Darkest Hour Read online

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I guess slave-runners aren’t really my cup of tea. That is who you married instead, right? A slave-runner. Your father must have been so proud.”

  That wiped the grin right off her face.

  “You leave my father out of this,” she snarled.

  “Oh, why?” I asked. “Tell me something, is he sore at you? Your dad, I mean. You know, for having Jesse killed? Because I imagine he would be. I mean, basically, thanks to you, the de Silva family line ran out. And your kids with that Diego dude turned out to be, as we’ve already discussed, major losers. I bet whenever you run into your dad out there, you know, on the spiritual plane, he doesn’t even say hi anymore, does he? That’s gotta hurt.”

  I’m not sure how much of that, if any, Maria actually understood. Still, she seemed plenty mad.

  “You!” she cried. “I warned you! I told you to make your family stop with their digging, but did you listen to me? It is your fault you’ve lost your precious Hector. If you had only listened, he would be here still. But no. You think, because you are this mediator—this special person who can communicate with spirits—that you are better than us…better than me! But you are nothing—nothing, do you hear? Who are the Simons? Who are they? No one! I, Maria Teresa de Silva, am a descendant of royalty—of kings and princes!”

  I just laughed. I mean, seriously. Come on.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “And that sure was some princely behavior, killing your boyfriend like that.”

  Maria’s scowl was like a dark storm cloud over her head. “Hector died,” she hissed in a scary voice, “because he dared to break off our betrothal. He thought to disgrace me in front of everyone. Me! Knowing, as he did, of the royal lineage running through my blood. To suggest that I would—”

  Whoa. This was a new one. “Wait a minute. He did what?”

  But Maria was off on a rant.

  “As if I, Maria de Silva, would allow myself to be so humiliated. He sought to return my letters and asked for his own—and his ring—back. He could not, he said, marry me, after what he had heard about me and Diego.” She laughed, not pleasantly. “As if he did not know to whom he was speaking! As if he did not know he was speaking to a de Silva!”

  I cleared my throat. “Um,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he knew. I mean, that was his last name, too. Weren’t the two of you cousins or something?”

  Maria made a face. “Yes. I am ashamed to say I shared a name—and grandparents—with that—” She called Jesse something in Spanish that did not sound at all flattering. “He did not know with whom he was trifling. There was not a man in the county who would not have killed for the honor of marrying me.”

  “And it certainly appears,” I couldn’t help pointing out, “that at least one man in the county was killed for refusing that honor.”

  “Why shouldn’t he have died?” Maria demanded. “For insulting me in such a manner?”

  “Um,” I said, “how about because murder is illegal? And because having a guy killed because he doesn’t want to marry you is the act of a freaking lunatic, which is exactly what you are. Funny how that part didn’t trickle down through the annals of history. But don’t worry. I’ll make sure I get the word out.”

  Maria’s face changed. Before, she’d looked disgusted and irritated. Now she looked murderous.

  Which was kind of funny. If this chick thought anybody in the world cared about what some prissy broad had done a century and a half ago, she was mightily mistaken. She had managed to kill the one person to whom this piece of information might have been remotely interesting—Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D.

  But she was still apparently high on the whole we-de Silvas-are-descended-from-Spanish-royalty thing, since she whirled on me, petticoats flying, and went, in this scary voice, “Stupid girl! I said to Diego that you were far too much of a fool to cause trouble for us, but I see now that I was wrong. You are everything I have heard about mediators—interfering, loathsome creature!”

  I was flattered. I truly was. No one had ever called me loathsome before.

  “If I’m loathsome,” I said, “what does that make you? Oh, wait, don’t tell me, I already know. A two-faced backstabbing bitch, right?”

  The next thing I knew, she’d pulled that knife from her sleeve and was once more pointing it at my throat.

