All the Blue-Eyed Angels

by Jen Blood

  Diggs had never made a secret of his disdain for Michael, but now there was pure bile in his tone. I got up and put the rest of my water back in the fridge. Diggs followed me over, but I noticed that he was careful not to stand too close when I turned to face him.

  “So, this whole thing is…What? A pissing contest between you and my ex-husband because he was there to pick up the pieces when I almost bled to death on our bathroom floor, and you weren’t? You’re not my fucking guardian angel, Diggs. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

  His eyes flashed with that undercurrent of fury he always tries so hard to keep hidden. He closed the distance between us. I stood with my back to the sink, Diggs close enough that I could smell his aftershave and feel his heat, his gaze locked on mine.

  “I should have known,” he said. The anger was gone suddenly, replaced with a guilt so deep it almost hurt to look at him. “That weekend—I knew there was something wrong. You looked like hell, you weren’t eating, didn’t sleep…I’ve known you almost twenty years now. I should’ve known something was wrong.”

  I could have handled a fight—hell, I can always handle a fight. It’s all those other, messier emotions that make me crazy.

  “I didn’t want you to know,” I said. “Not yet. I needed to figure everything out first.” I didn’t go into the details, all the stupid scandalous crap with my philandering ex-husband and a baby I couldn’t handle and the envelope from Malcolm Payson that had effectively upended my universe. I didn’t really need to, though; Diggs always got that kind of thing.

  We stood there in the kitchen in relative darkness for a few seconds, close but not quite touching. I fisted my hand in the front of his t-shirt. He didn’t move. I took a step forward—enough that our bodies were flush, neither of us breathing. He tucked a tendril of hair behind my ear.

  “Erin,” he said. A whisper, so soft that it sounded part-plea.

  I leaned up on my toes, my hands at his sides. He met me halfway, his lips softer than Michael’s, his body familiar and tantalizing and terrifying against mine. For a few seconds, the kiss was the only thing that existed, his mouth warm and bruising, his hand tangled in my hair.

  There was a battle he was fighting—I could feel it in the kiss, in the tension his body still held, in the way he never quite gave himself over to the moment. His left hand fell to my arm, squeezing gently as he started to pull away. Before he could disentangle himself entirely, there was the sound of movement at the kitchen door.

  We sprang apart like a Roman candle had gone off between us.

  Juarez stood at the door with an empty glass in his hand. “I was just—sorry, I couldn’t sleep. I was getting some water. I’ll—I can get it from the bathroom. Sorry,” he repeated.

  I couldn’t look at Diggs. My face was burning, my body still charged with the kiss and the thought of where it might have led. I grabbed Einstein and hurried away, brushing past Juarez.

  “Don’t worry about it. I was just going to bed.”

  “Erin,” Diggs called after me, but I was already halfway down the hall. I didn’t turn back.

  I tossed and turned for most of the night after that. About twenty minutes after I’d locked myself in my room like an angsty teen, I heard footsteps outside the door. If I’d expected Diggs to barge in, I was disappointed; he didn’t even knock. I imagined him in the hallway wrestling with his conscience, already condemning himself for his moment of weakness. I told myself I was glad he didn’t force the issue by making us talk it out then and there, and I almost believed it.

  The next morning, I was up and out before dawn. I had been hoping to get Diggs to help me unlock Payson’s mysterious suite that day, but I decided to go it alone. It wasn’t like he’d been trained in lock picking anymore than I had. Besides which, it felt like I’d started to rely a little too much on the men in my life these days; it would do me good to stand on my own.

  By the time I got to the island and made the trek up to the house, morning had broken. A cool, damp fog hung over the water and wrapped around the shore, and a light rain had dampened my hair and my spirits. My nose and fingers were ice cold. I could hear the low diesel hum of fishing boats in the harbor, but all else was silence. Apparently, the birds were sleeping in.

