Chapter Four

In the Mourning

We were in the car.

Rain tink-tink hammers on the roof of the car. The sky cried against our windows and the windshield of the fire engine red 'Bird. Burnt pumpkin glow flashes by me. In the steamy, glistening wet dark outside my chrome and steel shield, those kids are waiting. I knew that. The certainty of it filled me up like water in a pitcher. Eventually my knowledge would overflow out of me and I'd go stark raving nuts.

The music on the radio chimed in the heavy silence between us. Every note hits my ears like a sledgehammer. Why won't Jamie talk to me? What can't be spoken in the dark interior of his Firebird? What's so secret?

And who are those freaky kids waiting to hurt us?

I don't know how I know it, but those kids weren't just regular kids. Witch kids, demon kids, whatever, I didn't know, but they were more dangerous than any human monster on this planet. The very surety of it filled me with icy dread. I shiver in the chill air inside the car and my best friend ratchets up the heat again for me.

Why isn't he shivering? Doesn't he feel the cold? It seems he never does. In summer or winter, he wore the same clothes - black sweaters over white, short sleeved undershirts and jeans of varying colors: blue, black, white. Never did Jamie sweat, or shiver, or flush with the heat or turn blue with the cold. Stupidly, I'd ignored it, thinking he was just good at regulating his body temperature. But now... not so much. No, not so much now. There's something about him that makes electricity arc inside my skull. It's some idea, waiting for me to speed up and snatch it.

Something deep inside of me made me wonder if I really wanted to know what my subconscious was trying to tell me.

Instead of trying to break that lead-heavy silence surrounding us both by talking, I closed my eyes and thunked my head against the window. The heat of my skin burned away the mist crawling up the glass. Through the evanescent haze I watched the night go by and tried to think of happier, lighter things until we made it to Jamie's place.

Weekend nights - any nights, actually - spent at Jamie's are fun. On school nights he would bug me about school work sometimes but not tonight. It was Friday night, and he owed me an explanation. Those kids, the demon witch kids that were after him.

Or was it us?

Did they want me too?

Jamie's apartment is at the intersection of a street named after a type of cheese and a street one intersection over from Broadway. That's how I remembered how to find it. My brain was an encrypted treasure map, I was a wild-eyed corsair girl, and Jamie was the treasure. Jamie, and all his wonderful things.

As we stepped into his townhouse apartment through the coral red door, the fear slid back and the mermaid feeling comes.

I get the mermaid feeling whenever we go to his apartment. I've never been alone here, so I don't know if that would affect it, but I don't think so. As I'm standing in the entryway, the rain water pearls on my skin, drips off. My edgy fear ripples beneath my skin. But at the same time, waves of contentment, of safety, wash over me starting at my toes and working upwards.

I love his apartment. It's always been my haven. Temple! That's what it is. I can't explain but you'll see.

On the floor are beautiful ceramic tiles that each have a tiny mural on it, and together resolve into a rainbow-hued Celtic knot. The air is all full of incense, patchouli, cigarette smoke, Ocean Breeze scented candles, and the ice and oranges Jamie runs through the garbage disposal to clean it out and make it smell nice. On the walls are movie and rock band posters; huge portraits of stars as Greek gods (the Plutonian Marilyn Manson and a Marilyn Monroe-style Aphrodite, the Orphean Kurt Cobain and the multi-talented Johnny Depp in various costumes as masculine Muses) and murals of fairy tales starring child and teen actors from across the decades. The windows sleep under cartoon-sheet curtains fringed with black and hot pink lace. Strings of crystal beads chime against the doors and window panes. The raggedy patchwork couches and chairs are heaped with Chinese silk pillows and hand-embroidered afghans.

I immediately hopped onto the main couch, sinking into the black and brown leather. A blue velvet cushion with silver braid catches my eye - it says the Snow Queen in white ice letters - and I hug it to my chest.

Now Jamie has this thing, this special way of moving that only comes out for dangerous things. It kind of reminds me of the way Bernardo, one of the gang leaders in West Side Story, moves during the snap-dance at the beginning of the movie, the slinks and slides. Those shimmer-glimmer cocktail witch girls got nothing on him. I call it the Lynx, like the jungle cat. He moves like a monster man full of menace moving in to murder the masses. And his smoky baby-blue eyes burn lighter-flame hot.

Jamie's lynxing now. He doesn't know I notice it, but I notice everything about everything when I can. So I just watch him lynx on into the kitchen.

"Burritos?" He asks.

I sighed. Irritated, I replied, "Who were those kids?"

"Food first, grasshopper," he said.

