Psychic Read online

  “With my mind. With my heart. Justin was stable and smart and constant.” She laughed. “Almost the opposite of Alexander. We only dated for three months before we got engaged, but it wasn’t passionate. It was just methodical. We knew we loved each other, and that we could continue to love each other for the rest of our lives. We agreed to get engaged sitting in his car on our way back into the city one afternoon. It really wasn’t that much of a watershed event. It was just the next step, and we both agreed to it before either one of us started making plans.”

  “Sounds… disappointing,” Sam said. She laughed.

  “Trustworthy. I was happy, then, too.”

  There was a stir of conflict, and she looked away.

  “I love you, too,” she said. “Different than either one of them.” He couldn’t ask, so she continued. “I love you with everything in me, soul-deep. You don’t make me happy so much as you make me whole. I wonder what we would have been like, if we were just two normal people, but there’s no point speculating on different pasts. There is only one past, and we are who we are.” She rolled onto her side. “I wonder if I could actually have a serious relationship, with someone else, without it feeling like I was cheating on both of you.”

  Sam sighed.

  “You haven’t noticed, have you?”

  “What?”

  “Since I died. Things are different.”

  “What things?”

  “I know what you’re feeling, but it isn’t so… intense. Like the edge is off. Like I’m aware of you through six feet of dirt.”

  Samantha was stunned. She took quick stock of what she could sense of him and… He was right. The details were there, but they didn’t overshadow her own mood or thoughts anywhere near as much as she remembered they had. She had been so distracted with her blood-frenzy that she had missed it, at first, and then she had gotten used to it before she had ever noticed.

  “Wow,” she said finally.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked over at her.

  “I just thought… Maybe we hit some happy medium. All of the benefits, none of the… drawbacks.”

  “You think we could be romantically involved,” she said. He shied away from the precise words, but, yes, that was what he had thought. She chastised herself slightly for making him watch her with Alexander all night, like that. She had thought they were permanently past the point of considering their interest in each other, but he had a valid point. If his reaction to her were dampened enough, it probably would keep them safer, if not entirely immune to the distorting effects the bond had on their rational minds.

  “I couldn’t have stayed sane the last couple of weeks, if everything had been like it was before I died,” he said. “I knew from the first day it was different.”

  “And I was just too far away,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to jump into anything without having thought about it,” Samantha said.

  “As long as that is followed by a ‘but’, I’m happy,” he said. She nodded at the ceiling.

  “Yeah. But. I think you could be right. It’s worth thinking about.”

  She looked at him and he nodded, turning his face up at the ceiling. The shape of his lips, his nose, the scattering of hair across his forehead stood out in sharp contrast to the window, now that her eyes had adjusted. It stung, how fond she was of that shape. And how much it meant to her that he was happier, now. She rolled onto her side to face away from him, summoning focus, but finding physical exhaustion and a warm, comfortable blanket of sleepiness.

  “Sleep well,” he said.

  “Odds Jason is here on time in the morning?” she asked.

  “One in three,” Sam said. “He likes killing wraiths.”

  “He likes killing most everything,” Samantha said. Sam laughed.

  “With any luck, tomorrow will be a kill day.”

  “And then we can get out of here.”

  “You aren’t even starting to like it a little?”

  “No. I want to get him back to New York and start training him. I want to make Brandt choke on him.”

  “Is this something personal?” Sam asked. “With Brandt?” Samantha rolled over to face him.

  “When a demon messes with one of us, or when they mess with one of us by extension, like Brandt is threatening to do, we always treat it like it’s personal. It’s the only defense that works, long-term.”

  He nodded and then yawned.

  “That makes sense.”

  After that, she wasn’t sure if they spoke any more or not. That was as much as she remembered until she woke up.

  <><><>

  Samantha joined him on the front porch the next morning before the sun came up. He offered her his coffee and she took it, sitting in the second rocking chair.

  “Morning,” he said. She nodded, sipping coffee quietly. He regretted saying anything to her the night before, and she rejected his regret silently. He considered and declined several polite conversation openers. How had she slept? He knew the answer to that one. She had had angry dreams, purposeful, with strong motion, interchanged with frustrated ones, maybe she couldn’t move, maybe she just couldn’t figure out where she was, and one with poignant, terrifying sorrow. He had had the same ones, conceptually, and the amplitude of them had woken him multiple times the previous night. Ever since they had dreamed together at Heather’s house in Texas, weeks before, the flavor of his dreams had colored hers, and hers had done the same in return. Sometimes she was in his dreams, and sometimes she wasn’t, but the constant companion of the idea of her was a simple part of his concept of normal.

  He didn’t want to tease about Jason being late, or talk about hunting wraiths. He especially didn’t want to talk about last night. The shopping or the dancing or the conversation he should not have had, drunk past the point of effective filters between his brain and his mouth.

  She sent him a steady calm, an intentional one, over the pool of her own meandering thoughts. He took a breath of the muggy dawn air and returned the calm. Feeling it on purpose. The idea of feeling something on purpose as part of a conversation was still something he was learning. Somehow it came to Samantha more natively.