  “I will not stab you in the back,” Maria assured me. “It is your face I intend to carve.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. I reached out and seized the wrist of the hand that was clutching the knife. “You want to know what your big mistake was?” She grunted as, with a neat move I’d learned in tae kwan do, I twisted her arm behind her back. “Saying my losing Jesse was my fault. Because I was feeling sorry for you before. But now I’m just mad.”

  Then, sinking one knee into Maria de Silva’s spine, I sent her sprawling, facedown, onto the porch roof.

  “And when I’m mad,” I said as I pried the knife from her fingers with my free hand, “I don’t really know what comes over me. But I just sort of start hitting people. Really, really hard.”

  Maria wasn’t taking any of this quietly. She was shrieking her head off—mostly in Spanish, though, so I just ignored her. I was the only one who could hear her, anyway.

  “I told my mom’s therapist about it,” I informed her as I flung the knife, as hard as I could, into the backyard, still keeping her pinned down with the weight of my knee. “And you know what she said? She said the trigger to my rage mechanism is oversensitive.”

  Now that I was rid of the knife, I leaned forward and, with the hand I wasn’t using to keep Maria’s arm bent back against her spine, I seized a handful of those glossy black ringlets and jerked her head toward me.

  “But you know what I said to her?” I asked Maria. “I said, it’s not that the trigger to my rage mechanism is oversensitive. It’s that people…just…keep…pissing…me…off.”

  To emphasize each of the last six syllables of that sentence, I rammed Maria de Silva’s face into the roof tiles. When I dragged her head up after the sixth time, she was bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. I observed this with great detachment, like it was someone else who had caused it and not me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Look at that. That is just so interfering and loathsome of me.”

  Then I smashed her face against the roof a few more times, saying, “This one is for jumping me while I was asleep and holding a knife to my throat. And this one is for making Dopey eat bugs, and this one is for making me have to clean up bug guts, and this one is for killing Clive, and oh yeah, this one is for Jesse—”

  I won’t say I was out of my mind with rage. I was mad. I was plenty mad. But I knew exactly what I was doing.

  And it wasn’t pretty. Hey, I’ll be the first to admit that. I mean, violence is never the answer, right? Unless, of course, the person you’re beating on is already dead.

  But just because a hundred and fifty years ago this chick had had a good friend of mine offed, for no other reason than that he had very rightly wanted out of a marriage with her, she didn’t deserve to have her face bashed in.

  No way. What she deserved was to have every bone in her body broken.

  Unfortunately, however, when I finally let go of Maria’s hair and stood up to do just that, I noticed a sudden glow to my left.

  Jesse, I thought, my heart doing another one of those speeding-up, skidding things.

  But, of course, it wasn’t Jesse. When I turned my head, what I saw materializing there was a very tall man in a dark mustache and goatee, dressed in clothes that were somewhat similar to Jesse’s, only a lot fancier—like he was a costume party Zorro or something. His snug black trousers had this elaborate silver filigree pattern going down the side of each leg, and his white shirt had those puffy sleeves pirates always wear in movies. He had a lot of silver scrollwork on his holster, too, and all around the brim of his black cowboy hat.

  And he didn’t look very happy to see me.

  “Okay,” I said, put
ting my hands on my hips. “Wait, don’t tell me. Diego, am I right?”

  Under the pencil-thin mustache, his upper lip curled.

  “I thought I told you,” he said to Maria, who was sitting up and holding her sleeve to her bleeding nose, “to leave this one to me.”

  Maria was making a lot of very unattractive snuffling noises. You could tell she’d never had her nose broken before, because she wasn’t tipping her head back to stop the bleeding.

  Amateur.

  “I thought she might be more amusing,” Maria said in a voice laced with pain—and regret—“to play with.”

  Diego shook his head disgustedly. “No,” he said. “With mediators we do not play. I thought that was made clear to you from the start. They are entirely too dangerous.”

  “I’m sorry, Diego.” Maria’s voice took on a whiny quality I had not heard before. I realized she was one of those girls who has a “guy” voice, one she uses only when men are around. “I should have done as you said.”

  It was my turn to be disgusted.

