Chapter 23
She called Jakob back as soon as Owen Brophy’s tires squealed in fury from her curb. As if he had any right to be angry. “Stupidni policii.”
Jakob answered his phone. “I’ve found something, Natasha.”
She tensed. “Something tangible, or—”
“Psychical,” he said. “This person we’re seeking—they are quite excited about a pregnancy app, like for a tablet or phone. A calendar tracking how far along a woman is with child.”
The old-fashioned term was brief charm before her stomach dropped. Pregnancy? Sabrina was pregnant—and wouldn’t any relative of Galinko’s carry a grudge against both she and Blue Eyes? “Jakob—”
“There’s a skull and crossbones over the screen,” he said. “How melodramatic.”
His nonchalance fell hopelessly short and she wondered—was it his arrogance, or could it be naivete that always made him forget that she was as psychically attuned to his feelings as he was to hers? “I’ve seen that skull and crossbones too,” she said. The night she ran across the orchard in the dark then discovered Shoes, nailed to the doorstep. “They…they’re all in danger.” Adrenaline crackled in her mouth. Robyn had wept in her arms, asking “Is my Mama dead?” and she’d written it off as a child’s misunderstanding. Yet hadn’t Jakob always said that little children were all psychic until they were told it was impossible?
“Bratranek,” she said, and had to sit for how badly she was shaking.
Her bottom landed hard on the flat surface of the fairytale tome, forgotten on the ottoman. She shoved it aside, its weight feeling onerous somehow. “I know who’s doing this. It..it’s a Galinko.”
Silence, yet she could feel fury, old fury, streaming from him. Then—“You think a Galinko can psychically manipulate our Shadows, Natasha?”
The ink spill. She hadn’t factored it in, and now her shoulders fell, defeated as if she’d just won a race only to find out she’d DQ’d.
Jakob said “The Galinkos believe what the prophets in their Bible tell them, Natasha: that seers and second sight come from the Devil.”
There was bitterness in all that irony and it took her aback. She didn’t know he felt just as judged and crucified as she always had, and realizing it now made her feel selfish and small. She set it aside, got back on track. “Before our, my, Galinko and the red brush, Vincent Haslom—Blue Eyes and Sabrina’s father—he killed a Galinko out in the oilfield near Echo Creek.”
Jakob didn’t reply and in his quiet she could hear him, reflecting. She added “And if a Galinko did have preternatural abilities, how better to legitimize them, spiritually, than to use their abilities to avenge one of their own?”
More silence, this time skeptical, she could tell, so she drew a huge breath, ready to add more of it, all of it. But the words locked in her throat, and she found that she reached out, flicked her iPod speaker on instead. “Th-that’s how we’re all connected,” she said then, the weight of omission making her tongue thick. “Through the Galinkos.” Please don’t ask me to clarify. And please don’t ask why I turned on my music.
His silence stretched, made her tremble, and she was about to prattle out more, then— “So what do they want?” he asked, and a black, formless Shadow slithered along with his voice from her cellphone, floated through the cottage. “Would the Galinkos have me raise their dead?”
A rush of chills wracked her.
“Would that appease them? Would it satisfy that sanctimonious, hypocritical, too-large herd of Bible-wielding zealots if I raised their dead and let their dearly departed confess each dirty, vicious thing they did while they were still living?”
She shook her head, a wordless no, and forgot she had music playing and he therefore could not see how speechless and horrified she was at the mere prospect of a resurrected Galinko—red brush in hand and that malevolent, awful slice of smile on his face.
“I would be happy,” Jakob went on, “to call back their dead. Then I could watch their stiff-necked, pious selves fall upon their knees in horror as their dead spoke to them with all the filth and honesty that every departed thinks is their God-given right to share, without reservation.”
For the dead had no filter. He had told her this many times. It was, in part, why he was reluctant to ever use his skills as a medium. The dead could be brutal.
“The Galinkos would beg me to send their precious loved ones back to the grave.”
“W-we need to go to the policii,” she interrupted, breathless. “Real policii. Not Owen Brophy.”
