Secondhand Souls (2 page)

2

The Rumors of My Demise

Y
ou can’t just shag a nun one time then dine out on it for the rest of your life,” said Charlie Asher.

“You’re not exactly dining out,” said Audrey. She was thirty-five, pale and pretty, with a side-swoop of auburn hair and the sort of lean strength and length of limb that made you think she might do a lot of yoga. She did a lot of yoga. “You never leave the house.”

She loved Charlie, but in the year they’d been together, he’d changed.

She was sitting on an Oriental rug in what had been the dining room of the huge Victorian house that was now the Three Jewels Buddhist Center. Charlie stood nearby.

“That’s what I’m saying. I can’t go out like this. I need to have a life, make a difference.”

“You have made a difference. You saved the world. You defeated the forces of darkness in battle. You’re a winner.”

“I don’t feel like a winner; I’m fourteen inches tall, and when I walk, my dick drags in the dirt.”

“Sorry,” Audrey said. “It was an emergency.” She hung her head, pulled her knees up to her chin, and hid her face. He
had
changed. When she’d met him he’d been a sweet, handsome widower—a thin fellow who wore nice, secondhand suits and was desperately trying to figure out how to raise a six-year-old daughter on his own in a world gone very strange. Now he stood knee-high, had the head of a crocodile, the feet of a duck, and he wore a purple satin wizard’s robe under which was slung his ten-inch schlong.

“No, it’s fine, fine,” Charlie said. “It was a nice thought.”

“I thought you’d like it,” Audrey said.

“I know. And you
did
save me. I’m not trying to be ungrateful.” He attempted a reassuring smile, but his sixty-eight spiked teeth and glassy black eyes diluted the reassuring effect. He really missed having eyebrows to raise in a friendly way. He reached out to pat her arm, but the raptor talons that she’d given him for hands poked her and she pulled away. “It’s a very nice unit,” he added quickly. “It’s just, well, not very useful. Under different circumstances, I’m sure we’d both enjoy it.”

“I know, I feel like a bad genie.”

“Don’t tease, Audrey, it’s hard enough without imagining you dressed as a genie.”

They’d made love once, well, a few times, the night before he’d died, but after she’d resurrected his soul in this current body, which she’d built from spare parts and luncheon meat, they’d agreed that they would abstain from sex because it would be creepy—and because he lost consciousness whenever he got an erection—but mostly because it would be creepy.

“No, I mean I feel like you made a wish, and I granted it, but you forgot to specify the circumstances, so you were tricked.”

“When did I ever wish I had this?” He gestured to his dong, which unfurled out of his robe and plopped onto the rug.

“You were pretty delirious when you were dying. I mean, you didn’t explicitly
ask
for it, but you
did
go on about your regrets, most of which seemed to be about women you hadn’t had sex with. So I thought—”

“I’d been poisoned. I
was dying.”

During his battle in the sewers below San Francisco with a trinity of ravenlike Celtic death goddesses called the Morrigan, one had raked him with her venomous claws, which eventually killed him.

“Well, I was improvising,” said Audrey. “I’d just had sex for the first time in twelve years, so I may have put a bit too much emphasis on the male parts. Overcompensated.”

“Like with your hair?”

“What’s wrong with my hair?” She patted her swoop of hair, which approximated the shape of Hokusai’s
The Great Wave
, and would have looked more in place on the runway of an avant-garde fashion show in Paris than it did anywhere in San Francisco, especially in a Buddhist center.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Charlie said. How had he blundered into talking about her hair? He was a beta male and he knew by instinct that there was no winning when it came to discussing a woman’s hair. No matter where on that path you started, you were bound to stumble into a trap. Sometimes he thought he might have lost a mental step or two in the transfer of his soul to this body, even if it had been done only moments after his death. “I
love
your hair,” he said, trying for the save. “But you’ve said yourself that you were sort of overcompensating for having your head shaved for twelve years in Tibet.”

