by A D Seeley
That’s when her heart started pounding. Tracker was looking at her in the same way that Inac did. She was frozen. How could she keep this from going where she thought Tracker was going to take it? His face loomed closer and she still couldn’t move. It wasn’t until she felt his lips on hers that she was free.
She turned her face away, saying maybe a little too shrilly, “What are you doing?!”
He jumped back, like she had electrocuted him.
“I…you said you’d never reject me….” He looked like he was going to cry again.
A pang of remorse for how she had overreacted to his kiss stabbed through her. In an attempt to backpedal so that he would stop looking at her that way, she said, “Sorry. It just took me by surprise. And I’m not rejecting you. I just don’t think about you in a romantic way.”
“How’s that not rejecting?” he scoffed.
“Well…what we have is better in some ways.”
His respondent laugh sounded border-line crazy. She had obviously said the wrong thing.
“That’s how it’ll always be then, Hara. You’re always too nice…too polite. Just tell me straight up how I’m not as good-looking as Inac. How I’m not as smart or funny or chivalrous….”
Something in Tracker had definitely snapped.
“Well you know what?!” he cried like a banshee as he stood up. “I’m not as crazy either! Do you know how many people he’s killed? In his own words, more than are even alive on Earth right now! And he doesn’t really love you, Hara. He just wants to sleep with you. He told me about how you let him feel you up with me right there when we went camping. He says that you’re like a peach ripe for the picking!”
She was about to slap him, to stop his rambling, but how could he know about that morning if Inac hadn’t told him?
“Shut up!” she screamed when she realized that he’d have to have learned about it the way he’d said.
“And you know what else? He’s going to kill you next. That’s been his plan all along!”
“I said shut up!” she shrieked at a decibel that could shatter glass, using it to propel her until she was standing up, ready to face him herself.
“And you’re just walking right into it! I used to think that you were innocent, but you’re not! You’re giving into him willingly! Maybe Crystal’s rubbing off on you because you’re a slut, just like her!”
Hara slapped him so hard that he lost his balance and fell to the floor. His words were just too close to the ones she told herself…about the S-L-U-T part, at least. The rest…she’d thought the rest wasn’t true until now. She couldn’t believe Inac was bragging about her as a conquest….
They both had tears in their eyes again.
“Get out of here, Tracker,” she seethed through clenched teeth. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Fine with me. Have fun dying,” he said before leaving, slamming the door behind him.
With that final sound she fell, sobbing, to her knees.
***
“Sir, you have a visitor,” the rotund doorman Ollie said as soon as Inac walked into the immaculate white marble lobby, a gunny sack over one shoulder.
“Who?” he replied as he turned to see Tracker eagerly striding toward him. One side of his face had a red handprint on it, but that wasn’t what Inac noticed the most. What he noticed more than anything was the horror and desperation in the kid’s eyes. He’d obviously done something idiotic…again….
“Inac! I need some of that drug you gave Hara before to make her forget!” Tracker shouted.
Inac glanced around the lobby full of haughty people staring back in fear and shock.
“Please?” Tracker continued, still only halfway through the lobby. “And don’t pretend like you have qualms about it because we both know that you just got back from assassinating the Israeli Prime Minister and then pinning it on the Palestinians so you can get whatever it is you’re after there.”
If there weren’t so many witnesses, Inac would break the kid’s neck before he spilled everything.
Inac reached out to Tracker, violently grabbing him by the scruff of said neck and pushing him toward the elevator. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and talk,” he hissed.
Despite his grip, Tracker eagerly nodded until Inac let go of him.
“Why don’t I meet you by the elevator?” Inac suggested.
Once Tracker was walking away, Inac said in a loud enough voice to carry to the witnesses, “Sorry. He’s schizophrenic and obviously off his medication. But what can I do? He’s my fiancée’s brother.”
Ollie was obviously convinced, as were most of the spectators. Only a couple of them didn’t look as though they were, and those were the ones who had been in the perfect position to have seen the murderous thoughts behind his eyes. He should have acted surprised and disgusted at being accused of murder instead of worried about what people would think.
“Would you like me to call someone, sir?” Ollie asked.
“No thanks. I have some of his medication upstairs.”
“Very good, sir.”
As soon as they were inside Inac’s house, he dropped his gunny sack and turned on Tracker, grabbing him by the arm and pulling it behind him just like he had in Yellowstone.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? Do you want to die? If so, you don’t have to go about it that way. I will kill you if you only ask.”
He eased up on Tracker’s arm just enough so the kid would be able to speak through his pain.
“I just need that drug!”
“Why?”
“Because Hara needs to forget!”
“Forget what? What did you tell her?” he hissed, pushing on Tracker’s arm until he cried out in pain. Getting information out of this kid was like pulling teeth. And if that’s what he had to do, then he would do it.
“I kissed her!” Tracker screamed.
