Anton Strout - Deader Still

Godfrey checked the page and shook his head. “Not unless there’s something seriously paranormal about Ramses the Second that we don’t know about. It’s only in truly bad fantasy books that popular historical figures ever turn out to be supernatural or dabbling in the dark arts.”

He scanned the page with his finger. “Sadly,” he continued, “the monolith needles were erected in celebration of Ramses’s military victories, not to celebrate a dark covenant or anything like that. You know, I’m starting to think this Cleopatra’s Needle might not be as evil as you think it is. After all, I doubt Egypt would have gifted it to America if it was a lightning rod for collecting evil. Don’t you think?”

I couldn’t argue with him.

“You talk sense,” I said. He saw the look on my face and gave my shoulder a collegial pat. It felt awkward and forced, as if Godfrey didn’t often have much contact with other people.

“I can work on the hieroglyphs,” Godfrey said with a spark in his voice, “but that’s going to take a while. It’s also going to take some time to go through all the cross references too, but on the surface I don’t see anything terribly supernatural about this needle of yours. Sorry.”

I stood up and gave him a reciprocal pat on the back. When I was done, Godfrey pulled at his lapels to smooth out his coat where my hand had touched him.

“Well, thanks for trying,” I said.

Without another word, Godfrey shoved his face back into the pile of reading on the table and was once again off in his private mental world. I slowly backed away so as not to disturb him and headed back to the stairs, alone.

I had to figure out how to best utilize what remained of my day. I checked my watch as I climbed back up to the Department’s office level. I could go to the Javits Center, but by the time I got there most of the day on the show floor would be over. Perhaps I could serve the Department better by staying at the office and working on my backlog of paperwork. Having a break from Connor would be nice, too. I’m sure we’d have a jolly old time later staking out Central Park for the jogger’s ghost at the crack of “Oh God” o’clock, but for now, some mindless office work seemed the perfect remedy.

Once I was back at my desk, I started sorting through my mountain of paperwork, looking for anything to fill out in conjunction with the vampire case. There had to be something I could do to help move things along while the office bureaucrats flowed with their molasseslike efficiency. Ever since the Inspectre had secretly put me in charge of the investigation, I had felt like a bossy ass, but at least I had some time alone for now to get some paperwork out of the way.

Not that I was able to get anything started. After looking through the first few inches of paper, I realized I was fresh out of Form SSO—Shufflers, Shamblers, & Others, where the vampire qualified under Other. Filling it out would speed up the Enchancellors, and without it I was screwed. Connor, seasoned pro of pencils and papers, probably had it, though. I snuck over to his desk to snag a few. Connor’s desk was locked this time. I thought back to when I had been looking for the Spidey PEZ Dispenser but found his folder of clippings about me instead. Maybe he thought I might accidentally find it—like I had—and decided to lock it away just in case.

Without being able to check the drawers for the form, I hoped he had some of them in the shuffle of paperwork on top of it. Psychometry was a great tool when it came to playing lost and found.

I sat down at his desk and placed my hands flat across the top of it and paused before throwing my power into it. The electric connection was instantaneous and I set my mind to finding the forms I needed.

The world in my mind’s eye switched to some time yesterday, the only indicator being the slightly smaller piles of paperwork on both of our desks. It was disorienting being Connor, because I was staring across the desk at yesterday Simon filling out the incident report on the party boat massacre. At that moment, that version of me wasn’t paying attention to Connor at all.

Connor, however, was focused on a single sheet of paper, which I assumed was the form I was looking for, but something was wrong. I tried to change my focus to the paper itself . . . only to find it blank. I could feel Connor’s eyes moving. He was definitely reading something on the page, but I couldn’t see it, even though I was staring straight at it.

I threw all of my concentration into it, pressed my power into reading the paper. Something that felt like a sinus headache started to throb, but I pushed even harder in my attempt to read the letter. The world went black.

When I woke up, I found myself lying on the floor, tipped over in Connor’s chair. Luckily, since I had fallen over behind both our desks, I was blocked from the view of anyone who would have been passing down the aisle. The back of my head hurt like crazy, and when I felt it, there was a painful lump just above the base of my skull from where I had hit the floor.

I stood up, shaking worse than I usually did after a psychometric episode. I stumbled over to my desk and fished around in my drawer for a roll of Life Savers. Erring on the side of caution, I grabbed two of them. This wasn’t normal. Usually I felt a little drained from using my power, but it shouldn’t have been this bad.

Someone or something had blocked me from reading Connor’s letter.

I headed home nursing the goose egg on the back of my head. I was all prepared for a good sulky walk and then a few hours of sleep before meeting up with Connor at Central Park again, but sadly, what I wanted didn’t seem to matter much to the universe at large. When I parted the curtains of the movie theater, there was Mina, sitting in one of the coffee shop’s comfy chairs, waiting for me. Her back was pressed into one corner of the chair, and her legs were thrown in irreverence over the opposite arm of it, showing off her evil little curves. She was still dressed as if she had come from watching The Matrix one too many times.

“What are you doing here?” I said. I quickly closed the curtain behind me, not really sure what I was trying to hide. The offices were well obscured behind the door at the very back of the theater, so all I really ended up hiding was the movie theater itself. I quickly looked around the coffee shop. At this time of night there weren’t too many people I knew from the D.E.A. in there. More important, I was glad to see that Jane wasn’t there. Her running into Mina right now was the last thing I wanted.

Mina swung her legs off the arm of the chair and crossed them at the ankle as she sank farther back into the cushions, giving a catlike stretch that accentuated every curve of her body. I tried not to notice, but failed miserably.

“You must really like vampires, huh?” she said when she settled down.

I wasn’t following. “I’m sorry . . . ?”

Mina looked at me like I was thick in the head. “I’ve been sitting here for hours,” she said. “You must have sat in there and watched Nosferatu a million times today.”

Right, Nosferatu . It all came clear. For a moment I’d forgotten that Mina didn’t know what I really did for a living, so she assumed I had been sitting in the movie theater all day.

Still, what was she doing here at all?

I sat down across from her and leaned in close, whispering. “Have you been following me, Mina?”

She laughed, a little bit of that old-school crazy lighting up in her eyes. “God, that sounds so stalkery . . .”

“And yet here we are.”

“I didn’t follow you the whole day,” she said, as if that somehow excused following me at all. Her face turned to a mask that was a combination of disgust and disdain.