by Cole McCade
He looked so alien she wondered if there had ever been a man inside that husk at all—or if he had been born this broken, and spent his entire life trying to cut his missing pieces out of someone else.
“There is a purity to you,” he whispered. “Strange. Fascinating.”
No there isn’t.
I’m ugly.
I’m ugly inside. It’s just where you can’t see it.
She tried to twist away, her cheeks rubbing his palms and arousing shocks of hyperawareness she didn’t want. “Don’t touch me.”
He didn’t let go. She couldn’t move him, his hands a cage that remained immobile, trapping her, as if he wasn’t even trying; all she was doing was tangling herself in him, her hair snaring in his fingers and pulling, her face burying into his palms each time she shook her head.
“Do you find yourself in a position to make demands, then?” he growled.
She tried to jerk back, yanking her head back as hard as she could, but succeeded only in snapping her neck in a tight, painful twinge and thudding her head against fingers like stone. Her headache flared into overdrive, blinding, throbbing, and with a whimper she slumped forward, gasping for breath, falling helplessly still with her head hanging and his grasp the only thing holding her up. Trapped. So fucking trapped, with nothing to do but sit here and wallow, with every moment, under the crushing weight of her own powerlessness, her own uselessness.
As powerless and useless as she’d been when he’d cut that man’s throat, then turned and looked at her as if she was next.
“Please.” She choked on the word, tiny and sticking like a swallowed pebble in her throat. “Tell me you didn’t hurt my father.”
“Not physically, no.”
Her eyes opened. She stared at him dully, while he refracted into two, three, ten, a hundred of himself prismed through the tears that hovered on her lashes and threatened to fall. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He caught a lock of her hair, drawing it forward. Cocking his head, he studied it with a certain calm, analytical focus, then gently laid it against her collarbone, her chest, with a quiet intimacy he had no right to claim.
“Do you think he is not in pain, wondering where his daughter is?” he asked. “Do you think he does not feel your absence like an open wound that he worries until it bleeds, with every moment your safety is in question? Do you think it does not destroy him by inches, wondering if someone will deliver you back to him lifeless?”
“You can’t—” She jerked her wrists, then whimpered and stopped when the rope bit hard into her panties, and a hot-wet burst of something burning and rough tightened her skin, shameful and terrible when she was frightened, angry, panic setting in hard, touching her with fingers made of nettles. “You can’t do that, you don’t understand, he has multiple sclerosis and if you elevate his stress levels—”
Her voice strangled off as a sob rose to choke her, steal her air—then turned into a cough, racking and clawing at the inside of her throat. She sucked in hoarse, desperate breaths, but each one was like swallowing dust and sent her coughing again, this awful, hollow thing, booming around her chest and shaking her entire body. She barely glimpsed him moving in her peripheral vision, but then he was there with a broad hand pressed against her back, a star-shaped brand that burned as if he touched naked skin. He pressed the glass to her lips.
“Drink,” he commanded.
She leaned away, swallowing, managing to moisten her throat enough to croak, “Wh-what is that?”
“What does it look like?”
“…water.”
“Then it is water.”
The rim of the glass pressed insistently to her mouth, tipping, water washing against her closed lips and leaving her no choice. She opened her mouth and accepted a small sip, clean coolness flooding her mouth and pouring down her throat to smooth away the itching burr and let her breathe without breaking apart again. But she refused any more, turning her face away again, staring fixedly across the floor and toward a far wall she could barely make out in the shadows.
“Better?” he asked.
“Did you poison it?”
A hint of amusement turned that accent rich and rolling. “Again: why would I?”
“Because—” She sighed. “Just…because.”
She didn’t know. It didn’t make any sense to kidnap her, tie her up, then kill her with a conveniently poisoned glass of water. But then it didn’t make any sense to talk about keeping her and trying to make some vague decision, either. None of this made sense. The things he said. The things he did, the way he looked at her, why he’d kidnapped her and yet said nothing of threatening her, harming her, killing her to keep her silent. He’d caught her red-handed with her fingers on the phone and 911 dialed in. He had to know if he let her go, she’d go straight to the police.
