Hell hath no fury like a pissed off nun.
You’d think I enjoyed it for all the ways I’ve managed to invoke her wrath.
“I know, I should have handled it differently, so you can skip that speech.” Even several states away and over the phone, the cold steel of her glare made my guts quiver. Not in the good way. “What should I do now?”
“Why is it my responsibility to get you out of trouble when, if you’d listened to me in the beginning, you wouldn’t be in it?” Her sneakers squeaked. I pictured her pacing the wood floor of the gym in the church basement, the punctuating squeal the sound of pivoting on a toe to change direction for another pass. No trace of her concern over the attack survived her seething irritation. Too bad I couldn’t have told her about that part last.
“It’s not. I’m asking for advice.”
“No, Caitlin, advice is what you ask for when something unexpected happens. This is bailing you out because your mouth got you in trouble. Again. We’ve been over this.”
“And you’re treating me like a child.”
“Because you’re acting like one!”
I didn’t have a response. She wasn’t wrong. I felt like a child. Had I screwed it all up to make them take the job away from me so I could get my break? I didn’t think so. Not consciously, at least. But my fuzzy, jumbled brain was part of the reason I’d asked for the time. Time to sort things out. Time to make decisions about what the hell I was doing with my life. And instead of doing all that, I’d had a job thrust at me.
Didn’t even make it out of the damned frying pan.
The ceiling fan wobbled as it stirred the cool air in the hotel room. I lay in bed in my underwear letting my skin pebble with goosebumps and waited for Marty to return with food.
“Caitlin?”
“Yes?”
“You have nothing to say?”
“Nope.” I shifted against the pillows. “It’s been a hell of a morning.”
She sighed. “You make me crazy.”
Ditto. In so many ways.
“And you know I’m going to help you, even if it’s helping you defeat yourself.”
“You always said I was my own worst enemy.”
“You are, my dear,” she said, her voice soft. “That’s what scares me.”
“I didn’t think you got scared.”
“Not by much, but I’m not immune.” Rustling on her side. Rummaging amongst her papers, for a pen, perhaps. “Now, tell me again everything that happened, including the names of the officers.”
Thirty minutes later, I had a plan, and she’d lost her prickly edge.
“Thanks again,” I said and rolled on to my back, the pen and paper and all my notes abandoned on the side table.
“Will you at least try to play nice with the locals?”
“If I say yes, do I still get to take my vacation?”
She sighed. “I know, I’m sorry. If it weren’t for Sister Evangeline’s death leaving a big swath of the South unprotected, I wouldn’t ask this of you.”
Neither of us knew Sister Evangeline, but Sister Betty seemed to be taking it pretty hard. From what she told me, Sister Evangeline’s territory stretched from Tallahassee through Louisiana, covered San Antonio, and she traveled it on a Harley with a rifle strapped to her back. Envy wiggled through me imagining what kind of badass could handle anything from the bayou nasties to the vampires that inspired those popular novels (and Tom Cruise ruined), and still have the gusto to deal with chupacabra infestations every few years in the San Antonio mesquite scrub.
“Still there?”
“Yeah, just thinking.”
“Great! Can you start practicing that before you speak so we don’t have to work so hard to bail you out in the future?”
“Har. Har.”
She laughed. “You have to admit, that was funny.”
“Yeah, okay, fine.” I debated bringing up the letter. It could wait. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Stay safe.”
I said goodnight again and ended the call. The cut on my calf itched, and my right shoulder ached. Must have pulled it in the fight, I thought, yawning so hard, my jaw popped. The cool air felt so good, and I closed my eyes to enjoy it. For just a minute.
“Cee, you’re dreaming.”
Three tongues slid out of the mouth of the thing hovering over me, each moving on its own. One slid across the leathery upper lip of the hideous mouth; the other two wiggled toward me. I fought the bindings securing my wrists, trying to see past the scaly, furred thing, the hot stink of its breath making my eyes water.
“Wake up.”
I thrashed, straining to see around the hulk of the beast, not wanting to draw attention to Marty’s presence. The thing couldn’t notice him. It hadn’t heard him over the screech of its claws on the stones behind me. Instead, it loomed closer, rancid breath burning my eyes as all three tongues reached for my face.
Marty had to escape.
“RUN!”
The word sounded alien and wrong. The world rolled. Everything shook, and even the monster tilted, its tongues lolling. Long, sticky strings of saliva drooped from the nasty curl of its lower lip and arced with the shift in gravity.
“Cee, wake up. You’re dreaming.”
The mouth opened wider.
“Caitlin!”
