Dead To Me Read online

  Dead to Me

  Anton Strout

  “Urban fantasy with a wink and a nod. Dead to Me is a genuinely fun book with a fresh take on the idea of paranormal police. I’m looking forward to seeing what Strout does next.”

  —Kelly McCullough, author of Web Mage and Cybermancy

  Drop-Dead Gorgeous

  Although Connor didn’t show any signs of psychometric power himself, he was the perfect instructor for someone like me who already possessed it.

  “You never get even the tiniest of visions like these?” I asked. “No flashes, glimpses, maybe something you might have labeled as déjà vu?”

  Connor shook his head. “Nothing. I guess it’s not in my area of expertise.”

  “So you’ve only got the one, then?”

  “One what?” Connor said, confused.

  “Area of expertise,” I said.

  Connor nodded. “That I’m aware of. In fact, you’re sitting across from it.”

  “Huh?”

  Connor leaned in and whispered, “Across from you. The brunette.” He gestured toward the woman sitting on the couch next to his chair.

  I tried to appear casual as I glanced her way and found myself staring at the fetching woman I had made eye contact with earlier.

  Outside of her natural beauty, I saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Great skin, smartly dressed. I judged her to be in her late twenties. I leaned across the table toward Connor.

  “Women are your expertise?” I whispered. “What about her?”

  “Oh,” Connor said matter-of-factly, picking up his iced coffee and taking a lengthy sip, “she’s dead.”

  To the mystical and elusive Orlycorn,

  a rare creature that possesses the power

  to make all things possible

  Acknowledgments

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently so does an acknowledgments page.

  First and foremost, I must thank the other Dorks of the Round Table, authors Jeanine Cummins and Carolyn Turgeon, without whom I never would have written much of anything; my editor, Jessica Wade—your red pen is swift but just; copyeditor Joan Matthews, for making my words seem all the more polished; Montana Wojczuk, Daniel Schermele, and my agent, Kristine Dahl, over at ICM; author Jennifer Belle, queen bee of the “world’s worst” workshop, and the rest of my fellow workshoppers.

  I may write the words, but that is only one of many integral steps. To every department at Penguin Group (USA) Inc., for every last thing you do to make a book like this happen, but especially Norman Lidofsky and the paperback sales force.

  To all my friends, family, and colleagues for their support: Susan Allison, Bonnie, Dustin, and Elyse Clark, Ginjer Buchanan, Hank Cochrane, Christine Cody, Laura Corless, Sharon Gamboa, Leslie Gelbman, Michelle Kasper, Patrick Nolan, Don Redpath, Don Rieck, Lisa Pannek, Gary and Jean Strout, Jeremy Tescher, Clan Trieber, Edna and Raymond Van Valkenburg, Trish Weyenberg, Michael Yarmark, and finally Annette Fiore, Judith Murello, and artist Don Sipley, for an amazing cover that I couldn’t be happier with. If I’ve forgotten any of you, don’t worry…I need to save some thanks for the sequel anyway.

  And last but not least, to you, the reader. Without your bloodshot eyes poring over these words, this book would only exist in my mind. Writing it was only half the journey; sharing it is the other.

  There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?

  —Woody Allen

  Content

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  1

  I managed to get out a quick “Tamara, wait…” before I felt the interior doorknob of my SoHo apartment jab into the small of my back. Tamara ground against me like she was trying to make her body occupy the same space as mine—and I certainly wasn’t complaining. Our mouths locked, the sweet taste of whatever umbrellaed concoction she’d been drinking mixing with the Corona flavor of mine. It was a surprisingly good combination.

  “Simon, shhh…” she whispered, pushing me even farther into the apartment. She fell toward me with a sudden “Ow!” It was dark, but I could still see her hopping about on one leg. She had been trying to strip off my brown suede coat and the GABBA GABBA HEY Ramones T-shirt I was wearing, but now she clutched her knee.

  “You okay?” I asked, finding the switch from horn-dog to concerned a difficult one to make.

  “Yeah,” she said, and hissed out a long, slow sigh of pain. “What did I hit?”

  “Just a packing crate,” I said, reaching out and steadying her. I contemplated turning on the lights to check on her, but hesitated, debating whether or not the other two dozen packing crates around my living room might scare her off. It wasn’t that I was a slob, but given my workload at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, my personal antiques acquisitions had become backlogged. They were spread out across my dangerously darkened living room like little landmines from the Ghost of Bruises Yet to Come.

  Luckily, a little knee pain wasn’t enough to stop Tamara. We resumed our lip lock while I weaved us safely past the labyrinth of crates and down the hall to my bedroom. If she was still hurt, she hid it well. I guessed that the promise of sexual healing was helping her tough through any damage to her knee.

  Thankfully the last part of the journey toward my bedroom went without incident. The edge of the bed hit the backs of my calves, bending me at the knees, and I fell back onto it as Tamara threw herself on top of me.

