A Touch Too Much Read online

  “You are.” She grinned.

  A bell ticked off each passing floor.

  The elevator could take all damned night for all I cared.

  Her faded jeans and gray t-shirt made it damned hard to remember her real vocation. Even drunk, she leaned against the wall with the unconscious grace and fluidity she used when fighting. Only her occasional hesitation or indrawn breath hinted at the bandaged bullet wound on her side. She cleared her throat and straightened. “So tomorrow—”

  I groaned. “Tomorrow can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Well, technically, it’s tomorrow, so…” She waggled her phone between her fingers.

  “Not until I sleep, it’s not.”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” she said, unable to suppress a laugh.

  The elevator lurched to a stop, and we spilled into the hall, giggling and shushing each other. Nothing about the twisting paisley carpet pattern made the hallway easy to navigate drunk, but with our arms around each other, we mostly avoided bouncing against the walls. I held her tight to me, my hand on her hip to avoid the bandage barely a hand’s width above. For once, the long hallway seemed more like a gift than a punishment.

  “Here we are.” She flourished her free arm at my door.

  Reeling from the sudden stop, I flopped against the wall to dig the plastic key out of my pocket. “You could stay.”

  Sister Betty laughed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not? There’s two beds.” I shrugged, awkward, doubtful that reminding her about Marty’s presence would improve the odds of her staying. Awareness of the invitation’s implications grew and threatened to rush in at any moment. “Besides, I brought my thoroughly non-threatening Batman pajamas.”

  “I’m sure they’re adorable on you.” Sister Betty tapped my nose and seemed to sober up. “But it’s still not a good idea.”

  I struggled against my disappointment. “Alright. So, breakfast in the morning?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Will you be up before the hour strikes double digits?”

  “If not, brunch.”

  Swaying a little, she laughed. “Then I’ll see you in the morning.” She kissed my cheek, and I smelled her shampoo, her soap and the faint, sweet scent of whatever she’d been drinking. “Sweet dreams.”

  I didn’t open my door until she disappeared down the hall and around the corner.

  The lock mechanism made a funky sound, then clicked open. I shut the door behind me as quietly as possible. In the dark, I thought Marty’s breathing meant he was asleep.

  Until he spoke.

  “Couldn’t close the deal with Sister Hotpants?”

  I barked my shin against the bed frame and bit back a curse. “I thought you were sleeping.” Rubbing the sore spot didn’t help. It would bruise before morning.

  “Nah.” He turned on the bedside light and blinked in the glare. “With all the bad dreams I’ve had the past couple of nights, I’m not exactly eager to sleep. Especially if Cooper’s right. They can’t come true if you’re not asleep to have them.”

  I sat on the bed, my back to my friend, ignoring the way the room tilted and spun as I untied my Doc Martens. “Maybe. But, I’m not convinced he’s right.”

  “You’re never convinced until someone proves you wrong. That’s your default setting.”

  Touché. “And one of our shared traits.” My Docs landed with a thud beside the nightstand. The thick-soled boots looked so out of place beside the antique-styled furniture. “But it’s not time to think about this. Not until I get some sleep.”

  “I could switch rooms with her so you guys—”

  “She said no.”

  “But she won’t see your fabulous Batman ‘jams.”

  I laughed despite my frustration and flopped back on the bed. “You’re the only lucky one on that score.”

  “Her loss, friend.”

  And mine.

  Marty tapped his phone before shoving it in his pocket. “We’re going to be late.”

  “It’s morning. I’m doing the best I can.” The coffee he’d made me hadn’t stripped the gravel from my voice, but I felt marginally more human. Once my brain came online, I might actually reach personhood. “This nightmare business is going to be tricky.”

  Last night, before he finally dropped all the “shop talk,” Agent Cooper laid out a strange and disturbing case involving the creature Marty and I first encountered at the airport. The supernat that attacked us on the street might be another of its kind. It unsettled me. I’d chased ghosts and ghouls, fought zombies and vampires, but how the hell do you track down a nightmare? And what do you do once you find it?

