moose testicles or something?”

“I don’t know. I just—“

“I had a swimming dream, too.” I told him every detail, only holding back the skeleton that went tumbling by in the turbulent waters. When I was done, he was holding onto his goatee, pulling on it, deep in thought.

“And that’s it?” he asked. “That’s everything?”

“What else should there be?”

“I had a similar dream, only there was this skeleton. With a spinning skull. It came off and rolled end over end in the water, flashing jaw bone and forehead and…” He drifted, shook it off. “I should stop eating pizza with hot sausage and peppers before bed, that’s all.”

He took to the street carefully, minding the unplowed sections, coasting past black ice, navigating corners with more care than usual. He finished his coffee quickly, drinking with purpose; I had the feeling he’d have mainlined it if possible.

“Five forty-five,” the car said. I may have cost myself another six thousand dollars when it did.

***

The Epp farm was tucked behind an industrial park on the east side of the canal, not far from the Twin Flight Locks. From the looks of it, the farm had been there for generations, predating the industry by decades. It consisted of two barns and some henhouses, a maze of chicken-wire fences topped with fresh snow, and a light blue farmhouse with doors and shutters freshly painted the brilliant yellow of egg yolk.

Downwind, it stank of years’ worth of guano. So did Mr. Epp, who came waddling out of the smaller barn wiping his hands on his olive green coveralls, trudging through the snow. His padded, red plaid jacket was the type that always made me think of lumberjacks. Under a crammed-down, wrinkly Molson Canadian knit cap of washed-out grey, he had poker-straight orange hair complemented by a silver-streaked carroty handlebar mustache that he must have begun cultivating about the time I was born. I thought Batten’s upper lip would be sorely intimidated in the face of such manly follicles. When he opened his mouth to talk I expected him to draw matching revolvers like Yosemite Sam. He was definitely the rootinest, tootinest, chicken-poopinest dude I'd ever laid eyes on.

“Why, I know I said I’m up and at ‘em before dawn, officer, but I sure didn’t expect you to show before the sun did.”

I whispered, “Is he for real?”

Schenk elbowed me. Because of his height his chiding elbow connected with my left ear. “I understand you witnessed some youths down by the pond recently,” Schenk said. “Why don’t we go inside and you can tell me all about that?”

“Sorry, you misunderstood.” The farmer rubbed one hand with the other in rough strokes, thumb-in-palm. “I said I knew they were down there, but I didn’t personally see them.”

“Oh?” Schenk withdrew a flip pad and his pencil from his inside jacket pocket and scribbled a note.

“The chickens saw them.”

Schenk didn’t miss a beat. “The chickens.” He wrote this, too, as though it could possibly mean something.

I raised my hand like I was in class. “Uh, how do you know the chickens saw them?”

“They told me. Well, not me, directly.” Epp smiled widely. “Obviously, I can’t talk to chickens.”

“You can’t,” Schenk clarified.

“No, not me, no sir.” When he shook his head Epp’s ginger handlebars waved hypnotically back and forth like magic tentacles. “So, I’ll just go get the Chicken Whisperer, and we’ll get to interviewing your star witnesses, officer.”

Epp tromped off in the direction of the house. Schenk let a long, steady breath out of his nostrils and began to thump his pencil against his pad rapidly, taptaptap. My eyes snuck sideways and way, way up at him.

“Did he just say Chicken Whisperer?”

Unhappily, Schenk confirmed, “He did.”

“Oh, I’m so glad I answered your call this morning.”

“You owe me big time.”

“Wait a second. You woke me up, told me to come with you under pain of replacement with some less-awesome psychic, and I owe you? What kind of happy horse hockey are you trying to pull, Longshanks?”

“Hockey?” He paused, thoughtful. “I'll be damned. That's why he looks so familiar. He could be Lanny McDonald's twin brother.”

What I knew about hockey would probably fit on a puck with room to spare, because I am the worst Canadian in the history of ever, so I kept my ignorance to myself. I thought he needed a pat on the arm to bolster his spirits, so I gave him one.

He glanced down at me. “Getting anything off him, Big City Psychic?”

“Not a thing,” I confessed. “The Blue Sense must not be awake yet.” I turned at the sound of the door. “Holy crispy crapsicles.”

Epp thumped out the back door of the farmhouse wearing a floppy blond Marilyn Monroe wig and a quilted housecoat thrown over his overalls. He backhanded ropey platinum waves out of his hairy face. He’d smeared tangerine lipstick on his lips. It matched the color of his facial hair almost perfectly. He made me feel like Janet Leigh when the shower curtain tore open. It’s entirely possible I let out a little eep in lieu of a violin musical sting.

Schenk said tentatively, “Mr. Epp?”

“I’m Tina Epp, the Chicken Whisperer.” She handed Schenk a business card. “I’ll take you down to talk to Henny. She’s in charge of the girls out in the big barn. This way.”

I whispered out the side of my mouth, “It’s that new horror movie: Mrs. Doubtfire Silences the Lambs.”

Schenk clamped his lips together hard to keep a straight face and tucked the business card in his back pocket. “Uh, ma’am?” He followed her into the barn, clearing his throat. “Who's Henny? A hen?”

The barn was lit by stark white fluorescents and warmed just enough to take the chill off. The smell of chickens was only mildly worse inside. Epp began rubbing her hands again.

“She’s the Black Jersey Giant. Isn’t she a beaut? Now, hold on.”

She approached the pens and began talking to the chicken. In clucks.

I said, “How come you got a business card and I didn’t?”

Schenk was working valiantly at keeping his shit together; he flicked me an annoyed glance, dug the card out, and handed it to me. It was warm from being tucked against his butt cheek and it read: Chickens: I “get” them. The hinky quotation marks made me wonder: how exactly did Tina Epp “get” the chickens? She folded her fists into her armpits to make ersatz wings of her arms and used one boot to scratch at the dirt.

“This might be the best/worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” I confided to the cop in a whisper, “and I’ve been chased by half-naked zombies cosplaying wildlife.”

“Nope,” Tina reported to us, flexing her fingers. “Nope. Sorry. Henny says the girls don’t know nothing. Only the rooster was out.”

I ventured, “And you can’t talk to the rooster?”

“Aw, heck no, not me, ma’am.” She batted at her wig again, spitting as strands of hair drifted and stuck to her mustache and lipstick: rookie make-up problem. It almost never happened to me anymore. Mostly because I stopped wearing lipstick.

Schenk opened his mouth, and by the hitching of his belt I figured he was going to tell Epp we’d be heading out. Epp held up one finger to tell us to wait.

“You just hold yer bones, officer. I’ll go on in and fetch the Cock Whisperer.”

Schenk and I froze in mutual stunned silence, our eyes slinking sideways to each other’s, while Epp clomped back toward the house in her black rubber boots, rubbing her hands in one another. I wondered if Schenk realized his hand had drifted to check that his gun was in place.

“Are you scared, too?” I whispered.

“I’ve never been so afraid in all my days on the force,” he said.

“Can’t we just leave?” I hissed in disbelief. “Do we really have to interview the Cock Whisperer? What if this nutcase comes out naked?”

“Then we'll call an ambulance for a case of frostbite nobody wants.” Schenk made a calming motion at me with one big, capable hand. “Settle yourself, now,” he advised. “I want to find out if Henny the Hen’s rooster buddy is named Cocky the Cock.”

A gleeful meep escaped me and I swallowed my giggles. “Don’t!”

“I’m serious,” he said, but the twinkle in his eye said otherwise.

“I can’t,” I wailed from behind both gloved fists. “I can’t do it. I can’t not laugh at this. I’m sorry!” I tried smothering my laughter, fanning myself for air. This was a terrible idea because even in the cold air the overpowering reek of avian waste nearly made me gag. “I better go wait in the car.”

I turned to leave the barn, but Schenk snagged the back of my parka by the hood.

“Don’t you dare leave this spot,” he said with a downright ferocious smile. It reminded me of a lion about to tear a strip off of dinner. I felt my eyes widen in the face of his almost savage amusement. “You wanted to play. The game has just begun, woman.” He cleared his throat again, and slid his sunglasses on, despite the fact that the sun was still hours from rising. “Welcome to my world. Straight face, button your lip.”

“The Cock Whisperer better have a card, because I’m gonna want that.”

Schenk’s sigh told me grow up. “Here she comes. Whoops, he’s a he again.”

I couldn’t look. I kept my back to the Cock Whisperer as he jingled forth; I heard the little tinkles and thought, belly dancer? Please, Dark Lady, anything but a gimp suit studded with bondage rings. I studied Schenk’s amazingly blank face for clues and found nothing, but the reflection in his sunglasses gave it away; Lennie Epp had thrown on a purple and green, three-peaked, King’s court jester hat with bells sewn to the tips. Gone was the housecoat and Marilyn wig. His Yosemite Sam mustache had been hastily waxed down into dastardly curls.

And suddenly, I was okay. The laughter was gone. I felt the stir of psi and welcomed the return of the Blue Sense, settling in my brain like a warm, familiar hand on my forehead. I knew in that instant that Lennie was not insane, nor was he talking to the livestock, nor did he believe he was talking to the livestock. The chickens had seen nothing. Lennie was our witness. But Lennie didn’t trust us, not yet. In fact, Lennie was torn; he was desperate to share the fishy stuff he’d seen, but he was terrified of policemen. So Lennie was fucking with us to see just how badly we wanted his input. We were being tested.

I could see by the strained expression on Schenk’s face that he was about thirty seconds from tossing his notebook in the air and stomping off. When Lennie began to do a hopping jester dance from one boot to the other in front of the pen where he kept the rooster and singing “coochie-coo coochie-coo,” I spoke up.

“Mr. Epp, how much time did you serve at Kingston Penitentiary?”

Epp’s crazy dance stopped. He whipped around so fast his jester hat flew off, leaving his flat orange hair sticking up at the front. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother, Shecky.”

“Shecky Epp?”

“That’s right.”

“You realize that my cop friend here can check that in about two minutes, right?” I had no idea if that was a fair estimate or not, but it sounded good. “Computers. Wonderful things.”

Epp considered me with new interest. “You’re not a cop?”

“Nope. Wait, you mean I look like a cop?” I might have had a little zing of pride there. I might also have had an idea for something to do with Harry when we had some privacy.

“You talk like a cop, all polite and cordial—”

“I am freezing my tits off in your chicken-shit shed, Lennie,” I said. “So, if you're done giving us the lowest-rent version of Paris Fashion Week ever, how about telling me what you saw?”

Lennie’s eyebrows shot straight up, and over Schenk’s unhappy curse, the farmer hooted a laugh. He turned on his heel, crooking an inviting finger at us to join him in the farmhouse. We did.

“Saw three of them for the longest time,” Lennie told us, leading us through a maze of plastic bins filled with assorted junk in his mudroom. “Two guys and one girl. Early twenties. Always at night. Always had beer. Bottles, which bothers me, because…” He paused to give me a serious look. “Broken glass.”

I nodded, although I had no idea why he’d care about that. The Blue Sense told me he felt very strongly about it.

“Twenty, thirty times over the past year or so, just about every weekend or other,” Lennie continued. He left the door between the mudroom and a bright kitchen propped open. “They didn’t make no trouble, so I didn’t make no trouble for them.”

The kitchen looked like something out of a post-apocalypse movie, with empty cans scattered on the floor near an overflowing garbage pail, dishes piled in stacks by a cluttered sink, some broken, some coated in old food. I followed Schenk’s lead and pretended not to notice. Whether or not Lennie was the most slovenly housekeeper in the province had nothing to do with his being a witness.

“After a while,” he went on, shuffling through empty chip wrappers and stepping idly over a basket full of yarn, “they started bringing around a fourth person, another woman. Short. Blonde. Spiked hair. Glasses. Then the goth chick with the blue streak started bringing equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?” Schenk’s notebook was out again.

“For a while just a video recorder. Then other things. Voice recorders, funky readers, temperature gauges. Figured they were ghost hunters. I seen ghost hunters before, on account of the tunnel, eh? Even seen a TV crew once. They didn’t ask me nothing.”

“They missed the Shecky Epp show,” I said with a knowing smile.

Lennie had the grace to blush.

“Aw, I was just fooling around. Had to make sure you guys really wanted to know. Most people don’t take me seriously, so I don’t take them seriously. Usually, if someone is legit, they stick around through the antics for the after party. Like my wife.” He smiled sadly at the messy Marilyn wig on a crowded counter top. “Breast cancer took her. 2009.”

“Tina?”

“Nope, Patty; she took much better care of her mustache.”

I smiled, and he touched his mouth. Deep smile lines flashed around his eyes and they danced mischievously.

“The ghost hunters,” Schenk prodded.

“Oh, at least once a month, usually every couple weeks. Last time I saw them was…” He went to the wall where a Star Wars calendar was hung by a clip on a nail, unclipped it, and squinted below Jabba the Hutt. “November third.”

One day before Britney went into the canal at Lock One. “And you marked it down?”

“Yeah, it was strange because they showed up twice, and mid-week. First time, at the usual time, around nine o’clock, three of them, hauling their equipment bags. Second time, later, around midnight. Only this time, blondie was there. Loud Guy had a metal detector. They went out on the point, there. Mighty dangerous, that, what with the frost making all the weeds and rocks slick. Lucky they didn’t fall in. Oh…” Lennie seemed to remember that there had been a death recently. “Sorry.”

“Could you tell if they found anything during either of those visits?”

“Naw, just took their readings, made notes, laughed, talked. The usual. But after midnight, maybe even a little after one, I was up to drain the snake —ain’t getting old hell — and I saw them down there. I knew it was them because the tall boy, he’s got one of those fishing caps with the lights built right into the brim. That’s the only light they had all the way down to the point. Right out where you found that poor girl’s body.”

Britney Wyatt’s dump site. They’d been there.

If Batten had been here, there would be an intense barrage of questions, and I’d have seen him lean forward, vibrating — a bloodhound on the scent. In contrast, Schenk leaned back into the kitchen chair with a long exhale, looked away like the news bored him, inspected all the interesting things Lennie had scotch taped to his kitchen wallpaper, which skewed heavily towards pictures of bikini-clad chicks straddling Harley Davidson motorcycles. Schenk’s unbelievably long legs fell apart at the knees until he looked like if he got any more relaxed he’d fall asleep right there in Lennie’s kitchen.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Epp asked. “A beer or some water?”

“Sure,” Schenk said easily. “Water’s good.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “So, Lennie, when the threesome was out there, which people were there?”

Lennie took his head out of the fridge with a Brita water jug in his hand. “Uh, the girl with the black and blue hair and all the shit in her face—”

Britney Wyatt. “Piercings?”

“Yeah. She was with the tall boy with the fishing cap and the Asian kid with the Montreal Canadiens jacket whose volume doesn’t go below yelling. Beer only makes that worse. You know the type? Think everything they have to say needs to be heard.”

I smiled as Lennie poured Schenk a glass of water in a cup that might have been clean. He continued, “They went to the pond then did some wandering around before coming back to the pond.”

“And later that night?”

“They were joined by the blonde chick, the one with the spiky hair and the big jugs.” He looked sheepish. “Excuse me, I should say big hooters when a lady is present. Boy, yup, Patty woulda cuffed me upside the head just now.”

Ellie? My brain suggested this as a possibility, but how did she know Britney and the gang? My mind chewed this over while Schenk continued to question Epp about specific details: time, exact location, descriptions of the equipment, everything that Epp might have noticed about the group. When he was done Lennie took one of Schenk's cards and offered to call if he remembered anything else. He walked us to the front door. I noticed him rubbing his hands again, and glanced at the messy kitchen behind him.

“How long have you been suffering arthritis, Lennie?”

His big, ginger eyebrows twitched, and he looked at his hands as though just noticing he had any. “Boy, now, you got a good eye, young lady. They only hurt me some when the temperature drops, or I drank too much beer the night before. Don’t know why that’d be. Funny things. Knuckles and knees, them’s the crankiest bastards. Winter’s rough ‘round here.”

“Would you accept a little help if it could be arranged?”

Lennie grinned, showing off horse teeth. “Naw, it’s a waste of time to clean up after a crazy old bugger like me. Just get messed up again. Patty used to try, God bless her, but by the time she fell ill, she’d given up trying to keep up with ol’ Whirlwind Lennie, here. What she called me… Whirlwind.” His lips did a sad shrug. “‘Sides, I ain’t really rolling in the dough, you get me?”

“I know some people who have to do volunteer work. And you could do them a favor by letting them putter around here for an hour a week, pick up some stuff that hurts too much when you try it. Just an idea.” I left that with him and gave him one of my new cards, the FBI ones, which were hopefully not soon to be my former business cards.

This, I thought, was a perfect excuse to talk to my sister Rowena. If it wasn’t about us, or family, or me, or Harry, maybe I could sneak a conversation in. At least I could hear her voice just one time, and I wasn’t asking for anything for myself. Rowena had been cleaning homes for the elderly on a volunteer basis since she bumped an old man off his bike when she had been driving drunk at eighteen. The man had minor injuries, but Rowena had been so shaken that she had given up drinking completely, abandoned driving, and devoted her life to serving others. An extreme reaction, but Baranuiks go big or go home. In typical Baranuik fashion, my sister had overreacted and gone off the deep end.

He took the card and whistled softly. “What’s ‘Director, UnNatural Biology Department’ mean?”

“It means if your chickens sprout fur and start howling at the moon, or sucking the goats' blood,” I said, pointing up to the still-dark sky, “you feel free to give me a call. I’ll be on the very next flight back.”

Lennie used my card to scratch his temple. “When you say have to do volunteer work, are you talking community service?”

“More like guilty conscience.” I noticed Schenk pretending not to pay attention to this. He wasn’t as good at it as he thought. “Clean a house to clean the soul.”

“That so,” Lennie murmured thoughtfully. “I mean, I hardly invited you here so’s you could help me. I meant to help you.”

“And you did,” I assured him. “You change your mind, that number forwards to my cell phone. You give me a ring, okay?”

Lennie waved goodbye to us and watched us trudge back through the snow to the car. The snow had gained a frozen crust since we had gone inside, and the temperature was dropping fast. I figured he would have shoveled the walk if he could.

I thought Schenk was reading this all on my face, but when we got in the car all he said was, “Good job spotting the swollen knuckles.”

“You saw them, too, eh?”

“I did.”

“It was more that he kept rubbing them, prodding the sore spots. Sometimes, we can’t help fiddling with our pain.” I did my seatbelt up and half turned to him as he warmed up the car. “I think I know where Britney got my old business card.” And why Ellie’s not answering my texts. “You don’t mind giving my pal a ride to work, do ya?”

“This friend wouldn't happen to be blonde and have, and I quote, ‘big jugs?’”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Neither Nowland nor Hiscott ever mentioned her.” Schenk poked at the radio. The clock softly reminded us that it was seven fifteen. “Let’s go pick her up.”

I texted Ellie: I’m on my way with coffee. Be ready.

CHAPTER 17

ELLIE WAS NONE too happy to have Constable Schenk pick her up for work in his Sonata, but when push came to shove and shit got real, she was an obedient woman; she slid into the back seat without expressing her displeasure. I had chosen to sit back there, too, so I could more easily study her face, and we wouldn't be interrupted by the clock's continued admonitions about the time. I’d taken off my gloves, but I put my bare hands in my pockets so as not to alarm her. She sat with her knees primly pressed together, angled away from me toward the door, and stared out the window at the hoary wasteland.

I decided that to pussyfoot around would put Ellie through more anxiety than was strictly necessary, and got right to the point. “Ells, why wouldn’t you tell me you know Britney Wyatt?”

“That’s not your scarf,” she said. “You weren’t wearing one. Whose is it?”

“Mr. Merritt’s,” I said. “And don’t side-step my question. You knew why I was here. Why didn’t you tell me you know Britney?”

I could see the reflection of her face in the window. She screwed up her lips to one side as she thought about her answer. “She’s a flake. We’re not friends. I barely know her.”

“You gave her my business card,” I said. “Why?”

“She had something she wanted you to Grope with your whaddyacallit, your touch psychic Talent.”

“Yeah, I know all about it,” I bluffed, thinking about the bowling bag and the ball under the priest’s desk. “She took it to Father Scarrow.”

“No, not the skull,” she said. “A necklace.”

I bit down on my tongue hard to keep from yelping. A skull? It had rolled off her tongue like it was nothing, no big deal, just part of a dead person taken from a grave. I stared at the side of her face in wonder. Dark Lady above, who is this person? Is this my Ellie?

“She was going to mail it to you,” Ellie continued. “The necklace. I told her she could trust you, but I honestly didn’t want you involved, and when it came time to give her your info, I …” She scrunched her mouth again, and balled her hands together. She was wearing fluffy, yellow knitted mittens, and it looked like she was holding the sun in her lap. “I figured if she couldn’t get in touch with you, she might drop it. It seemed harmless.”

Grave robbing. Sweet Mother.

“Tell me about the skull,” I said quickly, impressed that Schenk hadn’t started his own interrogation from the front seat yet. He seemed happy to let me take this one, though his eyes spoke to me in the rearview mirror, pressing me to continue. “Did you see it?”

“No. She found it at the pond, with Simon and Barnaby. I wasn’t with them.”

“And the necklace?”

“That, too. At first, she figured some other ghost hunter or hiker just lost it, until she checked Google images for others like it. Turns out what she found was really old.”

Found? “Ellie, Britney Wyatt robbed a two hundred-year-old grave.”

“They’re not like that,” Ellie said, and finally turned her head to look at me. “Really, Marnie, I’m serious. They’re just curious kids goofing around. They weren’t digging stuff up. She said she found it in the mud.”

It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger who was so familiar, seeing someone from your past in the line at the grocery store whose face you couldn’t quite place. I tried to sweep aside my anger and disapproval and stay focused on gleaning information from her, like she was just a source and not my best friend since kindergarten.

“Where did she find it, exactly?”

“There’s a spot along the south shore of the canal’s overflow pond where the land juts out a bit. There used to be some old Lutheran church there, ages ago, and a graveyard. I guess they moved some of the bodies up to the Old Red Hook Cemetery back in the twenties.”

“Where is the necklace now?” I asked, remembering a necklace with a long, crystalline pendant in a plastic bag in the evidence box on Schenk’s desk.

“Britney always had it in her purse. She was going to mail it to you if you agreed to examine it. Once she suspected it belonged to someone who had been buried there, she was obsessed with finding out exactly who it belonged to. She went to all the local museums, churches, genealogy groups, trying to find a map or layout of the old cemetery, the one that got moved.”

“Did she ever find answers?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I think she did. Because when she told me the phone number on your card didn’t work, she was okay with it. She said she didn’t need you anymore.”

I wondered if Scarrow had given her answers, and how truthful they'd been, and whether he'd tried to give her anything else. “You gave her an old number, not my new one. Why did you mislead her?” That's me, an endless wellspring of trust.

“Because there was no point. It was silly. I didn’t want her to bother you.”

“You don’t get to make these decisions, Ellie. I still don’t get why you wouldn’t tell me.” I was pouting. It was unprofessional, and it wasn't showing off my positivity whatsoever. It might have qualified as a people skill if it had done the least bit of good in getting Ellie to open up.

“It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Relevant,” I repeated. “She went missing at the canal. She found the skull and the necklace at the canal’s overflow pond.”

Ellie went back to staring morosely out the window.

“Ellie, they found her body in that overflow pond yesterday. Britney Wyatt is dead.”

I didn’t expect any emotion; Ellie had always been very good at hiding her feelings. The choked-off sob that came out of her was a surprise. “Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was ever involved. I just want to stay out of it.”

Too late for that, Ellie. “Why were you ghost hunting if you don’t believe it at all?”

“Barnaby works with me. Barnaby Nowland. He works in the kitchen at the hospice. He thought the spirits of the dead patients were hanging around, haunting the place. He was always coming to me with stories and stuff he thought was proof. When I told him I didn’t believe in ghosts, he got even more determined to show me they existed.” She squeezed the mittens into a tighter ball. “He’s a loud, goofy kid. It was just for fun. We went all over the place. To the cemetery, to haunted houses, to the Blue Ghost Tunnel.”

“Britney wore the necklace to the tunnel?”

“She said she brought it there with the skull and an Ouija board to try to contact whatever spirit owned the necklace. They invited me to go along, but I was working. I met with them afterward. At eleven-thirty, on the third, at the south shore of the pond. They told me there had been a ton of activity in the tunnel, lots of voices on their recorders, answers to questions, spirit orbs on photographs, all that. Then she put the necklace on the planchette on the Ouija board right there by the pond. She called to the person by name.”

I could picture it perfectly: a hokey party game, a two-centuries-old necklace, and four idiots bumbling around with shit they didn’t fully understand. I suddenly understood Scarrow’s reluctance to speak to us near the pond, where Britney’s body had been.

“What name, Ellie?” I prompted.

“She called the spirit Mama-Captain.” Ellie’s chin fell, and she crumpled. A soft squeak of a sob came from within the shelter of her chest. “I should have told you. I heard it. I heard Mama-Captain. I saw her. I swear to you.” She hiccupped and sniffled. “Her anger. Rage. She howled at us. In our faces. Howled.”

I caught Schenk still looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I would have doubled-down on my swear jar that we both had the spectral librarian from Ghostbusters going from “Shhhhhhhh,” to “GRRAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!” in mind. We had pulled to a stop in front of the hospice, but Ellie didn’t notice.

Her words, now released from their prison, tumbled over each other in a jumble. “Barnaby fell over. I felt something shove past me to get at him. All this ice, shards of it, flew at us. It didn’t seem to come from the water, but it must have. Ice doesn’t form in the air from nothing. I had to cover my head with my arms. The sleeve of my other winter coat, the black one, is shredded. Imagine if that was my face, my cheeks. Britney was so excited, but we kept telling her this was bad. It was really bad. She was on cloud nine, she wouldn’t hear it. She kept promising Mama-Captain that she’d return the necklace, but only if Mama proved some things to her. It was almost…” Ellie choked on a sob and then shook it off, violently, before continuing, “Like Britney was holding the necklace hostage until the spirit behaved the way she wanted. But that can’t be what killed her. Can it? Marnie? It just can’t be. It makes no sense!”

“I don’t understand, Ellie,” I said softly. “What does ‘Mama-Captain’ even mean? Who is Mama-Captain?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie said, lifting her teary-eyed face. Her nose was bright red and her cheeks were pale. “But whoever she is, she’s really fucking pissed off.”

CHAPTER 18

ELLIE TOOK A few a moments to collect herself before she fled the car. When she’d disappeared beyond the glass doors of the hospice, I moved to ride shotgun. Schenk had his file out, but next to a few small notes, he’d scribbled abstract shapes. After shading them in, he began to tap his pencil, taptaptap, as he stared out into the distance.

“Eight forty-five,” the car helpfully informed us. I was already exhausted. Schenk had a glassy-eyed, wired look on his face.

“What are you thinking?” Schenk asked me.

“Not much.” I pulled on my gloves. “I’m thinking I want to try that Balkan donkey cheese. Also, I’m slowly adjusting to the realization that I might never be crowned Lord of the Dance. And I think you need to Google how to shut the frigging clock up, eh?”

He took this all in with a slow nod. I knew he would. “That’s heavy stuff for a Friday morning.”

I glanced over at him. He was doing his thing, staring straight ahead, giving me a window of privacy in case my bottom lip wanted to wobble, offering me easy-going space to talk if I needed to; there was no judgment, no pressure. I liked him a lot for that.

“On a completely unrelated note, my friend is apparently a grave robber,” I said, “and she’s not even sorry about it. Not really. She's sorry someone got killed, but she’s sorrier about how that affects her.” I should probably have felt guiltier about being judgmental about it, since Asmodeus, the Overlord Hizzownself, had accused me of always doing what was best for me, and the fact that it wasn't always the capital-R Right thing tickled His infernal balls.

Schenk grunted in agreement. “You know why she didn’t tell you.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure I’d like what was coming next; Schenk had excellent instincts, bordering on outright extrasensory perception, keener than I’d ever seen in a mortal. Wes and his sire, Master Strickland, were outright telepaths, and whoever they chose as DaySitters would in time have that Talent to draw from. As a mundane human, Schenk was downright spooky. Where I usually felt I had to rein other people’s flights of nonsense in, I trusted Schenk’s instincts.

“She wanted that necklace for herself,” Schenk guessed. “She misled Wyatt hoping that she would lose interest in it as a paranormal find. If you got your hands on it your friend might never get a chance to take possession of it, especially if you confirmed for Wyatt that it had some spiritual or supernatural importance. It would have gone to a museum or a research facility or something.”

My heart sank. He’d put his finger right on what was niggling at me, taunting at the edges of my perception. “That’s disappointingly plausible, if not more than a little cynical,” I noted, not disagreeing.

“Sorry. Even after Wyatt went missing your friend didn’t say a word. She was hoping no one would know its significance, and maybe she could collect it when the hubbub died down.”

“I didn’t see that.” Because I didn’t want to.

“What kind of psychic are you?” he said, but there was gentle teasing in it, meant to lighten the mood.

“The kind who likes frogs and Snickerdoodles and bubble baths that aren't interrupted by something sucking the heat out of the water while playing floor hockey with my phone.” I needed more coffee. And more Harry. And a one-way plane ticket to somewhere warm and un-haunted. I might get two out of three. Hooray, positivity! “Think Father Scarrow knew about the missing necklace?”

“Yep.” He ran his tongue along the front of his teeth and on the inside of his cheek, making his goatee ripple. “Could be what Hiscott told him in confession.”

“Or Britney brought him her discoveries. How much do you want to bet that skull they found is the mystery lump in Scarrow’s bowling bag? You talk to this Barnaby Nowland dude?”

Schenk pressed his back into the driver’s seat, causing the leather to creak, and he let his breath out in one long, unhappy stream. “Yes. Tuesday, the morning after Wyatt went missing.”

“He didn’t mention any of this, I take it. Not about Ellie, or the skull, or the necklace, or the priest, or the tunnel, or the Ouija board?”

“Not a whisper. Sorry.”

“Are you gonna smack me if I say you suck at interrogations? Because you kinda suck at interrogations.”

He turned to me with an un-amused grunt. “It wasn't an interrogation; I was taking statements from people who knew the victim.”

Good thing we spoke to the Chicken Whisperer. I decided that he had a point, and my being a snarky cockthistle about it was getting us nowhere. “Sorry. Need more coffee. Is Britney’s purse in evidence?” I asked, knowing it was, but pretending I hadn’t peeked in the evidence box. “Ellie said the necklace was always in her purse, right?”

“Her effects were in Hiscott’s car the night they went for their walk along the canal north of Lock One. I entered them into evidence just in case. Now, I’m glad I did. That necklace is in there.”

“You’re sure?” I thought back to Scarrow’s beverage “accident”.

“Yeah. It’s strange. Weighty. Thick chain, long crystal vial with wire around it. It stands out. You wouldn’t forget having seen it.”

I looked out the window and frowned in something I hoped looked like critical thought, because my poker face sucked, and I didn't want Schenk to know that I might have been present for evidence being stolen. “You’re positive it’s still there?”

“I can double check, but where else would it be? Think some ghost pilfered it? It's not like our evidence locker isn't secured and videotaped. We may be Canadian up here, but we're not that trusting.” He made witchy hand motions at me. “You want to do your thing on it?”

Sure, if Father Fast-Fingers didn’t swipe it. “Simon didn’t mention any of this either,” I supposed, “but Scarrow said something interesting to me in your office when you were in the interrogation room. I got the feeling he wanted to tell me more, but felt like he couldn’t, maybe because of the sanctity of the confessional, or because your office might be bugged, or whatever. When I asked him why a ghost would want Britney Wyatt dead, he told me to ask Simon. Is that obstruction of justice or interfering with the course of an investigation? Or does that not apply to priests? Or ex-priests. I'm pretty sure ghosts have even fewer rights than the undead, and I'm not sure you could arrest one, anyway.”

“Time to talk to Renfield Scarrow again,” Schenk said, and pulled back onto a barely-plowed Bunting Road. “But first, Tim Horton’s.”

I sighed. “I can’t believe Ellie kept this shit from me.” But you knew she was hiding something. Are you mad at her, or yourself? Both, I thought back at myself, because I'm a trusting, optimistic dumbass sometimes, and look how well that goes.

“Cheer up, Cinderblock,” he said. “Positive thinking, remember? I’m positive she won’t be the last person to lie to you while you’re in Niagara.”

His sarcasm sounded so much like my own when Elian was being excessively perky that I couldn't help but smile sourly. “It is indeed great to be home. And just for that, you’re buying me a Danish.”

“Nine,” the car said.

“No, two will be plenty. Anyway, you don't eat, so shut your gas hole.”

***

Father Scarrow was waiting for us when we arrived, Schenk having called ahead, and his welcome was a startling contrast to every other time I’d spoken with him; he was frosty, bordering on downright hostile. Maybe he was peeved that I'd picked his pocket like he'd swiped Britney's necklace, and wasn't cool with being the pilfer-ee rather than the pilfer-er. The card was currently tucked in my Moleskine diary. Maybe he was just mad that I’d chosen a stake-out and an impromptu dip in a cadaver-tea canal over our bowling date. In any case, his scowl effectively tamped down any temptation to giggle rising from my belly. He brusquely informed us that we were interrupting his breakfast, left us in the hallway while he put the dogs away, and returned to reluctantly invite us into his living room. As we passed his office, he closed the door then moved on. No invitation to wander and explore today.

I muttered to Schenk out the side of my mouth, “Why do I feel as welcome as a wasp nest in a mosh pit?”

I thought Schenk smirked behind his paper coffee cup, but I couldn’t be sure. “Oh no, you’re smiling,” I said. “That’s rare, like thunder-snow. Does this mean you’re about to chuck an atomic tantrum?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“How are you so bloody calm all the time? Do you have ice water in your veins?”

“Maybe.”

“Going all one-word on me again, Thag?”

He sipped his coffee again, and I was almost certain he was smirking now. “Yep.”

“I’ve got a single word for you. Wanna hear it?”

“Is it gonna end up in your swear jar?”

“Duh,” I replied, “but I think you could wear it with pride.”

“Thanks,” he said imperturbably.

Father Scarrow was back to wearing his black skinny jeans, sans cassock. I guess priests don’t wear that stuff for lounging around the house, although I sure would. Considering he was an ex-priest, I really wasn’t sure why he bothered wearing one at all, except that it probably gave the illusion of authority and reliability in tough times, or those moments he felt the need to influence or charm. Probably, it also concealed whatever his kink was as well; I certainly hadn’t expected him to come on to me. There's defrocked, and then there's defrocked, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be the latter by someone who was the former.

There was zero hint of flirtation today, and the only word that was anywhere near “fuck” that I was getting from him was “off.” When we got to the living room, I let Schenk take the lead, directing the conversation where he needed it to go. I hung back choosing a spot on the couch where I could watch them both while pretending sleepy indifference, leaning an elbow on the arm of the couch, and a cheek on a gloved fist. I made a show of yawning into that fist several times.

“Wake up, Marnie,” the priest ordered, snapping his fingers in my direction. “A young woman is dead. Surely, this is no time for a nap.”

I sat up straight with an irritated flush. “Miss Baranuik, to you. What’s got your rosary in a bunch, eh?”

Scarrow waved that away with an annoyed huff, and I summoned some psi to Feel around the room. Schenk’s suspicion was a quiet purl of warmth to the right. Scarrow’s uncertainty, fear, frustration, and suspicion were a bubbling stew threatening to overflow the pot and scorch us all. Scarrow’s suspicion? Did he know I took his picture, or was something else causing his doubts? I sensed he was frustrated with me but not distrustful. Someone else had wound him up before we got there.

I asked carefully, “Did someone take something from you, Father Scarrow?”

He blinked rapidly. “I …” He paused to look me up and down with new interest, like he hadn’t believed the psychic stuff until now. “Yes, I believe so. I don’t even know why he’d want it. Barnaby isn’t a spiritual boy. He’s only into the ghost hunting bit for its ghoulish undertones. The boy is fascinated, maybe too fascinated, by bones, death, the morbid side of things.” He cast a heavy sigh. “Fucking goths.”

“Barnaby Nowland took something?”

“An envelope of photographs is missing from my desk.”

Constable Schenk did a marvelous job of not looking in my direction, though I read the shift in suspicion. My initial urge was to jump up and defend myself. I wanted to cry, “I only picked his pocket! You watched me do it, fuckknuckle!” but I maintained my cool, as difficult as that was, and tried to follow Schenk's lead.

“I can take that up for you and question Mr. Nowland about these pictures. They’re important to you?” Schenk's notebook and pencil were out and poised for duty.

“They’re important to your case,” Scarrow said. “Somewhere in those pictures may be the identity of our poltergeist. Without the poltergeist’s identity, it will be nearly impossible to exorcise him.”

I thought about this, and wanted to ask Scarrow about Mama-Captain; did he still think the poltergeist was a him not a her? Schenk refused to get drawn into the ghost talk. He was focused on solid, mundane evidence right now. “I think you know why we’re here, Father Scarrow. We need to see what Britney Wyatt gave you.”

“I see.” Scarrow nodded sadly. “I was afraid of that, but I understand. Let me go get it for you.”

Schenk glanced over to lift one eyebrow at me in question, I assumed about the missing envelope of photographs. I gave him a look that was intended to convey how ludicrous that idea was; I was hardly in a position to palm any paperwork while stripping to Abba a cappella while simultaneously trying not to get shot the last time we'd been here.

Scarrow returned with the bowling bag and set it on the coffee table.

“What’s in the bag, Father Scarrow?” Schenk asked.

“A very old human skull.”

Disappointment spun out from him by how unimpressed Schenk and I were with his pronouncement. I guess he was expecting Schenk to go all Brad Pitt from Se7en. Maybe if he'd started doing Hamlet's soliloquy to Yorick, I'd have been a bit more appreciative. I'd had a human head show up in my mailbox and try to bite me, once. Disrespectful as disinterring the skull was, it was, at the end of the day, merely someone's quiet remains.

If Schenk's professional demeanor was a poker face, I definitely didn't want to play cards with him. His voice was as calm as ever. “Open the bag for us, Father.”

“No, please. I don’t open it in the rectory. I’m sorry that she brought it to my home at all.” He stuck one hand in his pocket, and used the other to ruffle his hair back from his face then gesture at us in an appeal to understand; he reminded me of a hip, young professor trying to explain James Joyce to a gaggle of smitten students. “I should have given it to you, perhaps, but you must understand. I need this.” He motioned to me, trying to draw me to his side. “We need this.”

“Sorry. I need to see what’s in the bag,” Schenk insisted. “Open it, please.” Okay, maybe if Pitt's portrayal of Detective Mills had been on Quaaludes and was paying a thousand bucks per swear, Schenk was doing it.

Scarrow sighed and pulled his crucifix out from under his black turtleneck. He cracked his knuckles before grasping the zipper. “Now, I believe you have something that belongs to me, too. Or rather, Miss Baranuik does. We can consider this a trade.”

“There will be no trade,” Schenk said, interrupting me before I could even consider the subject of the photograph. “This is an investigation into the death of a young woman with whom you were acquainted, and this bag may contain evidence that I am hereby taking into custody.”

“I’d like to speak to Miss Baranuik alone,” Scarrow said, struggling with the ancient zipper as it twisted.

“I still require Miss Baranuik’s assistance for the time being. You can speak to her on your own time, if she chooses to do so.” Schenk said. “Please detail for me the circumstances under which this item came into your possession.”

The zipper broke, and Scarrow used his hands to just push it the rest of the way open. All the strain dropped from his face like someone had slapped him with a limp bunch of rotten celery. It was replaced with the realization that he was utterly and entirely fucked.

Softly, he said, with horrified wonder and astonishing diction, “That shifty little shitdick.”

Probably, I shouldn't have brayed with laughter. I definitely shouldn't have fallen off the couch and landed on my ass while doing so. Probably, I'd go to hell for laughing at a priest's distress. Probably, Asmodeus would high-five me for it when I got there.

