The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  “Ellis Watson?” Garcia asked.

  “Shit.” Taking his sweet time in waking up, the guy was suddenly wide-eyed as he took in Garcia. “What happened to your hand?”

  “Are you Ellis Watson?” Garcia asked again.

  “Are you?” The smartass just had to be a smartass, and, barreling through his door, Garcia grabbed the front of the smartass’ t-shirt and carried him back into the flat.

  Glancing both ways down the hall, Fiona was glad to see it, at least, was clear, before she stepped in behind them, closing the door to contain the commotion.

  “What the hell, Man?” the smartass said as Garcia tossed him onto a raggedy sofa, but when Garcia pulled his pistol it was response enough to stop any further questions.

  “Are you Ellis Watson?”

  Door opening off the living room, another twenty-something guy stumbled out of it, apparently unaware of the home invasion until he glanced up and saw Garcia’s gun. Rushing back into his bedroom, he tried to shut the door, but Garcia pushed through it, grabbing the second guy and knocking him carelessly into the doorframe on his way back out.

  Tossing him onto the sofa next to his friend, Garcia wiped the same hand that clutched his gun across his profusely sweating forehead, broken appendage dangling useless again at his side.

  “Are you Ellis Watson?” He turned the question on the attempted runner.

  “No.” The guy was far more forthcoming.

  “Is he?” Garcia waved the barrel in the direction of the smartass.

  “No. That’s Franky.”

  “Is Ellis here?”

  “No. He hasn’t been around since yesterday.”

  “When did you last see him?” Garcia asked. “What time?”

  “I don’t know!” the smartass answered when, getting no reply, Garcia raised his gun. “Twelve, maybe. I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Do not move.” Garcia punctuated the point with the pistol, before returning it to his jacket to go back out the door.

  Trailing him from the flat, and back down the hall, Fiona cursed herself for thinking anything had changed, that Garcia would ever be honest with her, for thinking he had it in him to let this thing go.

  “Do you really think this is going to help anything?” She expected a throng of police cars as they cleared the building’s front door.

  “Get in the car.” Garcia grabbed the open passenger door, but couldn’t seem to wrangle himself into the seat. “There are plenty left.”

  “This is bloody idiotic,” Fiona declared. “They have already been here, Garcia. We’re chasing ghosts. It’s over.”

  Wild glint in his eyes making him look as crazed as Slade, Garcia stumbled back to her. “It is not over,” he said. “You can quit whenever you want, you coward, but it is not fucking over.

  “The ancient…” Carrying on in a mumble, he staggered back toward the car. “He gave me a way to reach him. Nine, nine, nine, six, nine, nine, six, nine. We just need to talk to him. He can tell us what to do next. He can help.”

  Falling against the back door, Garcia put his hand to the metal and vomited red. Eyes rising when, at last, he realized he was dying, they pled with Fiona for an instant before he collapsed onto his back, violent tremors seizing his body.

  A dozen bystanders circling around to watch, Fiona considered leaving Garcia to their good-Samaritanship, being the coward Garcia accused her of being, and getting the hell out of town. Not sure what possessed her to grab him by the shirtfront, haul his heavy ass off the street and toss him into the passenger seat, Fiona did it anyway, hoping her moment of gallantry wouldn’t prove a fatal mistake.

  17

  Throughout the day, they made their way one by one. United by a plight, it was natural to gravitate together, and they ended up in the parlor, the room most familiar to them, because familiarity mattered even more when everything else was so unknown.

  Disinclined to talk, they remained strangers to each other, keeping to their own spaces, scarcely making eye contact. So Delaney saw her fellow captives as she would have seen them in the world - the woman with the cheekbones who could have been a model, the young guy either still in, or just out of, secondary school, the Indian guy, the man with Down syndrome, the anxious blonde who had spoken to her the night before and looked ready to jump from her skin.

  Plus, Vicar Bryce and Kiara, the only one who had anything to say. Typical childlike observations, Delaney heard only half of them as the girl looked for things to keep herself occupied without straying too far from her side.

