Chapter 8
She really hated this job. Nonstop asshole customers making stupid demands about their stupid breakfast sandwiches.
“Can I get that with swiss instead of American?” “Do you have turkey bacon?” “Is there a way I can get the sausage, egg, and cheese, but vegan?”
They weren’t a full restaurant, for fuck’s sake. Their sandwiches came to them frozen and premade.
And yet, she had to keep explaining to people that they had no way of changing the ingredients in their sandwiches. If someone wanted vegan, they had to get a dry fucking bagel and like it.
I grimaced, pulling my hand back from the brown paper baggie.
“Let me do that,” Beck said, her tone a little annoyed.
She took the baggie and disappeared, headed for the kitchen and—presumably—the plates in there that she could pour the bagels out on.
She was moving quickly, the fringe on the bottom of her mid-thigh-length tunic swishing against the black of her leggings over knee-high tooled leather boots.
I bit my lip and straightened, moving away from the table with tubs cream cheese and stacks of paper napkins for the whole staff plus Elliot and Fiona—and which would hold the bagels again, presumably, when Beck came back.
Fiona McCallister was an occult librarian at the Library of Virginia—she was also a faun, almost as tall as me with bright red hair, twisty horns, freckles, and huge blue eyes with a faun’s tell-tale horizontal pupils.
Fiona knew more about the history of the occult than almost anyone in the state—except maybe for Mason Manning, although Mason would be the first person to say that he might go deeper on some things, but Fiona could find you anything, in the library or out of it.
“Is it getting stronger, Rayn?” Ward asked, his brow furrowed in concern as he watched Beck disappear through the doorway to the kitchen.
“Not exactly,” I replied. “Just more sensitive.” Despite my best attempts to keep rebuilding my mental brick walls, they were crumbly and unsteady.
I could still push the memories out after about the same amount of time and with the same effort, I was just more likely to fall into one from a slight brush of fingers or—as in this case—a careless reach for a bag of bagels to be helpful.
The problem in this instance was actually more likely that I was more aware of the smaller memories, since the woman who’d left her thoughts on the bag couldn’t have touched it for too much longer than the memory I’d just experienced. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t even have noticed.
Now, less than a minute was enough to leave an impression that could sneak up on my unsuspecting fingers. And send Beck—or someone else—to the kitchen on my behalf.
I really didn’t want to have to wear my gloves literally any time I wasn’t at my desk or in my apartment.
Especially as it got warmer. Summer was the worst time to wear gloves—they got soaked with sweat within minutes, and squishy gloves are definitely not fun to wear.
Your hands get all wrinkled and prune-like, and you leave little sweat-streaks everywhere.
Ugh.
“How’d you do it?” Fiona asked her big goat-eyes studying me. “Can you undo it?”
I grimaced. “Apparently not,” I replied. “I tried just… reversing the mental process, but while it helps some, it doesn’t reset it, and I have to be actively thinking about it, which I’m not used to.”
“Sounds kind of like what Archie did to you,” Mason remarked, looking over at Ward. “Although mental, rather than visual.”
I looked at him. Ward made a face. “That was a very not-fun several days,” he replied darkly. “I felt like I was in some sort of fucked-up cartoon.”
“At least you weren’t shutting down every ten minutes,” Beck remarked, coming back with a big plate filled with bagels.
I felt my cheeks heat.
“Oh, hun, not what I meant,” she said, her voice sounding sympathetic, which was honestly a little confusing, since she’d just been mad at me. “Just making the point that it was easier for him to deal because he didn’t keep… skipping.”
“Skipping?” Mason asked, sounding a little amused. “He’s not a vinyl record.”
Beck shrugged. “That’s kind of what it looks like, though, just… screee. And then like ten to fifteen seconds later, he’s back.”
Maybe it was weird that I’d never thought about it, but it had never occurred to me to wonder what it looked like to other people when someone else’s memories hit me.
I knew I lost time—but it wasn’t long. I hadn’t even realized it was ten to fifteen seconds—I knew it wasn’t that long, but I’d never timed one. It would be hard to.
I had the feeling that some of my more recent forays into other people’s memories had taken a lot longer—when Raj and Hart had me deliberately trying to go deeper into them. But that wouldn’t have been disruptive the way, apparently, the ones that ambushed me throughout the day.
