Years ago, right around puberty, she started seeing a black cat with a purple aura surrounding it. It was the size of a panther. Its fur black, it had a heart-shaped tuft of white on its chest, and eyes that roiled like molten gold.
Calico was certain it meant she had the same mental illness as the rest of the family. It was an illness that caused the others to believe so fervently in dark creatures haunting the night. An illness that even persuaded certain family members to take up vigils against those make-believe creatures. Maybe their family birth marks were brain tumors. Calico had never spoken of the cat because it couldn’t really be there.
“Did Dad tell you where I was?”
Calico smirked at her and nodded.
“Guess I’m not surprised. But I need to be in isolation. You know that. Why are you being such a shit about it, do you think this is easy for me?”
“You know why. Same reason I’m a shit about all our family secrets.”
Tabs sighed. “I know you don’t believe but can’t you at least go along with it for my sake? This is important to me.”
Calico bit her tongue. She wanted to rant and rave. Convince Tabby this was all idiotic and she should give it up.
Calico knew she was also trying to convince herself. She was terrified the monsters were real, but not for the reason anyone normal would think, as in monsters were scary. No. The reason was that if they were real, that meant she couldn’t have a normal life.
After several moments of silence, she said. “So how much longer before you leave?”
“Not long.”
“I’ll stop by again.”
“I wish you wouldn’t, it only makes it more difficult. This is hard for me, too. I’m going to miss you. Miss Mom and Dad.”
Calico’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“Don’t.”
Calico wandered to the card tables and picked up a few papers. Tabby nearly knocked her down snatching the papers from her hand.
“Don’t mess these up!” There was anger in her voice. In a huff, she slammed the paper down and nearly broke the flimsy table.
“You know what, fuck you,” said Calico, getting in Tabby’s face. “You and your stupid vigil. It’s complete shit and—”
Tabby grabbed her sister’s arm.
“That hurts!”
“Good!” Tabby pulled her across the floor and opened the door. “I love you, now get the fuck out of here and never come back!” She flung her sister into the hall, slamming and locking the door behind her.
Calico stumbled and fell to the hallway floor. “I love you, too, you fucking bitch!”
A door down the hall opened and a man’s head peeked out. “Excuse me, but you’re being—”
“Fuck off!” screamed Calico, letting it come from deep within her chest. It felt so good. She pushed herself to her feet, wiped the tears from her eyes, and stomped down the hall, glaring at the man until he retreated back into his apartment.
CHAPTER SIX
The man in the expensive suit and weird blue-gray eyes cradled Detective Detrick Palmerroy in his arms effortlessly, even though the detective weighed over two hundred pounds. He’d woken a few moments earlier, surprised he wasn’t dead.
They were inside a building, moving upstairs—but that was based solely on motion. There was no light at all. For that reason, Palmerroy couldn’t swear it was the well-dressed man, but who else would it be? The man didn’t seem bothered by the lack of light. But for the detective, it was disorienting and terrifying to glide through darkness like that.
He used his outside arm, which still loosely held his gun, to punch the man. Palmerroy knew his broken wrist would hurt like hell, but hopefully the weight of the gun would shock the man into dropping him. The electric surge of pain in his wrist from striking the man’s face nearly knocked the detective back out. He breathed raggedly and tried not to groan. The gun fell free and bounced down the stairs. There was no reaction from his captor.
“Okay, bud, let me go. I’m a cop.” Palmerroy bucked and twisted, fully expecting to free himself. The detective was big and in great shape.
Instead, the man gripped him harder, stopping him from all but wriggling feebly. Palmerroy’s good arm hung down, trapped against the man’s body—but that put it in position to reach between the man’s legs. He grabbed and twisted.
At least it got a reaction. The man grunted and squeezed the detective with such strength that he couldn’t breathe and felt bone or cartilage pop in his chest. He released the man’s balls and the man eased up on his grip. Palmerroy felt like a trapped child, which freaked him out as much as being blind in the dark.
All the while, the man walked at a steady pace, turning at one point and continuing up. There was no feeling-his-way in the darkness, nothing tentative to his step. And the guy wasn’t breathing hard at all from the exertion of carrying him.
What was going on with this freak? Was he on PCP? That might explain his unnatural strength and, he didn’t know, maybe it screwed with his vision so he could see even in darkness. Or Palmerroy was still unconscious and he was dreaming about vampires.
When the man pushed open a door, the edge of the frame hit Palmerroy’s head hard enough for him to snort from the pain. The man carried him on a level surface, a wood floor creaked under his feet. But if they were no longer in a stairwell, where were the windows? Maybe they were in a hallway with no access to the outside.
Without warning, the man dumped Palmerroy onto the floor. Instinctively he put out his hands, jolting his broken wrist once again. He cried out and spasmed from the pain, but immediately pushed himself up. Blindly, he put out his good arm and felt for a wall that could help guide him. But there was nothing in any direction he tried.
“Where are we? What the hell is going on?” Surreptitiously, he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his phone. He tried to figure out how to turn it on and call 9-1-1 before the man could take it.
