Blightmare (The Marnie Baranuik Files Book 5) Read online

  BLIGHTMARE

  THE MARNIE BARANUIK FILES, BOOK FIVE

  By A.J. Aalto

  Copyright 2017 A.J. AALTO

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Inquiries about additional permissions

  should be directed to: [email protected]

  Cover Design by Greg Simanson

  Edited by Rafe Brox

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-0-9952004-4-9

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not exist without the suffering of untold billions, the sacrifice of sleep, sanity, and brain cells. It could also not exist without the support and guidance of the staff at Pixiegrind Ink, in particular Melissa Flickinger, Berenice Jones, Lauren Thompson, and my long-suffering editor, Rafe Brox. Big thanks to my family, who listen to my random, wacky ideas at all hours. I don’t know how any of these people put up with me, but I’m really glad they do.

  Dedication

  For Jason Jones, who told me I could.

  And who reminds me that I can every time I need to hear it.

  Chapter 1

  I landed a punch, and the resounding slam of glove on body was satisfying. When he dropped his right hand, I threw a left hook, eagerly, with passion, feeling the warmth in my body like it was an elixir of salvation. The blows were mine today, over and over. When he didn’t come back at me fast enough for my liking, an impatient growl snagged in the back of my throat. Swiping my upper lip sweat on the gauze bandage on my right forearm, I danced on the balls of my feet, ready, eager, spoiling to engage.

  “Chin down,” Hood told me. “You’re lifting your chin on the reach. Keep it tucked.”

  I took that under advisement and threw a few body jabs downstairs, dropping to keep my eye level with my blows. I swung into defense before coming in with my knee. He blocked me and counter-punched rapidly, and I slipped and rolled under them, light and fast, anticipating his reactions, waiting for a clear shot.

  “Elbows in tight,” he corrected. “You’re looking for the shots, don’t telegraph. Sloppy today, Mars.”

  I checked that then surprised him, shuffling my dominant leg back and throwing a left leg kick, catching him solidly on the side of his thigh.

  “Nice!” he barked. “That was not sloppy. You’ve been practicing that.”

  That’s right, I thought with a sniff. Marnie three-point-oh up in the house, now.

  He threw a right that I caught, redirected, and countered. When he came back at me with his favorite jab-cross-hook combo, I dodged, blocked, and ducked. I changed the rhythm up, dropping my defense on my right side to draw him in; he took the bait and jabbed there. I slipped and hooked, again landing a solid shot. He nodded, pleased that I was controlling the pace. I feigned a low blow to the inner thigh and instead went high, catching his headgear with a sweet thwap!

  The alarm on his wristband went off and he backed off. I advanced, not finished with him. Rob maintained his distance, stalking off to the left, watching me from across the blue mats, breathing more heavily than I’d seen him do in a while. “We’re done.”

  “Nope,” I said. “You’re not all-in. Don’t think I can’t tell, either. Let’s go another fifteen, and this time, don’t treat me like we’ve never done this before.”

  “I’m done, which means we're done,” he said, moving to the bench for his water bottle. While he drank in small sips, he looked at me expectantly, the way a zookeeper won’t turn his back on a jungle cat. His eyes said he understood my need to fight some more, but the set of his shoulders warned me to back off. I did.

  Taking off my headgear and sparring gloves, I tossed them on top of my bag, and then planted both bare hands on my hips. His gaze cut to them for the third time today. I was no longer wearing my leather gloves to block that particular Talent; a touch-psychic with bare hands was liable to get visions and impressions from everything she so much as brushed. I had long since stopped giving a shit. Let the visions rage. I could handle it. I could handle anything, right? If I kept lying to myself that way, maybe it would become true. In the meantime, I was drowning in stimuli, which was still better than being alone with my thoughts. My thoughts were assholes.

  The room smelled of fresh sweat and old athletic padding. I watched Rob catch his breath while he shifted and stretched his muscles.