  She handed his coffee back and he finished it, going into the house to pour another cup. It occurred to him on his way back out of the house that he could have gotten her a separate mug, but it seemed silly. She put her hand out to take the cup even as he sat, and he handed it to her. She wasn’t hung over. He might have had a little too much to drink the night before, and he was feeling it, but she was fine. She was just happy sitting and drinking coffee. Underneath it was a restless urge to be moving, to be conquering, but she just held herself still, enjoying this one moment. He put his hand out to take the cup back.

  The Cruiser pulled up the drive, and the day began.

  <><><>

  Jason’s count of the cars indicated that all four members of staff that she had identified the previous day were there. There were two other cars that they didn’t recognize. Jason was pretty sure one of them had been in the parking lot the morning before. The other, none of them could be sure.

  “In the back door, where we went in yesterday?” Jason asked.

  “Could go in as prospective clients,” Sam said.

  “It would work, but I’d rather just bust them and get to the cleanup as fast as possible,” Jason said.

  “I’m with Jason,” Samantha said. Jason looked back at her.

  “I just want something simple to shoot,” he said. She couldn’t blame him.

  “Back door it is, then,” Sam said. “Just be sure we actually catch them at something obvious.”

  “If the viewing is tonight, they have to be working now, right?”

  There was a pause as they looked at the building.

  “Let’s do it,” Sam said. They unloaded out of the Cruiser, Samantha carrying her backpack around the building as Jason checked the chamber in his gun. She was going to need to pick up so
me more steel ammunition when they got to New York. She set the backpack down by the back door as Jason knelt to open the lock, glancing at Sam. He had a shotgun in his hands and a knife on his belt. She drew Lahn.

  Jason pulled the door open an inch, as quietly as he could, and put his eye to the gap. He watched for a moment, then stood.

  “Well.”

  “Are they down there?” Sam asked.

  “Eight,” Jason said softly. “They’ve got the chest open, and they’re chowing down. Are we ready to do this?”

  “Open the door,” Samantha said.

  “Try not to get yourself shot,” Jason said, swinging the door open.

  “Don’t shoot me,” she said, striding into the building and pulling her sunglasses off, tossing them onto a table as the three people standing over the body looked up, and the other five, scattered nearby as they ate, watched her. There was a general throat-clearing growling as she stopped, cutting the air with Lahn’s back-blade.

  “Immortality is not a blessing granted to men. You have claimed your lives as your own, and I am here to return them to God.”

  She spun left as the group mobilized, hearing the gun report as Jason took his first shot. Lahn slashed through a ribcage as Samantha cleared a space around her, the blade’s markings and trace silver keeping the wound from closing. She felt Sam come to her side, firing a shot of steel pellets into the crowd of wraiths as they came to recognize what was happening. They were smarter than zombies. They scattered, overturning metal tables where they were available and hiding behind anything they could find.

  One of them got behind Samantha and the woman sprang, getting her fingernails clenched into Samantha’s shoulder as Samantha turned and stabbed her. Samantha twisted clear, against the thumb, not the fingers, and pulled Lahn, decapitating the woman in the next motion. Two more gunshots and the shotgun went off. Someone was running.

  “Sam! Sam!” Jason yelled. Sam and Samantha both looked. “Samchesca. Go get him,” he said, pointing up the stairs. Samantha nodded, glancing once at Sam.

  “We’ve got this,” he said. She took off running up the stairs after the tall, lean man she caught a glimpse of as he dashed around a corner at the top of the stairs. He ran the funeral home. She had seen him the day before, directing the other three members of the staff and speaking discretely to members of the family. He was well-dressed then, as now, and would have been on the verge of attractive, if he had had any more familiar facial expressions. He was also the one who had been holding the dissecting blade when she had entered the room downstairs.

  Samantha reached the top of the stairs and turned right after him, only just narrowly ducking fast enough to get out of his range of motion as he swung at her. The cinderblock wall that he hit instead crumbled behind his fist.

  “You’ve got a lot of juice, I’ll give you that,” she said, spinning to one side and putting her blade up in between the two of them. The two of them circled in the front room as more gunfire echoed up the staircase. He smiled at her, a disconnected pull of muscles at one corner of his mouth, absent any matching motion in the rest of his face.

  “We are the beautiful. You will make a good addition to our family,” he said.

  “You are the oldest,” Samantha said.

  “I am the most important. I am Father,” he said. Samantha feinted in to his right, then slashed left, only narrowly escaping his grab at her wrist. The small wound on his side closed over.

  “Does that mean you know Mother?” she asked.

  “She comes,” he said, moving to cut off the doors out of the front room. Samantha stabbed at him again, kneeling and rolling over her knee to get a doorway to her back again.

  “We’ve met, Mother and I,” Samantha said. “I’m going to kill her.”

  He punched over her head and took another chunk of wall out.

  “Mother does not die. She builds her family.”

  “Oh, we’ve met,” Samantha said, stabbing again as she thought he might have been off balance. He moved deftly away, catching her backhanded across the shoulders. She rolled with it, taking the force as best she could, letting her body absorb it, uncontrolled, as she felt her weight leave her feet, then she found the floor with the back of her shoulder and curled, getting her feet down and facing him again, backing him down with the flashing blade as he came to press his advantage.

