Sorrow's Edge Read online

  It wasn’t until I got the receipt that I knew all hell was breaking loose. Instead of my total, on the receipt there was a hotel name and a room number printed. The only problem was that it was my hotel, the Marian Motel, and my room number, 1408. After a minute, the text changed back to what it should have been—a normal restaurant receipt.

  I grabbed Tabby by the arm. “We have to go.”

  ###

  “What the hell, Jimmy?” she asked as I dragged her over to the car. I knew I was hurting her arm, but she was too stubborn to just come when I needed her to.

  “We have to get back to the room. Now.” Maybe it was the panic in my voice that did it. I let go of her arm, and she followed me down the street.

  She didn’t argue anymore. We both jumped into the car, and I got us back to the hotel as fast as I could. It probably wasn’t fast enough. I just hoped that Lucy was still there and I wasn’t about to find Isaac spread about the room in pieces.

  We ran from the car after I parked it and dashed up to our room. I could hear Isaac yowling from within. This wasn’t good.

  I slid the key card into the lock. The light on the lock went green. God help me if the bastard hurt the cat. I opened the door.

  We headed in, Tabby bringing up the rear. Isaac was sitting on the bed with his back hunched and his lips pulled back into a snarl. He was staring toward the window. At the little table in front of the window, a man sat, staring at us.

  He looked like he was tall. He had these long skinny legs that were defined by his white suit. His hair was as white as the suit and was wavy to the point that it kind of billowed down to his shoulders. He wore black plastic framed glasses.

  “Close the door, if you will,” he said to Tabby and motioned with his hand. The nails on his hand were long and perfectly manicured.

  With wide eyes, Tabby complied, perhaps because she didn’t want to let the whole hotel know our dirty laundry. Though, if having a random guy break into your hotel room wasn’t cause enough to create a disturbance, I don’t know what was.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I asked.

  He wrung his hands together and sighed. “I had hoped things would be more civil.”

  Where I’m from, you didn’t chit chat with someone that broke into your house. You shot them. Good thing I didn’t own a gun.

  “Look, buddy. You broke into our hotel room, sent Jimmy a flask from who the hell knows where, and you want us to be civil?” Tabby’s eyes were starting to glow red. The idiot hadn’t seemed to realize that she was the violent one.

  I would never have come right out with the stuff about the flask. She was so flipping cool.

  “I’m guessing you’re the one who called me?” I asked him. Might as well get the spotlight off Tabby. She was having a hard enough time keeping her cool. At least this way, if he fucked up, she could catch him broadside.

  He uncrossed his legs, stood up, and gave a strange little bow. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Nicholas Vespa, and I am also a spiritualist.”

  I nodded. He sounded more like a motor scooter salesman than a person that dabbled with the occult. I wasn’t completely ignorant when it came to spiritualists. Yeah, I’d read about one with the whole Sorrow’s Point mess, and I suspected she was more of a witch than a spiritualist, but whatever. If this guy was what he said he was, I was really confused as to why he was in my hotel room and why he sent the flask. “You said on the phone that you needed an exorcism.”

  He smiled like a cat that had just eaten a canary. “Not exactly. I’m not sure if an exorcism is called for really. It is more of an agreed upon possession.”

  Things had stopped making sense, and when stuff didn’t make sense, it wasn’t true. “So, why did you lie?” It was a lie after all. He’d said on the phone that he’d seen O’Malley and that he’d needed an exorcism. I did not like being lied to. Especially when the person that was lying to you thought you were stupid enough to take them at face value.

  “Just so you know, lies are one of my pet peeves. And how the hell did you get into my room?” I was blocking the doorway with my body.

  Tabby moved and sat down on the bed next to Isaac. The cat cuddled up to her and stayed there. It didn’t escape my notice that the cat was claiming his spot. I was second place.

  “Does it really make a difference? I am here now. That is what matters.”