Sigh again.

I heard a metal-flick noise, a flitter-flutter, and the scent of nicotine incense filled the air, old as classic literature and sweet as a girl in Mary-Jane shoes.

I don't expect any grown-ups to get that. Cheers to you, Greenday fans.

It took less than ten minutes to get the chicken and cheese burritos and paper-thin sliced pancakes and blueberry preserves. He even brought out cherry Kool-aid and coke, poured into crystal wedding glasses. Whatever this was, he felt bad about it, and me. Why?

"Okay," I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye as he slink-lynxes back over to me and slithers to the couch. "Spill it."

Silence.

"Tell me," my voice is crystal violin strings, tight enough to snap if the pressure ratchets up any higher. "Jamie, you gotta tell me. Those freaks, those kids... who are they? What's going on?"

"They're... they're hell hounds, Kates."

Okay, wait. Pause. Back up, rewind to right before that. Now play that again for yourself. Did you catch that? I think I imagined it. Better make sure.

"What, now?"

"They're hell hounds, Kate. Those kids... they know me. Their names are Ciera, Berret, and Rosalyn, and they are bad news. Big time bad news. I screwed up and now they're here to find out why and fix it."

He won't meet my eyes.

In my chest, the fear-drum of my heart begins a new rhythm, slow and spiky, echoing the rising panic in my throat. Those kids were supposed to be demon dogs or whatever. I didn't even know what that meant. I knew a lot about mythology and stuff, but hell hounds weren't exactly my area of expertise. What I did know was that Jamie's dripping wet hair drip-dripped water onto his cheeks like blue tears and the pain reflected in the water burned my mouth like neon yellow acid. Was I about to learn something I didn't really want to know?

"How did you screw up?" I ask.

He looked up at me then, the burning dot of his cigarette mirrored in his eyes, a trio of crimson embers. Agony slithers under my skin, waiting to be unleashed. What is he going to say? What could he have done to summon those freaks?

"I stayed with you, Kate."

Stunned, too stunned to think, to breathe, to understand. Why was that a screw up? Who were those slinky black wraith kids? Hell hounds, yeah sure. But they looked pretty human to me. Werewolves or something? Jaws music plays in my head at the idea. Am I right, they're some kind of shape shifters? Or am I going completely gonzo?

My mouth is ice. It burns my tongue with the cold and freezes my lips, trapping my questions in my throat. All I can do is stare at him and will him to explain it to me.

"Kates... I'm not who you think I am."

Okay, had that one pegged from about age twelve, I think to myself, the sarcasm hot against the ice in my mouth. The frigid frost grip begins to melt a little. Soon I'll be able to speak. Hopefully the words won't melt away in the heat. The shock might wipe my questions from my brain if I'm not careful.

Looking into his eyes - blue as Peter Pan's, full of grief, they hurt like glass - the ice thaws a little. My heart quakes and my fear burns like hell.

"Who... who are you then?"

"I... I'm dead, Kates. I've been dead since before your parents were born."

Immediately, my brain hits on Twilight, on the Night World, on Anne Rice and a whole bunch of other vampire books sitting on my mom's bookshelves. Was that what he meant? Was he an undead bloodsucker prolonging his unholy unlife with human or animal blood? Somehow, I sincerely doubted that. There was too much that was human about him for it to be something that dark.

Jamie skipped and jumped and ran around in the sun like a frolicking puppy on steroids, he ate regular food with the savagery of every obnoxious boy between five and twenty-five known to man, and he went to church with me every Sunday. We used to play in the woods when I was a kid, and he did woodshop in his spare time. He drank lemonade, ate garlic bread until his breath made me want to puke, and he bought me a silver necklace for my birthday every year. Weren't aversion to all those things - sunlight, food, churches, wood, lemons, garlic, and silver - the indicators of vampirism? If he took a vampire test, he'd fail, he was so human.

But if he wasn't a vampire... then what? My brain wouldn't supply the answer.

"What, are you like... a zombie?" I joked, trying to smile but my mouth remained frozen. "Or a demon or something? Maybe you turn into a wolf at the full moon? Or are you just a random immortal?"

For a long time, he was silent. Suddenly, he reached out to touch my hair, brushing it back from my forehead. I blinked up at him and watched him get ready to shatter my world with the revelation of what he was.

"It's okay, Jamie," I managed to whisper. "You can tell me."

He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. His skin was wet, and his shirt clung to him, but I didn't care. Like I so often did, he needed a hug, so I let him hug me. When his lips moved against my ear, I tried not to jerk away. His confession shocked me.

"I'm a ghost, Kate."