Footsteps sounded several yards away and by the slight echo, Palmerroy realized they were in a large room. The detective turned away from the footsteps and put as much distance between himself and the man, gamely holding the phone in the hand with the broken wrist while using his good arm to keep from bashing into a wall.
Behind him, he heard cloth drop onto a table or onto the floor. Was this all meant to scare him? The detective hated to admit that it was succeeding. Then he wondered if he was walking in a circle. Where the hell were the walls in this place? This had to be a dream and he was in infinite darkness. That’s when his hand smacked into a wall.
Transferring his phone to his good hand, he turned back in the direction he thought his captor was standing. The light would give him away no matter what he did, so he wanted to see the room he was in. That’s when he heard the man speaking, but it wasn’t to him. It sounded like a chant, like he’d heard monks do on PBS one time.
Palmerroy turned on the phone. The room was huge, it must have taken up the entire floor of the building. Over halfway across stood the man. He was naked, his clothes draped across a table. There were two other men, both dressed impeccably, flanking the man.
“Get the phone,” said the naked man.
They moved as fast as the man had earlier, sprinting as if in the Olympics. The detective dialed 9-1-1, but they were on him. It was hard to tell in the light of the phone, but they both seemed to have blue-gray eyes and ashen skin, even though the man on Palmerroy’s right was African American.
The detective dropped the phone and swung an uppercut with his good arm, clipping the guy to his left in the jaw. It was a good hit. Solid. The man’s head went sideways as expected, but then he just turned back toward the cop, no sign the punch had phased him in the least.
“What are you?” he said.
They grabbed his arms. One of them smashed his phone with the heel of an expensive dress shoe. As the detective struggled, they simply lifted him clear of the ground and carried him. He kicked, but it didn’t do anything
.
Palmerroy realized that despite his phone being trashed, he could still see. It took him a moment to pinpoint that the source was a dark red glow coming from the floor in front of the naked man, who raised his arms. His body was flawless—he must have worked out like a beast. Even in just the glow, his muscles were sharply defined and lean like a triathlete. The guy was ripped with zero fat.
You ever hear of a fat vampire?
As he got closer, Palmerroy saw that the glow from the floor formed a pattern. It was two concentric circles, the outer one about six feet across, with a complex design in the middle that looked like a wiring diagram of an electrical circuit. He assumed the man wasn’t making plans to rewire the building.
The men carried him to the circle and dangled him over the center of it while they stood outside the maroon glow. Did it suddenly get cold in the room? He shivered and saw his breath. The A/C must have been cranked.
The naked man turned away briefly, still talking in a low chanting voice. Palmerroy didn’t understand the language. Maybe it was gibberish. The man picked up a wooden box from the table behind him. The box was about a foot long, seven or eight inches across, and the same height. The lid, which slid into a groove, was open halfway. The man held the box toward the detective, as if trying to give it to him.
The maroon glow brightened and then something bit Palmerroy’s back. He winced and arched but couldn’t move more than that. The spot on his back burned. A spider? Maybe the nutjobs put a brown recluse down his shirt when they grabbed him, part of their psychotic plans.
But then his chest hurt. At first it was like the bite on his back. He wanted desperately to scratch at it. He grimaced at the pain, then cried out as his chest felt like it burst into flame. Was he having a heart attack?
The man stopped chanting and said, “You can release him.”
Palmerroy fell to the floor, his legs unable to hold him up. Now it felt like the circle itself was burning him. He twisted onto his side, but when he tried to reach outside the circle, his hand stopped at the edge as if coming into contact with a solid wall. Then the pain really hit. He thrashed and screamed. The pain was beyond anything he’d felt before.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Calico unlocked and entered her townhouse through the back door, slamming it shut. She was still pissed at Tabby about the fight at her apartment. Slipping off her red ballet flats, she slipped on her pink Crocs. She ducked into the first doorway on her left and dropped her tote on the dining room table. Taking her iPhone with her, she turned back through the little hallway that ran the length of the townhouse. Across the hallway was the door to the basement. She went down the stairs, flicking on the lights.
The basement was her jewelry studio. There were two rows of bright fluorescents attached to the wood joists. Her basement wasn’t finished, with exposed joists for a ceiling and concrete floors and walls. It was nearly the length of the townhouse above, giving her ample room for the three large worktables, a long wall of shelving stacked with dozens of plastic drawer systems, and even a strong metal cabinet in one corner for precious metals and gems.
Her parents talked about her jewelry business as her little hobby, but it was much more than that to her. Her goal was to someday soon, she hoped, quit her day job and make jewelry full time. She wasn’t making money at it, yet, but she had over a dozen orders from small boutiques. Right then, however, she wasn’t thinking about her business.
She went to the wall of shelves and pulled open a small plastic drawer, reached to the back of it, and came out with a key. Opening the nearly floor-to-ceiling cabinet, she pulled out several small spools of silver wire.
Taking it to a worktable, she sat on her stool, nicely padded with a back to it, and turned on the magnifying work lamp, pulling it into position. She bent over the magnifying lens and unrolled a short length of silver. The wire was thin, like angel hair pasta.