  She found herself in a corner again, confronted with a human. The magic that was powering him wasn’t his. That was what made him such an adversary to her. He wasn’t demonic - she couldn’t use light power as a direct weapon against him - and she couldn’t nullify magic that he wasn’t sourcing himself. Somewhere out there was a sorceress who was propping him up, sending him at Samantha - intentionally or not - as a puppet. She started putting up small defensive magics in the space between them, not worried, but taking edges where she could take them. He warily pushed her back, step by step, avoiding the blade. It would take the life out of him, if the cut went deep enough or found something important enough.

  She found the corner with one hand, and held. She made several more broad swings at the wraith, putting him back into a radius that gave her space to breathe.

  “I can do this all day,” she said.

  “I do not sleep,” he said.

  There were two sharp reports, and his head jerked forward. Samantha stabbed, and his body rolled away, his hands grasping at the back of his head. His weight took Lahn with him, embedded in his chest. Jason strode across the room and shot him in the face, two, three, four more times. He lay still. Samantha retrieved Lahn, wiping the blade on the wraith’s body.

  “Thanks for getting him pinned down,” Jason said.

  “No problem,” she said. “Everything go okay downstairs?”

  “All done,” he said. “Sam said you got hit. You okay?”

  Samantha hadn’t remembered. Rubbed her back, nodding.

  “Lucky shot.”

  “Doesn’t usually happen to you,” he said.

  “Demons are different,” she said. He put his gun away and motioned her back downstairs.

  “Yeah, they’re stronger.”

  She looked back at the body in the front room, then followed Jason back downstairs.

  “There was something down here I wanted to take another look at,” Jason called over his shoulder. She found the room a shambles of metal and bodies, with Sam checking to make sure that everyone was properly dead.

  “We good?” Jason called.

  “Good,” Sam answered. Jason walked over to a side door and tried it. It was locked. He frowned, and Samantha walked closer, hearing soft noises.

  “Is that… someone crying?” she asked. Jason knocked, and there was a squeal, then silence.

  “I’m going to open the door,” he said. “Don’t jump out at me or anything.”

  He knelt to open the lock and stepped behind the door. Samantha went to stand where she could see into the room as soon as he opened it. Sam stood nearby, watching. She nodded at Jason and he cracked the door, holding his shoulder against it. Samantha saw a tangle of dark hair and gray cloth, but nothing more clear than that. She indicated to Jason that he should open the door slightly further and he allowed more light into the little room. Scared eyes peered up at Samantha.

  “Who are you?” Samantha asked. The girl shook her head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Samantha pressed her lips and nodded to Jason. He swung the door the rest of the way open and peered around it. The girl cowered into the corner further, hiding her eyes into her arm.

  “You were upstairs yesterday,” Samantha said. “I remember you.”

  The girl looked up.

  “I can’t go. They won’t let me go.”

  “They’re gone,” Samantha said, offering the girl a hand. Jason braced, putting his hand on his gun. The girl shuddered away, then edged slowly out of the closet in a cautious crab walk, tucking her feet underneath her when she saw Sam.

  “You’re okay,” Sam said.
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “I’ll never be okay,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” Samantha asked. The girl looked at her, deciding for a moment, then put her arm up over her knees, revealing a white bandage.

  “It won’t heal.”

  Samantha knelt and carefully began to unwrap the cloth, heart sinking. She got down to skin to reveal an oozing set of teethmarks. She stood. The girl watched her, fear sinking into resignation. Even as Samantha stood, the wound began to bleed as the lack of pressure from the bandage allowed fluids to begin seeping out again.

  “They say it won’t heal until I eat,” she said, looking around the room slowly. Samantha walked over to Jason, Sam joining them.

  “She hasn’t got a pulse,” Samantha said. “She’s one of them.”

  Jason glanced at the girl.

  “What do we do with her?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing else to do,” Jason said. Sam looked at Samantha.

  “Do you think it’s inevitable? That she’s going to be evil?”

  Samantha grimaced.

  “I don’t know. She can’t just stop using the magic. It isn’t voluntary. Unless Mother lets her go… I don’t know.”

  “Mother?” Jason asked. Samantha nodded.

  “The leader mentioned her. Called himself Father.”

  “These guys… They’re involved with the same thing that made the zombies in New Mexico?” Sam asked.

  “These would be her chosen few, if I make my guess, but yes. These are her handiwork.”

  “That’s sick,” Jason said, looking at the girl again. Samantha nodded.

  “It is.”

  She knelt next to the girl.

  “How do you feel?” she asked. The girl stared.

  “I haven’t talked to someone who… wasn’t…”

  “Undead,” Jason supplied. The girl looked up at him, then back at Samantha.

  “How do you feel?” Samantha asked again.

  “You… Everyone upstairs…”

  “Tell me,” Samantha said.

  “I want to bite you,” the girl said. “To eat you. It’s all I think about.”

  Samantha nodded.