Releasing a shivering groan, I opened my eyes. The mirror, and the world inside it, was gone. She was gone. A crushing ache sat on the back of my head. It’s twin (slightly lower on the pain scale) rested on one side of my face. My rapid healing had been slowed to a crawl by the frigid air. That much was real. And the cold storage I’d been wondering about? I found it.
Propped up against the frosty wall of a sizeable walk-in freezer, my wrists and ankles were bound. Fluorescent lights glowed bright, shining onto the rows of metal shelving units. They’d likely displayed the many cans, coolers, metal containers, and boxes that were now on the floor; opened, overturned, on their sides, and empty. Wooden pallets held nothing but tarps, bunched up and piled on the vacant slats. Meat hooks hung from a modern, electric track affixed to the ice-encrusted ceiling. All were spotless.
Someone cleaned the place out in a hurry—before leaving us here to freeze to death. But they’d forgotten one thing: the six-foot tall, plastic-wrapped body leaning in the corner. It was the only complete corpse I’d seen since the case started. It wasn’t a recent addition to the room, though. Ice had grown off the wall to cake over the width of the body, cementing it in place. Whoever the victim was, they died well before the remains were discovered at the river.
Creed was on the other side of the room. Unconscious, and tied, he was slumped over with his head hanging limp. Blood dotted his torn shirt. A heavier concentration stained the right sleeve of his jacket, where the bullet had grazed him. Bruises and scrapes darkened his jaw. Remembering Creed’s wrestling match with the aproned-man, it was a safe bet more contusions were under his clothes. Yet, his pale skin and blue-tinged lips worried me more.
Watching, to make sure he didn’t wake, I scaled my hands. Fire took a few tries. The bitter cold was slowing my body’s response. My numb extremities and the pain drilling into my head weren’t helping. Once a flame sparked, it burned rapidly through the rope around my wrist. Pulling the heat back inside, I tucked the singed pieces in my jacket pocket.
I gave my hands a few shakes, making the blood flow. As it did, I elevated my body temperature enough to stop my shivering and untie my ankles. I checked on Creed, then. His pulse was slow, but not in the danger zone. Not yet.
I settled his cockeyed glasses into place, then left him and tried the door. A tug and a kick confirmed the obvious. The solid, industrial grade steel wasn’t going down easy. Blowing it to bits was my best choice, if I was able to muster enough fire covertly. There was no emergency lever, in case of accidents. Assuming there wasn’t a padlock or deadbolt on the other side, the lock was pickable. I just didn’t have the right tools.
I checked my pockets. My phone was gone. Not that it would have worked.
I was about to get creative on the lock when Creed stirred. “Dahlia?”
“Here.”
He groaned, as I approached, “What the hell…?”
“Not unless it froze over. Keep still.” I rubbed his hands with mine, trying to warm him as I untied his wrists. “How’s your arm?”
“In this cold? It hurts like a son of a bitch. How’s your head?”
“Same. I’m not sure how long we’ve been here.” Or how much longer we can last, I thought. I met his eyes, and I knew he was thinking the same thing.
Freeing his wrists, as I moved onto his ankles, he argued. “I got it.”
“Your fingers are numb.”
“And yours aren’t?”
Unable to tell him the truth, I backed off.
Creed eyed the door as he fussed with the rope. “Any luck?”
“Not yet. I haven’t been awake long.”
His stare slid next, to the body in the corner. “Who’s the stiff?”
I tried not to smile. “Don’t know. But he’s been here a long time. You don’t get that freezer-burned overnight.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.” The ropes came loose. Throwing them off, Creed gripped the shelf and hauled himself up. Forcing his muscles to move, he went to the door and gave it the same, customary, irritated yank I did. When it yielded no results, he studied the hinges. Another yank followed. Then a series of kicks. He patted his pockets.
“My phone’s gone, too,” I said.