  This was not going to happen. I had better things to do than listen to some old dude lord over me. “Look. There’s this thing called free will, and if you piss me off, I do have the choice not to help you.”

  Vespa coughed. “Really? I should think that your superiors would have something to say about that.”

  What would a “possessed” guy know about the Order? “Why do I suddenly feel like I am fighting with a demon instead of a man?”

  Vespa grinned. His eyes turned yellow, and the pupils turned to slits. Oooh, big scary.

  “Jimmy?” Lucy asked from behind me. Her voice shook a little. Not good.

  “Yes?”

  “He wants to take me.”

  I looked down at her. Her body was more transparent than usual.

  Fuck this shit. I was not going to let anyone mess with me a second time. I stilled myself and started to get ready to fight. “Foul being. Dark bearer. Hear me. You have not been invited. Being invited is a very important thing. And I take great offense to those who hurt my friends.

  The demon blinked. “What is it that you think you can do?”

  Okay, play time. I felt the weird power bubble up inside of me. I knew how to put it out there. All I had to do was speak a certain way and blammo. “You are not invited. Lucy’s soul is not yours. It bears my mark. Be gone.”

  With every word, I could see ripples of power move through the air around me. He’d done it. Maybe it would teach him a lesson not to piss off a marker.

  With a loud bang, Vespa collapsed onto the floor.

  “Oh shit,” Tabby said. “Should we check on him?”

  I looked at him. He was breathing. Good enough. “I’m not touching him. It could be a trick.”

  Tabby nodded. After a few minutes, Vespa woke. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Marian Motel. My hotel room.” I leaned against the wall in front of the door. I wasn’t just going to let the dude run away. I had some questions.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked me.

  I looked at Tabby, she looked back at me. This wasn’t normal.

  “You don’t remember?” Tabby asked.

  He got up from the floor. “I get these spells where I remember nothing. Sometimes, I miss entire days.”

  Yup. If I hadn’t already seen the demon, I would suspect he was either possessed or had some psychological disorder. With those eyes, I was thinking possession.

  “Who are you?” he asked me.

  “Jimmy Holiday.” Or marker extraordinaire, cool guy without a robe, I was getting ahead of myself.

  “Oh thank God. I had to be sneaky, you know?”

  I blinked. I was starting to get a tension headache. “Sneaky how?”

  “It wouldn’t let me contact you again. I had to wait until I had the power, when he was asleep. Then I was able to send you the package.”

  And back to the flask we were. I ignored the fact that my brain was now thinking like the little green dude from the Star Wars movies.

  “What does the flask signify?” Tabby asked.

  I looked at her then back at Vespa. Something was going on there, and Tabby, being a hell of a lot more astute than I was, picked up on it.

  “It…belongs to a famous spirit. I knew you’d come here if I sent it.” He brushed off his suit.

  “What famous spirit?” I asked.

  “Why your ancestor, Doc Holliday, of course.”

  Fuck me.

  ###

  Vespa left the room soon after. He did give me his cell number so that we could reach him. I’d told him I needed to think things over. The truth was, I was so pissed off about t
he invasion of my privacy, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to help him. Demon or not, you don’t just saunter into someone’s hotel room unannounced. It just wasn’t cool.

  Lucy kept staring at the door—almost as if she expected him to come crashing in. I couldn’t blame her. The fucker had tried to take her away. I still didn’t quite understand what the marker power did, but it was able to make the beasties go away. Lucy seemed okay now, just nervous. Isaac was curled up against where Lucy’s leg sort of was, asleep.

  “What are you going to do?” Tabby asked.

  “I don’t know.” It was true. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to bother to help the guy after all that. It would probably be best to haul our asses back to Virginia and take our chances.

  Tabby got up from the bed and hugged me. “I’m not crazy about this either.”

  Her arms felt good, both soft and strong at the same time. I took a deep breath. “With Lucy, I cared because she was this little girl, ya know?”

