by Abbie Roads
Honey. Find Honey.
His legs were rubbery underneath him. You will do this. Honey needs you, and you’re not letting her down because your fucking legs feel weak. He took a lurching step forward, nearly fell, grabbed onto the bed. Pain wrestled him, squeezing, cinching tighter and tighter. Water drenched his face—sweat or tears; he didn’t know which.
Whatever he was going through was nothing—fucking nothing—compared to what she was enduring. Or, had the Strategist already killed her? Lathan couldn’t breathe past the thought.
People rushed the room, rushed him. Hauled him back into the bed as if he were a wayward toddler.
Exhaustion weighed heavy underneath his skin. He could fight it, but not everyone else too.
“No. No. No. Need to find her.” He shouted the words, but wasn’t certain they came out coherent or a garbled mess. The first restraint lashed his wrist to the side of the bed. He thrashed. A restraint on his ankle. He lashed out. Someone caught his arm. “Stop. I need to find her. Don’t do this.”
Suddenly, Gill and his parents stood at the foot of his bed.
Mom’s perfume was no less noxious, her attire no less formal. The only thing different was that she no longer disguised the look of disgust on her face behind her snooty rich-woman mask. His parents had been through too much with him to see him as anything more than an aberration, a problem, a disturbed person. And this just reinforced their view.
Dad tried to catch Lathan’s remaining free leg. He kicked out, avoiding his father’s hands, and focused on the only person who would help him. “Gill. Don’t let them do this. Don’t. I’ve got to find her.”
Gill’s attention was grabbed by the nurse speaking to him and then by Lathan’s mom, who kept gesturing at Lathan like it was his fault he’d gotten shot and ended up in the hospital. Gill glanced back at Lathan and said something, but Lathan’s brain couldn’t translate the words.
“Can’t read your speech. The Strategist has her. The Strategist. The Strategist.” He kept repeating the name, trying to be articulate, hoping Gill understood. “I’ve got to get out of here. Find her.”
Mom started signing the moment Lathan said he couldn’t read Gill’s speech, but nothing Mom could say would ever be as important as what Gill had to say right now. He focused on his friend.
Gill switched to their teenage bastardized version of sign. The Strategist?
Lathan nodded. Dad caught his leg, held it firm while a nurse tied Lathan’s ankle to the bed. Gill began loosening the bonds on Lathan’s wrists and barked a nasty something at one of the nurses and finished unleashing his hands.
“Junior shot me. I killed Junior. The Strategist took Honey.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. How? Why? Gill signed.
Those were questions that needed to be answered, but not now. “Need to find her.”
Everyone’s looking for her. Thought she shot you.
“Help me up.”
Bullet in your chest.
“Don’t care. I can track the Strategist.”
Gill gave a quick nod. He unlashed Lathan’s legs. Lathan swung them over the side of the bed. Unconsciousness snuck over him. He was out before he hit the floor.
* * *
The reflection of a dim orange light pulsated in the dark hospital room. Lathan idled, motionless. The ethereal dream of Honey still wrapped him in its comforting embrace—him, her, tangled together. One entity. Floating in a place not in the vertical plane—no past, no future, only them.
The peace of the dream faded. Reality intruded. Deep internal pain began drilling into his chest, but it wasn’t as intense as it’d been before. He felt… Better wasn’t the right word. Stronger, maybe.
Gill slept in a chair next to the bed, his suit jacket over him like a blanket. All the previous shit between the two of them seemed so paltry and stupid. Gill had always been there in the most hellish moments of Lathan’s life. This time was no different. A true friend. Better than the people he was attached to biologically.
Lathan pushed himself upright, a dull resonance thrumming in his heart. Everything inside him screamed to hurry, hurry, hurry, but he couldn’t afford to end up unconscious again. Gill awakened, stood, and stretched his arms above his head.