Which meant whatever decision he needed to make was already sealed.
It was just a waiting game as to when he reached that conclusion.
How long he would wait was anyone’s guess. A panicked, quiet voice in the back of her mind whimpered I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, please don’t let me die, but she ignored it, closing her eyes. Closing her eyes made the bad things go away, like when she’d closed her eyes and covered her ears so she wouldn’t have to see her mother naked under her skirt and flashing herself to the world; so she wouldn’t have to see the man with the tattoos kissing her mother like he’d bought her for a higher price than Willow’s father could ever pay. And with her eyes closed, that quiet voice of fear was only a wordless chitter she could ignore while she searched inside herself for calm.
Depending on how long he kept her, he’d have to untie her at some point. He’d have to let her up to use the bathroom, if there even was one in here. If not for that, for some other reason. She’d watch for her chance. Wait. She’d have to be ready—every second, every minute, every hour, on her guard and ready to run. If he waited long enough, someone might even track her down.
Maxi. Maxi knew. Maxi would look for her. And the police had been on their way. That was how it worked, right? If you called 911 but were in a situation where if you spoke, you’d put yourself in danger, they’d respond to the call by dispatching units to the location the call originated from. They’d get to the house, talk to her father and Maxi, find her phone, possibly signs of forced entry—though she hadn’t heard any sounds of force at all, before he’d invaded her life. He’d come in like a whisper, slipping between the cracks, silencing the voices of their house until there was nothing but the smothering quiet, and him.
And there was nothing but the quiet and him against the dark canvas of her eyelids now, as he said, “You are thinking things you should not be thinking, little one.”
She opened her eyes. He still knelt before her—close, too close. Close enough that she could see every fine hair of pale stubble dusting the sharply angled line of his jaw; close enough to make out the fine, precise edges of the dip over his upper lip. This was what Lucifer looked like. The Morning Star, the fallen, he who was most beautiful among all the heavenly host.
The most beautiful, and the most dangerous.
“You said you kill people with reason,” she whispered. “What reasons?”
“Ah.” He inclined his head. “Now you ask the interesting questions.”
“No.” She shook her head. Her heart rose up, hovered, trembling on the edge of a precipice and waiting to crash. “It’s not interest. You know what I’m asking. Are you going to kill me?”
He only looked at her, searching her face. For what, she didn’t know, but each second probed deeper inside her, exposing her insides and all the things she buried down where she couldn’t see them well enough to want what she could never have.
Then he pulled back. Stood. Turned away, the waterfall of his hair swaying against his back and trailing over broad shoulders in skeins like spider’s silk.
“That depends on you, little one,” drifted over his shoulder, as he walked a
way on those silent strides that glided with the smoothness of a shark’s fin cutting the water. “You asked why I kill. It is better to ask why I do not.”
“Why don’t you?”
He stopped, glanced back, one amber eye cutting through the tumble of his hair. “I do not kill the innocent.”
Then he was leaving again—the shadows reaching for him, and she strained after him, her teetering heart already plummeting, falling, desperate and frightened and fearing the moment of painful impact.
“Wait!” she called. He stopped again, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. She stared at the taut line of his shoulders. “Give me a name,” she asked, and licked her lips. “Unless you want me to call you ‘hey, asshole’ until you make up your mind to kill me.”
At first she thought he wouldn’t answer. Stock-still and silent, his hands curling: slow, tightening bit by bit as if the gears inside were tightening and drawing up, making his knuckles jump out in stark, cruel blocks.
“Priest,” he said softly. “Most people call me Priest.”
“Why?” she asked, and thought of the rosary dangling against his chest.
“Enough questions.”
He stepped forward again—and the darkness in the corners and the walls swallowed him, until he was nothing but a voice taunting her with its unspoken secrets and unanswered questions and a terrible, gut-twisting promise:
“Try to rest, little one. Tomorrow…we find out if you die.”
