Hush
Sixteen
Warning: Really messed up comment regarding abortion.
It turned out that Jesse high tailing it after Paul had less to do with him being worried that Paul wouldn't fulfill his end of the deal and more to do with being worried that Paul would try and get behind the wheel after how much he'd been drinking. It was a smart call on Jesse's part. Paul had insisted that he wasn't drunk, but our plans didn't include letting him get arrested or accidentally murder innocent people while under the influence.
Unfortunately, neither Jesse's BMW nor Paul's Lamborghini had a backseat. So one of us was tasked with driving Paul, and the other would have to drive alone. And, as luck would have it, "one of us" meant me. Paul had outright refused to let Jesse drive his car. I wasn't sure if he would've changed his mind if he knew that Jesse was a better driver than I was or if his decision was rooted in general discomfort at having Jesse take control of one of his possessions.
Regardless of his reasoning, I gave Jesse Patrick's address, and we both drove off, with me taking the lead.
There was silence in the car between myself and Paul for a few moments as we drove along 17-Mile Drive. I surprised myself by being the first one to break it.
"You know shifting isn't the only way to gork your brain, right?" I asked as I nodded towards the bottle of champagne he was nursing.
"You caring about me, Suze?" Paul asked.
"More like I'm taking pity on your liver."
Paul shrugged. "It's a work hard, play hard lifestyle. Gotta have a hobby between all the investor meetings."
"Golf just doesn't cut it anymore? Or what about your fiance?"
"What about my fiance?" He asked, looking at me curiously. "That's the second time you've mentioned her to me. You really are jealous, aren't you? Worried that I won't be around to save you from de Silva when it all goes to shit, huh?"
"I'm not jealous, and I'm not worried," I said, as emphatically as I could. "I'm just wondering isn't there more to life for you now-than drinking and whatever the hell else it is you put in your body?"
I could feel Paul staring at me even as I kept my eyes on the road.
His voice when he spoke next was cold. "You might be a counselor now, Suze, but don't try and psychoanalyze me," he said.
Those were the last words we exchanged for the duration of the drive. The rest of the nearly half hour long ride to Patrick's was silent and punctuated only by the occasional sound of Paul raising the champagne bottle to his lips.
In the end, Patrick's address led us to a small looking house in a neighborhood full of similarly small houses. One of his next door neighbors was having a raucous party, and cars had spilled over all along the street and into parts of Patrick's lawn. There was only one car in the driveway though, and, presumably, it belonged to Patrick.
There was just enough space for both Paul and Jesse's car to pull into the driveway behind it. Both the Lamborghini and the BMW looked out of place in the neighborhood though. I hoped anyone milling about from the party next door would be too drunk to notice how conspicuous our presence was.
Paul put a stopper in his bottle of champagne and set it down on the floor of the passenger side. "This it?" he asked.
"I think so. But he's not going to want to see me or Jesse. You'll have to go up there and, I don't know, ask if you can use his driveway. Then we'll be in right behind you."
"I remember saying I'd help with your ghost, not spearhead an entire investigation."
"I swear to God, Paul, I will let Jesse murder you. Just do this, would you?" I said as I unbuckled my seatbelt.
"If anyone gets shot this time-," Paul said as he opened his door.
"I didn't even bring the shotgun with me. Calm down."
We both exited the car a few seconds later, and I headed back towards Jesse to inform him of our latest plan. Unlike earlier at Paul's, Jesse agreed that it was probably best that we held off on showing our faces for a little while. Jesse and I trailed behind Paul and did our best to stay out of view of the front windows of Patrick's house.
Paul rang the doorbell, and we all waited for Patrick to come to the door. For a second, I was worried that he couldn't hear his own doorbell over the sound of the party raging next door, but my worries were for naught.
I couldn't see Patrick's face from where I was standing, but I could hear him ask, "Can I help you with something?"
"I was actually wondering if I could park in your driveway. I'm trying to get into the party next door, but the street's pretty full already," Paul said. "I can pay you."
Paul reached into his pants to retrieve a wallet, and Patrick opened the door a bit wider until there was light from his house flooding out onto his lawn. Jesse and I took that as our cue.
