A dark blue sedan was parked a few yards away near a set of stairs that led to the rear entrance of the Chinese grocer a few doors down from the bakery. The motor was idling, and the driver’s side wheels were on the alley sidewalk so it didn’t block access. She didn’t think anything of it. People parked like that all the time. She thought about walking down to Clay Street and waiting there.
“Paisley.” The all-too-familiar voice came from just ahead of her.
She jumped, heart slamming against her chest. She knew it was Rasmus even before he stepped from a shadowed area of the alley. Not far from the idling sedan. His suit was out of place, incongruously pristine against the dark, unfinished stone walls, Dumpsters, and broken-down crates and boxes. He moved into the center of the alley, blocking her way to the street. How the hell had she missed seeing him?
“You made your point with my apartment, Rasmus. Leave me alone.”
He drew a hand through his braids, his fingers lingering on the beads that softly clicked. “I wish to talk to you. That’s all. You have to understand me. If you’ll just come with me, we can have a quiet discussion, and everything will be fine.”
There was no point trying to convince him to leave her alone. His mind didn’t work logically where she was concerned. She turned on her heel, fumbling to get her purse around to the front so she could grab her phone and call for help. And run like hell for the bakery. Rasmus followed her, and oh, Lord, he was faster than she expected. Too close. And she wasn’t close enough to the bakery.
She sprinted for the bakery door, the phone clutched in her hand. Two more steps, but she could hear him breathing. She yelled at the top of her lungs, high and shrill over the sound of his shoes on the concrete, and felt the chill certainty that she wasn’t fast enough to make it to the door before he caught her.
And she wasn’t.
He reached around her and knocked the phone from her hands. It spun across the alley to land God knows where. She opened her mouth to scream again, and she saw stars as heat shot up her arm and, swear to God, ended up in her head.
His arm clamped around her waist and his other hand covered her mouth hard enough to pull her head back. She told herself not to panic, to pay attention to what he was doing. The pain in her head practically blinded her, but she went still, as if she were giving in.
“That’s right,” he said. He loosened his grip on her, and she struck out however she could, arms, legs, feet and hands. Rasmus swore and wrapped his arm around her throat, tight enough to make it hard for her to breathe. He was bigger and stronger than she was, and this was it. She knew he was going to kill her now. He dragged her backward, toward Clay Street, his arm tight over her throat. “You will come with me, Paisley Nichols.”
The sedan’s motor rumbled in her ears. Of course the car was his. She should have known. She ought to have been more suspicious. His goal was to get her inside the car. If that happened, she was as good as dead. At one point, she managed to get her foot tangled in his legs, and Rasmus stumbled. She whipped her head to the side, and his arm over her throat slipped. She sucked in a deep, blessed breath and screamed as loud as she could.
He recovered from his stumble in time to grab her by the jacket. He yanked her back. “Assistance, please,” he called out. He put his mouth by her ear. “Scream as loud as you want. No one can hear you but me.”
He had both arms around her now, and she realized someone had opened the rear passenger door of the sedan. The front passenger door opened, and a man got out and trotted toward them. His hair was buzzed short, and like Rasmus, he wore a suit and tie. She recognized him as the detective who’d interviewed her after the apartment fire.
She fought with everything she had. The other man reached them, and Rasmus pushed her toward the fake cop. She couldn’t stop herself from falling. Falling. Off balance, stumbling, and painfully dizzy. He caught her, and her entire body exploded in pain. She could barely think.
The fake cop dragged her to the car. She choked on exhaust as he pushed her toward the back passenger door. The end of everything. This man was stronger than Rasmus, and he moved faster. Fear rattled through her, because the car was only three feet away. She kicked and screamed and hurt her fist when she landed a punch, but none of it made any difference. The man holding her grunted, then hauled her off her feet. If she hadn’t kicked the car door and swung it partway closed, he’d have managed to get her inside. She had a glimpse of a dark interior and someone in the driver’s seat.
Ka-thump.
Something large and heavy landed on the roof of the sedan, rocking it on its wheels. Everyone froze.
“Tell him to let her go, Rasmus.” Iskander stood on the roof of the car, knees bent, weight on the balls of his feet. His eyes glowed. “If you don’t,” he said, jumping to the ground without making any noise at all, “your guy is dead.”
“This is not your business,” she heard Rasmus say.
“Sorry. No second chances.” Iskander drove the heel of his palm into the forehead of the man holding her. She felt the collision between hand and forehead, the backward jerk of the man’s body; then there was a dull crack, and she was free. Iskander grabbed her upper arm, which was a good thing, because she was shaking. “Stay with me, cupcake.”
Rasmus let out an inchoate sound of fury, and her vision still must not have been working right because the air around him shattered, as if somehow he’d turned it solid and then broken it into pieces.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Iskander said. The only sign that he was worried was that his fingers tightened around her arm. Rasmus said something that didn’t sound like English. The man in the driver’s seat of the sedan got out via the passenger door and headed for them. Iskander lifted one hand. “Oh, come on. I’ll just take him down, too. You know that.”
The driver kept coming.
