Kiss Me Deadly Read online

  “Except sometimes it does.”

  Velvet thought about the shadowquakes that happen when souls set their minds to a little mischief in the land of the living. It was bad enough with all the psychics and the mediums trying to interfere in Purgatory, but add some dead apples to the mix, and it was a recipe for trouble.

  Charlie shrugged and finished his counting. “One hundred and eighteen pieces.”

  “Sweet.” Nick whistled.

  Charlie nodded in his direction.

  Nick stepped forward. “You don’t sound like you blame Old Abner for taking off.”

  “Well no. Not with...” He stopped mid sentence.

  Velvet thought she saw his eyes dart toward the doorway. But when she slapped the curtain open, no one was there, listening or otherwise.

  “You were saying?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t saying nothin’. Abner’s just gone. Isn’t it up to you guys to find him anyway? We’ve got missions and stuff to deal with. Being down a team member doesn’t exactly lighten the work load.”

  He stood up and stripped off his robe immodestly.

  Velvet pivoted away and dove head first through the curtain.

  She heard Nick saying his good-byes and then he ducked out too.

  “That was weird.”

  “Uh ... yeah,” she said. “I could have gone a lifetime without seeing...”

  “I meant what he was saying about Conroy.”

  Back in the open area of the courtyard, they found Amie, changed into a satin tuxedo and top hat, her hair coiled about her face like a caress. She sat atop the table with her legs crossed and skirt slit open to reveal surprisingly long legs for such a short girl. All around her sat the card players, the gloom of their loss replaced by wicked laughter. Glancing across the room and eyes lighting on Velvet, Amie launched into a fit of evil giggles.

  Velvet was pretty sure she was the butt of the joke.

  Amie led them to a tiny gate that opened up into a field. There were so few areas of Purgatory that weren’t occupied by some sort of construction so Velvet was surprised to see a paper garden. Origami trees made of twisted metal and newsprint leaves surrounded them like an orchard and beyond that a crude stone wall beset with crepe vines and a small bronze door, no taller than if it had been made for dogs or dolls.

  “What’s that?” Nick squatted and peered into the shadows.

  Amie knelt down next to the door, steadying herself on the iron ashpot standing nearby—a returning soul always returns fresh and clean and bright ... blindingly bright—and produced a shiny bronze key from her pocket. She cranked the lock and opened the door, revealing a thin crack in the limestone behind it. No ordinary crack, obviously. Not like the ones you jump over to avoid breaking your mother’s back, or the kind to which you “just say no” when propositioned by a slimy guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot.

  In Purgatory, cracks were doorways. Usually.

  The majority of cracks in the Latin Quarter were safely protected in caves, behind big wrought-iron gates. The ones that developed later from manipulations and shadowquakes had since been sealed—or rather, most of them had.

  Velvet glanced at the little door, hinges glinting in the low light of the garden.

  “So this is the way, then?” Velvet asked, not really expecting a response, and not really getting one.

  Amie simply gestured to the spidery crack in the limestone and stepped aside, rolling the key between her fingers.

  “You wouldn’t lock us in there, now would you?” Nick joked, unbuttoning his vest, and drawing the attentions of both girls.

  Velvet lingered on the shimmering glow of her boyfriend’s chest, until she felt another set of eyes perusing the merchandise, however.

  She snapped in Amie’s direction. “We’ve got it from here, thanks. Unless you’ll be accompanying us?”

  “Why would I?” Amie retorted. “You’re so good at your job.”

  “Then maybe you should run along and give us a little privacy?”

  Amie arched her neck and peered around Velvet at Nick, who continued to undress. Velvet stuck her head directly in her way. “Seriously. It’s called loitering, look it up.”

  “All right,” Amie threw her hands into the air. “I was just trying to be helpful. But you’re the big Body Thief, aren’t you?”

  Velvet rolled her eyes and wished for the girl to simply disappear. Then she pivoted and shielded Nick’s body as it thinned and stretched, becoming less corporeal by the second until, finally, he slid his whole self into the crack, like a letter into a mail slot.

  “Stay away from him.” Velvet warned.

  “Oh,” Amie cooed. She held up her delicate white fingers and brushed them against Velvet’s cheek. “And what if it’s not Nick I’m after?”

  Velvet shrank back, and the girl cackled viciously, turning and striding back through the garden happily. She may have even been humming.

  Doesn’t she know I’ll hurt her? Velvet fumed.

  ***

  Slipping through cracks doesn’t really feel like travel. It doesn’t feel like anything. One minute you’re stretching out, naked as the day you were born, only slightly less ... there than you were before, and the next you’re popping out on the other side, looking exactly like you did the moment before you died.