“I have no idea how this came into my possession, officer, because this was not here last night.” He reached in and lifted a ceramic skull with a handle and a broken spout. It was a heavy, ceramic teapot without its lid. Bitchin’ teapot, the mischievous part of my brain supplied, and I pushed that thought away and tried to quell my giggles. The hole in the top was chipped along the edges with a great, tea-stained fracture on one side.

As Schenk got up to make a phone call in the hall, I asked, “What makes you think Barnaby Nowland took your photographs?”

“He was the only person here last night,” Scarrow said. He nailed me with a knowing look and my guts squirmed. “And you’re the only person who got close enough to take that picture out of my pocket.”

I took it out of my notebook and returned it with an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Sometimes, I do things the wrong way.”

“Yes, I see that.” He glanced at my gloved hands and asked, “Did you do your psychic thing on this?”

I nodded, but didn’t offer him any further insights, or mention my cowering, spectral guest at North House. “It’s a carte-de-visite.”

“Yes. They generally went out of fashion when the cabinet card came into use in the 1870’s, but some families continued to use them. The Briggs-Adsit family held on to the past quite firmly. Not one of them was particularly good at letting go.” He held the print gingerly, though it was laminated for protection. “I’ve narrowed my search to them, and the O’Donnells. There’s more spiritual upset in the O’Donnell family, obviously, because of the murders—“

“Wait, what?” I knew one of the famous Donnellys, Patrick, was buried at the new Red Hook cemetery. “Do you mean the Black Donnellys?”

“No, the lesser-known White-O’Donnells.”

“Are you fucking with me?” I asked. I grimaced and added to what I owed Mr. Merritt, but how many times is a girl going to say something like that to a man of the cloth? So totally worth it.

“No, I’m quite serious.” Scarrow stared unhappily at the skull teapot. “Paul and Mary-Ellen White-O’Donnell are both buried in the Old Red Hook Cemetery, and died in a terrible murder/suicide. That sort of passing leaves a great psychic scar on a spirit. Britney believed she saw Paul White-O’Donnell. She called him ‘Tall Man with Flower’ in a video blog she kept.”

He showed me the carte-de-visite, the one I had given back. “This young man is Captain John Briggs-Adsit. In case you can’t read the rest, it’s Mother and Father, 1864. His mother had a notorious temper.”

“And the uniform?”

“American Civil War. They fled to Canada after John was discharged earlier that year.” He drifted off, shaking his head at something I was not privy to. “Barnaby Nowland is in danger and he doesn’t even realize it.”

Schenk’s voice rose in the hall to an aggravated mutter, but I couldn’t make out the words. The dogs in the safe room snuffled with their big noses under the door and scratched, causing the door to rattle in its casing. One of them gave a single, plaintive yelp.

I asked, “What would Barnaby do with the skull?”

“He once expressed a desire to see it on his mantelpiece.”

Blerg. “Does he know that Britney may have died because of the skull?”

“He seemed emotionally unaffected by that when we spoke last night. He asked for the skull. I told him no and that I needed it.”

“Did you tell him what you needed it for?” Okay, not the subtlest gambit into figuring out his motivations, but he was barely paying attention to me as it was. I just wanted him to keep talking.

Scarrow played with the carte-de-visite, turning it around in those bony, nimble fingers. His big Adam’s apple bobbed. “I was only out of the room for a minute. He must have come prepared though, with this teapot… which, by the way, bears an eerie resemblance to the skull in more than one way.”

“C'mon, dude, focus. What do you think you need this skull for?”

“If I can find out exactly whose skull it is, I can return it to that person’s grave, along with any personal effects that might boost any show of respect.”

Personal effects. Like the necklace. Speaking of boosting things.

He continued, “Then I can attempt to exorcise the rage from the spirit’s aura, and dismiss any other spirits this poltergeist has lured back through the veil.”

I gaped, and then laughed without meaning to. “How the hel--ck would you do any of that?”

“Helck?” Scarrow’s lips twisted and one eyebrow twitched up.

“I don’t swear anymore,” I fibbed. “I’m a good girl when I’m in Canada, eh?” Apparently.

“You pick-pocketed a man of the cloth, lied to that same priest in a church, and asked him if he is, quote, 'fucking with you,'” he confirmed. “Interesting choices.”

My life was a nonstop cavalcade of bones and boners, and I didn't have time to examine the poor life choices that delivered me here, and I definitely didn't need to have decisions questioned by an aging rock-and-roll Reverend who got tossed out of the church for sticking his dick in the eye of doctrinal opinion. Maybe later, after a few drinks, and Harry making reassuring noises in my ear as he fed, I could indulge in some introspection and have a good, solid laugh about it. I could use a lot more of that, and it seemed like a pretty good decision to me.

“Ex-priest,” I pointed out, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling. “And ex-church. My point is, the cemetery was flooded over ninety years ago. I’ve seen pictures of it after the water gets drained in winter. There are no obvious plots, no headstones, nada. You can’t tell where the plots would have been, and even if you did have some sort of old map…,” I winced. “I hate to say this, but between the shifting mud, the frost heave, the rotted caskets, the water invasions… the bodies would have been displaced. Who knows, they may have even done earth moving in there when they dredged the canal or built up the retention ponds.” I thought about the humped promontory with its broken cement. “I know they at least cleared some of the fallen walls from the old canal that used to run nearby. I’ve tripped over some of the remnants.”

“So we do it together,” he decided, his eyes flashing with new excitement. “I can prove to you that ghosts interact with us. I can also prove that a poltergeist can force its way through the veil without being held or swayed by demons. Together we can present the evidence to the church.” He lowered his voice so Schenk couldn’t hear it from the hall. “I’ll take you where an experience is almost guaranteed. But just us. Not your officer.”

My internal alarm bell started firing off warnings about people I had foolishly trusted in the past. Danika Sherlock. Ruby Valli. Gregori Nazaire. Neil Dunnachie. Malas Nazaire. Declan Edgar. But mostly, it wanted to return again and again to Ruby, the harmless-seeming old lady with the bright skirts and squeaky Wellington boots, who had seemed like the obvious person to go to when I needed expert help, and who had put roofies in my Chai and nearly sacrificed me to a demon. Now, as the exorcist looked at me with his eyes full of fire, I thought, do not drink the tea.

“Okay, where is it?” I said, standing in a rush. “Probably you don’t even hide it well because who would ransack a priest’s stuff, right?”

“Marnie, what—“

“Where is it?” I ran my gloved hands under the couch cushions, tossing throw pillows around the room, pulling down the back cushions on the Chesterfield.

“Where is what?” Scarrow asked.

“The grimoire. The roofies.” I started pacing, and then began a hasty investigation of his bookshelves, tipping every one of the books onto the floor, ignoring the hard covers hitting my boots. “I’m not an idiot, Renfield Aquinas Thackeray Scarrow. Mr. Rats. There, I said it. Rats! Rats! Go ahead, rip my nipples off!”

“Marnie, shhh,” Scarrow said, indicating the cop in the hall.

“No. No, I won’t hush. Where’s the Wolfsbane? Come on, I’m calling you out, mister. Let’s see what you got.”

“I’ve got nothing,” Scarrow insisted, showing me his open hands. This made me think of Chapel’s soothing psychological moves, and further infuriated me.

“Don’t try that body language crap!” I snapped, pointing at his hands. He shook his head, looking baffled. “Maybe black magic’s not your style, huh? Maybe you keep arsenic and strychnine next to your sacrificial altar.”

“Are you finished?”

“Not until I find the other shoe.”

“What other shoe?”

“The one that’s going to drop on my head the minute I trust you.” I pointed a gloved finger at him with a sour smile. “Think I’m easy to fool, eh? Like I never learn from my mistakes? You don’t want me to bring the big, overprotective cop to the tunnel with us? Hello? Red flag! I see you waving!” I flailed my arms to demonstrate the big signal I was getting. I grabbed hold of the tilt-down door of the secretary desk nearby. It was locked; instead of folding down into a writing surface, it just bumped against its lock — badump badump. “What’s in here, huh? Your duct tape? Your zip ties? Your murder kit? Your ju-ju go-bag? Your machete? Your voodoo hoodoo dolls?”

“No.” Scarrow scratched the back of his neck. “Just regular, private things.”

“Like what?”

“Like guys have, Marnie,” he said with a so-what shrug.

“I’m not trusting you until you unlock this!”

He dug in his front pocket and tossed me a small pair of keys. “Knock yourself out. If you see anything in there you might like to explore in more detail, you be sure to let me know.”

The Blue Sense smacked me on the nose like a rolled-up newspaper. The desk was where he kept his porn and sex toys. All at once I whipped off a glove and touched the top of the desk, not thinking too closely about what I might be coming into contact with, and was hit with waves of shameless, unbridled lust, in a variety of flavors and expressions. Ren Scarrow might be many things, but “piously celibate” was nowhere near that list. I breathed a sigh of relief and made sure my hand was neither tacky nor breaking out in a Harry-inflaming rash. “You’re just trying to intimidate me with what you wank to.”

“I can’t imagine that would intimidate you, Marnie.” He put his hands in his pockets, apparently reconsidered the suggestion, and put them on his hips instead. “But ghosts affecting the physical realm; that intimidates you quite a bit. Why are you fighting this?”

“Because I…” I let out a frustrated huff. “You’re trying to distract me again.”

“Distract you from…?”

“Discovering you’re a villain.”

“I’m only villainous in the dark,” he promised.

“You’re doing it again. Where’s the necklace? And don’t you dare pretend to me that you didn’t steal it from evidence.”

“I need it,” he insisted.

“You’re a thief and a liar,” I said. “And maybe something worse. But you can be all those things in jail when Schenk finds out. He probably heard you confess right now anyway.”

“Fine, let me put your mind at ease. I am not a killer.” He showed me a smile, and I was again reminded of the little ways Chapel manipulated his tone or facial expressions or the subtle position of his limbs to elicit the subconscious response he wanted from someone. “I am not trying to con you or hurt you. But I want something.”

I braced for it. “Is it my eyeballs? I bet it’s my eyeballs. I knew it.”

He chuckled. “No. I want you to witness what I’ve seen.”

“That is totally an eyeball thing! You really suck at anatomy, on top of all of your other failings.”

“And I want you to help me. I think you can. In fact, I know you can. I’ve done exorcisms before, but never on a poltergeist of this magnitude.” He dropped his hands, and for a moment he looked like he needed me. The Blue Sense soared to life to wash through the room, and reported no deception; either he was telling the truth or believed whatever he was saying so strongly that he no longer knew it was false. “This poltergeist drew Britney Wyatt into that water, and drained every joule of heat from her body. I’m willing to bet the coroner’s report will report the cause of death as drowning, but her body temperature was almost certainly lower than even that of the surrounding water, her tissues showing signs of frostbite deep inside, in the organs. Her lungs won't have been full of water; if anything, it would be ice, causing them to burst within her chest. She was probably freezing from the inside out before she slipped into unconsciousness, helpless in the black water, sucked dry by this angry spirit. And make no mistake: Britney’s own spirit is stuck here until we resolve this. I cannot imagine a more terrifying fate. The poltergeist must be banished beyond the veil where it cannot touch us, preferably before it hurts anyone else.”

All traces of teasing or guile had vanished from his face, and I sensed he was sincere and frightened, but determined. Mr. Cynical had seen the worst thing he’d come up against, and he wanted to pick a fight with it, but his self doubt now showed in new lines on his forehead. “I need your help, Marnie. Just you. This is no place for him.” He motioned with a frown at the hall. “He can’t help us with this. I mean no disrespect. He’s a formidable officer of the law and an intelligent ally… but this is a matter for preternaturalists.” He thumped one last nail in the coffin. “You don’t want him to get hurt. He’s not prepared for this. That will put him in danger. You could get him killed.”

I hated him for saying that. I didn’t want to picture the dreadnaught bulk of Constable Patrick Schenk broken and battered, frozen solid in a foot of water, covered in a silken sheet of MUCE, staring at the night sky with accusing eyes, his mouth jacked open in a final, soundless scream. The vision was so vivid that it drew a shudder. “I won’t let that happen,” I said, more to myself and my mental Schenk than to Scarrow.

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Marnie.”

“No, you call me Miss Baranuik,” I said, remembering what Harry said. “There are some major problems, here. First, we don’t know where the skull went.”

Scarrow agreed. “Barnaby took it somewhere.”

“Second, the poltergeist is really fu--ntastically angry.”

“Funtastically?” Amusement glinted in his eyes.

“Bite me, creep. Third, we could get seriously injured.”

“Killed, even. Yes. And if my theory about what happened to Britney is correct, it will be both terrifying and excruciatingly painful.”

“Well, fuck.”

“We could do that first,” he said, smiling slyly, “if you think that’ll help.”

“You’re doing it again,” I accused.

“I’ll behave when you do.” He pointed to the low-grade disaster I'd turned his office into. “Now, will you clean up your mess?”

Schenk marched back into the living room, sparing a glance at the disemboweled bookshelf and pillows on the floor, and hooked one big hand in the hood of my parka.

“Miss Baranuik,” Schenk said calmly, “may I see you outside for a moment?”

I shrugged at Scarrow and threw him the keys to his desk as I was marched backward, hood first, from the room. “Guess I’ll do it later?”

“I’m leaving it for you,” Scarrow warned.

“I’ll be back soon,” I promised. “And not in some French Maid getup, so don't even think about it.”

When Schenk released my hood, I spun and chased him out to the Sonata. His long legs made this a problem, as his one stride was about four of mine. I hurried to catch up.

“No time for lunch,” Schenk said, not looking back. “Y’okay? No gigglefit?”

“Nope,” I said, but there was an undeniable residual effect from being in Father Scarrow’s presence; a lightness to my step, even after an argument, that I still did not understand. “Where we going?”

“Body in the pond.”

“No, that was yesterday. Are you getting your days scrambled? Sometimes that happens to me, too.” I jumped into the car as soon as he unlocked it. I strapped in and thought about telling him about Scarrow’s concerns and plans, but his eyes were wide; there was a lot going on behind them, and I didn’t want to add to it.

“Same spot,” he said gruffly, pulling out onto the Haulage, taking the corners with less care than he had earlier. “Different body.”

“I thought they had that area cordoned and secured,” I said, remembering the uniformed officer cruising under the floodlight last night. “It was being patrolled.”

Schenk said tightly, “It was.”

“Bodies don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

“Apparently it floated to the surface in front of the patrolman’s eyes. Body moved ashore into its position while the officer was calling it in, watching it.”

I had the sinking realization that I already knew the answer, but asked anyway. “Whose body?”

“Barnaby Nowland.”

CHAPTER 19

DEAR DIARY: FUCK fuck fuck fuck fuck! Also, fuck. Love, Marnie. PS: I found a really bitchin' teapot.

There was no doubt about it; the body of Barnaby Nowland, clad only in jeans and a t-shirt, lay in exactly the same spot as Britney Wyatt’s had, in the same position, head tucked between two rocks, covered by a silky, white sheet of MUCE. This enraged Schenk. He hid it remarkably well, but he couldn’t hide it from his buddy, the empathic psychic. The Blue Sense was hot and chaotic against the left side of my body. Beside me, Schenk vibrated with silent fury, a towering mountain of training and restraint, needing to put his massive mitts on some mundane cause and strangle it into submission. Though he felt the unfairness of blaming me, I could sense he was tempted; before the weirdo psychic showed up all his missing persons showed up as cut-and-dry, human-on-human nonsense, or disappeared of their own, very human, volition. Now he had to put up with both an exorcist and a witchy psychic, as well as a whole lot of evidence that only fit together if you accepted paranormal explanations.

Batten was as mundane as his standard-issue boots; Hood was as stolid as the winch on his Humvee; both had come to grips with the preternatural intersections of the world they thought they'd known with something that might approximate grace and adaptability. Schenk hadn't gotten there yet, and watching him fight it filled me with an uneasy mixture of terror and sympathy. If there was anything I could do to smooth the way for him, I would have. There weren't exactly training wheels for this kind of world-view adjustment.

The uniformed officer who had been on the scene when the body appeared was sitting at the back of an ambulance in the vehicle’s heat, trying to push his explanations past chattering teeth for the third or fourth time to yet another superior; this time it was Detective Sergeant Malashock herself. She was dressed for the field in heavy boots and an overcoat with the collar turned up in lieu of a muffler. Though she was nodding I could tell she was having a hard time picturing the events that the shaken young constable in front of her was describing.

Dr. Taylor was again on the scene, and after handing a folded piece of paper to Schenk, he left our side to direct his assistants. Schenk scanned the paper, holding it in both hands so the wind didn’t flap it about, and then handed it off to me. Taylor’s toxicology screen from Britney Wyatt’s autopsy showed negative results for ms-lipotropin, V-telomerase, and batrachotoxins. Britney wasn’t killed by a revenant or a mermaid. Her macula showed no radiation damage, so the culprit wasn't a Will-o’-the-Wisp, either.

The crime scene unit had their hands full with the slippery terrain and the bad weather, despite the protective advantage of the crayon-blue tarp tent. Radio babble got snatched away by the wind, which whipped in seemingly random and directionless gusts and spirals. I secured my hat strings under my chin and yanked at my gloves, wishing I had Ellie’s big fuzzy mittens instead. The leather did little to keep my hands warm in the relentless storm, so I stuck my hands in my pockets, where I found a sandwich wrapped in plastic. Peanut butter. Strawberry jelly. The crusts had been cut off. Was put food in Marnie’s pockets part of Combat Butler’s job description, or had he suspected I’d not have time to grab a meal today? I looked at the scene before me and figured he was right; if I got so much as a cup of coffee anytime soon, it’d be a miracle.

I couldn’t think of anything constructive or helpful to say, so I sighed. “Well, Boogernuggets.”

“Settle down, Cinderblock,” Schenk said. “It's a bit early to start dropping B-bombs.”

“I fell in there last night,” I said, looking up and down the shoreline, trying to orient myself. “Like, right there. Didn’t I?”

“You were a little further east,” he agreed through his teeth, “but yeah.”

“There was definitely no corpse here last night, right?” I swallowed hard, trying to block the frustration flowing from him. Unwrapping the sandwich with my gloves on was tricky; when I managed it, I offered him half. “Just the killer skeleton.”

He took the sandwich but didn’t eat it. “Your branch? I tossed it over there.” He gestured with the bread at an embarrassingly small branch. More of a twig, really. What little pride I'd been accumulating trickled away and died quietly of shame.

“Felt like a killer skeleton, sorry,” I said a little defensively, chagrined by the memory of my wounded-cow howling. “What was Barnaby Nowland doing near the canal? You’d think if your ghost hunting crew stole a dead guy’s skull from a pond, and one of your gang got killed and washed up at that pond, and then you stole the maybe-haunted skull from a priest, you’d stay the hell away from the Pond of Doom.” I masticated PB&J then dug Wonder bread out of my molars with my tongue. “Hate to speak ill of the dead, but maybe he wasn’t too bright. I mean, even Shaggy wasn't that dumb, and he was a stoner who thought his dog could talk.”

“I guess we’ll find out when we track Nowland’s last known movements, and where he went in. Find his car, the last people to see him, check the canal videos from late last night.” We watched the forensics guys running around through the blizzard, trying to do their thing while being assaulted by the storm. It seemed no matter which way I turned, the snow was whipping right up my nose.

I said, “Being in a graveyard always makes me think of my own death. You?”

“Mortality? The afterlife?” He gave the half a sandwich back to me. I ate it. “Deep, doleful thoughts there, Cinderblock.”

“I’m more concerned about what they’ll say at my eulogy.”

“I’m sure your companion already has one prepared.”

“He does treat me like I’m a minute away from disaster at all times.” I finished the sandwich and dusted the crumbs off the front of my parka. “Speaking of disasters, Father Scarrow wants me to go with him to the tunnel.”

“The haunted one,” Schenk clarified. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

“That might be the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“Not even close. I used to bang a coworker. And this one time, I met a half-possessed, homicidal ex-DaySitter alone in a cheap motel, and she tried to gut me. I had to fake my own death to survive. The stabbing, I mean. I didn't fake dead during sex. I’m not that kinky.”

The wind snatched at his scarf, sparing both of us any more of my True Confessions babble. He popped his collar and rearranged the scarf up around his ears. “I'm still not sure Father Scarrow isn't involved with these deaths,” Schenk said. “You are absolutely not going anywhere alone with him, sorry.”

“He won’t go if you’re there. He thinks you’re a problem. Sorry.”

“I'm a cop. It's my job to be a problem for people doing illegal things. Besides, I’ve already been there.”

I tilted my head back and stared at him from under the sliding hem of my floppy hat. “To the Blue Ghost tunnel? When?”

“Took a crew out to check it for evidence after Simon Hiscott mentioned it during his initial questioning.”

“And?”

“Nothing out there but a bunch of frozen frogs.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Frogs don’t freeze.”

“And bats.”

I felt my brows knit harder. “Bats don’t freeze, either. They either migrate to a more suitable cave or tunnel, or hibernate.” Now I absolutely had to see this tunnel. I had an idea. “What if I bring Harry?”

“I thought revenants couldn’t be near ghosts because of the Kinship of the Departed. The ghosts could drive revenants insane.”

I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “You’ve been doing your research.”

“Had time to kill on a stakeout where my partner didn't take an impromptu swim, so I read your diary. I’m very thorough.” He cut his eyes down at me. “You said mean things about me.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “It’s true that Kinship of the Departed will cause a deep and instant emotional connection between Harry and any ghosts that may be lingering in that place, but that will be a good way of seeing if there actually are any dangerous manifestations there, and Harry can keep his distance if he starts sensing their presence.” The ghost at North House made Harry uncomfortable, but didn’t drive him batty. More like annoyed that he was a ghost-wuss.

“Will Harry be willing to participate?” he asked, adding, “Unofficially, of course.”

“Are you kidding me?” I don’t know. “Sure, he’ll do it.” Maybe. If I beg. I texted Harry about my tunnel date right away. “He won’t get this until he rises at dusk, but we should have his answer then. What next?”

“Barnaby Nowland’s apartment. I want that missing skull.” He rubbed a gloved hand across his face, wiping snow off his goatee. “If you molest your way around the apartment, will you get vibes or whatever?”

“Probably lots of whatever, but maybe some vibes, too. And it's not molesting, jeez. You make it sound filthy.”

“I’m really getting sick of this ghost shit, Cinderblock.”

That was true, but there was something else, something he wasn’t eager to admit. I politely pulled back on the Blue Sense, knowing he wouldn’t appreciate my prying into his emotions. Instead, I waited, looking way up at him, to see if he was going to continue to share. When he didn’t, I nodded.

“Me too,” I said. “Can we hit the grocery store before we go to Barnaby’s? There are some things I’m going to need.”

I liked that he didn’t question it, just started away from me towards his boss, saying, “If you make it quick.”

I nodded that I understood and headed back to the car ahead of him, kicking snow off my boots as I watched him check in with Malashock before joining me and driving off.

CHAPTER 20

“IF THERE’S A skull in this apartment, it probably belongs to a rat,” I said, tiptoeing into an apartment that made Lennie Epp’s place look like a surgical suite. I put my grocery bag full of goodies down on one of the age-stained plastic lawn chairs Nowland used as living room furniture.

Schenk took it in with the flexibility of a cop who had seen much worse, picking out every dirty detail in a heap of dirty details: empty pizza boxes, crusty socks, desiccated house plants, old food, new food, discarded soft drink containers, glossy magazines for an obviously male “readership”, game controllers for a couple different consoles, and the centerpiece of it all, a massive TV mounted on the wall and tuned into the Discovery Chanel, currently showing a muted episode of Mythbusters; Adam and Jamie appeared to be duct taping a stick of C-4 to a watermelon. I admired their culinary stylings, but Harry insisted on cooking in much more conventional ways.

“I feel like I should have Scarrow's cadaver dogs with me looking for mummified takeout containers. I really hope Barnaby didn't keep any pets. I ever tell you about the time I zorched a zombie with a tray of completely grotendous kitty litter?” I grimaced. “How the hell are we going to find anything in this disaster zone?”

“We think like the guy who lived here,” Schenk said, unperturbed.

“Right. Think like a loud, single, twenty-something man obsessed with bones and boners. No problem,” I said, taking off my gloves. “If I was a twerp, where would I put a human skull?”

“Anxious to see those powers at work again,” he said, motioning to my bare hands.

“If you’re expecting me to play psychic bloodhound or follow my fingers around like a dowsing rod, you’re setting yourself up for a disappointment,” I said. “I’m not touching a thing until you point out something relatively clean.”

A pair of blue latex gloves appeared from Schenk’s jacket pocket like magic, and he handed them to me before donning a pair of his own. I followed suit. When I stuffed my own gloves in my coat pocket I found something bunched up there and pulled it out. One of Harry’s monogrammed handkerchiefs. I could see the outline of Asmodeus' infernal ring inside it. Had Harry put it there? Did he think I’d need it today? I shoved it in the front pocket of my jeans and adjusted the latex gloves.

“What’s in the grocery bag, eh?” Schenk asked.

“Sage, caraway, matches, twine, Twizzlers,” I said. “You know, the usual.”

“Sure,” he said agreeably. “Witchy stuff.”

“Except for the Twizzlers,” I said, ripping open the bag and pulling out a long, red licorice twist with my teeth. It hung out of the corner of my mouth like a flaccid, ribbed stogie; it bobbed when I talked. “Had a craving. Want one?”

He passed by showing me his blue palm. “Just putting this out there: don’t mess up any possible evidence I might need, eh?”

“Evidence like…” I chewed thoughtfully on my Twizzler. “That crusty stuff on the couch that I’m praying is a coconut yogurt stain?”

“Maybe it's Pule. Fell off a canapé,” Schenk said. “Don’t burn the place down with those matches.”

“I won’t torch any of Barnaby’s stuff,” I promised. I never even got a chance to meet the guy, but I was about to learn more about him than I wanted to. I used the tip of my boot to pull the bottom of the coffee table drawer out a little, and peeked inside. “I’m guessing this fellow didn’t have many visitors.”

“Oh?”

“Dude keeps rubber vaginas and lube in his living room,” I said, pointing down into the drawer with one blue finger. “I do not envy the people who have to process this apartment.”

“Like I said, no torching.”

“I bought a jar of baby food so I could use the glass jar for burning my sage. Is it okay if I rinse the apricot goo down the sink?”

Schenk made a face like it wasn’t okay, not if he followed procedure. He turned his head slightly to look at the uniformed officer outside the apartment door. The officer was ignoring us, checking something on his smartphone. I suspected it was Facebook, judging by the way he swiped, scanned, and poked.

“Don’t run the water too much,” Schenk allowed, “and make a note of what you did.”

“I don’t think forensics needs to know what Barnaby rinsed down his sink this week to help solve this murder, Longshanks, but if it makes you feel better I’ll take copious notes about the kitchen,” I said. I took one step toward the dim little alcove that served as a kitchen in the bachelor apartment. “Which is fucking filthy, by the way. I really wish the FBI had bought me that flamethrower. This place doesn't need a cleaning service, it needs an exorcism, and maybe get rinsed out afterward with a fire hose filled with holy water. In which case I will be waiting politely four miles away. I don't wanna do that 'I'm melting, I'm melting, what a world' thing all over your boots.”

“Exorcism? Should I have brought Father Scarrow?”

“He’d swallow his tongue if he saw my witchy stuff,” I said, not that Scarrow had behaved like a run-of-the-mill priest about anything else so far. Still, he might hit me with holy water, and, at best, I’d break out like I'd been pepper sprayed. With lye. “Besides, how do we know he’s not responsible for the poltergeist? Maybe he’s a black witch using the Lesser Key of Solomon and crying foul to throw us off his tracks.”

Schenk made a doubtful noise. He was rubbing his blue-gloved hands together like Lennie Epp had. “Knitting injury, Tough Guy?” I teased.

“Do me a favor,” he said, ignoring the dig. His chin jut out in a hands-free gesture I’d seen Batten make a couple times. “Don’t get that herb stuff all over the place until forensics has done their sweep, either. I don’t need them reporting to me about paprika in the carpet.”

“Paprika? What am I, making deviled eggs? Would anyone even notice?” I asked, pointing at all the multifarious and decidedly funky stuff already embedded in the carpet. Schenk aimed a big, blue finger in my direction and I nodded and tossed him a salute. “Right. Extra careful with the herbs. Gotcha. Hey, tell me something…”

“Nope,” he said, nodding a back-when-finished-here to the uniformed officer outside the apartment and shutting the door.

“When did the knitting thing happen to you?” I didn’t think he’d answer, but he did so straightforwardly and without pause, making me wonder if he got asked that a lot.

“My mum taught my daughters,” he said, sweeping the living room with his searchlight gaze, over open titty magazines and half-empty glasses of moldy juice, bowls with bits of cereal congealed in the bottom, and an elaborate candelabrum sans candles. “I picked it up helping them get good at it.”

I studied his face for a moment. “And you continued knitting because doing something repetitive with your hands frees up your mind to puzzle stuff out,” I guessed. “What exactly do you make?”

“The neonatal unit at the hospital can always use knitted caps for premature babies,” he said, now looking at me in a silent challenge. “My youngest was a preemie.”

“Sorry. I can’t mock any part of that,” I complained.

“Shit, it’s not like I knit at my desk.”

“You could. You’re, what, ten feet tall?”

“Five-foot-twenty.” He smirked.

“Six-eight,” I said with a low whistle. “Ain’t nobody gonna make fun of you to your face, dude. Pretty sure a guy your size holding two giant needles can knit wherever the fuck he wants.”

He murmured agreement. “Did I mention that your sister, Carrie, also had your business cards?”

“How’d you find that out?”

He gave me an I’m-a-detective, duh look. “She says you haven’t been home in a while.”

I used a latex-gloved finger to swipe at the kitchen counter to see if the crumbs were stuck to the surface or not. “So?”

“Why not?”

“Must bother you,” I said, flicking any loose crumbs on the floor. “A mystery you can’t solve.”

“They don’t like you, eh?” He made a little hand motion like a bomb exploding and mouthed at me solved.

“Just like that, huh?”

“Sorry.”

“Who fuckin’ asked you, Smartypants?”

“You okay in here while I check the back rooms, Cinderblock?”

“Of course. I’m a scientist. I’m not scared of maybe-killer ghosts.” Lies, lies! “Besides, I’m bad-ass.”

“You’re bad-ass,” he said, as if making sure he’d heard me right.

“If you can’t tell how bad-ass I am, you need bad-ass lessons.”

He half-smiled. “The meter still running on your swear jar, or do you think I'm not going to sell you out just because you're not cursing in my vehicle?”

I made a betrayed noise in the back of my throat and faux-pouted at him. He turned to make his way through a maze of boxes in the hall and disappeared from view. For a moment I was certain I’d never see him again, that he’d get ghost-slain in the bedroom and our final conversation would have been stupid. After a moment’s discomfort, I shrugged it off and got back to work.

The latex gloves would protect me from germs and assorted icky stuff — super science-y term from a super science-y scientist — but they would not shield me in the least from psychometric impressions. Whatever I touched was apt to offer up any number of visions, and, given the run of my thoughts from the purely visual examination of Barnaby's crib, I was so not looking forward to plumbing those particular depths in full Blue Sense Technicolor. The last time I’d been in Canada I had Groped the apartment of Paula McKnight, a missing woman with a disturbing past of abuse and personal trauma. Then I’d had both Harry and Wes to back me up. Here, now, I was on my own, but the visions in this apartment should be relatively benign, except for, you know, those associated with a missing human skull and its slovenly, chauvinistic pilferer. Triple blerg with a half twist; and it sticks the landing because the floor is disgusting. Is that an open tin of SPAM?

I dug out the jar of baby food from my grocery bag and went into the kitchen, snooping at the same time, and humming Tom Petty’s Running Down a Dream. The clock on the microwave flashed 12:00 over and over. The clock-set button was crusted with something slimy that hadn’t quite solidified. I decided it might be wise to double glove if Schenk had extras. I twisted the cap off the baby food, heard the satisfying schlick-pop, and went to the sink, singing under my breath.

At first, my brain did not compute what I was seeing. My mouth kept working on Tom Petty, but the lyrics for anything but the chorus were lost to me, as my eyes tried to explain what was in the sink.

The single-tub sink was full to the chrome edge with jiggling ectoplasm. I looked at the open jar of apricots, and back at the goo. “Dear Diary: Foiled by ghost spooge! Hate when that happens. Love, Marnie.”

It wasn’t the same as the white, silken sheet we’d seen draped over the corpses of Britney Wyatt and Barnaby Nowland, though; the multi-unified chain ectoplasm had been delicate, a chiffon shroud, grave cloth floating around the bodies in the water. This sink glop was green-tinged and thick, like snot from the deep recesses of a sinus infection.

“Do regular ghosts make a different type of ectoplasm than poltergeists?” Maybe you should look in the smart part of your brain, Marnie, I told myself. “I should know the answer to that, but there’s only so much one can retain after a decade, eh?” The sink full of goop was silent on the matter, but I sensed a clear feeling of disappointment in my failings. Slime with attitude. I dug into the corners of my brain like a rat in a dumpster, trying to remember what I’d learned about different types of chain ectoplasm, but the answers eluded me.

A wind picked up from nowhere and whisked my frog hat off my head. I grabbed at it but my hands were full of jar and lid, and I wasn't quick enough. The hat landed in the sink, where it floated atop the goo briefly before becoming booger-logged and sinking out of sight. I flashed back on a wad of boggle phlegm hitting me in the forehead. What had become of my life? It was a nonstop joyride of glamour and junk-punches lubricated by ghost slime and monster fluids. I didn't sign up for this snot-fest.

“Fucker. Give that back,” I told the kitchen sternly, a second before realizing that was the worst intention I could have put into the universe at that moment.

Ectoplasm roiled out of the sink in a spatter of thick droplets as the Cosmos tried to return my hat to me. I made a cry that sounded like glark! and jumped safely back. “Ha! Didn’t get me.” The hat was apparently snagged on something in the basin and only came up high enough for the frog eyes to poke above the surface, like a yarn crocodile regarding me from a particularly viscous swamp.

I had thrown out my hands to protect me from the potential, gooey projectile, and the Blue Sense rewarded me with the sinking certainty of what the something snagging my hat was. I set the baby food jar on the counter beside the sink and balanced its lid on top.

Where there is ectoplasm, there had, at some point, been a ghost. More than one, perhaps. They liked, or didn’t like, this sink for a reason. I pulled the latex gloves up around my wrists better, feeling the corner of my upper lip turn up. Ignoring the fact that I was here because of my own cat-snuffing-grade curiosity, I snarled, “I fucking hate this job.”

The ectoplasm was colder than ice water, and plunging my hands into it might have been the most disgusting thing I’d done since watching a zombie-revenant hybrid devour its own coffin-birthed fetus, still dangling from the umbilical cord. The sink goo wasn’t as thick as it looked, more like gravy than gelatin, and, as I fished around, my fingertips brushed something hard under the swampy fur of my hat.

I pulled it out of the sink and turned it to face me, pinching my lips together tightly. My heart had started an uneven jig against my ribcage, fluttering unhappily. I placed it on the counter top to the left of the sink, shoving aside some crusty dishes. My hat lay across the top like a deflated toad beret on the world's ugliest and most emaciated mime. With two fingers I pulled the hat off the skull and it slithered back into the sink.

“Hey, Longshanks,” I called out. “Evidence ate my hat! I'm gonna need a receipt and a stiff drink.”

CHAPTER 21

HE DIDN'T BRING either thing I'd asked for. His heavy tread hurried toward me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my sad prize. Thickened ectoplasm clumped in the pit of an eye socket like a snail pulled from its shell. I’d never eat escargot again. Not that I ever had, but this convinced me not to start. I'd probably have to swear off raw oysters, too.

The skull had a hole in the top. Ectoplasm sluiced out the jaw and oozed from the nasal cavities. I desperately wanted to rinse it off, not just because I wanted to see it in greater detail, but because the bony visage before me had once belonged to a person, a rather important fact that was not lost on me. The slime, regardless of its otherworldly source, seemed an obscene, intimate defacement. I imagined someone handling my skull a hundred and fifty years after my death, and thought I might enjoy a show of respect. A bubble appeared in the ectoplasm in the nasal cavity from some air captured inside, and I couldn’t look away until it surfaced and burst silently.

Schenk’s breath was unsteady behind me as he stood without speaking for a moment. I tilted my head back and got a great view of his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively. Then he said, “I never liked that hat, anyway. I’ll get an evidence bag.”

“Can I rinse this gunk off?”

“Nope,” he said, and went to the front door, where he’d dropped his own bag of gear from his trunk. He was back a moment later, the bag held in front of him, opened delicately.

I picked up the skull to drop it in the bag when the kitchen light blinked out, pitching us into relative darkness. The microwave went ding and started cooking nothing, the little plate inside churning around and around.

I held the skull over the sink so it wouldn’t drip on the already grungy floor. “Leftovers?”

The sound on the TV in the other room blared on for a second, and one of the Mythbusters screamed something about gaining altitude and then cut off abruptly.

I set the skull down on the counter. The lights flickered back on with a buzzing complaint, first one long fluorescent tube, then the other.

Schenk and I stood still and looked around the small space.

“Hello?” I said experimentally.

Schenk lowered the bag. The microwave stopped, beeped twice to tell us it was done, and went dark. He raised the bag, and prompted me with a look. I picked up the skull and tried to put it in the bag again. The lights above shut off and the TV blared. I caught the tail end of a cereal jingle.

I put the skull back on the counter and the TV went silent.

“A certain dead sassybritches does not want this skull to go in the bag,” I said.

“It’s going to end up there sooner or later,” Schenk advised quietly. The overhead lights went back on.

This time we were not alone; from the picture I’d stolen from Scarrow, I recognized John Briggs-Adsit, a full phantom right down to his boots. He was cowering on the floor in front of the fridge, his arms covering his head. He looked like he was crying, but no sniveling sounds could be heard.

“Are you seeing this?” Schenk whispered.

“He’s trying to distract us,” I guessed. “Sorry, Longshanks, I have to rinse this skull off. It’s more than him just not wanting us to put it in the bag. There’s something he doesn’t want us to see.”

I plunged my gloved hand back into the sink and pulled the plug. It came up with a slimy, sucking noise, and I left it resting atop an old bowl of hardened spaghetti with a dead bug in it. The ectoplasm began to drain out noisily in gulps and schlorps, and I ran the hot tap to coax it along. Schenk made an uncertain noise but did not order me to stop; he was far too busy staring wordlessly at his very first apparition. I sensed he wanted to back away, but was resolutely standing his ground.

I ran my gloves under the tap, wishing the water would warm up. The pipes clanked and groaned and the drain gurgled, choking on the sludge. I rinsed the skull, and then rinsed my gloves a second time, swishing the gunk off the sides of the sink.

“He’s watching you,” Schenk said. I peeled the latex gloves off and threw them in the sink, drying my hands on a not-so-clean, fairly stiff dish towel hanging from the bar on the stove.

“Well, unless he’s going to speak to us, he’s a distraction. What's it gonna be this time, Johnny? You gonna talk, or does Bugsy here need to get rough with ya?”

I made shooing motions at the cowering, spectral soldier, and he fled like mist blowing past headlights, disappearing near my hands and reappearing in a stuttering, strobe-like fashion further away. I'd seen Harry shadow step, flying from shadow to shadow faster than any mortal could move, but this was different, like watching an old movie with a bunch of frames missing. Schenk followed, digging out his phone to take a video clip. I paused, letting Schenk get a good, long view of it, and then herded the spirit into the hall closet where he appeared again, crouching among a half-dozen pairs of mud-crusted sneakers. When I was confident he’d stay, I slammed the door. On Schenk’s wrist. He bellowed impressively.