When the man was within arm’s reach, Iskander punched him the way he had the other, a hard strike to the forehead, and the driver just crumpled. Fast. So fast all she saw was the blur of Iskander’s arm and then a body falling to the ground. “I wasn’t kidding, mage.”
Still holding her arm, Iskander walked past the idling sedan and away from Rasmus. She didn’t believe for a minute Rasmus would let them go. But nothing happened except the air around them got hot. Five steps, then six, and the heat burned around them. Iskander sped up, a jog that widened the distance between them and Rasmus. She could see his pickup double-parked on Clay. She ran, too.
“In the truck,” Iskander said when they reached Clay. He moved past a car legally parked at the curb, practically vaulting over the pickup to reach the driver’s side. From inside, she opened the door for him, and he got in. The keys were in the ignition, and he casually started the motor, put the truck in gear, and headed into traffic like he killed people every day. No big deal.
A thousand questions whirled in her head, so many she didn’t know what to say. Shouldn’t he call the cops? Were those men dead? Where the hell had Iskander come from? She dropped her purse on the floorboard. “I lost the phone you gave me,” she said.
“Your new one came today. I have it all set up for you, but it’s at home charging.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Doesn’t work if you don’t charge the battery.”
“I guess not.”
“Next time,” he said, reaching to briefly clasp her shoulder, “you wait inside until I call and tell you it’s safe to come out.”
“Okay.” She felt numb, and that didn’t seem right. He wiped his left hand on his jeans and left a dark smear behind. At one point on the way back, he drove over a pothole, and the window on his side rattled, then fell into the well of the door with a thunk. Wind rushed through the cab.
“I gotta fix that one of these days.” He stretched his arm along the back of the bench seat, his fingers brushing her shoulder, and she didn’t avoid the contact. Maybe she should have. He drove most of the way one-handed.
They didn’t say anything until they were
in the house and she’d dropped her purse on the floor by the rear door. Iskander wiped his left hand on his pants again, and she realized that was blood smeared on his jeans. She looked up and she just didn’t have any words. Only emotions that got too big to hold in.
“Can I get you something?” he said. “Root beer? Water?”
She opened her mouth to say, No, thank you, but what came out was a sob she barely choked down.
“Hey,” he said, looking appalled. “You know the rules.”
She tried again, this time meaning to tell him thank you, but to her horror, her eyes burned with tears. She felt as if Rasmus had managed to get her into his car. That at any moment, she was going to wake up and find out she’d hallucinated the whole scene with Iskander and that she was a prisoner in Rasmus’s car and about to die.
Iskander held out his arms, and she walked forward and let him fold his arms around her and hold her while she broke the only rule he’d ever given her.
CHAPTER 11
Two weeks later, about 7:00 A.M., Vallejo Street
Paisley always woke up five minutes before her alarm. She had a real alarm clock now and didn’t need to rely on her watch. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling and absently rubbed her sternum. Her chest ached a little, almost as if there was a bruise underneath. The heavy curtains on the windows kept the room dark even when it was light out.
She looked across the room to where she kept her new alarm clock and didn’t see the glowing red display. Strange. She blinked a couple of times and still didn’t see it. Not knowing for sure what time it was sent a jolt through her. If the electricity was out, she might have overslept. She reached for the bedside light and clicked it on.
The light came on. While her eyes adjusted, she sat up and squinted in the direction of the clock. She deliberately kept it far from the bed so she had to get up to turn off the alarm. The table was empty.
She was halfway across the room, intending to find out where the clock had fallen, when the alarm went off with the usual jarring electronic buzz.
Eeh. Eeh. Eeh.
Behind her. The sound was behind her. She turned, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. The clock was on the floor by the bed, its red numbers glowing and the alarm blaring away.
She didn’t remember moving it. It would be idiotic of her to move the clock there. She’d just turn it off and fall back to sleep. In fact, she knew the clock had been exactly where it always was when she went to bed last night. She turned off the alarm and returned the clock to the table.
Iskander wasn’t home. She knew because… because she just knew. She walled off the incident with the clock. Maybe Iskander had come in to clean, and he forgot to put the clock back after he moved it. He was big on keeping his place clean. Maybe she’d only imagined the clock had been in its usual place last night.
The entire time she got ready for work, her chest ached. For a while, it hurt to breathe. She kept touching her sternum, expecting to feel a bruise, but the pain wasn’t on the surface. She showered, dressed, and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. She took out eggs for an omelet and returned the carton to the refrigerator.
She still had her hand on the door when a familiar tickle in her chest started up. Without questioning her impulse, she opened the fridge again to get enough eggs for two omelets. As she closed the door, the carton slipped from her fingers. The eggs went splat on the floor. Egg whites and a slower stream of golden yolk oozed toward her shoe.
Drat.
She grabbed a roll of paper towels and knelt to clean up the mess. Or would have, except the center of her chest flexed; that was the only way she could think of to describe the sensation. She knew before she crouched down that there wasn’t going to be a mess to clean up. The tiles were now dry, even though the cardboard egg carton was on the floor and listing to one side because the bottom had crumpled along that edge.