CHAPTER SIX
ALONE.
It took a moment to sink in, but then she realized: he was leaving her alone, abandoned in this space for God only knew how long, hemmed up with nothing but the silence, the shadows, and that threat hanging over her head.
That, somehow, was even worse than being here with him.
“Wait,” she called. “Where are you going? Don’t—” She swallowed thickly.
Don’t leave me alone.
But he said nothing. He might already be gone, and she just hadn’t heard a door open and close when he swallowed sound into the void around him until he walked in a cloak of silence. But then came a heavy mechanical noise, metallic, grating—and far across the room, a sliver of pale light cut a line in the darkness. Then larger, a rectangular gash opening against the black, rising higher and higher. Garage door, or some kind of industrial roll-up.
That window into the outside—outside, and freedom—expanded. That door right there; that was her goal. That was what she needed to fight for. One moment soon he’d slip, or not tie her knots tight enough, and she’d make a break for it and pull that door up and roll out as soon as the opening was large enough for her to squeeze through.
She caught a glimpse of a car: long, black, sleek and low and sharp with something blue emblazoned on the hood; maybe a bird. Not the kind of car she’d have expected him to drive. She supposed part of her thought he wouldn’t drive at all, but instead take to the rooftops like Batman, black coat flapping like the bat’s serrated cape. Then his silhouette passed in front of the light, blocking it out with imposing certainty, before the door rolled down and darkness fell again. Steel clanged to concrete with deep finality. Something rattled—probably chains, a lock, or both. Then another mechanical grinding; then the grumbling roar of an engine, loud at first then settling into a low purr, then fading away into nothing at all.
He was gone.
She held her breath, waiting, counting. Counting seconds up to a minute, two minutes, five, three hundred instants of agony counting out another bead of sweat licking down her spine and another knot tied in her fear-twisted insides. Two-ninety-eight, two-ninety-nine…three hundred.
He didn’t come back.
And hopefully by the time he did, she’d be gone.
Catching her tongue between her teeth, she rolled her shoulders and slid her wrists together: working back and forth, up and down, testing the give in the ropes. They were so tight her fingers were numb, and trying to move made the protruding bones in her wrists grind together, the skin dragging and sticking like rubber. She curled her fingers, searching for the knot, stretching until her knuckles popped, bending her wrists until they hurt, running her fingertips over the tight-pressed ridges of rope coiled around and around in stacks going up her forearms. As far as she could tell there wasn’t a knot, except the one tying the second rope to her wrists.
She tested her legs next, flexing her thighs and calves and trying to pull. Nothing. The chair skipped forward a little, and she clenched and tightened her body, trying to jerk forward, and managed to skip the chair half a step but no more; it fetched up hard, awkwardly. He’d be back before she made it even halfway across the room, unless…
She tried to roll forward, bracing her feet on the concrete floor, standing in a squat with the chair perched on her back. Yes. Yes. She took a step forward—then yanked back, dragged by some kind of tether. She tumbled back hard, the chair thudding back down on its legs, her butt thumping painfully hard back into the seat. Swearing under her breath, she twisted to try to peer behind and beneath her, and caught a glimpse of a length of chain and an iron ring embedded in the floor. Probably leftovers of whatever machineworks had been here before.
Mother fucker.
He’d bolted the chair to the floor.
Sighing, she tilted her head against the chair’s back and closed her eyes. Of course. Of course he’d bolted the chair to the floor. She wondered how many people he’d brought here, how many people had sat in this self-same chair and struggled and fought and sweated and screamed until he’d finally put them out of their misery.
The idea made her skin crawl, like it was trying to pull away from the wood of the chair and any blood soaked into it. Maybe this was what he did. Brought people into his lair and killed them. Maybe that was how she’d ruined his kill; he’d meant to kidnap that man, bring him here, tie him to this chair and torment him with his strange questions, his invasive touches, the horrible open-ended fear of not knowing.
