by Gabi Moore
“Howdy, Sunshine.”
“What do you want?” she snapped.
“Don’t be like that. We caused you a lot of trouble on top of everything else you’ve had to go through tonight. I want to get you home, as quickly as possible.”
Aurora eyed him suspiciously. He was driving a dark sedan, probably black, but details were hard to make out in the dim street light. He didn’t seem threatening, but then, crazy people who kidnapped you and left your body in the sewers probably didn’t seem threatening at first, either.
There was the fact that he was a cop, at least, and Aurora wanted very badly to convince herself that it was safe to accept the offer. Money was always tight, and in New York, Uber surge pricing was out of this world. Hell, standard fare was astronomical.
“Okay, fine.”
She stepped carefully through the snowbank around to the passenger side of the car. Milo leaned over to push her door open (somewhat gentlemanly, Aurora guessed) and in she climbed, in to the relative warmth of Officer Milo’s car. She shivered; at least Milo had a coat.
“So where’re we going?” he asked, although he’d already started driving in the right direction. Aurora snorted.
“You mean you didn’t do a background check and research where I lived and work and what sort of ice cream I like? What kind of cop are you?”
“Well, I did all those things, but I was so hung up over the fact that you like mint chocolate-chip, I completely forgot your home address.”
Aurora laughed reluctantly, although it was a little odd that Milo had managed to guess her favorite ice cream. She shook it off and gave him her address, and they cruised off through the quiet streets.
“So. That’s quite a uniform they have you in at Witching Hour.”
“It fits the theme, or so Chip says. I tell him it’s going to scare women away, and a bar without women is a bar single guys don’t care much about. But he’s held on this long. At least until now. I don’t know what we’re going to do now.”
Aurora fell silent. She hadn’t meant to touch on her real fears with this total stranger, especially not this total stranger. She was getting sleepy in the warm car, and now it was a bit of fight to keep her eyes open. Quickly, she added, “So how long have you been a cop?”
His voice was proud, and maybe a little amused, as he answered. “Twelve years.”
“Twelve—?” Aurora stared at him. There was no way he was that old. Unless he was counting his years in the police academy. Yeah, that must be it. If he joined at eighteen, he could be a youthful thirty.
“I know, I know. How does a guy like me survive in this city for twelve years?” He asked it in complete sincerity, which led Aurora to believe that he’d mistaken her shock. Fair enough. “I’ve been with Dora for four. She’s a damn good cop. She’s got a poker face for Vegas, I tell you.”
Aurora snorted. “Honestly, neither of you look much like cops, sorry to say.”
“Hey! That’s done purposefully,” Milo protested, grinning. “We work together, you see. Different interrogations require different techniques. In your case, we had to play a little ‘smart cop, dumb cop’.”
“You’re performance was stunning. You must be a method actor.”
He looked at her, surprised. “You’re almost as snarky as she is.”
Aurora had to laugh at that. “Give me a few years, and I’ll be a real terror. I just have to finish my English theater studies so I can earn my merit badge for Shakespearean insults.”
“That was impressive! Do you think these up ahead of time?”
Aurora was still laughing when they pulled up to her apartment. She couldn’t help it; Milo was infectiously humorous, easy-going and yet sharp. Much sharper than he’d acted in the police station. Her conversation with him had been her best in a long time, and Aurora wondered whether she’d ever get to speak with someone like that again between fluttering foolishness at Moreau’s, pumping EDM at Witching Hour, and the timeless, catacomb-quiet at home.
She stepped out of the car, and movement overhead caught her eye. Aurora looked up toward the clear February sky, and felt her chest tighten in fear.
A curtain was billowing out a broken window several floors up. It was her living room window, her mother’s curtains.
No. No, this was too much. Aurora shut Milo’s car door, not hearing at all as he called after her to stop. After everything else today, this was too much, surely. Aurora punched in the door code and started running up the stairs. About halfway up, the lights in the stairwell were broken, one after the other, but she didn’t notice, just kept running up through the darkness.
