Dying for a Living (A Jesse Sullivan Novel) (10 page)

How the hell was I going to keep a six-foot invisible guy with wings a secret? How does someone pretend not to hallucinate?

“You start by not talking to yourself,” he replied.

I whirled on him, processing what he’d just said. The dark smudge of his body against all that sterile white was startling enough. The strange expressions from the nursing staff and the man at the vending machine retrieving his Coke suggested, indeed, I had narrated my concerns aloud.

I flashed a few tight smiles and laughed. Nothing to worry about here. But under my breath I muttered. “Not another word.”

I found Ally where I’d left her. Dr. Stanley York stood beside her in his lab coat. Both of them looked really grave about whatever it was they were speaking about. Ally bobbed her head up and down slowly, regretfully, like she hated to agree with what Dr. York was saying. They were talking about putting me away forever.

“Not hospitalization, no, but they are talking about you,” he said. I jumped at his voice in my ear.

“Did they lie about me passing my exams? Did they just want me to voluntarily come out to the waiting room so they could get me here?” Why was I whispering? Hell, why was I asking him?

“They didn’t lie,” he said.

I didn’t see any cops or staff on hand to sedate me. The only cop I saw wasn’t even dressed properly. His shirt was all wrinkled and untucked as he leaned over the nurses’ station to kiss a nurse.

“It’s his wife,” he said, as if he’d been watching the pair too.

I whirled on him. “I thought I told you to quit talking to me.”

“Jess?” Ally said. Great, she’d probably just heard me yelling at myself.

“Congratulations, Jesse,” Dr. York said. He extended his hands to envelop mine as I crept toward the pair. “I hear you passed your tests with flying colors.”

“Except that I’ve got high alkaloid levels,” I replied, suspicious of his well-wishing. Ally forced me into my jacket.

I tried to pay attention to Dr. York but wings over there made me nervous. He was eyeing Ally.

“You’re not in a hurry, are you?” Dr. York asked. I refocused.

“No, not necessarily.” This was it. They were going to keep me here. Ally scratched her cheek when a feather brushed it but she never acknowledged the cause. I turned farther away, using my back as a shield against the weirdness. At the very least, I didn’t have to look at him.

“What do you need?” I asked. Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around.

“I heard about the FBRD suspending your replacement license, but I hope you will still do the seminar. I spoke to Special Agent Garrison and he is perfectly fine with that.”

The back of my neck crawled. Don’t look around. Just answer him. “I don’t feel well. Can’t someone else do it?”

“Cindy was scheduled to, but she took one of Cooper’s replacements. I understand you are very busy. Really, your work load is already quite impressive. If only all the agents serving our community were as fine as you.”

Flattery. My one true weakness. “When is the seminar?”

“Friday.” He let his pleading eyes seal the deal. Damn it.

“I don’t know why more NRD-positives aren’t dying to become replacement agents,” I replied. Because sarcasm makes everything better.

“Exactly,” he beamed. “See you Friday. Until then, get some rest.”

Rest? My hallucination was picking at his under-feathers.

Just before the good doctor rounded the corner, he called out to the nurse behind the station. “Stacy, tell your husband to wait until your break.”

Blushing, the nurse stepped away from her cop and pulled at the hem of her scrub shirt.

Her husband. It really was her husband. Had I known that before my illusion told me?

“Turn that up,” Ally said as she came to stand beside me. I turned my attention in the same direction and saw a familiar face in the television hanging above the nurse’s head.

“Ms. Sullivan, is it true a woman by the name of Eve Hildebrand tried to kill you?”

“Yes. Ouch.” A strung out looking zombie with rat nest hair bulging from one side of her head, answered with a raspy voice.

“I look like shit,” I said. Ally took my hand to reassure.

I should’ve been mad. My first time on television and I looked horrible. But I wasn’t mad because I couldn’t quit thinking about my newest problem—and what the hell I was going to do about him.

“My name is Gabriel,” he said, as if reading my thoughts.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

“You don’t look so bad, honest,” Ally said, misunderstanding my panic.

No names, I thought. No names.

After all, if hallucinations were anything like puppies, then names meant something. A name meant it would stick around.

Chapter 8

I
sat crossed legged on my bed with two white 800mg painkillers on the comforter in front of me. Ally had given me the pills and the glass of water on the bedside table before disappearing downstairs to work in the home office. Though she’d already given our paperwork to Garrison, she wanted to get all our papers in order in the event this investigation got uglier. Clearly, she’d been talking to her brother.

Of course, no amount of paper would undo the fact that I murdered my stepdad, if that secret got out. Gabriel sat in my desk chair, his massive wings stretched all over the desk itself. He’d knocked my pencil cup to the floor without as much as an apology. I couldn’t chastise him louder than a whisper because I was supposed to be asleep.

I pointed at the growing pile of feathers at his feet. “Do you shed like that wherever you go? It’s screwing with my OCD.” I couldn’t get the picture out of my head—his wings out the window as Ally drove, little black feathers swirling up to the sky at fifty-five miles per hour.

“You are the only one who sees them.” He didn’t bother to whisper like I did.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “How can you be both real and not real? I mean, none of you is real, but—” My voice faltered.

When he didn’t answer, only blinking those large green cat-eyes at me, I resorted to gesturing wildly. “Like in the car you were sitting in the seat, but your wings went right through the door and out the back like the car wasn’t there. But you were there enough to sit in the seat. And you’re doing it again now with my desk!”

He shrugged. “I do not know.”

“What do you know?” Again he said nothing. “How am I supposed to figure out what you are if you won’t talk to me?”