We could tell the moment Patrick saw us because he began to close the door in Paul's face. Paul saw the move coming though, and he shoved both his shoulder and one of his feet into the door to keep it ajar.
His efforts weren't necessary for long though because Jesse was behind Paul soon enough, and, between the two of them, the door flung open.
I entered after Paul and Jesse and closed the door behind myself. No one was going to notice what happened at Patrick's house what with all the noise next door, but there was no reason to tempt fate.
"I'll call the cops," Patrick said, backing away and nearly tripping over his own sofa.
"You won't," I said. "Because the cops are going to find that watch you're wearing way more interesting than the fact that you let us in."
"I didn't let you-!"
"We only want a few words with you for now," Jesse interrupted.
I didn't know where Jesse was going with that. We hadn't planned on asking Patrick anything other than Alexa's whereabouts.
Patrick didn't move and didn't say anything. His back was still against his sofa. We were standing in what must have been his living room. He had a couple of lights on in both this room and the room next door, though the brightest thing in this room was his TV screen. He had a PlayStation hooked up to it, and a game was paused on the screen. Other than the TV and sofa, he had a coffee table stacked high with half-empty chip bags and energy drinks, and a tall bookshelf lined with books, more video games, CDs, DVDs, and even a few VHS tapes. Despite the cluttered feeling that all of the cords and cases gave, the room was pretty well kept.
Jesse stood between Patrick and the bookshelf, with one hand in a menacing grip on Patrick's arm.
"What are the two of you planning?" Jesse asked.
"We're not planning anything," Patrick said. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You must have some kind of long term plan," Paul said. "Otherwise, you'd have moved out of this shithole the moment you knocked off the first store."
"I haven't stolen anything," Patrick said stubbornly.
"Because technically Alexa stole it for you. We get it," I said.
"Why do you people care so much? And I don't even know who you are," Patrick said, pointing at Paul with the hand attached to the arm that Jesse wasn't holding.
Paul didn't bother explaining himself, but Jesse decided to humor part of Patrick's question.
"We care because we're mediators. When there are ghosts in this world we consider it our personal responsibility to move them along. And during that process, if a ghost should start to make trouble amongst those who are still living, it's our responsibility to handle the problem," he said.
"The books never said any of that," Patrick said.
"The books?" Jesse asked confusedly.
I was confused at first too, but then I glanced at Paul, and I quickly realized exactly what books Patrick was talking about.
"I thought you had the only copy of those," I said to Paul while Jesse looked on in confusion.
"I have the original copy," Paul corrected. "How do you think the scientific community laughed Pops out if they never read his work?"
And then Paul spoke in a voice that was no longer directed at me. "Dr. Oliver Slaski," he said. "That's whose work you read, isn't it?"
Patrick hesitated but then nodded.
"What works are you talking about?" Jesse asked again.
"They're these journals that," and I paused to stop myself from identifying Paul as the grandson of the researcher. "They're these journals that details the powers that shifters have. It's how Alexa knows about being able to get in and out of that foggy place, I guess."
"But they talk about more than that?" Jesse asked.
"They talk about everything," Paul answered, looking directly at Patrick. "If you've read those books, then you must have big plans in mind. Because they talk about a hell of a lot more than just how to do basic shifting."
And Paul was right. I didn't know everything that Dr. Slaski wrote, but I did know that those books mentioned a lot more than just how to shift in and out of Shadowland. I knew that those books were the reason that Jesse was here, alive in the twenty-first century, with warm blood flowing through his veins and a doctorate in medicine. So I didn't have to ask to know exactly what Patrick was planning.
"You're trying to bring her back," I said.
This time, Patrick didn't bother denying anything.
"I didn't want things to happen like this," he said. "Alexa's gotten carried away. If it was up to me, that woman wouldn't have died. We're only doing this so we have the money to be together once she comes back. She's used to a different lifestyle than I am, and I need to be able to finance it. I need to be the man she deserves when she comes back."
I couldn't help but think about how that kind of sounded like what Jesse had been saying to me for years before we got married. He wanted to be able to provide for me and do all of that other nineteenth century patriarchal bullshit. It made as much sense to me now as it did then, so I couldn't say I felt my sympathies rising.
"When she comes back? How are you going to bring her back?" I asked.
