Dead Waters - Anton Strout [5]
The tattooist stood there in shock. Her pain in the moment was a thick swirl of mad emotions coursing through me. Tears flowed hot down her face. . . There was a mania in her head that made it hard to keep myself separate from her jumble of irrational thoughts. Her fingers ached from clutching the powerless tattoo gun. She looked down at it, and then dove for the outlet where the cord had pulled from the wall. It roared to life and she stared down at the pulsating needle, before raising it to her face. Whatever she was going to do next, I couldn’t watch. I pulled my mind’s eye back to the present.
The ghost woman—Cassie—was still sitting right in front of me in her tattooing chair, her head craned up to look at me. Her face was still half-hidden by the sunglasses. I could guess why.
“What did you do to yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.
The tattooist gave me a wide, grim smile. “I couldn’t bear to see him with another woman,” she said, “so I didn’t want to see him at all. But you’re not him. You’re not Jeremy.”
Residual sensations of her anger and jealousy forced themselves on me, the tattooist’s raw emotions overpowering my own. The return of a person’s psychometric emotional state was such an unfamiliar and unbidden force, so violating, that I staggered, grabbing for the barber’s chair.
“Look out!” Jane shouted. The floating structure overhead shifted and faltered. It continued to whirl around, but with the woman’s growing agitation, it jerked unsteadily in its course above us. Standing under it didn’t strike me as the smartest idea right now, either, and I backed away from the chair as bits of glass started falling from the unstable array of floating lamps above.
The woman cocked her head off in the direction Jane had spoken from. “Is she here, too?” the woman said, the rising anger in her voice cutting into my ears like glass. “Your little blond friend?”
Although Jane wasn’t Pixie Cut, and I wasn’t Jeremy, it really didn’t matter. All that mattered was that crazy Cassie had switched her focus to my girlfriend.
“Jane!” I shouted over the falling debris from the structure above. “Run!”
Jane stepped out from behind the armoire that hid her, moving for the aisle, but her footfalls echoed out as she did so. The tattooed woman flicked her wrist and several floor lamps tore themselves free of the structure and flew through the air toward Jane. Two of them smashed into armoires near her, but one found its mark and tangled itself between Jane’s legs, sending her tumbling.
“Crap!” I yelled. I didn’t wait to see where Jane landed. I was already running off in her direction, seeking cover as I went.
Lamps of every size flew past me as I ran. The dull thump against my leather jacket from two smaller ones pushed me forward, but I kept running and dove for the safety of a large chest of drawers. Jane’s looked out from beneath one of the nearby beds. When I hit the floor, there was a crunch of broken glass under my coat, and I rolled toward Jane as she pulled me under the bed.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“Oh, you know,” she said, with a nervous smile. “Just busy cowering.”
“Mind if I join you in a quick cower?”
Jane laughed, letting out some of her nerves. “Be my guest.”
I took a moment to catch my breath, and then rolled onto my stomach, putting my back against the bottom of the sturdy old bed frame. “We stay here too long, I think we’re going to die.”
I pressed up on the bed, driving the headboard down into the ground and lifting the feet of it.
“I hate antiques,” Jane said, grunting as she joined me in pushing up the bed. “So damned heavy.”
“But sturdy,” I reminded her, hoisting the bed into a protective wall position with one last burst of survival adrenaline. “Good for cover. Good for living.” I quickly told Jane everything about the lovers’ triangle I had witnessed in my vision.
“Maybe the haunting is totemistic,” Jane offered when I was done.
I looked over at her, the word