  The wrought-iron gate I’d wrestled with the last time I was there had blown shut again, though I had thought I’d propped it open securely enough to stay that way. A niggling voice that sounded a lot like Diggs whispered warnings that I chose not to heed.

  I checked my cell phone. There was a weak signal that might do the trick if I needed to make a call. Not that reassuring.

  “It’s my friggin’ island,” I said, after a few seconds of immobility. Einstein looked at me and whimpered, but he didn’t argue the point.

  I pulled the gate back open as wide as it would go, grabbed another branch from the forest floor, and wedged it in place. After a couple of times hauling on it, I convinced myself it wasn’t moving again.

  Einstein and I resumed our hike.

  There was nothing strange about the house when I got there. Not that there would have been, necessarily, but I’d seen enough horror movies over the years that a ghostly face in the window or a slamming door wouldn’t have been that surprising. Terrifying, yes; surprising, no. Once we were inside, though, there was nothing but the same old darkness and mildew and oppressive silence. Einstein growled at the meeting room entry, but after a few seconds waiting to see if the sky would fall, I convinced myself that he was just being paranoid. He’d watched most of the same movies I had, after all.

  The rain began to fall harder outside, beating down on the old roof and slashing against the windowpanes. I lit a couple of battery powered lanterns I’d brought over earlier in the week, and started a fire in the fireplace.

  Einstein paced at the bottom of the stairs. He started up the steps a couple of times, whined, and returned to my side. I thought of the lamb’s head we’d found the other day, then of the gate I had been almost positive I’d propped open securely before.

  “We could call Diggs,” I said.

  Once the suggestion was out there, it sounded lame—especially given the incident the night before.

  “Or not.”

  I got up from my spot by the fire, grabbed a flashlight and my trusty hammer, and headed up the stairs.

  I opened the bedroom doors on the second floor in an effort to start airing the place out—which thrilled Einstein, who took advantage of the opportunity to explore a whole mausoleum’s worth of new nooks and crannies. We were about halfway down the hall when he lost interest in the game and began to growl, then raced ahead of me, the fur raised along his spine and his tail held high. He stopped short at the double doors leading to my father’s old room. His nose was glued to the bottom of the door, his lips pulled back to reveal some very sharp canine teeth and a snarl I’d never seen before.

  I went to the door and dragged him back by the collar. The growling gave way to a desperate whine as he tried to get away. He glanced at me, brown eyes anxious, then back at the door.

  Shit.

  I stood there for a moment of indecision. I could call someone. I should call someone. Especially if some lunatic had been out on the island screwing around with the gate—presumably the same lunatic with a penchant for decapitating farm animals.

  Instead, I knocked on the bedroom door.

  “Anybody in there? Ghosts, psychotic killers, mutants of the underworld?”

  No answer.

  I took a breath, since I’d forgotten to do so for a while. My hand fell to the doorknob.

  I opened the door, the hammer held aloft.

  Einstein tried to scoot past me, but I blocked his way. We stood in the doorway, the dog whining as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  The smell was unmistakable. Something long dead lay in the center of the old wood floor, beside a double bed that had once belonged to my mother and father.

  “So, I guess we found the rest of that lamb,” I said
.

  I ordered Einstein to sit just outside the threshold, which he did grudgingly. Sure enough, by the light of my flashlight I traced the body of a decapitated lamb, the wool and part of the flesh well-rotted by now. Someone must have been holding onto this for a while—when we were here just two days ago, Einstein hadn’t shown any signs of smelling it, so I couldn’t imagine it had been in the house long.

  Which meant someone had been here. Recently. The realization blindsided me: I wasn’t overreacting. This wasn’t my imagination, or just some redneck playing a prank. Someone had been here, and whoever that someone was, they had access to the house and an obvious axe to grind. I returned to the hallway and closed the bedroom door, then started to call Diggs before I reconsidered and called Juarez instead.

  The call went straight to voicemail. I left a message and hung up. Once Einstein realized he wouldn’t be having lamb for lunch, he abandoned me and headed back downstairs to chase wayward field mice around the house. I waited for Juarez to return my call and tried to sort through everything that had happened since I’d first gotten to town.