And then, I was sitting up, squinting against the harsh light. The sheet pooled around my waist, exposed skin breaking out in goosebumps.
Marty sat on the bed, a white plastic bag dangling from his left hand, his right on my leg. “You okay?”
The room looked exactly as it had when I hung up with Sister Betty. Marty’s rumpled blankets. Same wobbling ceiling fan. My notebook on the bedside table open to pages of scribbled notes. Orange sunlight burned through the window. The recesses of my brain registered the impending sunset.
“I think so,” I said, covering my chest with the sheet.
“Don’t cover them on my account. They’re pretty and all, but,” he shrugged, “meh.”
“I know.”
“Sounded like a pretty intense dream. Want to talk about it?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t anything special. Probably stress.”
Stress with three tongues. My imagination had issues.
“Okay,” he said and lifted the bag, the plastic crackling, “food, then!”
“Shirt first. It’s cold in here.” I slid out of bed and pulled on a t-shirt long enough to cover my panties and grabbed a towel before I climbed back into the soft bed.
“Better than out there,” he said as he stood. “I’m sweating like a pig. And still no ghosts. For a so-called haunted hotel, it’s spook-free.”
“Right.” We’d yet to encounter ghosts on any of the jobs we’d worked together. My experience with them wasn’t horrific or anything, but I’d rather deal with the corporeal. Easier to fight.
“I hope to see one before we leave,” Marty said, handing me a Styrofoam food container and climbing into bed beside me. “It’s on my bucket list.”
“When you know there’s so much weird shit in the world, why do you still want to see ghosts?” I stuffed a piece of fried shrimp in my mouth and groaned as it burst in a shrimpy-greasy little Cajun-spiced explosion. Maybe I should stop teasing Marty about his restaurant review apps. Maybe.
“Why not?” Marty lifted his po’ boy and took a monster bite, echoing my groan of pleasure. Whatever he said got lost in the mouthful of food, but I think I got it anyway.
I took a bite, talking through the mouthful. “Isn’t what we do enough to scare you?”
“I want to know,” he said after he swallowed.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then licked a drop of sauce from it.
“You are such a cavewoman.”
“Whatever.” I wiped my hand on the towel. “You’d have done the same. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it’s heaven.”
“God, yes.” He took another huge bite and flopped against the pillows to chew.
I took a smaller bite. Food didn’t diminish the dream. I thought as I chewed, trying to figure out what about it seemed…familiar.
“Hey-o.” Marty poked me in the side. “Food time. Sleep later.”
Pointing at my mouth, I chewed and swallowed. “I’m eating.”
“Any word from our new friend, La Fontaine?”
“Nah.” I dipped a piece of shrimp in the sauce. “Don’t expect anything, either.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Tonight, we hunt the dog and tomorrow we follow Sister Betty’s damage control plan.”
The hiss of metal scraping metal on our hotel room door made both of us turn.
“What —”
I held up my hand and strained to listen over the whump of the ceiling fan’s uneven spin. Something like…breathing.
Shadow blotted out the light under the door.
“Holy shit.” Marty’s hand covered his nose and mouth against the burnt, sulfurous reek filling the room.
“Shut up,” I whispered.
The shadow moved, retreated, a little light seeping in at the corners of the door. More scraping, like a wire brush against the metal, then the shadow under the door disappeared to the left, toward the open hall. Footsteps echoed like low thunder as it retreated.
I threw the blankets back, food tumbling with them, and scrambled out of bed. In my t-shirt, underwear, and bare feet, I ran out the door.
Eerie stillness filled the hall. The strange hour between dinner and bed time that almost always emptied a hotel meant silence. No footsteps. No breathing. No metal scraping. I couldn’t even hear TVs behind the closed doors I passed. At the end, where the hall split in opposite directions, I stopped, looking each way. No hint of the recent passage of any person, animal, or specter. I muttered a curse under my breath and spun from one direction to the other.
“Sister Betty would chastise you for language. If she wasn’t distracted by your practically bare ass.” Marty stepped up beside me. “Cute panties, by the way.”
I ignored his comments. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“You think it was Helen’s dog?”
“Doubt it. It wouldn’t come for us.”
“Maybe it wasn’t looking for us.”
“What do you mean?”
“She said its role was to guard the dead.”
If it was looking for the dead, it would seek out the haunted places where it could herd them like an otherworldly border collie. “So maybe it’s herding them.”
“Which is probably why I haven’t seen any. The little bastard’s collecting them. The question is, how do we find it?”
“We go where the dead are. Or should be. Time to gear up.” I looked at my bare feet and the hem of the shirt brushing against my upper thighs. “Well, clothes first. Fighting naked sucks.”