Chapter Twenty Eight
The breath Natasha drew would expel as a scream, so he pulled her into him, wrapped her tight. “Shh, shh, shh.” He held her. “Don’t look. Close your eyes.” She shook so bad he vibrated too as he pulled out his phone.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Need police,” he said. “There’s a body—” Natasha whimpered as he rifled off the address. He held her tighter.
She peeled out of his arms. “And an ambulance! Owen, we need an ambulance! He’s—”
—Dead, Tsarina. We don’t need an ambulance—
She looked stricken. He reclaimed her, snug against his chest. “It’s a hanging,” he told the operator, calmer than he felt.
“Dispatching police. Stay on the line, sir.”
He kept Natasha locked against him while he delivered his name and address to the operator, crooned “No, no, no” every time she impulsively tried to turn ’round and look.
Vestemere was small enough that he heard the whine of sirens immediately. Natasha did too and battled out of his arms. “If Walter Galinko was our threat-maker, then wh-who did this to him?” She hiked a thumb over her shoulder.
“A woman,” he replied, tight.
“How do you…” She grabbed his hand, touched his palm. “Your girlfriend told you?”
She looked confused and he was glad she was distracted enough not to look back at the body whose entrails…he glanced. Had congealed. Were drying. Were…he squinted as Galinko seemed to weave before his eyes. Christ! Was he still alive? He made for the body, but…no. Galinko remained where he was, all motionless gore. Still…something was off.
“Owen?”
He kept his eyes on the corpse. “Yeah?”
“How…how does your girlfriend know about this?”
“Because I told her.” He remained affixed to Galinko. “She’s a cop.” He sensed her surprise, then added, wry, “and you’ve been saying ‘Night Crawler’ wrong, by the way. It’s not knight as in hero. It’s night as in dark. It was an operation. I was the operation—because Sondra wasn’t just my girlfriend. She was also my sergeant,, and when we went undercover it…went bad.”
“You mean she went bad.”
He stiffened, but couldn’t take his eyes off Galinko. Something was off. What, the hell, was off? “I’m not quite that judgmental, Tsarina.”
“Yet here you are calling me Tsarina,” she retorted, yet against his chest he could feel her start knitting her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said then, quietly. “I know what it’s like to have people judge someone you love. I…I have Jakob, remember?”
Yeah. Jakob, who’d bade him to take care of her, yet who’d brought her here into danger—then left her alone again and again.
She shrank, clearly misreading his stiff posture. “Jakob didn’t do this, Owen. He couldn’t have. I was up until light—you saw all my baking!—he didn’t leave his room. He—”
“I just finished saying it was a woman,” he snapped, immediately regretting being curt, but still. This same woman, whoever she was, had shown her her tombstone. And precious cousin Jakob knew that.
A police cruiser roared up, siren howling, and as its lights spilled blue and red hues on the street someone yelled “Owen!”
Rob Haslom, sprinting over town square. Steve lumbering behind. “What’s going on?” he asked, and as Natasha pushed herself away, searched her face. “You okay?”
What the hell, Old Man? What was with all this undisguised infatuation whenever the Tsarina was around?
—Owen! He’s just being kind—
He glanced down, and—Well, look at that. She’d latched her cold, delicate hand onto his. He slid his palm, flush with hers.
—Now who’s being naïve?—
He turned to Rob. “Accident inside,” he said, and the police officer left his cruiser, approached.
“You Owen Brophy? Want to show me what’s going on?”
“One sec.” He turned to Steve. “Where’s your ’burbie?”
Steve jabbed a finger to his old rusty suburban across the street. “You,” Owen peeled his fingers away from Natasha. “Go plant yourself in that truck. And stay there till—”
“No! I need to stay, Owen. I saw...” She did not, likely could not, look at her cousin’s store.
He gave her a severe glare.
Her cheeks pinked, still—“Owen, I have seen terrible things before.”
Meaning her Shadows? Or all the cruelty that had left the sorrow in her eyes? “I’m sorry,” he murmured. For always barking at her. For bullying her. For saying something stupid and cruel like “I don’t like you” when it was a lie and had been from the start. Sorry too that her ability, her mind, tortured her with horrors like Galinko, now hanged and gutted like an animal in her cousin’s so-called ‘store’. “I’m just trying to help, Tsarina.”
