Free Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) by A.J. Aalto

straddled me again, and I felt her stare. My dry eyes longed to blink through a mat of shorn hair strands.
    “Not pretty now,” she said softly, sliding her fingers to my throat. They were slick; she had cut herself while stabbing me to death. Poor baby.
    Despite my lack of pulse and breath, she'd know I wasn't really dead if she got one of her so-called “flickers” about what I was attempting one-handed under the bed. I wondered if my pupils were actually dilated like a real corpse as I stared unblinking. I knew I was still losing blood; I could hear it squelch in the carpet's padding under Danika's knees. She palpated my throat. A retching gag escaped her.
    She rolled off me to all fours to vomit forcefully against the side of the bed, splattering my jeans with sour bile. When I retold this story to everyone I knew, I was definitely going to leave out that nasty detail. Add vomit to the stench of old cigarettes in the carpet, spilled coffee, and the coppery tang of blood, and you had the horrible potpourri of her revenge. She stood, wavering uncertainly on her feet, turning her back on me.
    She coughed, spitting to clear her mouth. “Getting late. Be on my way…” she breathed, whipping off the robe and depositing it in a swish of terry on the floor. She peeled off the yoga pants to reveal weatherproof rubberized pants, the kind worn by hardcore all-weather fishermen. They were wet with my blood but would wipe off easily. “You had what's mine. Now I'll have what's yours. That's the promise.”
    And my brain shrieked, Harry!

EIGHT
    Funny things occur to you when you're dying. Bleeding out for the second time in three months, I thought deliriously, I could have used that damned No. 2 pencil. And: Soft palate impalement. That's what Batten called it. And: I think Batten waters down his cologne. How can I prove it? And then: I'm going to die, here. I don't want the reek of vomit to be the last thing I smell.
    When I was sure she'd gone, I broke the sage pentagram with a trembling hand, accidentally flicking the onyx deep under the bed. The shuddering breath that followed was sweet, but the sharp pain of the stab wounds returned with my life. I'd never imagined anything could hurt more than gunshot wounds. Stab wounds gaped, flesh mouths silently screaming scarlet; every slight breath I hitched-in made it so much worse. Unfamiliar noises scratched and scrambled along the back of my throat, injured animal noises, sounds of plain, mindless desperation.
    My cell phone was smeared with blood that had poured down my back to soak the rump of my jeans, and rolling over to free it from the sticky denim was torture. Sounds were starting to filter back: cars on the street, a motorcycle rumbling by. She'd left the door half open. Frigid winter air spilled in. Could I get up enough voice to shout for help? Would anyone hear? The front desk guy? A passerby? Out here? Not likely.
    There was so much residual rage in the room I could taste it on the back of my tongue; I gagged, which tugged savagely in what must have been the worst stab wound, in my belly. I huddled around my pain, hissing through my teeth.
    I should have dialed 911 first, but my heart contracted frantically for my Cold Company, hammered with an un-ignorable drumming,fists on taut skins, a violent thundering pushing hot urgency through my veins. I knew this was the Bond's doing, the near-severing of our mystical tether firing off unrelenting pressure to reach him: my partner, my advocate, my champion, nothing else mattered. Swallowing back panic, I thumbed-in his number.
    One ring. No answer.
    Two rings. Harry, please!
    Three rings and it went to his civilized, articulate message. I sniveled something indecipherable and tried again. No answer. No answer. If he was prone now in his casket… Oh, Harry, get out get out!
    I spit out a blood-choked sob and dialed 911. Dispatch had barely said a syllable when I was gasping at her repeatedly, “she stabbed me, she stabbed