She wondered how terrible it made her, that she wished that nameless man was in her place right now.
She opened her eyes and took a longer look around the room—searching for something, anything, that might help her escape. When he’d been here he’d commanded her attention: he with this presence that filled the entire massive space, he with the quiet, certain promise of violence in every economical movement and unreadable glance.
But without him standing in a wall before her, distorting reality until he was at its center, she could make out that she was in the middle of a massive room with concrete walls, longer than it was wide; the ceilings were high, nearly two stories tall, but the sheer size of the room made them look low and close and claustrophobic. Banks of florescent lights were spaced along the exposed beams overhead, but the only one turned on was right over her head, casting her in a cone of chill light as if she were in an interrogation room. The rest of the room’s illumination came from moonlight drifting through thin slits of windows high up on the walls, almost to the roof—and from small, wall-mounted lamps in pale gold, spaced around different areas of the room as if highlighting them for display.
One spotlight shone down on a punching bag, battered and taped, bolted to the ceiling and hanging near one wall next to a gym mat and a rack of weights. Bladed weapons lined the wall behind the punching bag: knives, long slender swords, things she couldn’t really recognize as anything but sharp-edged and silver and lethal. No guns. Not even one. Only those deadly edges, winking at her with knowing eyes.
Another light illuminated a delicately painted Japanese wall screen blocking off a small corner area, white paper in ebon wood frames; a pair of jeans was draped over the top. More lights glinted off the edges of kitchen fixtures bolted along one area, all in stainless steel. Against the wall to her right, underneath another bank of lamps, was a massive bed: larger than a king, standing on a platform, its enormous headboard carved of polished, blocky black wood with metal slats, doors inset into either end, as if she could open up either si
de and walk right into the headboard. The starkly white comforter was tucked perfectly into place, the entire bed made with military precision. Just as white was the long, low leather sofa positioned on the opposite wall, square and modern and utilitarian.
He lived here. Or someone did. This had the air of a hideout: somewhere no one would be expected to live, somewhere no one would expect to look, converted into something that could at least passably serve as a home. These odd little touches offered strange glimpses of his character, his self. The style of the bed, the sofa. The near-OCD neatness. The art on the screen, traced with softly brushed lines of ink outlining ghostly branches, sakura flowers, Japanese characters. The way the blades shone as if so lovingly polished, prized possessions to be preserved, not used.
Except he used one. He used one on that man, and soon he’s going to pick one out to use on you.
Maybe he’ll let you pick your own.
The hunting knife. That was the one she’d choose. Its edge was fine and keen and wicked sharp, would cut through her throat like butter, and she’d hardly feel a thing except her skin going hot with the soaking wash of her blood, while everything else went so, so very cold.
Stop it.
She couldn’t work herself into hysteria. Hysteria had gotten her into this. Focus. Observe. Keep herself alert, and don’t sink into the mire of screaming panic currently churning her insides to sludge. She focused her attention on the paintings strewn along the walls, instead; anything to distract herself. They were artfully arranged, turning the Spartan echoes of concrete and utilitarian life into a strange portrait of urban elegance. Most were simple things, stark and minimalist impressions of nature in black and white, but she was caught by a bank of square canvases in multiple sizes, arranged together in mosaic tiles until they were at once many pictures and a single whole.
Each was of the same man: African-American with stark, regal features, his deep skin painted in shades of gray so dark it was nearly black, yet the shadows and highlights were vibrating shivers of violet and magenta and blue and amber that seemed to rise off the canvas like smoke. Whether he stood in profile, gazed off to one side, bowed his head, or looked directly at the viewer, something about him spoke of a raw, dark honesty. As if, with his strange yellow eyes—such a fierce yellow, and yet so different from Priest’s cold, depthless fox-gold, imbued with such life, such despair—he saw his own reflection, naked of the lies humans told themselves to survive.