“Maybe,” she said. She was going to have to let it go. For one thing, as a Buddhist nun, being vain and whiny about how her hair looked was a distinct regression in spiritual evolution; plus, she
had
trapped the man she loved in a tiny body she’d cobbled together from disparate animal parts and a good-sized block of turkey ham, and she felt responsible. This was not the first time they’d had this discussion, and she couldn’t bear to extricate herself from it using a weak,
Kung F
u of the Disrespected Hairdo
move. She sighed. “I don’t know how to get you into a proper body, Charlie.”

So there it was, the truth as she knew it, laid out on the carpet as limp and useless as—well—you know.

Charlie’s jaw (and there was a lot of it) dropped open. Before, she’d always said it might be complicated, difficult, but now . . . “When I started buying soul vessels from your and the other Death Merchants’ stores, putting them into the Squirrel People, I didn’t know how to do that either. I mean, I knew the ritual, but there was no text that said it would work. But it did. So maybe I can figure something out.”

She didn’t believe for a second she could figure it out. She’d moved souls from soul vessels into the meaty dolls she constructed, using the
p’howa of forceful projection
, thinking that she was saving them. And she’d used the
p’howa of undying
on six terminally ill old ladies, thinking she was saving their lives, when, in fact, she had simply slowed their deaths. She was a Buddhist nun who had been given the lost scrolls of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and she could do things that no on else on earth could do, but she couldn’t do what Charlie wanted her to.

“The problem is the body, isn’t it?” asked Charlie.

“Kind of. I mean, we know there are people out there walking around without souls, and that eventually a soul vessel will find them, they will find
it,
but what would happen to their personality if we forced your soul into someone, then they encounter their soul vessel?”

“That would probably be bad.”

“Right, plus, when a soul goes into a vessel it loses its personality: the longer it’s out of a body, the less personality it retains, which is good. I think that’s why we learn as Buddhists that we have to let go of ego to ascend spiritually. So what if I could move your soul into someone who didn’t have a soul, hasn’t encountered their soul vessel yet. It might destroy their personality, or yours. I don’t want to lose you again.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say. She was right, of course. The Squirrel People were prime examples of souls without memory of their personalities. Except for a couple, whom Audrey had moved when the soul had been fresh in the soul vessel; all of them were just goofy little meat puppets. They’d built their own little city under the porch.

“Phone,” said the meat puppet Bob as he entered the room, followed by a dozen other Squirrel People Charlie’s size. Bob was so called because Audrey had constructed him using a bobcat skull, which now sat on the bright red miniature beefeater uniform of a Tower of London guard. He was the only one of the Squirrel People besides Charlie who could talk; the others hissed, clicked, and mimed to get their points across, but they were all elegantly dressed in the costumes Audrey had made for them.

Bob handed the cordless handset to Audrey, who clicked the speaker button.

“Hello,” she said.

A little girl’s voice said, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!”

Audrey held the phone out for Charlie. “It’s for you.”

D
etective Inspector Nick Cavuto, Rivera’s partner on the SFPD for fifteen years, stood over the pile of pale and black that lay on the floor behind the counter of Rivera’s store.

“Looks like you killed a witch,” he said. “Sad,” he said. “Lunch?”

He was six foot four, two hundred and sixty pounds, and took great pride in playing the old-school, tough-guy detective: wearing a fedora from the 1940s, rumpled suits, chomping on cigars he never lit, and carrying a blackjack in his back pocket that Rivera had never seen him use. In the Castro, where he lived, he was known as “Inspector Bear.” Not to his face, of course.

“She’s not dead,” said Rivera.

“Shame. I was hoping munchkins would come sing the ding-dong song in your shop.”

“She’s not dead.”

“We could knock off a couple of verses if you want. I’ll start. You come in on ‘
which old witch
’?”

“She’s not dead.”

“How long’s she been out?”

“About twenty minutes, then thirty minutes, that’s when I called you, then”—he checked his watch—“about fifteen minutes.”

“So she came to and you rezapped her?”

“Until I could figure out what to do.”

“You miss the job, don’t you?” Cavuto pushed his hat back on his head and looked to Rivera for the confession. “You know, technically, you being active reserve, you can ride along with me anytime you feel like Tasing someone. Zapping random hippie chicks in your store can’t be good for business. You’ll have to buy lunch, of course.”

