The Dark Communion (The Midnight Defenders) (8 page)

.

9

I pulled around behind the house, parked in my usual space, and glanced at the clock. It was late. All the windows were dark. Everyone had gone to sleep, probably hours before, which was fine for me. After the drive I’d had, the mood I was in, I didn’t feel much like talking.

I stopped in the kitchen to grab a quick bite and a cold brew. An abandoned dust mop sat on the counter beside an empty saucer of milk, proof that Chess was on the prowl, but apparently he wanted as much company as I did.

Chess was Cheshire, a type of Spritely house spirit called a Brownie. He worked at night, preferably while we slept, and didn’t like to be seen. He stocked our groceries, did our dishes, cobbled our shoes, prepared our meals, and cleaned the lint out of the dryer. He never accepted payment, just a saucer of milk every day, maybe a little biscuit with honey, and Ape swore if we ever considered it payment, Chess was likely to disappear.

As far as I know, he came with the house, but I’d only met him once, when I first moved in – something about him needing to get used to my scent.

From the kitchen, I wound my way through the house and crept up the stairs to Nadia’s room. Cracked the door open slowly. No lights were on, but a lone candle flickered on a side table.

“Nadia?” I whispered, but she didn’t answer.

I stole into the room, removed the box with Huxley’s amulet from my pocket, and set it down next to the candle, blew out the little flame as I did.

I turned to leave but stopped, looked back at her wrapped up in those plain white sheets, the comforter that looked like it belonged in some random hotel room somewhere. Her entire room was like that: off, borrowed. Apart from her clothes that hung in the closet, nothing in her room betrayed anything about her.

Because of my work, I’d been around young girls. I’d been in their rooms, looking for clues on cases, saw the dollies or the posters or the painted walls. She was a young lady, yet the drab paint job, the perfectly boring decorations on the shelves, the horrible painting of a farmhouse and cornfield could have belonged anywhere.

There was the chair she loved, though, in the corner. The old brown wicker frame and over-sized padded cushion that was cradled in it would’ve looked better in a college dorm – which is where it had come from, bartered from some frat boys who thought their dorm was haunted. When I first quit the Hand, I had nowhere to go, so I crashed at the office. Nadia, who was only eight at the time, slept in that chair. When Ape took us in, she asked to keep it.

It was the story of her life, and why, I knew, her room was so, well, not her. Like me, she didn’t feel she had a home. She hadn’t for years. Homes are like that. Suddenly yours can be torn from you, and it can take years, decades maybe, before you find another – if you find another.

My thoughts drifted back to Alara; when she and Anna had gone, it’s like any hope I had of a home died with them. Whether the seminary, the Hand, my office, Ape’s place, I was just leasing space. All I needed was a bed to lay my head and a pot to piss in.

With Nadia, she hadn’t had a home since her mom died when she was six. From there, she was taken in by her dad, and while Huxley tried to provide, he was no family man, didn’t know how to be. There wasn’t a spell for that. She was only with him two years before I got her. Nothing seemed permanent, so she never established roots, never attached a claim to anything she couldn’t pack and take with her.

That was Nadia. She was an orphan, daughter of a black Haitian voodoo man and a poor, white, trailer-trash mama from Alabama, born out of wedlock and raised by the hapless bastard who got her father killed.

Sometimes I’d tell myself I kept her around because I owed it to her old man, and maybe that used to be true, but these days, I kept her around because I liked her. Because in a way, she reminded me of me, the way she was a fighter, the way she didn’t give a damn, the way her ability made her a freak.

Unlike me, she wasn’t born with her ability. She’d had an accident, woke violently, shaking and screaming, and that’s when it happened: the room lit up like a damn traffic light.

After extensive testing, Ape determined that the colored energy discs she created altered the inertia of an object, changing its willingness to move. Red discs caused an object in motion to stop. Green discs made a stationary object go.

We set up some tin cans in the backyard, and she sat out there for months, hours at a time, hurling disc after disc like sodding ninja stars until she could hit a target forty yards away, perfectly, every time. Yet, despite her training, she lacked the experience in battle that Ape and I won the hard way: years of discipline and experience and fucking truck-fulls of luck.

So we didn’t let her help as much as she’d like, she was still a young girl, and I was dead-set on not disappointing her father again. Huxley trusted me with his life, and then for some reason I’ll never understand, when I failed him, he trusted me with the life of his only daughter. Hell, it was his dying wish I raise her, tell her about him, and give her the amulet.

