Of course, if I really did block my emotions, he wouldn’t be able to feel them if I got in trouble. Thankfully, that didn’t happen often. If I needed Reyes, I would just summon him. Easy as pie.
With that settled, I bowed my head, drew in a lungful of air, and said the first word that came to me. “Occultate,” I whispered, focusing my energy behind the word inside myself.
Hide.
Hide my feelings. Hide my fears. My doubts about being a mother. About raising a child in our world. If demons weren’t attacking, maniacs were. There was always another murderer around the corner, or a messed-up departed person who mistook me for his overbearing mother and came at me with a butcher’s knife. What kind of world was I bringing the bun into? How could I ever keep her safe?
“You know,” Angel said, his voice full of humor, “you could say it in any language. You’re the reaper. What you say goes.”
I blinked to attention. “I know. But it just feels right giving commands in Latin. Or Aramaic. Or even Mandarin. It sounds more important. I don’t really feel any different, though. Did it work?”
“No idea. It works only if you want and believe it will work. You are the center of your power. Only you can determine what works and what doesn’t. Are you finished?”
“I guess, but I wanted to talk to you about something else. We’re supposed to have a few unwelcome guests on this plane soon.”
“Yeah, I heard. The Twelve.”
“What do you know?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Not much. Just that they’re, like, hellhounds or something, and they were summoned.”
My ears perked up. “I heard that today, too. They were summoned. They didn’t just escape and make their way here willy-nilly. Do you know who summoned them?”
“Nah. I only know the general gossip. Some of these dead people are worse than old women.”
I was neither disappointed nor surprised he didn’t know more. But I really wanted to find out who on earth – literally – would summon hounds from hell.
“Just be careful, hon. I don’t know what these things are capable of. What they’ll do.”
He smirked. “You worried about me?”
I took hold of his chin again, drew him forward until our lips met, giving him a gentle kiss before breaking away. “I’m always worried about you.”
His head dipped shyly. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Where are you going?”
“Mrs. Garza’s niece has a recital. She’s going.”
“You mean your niece. They’re your family, too, remember? She wants you to call her Mom. That’s a pretty good validation of how she feels about you.”
He lifted a shoulder again before disappearing. He was on his way back to me. We’d been together for over ten years. Surely my learning that he’d been lying about his identity this whole time wouldn’t stop us from remaining friends. He constantly reminded me that, technically, he was older than I was, but times like this, I always felt like the older one. Probably because he still looked thirteen.
I shifted into drive again and pulled onto the side street.
“You lead a complicated life,” Jessica said.
“Tell me about it.” I screeched to a stop in front of an abandoned mental asylum, the kind you see in horror movies and music videos.
Jessica shriveled at the sight of it. “Is this the demon’s lair?”
“Nope. This is a friend of mine’s lair. I just have to make a quick pit stop to see if a few people are still kicking or not. Next stop is the demon’s lair. It’s a nice adobe off Wyoming. Very discreet. But I’ve heard that those pristine plaster walls were painted with the blood of virgins. Or a terra cotta latex from Sears. Not sure which.”
“You’re evil,” she said.
“Tell me something my stepmother didn’t yell in my face every day since I was two.”
I grabbed my flashlight out of the backseat, got out of Misery, and found myself facing a digital lock on the chain link surrounding the asylum. The tall gate as well as the rest of the fence was topped with razor wire, a nice but superfluous touch. In this neighborhood, the residents would see the razor wire as more of a challenge than a deterrent, but Reyes had felt the security measure necessary. I found his concern endearing. He knew what Rocket and his sister meant to me, and he’d bought the building and the land around it to preserve it so Rocket would always have his home.
Rocket was a large man-child who’d died in the ’50s in this very mental asylum. He was a savant – an incredible being who knew every name on earth – and he could tell me if a person was still alive or had already passed. I took advantage of that more often than I probably should. While his sister – who’d died of dust pneumonia around the age of five – also lived at the asylum with him, I rarely saw her. She was cute as a bug’s ear and painfully shy.
So here I was again, trying to break into an asylum that I now owned, but because of the razor wire, scaling the fence was out of the question. I didn’t know the security code. Reyes had yet to give it to me, and I wasn’t about to call him and alert him to the fact that I’d ditched him. I should have stopped at the Daeva’s house first and convinced him to come along with me. He would be a measure of protection, one that would tamp Reyes’s wrath once he found out what I’d done. Wouldn’t tamp it a lot, but it’s the thought that counts.
I wasn’t a moron. I wasn’t really putting myself at risk. I knew if one of the Twelve showed up, I could summon Reyes instantly. He could still be my protector incorporeally, since the hellhounds would be in the same state – incorporeal – but he’d be mad nonetheless, seeing my actions as reckless and impulsive.
Maybe they were. I placed a palm against my abdomen. I really did have more to worry about than just my own ass now. According to prophecy, the bun was a lot more important than I would ever be, any day of the week. But I still had a job to do and bills to pay. I could hardly expect Reyes to follow me around for the rest of my life, no matter how delicious the thought.