“Figures. I just bought the damn thing.” Tilting his head back, he considered the vents in the ceiling. Then dismissed them, as I had. They were too small. “There has to be something here we can use.”
Me, I thought, as he searched the shelves. Except, as badly as I wanted out, I had to let him try first, and wait for the right opportunity.
Creed returned with a putty knife. I stepped clear, and he went to work, attempting to force the knife in between the door and the frame. Several times, I thought he had it. But the cold was stealing his dexterity and weakening his grip. The metal kept slipping out of position and scraping his skin, causing Creed to issue one angry, trembling expletive after another.
I decided to leave him to it and inspect the body in the corner.
The ice was too thick to remove by hand. Creed was occupied, so I brought out a few claws and chipped away at the pieces. When enough came loose, I ripped the plastic and tore it straight down the middle. The show of wrinkles and gray hair on the human male placed him at around seventy years old at the time of death. His frame was robust, wrapped in a blue, three-piece suit. There was a circular hole in the fabric, and his chest, right where his heart used to be.
Despite the ice crystals and discoloration, I recognized him instantly. “That’s one suspect down.”
Creed glanced over. He’d seen the pictures in Ronnie’s file. “Oliver Gant. Guess he survived the fire.”
“Wonder what he’s doing here. Seems odd they’d empty out the freezer and leave the most incriminating piece of evidence behind.”
“Maybe it was already empty. Or they thought we’d be too dead to care. And we will be, if I can’t—” Creed fumbled the knife. It dropped from his shaky grasp and clattered to the floor. “Goddammit! My fucking hands are useless.”
I intervened as he bent to retrieve the tool. “If you break it off in there, we’ll never get out.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Warm up and try again. Remember. Fingers are helpful in your line of work.” I pulled him away from the door. He was shivering too badly to protest.
Gathering the tarps, I spread one out on the floor and placed another on top of it. Not making direct contact with the frigid concrete had to help. Sitting side by side, I pulled the last tarp over us both and put my arm around him. I snuggled close. Creed stiffened. He wasn’t thrilled with my intrusion into his personal space, but he was tolerating it, so I wrapped my other arm around his chest, clasped my hands together, and held him tight.
“You should come by the gym,” I said. “Some serious sparring, a few times a week, might shrink that giant ball of stress you’re so fond of carrying around.”
“I prefer to work out alone,” he said.
“What a surprise.”
He shivered against me. “Son of a bitch. Is it getting colder in here?”
“Give me your hands.” I grabbed them. Ignoring Creed’s resistance, I pumped a bit of extra heat into my breath as I blew on his fingers. “I don’t think there’s a guard out there. If there was, he would have taken issue with you assaulting the door.”
“I agree. If we ever get it open.” A muttered curse slipped out with his harried breath. “We shouldn’t have entered the building. Not without backup or working phones. As soon as we found the bodies, we should have—”
“Left? Please. Which one of us Lone Rangers was going to lead that charge?”
His reply was a frown and a long, hard shiver. “The men who attacked us, they were human. Right?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean they know what’s going on. With a big paycheck and some skillful manipulation, they might believe they’re saving the world from government experiments gone wrong or invading aliens.”
“Then who’s
behind the curtain? It’s not Oliver Gant. And his son has a list of degrees behind his name. Even if he is alive, Arno’s profile doesn’t exactly scream ‘lead serial killer’.”
“Could be he’s following in his family’s footsteps.”
“I think this place was built to slaughter cows. Not monsters.”
“How do you know?”
I’d expected a grin. Instead, Creed shook his head with a disappointed frown. Like, with every conversation, he was growing more and more dissatisfied with my answers. “How do you keep a lid on it all?” he said. “The evidence. The lab reports. The sightings. You can’t do everything alone. There has to be a huge network in place to handle the cover-ups.”
“It’s not the size of the network. It’s the skill of the operatives involved.”