Milo was shouting after her as she climbed the stairs three at a time. She tripped more than once in the cumbersome boots, but that didn’t matter. She had to get upstairs. She had to get to her apartment. She had to her to her mother.
On her floor, none of the lights were on, and filtered street lamps threw deep shadows across the hall through windows at either end. Aurora didn’t even stop to be afraid. She reached her door in three large steps and snatched the door handle, forgetting that it was locked, that she’d need to dig her keys out of her purse.
But the door swung open. It hadn’t even been shut all the way.
Cold air pressed out through the door, but Aurora didn’t feel it anymore. Tears were blurring her vision, terrible tears of expectation, dreading what she was going to find inside. She walked in slowly, not ready. Milo had caught up, and entered the apartment behind her, gun drawn.
Something bad had happened. It was clear at once, with one look at the splintered kitchen table, the shattered living room window. Deafening silence beat against her ears like waves of the ocean, relentless and bigger than Aurora could have ever imagined. It was so, so still, and cold, and dark.
Her mouth opened to call for her mother, but no sound came out. Numb, Aurora moved through what was left of her apartment, not knowing at that moment that truly, she was walking through the wreckage of her old life. She didn’t know it, but she felt it, and sat down heavily on the old lumpy sofa in the living room. There was a gash in the back, as if it had been cut with a sword, or several swords. Or claws.
Milo scanned through the apartment as Aurora sat alone, staring at the wall. It seemed he didn’t find anything, because he returned minutes later to find Aurora lying in a ball on the couch, with an old flannel blanket pulled up over her shoulders. Her eyes, large and dark in the cold light of the street outside, didn’t seem to see him standing there, and he had to shake her a bit to get her attention.
“Aurora. Aurora. There’s no one here. Your mother is gone.” He shook her until her face turned in his direction. “Here—sit up. We need to leave, okay? It isn’t safe here.”
Safe? Where was safe? The only place Aurora had really felt safe was with her mother, and Ramona wasn’t here. Where was she? Where had she gone?
Aurora let herself be coaxed into a sitting position. Part of her felt like it wasn’t healthy to endure this many shocks, one after the other, but mostly she just felt sleepy. She pulled the flannel closer. Maybe it was time for a nap.
Then she looked up at the open doorway.
There was a shape standing there; he was tall, almost touching the doorframe with his head. Out of the light of both the hall and the apartment windows, he was nothing but a shadow, a mass of muscle in the darkness, filling the space of the door without a sound.
Milo swung his gun around the second he saw the horror in Aurora’s eyes.
“Jeez, man,” he breathed, dropping the weapon. “You’re going to give me a damn stroke.”
The figure stepped into the apartment, his dark face solemn. “I was too late. I tried to chase them, but I lost their trail three blocks over. They took the mother.”
Aurora had heard that voice before. She looked up at the figure, trying to focus on this one thing. One thing at a time. There was no way she could bear to handle more than one thing at a time.
“Shit!” Milo hissed. “How
long ago?”
“Minutes. If you arrived five minutes earlier she’d have been right in the middle of it. It’s better than you arrived too late. If she showed up right then, we would have been trying to fend off a horde on our own, with sunrise hours away. This way, they ran instead of fight me.”
“Cheng is going to blow his lid,” Milo sighed. “He knew this was coming. Dammit, if Moreau would have just seen a doctor, like we told her—”
“Moreau?” Aurora spoke up suddenly. She’d heard a word she knew, and struggled upwards through the thick, sluggish current of her thoughts. She realized where she’d seen the stranger before. At Moreau’s.
“Mr. Fredericks?”
The stranger cringed as Milo threw him a surprised look. “Mr. Fredericks?” he asked thinly.
The stranger from Moreau could hardly have looked more different, now. Instead of a suit, he was dressed in tight jeans, sneakers, and a thermal shirt. It hugged his corded arms, broad shoulders, burly chest, and narrow waist much better than the suit ever could have.
