by S. J. West
When I first learned he’d bought the home next to mine, I almost came over and burnt it to the ground. He flaunted what I hated the most about myself. The desire for human blood was a craving I fought every day, every minute. Only when I was with Lilly did the need feel numbed, almost like I was a normal person.
“Malcolm!”
He quickly appeared in front of me.
“Well well well, what brings you here Brand? Has Lilly come to her senses yet?”
“Lilly’s missing,” I informed him wiping the smug smile from his face. “Someone’s taken her.”
“Who’s taken her?” I was surprised to see genuine worry from the mongrel.
“There was a trail left in her room. I’ve tried to follow it but whoever took her had help. There are too many false trails for me to know which is the right one.”
“Have you tried Will? It wouldn’t be the first time he’s played the traitor card.”
I pulled out the cell phone in my pocket and called Tara back.
“Lilly?” Tara’s desperate longing to hear Lilly’s voice mirrored my own.
“No, it’s Brand. Have you talked with Will yet?”
“Yeah, he hasn’t seen her either. Said he was comin’ over here.”
“Malcolm hasn’t seen her. We’ll be there in a few minutes too.”
Tara thanked me and quickly hung up the phone. I could only presume she was hoping beyond hope Lilly would be calling her to tell her she was ok. I knew that phone call wouldn’t be coming anytime soon. It might never come.
“Will’s going to Lilly’s apartment. We should probably meet him over there. Maybe the three of us can try as many of the trails as we can. One of them has to be the right one. Do you have a car?”
I should have known Malcolm would buy the most outrageous car he could possibly find, one to draw as much attention to himself as he could. What better way to lure an innocent to their death than by tempting them with flashy possessions?
At least it was fast. We made it to Lilly’s apartment just as Will was pulling in.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Will asked us as we walked to meet him at his car. I didn’t want Tara to know we were here yet. We needed to work quickly.
I explained to Will what I had found and what we needed to do. We all phased into Lilly’s room and began to follow as many of the trails as we could but the trails were too well organized. They kept backing up on themselves leading to other trails which did the same thing. None of them led us to Lilly. The futility of our search became apparent within a few short minutes. Eventually, we had to give up. It was pointless.
We met back in front of the apartment, all of us despondent at our inability to locate Lilly. I knocked on the apartment door.
Tara snatched it open. “Where y’all been?” she asked leaving the door wide open and returning to the kitchen. She picked up the receiver of the phone there.
“Yes, I realize it’s only been a few hours, but this ain’t like her, officer. I got a gut feeling something’s wrong.” There was a pause. “Why I gotta wait 24 hours? I know she’s missing now!” She paused again listening to the police officer on the other end of the phone intently. “Give me your badge number,” she said agitated, grabbing a pen from a cup of them by the phone and writing down the officer’s name and badge number on the phone book sitting on the counter. “You better hope nothing happens to her. If one hair on her head is missing when I find her, I’ll have you fired so fast you won’t know what planet you’re on.” She slammed the phone down and looked at us. “Can you believe they’re gonna make me wait a whole 24 hours before they do something? What the hell are we paying their salary for if they’re just gonna sit on their asses like that. In 24 hours, who knows where she might be!”
I was concerned Tara might hyperventilate. I went to her and convinced her to sit down in a chair at the kitchen table. I understood Tara’s worry. If I let myself stop and think about what was happening, I knew I would be just like her. I couldn’t let that happen. If I was going to be any use to Lilly, I needed to keep my emotions under control, bury them for the moment and think what needed to be done next.
“Did you hear anything this morning, Tara? Anything out of the ordinary?” I asked.
“Well, I did hear her laugh once. I went to her room to see what was so funny and she was gone, like she just disappeared into thin air.”
That laugh was the last thing I’d heard from Lilly before leaving her that morning. Whoever took her must have grabbed her almost immediately after I left.
Why didn’t I go back to her and steal that one last kiss? If I had…
No, I couldn’t think like that or it would surely drive me mad. We had to think of a way to find her.
“Well, I can’t just sit here and do nothin’.” Tara grabbed her car keys and purse heading out the door. “Y’all look everywhere you can. I’m gonna go on campus and see if I can find out anything. Maybe someone’s seen her there.”
She was out the door before any of us could talk her out of it. It was just as well. She’d need something to keep her busy while we thought about our next step.
Once Tara was gone, I told Malcolm and Will that Lilly had spent the night with me and I had brought her home only moments before her apparent abduction.
“Whoever took her, grabbed her just after I left.” The words were hard to say. Regret was too shallow of a word to describe the pain I felt. I should have stayed with her. I should have been here to protect her.
“Well, we know it had to be one of our kind,” Will said.
I had seen the way Will looked when I told them Lilly had spent the night with me. He knew in that instant she had chosen me above him. I actually felt sorry for him in his moment of realization. If it had been him she had chosen instead of me, I know I would have felt shattered on the inside from the loss.
“Let’s all try to contact as many of our own as we can,” I told them. “Someone has to know something. There’s no way one person could have made all those false trails.”
