Wicked Ink

by Simon, Misty

  “Garrett, where are you, guy?”

  “In here,” Garrett answered. His mind clouded over with a lust for death and destruction. But this time he pulled up the only good he could think of, focusing on Dory as Jackson hustled him and Marta out of the warehouse.

  Chapter Five

  When Garrett didn’t show up right at four o’clock, Dory was disappointed. Maybe he had gotten the hint that she didn’t need a protector. She chose to think that instead of worrying.

  She hopped on her scooter, put her helmet on and started the tiny engine. It was a handful of blocks home, no big deal. Still, she did look over her shoulder several times just in case she wasn’t as safe as she had professed to be.

  When she pulled up in front of her building, she was concerned to find a group of people gathered on the sidewalk—several policemen and Marta’s family. Had they found her? Could she be dead? Marta was such a sweet woman. She’d helped Dory several times right after her last arrest, as well as when she was going through accounting school. With her gentle persuasion and tough love, she had helped Dory find a new path and a new way of doing things. She’d even helped her find a place in this apartment building.

  Heat and tears welled in her eyes as she noticed the way Marta’s son’s eyes were glistening. No way would this be good news. Greg was a strong man—a happy man—and she had never seen him cry.

  She stowed her gear and ran over to them, wrapping Greg and his wife, Claire, in a tight hug before offering words of comfort. Nothing could truly be comforting, but she would try anyway. For Marta.

  “Dory, oh, Dory.” Greg ran a hand down the back of her hair, smoothing what she was sure was total helmet head.

  “Greg, I’m so sorry!”

  “Why, honey?” He held her at arm’s length, and she finally got a good look at him without the bias of her own feelings. “They found her, honey. She’s going to be okay.”

  Relief flooded through Dory, making her weak-kneed. They’d found her? “Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know, but some guy dropped her off at the hospital. He said that he found her walking around the old business district. Jackson something or other. They said he wasn’t involved at all, and Mom is talking her head off about all the things she remembers.”

  “Did they hurt her?”

  “She has some cuts and bruises, a few bumps, several broken bones. I haven’t been able to see her yet, but I’m told she’s going to be fine. All of this is hard to swallow, but I’m trying to remember she’s a tough old broad.” Greg held her hands, which were icy from the shock of thinking Marta was gone. Slowly she warmed up, and a smile bloomed on her face.

  “Well, when you do see her, tell her I’m thinking about her and hoping for her speedy recovery.”

  “Will do. Now, I’d better get back to the police officers to see when we can get into the hospital. You take care of yourself. Be careful.” Greg walked back over to Marta’s apartment and then let himself in the front door.

  His words so closely echoed Garrett’s that it brought the man front and center in her brain. Where had he been? Was he home now?

  Taking the stairs as quickly as she dared in her low heels, she made it to the third floor in record time. No one was on the landing, and Garrett’s door was closed. She didn’t think he’d be waiting for her in the hallway, but there was a part of her that wished she at least had his phone number so she could make sure he was all right. He wasn’t the only one who was allowed to worry. And just because the only other man in the building hadn’t been attacked didn’t mean the bad guys couldn’t change things up in an instant if they wanted.

  She’d just knock on his door to see if he was home.

  But when she knocked, the door creaked open under her fist. She had never known Garrett to leave his apartment open. He’d told her once that he was all about locks, warning her to get into the habit of locking her door behind her even if she only had to run a quick errand.

  Curiosity and a sense of impending doom propelled her over the threshold and into his home for the second time in a little over twelve hours. She searched the rooms, calling out his name, her voice soft. If he had come home to sleep off their lunch and heal his wounds from this morning, she didn’t want to be the one to wake him. But he wasn’t on the leather couch, and he wasn’t in the kitchen. The bathroom door was partially open, so she peered in. Empty. His bedroom was last. She really didn’t want to intrude, but the thought of finding his body half-naked again was not exactly unappealing. She’d been crushing on the dark-haired man ever since he moved into the building. But she’d admired him only from afar. That glimpse of his chest this morning had set something off in her girly bits that she was having a hard time tamping back down. The kiss had only added fuel to that fire.

  Very carefully, she opened the bedroom door with just the tips of her fingers. But it was obvious within seconds that the bed was perfectly made and no one was lurking in the closet.

  That word, closet, rang in her head for a moment before she remembered the odd staircase in the closet of the main room. Did he have access to the apartment upstairs? Did he rent both units? The landlord had told her the place was being remodeled when she had asked about having it rented out to a friend at work, but she’d never heard any kind of construction noise from up there. Which didn’t necessarily mean much, since she wasn’t home during the day. But she’d never even seen any workers going up and down the stairs.

  A sense of foreboding hit her in the chest as she took careful steps toward the closet door. What if it was his private sanctuary? What if it was where he truly lived instead of this sparsely furnished space that looked more like a decorator’s half-baked attempt at furnishing? What if he did wild, kinky stuff up there that she did not want to know about?