  “Harry told you to take it easy on me today,” I noted, trying to keep my voice friendly; it still came out more harshly than intended. I hadn’t managed to get my sense of humor back in the two months Batten had been... gone... and when the humor did come, it was a dark, bitter thing with sharp edges and unkind hooks and barbs. The temptation to laugh felt disloyal, like I shouldn’t let myself be amused or amusing yet.

  The sheriff of Lambert County rolled his eyes so grandly, Harry would have been impressed. “If I listened to everything your dead guy told me to do, I’d never put a hand on you, except to coat you in six layers of bubble wrap.”

  That, I believed. Harry had enjoyed the concept of me learning the skills to defend myself, to get in shape, to handle guns and other weapons; well, he had, back before we lost Batten. His attitude on the matter had since shifted dramatically; Harry wanted me home on the couch, snuggled securely in a blanket, eating cookies all day, waiting for him to wake at dusk so he could coddle me like a bird with a broken wing. That, in my opinion, was some serious limp-twattery. I wasn’t broken. I was managing just fine, thank you very much.

  Okay, maybe not fine-fine, but I was managing. I thought I was managing. Maybe nobody else thought so, but they could jump up each others’ assholes. Okay, they definitely thought I wasn’t managing, because, with the leather gloves off, I got a dose of doubt and concern every time I popped Hood, even through the sparing gloves. I didn’t need an adultier adult adulting at me when I was trying to punch him, though it did make me want to slug him harder. It was a vicious cycle of a feedback loop: I wanted to smack him for feeling worried about my well-being and state of mind, and every time I connected, I got a reminder of his worry. Maybe I should have asked him to teach me some kicks instead.

  Hood took off his gloves with a loud tear of Velcro and squatted near his bag with less ease than usual. I squinted at his knee. “Did I catch you wrong?”

  “Nope,” he lied, and the Blue Sense, my constant companion now, reported his fib clearly.

  “You sure?” I asked, concerned. “Gimme your hand.”

  “Fuck off, Mars,” he grumbled and swiped a towel from the bench nearby to wipe his face and neck down. “Don’t start that Groper shit with me today. I’m in no mood.”

  “Rob—”

  “No.” He pointed at me with the sweaty towel. “When you ask for space, I give it to you. You’re gonna show me the same respect.”

  Point: Hood. I nodded, checking my tracker wristband to ballpark how much running I could fit in. A Canadian girl at heart, I’d set my app to the metric system, despite Hood’s determination to instruct me in miles and pounds. “Fair enough,” I said, wiggling my witchy fingers at him, “but if you
want me to fix it, you can find me on the track. Gonna go do five K.”

  I turned to leave the sparring room and Hood snagged me, hooking my elbow before I could get to the door. His hand was gentle but unrelenting. “Oh, no, you’re not. I know you’ve got the whole DaySitter endurance thing going for you, but you’ve been at it for three hours already. Hit the showers, and then we’re going to hydrate. What have you eaten today, anything?”

  The truth was, I couldn’t remember putting anything in my stomach but coffee atop caffeine pills and my herbal supplements to shake off the grogginess from the sleeping pills I’d taken the night before to keep the nightmares away. Harry kept finding the uppers like he was a goddamn drug-sniffing dog, and he kept unhelpfully replacing them with Bremalanotide. That much, at least, I could appreciate, since he and I were sooooo not having sexytimes, and, even though I'm sure The Overlord would understand, I definitely didn't need him getting up my nose because he wasn't getting his nookie fix through my Bond with Harry, either. So, I had to store my perky pills at the office, which meant driving into Ten Springs at six, still groggy, and being reminded that it used to be the office that Batten and I shared, all before meeting Rob at the gym. If I hadn't been a morning person before, I sure as fuck wasn't one now.

  “I’ll grab a protein shake after my run,” I evaded, and twisted my arm to force Hood to let go. His squawked complaint was ridiculous; he’d taught me how to get out of that hold himself. I slipped out of the sparring room and went to the nearest side of the track to check my laces. Hood didn't follow me, but his disapproval did.