It took the rest of the day for me to track down as many of my fellow Watchers as I could. We didn’t speak with each other on a regular basis, but we did keep track of each other’s whereabouts. None of them knew where she was. I would have known if they were lying.
When I told Lilly that first lunch we spent together that I had a lie detector in my head, it was the truth. I could tell when any creature, human or otherwise, wasn’t being honest with me. I wished Malcolm and Will had the same ability but knew they had lost it long ago. Malcolm would have lost it the moment he drank the blood of his first victim. Will lost it as a consequence of following Lucifer, the great deceiver. None of their kind would talk with me though. They’d see me as an enemy, someone who was still holding onto the hope of returning to God’s favor.
When I ran out of places to go, I returned to the apartment. I phased right outside the door. Just as I lifted my hand to knock on the door, I heard a wail so loud and filled with such torment I thought someone was dieing inside. I opened the door forgetting about the formality of knocking. There on the floor was Tara. She was lying on her side with her arms under her knees and her knees tucked up to her head. She rocked back and forth wailing the most heart wrenching, soul shattering cry I’ve ever heard.
I went to her and knelt by her side. “Tara, what’s wrong?” My blood ran cold. “Did something happen? Did you find Lilly?”
“No,” she wailed, rocking herself as if trying to find some comfort in the movement. “I can’t find her. I can’t find her…” she kept repeating to herself.
I tried to make her get up off the floor but every time I did, she hit out at me with her arms or her legs. “Leave me alone! Get away! Get away!”
I felt helpless. As I stood over Tara, I saw myself in her torment. If I let my feelings go unchecked, I would surely be on the floor with Tara screaming over my loss. But, I couldn’t give up hope. Not yet.
There was a knock on the door. I answere
d it to see Malcolm and Will had returned.
“Anything?” I asked them, but already knew the answer from the tortured looks on their faces.
They shook their heads anyway.
When Will saw Tara, he went to her and knelt down beside her, whispering in her ear. I’m not sure what he said but it seemed to break through her grief. She looked up at him and grabbed his hand with hers, still weeping but quietly now. He lifted her off the floor into his arms and carried her to her bedroom.
“What do we do now?” Malcolm said after they left. “None of my people say they know anything. Not even Justin.”
“I don’t know,” I replied, feeling my despair climb closer to the surface threatening to breach my fragile mask of control.
“Well, I can’t just stand around here and do nothing,” Malcolm said.
I looked at him, surprised by his sincerity for Lilly’s welfare. I’d known Malcolm a long time and had never seen this side of him before, caring for someone else instead of worrying about his own needs.
“Why do you care so much about her?” I asked him, curious about his motives toward the love of my life.
“You know why,” he answered. “She’s not like anyone either of us has ever met. She makes me feel like a real person, not the monster I’ve become living on this God forsaken planet. I don’t want to lose that feeling. I can’t.”
“You’re not in love with her are you?”
“Would it matter? She’s chosen you. But,” a sly grin crossed his face. “You better know right now that if you slip up I’ll be there for her if she wants me. I have no qualms about being her second choice.”
“You won’t get that chance,” I assured him. “I’m not letting her go again.”
“Well, I’ll be watching. If I see an opportunity I’m taking it. You just got lucky I wasn’t around when you two met. It has to be her love for you that makes her immune to my charms. Just watch yourself, Brand.”
I think it was the first time in a long time Malcolm and I understood one another.
“I need to leave,” he said. “I can’t stand sitting around twiddling my thumbs when she’s out there somewhere. I’m going to go look for her on my own. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” And he was gone.
I stood alone in the living room. I could still hear Tara’s tortured cries and Will’s murmured reassurances that everything was going to be alright.
I had to get out.
I went to Abby’s house. It was night by now but I needed to see her anyway. She never wanted me to come this late because she knew how seeing her after the moon rose affected me. The song Abby had written for herself played throughout her home. She said it had a calming affect on her alter ego. I went down the stairwell from the kitchen to the basement. The wall which usually concealed Abby’s cell was open and Rose Marie sat across from it reading Wuthering Heights through the bars to her.
Rose Marie looked up at me as I approached. “Mr. Cole,” she said, closing the book and placing it on her lap. “Is something wrong?”
I looked at my child in her prison. My Abby.
“Lilly’s missing. We can’t find her.” I looked at Abby, transformed into the monster I had cursed her to live with. “I just needed to see Abby.”
Rose Marie stood from her chair and laid the book down on its seat. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
I thanked her and went to stand by the bars meant to keep my daughter from harming anyone, including herself. She walked over to me on her awkwardly bent legs staring at me in pity. If anyone understood how much I loved Lilly, it was Abby. She knew the loneliness of my life and was ecstatically happy when I told her I had found someone I wanted to share it with. When I broke off my relationship with Lilly, thinking I was doing the noble thing and protecting her from what I am, Abby was the one who called me a coward. She told me to fight for my chance at happiness.
“This is the only time you’ve ever felt this way about anyone, even my mother,” she had said. “How can you not fight for her?”