  Tabby stepped back. “When you were a priest, would you have done the same for all of your parishioners?”

  “Not all, but most.” But none of my parishioners had tried to steal the soul of a little girl either. It did make a difference.

  Tabby walked over and tapped the top of the little table. “What is it about this guy that bothers you most?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes, honestly.”

  “That he freely invited the demon in. I don’t have a problem when someone is attacked, but to make deals with these things, that’s evil too.” Not to mention what he’d just done. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he wasn’t aware of what the demon was doing. Lucy certainly was. She’d indicated that in the dreams I had about her at Sorrow’s Point. I knew enough now not to ignore things most people would discount.

  “If it really bothers you, why don’t you call them?” Tabby asked.

  “Call who?”

  “Your employers or whatever they are. Surely, they could send someone else.”

  I sat down on the bed. Lucy looked at me. Calling the Order would be a hard thing. Telling them that I wasn’t able to do this job, well, that would be admitting failure. Maybe Tabby and Lucy should go back home and I’d stay here? No, Lucy couldn’t be that far from me. Shit. That wouldn’t work either.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  “You said you’d protect me.”

  Leave it to a kid to blatantly put it out there. “Yes, I did. And I will.” That was the end of it. I had a job to do—protect Lucy. Whatever went along with it, well, I’d just have to deal with it.

  She started petting Isaac, or sort of at least. Her hand passed through his coat. Isaac opened one eye, feigned interest, then fell back asleep. “You saw what it was doing to me. You have to send it away.”

  I was starting to think that Lucy was the best thing to ever happen to me. She kept my conscience straight. That was it then. I had to deal with Vespa. “Thanks, Lucy.”

  She smiled.

  “So, how are you going to do this?” Tabby asked.

  Good question. I knew nothing about this type of possession. The Church assumed that no one would ever want to be possessed. “I guess I’d better get to know what a spiritualist actually does. After that, I’ll call Vespa.”

  “What can I do to help?” Tabby asked.

  “Find out everything you can about Doc. I want to know what the connection is. Why would a possessed man send an artifact that belonged to my ancestor to me? There has to be something there.”

  Tabby nodded. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  She left the hotel room. I didn’t want to do this exorcism. Of course, I hadn’t wanted to do Lucy’s either, but that’s beside the point. The one thing I did know was that if I didn’t get rid of this thing, it was going to take Lucy. That was not an option.

  ###

  I loaded up the iPad. Immediately, I got a pop-up informing me that my forms had been received and I should get my first check in about two weeks. Ye Fucking Ha. Guess that meant that I’d be getting a paycheck sometime this century. Online bill pay was going to be my friend for awhile.

  I pulled up the browser and started looking around for spiritualist information. Most of what I found was people proclaiming to do spells for money, et cetera. Definitely not what I needed. Finally, I found a site that had a lot of old photographs with ectoplasm and séances. The historical stuff. Many of the photos were debunked, but there was one that gave me chills. The guy looked like Vespa: the shoulder length white hair, the long mustache, it was all there. I saved the photo to the desktop. If Vespa was that old, that might explain the power the demon had. But with a man being possessed that long, how could there even be any of his soul left? Besides, I’d never read anywhere that a demon could prolong human life for hundreds of years. Yet again, more questions than answers.

  Logic said that this guy was likely a descendant, an uncanny one, but a descendent none the less. So, that left me with one question really: Why in their right mind would anyone willingly let a demon inhabit their body?

  Even a normal person knows that demons aren’t exactly easy to get rid of. There have been too many movies about it. I just didn’t buy the fame and fortune crap. Pride maybe. Power certainly. But money? It would be easier to rob a bank. Plus, if you got caught, you’d serve a light sentence if it was your first time doing something that bad. If you told them a demon made you do it, the judge would laugh you out of the courtroom.

