GRIT

by Elle Cross

  I knew that she was only half-listening to me when she had that faraway look, her eyes more gray than aqua. For what it was worth, I was glad to have his memories, to know who he was so that he didn't die anonymously. I could've gone without the horror movie images, though.

  And that creepy parasite thing that had seen me when I was connected with Owen? That was entirely in the bad juju category, and nothing Corbin could do to investigate what she couldn't see.

  While she was deep in her inner world, I paid our bill and quickly filled a takeout box with the few leftovers we had. Corbin would want a midnight snack.

  All set, I nudged her from her reverie. "Hey, so let's get some bubble tea so we can walk off that dinner and get some fresh air in you. Oh, and if Ricci isn't busy, I'd like for her to re-do some of my tattoos." At least the ones on my wrists. They’d be an easy job, quicker than getting a manicure.

  Corbin came back to me in degrees. "Yes, let's," she said, her voice a touch dreamy. It was only ever like that when she was deep in thought. She blinked, and when her eyes were back to aqua, I knew she was wholly present again. She looked around the table, confused. "Did you already pay?"

  I held up the to-go bag. "And got your midnight snacks."

  She rolled her eyes and tsked. "Aw, I meant to pay."

  I rolled my eyes right back. "Well, pay for the bubble tea. Save me a trip to the ATM."

  She snorted then. "You and your anti-cash."

  "It's dirty!"

  We walked for a couple of blocks, arguing about the merits of a cashless economic base. We ducked into the tattoo parlor, but saw that Ricci, my favorite tattooist was occupied, so I made an appointment for tomorrow. That way I could get both wrists and neck easy-peasy. As we headed out toward the teashop, I smelled something familiar. Something out of place here in Chinatown.

  Corbin was immediately on alert in response to my caution, scanning the area with her sharp eyes. "What do you see?" she asked, barely a whisper.

  "It's not what I see. It's what I smell." Amber and spice...and a hint of something else. Just a thread woven between the fish and sewer smells of the open food market, but it was there. Unmistakable.

  I turned to Corbin. "It's Jack."

  "In Chinatown?” she said, incredulous. “He'd never be caught dead down here."

  "I know, but it's him. I think he's in trouble." Not being able to identify that thread mingled with his scent troubled me.

  Corbin made me stay put while she scoured the park across the way. There was a police precinct just a few blocks over. It wasn't Corbin's house, but we'd alerted some off-duty officers to get some back up.

  Lucky for them, they didn't hesitate.

  I lost Jack's scent.

  She hadn't asked if I were sure that I'd smelled him, the same way I'd never ask her if she was sure about anything she'd ever seen. These scents were more than just replicable fragrances that can be mass-produced like perfume.

  This was like smelling DNA or fingerprints or retinas. Unique. One-of-a-kind.

  While Corbin scoured in the direction I'd pointed out, and other officers joined in to assist, I stood useless under the awning of a corner fish mart.

  I felt a presence, then the weight of a look. A flutter of movement made me turn my head toward the street. In the middle of a wash of light from the street lamp, shadows moved and danced. More than shadows. The air in the street in front of me seemed to bulge and ripple. Like the night was a curtain and there were people moving behind it.

  I blinked, doubting what I saw. I wished I had Corbin's eyes.

  And then the unmistakable outline of a Human figure rolled on the ground, and I strained to follow the flashes of light, those hints of an outline. More shadowed forms pulled and rippled at the night, heading for the figure on the ground.

  The figure crawled on hands and knees, pushing against the veil of night until it stretched into an oily blackness that finally, finally raked away from him, like a mask being pulled off his face.

  The heady scents of amber hit me first, then mingled with spices.

  Jack.

  He was dressed in his trademark black tux, though most of it was torn and rent. His beautiful lip was split, face all bruised and bloodied.

  We locked gazes, an eternity of desperation and longing poured in that moment between us.

  Jack's eyes were wild and crazed. "Vesper. Run. Now!"

  And then the shadows engulfed him once more.