And say what, Natasha? That we psychically know one of the pulpit-pounding Galinkos is threatening Robert and Jessalayna Haslom?”
Would he ever get her name right?
“We don’t know that. We’ve surmised that. And even if we had seen a Galinko, do you think the policii would believe us?”
Yes. Cory Chandler had worked with a psychic. Her Shadows had shown her. “They—”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said and she sensed him about to hang up.
“Wait! How? Is that who you’re tracking in Cascadia? One of the Galinkos from back home?”
A hesitation, so small she would have normally overlooked it, held him silent a moment. Then “Don’t you trust me, Natasha?”
“What does that have to do with it? And who doesn’t trust who? You brought me here but leave me in the dark. You go to Cascadia every day but tell me only cryptically who you’re looking for there. Have…have you known all along it’s a Galinko?”
“I shut you out, sestranek? You’re the one who’s turned on your music. And either way, you say shutting you out, I say keeping you safe. What happened the last time a Galinko got close to you?”
So he had known. “Jakob—”
“Stay close to the sister. I told you before you have an ally in her.”
“So you knew all along she’s in danger?” And what about Robyn, her little sweetheart? Her little niece?
“You’re fine with each other,” he said.
She stomped a foot. “Define ‘fine’, Jakob! Tell me—”
“I’ll be in touch.” He hung up.
he stared at her cellphone, fingers curled and cold around it. “You barely let me say a word then tell me less than that yourself.” She tossed the cell on the sofa. What was his real agenda? And how could he, with his stronger abilities, not see that Vincent Haslom was the real villain here? The Galinkos, no matter what they were, did not necessarily want to speak to their dead— they simply wanted to find their dead, give him a proper burial, bring him home.
Yet they couldn’t. Vincent Haslom and her mother had hidden that body somewhere upon the endless prairie, Silva blackening the wheat fields with ink pools of Shadow whenever someone got near. But then…then she had died too. Murdered, according to Haslom’s ‘fortune teller’. Natasha drew her hands together. “Show,” she whispered, and Shadows whirled, an image of bleached bones scattered amid stubble that looked like anywhere, everywhere, on the eastern Alberta landscape.
She spilled the Shadows from her cupped hands and as they tumbled to the floor, the bones clattered, a muted mimic of how they’d sound if they were real. Gazing out the front window, she looked in the direction of the cemetery. “Huntsman,” she said, “you will tell me where you and Matka hid your Galinko. We will end this vendetta.”
But not before she stuck close to Sabrina, went with her to—of all places—the local bar.
Beer Run had saloon doors and peanut shells scattered on a hardwood floor. “This place should be out on your prairie Alberta.” Sabrina grinned. “Complete with a couple hunky cowboys wearing chaps and no shirts.”
Because crowds of shirtless cowboys typically wandered amok in her home province? Natasha gave her a droll little look.
“Or cowgirls?” said Sabrina, sporting a droll look of her own. “There was once a time when I wasn’t discriminate.”
“And never a time when you actually behaved.”
A clatter of billiard balls punctuated the remark and when she looked up her gaze met the sea. Knight Crawler, she thought, but even in her head she sounded a bit breathless. Owen Brophy wore Levis, a black t-shirt, and his long hair tied back in a band. A rumble of thunder, Shadow thunder, filled the bar and all at once, it started to rain. She gasped, but “Don’t run away,” said his Shadow, and walked out of his body, approached her.
“I—” She took an involuntary step back but then another Shadow, her Shadow, stepped out of her and into his path. “You scare me,” it said.
He nodded. “Everything scares you. Everything makes you sad.” He raised his face to the rain. “You cry, all the time.”
She gasped, shocked. No one knew that. Yet before her, her Shadow nodded, no denying.
His Shadow smiled sadly, no dimples. “Come here, Natasha,” it said.
Her Shadow drifted close to his and he carefully, tenderly, slipped his hands around her. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”
“But—”
“You’re so beautiful when you forget you’re unhappy.”