I walked up to the gate and decided to try my luck. I punched in Reyes’s birthday, to no avail. Then my birthday, also to no avail. Then, just for shits and giggles, I punched in another date and stood stunned when a dot on the display flashed green and the gate unlocked. I paused, surprised he’d remembered the very first time we met in the flesh – the night I saw Earl Walker beating him. The night I’d tried to stop said beating and almost got into even more hot water than I could handle.
But the ordeal had been worth it. Every moment with Reyes was worth it, and that first sighting, as heartbreaking as it was, had changed my life.
I strolled up to the metal doors, punched in the same code, and gained entrance again. At least his security measures would keep out the riffraff. Mostly partiers who wanted to destroy the place once their alcohol levels reached the size of their IQs. This place was historic, fascinating, and to many, creepy as hell. It was awesome.
But even for Reyes, these were a lot of security precautions for a run-down building that had been abandoned in the ’50s. Thankfully, there was no alarm system, but even without one, I had to question all the other electronics. Unless he was storing weapons of mass destruction down here, I had no idea why we’d need this much protection.
I stepped inside the lobby and continued down a darkened corridor.
“Rocket?” I said, my voice soft as I trampled through dirt and debris left by partiers. Much of the surface had been tagged, but Rocket’s etchings made them look rather beautiful, like crumbling pieces of ancient abstract art.
The last time I saw the Rocket Man, he’d been scratching my name into one of the walls. He wrote only the names of those who had died or were about to die, so seeing my name up in scratches was sobering. But that was before I knew about the bun. This was a whole new game, and I was not about to die anytime soon. My daughter had to be born. Her birth was prophesied according to some guy way back when, before the invention of sliced bread. Rocket was wrong, howeve
r – and this wouldn’t be the first time. Well, okay, technically he hadn’t been wrong yet. He’d prophesied Reyes’s death, and Reyes did die for a few seconds before I brought him back to life with a kiss – according to my affianced, anyway. So I had to believe that Rocket’s record was yet untainted, but was about to be. If there’s one thing I’d learned as a supernatural being thus far, it’s that there’s always a loophole. No way was I going to die now. I would lie, cheat, and steal to make sure nothing happened to the bun. And I needed info to assure my survival.
Sadly, Rocket wasn’t the easiest being to get information out of, but he was going to give me a few more details if I had to strangle them out of him. First, however, I needed to know about the suicide victims. I could keep his attention for only so long. If I had to choose between me and the suicide victims, I’d have to choose the latter. They could’ve been abducted. They could still be alive and suffering. Their safety had to come first in this situation. Then maybe I could convince Rocket to tell me something about my own demise. Demises in general sucked. My own would probably suck even worse from my point of view. It was hard to tell at this juncture.
I took the stairs to the basement. He’d been favoring the basement lately, as it had a few unused walls. I turned on my flashlight and slowed the lower I got.
“Could this place be any creepier?” Jessica asked, appearing behind me, her hands cradled at her chest as though afraid to touch anything.
“It is now,” I said, refraining from doing a fist pump and shouting, Score!
A singsong voice fluttered through the air toward me. “Somebody’s in trouble.”
I recognized the voice as Strawberry Shortcake’s – not her real name – a girl who’d drowned when she was nine. She’d taken up residence with Rocket and his little sister, Blue Bell. My gratitude with respect to that fact knew no bounds, because before SS had taken to squatting at the asylum, she was better known as a crazy stalker chick who warned me repeatedly to stay away from her brother, David Taft, a police officer in my uncle’s precinct. And she often tried to scratch my eyes out. Not an endearing quality.
Since Taft and I could barely stand each other, her concerns had never truly been an issue, but she’d seen me as a threat until her brother started dating skanks. Her words. After that, she decided I needed to date him after all. Thankfully, she was too busy being Chrissy from Three’s Company to push the issue.
Jessica and I turned toward her. SS wore her usual pink Strawberry Shortcake pajamas that were all the rage back in the day. Her long blond hair hung in tangles down her back as always, and her baby blues shimmered a silvery color, even incorporeal as she was. Though her luster had a general grayness to it, she was as solid to me as the walls around us.
The grayness often gave the departed away. And the cold. But more than that, their lack of emotion was a real tip-off – I couldn’t feel any radiating off the dead, as I could the living. Even without those signs, there was something intangible about the departed that made me instinctively know they were no longer among the living. It just registered in the back of my mind when I met someone who’d departed. I could always sense it. From the day I was born, I knew there were two kinds of people: the living and the dead.
What took me much, much longer to comprehend was the fact that not everyone was able to see the departed. My confusion had caused me problems growing up. Especially with my stepmother. But that was a story – or, well, a dozen or so stories – for another time.
Strawberry stood there, petting a ragged Barbie doll with its hair chopped off in large chunks. Which wasn’t creepy at all. Poor Malibu Barbie. All her Malibu friends would be horrified. Taft told me his sister had always cut off her dolls’ hair. A fact that kind of scared me. I did have to sleep occasionally, and the thought of a departed child in dire need of therapy cutting my hair in my sleep did nothing to ease my mind as I fell into oblivion.