  “’Laney?” Kiara tugged the sleeve of the shirt Vicar Bryce had scrounged from the closet in his room, just as old and scratchy, but still better than the ballooning sleeves that adorned every garment Delaney had found in the closet in their own. “Are we going to eat dinner?”

  Young eyes worried as they looked to her, Delaney tried to remember how long it had been since lunch. Or had they eaten lunch? She remembered Kiara asking for something at some point after breakfast, but when Kiara picked a cereal bar and more juice, Delaney let it be sufficient.

  “Yes, of course we are.” She felt a rush of guilt that Kiara had to ask as she pushed out of the surprisingly comfortable chair, wearier than she should have been considering she’d done nothing but sit around all day, and took Kiara’s hand.

  “I’ll help you.” Vicar Bryce got to his feet too, and Delaney managed a genuine smile, before Kiara’s insistent grip pulled her from the room and down the hall to the kitchen.

  Sorting through the produce on the counter, spotty, but still a blessing given the season, she had no idea what they were going to do with it, but, given how lacking Kiara’s first two meals of the day were, she piled it together anyway, figuring they had to eat something of relative value.

  “Kan jeg hjaelpe?”

  Unexpected query drawing Delaney’s eyes to the doorway, the man with Down syndrome grinned in at her. Wondering if he was more or less confused than the rest of them, Delaney was certain there was someone in an utter panic over his disappearance. As Kiara’s parents had to be.

  “I don’t…” It hadn’t even occurred to her they might not all speak a common language.

  “He wants to know if he can help.” Vicar Bryce said. “Uh, onsker du at vaske kartofler?” When he held up a bag of potatoes, Delaney got the drift, and, taking the bag from Vicar Bryce, the man looked happy to be given something to do that wasn’t just sitting around waiting.

  “What language is that?” Delaney asked as they settled into a pattern of washing and chopping.

  Kiara perched on the counter beside her, Delaney handed her a piece of carrot, glad to see that, though she wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about it as she had been her chocolate-coated cereal bar, she would still eat it.

  “Danish,” Vicar Bryce answered.

  “Is that where you’re from? Denmark?”

  “No,” Vicar Bryce responded. “I live in Oslo. The languages are similar enough that we can understand each other. Thank goodness.” Glancing down the counter, he seemed to realize how horrible it would be for the man if no one could communicate with him at all.

  “So, has anyone even explained to him what’s going on?” Delaney questioned, and it was clear Vicar Bryce hadn’t thought of that either.

  Looking down the counter at him, he watched the man for a moment. “Perhaps it can wait,” he said, and, the man appearing rather content in his potato-washing, Delaney agreed. Perhaps, in their current circumstances, being temporarily unaware was the best any of them could hope to be.

  “What are you making?” It was a few minutes later when the nervous blonde came into the kitchen.

  Blowing out a breath that captured Delaney’s own frustration at the food situation, Vicar Bryce nudged a few things aside to reveal a large can of broth.

  “Some sort of stew?” he put to a vote, and when Delaney shrugged in general agreement and no one else said anything, it became a consensus.

  Counter too occupied for further
hands, the woman looked to the other workspaces around the room, apparently determining them too distant. “I’m Heidi.” She huddled closer instead.

  “Bryce,” Vicar Bryce said.

  “I’m Delaney.”

  “Hvad hedder du?” Vicar Bryce questioned the man.

  “Rupert.” He looked up from the sink.

  “And this is Kiara,” Delaney said, handing Kiara another carrot slice as she glanced back at Heidi. Watching the woman’s eyes fill with tears, it paused her in turning back toward the counter. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” Heidi didn’t bother to lie. “I have a son… a little older than you. He was staying at a friend’s house. I just keep thinking what he must have thought when I didn’t come to get him. How scared he must have been.”

