Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

I coaxed Paloma out the door. She shook herself, dog tags jangling, then trotted along beside me as if the lemon-colored sunlight, the flowering bushes and palms and pines and eucalyptus, the sprawling houses set behind walls and gates, were conspiring to make her feel better.

The white house came up on our right. I’ve always been curious about it. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out of it, never glimpsed a car moving through the curve of driveway flanked with drooping palm trees. The house wasn’t gated off from the street, but sat exposed like a bone in the sun. You sometimes see shabby, neglected houses in Bel Air, squatting on lots that have accumulated millions of dollars of value over the decades, belonging to people who refuse to sell them even if they can’t afford their upkeep, who plan to live in those houses until they die.

But nobody lived in this house. The windows were dark and blind.

Today, instead of walking past it, I paused at the lip of the driveway. Paloma took the opportunity to fling herself on her back in the grass and roll around. I listened to the chatter of birds, the roar of a nearby leaf-blower. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was like an invisible hand reached through my skin, grabbed one of my ribs, tugged me gently toward the house. Trust your instincts, my mother is always telling me, the implication being that if she had trusted hers she would never have married my father.

I walked up the driveway, through the pools of shade beneath the palms, up the three steps to the door. I still didn’t know what I was doing. It was like something my body knew and announced to me, like when it’s time to eat or go to sleep. Except now it was time to knock on the door, so I did, one rap, two raps, three, and then my hand dropped to my side and I thought, Am I crazy? What am I doing?

I turned around to go when a voice from inside said, “Sasha, come in.”

I did not hear that. I did not hear someone say my name.

The dog was sitting on the step, cocking her narrow head at me. The wind pushed a cloud overhead, and the air darkened for a moment and then went bright again.

The door gave a clicking sound, and swung inward.

I saw white walls and a clean hardwood floor and more space than I would have expected. A man was standing in the middle of the hall. The light entering the windows behind him cast him in silhouette. Paloma gave a happy bark and jolted forward. I didn’t realize my hand had slackened on the leash until the end jerked out beneath my fingers and Paloma was hurtling herself at the man. “Hello, Paloma,” he said, and stooped to pick her up. She writhed in his arms and tried to lick his face.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but that’s my dog.”

The man stepped forward. Maybe he saw the way I tensed because he was careful to keep some distance between us. “You’re a little late, Sasha,” he said.

The shadows fell away from him, and I could see that his eyes, even across the space that separated us, were very blue. His face did seem familiar. It was long with good cheekbones and a strong nose. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and he was lean and long-limbed. I guessed him to be a few years older than me—nineteen, maybe twenty?

“We have to get started,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your lessons.”

“My what?”

“Sasha, don’t you recognize me?”

“Who are you?”

“You know my name,” he said. “Wait a moment, and it will come to you. We have an appointment, Sasha. A series of them, in fact. But we don’t have a lot of time. I’ll have to go back soon.”

This had to be some kind of setup. He was too good-looking, for one thing. He belonged on a movie screen or the cover of a romance novel or in someone’s fantasy. Maybe I’d been chosen for some kind of reality show? This was Los Angeles, after all, and every now and then you saw film trucks in the neighborhood, parked along the narrow curving roads while traffic directed around them.

I glanced around, checking for places where cameras might be viewing my every move. But the place seemed ... truly empty, like it was just this guy, my dog, and me.

“Sasha, it’s time we get started,” the guy said. “It’s past time.”

“For all I know,” I said, “you’re a serial killer.”

“I promise you I’m not a serial killer.”

“Like you’d admit it if you were.”

“You know my name,” he said quietly. “Here, I’m going to write it down...” He suddenly had a pen and notepad in his hands—I had to blink, where had they come from?—and scrawled something down. He ripped off the top paper, folded it in half and held it out to me. “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me the name, my name, that I wrote down on this paper.”

“I have no idea who you are.” But I felt something ... shift ... in my brain. And suddenly I knew—knew in a way that went all through my body—that he was right, that I had met him before, and that my whole life had been leading to this moment.

“Haiden,” I said.

He smiled and dropped the notepaper. It fluttered to rest on the ground with the name staring up at both of us in printed block letters:

HAIDEN.

2

So I stood there for I don’t know how much longer, the guy—Haiden—looking at me with those preternatural blue eyes. Part of me was still thinking: reality show. Kind of clinging to the idea. But then I felt that invisible hand tug my rib again.

Trust your instincts. So I stepped across the threshold and into the hallway.

And I swear I felt the air shimmer, as if part of reality had rearranged itself around me. If he does turn out to be a serial killer, I thought, I’m going to feel really, really stupid.

I followed him into a long sunken room with a stone fireplace in the corner. The only piece of furniture was a table in the middle. There was a bowl of fruit on it. Apples. They had the kind of dewy, rounded perfection you only see in magazines.

“What are we doing?” I asked. Paloma trailed behind us, her toenails clicking off the hardwood. “What do you mean by ‘lessons’?” Absently I reached out for the fruit on the table. I was picking out an apple when Haiden barked, “Don’t!”

The apple dropped from my hand, rolled across the table.

“Don’t eat that,” Haiden said, “don’t eat any of that fruit until you’re absolutely sure and ready. Do you understand me?”

“Until I’m ready for what?”

Haiden watched me for a moment. Then, ignoring my question, he said, “What if I told you there was another realm that ran alongside this one?” Haiden had something in his hands—like the pen and notepad, it had just somehow appeared there—and he approached me with it.

It was a black scrap of fabric. A blindfold.

“I’m going to teach you how to see and feel and communicate with it. I’m going to teach you a kind of clairvoyance. Clairsensing.”

“You’re seriously going to put that thing on me?”

“It’s the first exercise,” he said patiently. Then he said, “Sasha, are we going to do this or not?”

“My dog likes you,” I said, “and my dog never likes anybody.”

“Dogs and I understand each other.”

I liked the idea of another realm. It reminded me of the stories I used to write when I was a little kid, back when I had this idea that I wanted to be a novelist.