  “Does this mean you’re throwing Cooper a bone and helping out?”

  I snorted and wriggled into my jeans. “I never planned to leave him hanging. I just needed like five minutes to myself. A pretend vacation, if I can’t get a real one.”

  “Makes sense.” Marty walked over to the desk to survey the weapons we hadn’t yet returned to the rectory arsenal in the Saint Louis Cathedral. “What’re we taking?”

  “To brunch?” I slid a shirt on and twisted to see how it fell in the mirror. “Unless you’re worried about the crab cakes being more than fresh, I think we’re good.”

  “Har. Har.” He put his hands on his hips. “I was thinking more about what we’d need after brunch, or have you not learned your lesson about wandering around unarmed?”

  My meager two days in New Orleans had proved…eventful. After the airport encounter where a monster dropped a victim with a touch, I’d been shot at by a priest hell-bent on stopping monster hunters from interfering with “God’s plan,” attacked by some supernatural creature on the street, and led a mythical harbinger of death and catastrophe on a wild run through the French Quarter, all while un-, or under-armed.

  Is it any wonder I needed a break?

  “I’ve learned it,” I picked up my Docs and sat on the edge of the bed facing him, “but Denver omelets and biscuits and gravy don’t usually demand small-caliber arms.”

  “When others eat them, they probably don’t.” He waved at the array. “But, this is you.”

  I did kind of hate it when he was right. “You take the Glock. I’ll take one of the 1911s.” The 1911s were big guns, but my favorite to handle. The weight would be a familiar comfort for me, but Marty wouldn’t stand a chance with them on a good day. “How’s your head?”

  He tilted his chin. “My eye’s pretty.”

  Though the swelling had gone down, he still had a lump where he’d clocked himself on a mausoleum while we hunted the Black Dog in Saint Louis Cemetery Number One. The overhead light made the bruise shift colors as he turned. “Pretty, indeed. But that didn’t answer my question. I’m more concerned about the inside.”

  “I’m fine. Just hungry.”

  “You don’t sound excited.”

  “About my head?”

  “About food. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

  “I’m excited. It’s supposed to be top notch. Four and a half stars on Yelp, thousands of reviews.” He picked lint from the blanket on the bed. “Might be better than last night.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “We need to get going.”

  I dropped the laces, hands on my hips. “You never let me get away with a non-answer. What is it?”

  “Nothing.” He turned and walked to the window.

  “If you’re not feeling well, we should get you checked out.”

  “I told you, I’m fine.” With a shrug, he pulled the curtain aside and shaded his eyes. “Minor headache, but no concussive symptoms.”

  “WebMD isn’t a—”

  “I called my mom.”

  I shut up.

  “She diagnosed me via remote appointment. Video chat and everything.” His voice dropped along with his shoulders. “Satisfied?”

  “Yes.” I focused on tying my shoe, unsure of what else to say. Marty seldom called his parents, since their conversa
tions rarely ended well or at a reasonable volume. “How’d it go?”

  He turned back to the table of weapons and lifted a shoulder holster. “It’s too hot to wear anything over this.”

  Evasion. Not good. “True, but legal or not, we’re not provoking idiots with open carry.”

  “Right.” He checked himself out in the mirror and me in the reflection. “So we stop to raid the arsenal?”

  “Nah.” I slid off the bed and rummaged through my suitcase. “I’ll throw on something to hide the shoulder holster, and I can pack the Derringer in an ankle holster. Text Father Callahan and ask him to bring something for you.”

  We worked quietly, him on his phone, me searching for something I wouldn’t sweat through in thirty seconds.

  “It was okay, by the way,” he said, his voice soft. “Talking to Mom.”

  “Good.” I tried to stay casual as I folded a pair of jeans before dropping them back in the suitcase. “Did she give you a hard time?”