  There were Joe Ashmont’s threats on the first day, followed by the discovery of the lamb’s head on the property and my bizarre run in with Matt Perkins in the middle of the night. I was now convinced that it hadn’t been the wind at all and someone had actually re-closed the gate to the property within the last day or so, but that was pretty minor compared to the beheaded corpse in my father’s old bedroom. The fact that they’d chosen that particular room told me that whoever this was had some knowledge of the Payson boarding house—certainly more than they could have gotten from reading a few articles online.

  I may be slow on the uptake, but I’m not a complete idiot—it was time to get the hell out of Dodge, at least until I had some backup. My mind made up, I headed for the stairwell before I realized I hadn’t heard anything from Einstein in a few minutes. I called for him and heard a muffled ‘woof’ downstairs in response—as though he was barking behind a closed door.

  My heart sped up and my mouth went dry. Einstein kept barking, his yips higher in pitch once he realized he couldn’t get to me. I made for the stairs at just short of a run, the hammer clutched in my right hand. I was five steps away, maybe less, moving fast while the dog kept barking and the blood rushed in my ears and the darkness closed in, when I heard the clip of heavy footsteps coming toward me. I wheeled around an instant before he hit, tackling me with a lowered shoulder and the force of a freight train, the momentum carrying us both a solid three feet before I slammed back against the wall with a faceless man’s hands around my throat.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Everything after that was a blur. I dropped my flashlight but managed to hang onto my precious hammer, slamming it hard into my attacker’s side. He yelped and dropped his hands from around my throat, but he was on me again before I could get free. He pulled the hammer from my hand and it dropped to the floor. I struck out blindly, and managed to get a solid left hook in before he countered with a blow to my right cheek that nearly dropped me where I stood.

  I kicked out blindly, trying to recall the lessons I’d learned in self-defense classes back in Boston. Knees, nuts, eyeballs. The problem was, I couldn’t see a damned thing. I landed a glancing blow to his leg before I struck upward and the heel of my hand caught his chin; I felt the bristle of a beard before he knocked my arm aside and a second blow landed dead on as his knuckles connected with my lip.

  I landed on my back, hard, tasting the cold copper of blood in my mouth as I fought for breath. He was on me in an instant, a thick body with no fat, his movements fast and fluid as he grabbed my bangs, tearing them out at the roots. His fingernails dug into my scalp and he pulled my head forward, then smashed my skull back into the floor.

  The world exploded into fragments of light on impact.

  I just lay there for a moment, too stunned to fight.

  He didn’t move, still straddling me. When I finally got my wits about me again, I writhed beneath him, bucking my body, trying to free my arms to strike out. It didn’t work; he pinned my wrists over my head with one large hand, the other wrapped around my throat.

  I could smell his breath, could feel it against my face as his lips found my ear.

  “Stop looking,” he whispered. His hand tightened around my throat until the blackness gave way to white light swimming behind my eyelids and I tensed, bucking harder as I fought for breath.

  And then, the world went still.

  I didn’t move for a good five minutes after I finally came around again. Einstein was still yelping frantically, from somewhere that sounded very far away. I managed to get to my hands and knees before dizziness and terror and pain took hold, and I threw up on the hardwood floor.

  When I felt like it wasn’t too radical a move, I got up slowly, walking my hands up the side of the wall like a toddler just learning to stand. My throat was sore, my voice raw when I called out to Einstein, trying to soothe him before I finally staggered down the stairs and let him out of the pantry where he’d been trapped.

  My cell phone rang while Stein was still trying to reassure himself that we were both all right. I flipped it open, glanced at the caller ID, and tried to steady myself before I answered.

  “I’m on the island. Can you come?” My voice sounded anything but steady.

  “I’ll be right there.” Juarez hung up without asking for details. I sank to the floor and gathered Einstein in my arms, both of us still shaking.

