Damn it, I should never have canceled that Uber.
At last we reached Cordova — my street. I turned right and trudged down the sidewalk, and couldn’t quite repress the sensation of relief that went over me as I spotted the awning that led into the lobby of my condo complex. No way would I go in through there, though. Not looking like a drowned rat and with a tall, grim-faced stranger in tow…especially a stranger who carried a trashed Trader Joe’s shopping bag with wine dripping out the bottom.
Instead, I went down a side path that led to the dumpsters. “Toss it in there,” I instructed the strange man. “I don’t want red wine dripping all over my floor.”
His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t have other items in there that you’d like to salvage?”
“No,” I replied wearily. I could live without the bag of dried apricots and the box of gorgonzola crackers. Well, maybe not the crackers….
With a shrug, he raised the cover of the dumpster and dropped the bag inside. Since I somehow knew that trying to take the other bag of groceries from him so I could go up to my place alone wouldn’t do any good, I headed back up the path, then zigged off toward the building where my condo was located.
As I’d feared, he followed, staying only a pace or two behind me. Clearly, he didn’t intend to let me out of his sight. Why, I really didn’t know. Did he think another pasty-faced man was going to leap out of the bushes and assault me? I was shaky and feeling shell-shocked, and all I wanted was to get inside my house and lock the door against the world…including the man who had just saved me. Right then, I needed time to think.
When I reached the door to my condo, I came to a dead stop and turned to face him. “If you think I’m going to let you in — ”
“I would not expect that,” he said calmly. “Here are your groceries.”
I stared at him for a second, then took the bag from his hand. “So…that’s it? You’re not going to stop me from going inside?”
“Of course not. It is safe for you there.”
Usually, I would have found such a statement reassuring. But after what had happened over on Marengo Street…. “How do you know it’s safe?”
“Because I do,” he replied, which of course didn’t help at all. If I hadn’t been freezing and soaked through, I probably would have gone hot with anger at his apparent nonchalance. “That doesn’t mean they won’t still try to get at you in the future. But your home is safe…as long as you don’t let them in.”
“‘Let them in’?” I repeated. Assuming an ironic tone that I was sure he didn’t believe for one second, I added, “What, they need an invitation? Are they vampires or something?”
“Or something,” he agreed. “Take care, Serena Quinn.”
And with that parting shot he was gone, walking swiftly down the path that led to the community pool. A second or two later, he had turned a corner and disappeared.
Vampires. Or something.
Hands shaking, I pulled my house keys out of my purse and went inside.
Chapter Two
After getting soaked through like that, normally I would have taken a long, hot bath. But I was far too shaken up after my encounter with the strange pale man — the one who had apparently been melted into a puddle of goo — to allow myself to feel so exposed. Soaking in a tub for a half hour or more, just lying there, naked? No, thanks.
Instead, I turned on the shower as hot as I dared and stood there until I’d banished the worst of the chill. Then I got out and dried myself off and got dressed in record time. Once I was done, I went to the window as I towel-dried my hair. With my free hand, I cautiously pushed the drapes to one side. Of course I didn’t see anyone, since the rain was coming down in earnest, and anyone with any sense would have retreated inside.
Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling of still being watched.
I fought back a shiver as I let go of the drapes. The condo had a gas fireplace in the living room, so I paused and flicked the switch to turn it on before heading into the kitchen. That one unbroken bottle of wine beckoned, but I knew better than to indulge myself when I was still so shaken up. Besides, it was barely noon, a little early to start on a bender. Mouth set, I got out a mug and nuked some water in it, then dropped in a bag of my favorite Darjeeling tea.
The warm mug felt good in my trembling fingers, which were still far too cold despite that hot shower. I sat down in my favorite chair, the big overstuffed one placed to the left of the sofa. A flat-screen TV hung over the fireplace, but I didn’t turn it on. No, I cradled the mug of tea in my hands and stared at the wall, and wondered if I’d finally gone crazy.
What I really wanted to believe was that the incident had only been another of my visions, or whatever you wanted to call them. Problem was, even when I was still coming to terms with what they were, I’d always been able to differentiate my waking visions from reality. Reality was bright and sharp-edged. The visions — even the ones I had when I was asleep — always had a hazy sort of quality to them, as if being seen through a camera with a thin layer of gauze over the lens.
The encounter with the crazed man…or whatever he was…felt far too real. I could still see way too many details about him, from the spiky, oily texture of his white hair to the faint line of a scar that had etched its way down one cheek. I rarely got that level of detail from a vision, only enough to know what was going on, and not much more than that. Anyway, my arm still ached where he’d grabbed me. Not once had I ever experienced any physical after-effects from one of my visions, except a brief disorientation. But disorientation rarely left bruises behind.
And then there was my nameless rescuer. He was far too real as well. Handsome, with those level dark brows and that firm mouth. His shaggy hair and the three days of scruff on his cheeks seemed to indicate he didn’t care too much about his appearance…or that he was the kind of guy who actually cared a lot but tried to affect that he didn’t.