And why wasn't Alexa here yet? Both Jesse and I were here, and her fiance was under duress. It really would've made sense for her to pop in by now. Were we going to have draw blood first or something?
"I'm guessing you haven't read Dr. Slaski's work then," Patrick said.
I shrugged and said, "I know enough." Because I knew about time traveling, and that was basically the piece de resistance of it all.
"The book talks about this technique. You take the soul out of one body, and you put a different soul in."
I swore in unison with Paul. That hadn't been what I expected him to say.
"You've got the nerve to do it where Suze here didn't then," Paul said.
Jesse looked at me imploringly for a second.
"Paul thought I was going to switch your bodies out and… Look, it's old business. I can tell you later."
Patrick looked between me and Jesse quickly. "I get it now. You died too then, didn't you?" he said to Jesse. "You're all a bunch of hypocrites. You know that, right?"
"I'm in no one's body but my own," Jesse said.
"Time travel then," Patrick said. "We would've done that, so Alexa could have the same body and everything, but since she had cancer, we figured it wasn't a viable option."
"Plan A was having my own body, but honestly Plan B is good enough for me at this point," a new voice said.
It didn't take me more than a half second to see that Alexa was now standing to my right. Paul stood to my left, and Jesse, still gripping Patrick, was in front of me.
Alexa continued, "You see Plan B is none of you making it out of this room alive. Except for you, Susannah. See, I think we've got enough money to call it quits and leave the country at this point. All I need is a new body. And after that fight we had the other day, I think you've got just the body I'm looking to come back in."
I grimaced and said, "I'll tell you the same thing I said then. Whether I'm alive or not, I'm going to make your life absolute misery."
I didn't mention the fact that I was pregnant. Alexa in all of her sadism probably wouldn't give a damn if killing me meant killing my unborn child, too. In fact, it would probably make her all the more excited to take my body. She'd be hurting me in a much more unique way than cutting me up with knives. Jesse stayed equally silent by Patrick's side. He must've been thinking the same way I was.
Paul, however, was not.
"You might think you want Suze's body, but you'll change your mind within nine months," he said.
Jesse's curse at Paul was in Spanish whereas mine was in English. Being at least bilingual, from what I'd seen back in the O'Neil's barn in the year 1850, I was sure Paul understood them both.
Alexa rolled her eyes and said, "I overheard your little talk in the kitchen the other day. If that's your big defense, then that's nothing that a coat hanger can't fix."
Her comment was distasteful at the very least, but when she said it about my kid, who wasn't even really a kid yet but would be someday, it made me feel downright murderous. I hadn't even finished adjusting to the idea of motherhood, but I couldn't recall ever feeling this angry in my life. In an instant, my vision, which had been filled with metaphorical red, cleared as I entered into a valley of deadly calm that I only transcended into when completely enraged.
Alexa grinned. "Did I hit a nerve?"
She stopped grinning once she saw my fist headed directly for her face. In the background, I could hear Patrick shouting at Jesse to let him go, but Jesse now had a full body hold on Patrick.
My punch didn't connect to Alexa's skull. Instead, she dematerialized so that she was standing between Paul and Jesse. It was a poor choice of movement on her part though.
Jesse's hold on Patrick was loosening now that Patrick had stopped struggling as much upon seeing that Alexa was uninjured. But Jesse's movement away from Patrick doubled as movement towards Alexa. And I could tell that Jesse was just as angry as I was over Alexa's words.
Alexa just laughed.
"I felt you trying to call me earlier, Susannah," she said. "So I know what you're trying to do now. You want to have your husband exorcise me with you and, I don't know, his mistress or something, as backup."
Paul spluttered at that. "De Silva's mistress? Me? You can't be serious."
Alexa ignored Paul and focused her gaze solely on me. "Newsflash. You can gather up all the friends you want to take me back to that place, but I can come back anytime I please. I thought you would have figured that out last time, you know, while I was stabbing you."
That did it-not on my end, but on Jesse's. He stopped holding back Patrick entirely, and grabbed Alexa. She was clearly caught off guard as she hadn't been looking in Jesse's direction at all.
"Slater, now!" Jesse said.
Paul grabbed a hold of Alexa, and, seconds later, the three of them were gone. Or at least, Alexa was gone, and both Jesse and Paul were unconscious.