  “Hello,” I said to Maria. “This is the twenty-first century. Women are allowed to think for themselves now, you know.”

  Maria just glared at me over the sleeve she was holding to her bleeding nose.

  “Kill her for me,” she said in that whiny little-girl voice.

  Diego took a step toward me, wearing an expression that told me he was only too happy to oblige his lady love.

  “Oh, what?” I said. I wasn’t even scared. I didn’t care anymore. The numbness in my heart had pretty much taken over my whole body. “You always do what she tells you? You know, we have a word for that now. It’s called being whipped.”

  Apparently, he was either unacquainted with this expression, or he just didn’t care, since he kept coming at me. Diego was wearing spurs, and they clanged ominously against the roof tiles as he approached.

  “You know,” I said, holding my ground. “I gotta tell you. The goatee thing? Yeah, way over. And you know a little jewelry really does go a long way. Just something you might want to consider. I’m actually glad you stopped by, because I have a couple things I’ve been meaning to say to you. Number one, about your wife? Yeah, she’s a skank. And number two, you know that whole thing where you killed Jesse and then buried his remains out back there? Yeah, way uncool. Because you see, now I have to—”

  Only I never got a chance to tell Felix Diego what I was going to have to do to him. That’s because he interrupted me. He said in this deep and surprisingly menacing voice, for a guy with a goatee, “It has long been my conviction that the only good mediator is a dead one.”

  Then, before I could so much as twitch, he threw his arms around me. I thought he was trying to give me a hug or something, which would have been pretty weird.

  But that wasn’t what he was doing at all. No, what he was doing, actually, was throwing me off the porch roof.

  Oh, yes. He threw me right into the hole where the hot tub was supposed to go. Right where they’d uncovered Jesse’s remains, just that afternoon…

  Which I thought was kind of ironic, actually. At least, while I was still capable of thought.

  Which wasn’t for long, since I lost consciousness shortly after slamming into the ground.

  chapter

  ten

  Here’s the thing about mediators:

  We’re hard to kill.

  I’m serious. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been knocked down, dragged, stomped on, punched, kicked, bitten, clawed, whacked on the head, held underwater, shot at and, oh yeah, thrown off roofs.

  But have I ever died? Have I ever sustained a life-threatening injury?

  No. I’ve broken bones—plenty of them. I’ve got scars galore.

  But the fact is, whoever—or whatever—created us mediators did give us one natural weapon, at least, to use in our fight against the undead. No, not superhuman strength, though that would have been handy. No, what we’ve got, Father Dom and I—and Jack, too, probably, although I doubt he’s had an opportunity to test it out yet—is a hide tough enough to take all the abuse that gets heaped on us and then some.

  Which was why even though by rights a fall like the one I took should have killed me, it didn’t. Not even close.

  Not, of course, that Maria de Silva and her paramour didn’t think they’d been successful. They must have, or they’d have stuck around to finish the job. But when I woke up hours later, groggy and with a headache you would not believe, they were nowhere to be seen.

  Clearly, I had won the first round. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway. I mean, I wasn’t dead, and that, in my book, is always a plus.

  What I was, was concussed. I knew right away because I get them all the time. Concussions, I mean.

  Well, all right, twice.

  Anyway, it’s not so pleasant, being concussed. Basically, you feel pukey and sore all over, but, not surprisingly, your head really hurts more than anything. In my case, it was even worse in that I’d been lying at the bottom of that hole for so long, the dew had had a chance to fall. It had collected on my clothes and soaked them through and made them feel very heavy. So dragging myself out of that pit Andy and Dopey had dug became a real chore.

  In fact, it was dawn before I finally managed to let myself back into the house—thank God Sleepy had left the front door unlocked when he’d come in from his big date. Still, I had to climb all those stairs. It was pretty slow going. At least when I got to my room and was finally able to peel off all of my sodden, muddy clothes, I didn’t have to worry, for once, about Jesse seeing me in my altogether.