“Mr. Fredericks?” And now, even in her shocked state, Aurora couldn’t fail to hear the humor in Milo’s voice. ‘Mr. Fredericks’, in question, was looking very uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than a six-something black man built like a wall of muscle was expected to.
“Look, she was… I couldn’t give my real name.”
Milo chuckled harshly. “Moreau told you not to go there at all.”
“Well, it’s good that I did, isn’t it?” the stranger replied with a snap. “Cheng and I both felt something… off, but he didn’t want to upset things—if we’d leapt straight in, none of this would have happened.” He gestured to the apartment around them, and at Aurora, who was sitting on her couch in the ruins of her life, watching their exchange as if through deep water.
Nothing they were saying made any sense to her. How did they know Moreau? And Cheng? What did they have to do with anything? What did they have to do with her? She was just a sales girl. A bartender. A nobody. And now, perhaps, an orphan. Alone.
“Oh…no…” she whispered. Her voice sounded far away in her ears. “No… no… Momma…”
“We can’t stay here,” the stranger insisted, glancing down at Aurora. “We’re sitting ducks. Much better to be on the move. Cheng wants us to all meet at the hospital. The sooner, the better. I think it’s time.”
Aurora wanted to ask, ‘time for what?’ Milo seemed to know; he looked very grim as he nodded. “All right, let’s get moving. Same hospital?”
“Same one as always,” the stranger replied, holding out a hand to Aurora.
She looked at it as if she didn’t know what it was, and honestly, at the moment, Aurora wasn’t sure she did know. He world had turned several full loops in the last few hours, and she didn’t have any secure footing, anymore.
She’d gone from one horror to the next today, and Aurora wasn’t sure she could take another one. What was there left to be tossed into her lap? She was afraid to ask, but as she looked around her old apartment, the kitchen table where her mother had always sat reduced to a pile of wood shards in its corner, she realized that she had already stepped into the next act. Whatever it was, she was already in it, now. There was nothing for Aurora to turn back to, so she took the stranger’s hand and let him help her to her feet. She needed more help than she’d realized.
“My real name is Lucian,” he told her in his perfect, rumbling voice. “Lucian Hemming.”
“Aurora Potier,” she replied automatically. A simple introduction—she was still able to handle that without a disaster. But the stranger—Lucian—smiled slyly.
“I’ve known you for much longer than you realize.”
His words sent a thrill of both eeriness and excitement down Aurora’s spine. Just today she’d been thinking that she’d never be in this man’s league. Between then and now, she felt as if an eternity had passed, and anything was possible. It was a joyous, and a terrible, sensation.
“Let’s go,” Milo rushed them out the door. The three of them retreated back into the dark stairwell, after Aurora grabbed a jacket from the hall. Milo and Lucian were both eager to get on the move and wouldn’t hear of letting her stop to change. They obviously feared the return of whoever had destroyed the apartment; looking around, Aurora found that she, too, didn’t want to be here if they came back.
But she stopped in the front doorframe anyway, just to glance back. Even in the dark, even wrecked, this had still been her home all her life. Her heart hammered in her chest; it was all she’d ever known.
A hand settled on hers, a large, warm hand. Lucian’s voice spoke softly, “There’s no use looking back. You aren’t headed that way.”
Deliberately, Aurora turned from the old apartment. She looked up into Lucian’s dark, dark eyes, surprisingly soft and understanding. She nodded.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Down the stairs they fled. Aurora had a hell of a time in her boots, but they all managed to reach the bottom in one piece; every time she’d been close to falling, it seemed that Lucian was there by magic, lifting her effortlessly back onto her feet. She knew she was still not her normal self; everything had taken on a surreal quality, and she felt nothing, as if her emotions had simply been shut off. Aurora wondered how long this blessed numbness would last, if maybe she could make it last all her life. But even so, there was no way for him to be so quick. She wasn’t frazzled enough to misjudge physics, or time.