  Like a memory.

  It might seem silly to strip down to your birthday suit for the process, but as Velvet knew from experience, when a soul pops back into the City of the Dead, it’s kind of nice to have clothes that haven’t been shredded to ribbons. It’s hard enough for Collectors like Booda Khan to bring clothing through into Purgatory, but getting them back out is another thing, entirely.

  The crack let out into a bright bustling kitchen, white floors scuffed with black rubber, and men and women in tomato sauce-spattered chef whites. It took a bit of hunting to pick Nick out of the clamor, especially when Velvet could only see the back of his body, transparent and protruding from the far wall like a piece of modern art, meant only for her eyes. Or any other ghost’s, she supposed. But, to get to him, they’d have to go through her first.

  “Nick!” she shouted over the din of the kitchen.

  He thunked out of the wall and waved excitedly. “Over here.”

  “Could you believe that bitch?” Velvet asked as she slipped her arm around his waist, or through it, as was the case. Souls in Purgatory were at least solid. In the “daylight”—as they sometimes called “being on earth”—souls were opaque and flimsy as smoke. She had to make a conscious effort to give her hands enough form to touch her boyfriend.

  Nick shrugged. “What I can’t believe is how good the food looks. Reminds me of Sal-Antonio’s on First. They had the best braciole in tomata gravy.” His voice took on that affected Italian New York accent that you hear so often on TV.

  Velvet glanced at the trays that passed and marveled at the shiny silver domes covering them. “Fancy,” she noted and stuck her head through the wall.

  On the other side, the dining room was packed with hundreds of hungry diners, cramming forkful after forkful of delicious-looking food down their salivating maws. She watched a plate of linguine with clam sauce being delicately served to a nearby patron, a staunch and starched gentleman in a pin-striped suit with a cloth napkin shoved into the neck of his dress shirt. He already had his fork in his hand by the time the plate connected with the tablecloth.

  “Enjoy-a!” the waiter pronounced and trotted off with a little skip.

  It was too much to take. They’d been talking about sweet and sour pork and stuff and now all this yummy food? Velvet couldn’t resist.

  She glanced at Nick’s head sticking out of the wall next to her like a hunting trophy. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well I’m thinkin’ we do a quick little possession and fill our mouths with some yum.”

  He nodded. “Then yeah. We’re thinkin’ the same thing. Yeah.”

  They didn’t need
a count of three, just rushed forward. Velvet dove headfirst into Mr. Pin-Stripe Suit, his cheeks already puffed out with creamy, garlicky clams. He was in a state of such taste-bud ecstasy that he barely noticed Velvet locking his mind away and taking possession. She always imagined encasing minds in an imaginary box near the subject’s left ear. Whether there was a box or not, she could care less. The visualization was the important thing, you understand.

  Nick struck out for the man’s date, a woman in a poofy gown. She could have been his daughter, but she wasn’t—Velvet felt the girl’s hand on the man’s thick knee the minute she slid him on like a new outfit. She watched as Nick took hold of the girl’s brain and jerked her hand away prudishly.

  “It’s just me, knucklehead.” Velvet chided.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But right now, you’re kind of a guy.”

  Velvet ignored him and glanced down at the plate. Swoon. It was hard to figure out what to do first. The extent of a Purgatory-bonded soul’s nourishment was the entertainments they took in at the weekly Salons. But this. This was real food. And she planned to cherish the experience.

  She scraped a clam out of its shell and spun it in the creamy sauce, plunging the tines of the fork deep in the noodles and spinning. She didn’t much care if she was making the guy look like a pig or not. She shoved the giant ball of slippery noodles and seafood into his mouth and chomped like a pig at the trough. The garlicky goodness exploded throughout her senses, and she closed her eyes, munching quietly as the clamor of the room was washed away in her rapture.

  “Oh, oh. I think that’s our guy!” A woman’s voice stuttered.

  It took Velvet a second to realize the voice came from Nick. She opened her eyes to see Mr. Pin-Stripe Suit’s date, face smudged with chunks of marinara and noodle debris, pointing across the room. Velvet followed her gaze and noticed a man, wearing sunglasses and a waiter’s uniform, shoving his arms into a raincoat.

  She shoved one more forkful of pasta into the man’s mouth and gave it a final loving chew before dispossessing the body and darting through the room after their prey. Turning around mid-run to scream for Nick, she noticed she was waist high in the center of one of the round tables, a fluttering hurricane lamp glowing inside her abdomen.

  She chuckled a bit at the sight.

