A Clean Break #3
At—her body? How—?
She watches as the men wrap her in a sheet, drag her cart into the room, stuff her in the hamper where the dirty linens go. They move with swift efficiency, expressionless.
She watches as they take her downstairs, put her body in a car trunk, drive off—
Her body leaves, but she doesn’t.
She’s still at the motel. Watching the red lights recede.
Her abandoned cart stands in the parking lot, and the car is gone.
And she’s still here.
Stone’s head lit up with pain. Brains—even mages’ brains—weren’t meant to process that much information in such a short time. He pressed his temples with the heels of his hands, struggling to make sense of the rapid-fire, faster-than-thought imagery.
Someone had killed Luisa—brutally snapped her neck—when she’d accidentally interrupted a drug deal in one of the motel’s unused rooms. That much had come through loud and clear.
They’d used her own cart to hide her body and transport it away, leaving her echo behind, eternally tethered to the site of her death.
But there had been something else—
He clamped his eyes shut, fighting to recall what was eluding him. Something about the men—
The men.
He’d seen those men. Those same cold-eyed faces.
He lowered his hands and looked at Luisa, who was once more watching him from the other side of the room. “It was those two, wasn’t it? They were the ones who killed you and took your body away. This is where they conduct their drug deals, and you walked in on one of them.”
She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes never left his face.
“And now they’re back. That’s why you reached out to me, isn’t it?”
The throbbing pain was already beginning to fade. Stone rose and resumed his pacing, rubbing his chin. “I don’t know how I can help you, Luisa. The police won’t do anything without proof, and I can’t exactly go busting into their room and take them down.”
She flashed him a challenging look, her meaning clear: No?
“Well—all right, maybe I could. Maybe. Mages aren’t indestructible, you know.
But in any case, I’m not going to. I’ve still got places to be tomorrow, and the police might have something to say about that if anyone catches me messing with those two.
Besides, me taking care of them isn’t going to free you from here. That’s not how it works.”
Her eyes went wide and fearful.
He shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. Me killing them won’t bring you closure, and that’s what it will take to set you free. It’s too bad you can’t affect the living. It would be much more satisfying if you sorted out the problem yourself.”
She frowned, her brow furrowing. She drifted back and forth a few times, almost as if considering her options. Then she stopped. The fear disappeared, replaced by the rage.
But it was different this time.
Something else had joined it now too, dancing across her silvery face.
Amusement. Relish.
Anticipation.
“Have you got an idea?”
In answer, she merely held his gaze for a couple more seconds, then flitted through the door. When he didn’t follow right away, her head poked back through on its twisted neck, as if to say, Well?
Stone sighed.
He was probably going to regret this. But then again, he did want to see what she had on what was left of her mind.
Also, it beat trying to sleep while curled up in the arse end of hell.
Luisa’s translucent form hovered just up the walkway, radiating impatience as Stone exited his room. As soon as he emerged, she took off toward the stairs. The way her neck was twisted, she could still keep an eye on him as she moved. If it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been creepy.
No, never mind. It was tragic and creepy.
By now, it was after three a.m. The parking lot was quiet; the only light on the second floor came from Stone’s room and the one next to the alcove. Either the drug dealers liked sleeping with a night-light, or they were still awake in there.
Stone followed Luisa’s echo with more caution, wondering what she was up to.
There was nothing to be gained by confronting the two men, since she couldn’t physically touch them.
Almost without exception, echoes couldn’t directly affect the living, only objects directly connected to them—usually, to the circumstances of their deaths.
Stone doubted she could frighten a pair of hardened drug dealers by popping through the door and mouthing, Boo!
So, then, what was she—
As Stone reached the far edge of the alcove near the door, Luisa’s echo turned abruptly and slipped through it. With a sudden brain wave, he caught on to what she was about to do.
He stopped, a lump of anticipatory dread forming deep in the pit of his stomach.
Oh, this was a very bad plan.
She couldn’t possibly be—
Luisa popped back out. Stone got a quick impression of a fierce, triumphant grin, and then the door slammed open and the two men emerged, their faces darkened with mixed confusion and menace.