Inac let go to look Tracker over. No wonder the kid was freaking. He’d finally gotten the guts to kiss the woman he loved and she’d obviously reacted badly.
“That’s no excuse to blow my cover. What am I supposed to do about that? I’ll probably have the authorities checking me out now.”
“So? You own them.”
“Not all of them. Some might talk.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Tracker said. He walked past Inac and to the stainless steel cabinets in the kitchen and flung them open as though his salvation was just beyond one of them. “Right now I need the drug.”
From behind the kid, he said, “No. I’m not giving it to you.”
Tracker turned, betrayal in his eyes along with all the other things the kid was feeling.
“Why not? I thought we were friends?”
Inac laughed. “And what gave you that preposterous idea?”
“Yellowstone. We had that good talk….”
“That doesn’t make us friends. Besides, I’m not giving it to you because we can’t just keep erasing Hara’s memory every time you do something stupid. Once people start losing too much time, they get suspicious.”
“But…I kissed her. I can’t have her remembering that!”
Inac shrugged and began lugging his gunny sack toward his bedroom. “Not my problem. You should have thought about that before you kissed her.”
“Please?!” Tracker sobbed.
His desperation made Inac pause to turn to him and ask, “And what am I supposed to tell her caused her memory loss?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then no. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some unpacking to do. You can leave how you entered.” He turned his back on Tracker, showing him that he had been dismissed.
“That’s not all,” Tracker whispered from behind him. And not a normal whisper either. The kid was afraid of something.
Inac turned, his eyes full of murder again. “What did you tell her?”
Tracker had been on the verge of tears, but it was now that they chose to flow. Tracker was scared; scared for
his life.
“I said, what did you tell her?” Inac hissed as he moved his face and body close to Tracker’s until the kid was backing up, shriveling from the murderous rage in Inac’s words.
In a squeaky voice full of terror, he said, “I kinda told her that you bragged about feeling her up and that you don’t really love her. That you’re gonna murder her. I also kinda told her about The Order and that They watch you. Oh, also how you called her a ripe peach.”
“Is that all?” Inac asked, his voice full of sarcasm. He was really contemplating breaking his neck after all.
“Oh. I did tell her that you said that you’ve killed more people than are even alive right now.”
Throwing his gunny sack to the floor, he yelled, “Dammit, Tracker!”
“I know! I’m stupid!”
“You’re much more than that.”
“Can you honestly say that Hara hasn’t gotten information out of you that you didn’t intend on telling her? Can you honestly say that?” The kid was begging for his life with that question…and it worked.
Inac let out a deep breath. “No. I guess I can’t. She just has this way….”
“…Of getting people to open up without realizing it.”
Inac looked at Tracker. He actually felt sorry for the poor kid. Tracker had been rejected by the only person he loved; really, the only person he ever had loved in his twenty-four years. The same had happened to Inac once, and it had driven him to kill his brother. Warning Hara about Inac was nothing in comparison to that.
“So how did she react to what you told her about me?”
Tracker seemed to realize that his death wasn’t going to come tonight after all and he let out his own held breath before saying, “She screamed a lot before slapping me so hard I fell to the ground.”
“Sorry, man. That couldn’t have been easy. I know how much you love her.”
Tracker’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “Yeah….”
“I’ll do it this time. But next time, you’re out of lifelines, little buddy,” he said, smiling at Tracker as he lightly pat his unmarked cheek in an attempt to reassure the kid.
“Thanks…Inac.” The kid was dazed. Being rejected would do that to you.
“Mm-hmm,” Inac said, trying to act as though it was no big deal. But, upon further scrutinization, he realized that the kid’s entire world had fallen apart and he felt a small pang of pity. “Look, do you want a dose, too? That way you can forget all about this?”
“Would you?” Tracker asked with such hope in his miserable eyes that, had Inac had a heart, surely it would have broken it.
“Sure. Just write yourself a letter of what you want to remember.”
“I don’t want to remember any of it. I’ll just write myself a note that says that I forgot today for a reason.”
“Fair enough. I’ll make you a dose, but it will make you pass out so give yourself the shot once you get home. I’ll go talk to Hara and give her a dose too. Just know, even though you won’t remember this, I won’t help get you out of whatever else you get yourself into. Next time you screw up, you and Hara are both dead.”
***
Inac knocked on Hara’s door, still unsure how to go about this. The only thing he was positive about was that he was going to be doing a lot of acting to convince her of his innocence.
She opened it, her red and swollen eyes accusing.
“Baby, what’s wrong? What’s happened?” he asked with concern as he tried to pull her into his arms to comfort her.
“Don’t ‘baby’ me,” she said, pulling away from him. “Tracker told me about how you bragged about getting…intimate…with me. About how I let you touch me….” As she said this she covered her chest with her arms, as though he was trying to touch her again. Or, perhaps, that he was a dirty old man attempting to do so which, of course, he was, if you wanted to get technical….
