do they fit into all this?”
Nick shrugged, sheepishly, scurrying along beside her. “Don’t know.”
“Well then, we better find out because I’ve no intention of spending another hell night in Vermillion.” Velvet stomped back toward the restaurant. “This ends today!”
Emile was just leaving his apartment as Velvet and Nick slipped through the wall. Nick stared at the sheer amount of bruises on the guy, and they both noted he was walking with a limp as he stepped outside and locked the door behind him.
Emile’s studio was simply decorated, a futon on a wooden frame seemed to function as the only seating in the place. Besides a TV and a small dresser with a few framed photos, the place was bare.
Nick wandered over to the photos and stood there, mouth hanging open.
“What?” Velvet asked.
He simply pointed at one of the photographs.
In it, Emile was all smiles and bruise-free, his arm around a petite Asian girl, her black hair pulled back in a tight chignon.
Amie.
At about five o’clock, Emile and his sunglasses limped into Il Fortuna and gave his jacket to the coat check girl with a wicked wink. Her response was a likewise lascivious
Velvet spun around and elbowed Nick in the ribs, or through them, actually. “Follow him!”
They popped out from their hiding place inside the coat-checked coats, and Nick ran straight through the girl’s desk after Emile, while Velvet took a moment to come up with a plan.
She knew she was going to have to possess the girl—Willa was the name on her name tag—but for what purpose? Velvet thought a moment, and then a broad grin spread across her face. Obviously Emile and Willa had some sort of relationship. She’d use that to get the goods on Amie, once and for all!
She hunched down beside Willa’s back and thrust herself up, through her and inside her as if Willa was a tight-fitting dress that Velvet had to shimmy into. The girl twitched a bit, but that was to be expected—Velvet was a big girl.
With no more than a “What the...?” from Willa, Velvet constricted Willa’s thoughts into that imaginary box and took her over.
“So easy,” Velvet said. The voice came out child-like and irritating to her ear. “Oh God. Nice baby voice.”
She glanced down behind the desk and found a sign that read, be right back, amicis. Velvet left her post and skipped toward the dining room.
There she saw Emile running; being chased was a more accurate description. A man in a mustard-colored blazer and a bushy goatee rushed toward the waiter with a fork, eyes blazing like someone had set fire to his brain.
Must be Abner.
“Abner!” Velvet screamed, but neither the man nor the ghost inside him seemed to hear anything.
They bolted, one after the other, through the swinging door into the kitchen, followed by an opaque presence she hoped was Nick. Velvet scrambled after them and bolted into the busy kitchen in time to see them all pass through the metal exit door.
There was a brawl going on in the dank shadows of the dusky alley. Colonel Mustard, both possessed and incredibly pissed off, pummeled Emile with fists the size of Easter hams. Emile, defending himself valiantly, seemed to have picked up a ghostly passenger of his own. His eyes radiated in the shadows, freckling his bruised cheeks with rays of light.
Nick?
“Stop it, Abner!” Velvet shouted at the goateed Colonel Mustard. “We’ve got you now.”
Emile ducked another punch, bobbing toward her and getting enough of a gap between him and the other guy to shout, “That’s not, Abner,” in a thick British accent.
“Why are you talking like that, Nick?”
“I’m not Nick, I’m Abner!” The ghost inside Emile shouted.
Velvet flinched. “Then where’s Nick?”
At that precise moment, the door banged open and a little girl rushed out, fists balled and ready for a fight, the blunt end of pizza crust bouncing from the corner of her lips like a cigar.
So if Abner is in Emile, who’s in the Colonel ... and the kid?
Colonel Mustard stopped dead and exploded into laughter. “You’re all ridiculous. You should hear yourselves.”
Abner/Emile rushed forward and pushed the Colonel through the open doorway and back into the kitchen, pulling the door shut and bracing it closed with a broken piece of board from a stack of pallets so the Colonel was trapped in the kitchen and couldn’t get back into the alley.
“So what’s going on here?” Abner asked. “Who are you? And who’s this?” He pointed at the little girl.
“My undertaker, Nick, is my guess,” Velvet replied, staring at the girl and shaking her head, judgmentally.
The little girl pushed up her sleeves, as though she was about to start throwing punches. “We know everything, Abner.”
“And what’s that? What do you think you know?”
Velvet interjected. “We know that Amie had some kind of relationship with the body you’re possessing. If it’s some kind of sick domestic violence thing then, seriously, you two couldn’t have played that out without getting an innocent living person involved? That’s really low.”
“No doubt,” Nick said, shaking his head. “Do we haul you back to Vermillion, or get you a guest spot on
Abner scowled and reached for his belt as though he’d go after the little girl/Nick, but the door behind them boomed and clattered. The board shook and shifted, threatening to fall loose and unleash the big brute from the kitchen.
“She’ll break through soon.”
“She?” Velvet echoed.
“Amie.” Emile/Abner sighed and shook his head.
Abner shook his head. “I’m protecting this body.”
“Just not very well?” she asked.
“Listen, Amie and Emile were together ... before she died. After she was gone, she couldn’t let him go. She found a way back earthside, through that crack you two traveled through, and when he wouldn’t accept her advances—she’d possess a variety of different girls to try to tempt him—she started to act out. Violently. So I intervened, of course.” He shrugged. “Well, as often as I could.”
“But why are you even here, Abner?” Velvet asked. “You could guard the crack from the other side, you know? Or even tell someone and get the crack filled in. Alerting Barker about all this might have been helpful.”
“I—” Abner started.
“The whole thing is pathetic,” Nick said, balling the little girl’s fists up and scowling furiously.
The little girl looked like she was going to throw a tantrum, and Velvet almost giggled at the thought. She wished Nick could see himself and the spectacle he was creating, but in that moment, a crackling sound issued from the kitchen, and while the door didn’t move a bit, Velvet knew someone was about to pass through it. Someone terrible.
Someone slutty.
Abner was already moving away, stumbling toward the green Dumpster. Afraid. Velvet and Nick stood their ground.
Tentacles of white smoke spilled from the cracks around the door, spreading over the brick like a vine, curling and undulating and, worst of all, thickening to the size of tree trunks. They weren’t dealing with Colonel Mustard anymore.
It wasn’t the first time they’d encountered a banshee—the more a ghost haunted, the more evil it exuded,