Grabbing small needle nose pliers with a wire cutter built in, she snipped a centimeter off the end. Picking up the snippet with the pliers, she formed it into a circle with her well-calloused fingertips and the top of the table. She snipped another centimeter, fed it through the loop she’d just made, and formed that one into a circle as well.
She worked, snipping and forming links, until she had a small rectangle of interconnected silver. Getting up and stretching her back, she went to a different array of plastic drawers, opening several, looking for small necklace fasteners.
“Huh,” she said with a slight chuckle. The drawer she’d opened held a rock. She’d forgotten she’d stashed it there. It was a stone she’d found as a little girl and kept all these years. She took it out. It wasn’t much bigger than a chicken egg, the stone a dark gray granite. She turned it over to look at the pattern that someone had drawn on it before she’d found it. The drawing was some kind of symbol in black ink.
“Focus,” she muttered, dropping it back into the drawer and closing it.
Pulling open a few others, she found the fasteners and returned to her table. She attached a fastener to the end of each row of the tiny chainmail, pulling the rectangle together to form a circle. It was a start. She snipped more silver and added more links.
Yawning, she blinked to clear her eyes. She’d been downstairs for hours. Standing again, she went to her woodworking table to start on the wood triskele. She had the small pattern drawn on graph paper. It was a symbol seen throughout their family’s written chronicles that represented life, death, and rebirth.
On the table was a pile of rowan tree heartwood dowels, shipped special from Ireland. They were roughly a foot long and an inch and a half in diameter, bound together in a bundle, and expensive. Mom and Dad bought them—just like her parents had helped with all the equipment for her jewelry business. And co-signed her mortgage and helped with payments.
Pulling the graph paper close, she used the tip of a pin to put holes into the design to mark connecting lines. Holes poked, she centered the design over a small polished disk of rowan heartwood cut from the end of one of the dowels. It was a rich brown color with a small slash of blond marking one side. She stuck a fine-tip black pen through each of the holes in the graph paper.
Removing the paper, she used a pencil to connect the dots with arcs to create the circular Irish pattern. Tabby had a tattoo of the same design on her left breast just beneath her collarbone. Calico grabbed her Dremel and used a small carving bit to cut the pattern into the wood.
Another hour passed before she had the piece carved out. It still needed to be sanded, but she set it on the table and laid the silver chainmail necklace above it, tilting her head one way and then the other. It looked good.
She stood. “Oh, man.”
Her body was stiff, and she was exhausted, but the jewelry work helped her unwind after the fight with Tabby. Like all sisters—all siblings—they had their fights, but they loved each other, and all would be forgiven tomorrow. A few hours later the alarm on her phone went off, letting her know it was time to get up for work. She’d call in sick, this was more important.
A few more hours passed. She’d completed sanding the rowan triskele, added a fastener to the top, and attached it to the silver chainmail necklace. It was finished. Calico slipped it into a rose-colored acetate bag, sealed it with a sticker with her logo on it, and went back upstairs. Grabbing her red-leather tote, she slipped the necklace inside and headed to her detached garage in the back.
She wasn’t as lucky with parking outside Tabby’s apartment as the night before and ended up nearly two blocks away. She got to the apartment and buzzed. And buzzed. There was no answer. Her sister was probably ignoring her. After five minutes, Calico was about to leave when someone came out the security door. Calico slipped in, tiptoed over the mildewy carpet, and froze as she stared down the hallway. Tabby’s door was wide open.
A flutter of unease skittered through her. She ran, her Crocs slapping against the wood. As she got closer, she heard male voices coming from inside the apartment. A home invas
ion? Calico rolled her eyes. Tabby would kick their fucking asses. No, the fear clawing up Calico’s legs was that something worse had happened.
Then she saw the lock, confirming her worst fear. The SCHLAGE lock was gone, a round hole in the door. Inside, two men worked. One was under the sink in the bathroom, his feet sticking out into the single room of the apartment, and the other was doing some paint touch-up work on a wall. The furniture was gone. Tabby was gone. She’d already left for her vigil.
It was a punch to the gut. “Fuck,” she muttered to herself. Tabby must have packed up the second she kicked Calico out.
The painter glanced up at her. “You here to look at the place?”
She shook her head.
“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Calico, would it?”
Confused, she said, “Yeah?”
He nodded toward the open door. “That box is for you. She left it with some money for the manager to mail it, but I guess since you’re here you can just take it.”
Frowning, she turned. Just outside the door was a brown box the size and shape that could hold an oversized bottle of wine. Shoulders sagging, Calico picked it up and walked back down the hallway, which became blurry and indistinct. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes.
Later in the evening, as Calico sat on her couch and stared at the TV without paying any attention to what was on, the first three notes of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” played on her phone. In a daze, she glanced at it, then sat upright, scrabbling for it. It was an anonymous text message that simply said, “Checked in.”
It was from Tabby using a just-bought prepaid cell phone and an anonymous texting service—so the text couldn’t be traced back to her. The impersonal text meant Tabby had started her vigil.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dark Vigil Page 3
