Soulless

Chapter 4

About an hour later I shifted my car into park in the driveway of my house. The tree-lined streets provided a little shade, but when I opened the car door, I felt the blast of warmth and hurried to get inside. The soles of my shoes seemed to stick on the driveway as I walked to the front door, pausing in the closed-off porch to shut the outside door before I opened the door to the house. The light was dim and mostly came in from gaps in the boards that covered all the windows, just the way Mom had set them up, screening me, the girl in the house, from the world outside every time she left.

I took a deep breath and slid my key in the lock. While Mom had been missing for the past six months, Ariadne had checked the records and told me that there wasn’t a mortgage on the place. I had used my ample earnings to keep the property taxes and homeowner’s insurance paid and a lawn and maintenance service helped keep the place up for me. I stopped by every week or so, just to make sure everything was okay, but otherwise the house was empty.

Except when Charlie came to town.

The smell of something cooking on the stove hit me as I shut the door. The air conditioner was running and I felt the effects, the cool air filtering in like a sigh of relief after holding my breath. The alarm was deactivated; no reason to keep it active since no one was living here. When last I had left, the place was clean, a little musty, but otherwise all right. I had left all Mom’s clothes in her closet, the dishes in the cupboards, but cleaned most of the food out save for the things like Ramen Noodles that didn’t have an expiration date looming.

I heard her clanging some pots in the kitchen before I saw her. She peeked a head around the wall and flashed me a smile. Her hair was dark, long, and stood out against her tanned skin and white teeth. Her lips were curled, and painted the deepest shade of red the cosmetics companies made. “Hey there.” She emerged from the kitchen and I almost blinked in surprise. I shouldn’t have; nothing about my aunt Charlene – Charlie, she liked to be called – should have surprised me by now.

She wore a white tank top that was partially sweated through, and jean shorts that were cut off way too short. Her bare feet were leaving moisture spots on the linoleum floors as she stepped, walking delicately on her toes over to me. Her midriff was bare where her shirt didn’t quite reach the waistband of her shorts, which was frayed badly and washed out, white threads where there might once have been blue, the button at the top of her fly a clash against her belly. I shook my head and she smiled wider. “Your mom didn’t like how I dress, either.”

“I don’t care how you dress.” I walked toward her, suddenly self-conscious in my heavy jeans and t-shirt that covered me to the neck.

She spread her arms wide, prompting me to give her a careful hug, avoiding the prodigious amount of skin she had exposed. “Be careful,” she said in whispered caution, “you know the stronger succubus will drain the weaker.” I pulled back and she made to muss my hair, but I pushed her away with a gloved hand, drawing a laugh from her.

“What brings you back to the Cities?” I asked, using the local slang for the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I walked my way to the couch as she leaned against the pillar at the edge of the kitchen.

“Just passing though.” She said it breezily, like she did almost everything, not a care in her world. She smiled. “Figured I’d drop in on my favorite niece.”

“Your only niece, to hear you tell it.”

“That too. You know, you could do a better job of stocking this place. All I found was Ramen.”

“Want to go out to eat?”

“No plans with your boyfriend, the agent, for tonight?” Her leer was suggestive, in a way that if my mom had ever let slip onto her face, would have freaked me out. They were so different.

“No.” I didn’t look away, exactly, but neither did I look toward her.

“Uh huh.” She bored in on me and stepped back into the kitchen, peering through the tiny pass-through that looked out into the living room. “You guys break up?”

I sat down and tugged at my jeans, which felt tight, restrictive and hotter than they had any right to be considering how low the air conditioner had been set in here. I’d feel the electricity bill this month, I bet. “No. Not exactly.” She stared through the little square hole at me, not looking away. “We had a fight.”

Her face disappeared, but her voice was still loud. “Lemme guess: about touching.”

I felt my lower lip jut out, puckering. “What else would we fight about?”

“Couples fight about lots of things, sweetie.” Her voice came from the kitchen, over the clanging of a pan. “But succubi tend to argue about one, if they’re crazy enough to be part of a couple.”

“You calling me crazy?” I said it with an air of amusement.

“Little bit. You are just like me, after all.” I caught a grin through the pass-through and then I heard water pouring down the drain in the sink. A minute later Charlie emerged from the kitchen. “I mean, there’s a whole world of men out there. You don’t really have the luxury of sleeping with the ones you like and expecting them to be alive in the morning, so…”

I looked away from her. “Yeah. I know it, he knows it, but it still makes us both crazy.” She sat down on the couch next to me, splaying out and putting her bare feet on the glass coffee table I’d bought as a replacement for the one broken months ago. “How do you deal with that?”

She had her mouth open, her tongue rolling over her molars, the very picture of disinterest. “You don’t sleep with the ones you don’t want to die, and you don’t get close enough to anybody to have it matter.”

“I just…I’m sick of being the world’s greatest tease to my boyfriend. He’s a good guy, and…” I stopped as her chest jerked in a case of the giggles. “What?”