She was eighteen in a few days.

As I left her room, I closed the door gently behind me and moved quickly and silently back through the kitchen and down another hallway and descended more stairs.

I think at its inception, the basement had been slave quarters or maybe just one of those mother-in-law suites, because it was designed as a living space, though not a very cozy one. I had it softened up a bit, a few coats of paint on the walls, some new insulation, some fresh carpeting. I had my own bathroom and a nice four-poster bed.

When I reached my room, my legs tingled. Sirens were great at fixing backs, no doubt about it. Had I been left in the care of hobs or selkies, for instance, we’d be installing a handicap elevator. As long as I could still walk – and run when needed – I could deal with a little numbness time and again.

I grabbed a quick shower, not really washing, just letting the hot water steam against me, scalding the dirt and dried blood off. I didn’t feel clean, just sterile, like the white feeding room at the Siren’s Song.

After that, legs still tingling, my naked body wrapped in a towel, I collapsed on top of my covers and drifted into restless sleep.

.

10

When I woke, it was dark in my room, and I lay still for a few minutes, my head pounding steadily.

I got up slowly, still in my bath towel, and took a step. Pain shot up my left leg and set fire to my lower back. I winced, stumbled, and caught myself on the dresser, leaned there a moment until I caught my bearings before stumbling the rest of the way to the bathroom. With some difficulty, I got dressed and shambled upstairs.

At the top of the stairs, I realized two things at once. The first was that it was indeed morning. The entire kitchen was aglow with brilliant sunlight that came unimpeded through the large picture window that overlooked the rear of the estate. The second was that while I slept, Chess had been baking – something apple-cinnamon from the smell of it.

Nadia sat at one of the stools on the island, sipped slowly from a cup of coffee and flipped idly through a newspaper. She nodded to me when I entered and continued reading. She didn’t seem to notice my walk had turned to a hobble overnight, or if she did, injury must have become so common place with me that she paid it no mind.

“Coffee?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything, but motioned to the coffee pot. “Chess made a spice cake,” she said, and the plate next to her bore what looked like two thick slices of a small bread.

I poured the coffee and took a stool near her, turned to gaze out the window at my car. “What time is it?”

“A little after eight. We were going to let you sleep. What time did you get in?”

“What are you, my mother?” I took a sip of coffee.

She laughed a little, looked up from the paper. “Sorry.”

“I got in late.” I looked down at her plate. Chunks of apples were baked in. “Is that streusel on top?”

She nodded. “It’s good. Want some?”

I took another sip of coffee. “Maybe later.”

She returned to her paper for a moment before asking, “Did you come in my room last night?”

I looked absently at her: jeans and a yellow tank top, long black hair pulled up. Huxley’s amulet hung around her neck. It looked nice on her, the purple of the gem complemented her skin tone, seemed to bring out something in her eyes. She wasn’t that rich, dark chocolate brown her father was; she had a little cream in her coffee.

“Happy birthday,” I said. “It was your father’s. He wanted you to have it..”

“Thanks.” She turned back to her paper. “And thanks for blowing out the candle.”

“If I hadn’t, Chess would have.” I took another sip, held a little on my tongue for a minute before swallowing. My leg still hurt, but it felt nice to sit down. “The necklace looks good on you. It was one of his charms. I suppose it’s magic.”

“Yeah…Medieval soldiers used to wear amethyst into battle; they believed it had healing properties.” I arched a curious brow at her over the coffee mug. “And they say the ancient Greeks would carve wine goblets from it to keep them from getting drunk. It’s supposed to be a symbol of purity and soberness, for the body and mind.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I’ve been up for a while. The necklace inspired some research in the library.” Her hand went to her neck as she said, “It’s beautiful, Jono.”

“I’m starting to worry I won’t have need for the prepared speech Huxley made me memorize.”

“I’m guessing the bones were from a black cat, or two rather, according to the belief that all of the magical power in the cat resided in a single bone.”

“Okay. Why do you say a black cat?”

“I can tell you’re not superstitious,” she said. “Huxley was a hoodoo guy, and in hoodoo the bones of a black cat are used for good luck, protection against dark magic and rebirth after death. Which is reinforced by the wishbones, most likely from a pair of black roosters.”

She was nailing it so far. “Alright. How ‘bout the beads then, smart ass?”