  We waited for the cavalry.

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  “You didn’t see him at all?”

  “It was dark. I couldn’t—ow,” I pulled away from Juarez’s probing fingers when he touched my cheekbone, sending a lightning bolt of pain straight to my aching head.

  “Sorry.”

  We were sitting at one of the old picnic tables in the meeting room. Einstein had been trying to climb inside me ever since I managed to drag myself out of unconsciousness. Now he was in my lap—all forty pounds of him—whining incessantly. When I flinched, the whine became a growl. Juarez dropped his hand.

  “I don’t think anything’s broken, but we need to get you to the hospital. You could have a concussion.”

  “I’m not going to the hospital.” I took his index finger and raised it until it was eye level, then moved his hand back and forth across my line of sight.

  “See? No problem tracking the movement. I checked my pupils, too—equal and reactive, just like on TV. I spent enough time tagging along with my mother as a kid to know what I’m talking about. There’s no concussion. I’m fine.”

  Juarez didn’t look so sure about that. I knew I’d sounded shaken on the phone, but now I was back in control. Sort of. A little freaked out and very sore, but in control all the same.

  And very, very pissed.

  “I didn’t get a look at him because it was so dark, but it was definitely a man. I think he had a beard.”

  Juarez nodded. Despite a blazing fire and feeling slightly better than I had an hour ago, I couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Did he say anything?”

  I thought of his mouth at my ear, the smell of stale breath. “Just ‘Stop looking.’ Short and sweet.”

  “And you didn’t recognize the voice?”

  I shook my head.

  “What about smells? Close your eyes.”

  I did, but re-opened them almost immediately when the images came back too fast. “Can we do this later?”

  “Sorry.” He sat down beside me. “This kind of thing happens and I go straight into cop mode. Are you sure you’re all right? If you won’t go to the hospital, at least come back to the mainland with me. You need to lie down for a while.”

  “I will—later. But first…” I stood, then reconsidered when gravity proved more formidable than usual. “How are you at petty crime?”

  Whatever you might say about his driving or his horrific musical taste, Juarez had it all over Diggs when it came to breaking and ent
ering. Since the stairwell up to Isaac Payson’s apartment on the third floor was so narrow, I let Juarez lead the way. He took a couple of small tools from his wallet, fiddled with the door for a few seconds, and, voila, he was inside. He glanced back my way.

  “You want me to…?”

  “Yeah, go ahead. I’m right behind you.” My heart hammered in time to the pounding in my temples; the last thing I wanted was to be the first one entering another dark, forbidding room.

  If I’d been expecting mirrors on the ceiling or chains on the walls, I was disappointed; Payson’s lair was tidy and innocuous. There were more of the same kinds of creepy religious paraphernalia found around the rest of the house: crosses and paintings; moldy needlepoint with Bible verses; Christ with kids and lambs. The first bedroom in the apartment was small, with just enough room for a bureau, a four-poster bed, and a couple of nightstands. I searched for photos of Payson and his wife Mae, but found none.

  Juarez opened a door at the far side of the room and looked to me for the okay before he went inside. I followed him into a long, narrow alcove with a low ceiling and three twin beds spaced evenly apart from one another. There were no windows, and just the one entrance. Juarez and I both bounced our flashlight beams over the walls, where we found children’s drawings and more Bible verses tacked on peeling floral wallpaper.

  The room was warm compared with the rest of the house; it was hard to get a full breath in the fetid air. I remembered playing a game as a kid, where I’d jump onto my bed from the furthest point possible so any monsters lurking beneath couldn’t grab my ankles. Standing there beside Juarez, just inches from beds that had belonged to children whose laughter I could still remember, I felt the same fear of unnamed beasties and ghosts from beyond the grave.

  “His children slept here?” Juarez asked.

  I nodded. “Micah, Sarah, and Ezra.”

  “You knew them?”

  I walked out of the little alcove abruptly, my breath coming harder. “I knew everybody.”