Charming (22 page)

By the time I slid a steaming mug over the surface of the bar, my stare was pissed off and challenging. “What?” I demanded.

Sig didn’t respond to my attitude. She sipped her coffee slowly, cradling the cup with both hands as if it were a bird’s egg. “Alison wants you to calm down,” she said matter-of-factly.

It took a moment for that to kick me in the gut. When I could speak, my voice was strained. “You’re talking about my dead fiancée?”

Sig didn’t look up from her coffee. “I’m talking
to
your dead fiancée.”

If I hadn’t had my elbows braced on the bar, I think my legs would have collapsed from under me.

“I saw her standing behind you the first time I walked into this bar,” Sig continued quietly. “She followed me out while I was trying to chase down that vampire you let go and begged me not to hurt you and told me that you were a good man. She’s been talking to me off and on about you ever since.”

My fingers scrabbled over the bar like a blind man’s. When my hand found what it was looking for, it clutched the ceramic coffee mug as if it were a lifeline. I didn’t bother to drink. I had met Alison in Pennsylvania. She had been sweet and giving and funny and smart and vulnerable. She had also been a little self-centered, and sentimental, and moody, and had terrible taste in music. She loved sex and making food and curling up under covers and I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to say. I can’t make it fit into words. I loved her. Loved her desperately and selfishly when I had no right to do so.

Alison hadn’t belonged in my world, but I’d been so lonely for so long that I’d lied to myself, told myself that I could leave my world behind and live in hers. And my world had found us. No wonder Sig hadn’t been surprised when I told her Alison had died.

Except…

“I can sense ghosts,” I said. “I can’t see them like you can, but I can sense them.”

“You’ve probably been living with this one so long you don’t even notice anymore,” Sig said, way too matter-of-factly for somebody who was talking about my dead fiancée.

“So you’ve been catching her up on her favorite soap operas? Letting her know how the Steelers are doing? That kind of thing?” I forced the lame-ass joke out of my mouth, but the words were hollow. I couldn’t feel anything except dread.

“Of all the dead, the ghosts who are kept here by love are the most articulate,” Sig told me sadly. “But I told you before, they only talk about the thing that’s keeping them here, and they don’t really listen.”

“This is bullshit,” I said, but I knew it wasn’t. This was how Sig had known my name. This was how Sig had gotten so much insight and information despite my geas. She hadn’t gotten inside my skull. Someone who knew me had gotten into hers.

Sig had said that she was a pyschopomp. A speaker for the dead.

“You used to make fun of Alison because she ate sandwiches with nothing but mayonnaise on them,” Sig informed me. “She says she made you watch a show called
Gilmore Girls
with her over and over. She says you were her Luke, whatever that means.”

I tilted my head up and stared at the ceiling, as if that could keep tears from building up in them. “Stop,” I gasped.

“What I’m about to tell you is all her, OK?” Sig said. “Alison says you owe her for the way she died.”

I nodded without taking my eyes off the ceiling.

“She says there’s only one thing you can do to make it up to her. She says if you really love her, you’ll do it.”

“What?” I demanded hoarsely. What could I possibly do? Kill myself? Kill every knight on the face of the planet? I couldn’t do those things. I’d already tried.

“Stop trying to be perfect,” Sig said.

That floored me. I did look at Sig then. “Perfect?” I said incredulously. “Is she insane? God, I know I’m not perfect. I’m nowhere close.”

“So stop trying,” Sig said, and now she was looking at me too. “You’ve been trying to be someone who could have kept Alison from being killed. You never relax, you never give yourself a break, and you don’t trust anyone or anything. You don’t let anyone get close to you. You won’t admit it, but you’re still trying to make amends. And you can’t. She’s dead, John. Let her die.”

I didn’t argue. My tongue felt like it was three sizes too thick. Tears were trickling down my cheeks, but I didn’t wipe them away.

Sig ran a palm over her face. I realized that she was crying too. “She loves you, John. You love her too. You don’t ever have to apologize for that. Everyone dies.”

Sig got up a little unsteadily and began to walk out of the bar. Then she stopped, took a deep breath, and turned around again. She walked toward me like someone in a trance. “This is her too, OK?”

She grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and pulled me across the bar into a kiss. At first I didn’t respond, but then my lips softened into hers and I was kissing Alison again. Sig was taller than Alison, but her lips kissed my top lip instead of my fuller bottom lip the same way that Alison’s had, a gentle pressure. Sig’s hands found the exact spot in the small of my back and rubbed it the way that Alison’s had. When Sig breathed my name, her voice said it the way Alison had. And then I was
putting my arms around Alison and pulling and lifting her across the bar so that her ass was on the counter and she was lying back into my arms.

And then Alison left. I swear to God, I felt her pass from Sig through me. Alison left me there kissing Sig with a trace of mischievous affection. It was Sig kissing me back hungrily, and it was Sig’s hands sliding under the back of my shirt while I lost myself in the warmth of her mouth, and…

Sig broke out of the kiss gasping, and it felt like she had ripped my soul in half. I stepped back and put a palm on the bar to steady myself while Sig scrambled to her feet.

I couldn’t say anything. It felt like I would never say anything again. This time when Sig walked out of the bar, her gait was unsteady. But she didn’t stop.