“Sorry! Shit! Sorry. Sorry. You stay in there,” I told the ghost, who promptly faded. Above the last trail of fog in the air was a beat-up Montreal Canadiens jacket with an envelope protruding from the pocket. I snatched it up. Scarrow’s pictures, smeared with a single splotch of ectoplasm.

“Aha!” I closed the closet door again.

Schenk cradled his injured paw and showed it to me with a thunderous glower. “I don't think a door is going to stop a ghost, eh?”

“Sorry. Lost my head in the heat of battle. Sorry.” I told whoever still wanted to listen to me, “Tough it out, soldiers. Look, I bet these are the pictures Barnaby stole from Father Frisky when he was swiping the skull.”

“I find it hard to believe that ghost killed both my victims when you scared him into a closet by shaking your finger at him.”

“I have awesome finger guns, man.” I sifted through the photographs, wandering back through the kitchen, Schenk on my heels. One of the photos was similar to the carte de visite I’d taken from Scarrow; Mother and John Briggs-Adsit, 1864. Mother wearing a crystal vial necklace and holding a giant wooden spoon.

“Hunh,” I said. “Maybe Barnaby wasn’t just looking for ghoulish collectibles. He was curious about this ghost, too.” For some reason I found the spoon in Mother Briggs-Adsit’s hand mesmerizing. “Harry saw this same spirit dude in my room at North House. He was cowardly, crouching, flinching. Definitely not aggressive. He just dicked with the plumbing and fucked up my plans for a nice, hot bath.” Schenk didn't need to know about the exceedingly steamy shower that I got instead.

“Maybe this skull belongs to one of them?”

“I can tell you right now, it’s not his mother’s skull.” I went back to the sink and re-gloved when Schenk almost absently handed me fresh latex. “Look at the long, narrow nasal cavity, the rounded supraorbital margin, heavy bony glabella.” I showed him between where the eyebrows would have been, and then swept the forehead with gloved fingers. “Backward slanting forehead.” I stroked down the jaw. “Square mandible,” I ran my finger behind the area where his ear would have been. “Large mastoid process. This skull belonged to a man.” I looked at the top of it, “Look at that hole at the top.”

“Gunshot?”

“Nope. Skull rot.” I turned it to the light. The top of the skull seemed thin, fragile, like it had been eaten away. “To be specific, these holes were caused by bacterial damage. I’m no forensic anthropologist, but I have seen this before. It looks like the late stages of the neurosyphilis.”

Schenk was flipping through the folded notes and yellowed papers that had been carelessly crammed in the envelope with the pictures that Father Scarrow had carefully collected. “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, Cannoneer 34th New York Independent Field Battery, First Division, 9th Army Corps, A. P. discharged 8 APR 1864 SCD.”

I nodded sadly. “Syphilitic Chronis Disease,” I said. “Good ol’ pecker flu from houses of ill repute. Here, we have neurosyphilis; you’d see this kind of damage in time.” I poked at the irregular holes in the top of his skull, and then spotted a series of fine lines and frowned. “But not this.” I brought the skull as close to my face as I dared and angled it into the lamp light even more. “This is blunt force trauma. Right here.” I pointed at a spot. “See the radiating fractures?” I tilted it to peer inside the holes at the innermost layer of the skull. “The skull is actually three layers, two hard layers sandwiching a spongier one.”

Schenk made an affirmative noise to tell me he knew this already. “This trauma was forceful enough to shatter all three.”

“Keeping in mind that John’s bones were previously damaged by the neurosyphilis, this may not have been an intentionally lethal blow.”

“After two hundred years I’m sure the bones would have taken damage.”

“Like I said, I’m not a forensic anthropologist, but I’d like to have someone who is look at this skull, the sooner the better.”

“Have to run it to Hamilton,” Schenk said, holding out a larger evidence bag. “What are you thinking?”

“Spit balling an idea or two,” I warned him, in case he was taking my word as an expert opinion, which it was not. “Some later side effects of the syphilis would have been troublesome for someone like Mother Briggs-Adsit, who, according to Father Scarrow, had a notoriously bad temper. Her grown son could have become frustrating to live with and care for: incontinence, confusion, psychosis… What if she hit him?”

He pointed to the picture. “With her giant wooden spoon?”

“Spoon of Doom. With a skull weakened by neurosyphilis like this, he could have been killed without her meaning to.” I thought about it. “If he was killed unintentionally, he may not have understood what happened. His confusion may have caused him to linger after death.”

“And after her own death,” he said, “Mother remains to care for John’s spirit with her own.”

I sighed. “And then these idiots stumble on the wrong grave.”

“Couldn’t have happened upon a worse pair to disturb.”

“Not only do they take her necklace, they take her son’s skull.”

“To use as a decoration.”

“Britney had kinder motives. Contact. Discovery. But if Mother Briggs-Adsit thought Britney was investigating the manner of her son’s death…”

“Guilt. Shame.”

“Followed closely by anger.” I shook my head. “A disaster waiting to happen. We need to find that necklace.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

Then I guess I team up with Father Spankass and work together to exorcise a homicidal poltergeist? “One thing at a time, Longshanks. Can I put the sound on the TV?” I asked. “It’s creepy quiet in here.”

“Shouldn’t we be listening for ghosts?”

“Fuck ghosts,” I said, picking up the remote control. “They’re here. We’re here. We know it, they know it. I’m done listening. You mind?”

“You’re the paranormal exp—“

Something hit the back of my hand, knocking the remote into Schenk’s bristly chin. His head jerked back but he made no complaint save a frown.

“See that?” I pointed at Schenk so the spirit would notice him. “That’s a cop that cannot even handle it right now. So knock that shit off.”

Schenk glowered at the room and then went back to search the bedroom again. I turned the TV to the local weather channel and stared at the everyday, mundane joy of a perfectly normal storm report.

The meteorologist said merrily, “Tracking this latest storm’s approach with that wide cold front coming down from the arctic, the blizzard conditions extend all the way into Pennsylvania and north into the Muskokas. Here in the Niagara region we’re expecting between twenty-five and forty-five centimeters of lake effect snow by the end of Friday and into Saturday morning, with some of the worst weather picking up again Sunday afternoon. Expect winds gusting up to eighty kilometers an hour, and temperatures hovering around minus five before wind chill, but it’s going to feel a whole lot colder than that, folks. With much of the region already blanketed by the week’s accumulation, and drifting snow and whiteout conditions making driving treacherous, authorities are asking that people stay in their homes and off the streets unless travel is absolutely necessary. We may be looking at a record snowfall this weekend. Of course, as always, our friends in Buffalo will be worst hit by this storm, with a snowfall totals for the week approaching a meter…”

I went to get another Twizzler or two, sticking the licorice in the corner of my mouth. There was a chance that Scarrow was wrong about the poltergeist being free of demonic influence.

“Just to cover our butts, let’s find out if we’ve got a demon in the house. Ready to show me some love, asshole?” I asked around the candy, fetching the twine from the grocery bag.

I took the handkerchief-wrapped ring out of my jeans pocket. I forgot all about herbs and smudging and candle magic, and made a twine loop from which to hang the hoop of metal. If I were treading a pure-white, right-hand path, I’d be doing this without the influence of Asmodeus, Father of the revenant line and Demon King. However, using darkness to flush out darkness made a whole lot of sense, in that “summon bigger fish” kind of way. Maybe He owed me a favor; maybe I owed Him one. Either way, I knew I had a sliver of His attention, especially when I was being intentionally, magically naughty. Harry would cluck and flutter about tainting my soul, but I was becoming increasingly comfortable that some stains, even Clorox and Woolite wouldn't be able to get out.

“This is how I roll, cocksucker,” I told the empty room, hanging the ring out on front of me like I was fishing. “I may look little and soft to you – just a warm, mortal meat sack waiting to be drained. But I’ve got bad friends in dark places who owe me big favors. Like this guy. Does He smell familiar?” I swung the ring around in the corners of the room and back into the closet, inching the door open on its track. No ghost. No poltergeist. No demon. I sniffed the closet air for sulfur, brimstone, burnt sugar, singed molasses, absinthe, all scents that preternatural scientists could reliably associate with the unnatural. All I smelled in there was sneaker stink, mildewed fabric and — familiar cologne? I sniffed at the Habs jacket. No cologne. I lifted my face to the air and the smell got lighter. It wasn’t Harry’s 4711. I lowered my nose to my own shoulder and gave myself a sniff. Old Spice. Combat Butler’s scarf. Duh, Marnie.

I closed the closet and held the twine up so that I could stare through the ring. I imagined flames roiling along the interior, as though I could draw them up from Hell to do my bidding. “Water by water meet fire by fire; Turn you, demon, to face the pyre. Show yourself, and kneel before the servant of your King.”

If there’s one thing demons don’t like, especially lesser demons, it’s being reminded of their place. Human beings are free and eligible for redemption and eternal peace. We live. We thrive. We improve. We become. Demons do not. Demons are stuck. Demons don’t get better with age or practice. Demons cannot fix their state or evolve or free themselves. If there was a demon here and I taunted it... well, I've done dumber shit. Rarely, but definitely dumber.

“I am,” I whispered, my eyes darting around the room to see if it made any difference. “I will transcend. The hands of the Blessed Mother and Her Mighty Consort openly await my own.”

Nothing.

I glanced at the picture of John Briggs-Adsit and his mother, and tried a new tactic. “Hey Mama-Captain! Your son dicked every whore in Jersey—“

An invisible force thwapped me in the face with my own Twizzlers, candy whips a ribbed, licorice scourge. For a moment the air fogged, and I felt a push of cold fingers digging into the right hand side of my throat. I slapped at it and shrank away, holding up my demonic ring as though it could repel whatever was trying to touch me.

“Or maybe he didn’t! Maybe he was a very good boy who got the syph by accident.” The hand holding the twine got very cold, like I’d stuck it out the window into the winter wind. “I mean, I can’t see how that’s possible. It was probably from all his whore-dicking, but—“

The blast that followed was blunter, a ghostly backhand crushing my lips against my teeth. The force of it made me stumble into the closet door and whack my head.

“Knock it off you frosty old twat. Your kid was soft in the head in more ways than one, but don't think you can pull that shit on me just because you're made of smoke and snot.”

“You talking to me?” Schenk leaned out of the bedroom to look down the hall at me.

“No.” I winced, using my left hand to cup my sore face. I took the ring off of the twine and put it back in my pocket, tucking it under my sweater. “I just got pimp handed by Casper the Unfriendly Ghost's bitch of a mother, I think.”

“Rough joint, eh?” Schenk said.

My phone chimed and vibrated in my back pocket, announcing a text, and while I dug it out, I drawled at Schenk, "No, this is great. I wish this was a hotel. I’d stay here every night. The room service is kinda punchy, but at least there's hot and cold running ghosts."

Harry’s text read: Are you quite all right?

I answered: Yup. Because really, when you’ve had your face whipped by your own Twizzlers, you don’t brag about that shit.

After a pause, he texted: Lies. I should be happy to go to your tunnel, if you would but grace us with your presence tomorrow. I didn’t have to wonder who “us” was, or where I’d be doing said gracing. I supposed that seeing my parents was unavoidable, now that they’d let Harry visit. If I didn’t go, I’d forever hear how he came and their own daughter would not. I decided against suggesting a completely different tunnel he could happily grace again, and was struck with an idea.

I dialed Father Scarrow to warn him that Harry would be joining us at the tunnel, and the invisible force clubbed me on the other side of the head, clipping me in the eye, knocking the phone clear across the room. I chased it across the floor and picked it up.

“Hey, Scarrow. There's a really mean ghost in Barnaby Nowland’s pig sty,” I whispered into the phone, “what should I do?”

“Play hard to get?” he suggested. “Wait, do you know how?”

“If I wanted cold I've got the ghost for that, Captain Tightpants.”

“Want me to come for a sleepover?”

“Renfield!”

“You can trust me. I'm a man of the cloth. Who’s with you?”

“It’s just me, Schenk, and an elaborate bag of goodies.”

“I meant the ghost. Which ghost is with you? Did you find the skull? The pictures?”

“Skull, pictures, and some of your notes.”

“Well, you’re doing something wrong. Stop tormenting the ghosts.”

“I’m not!”

“I know you better than that, Marnie,” he said, his tone that of a father chiding a wayward daughter.

“You’re supposed to call me Miss Baranuik,” I corrected.

“Did you just call to reap my sympathy, or do you want something?”

I opened my mouth to inform him about Harry and decided against it, because fuck the exorcist and his cheek. He could just meet my immortal companion without warning on a dark and stormy night in the middle of nowhere. And then take a flying fuck at a rolling donut on a frozen gravel driveway.

Like he read my mind, he said, “Whatever you’ve got up your sleeve, I’m ready for you, Marnie. I’m more than ready.” Then he hung up on me.

“Douchecopter,” I exclaimed. Boy, I’m glad Mr. Merritt isn’t here.

Schenk's head popped back into the doorway. “I'm still running a tally for the swear jar. And I wouldn't have taken you for a Browncoat. You're more of a Star Trek chick, aren't you?”

“You arrange a threesome for me with Captain Picard and Jayne Cobb, and I will love you forever, Longshanks.”

When he disappeared again, I texted Agent de Cabrera for emergency positivity. I got socked by a poltergeist. I wanna give up.

Elian texted: Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” He ended with a smiley face.

I texted back: Probably, Churchill wasn’t being punched in the gob by eldritch spirits. Then, to add that pinch of positivity, I added, I’m positive his enthusiasm was a sign of mental instability.

There was a thud from somewhere beyond the hall, and a shout of alarm.

“Uh, Marnie?” Schenk’s voice rose to a bellow. “Marnie!”

I heard reverberating female sobs growing to a wail before I got to the bedroom, and changed gears from a cautious, don't-trip-on-the-crap creep to an actual hurry, ignoring the throbbing in my face. I had no time to register the full horror of the room; there was too much, and it would have to wait. My eyes focused on Schenk, standing there with his arms out, as though to catch the black film floating around him, weeping pitifully.

Schenk had the necklace hanging from his fingertips. “All I did was touch it.”

“Put it down!” I shouted, looking for someplace he could do so. “Just there, on the bed.”

He dropped the necklace onto the tangle of dirty bed sheets.

The wailing stopped, like a song snatched away by a blizzard’s gale, and the shadowy mist swirled to the floor immediately and disappeared.

We stared down at the necklace. Then we stared at each other. Then we stared up at Barnaby Nowland’s bed. Schenk had kindly kept what he’d discovered about Nowland’s hobbies to himself when he’d joined me in the kitchen to see the skull. I was grateful for that because it offered me fifteen minutes or so of blissful ignorance that he was not enjoying. Now, seeing it for the first time, I had to work to keep from bolting from the room; getting backhanded by a ghost had nothing on what my eyes showed me.

The four-poster bed had been decorated on three sides with skulls, all human, and all undeniably authentic. The closest had teeth missing and a broken nasal bridge. It looked whiter than the others. I was betting Nowland had tried to bleach it and weakened the bone. His bedspread was black satin; what might have been sexy on another man’s bed was creepy and revolting here, under the watchful gaze of the desecrated dead. There were snake skins decoupaged across the upper curve of the cast iron headboard like Alice Cooper's worst holiday garland. There were five clusters of bones, perfect crib mobiles for a serial killer’s baby; long bones, short bones, lumpy bones, bones filed to points, all gathered with craft wire and strung with mini lights. I wondered how many had been taken from animals, and prayed he was just friendly with the local butcher. My biologist’s eye told me not to fool myself, and I had to look away.

“This is why Barnaby had to fuck rubber vaginas,” I told Schenk very seriously. “And, to be perfectly honest with you, that was probably the best destination for his cock this side of a wood chipper.”

“I’m afraid that’s not all he fucked,” Schenk said, but didn’t elaborate. I glanced at the night table. The drawer was open a little. I snuck a peek up at Schenk’s face for clues, and though he wouldn’t meet my eye, he shook his head minutely to advise against getting a better angle on the contents. The Blue Sense tickled me with Schenk’s revulsion. For once, I let someone else’s opinion trump my curiosity; I trusted the look on his face.

“This guy’s on the flaming Slip ‘N’ Slide straight to Hell. Your M.E. is gonna need a month and a half-dozen interns to ID all these bones,” I said. I looked at the necklace, and held up my phone to take pictures of it. “Was that the necklace you entered into evidence from Britney’s purse?”

“Looks like it.”

“Thing fucking wanders like Sauron’s ring.”

“The last time I saw it was Thursday when I interrogated Simon Hiscott. You were in my office with the box.”

“And Father Scarrow,” I said. “I believe he lifted it from the evidence box.” I related, quickly, the Clumsy Coffee Caper. “Then, when Barnaby stole the skull and the photos from Scarrow, he took the necklace too.”

“Is it getting colder in here?” Schenk asked, and I saw his words on the fog of his breath.

It was, and not just a little colder; the temperature had taken a sudden and alarming drop. My own breath fogged out rapidly, though I was trying not to freak out. “That’s no ordinary necklace,” I said, “not that I think that comes as any surprise. Just a second.” I forwarded a few pictures to Harry’s phone, and he dialed me immediately.

“What a lovely lachrymatory, darling,” Harry exclaimed. “Wherever did you find such a specimen?”

My teeth started chattering, and I held my phone gingerly between shoulder and ear so I could zip up my parka. Then I put him on speakerphone. “A what, now?”

“That is a tear vial, Dearheart. Also known as lacrimosa, or mourning vessels, or widow’s crystals. The one you have there is a later design, fashioned during the American Civil War.” He made a sound of discovery as he pieced two clues together. “Well, might one assume this has something to do with the carte-de-visite and the young lad in uniform who visited you the other night?”

A tear vial. “Would these vials generally belong to a woman?”

“Not necessarily, dove. I myself have owned one, though not on a necklace such as the one you have there. I believe it is in storage at home. I can show it to you someday, if you would like to see it. It’s quite lovely.”

"Tears should always be kept in something necklace friendly," I proposed. I leaned over it and peered at the tiny plug in the top. “Whine cork."

I handed Schenk the bundle of old, faded photographs. He began to sift through them quickly. The edges were worn soft by time, and some of them had crumbling folds. He took care not to rip them as he scanned again, stopping on one that he showed me, nudging me with his elbow.

John Briggs-Adsit in the full-dress uniform of a union soldier, with his mother in black, beside an open coffin. Poppa Briggs-Adsit was in the casket, surrounded by flowers. Mother was wearing the lachrymatory vial on her necklace. It appeared as if John’s father’s eyes were open, but they looked goofy, and when I squinted at them, I could just make out that someone had painted fake eyes on his closed eyelids. “Uh, Harry? Still there?”

“Mmhmm,” he said, lilting his murmur to make it a question.

“What kind of weirdo paints eyes on a corpse’s closed eyelids?”

“Funeral pictures, I am assuming. Is the family in the picture with the deceased? Are they dressed in mourning clothes?”

“Yes,” I said. “And it’s friggin’ creepy.”

“It was not uncommon in the late eighteen hundreds, love.”

I flipped the picture over. John’s father’s name was also John. He passed on October third, 1866. Schenk passed me another. John Junior’s funeral, closed casket, only a few months later. Mother Briggs-Adsit wore the same dress to her son’s funeral as she had to her husband’s, with the addition of her son’s brimmed hat from his army days.

I stared at that picture for a long moment, and the woman in the picture stared back at me accusingly from beneath that brim. Breath stolen, I felt the weight of her in the room.

“Mama-Captain.”

There were several other photographs of her, in formal wear, with the incongruous hat set upon her curls, first black, then grey, her face grimmer and sterner with the passing of years.

“Did she ever take it off?” Schenk asked, and I wondered if he was thinking aloud.

“I’m coming home,” I told Harry on the phone. “We’re done here.”

“Ducky?”

“Yes, Harry?” I said, handing Schenk back his pictures, watching him put them away in the envelope.

“I should thank you not to bring home any visitors tonight,” he said, and then he was gone.

I crooked my finger at Schenk and said, “Kitchen. Got more gloves?”

He gave me a fresh pair from his pocket. I snapped them on. “Okay, Schenk. You got your skull, your pictures, your whine cork on a mope rope,” I shrugged. “Clearly, I suck at exorcisms, and I can’t do a thing if you don’t want me to get my herbs out before the forensics team has been over here. I’m confident that there’s no demon lingering in this apartment. Scarrow can banish the spirits from this place, if that's needed. Part of me would love to take all this haunted evidence with me on my big date with the freaky priest to the Blue Ghost Tunnel and watch the whole universe go polter-ghosty-kablooey, because clearly that’s what would happen. The other part of me wants nothing to do with this shit, especially not around my Harry, and would be on the next plane to the delightfully secluded tropical island of St. Fuck This if I thought it was an option.”

Schenk nodded. “Way ahead of you.” He poked the necklace gingerly with a thick finger, experimentally. “Sure you don’t wanna take this with you? I hate to hear a woman cry.”

“I don’t need it, I’ve got my own.”

“Lying to a cop, now,” he said. “Tsk tsk.”

“You don’t know,” I said. "I like to keep mine filled with herbs and spices, because the tears of widows are fucking bland otherwise."

I went back through the maze of boxes to the filth-ridden kitchen, Schenk following, as I poked at light switches on my way. It seemed way too dark in the room, but the sun was fading early, and another storm was rolling in. The skull sat on the counter where we’d left it.

He popped it into a large evidence bag without incident, gathered up all the bags he'd tucked this, that, and the other into, and then took a long, hard look at me, squinting. “Sure you’re okay, Cinderblock?” He cocked his head and very kindly did not voice that my upper lip was starting to puff up, though I’m sure it was a detail he didn’t miss.

I touched my right eye gingerly and winced. “I need to go home and get face deep in a bag of ice. You tell no one about me getting my ass handed to me by what may be a little old lady ghost, got that?”

“Oh, I’m going to tell everyone.” He smirked, walking me out of the apartment. “First on my list, journalistic genius Jerry Formick. I see the headline now: Ghost Granny Wales on Great White Dork of Psychic Investigations. That story would get that asshole off my back for a solid fucking month.”

“Hey, stop swearing, twat-cracker.”

“You stop swearing, hose-smoker,” he shot back.

I gave his arm a playful shove, but I had as much chance of moving him off his feet as I did tipping a tractor trailer over. “Officer, he’s swearing!” I tattled to the uniform on the way out.

“Sorry.” The officer cracked half a smile and shrugged a whaddya-gonna-do for me. We locked up and handed the keys off to the constable, who had gone back to checking replies to his undoubtedly witty Facebook status message and barely noticed our exit.

Dear Diary: I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but every dead person I met today, except Harry, was a complete fuckpocket. There's a whiny soldier, his abusive cunt of a mother, and a disrespectful pervert who should have been on an episode of Hoarders before he got locked up for life for desecrating corpses. I want to go home and watch Wesley fuck my slippers because it's less awful. Love, Marnie. PS: Longshanks is a geek.

CHAPTER 22

“TRY NOT TO show off too much, Harry,” I said from inside my ski mask.

Harry had not dressed down for his big meeting with the priest. He had, if anything, gone overboard; under his heavy coat he wore a frilled silk poet's blouse that matched the thundercloud grey of his eyes, the high lace collar of which poked up around his pale throat. The coat nearly covered the long, lace cuffs at which he insisted on tugging. A black silk top hat rested on his lap. Immaculately shaved but for his upper lip, he’d switched fake mustaches to one that reminded me of Rhett Butler. His sandy brown hair smelled of pomade, and though he had neglected to refresh his 4711 cologne, I could still smell it on my own face from when he’d last hugged me.

“Moi?” Harry’s eyes went wide with feigned indignation. “Show off? My brazen little sugarplum, do you presume to suggest that I am an ill-mannered braggart?”

“No, not at all,” I drawled, dripping sarcasm. “Why, faced with a man of the cloth, I have no doubt you’ll be restrained to the point of being invisible. How will I ever draw you out of your shell?”

Harry’s smile narrowed to a grim line, and he flashed fang. “Only, I should be the perfect gentleman-monster your lad expects me to be, love.”

My lad? I sighed. “If you eat the priest, you’ll get a bellyache and a speckled tongue.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” he retorted, making sure his coat was buttoned to the chin. He shot his cuff and glanced at his watch. His little fidgets weren’t fooling me; Harry was not interested in his appearance right now, or the time. Harry could think of nothing but the priest. It had been a while since Harry’s last encounter with a man of the cloth, and that had been on far friendlier, if sadder, terms, at the funeral of a young girl who hadn't deserved what happened to her. Tonight, Harry was spoiling for confrontation, and I felt decidedly like a prize to be won. Probably, that was his intention. Probably, I could have felt flattered that he wanted to fight over me. Probably, it shouldn't have made me want to tell both Harry and Scarrow where to stick their territorial urges.

So, it was definitely time for some people skills. “It’s too cold out here,” I said. “This was a bad idea, Harry. Sorry.”

“Steady on, cricket.”

“Mr. Merritt can drop me off at the café,” I said, “and then take you back home. How would that be, eh?”

“I do so enjoy your expressing yourself in your mother tongue, eh?” He winked at me. “Must you wear that ridiculous balaclava?”

I pouted; though it was hidden by the black fabric, I’m sure he knew it. “It hides my fat lip and makes me feel like a bank robber. And you can give me lip about this Canadian accent when you stop sounding like a Victorian dandy, Lord Highbrow McAntiquated.”

Harry turned to me so that he could show me how grandly he was rolling his eyes. “The night’s weather is indeed quite unfriendly, but you must allow that I have braved much worse. Have you forgotten that I was in London for the terrible winter of 1715?”

I played along, comfortable with not knowing what the hell he was talking about. “But of course I keep track of all your movements, Harry. All four hundred years of bopping around the planet.” I mimed licking a finger and cheerfully flipping through an imaginary logbook. “Oh, right, how could I have forgotten? That was the year the Thames froze over.”

“The Thames has frozen over many times, Dearheart, but I cannot remember a time the ice heaved so high. Flood tide beneath the ice, a veritable wall of slow-moving destruction. Dreadful.” He smoothed the front of his jacket. “It ruined one of my favorite public houses, where a gentleman could find both a blazing hearth and warm drink of an evening. I’m positively chilled by the memory. ”

Mr. Merritt’s liver-spotted hand automatically poked at the dash and the heat went up a notch. He put on the blinker at a stop sign; we were the only car on the road, but Mr. Merritt liked to do things by the book, I’d noticed. He came to a full stop, paused long enough for me to wonder what he was waiting for, and then turned left cautiously. Even with so much care the back of the hearse fishtailed slightly.

“You’re going to catch the cold deep in your bones, tonight,” I told Harry. “You should go home.” My upper lip was still throbbing from getting cold-cocked by the ghost that afternoon, and I thought we could both use an evening at home in front of the fire, cozy in the Winter Room, browsing the books and enjoying one another’s company. There came a point in every investigation where I felt I’d taken too big a slice of the pie and I longed to withdraw, call it quits, circle the wagons and protect what little safety and sanity I had. My I-Don't-Wanna meter was edging towards that redline.

My Cold Company knew it, too. “Soon enough,” he assured me. “I would not be so ungallant as to abandon you to the night again, especially after yesterday's watery misadventure and your tumultuous afternoon in that disgusting little urchin's abode. After some shadow-chasing with our host, I shall rush home to hot bath and heavy robe, the comforts of home, to apricate in the warm care of my fair sweetheart... only, you will have to change. I packed several lovely nightgowns for you.” He nudged my leg with his. “I think the chocolate silk would be appropriate.”

“Distraction. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”

He gave a little caught-out shrug, and the Bond informed me that getting up to something was only the beginning of what he had in mind. Unf.

“Play nice,” I warned, but wanted him to do anything but once we had some time alone.

The teasing sparkle was again in his eye and he dropped me a wink.

“Suppose we do meet this spirit, again, Harry. The soldier.”

“If you’d allow me to counsel you in this matter, ducky, I would suggest that he may be our greatest confederate.” He blinked quickly and said, “Poor choice of words, I’m afraid… poor sod. Let us pretend I said ‘ally,’ lest we offend the chap.”

“An ally against his own mother, the slap-happy poltergeist?” I thought of Harry’s descriptions of our soldier-specter, crouching on the floor, shrinking in the corner, and seeing him for the first time myself, first a film, strengthening to a shadow, and then banishing him into the closet with a single finger. How easily I'd made him flee. Easier than shooing a fly. “Why is he so scared? You know, besides the fact that he’s maybe been pulling a Norman Bates with his charming mother.”

“We must ask him.” He tapped my gloved hand on the bench seat while Mr. Merritt navigated a poorly-plowed stretch of road. “And Norman Bates is not a fair comparison; Bates murdered his mother. I assure you John Briggs-Adsit never harmed a hair on his mother’s head.”

I gave him a sidelong glance, remembering the hole in John’s skull. I hadn’t mentioned any of the evidence to Harry; since I’d started working for the PCU I’d kept more of my work to myself, as much as that was possible given our Bond, as a matter of habit. “Do you think she might have hurt him?”

“His current sense of self, as I perceived it, was scrambled by the muddle of being lost,” Harry said. “’Tis not easy, being lost, and spirits become confused, but if you were to tell me that, near the end of his life, he had cause to fear his mother, I would not be surprised in the slightest.”

“How do we get through to him? He’s been appearing to me, so he’s got something to say.”

“Relate to him as you would to any living person,” Harry said softly. “I must not, myself. It is best that I keep my distance. If he cleaves too strongly to my sympathetic presence through Kinship of the Departed, he will never move on to the light, and will be Earthbound for all eternity. That is a frightful fate for an innocent soul, and one I do not wish to add to my litany of damnations.”

“How will I relate to him?” I said with a discouraged sigh. “I don’t know what his life was like. I’m not a Civil War buff. I don’t know what his situation was, other than a few sketchy facts and some guesswork. What am I gonna talk to him about, how syphilis is a major bummer? I certainly can’t chat about my life, or how my extra-large Tim Horton’s cup won’t fit in the microwave for reheating. Maybe we could bond over how much we disappoint our mothers. That'll be a hoot and a half, I bet.”

Harry stared at me for a long moment, as if deciding whether or not to shake me. I hadn’t realized how serious the moment was becoming until he looked at me like that.

Then, after a brief, tight pursing of his lips, he spoke slowly and deliberately. “Good Heavens, woman, he’s dry of life and cold beyond anything anyone in the physical realm can imagine. Yes,” he said in answer to my glance, reading my doubt through the Bond, “even I cannot imagine, nor could I express it sufficiently, the final, illimitably icy touch of Death. Your Johnny doesn’t remember trivial nonsense like meat and wine or tea and toast. He remembers only those bright, savage moments that impressed upon his soul, what sheared his heart in two, what lifted him up, the sweetest and most painful parts of life, the most important things he’s lost: loyalty, fidelity, connection. Seeing the swell of his first child in his wife’s belly. Hearing a small voice call out for him in the night after a bad dream, his child’s giggle at a silly joke. The sigh of a woman beneath him. He remembers what it is to be flesh and blood. He remembers what it is to love.”

I saw the flash in his eye and felt through the Bond a moment of envy, clamped down tight; a ghost, a man who had been gone for two hundred years, still knew how it felt to love, could access that feeling. Harry could not. Those who receive the gift of immortality are denied the pleasure of love for all time. Even after he was eventually ash, Harry’s spirit would not linger, not like this one, not with any sort of awareness or ability to feel. He had lost love forever. Harry opened his fists, looked down at them in surprise, and showed them to me as if amazed he had tightened them in the first place. “This is how you will reach him, my angel. Do not threaten or chide. Do not mock this man. Remind him of love. Tell me you will do this for him.”

“Of course, Harry.”

“Promise me, now, ducky. It may be far more important to reach John than it is to cajole Mother.”

I looked down at my leather gloves and felt inadequate to the task as I digested this. “You feel John is the key, not the killer poltergeist?”

“Yes,” Harry said firmly. “Your priest is fair support in this, and may, in the end, be responsible for ridding the area of the poltergeist. However, the spectral remnant of John Briggs-Adsit is but a broken shadow of the man he once was. Give him the opportunity to rise, to stand like a man, to regain strength and pride, to go into the light knowing that he deserves to be there. He will, if he can, help you banish his mother. He fears her now, but this was not always so. Something terrible has happened to create this scar upon him. You must help him. You must. The exorcist cannot.”

Again, I pictured Adsit’s bacteria-rotted skull, the tell-tale fracture, the slow ooze of ectoplasm from the nasal bridge. “Why me?”

Harry smiled enigmatically and looked out the window at the snow streaking by. It hadn’t stopped snowing since I got to Canada. It was like the country was having a snit fit about my return. Harry repeated, “Remind him of love, my Own.”

“I’ll try. Love’s not really my strong suit.”

“And that is my greatest failing as your companion,” Harry said.

I turned to look out the window into the snow-swirled darkness, pressing a fist into my belly to quell the fit of mirth that was no doubt in my future. “This priest gives me weird feelings.”

“I would be dead shocked if he did not,” Harry told me.

“I’ve met priests before. They never made me twitchy and floaty and giggly.”

Harry let one pale hand land on my knee and he gave me a pat there. “A pure and uncorrupted priest does not speak your language; their words become white noise and do not penetrate your defenses. This defrocked rake sees you, and sees through you. He has all your weak points pegged and your defenses lowered. That terrifies you, even as it draws you in. Your strongest defense mechanism, your humor, rises to the surface to distract you. The Bond, in turn, swells to remind you that your Talents and powers are conditional on your remaining my Own. This conflict causes those jitters that your mind is misinterpreting as jollity. Rarely do you take serious issues seriously, my love. You prefer to smartass your way through life’s hard spots.” He crooked a thrice-pierced brow. “Redemption embodied stands before you, and you have one foot on the dance floor with him. The rest of you is reacting to how ridiculous that idea would be.”

“So you’re saying my giggle fits are the Bond’s defense to the priest’s dirty offers to have me switch allegiance?”

“There are many built-in mechanisms you would not have yet experienced, ducky. I am pleased this one is working so well, and continues to remind you of your place as my DaySitter, my Bonded One, my advocate, and my salvation.” He patted me again, this time his touch a promise. “I shall, tonight, do my best to augment the Bond’s efforts.”

“Gee, I dunno, Harry,” I drawled. “If this case were any funnier I’d likely bust a rib. Can’t you just flash me some wang if I start laughing? Sober me right up.”

“By my troth, love, I’d have thought that, being offered his manhood, your — ahem — other proclivities would have won out by now. Imagine how pleased I am to discover that you have some measure of control, however subconscious it may be.”

I shot him a sour smile, but Harry had returned to staring out his window at the snow. I could see the reflection of a satisfied little twist of a smile in the glass, and he pushed something foreign through the Bond in my direction that might have been pride.

The street lights at the old parking lot near the canal had been broken by local drug dealers who didn’t want their nighttime commerce illuminated. When the hearse pulled into the lot, several wary, slouching shadows moved back to their vehicles but didn’t get in, giving only the smallest bit of ground to our obviously not-cop trio. When we didn’t leave, they stared, feral pairs of eyes from beneath hoods and ball caps assessing who we were, what we intended, with calculated precision. Harry got out of the car, uninterested in what he saw as insects milking blood from the populace; they were not a thousandth the predator he was, and he prided himself on having character and class when he drained. When I unbuckled and joined him, Harry’s attitude toward the dealers changed. He let his irises shift from soft, human grey to high-polished chrome, and turned to flash the dealers a warning, fang-filled glower. Car doors slammed and we were alone a minute later.

“You enjoyed that,” I accused with a shrouded smile, watching Scarrow’s car approach through a soft snow.

“Not nearly as much as I shall enjoy this,” he promised. “If he shows me the slightest offense, I shall demand satisfaction, and will find it, by the Lady’s honor, as Jonson did with Spencer. Must one confirm that you are ready to stand as Second, or may one assume?”

I massaged my forehead through the balaclava. “If you’re talking about dueling pistols at dawn again, weirdo, I’m gonna slug you in the bahookie.”

“You will do no such thing, and I do not appreciate your sass.”

“You love my sass,” I retorted. “Now behave.”

Father Scarrow approached, wearing a black parka and weighted down with a heavy backpack. In his hand he had a black book bristling with paper sticky tabs on all three unbound sides. He nodded at me. “Nice ski mask.”

“Thanks. Remind me to Google 'Jonson and Spencer' later.”

“Only if you remind me why we are doing this at night like a couple of crazy people.” Harry moved around the back of the hearse into the red glow of the taillights and the priest flinched. “Oh.”

“Brought some back-up,” I said. “So keep your crucifix under your coat, please. Father Renfield Scarrow, this is my companion, Lord Guy Harrick Dreppenstedt.”

“How do you do, Mr. Scarrow?” Harry lifted his top hat off his head briefly and offered the slightest of bows, really more of a nod to satisfy the requirements of his personal code as a gentleman and the demands of courtesy.

Scarrow nodded. “Ah. The vampire.” He waited, seemingly to see if the V-word would cause offense. I expected it to, considering the way Harry was wound up and ready to rumble, but Harry had other ideas. A felt a ribbon of mischief dance through the Bond to tickle at the outer edges of my senses.

“Good evening, Little Father,” Harry purred. “The Bible is a nice touch.”

Scarrow held it up in one hand and smiled. “I thought so.”

“And if one might inquire as to the well-being of your loved ones, how does your flock? All tucked in safe and warm?”

“Safe, yes,” Scarrow murmured, narrowing his eyes, perfectly aware that he was being toyed with. I thought he’d add “safe from the likes of you,” but he resisted the urge. The Blue Sense started jittering around the exorcist, and his excitement struck me as every bit as optimistic as Harry’s. He believed they were evenly matched, and Father Scarrow was confident he could keep pace with any chase that Harry might give. I'd been on some of those chases, as the hare and willing prey. Unless Scarrow had some rockets affixed to his boots, it was no contest. Harry against a mortal was a bigger mismatch than his Ferrari versus my Buick.

If I knew Scarrow’s excitement, Harry did as well. It didn’t show on my Cold Company’s face as he stepped closer. “One wonders how they will manage without their good shepherd on this dreadful winter night, when the wind is enough to freeze one’s marrow and the chill positively chews away the cheery brightness of one’s soul,” Harry inquired.

“A wise shepherd keeps both eyes on the wolf,” Scarrow said, “and trusts the lamb to God’s hands.”

Point: Father Cheekyass. Scarrow in turn advanced on Harry. It was just two steps, but his chin was up, and it was enough to make an impression. The dogs went nuts in the back of Scarrow’s car, their breath fogging the glass, spittle hitting the window in front of snapping jaws. Harry held his ground, one hand on the door handle of the back of the hearse, but his smile faded into a tight twitch of lips. He inclined his head to accept a truce, but what I felt through the Bond was a shift; Harry had expected to be able to intimidate the holy man. Perhaps his earlier run-ins with priests had gone much differently. Ren Scarrow wasn’t a conventional man of the cloth. But then, I could have warned him about that.

Scarrow turned to me. “Did you bring better boots?”

Harry coughed to say told you so, or something with a similar sentiment but a lot more syllables.

I looked down at my Doc Martens. I could already feel the cold through the unlined leather. If I ever came back to Canada I’d buy a new pair of lined ones, but for now, I'd suck it up, or maybe just lose some toes. "I'll be fine."

“Snow’s up over your calves,” Scarrow said. “They don’t plow this road past the factory turn-in.”

“I’ll be fine,” I repeated.

“You’ve got a hole in the knee of your jeans,” he pointed helpfully.

“It matches the hole in your head,” I said. “Worry about your own knees, pervert.”

“I don’t want you to get frostbite.”

I opened my mouth to say something filthy about where the frost could bite him, but Mr. Merritt was still in the hearse idling behind me, and I already owed him close to a bazillion dollars for swears. “It’s barely frayed. Can we get on with this?”

“He shouldn’t come,” Scarrow said, indicating my Cold Company, who was reaching into the back of the hearse for something that looked like a big white sleeping bag. “His kind is not welcome.”

“Why don’t you plug your—“ I eyeballed Mr. Merritt, then glared down at the priest’s zipper to indicate what I imagined was a crampy man-vag. “Nose.”

