God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (13 page)

As Clover finished eating, she had to fight off her feelings of shame and gluttony, a holdover from childhood, the result of her mother’s incessant reminders for her to watch her figure. She had been lucky to escape with misplaced guilt instead of a severe eating disorder and knew it.

She stifled a burp with the back of her hand and laughed.

“Ugh, excuse me!”

“Nice,” AJ said and she was happy to see he was laughing instead of being grossed out.

“I hate to tell you this,” Clover said, “but you have to leave now so I can get dressed.”

“The ol’ Burp and Boot, eh? Sad to say, I’ve received this treatment before.”

She laughed and then beckoned him closer with her finger. “Come here. I have to tell you something.”

He leaned forward and she put one hand on each of his shoulders and put her mouth next to his ear. “Thank you,” she whispered, and before she knew she was going to do it, she kissed him.

It began as just a quick peck, but how rarely a kiss stays that way, especially the first one. It blossomed, and when their lips finally parted, he looked into her eyes and kissed her between them.

“I’ll be in the front room,” he said and smiled. She smiled back and then shooed him out. She sat there for a moment, her whole body warm and tingling. She wouldn’t say it out loud, or even let herself really think about it, but she knew what was starting to happen...

* * * * *

AJ tried very hard to wipe the grin off his face but he must have missed some of it because Gomez took one look at him and gave him a knowing wink.

“How was breakfast?”

“A hell of a lot better than dinner.”
AJ watched the rain through the window. “So what’s the plan for today, anyway?”

“Well, we figured
you
would stay here and
we
would guard you,” John said.

“Then, after
that
, we thought maybe we would guard you while you stayed here,” added Gomez. He put most of a donut in his mouth at once, more for AJ’s amusement than to eat it.

AJ grinned and shook his head. “Well, since the itinerary is so full, we better get busy.” It wouldn’t be the most exciting day he ever had, but considering what was passing for excitement lately, he thought he would manage just fine. If shit went down, it went down, and they’d do their best to deal with it. Giving himself an ulcer over it wouldn’t help.

“AJ? Could you come here for a minute?” Clover called from her room. He nearly dropped his cigarette when he walked in. The guy from the alley and the security tapes, the one who most definitely was
not
Detective Quidman, was perched on Clover’s windowsill like a gargoyle.

“You...uh, wanna come in?” AJ asked.

The stranger shook his head. “I don’t have a lot of time here so we need to hurry this up. Now, do you have a book--”

“I got lots of books,” AJ interrupted.

“It’s not a normal one. Did your real father leave you anything after he died?”

“Just a trust fund that I can’t get at until I’m 26.”

“But no book?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Call your family. If we don’t have the book, it’s gonna make this all a lot harder to do.”

“Make
what
a lot harder to do?” AJ asked calmly but wanted to scream.

“I don’t have time to explain. Just get a hold of them and--”

“You want me to call them up and ask if my dead parents left me a book twenty-some years ago?”

“Yes. It’s dark red, very old, very thick. It has a big lock and a symbol on the front of it. Find it.”

“Everything all right back there?” John called from the front room.

“Yeah, no problem,” Clover yelled back.

“That the cop working on this? The main one, I mean? Detective Lubbock?”

“Why?” AJ asked.

“Give him this,” the man perched in the window said, reaching into his long black coat and pulling out an envelope.

AJ took the envelope and looked down at it. It was made of the thick, soft paper you just knew was expensive. On the front it said
Det. John Lubbock
, printed in a neat, careful hand.

“
Wait, what is this?” AJ asked.

“Just give it to him. I’ve got to go. I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait! What’s your name?”

“Logan.” And then with a liquid smoothness, he reached in and pulled the drapes shut in front of him. When AJ opened them back up again, he was gone. They were on the fifth floor but there was no sign of him.

AJ stared out the window, vacantly, until Clover brought him back to reality with a hug.

“What have I gotten into?” He hugged back and rested his head on her shoulder.

“Not you.
We
.”

AJ called home six times in the three hours since Logan had been there. He had yet to reach anyone and it scared him. Although, there was nothing rational to base these fears upon; yet he didn’t feel like the most rational of people at the time. If Logan thought of going to his parents for this book, wasn’t it possible someone else would think of it too? A hard lump had formed in his throat by the time he finally got through on the seventh call. He was actually sort of surprised when his mother answered and was ashamed to realize he had almost given her up for dead.

“Hello?”

“Mom?”

“Hey, you! What’s up?” She sounded as chipper as ever.

“Where have you guys been since, like, Thursday?”

“Well, we turned off the phone and finally went through the attic,” she said, a note of near triumph in her voice.

“You guys did the attic?” As long as he could remember, his parents had been threatening to go through the attic, to clean it out and separate the crap from the keepsakes.

“Yuppers. Oh hey, that reminds me. We found something up there that we should have given you a long time ago.”

He thought first of some childhood birthday present or Christmas gift that had been misplaced in the clutter and forgotten. “What is it?”

“A book.”

“What kind of book?” His mouth went dry. Inside, he already knew. He felt it, like a giant gear slipping slowly into place, like great, invisible wheels beginning to turn on concert with one another.