Rain fell harder and she knew then, that it was sorrow. Her sorrow. Her loneliness. Her Shadow shrank, ashamed, but he simply brushed her wet hair from her cheeks. “Who hurts you?” he asked. “Who throws rocks at you?”
How did he know that? How was any of this even happening? Owen Brophy was no psychic—she’d checked.
“I—” said her Shadow, but his hand reached out, touched a mark on her left breast.
Her eyes popped. Oh, my—her Shadow was shirtless! Damn Sabrina for planting that idea!
“What’s this?” he asked and she knew, without having to look, that he was tracing an old scar.
“That…” Her Shadow looked at the floor. “…that rock was sharp.”
His Shadow groaned. “My God, Tsarina. Who does this to you?”
“They…they would like to stone me to death,” she whispered, a confession she’d barely let herself think, much less say aloud. “They would like to see me dead.”
His Shadow stared at hers, horrified, and she watched herself wither within his gaze. “I…I’m not a bad person.”
To her shock, his Shadow yanked hers close, wrapped his arms tight around her. “I know that,” it said. “And I won’t hurt you. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
Her Shadow melted against his and as she stood there, watching, she could feel his body heat. His strength. Sabrina said “There’s a table,” but it sounded like her voice came through a wind tunnel, and it was all Natasha could do to follow her, pull away from the Shadows of her and Owen Brophy, let them disintegrate atop all the peanut shells on the floor.
“You okay?” Sabrina frowned and Natasha forced herself to nod, but it took forever to break eye contact with Owen Brophy, her heart pounding and her body…longing. He had held her. Just now, in front of everyone yet in front of no one, he had held her. And she’d never felt so warm or so safe in her life.
She trembled as she climbed atop a stool at the leggy table Sabrina claimed, and when a waiter came ’round she said “Make that two,” when Sabrina ordered iced tea.
Sabrina looked appalled. “But I want to smell booze,” she said. “You were going to have beer.”
Ugh. The smell of beer made her gag, and she never drank alcohol—it made her Shadows too unpredictable. And they were clearly unpredictable enough. She glanced over at Owen Brophy. He was still shooting pool with his brother, Steven, yet she could sense he watched her too. Had he just seen their Shadows in the rain? Anxiety gripped her, but…no. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t psychic. She’d checked.
Sabrina said “A margarita. Strawberry” to the waiter who hurried away.
Oh, damn “Umm…Sabrina—”
“Don’t be embarrassed.” Sabrina rummaged in their table’s basket of peanuts. “A million years ago, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, either.”
Oh, damn indeed. Heat torched her face and before she could deny anything, Sabrina stuck a hand in the air. “Hey little woman!” she called.
Oh, damn again. Jessalyn Haslom had just come through the swinging doors.
“Why the long face?” said Sabrina and Natasha swallowed. How to reply? Then she realized Sabrina wasn’t talking to her.
Jessalyn plopped onto a stool. “I just got screwed by a buyer,” she said, then added “Apple juice” when the waiter returned with the margarita and iced tea.
Natasha’s brow quirked and Sabrina laughed. “Apple juice?”
The corner of Jessalyn’s mouth hiked. “Some might call it a craving,” she said.
Sabrina’s jaw dropped, then she whooped, and there was a whole sentence in the cajoling kick she delivered to Natasha’s shin under the table. A baby, it said. Two babies.
Yet Jakob had seen a pregnancy covered by a poison-green skull and crossbones. Natasha’s stomach kicked over and when Sabrina said “Skoal!” she lifted her drink too, but only to be polite.
The alcohol hit her as Jessalyn said “Fourteen weeks today” and flashed the screen of her cellphone.
The pregnancy app. It had never been about Sabrina. Natasha didn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified, and as her heart pounded, Owen Brophy’s Shadow reappeared, beckoning in the rain. “Talk to me, Tsarina. You don’t have to be scared.”
She looked quickly away.
Sabrina grinned at Jessalyn. “Don’t mind our new gal here,” she said. “She keeps getting distracted by how much she wants to do the Bad Boy Boogie with Owen Brophy.”
“I do not!” she squeaked.
Jessalyn scrunched her nose. “Owen?” she said. “Serious?”