Harry touched my elbow and handed me my backpack and the white thing. It was a snowsuit, the puffy one-piece kind that kids wear to build snowmen in the yard and hardcore outdoorsy types have for sightseeing in Antarctica. It had a thick black zipper that ran from the crotch to the neck. I examined it with all the lip-curled enthusiasm of Gordon Ramsey inspecting a grease pit that specialized in yesterday's coffee and cockroach turds.

Harry ignored my distaste and motioned for me to put it on while he explained, “I think what your lad means to say is, in the event that we should meet belligerent apparitions, Kinship of the Departed makes this trek a perilous one for me. While I think the possibility is a remote one, I appreciate his apprehension, though I shouldn’t like him to trouble himself with concern for my well-being.”

I shoved my boots into the leg holes of the one-piece suit, thinking if they got stuck I could use that as an excuse to ditch it. They slipped right through. I handed Harry my pink parka and slid my arms into the snowsuit, zipping it up to my neck. Harry tossed my coat into the back of the hearse, slammed the doors, and motioned at me to click up all the unnecessary, lifejacket-like buckles. I looked like the Michelin Man's wife and felt like Randy from A Christmas Story, hardly able to put my arms down and more than ready to whine about it. The shiny fabric went schlip schlip schlip between my thighs when I walked; I was really glad Batten wasn’t here to see and hear it. If he harbored any Mrs. Stay Puft Marshmallow Woman fantasies, those were going to remain vigorously unfulfilled by Yours Truly.

Scarrow fetched the dogs from his car, holding their leashes tightly as they kept all their attention turned towards Harry and made unhappy noises in the backs of their throats. Despite their anxiety, they kept their heads down and low, staying at Scarrow’s heels. Harry said a few quiet words to Mr. Merritt, who was to relax at a nearby coffee house for an hour or so and then circle back to pick us up here with hot beverages. I batted my lashes at Harry’s butler through the eye holes of my ski mask, who mouthed espresso and gave me a little questioning smile through the glass. I nodded rapidly and held up two fingers for a double shot. Mr. Merritt gave me a wink that reminded me of my Grandpa Matts before pulling away and heading for the canal bridge.

As we walked, Scarrow would give a tug on their leash and the dogs would shut up for a second, only to start warning us again; they did not like the fact that Harry was following us. He fell behind, keeping a safe distance, a well-dressed shadow at our backs. The ice-draped forest on either side of us pressed in.

“Are we there yet?” I asked, shoving my feet through the snow another three steps. “Dear Diary: We were not there yet. We’re never going to be there. Love, Marnie.” My toes were already numb, and the wind whipping snow against my eyes through the ski mask was pretty irritating, but thanks to Harry’s foresight, my body was warm in the snow suit. Now that the glossy fabric was damp, it went thwish thwish thwish, which was fractionally less annoying than schlip schlip schlip. Once we got to a more heavily-wooded area that blocked the wind, it let up enough for me to open my eyes past squinting.

As Scarrow had warned, we had come to the spot where the road was unplowed; the snow was at least a foot and a half deep, and the path looked like it went on forever. The encouraging bit was the ATV track in the snow up ahead; at least we weren’t the only ones who ever came out there. Positive thinking: if the ghosts murdered us, someone would find the bodies eventually. Agent de Cabrera would be so proud of me. I looked back from where we came and longed to see Mr. Merritt and the warm comfort of the hearse driving up the lane to rescue us.

There was an unhappy squawk in the trees as we trudged past.

Ren said, rather unnecessarily, “Ravens.”

“I live with a dead guy; me and carrion birds don't get along.”

“Three of them.” His breath fogged in front of us.

“So?”

“Three ravens together serve as a phantom vessel for the spirits of the departed if they cross the veil on purpose. A ghost has traveled from the other side to reach out to someone. Perhaps you, perhaps me, perhaps both of us together. Or perhaps your companion.”

“What a load of hogwash,” I said, glancing behind me to double check Harry’s reaction to the birds. Harry shook his head. No ghosts yet. “Where do you get this psychopomp crap?”

“It’s true.”

“Says which scientific journal?” I asked.

“Says my own powers of observation.”

“So the ravens told you they were actually a spirit in disguise,” I clarified.

“Not in so many words,” Scarrow said with a tolerant smile, as though I were the confused one.

“I got a word for you: 'Nevermore!'”

Harry coughed theatrically to cover a surprised laugh, and an affectionate tendril wrapped around me through our Bond.

“You’re a straight-up fruitcake, aren’t ya?” I said conversationally. “Like, escaped last year from a mental institution and are hiding out from the guys with the butterfly nets, that kind of fruitcake.”

“Now who’s dropping hogwash?”

“Look, holy dude, you can’t just say stuff and make it be true. For instance: despite appearances, that wild grape vine is actually a new species of hippopotamus.”

“You’re being stubbornly ridiculous.”

“No, I’m showing you what you sound like. If those three ravens — I only see two, by the way — are a spirit divided into three bird bodies, you prove to me that it’s true.” I had gotten two cups of popcorn and a large soft drink thrown at me the first time I'd seen The Crow in the theater and the bad guy had done his quick impression of the bird in the church. There's a bird that accompanies each revenant – a Debt Vulture – but it had nothing to do with supporting their UnDeath, except to hang around, waiting for it to end. I kind of felt bad for Harry's, whom we'd named Ajax, because that had to get boring as fuck after the first hundred or so years. It's not like they could do crosswords or play Peggle to pass the time.

“I could,” Scarrow said, “if we had more time, because I’ve got all my equipment. But we can’t be out here all night. We should visit the tunnel and get back before we freeze, yes?”

“What kind of goodies do you have in this backpack?”

“We want to record some EVPs, use full spectrum photography,” he explained. “We’re going to monitor EMF fluctuations. I’ve seen them go from eight to point-zero-three in the tunnel. I want you to see what Britney Wyatt saw.”

My mind flashed back on the canal, on her head-first plunge into the cold, dark waters, her last thoughts of Simon, her inability to struggle, her desperation to come up for air, and her sinking, sinking, sinking…

“MJ?” Harry said softly behind us, and I snapped out of it. A quiver of his discomfort slipped through our Bond, but my Cold Company tucked it away.

Father Scarrow said, “I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?”

“What did Britney Wyatt see?” I side-stepped.

“She mentioned several resident spirits in the tunnel. I’ve visited them myself.”

Simon said Scarrow had sent Britney away. “Did you go with her?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “She was using an Ouija board. I came on my own, with the dogs. It’s an excellent training ground.” He had something in his pocket all ready to go, and showed it to me.

“What is that, a digital recorder? Are you kidding me?” I stared up at the stars, seeking patience in the heavens. The Blue Sense reported that Renfield Scarrow was sincere, and that he truly believed what he was dishing.

“I’d simply approach the birds, ask questions of their spirit, and record their answer.”

I humored him for a moment. “Questions like, who were you in life? Why have you returned? Do you have a message from the Beyond?”

“Yes.”

“How do you propose blocking radio frequency contamination from the marine radios? Look where you are. We’re right on the canal near the twin flight locks. Ships are still going through until, what, the end of the month? Into December?”

“I haven’t asked, but…” He drifted off. “I get quite a lot of activity at the rectory as well.”

“You live on the Haulage,” I said. “That’s also on the canal, with the ships, and the locks, and the marine radios. Sorry, spanky, but I believe that’s too fishy to count as proof. Try again.”

“Very well,” he said tightly. “Take off your ski mask and show me that fat lip.”

“I’m not arguing that there are ghosts,” I repeated for the hundredth time. “Hell, I’m no longer claiming they can’t affect the physical realm, since I got viciously Twizzlered in Barnaby Nowland’s apartment. I can’t prove that was a ghost’s doing, and not…” I threw my gloved hands wide to demonstrate my helplessness. “I dunno, candy possessed by mischievous sugar sprites?”

“Well, now you’re being absurd,” Scarrow said.

“Only just now?” Harry said behind us, pushing his voice forward past the wind with his preternatural vocal talents. Thanks to his audiomancy, it sounded like he’d murmured it in my ear, close enough for me to hear the teasing tone.

“Okay.” I turned for a moment and stared into the woods near the place we’d heard the bird complaints. “Hey ravens, if you’re a spirit trying to make contact with us I invite you to do so.”

Scarrow gave me a long look. “You should be careful what you say. You don’t know who that is or what they want.”

I smirked. “I’m pretty sure that is nobody but a couple of birds, but if you want to find out, we’re going to need to communicate, right? And I’m not talking about random snippets of speech from the dudes on the ships.”

“I wonder what would happen, Marnie, if you had some faith.”

“You don’t know me,” I said. “I’m all about believing in stuff. I fall for all kinds of nonsense, like predictions by the weather man and promises men make when they’re horny. I have plenty of faith. Probably, I have too much faith. I have faith in the problem-solving magic of an Oreo cookie. I have faith in the restorative powers of frequent masturbation. I believe the Dark Lady and Her Consort tolerate me with the kind of loving resignation one reserves for housebreaking a puppy, most days, but I also believe that if I keep trying, everything will work out fine in the end. And I have faith, Father Scarrow, in that glorious, mysterious creature and his incredible prowess,” I said, cocking a thumb over my shoulder at Harry, who had stopped to turn his head to the west, staring into the woods. In profile, Harry looked like he was posing for a portrait: Dandy in Ice and Lace, perhaps, or Fopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I knew he sensed my blend of devotion and amusement, and I felt a preoccupied push of pleasure through the Bond. I had to bite my tongue so as not to implore: Behold the Face of Immortality! Isn’t he nifty-keen? It didn’t matter how many times I saw him, or witnessed his tricks and talents. Every single time, it got me. Instead of making a fool of myself, I told the priest, “I have no doubt that my Cold Company can provide the answers I lack, and will valiantly and effortlessly protect us from any unseen terror that’s lurking out here.”

“How charitable and flattering is my advocate,” Harry said. “Alas, I believe your observations are flawed, muffin.”

“Way to piss on my speech, Harry.” I sighed. “I was trying to be faith-y.”

When we started walking again, Scarrow asked, “May one ask what’s in your backpack?”

“I don’t have your fancy doodads and dangle-rods,” I side-stepped. I’d had Mr. Merritt get me an Ouija board from Toys 'R’ Us that afternoon, just for fun. I doubted it would work. Genuine scrying required a give-and-take element, blood or bone, an offering or sacrifice of some sort. Besides, the exorcist seemed not to like the idea of the Ouija very much, so it was mostly to needle him. I changed the subject. “Schenk told me you got booted by the church.”

“For my work with exorcisms, yes.”

“They didn’t like you taunting demons.”

“They didn’t like me disproving the relationship between demons and poltergeists.”

I waited for him to say more. Eventually his ego prodded him to reward me. “Current belief held by the Church is that a poltergeist is an angry ghost, held back from ascending to perfect peace by a demon,” he said. “This demon is usually controlled, in turn, by a witch practicing demonology via the lesser key of Solomon.”

“That jibes with current scientific theory in the preternatural biology community as well.”

“My own personal observations have disproved this.”

My personal observations, on the other hand, were exactly what I'd said they were. Nearly being sacrificed to one of those demons gave me strong opinions and keen insight into the subject. It also made me punch little old ladies right in the clambasket for doing it. The ring of Asmodeus in my front pocket seemed to grow warmer, although I was sure it was my imagination. “How so?”

“Places haunted by a poltergeist have resisted expulsion.”

“Maybe you suck at expulsion,” I suggested, remembering the ghoul of Danika Sherlock roasting in a pit of flames, a demon named Berith being cast from her corpse, feeling the infernal thing blow past me like the breath of Hell.

“No. I don’t.” He said it seriously, without a trace of egotism, and I believed him. “People tormented by a poltergeist often show no signs of possession, which would be typical in the demon-poltergeist-victim triad, if the church were always correct.”

“You seem to be, shall we say, not a big believer in the Church's inerrancy?”

“I’ve been searching a long time for what I call a self-determining poltergeist. They’re very rare, you realize. Most poltergeist situations that you preternatural biologists deal with are actually spirits trapped by lesser demons, weak demons, and are easily expelled.”

“But?”

“This spirit is old, powerful, and appears often. It’s strong, the strongest I’ve ever encountered outside of the MacKenzie poltergeist in the Covenanter’s Prison section of Greyfriars Kirkyard.”

We crested to the top of a little hill, the ground ahead sank and curved into the woods behind several piles of concrete chunks and boulders covered with snow caps. The trees here were mostly deciduous, chestnuts and maples naked of their leaves, some broken and tilted by this winter’s early blizzards.

“There’s a fair amount of psychic effluvia in this area.” Harry observed, looking down into the gulch. “And more than one disturbed spirit.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered. “I’ve got goose bumps in places I can’t mention in front of a priest.”

Ren’s brow quirked as his lips slid into the kind of smile I didn’t think anyone who'd taken a vow of celibacy, even if it had been revoked or recanted, should be allowed to indulge. Harry could smile like that. I wished Batten could smile like that. I'm pretty sure Asmodeus could turn that up to eleven when he put on his angelic aspect and needed to seal the deal on a soul-stealing seduction. But some defrocked dude who'd forsaken the pleasures of the flesh should absolutely, positively, no-fuckin’-way have worn a look that lewd. I almost broke into the giggles again, but Harry picked up on the run of my thoughts and soothed me without a word.

Scarrow said, “You grew up in Virgil, you said? Have you ever been here?”

“No, but many of my sisters have. And my little brother,” I said, glad that Wesley was not here. Kinship of the Departed could very easily overwhelm the new dead, and I didn’t need my brother convinced that he should try to join the spirit world. That wasn’t possible for revenants. Since bending his neck to Master Strickland in exchange for immortality, Wesley’s soul was earmarked with a different forwarding address, substantially farther south, metaphysically speaking.

We were hovering, and I felt their reluctance. Now that we were here to witness the dead, none of us wanted to, not even Father Skinnyjeans and his patient dogs. The train tunnel was barely in view; all we had to do was go down this frosty gravel path, around a little bend, and into that dark hollow. No biggie. I swallowed hard, and started down.

“All aboard, motherfuckers,” I said as I lead the way, “we’re taking the express train to creepyville.”

CHAPTER 23

“DON’T GET ME wrong,” I said, staring up at the bricked-in tunnel. To the left of a gated opening was a small, square hole in the wall, circled by a bunch of boner-related graffiti. “I don’t doubt that this place is lousy with ghosts, but that doesn’t mean—”

Something inside the tunnel moaned, and all the little hairs on the back of my neck tripped up in unison. The dogs whimpered and settled into a nose-down position. Wind. Just wind.

“Well, there's no point in all of us being eaten by a poltergeist, so I'll just-” I backed rapidly away from the hole in the wall and Harry hooked me by the elbow. My snow suit legs went schlllllllllip. “So I’ll just go first, shall I?”

“You are ever so brave, my pet,” Harry’s voice dripped sarcasm.

“I’m warning you guys,” I said, “if something jumps out of the dark while I’m halfway through this hole, I will pee. I will pee forever. And it'll be inside this stupid marshmallow suit, so I will die like some pee maggot float nobody ever wants in the Macy's parade.”

My knees crunched in the snow as I got down in front of the square opening in the wall. The stone was damp and slick, a revolting shade of grey-green. My suede gloves would definitely need to be dry-cleaned after this little excursion. I stuck my head in to look inside, and instantly drew out with a loud, “Nope!”

“Dear?”

“It’s bad in there,” I said, letting the tone of my voice and a shuddery little unghh describe what mere words could not. I did not wait for their encouragements or reprimands; I tried again, tucking my head in, holding until the jitters passed, tucking my shoulders in, waiting for some unseen horror to lunge out of the dark and eat me head first. When nothing did, I inched further, and was almost through when one of the dogs barked sharply; I jerked, losing my grip on the stone and tumbling the rest of the way in. I shot to my feet, assuming a karate stance. I’m sure any ghosts in the tunnel were mightily intimidated, even though I don’t know karate, and punching a ghost seems like it wouldn’t be a very effective deterrent.

Harry chuckled, which must have opened some sort of stress-busting floodgate for Father Scarrow, who guffawed loudly.

“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you both so hard.”

“My own darling, are you quite all right?” Harry said through his merriment, gliding forward toward the wall hole. “If I might suggest a course of action?”

“Not necessary,” I called, poking my head back out.

“Do you mean to say this concatenation of events—“

“Totally planned,” I fibbed. “Scaring off any wild animals and such.”

“As one does,” Harry said agreeably.

“Like Bear Grylls does,” I said. “You bet your ass.”

“What do you see?” Scarrow asked.

“A whole lot of fucking dark, since I'm inside a walled-off tunnel, at night, in a snowstorm, you cross-stroking wankbasket.” I dug out my phone and turned on the flashlight app, shining it into the depths of the tunnel. It was low, rounded, quiet-but-not, dark-and-darker, and it felt terribly unwelcoming. Some ass-clown had apparently been playing Pennywise, because there were broken balloon husks strewn on the ground. Rotted railroad ties were coated with a layer of glittering frost. The mud between the ties looked slippery, and there were footprints in it. Big ones. Big floppy clown shoes? “Because that’s exactly what I need, Brain. Invoke a Stephen King monster while I’m down here. I bet this suit don't float.”

The light from my phone illuminated thick moisture in the air that was probably, with my luck, full of mold spores and hanta virus.

“MJ?” Harry called. “What do you see?”

“I see nothing,” I concluded. “I see squat in a bucket of nada. Is that what I'm supposed to be seeing?”

“How precise is my darling,” Harry marveled.

“Fine. I see rather informative graffiti telling me to go fuck myself. Might do that later. Also, Big Ben was here,” I said. “That seems to be important, as it is repeated several times in various colors of spray paint. Maybe these are his footprints.”

“Anything useful, ducky?”

“Well, some contrary punk wants me to ‘party hard’ but also ‘get out while I still can’. Sure wish he’d make up his mind.” Harry made an impatient noise, and I moved my phone around to spread the light. “There are some frozen white mushrooms that I wouldn’t eat if you paid me in solid gold dildos. Bat guano. Some frayed rope. And a condom wrapper. Two.” I moved deeper into the tunnel. “There’s water to the left; I don’t know how deep it is, and I don’t want to. Old plastic water bottles. More rope. And a half a rusty handcuff.” I felt the corner of my upper lip peel back in a grimace. “And now I’m thinking there must have been some creepy clown gangbang porn filmed down here. Would you guys get your skinny asses in here, please?”

Harry reached for the iron gate across the doorway and it swung open at his touch. He was too much of a gentleman to point out that it wasn’t locked, and that I’d squished through the grim little crevice like a dollop of foul-mouthed frosting into the nastiest Twinkie ever for nothing.

I indicated the low doorway. “Mind yer melon. We’ll explore a bit, talk to some ghosts, get murdered, and make it home in time for Matlock, sound good?”

“Okay, we’re in,” Scarrow said, rather unnecessarily, bringing the dogs with him.

The wind picked up, slamming the gate hard. Scarrow and I jumped together, bumping shoulders. Harry’s reaction was the irritated twitch of his thrice-pierced eyebrow.

“From now on, nothing will go wrong,” I said.

The storm outside picked up all at once. Snow whipped into the tunnel through the bars on the gate and the little crawl hole, pattering to the floor.

“Except the blizzard,” I amended.

Thunder rolled overhead.

“And the thunder-snow,” I added.

At the far end of the tunnel there was a loud crash and a foomph, and the meager moonlight that had been there disappeared.

“And the snow caving in.” I turned up the brightness on my phone’s flashlight; it flickered and died. “Oh, come on.”

“We’re not alone,” Scarrow said. He pointed his flashlight into the darkness. “This way.”

“Sure, yeah, we should really go check on that oogy noise in the dark tunnel during a poltergeist outbreak. “ I frowned under my ski mask. “Meathead.”

Scarrow pointed to his chest. “You callin’ me a meathead?”

“It’s literally all I have left to say to you.” I glared and moved away from him, muttering under my breath, “Brings me to a haunted tunnel in the dead of night to get murdered in an ugly marshmallow exposure suit. Because that’s how I want my corpse to look.”

“How would you prefer to look when you die?” Scarrow asked.

“Less like a manatee.” I modeled the suit for him in a slow turn. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” One of the dogs yelped, and it echoed down the tunnel. “See? Fido agrees with me.”

Scarrow let the dogs off their leashes and they started sniffing around, wagging their tails, giving Harry a wide berth. I’d never seen dogs capable of ignoring a revenant before; Scarrow was, if anything good could be said of him, an excellent trainer. The priest got out various gear from his pack and started a sweep. He informed me that he was getting no EMF hits at all. I moved deeper into the tunnel, doing my best not to roll my eyes.

“Well, Harry?”

“Forgive me, ducky, I feel no presences with us at this time.” He swept the tunnel with a gaze full of distaste. “Above, I was certain that there were spirits, but now I sense nothing.”

One of the dogs was nudging something with his snout and made a snuffling noise. Frog and bat bodies littered the floor in the middle of the tunnel, frozen, just as Scarrow had said. Other, more professional preternatural scientists would use the term “teterrimous” to describe the pile of frozen frogs, but that’s just fancy talk for “foul and fucked up.”

My science kicked in. “Frogs don’t freeze in winter. The high glucose in their blood acts like antifreeze.” I squatted. “These poor things look deflated. And why did the bats not migrate to a more suitable cave or tunnel if they couldn’t hibernate here?”

Scarrow was staring at Harry with shrewd eyes, head cocked to one side, calculating. “Britney was able to see three specific, reoccurring ghosts in this tunnel; Old Man with Flowers, Train Engineer with Hat, and Limping Boy. Perhaps these spirits do not like the atmosphere in the tunnel tonight.”

Harry drew himself up to full height and gave an insulted sniff.

“This shit is five different kinds of crazy,” I said, checking my phone battery. I had charged it fully before coming; it was so flat now it wouldn't even display the low battery warning. I tucked it in one of the zippered pockets of the snow suit, took my backpack off my shoulder, propped a knee in front of me so I could put my bag on it and not the icky ground, and rummaged. “It’s a good thing I brought Smarties; I’m gonna need the extra smarts.”

“That’s what you need,” Scarrow said. “Sugar.”

“I brought lots of candy. I stopped at the Bulk Barn before we came. Candy helps me think. I’ve got Fuzzy Peaches, Hot Lips, Bottle Caps, Pop Rocks. Why don’t you want to use an Ouija board?” I held out a candy bar. “Big Turk?”

Father Scarrow came to an abrupt halt. “I told you not to bring one of those here.”

“Got a problem with Turkish delight?”

“You brought an Ouija board.”

“Would I do that?” I said, offering him a little box of candy. “Nerds?”

“If you use a scrying board you throw open a portal to the other side loudly enough to alert every single spirit in the area to our presence.”

“And the poltergeist responds by taking a double shot of crazy?”

“We must be subtle in our approach,” Scarrow said.

“Tell her that,” I snarled, rolling up my ski mask to my brow ridge. “Are these bruises subtle?”

“There’s no way to tell who’s going to come, but if you’re asking for spirits, you’re going to get one,” Scarrow told me. “You just have to hope that the right one is listening.”

“You are,” Harry paused to weigh his words dramatically, “misinformed.” Harry turned away from Scarrow as though he had expected nothing better. “There are ways to contact a specific spirit, ways that would never have been imparted to the likes of you.”

“The likes of me,” Scarrow repeated, and I heard the edge creep into his voice. “You, a man who made a pact with a devil, dare to look down on me?”

Harry allowed himself a smile of superiority. “Kinship of the Departed imparts to the revenant answers to questions you would not have the wisdom to ask. The dusky wings of death part to give the revenant a glimpse of the enigmas of the soul and spirit—“

“The soul and spirit are one and the same,” Scarrow said.

“I have no doubt that you believe so,” Harry parried, happy to dance with the holy man, “but you are not entrusted with the many secrets of the dead, priest, mysteries you are neither worthy of nor entitled to.”

“Boys,” I said. “Stop cock-fencing and focus. This is about speaking with the ghosts. You two are going to have different approaches.”

“We need to be careful,” Scarrow warned, making the clear decision to ignore Harry’s taunts. “Inviting spirits parts the veil. Once parted, you can’t just change your mind. It’s like hosting a party. You may very well get uninvited guests bent on causing trouble.”

“Well, if assholes crash your party, you call the cops. What do you do if a rowdy spirit crashes your invite?”

Scarrow shook his head. “That’s precisely my point. There are no ghost cops who will deal with the intruder.”

“Can’t your dogs scare them off?”

“My dogs find ghosts, they don’t chase them off.” The dogs in question didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. One had settled in a bored sit near the gate. The other was lapping grungy water from the rill along the side of the railroad ties.

“So how do you dismiss an unwanted ghost?” I said, and the Blue Sense abruptly roared to life.

I had to work hard to keep the sudden insight off my face, and Harry turned his back on the priest to give me a surely-you-felt-that stare. And I had. Father Scarrow most certainly did not want us to dismiss any ghosts, which was odd, considering he was passing himself off as an exorcist, and getting rid of unwanted spooks, specters, and spirits was pretty much the definition of the job. Sending lost souls to the light and to perfect peace, that’s what he’d always claimed. Saving those who could be saved.

I tested him. “So, no scrying board?”

“No. Absolutely not.” One of the dogs gave a nervous yelp at the anxiety in his master’s voice, and Scarrow settled him with a soft noise. “Too dangerous.”

Harry coughed into his gloved hand and read my intentions through the Bond. He gave me a slow nod and a broad, theatrical wink. I didn’t know exactly what he had in mind, but knowing my Cold Company, I knew it wouldn’t be subtle.

I asked, “If we do run across ghosts here, we should talk to them and then… not release them?” Into the light and eternal peace where they belong. Right, holy man?

The priest struggled with his apprehension for a moment then dismissed my question with an irritated wave of his hand. He pulled a little rag doll out of his pack and shook it a little. Its red yarn hair fell into place around accusing eyes of brown bead.

“Whatcha got there,” I asked, “Raggedy Damned?”

“A lure, if you like. The last time I was here a child’s spirit was lingering, probably the one Britney called Limping Boy. I might entice him to appear with this.”

“We’re not here to play with creepy dolls or the ghosts of children. We’re here to talk to John Briggs-Adsit,” I said, but what he was doing had gruesome appeal; it was almost mesmerizing. The doll had arresting beaded eyes, and its neck had lost some stuffing, so the head hung askew, tilted to one side as if it had been hanged. Hearing a goofy pitch creep into my voice, I said, “No. Don’t do it.” I let out an involuntary meep of delighted faux-horror. “Don’t put the dolly in the mud!”

Scarrow sighed at my theatrics and set the rag doll against the brick wall in a relatively dry spot. “We can just leave this here with an EMF meter and video and you don’t have to worry about it. My side project.”

“Dear Diary: Father Scarrow put the dolly in the mud,” I whispered to myself and left him to his project, following where Harry was strolling, waiting for my Cold Company to make his move. He was holding the edges of his coat close to his body so they wouldn’t brush against anything dirty. I stood for a moment in my muck-smeared coverall with my arms crossed and just looked at him, smiling. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

Harry did a charming half-turn, letting his coat fan out like an opera cape, and I sensed it was time for the big show. “You know, something has been niggling at my conscience.”

You have a conscience? I thought, and tried not to grin. “Oh?” I prodded helpfully. “Would this have anything to do with that thing that we were discussing before? That you’re super sorry about and need to confess?”

“Oh, yes.” He performed a proper drama-king sigh. “If only I could unburden my soul’s darkest secrets and release this inner turmoil that weighs upon me…” He paused to give the priest the long side-eye.

Scarrow clearly wasn’t buying it. “You’re not asking me to hear your confession, surely? Here? Now?”

“One wonders when one would have a better opportunity, Little Father,” Harry said. “Do you not trust my pipistrelle to watch the dolly for you? It does not seem an arduous task, no more so than her usual ganderflanking about.”

I scowled at him and shuffled closer, my snowsuit going schlerp schlerp schlerp, having added grit and muck to the wet. “Ganderflanking better be a good thing, dead guy,” I said under my breath. “Or I will hug you like Swamp Thing.”

“Besides, you may, in fact, have a point, Mr. Scarrow,” Harry went on as though he hadn’t heard me. “Kinship of the Departed may be inhibiting the spirits here, instead of inducing them to come forward. If the two of us were to step outside with the dogs, we could clear the atmosphere for MJ and she would have a better chance at contacting Captain Briggs-Adsit.” The gaze he leveled at the priest was a challenge. “Of course, if you wish not to hear the darkest secrets of a creature of my advanced age, I would completely understand; few would have the stomach for it.”

“Balls,” I interjected. “He obviously means balls. Or maybe he's like Elian, and prefers the term huevos or cojones.”

Scarrow considered his EMF reader in one hand and the digital recorder in the other.

I repeated sadly, “The Ferengi would say you haven't got the lobes. I know a bunch of ways to call you a dickless chickenshit, dude, even if my Klingon is rusty.”

Scarrow scowled and slapped the device into my gloved palm. “Fine. Take readings. Listen, this is what an anomaly sounds like.” He pressed a button that said “Test” and it made a little noise like voof-whoosh. “Keep the video running. Do temperature sweeps. If you get a drop of more than ten degrees—“

“You guys are right outside,” I soothed. “What could go wrong?”

Harry hesitated at that and gave me a worried frown; he hadn’t considered what I might actually do when he’d offered to distract the priest. Now, he wasn’t so sure. I shooed him away.

The minute the iron gate closed behind the dogs, Scarrow, and Harry, I abandoned the digital voice recorder and the exorcist’s video equipment, and took the EMF reader and my backpack to the dark end of the tunnel where the snow blockage was settling in packed clumps to allow scant moonlight to filter in.

At this end, the railroad ties and the ground both sloped down until they disappeared under the water. I unzipped the bag and took out the Ouija board, putting it on the ground. The thrifty Mr. Merritt had saved some of Lord Dreppenstedt’s money and got the off-brand one; a “Wee-Gee Fun Board.” I set the EMF reader on an angle next to the wall. There didn’t seem to be any anomalies, but that wasn’t really my focus.

I knew Harry wanted me to attempt to make contact with John Junior, and he was probably right, but the temptation to try what Britney had tried, to see what Britney had seen, was just too strong. Perhaps John was the key, but Mama-Captain was the big fucking problem here. She would have to be dealt with. I pulled out my canister of Morton’s salt and drew a generous protective circle in the mud. Next came the spray paint. Mr. Merritt had bought me glow-in-the-dark in sparkly pink, because apparently he thinks I’m a twelve-year-old girl. Considering I was wearing a My Little Pony nightshirt the other night, I supposed that was fair.

I shook the can and sprayed “John Briggs-Adsit has swamp dick,” on the wall. Then I added, “John’s syphilis is so bad, it has crabs.” I underlined the it, in case anyone got confused. Then, “John’s syph-crabs have the Clap. Double-Extra Clap. Got it from the whores. Whore Clap.” Okay, so I'm no Banksy. I was still sincere.

I felt like my inflammatory statements needed more oomph, but the thick air was filling up with aerosol propellant and I could barely breathe as it was. I started humming and singing, “Mother Briggs-Adsit… I’m mocking your baby… I’m being disrespectful… Hey, lady… do you hear me, Mama-Captain?” It was a wonder I hadn't gotten a songwriting contract from a record label. This was some catchy stuff. I decided to go back to what had worked in Nowland's apartment, set to the jaunty tune of, “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “Ol' Johnny boy, your broken toy,” clap clap clap clap! “dicked every whoooooore in Jersey...” There may have been hip thrusting for emphasis.

There was a sound at the entrance of the tunnel, and I squinted to see if the boys had been drawn to the yard by my milkshake. I didn’t see anything until my eyes fell on the rag doll.

It wasn’t sitting against the wall anymore; it was laying face down with its little cloth legs spread. I didn’t take my eyes off of it as I squatted by the Wee-Gee Fun Board box, removed a glove, and ran my thumbnail around the lid to break the paper seal. I took the board out and unwrapped the plastic on the planchette, all without taking my eyes off the muddy doll.

Its fabric dolly face tilted like a snake rearing up. I felt my eyes go wide. The doll’s face was streaked with mud in a grotesque parody of tears, or maybe the lead singer in a Scandinavian death metal band. It tilted an inch to look at me.

“It’s not looking at me,” I whispered to myself. “It has beads for eyes.”

Like an eel making a slow turn, the dolly swam through the mud until it was a slow little cloth torpedo aimed right at me, then stopped and waited.

“Oh, is that right?” I asked. “You mad, bro? You wanna go?” I put the spray paint down on the crumpled backpack and made come-at-me fingers at the dolly, totally channeling Morpheus from The Matrix. “Good luck with that. You’re a toy. I’m a fucking freight train of disaster in a tunnel full of dead shit. Wait, what was my point, there?” The doll jerked forward like a fencer feinting. I squealed a little, grabbed the planchette, and pointed it to the HELLO position on the board. “Is that you, Mama-Captain? You’ve smacked me around enough today. Hold onto your spectral titties and get ready for a craptastic shitstorm of magic.” I stuck a hand into my backpack to retrieve my sage, a match, and a toothpick. “We end this now.”

The air began to swim, and I wondered if I was just high from the aerosol in the spray paint can, or if there were more ghosts wafting around. I didn’t have to wonder long. One I took to be Tall Man with Flower came forward from the miasma, and then dissipated. The EMF reader was set to go voof-whoosh in the event of an anomaly, but it went bee-boop instead. I didn’t have instructions for bee-boop. I had been waiting for voof-whoosh. What the hell did bee-boop mean?

The air got colder in front of me so I lowered my ski mask; my breath coming from the nose holes fogged. I hurriedly struck the match and lit the sage, smudging the air to rid it of any angry, dark entities. Several tendrils of the ghostly vapor shied away from the sage smoke, while others reached out for it. I kept one eye on them and one eye on the dolly that was again creeping my way. Belatedly, I wished that I was part chameleon so I could swivel my eyes in different directions.

“Holy rolling shitballs,” I whispered. “How many of you misty jaggoffs are there? Listen, don’t you know you’re supposed to go into the light? This is not the place for you.”

A three-headed blob formed in the haze in front of me, and at first I thought it was Asmodeus; it did not solidify and start mocking me, however. I began reciting the first spell to come to mind, since I was really flying by the seat of my pants. Tossing the burning sage down beside the board, I pricked my thumb with the toothpick and flicked blood onto the GOODBYE, then spritzed a little paint on the back of the planchette.

“Dread Aradia, I’m Your home / Write Your lessons in my tome / Make me crafty, make me keen / Take possession, Holy Queen.”

The blob parted to reveal a small spirit that moved with a limp, and the dolly shot forward like a striking rattlesnake.

With a fervent burst of power, I hurried my tongue and blurted, “Mighty Hecate, Morbid Flower / Fill this vessel with Your power / amplify inflamed remarks / burn them with these farewell sparks.”

I heard my last words come back at me with the backdraft and realized that “amplify” and “inflamed” were bad choices. I grabbed my backpack and bolted past the burning sage as the Wee-Gee Fun Board ignited. At the last second I noticed the “flammable” and “combustible” and “do not use without ventilation” warnings on the paint can, saw the flames react to my spell with a great lick into the air, thought fuckanut, and took a running leap toward the entrance. I didn’t get far before the can exploded with a healthy, mystically-magnified bang and a violent shove of air against my back. I belly-flopped, covering my head with my arms. The spell forced the blast up and out, expanding in all directions. The entire tunnel shuddered, and little stones began to rain down, dusting from above, and another minor avalanche sounded like it was collapsing through the overhead aperture.

There was a loud, splintering crack from the far end of the tunnel, and my warning bells started ringing louder as a support beam groaned. I launched to my feet, threw myself against the gate to slap it open, grabbed the iron bars, and sprang forth into the night; I flipped with almost ballerina-style grace in a perfect spin. If I hadn’t been on fire, it might have been fancy.

I went headfirst into a nearby snow pile, rolled twice, and ended up face-down and spread-eagled like the doll. I picked my face up out of the snow only to see Scarrow’s small, rough hands cupping snow directly into my eyes.

“Ah!” I sputtered. He began packing it in the back of my head, smacking, smacking, and plunging my face into the snow. I squawked angrily. “What the glorious fuck?” I cried, muffled by the snow that was getting crammed up my nose.

“The back of your ski mask was on fire.”

“Oh.” I patted the back of my head with my bare hand. “Is that why I smell burning hair?”

Scarrow didn’t wait for Harry to help me; he hauled me up by my elbow. “What the hell did you do in there?”

I was going to snap, “my job, ass-hat,” except talking shit to suspiciously animated dolls is really not my job, here or at home. I pointed behind me, jaw working, and ended up with, “Limping Boy started it.” I explained about the ghosts, and the spray paint, and the spell, and the Ouija board.

“He was trying to play with you,” Scarrow yelled. “That’s what he does. He drags the doll around in the mud.”

My lips formed a perfect O of understanding. “Well, the doll was looking at me funny.”

Scarrow gave an exasperated snarl and stormed back into the tunnel, presumably to see if his equipment was salvageable. I waited in my blackened snow suit, brushing off the ashes and dust, squirming under Harry’s disapproving gaze, not quite able to meet it. There was a squawk in the trees that sounded like laughter. “Hey, look, three ravens. Wonder — heh heh — if that’s a spirit from beyond the veil. Like Scarrow said. What do you think, eh? Those pesky ravens. I should, uh…” I kicked some snow. Beat up and partially charred, my boots were starting to look a little worse for wear. “Should we show Scarrow the three ravens?” My voice trailed off and I snuck a peek up at Harry’s face.

“You blew up a tunnel,” Harry said stiffly.

“Well, if arson isn’t the answer, I just don’t understand the question. Sorry.”

“You blew up a tunnel,” he repeated, “because a doll looked at you.”

I sucked my molars and shoved my suede glove back on. The fingertips were shredded and still smoked a little. I held my hand up, wiggled my fingers to show him. He did not look amused. “Relax,” I ordered. “I didn’t blow up the whole thing. Just the back end. Nobody needs the back end. And, technically, I didn't blow it up. I caused a small explosion, and it collapsed. That's totally different.”

Scarrow returned from retrieving his things and bellowed, “It’s ruined. Everything’s ruined.”

“Hey, your shit was broken before,” I said, pointing at the smoking remains of the EMF device. “That thing didn’t go voof-whoosh; it went bee-boop. I wasn’t trained for bee-boops!”

“The tunnel.” He shook the blackened rag doll. “You’ve all but destroyed it!”

“It’s hardly busted at all. And I’m not sorry!” I said. “That was a fetid trench of trapped souls wallowing in misery.”

“Was?” Scarrow choked.

“And you, you clownshit-crazy asshole, were keeping those spirits here to dance at your whim. Do you enjoy madly plundering graves and hearts and tunnels and underpants? Because I think you’re a Grade-A wankminstrel.”

“What do you mean, 'keeping them,' ducky?” Harry's attention was immediate and intense, a bird of prey spotting a young rabbit alone in a wide, grassy meadow.

“Well, that’s the best news,” I said. “I learned how to dismiss ghosts using a ten dollar knock-off Ouija board. It works, and it’s really super easy, too. Sometimes, even I’m amazed at my drive-by genius. Like, poof, they’re gone. In fact, I saw the three ghosts Britney mentioned — Tall Man with Flower, Train Engineer, and Limping Boy — and sent them all across the veil.” I frowned. “Didn’t see Mama-Captain, though. Or John. Oh, hey, did you grab my Wee-Gee Fun Board while you were in there?”

“You are a lunatic,” Scarrow said quietly, staring down at his dogs in shock, like he couldn’t quite make the gears turn in his brain anymore.

“So, it’s burned, then? That’s what I figured.”

“The sound of your voice is like a death knell to any sanity I have remaining,” the exorcist declared, and one of the dogs growled in response to his irate tone.

