for ten beds with space left over. I balked in the doorway at the sight of gleaming metal, starched sheets, and the sharp, tongue-coating smell of disinfectant. I’d never had a good experience in a place with those particular things, and I didn’t expect this time to be any different. Granny Rosemary had died in a place like this. She’d been Glory’s and my best hope-our only hope-of staying out of the system. But of course, she’d died because, hell, where would the punch line be without that, right?
At Mom and Tess’s funeral, she’d sat down in one of those cheap plastic folding chairs and never got back up again. Purple with flecks of foam on her lips, she’d been hauled away in an ambulance. She’d lingered for a day or two, but I never got my hopes up. By then, I’d gotten the message but good. You only had to pound it into my brain so many times before I made the connection. Hope was the candy in the pervert’s pocket, the stereotypical soap in the prison shower, the cheese in the trap. And life… well, life was what happened when you leaned in for a look.
“Mr. Eye.” Hector’s voice was patient in my ear but unyielding. “The tests are painless, I promise you.”
I was fairly certain I’d already driven my point home to my warden on the whole trust issue, and on top of that, my jaw hurt more than it had yesterday. In other words, talking was both pointless and painful at the moment. I settled on giving a scornfully disbelieving grunt, squaring my shoulders, and walking into the room. In short order, I was given scrubs to change into, after which an excruciatingly detailed medical history was taken, covering me and every relative I knew of. Then again, a medical history was attempted might be a better way of putting it.
I knew nothing about my real father. I hadn’t known him. He’d left town not long after he’d gotten my mom pregnant with me. I knew his name, and that was about it. Did he have diabetes or heart disease? Prostate cancer? Hypertension? Was he an all-powerful psychic with erectile dysfunction? Damned if I knew or cared.
Dressed in the pale blue scrubs given to me by a cute nurse who reminded me of Abby, I sat on the edge of one bed, with one hand holding ice at my jaw and gloves still firmly in place. Every answer I gave was clipped, short, and a little thick from my swollen jaw. Hector’s stone face had tightened perceptibly that morning when he’d opened the door to my room, and he’d immediately offered me more Tylenol. Apparently, I was a little less pretty than I’d started out yesterday. Dr. Guerrera had taken one look at me and disappeared into a back room, to return with an ice pack. I’d given serious consideration to ignoring it but decided in the end to let stubbornness take a backseat to pain this one time.
“I’ll get an X-ray of your jaw, Mr. Eye,” Dr. Guerrera told me as she finished up the history and put away the clipboard. “It would have been better if you’d been brought in yesterday.” The glance she gave Hector was pointed and cool.
He could’ve explained that he’d offered and I’d refused, but Allgood didn’t cut himself any slack. For a blackmailer, he set remarkably high standards for himself. “I dropped the ball, Meleah. I apologize.”
She sighed and shook her head as she gathered supplies at my elbow. “I’d thought better of the men assigned here. Who was the Neanderthal goon who did this?” Her latex-covered fingers touched my jaw gently, running from my chin to just under my ear.
“Sergeant Borelli, and he’s now out of the equation,” Allgood said flatly. He’d lost the lab coat from yesterday and was dressed in a simple black shirt and slacks. Somehow he managed to make it look like a uniform, starched and immaculate.
“Borelli.” She winced and frowned. “Yes, I suppose if anyone were to assault someone, it would be him. He doesn’t precisely spread goodwill and charm wherever he goes, does he?”
“He spread plenty on me,” I muttered.
Meleah Guerrera lowered her gaze, and Hector, if anything, looked more grim. His man, his fuckup, I could read it clearly behind pale eyes.
“Have you gotten Glory out of jail yet?” I asked abruptly.
“We’re working on it.” Allgood exhaled. “But even when we do, she’ll be in our custody until we’re finished with you, Eye. She’ll be treated well, certainly better than in prison, and when you’ve done your part for us, she’ll be released. Free and clear.”