Luisa vanished.
No, Luisa, you didn’t—
The drug dealers’ searching gazes fell on the only other living thing within sight: Stone.
Their expressions went hard, and then they were moving.
Stone was fast.
They were faster.
The skinny one drew his gun. The buff one with the tattoos and the tank top lunged forward and struck with a cat-quick fist, clocking Stone in the jaw with the effortless aim of a guy who did this sort of thing as part of his daily routine.
Two thoughts flashed through Stone’s mind as he flew backward and crashed, stunned, onto the walkway on the other side of the alcove.
The first was that magical shields only worked when you got them up before the bad things hit you.
The second was that Tank Top even had tattoos on his knuckles.
Apparently, there was no accounting for the things you noticed when about to get your head blown off by two guys you had no personal beef with.
Stone shook his head, trying to clear the static enough to form a spell.
Skinny and Tank Top were already closing in on him. If he didn’t get it together now, getting out of this dump and back to civilization in the morning was going to be the least of his worries.
Where the hell was Luisa?
And then he spotted her.
She hovered a short distance behind Skinny and Tank Top, floating high enough to give him an unobstructed view of her off-kilter face above them. She caught his eye, and then she did something unexpected.
She cut her silvery gaze sideways.
Very obviously sideways.
Comically sideways, with a level of exaggeration worthy of a Three Stooges short.
For good measure she jerked her neck to the same side, which, given her current state, was more unsettling than comical.
Stone’s brain got hung up on what the hell she could mean by all of this, but his reflexes did the same thing anyone else’s would have under the circumstances.
He looked the same way she had.
This was all happening at lightning speed. The drug dealers hadn’t shot him yet, probably because they’d figured out the blast would rouse every sleeping guest at the motel. But that didn’t mean Stone wasn’t about to be in a world of hurt if he didn’t come up with something pretty damn quick.
What was Luisa trying to show him? There was nothing there—certainly nothing he could use as a weapon. All he saw was the chain-link gate across the alcove, the corner of the shadowy maid cart behind it—
And the lock holding it closed.
Popular wisdom states that when you’re about to die, you see your life flashing before your eyes in a split second. Stone had no idea if that was true, but something absolutely did flash across his mind at that moment. Three thought fragments, in quick succession:
His ridiculous notion, earlier tonight before any of this nonsense had started, that he’d seen the maid cart move behind the gate.
The wispy red energy he’d spotted drifting around it.
And Luisa’s vision of her murderers stuffing her body in the cart.
It all came together in a sudden, magnificent bloom of insight, driving the last of the static cobwebs from his brain.
His manic, feral grin must have startled the drug dealers, at least enough to pause before they reached him. Only for a second, but that was all he needed.
He reached out with his magic and popped the lock on the gate, pulling it free and tossing it aside.
Behind Skinny and Tank Top, Luisa’s plain face lit up in triumph.
After that, everything happened even faster.
Luisa disappeared again, or maybe she just moved so quickly Stone could no longer follow the motion.
Whichever it was, a second later a bright red glow flowered in the alcove.
Stone couldn’t see much of it from his vantage point on the ground, but that made it somehow worse—as if an unseen portal to hell were opening just beyond his vision.
Skinny and Tank Top got the full impact, though.
They both whirled away from Stone, their eyes bugging out and their jaws hanging open at whatever they were seeing.
The maid cart, suffused with the hellish red glow and seeming somehow bigger than its actual size, erupted from the alcove, smashing the gate into the side wall with a thundering thoom that shook the walkway beneath Stone.
Skinny and Tank Top had no time to react.
The possessed cart did zero to sixty in a time that would have put a Ferrari to shame.
It slammed into the pair of them with far more force than something its size and construction should have been able to manage, driving them forward into the metal safety railing.
The combined weight of the cart and their bodies at that speed proved too much for the cheap structure. It twisted with a wrenching metallic shriek and gave way, sending them flying, arms flailing and legs pumping, over the edge.