“Hey, now, you be nice,” I warned, mildly disturbed that I was finding him significantly hotter now that he was livid with me. “Or I’ll come to the rectory with a new Ouija board and say GOODBYE to all your soldiers. Should probably do that anyway. Won’t be able to sleep knowing they’re stuck here and you’re using them. Using formerly-human subjects for your experiments is pretty fuckin' evil, dude, and definitely on the Mad Scientist Checklist.”

Scarrow wrapped the leashes tightly around his right hand, again and again, while his knuckles turned color. Harry must have sensed the threat before I did, because the Blue Sense had gone quiet for me with all the commotion. Harry stepped easily between me and the priest, and gave him a calming cluck of his tongue. “The hour is late.”

Scarrow did not reply; maybe he didn’t trust himself to speak.

Harry said, “I believe you should say good night now, Little Father, and return to your ill-kept flock.”

Scarrow squeezed his eyes shut and briefly looked like he was trying to pass a kidney stone. There was a moment when I thought he might actually disregard the danger of the revenant standing there, though Harry’s eyes had slipped from cashmere grey to warning silver, and his fangs were fully extended. Then Scarrow pulled on his dogs and they all moved past us, collars jingling. Harry and I listened to the brisk-paced crunch of his boots on snow all the way back up the hill and into the distance.

I shoved my mostly-gloved hands in the pockets of the snow suit. “He took his dolly and went home.”

“A fairly amusing observation, my love.”

“I don’t think he’s going to invite me over to play with his doodads and dangle-rods anymore.”

Harry showed me a playful smile. “I’m sure I can find other toys for you to play with, my pet.”

I perked up. “Like grenades?”

My Cold Company chuckled and yanked at the bottom of my ski mask to pull it back down over my bruised chin, a warm thread of affection with something decidedly hotter and more intimate lurking beneath. “You have been known to give them stranger nicknames. Home and to bed, ducky.”

CHAPTER 24

I LOWERED THE ice pack from my forehead and said, “I do not want to see my parents, Harry.”

“Well, you’re going to.” There was no flexibility in his tone. It was an out-and-out command.

I felt Mr. Merritt go still beside me, and the sound of pouring tea slowed to a dribble. I glanced up at him and we exchanged an oh-reeeeeaaallly eyebrow lift that hurt my head, before he withdrew from the Winter Room, leaving the tea trolley behind. The man made no sound as he left, for which my head was grateful.

I indulged in some shortbread and studied Harry from across the room. “You made Combat Butler uncomfortable.”

“I do wish you’d stop referring to him by that ludicrous sobriquet.”

“It’s no more ludicrous than suggesting I waltz into the pit of vipers that is my parents' home.”

“Nonsense, a waltz would be inappropriate.” He poked a shortbread biscuit, pushing it around the plate. “A square bashing, perhaps.”

I leaned my cheek on my fist. “A what, now?”

“A military parade, my darling. If you don’t mind terribly, pick a march and do it soon.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Do you not trust my judgment, my pet?” Harry asked, toying with a biscuit he wouldn’t eat, brushing crumbs off the plate and onto the floor. After playing coy with his gaze, he met my eyes. “Your father is unwell. I am advising you to make peace with him on the off chance that his condition worsens and you lose the opportunity to do so.”

“How do you know he’s not well?” I asked, and then answered my own question. “Oh, right, they let you in.” I shouldn’t have been surprised by Harry’s audacity. He could be as subtle as the fall of night when the situation called for a delicate approach, but give Harry an obstacle to tackle, especially on my behalf, and he was a battalion all by himself.

“How ill are we talking?” I asked.

“He suffered a stroke, and not a small one.”

And nobody told me. Not even Carrie. I struggled to put into words my frustrations to the one person who already understood exactly how I felt. “You know, technically, I am still part of the family.”

“Of course you are.”

“I’m still his daughter.”

“And he wishes to see you.”

“Whaaaaaaaat?” I was afraid to believe that in case it turned out not to be true, but saw no deception on Harry’s face, and felt only sincerity through the Bond. “You’re sure?”

Harry nodded.

“What about my mother?”

“Oh, ducky,” Harry said with a sympathetic sigh, “why must you ask me questions to which only dreadful answers are possible?”

I tried to remain stubborn and sulky, but couldn't. Harry picked up on my crumbling resolve through the Bond and reminded me, “You did promise me.” He left me a single unblinking moment for any final retort, and then rang for Mr. Merritt to bring the car around.

I dressed slowly, dragging my feet on my way to the hall, taking my time zipping my parka, pretending to fumble with my gloves. Harry ignored my stalling techniques, shrugging into his long coat, tossing his scarf around his throat, and going out to the car without giving my delay even the slightest chiding.

Mr. Merritt offered me the ski mask. “It’s only a little singed.”

“I like your positive spin on things,” I said.

“Perhaps your visit will go well, madam.”

I sighed at him in reply. “And maybe doves will fly out of my nostrils, spreading peace and love to the world! They’re nasal love doves!”

“If you’d care to swear, madam, I could overlook it this once.”

“A free swear?” I brightened. “Boy, I’m gonna have to think about that one. I don’t wanna waste it on a 'shit' or 'fuck.' Oh, sweet, fancy stumblefucks, did I just waste it on that lame-ass shit?”

Mr. Merritt chuckled. “If you did, madam, I certainly did not hear it.”

I wanted to hug him, but thought that might be pushing it too far with his decorous reserve. I slid the mask over my bruised face and shot him a salute before turning out of the front door.

The hedgerow and cedars offered a wind break in front of the driveway, but the storm had shoved drifts in wavy mazes across the flagstone. I dawdled on my way to the car, pretending I had to tromp through the drifts, the thick snow bogging down my forward motion. Eventually, I made it to the passenger seat, climbed in, buckled up, and brooded for the entire drive from Niagara-On-The-Lake to Virgil. As the terrain started looking more and more like home, my guts began to knot, and when Harry finally turned into the driveway, my hands and feet went cold and numb.

Harry made an unhappy noise and patted me on the arm, but made no move to evict me from the car. I was going to have to do this all on my own, like it or not. My money was on “not.”

I put off getting out of the hearse under the pretext of texting Carrie. Harry fussed with his scarf but said nothing. His fingers began a smoothing ritual along his pierced eyebrow.

“I’m not ready yet,” I said. “I have to inform my sister I’m going to Mum’s. She’d never forgive me if I didn’t give her the gossip first.”

Carrie’s text asked: Need me?

I replied: Nah. I’m tough like old cheese.

It took Carrie only a second to text back: You’re exactly like that.

“You’re stalling, love,” Harry said gently.

I didn’t look up from my phone, but my texting finger stopped poking. “Can you blame me?”

Harry’s hand landed on my leg and he gave me an encouraging pat. “The sooner we get this over with, the better you’ll feel.”

I chewed my lip. “When we get back to North House, will you make some brownies?”

“If you’re a good girl,” Harry teased, flashing me a hint of fang in his smile.

“Don’t you dare bite me in my mother’s driveway, mister.”

“How now, my sprite, have you become so ashamed of me? I spent five years feeding from my beloved pet in this very house.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, opening the car door. “Don’t remind my mother of that.”

My parents' home was an unassuming brick bungalow surrounded by soft fruit farms, with four long greenhouses in the back, and a second house for the migrant farm workers who come up in the spring. In November, that structure stood empty, and the farms on both sides were quiet. There were only two lights on in the main house; the one where the TV room was, and the front hall light, which illuminated the windows in the steel storm door. My heart got heavy; nobody had put up the Christmas lights along the road-facing side of the house. Were they not celebrating? Was no one willing to do the job Dad usually did when he was well? I had five sisters, four of whom still lived in the Niagara region. Not one of them could be bothered to string some multi-colored lights for the old man?

I abandoned my ski mask on the front seat and tucked my hair behind my ears, touching my cheek delicately to check the soreness there. It was no longer throbbing, but it was painful to touch. The visible proof that life was kicking the crap out of me would no doubt reaffirm my mother’s opinion that I was walking the wrong path, and had been for some time. The path from the car to the door was plenty wrong enough for me.

My mother was standing at the door when we got there, one hand still resting on the knob as though she wasn’t committed to keeping the door open. She hadn’t aged; she never did. Yoga, a farmer’s diet, and excellent genes kept my mother eternally forty; she was a wiry fifty-five. She’d swept her long, white hair back in a ponytail with a plaid scrunchie that was probably left over from my teens. From behind bifocals, she stared me down as I approached, taking in my black eye and fat lip without surprise. I took a deep breath and decided to launch a preemptive forward attack.

“Dad had a stroke. When?” I demanded without preamble. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone call?”

My mother dropped her eyes. Her ballerina-style house slippers became the object of fascination.

Harry stood framed by the open doorway, the porch light illuminating a veritable blizzard behind him. My mother hesitated silently. Harry inclined his head to acknowledge that he accepted her distaste with regret. Then he swung his full attention past the coat rack in the direction of the TV room. “Good evening, Roger. Might I come in again?”

“No,” my mother spoke up, her tone stony. “He’s had enough of your company.”

Harry again nodded to acknowledge her. “Begging your pardon, Mrs. Baranuik, but it is Roger’s permission I need, and his that I now seek.”

“You upset him enough the first time.”

“How quickly you forget that I am perfectly capable of gleaning his emotions. I assure you, madam, whether you like it or not, your husband is quite eager to see me again.”

I moved forward so I could see past her, and my mother wilted backward. Dad was in a portable bed that I’d never seen before. They’d changed the TV room into a convalescent space for him, and on either side of the bed were tables stacked with books and pens and magazines, remote controls, prescription bottles, and empty glasses. The television was tuned into the weather in Buffalo, and I wondered if they were expecting either Claire or Margot to return home from their various travels via the Buffalo airport.

My father wet his lips with a swipe of tongue, and his brow furrowed. “Lor—” He took a deep breath while I held mine, and then he tried again. “Lord Guy Harrick Dreppenstedt, you are welcome in my home.”

Since another invitation was needed, I assumed that my father had uninvited Harry after he left the last time, probably at my mother’s insistence. Harry did not rush his entrance, nor was he so ungentlemanly as to cast a smug smile at my mother. He merely crossed the threshold like a shadow falling across the room.

“I thank you,” Harry said, inclining his head, “and accept your kind invitation. Would you allow me to once again approach your bedside?”

My father nodded, his eyes darting to his water glass. Harry obliged without being asked, brought the glass, and angled it so the straw reached dad’s lips. When dad’s thirst was quenched, Harry set the glass carefully on the nearby table, then tucked his long coat under him gracefully as he sat in the wooden chair next to the bed.

“The house is quiet tonight. What a blessing. How well I do remember the days it was not always so.” Harry did not look back at me, but I felt his desire to have me closer to him, so I ignored my mother’s icy glare and went to the bedside.

My father was a frail imitation of the man he’d once been; where my mother had barely changed in the years I’d been away, my father was nearly unrecognizable. There was more than a stroke going on, here. More than the drink, too, I imagined. Knowing him, he’d heard a diagnosis and ignored it, avoiding the doctors and treatments. Reluctant to feel the answers, I balled my gloved hands and crammed them into the pockets of my parka.

Harry went on, “How perfectly terrible it must be, sir, to be in your present condition and surrounded by six Baranuik women—six! — and unable to defend oneself.”

“Tor…ture,” my father said with difficulty.

“Oh my, yes, of course it is, I do not doubt this. You are a beleaguered wanderer in an uncharted territory of Hell, a soldier with neither weapons nor armor, an explorer without a compass, besieged on all fronts by shrews and sirens, harpies and harridans.” Harry showed my father a dark look full of meaning that earned him an enthusiastic snort of agreement. “Dark Lady knows I have enough trouble with just the one, carrying on the way she does, always fussing and flailing about.” Harry’s lips made a little moue of complaint about me, and he shook his head sadly. “Sunday dinners, now that the girls are grown up, must be deafening. Every ounce of my masculine patience cringes on your behalf. You have my profound sympathies.”

One half of my father’s lips curled into a wavering, unpleasant smile and he exhaled in several sharp bursts; I realized he was laughing.

I sighed. “Harry, don’t tire him out with your jibber jabber.”

“And lo, I have thoughtlessly and insensitively brought the seventh back to darken your door. Soon you will again witness the inevitable tirade of your eldest; much like the inelegant ramblings of a madwoman, it will go on and on with neither logic nor limitation.” His eyes were heavy-lidded with teasing affection. “I do hope you will forgive me for not coming alone. Only, I thought you might like to see her.”

“Not… hear her,” my father said, and half his face smiled again.

Harry said, “Just so.”

“Hey!” I squawked.

“Hush… you.” Dad’s eyes settled on me, and he sighed heavily, a satisfied sound. The Blue Sense wiggled to attention to reveal his relief at seeing me; he had thought I wouldn’t come. My mother slipped from the room in obstinate silence.

I crossed my arms over my chest, mollified a little by his teasing. It had been ages since my dad had joked with me. I rolled my eyes at him. “I get the hint. I’ll sit here and be quiet.”

Harry affected a shocked gape. “Silenced by two words! Your father must teach me this blessed magic.”

I stuck my tongue out at them. Harry beamed, and released a dollop of contentment through the Bond at me; he was enjoying himself, and the fact that I was loosening up.

Dad pointed at me and frowned. “Face.”

I touched my fat lip. “Oh, that. A ghost gave me a swift kick in the kisser and whapped me with some licorice. It was a whangdilly of a fight, all right, but I’m still kicking ass and sucking wind.” I made two fists to display to my father my balls-out enthusiasm. Then I did a flex and growl that would have made any of the more flamboyant 80’s era WWE wrestlers proud. I'm amazed my muscles didn't totally blow out the sleeves of my jacket. Dad wheezed something that sounded like amused approval.

“We’ll sing an ode to your delusional greatness some other time, shall we?” Harry murmured. The teasing smile he sent me was irksomely beautiful, which any other time would have caused some heavy breathing. Tonight, standing beside my father’s sickbed, with my mother lurking stonily somewhere nearby, it merely lifted my mood and reminded me that I wasn’t always the screw up everyone thought I was.

Dad tried to roll his eyes at me and only one made the full trip. He motioned at a stack of Moleskine notebooks beside his bed. I moved to hand him a pencil and he shook his head and jabbed a finger at them.

“You want these?” I asked, and offered him the top two. He waved them away.

“Your father would like you to have those,” Harry said without looking at me; there was a subtle shift in the Bond and I felt Harry attempting to shut me out. He smiled at Dad and laid one cool, pale hand atop my father’s.

I shifted through the books. “These aren’t empty. There’s writing in these, dad. It’s your work…”

“He knows,” Harry said, still not looking at me. “Your mother will have a plastic bag in which to carry them. You should excuse us now; Roger wishes to speak with me in private.”

I took the hint and went to sit at my mother’s kitchen table, smelling fried sauerkraut, Oktoberfest sausage, and potatoes with onion. Harry and I weren’t staying for their late dinner, but she insisted on feeding me something. The Blue Sense reported her feelings of reluctant duty, like I was a stray cat she only fed because to do otherwise would mean death. When she put a heaping plate of her winter fry-up in front of me, I reached for the salt. She made a disapproving little hum that made my hand pause. The fact that my mother’s little disapproving hums still worked so well grated my second-to-last nerve. I picked up the salt shaker—shaped like a little grey owl—and did not look up at her, daring her to say anything.

“I already salted the potatoes,” she said.

“Good. I like salt.” I salted some more.

“At least taste them first before you assume my cooking is bland.”

“I never said your cooking was bland,” I said calmly. “I said I like salt.”

“I put lots of garlic in this time.”

“Good,” I said. It was getting hard not to roll my eyes. “Garlic is great.”

“Your father likes garlic,” she said tightly. “I made this to suit his palate, Marnie-Jean.”

“What part of ‘garlic is great’ did you take for an insult?”

“Your father enjoys sauerkraut with his fry-up.”

“I’m glad,” I said, “since he’ll be eating it tonight.” I tried to cool down, and, thinking to diffuse the tension with a compliment, added, “It’s very good. Tasty.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t throw every herb I had in the pot.”

I frowned. “I don’t do that either.”

“Always did go overboard with things.”

Overboard with things? Oh, bitch. I stabbed a potato, shoved it in my mouth, and demanded around it, “Like what things?”

Mom peeked into the oven to check the progress of the pork chops. “Just things.”

“Like herbs?” I guessed, noticing the potato in my mouth was, in fact, too salty; there was no way in hell I’d take a sip of water. No fucking way.

“Herbs, spices, salt... ”

“And?”

She went to stand by the fridge, aimed her glare at Dad’s sick room for a moment, where Harry’s gentle laugh could be heard in response to something my father had said. “You always added far too many onions to every pot. That’s why I discouraged you from cooking.” She gave her homemade applesauce a stir, and it hissed and plop-bubbled. “Too many onions to every pot.”

Onions to every… “Why are we fighting about cooking, Mom?” I asked, knowing damn well she wasn’t talking about onions.

“We’re not,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron, more habit than necessity. “We’re not fighting. There’s no need to fight. Just keep your voice down.”

“Oh, that’s right, Mom,” I felt myself teeter on the brink of losing my shit. “Keep your voice down. Don’t talk back. Don’t rock the boat. Just shut up, that’s what you really want to say, right? Just sit down and shut up and stop making my life complicated.”

Harry’s soft throat clearing from the threshold of the sick room distracted both of us. When we looked over, he beamed a glorious smile. “How it warms my cold, black heart to see the two of you sharing a meal.” He aimed his smile at me, and it gained a knowing tilt. “Why are you adding more salt? Tsk tsk, Dearheart, salt is terrible for your blood pressure.”

I gripped the shaker, just noticing I was still clutching it, my knuckles white around the little owl’s neck. “Maybe I’ll open this shaker, guzzle the whole damn thing, and end it all!”

“Oh, dear heavens, such a fuss you make. Just eat your potatoes, you ungrateful child, and we’ll discuss your plans to slowly poison yourself at a more appropriate time.” Harry gave an exasperated and unnecessary exhale. He rolled his eyes at my mother and swept back in to Dad’s room.

I turned to bite my mother’s head off and caught the tail end of a smirk sliding off her lips. “What’s so funny?”

“Astute, for a monster. He certainly has your number.”

I bit my tongue, hard. She took the seat across from me at the table and poured a cup of tea from the blue and white Corningware pot that lived eternally in the middle of their kitchen table. I knew it was likely stone cold, and steeped strong enough to strip the enamel off teeth. Four or five sad, sodden tea bags were probably drowned at the bottom.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You are an ungrateful child, and you’ve hardly grown up. I spoiled you rotten, Marnie-Jean. You and Carole-Anne both. I was so excited to be a wife and mother, to live my life properly, not the way my mother did, shunning her responsibilities, traipsing around Europe with…” She didn’t say Harry’s name, but she wagged an indicting finger at the other room. “I was happy to be nothing like her, and I worked very hard at keeping house.”

I opened my mouth to defend Grandma Vi, but my mother’s temper was stirring like that applesauce, hot and hissing, and the Blue Sense warned me to let her speak, to get this off her chest and out in the open once and for all, even if it hurt me to hear it.

“You never had to lift a finger around this house,” she said, “and I did you no favors in that respect. I thought I was being a good wife and mother, and perhaps I was. But I taught you nothing of hard work. I suspect when something tough crosses your path, to this day you sulk about it like a teen in a snit, instead of rolling up your sleeves and digging in.”

I let that settle in the room for a minute, let her feelings have a moment in the spotlight. I could see where she was coming from, understood her motives. The fact that she was flat fucking wrong was beside the point.

Or maybe it wasn't.

“I don’t think that’s a fair assessment,” I said, not pointing out that she’d flipped a switch when I was about ten and proceeded to treat her youngest five children like prisoners of war; it might explain why I was currently mothering my own brother. “When it comes to hard work, I might pout, but I do it, and I don't give up. Or hadn't you noticed my face?”

“Is that why you’re hiding in the mountains in a shit-hole cabin like some crazy hermit?”

Whoa. Mom dropped the S-bomb. Shit just got real. I very carefully hid my surprise. “Okay, I retired early,” I admitted, “because of some poor personal choices and a fucking bullet wound. I don’t know if you forgot that part? But I’m working again. I have a job with the F-B-frickin’-I. I’m using my degree, and my Talents. I’m not hiding, and I’m not a crazy hermit. You might see how I've flown halfway across the continent, to another country, to help solve a mystery the police need help with. I haven’t moved to the city because it’s beautiful at Shaw’s Fist, and I like the peace and quiet.” And the occasional kinky sex -chase through the woods. “And, despite what you might think, I’m actually kinda good at what I do.”

“I wonder if your policeman friend would agree with that.”

“Constable Schenk was here?” I stabbed another potato and scooped fried onion with it, desperately wanting a drink of water. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to ask about your psychic abilities.”

Schenk didn’t have to come here for that; he’d seen my abilities first hand. I suspected he was here for other reasons, though I couldn’t imagine what he was nosing around for. “What did you tell him?”

Mom raised her mug to her lips but didn’t drink. “I told him you were the real thing.”

“Oh?” I blinked in surprise.

“Yes.” She put her mug down carefully, deliberately, like she didn’t want it knocked over in the event of a rumble. I braced for it. “I told him the way it all started, how it worked.”

“From your point of view.”

“I could hardly do otherwise,” she said. “I speak my mind, Marnie-Jean. It’s not a crime to have an opinion that differs from yours.”

Oh, Aradia, give me strength. I took a steadying breath. “Well, I can’t wait to hear this. Go ahead, Mother.”

Her lips did a prim little twist. The Blue Sense told me she knew she was going to come off badly, but was resigned to the fall-out from her choices. Hers was a stubborn brand of cruelty. She’d been punishing me for my choices for a decade, now, but no harder than she punished herself, so she felt she was being fair. “I told him a monster stole my real daughter away at the tender age of seventeen, and replaced her with a lunatic witch with no moral compass and no sense of—”

“Enough!” The bark that cut the air made me jerk in my seat. It had been a long time since I’d heard Harry’s voice so sharp. I noticed he was holding Dad’s Moleskines, and felt through the Bond a press of irritation and anxiety; Harry had had his fill and was ready to go. “At the risk of sounding ungentlemanly, might I say, madam, that your hospitality leaves much to be desired. I am no disease that has infected your home, stealing away your loved ones like a cancer, though you seem determined to see me as such. I am a gift that your mother chose to offer, which your daughter freely and shrewdly chose to accept. Under my care, she continues to flourish and prosper. Your husband has, in his wisdom, come to accept this, and though I do not hold a hope that you will join him in this opinion, I will thank you to keep in mind that I am your daughter’s most loyal supporter, her guardian and companion, whether she be a lunatic witch or not.”

“Um, not,” I piped up between the two, waving my fork in the air to make my point. “Not a lunatic witch.”

Harry continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “And you ought to guard your tongue from passing blasphemous slurs against a gentleman of my caliber.” He passed a smoothing finger across his thrice-pierced eyebrow, and then brushed away imaginary lint from his shirt front. “Say goodnight to your father, my pet, and bid him sweet dreams. We must be about our business.”

I was quick to abandon the table, feeling Harry’s patience dwindle rapidly. I popped in to see my dad, and then let Harry help me with my parka. We hurried into sub-zero temperatures that were far more cheery than the atmosphere in my mother’s kitchen.

“Way to stick up for me, Harry,” I said.

He looked surprised. “But of course you can speak for yourself?” He made it a question, studying my face. “You don’t need me to rescue you. However, if it would please the secret damsel that lies in distress behind your bold front, I will rally to your charge and return to battle.” He balled a fist and made to return to the porch where my mother stood glaring.

I grabbed his forearm. “No. You’re right. Leave it.”

“Are you certain?” he asked, holding the passenger door open for me. “Only, it seems after rousting the dragon of your father’s jealousy from its decade-long hibernation and slaying it neatly, I am feeling rather heroic.”

I had to smile, though I wasn’t quite up to laughing just yet. “Home, brave Galahad. I need a drink of water like you wouldn't believe.”

CHAPTER 25

I’D LAST SEEN Rowena when she was a sullen tween in braids and short-shorts, long before her bar hopping and her drinking and her accident and her slap on the wrist from the courts. She was a woman, now, but no less sullen.

The morning sun was glaring off the snow, and Mr. Merritt had some seriously bad-ass sunglasses on; Combat Butler goes Men In Black. I, on the other hand, looked like I’d been beaten down from all sides and left for dead. I pulled the ski mask off and left it on the passenger seat, smoothed back my bedraggled hair, checked my fat lip in the rearview mirror, and then got out to face the youngest of my five sisters. A mere eleven months older than Wesley, Rowena would, before long, look like she'd lapped him in physical age. Where Wesley would continue to look a scarred twenty forever, Rowena was weathering with the stresses of life like a normal, mortal human, even without her living harder than most of the family was happy with.

Of all my sisters, Rowena had the oldest soul. Today, from a distance and with the winter sun turning her blonde hair to windblown threads of white gold, she seemed all of eighteen everywhere but those steady eyes. Bird’s egg blue, hers were full of melancholy and experience, and belonged on a grizzled old war veteran, not plopped in the middle of an angelic face. She was wrapped in an afghan that had likely come from Claire’s talented hands. As she got closer, I saw the hint of bony shoulders under that blanket, a silver cross hanging outside a grey Roots sweatshirt, thin legs in matching grey sweatpants, cheeks gaunt but swept with a bit of blush. Or maybe that was wind burn from the chill off the lake. There were fine lines on her forehead and black circles under her eyes that shouldn’t have been so pronounced. If I didn’t know better I’d think she had taken Wesley’s place as the family addict, but these were the ravages of an internal war, of deep self-loathing and reparations, as if she could make amends with karma by starving herself or making her life more difficult than it needed to be. Her penance would never satisfy the jury in her head. Rowena saw a different end to the accident that had injured but not killed a pedestrian, and the end she saw was unforgivable.

Rowena didn’t hug me, or smile, but she came close enough to hand me a grocery bag.

I said, “Sorry to call around eleven. I know it’s time for Coronation Street.”

“My TV hasn’t worked in months,” she said with a one-shouldered shrug. Her voice was so different than I remembered it, hard and edgy without the mitigating sweetness of adolescence. “Dad’s doing a bit better today. Mom’s happy… about Harry, I mean.”

“Not about me,” I clarified, not that I needed to.

“Fuck, no.”

“Why the heck would she be happy about Harry?”

“Heck, eh?” I thought she wanted to smile, and the frown that followed was caused by irritation that I was daring to amuse her. Humor as defense mechanism used as the best offense possible. She repeated as though she didn’t hear me right, “Heck?”

“I can’t afford swears,” I said, cocking one gloved thumb at the hearse where Mr. Merritt was pointedly not watching us over his New York Times. “I bet him a thousand bucks a pop, because I'm an idiot.”

She glanced over my shoulder towards the car. “Didn’t know people still read the paper.”

“He’s really super old,” I explained. “So why is Mom happy with Harry?”

“Because of Harry refusing to turn Dad.”

Turn him? I didn’t know what to say, so I stuck with a safe, “Oh.”

“Harry said he’s not old enough to turn people into vampires,” Rowena said, and I sensed she was testing me to see if this was fact, “so he had to say no to Dad.”

I nodded and gave her another, “Oh.”

That seemed to satisfy her. The Blue Sense started to wake up, but I did my best to squelch it, stomp it back. This was one case where I adamantly did not want to know what someone was feeling, about me or anything else. As if sensing this struggle inside me, Rowena glanced at my leather gloves as I clutched the handles of the grocery bag. She stuffed her own bare hands inside the pockets of her sweatshirt and looked at me expectantly. I tried to imagine what in the world to say next. An apology? For what, exactly? For wearing gloves? For being psychic? For not calling to be yelled at and rejected? For not at least trying? I’m not sorry about accepting Harry. Rowena kept her eyes on my face and seemed to be waiting. She always could win a staring contest, and could go freakishly long without blinking. No one in their right mind would play poker with Rowena Baranuik.

“Anyway,” she said, letting me off the hook, “Mom’s pleased.” Pause. “With Harry.”

“Not with me,” I said again.

“Right.”

I nodded, chewing my bottom lip. “Well, this is all news to me. Harry didn’t mention Dad’s request.” He wouldn’t have mentioned it to me, though; he’d simply taken care of it and moved on, not wanting to upset me.

“Margot says not to break this board.” She looked at me with that expectant look again, like she was waiting for a fight.

“I hardly ever break stuff,” I lied.

“She’s not painting another.”

“I won’t ask her to.”

“She had nightmares after she made this one. That’s why I had it. Stored it in my garden shed.”

I looked at the bent and battered green aluminum shed that had been there long before this place belonged to Rowena. It was draped with a blue tarp to block snow and rain from getting in the hole that some storm had made, and not all that recently, by the looks of it. If Harry thought my place was a dump, he’d have hauled both me and my sister out of hers bodily and would be on the phone to his renovators before either of us could squawk.

“Well, thank you for letting me borrow the board. Do you want it back?”

“It gave Margot the creeps,” she said, repeating. “She won’t make another.”

I got that much already, thanks was trapped behind my teeth. With anyone else I’d have been losing my shit by now, letting the expletives fly, but this was a chance, however slight, at an inroad to family peace. I peeked at the fancy scrying board in the bag, took a deep breath, and let my frustration go on the exhale. “I’ll be careful with it. Do you want me to bring it back when I'm done?”

“It’s just something pretty to look at,” she said. “I don’t use it. I’m not into the occult. Taints the soul.”

Look at? I thought you kept it in the shed. “Ah. So what I’m hearing you say is, 'I’d like something pretty to look at for Christmas.' Like, maybe a TV that works?”

“Witches don’t buy Christmas presents,” she said, too quickly, and with a cool little laugh. “You’ve never bought me a Christmas present.”

That was wildly untrue, but her barb struck home. I still held my tongue, somehow; she was intentionally ignoring the extra stockings Carrie and I had made all the younger kids when we were teens, and, later, the gifts Harry and I lavished on the family, even as their resentment toward us planted roots that showed no signs of dying back or pulling free.

“Okay, Rowena,” I said, disappointed. This isn’t how I wanted this to go. “No presents.”

I made to get back in the hearse and Rowena’s hands came back out of her pockets; though she didn’t exactly reach for me, the gesture stalled my feet.

She said, “I, uh, contacted that Lennie Epp fellow like you said. Going to see him Thursday for an hour.”

“Not sure you’ll make much of a dent in an hour, but enjoy.” I added, “You do good work, kiddo. I’m proud of that, if it matters.” I nodded, not knowing what else to say but not prepared to give up as long as she was still willing to talk. “Good work, for sure.”

“I hear from Carrie that you do good work, too,” she offered, “except for all the people dying.”

She tried. I didn’t smile, though a dark part of me found it deeply amusing. “Yeah, well, I try to keep the death toll low in every case. That’s a real source of pride for me. Is Claire out west?”

“Her last year,” Rowena said, and then, reluctantly, as if it was a precious family secret I shouldn’t be privy to, she added, “Biology. But not monsters. No preternatural stuff. Real science. Marine biology.”

“Good,” I said, ignoring the little digs. Real science. I wondered if Mr. Merritt would mind taking me for a dozen donuts after this ordeal; I was so not used to biting my tongue. I opened my mouth to tell her that Carrie mentioned it to me, second guessed that, and shut up. Then I thought to mention Wesley staying with me, but felt that no one in the family was quite ready to handle his life choices, and kept my teeth together.

She watched me struggle and said nothing, waiting.

I did my best not to look behind her at the run down house, the busted ten-speed bike stuck in a wedge of piled snow. If I asked Harry to, he’d send around a crew to patch the windows today, spring for a new bike, or a car, or whatever else she was denying herself as self-punishment. “Do you need anything? Anything at all?”

“Trying to be a big sister, now?”

“No.” I sighed and tried again, a bit of my anger leaking out. “I just want you to understand, I’m a resource you can draw on if you need—“

She stopped me. “Your wealthy dead man can’t buy me, Marnie.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I insisted, but my voice had raised enough to echo in the carport. I swallowed my frustration back, afraid to lose what little ground I’d gained, afraid she’d shut down. “The door’s open, is all I meant. I understand that luxury is something you think you don’t deserve, kiddo, but adding a bit of comfort to the basics isn’t a crime. I’m here for you, even when I’m…” I made a flinging hand motion to the south to indicate Colorado. “There for you.”

An awkward silence fell, during which I could hear water dripping from the icicles on her gutters in a steady patter. There was no wind this morning. The sun off the snow was nearly blinding.

“Well, maybe you could call sometime,” Rowena suggested. “Tell me what kind of cases you’re working on that gives you two black eyes and a fat lip.”

I felt a warm swell of hope. It was something. She was leaving the door open a crack. “Sure. And to be fair, I only have one black eye.”

Rowena shook her head slowly. “Don’t look at yourself in the mirror much, do you?”

I winked one eye and then the other. Both hurt equally. Balls. I closed both tightly, and the ache in my sockets tore an elongated ooooowwww from me.

Rowena snorted. “Dork.”

“I’ll call you next week some time,” I promised. “I’d like to check on Mr. Epp, if that doesn’t breach some code of confidentiality or ethics or whatever.”

Rowena let a self-deprecating smile slip. “We’re Baranuiks,” she reminded me, and started walking back to her house, hugging the afghan tighter. “We ain’t got no stinkin’ ethics.”

She hurried and did not look back; I watched her until the door closed with a jingle-bell sound, hinting at holiday decorations inside. The sun felt nice on my cheeks. I glanced up at the sky, feather grey with hints of blue. An artistic hand had painted white and grey clouds with the lightest of brushstrokes across today’s sky. I got back in the idling hearse and sat in the passenger seat, clamping down on the threat of happy tears while Mr. Merritt took his time folding the fat newspaper and then pretended to fine tune something with the dials and buttons on the dash. Finally, he offered me my ski mask. He’d been keeping it warm for me under one of his thighs.

“Tim Horton’s, madam?”

I laughed with relief, turning my face away so he wouldn’t see my eyes well up. First, my sister doesn’t spit in my face, now coffee? This day was coming up Marnie! If the poltergeist didn’t kill me, it might be the best day ever.

CHAPTER 26

Mr. Merritt cruised into the parking lot at the Oh Yeah! Café and I spotted Schenk’s sedan. The lot had been plowed into high piles occupying a couple of the outlying parking spaces, and the sun was making a little headway towards melting some of the dregs and ice that remained on the exposed pavement. I stuffed my sister’s scrying board in my backpack before heading in to see Schenk. I passed Detective Sergeant Malashock on her way out; The Blue Sense stirred to offer up her confusion, frustration, and disappointment. She didn’t recognize me with my ski mask on, not even when I threw her my patented flowery salute, complete with finger wiggles.

Schenk, on the other hand, recognized me immediately. He was finishing up some rye toast, wiping it on his plate in egg yolk and hot sauce. “Grab a seat, Cinderblock. Take that thing off, they’re gonna think you’re sticking up the joint.”

“Can’t.” I left the balaclava on, but took my parka off and hung it on the back of the chair before sitting. “It got worse.”

“Twizzler marks?”

I blew hot air out the little nose holes in my mask. “You’re a funny guy.”

“The fat lip?”

“The black eye,” I said, drawing it out to emphasize my displeasure, leaning across the table as if daring him to push me. “Eyes, plural.”

A twitch of a smirk. “Lemme see.”

“You’re not my friend anymore,” I said sullenly, pulling a laminated menu card closer with one gloved hand. “I’m getting a new ski mask with a mouth hole so I can stick my tongue out at you.”

“I’ll knit you one, eh?”

“Get right on that, would ya?” I twirled a finger around my masked face to indicate the damage. “This is all my mom’s fault, you realize.”

“Your mother hit you?” He said it like he wouldn’t be at all surprised.

“Nope, just in the mood to trash my mother behind her back.”

“I have a feeling she started it.”

“You've met her,” I said, as if this explained everything.

“She seems nice,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“You were probably high,” I said. “You should stop smokin’ reefer on the job, officer. It’s messing with your job performance.”

We happened to glance past the struggling begonias on the window ledge to the parking lot at the same time, to see Malashock still standing by her car, talking on the phone. She began to pace parallel to the front bumper, high heeled boots avoiding a snow-filled pot hole. The waitress came by our table, refilled Schenk’s coffee, turned my cup over, filled it, and put a plate of French toast in front of me. After she went away I frowned down at the plate. “I didn’t order this.”

“I did.” When I tried to pass it to him, he clarified, “For you.”

“How’d you know I was coming?”

“Felt a disturbance in the Force.”

I looked at him steadily; when Dickie Binswanger ordered for me without asking, I hated it. When Schenk did it, I found it considerate and endearing. I knew he was going to insist on paying for it. This time, I would let him without a fight.

He shook his head at me, smiling. “Take the damned thing off. Your face can’t be that bad.”

“You won’t vomit?”

“No promises. Sorry.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Longshanks, it hurts to smile.” I pulled the ski mask off but held onto it, in case my bruises had gotten even worse than when I checked them in the rear view mirror of the hearse in Rowena’s driveway. I snuck a look at Schenk’s face to check his reaction. He was doing an excellent job of not smiling, but his eyes said he wanted to.

“I’m not going to lie,” he said, eating the last crust of rye. “It’s bad.”

“It could be worse?” I made it a question.

He nixed that with a quick, “Not without cutting something off,” and pulled a folder from his bag. “Did some digging on the Briggs-Adsits.”

“How?”

He paused in the act of shuffling through his papers to give me an I’m-a-detective-you-simpleton look. I gave him an answering okay-duh-but-how eyebrow lift. It hurt my bruised face, and I touched my fat lip gingerly. “Okay, where?” I specified.

“Local museum had some interesting records from the times. Very distinctive folks, the Briggs-Adsits. You were right about the psychosis, though nowhere in these notes was syphilis mentioned. A few months before John Senior’s death, church records show that Mother Adsit – whom they call Elizabeth, Beth, Bess, Betty, and Betsy, depending on the source – was asked to stop bringing John Junior to church because he was disrupting Mass. After the funeral of her husband, she stopped coming to church, but had a bug up her ass about the whole thing and began harassing other churchgoers at their homes. The local sheriff, who was the law here before Niagara Regional Police existed, told her to settle down and knock it off, basically, after which she came at the parishioners with her wooden spoon.” He gave me a look.

“The Spoon of Doom,” I said, making a little O with my swollen lips and drawing it out all spooky-like. My toast was terrified, so I stabbed it with my fork and put it out of its misery.

“Son dies a few months later, head injuries 'sustained in a fall.' Officially, declared an accident.”

“Right,” I said. “Killer Spoon.”

“She refused to let her son be buried in the church’s cemetery, and there are no records of him being buried anywhere else.”

“Ew?” I munched French toast, doctored my coffee carefully and braced for impact before sipping it. “That’s grody to the max.”

“You’re not old enough to say 'grody to the max.'”

“But you are,” I said. “I’m using the vernacular of your youth.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. It's heinous. Bogus. Gnarly. Whatever the opposite of ‘radical’ was.” He killed the smile that was threatening to appear with a mouthful of coffee.

“Do I want to know what happened to soft-headed John Junior’s body?”

“No idea, but he seems to have ended up in or near Mother Briggs-Adsit's own casket in the original Red Hook cemetery, so explain that one.”

“A two-bodies-one-box situation?” I suggested. “How many years apart?”

“She lived another twelve years, and was one of the last people buried at the original Red Hook cemetery before the church was torn down in 1879. In 1920, they put the call out for people to move their kin before the overflow pond was installed.”

“But no one was left to move the Briggs-Adsits,” I finished, “among those hundreds of others.”

He rubbed his face with one large hand. “The coroner is attending to Nowland’s autopsy today, but I expect the same results as that of Ms. Wyatt’s; severe hypothermia. Found Nowland’s car by Lock Three. No idea how either he or Britney got up all the locks into the overflow pond at the Twin Flight Locks, or how they got there without anyone along the way noticing it. I can’t charge a poltergeist with murder, so this may all be moot. What do I do about it?”