Lathan got out of bed. Tested his weight on his legs. Somewhat steady. Gill handed him a pair of scrubs pants. Lathan half sat, half leaned against the bed and pulled them on. After he situated the pants well enough to cover the necessary parts, he let the hospital smock fall off his body. His chest hurt every time he moved his arms. He’d go without a shirt rather than trying to lift his arms through sleeves. An inch-thick bandage covered his heart.
The room was too dark to see Gill’s mouth, but he seemed to know exactly what Lathan was going to do. Lathan ripped out the tubes in his hand. Gill handed him a towel to wrap around the bleeding.
Lathan shuffled across the room toward the door. “I’m ready to go.”
Gill draped his jacket over Lathan’s shoulders. Lathan gave him the finger—his version of thanks—then opened the door. A nurse power walked in their direction, irritation pinching her face and scenting the air. Gill pointed toward the elevators, and Lathan continued in that direction. Let Gill handle the nurse.
Once he was in the car, exhaustion snuck into Lathan’s bones, but every time he closed his eyes, he was back on that kitchen floor watching Junior bite Honey’s breast, back there feeling so angry, so helpless, so fucking weak. Sleep was not his friend.
The headlights of Gill’s car sliced through the bleak darkness of the highway. Gill pushed the speedometer into the high eighties. Miles and miles of blacktop passed without them seeing another vehicle. Lathan imagined the entire world had simply gone to bed, granting him the small gift of unimpeded progress toward home.
A cuticle of bloodred sky split the horizon, soaking the world in its sinister color. His skin tingled with foreboding.
Gill parked at Lathan’s front door, turned on the overhead light, and touched his arm—a request for attention, when he knew Lathan was nearly delirious with worry. “There are some things you need to know. I sent your parents home. Told them not to come back. Your mom was lobbying for you to be shipped to the nutty ward. Between her and her checkbook offering donations to the hospital, she almost succeeded. You weren’t even medically stable or mentally unstable. I’m not sure that she’s not going to try some legal craziness to get her way. She wasn’t happy.”
Lathan nodded. Didn’t really expect anything less from his mom.
“And Junior shot Little Man too.”
“Asshole shot my dog.” Lathan’s fists clenched tight. “If I hadn’t already killed him once, I’d kill him again. And again. And a-fucking-gain.”
“Little Man’s alive. He’s at the veterinary hospital. The bullet lodged in his shoulder muscle. He’s had surgery. The doctor says he should be back to normal in a few months, but because of his size, he’ll always have weakness in that leg. Probably a limp.”
As fucking sissy as it made him sound, Lathan wanted to run his hands over Little Man’s gangly body, wanted to smell dog dander and all the places Little Man visited in a day. He wanted to watch the big oaf flop down on the floor in a fit of canine ecstasy at having his ears scrubbed. He missed his dog. He missed Honey. He missed his fucking life.
“Evanee’s prints were on the gun that shot you. And on the knife that killed Junior. She was gone. The evidence pointed to her. Dr. Jonah reinforced the theory. He suggested that her mother’s death was the inciting incident.
“If the Strategist was in your home, he staged the scene. And did a flawless job. There’s nothing to support what you say happened, and everything points at Evanee.”
“She didn’t do it.”
“I’m only going to ask you this one time, and I’ll never ask it again. Are you certain—one hundred percent—that she wasn’t working
with the Strategist?”
“I’m so far beyond certain that your question is bizarre.” Lathan didn’t waste time pondering the answer. He got out of the car.
Like in the movies, crime-scene tape was wrapped around his front porch.
Gill used Lathan’s house key to slice through the police seal and open the front door.
The stench of decomposing biological material bashed into Lathan like a physical entity. His gag reflex kicked open his throat. He dry heaved over the side of the porch, each spasm of his throat sparking a punch of pain in his chest. How the fuck was he going to go in if the smell was so overwhelming he couldn’t stop heaving?
Swallowing hard, he summoned his willpower. Underneath the rot was the smell of people. Strangers. Probably EMTs, police, FBI, crime-scene techs. How many people had been in his home?
Without going in, Gill reached inside and turned on lights.
