Dirty Blood (40 page)

— Chapter 154
, Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Book
of Going Forth By Day

The last funeral I went to was for a lion. Sarah. She
was mauled to death by her lover. There was no casket. Just a
canvas tarp and some very thick plastic.

The open grave I stood before this afternoon did have
a casket. Wood and brass, a human inside laying atop satin and
cotton. My mother. And she wasn’t mauled to death by anything
except her psychosis.

The idea of leaving Delia in the ground, all by
herself, with nothing but a rosary to keep her company made me sick
to my stomach. She never had a rosary in her awake life. The douche
bag at the funeral home must’ve thought she would need one for her
eternal sleep. Presumptuous dick with his combover and his
sweat-stained shirt. I should’ve insisted on packing a wool blanket
or her favorite red sweater. The Egyptians loaded tombs with food,
jewelry, even combs and dishes. They had the right idea. North
Americans were cruel with their burials, leaving their dead to fend
for themselves with nothing but useless beads.

The generic one-size-fits-all eulogy proved that the
on-call pastor knew nothing about my mother. He was just filling
his shift, doing his job. “Aunt” Marlene and my “uncles,” Ted and
his brother Irwin, my legal guardians and the only real caregivers
I’d ever known, took turns placing their pink carnations atop the
casket, followed by a steady stream of people who were the only
family I had left—fellow circus company members, none of us bound
by blood or genes but all of us related forever. Wire walkers,
acrobats, trapeze flyers, animal wranglers, sword swallowers, a
psychic, the tattooed guy. Normal people, or, normal to me.

I stood to the side, twirling the stem of my own
flower between my fingers. I didn’t want the arms of condolence
wrapped around my shoulders, these well-meaning humans whispering
words into my ear to try and make me feel better. Nothing was going
to make me feel better, not now. Maybe not ever.

“Gemma, do you want to say a few words?” Aunt Marlene
asked me through the wrinkled, wet handkerchief under her nose. The
small crowd was silent, watching me, their eyes pained, cheeks
wet.

“What, like, hey, Mom, happy new year?” I looked
away. I knew Mar was hurting, too, but I didn’t care. I had some
leeway when it came to being an obnoxious punk. It was
my
mother who was dead,
my
mother who’d left me in the care of
others while she unraveled in any number of mental institutions,
my
mother who said she loved me but loved herself more. I
could be the biggest ass in the world, if I wanted to. I’d earned
that.

Standing around the periphery of the yard hovered a
collection of ethereal bodies lacking the density to obscure the
frosted greenery behind them. The shades. Delia wasn’t among them.
Did that mean she was in heaven? Hell? Somewhere in between? If she
were in-between, she’d have been standing among them, watching me
from the eastern tree line, stuck between this life and the next.
Where do people go after they’ve swallowed enough pills to kill a
stable full of horses?

It was too much. Too much misery. Too much sadness. I
surveyed the assemblage of forgotten souls—men, women, a few
children, some dressed in period clothing, some more recent. The
old dead mingling with the new. Seeing the kids was the hardest.
Little kids weren’t supposed to die. And they sure as hell weren’t
supposed to be shades. What kind of god does that?

I didn’t dare let my eyes linger too long for fear of
drawing the attention of fellow funeral-goers. The shades never
spoke to me, nor I to them. And I wondered if so many were present
because they knew I could see them, or if they came out for every
new addition to their hallowed ground. Like a
welcome
to the
neighborhood sorta thing.

A little girl waved at me. I waved back but felt a
hand on my opposite shoulder. As I met Marlene’s gaze, she gave me
a weak, questioning smile, one I’d seen dozens of times before:
Are they there? Are the people there?
She knew what I could
see. She, Ted, and Irwin were the
only
ones who knew I could
see, except for Delia. Delia saw them, too, but her shades were
mean, prone to endless torment. Not quiet and unobtrusive like
mine.

I nodded and looked down at my feet.

The casket shuddered on the metal framework when the
guy pressed the black button to engage the lift motor that would
lower my dead mother into the freezing ground.

“…We commend the soul of our sister departed, and we
commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust
to dust…”

The last of the flowers were lobbed into the pit.
“You want to ride back with us, Gems?” Junie. My best friend and
lifelong companion, her face blotchy and swollen from crying. She
hadn’t known my mom very well, but she’d seen the damage Delia’s
mania had inflicted upon me. It was safe to assume that Junie’s
tears were more for me than for my mom.

“No, thanks, Junie. I’m going to wait here for a
while. Feel sorry for myself a little longer.”

She hugged me and walked toward the car, trailing her
twin brother Ash and their parents. She still had her carnation in
hand, as though she’d forgotten to drop it into the grave. Knowing
Junie, she wanted to press the flower between two bricks and save
it in one of her endless scrapbooks. She’d glue it right next to
Delia’s obituary, the one the hospital filed as a matter of public
record. Boring, lacking sentiment. “Loving mother and loyal
friend.” Again, whoever was in charge of filling in the blanks of
the obit worksheet knew little to nothing about the true Delia
Flannery. No one wants to read “haunted by unseen demons” and
“prone to sudden outbursts of psychotic behavior.” Not quite as
romantic.