“I vote we find this desecrated grave, return the skull and the tear vial, send the soldier’s ghost into the light, exorcise the poltergeist, and then hit the nearest donut shop.” I forked a piece of syrup-sodden French toast into my mouth. “After all that, I’m gonna need a Dutchie real bad.”

“Because you don’t get enough sugar, right?”

“Probably, I could never get enough sugar.”

“How about diabetes? Could you get enough of that?”

“I’m a DaySitter,” I said smugly, swirling another hunk of French toast in syrup. “I can’t get diabetes.”

“But you can get whipped to death by Twizzlers. What an interesting life you lead.”

“The way I figure it, a truly messy death is inevitable,” I said, “but only for one of us. You’re probably gonna be okay.”

“That’s a relief.”

“I’m gonna croak, so I might as well enjoy some yummy stuff before I get clonked to death by Mama-Captain’s Super Spoon of Suck.”

“Shit,” Schenk said, looking down at his phone, and then out at the parking lot at Malashock. “Shit.”

The Blue Sense didn’t give any warning before slamming me with Schenk’s upset. “It can’t be Simon,” I said. “Simon’s in prison.”

“Hospital for psych assessment,” Schenk corrected. “Seventy-two hour hold.”

I demanded almost breathlessly, “Ellie?”

He stood, tossing down cash for breakfast. “No. You just chill, don’t worry about it. Malashock needs me.” He glanced at the parking lot out the big windows. “Riding with her. Take my car and get home before this storm rolls in. I’ll pick it up later and catch you up.”

“Storm?” I frowned, glancing outside at the blue sky, and then behind me at the flat screen TV on the wall. The sound wasn't turned up loudly enough to be annoying to the patrons, but the red severe weather alert was scrolling across the bottom of the news channel was hard to miss. “Damn, I thought that shit was clearing up.”

“The calm before.” He shrugged into his leather jacket and dug out his car keys. He hesitated before giving them to me. “Listen, don’t touch the boxes in my trunk. Keep them sealed. Don’t open it, don’t touch it, don't anything. Just... don't.”

“I'm not gonna fondle the junk in your trunk, Thag. Yeah, yeah, chain of custody,” I said, ignoring his glare. “No, this time I got it.”

“No more sticky fingers.” He jingled the keys an inch from my gloved hand to make his point. “Behave.”

I snatched the keys with a sigh. “Who do you think you’re talking to, constable?”

“I’m fairly certain I know who I’m talking to.” He crammed on black leather gloves and adjusted his scarf. “No touching. Go straight home as soon as you’re done.”

“Sure thing, Longshanks.” I ignored the punctuating jab of his thick forefinger in the air before he gathered his files in a flurry of papers and hurried out into the drippy morning.

I changed chairs so I could see the TV, and watched the meteorologist animatedly explain how the coming storm was the biggest of the season, bigger than the last, bigger than any he’d seen in his career. He looked like a puppy when the package of Snausages got rustled, bopping from one side of the screen to the other, pointing out the causes of his excitement. I could practically see his tail wagging. Pictures and video of previous storms showed cars buried by drifts, men out pushing trucks, wheels spinning on ice, tree branches snapping under the weight, roof shingles scattering in the wind. I looked outside again at the blue sky. Icicles along the gutter dripped in the sun.

I finished my coffee, and the dregs of Schenk’s, and the last bit of my toast. I wondered what kind of cool things I’d find if I snooped through Schenk’s car. My phone rattled against the table, and I slipped off a glove to do the swipe-and-pass-code thing.

Schenk’s text read: Don’t you dare.

I smiled down at my phone, and hoped, wherever he and Malashock were rushing off to, they’d be safe and successful. My phone buzzed again, and a little notification dot appeared beside Batten’s name. My heart gave an overeager jolt, and all the blood rushed to my cheeks.

I checked the text. Binswanger sent flowers. A second later: I threw them out. And: You’re out of beer. And then: Your bed is lumpy and your pillows smell like bubblegum. Finally: You have forty pairs of underwear and all but two have frogs on them. Freak.

The cabin had two guest bedrooms upstairs, but he’s sleeping in mine? Counting my underwear? I tried not to chortle out loud in the café, and looked up at the TV as if the meteorologist might hand out relationship advice with his warnings about the wind chill.

I texted back: Why are you trying on my underwear? If you drew fangs on all my panties, I'll drag you balls-first through a belt sander.

I saw little dots that indicated he was typing and then they stopped. There was a long pause, during which I could imagine him backspacing over something. I grinned at the phone and mentally challenged him not to be a wiener. What he sent was: I broke your vibrator. It was an accident.

“What?” I blurted out loud, and then sent an apologetic smile at the people at the table beside me. “Sorry. My not-boyfriend busted my-” I saw them gape and remembered my black eyes and fat lip. “No! Not my face, my, uh… never mind.”

I texted Batten: How the fuck did you manage that?

He replied: I’ll never tell.

I sent: Better replace it. I need that thing.

The reply was immediate. Get ya the biggest one I can find, Doom Chasm.

My finger jabbed the phone with every letter. Got a thousand rabid wolverines to kill, so you'd better. Hate you so much, Kill-Notch.

I was about to put my phone away, grinning like an idiot, when he sent one final thought: No you don’t.

All at once, too much restless, happy energy swelled low in my belly and spilled through my veins, making my arms tremble. I snuck one bare finger to the begonias on the window ledge, checking to make sure no one in the café was looking at me. For a moment, nothing happened; I took a long, deep breath and settled my bones in the chair, relaxed, let the energy flow out, spilling heat in waves to calm myself. The begonia leaf nearest my finger trembled, and one pitiful red bloom popped open, and then another. Dread Aradia, Mother Mine / Keeper of the day, Divine / dull the spark and quench the fire / free me of my heart’s desire. Another deep, grateful exhale, and three blooms sprang open. The green on my side of the plant had deepened slightly, and the foliage fairly quivered, though I doubted anyone would notice.

I gathered my backpack, pulled on my ski mask, yanked on my parka, took Schenk’s money to pay at the counter, and grabbed a coffee to go. I thought maybe I’d go home and rest a bit to recharge, research exorcisms, and then drop in on Father Scarrow for a plan of attack. Surely, if anyone knew what to do next, it was the sketchy exorcist. Or maybe I'd finally try to get that hot bath that Junior had interrupted. Or, better yet, get some more of what Harry had done to make up for it.

The temperature had plummeted since I’d come in, and standing just inside the door, I saw that the icicles had stopped dripping. When I left the café, a pained squeak escaped my throat. I ducked my head against the renewed wind and pressed the unlock button on the key fob to make sure I was heading to the right car. The headlights blinked and I hurried to Schenk’s Sonata. The wind snatched the door when I opened it, and I had to struggle to close it, gasping once it shut.

The clock on the dash told me “ten-fifteen” when I turned the key. I was very aware that there was a box of stuff I wasn’t allowed to touch in the trunk. Probably, if Schenk had never mentioned it, I wouldn’t have known it was there. A shadow fell over the car, and the warmth of the sun shining through the windows faded quickly. I leaned forward against the steering wheel and looked up. Conditions in the sky had taken a turn for the worse, bruising like my face. The first few flakes of snow began to dust across the windshield.

I reprogrammed Schenk’s radio pre-set buttons from his assortment of Canadian and American classic rock stations to a single obscure channel that played nothing but manic electronica, and then turned down the volume down so it didn’t bug me while I drove home and pulled out of the Oh Yeah! Café parking lot for the last time.

I didn’t make it very far.

CHAPTER 27

THE SNOW WENT from drifty to wild in under ten minutes, pounding down like a bully was dumping malevolent confetti by the bucket load. The headlights of the Sonata turned the blizzard into a fantastic show, spotlighting each and every flurry and gust, individual flakes dancing down and swooping up, lifted and tossed in crazy, haphazard plumes. I crept along the road going less than thirty kilometers an hour, steering around drifts until I hit a patch of road that was clear, where I thought I’d better pull over for a minute. My butt cheek vibrated, and that was a good enough sign that it was time for a break.

I dug out my phone, threw a glove off and answered with, “Yo.”

“Is Father Scarrow with you?” Schenk asked.

“You just left me alone in the café,” I said, flexing my sore fingers. I’d been clutching the steering wheel harder than I thought. “You know he’s not. What’s up?”

“I’m at his place.” He lowered his voice. There was chatter in the background, other voices. “The dogs are dead.”

“What kind of dead?”

“Frozen solid in the living room,” he said. “Marnie, Scarrow’s not here.”

“He better not be out in this. The storm is ridiculous.” There was a flash of lightning that lit the onslaught of snow, followed immediately by a crack of thunder. Thunder-snow. “Did you hear that?”

“It shook the rectory.” There was a low growl in his voice. “Where are you?”

“Ten-twenty,” the car’s clock reported.

“Pulled over on the side of Thorold Stone Road not far from an exotic meats farm, if I’m reading that sign through the blizzard correctly. I can hardly see past the headlights. I’m going to give this a few minutes to pass.”

“If you get cold, there’s…” He cleared his throat. “An extra hat in the trunk that might fit you.”

His knitting. “I’m not opening this car door for nothing,” I said. “I’ll never get back in; the wind is scary-cold, and I’ll blow away.” I had a mental image of me windmilling out in the storm until an errant gust took me cartwheeling through the sky.

“Then stay put. There’s an emergency candle and lighter in the glove box if you need them,” he said. “Listen, I’m glancing at a few notes of Scarrow’s about the Briggs-Adsit family. They tell of Mama-Captain being something like a drill sergeant. She cared for soldiers deserting from the civil war alongside Johnny, opened her home to a whole bunch of them, but she was a high-iron bitch who treated them like slaves and wasn’t afraid to take a wooden spoon, switch, or broom handle to those who slacked off or displeased her.”

“That jibes with what we suspected,” I said. “We need to find Scarrow, quick. If the poltergeist took out his dogs, that means this thing can go further than I thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I assumed that the poltergeist was limited in its ability to travel,” I said. “Ghosts haunt places, people, or objects, right? I mean, that’s the theory, but at this point, I’m no longer trusting theory.”

He made an agreeing noise and a grunt for me to continue.

“John Junior showed up at North House after I took the picture of the Briggs-Adsit family from Scarrow’s pocket. His mother was in Barnaby Nowland’s apartment with us, but I assumed, like Scarrow probably did, that she was haunting her mourning necklace, the lacrimosa. Similarly, John was in Barnaby’s place because his skull was there. They’ve not popped up anywhere randomly, only in relative closeness to an item that meant something to them, or near to their desecrated burial ground.”

“Lock One, Britney Wyatt—“

“She had the lacrimosa in her purse that night,” I reminded him, “which was in Simon’s car nearby.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Scarrow didn’t have the skull, or the lacrimosa, or the letters we found at Nowland's apartment in the rectory anymore.” I paused to let that sink in. Were those things in the trunk? My scalp prickled. Fully expecting two dead people to be sitting in the back seat staring at me, I glanced over my shoulder and double-checked the rearview mirror. There was no one visible, but that didn’t exactly reassure me.

Schenk said, “So how and why was the poltergeist able to show up here to kill the dogs?”

“And where is Father Scarrow, if not there burying his dogs? He may have bolted,” I said, “once he realized it wasn’t safe in the rectory and Ma—“ I stopped, wary of saying her name near her artifacts, the way Scarrow hadn’t wished to say John Junior’s name near the overflow pond. “Once he realized that the poltergeist can go wherever she wants?”

“You think Father Scarrow has left town?”

That’s not right, my gut told me. Father Scarrow doesn’t run away from trouble. Father Scarrow runs toward it with a battering ram. “No. He saw the dead dogs and decided to put an end to this on his own.” Without the skull, or the lacrimosa.

Schenk made an apprehensive noise. “He wouldn’t be scared off.”

“No. No, he wouldn’t.”

“We can’t organize a search party in this, the weather is too hazardous. Get home when you can. I’ll call you when we find him.”

“He’s in danger.”

“I know.” He muttered something under his breath that sounded like he was reading aloud ritual incantations for exorcism. “Maybe he went to try and exorcise the Briggs-Adsits from the tunnel or pond.” Then quickly, “Don’t you go there without me. “

“You either,” I warned. “And stop reading that shit out loud.”

“Uh oh.”

“What?”

“Maps.” I could hear shuffling of papers and Schenk cleared his throat. “Graveyard maps. With plots. And names. He has the name Adsit circled on two, three, four copies here of the same map. Different handwriting, different pens, markers. Some have other names circles, notes jotted… oh, shit.”

I was a second ahead of him. “The Adsit plot was located right where we found Britney’s and Barnaby’s bodies, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Longshanks? Who makes four copies of something? Normal people make two, or five, or ten. Not four.” The four is a lie, an unhelpful voice from my past insisted on reminding me. We shared an over-the-phone silence for a heartbeat before I stated the obvious. “He’s taken one copy of the map and gone to the pond.”

“By himself.”

“I’m closer,” I said. “I’ll head there first.”

“Stay where you are, I’m on my way now.”

“No. I’ll drive your car to New Red Hook. All the case evidence is in the trunk, right? We’ll need that.”

“For what? We’re bringing Father Scarrow home. We’re not doing an exorcism.”

“We may have to,” I insisted, “if we want to get Scarrow out of there alive.”

He was quiet for a second before grunting; he wasn’t giving me permission, but that rarely stops me.

“Stay on the main roads as much as possible.” He said something rapidly to someone in the rectory, who replied sharply, and then someone else had words with him, then he was back. “And when you get there, wait in the car. Don’t trek out to the pond without me.”

I squinted at the road through the snow. “Uh huh.” Not much of an agreement, and I honestly just said it to shut him up. He could easily be stuck in snow at the rectory for hours. I couldn’t wait that long. The exorcist was gonna end up in the water, covered in MUCE, staring unblinking at the snow as it covered his face.

“Not on my watch,” I muttered, and hung up on Schenk. “You’ve got five minutes, officer. With or without you, I’m not losing another life to this bitch.”

CHAPTER 28

BY THE TIME I pulled into the small lot by the New Red Hook Cemetery the sky was churning with heavy black clouds, and I was very reluctant to leave the warmth of the car. The wheels sank in snow and I put the car in park and gave myself a long talking to. Schenk said to stay in the car. For how long? If you got here okay, so can he. If Father Scarrow is at the pond, he’s in trouble. Is he dying right this second? Maybe. Possibly. There’s only one way to find out. If you wait in the car much longer he could die. If I don’t, I could wander around lost in a blizzard and freeze to death. Or encounter the poltergeist alone. Shit.

I did a quick inventory: evidence box in the trunk. Had Schenk kept everything together? Skull? Necklace? Had he already sent the skull to forensic anthropologists like he said he would, or was it still in there, staring blankly out of a plastic baggie? Were the pictures there? Did they matter? My eyes fell on my backpack; the scrying board was inside it, painted by my sister Margot’s deft hand and jazzed up with gemstones. Would it work the way the Wee-Gee Fun Board had in the tunnel? Again, only one way to find out. I checked the rearview mirror for signs of Schenk. All I saw was snow. My own tire tracks had already ghosted over, blurred with new and blowing accumulation. I longed for that white puffy snowsuit, even half-charred. I would gladly be a toasty, singed S'more rather than a Gropesicle.

“Okay, what’s the plan, Marnie?” I asked myself, pulling on my ski mask. “Just pop out there in the blizzard and attack the crap out of a poltergeist? Sure, that doesn’t sound anything like a giant clusterfuck. Spine breaker! Flying scissors! Top-rope moonsault, bitches!”

Longshanks will be so pissed if he shows up and you’re off floundering in the white out. Then he’s got two dumbasses to rescue instead of one. That’s not cool. Be smart. I nodded at no one but myself, loaded up the GPS on my phone, and pinpointed my current position. I almost texted, then thought about it: I didn’t know Schenk well enough to know if he’d check it while driving, and with this weather, distraction could mean ending up in a ditch. I grabbed my Moleskine from my bag and ripped off the last page, took up one of Schenk’s always-present pencils from the cup holder, and wrote Fetching Scarrow from pond. Will text GPS coordinates ASAP.

I popped the trunk, set my teeth, and launched out of the car, dragging my backpack with me. The cold wind dropped slightly and the snow seemed to increase, falling furiously straight down, less fluffy and more like ice pellets. I spat on the lower edge of the window, slapped my note to it, wedged the edges of the paper into the weather stripping, and waited a second for it to freeze there. Then I marched to the back of the car, still looking for Schenk’s headlights. The box of evidence was now sealed with a strip of red tape. I broke the seal with the pencil, and tucked it inside the box in case I needed it again. I spotted a first aid kit in a black bag in the corner. I rummaged through it and emptied the whole thing into my backpack. There was a crowbar along the right edge of the trunk. I hefted it in one gloved hand, feeling a bit like I was stalling, wondering if I’d survive if I actually needed a fucking crowbar to fight off a poltergeist. On one hand, a crowbar was good enough for Gordon Freeman to fight off an army of mutated horrors in Half-Life. On the other, I pictured Mama-Captain using it to clobber me the way she’d used the Twizzlers, or her Spoon of Doom. Reluctantly, I put it back, knocking a roll of something to one side: bright yellow reflective tape. I grabbed the tape and ripped off a long strip, slapping it on my chest. I tore several others, wrapping them around my forearms, and one more that I tried to slap to my back but ended up across my shoulders. Good enough. I’d be visible in the storm. Kind of. Or at least I'd be a half-assedly decorated and slightly more easily-found corpse. I slammed the trunk closed, knocking off a wedge of snow that had already collected on top.

I took one long, hopeful look down the road for Schenk. “Last chance, officer.” I checked my phone’s GPS for guidance, waited a beat longer, and then started away from the car, heading for the entrance.

Someone had closed the New Red Hook Cemetery gate and secured it with a padlock. This was a rather amusing symbolic gesture since the gate only extended twenty feet on either side of the road before going to overgrown, brown hedges. Entrance to the graveyard was a pain in the butt but hardly impossible. I set the evidence box on top of the hedge, tossed my backpack over it, and then began muscling through, kicking down hard with my boots to snap branches. The wind shoved me back once, slamming into me with a bracing force. I gritted my teeth and snarled at it, which didn’t do much to help but felt really good. If the hedge had been green I’d have taken energy from the leaves, but the leaves were long gone. Any crisp leaves that stubbornly held their post were snatched away to go skittering across crusted snow.

Driven forward by the stubborn determination to beat Mama-Captain to Father Scarrow, I plunged out the other side of the fence, reclaimed my backpack, slung it on my shoulder, and grabbed the evidence box. To generate some much-needed heat, I started to run, awkwardly at first, but finding my stride through the calf-high snow on what I assumed was the road, since the snow here was a foot lower than the surrounding humps. I hustled, wishing for the schlip schlip schlip of the snow suit, longing for Harry’s added strength, or some witchy sources of warmth, thinking, Man, magic fucking blows in the Great White North. I hadn’t noticed the giant gap in my abilities any other winter, but to be fair, every other winter I generally wasn’t outside chasing shadows. I was usually just chasing brownies with espresso.

I reached the fence on the far side, marking the few tall headstones I recognized from my last visit; an obelisk for a town founder, a weeping angel for a fallen nun, a tall cross for a war hero. Here I paused and checked my phone. No messages, no texts. I checked the GPS and texted my current coordinates to Schenk. When there was no reply, I assumed he was a good driver and was being cautious. I put my phone in my front pocket for easy access and went to the gap in the fence.

The last time I’d been here there had been hard-packed trails leading down a slippery, treacherously steep and uneven path full of ankle-snapping rocks and mud holes. Now, that was all covered with snow. It looked to be all one height, but I knew that to be false. Hidden under this drift was a plunging path. No sign that Father Scarrow had been here before me. I looked back the way I’d come, the places I knew I’d stepped. Next to the obelisk, my footprints were still visible, but beyond that, to the tall cross, to the angel forever sobbing into cupped hands, there was almost no sign that I’d been here, beyond some faint and fading ruts in the thick white cover. I took a deep breath and plunged into the drift, stomping firmly with my boots to find solid ground. The ground dropped suddenly, but I expected it and kept my footing. For a few steps the snow reached my hips, but then I was through the drift and onto steadier ground. It wasn’t long before I wished I had stayed in the car.

The pond came into view. The blue forensic tent had been left up, but the storm had shoved it half aside. I imagined Mother Nature laughing at the foolish attempts of man to hold back her forces and tossing the structure out of her way. It was now a crumpled blue thing mostly buried in the snow on the shore, one corner of tarp flapping madly against several jutting rocks. The wind was at my back now, pushing me onward, and I leaned back against it, sure that what I would find ahead was not something I wanted to be rushing toward.

I was right. My feet came to a full stop. I put the box down and let the backpack fall off my shoulder. It was a good thing that Mr. Merritt wasn't within earshot.

They stood there, some more solid than others, vapors and shades hovering a foot and a half above the frosty water, marking their final resting place like sentinels. Hundreds of silent apparitions, unmoved by the raging wind; their white, misty faces were barely more than vague impressions staring at nothing. Even the best sketch artist would have produced little in the way of identifying features with most of them, but here and there I could see a narrow chin or a broad forehead. The one closest to me was slim and angular.

My breath left me and my mouth dropped open. A crowd of ghosts populated the space above the pond. There was still no sign of Scarrow, dead or alive. The water level in the pond seemed low. For as far as I could see, under the floating spectral shapes, the water appeared no more than calf deep. I could now see where I couldn’t the last time I had been here, the light brown soil beneath the water, lumpy and uneven, speckled with white-grey chunks of broken cement, old tombstone bits, and slime-coated limbs of trees. Lightning flashed overhead followed by an immediate crack of thunder. I cut my eyes to the ghosts. No reaction. They didn’t move, flinch, grow, shrink, nothing. They just hovered there, staring. Waiting.

I dug out my phone, pulled off a glove and shoved it in my snow-crusted pocket, hissed at the painful cold on my bare hand, and started pushing the button to take pictures. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. When I got to a hundred, I sent the last one to Batten then dialed his number.

He answered with, “Is that what I think it is?”

“What the fuck do you think it is?” I asked over the wind, squeezing my eyes shut. When I opened them, the sight was still the same.

“Um, ghosts?”

“Yeah,” I said, unable to form a wittier reply.

“How many?”

“Based on a prior conversation with a triple-x exorcist ex-priest?” I tried to remember the exact number, and ended up with, “Six hundred sixty-something.”

Batten sounded unhappy. “You’re doing something stupid right now, aren’t you?”

“I’m talking to you, so that's a given. But I'm also saving someone’s life.” Hopefully.

“By being stupid.”

“No,” I said sourly, squinting through the snow and wind.

Batten warned, “I don’t own a black suit.”

Liar. “You’re not going to need one.”

“Not writing your eulogy.”

“You won’t have to,” I promised. “But just in case I’m about to die,” I grinned into the storm, “talk dirty to me.”

“Jesus fuck.”

“No, nicer. Be romantic and shit. We can get to the kinky role-play later.”

“Marnie…” He sighed long into the phone. “Get the fuck out of there, please.”

I bit my bottom lip. “Oh, how I would love to. If there was anyone else who could do this,” I trailed off and scowled against the blowing grit. The snow was like sand; tiny and hard, it hissed against the accumulation on the ground. The few buckthorn trees clustered around the shore thrashed in the wind. “There’s a man out in this shit who thinks he doesn’t need help.”

“Maybe he doesn’t.”

“And maybe he does,” I said. “I didn’t call you to talk me out of this. I called you to get me all hot and bothered before I bite the big one. Don’t let me die all cold and lonely. Where’s your heart? Have mercy, dude.”

I thought I could actually hear his eyes roll. “Let me get some privacy, Weirdzilla.”

My heart skipped a beat. “The dead guys are at rest. Sex me up, pal.”

“Meh,” he said warily. “Your brother’s a telepath, and he’s been fighting rest lately. I don’t trust him.”

“Make with the words,” I said.

“Let me make sure Chapel’s not still here, Snickerdoodle. Hold your horses.”

I stamped my feet, and started toward the shoreline, watching the ghosts to make sure none of them so much as looked at me. They stared in unison at the hill behind me, like they were waiting for something. “Hurry up, man, I’m ten feet from a battalion of entities from beyond the veil, for fuck’s sake.”

“They can’t hurt you, right?”

“Uh…” I scrunched my face under my ski mask and the pain was definitely not fucking off yet. I paused in my stride until the discomfort subsided, then continued forward. “Well, I wouldn’t say that anymore. Let’s just say I may have papers to write when I get home.”

The ghosts stared through me like I didn’t exist, or they hadn’t noticed me. Yet, my mind teased. Their filmy forms did not stand in an even, military formation, but scattered here and there, and though they faced the same direction, they didn’t seem to be aware of their surroundings or one another.

Until the first one turned to look directly at me.

My throat closed around a strangled little squeal. The spirit dipped its chin to take a closer look at me without a change in expression; it didn’t seem to care that I was there, but I was absolutely sure that it was aware of me.

I opened my mouth to say something to Batten but what came out was, “Mr. Ghost, Sir? Scientific theory states that you are lost and unaware of the physical realm.” Heart hammering in my chest, I sidestepped twice to the left along the jumble of snow-covered rocks. The apparition turned, a smooth motion that did not require limbs, to follow me with its gaze. “Nope, see, you just broke the rules, there. You’re not supposed to see me.”

Batten said something in the phone but it crackled and cut out. I looked down at the phone and watched the signal drop from four bars to two, one, and then I lost the call.

“Sir,” I whispered tersely at the ghost, “you may have just cost me my last corporeal nookie. Now, I don’t know if phone sex is a thing after death, but I will never forgive you if that bitch kills me today. Shame on you for denying a girl the last groin-tickle of her life.”

I waggled my phone at him, and then checked the bars. My signal bar was dancing up and down erratically. I thumbed the GPS; I had enough signal for that, apparently, and I texted the numbers as quickly as I could to Schenk in case I was about to lose my phone entirely.

“If I wasn’t searching for a dumbass exorcist, I’d get video of you breaking the rules, there, Casper.” I took a deep breath to calm myself. “I owe Father Scarrow and his doodads an apology.”

If Scarrow wasn’t lying dead in the spot where we’d found Britney and Barnaby’s MUCE-covered corpses, then where the hell was he? I couldn’t stay out here and wait all day. Call Mama-Captain to her grave, here? Call to John Briggs-Adsit? Release the spirits back to beyond the veil? The ring in my pocket began to pulse with warmth and I thought, Dream on, demon, I’m not giving these innocent souls to you. But thanks for warming my crotch.

If I called Mama-Captain with the lacrimosa, would she come? Would she shove it down my throat and kill me? I went back to the evidence box, moving slowly in case it was possible to startle a herd of ghosts into a stampede. What’s a herd of ghosts called? the scientist in me asked. You knew this, once. You don’t know it now? And in my mother’s voice, I thought, What good are you, Marnie-Jean?

The spirit closest to the evidence box turned again to watch me, and I slowed to a tentative creep. A host of angels, my brain began, stubbornly working on this question instead of dealing with whatever the hell was brewing before me. A racket of banshee, a scamper of boogeymen… The ghost’s mouth began to open. It sank slowly, revealing black empty space purling with white mist that spilled out. The ghost next to him flinched and turned to face him. A congress, I thought, not in the least bit relieved that it had finally come to me. A congress of ghosts. One by one, several dozen other ghosts in the congress faced the gaping one, as if sensing something wrong.

A long, low noise started under the sound of the storm; a dragging moan lifted from the shore and then cut off as though whisked away on the wind. A female ghost from two rows to the left over started drifting closer, whispering something that I couldn’t quite catch.

“No-no,” I said. “Don’t do that. Don’t go into stampede mode or anything. Settle down there, mist-face.”

The ghosts she passed noted her movement, and drifted with her, slipping into one another, passing through, stirring like foggy broth. I went to my backpack quickly and grabbed the scrying board.

All motion stopped in my peripheral vision and I glanced up. They had all gone still to stare directly at me, each and every one of them.

“Fuckanut,” I whispered. They won’t hurt me, I told myself, but my fat lip begged to differ. Where the fuck are you, Father Scarrow?

I was about to take my gloves off to lay fingers on the planchette when my phone vibrated. I dug it out and looked at the text.

From Schenk: GPS check on Scarrow’s phone shows it in the vicinity of the tunnel. Going there. Guard opening gates.

“Well, double-fuckanut.” I looked across the shallow water to the other side of the pond, where the land took a small rise before it would dip again to the Blue Ghost Tunnel. At least Schenk would be able to drive most of the way there until the unplowed snow bogged him down. I had to decide whether to hoof it back to the car, which was probably buried, or find my way around or across the pond. I didn’t know which would be the better choice, but rolled off my glove and texted back: Ok, on my way.

Need the good news, Cinderblock, he texted. Tell me something reassuring.

I replied: Isn’t that what hookers are for? but after a moment's consideration, and because I couldn’t bear the thought of knowing that Longshanks was heading to a ghost-infested tunnel with his nerves on fire, I added, I’ve got everything we need. Just find Scarrow. It’s going to be okay. Only enter tunnel without me if you must. Rid yourself of doubt and fear. Then, thinking of the Twizzlers, added, Leave your gun in the car.

He didn’t reply. I set my jaw tightly, mentally willing him to agree, feeling my brow furrow with concern. I repeated, no gun, adding half a dozen exclamation points after it.

When he replied: got it, I set my phone to take video, leaned it against the evidence box, and pressed the button to start recording. Then I took off my other glove.

“All right-y then,” I announced, laying my bare fingers on the planchette. “It’s time to put this congress to work.”

CHAPTER 29

THE INSTANT MY flesh touched the cool wood of the planchette I had the undivided attention of every spook, specter, and spirit in the vicinity. Several closest to me began to whisper, their secrets intimate, appealing to me to hear their pleas; it was almost impossible to ignore the voices of the dead, but I kept my head down, glancing up only to make sure none of them were coming at me too quickly or showing signs of aggression. For the most part their hollow entreaties sounded nostalgic, aching for the warmth of life or simple acknowledgment.

As the Blue Sense began to rise, I could sense their collective confusion. They did not, as a congress, understand why they had been called forth, nor did they understand who I was, or by what mechanism they were stuck, but they did know, in no uncertain terms, where they were: home, and lingering by their own remains. Some of them were only now coming to grips with the fact that they were dead. Even having been gone for so long, some had never truly processed crossing over. They had been in one good place and then another with no sense of loss or change. These were the people who had died peacefully, surrendered to Death and to Heaven without fight or trauma. Others knew they were dead, but had earned their accession and had been at peace; they were not happy to be back and longed for release.

“Just one favor before you go,” I promised. “Kind of a life-and-death favor, okay?” I had been crouching beside the scrying board. Now I sat right down in the snow and straightened my back, and addressed them in a loud, clear voice. “Humble spirits, I beseech thee. Draw from the water the strength you require, and having done so, return beyond the veil to the peace you crave.”

Some of them got the gist of it right away. I watched as ice formed on the surface of the pond, first as the sheen of frost which cracked and dissipated; I could practically see the change in temperature as the spirits drew heat from their surroundings. Further out, another crystalline sheet, forming and breaking, drifted and began to solidify under the multitude of spectral shades. Overhead thunder was muffled by the heavy fall of snow. What had Father Scarrow said about thunder-snow? (“Ionized air during a lightning storm offers up more energy for the incorporeal human entity to draw upon.”) The scrying board dusted with mixed ice pellets and flakes as they slanted down around me.

Soon, one crystalline sheet became two, and four, like multiplying amoebas, and joined each to each, crackling against one another, a bridge of ice across the pond. The wind snatched away the sounds of their effort, but each spirit had something to say on the matter, a cry of wonder, a moan of exertion, a final whispered secret, told desperately through the fog of spectral mist. I nodded at them, and reassured them, “I hear you. Leave your words with me. I will speak for you.” Probably, I should have taken notes. Shorthand. Something. I was a lousy secretary for the dead.

When the combined whisper of six hundred dead overpowered the howl of the wind, I began to think that I’d made a mistake in promising I’d deliver their messages. There were so many, and I couldn’t understand a word of it, now. Hopefully, my phone was capturing enough to filter through later. The whispering slowly shifted into a litany, over and over, repeated by rote, softly at first, but growing louder and more insistent. They wanted something. I was wrong: it was one message. When I figured out what they were saying, the words sucker punched me low in the belly.

“We remain,” they said, angrily, sadly, confusedly. “We remain. We remain.” And then, simply, “Don’t leave us.”

My throat clamped up with regret and my eyes stung. They repeated as one, “Don’t leave us.” My vision blurred and I blinked away tears, forcing myself to focus. They felt betrayed, and alone, and forgotten here, beneath the water. I had to fight hard not to get hypnotized, drawn in by the depth of their melancholy.

I saw that the heat sapped from the pond had made enough ice to form a bridge across the water, hopefully thick enough to bear my weight. Every dead gaze was firmly fixed upon my face, beseeching eyes, despondent looks, the faces of those long passed who should never have had to face the living again, and whose bones should never have been forgotten here.

“I see you,” I said. “I will return, and I will speak for you. Go now, and be at peace.”

I slid the planchette to GOODBYE and bid them farewell.

As one body, and with one united sigh, they blew away with the wind.

CHAPTER 30

“OKAY, MOTHER NATURE, don’t fail me now,” I said, hopping to my feet and stuffing the scrying board away. I stopped the recording on my phone and tucked it away then shoved my gloves back on. “Before I can volunteer as poltergeist bait again, I need to get from here,” I pointed at the little spit of land that jutted into the pond to the land on the other side; now hidden by the dense falling snow, “to there, without going ass over antlers and into the drink, ya feel me?”

Mother Nature was not quiet; she raged all around me with her blowing snow and gusting winds. She didn’t want to play nice. I was fairly certain my eyebrows were frozen.

“And from there,” I told her, “I shall rescue the holy man and commence witching the blessed dogsnot out of that poltergeist. I think. I hope. The congress was nice enough to build me a bridge.” I stared up at the unfriendly skies. “Please, Dread Lady, if you make me light of foot, I won’t eat another donut hole as long as I live. I swear on the last Timbit on Earth.”

I hoisted the backpack onto my shoulder and took the evidence box in my arms, checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and zipped it into the pocket of my parka for safekeeping. Cautiously, I set one foot on the ice bridge.

It creaked and something deep underneath complained with a snap! “Now, be nice. I know the water is only a foot deep at the edge, but I don’t know what it’s going to look like halfway across, so, bear with me.” I lifted my left foot off the shore and set it on the ice. After two tiny snip-crinkles, the ice didn’t seem to shift much. “Okay, good. This is good. Juuuuuuust like this.” I shuffled a few steps ahead, shifting the evidence box so it was secure in my arms. A few more steps. The water on either side of the bridge looked fairly shallow. I held my breath, glancing back at the shore as I slid like a kid pretending to skate, not lifting my feet but skidding forward little by little. The shore got further away. The cold seeped through my ski mask; my ears ached. It seemed like the apparitions had drawn an enormous amount of heat away from this area in particular. The further across the pond I went, the colder the fog became, until I was slinking through near-frozen soup. The air puffing from the little nostril holes in my ski mask misted and the fabric of the mask was crusty and hard. For a moment the snow let up and I could see where I was going. She wasn’t fooling me; I knew that any second Mother Nature would blast me again. This storm was what my Grandpa Matts would have called a humdinger.

“Please, Mother Nature, don’t—” Thunder-snow jolted me and I jumped a little, enough to rattle the ice beneath me. I felt it shifting and cracking, and froze in place. “Oh, bitch!” I whispered fiercely.

Terror struck, I couldn’t move. The water still looked fairly shallow; ahead, it got too murky to judge its depth. When my hands stopped shaking and my knees felt less wobbly, I started to shuffle step again, talking to myself aloud as I went. “Dear Diary: I think I just peed my pants a little.” Shuffle, shuffle. “I’d like to say it was the first time since Kindergarten,” Shuffle, slip, shuffle. “Buuuut I think we both know that would be a lie. Love, Marnie.”

Humor helped; self-deprecation, a classic Baranuik defense mechanism. I kept my eye on the other side of the pond, daydreaming that not only was Scarrow fine and dandy, but he had successfully exorcised Mama-Captain without me, said “Shoo!” to the cowardly spirit of John Briggs-Adsit, and Schenk was fine, and they had summoned up an ambulance and were sitting inside it getting warm and saving me a coffee and a warm blanket. They might even have a brownie, still warm from the oven. Not a donut hole, because I promised I wasn’t going to eat those anymore. Sweets and warmth and safety. Yes, that’s probably what was happening over there. Of course it was. Positive thinking. De Cabrera would be so proud, yes he would. I closed my eyes and could almost feel the near-future burn of too-hot coffee on my tongue. All I had to do was keep talking, keep shuffling, and get to them.

“Dear Diary: I fell in this water yesterday.” Shuffle, slide. “Was it only yesterday? No, two days ago. When was it?” Slip, shuffle. “Fuck it, whenever. It was cold. And unpleasant. And even though I was only grabbed by a branch,” shuffle, whimper, “I know damn well there are six hundred skeletons under that mud, all heaved-up and unboxed. And the mud is really mushy, and I’m sure I’d sink up to my waist. And then what?” Shuffle. My breath hitched in as my throat constricted around my voice box and made my declaration a squeak. “Then I’d be waist-deep in mushy-gushy mud surrounded by icky, old, brown skeletons grabbing at me.” I paused to consider this. “Okay, probably they wouldn’t grab at me. But they’d poke me in the butt and stuff. Don’t you just hate being butt-poked by skeletons? Of course you do. Everyone does. It’s very un-cool. And then I'd die of hypothermia. Love, Marnie.”

That conversation was a lot less helpful, and I tried to push the thought of old bones and a soggy death out of my mind. “Dear Diary: When I get home, I’m going to retire again, and spend all my time harassing Mark Batten for hot sex, wrestling him out of his pants, biting his shoulder, and digging my fingernails into his beautiful ass. Yes. Now, that is what I call a solid fucking plan. Pun intended. Love, Marnie.”

It wasn’t going to happen, but it sure sounded good. I wondered, as I shuffled away from the deep middle of the pond toward the opposite shoreline if he had actually broken my vibrator, and if he was actually replacing it, and if he was actually buying the biggest one he could find, which would be, if my memory of the closest sex shop in Boulder served me correctly, the Cockasaurus Rex 3000. I wouldn’t mind owning one for laughs, but I sincerely doubted anyone outside the porn industry would get much use out of it for anything but home defense. The thing was the size of a Dachshund.

“That’s right, Marnie. Keep thinking about giant dildos. That’s how we’ll survive this. Power of the pervert.” I closed in on the other side as the ice crackled, groaned, and moved underfoot; I held back the urge to hug my box and run the rest of the way just to get to safety. The shore was close enough that I could have thrown my backpack to it, but making a stupid mistake now would plunge me into deep waters; unlike the other side, this shoreline did not have a shallow rim. I couldn't see the mud at the bottom here. My footing uncertain, I took it a hesitant half-step at a time, feeling rushed by new doubts about Scarrow and Schenk handling things without me.

With the edge just a few tantalizing feet away, I bit down hard on my tongue to resist jumping to it. “Dear Diary: This is my final entry, because I acted on impulse and wound up a Marnie-sicle. Love, splash!”

And then I was back on solid ground, so relieved I could throw up. I didn't waste time looking back at the pond. I found some solid footing and began hiking up the incline to the top of the rise, slipping only once and catching my shin on a log. I paused a second or two at the top to catch my breath and swear therapeutically, and noticed three large ravens on a power line above me. One of them had a blue-black streak, or maybe that was just the way this stormy day’s weird, patchy light hit the feathers. Three more took flight from a nearby tree and settled beside the first three, and my scalp prickled. One gave a loud and pointed caw!

I stared at them. They stared back. The skin between my shoulder blades crawled unpleasantly. Refusing to entertain the exorcist’s raven psychopomp nonsense, I carried on, spotting the break in the trees where Scarrow had led Harry and me up out of the valley from the Blue Ghost Tunnel. Had that really only been last night? It seemed like weeks ago. I definitely needed to un-fuck my sleep schedule once I got back to Ten Springs, starting with a very long nap.

