Chapter 28
He grinned at her through rot-blackened lips. In a way, he was perpetually grinning because the flesh had sloughed off one of his cheeks. Hazel stared at the bare spot, the exposed white teeth nested in pink and gray meat, as Chapman started to speak.
“You’re really not much of a homemaker, are you?”
Maybe Hazel would have had an answer to a less incongruous question. Maybe not. Her hands and face had gone numb, and the world around Chapman faded into a blur. Was he shifting it into the ethereal, or was she just panicking?
Porque el no los dos? she heard Tiffany quote in her head.
“Uh,” said Hazel.
“Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You modern girls all have other callings, don’t you?” He chuckled. Hazel could hear bones rasping together. “And it’s not like you’re expecting company.”
“I wasn’t.” She let her hand drift downward toward the knife at her belt.
Chapman clicked his tongue. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Not right now.”
He can’t. Hazel’s memory kicked in. Not unless he wants to piss off his patron.
“You just behave yourself,” said Chapman, “and we’ll have a nice little talk. Like reasonable people.”
Deduction followed memory: He doesn’t know that I know his limits.
Ligat had said he wouldn’t tell the demon about their encounter in the city.
Either he’d kept quiet about talking to Hazel in the first place, or the demon hadn’t told Chapman.
Whatever their reasons for leaving the dead man in ignorance, Hazel was going to keep him that way.
“Okay,” she said. She didn’t have to pretend she was afraid, but she exaggerated it, clearing her throat and holding her hands up in front of her. “I’m reasonable. Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
Chapman didn’t reply at first. He got up from the chair and glanced through the window. “You stayed out for a while,” he said. “Haven’t you bothered to learn how dangerous that is? Or are you too selfish to care?”
Once again he knocked her off balance with just a question, startling an incredulous laugh out of her. “Selfish? The gentleman with a basement full of pickled tongues thinks I’m too selfish?”
He rushed at her without a word, head down, floor thudding beneath his boots.
Hazel screamed, spun, and ran. She bolted back down the narrow hallway toward the warded part of the house with her senses narrowing to the darkness in front of her and the smell of rot in her lungs, thinking stupid, he can’t kill me, but he can probably hurt me plenty.
Thank God it was a short hall; the wards started about halfway. The line was invisible, but Hazel could feel it, like a difference in air pressure or temperature, and she was almost across when Chapman grabbed the back of her shirt.
“You will not sass me back,” he roared, his voice half-clotted. She could feel his fingers through her shirt, some painfully bony and others coated with cold, clammy flesh. “You turn around right now and look me in the face.”
Hazel snapped her body around. She heard cloth tear with the motion and felt chilly air against her bare back, but both seemed to happen at a great distance.
Chapman’s face was immediate. The part of his grin he could control was gone now, the tatters of his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his dead eyes were narrow. “We’re going to come to an understanding, missy,” he said, jutting his head forward for emphasis.
Hazel slammed a right hook into his face.
The crunch she heard could have been either Chapman’s jaw or her hand; the punch hurt.
Kicking him in the knee at the same time was less painful, and Hazel fled to safety as the revenant sagged backward.
In a second he was up and charging toward her again, hurling himself across the faded linoleum, only to slam into the invisible wall of her wards.
His bones did crack that time. He staggered and caught himself on the wall, gray flesh sloughing off his hand.
Hazel realized that she had some on her knuckles too, the slimy feeling getting through to her past pain and adrenaline, and frantically wiped the back of her hand on her pants.
Blood came off with it. She’d skinned her knuckles at least, maybe more.
That wouldn’t go well with dead flesh. More rituals.
And hydrogen peroxide. And a shower in Lysol.
“I never took anybody who wasn’t fair game,” Chapman rasped at her from beyond the barrier. “They all broke the rules.”
“What rules?” Finally getting a second to use her opposable thumbs, she grabbed the knife out of her belt.
“Any rules. Adultery. Theft. Assault. Speeding. Drugs.” He half chanted the words, and each one carried the stench of decay.
Rational discussion wasn’t even on the table—an undead serial killer might be the ultimate Debate Me Bro—but Hazel wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. “You killed people to punish them for speeding? Shoplifting?”
His clouded eyes still flared with contempt. “I don’t punish. I’m not a prosecutor. But if you violate the rules of society, then you lose society’s protection.” Chapman waved a hand toward the wards, the bones in his wrist flexing and creaking. “Once you step over the line, you belong to me.”
Jumbled thoughts of lamb’s blood on doorsteps and the Mark of Cain, or maybe the Beast filled Hazel’s head, a weird mixture of Sunday school and deranged mystics. “So what rule did I break?”
“Sorcery is detestable to the Lord,” he said.
“You made a deal with a demon.”
“The rules for wolves are not the rules for sheep. And you’re divorced,” he added as an afterthought. “I did my research.”
I thought I’d done mine. I should have—
But no. She could beat herself up for a lot of things, but Chapman had hidden his nature well. She shifted direction. “Do you think your friend will play by the rules if it gets its way? Or the things it brings with it? I never heard that they distinguish between guilty and innocent.”
Chapman smiled again. Hazel saw the tendons in his jaw move as he did and fought the urge to gag.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “My death didn’t go the way I wanted, and I know it didn’t go the way you would’ve liked.
Now, here we are. You can only hold out for so long.
You know that. As long as you’re alive, you’re putting everybody in danger. ”
That was his game, Hazel realized, and wondered if the demon suspected Chapman was trying to double-cross it. From what Ligat had told her, it would much rather have her as a gateway than have to give orders to Chapman in her body.
She deliberately glanced away for a few seconds, like he’d gotten to her and she was trying to hide that. “So what am I supposed to do, jump off a bridge?”
“A smart girl like you doesn’t need a bridge,” said Chapman.
“Jesus, are you really saying—”
“Watch your language.”
“—are you really telling me to kill myself?”
“If you had more of a sense of duty,” said Chapman, “I wouldn’t have to.
I don’t expect you to listen to me either.
But maybe you’re not as selfish as I think you are.
Maybe you’ve got a bit of responsibility in you.
” He sighed with another wave of charnel stench.
“I figured I should give you a chance. Now I guess I’ve done all I can. ”
He shrugged again, lifted his hands in resignation, and stepped back. The shadows of the hall took him away.