“Well, black onyx is typically worn in the festival of Samhain and represents death.” She stopped for a minute. “Which is funny because the onyx, amethyst, and bones all tip their hats to the patron loa of New Orleans, Samedi and Brigette, also known as the Ghede who preside over graveyards.” She paused a moment, taking a sip of coffee. “The loa are the voodoo gods.”

“I know what the loa are,” I said, not so much annoyed but playing it off that way.

“Now the Ghede don’t do anything without first invoking Papa Legba,” she continued. “Are you familiar with him, too?” She gave me a wicked smile and continued before I could say anything. “According to voodoo tradition, he opens and closes the doors from the world of the living to the spirit world, turns the wheel of fortune, and opens doors of opportunity. The gold, jet, and red tiger’s eye pay tribute to him.” When she finished, she took a deep breath and turned to me proudly. “Was that the prepared speech?”

I scratched my head and said, “Something like that.” I took a bite of her streusel cake and asked, “Did you figure out what it does then, too, genius? Or did your books not say all that?”

“I have a theory, but why don’t you tell me.”

I took another bite of cake as I thought over the words to use. “We fought a lot of stuff, and Huxley wasn’t terribly good at hand-to-hand combat.” She nodded. “He did spells and shit, which took a lot out of him. When he wore down, the amulet would glow, and he would get a renewed fire. He tired often, called the amethyst his second wind.”

I looked at her for a quiet moment and said, “What’s your theory?”

She looked down at the amethyst. The gem seemed to glow in response to her, like the dying flicker of a flashlight bulb, but that might have been my imagination. She didn’t look up as she said, “My father bound his energy to the gem.” She shrugged. “Huxley was trying to cheat death.”

The smile that found its way to my face with those words was undoubtedly awkward and uncomfortable, but it didn’t silence the words that followed. “Too bad it didn’t work.” I didn’t need to mention that he’d been dead for ten years. Huxley was always the elephant in the room whenever she asked me about the past, about old cases. She never really asked about him, and if the topic came up, she always found a way to change the subject to something else.

“Well, it’s a good theory, anyway,” I said, my smile muted now but more sincere.

She didn’t say anything, just nodded in understanding.

“He asked me to tell you about him.” I wasn’t good with feelings and the sappy stuff. It wasn’t easy for me. “He was proud of you, ya know. As far as I could tell, you were probably the thing he cared for most. It was important to him that you remember who he was.” I paused a moment. “Do you…have any questions…about him?”

She thought about it for a second, looked down and away. Careful not to meet my eyes, her hand found the amethyst, and her finger traced the outline of the gem. I thought I saw something glisten in the corner of her eye, but she blinked and it was gone.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “But if you think of anything….” I stumbled into silence a moment. “There was this one time…” I probably sounded stupid, but all the talk about my old mentor had kicked some things up in my head. “We were in Peru chasing a clan of chupacabra – nasty little bitches – and we’d holed them up in a cave in this forest. There were probably five or six of the buggers, and they’d taken some goats, but this little farm boy had wandered in after them. Huxley summoned some kind of arctic wind, froze the nut hairs off those nasties and left the boy completely unhurt.”

I hadn’t been paying attention to her as I talked and happened to glance over at her as I said, “Of course, the goats were dead…”

She’d turned away from me, wiped her eyes with her fingers, sniffled a little. She took a breath and said, “Can we not do this right now?”

I took another bite of cake, put a hand on her shoulder, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged me off, stood from her stool a minute, and looked out the window, a hand over her face. When she turned back, she looked collected. She smiled weakly and said, “Thanks for the necklace.” Then she sat and turned back to the paper.

I finished her cake in silence. There were other places I could be, other things I could be doing, but they could wait. I didn’t know how things were going to go, and if she still wanted to talk, I didn’t want to just walk away.

After a time, she folded the newspaper and set it aside. I watched a pair of wrens fighting over a discarded apple core in the back grass, couldn’t help but notice her silence, and eventually I turned to look at her. “What?” I asked, the last of the cake in my mouth.

“I thought you would have told me what happened by now.”

“What did happen?”

“Last night. You were supposed to be gone an hour. Obviously, something happened, and then on the phone you said something about a new case. So, spill.”

I told her about Eric Gables’ visit, the sheriff’s office, and my excursion at the Siren’s Song. I left out the bits about kissing Lorelei and the sad drive home.

“So now what?”

“Today, I was going to go by Adam’s school. There was something in the journal about where he met Dewey.”

“The imaginary friend.”