  Of course, the only person who could answer that for me was Vespa himself, and I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him again this soon. I wanted to get all of this over and done with, but I wasn’t about to risk anyone’s well-being again. The only reason I wasn’t beating myself up over Lucy is that we were all broadsided with Vespa. Now I was on the alert, and I was going to make sure nothing like that had a chance to happen again.

  The Church would probably feel it was my duty to help him. I felt differently. I was only helping him so that nothing else bad would happen. He could shove the rest of it up his ass as far as I was concerned. It was enough that I was actually going to do this. It didn’t mean I had to like it.

  ###

  Tabby came back a few hours later with a crap load of pamphlets and a book. Her hair had escaped its bun and was billowing out around her face, almost like a halo.

  “Damn,” I said when she dropped it all on the bed.

  “Your ancestor is kind of popular if you haven’t noticed.” She kicked off her shoes and walked across the room.

  I laughed. “Something tells me he wasn’t like the way he’s portrayed in movies.”

  “No one is like how they are shown in movies.” Tabby sat down in a chair at the table, opened the pop bottle she had in her hand, and took a swig.

  I started flipping through the pamphlets. “Can you imagine living back then?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was fucking hard. We’re too used to air conditioning and buying our food at the grocery store. Hell, just to have a sandwich you had to bake the bread, butcher a pig, cook the ham, and make the mayo. No, I couldn’t do it.”

  I laughed. “Yes, you could. You can do anything you put your mind to.”

  She took another drink of her soda. “You wouldn’t be much better. I can’t see you riding a horse just to go to the next town.”

  She had me. Way back when, before we’d broken up the first time, she’d tried to get me on a horse. The poor thing stood still. I just couldn’t get into the saddle. I fed it carrots instead.

  “So, my ancestor. What do you think he was like?”

  She paused for a minute. “None of these guys were sweet, Jimmy. They were total assholes. They had to be. It was survival of the fittest.”

  “How about Wyatt Earp?”

  She laughed. “He only took the role of marshal so he could kill the killer of his brother. Doc Holliday was a gambler. These weren’t the kind of guys who spent their time p
etting puppies.”

  “I still would love to know what my ancestor has to do with a possessed spiritualist.” The link was still out of my reach.

  “Then maybe, just maybe, it’s time for you to calm down, and we’ll ask him. We could meet him for dinner somewhere,” Tabby said.

  I looked at Lucy. She was ignoring me and watching TV. I didn’t really have any other choice. I’d exhausted all the avenues I knew of to get information. And I seriously doubted if a biography of my ancestor would have an occult section. Hell, this was the first time I’d heard of it.

  “I guess that would be okay,” I said.

  Tabby tossed me Vespa’s card. “Get on with it, then.”

  ###

  I dialed his number… and got voicemail. I just couldn’t win. Why couldn’t things just work out the way I needed them to?

  “Yeah. Mr. Vespa? This is Jimmy Holiday,” I said. “We’d like to meet with you for dinner. Call me back when you get the chance.”

  I hung up. Some days, it just didn’t seem like it was worth it to get out of bed.

  “At least you did all you could do,” Tabby said.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Part of me was really upset with myself for dragging my feet earlier. Yeah, true, I had a reason to be pissed, but once I decide to do something, I follow through. I should have just told him we’d meet him later so I’d have a chance to calm down as well as get some of these questions out of the way. I was more concerned with keeping myself from beating his ass. Now I just hoped that it wasn’t too late.

  “Isaac’s hungry,” Lucy said.

  “How do you know that?” Tabby asked. She looked down at my little charge.

  She shrugged. “He told me.”

  Lucy’s ability to communicate with Isaac was getting really odd. I was starting to wonder if she was putting words in his mouth or if he really was telling her these things.

  “Well, Isaac has food,” Tabby replied. She turned her attention back to the pamphlet she was flipping through.

  “He wants fish,” Lucy said.

  I looked at Lucy. This was getting weirder by the minute. Just what I needed, a spirit living in my house that could talk to animals. What was next, a cockroach conga line?