I said a quick prayer (“Lord and Lady, soothe my head / Quiet all the angry Dead.”) and made my way through the snow drifts to the tunnel as quickly as I could manage.

By the time I got to the tunnel I had lost all feeling in my toes, my jeans were frozen stiff around my aching knees, my knuckles throbbed around the box of evidence, and the only part of me that was warm was my upper lip, safely trapped under my ski mask and humid from my panting. I saw no ambulance, no car, no Schenk, and worst of all, no sign of Father Scarrow anywhere. I set the box down outside the entrance. Someone had attached a lock to the gate since we’d been here last. The canal authorities? The factory? Was this factory property? The police? Had Schenk come out here to do it? Had Scarrow? Whoever it was, they didn’t bother blocking the hole in the brickwork. I peered inside while digging out my phone for light.

“Father Scarrow, are you in here?” Drips. Movement. Shadows. “Is anybody here? Longshanks?” I bit my bottom lip, lowering my voice. “John? Mr. Briggs-Adsit?”

I wondered, should I leave this box of stuff outside the tunnel or keep it with me? Schenk said not to let it out of my sight, but bringing John’s skull and Mama-Captain’s lacrimosa into the tunnel seemed like a supremely bad idea. Damn it.

“Renfield?” I yelled into the hole. Nothing. I lifted the box into the hole before me, grimaced, ducked, and took it real slow so as not to slip on the frost-slicked mud inside. I turned on the flashlight app on my phone. Holding the phone delicately in my teeth, I went gloved hands first, eyes searching for any movement in the shadows.

This time, I didn’t fall. There were no dogs to startle me with a sudden yap. Because the poltergeist drained them of heat until they literally froze to death. Like she did to Britney, who took her necklace, and Barnaby, who had her son’s skull. And now you have both. “Happy thoughts,” I muttered to myself.

I picked up the box and my backpack, no longer hurrying, vibrating on the edge of pure terror. Because my brain hates me, House of Pain’s “Jump Around” was playing in the back of my mind. I blamed Harry. He’d probably been rapping like an undead dork in the big, beige bedroom at North House while I slept. That thought took the edge off my terror. I will not jump around. I will not get up, get up, and get down. “Hello?” I kept my voice light and sing-song, stubbornly maintaining the hope that he was just crouching in here doing something flakey or pervy. “Father Scarrow? Renfield? Hey, Mr. Rats. I’m calling you that thing you hate. Come out and spank me.”

There was a spot ahead that constantly dripped water, and I had to scoot closer to the slick wall to avoid it. That’s when I noticed the MUCE hanging in thick runners from between the bricks. My upper lip curled in distaste at the snot-like encrustation. “Is that you, Mama? Or is that just John?”

The dripping stopped and I glanced behind me at the spot. The water still flowed, but now it just hung there frozen in midair, icicles attached to nothing at top or bottom, growing longer as the new drips coalesced and froze. I squinted at them, awkwardly aiming my phone’s light app at them while balancing the evidence box in both arms.

“Shivering shinbones! That’s not science-y. That’s wrong. Stop doing that, water, that’s the wrong thing to do.” I inched closer. “What kind of assholery is this? Obey gravity.”

But they did not obey gravity. The frozen droplets hung there stubbornly with their crystalline beards, as if to prove a point: I see you. Now you see me, too.

“Okay, okay. Hi. Very good. You’re fancy, you can freeze drips midair. I admit it: I do believe you can do a great many things to the physical realm. You’re clearly manipulating energy. But I have to say I’m disappointed with some of your choices. Pulling thermal energy from your surroundings, really? Thermal energy is pretty low quality. Second Law of Thermodynamics, high entropy, babe. Now, what you wanna do is draw your energy from a low entropy, high-quality source, like an electrical socket, or a human being. But then, as I say this, I realize you’ve got that last bit all figured out, haven’t you?" I chuckled nervously, ignoring the way my pulse was suddenly drumming in my ears, and carried on down the tunnel away from the bobbing icicles. “I’ll write a paper. I’ll put your name in it; how’s that? I was wrong about you; science is wrong about you; Father Scarrow is right. I will apologize to him the second I see him.”

And I would, but he wouldn’t hear me. I was almost to the caved-in end of the tunnel when I spotted the black lump sticking out of the water.

CHAPTER 31

I EXHALED HARD, muttered, “Shit,” and hurried forward as quickly as the slippery mud between the railroad ties would allow. Frost slid and squelched underfoot, but I managed to stay upright.

His head was underwater, face down, his heels sticking up, toes hooked onto the last railroad tie before the tunnel dipped and became waterlogged. The entire end of the tunnel stank of sulfur and charcoal and singed wood. I set the evidence box down carefully, flung off my backpack, and crept forward. No bubbles. No movement. The water was slick and glossy with ectoplasm, and though a sheet of MUCE obscured his head, I knew from the black skinny jeans on the ankles under the cassock that this was Father Scarrow. A King James Bible with sticky tabs along all three paper sides rested as though neatly placed on top of a railway tie, centered between two clusters of spindly, snow-white mushrooms. Scarrow’s simple cross was centered on its well-worn, black leather cover, and a folded piece of paper was stuck in it like a bookmark.

“I’m sorry, Father Scarrow,” I whispered, tiptoeing closer, getting low near the boots. In the corner of my eye to my right, the darkness grew meatier, solidified. I told it, “Relax, whoever you are. I have to check him.”

I removed my gloves and pinched the edge of his jeans where they were stuck in his boots. They clung wetly to his leg, but I could already tell by the rock-hard coldness of that leg that Scarrow was dead and frozen solid. Again reminded of a frozen turkey leg, I wiggled one of his boots until it came away and set it aside. Scarrow’s stiff body bobbed up and down in the water, dark hair fanning out from the back of his head.

That mass to my right shifted and I heard a sigh. “No, no,” I told it angrily. “Shut your cry-hole. I gotta make sure. Just going to press on the posterior tibial artery by his ankle, here…” When that yielded no result, I shifted my two fingers to his foot to check for a pulse in the dorsalis pedis. It was hopeless. Father Scarrow’s heart had stopped long before I got to the Blue Ghost Tunnel. I sat back on my heels and let regret rinse down through me for a moment, wondering if I could have saved him if I’d come straight here when Schenk said he was missing, or if I’d stuck with him when he’d asked me to. He should never have come here alone. Was this my fault? Had I left him no choice?

“No, that’s bullshit,” I said under my breath, angry with myself, angry at Scarrow, looking down at the distinct lack of rash on my DaySitter fingertips, where one touch of the holy man’s bare skin should have made it flare. “He had my number. He could have called. He should have called.” I scowled at the bobbing corpse. “I could have helped you. Why didn’t you call?”

Because he thought you were a lunatic, my cruel brain reminded me. Because he was pissed that you sent away his test-tube ghosts.

Just to the right of Scarrow’s abandoned boot was a crouching shadow. I pulled the evidence box to me, loosened the lid a bit, unzipped my backpack, and took out the scrying board to set on the ground.

Without looking directly at the cowering shadow, I said bitterly, “Hello, John.”

The ghost did not react to my presence. It seemed to be staring at Father Scarrow. Ghostly fingers clawed at a spectral mouth, padding at the filmy shape of his bottom lip. He had far more form than the congress had, clad in his civil war uniform, minus the hat. I wondered if he’d been wearing the uniform when he died, or if Mama-Captain had dressed him in it for his burial, wherever that had taken place.

“John, do you see me?” I asked, putting the planchette on the scrying board. I poked it toward HELLO. “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, I’m calling you. Do you see me?”

The ghost’s eyes cut in my direction at once. In a voice barely louder than a breath, he told me, “You do not belong.”

“Well, no fucking offense, shitcart, but neither do you.”

He paddled his lips some more, and began to giggle. It was the worst thing I’d heard since the squeak of Ruby Valli’s rubber boots on snow when she was coming to kill me; my shoulders scrunched up with revulsion.

The specter stopped his lunatic gibbering with a jerk and looked up at me like he only just noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

“Uh huh, you said that already,” I said. “Did you hurt Father Scarrow, John?”

He started to moan, softly at first, building to an agonized howl from the belly. The tunnel amplified it and it echoed around us. I was impressed with the spirit’s ability to project so much sound. The groan dropped abruptly. “It’s dark,” he whispered, sending one spectral arm out into the air around him. It trailed fog through the air, stealing thermal energy as it went. “It’s too... it’s dark. I want to go. I want to go. I remain.” He started, and for the third time noticed me. “You do not belong here.”

“Oh, John,” I said with a sigh. “You stayed with him, at the end, didn’t you? You knew Father Scarrow was in trouble.”

His voice was joined by another; this one, I recognized.

“You do not belong here,” Father Scarrow’s spirit whispered. Then, confused, “I remain.” And, stronger now, “You do not belong here.”

I stood, and flashed my iPhone light around until I found a dark spot that wouldn’t light up. I squinted at it. “Don’t jizz a brick, holy roller,” I said. “It’s not like I’m out here eatin’ corndogs with the devil. I was trying to save your skinny ass. Looks like I got here too late.”

His shadow had no shape; Scarrow was having trouble forming more than an amorphous blob, but his voice was clear and gaining power. “The graves. The watery graves…”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re not drawing me back into the cemetery for a game of Graveyard Grab-ass, are you?”

I turned the planchette to GOODBYE and said, “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, I release you. Go into the light, John, and rest in peace.” The shadow flickered, like someone was quickly turning a light on and off, but when the flickering was done, still he remained. “Why isn't it over? Go into the light, soldier!”

John said, “You do not belong here.”

“Neither do you,” I damn near bellowed. “You’re dead, Captain. Fuck off into the light!”

Father Scarrow’s spirit made a mournful sound. Even dead he was a judgy judgypants. Eat me, you skinny-jeaned stiff.

“It’s Mama,” I figured. “Right, John? Maybe your mother wasn’t always dangerous, but she changed, didn’t she? The sicker you got, the worse she got.” The crouching shadow had nothing to say, but his eyes flew wide with terror. “You didn’t want to witness this shit, but you’re stuck with her.”

The shadow shifted. Ghostly hands slid over ghostly ears. The shadow began to rock back and forth just out of the range of the light from my phone. When I swung it in his direction, the shadow vanished. I turned the phone away only slightly and there he was, crouching and rocking.

Father Scarrow’s spirit wavered and disappeared. There was a soft, cold touch of air against the only bit of my neck not covered by parka or ski mask, like a hand tickling the soft hairs there. John’s ghost gasped and began fingering his open mouth again. I froze in place.

“She’s right behind me, isn’t she?” I swallowed hard. “Well, fuck. That’s right, you heard me. I’m swearing. I don’t care how much it costs me. Because there’s a dead exorcist lying beside a very scared ghost, and a killer poltergeist sneaking up behind me, and I can hear her fucking whispers now, so fuckityfuckfuckbitch!”

I side stepped closer to the Bible, wondering how badly it would hurt to pick it up. Sooner or later I would probably have to, when it came down to exorcism. Once upon a time Declan Edgar had given me a crucifix to wear, and I hadn’t burst into flames. Maybe the Bible wouldn’t be so bad.

“Hey holy man, got an ass blaster?” Scarrow’s spirit was silent on the matter. “You didn’t actually come out here without your electronic shitwidgets, did you?”

Had Scarrow had anything in his hands? I shuffled closer to the water to peer at the corpse. The ski mask felt like it was getting tighter on my face, pressing into my lips, squashing my nose. I pulled it off and hauled air deep into my lungs.

That’s when I discovered that spirit hugs are bad for the soul.

Incorporeal forces gripped me around the rib cage and began to tighten. I went limp, playing noodle, and slipped to my bum in the mud, throwing one bare hand out to slap the Bible. As soon as my bare hand hit the Good Book, the force around my chest loosened and I gasped gratefully as frigid air poured into my lungs. I didn’t even care that the Bible was peppering my palm with little bumps and blistering the skin. I crawled closer to the scrying board and grabbed the planchette like it was a weapon, shaking it in the air.

“Listen, you diaphanous dicksmack, I once raised a ghoul with an eyeball and killed a zombie with a box of dirty kitty litter. I am all-powerful and stuff, so watch your amorphous ass.” The Bible flew free of the mud and hit me in the temple too quickly for me to react. I pointed the planchette at the empty air. “That,” I enunciated with exaggerated care, “was not nice. John? Renfield? Mama-Captain isn’t being nice. Make her stop.”

Their shadows coalesced in one misty, two-headed hump at the far side of the water, huddled together. A fine-veined film of ice was beginning to form on the water, and the temperature in the tunnel was dropping quickly enough to hurt my exposed skin.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, you two,” I warned, scrambling to my feet, “but my faith in you is taking a major ass-reaming, here. Can’t you do something better than that limp-dicked conjoined twins shtick? She's eating your fucking lunch.”

The evidence box skidded away from me like it had been kicked. My backpack rolled in the mud twice, spilling its contents: little plastic bulk herb bags tied with twist ties, half a pack of Twizzlers. My golf pencil rolled into the grime, and my mini Moleskine diary fluttered out into a downward-facing fan. I hadn’t actually written very much in it yet, but now its pages (its beautiful, blank, soft-white pages, I lamented) were soaking up brown water.

“Oh, you cock-juggling thundercunt,” I barely breathed. “Now you’ve asked for it. John? I got something to tell you. And you’re not gonna like it.”

The temperature dropped so quickly in front of me that the humidity in my exhale froze and dropped like glittering ice dust.

“Mama’s got a secret shame. It’s kept you bound to her here, in the dark, in the cold, tormented in this dreadful limbo, for a long, long time.”

With a short, vigorous eruption of power, something shoved me in the solar plexus, but not hard enough to knock me back. She was gonna have to do better than that. I set my teeth, widened my stance, and continued.

“She hurt you, John. She hit you with the spoon. Right on the top of your head. Do you remember?” I showed him by using my free hand to remove the ski mask and pat atop my blonde, sweaty, tangled mess of hair. “Right here. She hit you hard. She was frustrated. You weren’t acting right. Not your fault, you know; the neurosyphilis could have caused psychosis. Breaks in reality. You probably had no idea you were acting strange, and certainly had no way to explain it, or stop it. Your mother would not have understood it, either. She had no way of knowing that your skull was deteriorated from the bacteria, but it was. I don’t know how many times she hit you. Maybe she hit you often. Maybe she hit you every day, near the end. Or maybe it was just one time. She lost her temper and whacked you. Either way, she killed you. That’s why you’re still here with her. That’s what Mama’s killing to hide.”

The poltergeist formed as a spiraling swirl of frost before me in a whirling fury. Apparently nobody likes the bad guy's big reveal monologue; especially the bad guy. Everyone's a critic. Sheesh. I slammed my ski mask to the dirt, planted both hands on my hips, and gave the misty ghost swirl the your move glare. She responded by tossing the top of the box top off, tearing at the plastic bags within, and tossing the skull to its shattering end, shedding herbs and lipsticks and bone chips in a blizzard of mortuary chaos.

I fell to my knees, grabbed the salt and sage, and began a hasty circle around myself, raking forward bits of skull until I had it all. I hurriedly collected the bible, scrying board, and cross into the protective circle with me. I wasn’t fast enough. The poltergeist tore ass past me, heaved Scarrow’s dripping body out of the water, and sent him through the air with so much force that his head flew off before he landed on me. His wet hair whipped MUCE through the air in a fan. It hit the wall with a thud and rolled to face me, tongue lolling out. I covered my head with my arms, cramming my eyes shut. I flashed back on Neil Dunnachie’s exploding zombie and the resulting raining chunks, and my gag reflex tickled in the back of my throat.

I snuck a peek at the tunnel. The poltergeist was no longer visible, having expended so much energy, but her draw caused a visible purl of white mist along the ground, and I watched it move toward me, leaving a trail that was stringy and sticky and wet, like liquid cobwebs.

“Marnie?” Schenk’s bellow at the door. I was too afraid to turn around, to take my eyes off the danger.

“Scarrow’s dead!” I shouted, making a ring around me with salt and smudging the air. “Mama-Captain is here, too.”

“I’m coming in.” Schenk huffed angrily. I don’t know how he managed to squeeze through the hole in the wall, but soon he was jogging toward me, filling the confined space with his reassuring presence. “What the fuck are you doing in here alone?”

“Petulantly nursing a case of recreational self-destruction?” When he got close enough, I grabbed his arm and hauled him into the salt circle, pointing at the corpse of the priest. “I was trying to save a life, so curb the nerd-fury, Longshanks.”

“No,” he said automatically; I couldn’t be sure he was actually listening until he said, “Witness my nerd-fury. I told you not to come alone.”

“I thought I could get to Scarrow in time.” I swallowed hard with a gulp. “Patrick?”

“Yes, Marnie?”

“I got whapped by a dead priest.”

“Did you?” He placed his feet carefully as he moved past the emptied box, skull fragments, headless body, and punctured plastic baggies. I had no doubt he picked out every detail, from the smashed skull of John Briggs-Adsit to the empty herb bags, to the bible, to the scrying board. “You got a little MUCE right…” He wiped the corner of his eye to indicate mine. “Lower. Right there.”

I moaned unhappily and backhanded my face to clear it of goop. “Ick. A great muchness of ick.”

Schenk ran a hand through his short hair unhappily. “Did you touch anything?”

“All I did was check him to see if he was okay, I swear.” I flapped a hand at the corpse. “He’s not okay.”

“Vital signs?”

“Bad. Really bad. He’s got a terrible case of I’m-so-dead-itis.” I craned up at Schenk to see if my black humor would faze him, but I should have known better. “He’s got no pulse.”

“He’s got no head.”

“He had it when I got here,” I said, hearing the defensive tone. “Mama threw his corpse at me. Don’t tell Agent Batten or the FBI Internal Affairs dudes. They love to pin this shit on me.”

“Crime scene guys will collect it. Backup’s on their way, but the roads are approaching damn near impassable.”

Backup. That was the worst idea. “No, send them away. Can you keep them back?” I explained about the body heat, and the poltergeist sapping it and using it to become more powerful, more firm. “We need to get rid of the poltergeist with the fewest casualties possible. John Briggs-Adsit is held here by her. Scarrow is here.” I thought about the six ravens and reluctantly admitted, “I’m willing to bet Britney and Barnaby's spirits are still somewhere nearby. I don’t think we can send them to the light without getting rid of the poltergeist first. She's got them tethered to her. Or maybe it's like a tractor beam.”

The flesh crawled along the back of my neck and my shoulders went up. Schenk cut his eyes at me and I knew he was feeling it, too; a tug at our internal heat, and the goose bumps that followed.

“Aaaaand then there’s Mama,” I said. My innards squeezed in on themselves involuntarily and a great shudder went through them. “She’s squinkalicious.”

“Listen,” he said, and we both stopped talking, held our breaths, strained to hear what sounded like someone walking through puddles toward us. Plip plip plip. We stared as John’s ghost re-formed, cowered and sobbed quietly beside the exorcist’s corpse.

“How do we get rid of the poltergeist?” Schenk asked.

I thought about this. “The ghost hunters pissed her off, digging up old family shame. But the exorcist,” I gazed at the headless body in the ectoplasm-coated cassock floating in the water. “Father Scarrow was the real threat; he scared her. He was a priest and a scientist. Mama-Captain couldn’t wait to get rid of him. Isn’t that right, Mama? You needed him gone. Not only did he know what you were, but he knew how to find you, and how to get rid of you for good.”

Something sailed through the cool air and hit me dead center in the forehead. Two more squishy missiles whipped through the air, and I tried to dodge them unsuccessfully. I looked down at the cold little blobs at my feet.

“That bitch threw dead frogs at me. Did you see that?”

I felt a swell of unease through the Blue Sense, but Schenk’s deadpan humor didn’t falter. “I feel like the mood in this tunnel is such that laughing at your misfortune would be inappropriate.”

“That’s correct.”

“You have frog goo on your forehead.”

“My fault for taking off the ski mask.”

The wind dropped; I wouldn’t have thought it possible for the air around us to get colder, but it did, and my scalp tightened at the same pace as my ass. Then the wind picked up in a sudden, soul-shearing shriek.

“We can’t wait. Failure isn’t an option here. This poltergeist isn’t going to stop. She’s going to kill Simon and Ellie next. And maybe you. And maybe me. That last part is the bit that worries me most.” I jabbed a finger at the pile of stuff, and took the lacrimosa. “Grab that map and bible, constable. We end this now.”

CHAPTER 32

WE HIT THE pond from the northeast shore. The weather, which had been fairly shitty before we’d gone into the tunnel, had taken a power slide toward terrible and face-planted in downright hideous. The snow had become hail. The wind had picked up and was whipping in mad gusts. Never had I witnessed a noisier, more chaotic winter night. It would go down in the history books, or in my diary anyway, as the Great Ghastly Night of Twenty-Thirteen. Bare tree limbs thrashed. Clumps of snow picked up off the ground and flew through the air to mix with the hail. None of it slowed Schenk’s stride. With Father Scarrow’s bible stuffed under his jacket, strapped by his empty shoulder holster, he barreled downhill toward the pond leaving a wide swath of footprints in the snow for me to hop in and out of on my way after him. He made it down the hill without tripping and hit the ice bridge running.

Alas, I am not as graceful. After a brief, screaming trip down the hill, I came to a stop by executing a textbook belly flop into a frozen bush. I picked myself up, adjusted my backpack on my shoulder, and charged after him.

MUCE surged out of the water on either side of the bridge and wrapped Schenk’s impossibly long legs like liquid fingers with a mind to drag him down; he trudged forward regardless, a powerhouse with brontosaurian shoulders, unstoppable as a tank through the mud. Lights flashed on either side of us, deep under the water, drawing the eye.

I shouted through the wind, “Eyes front and center!” But he waved back at me to tell me he knew better; he hadn’t forgotten his run-in with the hypnotizing lights at Lock One, and wasn’t likely to let it cloud his mind again.

The pond frothed up, drenching us; the ice that had formed on the water churned and wobbled as it began to break up beneath Schenk’s weight. The poltergeist began greedily drawing heat from the water, sucking, sucking, and we could see her, a looming shadow at our side, keeping pace, reaching limbs growing like a cancerous cloud up and over us, blotting the sky. I doubted that she cared if her thermal suckitude was reinforcing my fragile ice bridge from beneath, and I hurried in Schenk’s wake with the baggie clutched in my teeth. Despite that, the ice beneath Schenk gave way under both his feet mid-stride, and he plunged into the pond up to his knees; he lurched back to extend a hand to me. I clutched at his big forearm and held tight as he more or less heaved me from one side of the break to the other before clambering the rest of the way across. Unfortunately for me the ice was rotten enough to drop me through it as well, soaking me to above my knees before we could both scramble ashore.

“You okay? Gonna make it?” he shouted in the direction of my ear. I nodded rapidly. He took the bag from my teeth and zipped it open, flapping the map open, and sticking the bag back in my face. Without thinking I took it back between my teeth. He did a double-take, but left it for later comment. Vision blotted by snow, he read the map then oriented himself. He pointed at the ground about ten feet off shore and yelled over the shrieking wind, “Elizabeth Briggs-Adsit was close to the fence, last one buried, plot ended up next to a farmer’s fence. Handwriting here says ‘stone knocked down by cow, 1918.’”

“Show me how far out.”

“The Briggs-Adsit plot should be there. Really hard to tell exactly. So much has changed.” He pointed at a spot on the map which was blurring because of the water, and then pointed about seven feet to his left. “Now what?”

The sky darkened as Mama-Captain grew furiously above us, sucking heat from every available source. We’d be next. Why we weren’t first, I’ll never know, but will be forever grateful to the mechanics of ghostly manifestation. I took the bag out of my mouth.

“Ignore her,” I yelled back, bringing the bag forward and shaking the skull chunks. “First, we return John’s skull to his body.” I paused to pinch my lips shut and hug the bag into the shelter of my body as a massive wave hit me, threatening to spill me on my ass. I threw my shoulders into it and managed to stay upright, then shook the water out of my hair and shouted, “We need to find the rest of their bones.”

With the ghostly fingers tearing at the map, Schenk shook his head. “Impossible. There could be ten feet of silt and mud and rocks to dig through.”

I showed him my bare hands. “This part’s my job.”

“You’ll have to go under,” he said, his brow furrowing deeply. “Under the dead people water.”

I flapped my hair out of my face and yelled through the wind, “You said it wasn’t dead people water!”

Before he could answer the wind blasted down at the water, throwing sheets of icy spray off the pond. “I was trying to make you feel better.”

“Convection microburst!” I yelled, holding onto his sturdy arm to brace myself against the wind shear. “Get away from the tree.”

“Is she doing this?”

I didn’t have time to work out the possibilities of cold air sink and convection caused by incorporeal human entities in any sort of scientific fashion, because panic was rattling through my brain as if a pinball wizard was at the paddles. I answered, very simply, with my gut feeling. “Yes.”

I clutched the bag of skull fragments, took two breaths in and out, heaved in a deep, final breath, and dove under the water towards the Briggs-Adsit plot.

The water was turbulent and churning and sluggish with slush. I could barely see, and there were obstacles in my way, chunks of cement and bricks that mimicked broken headstones and grave markers. I had to come up for a quick gulp of breath and then dive beneath again, to do another rapid, scrambling search for the marker, if there even was one. I began to doubt I’d find anything and pushed up for another breath when I spotted something half sunk in the mud, a rounded stone. I stuck my foot on it, went up to gulp air, and thrust down again, left hand first. My palm hit the marker and I summoned a hot burst of psi to explore the stone. What I felt wasn’t Mama-Captain and her homicidal wrath, it was John’s cowering in cold, lonely terror.

I shoved my arms down into the mud, making room for the bag of skull fragments, pressing it down as best I could. The swirling, bitingly cold water stung my eyes. I pulled extra mud on top of the burial spot. The frosty slush in the water felt like death’s cold fingers in my hair. When I was sure the bag would stay under the mud, I pushed off and surfaced, coughing and hauling air deeply and noisily into my screaming lungs. Schenk met me with both hands outstretched to steady me as the waves coursed around us.

I took the tear vial out of my pocket, wrapped the necklace of the lacrimosa around my neck, and slipped Asmodeus’ ring on it before closing the clasp. The wind responded with another violent burst, shoving water in a wild vortex away from our bodies, only to have it rush back in on us.

The black outline of the poltergeist coalesced above us and I grabbed the necklace off my neck and showed it to her.

“Hullo, Mama!” I cried, teeth chattering. “Got something of yours! Come get it!”

The entity poured out of the sky like purge fluids from a putrefying corpse, thick, viscous, and nasty. When it collected into an identifiable shape and turned its face at me, I swung the necklace back and forth like an old-timey hypnotist with a pocket watch.

Schenk yelled at me through the wind, “Throw it. Just throw it and let’s get the fuck out!”

I couldn’t risk the chance that she wouldn’t get it back. I had to get it in her grasp, had to make sure. I held it out to her, knowing that she could drain every bit of energy from my body at any second, needing her to take the necklace and the ring of Asmodeus, to accept the gift. I felt the tart sting of hot cinnamon candies on the back of my tongue, but instinct told me to wait.... wait....

The old woman took shape mere inches from my face, and I heard a rustling crunch as all my wet hair suddenly froze into a wild mane of icicles.

“Someone wants to meet you,” I told the snarling apparition. “In fact, I suspect He will be delighted to make your acquaintance, you unremitting bitch.”

The ground shuddered behind me.

Mama-Captain took the lacrimosa. Her spectral mouth dropped to reveal only blackness, a great chasm of pain and rage, and the sound that came out of it was the buzz of a million angry wasps. She lifted the necklace and slipped it over her head, where it settled on the fine, black turn of her neck.

That’s when I whispered His name. “Asmodeus.” Just once. Once was enough. My tongue stung again, harder, hotter.

Mama-Captain turned to walk back into the shallow water, trailing her ectoplasm, reminding me again of electrified, liquid spider webs. The water behind her began to bubble, to boil, and my heart slammed in my chest. I threw a hand out to grab at Schenk’s arm.

“We gotta get back,” I said. “Back off. Now!” I threw the bible back at him. “Hold this! Don’t look back.”

“What did you do?” he yelled.

“Trust me, turn your back!” I shoved at him, and he launched into motion. “I think this might be some serious Raiders of the Lost Ark Shit,” I screamed at his back. “Don’t look back! Don’t listen to it!”

Schenk put twenty feet between him and the pond and turned his back on the water; he didn’t look back, except a quick peek at me to make sure I was still close by. I, on the other hand, had to look at the pond. I had to see this.

The demon king Asmodeus, The Overlord, the Banker at the Baccarat table of Hell, King of the Second Circle, Lord of forty-three legions of demons, and all around infernal pain in the ass, shot out of the icy froth with His scaly, red arms thrown wide. Bigger than I’d ever seen Him, he opened His bull's mouth, the smile never leaving His human face as He swallowed Mama Briggs-Adsit whole. His goat's head bleated something that sounded ominously like an incantation in an unclean tongue at the roiling sky. Everything in me flushed hot and limp, like I’d been trapped in a sauna all day.

He glanced down and spotted me. The ground shook again, and snow and ice began to rain off boughs and branches of the trees between us. I might have peed myself again, but I'll never tell.

Asmodeus waved at me with one dragon-like claw, and my nipples hardened painfully under my clothes. A waft of hellborn heat hit me and Schenk, and my frozen hair blew straight back from my face, clattering around my ears like frosty dreadlocks before melting into a sodden mess. I watched the demon king as he did a strange little happy dance in the water, kicking up droplets, surrounded by fresh steam as his infernal influence battled the wintery conditions, looking very much like an overgrown puppy with a bacon treat, or the most sarcastic rendition of me getting my first Girl Scout cookie of the season. He flapped about and waggled his rear end in my general direction. Not the scariest demon sighting in my life, but I had come to expect odd things from the Master of the Falskaar Vouras.

I glanced at Schenk, who was still obediently not looking; no fool, this mortal knew when the paranormal shit was hitting the fan, and knew when he was out of his league. Apparently, I did not share the same measure of common sense. My brain suggested, “hey, hauling ass out of here sounds like a good idea,” but the rest of me thought maybe I should stay. A prickling along the back of my neck urged me to take one last look at the demon king.

The Overlord stood still now, staring over at me, and I felt the weight of His focus shift. He’d had His fun, collected a new soul, and gobbled it up. Now, His terrible yellow eyes caught my gaze, and I felt Him bear down through that same Bond that allowed Harry and me to communicate our wants and needs so effortlessly to one another. For a moment, there was no doubt that I belonged to this creature. I was His DaySitter as much as I was Harry’s. I was a servant of the Second Circle of Hell. There would be no redemption of my soul, and someday I would join Mama-Captain in that scaly red gullet. That demon would guzzle me right down and then do a gleeful jig to work off the calories. He was my future, right there, smile spreading to reveal a sharp, nightmarish landscape of shattered teeth. The only silver lining to His visit was He was defrosting us where we stood; sure, it was hellfire, but it sure was toasty.

Heat you right up, the demon promised, His infernal and familiar voice pushing into my brain.

“I hear ya,” I said, mostly to myself, nodding in His direction. “But not today. I’ve got more asses to save first.”

And more to send Me, He reminded me with a chuckle that felt like being ground between boulders inside my chest. I saw His focus shift to Schenk and I tensed; for a dreadful moment I could picture Him taking the cop, too, for no other reason than greed. Instead, He pressed His voice into my brain again. Finally found a man who listens to you. What a chump. He should have his head examined.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I flipped the demon king an enthusiastic middle finger. His yellow eyes gleamed with glee.

Thanks for the hot date. The demon king put a hand to each of His less-human heads, and blew me a double kiss the likes of which few humans would ever see. Later, Toots.

Asmodeus put His hat back on His human head, and sank grinning into the now-boiling water of the Welland Canal overflow pond like a sweaty fat man in a hot tub. A single black feather drifted down from the sky, landing on the snow in front of my boots.

***

“Slow down,” I panted, lifting my voice to be heard over the wind. “Whoa, Longshanks. Stop. Hold up!”

Once the heat of the demonic presence had melted the snow around Schenk’s boots, he’d gotten a metaphorical spark up his ass and bolted up the hill. Without a moment's consideration whether or not what I'd told him not to look at was gone, Schenk had had enough. I chased him uphill until I nearly fell down with exhaustion. I paused at the back of the New Red Hook Cemetery to lean against the obelisk of the town founder, a man who had built mills where they’d told him not to, a man who had seen future progress and had acted accordingly. Today, his town didn’t exist, save for these cemetery stones and two tall metal gates and a rather pitiful hedge. Now, I rested against his memorial and wondered what he would think about all this. My teeth were still chattering something fierce, but I was filled with the fire of victory deep in my belly. Mama-Captain was gone; her soul was paying the ultimate price for her murderous rampage; maybe that had bought me a bit of internal toastiness from Asmodeus as a promise and a reminder, as well as some perverted kind of thanks.

I turned on the hill to face the pond, considering.

Schenk slowed to a stop, coughed hard until he caught his breath, then joined me. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded. “No. Stop. Don’t tell me. Is it over? Is it done?”

He looked like a drowned rat, except he was so much bigger than a rat, so maybe like a drowned horse, and I thought to mention that to him, and couldn’t find a way to make it sound complimentary, so I thought I better skip it. When my gaze drifted to the top of his head, though, what little smile I’d had slid right off. He looked like he’d been frosted, or maybe dunked in a vat of industrial bleach, scalp first.

“Uh, Schenk? I don’t mean to alarm you, but,” I squinted up at him. “All your fucking hair turned white.”

He slapped a hand to his head. “Shit,” he said, but his eyes were on me. Or rather, my forehead. “I don’t want to alarm you, but your hair has gone black. And blue. Like your face.”

“What?” I grabbed a wet handful from behind my ear and pulled it in front of my sore eye. I saw black locks and a streak of turquoise. Just like Britney Wyatt’s hair. “That doesn’t happen!”

But as I said it, I heard all the times I’d said the exact same thing about ghosts not affecting the physical realm over and over for the past week. I gave up. It was scientifically implausible and surely some kind of magical glitch; I’d put it on the Worry About it Later list, which was getting alarmingly long. Positivity, Marnie; maybe that just means you'll have a lot of later to worry with. Elian would be so proud, once he stopped facepalming.

“At least it’s over,” he said.

“Almost. One more thing,” I said, plunking down on my knees in the snow and hauling my backpack off my aching shoulders. I plopped the scrying board on the ground, but the zipper had been half-open and the planchette was gone, lost to the pond or the tunnel or the running. “Gimme your pencil.”

He didn’t ask, just handed it to me. I tapped it three times on the board, taptaptap, and then laid it to point at HELLO, and most definitely did not start humming the Lionel Richie song.

“Father Scarrow?” I called. “Renfield Aquinas Thackery Scarrow…”

Schenk moaned. “No more ghosts.”

“... Britney Anne Wyatt. Barnaby Allen Nowland.”

When the three figures appeared, I added, “Captain John Briggs-Adsit, I’m calling you. Do you hear me, John?”

The man who appeared in uniform before me did not look familiar; he was not cowering in a corner but standing upright, chin high, wearing his hat slightly askew at a jaunty angle. The smile on his lips was beatific and serene. Britney’s spirit extended a hand toward me, and in it was a square shadow, the hint of a business card. Barnaby’s ghost stepped in front of her, looking first at the cop and then me, seeming confused and lost. Father Scarrow’s spirit put his palms together, tenting his fingers, and looked toward the Heavens.

“Really dude?” I drawled, giving a snort. “Okay, then. Good luck with that.” I glanced up over my shoulder. “Any last messages for the departed, Longshanks?”

Schenk shook his head hard, and I realized he was choked up and didn’t want to speak for fear of being emotional in front of me. I snapped that twig right away. “Come on, ya big soft softie of softiness. You found her, dude. She’s going to be at peace. Say goodbye.”

He rubbed his goatee hard and grumbled something at me that sounded suspiciously like shutthefuckup. Then he crammed both hands in his wet pockets, stamped his feet, and said, “Come on, let’s get this done. I’ve got white hair and hypothermia. Jesus.”

I nodded, took one long, final look at Father Scarrow, who was vamping angelic now, and moved the planchette to GOODBYE.

CHAPTER 33

THE NEXT MORNING was cold but sunny, and my mood was damn near delightful. The heated bench seat of the hearse was toasting my tush by the time Mr. Merritt cruised past the New Red Hook Cemetery. The gates were open. The path had been plowed and salted. There were media vans and cars outside the police cordon, and two uniformed officers oversaw the buzz of forensic crews going in and out. There was no sign of Schenk’s midnight blue Sonata or his newly frosty locks. Mr. Merritt glanced at me for direction and I nodded to carry on. He did a circle in the crunching gravel just as some reporters noticed the hearse; not that it wasn't exactly the most inconspicuous vehicle in which to be traipsing around. I saw Jerry Formick go for his camera, so I powered the window down in time to shoot him a farewell finger. He snapped a few pictures as we sped away. I hoped he got a good one of my nifty new black and blue ghost hair.

“Do I owe you a grand for that rude hand gesture, Mr. Merritt?” I asked.

“Did you make a rude hand gesture, madam?”

“Nope.”

Combat Butler checked the rear-view mirror to monitor the media vans, maybe to discern if we’d be followed. We weren’t. “Perhaps on your next visit we could work on your lying?”

“No need,” I said, slouching into a nice, relaxed slump. “I’m already a pretty good liar.”

“Begging your pardon, madam, but you’re a dreadful liar.”

“But you’ll miss me when I’m gone, right?”

“North House will not be the same without you,” he admitted, and I thought that twitch around his mouth meant he was wrestling back a smirk. “Tim Horton’s?”

“Yes, please.” I glanced behind us at the gleaming casket in the back. “Did Harry pay off my swear debt?”

“But of course,” Mr. Merritt replied. “Lord Dreppenstedt also included a hearty holiday bonus, including something he called ‘hazard pay.’”

“Hey, where’s my hazard pay?” I squawked. “I fell in dead people water, was exposed to visions of drowning, slapped in the face with candy, had my hat destroyed by ghost goobers, slugged with dead frogs, nagged by my mother, found out my BFF is a grave robber, and nearly died of hypothermia feeding a poltergeist to a Demon King. Also, I had to promise to give up Timbits. Also-also, I found out that ghosts are scary. That’s not the kind of thing you forget, Mr. Merritt. Now I have to be scared of ghosts for the rest of my life. Don’t even get me started about the articles I’m going to have to write, and the videos I need to upload. Total nightmare. Plus, look at me!” I used a gloved hand to grab a lock of black hair and shake it in his general direction. “For cryin’ in the sink, I look like Lily Munster in Technicolor.”

“But did you not come here of your own volition, madam?” Mr. Merritt asked with a baffled frown that I suspected was a Fakey Fakerson faux frown, existing only to taunt me. The Blue Sense reported that Mr. Merritt was enjoying himself. “Did you not in fact insist on being part of this investigation?”

“So, what are you saying? I’m not allowed to complain about stuff that I demanded should happen?” When his eyebrows did a little confirmation of this at me, I huffed playfully at him. “Since when is that a rule?”

“Always accept your lumps without fuss, madam, when you have asked for them.”

I was pretty sure Harry hadn't told Combat Butler about our occasionally kinky sex. Maybe. I crossed my arms over my chest but couldn’t help but smile. “I’m going to miss our little talks, Combat Butler. When are you going to come live with us in Colorado?”

He laughed, then, a surprised hoot, like the idea tickled him. “Oh, no, madam, I think not.”

“Because I’m a huge pain in the rump?”

“Not at all,” he said, and my empathy assured me he was being sincere. “I have three grandsons here who need their Pop Pop around.”

“Let me guess, Byron: those charming young lads are named Ewing, Fairfax, and Wordsworth.”

“They’re called Cody, Brent, and Tom.”