And the street level , Aurora found herself being ushered back in to Officer Milo’s car, back into the front seat. Milo was already behind the wheel. She turned to Lucian, about to ask if he wanted, shotgun, but he was gone.
“Where?”
“Get in!”
Without another word of protest, Aurora leapt inside and slammed the door. Not for the last time this night she wondered she wasn’t just being caught up in an elaborate kidnapping scheme. Then, of course, back would float the memory of Lucian’s strong arms around her, the heaving muscles of his chest, lifting her as though she weighed nothing… There was no need for them to trick her.
The windows fogged as they drove, but Aurora wasn’t really seeing the world as it passed. She was quite a distance away by the time they pulled into a parking spot and Milo climbed out. She followed, not seeing which hospital they were at. Not wondering why they were at a hospital. In fact, Aurora found herself blissfully un-curious, and unconcerned, as Milo led the way through the parking garage and into the hospital proper.
She hadn’t even stopped to wonder why Lucian hadn’t ridden along with them.
Aurora hadn’t been in a hospital in a very long time, not since her mother’s panic attack some five—was it six, now?—years ago. Needless to say, the memories of white hallways and scrub-clad hospital staff were not happy ones for her, but Aurora was still deep in a state of semi-trance, distantly aware of her surroundings, but unaffected by them, as if she were watching from the building next door.
Milo led her in through the front lobby, which was not so scary. Neat furnishings, soft lighting, and friendly front-desk staff. Well, as friendly as you got in New York at one in the morning, anyway. Milo and Aurora were directed to the elevators behind the information desk, and travelled up to the fifth floor.
As the elevator hauled upward, Aurora watched the numbers without interest. She barely noticed the strange looks she was getting from the staff and few late-night visitors. After all, under her jacket she was still dressed for work at Witching Hour. But Aurora didn’t pay that much attention, and when the elevator stopped and the doors opened, she followed Milo out and to the right, tracking the turns of a hallway that led into a med-surg unit.
Milo was following the room numbers, but Aurora was following some invisible tracks, some sixth sense down the hall. In better times, she might have wondered why she knew for certain which room they were going to; at the moment, she walked blandly down the hall, ignoring looks from the nurses at the station. Busy with room numbers, M
ilo didn’t even notice her behavior, and dived into the right room seconds before Aurora reached it.
“Milo! What took you so long?”
Aurora froze. That was Madame Moreau’s voice; they were visiting her at the hospital. What were they doing visiting her in the hospital? Aurora’s wonderful numbness was being disturbed, and the dreadful pang of reality was creeping closer. Her boots were stuck in place in the hallway; Milo stuck his head back out in the hallway.
“Get in here. It’s not safe for you anywhere, so you’d better be in here with us.”
With them? With who? Milo and Madame Moreau?
“I… I don’t think I… want to…” Aurora’s voice spoke up.
Milo frowned at her. “What? What are you talking about?”
Over his shoulder, Lucian peered out into the hallway. He looked even better in full light than he had half in shadow.
Aurora’s heart bumped. “How? How did you get here so fast?”
But Lucian’s face closed off, which left Milo to coax her into the room. More confused than ever, Aurora reluctantly let herself be drawn in through the hospital door, which Lucian shut behind her. She lurked near the sink, uncomfortable, and took in the scene within the room.
Madame Moreau was hardly recognizable. She’d only been at the hospital for a day; Aurora didn’t know what they’d been doing to her, but it looked like a month. Without her dramatic black furs, meticulous hair, and glamour wardrobe, she was just a frighteningly old woman. Aurora doubted she weighed more than sixty pounds, once she was in a simple hospital gown. Not to mention the lack of make-up; a specter was peering out of the huge mechanical bed, deprived of foundation, blush, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick.
The specter was looking straight at her, and Aurora found she could not break the gaze. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Milo and Lucian, of course. But it wasn’t until he stood up on the other side of the bed that Aurora saw the room’s fifth occupant.