  "Jack!" My heart poured into his name.

  The shadows came for me then. I felt the weight of their gaze.

  Their intention.

  A fissure cracked inside me. A rage the quiet of falling snow crystallized around me.

  I let go. The power I let loose at the shadows carried the sound of a building avalanche in its wake. It hit against the rippling night and careened upward, lighting up the entire city block. Streamers of fire and lightning exploded around the block. Corbin had run to me, and pulled me back under the shelter of the awning.

  The shadows were gone, and the night was flat and still again. No more shapes rippled against it.

  Corbin was breathless at my side. "Vesper, what's wrong? What happened? Who attacked? Where's Jack?"

  I blinked at her rapid-fire questions. Officers were all over the street now, crawling under cars, down alleys, chasing any car that passed this way.

  "Vesper.” Her strong fingers gripped my shoulders as she looked me straight in the eyes and spoke slowly. “You yelled for Jack. I saw him for maybe a second. Where'd he go? Vesper? Where is Jack?"

  My eyes were rooted to the spot in the middle of the street. Where he had broken free for just one moment. Before he was dragged back into an abyss. "He's gone."

  I placed my palm on the palm plate on Jack's door.

  Nice to see you, Honey girl. Come in, come in.

  The stupid machine captured him so perfectly, I bit down hard on my lip so I wouldn't cry.

  I moved back quickly, though, knowing that Corbin wanted to lead her team in. I sank to the floor at the midpoint between our two apartments to wait.

  Another team swarmed into my apartment.

  Rajah sniffed them all as they passed. He came out into the hall to lick my chin. I wrapped my arms around his neck, petting him silently while he stood still for me.

  Volleys of “Clear!” rang out. Rajah broke free of my grip and trotted back into our apartment. I sat alone and bereft.

  Corbin strode out of Jack's apartment and crouched down to my level. "You up for this?"

  I nodded emphatically, not trusting my words.

  "Let's do this then."

  I heard Rajah's trot and whine, and saw he had my blanket from my reading couch clutched in his mouth.

  "What'd you do that for? Silly dog, put it back."

  He whined more, gurgled in his throat.

  Resigned, I took the blanket from his mouth. And then realized it still smelled like Jack.

  I buried my face in the blanket and did what I promised myself I wouldn't do in front of a hallway full of police officers.

  I cried.

  I walked the perimeter of Jack's apartment, hugging the blanket tight to my body. Rajah trotted alongside me, his shoulder affixed to my hip.

  The apartment was as expected for a free-wheeling bachelor who moonlighted as an escort. Black leather furniture and the newest big screens were balanced by elegant dark woods and warm accessories. His style leaned more toward sensual elegance rather than college frat room.

  As I walked through it, nothing seemed out of place or out of the ordinary, which seemed worse somehow. If the apartment had been ransacked, then I could accept that some horrible people had taken him. Maybe there would have been some clue left behind. With his apartment so…pristine…it made it seem like he should be sauntering through that door at any moment.

  But I knew that wouldn’t be the case. I knew that some unseen forces had taken him, and left no clues behind. Nothing Corbin could see.

 
Tears streamed down my face.

  I wanted to tell all these cops to go away, to stop filling his place with their noxious odors. I glared at one CSI who reeked of rotting seaweed, who was spending an inordinate amount of time checking out Jack's stuff rather than processing it. Rajah’s growl rumbled through his entire body.

  "Hey, you!" Corbin snapped her fingers at the CSI. "Make yourself useful or get the fuck out." Someone else on the man's team rushed over to finish reprimanding him as we walked by.

  No one wanted a pissed off Detective Troy except me. I needed her angry. Needed it to fuel my own, and make me less weepy.

  I walked in her wake. "I'm not feeling anything. Nothing seems off." I wished I hadn’t sounded so whiny.

  She of course was in fine form. Cool, collected and one hundred percent in charge. "It's ok, just take it slow. And if we find nothing here, we'll find something someplace else."