  Ever since I’d accidentally knocked over her drink at Eccentric Circles three weeks ago, our encounters had consisted of one sexually charged (but unfulfilled) moment after another. But not tonight. Tamara straddled me, her hotness lit only by the moonlight coming in through the window. The smell of cinnamon rose off her, swirling around in my head, and under her jacket her tight little black dress—the one that every other woman in New York City seemed to own—clung to her like a second skin. I was in heaven.

  Not that things stayed heavenly for long. Around me, things rarely did. As Tamara finished struggling out of her coat, she threw it to the side. Her cell phone slipped free from it, hit the mattress, and rolled to rest against my arm. No big deal for most people, but with my preternatural powers, that was all it took to ruin things.

  It’s called psychometry—the ability to divine information about people or events solely by touching personal objects. As Wonder-Twin-powers cool as that might sound, it wasn’t. I tended to end up knowing more than I should about a person…or wanted to.

  I started thrashing around underneath Tamara, desperate to avoid what I knew was coming. She seemed oblivious to my escape attempts, and when I tried to sit up, she pushed me playfully back down. With an evil grin, she pinned my shoulders to the bed before attacking me with a barrage of kisses. My last thought as the electric pulse of my power kicked in was Oh shit.

  Once under the influence of a rush of psychometric power, I had very little control, especially when it took me by surprise. Without my emotions in check, the power latched on to t
he sexual energy between the two of us and buffeted me with a flood of details from Tamara’s past.

  It was full Technicolor glory in my mind as I was struck by the psychic vision of Tamara’s firm, naked form. It stung all the more since I’d been mere seconds away from experiencing the real thing for myself. Instead I was forced to watch her getting it on with another guy—a goatee-sporting, muscle-bound blond who was, of course, infinitely more attractive than me. Tamara wore nothing but enough red, gold, and green beads around her neck to make Mr. T jealous.

  Mardi Gras. It had to be.

  The beads swayed hypnotically, rhythmically—shink shink shink—as the two of them pawed at each other like cats in heat. I wanted to turn away, but in the vision I was incapable of doing so. One moment I was watching the guy’s well-muscled chest as he thrust his body against hers. The next brought Tamara’s face into focus, her eyes shut tight and her curly brown hair loose around her shoulders as this stranger enjoyed things I had hoped to be doing myself this very evening. And the beads shinked on…

  What the vision showed me was something deeply private from Tamara’s life. I was someplace I shouldn’t be, feeling every touch, hearing every sound of her and some guy from her past bumping uglies…it was enough to drive me mad. With every Mardi Gras–fueled gyration, gouging my eyes out started to seem like a better idea. Not that it would have blocked the visions.

  Flashes of reality slowly began to slip back to me. Tamara was still oblivious to the private mental hell I was experiencing while pinned underneath her. Her lips were now clamped down on my neck like a vacuum hose and her hands were busy tugging up my shirt. All of these were things I would ordinarily have been thrilled to experience—but I couldn’t enjoy them. The images of Tamara’s own private Girls Gone Wild moment had become a permanent scar in my brain. Parts of me withered in response. The troops retreated, as it were.

  When the psychometric flash finally faded, the usual hypoglycemic side effects kicked in and my entire body felt drained of energy. Using the last of my will, I somehow found the strength to push Tamara off me. She fell back onto the mattress, and I rolled weakly off the bed and onto the floor.

  “What the hell was that all about?” she asked as she righted herself on the bed. I could hear the surprise in her voice, but I ignored the question and started crawling for the door. Between my psychic disorientation, physical weakness, and the occasional Mardi Gras flashes echoing in my head, I felt like I might pass out. The images had almost faded for good, but then one last vivid burst of wild thrusting brutalized my poor brain. Tamara’s voice moaning his name echoed wildly in my head: Fergus! Fergus! Fergus! With that, my body gave out and I fell over, unable to move. The refreshingly cool wood of the floor pressed against my face.

  “Fergus…?” I muttered weakly before I could stop myself. I still felt half in the vision, unable to control myself. I stared up at Tamara, her eyes now wide.

  She leaned over and lowered her face until I could see the sheer shock on it.

  “What the hell did you just say?” There was genuine surprise in her voice now.

  All I could feel was intense sadness over the way things were rapidly unfolding—the way they always unfolded when I started to get close to anyone. For three weeks, I had been able to enjoy the myriad little things about the tease leading up to tonight. The way she walked across a floor, the way her eyes drew me in, the way I had become envious simply of her clothes because they had the pleasure of moving over her body. And now, it was all coming down around me.

  Tamara jumped up from the bed and paced toward me. She looked embarrassed and shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How do you know about Fergus?” she said, confused.

  Her words swam around in my head, but I couldn’t force myself to say anything more. My struggle to stand back up took all my focus and energy. I pressed my back firmly against one side of the doorway and began inching myself up. My legs shook beneath me with the effort, but shortly I found myself standing with the arch of the door stabilizing me. As I steadied myself, Tamara adjusted her dress and moved closer, getting in my face.