  Because, of course, Jesse was gone.

  I tried not to think about that as I crawled into bed and shut my eyes. This strategy—the not-thinking-about-Jesse-being-gone strategy—seemed to work pretty well. I was asleep, I think, before that thought had really had a chance to sink in again.

  I didn’t wake up until well past eight. Apparently Sleepy had tried to get me up for work, but I was too far gone. They let me sleep in, I guess, because they all assumed I was still upset about what had happened the day before, about the skeleton they’d found in the backyard.

  I only wish that was all I had to be upset about.

  When the phone rang a little after nine, and Andy called up the stairs that it was for me, I was already up, standing in my bathroom in my sweats, examining the enormous bruise that had developed beneath my bangs. I looked like an alien. I’m not kidding. It was a wonder, really, I hadn’t broken my neck. I was convinced that Maria and her boyfriend thought that’s exactly what I’d done. It was the only reason I was still alive. The two of them were so cocky, they hadn’t stuck around to make sure I was well and truly dead.

  They’d obviously never met a mediator before. It takes a lot more than a fall off a roof to kill one of us.

  “Susannah.” Father Dominic’s voice, when I picked up the phone, was filled with concern. “Thank God you’re all right. I was so worried…. But you didn’t, did you? Go to the cemetery last night?”

  “No,” I said. There hadn’t been any reason to go there, in the end. The cemetery had come to me.

  But I didn’t say that to Father D. Instead, I asked, “Are you back in town?”

  “I’m back. You didn’t tell them, did you? Your family, I mean.”

  “Um,” I said uncertainly.

  “Susannah, you must. You really must. They have a right to know. We’re dealing with a very serious haunting here. You could be killed, Susannah—”

  I refrained from mentioning that I’d actually already come pretty close.

  At that moment, the call-waiting went off. I said, “Father D., can you hold on a second?” and hit the receiver.

  A high-pitched, vaguely familiar voice spoke in my ear, but for the life of me, I could not place it right away.

  “Suze? Is that you? Are you all right? Are you sick or something?”

  “Um,” I said, extremely puzzled. “Yeah. I guess. Sort of. Who is this?”<
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  The voice said, very indignantly, “It’s me! Jack!”

  Oh, God. Jack. Work. Right.

  “Jack,” I said. “How did you get my home number?”

  “You gave it to Paul,” Jack said. “Yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

  I did not, of course. All I could really remember from yesterday was that Clive Clemmings was dead, Jesse’s portrait was missing…

  And that Jesse, of course, was gone. Forever.

  Oh, and the whole part where the ghost of Felix Diego tried to split my head open.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Okay. Look, Jack, I have someone on the other—”

  “Suze,” Jack interrupted. “You were supposed to teach me to do underwater somersaults today.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I just…I just really couldn’t face coming in to work today, bud. I’m sorry. It’s nothing against you or anything. I just really need a day off.”

  “You sound so sad,” Jack said, sounding pretty sad himself. “I thought you’d be really happy.”

  “You did?” I wondered if Father D. was still waiting on the other line or if he’d hung up in a huff. I was, I realized, treating him pretty badly. After all, he’d cut his little retreat short for me. “How come?”

  “On account of how I—”

  That’s when I saw it. Just the faintest glow, over by the daybed. Jesse? Again my heart gave one of those lurches. It was really getting pathetic, how much I kept hoping, every time I saw the slightest shimmer, that it would be Jesse.

  It wasn’t.

  It wasn’t Maria or Diego either—thank God. Surely not even they would be bold enough to try to take a whack at me in broad daylight….

  “Jack,” I said into the phone. “I have to go.”

  “Wait, Suze, I—”

  But I’d hung up. That’s because sitting there on my daybed, looking deeply unhappy, was Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D.

  Just my luck: Wish for a Jesse. Get a Clive.

  “Oh,” he said, blinking behind the lenses of his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. He seemed almost as surprised to see me as I was to see him materialize there in my bedroom. “It’s you.”