When they were both on the job, Cavuto usually started talking about lunch while he was still eating breakfast.

“She’s not a normal hippie chick.”

“No doubt, most people are just down then right back up. That’s a long time to be out from a stun gun.”

Rivera shrugged. “It’s her best quality, as far as I can tell.”

“You’re going to have to figure something out, you can’t keep stunning her, I can smell burning—is that Scotch?”

“Peat, I think. Yeah. That’s not from the stun gun, that’s just how she smells.”

“Want me to cuff her? Take her in? I can probably get a psych hold on her for the outfit alone.”

“I think she might be a supernatural being,” Rivera said. He rubbed his temples so he didn’t have to look at Cavuto’s reaction.

“Like the alleged bird woman you allegedly shot nine times before she allegedly turned into a giant raven and allegedly flew the fuck off ? Like that?”

“She was going to kill Charlie Asher.”

“You said she was giving him a hand job.”

“This one’s different.”

“No hand job?”

“No, in that she’s a completely different creature. This one doesn’t have claws that I can see. This one just screams.”

“But you’re sure she’s supernatural because . . . ?”

“Because when she screams my head fills with images of people dying and other horrible things. She’s a supernatural being.”

“You’re
a supernatural being, ya berk,” said a female voice from the floor. She sat up.

Rivera and Cavuto jumped back, the latter with a slight yip.

“One of those wee soul collectors, ain’t ya? Sneakin’ about all invisible-like.” She tossed her hair out of her face—a twig flew out onto the carpet.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” said Cavuto, acting as if he hadn’t just yipped in fear like a tiny frightened dog.

“AHHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEEE!”

The two jumped back farther as she climbed to her feet. Cavuto shook his head as if trying to clear a cloud from his vision.

“See?” Said Rivera.

“Do you have any ID ma’am?” asked Cavuto.

“I’m
Bean Sidhe
, ya great mortal twat! AHHHHHHHIEEEEEEEE!”

“ZZZZZT!”
said the stun gun.

She fell back into a pile of rags. Cavuto had snatched the stun gun and put her down himself. He handed it back to Rivera then knelt, drew the handcuffs from his belt, and snapped them around her slight wrists.

“She’s cold.”

“Supernatural,” said Rivera.

“She’s not the only one, evidently.” He took off his hat so Rivera could see his cocked eyebrow of inquisition.

“I’m not supernatural.”

“I don’t judge. I am not a judger. It’s traumatic. I know how I felt when I got outed by surprise.”

“How was that a surprise? You were marching in the Pride Parade wearing your dress blue uniform with no pants and a yellow codpiece.”

“Didn’t mean I was gay;
Cops without Pants
was the theme that year. You got any duct tape? That shriek is fucking spooky.” Cavuto rolling with the weird, as he always had. He had the ability to deny a supernatural situation while simultaneously dealing with it in a practical way, which is why Rivera had called him in the first place.

“You’re going to tape her mouth?”

“Only until I get her to St. Francis and can get them to sedate her and sign off on a psych hold. I’ll say she did it herself.”

“St. Francis isn’t ten blocks from here. Throw her in the car, hit the lights, and you’ll be there before she comes to.”

“I’m not going to carry her to the car when she is perfectly capable of walking on her own, probably.”

“I’ll help you. It might be twenty minutes before she comes to.”

“Plenty of time for you to go buy burgers down the block and bring them back.”

“I’ll call the order in and go pick it up.”

“Curly fries. Two doubles, no tomato. You’re buying.”

“Inspector Cavuto, you are a huge lunch whore,” said Rivera, reaching for the phone.

“
Protect and served, lunch
—SFPD motto.” The big cop grinned. “But it may not be a bad idea to keep her down. I have some zip restraints in the car for her ankles. Call for burgers.”

Rivera hit the burger button on speed dial and watched his ex-partner lumber out to the brown Ford sedan, which was, as usual, parked in a red zone. The big man popped the trunk and stirred around inside.

The girl from the burger place came on the line with a perky, “Polk Street Gourmet Burgers, can I help you?”

“Yeah, I’d like—”

ZZZZZT!