  “Less than usual when I told her about my head.” He laughed without humor. “I have a feeling the lecture will come next time.”

  His mother, a neurosurgeon of relative renown in the Boston area, never approved of her son’s involvement in monster hunting and never missed an opportunity to remind him where he’d be in his medical career if he’d stuck with it. She compared our work to ghost hunting TV shows. Despite Marty’s easy-going nature, her jabs spurred intense, heated arguments I’d fled more than once.

  “She said I didn’t need to worry unless I started vomiting, lose consciousness or,” he waved a hand in a vague gesture, “a list of other stuff I wrote down.”

  “Maybe she was worried.” I felt the heat of his glare before I turned. “What?”

  “Right.” He tossed the shoulder holster on my bed. “We’ll go with that.”

  I opened my mouth, hoping something supportive would fall out. “She…” Nothing followed. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “I’m used to it. You ready?”

  3

  “What do you think?” Cooper sat back, but nothing about him appeared relaxed, even after a lengthy, gluttonous brunch. I had to give him credit, though. This time, he’d waited until we were ensconced in the relative privacy of the rectory to start the business talk.

  I leaned forward, shifting some of the papers in front of me to see the pictures again. The guy from the airport. The monster in its overaged frat-boy guise. Only one full-frame picture of his face made it into the file to identify him, but Cooper had shown us a video, and a series of digital stills pulled from it. It tracked him from the moment he emerged from a men’s bathroom until he fled through the baggage claim doors. No records from before. No indication when he landed or images of him from any gate or terminal. Nothing could keep the dread and foreboding out of my voice. “I think this is going to be far more complicated than any of us are prepared for.”

  “There’s no record of him disembarking a plane? Or of crossing security?” Sister Betty asked, laying the report back in the file folder.

  Cooper shook his head and crossed his arms. “Nothing. We had techs go back forty-eight hours, and there’s nothing, not even using facial recognition or behavioral analysis.”

  “How is that possible?” Marty even abandoned his tablets to pore over the documentation in front of us.

  “What about coming in through the baggage claim doors?” I asked.

  “Nada,” Cooper said. “When the techs didn’t find record through security, that was the first place they looked. They can’t even find record of him going into the bathroom. “It’s as if he materialized in the bathroom and walked out.”

  “Maybe he did,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “IFM,” Marty muttered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. If Cooper and DEMON’s hypothesis about this creature’s supernatural pedigree was right, Marty’s It’s Fucking Magic would be a plausible explanation for anything we might encounter.

  “What are your thoughts on how to proceed, Hunter?” Cooper asked, his voice lacking the irony and sarcasm I’d have anticipated hours earlier.

  “We do it the old-fashioned way,” I said, pushing my chair back from the table. “We’ll split up and investigate.”

  Whether you’re Joe Average or have the dubious blessing of being associated with law enforcement, dealing with the TSA sucks. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the federal government had done a job fair targeting wraiths and slapped uniforms into the ones that passed for human. But I knew better. DEMON had tight control over the various species that could and could not hold jobs interacting with humans, even if no other government branch was aware of it. Besides, not even the government would be dumb enough to allow literal soul-sucking creatures to interact with humans.

  Human or not, the TSA agents at Louis Armstrong airport provided nothing Cooper hadn’t already shared with us. Even with the additional access and conversational lubrication hastily-procured federal IDs provided, no one we interviewed remembered the frat-boy man in any security line. With as many travelers as the airport handled on an average day, I’d expected as much. The gate agents we talked to provided even less detail, but Marty’s digital wizardry captured every word they said as I asked questions and probed for more.

  The only bright spot of the trip happened when I stumbled into my favorite New England coffee and donut chain and procured a cold brew and a chocolate-glazed donut. And that happened a very long nine hours after a sour-faced man hustled Marty and I into claustrophobic offices off the terminal proper in the furthest approximation of southern hospitality possible.