“You don’t have to be a tease. I mean, there are other ways to—”

“Well, yeah, I mean, I know but—” I stuttered as I answered her.

“Just making sure. I wouldn’t have expected your mom to teach you anything.”

I blushed. “She didn’t. But I mean, I know stuff—”

“Sure you do, sweets. Sure you do.” Charlie slapped me on the thigh and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “So are we going out to eat or what? ‘Cause I’m starving and I poured the Ramen down the sink.”

“What?” I blinked, still thinking about what we’d been talking about a sentence before. “Oh, sure.”

“Your treat, right?” She gave me a wide grin. “Not all of us have high-paying gigs with the meta cops. The rest of us have to make our money honestly, and I blew the last of my cash getting back into town. Haven’t had a chance to stop by the…ATM…yet.”

“Sure.” I nodded at her and reached for my purse, which was hanging at my side. “My treat. There’s a Greek place over in Eden Prairie that’s really good—” My attention was caught by the sudden ringing from my bag. “Sorry.” I grabbed my cell phone and answered it while Charlie looked on with an eyebrow raised. “Hello?”

“Are you off-campus?” Ariadne’s voice was clipped, urgent, washed out slightly by the connection.

“Yeah.” I looked around the living room. “I’m just at my house, checking to make sure everything’s still all right.”

“I need you at Headquarters immediately.” Her voice was pinched, more hurried than usual. “The Director and I need to speak with you.”

“Umm.” I swallowed, heavy. “Is this about—”

“I’m not going to discuss it on an open line. Report to the Director’s office in forty-five minutes.” I heard a click and looked at the screen of my phone. She’d hung up on me.

I looked up to see Charlie staring at me, her head slanted to the side. “About this Greek place?”

I felt the tension in my guts and wondered if I was about to get a thorough ass-chewing back at the Directorate. “I can’t. I just got called back to work.”

Charlie’s jaw dropped slightly and then twisted to a kind of cold disbelief. “I just threw out the Ramen.”

“I’m sorry.” I put my phone back in my purse and my hand pushed my hair behind my ears before it fell over my eyes. “I have to go.” My hand came out with ten crisp twenty-dollar bills and I handed them to her. “This should cover dinner and a little more. I’m sorry to leave so abruptly, but—”

Her eyes lit up and she took the money a little quicker than I would have thought. “It happens.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and bit her lip as she counted the bills.

“How long are you in town this time?” I tried to catch her eyes, but they were on the money still.

“Not sure.” Casual indifference. Great. “A day or two, maybe more, maybe less.” She smiled, oddly infuriating me. “You know how it is. Sometimes I get the call and I have to get outta town.”

“Yeah, maybe you can explain how that works to me sometime.” I laced it with irony. “I need some help, when we get a chance, you know, keeping them under wraps—”

“Pfffff.” She turned her exhalation into a full-blown insult by rolling her eyes at the same time. “We’ve been over this. You absorbed them, not vice versa. It’s not that hard. You just make them do what you want them to do. It’s your body, not theirs. If they give you any flack, tell them to sit down and shut up, that it’s your head and you’ll run it however you please.”

I pondered how to explain to her how powerful Wolfe could be when he wanted to assert himself. The drug that Dr. Zollers had put me on helped keep him on a leash, along with some other pointers about building a wall in my head that Charlie had given me over the last few months, but I didn’t feel like it was enough. He was still back there; I could feel him sometimes, and I hated it. “All right. I gotta go.”

“Call me, kiddo. We’ll do lunch sometime.” She winked at me and started toward the bedroom.

“Just make sure you do the dishes before you leave.” She stopped in the hallway and shot a look back at me, a little frown with a slanted down eye that made me wish I hadn’t said anything. “You left them in the sink last time and I didn’t find them for a week.”

“Ugh, fine, yes, Mom.” She said it with a laugh and another roll of the eyes. “Tell your bosses I said hi.”

“Yeah, right. Because you want the Directorate to know about you.”

“Hell no. I’d like to remain far off their radar, if you please.” She tugged on her waistband. “They’ve probably got a file on me. You should check sometime.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They don’t have any record of my mom having a sister.”

“Uh huh. If you were the suspicious sort, you might think something of that – like I was lying?”

I started toward the door. “I don’t think you’re lying, Charlie.”

“Why’s that? Doesn’t everyone in the meta world want a piece of you? Having someone pretend to be your aunt when you still don’t totally know who to trust? Seems like kind of a winning strategy to get close to you, if it worked.” She was stock still, waiting for me to respond.

“You’re right.” I opened the door. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” I smiled at her and a puzzled look crossed her face. “You may be my aunt, but I don’t trust anybody.”

I caught a flash of a smile from her as I backed out the door. “Heh. You really are just like me. See ya later.”

I closed it behind me, stepping out onto the warmth of the porch, and felt the heat pervade me again. “Guess it runs in the family.”