“Operatives? That sounds military. Is that what we’re talking about here? Is the government involved in this? Are you part of some off-the-books covert operation?”
“In a way.” It wasn’t a complete lie. A ruling body was involved, just not a human one. But his assumption gave me an idea. “There is an organization at the root of this, but I can’t discuss the details with you, Alex. I’m sorry.”
Creed’s blue eyes were sharp and penetrating. He said nothing, but his silence didn’t mean he believed or accepted my words. Plenty of accusation was going on inside his head.
Hoping to move his mind onto something less problematic for me, I steered histhoughts in the opposite direction. “I know this isn’t the best time, but we haven’t talked about Sam since the accident.”
“You’re right. This isn’t a good time.” His grim tone was an obvious warning. “And there’s nothing to talk about. She’s dead.”
“She was your fiancée.”
Creed’s head snapped around. “I never told you that.”
“You were out one day, Dr. Winters stopped by your desk and…we chatted.”
“About our former engagement?”
“It came up. She said—”
“Let me guess. I drove her away?”
“No.” His hands had taken on a healthier tone. I let them go and put my arm around him again. “She said you weren’t the same person after Scott died.”
“How could I be? He was my little brother. It was my job to protect him. It was the most important job I’ve ever had, and I failed.”
“That’s not true.”
“You don’t have any siblings, do you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Then you don’t know what it’s like. I couldn’t sleep or eat. I could barely work. A future with Sam seemed impossible when all I could think about, all I could see, was Scott hurt and alone and scared, ending up like…like one of those damn slabs of meat upstairs.”
As Creed went on, reciting what I already knew about his brother’s disappearance, and the dead-end investigation that nearly broke him, my focus shifted. I didn’t mean for it to, but his voice took a backseat to the black cloud of trauma creeping from his soul. It spread, curling around his back and shoulders, and I almost pulled away. I hadn’t made physical contact with Creed’s ghosts, and I wasn’t sure this was the best time or place. But I was more than curious. From my first glimpse, I’d been intrigued by the odd, red halo wrapped around his trauma. It was there now, pulsing as he spoke, throbbing longer with each word.
Yet, as hesitant as I was to dive into the Pandora’s box of Alex Creed’s psyche here, I couldn’t bring myself to move. The black flowed over me, and I dropped my shield. I analyzed his pain, as I would any other, and found all the usual hauntings that came with losing a family member: loss, grief, regret, guilt, resentment, anger. Yet, something about it was wrong. His trauma felt too routine, too typical for what Creed had witnessed. It felt almost… Generic. Manufactured. And unusually fresh.
Time might have faded the details, of the tragic event, but not the emotions. Creed hadn’t processed any of them. The loss hadn’t gotten any better. His grief hadn’t eased. His sentiments were as strong now as they were then, stuck in the past; suffocated by his failure to resolve the case, strangled by the uncertainty of what he’d seen—and confined by a red, pulsing chain of helpless rage. It was so tight and restricting, enfolding every wisp, every bend of the trauma that haunted the man’s soul. Watching it, I had trouble drawing breath. Because I understood now.
All this time, I thought Creed chose not to let go of the pain. He held onto the terrible memories of that day, using the grief, letting it drive him. But doing so was never his choice. His mind hadn’t created a subconscious coping mechanism to deal with the loss. He couldn’t move on because something was in the way. Something was preventing him from healing, keeping his soul in a perpetual limbo of heartache and bitterness.
The red halo wasn’t an anomaly. It was a prison.
Son of a bitch. Someone did this to him.
Plenty of creatures had psychic abilities. Yet, if the ability to lasso someone’s emotions was common, I would have seen it before now. But what purpose did such a power serve, to hold a man captive by his own pain? And why him? Had Creed been a target, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Compounding the problem, was the recent loss of the woman who’d been with him through it all. Sam was there every day as they waited for news. She held him in her arms when the search was called off. She drove him to the woods when Creed insisted on continuing to look on his own and cried with him when they buried an empty coffin. When he pulled away, no longer able to bear watching his parents cringe at each shovelful of dirt that fell upon the lid, Sam endured his rejection. It was the first of many.