A second later, a loud crash announced their impact below, bringing an abrupt halt to their screams.
Stone scrambled to his feet, careful to avoid the broken part of the railing, and hurried forward to assess the damage. Around him, lights were coming on in the other rooms.
In the confusion of everything that had happened, he’d forgotten one other relevant bit of the Sunbeam Motel’s layout until now.
The two drug dealers hadn’t fallen into the parking lot, perhaps breaking part of their fall on the hood of some hapless suburban family’s late-model SUV.
Instead, barely visible in the darkness, their twisted bodies lay in an unmoving heap under the broken maid cart in the empty deep end of the drained swimming pool.
A quick glance with magical sight revealed a pair of rapidly fading auras that winked out even as he watched.
In a fitting touch, Tank Top—the one who had actually committed Luisa’s murder—was at the bottom of the heap, his thick neck bent at an even sharper angle than the echo’s had been.
Stone saw no sign of the red energy around the cart.
“What the actual fuck is going on out here?” a voice screamed from down below. A moment later, Frank the Night Manager came trundling out of his office, peering around as if expecting the motel to be under attack.
By this time, more sleepy, confused guests had emerged from their rooms and joined Stone at the railing.
“What happened?” a middle-aged man in an anime T-shirt and plaid boxers asked, holding tightly to a curious boy’s hand.
“No idea,” Stone said. “I was just looking for the ice machine, and—” He shrugged, as if to say, I got nothing. He disengaged from the growing crowd of lookie-loos and returned to his room before anyone else noticed him.
Luisa was waiting for him inside, floating in her usual place in front of the broken TV. This time, though, the rage was gone. Her smile lit up her face, making her almost pretty if it weren’t for her twisted neck.
“You could have got me killed, you know.” He shot a sour glare at her but couldn’t make it stick. Perhaps it made him a bad person, but he couldn’t summon a shred of sympathy for the two dead murderers. He wouldn’t have killed them himself, but he couldn’t deny they’d gotten what they deserved.
Her smile departed, replaced by something that could only be gratitude. She was already starting to fade, the silvery edges of her hair and her uniform fuzzing out like watercolors in a bathtub.
“Goodbye, Luisa,” he murmured. “Good luck on the other side.”
As her form lost coherence and drifted away, her silvery eyes were the last to go.
Stone realized he would never even know her last name.
Of course he didn’t get away without being questioned.
The Sunbeam Motel quickly became a circus of whirling red and blue lights, overlapping bursts of radio static, and cops and crime scene investigators prowling around trying without much success to make sense of the bizarre situation. Nobody was getting any sleep.
The good news was, no one had seen Stone near the two dead men. None of the guests had been brave enough to emerge when the slamming and shouting had started, and by the time Skinny and Tank Top had made their fatal swan dive, Stone had been nothing more than a fellow curious onlooker.
He could tell the police were frustrated at the lack of living eyewitnesses, but he also got the impression they weren’t planning to try all that hard to solve this one.
Apparently, he overheard after he’d gathered his gear and joined several other guests in a predawn exodus from the Sunbeam Motel, both men had extensive rap sheets and were wanted on suspicion of at least two other murders.
In other words, nobody was going to miss them.
He was sitting in the back corner of an all-night coffee shop an hour later, sipping a weapons-grade brew and scrolling idly on his phone, when a text popped up from Verity.
I know you won’t get this till tomorrow morning. Just finishing up some packing. Anything you want me to bring?
He smiled, picturing her dashing around her apartment, tossing things haphazardly into bags. No, got everything I need.
Her surprised reply came back fast: Wow, didn’t expect you to answer for hours. What are you doing up this early?
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
Try me? I have time.
The server, surprisingly cheerful for this gods-awful wee hour of the morning, came by and left another cup of coffee. She reminded him of Luisa: young, slim, with long dark hair and a plain, pleasant face. But unlike Luisa, she was still alive. Still in the world.
Still remembered.
Tomorrow, Stone sent back. I want to tell you about someone I met tonight. I think you would have liked her.