Private Demon

Not castoffs, he thought, trying to understand what he saw through her eyes. Antiques. Heirlooms.

In the real bedroom, Jema slept on. In the dream realm, she sat up and looked straight at him. "Hello. Who are you?"

Questions in dreams had to be answered with caution. The wrong words could cause the sleeper to awaken suddenly. Thierry did not want Jema to fear his presence, or anything about him. If she did, she would never tell him that which he needed to know. Before he moved out of the shadow concealing him, he conjured a hooded cloak out of the dream realm and drew it around him[LC6], so that she could not see his face. "I am whoever you wish me to be."

She laughed. "That's convenient."

Thierry sat down on her bed—her two-hundred-year-old Colonial American bed, another much-cherished acquisition—and took her hand in his. "Perhaps I could be someone you trust. Someone for whom you care."

Jema's smile faded. "No. I don't want you to be anyone like that. If you are, you'll leave." The colors and shapes of the room rippled like the surface of a clear pool struck by a heavy stone. "I know I'm not here to be loved, but I'm tired of being alone."

He touched her cheek. Her skin felt hot and damp, the way it might after she wept. "I won't leave you. I want to know everything about you." He might have to risk some questions, in order to coax her into telling him about Miss Lopez and the hall of artifacts.

She drew back and her voice turned cool. "Why?"

Why, indeed? Thierry suddenly realized that he had no business here, not with this lonely, neglected little cat. Her illness was serious, and what few months or years she had left to her should be lived to the fullest. All he could give her was madness and pain. He should slip out of her dream, out of her bedroom, and out of her life. He saw himself doing so, quite clearly. "I need you."

Jema reached up and touched the edge of the hood covering his face, but did not try to push it back. "What are you? Are you Death?"

Thierry could not speak. Could not deny what he was.

"No, not Death," she murmured. She picked up one of his hands and examined it. His nails had grown long again, thick and pointed, like talons. "You've come from the painting over my desk."

The painting. Thierry remembered it now. The same nightdress, the same silky ribbons had adorned the figure of the sleeping woman. His cloak was not unlike the shadow cast over her bed; the form of a man whose hands were not those of a man…

Now he understood her dream. We have become the painting that she loves. "Yes."

"I'm glad." She brought his hand up and pressed her cheek against it. "I've waited so long for you. Will you come back to me again?"

He closed his eyes, almost breaking from the dream before he gave in to temptation. "Yes."

Chapter 9

"You'd be the archbishop's problem priest," a harsh voice said.

John turned from studying the cork bulletin board in the Haven's entrance hall to see a thin, big-eared man staring at him. The man was wearing a carpenter's jeans and Union Jack flag T-shirt. His orange-dyed hair fell in thick dreadlocks that reached his shoulders. If all that wasn't enough to chisel an impression, white letters on the shirt spelled out BUGGER OFF IRAQ.

"I'm John Keller. I'm here to see Dougall Hurley about the counseling position you have available." John wondered if Union Jack here would be his first client. He had the right clothes, but his face was on the weathered side for a teenager.

The dreadlocks swung forward and back as small blue eyes inspected him. "You'd be a wop, a spic, an Oreo or a Twinkie. Which is it?"

John despised racial slurs about as much as he did white men who affected dreadlocks. "I wouldn't know. I was adopted."

"Oreo'd be my guess. More cream than coffee. I'm Hurley." He didn't offer his hand. "You don't like my hair."

"Your hair is immaterial," John said. "I don't like your language."

"Irish were the white niggers in this country. Still are," Hurley informed him. "I'm just embracing my cultural heritage. "You really looking for a job, Keller, or a place to lie low?"

What, precisely, had Hightower told this man about him? "I'm applying for a job." Which he had no intention of accepting, because he didn't work for racists, so he'd make this fast.

"More mouth on you than what he usually dumps on me." He jerked his head toward the office at the end of the hall. "Come on, then, let's have a go."

Hurley's office was a hodgepodge of scrounged furnishings and file piles. Antiwar posters almost covered the stains and holes in the Sheetrock walls. A bumper sticker plastered to the front of his desk read NAMES CHANGE, SKIN DON'T. An ancient coffeepot sat cooking the molasses-colored brew inside its carafe to an even murkier black.