“Yes,” said Sabrina. “She wants to count his tattoos with her tongue.”
No, she wanted to count how many legs were on the table—after she crawled under it to hide.
Jessalyn’s nose was a perma-wrinkle. “But Owen’s all…biker-ish. And you’re so….”
Natasha stiffened. “I’m so what?”
“Exotic,” said Heart-Face. “Gorgeous.”
“Ooh-la-la.” Sabrina chortled. “Beauty and the Beast.”
“Exotic?” Natasha stared Jessalyn down. “I sound like a bohunk and when I’m not wearing t-shirts and yoga pants, I’m wearing t-shirts and yoga pants.”
“And that sexy dress from the other night at dinner, the one that made me want to sell my right kidney for just one day with your cleavage and legs.”
“Cleavage and legs not unnoticed by Badass Brophy.” Sabrina lifted her iced tea.
Natasha scowled. “He has a girlfriend, you know.”
“Well, you don’t see her here, do you? But guess what you do see? Him, looking at you.”
“Of course he’s looking at me. He’s waiting for me to do something wrong.”
Jessalyn sputtered. It pleased her. “He thinks I’m a con-artist,” she added. “He’s even wondered if I am a prostitute.”
“What?” Sabrina brayed laughter. “No he hasn’t.”
Jessalyn stared at her.
“And just because I think he’s attractive doesn’t mean I’m attracted to him,” Natasha tacked on, but had to rub her arms, eschew the sensation of how his Shadow had held her.
Sabrina gawped. “Where did this kick-ass version of Natasha come from? I like her even more. Hear that, Brophy?” she said, nowhere near loud enough for him to really hear. “She is so over you.” She gave him the finger.
“Sab!” squeaked Jessalyn.
Over at his table, the Knight Crawler flipped Sabrina off too, and while Jessalyn giggled Natasha smiled grimly into the dregs of her margarita. Where had this Natasha come from? Perhaps she swam out of the booze. Or maybe she was just feeling confident because she’d finally made a friend, a real friend, not someone who just wanted to throw more rocks at her, like Heart-Face Jessalyn.
“Can I paint you?”
She swiveled. Jessalyn was examining her while Sabrina and the Knight Crawler fired peanuts back and forth across the bar. Jessalyn said “When you forget to be shy and nervous, your eyes duck into some really deep places, Natasha.”
You’re beautiful when you forget you’re unhappy.
Right. And you’re both full of bullshit. “Someone did paint me once.” She straightened, spine like a rod. “I went running one night and some local thugs tossed a bag over my head. They tied my hands to my feet from behind then painted me with a red brush.”
Jessalyn gasped and Sabrina stopped lobbing peanuts. “That…that’s fucked,” she said.
“So no, thank you,” Natasha smiled coldly. “I don’t want to be painted.”
Jessalyn looked ill. Natasha stuck her hand in the air. “I think I’d like another,” she said.
The waiter hurried over and Owen Brophy trailed behind him, all dimples. “You three up to no good?” he asked.
“Oh, absolutely,” she replied.
Sabrina choked on her iced tea and Jessalyn’s mouth flopped open like a puppet with cut strings. Natasha fixed her gaze on the Knight Crawler. “Would robbery be too obvious? Burglary does have a bit more finesse, but how about I just cut to the chase and roll the first old lady I see on the street?”
The waiter returned, a margarita on his tray. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said and dropped three twenties on the table, more than enough for everyone. “I had a good time with you,” she said, looking deliberately at Sabrina, whose face was both flummoxed and impressed. “Goodnight.” She marched away with her head up.
How about murder?” Brophy called, to her departing back.
She turned. “Which role are you auditioning for, Policii Brophy? Accomplice or victim? I’ve not room for both.”
“Burn,” said Sabrina, and Natasha saw her Shadow raise its glass in salute as she shoved herself out the swinging saloon doors.
Her tombstone waited in the future, and her Shadow hadn’t lied when it told Owen Brophy that the citizens of Echo Creek would happily stone her to death. Still and all, she’d never felt so alive in her life.