  “I’m sure he knows you would have come if you could,” Vicar Bryce assured her, and, with an unconvinced nod, Heidi blinked away the tears and looked for something to occupy herself, finally opting to go through cabinets until she found a large pan to set on the stove.

  It wasn’t long after that the cheekbone model, Jemma, came in with Ellis, the student, and the Indian man, Akun, who, it turned out wasn’t from India, though his parents both were, but was born and raised in France and had the thick accent to prove it.

  “Let’s eat,” Vicar Bryce said when the stew was done, sliding a loaf of day-old bread onto a board and grabbing a large knife on his way out the door.

  “We’re not eating in here?” Jemma asked.

  “There’s no reason to crowd around that small table,” he replied. “If we’re going to be stuck here, we may as well dine in comfort.”

  Ladling the last bowl of soupy stew as Vicar Bryce went across the hall to the formal dining room, Delaney took Kiara down from the counter, deciding the man had a point.

  Back in the parlor after dinner, conversation was easier to come by. Sharing morsels about their lives, like who was married - Vicar Bryce and Jemma, much to Ellis and Akun’s joint dismay - and other things that shaped their basic identities, they knew just enough about each other to understand the lives that had been left on hold.

  Every so often, a deraph would appear on the landing outside, for a fleeting moment going up or down the stairs. Never a surprise, Delaney was able to link each one to a person in the room by whoever looked to the doorway first. She wasn’t the only one, it seemed, who felt the connection the deraphs claimed. So, maybe it was true, maybe they did have some sort of mystical link. The gods knew, just because Delaney had never heard of it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. After years of study, she had barely scratched the surface of the Holocene, let alone those ages that came before the Neolithic Revolution. With no specimens for experimentation, and documentation extremely limited, the supernatural world was considerably more difficult to investigate than the human one.

  After the first few deraphs passed, disrupting the flow of conversation each time, Akun looked to Delaney. “What do you know about them?” he asked, though, each word rolling, it took Delaney a moment to comprehend the question.

  Glancing to Kiara when she did, she told him they could talk about it later, and, with a disappointed nod, Akun slid back in his chair to impatiently wait.

  Everyone doing their parts to keep her entertained, it took only a few hours for Kiara to wind down. Carrying her into the bedroom, and stripping her down to her shirt and panties, Delaney tucked her into the pile of blankets, waiting until she was fairly certain she would stay asleep, before leaving the light on and door open to return to the living room and a captive audience.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked them.

  “Whatever you know,” Akun said.

  So, with no better guidance, Delaney told them everything, all she knew about deraphs, admittedly limited in comparison to what she knew about other species of daemonry, and many of the same things they had likely already experienced for themselves.

  To her relief, no one looked surprised when she told them deraphs were innately seductive creatures, with powers to attract and appease their prey, and it made her feel slightly better about her own relentless attraction.

  “Do you believe they don’t want to hurt us?” Heidi asked, and Delaney listened to Vicar Bryce’s quiet translation to Rupert beside her.

  “Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment to consider whether she was lying, surprised to realize she was telling the truth. As far as she could see it. “There are plenty of accounts of those who hunt species like the deraphs being every bit as vicious as those they seek to kill. The deraphs could do what they want with us. They don’t need a made-up story. There’s no reason for them to lie about us being in danger. There’s no reason they would have brought us here, and given us places to sleep and food if they don’t need us alive.”

  No reason she could think of, at least, that wasn’t utterly far-fetched or disturbing. So, it was best not to think too hard about it.

  “Do you think we’ll ever go home?” Akun asked.

  “I don’t know,” Delaney responded. It was the one thing she would have no way of knowing even if she knew everything there was to know about deraphs. Elusive and highly intelligent, though, she knew hardly anything, which was why deraphs had survived into modern times when so many species of daemonry had gone extinct.

  “How do you know about this stuff?” Jemma’s stare felt almost accusatory. “It’s bizarre.”

  “I’m a theology student,” Delaney replied. “I’ve been learning about these things for a long time.”