"You don't want the coffee," Hurley told him when he caught John looking at it. "Turns your insides African-American."

"I can drink anything," John said mildly, "but I prefer tea."

"Aren't you the bloody cucumber." Hurley sat down in the rickety-looking chair behind his desk. "As it happens, former Father Keller, we don't do tea here."

He nodded. "I'll bring my own." To another job. Any other job but this. '

"We also don't harbor fugitives unless they're under eighteen and haven't copped to a major felony. I'm the only broken-down priest on the premises, and most of my time is spent trying to keep the kids from dealing, turning tricks, and making funny-colored babies." Hurley raised his orange brows. "Jump in anytime you'd like to tell me how I should piss off."

It was good practice for other job interviews. "I've completed several courses in psychology and child management, and I have practical experience with feeding and counseling the homeless, including their children." It was hard to recite what credentials he had without sounding defensive. "I'll need some direction, but I'm a fast learner. I believe I can handle whatever the job entails. Your racism offends me."

"Good. I'm an equal opportunity bigot. I hate every-fucking-one." Hurley tucked his hands behind his head and kicked back, making the chair beneath him creak. "Right. Let's say Melissa, little not-quite-white girl, who's built like Beyonce but can't walk and chew gum at the same time, comes to you. She wants to know what she should charge her boss at the diner for a hummer. You'd counsel her to do…?" He spread out one hand.

"I'd suggest other ways she can make extra money." John kept his face bland. "Or, if she had her heart set on it, I'd find out the blue book on Hummers and help her sell the car."

Hurley uttered a single, sharp laugh. "You come with a little sense of humor, former Father Keller. His Graciousness didn't mention that."

His Grace hadn't mentioned a lot of things. Such as how a bigot like Dougall Hurley had ever been ordained.

"Look, former Father Hurley," John said, "I don't want to be here, but I've nowhere else to go. Neither do these kids. Frankly I don't care if you call me John, Keller, or Snickerdoodle, but call a kid a racist name in my presence and then you'll see me pissed. Avoid that, find a hairdresser, and we should all get along fine."

"What about your sheet?" Hurley's gaze moved over him. "You've got one. Overseas and sealed, so I can't get a copy, but I know it exists."

He thought of getting up and walking out. But he would not run from his sins, or this man. He was done with that. "I was charged in Rio with solicitation. I did nineteen months."

"Solicitation." Hurley whistled, then pulled out a fax and tossed it onto his cluttered desk, where it curled into a tube. "That sounds so much nicer than 'banging a spic working girl,' doesn't it? While you were in uniform, no less."

"You already knew."

"Call it a test of honesty." Hurley's lips thinned. "All right, here it is, Don John. You eat, sleep, and work here. No private sessions, no special privileges."

"You're offering me the job?"

"Shut up; I only do this once. You take your turn scrubbing toilets and peeling potatoes like everyone else. I can't pay more than minimum wage, but I'll toss in your room and board. I find you with your hands on any part of my clients, for any reason, you'll go back to jail." He gave him a genuine smile. "What's left of you."

It was not what he had hoped for, but it was more than he had. "Accepted."

"Christ, you're stupider than I thought." Hurley pulled his feet off the desk. "I'll show you around the zoo."

John expected to hear a continuous stream of racial jokes and slurs out of Hurley's mouth as they walked the narrow corridors of the Haven. The shelter manager instead gave him a precise and informative minilecture on runaway children.

"A million and a half kids live on the streets in this country," Hurley told him as they went through a restaurant-size kitchen with incredibly ancient appliances. "Every day fifteen hundred more run away, are abandoned, or become homeless with their families. Five thousand of those will be murdered, kill themselves, or die out there in a year."

John learned that the shelter's clients had been on the streets anywhere from a few days to years, and two-thirds of them were girls.

"Fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds get the hard grind," Hurley said as they walked up the first of the resident floors, which John expected to be deserted. Instead it was packed with teenagers coming in and out of rooms, loitering in doorways, sitting in the halls. All eyes turned to him and Hurley as soon as they came into sight. Oddly they reminded him of the hamsters he'd once seen in a pet store: terrified, resigned, handled by any number of rough hands. "They're too young to get jobs and apartments, too old for foster-care placement. That's why I lost our state funding: no max stays, no forced placements or reunifications." ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">