Ward was right—they were happening more often since I’d pulled down my carefully-built mental brick wall. Putting that wall up had been a lot of work and a lot of concentration. I knew, in theory, that I could put it back if I wanted to when this case was over.
I just wasn’t completely sure I did.
First, there was the fact that the deeper I could go into the memories of victims or criminals, the more useful I could be to Raj and Hart—but also the more useful I could potentially be to the company I worked for.
Because sometimes we had clients come in looking for help with something that wasn’t just dead people and murder.
Murders came to us from the Richmond PD.
Our clients were usually trying to find an object or a document—a will, a piece of jewelry, a hidden safe.
Those were the things that Ward could help with by talking to the dead.
But sometimes our clients found things they didn’t know what to do with—where they’d come from, who had owned them, sometimes even not knowing what they were.
Like the woman who had once come in with a brooch that she’d thought was her grandmother’s, but her grandmother—when Ward had summoned her—had no idea what it was or where it had come from.
Mason could sometimes help with those things—if they were old enough.
Sometimes those clients were Lost Lineage families—people trying to figure out who they were and who their ancestors had been, and all they had was a locket or a key or a handkerchief.
Ward could sometimes get their owners, if they had names he could use to summon the dead to ask…
but I could make that all go much smoother.
I could touch the objects, find out who had owned them.
What they’d felt. Things they’d thought about.
And now that I knew I could do something—I didn’t want to go back to just being the guy who sat at the front desk, answered the phone, and scheduled appointments.
I could be a real part of Beyond the Veil. Instead of whatever the hell I was now. A charity case they’d adopted to make themselves feel better. Or maybe because Ward felt responsible for me. But I was still a charity case.
“Rayn?” A deep voice interrupted my self-pity.
I looked up, finding Mason holding out a plate, an everything bagel with veggie cream cheese sitting on it, each half cut in half again so that there were four pieces.
Exactly the way I did it myself.
He was holding the paper plate using a napkin so that his fingers didn’t touch it.
I swallowed around emotion, managing to mumble a “Thanks” around the thickness of my own tongue.
“You have to take care of yourself,” Mason said softly, the words meant only for me. “That means you have to eat.” I took the plate from him, and he held on just a little longer. “And that you need to protect yourself.”
I frowned, even though he let go of the plate. “Protect myself?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “From what?”
His smile was odd—amused, but also a little sad, it seemed. “Yourself,” he replied, then turned away, although I didn’t understand what he meant by that.
I carried the plate back to my desk, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin and head, then settled in the chair to eat.
The gorgeous carpenter is back, Sylvia announced to those of us who could hear her.
Three of us looked down the back hallway, which was where Hart or Taavi tended to drop Elliot off in the morning.
Fiona was here because of Elliot—she’d brought a bunch of symbols and texts that Ward, Mason, and Beck had combined into a customized design that would serve as both a summoning and containment sigil that Elliot was going to hand-carve into the top of the massive oak table he’d finished building yesterday.
I’d seen it this morning. I didn’t know anything about furniture and didn’t have any sort of eye for art, but it was a really nice table. And it was huge. He and Seth Mays had put it together in the conference room, because it was too big to fit through the door.
“Elliot!” Beck called when she saw him come lumbering down the hall, a bulging bag of tools over one shoulder, a case in one hand and a travel mug that I recognized as one of Hart’s in the other.
“Morning,” he called back, his voice still a little slurred. He offered me a slightly lopsided smile. “Coffee in the kitchen?”
I nodded.
“Great.” He dropped the bag and case by the open doorway to the conference room and shuffled into the kitchen.
“You need a refill?” Fiona asked me, pausing by the corner of my desk. I’d just taken a bite of my bagel, so my mouth was full. I did want more coffee, but I didn’t want her to touch my mug.
“He’ll get his own,” Mason said from behind her, then wiggled the fingers on the hand not holding his bagel.
“Oh. Right.” She blinked a couple times. “You’d get something from that short a trip?” she asked.
I shrugged, swallowed, then answered. “Maybe.”
“That’s…” She paused, blue goat-eyes sympathetic. “Shitty,” she finished.
I snorted. “It’s kind of annoying,” I admitted.
“How about I bring the pot back here?” she asked. “You take creamer or anything?”