He let an instant of surprise show before schooling his expression to let disbelief make a brief appearance—neither emotion could stay too long or it would look completely fake. That’s why he let anger take over. But the kind that was protective; like he was angry that someone else knew the intimate detail in the first place.
“I don’t know how he knows about that because I never told him,” he said as he tightened his jaw.
“How else could he know?” she demanded. She didn’t believe him yet, but it was obvious that she wanted to.
“Maybe he woke up…. Maybe he snorted on purpose so we would stop…” he said, acting like he’d just thought that up, when really he’d come up with it as a possible excuse on the drive over. “Or…maybe he read your diary. You did have it sitting on top of your bag in the tent. Maybe he read it to see where we’d gone for those eight hours.”
“So you really didn’t?” she asked, a kind of hope in her glossy eyes that mirrored Tracker’s exactly.
“Of course not,” he said, feigning hurt that she could even think such a thing.
“Oh Inac…” she said, rushing into his arms to cry.
They then sat on the couch where she told him everything. There was a lot Tracker had left out. For instance, about Father Carroll being the one to bring Tracker into The Order, though Hara didn’t seem to know the sect’s name.
Inac was glad Crystal wasn’t home because then he wouldn’t be able to do what he needed to. As soon as Hara fell asleep in his arms, he injected the medicine into her vein. Then he checked the house and her journal, making sure that no evidence of tonight was there to remind Hara of what had occurred. Once done, he went back home and went to bed. All of this blasted drama had exhausted him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
***
A piercing scream woke Hara. Her head pounding with every wail, she tried over and over again to shut off her alarm clock. When she finally got it to stop, she turned over and re-closed her eyes. Her head, however, wouldn’t stop its hammering reaction to the sound. She felt like she had that morning at Inac’s. In fact, she couldn’t recall a lot of yesterday either. Did she drink another whole bottle of wine?
She was barely slipping back into blessed darkness when a pounding on her door started her head’s reaction all over again.
“Hara?” Crystal’s voice said too loudly.
“Please stop yelling. I have a massive headache.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Just leave me alone and stop yelling,” she grumbled. Her mouth felt like a mass of cotton was stuffed into it.
“Okay. If you need anything, just let me know.”
After she left, Hara fell back asleep. A little while later, she felt someone sit on her bed so she opened her eyes, trying to focus on what appeared to be Inac.
“Here,” he whispered. At least she thought he was whispering because it stabbed into her head as though an ice pick was chiseling at her brain.
It took her a moment to realize that he was holding medicine, a glass of milk, and a slice of bread out to her. Because she was too weak, he put the pills into her mouth and held the glass up for her to drink from. Then he ripped off a piece of bread and set it on her tongue. He stayed, giving her pieces of bread and sips of the milk, until she’d had enough. Then he massaged her temples and scalp before putting pressure on different points of her body. She felt her headache dissipating with each one.
When she finally felt better, she opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“Thanks. How’d you know I was sick?” she asked in a croaky voice.
“Crystal called me. She asked if I was back in town so I could come take care of you.”
“Oh yeah!” she said a little too loudly—maybe her head wasn’t all the way better yet. Quieter, she asked, “When did you get back?”
“Last night.”
“And you’re just now visiting?”
“I wanted to come by, but I had a lot I had to take care of.”
“Oh.”
“So how are you feeling now? Your headache gone?”
�
�Yeah,” she said, wincing from the bit of it still present. “Mostly. At least as long as I don’t yell or move too much.”
He flashed her the briefest of smiles. “Any other symptoms I can remedy?” he asked with a devilish edge to his voice. Without waiting for her to answer, he bent down and kissed her, giving her a taste of delicious mint mixed in with his masculine taste. When he pulled away, he asked, “Did that release enough endorphins to take away all your symptoms?”
She giggled. “My head feels wonderful now, but I still don’t remember most of yesterday.”
His brow furrowed and he started rubbing her feet, as though doing so would clear his own mind. “What do you mean? You forgot some things like you did after drinking that bottle of wine?”
“Yeah. I guess I drank a lot again.”
“No, Hara. You don’t smell like alcohol like you did the last time.”
“Then what else could explain me forgetting?”
“Both times you had a nasty headache…” he said, not looking up at her as he swirled his thumbs around the bridge of one foot.
“Yeah? So?” she asked, lightly kicking at him so he’d look her in the eye.
His eyes were worried when they met hers. “I think you should see a doctor at the student center. Actually, I think you should see a neurologist. We should get you a CAT scan or an MRI or whatever. If you’re losing time before waking up with debilitating headaches, then we should make sure that you don’t have a tumor or a blood clot or something. I’ll set it up right now,” he said as he stood up and started walking out of the door with purpose.
“Inac!” she called. When he looked back at her, she said, “Now I’m scared. Will you come hold me?”
He gave her a faint smile that made her feel a little better. “I’ll come right back. I’m just going to use the phone in the kitchen to make you an appointment.”