“Well, it was one the orphanage gave us...it was in your birth father’s will, along with the trust fund.” She sounded a bit ashamed of it all, of forgetting a dead man’s wish for over twenty years.

“What’s it look like?” he asked, thinking red, old, and thick
.

“Old. It’s damn thick, too.”

“Were you planning on actually giving it to me some day or what?”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. We were saving it for when you were old enough to take care of it. It’s just that we--”

“Put it in the attic,” AJ finished for her. “Okay, well, I’m gonna be up there within the next couple of days to get it, so don’t let anything happen to it.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie. We’ll take care of it. So. How’s things?”

He opened his mouth and then clapped it shut again, thinking of everything that that had been happening.

Great, Ma, he thought. Beat a dead guy
back
to death with a bat, another with a hammer. I’m under police protection, but on the upside, I met a girl!

“Good, Ma,” he said. “Things are good.”

“
What
is happening in that city of yours?” she asked. She always said it like that. Anything bad that ever happened that made it on the news, she asked him about it like
he
was the cause of it.

“What do you mean?”

“All these
bodies
going missing? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen this on TV. People stealing bodies from hospitals, morgues, ringing a bell?”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Just the two, though?”

“It
started
with just two. On the news they said four more in the last twenty-four hours, and that it might even be higher than that, and people just aren’t reporting it. Afraid of lawsuits from the families, they said.”

“Who said that?”

“The woman on the news,” she said and sighed. “I told you that city was bad, Amon,” she added, using the name she reserved for times of worry or stages of high piss-off.

“Ma, I’m fine,” he said. He felt bad about lying to her, but considering the alternative dampened the effect.

“I just wish you’d let us help you move into a better part of town, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with taking money from your parents.”

“Ma...”

“I know, son. I’m sorry. But wait till you have kids someday, and I guess then you’ll understand.”

A snatch of Creedence Clearwater Revival ran through AJ’s head, sending a shiver twisting up his spine like a bent coat hanger:
Someday-ay never comes.

“Just promise me you’ll reconsider? About the money?”

He promised her and they talked for a while longer: how was he eating, how was work. He asked how his dad’s classes were going, said he had to go, and reminded her he’d be up to get the book.

“Okay, hon, I’ll see you soon. Love you.”

“Love you too, Ma. Bye.” AJ hung up the phone and turned around as Clover walked into the room. “They have the book.”

“Get
out
!”

“Yeah. They finally went through the attic yesterday and it’s been up there for all my life, I guess.”

“Your mom found it
yesterday
?” Clover asked.

AJ nodded.

“
That’s
pretty…convenient.”

“Extremely,” AJ said.

“You know how we were almost at the same showing of
Josey Wales
?”

“
Yeah.”

“And I never really told you why I came in to the store the night we met, did I?”

“I assumed for cigarettes.”

“Sure, for cigarettes. It didn’t strike you odd that I drove halfway across town to buy them, though?”

AJ stopped and thought for a moment. “Actually, no. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“It was almost three in the morning when I got there, you remember that?”

“Of course.”

“I was asleep up until about midnight. Then I snapped up, wide awake. Like I’d been shot up with coke, or something, while I was asleep. I just got this urge to be up, out. I walked around my living room for a while, just…pacing, like you see on bad sitcoms. I smoked my last smoke and decided I
had
to have more. So I got in my car, and started to drive. There’s a 7-11 like five minutes from my apartment, but I didn’t want to wait for the light to change, coming out of my complex, so I took a right instead of a left. It felt nice, being out, driving around. I felt
better
.”

“
So you just kept driving,” AJ said.

“Yup. Now, I’ve been to that neighborhood a ton of times. That neighborhood the theater is in? I love it, all the old shops and stuff. I wasn’t consciously driving over there, though. If a light was green, I kept going, if it was red, I turned right so I didn’t have to wait.”

“And there you were,” AJ said.

“There I was. I’ve been thinking about that a lot these last few days. When they were stitching my arm up is when I started
really
considering things. I bet if we sat down and told each other about the last six months, there would be a ton of times we were at the same place at the same time and didn’t know it. Then, one night, I wake up and go for a drive at two in the morning, something I’ve
never
done, following the traffic lights. I walk into Vito’s, what was it, three minutes ahead of the other guy?”

“About that, yeah.”

“We’re told that everything might hinge on a book you’re supposed to have but have never seen. You call your mom and she just
happened
to have dug it out of deep storage in your attic yesterday?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice a whisper.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Clover said. “But it’s meant to happen.
We
were
meant
to happen.”

She stepped closer to him, laying one hand on his chest, looking up into his eyes. She opened her mouth to speak but didn’t. Instead she stepped forward, laying her head on his shoulder, and hugged him tightly, and for a long moment they were quiet, and together, and happy, though perhaps a little afraid.

“When this is over, though, you have to take me on a
real
date,” Clover said and the two of them laughed. “Breakfast at two in the afternoon? You gotta step your game up, man.”

“Deal,” AJ said and pulled her to him again.