  I nodded along with her, believing everything she said, snapping up the morsels of her confidence like a starving man would in front of a buffet. Corbin's absolute certainty was another blanket I clung to.

  I saved Jack's bedroom for last. I’d never entered his room the entire time we’d been neighbors. It felt like an unspoken kind of thing. Like it would invite too many complications.

  Standing there, just outside the door felt like I would be stepping into some place off limits somehow. As if this would be admitting that he was lost to me forever. I had to breathe and tell myself to stop being stupid. He wasn't dead. He couldn’t be dead. He was alive, and this was how I would learn how to find him. I pushed through the doorway, then, while Corbin lingered back to give me space for first impressions.

  My first thought was that I'd wandered into a different house. The second thought was, where in the hell did he sleep?

  The room felt like it was a prop, staged perfectly for a real estate agent waiting to sell it. It was outfitted in his signature black. But other than that, nothing in this room seemed like Jack. Felt like Jack.

  The bed was queen-sized, tucked into the corner with a nondescript bedside table and matching bureau along the wall. A full-length, tri-fold mirror on a raised dais that looked like something out of a store's dressing room was on the far wall opposite from where we stood at the doorway. The rest of the space was blank and devoid of personality.

  It all seemed...wrong.

  So, he hadn't invested in an interior designer. So what if there was an inordinate amount of unused negative space. There had to be more to this room than what I was seeing that made it feel off to me.

  "This room. It's completely unscented."

  Corbin sniffed around. "How do you mean?"

  Understandably, she was confused. I knew as much as she did that it smelled like cleaning agents and whatever else the maid service had used.

  But it didn't smell like him. At all. It was as if Jack had never used this room. I walked out into the living room, and was drenched with the scents of Jack. Walking back into his bedroom, it was like walking into a sterile room mad scientist’s used for labs. I felt like I had spanned two different apartments.

  I told Corbin what I felt.

  "Well, we both know what he did. He was kind of a night hawk, wasn’t he? Always out and about…for business." She had framed that as delicately as possible.

  "Yeah, but even you, famed non-sleeper, crash in your bedroom every now and again. You walk into it. Are present in it at some point. And believe me when I say, even without you in it, even while away on vacation, it still smells like you."

  Rajah sniffed around this new area, then sneezed, as if confirming what I said.

  I opened the walk-in closets to prove something to myself. Just like mine, his closet was as big as the room itself, and wrapped around toward the master bathroom. In my apartment, I had asked them to make my bedroom, bathroom, and closet connected. Jack had apparently chosen to keep the bathroom and closet separate, gaining access to the bathroom from the main hallway only.

  The moment I walked into the closet, I was enveloped in Jack's scent. Amber and spices hung heavy in the air, so recent he could be standing in front of me. I breathed him in.

  I ran my fingers over the suits hanging in precision, one entire section devoted solely to varying cuts of the same black Armani. Only one hanger was empty.

  A garment bag waiting for the dry cleaners hung next to the empty hanger. I unzipped it, and recognized the coffee stain and dried mascara on the lapels. This was the jacket he'd worn just last night. Since he evidently slept in my apartment last night, this had been hanging here since this morning, at least. Possibly even later on in the day.

  I lifted the sleeve of the suit jacket, inhaled deeply.

  I didn't even have to try to find his scent, but I never wanted to stop smelling him.

  I unzipped the garment bag more. Stuck my nose right into the jacket itself, smelling the lining, the collar, everywhere on the thoroughly scent-soaked fabric.

  Some time in my sniffing spree, Corbin had entered the closet, too, and had been checking the space behind the clothes. Anywhere someone—or something—could have been lurking or hiding.

  If I'd been smarter, I would have checked those spaces, too.

  "Corbin," I said.

  "Mmm?" Her voice was oddly muffled, and I turned around wondering what she was doing. She was on her knees checking out the cushions on the seat in front of his wall of shoes.