Marlene and Ted shook hands with a few of the other
company members while I waited, leaned against a tree. I could
smell Irwin’s pipe smoke wafting across the grounds. He was already
planted in the front seat of Ted’s truck, waiting for us to finish
up. Since his accident, he didn’t tolerate the cold very well.

“Let’s go, honey,” Marlene said, offering me her
gloved hand.

“I’m going to wait, Mar. I’ll walk back to the hotel
in a bit.”

“Gemma, it’s too far and too damned cold to walk,”
Ted said. “We can come back next weekend if you want.”

“Ted, why don’t you and Irwin head on out, grab
something to eat, and Gemma and I will get a cab in a little while,
when she’s ready to leave.”

Ted was silent for a beat, chewing on a fresh
toothpick. He couldn’t smoke in the graveyard, so toothpicks had to
suffice. “All right. Whatever you think.” He pulled out his wallet
and folded some bills into Marlene’s hand before kissing the top of
my head and heading to the truck.

The branches of a stately oak would serve as umbrella
to protect my mother from the elements, or they would once spring
arrived and the arms and fingers exploded with fresh leaves. Right
now, they were sparse and straggly. Almost scary, like witch
hands.

I separated myself from Marlene and slid to the
ground, my back against the girth of the tree’s old trunk. I folded
my long wool coat tight around my lower half and wrapped my arms
around my knees to keep the chill from sneaking up my pant legs.
The ground was hard, cold, but not wet. At least not where I was
sitting. No snow under the tree, too cold to be wet.

The crowd dispersed with relative speed, the cars
weaving their way out of the cemetery and back onto the main
highway toward the hotel. I watched Ted’s beat-up truck as it
inched forward in the queue of vehicles, the distant profile of his
brother in the passenger seat wobbling as they went over the speed
bumps a little too quickly in a rig with lousy suspension. The
right rear brake light was out.

Marlene didn’t impose herself on me by taking a seat
next to the tree. Instead, she tightened the black wrap around her
shoulders and took a quiet walk through the gravestones, pausing
now and again to read the epitaphs, glancing back at me to make
sure I was still sitting where she’d left me. An elderly shade
followed her, a woman with a hunched back and a kind face, a dirty,
threadbare shawl draped around her. The granny stood near Marlene
whenever she stopped, like an invisible tour guide.

I willed myself to cry, to squeeze out the tears
everyone expected me to shed. My eyes were parched, itchy,
uncompromising in their anti-tear position. I plucked the petals
off my carnation, creating my own snowstorm of pink on the earth
around me.

What am I supposed to do now, Mom? Tell me that.

I stared across the yard. The shades hadn’t moved
much, though a few of the children were chasing one another around
the more impressive grave markers. It made me smile a little to
think that even in death, children could still play.

A flash caught my attention, the reflection of winter
sun off the passenger door window of a black car. There was a
split-second delay between the man shutting the door and the actual
sound reaching my ear, evidence of how far away he was from where I
was seated. His movements were catlike, quick and quiet. Dressed in
a black suit and long black overcoat, the only splash of color was
a red pocket square in his left breast pocket. In his hands he
carried a sizable bouquet of pink flowers—roses, I think. His head
was down, his face obscured by the rim of his black fedora.

He walked up the slight incline and stopped just a
few feet short of the mouth of Delia’s as-yet open grave. If he saw
me sitting off to the side, he didn’t let on, just bent down,
dropped the flowers into the pit, and muttered something in a
language I couldn’t understand.

He pivoted on his heel, head still down, and moved
with equivalent stealth back to his car. So quiet were his approach
and departure that I wouldn’t have even noticed his presence had my
eyes been closed.

The only thing that confirmed that I had seen an
anonymous visitor was the sudden, strange disappearance of the
shades.

Something—or someone—had scared them off.

* * * * *

To learn more about the author, visit
http://www.jennifersommersby.com

For more titles available through Accendo Press,
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Available from Accendo Press:

Sleight by Jennifer Sommersby

DreamKiller, The Longest Day by Heather
Hildenbrand

Gordy by Heather Hildenbrand

Coming Soon from Accendo Press

Descended by Blood by Angeline Kace

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons (living or dead),
is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication, in any format, can be reproduced or transmitted in any
form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without express
written permission from the author and/or publisher.

Dirty Blood © 2010 by Heather Hildenbrand.

Edition: April 2011

About the Author

Heather Hildenbrand was born and raised in a small
town in northern Virginia where she was homeschooled through high
school. (How was it? Try having your mother as your teacher.) She
now lives in coastal VA, a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean, with
her military husband and two adorable children. She works from
home, part time, as a property manager and when she’s not furiously
pounding at the keyboard, or staring off into space whilst plotting
a new story, she’s helping her husband with DIY projects in their
home (he woodworks – she paints) or lying on the beach, soaking in
those delicious, pre-cancerous rays.

Heather loves Mexican food, hates socks with sandals,
and if her house was on fire, the one thing she’d grab is her DVR
player.