“Right. And then I was thinking about going by the Johnson place.”

“But the sheriff told you to stay away.”

I shrugged. “Don’t you think I could get more out of the bathroom then the cops did?”

“Maybe,” she said, “but what good does it do you if you get arrested?”

“Fine. What do you suggest then?”

“They go to the same school, don’t they? Adam Gables and Clint Johnson?”

“I guess.”

“You’re already going to be there, just see if you can ask the kid a few questions, get him on neutral ground.”

I considered that for a second. “Not a bad idea.” Then I asked, “So what happened to you yesterday? I called the house a few times.”

“Well, Terry’s cousin Rebecca called.” She didn’t call him Ape, she called him by his Christian name, said it was more personal that way. He did let us live in his house and all, we ought to treat him like a human, not like a circus act. That’s more or less what she told me once. She’s gonna join PETA when she grows up, too. “I thought that was weird. I’ve never known any of his family to call here before.”

I nodded. “I don’t think he’s talked to Rebecca since his parents’ funeral – what – twelve years ago. What the fuck did she want?”

She grew quiet for a minute before she said. “You remember Ape’s uncle, Arthur?”

Arthur David Towers was a Howard Hughes-type eccentric. He’d married several times to people like Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, and, inevitably, when the relationships fell apart, he would take off in a hot-air balloon or take a dog sled across the arctic. He climbed Everest, ran with the bulls in Spain, and rode a camel across the Sahara. What’s more, he became famous for his exploits, sold the book rights on his life and starred in two feature films, as himself.

Last year, however, he turned eighty and started falling apart. Doctors told him to take it easy, but after all the things he’d done, he’d never learned to relax and he was going crazy sitting still. He broke his hip trying to scale the roof of his house.

Arthur had quite a few kids from all of his marriages – Rebecca being the eldest – and whether they were looking out for him or trying to keep him out of the way for their own good, they put him in a home.

“Of course,” I said, fearing I knew what was coming.

“He’s missing. Terry and I went out to the assisted living home.”

“Wait. What? Missing how?”

“Just gone. He got up and walked away, from what they told us.”

“When?”

“Last Tuesday.”

“Arthur’s been missing for a week and a half, and that bitch calls him up yesterday?”

“I know.”

“Arthur’s the only one in the family who doesn’t hate Ape because he’s…well, a monkey. He’s been like a dad to him, and that bitch…”

“You haven’t heard anything yet,” she said. “The nurse told us Arthur liked to pretend he was still having his adventures, exploring and whatever, right? So one night, maybe a month ago, they found him in the basement, unconscious. Apparently, he had a seizure and for the past few weeks, he’d been a complete vegetable: spoon-fed, diapers. Nurse-care, 24/7.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. They found his empty wheelchair by the forest outside the home. There weren’t any footprints or anything. Ape’s a mess over it all.”

“Did they call the police?”

“Yeah,” she said. “They swept the forest and found nothing. There was a neighborhood and a school past the trees, and they looked there too.”

“And you said they found him in the basement? When he had his stroke? Where exactly?”

She seemed to think about it for a moment before she said, “In the laundry room, face down by a sewer drain. Why?”

“Any chemical burns or bug bites?”

“Nothing. His nurse said that was the first thing they did when they found him was check him for injuries, as they were liable. Also, he was sponge-bathed regularly, so any marks or whatever would have been found.”

“Life’s full of mysteries. Where’s old monkey boy now?”

“He’s in the garden.”

“I better go see if he needs my help.” When I stood up, I winced. The pain was much worse this morning than it had been, severe enough in my legs that they began to buckle under me. I quickly grabbed the stool, and Nadia leapt to try to hold me up.

“It’s your back, isn’t it?” she said. “Ape said it was bothering you when you left the house yesterday, and I’m sure having it cracked around a stripper pole didn’t help any.”

“You always say the sweetest things. Stripper pole. Sounds so dirty when you say it.”

“Most people don’t have a Siren mistress to knit them back together, Jono. You’re lucky.” She helped me across the kitchen to the table. “You need to lie down. Do you want the floor or the table?”

“It doesn’t really matter. Probably won’t get up from either.”

She helped lower me to the floor, the whole time the pain robbed my brain of all words but one. “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck….”

When I was finally on the floor, she rolled me on to my stomach. “Sorry ‘bout the cusses, love.” She slid my shirt up around my shoulders, stretched my arms above my head. “What are you doing?”