“So am I,” she said.
“Then stay close to me.”
Their eyes caught and shared something he couldn’t decipher before the cop, emerging from the store, said “Is this some sort of joke?” He fixed Owen with a glare. “Thought you told 911 there was a body in there.”
“I—” It was see-through. The realization occurred as he looked at the now wide-open doorway and saw that nothing was there. Just the massage table with its bow, and a muscle chart affixed to the wall. Galinko’s body, what he’d known to be something ‘off’…it had been see-through.
“Hey!” A new voice cut into their small crowd at the curb. Jessalyn, Cory Chandler tailing her, said “What the hell’s happened now?” She sounded harried and scared, and the cop barked “Hey!” as she tried to barrel through the shop door to see. Then she rounded on Natasha. “What did you do?”
“I—” The Tsarina backed away, and he quickly tucked her behind him.
“Back off!”
All of them, even the cop, shrank back. But it was Natasha who spoke next, to the officer. “It was me.” She stepped out from behind his shoulder. “I came to get something from my cousin’s store, and when I opened the door I saw—” Her hand was a mess of tremors as she pointed. “Well, I guess I saw that muscle chart, but the way the light hit it, and with that red bow on the massage table…” She swallowed, an audible click. “I…I thought it was a body.”
The cop stared at her.
“I-it scared me,” she added, “so I called Owen, and—”
“—and you didn’t look?” This, the cop directed at him.
“She was hysterical.” He shrugged and, playing his part, slid an arm ’round her. “I was more concerned about her than what she said she saw.”
The cop hissed with a sigh. Owen didn’t blame him. Still, he slipped his free hand into Natasha’s, melded their palms.
—Good thinking, undercover officer—
She replied
—I hate lying—
and he could practically hear her hands, itching to fret.
The cop said “I wish I could charge you both with mischief.”
“But I didn’t mean to be mischievous!” Natasha blurted, and Owen winced. Would the officer think she was being a smart ass?
Nope. He squinted in a way that took her for a dumb blonde. Playing along, he snugged her up close, shot the billion-watt smile in a way that said ‘What can ya do, man?’
The officer didn’t smile back, instead spoke into the radio affixed to his shoulder. “10-74,” he said, a 10-Code Owen knew. ‘False alarm’. “Cancel ambulance,” he added then walked back to his cruiser without further ado.
“Excuse me.” Natasha slipped out from his under arm with a sheepish smile to the others.
He grabbed her hand
—Where are you going?—
She said
—Galinko is somewhere. I want to try reading my Shadows—
Cory Chandler stepped forward. “Silva,” he said, hoarsely.
Natasha turned and Owen was staggered by the momentary flash of rage on her face. But then, in an effort reminiscent of her cousin, she swiped her expression clean. “Natasha.” She annunciated each soft vowel clearly. “My mother Silva is dead. My Uncle Michael killed her.”
Chandler’s face drained and “Ne.” It seemed to fall out.
“I’m afraid so,” she replied, then added something in her native tongue.
Chandler nodded. “Ja,” he said hoarsely. “But not…not fluently anymore. I no longer have anyone to speak Czech with.”
“That’s a shame,” said the Tsarina, all silver hair and all-seeing gold eyes.
You’re amazing, Owen thought, and hoped she could hear him.
“Please excuse me.” This time she pointed her gaze at Jessalyn. “I’m going inside. I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed myself terribly, over-reacting to shadows.”
He caught the double meaning with ease.
“My cousin left a gift and here I thought it was something sinister.” She smiled thinly, then bowed to Jessalyn. “Good day.”
In other words, screw you. He felt like grinning, but then
—I need you with me so you can see—
she said, her voice sliding like a silken ribbon into him, soft and satiny. Feeling it made something deep inside of him shudder
—Owen?—
she prompted.
—As you command, Your Highness—
It was strangely delightful to feel her scowl, all prickly nettles.
—Shut up—
she pouted, all petulance and prickles.
—And stop calling me that!—
©bonnie randall 2005
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