  Leaning against the high-top table in the coffee shop, I scarfed the last bite of my donut, watching my partner. With a yawn, he cracked his knuckles and stretched, asking the question I’d been asking myself for the last couple of hours. “What now?”

  I sighed and shook the ice in the almost empty cup to get the last of the coffee lurking in the bottom. “We figure out which supernats can materialize in our world. With and without assistance. ‘With’ gives us the long list, and ‘without,’ the short. Then we keep hacking away at it until we’ve got the most likely suspects.”

  “Done and done.” He tapped his tablet to life and slid it across the table. “The biggest culprit is likely to be a nightmare.”

  I swore under my breath. Something I knew how to fight would have been ideal. “I was hoping for something a little more corporeal. Goblins, minor devils. Hell, I’d even go for taking down a herd of manticores.”

  “I hate manticores,” Marty mumbled and shuddered, probably recalling the last skirmish we had with them in Nepal. A week stalking the haunted forest for a leathery-winged beast with the body of a lion, a scorpion’s stinger while dreading a not-quite-human face emerging from the shadows leaves a lasting—and negative—impression. Worse when it took three days after the first fight to finally kill the damned thing.

  Longest three days of my life.

  I shuddered, too, remembering the stitches I’d needed after the final battle. My thigh twinged with phantom pain, and I pressed it with the heel of my hand. “Yeah, me too, but it would be a straight forward job. Hunt, capture or kill, move on.”

  He scoffed. “Since when is anything we do ‘straight forward’?”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he had a point. Instead of saying anything, I picked up the tablet and skimmed the text. I sucked the last of the coffee from my cup and hoped for a monster easier than a nightmare.

  A girl could dream, after all.

  My heart thumped against my ribs as I tried to slow my breathing. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold. Every nerve buzzed with the aftermath of the nightmare, every sound amplified, every twitching shadow making me jump. I blinked against the light and tried to focus on the details of the hotel room to ground myself. My bed. Marty’s bed. The unbalanced ceiling fan.

  This was real. Despite what happened in the dream, everything was fine. None of it had actually happened.

  I lo
oked around.

  Or had it?

  The pen trembled in my hand, poised over my notebook, but the words to describe what I’d seen wouldn’t come.

  Marty rubbed his eyes, squinting. “Did you get it?”

  “No.” I dropped the pen into the open binding and lay the notebook in my lap. “Before I can get it down,” I shrugged, “it’s gone.” Not that my body noticed. I needed another run through the French Quarter to burn off all the energy jangling my nerves. It’d probably be enjoyable without a hellhound at my heels.

  Marty yawned and nodded. “What now?”

  Sweat ran down my back like a spider across my hot skin. I rolled my shoulders and tried to ignore the sensation by focusing on my notebook. The few words I’d scribbled made little sense. Banquet. Blood bisque. Sparkly dress. Key. Illegible squiggles between them should have been words, but weren’t. At least not words I could read.

  “Try to sleep?”

  My body trembled, and my brain whirred, flashing images that made no sense. “Not an option.”

  “Guided meditation?” He already sounded half asleep. Lucky bastard.

  Sister Betty taught me not long after I started training with her. She’d refused to let me leave training sessions before I’d used it to bring myself down. It’d probably saved my life by making sure I didn’t do something stupid and get killed. Fighting the things that had eaten my baby sister in front of me did little to dissipate the anger that threatened to consume me back then. Meditation helped. Sometimes, when things got bad, it still did.

  But not tonight.

  “I need to get up and move.”

  “‘Kay.” He yawned and buried himself under the fluffy blankets so deep, only the top of his brown curls peeked out. “Turn out the light.”

  “Yup.” I put my notebook on the nightstand and threw back my blankets. At four in the morning, surely there’d be something to do in New Orleans. Maybe even make a misbehaving monster regret its life choices.