I had a feeling he was the former, just because the metrosexual types I’d known would have put a hell of a lot more effort into their clothes, not to mention a lot more product in their hair. And the way the stranger had dispatched my attacker…. Sure, I’d seen that kind of fighting before, in movies or on TV. Not right in front of my eyes.
What I’d never witnessed before, even in make-believe, was a man dissolving into nothing like that, just like the Wicked Witch of the West or something. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. And yet I’d stood there and watched the whole thing.
Which meant it had to be possible. If that was true, then pretty much everything I thought I knew about the world had suddenly turned upside down.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Right then, I really wished I had wine in my mug, not tea.
I made myself take a sip, though, telling myself that I needed to stay sharp right now. Anyway, the tea felt good going down, warm and strong.
Even though I wanted to go to the window and look out again, I stayed where I was. The last thing I needed was to turn into the crazy neighbor who was always peering out through the drapes, trying to catch make-believe intruders creeping around in the bushes.
Although in my case, the intruder wasn’t exactly make-believe.
The stranger had said I would be safe here in my condo, though. Whether I could take his words at face value was up for grabs at the moment, but I chose to believe him. After all, I was the next thing to a recluse anyway. No one would think it terribly strange if I didn’t venture outside for a day or two. Most of the time, that was my standard behavior. My work — such as it was — kept me at home. I only went out for groceries or to catch the odd movie when I was sick of streaming them from my solitary living room. Even more rarely, I’d meet for lunch or dinner with the one friend who had stuck by me through everything: Candace Neely, my college roommate. Everyone else had slipped away, not sure how to handle the change in my circumstances.
At any rate, it wasn’t as if I had the kind of active social life where people would even notice o
r miss me if I stayed inside for days at a time.
I set my mug down on a coaster and frowned. Although Candace had believed me, had never tried to deny my visions, I wondered what in the world she would think if I called her now and told her what had happened to me. Would she think this was the final straw, that I’d really lost it at last?
Not that I would blame her. I was beginning to think the same thing.
If I hadn’t seen my attacker melt away into nothingness, I would have thought he was just some whacko who was trying to get at my brother through me. Yes, I kept a low profile, but Jackson was still the junior senator from California, the one being groomed for a run at the White House. He hadn’t announced his candidacy yet, but we all knew it was a foregone conclusion. My parents and my sister were thrilled. I, on the other hand, could only think of the increased scrutiny and shudder. How long would it take before the tabloids started screaming about Senator Quinn’s crazy little sister?
But politically motivated whack jobs didn’t melt into pale puddles of slime. What had just happened to me an hour earlier couldn’t be explained away. Not by any rational means, that is.
Vampires. Sort of.
How could a person be “sort of” a vampire? That was like being “sort of” pregnant.
Anyway, vampires weren’t real. That silvery stuff my protector had thrown at the guy…it had to be some kind of weird experimental chemical, something capable of making a human body melt away and disappear. I was far more ready to believe that kind of cloak-and-dagger CIA stuff than confront the reality that my assailant was some kind of strange supernatural being. After all, the conspiracy websites were full of that kind of thing, always talking about the sort of tech the government kept hidden. My brother laughed at those rumors, but…wouldn’t he be compelled to do so, because of his position in the government? Being a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Jackson had to keep pretty close-mouthed about a good number of subjects.
However, I had to admit that my savior — whoever he was — didn’t exactly fit the profile of a Secret Service agent. Families of senators didn’t rate that level of protection, but I’d seen enough Secret Service men and women when my family traveled to D.C. for Jackson’s swearing-in that I knew the man who’d stepped in to protect me wasn’t exactly sporting regulation hair or clothing. Ditto for the scruff of beard on his chin and cheeks.
Undercover agent? Maybe, but someone like that wouldn’t have been assigned to protect me unless some sort of serious threat had been leveled at the family, and I hadn’t heard of anything along those lines. Oh, sure, I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Jackson didn’t get his share of hate mail — that was just part of the job — but I knew he would have contacted me if something of sufficient gravity had occurred. Or rather, he would have called my mother, and she would have called me, no doubt begging me to come home and live with them.
That was a constant refrain of hers. The condo had been a compromise, close enough to the family home in San Marino that she could come flying to the rescue if necessary, but also far enough away that I could pretend I had a modicum of independence.
There was a joke. They’d bought this condo for me, bought the Mercedes GLA SUV that was sitting, barely driven, in the condo’s one-car garage. The freelance editing and script-reading jobs I used as a way to fill up my empty days brought in some pocket cash, nothing more. I hated the feeling that I lived on my parents’ sufferance, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. With the way the visions could come over me at any time, I couldn’t hold down a real office job. My dream of being a teacher — and the master’s degree I’d been pursuing when the accident occurred — were both long gone, shattered forever the second that Ford Explorer slammed into me and knocked my limp body across the street, breaking multiple bones and sending me into a coma that lasted for days.