  Once Nick had given up on his food—the man’s date spasmed a bit as he disentangled from her—he joined her, running flat across the restaurant. Nick wasn’t nearly as proficient with the living as he was the dead. You should see him maneuver a corpse, though, Velvet thought. Fast zombies do exist. At least when Nick was working on them. But she didn’t have the stomach for the job and, thankfully, she’d only had to steer a dead body once.

  Velvet darted for the door, Nick hot on her heels.

  They sped out the front door and into a dark rainy street. Huge drops pelted off car roofs in sharp tink s, a salty wind blew, and the shadows of young lovers holding each other under umbrellas stretched toward them like freaky mushrooms grown up out of the sidewalk.

  There was no sign of Abner Conroy.

  “Do you think he saw us?” Velvet asked. “Or you rather, since you were pointing at him like you’d seen an alien or something.”

  “Um ... I was distracted.”

  She nodded. “Mmm hmm. Well, he’s definitely working in the restaurant. So close to the crack, he’s literally on top of it. It doesn’t make sense that the Vermillion team couldn’t find him.”

  “Maybe they weren’t looking,” Nick suggested.

  Velvet thought about that for a moment. They had said they were terribly busy. But what had she and Nick really seen? The kid spent his evening conning old souls out of their paper coins, Amie was busy all right—being a bitch and a tease, to put it mildly—and the other poltergeist enjoyed her snooze time. Not quite as active as Amie had led them to believe, it’s true.

  “I think you’re right, but we’ll have to get to the bottom of it tomorrow. Tonight we’ll have to go back and endure some more of Vermillion’s warm and cheery hospitality.” She turned, and they padded back into the restaurant.

  ***

  Velvet slipped her feet between the horribly scratchy sheets draped over her thin canvas cot, a far cry from the comfy pillow-topped mattress that she’d earned in the Latin Quarter Salvage dorm as the leader of the team. It was like she was in the military or something. Clearly Vermillion had something to learn about comfort.

  She’d hardly made a dent in the paper-thin pillow supplied before she heard a soft rap of knuckles against wood.

  “Are you busy?” Nick was no more than a shadow in the doorway, barely visible if it weren’t for the glowing orbs of his eyes.

  “Nope just thinking.” Velvet slid her legs out from under the flimsy afterthought of a blanket and reached out for him.

  A moment later they were in each other’s arms, Nick’s lips pressed against her throat, into the clefts of her shoulders. “Whatcha thinkin’?” he murmured.

  Velvet pondered the question. What had she been thinking?

  Nick didn’t wait for an answer. He pressed soft kisses onto her eyelids, down each cheek. He covered her mouth with his, nibbling at the flesh there, beseeching her with tiny invasions from his tongue, cradling her head to pull her more deeply into his affections.

  Oh my God, she thought.

  The boy could kiss. But he could also make her forget.

  From the first days of their acquaintance, Nick was her biggest distraction. A welcome one, at the time, but dangerous. Loving him put everything she held dear at risk: her job, her friends, her reputation. It was against the rules to fraternize with your team members. So they hid. Making out in the shadows. Sharing kisses in those brief moments of privacy.

  Lucky for them—and it was that: pure luck—a wicked turn of events and a show of heroism allotted some leniency. Manny had pulled the necessary strings and now they could be together openly.

  Lucky.

  But even then, wound up in shrouds of blankets like a pair of mummies, Velvet and Nick couldn’t be entirely open about their love. The dorm was quiet. Their voices had to be hushed.

  “Nyx,” she whispered his secret epithet, the word stretching out into a whimper.

  A smile played across the boy’s lips, the flesh around them rubbed clean of ash and glowing like the blush from a slap. “Velvet,” he moaned and trailed the tips of his fingers down to her waist.

  Then the bed began to shake, but it had nothing to do with them.

  “Nick,” she said.

  He hummed some unintelligible response into the flesh of her neck.

  What started as a low rumble from deep beneath them, soon shook the walls of the cinderblock cell. Grits showered from gaps in the rattling metal roof. Screams filled the air.

  “Dammit!” Nick yelled and in an attempt to scramble from the bed, crashed to the floor, dragging Velvet off, too, their feet twisted in the bed sheets.

  She was about to shout, “Shadowquake!” But the darkness was already coiling around the gas lamp outside the door, squeezing the last of the light and casting Velvet and Nick into the darkest of shadows.

  They bumped into each other, stumbling. Velvet replaced her pajamas with a pair of tights and her plaid skirt. She crammed her feet into her unlaced boots, while Nick buttoned his shirt and hurridly tucked it into the waistband of his pants. She wiped the ash from her hands and forearms onto the scratchy sheet. Then she held her hands before her like a pair of lanterns. Nick looked up from tying the laces on his wingtips and squinted.