  “Theology?” Vicar Bryce was somewhat amused, and Delaney suspected it was because his study and her own were pretty far apart on the educational spectrum.

  “Specialized theology, you could say,” she amended.

  “Why?” Heidi’s arms wrapped around her torso, as if just the idea of it gave her a chill. “Why would you want to study this? Why would you want to know any of this?”

  Question prying, Heidi had no way of knowing how prying it was, and, with a sigh, Delaney realized, despite the forced intimacy of their circumstances, these people were still strangers to her.

  “I don’t know,” she withheld her deeper truths. “I guess most kids fear the monsters in the dark. I was always curious about them.”

  Expressions on the faces staring back at her a reminder of why she’d had such an easy time making friends most of her adolescence, Delaney could see little had changed. Dedicating one’s life to certain pursuits was always going to be creepy to people, like a kindergartner answering “undertaker” when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. If only she could introduce them to Stacy and her thug vampire gang, they would see she was actually pretty normal by comparison.

  “I think it’s about time for bed,” Vicar Bryce announced, though Delaney wasn’t sure if he was truly wearing down or was trying to rescue her.

  Everyone rising at the suggestion, none of them looked keen to separate. Safety in numbers, Delaney suspected they thought. She didn’t bother to tell them that, separate or together, the only way they would be safe in their current predicament was if the deraphs wanted them that way. They were at the mercy of those who held them, and deraphs weren’t exactly renowned for their mercy.

  When she got back to the bedroom, the air felt oppressively thick. Wheezing as she pulled the scratchy nightgown over her head, Delaney wondered if she could rally her fellow captives’ in a big group clean to make the place slightly more breathable.

  Throat scratchy from talking too long, and what had to be two centuries worth of dust in the air, she remembered the tea Jemma had discovered, with a small whoop of delight, amongst their rations earlier, and, stifling a cough to keep from waking Kiara, she went back down the hall to the kitchen.

  Light still on, it didn’t take long to find everything she needed, and she’d just put the antique kettle on to boil when she felt her. The same unrelenting sensation since their arrival at the house - no, before that, since she felt her in the shadows of the abbey butt
resses and yearned to walk into danger - Delaney had almost gotten used to it, the constant stimulation of Haydn’s presence.

  In the quiet privacy of the kitchen, with nothing else to distract her, though, her awareness of Haydn was unbearably insistent, and Delaney shivered, line of sweat forming between her breasts, as numerous other parts palpitated in anticipation.

  “Do you have something to say?” she asked when Haydn just stood there, feeding into the silence and Delaney’s acute desire. “Or are you just going to lurk behind me?”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  Delaney preferred neither. She preferred Haydn to go back to wherever it was she disappeared to when she went up the stairs, and not come down again until she was bearing news that they were being emancipated.

  Glancing back to tell her, Delaney realized her grievous error. Hovering in the doorway, black hair framing eyes that stared unblinkingly back, Haydn looked like nothing at which anyone with a pulse or libido could remain aggravated for long.

  “How are things going down here?” Haydn asked, and, realizing she hadn’t stopped staring, Delaney jerked her gaze back to the stove, watching the kettle refuse to boil.

  “Fine,” she uttered, but, nose choosing that moment to prickle, she tried to sniff the sensation away, unable to hold back the sneeze that seized her body, or the trailing cough that followed.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “You sound sick.”

  “Well, maybe that’s because this place isn’t exactly clean.” It was comforting to find something about which she could be truly annoyed.

  “Sorry,” Haydn said. “We don’t really use these rooms. Or breathe. So, cleaning isn’t exactly a priority for us.”

  “It’s not surprising you don’t use these rooms.” Delaney could be incensed about that too. Fixating on the realities of the situation - that she had been abducted, that she was being held prisoner along with seven other people, that, if they didn’t share some kind of connection she didn’t entirely understand, there would be nothing stopping Haydn from killing her - Delaney succeeded in turning the rest of her pent-up energy into indignation. “Since they’re the servants’ quarters.”