  "His stuff, his clothes, all of this...smells of him." I had to pause and calm my wavering voice. "He could only get here through that bedroom." Then I looked at her dead on. "How in the hell could he have walked through that room”—I stabbed my finger in the direction of that fake bedroom as if it had insulted me—“and not leave his scent behind? Especially since he'd been here at least once sometime today." I pulled on the jacket as if she’d be confused about what I’d meant, stroking the stiff lapel where the coffee stained it.

  Corbin kneeling was still an imposing figure, especially when she had that gleam in her eye, the one that I knew meant she would figure this out or die trying.

  I sincerely hoped it wouldn't come down to that. I squelched my fluttery panic at the thought of not having Corbin or Jack in my life, and hugged my blanket tighter against the now-constant throbbing radiating in my chest.

  In the middle of my panic attack, Corbin had come up beside me and placed her hand on my shoulder. "I don't know what's going on, but we're going to find out."

  As if in mutual consent, we spread out and scoured the bedroom. I felt less of an intruder here, with its empty spaces. Like I could pretend that these were non-Jack spaces.

  Rajah growled and whined at something by the vanity.

  I turned and met Corbin's eyes. She nodded.

  I motioned Rajah to me.

  Corbin paced in front of the vanity, sizing up the mirrors as she would size up her suspects in interrogation. As if it would somehow give up its secrets to her. She was so good at her job, I wouldn't have been surprised if an inanimate object just started babbling at her just to make her happy.

  She approached it slowly, checking the mirrors out as she went. I followed after her.

  Knowing what I kept in my own room, and considering that Jack's—I meant, this—apartment was set up as a mirror image to mine, I grazed my fingers against the wall, and felt a familiar catch for what was designed as a panic room. I pushed it.

  Panels moved aside, nesting into a pocket in the wall, and a cold mist exhaled into the room. Instead of a hidden recess like in my master bedroom, the open panels only revealed a darkness, too heavy and palpable to be merely shadows. It was a void that was darker than black.

  Corbin, Rajah and I immediately came together and retreated to the middle of the room.

  Aside from that one initial puff of mist, nothing else came from the recess. The tri-fold mirror seemed to be melting slowly, slowly, until it rippled smooth against the wall. There no longer were any seams, as if it had always been one smooth continuous piece of
glass.

  A flash of light lined the edges of the mirror before going still and dark once more. With the mirror flat against the wall, the dais looked a little ominous there, like it was a stairway to nowhere.

  I didn't know how long we stood frozen in our spot. Corbin was slightly in front of me on my right, weapon in hand ready to face a potential threat. Rajah, to my left, growling deep in his chest. Nothing else seemed to happen, and we exhaled a little.

  "Corbin," I finally whispered, not completely convinced we were safe.

  "Yes?" she whispered back. She must have felt the same thing, too.

  "Please tell me that you can't see your reflection either."

  "Nope, can't see my reflection."

  I suppressed a shiver.

  We were transfixed, staring at the wall opposite from us, which now had a seven foot square mirror embedded into it, except it reflected nothing. Not us, not the bed, nothing.

  Rajah whined.

  That broke the spell. In an unspoken choreography, we backed out of that room and quickly shut the door.

  "What the actual fuck?" Corbin hissed. She clutched fistfuls of her hair and paced the hallway. She was always unsettled with things she couldn't see.

  It's the same with me and non-smells.

  "I know right?"

  We kept our voices low, though we didn't need to bother. Everyone else was still processing the apartment, still focused on their work knowing there’d be hell to pay if they didn’t deliver results.

  Corbin was still muttering to herself. "Mirrors, man. That's like bad juju right there."

  "I hear that," I agreed with her.

  "So, it's not like we can take this entire room to the Basement for containment, and I'm not about to send my team in there into god knows what, because god knows what might happen."

  Corbin was pacing again, shaking her head. She had an idea brewing, and it was ready to erupt.

  “You got something, don’t you?” I could always tell when she had one of her hunches.

  She muttered to herself. I waited until she huffed and stomped her foot. She whirled around, her hands on her hips. “Do you think Jack had anything to do with…them?”