From the front door, Lathan could see the kitchen. See the horror. Blood. Everywhere. On the walls. Gallons of it on the kitchen floor, some seeping into the living room. A flood of blood. No way that was all Junior’s. Some of it, a lot of it, had to be his too. How had he survived? Honey. She was the answer.
Lathan walked in the door, but didn’t move any closer to the nightmare in his kitchen.
He closed his eyes and inhaled slow, long, and deep breaths, searching for her scent underneath all the layers. His brain sorted and sifted. A whisper scent, a thin thread in a complicated weave. He strained to lock onto her. Sweat slicked his armpits and trickled down his bare chest. Every time he almost got her, another scent overpowered hers.
“How long have I been in the hospital?”
“Five days.”
Lathan’s heart liquefied, the last bloody bits of hope evaporating in the reality of time. Five days. He’d been gone five days. The Strategist never keeps his victims long. She’s dead. The Strategist probably killed her four days ago.
Lathan beat his head with his fists, heard the sounds of anguish escaping his mouth.
Dead. An instant image flashed into his mind, her crying out for him, begging him to find her, save her.
He lurched to the stairs, stumbled. Fell. Half scrambled, half crawled, half ran upstairs to the bedroom—shrugging away from Gill’s too-fucking-helpful hands—to the one place where her scent would be strongest. His bed.
He careened into the bedroom. Sheets gone. Pillows missing. Another fucking loss. He sank down, face to the stripped mattress and sucked in a lungful of her honeyed scent.
Tears scalded his eyes. Exhaustion took over his body.
* * *
Lathan woke nose mashed to mattress, a diffuse misery pervading his soul. For a moment, he didn’t remember why his body and heart hurt. Then he remembered. He wanted to forget. Wished he had an erase button on his brain. But he didn’t. There was only one way to forget, but he couldn’t go down death’s highway until he finished one last task—find her body.
He struggled to his feet. Guilt and grief threatened to drive him to his knees, to force him into a lump of useless sobbing. He knew how to get beyond the feeling. In the past, he’d tattooed himself until the bliss of physical pain overwhelmed all the mental shit, but he was a thousand miles beyond tattooing.
He found the knife in his dresser drawer—a long-forgotten Christmas gift from Gill when they were in that awkward teenage state where they felt like they had to give meaningless gifts to each other to solidify their friendship.
He carried the knife into the bathroom. The mirror reflected a haunted, hollowed-out man that he didn’t recognize visually, but he felt exactly like that asshole looked. Like the breathing dead.
The knife felt clumsy in his hand—a cheap hilt, not balanced for performance. Didn’t matter. He pressed the blade into his arm. The first stroke across his skin brought little pain and even less satisfaction. He bore down. Should’ve used a jagged, rusted, serrated blade. Blood welled in his cleaved skin and dripped down his arm. He worked over his flesh, concentrating on lengthening, deepening the strokes, until her name was carved in bold, beautiful letters from the inside of his elbow to his wrist. Warm scarlet streamers chased down his arm, tickling and caressing his skin. Sensation smoldered, ignited into a scorching burn. Finally.
Like an old friend, pain obliged. He held his arm over the sink, closed his eyes, and savored the momentary physical release.
Underneath his feet, he felt the vibration of Gill coming up the stairs, then entering the room. Didn’t want to see the condemnation in his friend’s face. Didn’t want to talk about it.
Grabbing Lathan’s arm, Gill slapped a towel around the bleeding and applied pressure. More blessed pain. A nirvana of pain.
Gill yanked on Lathan’s arm, startling his eyes open.
“You fucking trying to kill yourself?” Gill smelled like anger and wood and blood. Odd combination.
“Not yet.” Total truth in those words.
“Listen. It’s not over until—”
“We find her body.” Saying the words didn’t hurt as much as Lathan had thought it would, but that was probably because adrenaline was choking off his emotions.
The tension on Gill’s face melted, but he didn’t say anything. He lifted the towel. Honey—her name in weeping scarlet letters.
“You have company.”
“Don’t want visitors.”