  She laughed softly to herself as she pulled the door toward her. She highly doubted Garrett was into kink—or that he would rent a separate apartment as his sex den. Not that she knew anything about that kind of stuff, but she would trust herself to know a deviant when she saw one. She had enough past experience to trust her instincts.

  She was wasting time by hanging around at the bottom tread of the tight spiral staircase. She wouldn’t get any answers standing down here and wondering. Whatever he had up there, she could handle.

  * * *

  “Please, Jackson, I don’t know if I can make myself turn the electricity on this time, but I need it. Whatever happened last time was an aberration. I have to be cleansed, or I’ll never be fit for society. Please.” Garrett clenched his hands and his teeth around the words. It had been both a blessing and a curse that he hadn’t needed to use the machine the previous night, because it had made him hope, just for a second, that he could use his powers without having to pay for being a good guy. But that wasn’t the way the world worked, and he knew it.

  “Man, I just don’t think I can. Get that Dory girl to come over. I don’t know what she did to you, but I can’t sit here and watch you fry for the thousandth time if it’s not necessary. There’s got to be a different way. I know this works, but why not try something else?”

  “There isn’t anything else, goddammit! You think I would do this to myself if I thought there was another way? I’m not a masochist. Just flip the fucking switch!” Garrett shut his eyes and clenched his jaw until his teeth ground together, bracing himself for the current to start running through his body, burning all the darkness and evil out of his system so he could breathe and behave like a normal human being again.

  He was still bracing himself when a woman’s scream split the air.

  “What are you doing?” the woman sobbed, yanking at the bonds that secured his hands to the chair and hyperventilating at the same time.

  He opened his eyes when he recognized Dory’s voice and the feel of her soft touch. “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Leave that alone! This has to be done or I’ll rip everything around me to pieces.”

  “No, you won’t. No, you won’t. No, you won’t.” She lo
osed the bindings on his wrists.

  His mind started to swirl with images of stabbing someone in the heart, running down the street with a torch of fire and touching everything in his path, breaking glass, and stealing things. His head felt like it was going to explode, and it would in a moment if she didn’t let him complete the purging.

  “Jackson,” he screamed, his head thrown back, grinding against the wooden supports that were supposed to keep him safe. But he wasn’t safe right now and neither was anyone in the room with him.

  Chapter Six

  “I have to get him out of here. Have to.” Dory knew some part of her had gone off the deep end. She could hear Garrett yelling at her, but couldn’t understand what he was saying in her blind need to get those bonds off him.

  Somewhere in the room another man stood in silence. She should be worried about him, her mind told her, but helping Garrett seemed so much more important than anything else at that precise moment.

  Finally the last piece of leather came free in her fumbling fingers, and Garrett shot out of the chair like a man possessed. He knocked her over because she couldn’t scramble out of the way fast enough, but when he looked down at her on the bare floor, she could feel hate and rage radiating from him like they were living things.

  She whispered his name, finally becoming aware of the fact that this space was even less furnished than the one downstairs. At least he had something to sit on in the other apartment. Here there was only that ugly, heinous chair, with its leather straps and wires hanging in disuse, and a table with a laptop in the corner.

  No matter what happened next, she would not regret saving him, even if only for the moment.

  His chest rising and falling, Garrett hovered over her like an avenging angel. His shirt was off and his hair was wild. He barely resembled the man who had eaten lunch with her this afternoon, but she knew the real Garrett resided in there somewhere. If only she could reach him.

  She caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She hoped to God her life wasn’t going to end this way after she’d struggled so hard to do the right thing and make something of herself over the past seven years. But if it did, then at least she’d had a good ride. And had come out a lot cleaner and happier than she’d ever thought possible when the cocaine had gripped her mind and body like a vice.

  “Ma’am. I’m going to need you to very slowly and very carefully back up. Just scoot away on your bottom if you can.”

  She lifted a hand to Garrett, but made no effort to move away from him.

  “No, don’t touch him, just move away. We’ll get him under control, and then we’ll all talk about this, okay? Can you please just move?”

  “You make him sound like an animal,” she murmured, making contact with the skin of his stomach. Moving her hand up past his abs, she smoothed her fingers along his rib cage and over his chest until his heart was beating hard against her palm.

  “Please,” the other man said.

  “Garrett, can you hear me?”

  He growled low in his throat, and she immediately started mouthing positive thoughts to keep herself sane.

  “It will be okay. You are not going to hurt me.” She knew deep down she was telling the truth as she recited the mantra her psychiatrist had given her when times were too tough to handle. “You will be okay. Let that light come through you and return you to peace. Let it cleanse you. Let it live in you. Let yourself go.”

  Something snapped through the air, clouding her vision and making her see colors where there were none. Her fingertips felt singed, but she didn’t move them from Garrett’s chest.

  And then he collapsed on the hardwood floor next to her and stopped breathing.

  “Oh, please, help me. Help him,” she cried to the man who still stood in the shadows in the corner of the room, not moving. He looked shocked. “Snap out of it! He’s not breathing.”