Her words had made me feel even worse than I already had at the time. And when I asked Izzi to pretend we were a couple thinking it would make it easier for Lilly to hate me, I thought Abby would disown me on the spot. I’d never seen her so mad.
Now, as I looked at my daughter, the guilt of what I had cursed her with threatened to consume me. It had been a long time since I saw her in her transformed state. The legends of werewolves had come from the children of the Watchers. If humans knew the truth of the world they lived in, they would probably run and hide in caves, too afraid to step out again.
“I’ve lost her, Abby.”
Abby whined sticking her nose outside the bars. I ran my hand along her snout and tried to find comfort in her closeness.
“I don’t know what to do.”
I wished Abby could talk to me. Her council had become very important to me over the years. She always had a wise and compassionate response to situations in life, both hers and my own. How I wished she could talk to me now. I needed her comfort and advice.
“I’m going to go out and search for her,” I told Abby. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. I guess until I find her or lose all hope, which ever comes first.”
She let out a pitiful yelp but I knew she would understand when she transformed back into her human form.
I phased and kept phasing from one place to the next. Every once in a while I would call Will to see if they had heard anything but there was never any new news. I ended up going all over the world, to every out of the way place and distant land I could possibly think of but found nothing. It was like Lilly had been whisked off the planet. I spent days searching, refusing to lose hope that the next place I phased to would bring me closer to her. By the end of the sixth day, I returned home, drained of hope, drained of life.
I stood in the dining room, unable to move, constantly having to remind myself to breathe. I knew if I moved the world as I knew it would shatter around me leaving me behind in a void of despair so deep there would be no escape. So I stood there, begging God to end my torment. Perhaps He hadn’t forgiven me after all. Maybe losing Lilly was my true punishment.
My eyes drifted to the tray I had prepared for her the morning after her declaration of love to me. The single red rose still lay across the plate, waiting for her to claim it like she had my heart, my soul, my very will to exist. I finally made my legs move and picked the rose up, a mirror of my own state. It had lost all of its earlier color and fragrance now. The petals were dry, fragile to the touch. I held the flower in the palm of my hand. I only had to close my fingers around its delicate structure to destroy it and with it the symbol of my new beginning with Lilly.
I felt the last vestiges of hope slip through my fingers. Like a drowning man in a sea of hopelessness losing his grip on the one person who could save him. I struggled to hold onto her, but the waves of despair crashing over my body tugged me even deeper, further away from her, further away from my last chance at happiness until I couldn’t feel her anymore. I couldn’t feel anything. My fingers closed around the rose in my hand, no longer able to pretend she was coming back to me. I fell to my knees finally releasing the grief I had been holding in. I would never again feel her warmth against my body or her lips touching mine. I would never get the chance to hear her laughter or see her smiling up at me allowing me to bask in the warmth of her tender love. I let the tears spill freely. What was the point of keeping them in anymore? She was gone. Gone…
“Brand!”
My head snapped up at the sound of her voice. Was I losing the last traces of my sanity? Did I care?
“Brand!” Her scream was louder, more urgent.
I stood up and walked to the foot of the staircase because I was sure her phantom voice was coming from the second floor.
“Brand!” she screamed, desperately wanting me to go to her, to save her. Was this the hell I would have to endure now? Hearing her frightened screams over and over in my mind?
She kept
screaming my name. I walked up the stairs slowly. Even if I were going insane, maybe this was all I would ever have of her again. It was better than not having her at all. If insanity meant I would be able to at least hear her voice, I didn’t want to be sane.
When I reached the door to my bedroom, I was afraid to open it. Would it end my pleasurable torment? Would I stop hearing her call my name?
I opened the door.
My heart started to beat again.
Chapter 17
Time passed but I had no way to measure it. Every once in a while, Justin would come and bring me something to eat. He didn’t stay long. From the way he looked at me, I got the feeling he felt a little sorry for what he was putting me through. Sorry for prolonging my torture.
At one of my meal times, someone else unexpectedly appeared in my prison.
“Hello,” he said holding a plate of food in his hands. He was tall with a muscular build and wavy brown hair.
I immediately didn’t like him. There was something in the way he looked at me with his dark green eyes which reminded me of one of those sleazy guys you see in movies. The one that always thinks he’s God’s gift to women. He was of course beautiful to look at on the outside, like most of the fallen angels I’d met, but his inner ugliness couldn’t be concealed by his handsome exterior. I instinctively stepped back from him.
“Did I scare you?” he asked trying to sound concerned, even though I could tell he secretly hoped he had scared me with his sudden appearance.
“Where’s Justin?”
“He’s busy at the moment. Apparently Malcolm’s questioning him about your whereabouts. He didn’t want to take the chance that Malcolm would follow him here.”
A surge of hope filled my heart at the mention of Malcolm’s name.
“Who are you?” I asked, watching the stranger lay my plate on the cot and glass of water on the stool.
“I’m Robert.”
I didn’t like the way Robert was looking at me, like he was imagining me without my clothes on. I felt dirty on the inside all of a sudden.