“Why am I in trouble this time?” I asked her, kneeling down and wiping a smudge off her cheek. She really was quite beautiful. It pained me to imagine who she would have become, given the chance. For the life to be ripped away from someone so young just seemed so terribly, terribly unfair.
“Because you’re going to die soon.”
On second thought, maybe she was better off. Away from other people and most sharp objects. I had a sneaking suspicion she would have become a serial killer. Or a telemarketer. Either way.
“Well, I’m hoping I don’t.”
“I hope you do. You can live with us.”
“She is adorable,” Jessica said, kneeling beside me. “What’s your name?”
Strawberry frowned. “I can’t talk to strangers. And I especially can’t tell them my name is Becky. Or that I’m nine. Or that —”
“Have you seen Rocket?” I asked, interrupting. We’d be there all day.
“I see him all the time.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Maybe. But you need to run the mean man out first.”
My brows slid together. “What mean man?”
“The one sleeping in the cold room. He eats cat food out of a can with his fingers.”
I tried not to gag on that thought. “Hon, are you telling me there’s someone here? Someone living here?”
She nodded, petting her bald Barbie harder and harder.
What the hell? How could anyone get in with all the security measures? I knew the razor wire wouldn’t deter anyone, but the code on the doors should have helped.
“He cut a hole in the fence out back with this big whacker thing and he crawls in through a basement window. He brings little brown bags.”
Oh. Well, that explained that. “He must be homeless.”
“No, he has a home.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because he goes there.” She pointed. No idea why. I got so turned around in the place, I barely knew which way was up. “He goes to that ugly house and then comes back here.”
Was he breaking into a home while here? I’d have to find out.
“Okay, pumpkin,” I said, lifting her into my arms with a groan. The departed were also heavy. How a person who walked through walls could be that heavy was beyond me. “Why don’t you take me to him?”
She pointed again, and Jessica and I followed her lead. We came to a swinging door to the kitchen.
I flattened against the wall. “Is he in there now?” I whispered to Strawberry.
She stopped chewing the Barbie’s little plastic head and shrugged, her lashes round with concern. This guy really scared her.
I turned to Jessica. “Go in there and see if the coast is clear.”
“What?” she screeched. “Me? Why me? You go in there and see if the coast is clear.”
I let out a loud sigh. “Jessica, you’re departed now. He won’t see you. You can stick your head through this wall, and no one will be the wiser.”
“Screw that.” She set her jaw and turned away from me.
Wonderful.
“Fine,” I whispered. “You can keep watch out here. Just warn me if anyone comes, capisce?”
Honestly, what was the good of having departed ex-friends if they refused to spy when I needed it most? I leaned forward and tried to peek in through the round window on the door, but years of grime and a huge face with a sheepish smile kept me from looking very far.
“Rocket,” I whispered, and then in a soft hiss, “is there a man in there?”
He continued to smile and I thought for a moment he didn’t understand, but he turned and looked over his shoulder at last. He faced me again and shook his head, the smile still shaping his pudgy features framed by a bald head. A little like Malibu Barbie’s.
I hefted Strawberry closer and pushed into the kitchen. “Hey, Rocket Man,” I said, using my free arm to give him a hug.
“Miss Charlotte, you’re not dead yet.”
“I’m aware of that, thank you. Have you seen the man who has been coming h
ere?”
He nodded and pointed to the “cold room,” literally an old walk-in freezer. Strawberry’s description of it being a cold room must have come from Rocket, who’d lived – and died – here in the ’50s, because now it was just as warm as the rest of the place.
I plopped Strawberry onto an aluminum counter and eased up to the darkened room, keeping my flashlight front and center. Jessica, completely ignoring my orders to stand guard, was right behind me, clinging to my sweater as we inched our way to the half-open unit. One quick sweep told me it wasn’t occupied, but it had been recently. More than one McDonald’s bag littered the area where someone had been sleeping. The stench of old cigarettes clung to the air as a makeshift ashtray overflowed with butts. Blankets and a dingy pillow lay on one side of the unit, while other homey items like a lantern and a couple of porn magazines sat beside them. I could only hope Blue Bell and Strawberry hadn’t seen the skin mags. Or him while he read them. No telling what a UV flashlight would pick up.
“I have a couple of names for you,” I said while studying the area. It didn’t really look like your everyday, garden-variety homeless lair. There were no clothes. No supplies like normal homeless people had. No blankets or cans of food like my friend Mary had in her shopping cart.
I did a quick check on Strawberry. She sat chewing on Barbie’s head, scanning the area with a worried expression. Why she would be afraid of a human was beyond me. If that’s what she was afraid of.
“You feel different, Miss Charlotte.”
I looked at Rocket from over my shoulder. “How so?”
“There’s more of you in there now.” He was staring at my stomach.
After a soft laugh, I said, “Yes, there is.” I was amazed he’d picked up on that. The bun was so brand-new. I’d conceived only a couple of weeks earlier. Hadn’t even had a pregnancy test yet, but I felt her warmth from the moment her journey began. Still, how Rocket felt her, I’d never know. She wasn’t even the size of a black-eyed pea yet. Maybe that’s what I’d call her: Black-Eyed Pea. B-E-P. I could call her Beep for short.