A sharp-toothed vixen dumped back into the henhouse. But what could I do? She was my sister. She was all the family I had; bad genes and sociopathic tendencies didn’t change that. She was… damn it, she was all that was left of the old Jackson. He’d died at age fourteen, somewhere between that old well and a shotgun. He was dead and gone, but sometimes when I heard Glory’s voice on the phone, all sugar over a layer of pure self-interest, it made me remember. Starry nights, peanut butter sandwiches, and the laughter of two little girls. If she were gone, if that were gone, it would be like those things, bright and hopeful, had never been. I didn’t want to admit that.
Pushing the unpleasant and futile thoughts to the back of my mind, I gave a hard-edged smile. “Eye? Come on, Hector. After all you’ve done for me, you should call me Jack.” I dropped the dripping ice pack carelessly onto the bed and added matter-of-factly, “Your brother did.”
He didn’t like that any more than he’d liked any of my other digs, but that didn’t matter, because Hector was a professional. Unlike Borelli, I sincerely doubted you would ever see him lose his temper. He was the embodiment of unbreakable control, with all his emotions-the fine and the not so fine-locked in a triple-chained suspended box that even the real Houdini, not my dog, would’ve scratched his head over.
“Very well, Jack,” he said with a metallic calm that thinned only slightly over my name. “Let’s get on with the tests, shall we?”
Dr. Guerrera called for Eden, who turned out to be the Abby-nurse, to start an IV in the back of my hand with quick and painless efficiency before leading me to an X-ray machine. I folded my arms and shook my head at the paper that mostly covered the table, mostly being the key word. “Unless this thing is fresh out of the factory, I need a sheet. An unused sheet.” I couldn’t touch any part of it with my bare skin. At first consideration, it didn’t seem like it would be too bad. The majority of the people who had lain there wouldn’t have stayed long enough to leave much of an impression. It would be the quicksilver of minnows in a rushing stream. Splinters of memories, here and gone. But there was always an exception.
Death was a big goddamn exception. People tended to die on medical equipment. A peaceful slipping away wasn’t so bad, a momentary tightening in my lungs, a coldness that numbed hands and feet. A heart attack? Crushing trauma? A burst blood vessel in the brain? Those were
… disagreeable. Dis-fucking-agreeable. It had happened to me once. A fender bender had caused me to end up in the ER. I’d been woozy, concussed, and sloppy. One full-blown seizure later, when transferred to a gurney, it was ingrained in me never to be that careless again.
Dr. Guerrera turned and tilted her head curiously at Hector. He nodded immediately. “Do it, Meleah. We’ve actually found the genuine article. If he says he needs it, then he does.”
She seemed doubtful; a scientific heart beat under the stethoscope that rested on her chest, but she retrieved a sheet from a shelf full of linens and spread it. “Have a seat, Mr. Eye. We can do your jaw while you’re sitting up.” It would’ve seemed odd to see a doctor personally performing tests like X-rays, but I was guessing the fewer people they had involved with their project, the happier they were. One doctor, one nurse who was drawing blood from me at the same time I was getting my jaw X-rayed. Who they all were, of course, was still a mystery. There was obvious military involvement, yet Dr. Guerrera didn’t appear to be military, and neither had the scientists performing yesterday’s tests. Hector, on the other hand, he had definitely been military at some point in his life, but he didn’t seem to be now.
Summerland.
Allgood had said, “Welcome to Summerland.” I wasn’t an idiot, and although I had nothing but scorn for my colleagues and the history of paranormal phenomena in general, I was familiar with it. I knew of Summerland. It was a name given to the land of the dead, heaven, the afterlife, whatever the hell you wanted to call the crutch you used. It was spawned in the late 1800s by a fraud of truly great proportions, the Joyce Ann Tingle of her time. I had to wonder in what capacity they were using it here. Since they were bringing “psychics” in so late in the game and because, according to Hector, people were dying, I had to think it was less about the paranormal and more about the death. And wasn’t that a fun thought.
Yeah, not so much.
My jaw wasn’t broken. That was the bright point of my day. The tests, more scans than your average grocery cashier saw in a week, lasted until mid-afternoon. In between them, the nurse, Eden, kept up a constant chatter. I didn’t mind. It was what reminded me of Abby, not her looks. Abby had the short platinum curls and pale brown eyes. Eden had a polished bob of chestnut hair, eyes the color of a country pond, dark green and still. She also had