Her hand shook when she touched the carton. The top had popped open when the carton fell, and she pushed it wide. Of the eggs remaining, not a single one was broken. Not one. In her head, she could hear the crack of shells breaking.
She rose, the egg carton in hand. She wasn’t crazy. She refused to be crazy. One at a time, she took out each egg, looking for breaks and cracks. There weren’t any. Each and every egg was a perfect, unbroken oval. The bottom of the carton had caved in on one side, and it felt soggy to her.
Paisley put her hands on the counter and dropped her head. Deep breaths. She needed to get more air in her lungs.
This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to her. Those unbroken eggs were just the latest in a series of odd events that just kept piling up until she had to accept the truth. She was losing her mind. Her slide into madness was even more frightening because she understood she was losing her hold on reality. Better to go insane and have no memory of being normal. Or at least believe in her new, warped reality. But she knew what normal was. She didn’t believe what was happening to her was in any way normal. Knowing made everything worse.
Strange things were happening to her. Impossible things. Things only an insane person would believe were real.
One time when she was making scones for Iskander in accordance with their agreement that she bake for him, she imagined she made her measuring cups move just by thinking about them. She knew for a fact the measuring cups she needed had been in the drawer. Fact. Incontrovertible. Except when she turned around to get them out, there they were in all their multicolored plastic glory. On the counter and within easy reach. Even though she knew she hadn’t gotten them out.
Another time, at the bakery, the wooden handle of her spatula broke in half. A piece the size of her little finger catapulted onto the floor. She’d stooped down to pick up the splinter. When she stood, the broken spatula wasn’t broken anymore. The handle was smooth, unbroken wood. She held the splinter in her hand, but there wasn’t anywhere it could have come from. Yet, she’d seen the handle break and watched the fragment of wood fly through the air.
Then there was the thing with her knowing when Iskander was about to come home. Before she heard him walking to the back door or up to the front door. Before she heard his truck. Five minutes before he showed up, the center of her chest always gave a strange little hitch. By the time she heard the Chevy’s motor, her chest would have been softly vibrating for at least a minute. The sensation always got bigger and bigger until he was in the house, and then, slowly, the vibration fell to a tolerable level.
A sane person knew that measuring cups did not move without physical cause. Broken spatulas did not repair themselves. There was no such thing as having ESP about when someone was going to come home. That sort of belief in the supernatural was her mother’s provenance.
The scariest thing, however, the thing that woke her up when she needed to be sleeping, was the way she reacted to certain people. The phenomena had started a couple of days after Rasmus’s attempt to abduct her. When she got close enough to certain people, she heard screams. Only they weren’t physically screaming, and no one heard the sounds except for her. It was as if hell existed inside them and the screams from the souls of the damned went straight into her head.
The screaming didn’t come from everyone she encountered—just a random few. It could be someone walking down the street or maybe a customer in the bakery. Sometimes the effect was low-key, like what happened with Iskander coming home; her chest got to vibrating, and almost always someone showed up who she knew had set her off. Sometimes the reaction was far worse. The screams deafened her; they slivered her nerves. She wanted to rush at the source, whoever it was, and reach inside them to make the awful sounds stop.
Compared to what was happening to her now, her mother was merely eccentric. She did her best to quarantine that part of her mind from the healthy part. If there were other people around when she had one of these experiences, she carried on as if nothing had happened—because, of course, nothing really had happened. The screamers were more difficult to ignore.
Their wails broke through the mental walls she built. Her best defense, she learned, was to get as far away from a screamer as possible.
Right now, she concentrated on the part of her she knew was sane and blocked off the rest. She understood who she was and where she was. Her name was Paisley Nichols. She knew the date and time and who was president of the United States. She owned her own business. Aliens didn’t exist and, except for Rasmus Kessler, the world wasn’t out to get her.
While she concentrated on her breathing, her chest vibrated in the same place that had flexed when the eggs fell. That meant that any minute now, she’d hear the rumble of Iskander’s heinously old pickup. She stood, head bowed, while she waited.
Three.
Two.
One.
The sound of Iskander’s truck was unmistakable.
She grabbed a bowl and cracked four eggs. This time they stayed cracked. While she chopped ingredients, the garage door motor revved up. That was him walking to the house. Coming inside. His keys clattered when they landed on the little table by the back entrance.
“You’re home early,” she said when he came into the kitchen. The first omelet was in the pan, bubbling away.
“Not much to do today.” He never elaborated on where he went, and she didn’t ask because his personal life was none of her business. She wanted to be a good housemate. Quiet. Respectful of his possessions and privacy. Sane. No one wanted a crazy roommate.
He opened the fridge and stared into it.
“You can’t live on takeout,” she said. The only thing he kept in there was root beer and leftover pizza or Chinese.
“Sure I can.” As usual, he was casual in jeans and a navy-blue Cal Berkeley T-shirt. His dark hair was pulled into a ponytail. Their relationship was strictly platonic, of course. He never made a move on her. They were friends. Just friends. Sure, there was flirtation once in a while, but they both knew nothing would come of it.
My Dangerous Pleasure Page 9