My throat tight, eyes burning; I covered my disquiet with a fake cough and shoved the memory aside. Afraid of getting sucked in again, I took my arm off his shoulder. A strange jolt of electricity jumped through me as I cleared the red barrier. But his ghosts didn’t try to hold on, as most were known to do. They remained trapped, as they had for so many years.
“It wasn’t fair to her,” he said, recapturing my attention. “The person she fell in love with was gone. I couldn’t be him again, and I didn’t want to. He was the man who failed to save his brother. The one who couldn’t protect the person who counted on him most. Sam deserved better. But she never got it, did she?” he snapped. “She died. And I couldn’t protect her either.”
Regret burrowed into my stomach for the pain her death had added to his well. It was already so full. And emptying it, even a little, wasn’t an option. The chain holding his trauma in place wouldn’t allow me to help Creed as I had Evans. If the electrical current was a defense of some kind, tampering with it might hurt him more than he already was.
All I could offer him were words. “I know we’re only colleagues, or allies, or partners—whatever you want to call us. You see me as a tool in your arsenal. And that’s okay. We don’t have to be friends to talk. If you ever need—”
“Is that what you think?” he cut in. “We’re not friends?”
“How can we be? You don’t trust me.”
“I trust your knowledge, your skills. I trust you to put the safety of this city above your own life, just like I would. I trust you to fight beside me and watch my back. I don’t think twice about putting my life in your hands. If that’s not enough, then I don’t know what the hell else you want from me.”
Was it possible? Had I found someone worse at making friends than I was? “I’m glad you can count on me not to kill you in your sleep, Alex, but that’s not what I meant.” He said nothing, and I studied his face. It was pallid and tense. His stare was crisp with an underlying sense of anger that was always, always there. “Some days I’m not even sure you like me.”
“Some days I don’t.”
There was only one way to answer him. “Asshole.” I got up. “You stay warm. It’s my turn.” Creed opened his mouth to complain, but I’d played my part long enough. It was time to get out of here. “I know you’re manly and strong,” I said, tucking the tarp in tighter as he frow
ned. “But women have muscles, too.” I gave him a wink.
Scooping up the putty knife, I returned to the door. Angling my body to limit his view, I thrust the tool into the gap and attempted to jimmy the door open. I failed a few times, to make it look good. Then I forced the flat blade in with more force than a human was capable of. A few jiggles and another shove later, and the door was open.
“Figures.” Creed threw off the tarp and stood. “I should’ve known you’d have no problem breaking out of a locked room.”
I stared after him as he brushed by. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Relishing the increase in temperature, we moved quietly through the halls. We checked every inch of the place as we wound our way back to the main entrance. Clearly, we’d been unconscious a while. Death was still in the air, but it was thinned now, diluted by a heavy concentration of soap and bleach. Previously locked doors were open, the rooms empty. There was no evidence of our scuffle, no broken furnishings and not a drop of blood—something I’d shed a decent amount of myself. There was no sign of the jawbone. The hooks and the troughs were spotless. As frustrating as it was for the case, at least I didn’t have to lie, concoct a story, or torch the place.
Creed beckoned me to one of the work tables near the front. The metal bin at the end held our belongings: both phones, his badge, his sidearm, the keys to my jeep and my weapons.
Before he could remark on my knife, and the unregistered weapon I tried to keep under wraps, I shoved it in my back pocket. “Okay, this…” I shook my head as I put my knife away, “this is just fucking weird. What’s the point of holding onto our stuff, if they expected us to die in there?”
“There was a deadbolt on the outside of the freezer. It would have been drawn if they wanted us dead. I think, someone’s trying to deliver us a message.”
Smoke & Mirrors Page 13