He tilted his head. “Why must you understand what I am?”

“Because something is wrong with me!” I took a breath. “I’m trying to figure out if I’m having a psychotic episode. Help me out here.”

He sat up straighter in his seat, losing that casual air of his for just a moment. Instantly, I realized the ridiculous nature of asking my hallucination to help me distinguish itself as a spiritual being or a psychotic episode. Then his tie changed colors, from black to the green of his eyes.

Dazzled, I pinched my eyes shut. “I’m under too much stress. Maybe you are a psychological device that keeps my mind from completely ripping itself in half?”

“If you take your pain medication, your judgment will be impaired.”

“Ah, so you’re like a voice of reason?” I bounced the two pain pills in my hand. “Does this mean I’m not having a psychotic episode? My judgment is irrelevant if I am crazy.”

“You must make an important decision soon. If you take those, you may make the wrong decision.”

“Ok, you seem judgment-oriented. That’s progress,” I said. “Insanity couldn’t care less about judgment, right? Besides have you ever tried to sleep with a neck wound before? Dr. York told me Eve’s knife scratched my spinal column. Think about that for a second.”

He watched me with quiet amusement, like I might be a puppy tumbling all over my big floppy ears.

“And have you considered that my decision-making abilities will amount to squat if I don’t take this pill and get some sleep?” I added.

He lifted an object from my desk and turned it in his hands. It was a snow globe that Ally sent me from London last winter while vacationing with her older brother. Gabriel kept turning it over and righting it as if he’d never seen one.

“You can’t see the city,” he said.

“You’re supposed to look at the snow not the city.”

“But it is not snow,” he replied.

“It’s not a city either.” I had to set the pills down again. If I held them for too long they’d start melting in my hand and leave that disgusting taste in my mouth on the way down.

He dropped the globe to the floor and it rolled across the carpet, stopping when it hit the leg of the desk. Tidiness meant nothing to this guy.

What the hell was I going to do with him? He acted as if he’d follow me forever. Just picture me at the grocery store, pretending not to notice a man with black wings fondling and dropping produce just like that damned snow globe.

“You know the problem with insanity? I can’t tell anyone I’m am crazy. Maybe I could work through this if I could talk to someone—but no. That’s just not an option, is it? So you know what I’m left with? You. I can only talk to you. And the fact that I’m willing to talk to you, the hallucination in question, is just proof that I’m crazy.”

“She sees that which is unseen. She will understand.”

“Rachel? And she was locked up!”

“Not Rachel,” he replied and blinked those big cat-eyes of his.

The only person I knew who ‘sees that which is unseen’ was Gloria. I didn’t even know how to begin that conversation.

“Back to our little game of ‘What the Fuck Are You?” I said. “If I touched you would I feel anything?”

He was out of his chair and across the room so quick I missed it in a blink. I gasped, face to face with a red tie. It had changed color again.

“What are you doing?” I choked.

He touched my cheek and my breath caught in my throat. His hand hovered for a moment, and then it moved right through me. I felt the strangest sensation, a warm tickle from head to toe, like each hair and nerve stood on its end. Then he returned his hand to his pocket, leaving my heart palpitating strangely. But he didn’t move away. He waited.

“Why are you still standing here?” I asked and tried to breathe my heart into a more comfortable rhythm.

“You want to touch me,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Touch me.”

My hand was half-raised to his face before I realized what I was doing. I jerked back, alarmed, but before I could fully retract my hand, he caught it. It was a tangible hand as any I’d ever touched, and equally as real as the chest he placed it against. He guided my fingertips under the soft satin-silk of his suit jacket’s lapel. But his chest was still, silent. No heartbeat.

“So—” I stammered. “Am I imagining what your hand feels like or do you really have a hand?”

My pulse had become a raging, monstrous thing in my ears. The swollen size of my heart made it difficult to get any air down my throat.

“I am more real than this life you live.” His tie turned dark blue, the color of midnight. The look in his eyes made me shiver. They weren’t green. They matched the tie, and the longer I stared into those dark pools the more I felt I was falling forward into water. Not just any water, nighttime waters, fathoms-deep, water which held the reflection of the still, starry sky above, a perfect replication of the heavens.

I bit my lip for focus, letting it go only once I’d tasted blood. “I’m so totally fucked.”

And he moved through me to the windows on the other side of my bed. His hands sought his pockets. His wings stretched then folded against his back until they disappeared completely. He’d become just a man with long dark hair staring out my windows. A strange man in my bedroom.

“When you’re upset your heart beats much faster,” he said. He turned toward me and as he did, his tie changed to the red shade I saw before.

“Quit doing that thing with the tie, please. It’s making me nauseous.”

“It alarms me when you are upset,” he said, quietly. The seriousness of his tight-set mouth made me believe him.

“It alarms me that I’m having conversations with a winged guy that no one can see, that a guy I’ve trusted with my life for the last seven years might have conspired to kill me, and that I was this close to having my head chopped off. On top of all of that, I might have to go to jail and be somebody’s bitch.”

“Explain trust,” he said. Gabriel was looking out the windows again, which were orange now with the sunlight closest to the earth. Long shadows of each tangible object lay stretched along the world as if to make the most of themselves before their moment was gone. He was very beautiful in this light. The whole scene, his back to me, edges of his body soft from all the light pushing past him, was like a dream.

“I’m not the one to ask about trust,” I answered. “I’m terrible at it. What little trust I have is easily broken.” I sighed. “And it shouldn’t be.”

“How can it be broken if it is not tangible?”

I fell backwards onto the bed with tears in my eyes. “Because it’s so fucking fragile.”