  The track was almost empty but for a few spry seniors power-walking in the outside lane and a guy I had started to refer to as My Buddy. For the past month or so, he’d been hanging around the track every day at the same time I was, and seemed to maneuver himself into the same rooms Hood and I occupied, even when we switched it up for variety. The only place he didn’t follow, besides the locker room and bathroom, was the sparring room; maybe he didn’t want to see just how badly I could kick his ass.

  Buddy was slightly less than six feet tall, in fair physical shape, and was polite with his eye beams, in that he was attempting to be careful not to let me see when he was checking me out. It had taken me weeks to catch on, mostly because I wasn’t in a noticing-people place; when I mentioned him to Hood, I got the you-should-have-seen-him-earlier frown of consternation. Part of my self-defense training involved noting suspicion-worthy people and details that might relate to my safety. I didn’t get any danger vibes from Buddy even after I clued into his always there-ness. As far as I was concerned, he was just a dude who preferred to work out at the same time I did. Every day. Where I was exercising. I wasn’t worried. I mean, I could have been worried, but that would have meant I needed to give two feathered fucks. Fortunately, I found myself freshly fuckless.

  I took a second to do the details thing with Buddy (dark brown hair, blue eyes, grey track pants, red and grey sneakers, Blue Jays baseball cap that he took off before running) before I decided to do ten kilometers instead of five. My personal best so far, without any witchy intervention, was forty-nine minutes, but I was feeling particularly spunky today. I was already warmed up, I had energy to blow off that I hadn't burned off sparring with Hood, and my mental confidence was high. I adjusted my short black ponytail; I had chopped it above my shoulders yesterday and my ghost hair was already brushing them again. I could see Hood on the other side of the safety glass. He flashed me five fingers – a command, not a request — and then shot one in the direction of the men’s shower room. I showed him ten fingers; when he scowled, I showed him my favorite one on both hands. I would have my run whether my red-headed mother hen clucked or not.

  I took one last moment to check in with myself, looking for any funny or odd sensations; I’d passed another full moon successfully, and by that, I mean without growing a pelt of fur and my bones cracking and re-aligning. This morning, I didn’t sense anything foxy within, and nothing foxier than usual. I didn’t know if I would, or should; I couldn't see any signs whether or not the lycanthropic virus from Gunther Folkenflik’s bite had taken hold in my body. Though lycanthropes were the most-studied cryptid on the books, they were still considered legally human, and medical studies were strictly voluntary. Most lycanthropes refused; the stigma was deeply ingrained, with workplace and social discrimination the sad norm. As a result, there were too many lingering medical mysteries about the virus, and I felt like I was finding my way blind on my situation. A wait-and-see proposition. Wait-and-see sucked a box of hairy balls through a bendy straw.

  Buddy had started his first lap by the time I joined him, which meant to catch me, he had to pick up the pace, and I had no intention of making it easy for him. When he fell in behind me, he slowed up again. One of these days, I was going to stop dead and shout boo! just to see what would happen. Until that day, I worked hard at ignoring the sound of his cross trainers striking the track a few steps behind me. I smirked at how hard he was breathing to keep up.

  Forty-six minutes later, I slowed to do a cool-down lap and pumped a fist at my side; personal record time. I’d lost Buddy at some point, either because he couldn't keep that pace as long as I had, or he simply hadn't had ten K in his workout plan. In any case, I entered the locker room on a runner’s high. After quickly showering and changing into black jeans, a black shirt, belted on my holster purse, and laced up my worn Doc Marten boots, I finger-combed and braided my unruly, turquoise-and-black ghost hair into a thick, wet plait. I reapplied a careful layer of gauze to the werefox bite on my forearm and the burn scar around my neck from where Asmodeus had tail-whipped me in Skulesdottir. Without looking too long at my reflection, I finished up and hit the bricks.