  “How could you know about that?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she became defensive. “It was New Orleans…just us girls away from our boyfriends. I…I got caught up in how much attention was being paid to me, but I never told anyone. I didn’t tell the girls later that night, I didn’t tell my boyfriend when I got back…nobody knows about Fergus.”

  All I could do was take it. Hell, I had to. I could barely stand, let alone tell her the truth. Besides, Tamara’s sense of normalcy had been pushed over the edge and she was desperately trying to make connections that might make sense.

  “Have you been stalking me?” she said, still puzzled. She paused before discounting the idea completely. Then a new idea struck her and her eyes opened wide.

  “Have you been reading my diary?” she asked with venom.

  My first thought was When the hell would I have done something like that? I had never even been to her place—and for good reason. The last thing I wanted with my abilities was to surround myself with an apartment full of another person’s belongings. To Tamara, though, my snooping through her diary made a lot more sense than any explanation I could possibly share with her.

  “Answer me!” she shouted suddenly, alarming me. Tears started running down her face, but I stayed silent. And woozy.

  Without warning, Tamara swung at me, surprisingly making contact with my shoulder. It wasn’t terribly painful, but it was enough to unbalance me and send my weakened body falling back to the floor. My head bounced off the floorboards, and my vision flashed white with the searing pain of impact. I lay there, waiting for the disorientation to pass, watching helplessly as Tamara gathered her coat, her shoes, and lastly the cell phone that had triggered all of this.

  She wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. “Find someone else who’ll put up with that, Simon. Someone who likes having their privacy violated. I hear a lot of women are really turned on by guys going through their stuff. Yeah, good luck finding someone like that. ”

  Tamara ran down my darkened hall, tripped over something, and swore. On her way out, she slammed the door fiercely. My strength slowly returned as I lay on the floor. I could have gone after her, but then I thought of my track record with women and didn’t bother. It was best to just let her go.

  I understood where she was coming from well enough. I had violated her, albeit unintentionally. Fergus was a private shame from her past, and I had just thrown him out there on the table. But what could I have told her that would have made sense? There was no reasonable explanation I could have given. And even if I’d been able to explain it away and smooth things over with Tamara, I would still have to live with those images burned into my mind.

  For now I would have to deal with the sad turn of events that the evening had taken, but maybe over time my work at Other Division at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs would teach me to cope better. It was easier this way, I told myself. Chalk up another loss in the relationship column. Alone was my natural state. It was better this way.

  Saying it over and over in my head, the words started sounding convincing. But the dull thumping feeling in my chest said otherwise. Tamara was gone. I was alone. Again.

  2

  I was so shaken from such an intense psychometric reading that I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my keys from the counter. I ran back up my hall to the door next to the bathroom, unlocking its three locks. I flicked on the light and was instantly blinded by the absence of color.

  Every last object in the room was exactly the same shade of white. There was an unused desk, two empty bookshelves, and a block of large, square storage cubes. A single cushioned chair—also white—sat alone in the center of the room.

  The White Room was my inner sanctum, a room I had put together to be as psychically neutral a place as possible. I needed a place that was clean of any potential trigger
s to my power, since everything else in my apartment was potentially chock full of other people’s pasts. I came there whenever I needed to calm myself after a particularly bad psychometric incident, and tonight’s Mardi Gras Slamfest definitely made that list.

  I sat down in the chair before I collapsed. When my panic finally settled down after several minutes, I realized that sitting here doing nothing wasn’t the solution.

  I just had to get out of my apartment for now. I got up from the chair, turned off the light, and relocked the three locks on the door. On the way out of the apartment, I chugged a glass of OJ to fight the hypoglycemic aftereffect of using my power. I slipped my black gloves on, heading for the elevator. I rarely went anywhere without my gloves these days. They were old and worn and the one thing that muffled my powers. It just made life easier to wear them, but second skin or not, they always made me feel a bit like the Bubble Boy.

  As I walked from my digs in SoHo up toward Union Square, I stopped at my trusty coffee guy and caught word that some real vintage Antiques Roadshow action was happening under the West Side Highway at Seventy-Ninth Street. I jumped straight into a cab. When the taxi approached the turnoff, the driver spooked out on me, refusing to take his cab any farther west. After a minute of pointless arguing, I got out and slammed the door.

  Prick. Did he think antiquarians really posed such a threat to society that he couldn’t take me a few streets closer?

  I walked the last few blocks west toward the address my coffee guy had given me. Makeshift lights flooded an impromptu night market that had taken root directly beneath an underpass of the West Side Highway, its tables and booths looking hastily thrown up and capable of disappearing in a flash if need be. The first time I had heard of these quirky shopping markets was through a friend of mine who had visited Taiwan. They were a life-form all their own, he told me—spur-of-the-moment shanty towns that sprang up and broke down in a single night, only to reappear like a magician’s assistant in a completely different location the next. Last year, I noticed that the phenomenon had quietly made its way stateside, mutating into a scattering of caravan flea markets that popped up occasionally throughout Manhattan. I looked forward to the times when I was lucky enough to come across them.