“Dr. Stone says it’s important. He’s got Xander, Isleen, and Evanee’s brother with him. Says it’s about Evanee.”
Evanee—his magic word. But nothing any of them could say was going to make this situation better.
“Take a shower. Bandage yourself up, then come downstairs.” Gill stepped back. “Or do I need to babysit your ass to make sure you don’t do anything stupid?”
Lathan flicked his middle finger in the air, a teasing response so Gill would stop riding his ass. The tang of cedar scented the air around Gill—fucking pity. Didn’t want to see it expressed on his friend’s face, but Lathan felt so goddamned sorry for himself that he didn’t have the gumption to be pissed about Gill feeling the same way he did.
Lathan stared off across the bathroom to the shower—the place Honey had sat, water scalding her skin, anguish tearing her soul. So much hurt in her life, and he’d barely had a chance to give her happiness. What might have been if she was still alive? He would’ve asked her to marry him. Would’ve made her happy. Would’ve given her kids—if she wanted them—something that he’d never dared to think about before he’d met her.
Lathan crossed the room and knelt at the spot Honey had occupied. He placed both hands on the slate, yearning to feel some connection with her by simply touching a place she’d once been. But he felt nothing. Nothing. When he looked back, Gill was gone, along with the knife and the shaving razor. Figures. Lathan tore off the bandage on his chest, didn’t bother examining the scab and bruises blooming outward from the wound. He stripped out of the scrub pants, stepped under the spray.
The water was liquid fire to her name carved in his arm. He held it directly under the spray, absorbing the pain, savoring it. He stayed in the shower until the water ran like ice and his body quaked from the cold. The torment he’d put himself under slowed the exsanguination of his soul to a trickle and gave him enough strength to begin the search for her body.
He dressed and headed downstairs to face life without her in it. Before he even reached the bottom step, he could smell the difference in his home. The overwhelming stench of rotting blood was nearly gone. Gill had transformed his kitchen from slaughterhouse to construction zone. The floor had been stripped to the joists. Bet he was going to catch hell from his superiors for destroying a crime scene. If he kept this nice shit up, Lathan was going to feel guilty for wanting to end it. Maybe that’s why Gill was doing it. Fucker knew him too well.
Dr. Stone, Xander, and Isleen stared at him, killing kindness on
their faces. Evanee’s brother paced around the space like a caged animal ready to attack. Why the hell was he here with them anyway? Was he friends with Xander and Isleen?
Thomas stalked toward him, his face splotchy and red. “I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation—”
So that’s how he knew Xander and Isleen. Xander worked with the guy.
“Everyone is looking for her. We’re going to find her.” Thomas’s face went cartoon, blow-your-top red. “She’s all the family I’ve got, and we’re going to fucking find her.”
At least one other person felt as strongly as he did about getting Honey home. Lathan wanted to believe the guy could find her, but it wasn’t that simple or he already would have.
No one else spoke. What was there to say? Sorry a killer took your woman? Sorry she’s probably dead? Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out? Words would only make it worse. “So why the fuck are you all here?”
Isleen flinched at his tone. Xander pulled her closer to his side at the same time he delivered a look of anger—deserved anger—at Lathan. Isleen was a tiny thing with expansive ocean eyes full of shadows. And Lathan had just scared her.
He felt like a shit. “Sorry. I’m… Fuck… I don’t…”
Isleen moved toward him, dragging Xander with her and nudging him in the ribs.
“Back when… were working Isleen’s case. When they called… in after she was taken… I’d been shot, right?”
Lathan missed a few words, but knew what the guy was talking about. He felt his head nod on his shoulders. He wasn’t sure he could speak beyond the grief for Honey jammed in his throat.
Xander lifted the hair off his forehead. “I caught mine in the head.” A round scar dimpled at his hairline. “It’s amazing what our girls can do.”
It’s amazing what our girls can do. Can do? The guy talked like Honey was alive. Hadn’t anyone informed him that she was dead?
“This thing between us and our women, the strange abilities we all have—it kinda makes us a family or something. And family backs up family.”