  Rob was waiting just outside the gym, now in his brown Lambert County sheriff’s uniform sans hat, smelling fresh and looking concerned. When I breezed past him with my bag over my shoulder, he followed me to my new Buick.

  “If you’re gonna arrest me, I think you should know, officer,” I said amicably, “I plan to resist and can probably take you. Better get your cuffs ready.”

  He drawled a dorky fake laugh for me. Hyuk-hyuk. “I think you should start getting relaxation massages, or therapy, or consider taking a yoga class.”

  “Already do yoga at home.”

  “Something relaxing,” he went on, ignoring me. “None of that Pilates fusion or Bikram hot power yoga. Just gentle stuff.”

  “Sayin’ I need to chill out, Red?”

  “I’m saying you need to slow down.”

  I stopped at the Buick and opened the trunk to toss in my bag, and then checked the time on my phone and turned the ringer back on. It dinged that I had missed messages and texts waiting. I’d deal with them at the office. “I’m late for work.”

  Hood tried to take my elbow again but this time, I dodged it. “You’re the boss,” he said.

  “Umayma’s the boss.” I shrugged. “I made her my manager so I’d be accountable to someone.”

  “No one is expecting you until eleven.”

  “You don’t know my appointment schedule,” I scoffed then shot him a look. “Harry told you. What is this, a tag team?” I did my lofty but still terrible British impression of Harry. “‘You talk to her, officer; she won’t bloody listen to me.’ Look, I appreciate the concern, but you can stow it. Both of you need to stop clucking. I’m fine.”

  “What did you eat today?” Hood asked again.

  I sighed, rolling my head back to stare up at the dreary March sky. “Harry made me two eggs, scrambled, with red peppers and a side of rye toast. Buttered. Happy?”

  I checked; he did not look at all happy. “You know I can call and confirm that, right?”

  Not until after dusk, smartass. “I also know you’ve got no business policing what I eat, but if it blows your skirt up, sheriff, knock yourself out.”

  “There’s no point in my coaching you if you don’t listen to my advice.”

  Point, Hood; I sighed a
nd nodded. “I know.”

  “You’re getting real good at lying to me, and I don’t like it one bit.” Hood chewed the inside of his mouth. “You think I can’t tell you haven’t eaten? You’re hungry.”

  “I‘m not,” I said honestly. I hadn’t felt like eating in weeks. Not since the—don’t do this. I started seeing the throne room, flashes of color, the marble floor, dark wings, a red hat, a bloody scrap of leather jacket, a dead queen, and shook it off. Nope, nope, nope.

  “Your body is hungry,” Rob said, kindly now, reading my pinched expression. “I can see the weight loss in your face.”

  “Can you see the I’m-gonna-clobber-you in my face, too?” I tried to joke.

  He carried on like he hadn’t heard me. “You’re also dehydrated. You can’t live on coffee and vitamins.”

  “I’ll add some vodka to my diet.” And sleeping pills. And caffeine pills. And whatever else gets me through this mess. “Are we done with the lecture, Red?”

  “Don’t do that.”

  I sighed, feeling helpless. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Talk to me,” he said. “And if you can’t do that, at least have a meal. Pop by Claire’s and throw down on a plate of pancakes with a side of fruit. Glass of milk won’t kill you, but I might, if you keep up this self-destructive bullshit. Understood?”

  He was right, and he was trying to help, and I felt like a proper asshole. I couldn’t look at him for a full minute, squinting across the parking lot at the intense sun turning all the windshields to Klieg lamps. I noticed my avid fan, Blue Jays hat back on, limping a little on his left leg, heading out to his car, and I motioned in his direction with my chin.

  “There goes My Buddy.”

  “Good,” Hood grumbled. “I want to run those plates, make sure he doesn’t have prior convictions for criminal harassment or felony stalking.” Then he swung his no-nonsense gaze back at me, not about to be distracted that easily. “Pancakes. Promise?”