  Whoever the man was, he got right to work, turning Garrett onto his back, then placing his big hands on his chest to begin compressions. Before the first push, Garrett turned onto his side, curling up into a ball and coughing as if his lungs wanted to come up out of his throat.

  “He’ll be fine. He always is.” The man sat back on his haunches, shaking his head, and murmuring to himself as if she wasn’t sitting right there. “It’s always best to give him a moment. When he purges himself in the chair, he’s always sitting upright. I wonder if that makes a difference.”

  “You mean, you’ve done this before?” Dory cut in, horror racing through her. How many times had Garrett sat in that chair? “What the hell is this?”

  “That’s not my story to tell.” The man laid his hand on Garrett’s shoulder. “Something’s different this time. You made it different. Why is that?” He peered at her through narrowed eyes as if trying to puzzle her out.

  “What did I do?” She backed away in trepidation, but the other man gripped her hand and put it on Garrett’s shoulder blade, right over a tattoo that looked like a menacing gargoyle. She had never seen this one before, since she was used to seeing him with a shirt on, but it was impressive and scary at the same time.

  “Talk to him again,” the man said, holding her wrist steady so that she didn’t jerk away. She’d already hurt Garrett somehow and didn’t want to do it again. “Talk to him, please. I’ll explain later.”

  So she did, asking any celestial beings who might be listening to help her help this man.

  Repeating the same things she had told him before over and over again, she kept a hand on his back, adding the other to his opposite shoulder blade. He twitched under her palms but then uncurled, his breaths evening out. She sighed a breath of relief for the first time since seeing him strapped into that monstrosity.

  Now, if only her legs would stop shaking, she might actually be able to function again in spite of the emotions storming through her. She needed a few minutes alone to just breathe.

  Rising from the floor, she looked at Garrett, prone on the floor as if taking a nap, and the stranger, who was rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “You both have some serious explaining to do,” she said. “I’ll see you down in the kitchen.”

  The stairs seemed twice as long going down as they had coming up. Her knees wobbled on the third from the bottom, so she sat down for a second to catch her breath. But she firmed her resolve and made it down the last three treads. She had never faced something like this before, something that defied rational explanation. It certainly frightened her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t handle it. Being an accountant wasn’t the whole of her existence. She’d just have to dig deep to find the strength to face this situation. In the meantime, she could do the one thing she had absolute control over.

  Heading straight for the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator and found the barest of necessities. A jug of milk and a bottle of ketchup sat in the door. A couple of shriveled oranges lined the bottom shelf and a block of cheese sat on the middle one. The bowl of stew she had brought him yesterday sat square in the middle of the top shelf. Pulling off the plastic wrap that covered it, she eyed the contents. He had barely touched it.

  Maybe the freezer had more to offer. Pulling the door open, she gasped. The whole thing was jam-packed with pretty much everything she had ever brought over. He’d returned her Tupperware over the past two months, but he must have bought stock in sandwich baggies, because there was the oriental chicken she’d spiced up just last week. The chickpea soup with an extra dash of garlic and balsamic vinegar sat next to it, along with the steak marinated in cayenne pepper, cumin and a jolt of jalapeño.

  She pulled out bag after bag of all the things she’d shared with him, all the extras she’d made thinking she was feeding him well. They all went into the trash she found under the sink. “Ungrateful! He could have just told me he didn’t like my cooking. He wouldn’t know good food if it sat up and bit him in the damn ass.”

  A part of her knew she was focusing so hard on the food because it kept her from thinking about the chair
and everything that had happened upstairs, but it felt too good to stop. Marta had often told her she liked her food a tad spicier and zestier than most, but it wasn’t bad. Several of their neighbors in the building liked it just fine. Two weeks ago, the college student upstairs had asked her for the recipe for the red pepper chicken with new potatoes Dory had made in her trusty Crock-Pot.

  Why on earth hadn’t he just told her he didn’t want to eat her food? She would have taken that much better than realizing she’d been a fool these past months.

  She threw the last bag in the trash with relish, then turned to open the cabinets. Maybe he had some peanut butter and jelly. She’d make him a plain old sandwich that he would actually eat.

  * * *

  Garrett had never felt worse in his life. His head hurt, and his heart hurt. Hell, even his hair hurt.

  “Come on, man, you have to get up. I can’t get you all the way down those stairs by myself, and there’s a little lady down there who’s waiting for some answers.”

  “What?” His ears were ringing, although everything else seemed to be subsiding a bit. At least his breathing sounded less like a freight train and more like a hybrid car. “What did you say? Who’s waiting?”

  “You heard me. This woman comes streaking in here like her pretty honey-blond hair is on fire, and she damn near rips you out of the chair just as I was about to hit the switch. Then she starts laying her hands on you and chanting. She was hysterical, and you were standing over her like you were some kind of fiend. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but you collapsed on the ground at her feet. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and after meeting you, I’ve seen a lot of shit, my friend.”