I had to stop myself there. Brooding over what might have been wasn’t going to help me one bit. Anyway, I’d had three years to get used to my change in circumstances. Better to focus on what had just happened this afternoon and try to come up with a reasonable explanation for what I’d seen.
Problem was…I didn’t think there was a reasonable explanation.
* * *
Three days later I did finally leave the condo. My friend Candace called and wanted to have lunch, and by then I was going stir-crazy enough that I agreed. True, I’d had a hefty editing job to keep me occupied, but a person could only fix comma placement and misplaced modifiers for so long before she started to get restless. Besides, I was going to be driven straight to the restaurant and retrieved there once I was done. It wasn’t as if I would be wandering the streets of Pasadena by myself.
I told myself that would be enough.
The storm that had descended the day of my attack was long gone. Now the skies were blue, the air mild, just about what you’d expect of Southern California in late February. An Uber came and picked me up, and transported me to Lucky Baldwin’s in Old Pasadena, a place Candace and I both loved, mostly because it was unpretentious and kind of a hole in the wall, and had the best fish and chips I’d ever tasted.
Why the Uber, when I had approximately forty thousand dollars’ worth of Mercedes sitting in my garage? Because I’d had a vision come over me once when I was driving and ended up parked on the curb. Thank God I didn’t hit anyone — or anything — and the tires and alignment survived the incident well enough, but ever since then I’d been terrified of the same thing occurring with a far less favorable outcome. Once a week I backed out the car and drove it around the block, just to make sure everything was in good working order, but I didn’t dare do much more than that.
Candace was waiting for me in the restaurant, which occupied an old brick building and had all sorts of nooks and crannies, one small room opening on the next. It was the kind of place that worked well when you wanted to have a private conversation, especially on a weekday when it wasn’t all that crowded.
As I approached, Candace waved and smiled. When I sat down, though, she took one look at me and said, “Out with it.”
Maybe I neglected to mention that she was a lawyer. Her firm’s office was just a few blocks over from the restaurant, on DeLacey Street. Anyway, part of the reason she was so good at her job was because she could take one look at a person and know whether something was going on.
In my case, something was definitely going on.
I sat down in the booth, not bothering to pick up a menu, since I knew exactly what I planned to order. “Out with what?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Are you really going to try that with me?”
“No, I guess not.” I noticed she had an iced tea sitting on the table in front of her, which meant she had to be back in court later that afternoon. On non-trial days, she generally would relax enough to have a beer with me. But clearly this wasn’t one of those days.
The waiter came by, and I asked for an iced tea as well, and ordered some fish and chips, since I figured I might as well get the whole thing out of the way. Candace got fish and chips, too, and then, once we were alone again, she settled against the wooden back of the booth and shot me an expectant glance.
I’d already resolved to tell her as much as I could, but now that the moment had come, I wasn’t sure of the best way to approach the topic. Hedging, I said, “Well…something strange happened on Monday.”
“Strange? Like…?” She trailed off there, but I knew what she was hinting at. She wanted to know if I’d had another vision.
If only it was something that prosaic.
I shook my head. “No. I was at Trader Joe’s, and….” I had to stop there, because the waiter had returned with my iced tea. Once he was gone, though, I continued with the story, telling Candace everything that had happened that rainy Monday morning. Well, almost everything. I did leave out that little tidbit about my rescuer’s comment concerning “sort of” vampires, but I didn’t hold back when it came to describing how my attacker somehow got reduc
ed to a pool of viscous-looking liquid. That was one detail I would have liked to leave out, except that it was the only real way to explain why there wasn’t any evidence of the assault.
During the narrative, Candace’s brows kept pulling together until she had a serious crease happening in the middle of her forehead. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“And tell them what? They would have thought I was crazy.” It certainly wasn’t out of bounds for me to think that most of the local cops would have probably decided I was off my rocker, and would have sent over a mental health worker rather than an officer. However, I did have a good relationship with Raoul Ortiz, a detective with the Pasadena P.D. Several years earlier, when a little girl had gone missing from her home up on Oakland Avenue, I’d gotten a vision of who had taken her — the boyfriend of a former babysitter. And Detective Ortiz had listened to me, and caught the guy responsible before anything too terrible could happen. But just because he didn’t think I was a fraud, or crazy, didn’t mean the rest of the department shared that opinion.
“You said the guy grabbed you pretty hard. Didn’t you get any bruises from that?”
“Yes, on both arms.” I paused then, thinking of the mottled bruises on my biceps, the ones that the elbow-sleeve T-shirt I wore covered pretty effectively. “But that still doesn’t prove much of anything. It wasn’t as if there was DNA evidence or anything like that.”
“And the man who stepped in to help. He didn’t give you a name?”
“No…but he knew mine.”
“So you have a stalker?”
The thought had crossed my mind more than once during the past few days. I’d also begun to wonder if the whole thing had been a setup, a fake attack so the man who appeared to be my rescuer could show up and look like the hero. To what end, I had no idea, and my theory still didn’t explain the way he’d made the other man melt away to nothing, but….
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I haven’t seen him since, though.”
Falling Dark Page 2