“Rats,” I said, and of course thought of Father Scarrow, and his nipple-ripping name, and his lewd smile, and his flowing, outdoor-model hair, and his skinny jeans. I stopped my brain before it showed me his headless body. Almost.

Mr. Merritt cruised down the Seaway Haulage Road heading north, past the rectory, but Schenk’s car wasn't there, either. There were three others there, and a crime scene van that looked like it had been snowed in last night. I recognized Malashock’s car at the side of the road where the plows had gone through. Mr. Merritt did another U-turn without having to be asked.

After hitting the nearest Tim Horton’s and grabbing a few coffees and a bag of Danish for the road, he struck out to Lock One, where we caught the first glimpse of Schenk, standing past the torn down frost fence, beyond the yellow police tape, staring out at the last push of the Welland Canal. His car was parked exactly where it had been the first time I met him.

Mr. Merritt pulled the hearse in beside the Sonata and I took two paper cups of coffee out with me. I’d left my ski mask in the tunnel; some crime scene guy had probably scooped it and entered it into evidence. The wind was chilly but not as horrible as it had been, and it tossed my black hair around my bruised face as I headed for the big cop. The morning was topped with a weird mix of blue skies and white clouds stained along their bottoms by grey, like the Green Man had dipped them in sludge before setting them above us.

Schenk didn’t turn to look as I came up on his flank.

“There better not be a donut in that bag,” he said gruffly.

My boots scuffed slush as I came to a full stop. “I’m not even holding a bag. Left my Danish in the hearse. Some detective you are.”

He looked down at me, slate eyes seriously scanning my upper lip, which had ceased to be puffy but was still nursing a split. I knew how bad my face looked; I couldn’t wait to get the stink-eye from airport security. I handed Schenk one of the coffees. He took off his gloves and wrapped both hands around the cup. “Thanks. On your way out?”

“Unless you need me to help you with paperwork.”

“That’ll be the day,” he said. “I have no fucking clue what I’m going to say, but I’m looking forward to the break.”

He didn’t say whether that was a break from the paranormal stuff or a break from me, and the Blue Sense was quiet about it. “What did Malashock say about last night?”

“That she no longer owes you a favor.” He tried to bend back the little bit of the coffee cup lid that's supposed to fold and clip, but he got a crappy lid and it wouldn’t stay. He ripped the plastic tab off and stuck it in his pocket. “Littering is a crime.”

I grinned. “I’m in awe of your complete and utter obedience to the law at all times, Constable FunTimes.”

“You should be,” he said, blowing off the coffee steam, looking over my head to the hearse. “He doesn’t mind waiting?”

“I pay him to do a lot worse,” I bluffed. “He’s an assassin after dark. Everything settled?”

He stared into the canal for a long while, and then sipped his coffee. “Seems to be. No activity here. I’ve got a clean-up team waiting for the crime scene guys to finish at the tunnel.” He looked back at the hearse, and the Blue Sense reported a momentary struggle within him, an internal debate. “Father Scarrow left a note for you at the rectory.”

Urg. “Was it private?”

“Very.”

“Did you read it?”

“Of course.” He took it out of his pocket and flapped it at me. I snatched it from his hand with a sigh.

“Dammit, Longshanks,” I said, giving it a quick scan. Since he’d already seen it, I read aloud, “Marnie, I write this knowing that this exorcism will most likely be my last. My home is not the sanctuary I had hoped. The poltergeist froze Drake and Wolf right in front of me. God forgive me, but I must assume His hand no longer protects the once-hallowed ground that I have without a doubt tainted. I’ve tried to call you a hundred times since then, but I am no longer alone here, and everything I attempt is blocked, every battery drained, every power source altered, every wire melted. By having the mourning vial in my possession, I have opened the door to the entity that was once Elizabeth Briggs-Adsit, but I do not regret having done so. Understand, keeping this object in the police station drew her attention to dozens of innocent men, and had the power to bring her to it. I had to remove it for their sakes. Since I assume Barnaby Nowland stole it from me, I hope you are now in possession of it. If I should die before this is resolved, I will warn you here: when Mrs. Briggs-Adsit comes for her necklace, LET HER HAVE IT. She will kill you if you do not. I will do everything I can to banish her beyond the veil before this happens.” I paused for a moment, fighting off a wave of sadness, and continued. “It is nine-thirty. I am heading to the Blue Ghost Tunnel to exorcise the area, and then I will move to the overflow pond to pay special attention to the Briggs-Adsit gravesite. I am not confident this will work without the skull and the necklace, but I can wait no longer as my life is now at risk. I am sorry that my selfish curiosity has brought us to this, and hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me. May whatever face of God you believe in bless and keep you, Marnie. I will pray for you.” I dropped my arm as if the letter had become unbearably heavy. “Well, shit.”

“He left funeral instructions,” Schenk said. “High noon. So the ‘unrepentant monster’ can’t attend.”

Harry. I checked my watch. “Funeral? Father Scarrow was murdered by a poltergeist. Do you have any idea what that would do to tissue at the microscopic level?”

“No. And neither do you, I bet.”

“Damn right, I don’t. Nobody knows. This is unheard of. That’s why Scarrow’s body, along with Britney Wyatt’s and Barnaby Nowland’s, will be at the morgue and then the Center for Preternatural Forensic Sciences in Hamilton for a looooong time.”

“They’ve already called about it three times this morning,” Schenk agreed. “I want my guy to do his preliminaries comprehensively first.”

“Who called?” I asked, opening my coffee and sipping carefully to see if it had cooled off enough not to scald my tongue. “Burns? Gyorkos? Mills? Souza?”

“Mills,” he confirmed.

“Fuckin’ Mills.” I gave Schenk the exorcist’s letter back, as he no doubt would need it for copies and paperwork and who knew what else. “I’ve had some run-ins with him. You do not want that guy to put you on his Christmas list, let me tell you.”

“Bad fruitcake?”

“You say that like there’s good fruitcake.” I glanced up at him while he finished his coffee. “And no, it wasn’t fruitcake.”

“Jelly of the month club?”

“Yes,” I said, “If by ‘jelly’ you mean ‘dick pics.’” When he looked mildly surprised, I said, “Hey, just because a guy’s a scientist doesn’t mean he’s not a fuckin’ weirdo.”

“True. After all, look at you.”

“Right—heeeeeey.” I smiled sourly.

“I’m not convinced you didn’t request those pictures.”

“Now, what you want to do is address all your files and correspondence to Souza. Souza is thorough.”

“And no risk of naked pictures.”

“In fact, you might want to run those files to Souza in person,” I continued, thinking of Melinda Souza’s long, glossy chestnut hair and startling green eyes. Last I’d heard, she was still single, probably on account of her serious nature, dedication to her job, fierce independence, and her tendency to be brusque. Mindy was not a warm and fuzzy kind of girl, but that was nothing Schenk couldn’t handle. He had a good, if Anderson Cooper-colored head on his shoulders, and shared the same serious nature and work ethic. Could Souza be the answer to Schenk’s dreams? Feeling a bit like Cupid, I said, “Bring tea, not coffee. Souza drinks tea. English Breakfast, if I recall. Milk, no sugar. Maybe a cookie. Cookies are a nice touch. But not in the lab. No food in the lab.”

He gave me the side-eye. “Why do I get the feeling you’re up to something?”

“Because you’re an overly suspicious, fancy-brains detective?” I finished my coffee and took his empty cup from him. He put his gloves back on and went back to staring at the canal’s surface. The sun slanting down into the water made it seem more grey than black. “You know, you might never get to bury Father Scarrow. If this is a confirmed death-by-Incorporeal-Human-Entity, they’re going to shove him in a freezer and study his bits and pieces for years.”

“You’re full of good news today.”

Positive thinking, Marnie. “Your hair looks good white?”

“Try again.”

“You’re right, it really doesn’t. Gonna dye it?”

“Will that work?”

“I doubt it. It’s ghost-touched hair.” That’s positivity? “Mama-Captain will never kill another person,” I offered. “The lost spirits are gone. John Briggs-Adsit, Britney Wyatt, and Barnaby Nowland are at peace.”

“So, there’s that.” He aimed a squint up at the clouds as they went across the sun, cooling us for a moment in shade before trundling onward and letting the sun return to its snow-melting duty. “Talked to the city about discussing plans with you to relocate the remains.”

The skeletons, those that remained under the pond’s muddy floor, would have to be carefully transferred to one of the Red Hook cemeteries, and Harry had agreed to foot the bill and assume all expenses for the memorial stone. This project would be a nightmare, years of red tape and litigations and anthropology surveys, but I’d kinda-sorta promised an entire congress of ghosts that I’d heard their pleas, and I wasn’t about to leave Canada without at least starting the process. “Thanks. Text me the names and numbers and Harry and I will get on that.”

He nodded. “Simon Hiscott was released on bail. You'll probably need to come back to testify.”

I sucked my teeth. “I don't suppose an attempted murder charge is really necessary, since one would-be plaintiff is now deceased, and I'm not pressing charges. Anyway, where’d he get the gun?”

“It’s his. Registered.” He shrugged. “A shooting sportsman. How’s your friend Ellie?”

“Didn’t want to see me to say goodbye,” I said. Positivity! “But my mom woke my dad up early so he could come to the door and wave. Sure, the only one of my sisters who would see me was, of all people, Rowena, but the good news is, she doesn’t hate me as much as before. I think. Don’t wanna push it. Maybe I’ll see her when I come back for the trial. I’m having Mr. Merritt drop the scrying board off to her later so she doesn’t have to see me.”

“That’s nice of you,” Schenk commented, crooking a finger at me and walking to the trunk of his car. “You should have had Mr. Merritt come say goodbye to me on your behalf so I didn’t have to see you.”

“You are a bit of a jerk today,” I mentioned affably. “A gigantic one, on account of how tall you are.”

“I am the Everest of Jerks,” he agreed, popping his trunk. He handed me a soft package wrapped in a plastic grocery bag, folded and taped. I put one of the empty cups in the crook of my arm to free a hand to take it. “Don’t open this until Christmas.”

“I don’t celebrate Christmas; I’m a witch. Well, my beliefs are fairly syncretic, but I don’t usually do the traditional stuff, mangers and wise men and all that.”

“Then don’t open it until the morning of December twenty-fifth because I asked you not to.”

“I’m opening it right now.”

“I will shoot you.”

I laughed from the belly, and relented. “You and your complete and utter obedience to the law at all times,” I repeated. “I didn’t get you a gift.”

He pointed to the hearse. “Your ass on a plane out of my country is the only gift I need, eh?”

“I’ve enjoyed your company, too, Longshanks.” I smiled knowingly. He nodded at my smile, and returned it. “Thanks for tolerating me. Harry should send you hazard pay, too.”

“Oh, he did,” Schenk confirmed. “Hey.”

When the sun came blasting out again I had to squint up at him to see. “Yeah?”

“None of this was easy,” he said. His gaze shifted to the imprint of my iPhone in the front pocket of my jeans. “You’re ballsy. When it comes to work, anyway. Maybe some of that courage will follow you home.” He leveled a challenging look in my direction that surprised me. I knew what he was hinting at immediately: a picture on my phone, a confession over nachos and wings, personal fears, private doubts, matters of the heart. Batten. The thought of returning home to Kill-Notch and his furious, clenching jaw and his hard ass and his hot glare made my knees weak, but none of that was Schenk’s business. I was about to tell him to butt the hell out of my love life when I realized that wouldn’t be fair, since I’d just set him up to maybe meet the woman of his dreams not five minutes ago.

“Ballsy, huh?” I said. “We’ll see, Thag.”

He nodded, seeing on my face that I got his drift. “Stay tough, Cinderblock. Take care of yourself, eh?”

I kinda wanted to hug him good bye, but that wasn’t our way; momentarily thwarted by our unspoken personal space arrangement, I shot him the best farewell smile I could manage. It didn’t quite feel like enough, but I respected the limitations and went to the hearse. Mr. Merritt had scooted out so he could hold the passenger side door open for me and take the not-exactly-Christmas gift.

I looked back only once, to watch Schenk stroll back to the side of the canal with his left hand in his pants pockets. With his right hand, he took something out of his inside jacket pocket. I knew it was a picture of Britney Wyatt. I watched him until his shoulders fell; then I turned around and faced forward in my seat to give him privacy while he said his other goodbye.

CHAPTER 34

MR. MERRITT ARRANGED for porters to load Harry and his casket carefully into the belly of the plane with the luggage while I got my ticket. Combat Butler’s goodbye before customs and security was quick and perfunctory. The Blue Sense told me that he didn’t enjoy farewells; he fled back to the hearse like he'd left the kettle on at home. He thought I didn’t catch him sneak a peek back at me before he left the building. It wouldn’t be the last time he saw me; before leaving North House I’d changed his laptop’s background picture to a picture of me from my iPhone with my mouth stuffed with cookies, giving him a thumbs-up. I wished I could see his face later when he discovered it. Maybe I’d call him on Skype.

I used the flight to organize my notes for the papers I’d have to write, and jot a list of everyone I thought I’d need to alert first about my discoveries. Scarrow’s discoveries. The Church wasn’t going to like it, but they didn’t much like DaySitters anyway, so I could live with that. The scientific community wasn’t going to like the news, either. Preternatural biology was a flexible field, but the other fields attached to it by necessity — ecology, chemistry, physics — were highly resistant to new ideas. The peer review process would be lengthy and fraught with doubt and even hostility; it wasn’t anything I hadn’t encountered before, but it was never enjoyable to be the bearer of unpleasant, not to mention paradigm-kicking, news.

Chapel was waiting at the arrivals gate when I got to Denver, looking boring but serious in shades of taupe and brown. The sight of him flushed days of stress out of my system; my ex-dhaugir, my ever-patient boss, my calm and cautious friend. Looking at Gary, I felt instantly at home. It wouldn’t be dark for another few hours, so Chapel had put the seats down in the SUV so the skycaps could load Harry’s casket in the back, with our luggage stuffed in on either side of it. Chapel held the passenger door open. I suddenly felt like hugging him, and wondered what the hell was happening to me; a few ghostly deaths and some demon dancing, and I become a softie?

Chapel waited until we were driving before noting, “That’s quite the black eye, Marnie.”

“Taunted a poltergeist.” I mimed a punch in my face. “Blammo! Whapped by a ghost fist.”

He favored me with a skeptical glance that I'm sure would have lasted longer if he hadn’t been driving. “The spirits of the departed cannot affect the physical realm.”

“Until one bitch-slapped me, that’s what I thought, eh?”

“And the black hair? Is that a blue streak?”

“Sorry. Wasn’t my idea. Dead girl left her mark on me,” I said, not entirely unhappy about it. If I avoided looking in the mirror, it hardly bothered me at all. “Could have been worse; Constable Schenk’s hair went completely white.”

Chapel nodded, and his simple acceptance of my explanations began unknotting my stomach. He was always so easy to be with. I wondered what Batten would think of my hair, and my belly did a funny flutter; I snuck a peek at my ex-dhaugir to see if he’d noticed. He seemed oblivious.

“Agent Chapel. Gary.” I chewed my bottom lip, trying to imagine what de Cabrera would say to encourage my positivity. All that came to me was Schenk’s encouraging voice. Ballsy. “We need to talk about work.”

Chapel pulled into heavy Saturday traffic on the I-70 without comment, but I could see a hundred thoughts going through his hazel eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses even without bringing the Blue Sense to bear.

“Remember how we worked together on the Danika Sherlock case?” I reminded him. “Imagine that, but with less ghoul sludge and fewer heads in mailboxes.”

He asked tentatively, “Are you considering parting from the PCU? Opening your own business? Working from home?”

“That’d be ballsy, eh? I mean, who would hire me, except for you?”

“What does Lord Dreppenstedt think?”

Harry’s gonna have a shit-fit, I predicted. Me? Working alone? Maybe boinking Batten on my days off between writing academic papers? Harry would dredge up his best expressions of outrage when I told him. Maybe even the fancy French ones. I wasn’t entirely new to working solo; I had once owned my own business, however briefly, and somewhere, tucked away in a Canadian evidence locker, there was a business card to prove it. I was currently working on a way to use that as proof that I could manage myself.

“I haven’t discussed it with Harry yet,” I admitted. “I thought I’d run it past you first and see if you thought it was even doable.”

“Are the hours at the lab too much for you?” he asked. “Do you need more time home during the day to watch Harry?”

“Oh, hey, he’ll buy that excuse,” I said, adding that to my mental list. When Chapel cast me a look that said he was more interested in the truth, I said, “I’m thinking I’m not a good fit in the FBI. Rules and regulations have never been my thing. I mess shit up on a regular basis. Internal Affairs would have a party if I left. Geoff would bake a fucking cake without putting kittens in it. Let’s face it, Boss Man: your life would be a lot easier with someone else in UnBio and me on the side. We gave it a shot. We had some success. But I’m a motherfucking handful.” I squirmed in my seat, then realized I didn’t have to pay anyone for swears, here. “I like cursing, Gary.”

He gave a sympathetic little chuckle. “I know you do, Marnie.”

“I don’t like being told off when I screw up. I get enough of that at home.”

He kindly did not point out that perhaps I should stop screwing up, and nodded instead. “Nobody likes their hard work criticized. Your tasks are difficult and often your methods must be unorthodox. I try to make allowances—“

“That’s part of the problem,” I said reluctantly. “You let it go, and then you get in shit for it. My mistakes become your mistakes. That’s hardly fair.”

“If that’s the only cost of doing business with you, Marnie, I will gladly continue to pay it,” he said. But I felt the weight he placed on the if, and the fact remained that I made his life difficult more often than not, even when he hadn't volunteered to be a pain-sink.

I had run out of points to make, and stared out at the grey-white skies; we shared a companionable silence as we approached the Denver/Boulder turnpike.

“Tell you what,” he pulled around an eighteen wheeler that made me think of Krystof Duchoslav chained underneath. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and we can talk about it on Monday? Maybe we can come up with some alternatives or compromises.”

Two days to reconsider. Did I really need it? I felt a surge of disquiet from Unflappable Chapel as the Blue Sense tickled my perceptions, and knew with sudden clarity that, despite my being difficult – and often an utter liability — SSA Chapel didn’t want me to resign. He felt like he was losing an asset. An asset? Chapel valued me. Only the Dark Lady above knew why. I doubted anyone else on the planet felt like that about me. It made me question my decisions again.

“Monday,” I promised. “Bright and early, your office, Boss Man.”

That seemed to assuage his worries. By the time we hit Boulder the sun had settled almost to the horizon. I turned on the radio and let some music soothe our uncertainties, and wondered if Constable Schenk had reprogrammed his presets (or developed an appreciation of perky techno) and figured out how to fix his dashboard clock, or if it was still telling him what time it was. I buried a smile behind my fist and stared out at the passing city lights.

***

When we hit my driveway I felt a familiar yawning emptiness in the back seat that told me Harry was stirring from rest. Chapel popped the back of the SUV as I hopped out and made boot prints in the first dusting of snow on the driveway, hauling the crisp mountain air deep into my lungs. One of the cabin’s windows glowed warmly.

Somewhere inside, my baby brother would be waiting to hear if the family asked about him; they hadn’t. That was probably better than what might have happened if they had, but I knew he’d be hurt. He’d probably sulk in bat form in a bunny slipper for the next week. Harry would give him scratches on his little furry noggin and tell him everything would be okay. I would make no such promises; no point lying to a revenant who could read your mind.

I took a long look at the cabin while I listened to Chapel speak to Harry as he emerged from his casket in the back of the SUV and into the cold night. Their friendly chit-chat was tense and hesitant; they both knew that changes were coming, and Harry wasn’t able to reassure Chapel as to the continuation of their friendship without knowing for sure what I had planned. Harry and I hadn’t discussed anything, but he was aware of my restlessness through the Bond, and my frequent complaints did not fall on deaf ears. Since my happiness greatly affected his own, Harry was paying close attention to my current List of Things That Piss Me Off. This Internal Affairs nonsense was currently the heavyweight on that list. Harry said nothing; he was taking a rare wait-and-see position.

Chapel reached for a casket handle and Harry tut-tutted. “Please, Agent Chapel, don’t strain yourself. The young lad and I will take care of that. MJ, will you kindly summon your brother and have him put on some pants?”

***

Batten was sitting in the living room in Harry’s chair, Bob the cat curled in a little fur ball on the blanket in his lap; he was still sporting a Movember mustache, but he’d styled it, kind of, and now he looked a bit like a badly-bleached Lando Calrissian. I dropped my go-bag. It had seen better days, but it had made it there and back again, and it had survived. Batten took in my black eyes, split lip, weird hair, mangled backpack, and scuffed up boots with a look that said he’d expected a disaster, just maybe not to this degree.

“Hey there, you snot-gargling fuck-knob!” I greeted.

His dark brow danced upward quizzically. “What the hell?”

“I wasn’t allowed to swear much in Canada.” I explained. “Too expensive. Sorry.”

“Uh huh. So now I’m bearing the brunt of your cork-popping?”

“Oh boy,” I said, sitting on the couch and curling up. “That sounds dirty. Maybe later, eh?”

Batten sighed, but it ended in a tired chuckle. “Nice accent. It’s cute.”

“Translation: you missed me,” I dropped him a wink. “Am I right, poonjockey?”

He rolled his eyes. “Finished?”

“You didn’t miss me at all? Not even a little?” I asked.

“You’re not so bad.” He made show of thinking about it. “I could have used a few more days off.”

“Dear Diary,” I drawled, dripping sarcasm. “Today Agent Batten said something not-quite-dicksmacky. It was a red-letter day. But he killed Mister Buzz, so I have to feed him to a wood chipper and a thousand rabid wolverines. Love, Marnie.”

“Buck up, kiddo.”

I threw a couch pillow at him, but it only made it halfway across the room. We both stared at the ill-aimed missile. “You know, I do have feelings,” I said.

Batten shook his head. “They’re just pants-feelings.”

I couldn’t deny that without admitting deeper, scarier things, so I nodded. Unlike Harry, who was as permanent as a tattoo, Batten was a feverish disease I couldn’t shake, one I was sure could be cured if that’s what I truly wanted. But I didn’t. If I was being honest, Batten was a weakness I wanted to keep. The hot-box of his company was overwhelming, not constant and calming like the hovering shade of my Cold Company. Probably, it was overwhelming for Batten, too. He was probably right not to cultivate too sticky an attachment to me.

He was reading something on my face, and advised, “Don’t always jump to the worst conclusion.”

“Sometimes a cigar is just a penis.” I nodded sagely. “You don’t seem as stressed out by vacation as before. Did babysitting relax you?” I held up a hand. “Wait, that doesn’t make sense at all. You hate revenants as much as you hate downtime. You hate the rules and the paperwork and Assistant Director Johnston’s bullshit, but you love The Job. You should be sitting funny, with your nuts in a big knot. Why are you chilled the fuck out? Did you break into my herb cabinet and smoke my weed? Please tell me you didn't break my vibrator in a moment of personal prostate exploration.”

“Your insight into my personality is breathtakingly inaccurate, Doom Chasm.”

“I know you better than you think,” I said.

To this, he rolled his eyes. He pulled the blanket off his lap and the snap-spark of static made the cat jump off his lap and scramble out of the room and down the hall. “Static electricity,” he said.

“You and your electric ball-sack,” I said. “So, what’s new? How’s Wes?”

“Can he change back into a man?” Batten asked. “Because I spent the entire time dodging his bat-faced dive-bombs.”

“Probably, but he’s having fun with the flight thing. You would, too. How’s our ward doing?”

“Mr. Half-A-Vamp? I peeked,” he admitted. “Once. When I was changing the feed bag. Cracked open the casket.”

“And?” I hugged myself, genuinely curious about the condition of my house guest, Mr. Duchoslav.

“He’s got a face again. There’s a lump under the blanket that might be hips.” Batten shrugged. “Smells pretty bad in there.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Like death?”

“Vampires always smell faintly of death,” Batten said, daring me with his gaze to disagree. It made me feel tired, too tired to correct his use of the V-word or argue. I gave a whatever-you-say shrug. “More bad news from Internal Affairs. They wanna dig deeper.”

To this, I smiled. “Better pour me a bigger cup of give-a-shit, dude, because I am fresh out.”

“Vacation is extended across the board for another two weeks.”

“And still, you’re not upset?” I asked.

“It’s your files they’re taking time with, not mine.” He looked like he wanted to say something else, but kept it to himself, tapping one foot on the carpet.

“See my concern?” I pointed at my face and leaned forward. “It’s small, and it’s buried under bruises, so you’ll have to look closely.”

“You’re smiling and not snarling,” he pointed out. “Are you high?”

“Nope. Just feeling…” I took a deep breath and let it out in a long stream. “Well, kinda ballsy.”

He took that in with a frown, but let it go. “Canada makes you relaxed. It’s creeping me out. How’d the case end up?”

“It was mostly good.”

“Mostly?”

“Parts of it were disgusting and awful and terrible and sad.” I admitted. “To be specific, my parts of it.”

“Say it isn’t so,” he deadpanned. “I find that hard to believe.”

“To be fair, everything Constable Thag Longshanks did was just swell, for a half-believer with a double ration of What The Fuck Is This Shit thrown his way. He’s totally pro and everything.”

I thought his jaw rippled a little. “But your contribution was…?”

“One magnificent fuckup after another. Then I saved the day, because I'm still awesome like that.”

He nodded again, like this was to be expected. “What about this ghost you were chasing? Did you find it?”

“It found me.”

He motioned at my bruised face. “Big bad ghost fists?”

“Not big.” I see-sawed a hand. “It was the size of, you know, little.”

His eyebrows came together in a knot. “What is ‘the size of little?’”

“You know big?”

“Uh huh?”

“Less than that.”

He smirked, and chuckled softly. “I did miss you.”

“Yeah?” I brightened, perking up.

He nodded but did not elaborate. That was okay. The room was warm and cozy and his company was, for the first time in a while, welcoming. “Will your new buddy ask you to help again?”

“Schenk? Oh, I highly doubt it.” I smiled to myself. “Not until sandal season, anyway.”

He gave me a curious head tilt, and I shrugged it away. I looked at him for a long time, and he sat there quietly tolerating it; ever the psychic null for me, he radiated no hints of what he might be feeling as I drank him in with famished eyes. My heart picked up to do the Snoopy dance in my chest.

Finally, he lifted from the chair. He stuffed both hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “If you don’t need me for anything else, I guess I’ll get back to my apartment. Water my plants. Sort my mail. Buy some beer. Watch some football.” He rocked back on his heels. “Now that Harry’s home, I’m not needed.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

“What?”

“That you’re not needed.”

“Oh.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug, looked down at the empty beer bottles on the coffee table, then back up at me. “Well?”

“Well what?” My belly had exchanged butterflies for a nest of bees, and they were stabbing me all over with the need to blurt out all my wants and needs and doubts and fears. I practiced my cool face, while at the same time hearing Schenk’s voice in the back of my head. (“Ballsy… at work, anyway.”)

Batten opened his mouth, took one hand out of his pocket to scratch at his chin stubble. “Should have shaved, except for the mustache,” he said, mostly to himself. “Want me to put your bag in your room for you?”

I looked down at the pitiful, mostly-deflated backpack. It weighed about twelve pounds, max, with my dirty diary, pencils, Dad’s Moleskines, toothbrush, deodorant, extra gloves, and change of underpants in it. “I think I got it.”

“Right.”

“Could you, before you go,” I clenched and unclenched my gloved hands, “maybe make a fire? It’s kinda cold in here. For Harry, I mean.”

“You can’t build a fire?”

I puffed hot air out my nose. “Well, you wanted to be needed!”

“I never said that.”

“You’re impossible,” I said hotly. “I try to find something for you to do—“

“Don’t do me any favors, Marnie, for fuck’s sake.” He moved to leave.

“I quit the PCU!” I blurted.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and slowly turned around, forehead scrunched like I’d started speaking an alien language. I squirmed in my frog socks, my toes curling with anticipation, wondering what the hell he was thinking or feeling, hating that of all the people in the world, he was unreadable to me.

“Why did you quit?” he asked.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said, standing up straighter.

“I’ve been telling you to quit for months.”

I glared at him, incredulous. “I've been trying to quit for months. I quit the day before I went to Canada, too, didn't I? Besides, I don’t do what I’m told.”

“But now you’re quitting.”

“I can do whatever I want.” When he just stared at me, I felt pressured to continue. “The hours are shit. And they took away my zombie beetles.”

“Fred and Wilma.”

“Right. And I’m not allowed to write the paperwork the way I want to. And Internal Affairs are a pain in the ass. And Assistant Director Johnston hates me. Besides, I don’t wanna work with you.”

“You don’t want to work with me,” he repeated.

“That’s right. Because you’re…,” I floundered. “Annoying. And you wear holy water mixed with Brut aftershave. Who does that?”

The tightness around Batten’s eyes softened, and the lines in his forehead vanished like some magic hand had erased them. “I’m annoying?”

“You heard me.”

His lips curled up and he started to laugh. “You should have consulted me.”

“I don’t need your permission to quit my job, you overblown snatchmagnet.”

He opened his mouth like he had something else to say, and then accepted my statement with a nod. “So now what?”

I realized I was staring at his mouth and tried to find something else in the room to look at, but my traitor eyes went back to his face helplessly. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“When you need your fire lit?”

A hot shot of lust rocked through my body from tits to toes and my brain melted instantly into a syrupy pile of goo. My lungs forgot how to draw breath, but that might have been because my heart stuttered in my chest so badly. “When I wha—?”

A rare smile that was all white teeth and victory grew, a genuine Mark Batten smile, just for me. He nodded at the wood stove. “The fire. For Harry. When you need me. You give me a call.”

“For Harry,” I repeated.

“Mmhmm,” he said, putting his hand on the doorknob. “Talk it over, see what he thinks. You let me know when you’re tired of doing it yourself, and you might like an extra hand.”

I blinked rapidly, pretty sure I knew where he was offering to put those extra hands, and followed him to the front door; as he strolled to the car, I wondered what the hell just happened. What had I said? What had he said? More importantly, what did it mean? The first snow of winter began to settle on the driveway. It looked like it had followed me home, along with that courage Schenk had wished upon me. Feeling a little stunned, and anxious, and hopeful, and scared, and maybe a little bit randy, I held the door open and watched him get in the car. The car that Harry gave him to keep him in Colorado, my brain reminded me. To keep you happy.

But how far would Harry go to make me happy? Would he sit by and watch me have an actual, adult relationship with Mark “Kill-Notch” Batten, notorious vampire hunter? With, what, romance? Sex? Love, even? Was that possible? Batten was not a psychic null for Harry; my Cold Company felt every twitch and flutter of emotion that Batten felt. Perhaps this would be Harry’s shot at a small remembrance of that one mortal emotion he was no longer permitted to feel directly?

Could Harry love me through Mark Batten? Was that possible? If Batten and I didn’t kill each other before getting there, that is.

Harry appeared behind me in a push of cool air, radiating comfort and encouragement, which struck me as odd, considering I was debating the best way to seduce Batten. Together, we watched Batten pop the collar on his jacket against the wind, and set to brushing snow off his SUV.

“I figured you’d be unhappy, Harry. Why is my quitting the PCU so damn amusing to you both?” I asked Harry without turning around.

“I believe you’re missing a rather important tidbit of information, which is the source of amusement, beloved,” he replied, and one of his cool hands brushed down the back of my hair. “Agent Chapel informs me that your carrion hunter is returning to his original line of work. Full-time.”

I felt my jaw loosen. “Sorry? He’s what, now?”

“Mr. Batten has also quit his job with the FBI, ducky. He made the decision and informed Agent Chapel two days ago. It looks as though you will both be working independently henceforth.” He made an amused little cluck. “Interesting, that. I thought he quite enjoyed his arrangement with the Preternatural Crimes Unit. But of course, our Mark does crave the thrill of the hunt, does he not? Oh yes. Onward and upward for our cold cook.”

This is not about me. This is not about me, I repeated mentally, but a secret, hopeful part of me whispered, What if it is? “What do I do now, Harry?” I asked.

“I trust you will take this slowly, kitten,” he said, his mouth directly over my shoulder. “T’would be wise to consider your next course of action carefully, and not rush into it like the proverbial fool.”

“Let me get this straight, so there’s no confusion. You’re not going to tell me not to chase the vampire hunter?”

“Would that it would do any good to give you such a warning, my pipistrelle, but I have learned over the years that it is better to let you fumble about and learn the hard way. Restraint is the key, my dove. Patience and restraint.”

I smirked. Restraint? “I take it you don’t mean the Victorian-era bondage gear under your bed.”

“Sass,” he chided, but there was a warm push behind his words. “Do not doubt that it grieves me deeply to witness my precious DaySitter making addle-brained choices that can only drive her to the brink of emotional ruin.” Harry added a great drama king sigh for good measure, so that I didn’t miss his faux grief. “One must console oneself with the knowledge that you will eventually come around to my way of thinking, and when you do, my angel, know this.” His cool hand cupped the small of my back, and together we watched Batten back out of the driveway. “I will be here to pick up the pieces. I will always be here to pick up the pieces.”

“Think there’s any chance that I can have a fully-functional relationship with Batten?”

He chuckled. “Don’t be absurd, love, but you are more than welcome to try. Far be it from me to deny you a shot at what happiness a mortal life has to offer. As I said, it pains me, but I will soldier on, bearing witness to your self-destruction, to be the rock you cling to when your ship hits the inevitable reef.”

“Why don’t you be my lighthouse, instead?” I said. “You know, guide me on how to do this shit? You’ve been around for four centuries. You have to have a dating tip or two.”

“My pet!” he gasped. “Would you rob me of the joy of being proved right?” He clucked his tongue. “Such a shame. Never do you give my needs a second thought in that pretty little head of yours.”

I half turned to give him my best side-eye. My black eye was pretty awesome for that, I had to admit. “Because it’s all about your needs, right, Lord Dreppenstedt?”

Harry flashed me a teasing grin that was all fang, and swept back into the kitchen. “Can you doubt it?”

I followed. “You know, my happiness is your happiness.”

“And my grief is your own. Must you continue to vex me?”

“Oh, I’ll show you vexing.” I grabbed his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. "Oooh, ooooh, I'm crushing your velvet! I'm crushing your velvet! Look, I'm rubbing against the nap!"

"You'll regret this foolishness if I have to come over there," he warned me, whisking his red apron off the rack by the pantry. He grabbed his wooden spoon out of the ceramic frog caddy by the oven, and brandished it at me like a weapon. For a moment, I imagined Mama-Captain’s Spoon of Doom, but found that, now that I was safely home, it seemed a distant thing, something I might have dreamed; the continued ache around my eye sockets disagreed.

“Now, hush, bird,” Harry said. “No more talk of love and rubbish. The biscuit tin is empty and I have baking to do.”

I agreed, “That’s far more serious.”

“And on an even more serious note, I should hope your bag would be unpacked before bedtime.”

I rolled my eyes, but it was easier to go do it than argue any more with him. I marched toward my room, thinking I should change the sheets as they’d smell entirely of Batten, and the last thing I needed right now was to obsess about the vampire hunter. “I know how an unpacked bag irritates you, Harry. I’ll get right on it.”

“My pet?”

I stopped, sensing a sudden shift in his mood. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Harry was staring at me intently; eyes that had seen centuries unfold were studying the set of my shoulders, the tilt of my head, marking in a sweeping instant every clue to my mood even before he could apply the immortal weight of his attentions through the Bond. When I did turn, I saw that his face had softened despite a slight frown.

“Do you…” He bit that off, and shook his head. Then he half-smiled at his own inability to speak his thoughts, and gave a little laugh. “Good Heavens, how ridiculous.”

“Harry?”

“Do you suppose I am the sort of man who would deny you true happiness in favor of my own?”

I cocked my head. “Is that a real question?”

“Only when it comes right down to it,” he said, “I admit, I am not entirely sure.”

“I don’t think a man your age could have doubts about his own character.”

He shook his head again, and that sad laugh returned.

“Say it, Harry,” I said, showing him my open hands in an imploring movement I must have picked up from Chapel. “There’s nothing you can’t tell me.”

“For certain, my teasing notwithstanding, I will always endeavor to do what is in your best interests.” Despite his drawing himself up to full height and nodding decisively, he didn’t seem certain at all.

“You know what sort of man you are, Harry,” I said, and if it hadn’t been for the quiver of vulnerability and shame I felt through the Bond, I would suspect he was pulling my leg. “And so do I.”

“Perhaps I am smaller than I imagine,” he said. “I do hope that your future adventures do not expose me.” He looked around the room as though waking from a bad dream, dusted off the front of his apron, and nodded once more. “Right. I have cookies to bake, and you have a bag to unpack. Off with you, ducky. I shall bring you a nightcap momentarily.”

***

My go-bag rested beside my bed, and it would be easy to unpack. Inside was the grocery bag, and inside that was a soft gift wrapped in tissue paper and too much transparent tape. There was a note on the tissue paper in Schenk’s barely-readable scratch on the back of a police services business card.

Even though you spilled coffee all over my paperwork, busted my clock, made me gain ten donut pounds, and called me a “soft softie of softiness,” I made you a hat. Thanks for the help and the nightmares, Cinderblock. Keep warm and stay safe. P.S.

There was nothing after the P.S., and it took me a second to remember those were Schenk’s initials. Ignoring his command that I wait until Christmas, I unwrapped the tissue to find a lump of orange and yellow banded knitting, with strings for tying under a chin; a hat like Jayne Cobb’s from Firefly, only the most kickass knit hat ever. I dug in with both hands, squeezing the softest wool my hands had touched this side of Harry's Vicuna scarf, and when the Blue Sense flared, it offered a glimpse of a protective streak a mile wide. Wound deep into the fibers by his own hands was a permanent recording of the strength I’d come to count on, through the wild and the weird, the cold and the treacherous, dangers both mundane and spectral. I bet if I put this hat on, some of that imbued strength would pass on to me, fill me with memories of a stubbornly unconquerable ally; if it imparted to me a fraction of Schenk’s fortitude, I’d be unstoppable. I plopped it over my black ghost hair, struck a Wonder Woman pose in the mirror, and grinned.

Yes, I thought, flexing my puny biceps, aiming finger guns at imaginary wrongdoers and miscreants. Look out bad guys. I would be ready for my next monster. I would be ready for future battles.

I would be ready for anything.

The End

ALSO BY A.J. AALTO

Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files, Book One) The media has a nickname for Marnie Baranuik, though she’d rather they didn’t; they call her the Great White Shark. A forensic psychic twice-touched by the Blue Sense, which gives her the ability to feel the emotions of others and read impressions left behind on objects, Marnie is too mean to die young, backed up by friends in cold places, and has a mouth as demure as a cannon’s blast.

Death Rejoices (The Marnie Baranuik Files, Book Two) Marnie Baranuik teams with the FBI’s preternatural crimes unit to discover that vampire hunters aren't easily rescued, secrets don’t stay buried, and zombie hordes are a pain in the ass to kill.

Cold Company (A Marnie Baranuik "Between the Files" Story) Bumbling forensic psychic Marnie Baranuik enters the world of a missing woman to find her before her stalker does

Dirt Nap (A Marnie Baranuik “Between the Files” Story) Beset by a rampaging stone monster and a furious quarry owner, trapped between a rock and a hard-ass, preternatural expert, Marnie Baranuik faces her biggest challenge yet, and discovers once and for all if size really does matter.

MORE GREAT READS FROM BOOKTROPE

Arielle Immortal Seduction by Lilian Roberts (Paranormal Romance) Arielle Lloyd has found the immortal love of her life, but when business calls Sebastian away, a stranger enters Arielle’s life and threatens to shatter her joy with a vicious assault.

Joe Vampire   by Steven Luna  (Paranormal/Humor) Hey, folks. I’m Joe, and I’m a vampire – not by choice, mind you, but by accident…a fate-twisting, fang-creating, blood lust-inducing misunderstanding.

Discover more books and learn about our
new approach to publishing at http://booktrope.com