Something was wrong. Something was missing. After a panicked moment I realized that it was Alison. A weight that had no name had lifted, and I wept like a child. Hot scalding tears poured down my face while I choked on feelings that were too big to articulate. I was sad, but it felt like the sadness was pouring out of me instead of poisoning me. It felt like I had been sleeping in the dark, not knowing I was in a coffin until someone pried the lid off. It hurt, but it was good, the way love is supposed to be.

18

I
t was odd, but when I got home I slept like a dragon. It was a healing, dreamless slumber despite the emotional roller coasters and the approaching full moon. When my alarm woke me five hours later, it didn’t feel like I was waking up from sleep; it felt like I was crawling out of a shell. Every sensation seemed new and intense and highly significant. So this was the taste of my coffee. This was the slight discomfort in the small of my back from the rocking chair. This was the feel of a cotton shirt being pulled over bare skin.

When Molly called to tell me that Parth had found an active cell phone mentioned in one of Anne Marie’s e-mails, I absorbed the news with a sense of detached resignation. I didn’t want to see any horrible things, or be scared, or get angry, or kill anything, but who does? Whatever else had changed, I still wasn’t going to let people I was starting to care about walk into a potentially dangerous situation without me.

I felt ridiculously awkward and self-conscious when Sig and her crew came to pick me up in Choo’s van. I had experienced something profound, and it seemed to me as if they were seeing
me for the first time. But habits began reasserting themselves, and I could feel my old life… my old shields and attitudes wrapping around me like armor as I climbed into the van. It was comforting in a way, and a bit frightening. I didn’t dislike that person, exactly, but I didn’t want to be him anymore, and I didn’t know how to be anyone else.

This time I was sitting in one of the bucket seats next to Sig. Dvornik was still recovering from his recent mojo no-no, and Molly had claimed the shotgun seat. Andrej had stayed behind to watch Stanislav, but Andro was in the back.

“You’re alone,” Sig said softly.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

Sig examined me carefully. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“No,” I said. “But you’re not going without me.”

Sig went from protective concern to mild irritation in the two seconds it took me to buckle in. “We got along fine without you before you came along, you know. It’s not like you’re the center of our universe.”

I had a feeling Sig hadn’t slept particularly well after our séance/make-out session.

“Can I at least be Uranus?” I wondered, drawing out the pronunciation
your anus
.

Sig’s face froze, then she looked away, trying to hide a smile while muffled immature sounds came from the front of the van. She shook her head the way people do when they don’t know what else to do. “Idiot.”

The location Parth had given us turned out to be a strip club about forty minutes away in a place called Between. Between, as its name suggested, was a town or county vaguely located in one of those long flat stretches found so frequently in North Carolina. We passed a few wooden houses, an unnamed
convenience store with one gas pump, a barbecue place whose owner’s name was painted on its white walls in big red letters, and an old building that either sold antiques or considered itself one. At some point we also passed Between.

“Go easy on me now, I’ve never been to this place before,” Choo grumbled as he turned around. He had a portable GPS locator on his dashboard, but it had told us to go through a creek.

“We should have brought Ted along,” Sig observed. “I’ll bet he’s been to every strip club in a two-hour radius.”

“In one capacity or another,” Molly agreed.

“Where is Cahill?” I asked, not really giving a shit.

“He’s looking into Anne Marie’s background some more. His partner isn’t the mentally flexible type,” Sig said. “And Ted can’t get us out of jail if he’s in one.”

“Maybe the next person we recruit for our little monster-hunting club ought to be a lawyer,” Molly suggested.

“Ha!” Sig had polished off a paper cup of coffee the size of a small vase and still seemed a little tired and grumpy. “I’d rather recruit a monster and start a lawyer-hunting club.”

Choo agreed so enthusiastically that I wondered if he was divorced. I didn’t ask.

Instead, we talked about places with strange names for a while. I had been to Nowhere, Oklahoma, before, and Choo talked about a town near Danville called Tight Squeeze. Molly said that she had always liked a place called Conception, and Sig swore that there was a Butts, Georgia. I wondered if a name like that made it harder or easier for the board of tourism, and we spent some time coming up with bumper stickers. “I love Butts” and “Drop on by and look at our Butts” and “Come into Butts.”

“You realize that if we die today, this will be the last conversation I ever have,” Molly pointed out.

“You’re right,” Choo said. “Let’s talk about basketball.”

Sig gazed at the back of Molly’s seat fondly. “Let’s just not die.”

We found the strip club at the end of a dirt road surrounded by distant trees and a lot of land that looked like it ought to be growing something. It was a one-story building, but it was a very tall, large, and long story, and I doubted that it ended well. The club had a gravel parking lot surrounded by football stadium lights, and there was a domed storage building about a quarter of a mile away, but those were the only signs of civilization that I could see. The place had thick concrete walls and was apparently closed during the day. Large steel slat shutters had been rolled down to cover the windows from inside. There were no neon signs, although the canopy-covered walkway leading to the front doors did say
MIDNIGHT ESCAPE
at the top.

We stopped well before we got to the parking lot, and Choo put in a Buddhist meditation CD and turned the volume on low. I had given him the CD as an alternative to the high sonics that he was experimenting with, and he had accepted it enthusiastically once I explained its properties.