Page 51 of The Sin Eater
Jesus fucking Christ.
I stand in the bathroom, rubbing product into my wet hair, and promise myself I’ll keep my damn mouth shut. No way. I liked dancing with him way too much to take that chance.
I’m setting down the bottle of product when I see her. The woman. The ghost. The murderer’s victim. She’s staring at me from the bathroom mirror, her eyes wide and pleading.
“Fuck,” I shout, my knees gone so weak I have to grab the edge of the sink to keep from falling. She wavers, but before she fades away, I make her a promise. “We’ll figure it out. I swear to you. The cops have your picture, and one way or the other, wewillfind out what happened to you.”
She’s gone before I finish. I close my eyes, willing my heart to slow down before I use a lifetime’s allotment of beats in one day. Her image blooms against my eyelids and I notice something I hadn’t before. She’s got a necklace on, a gold one, with a small medallion hanging from it. Before I can stop myself, I text Damon.
Tell yr sister to tell the cop that the corpse will have a gold necklace with some kind of Jesus thing hanging from it.
Grabbing a headband, I get the hair out of my face and put on my shoes. It’s about six forty-five, which gives me just enough time to get to work. Not enough time to get to the Brew first, however, which is a bummer. If ever there was a morning when I needed coffee, this one was it.
My phone buzzes when I’m almost to the hospital.
Jesus thing?
I don’t have time to text him back until I get into the morgue. Geneva’s off, so I’m working with Shanny and one of the on-call pathologists. We don’t have any new tenants, so unless something dramatic happens, me and Shanny should just have to coordinate funeral home pick-ups.
I take the opportunity to text Damon back.
Small medallion on a chain around her neck, prolly Jesus IDK
I watch the screen until his response appears.
How do you know?
Shrugging, I text back.Saw her in my bathroom mirror.
That’s creepy af.
He’s not wrong. I don’t really want to get into it by text so I send a shrug emoji and pocket my phone. Diving into the day, I try to let go of Damon and the dead woman, and if it weren’t for a tight ache across my forehead, I would have succeeded.
As it is, they’re both on my mind when I make a break for the Brew. Shanny is punishing herself by drinking hospital coffee so I don’t offer to bring her anything. In fact, I don’t even tell her where I’m going. She’s busy checking out homes for sale on the Windermere Realty website and since we aren’t expecting a funeral home pickup until closer to noon, I leave her to it.
It’s fucking cold outside, like, cold enough to snow. I’ve got my puffy coat zipped up tight, but thin cotton scrub pants don’t do shit to protect against thirty-degree temperatures. I go from a walk to a shuffle to an all-out run in the space of a block.
Jett’s behind the counter—of course Jett’s behind the counter. Today their hair is wrapped in a blue and silver scarf, one that exposes all the crags and valleys in their face. There’s a few people in line; shivering, underdressed hospital workers and a few student-types. Two women come in right after me and get in line, and behind them is a guy I recognize.
It’s the guy who wanted to talk to me about the carnival. I can’t imagine anything I’d like to talk about less, so of course I accidentally catch his eye. Worse, he smiles so I have to do the same.
Even worse, he tips his head and says, “Hi.”
“Wassup?”
He shrugs, smiling with his eyes if not his mouth. He’s cute enough to trigger my natural instincts to flirt, exceptDamon, so instead of flirting, I scramble for something to talk about in case he says anything else.
“Just finished a big job,” he says.
Damn it.The two women standing between us are looking at me funny, so I wave them ahead. “Oh, yeah?” I ask, struggling to place a name to his face. “What kind of work do you do?”
“Little of this, little of that. You know. This time I had to stake a rogue vampire, the stupid fucker.”
He says it like it’s no big deal, and I honest to fuck can’t tell if he’s joking or not. “A real vampire?”
“Not anymore.”
Well damn. I guessI staked a vampireis one of the very few reasons I’d be willing to have a conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop. “You do that a lot?”