by Gail, Stacy
Ella, one. Nightmares of the past, zero.
A sudden pounding on the front door through the security bars loosed a startled yelp out of her before she hopped to her feet and grabbed the nearest weapon, a baseball bat she kept leaning in a corner by the door. Logic insisted no one intent on doing her harm would knock, but since logic had nothing to do with potential attacks, she figured better safe than sorry. Another pounding on the door boomed through the small house before she peered through the peephole.
What the hell...?
“Ella!” With his dark hair mussed as if he’d raked his fingers through it and his eyes red-rimmed and sleepless, Nate bellowed as if trying to cave the door in through the sound of his voice alone. “Ella, damn it, open the door! Be alive and open this fucking door!”
* * *
Nate was too big for her kitchen.
The scent of coffee perfumed the air, and the microwave dinged to announce the day-old cinnamon rolls were now warm. With a quick peek to see if the pats of butter on the rolls had melted into a uniform gooey goodness, Ella took them out and placed them on the dinette table. Nate sat there, unmoving and out of the way, but he was just so damn big it felt like there wasn’t enough room for the both of them.
Then again, dressed in a bathrobe and llama socks, it was no wonder she was wishing the man was anywhere but there. But no matter how horrified she might be over her appearance, her grannies on both sides of the family tree would rise out of their graves to haunt her if she didn’t remember her manners.
“Feel free to help yourself, Nate. Those rolls come from the bakery by the gym. Ironically they do a brisk business, thanks to our clientele rewarding themselves for working out. Do twenty reps and give yourself a cookie.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t come here to bum a meal off of you.”
“Coffee and a roll could never be called a meal.” As she spoke, she placed a mug of steaming coffee at his place and settled down across from him with her own mug, then forked a gooey roll onto his plate when he didn’t serve himself. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but considering how you were trying to demolish my door, I have a feeling you didn’t drop by to see if my Southern hospitality muscles were rusty.”
His face was the grimmest she had ever seen it as he took a fortifying sip of coffee. “I thought I’d find you dead.”
“I gathered that from what you were yelling, so that doesn’t surprise me.” Surprise, no. Alarm, yes. On every possible level, her instincts were on red alert and she was ready to bolt into the nearest hole she could find. “The question is why you thought this. It’s not like I’m in any danger of spontaneously keeling over. Don’t I appear to be in relatively decent shape?”
“Whatever goddesslike shape you’re in has nothing to do with suffering a sudden accident.”
Her mind veered off into two radically different directions—the irrelevant and the ominous. “Goddesslike? You think I’m in goddesslike shape?”
Funny, how the irrelevant was so much more appealing than the ominous.
He gave her a look designed to make her quake in her llama socks. “This isn’t a joke, Ella.”
“Then what is it?”
“One woman is dead with parts of her body still being teased out from under a train at Union Station, and another didn’t show up at the Wrigley Building for work this morning when she’s the type you can set your watch by.”
“Okay.” Ella looked down at the hand gripping her mug and was amazed how her fingers could feel so cold while holding onto something so hot. “I’m sorry to hear someone died. I just don’t see why someone getting hit by a train and another disappearing would make you think I was in danger.”
“Briella Fields, Gabrielle Litte and Ella Little. These were the three names I pinpointed in Chicago who could possibly be Gabriella Littlefield. Briella Fields is the one who got knocked into a train. Gabrielle Litte is the one who didn’t show up for work. And you...”
“And me.” Ella put the coffee down, untouched. “Nothing’s happened to me.”
“Yet.”
She stifled a shiver and focused all her energy on boring holes into him with her stare alone. “You’re doing a bang-up job of freaking me out.”
“That’s not my intention. My only goal is to keep you safe.”
“I’m not sure what your intention is, and that’s a problem. See, two years ago I would have fallen for a line like you’re trying to feed me now—”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This isn’t a line—”
“I also would have taken it for granted that a stranger on the street wasn’t really a sick bastard waiting for me to pass him so he could grab me, knock me out and throw me into his van,” she went on, talking over him until he came to a curse-laden halt. “The point is, it’s not two years ago. It’s now, and I’m not the gullible person I once was. There’s no way in hell I’m going to blindly accept whatever you say as gospel and let you into my life so you can protect me from what might be figments of your—”
“This has happened to me before, Ella.”
That stopped her. She watched him wrestle with words that didn’t seem to want to come, but eventually the crushing weight of the room’s silence popped them free.
“Up until six months ago, I was a detective with the Atlanta Police Department. And if you don’t even believe that about me, I’m more than happy to give you my badge number and captain’s name so you can check me out. I have a clean service record, several commendations and I was one of the youngest in the department’s history to earn the rank of detective. I was born with a certain talent for finding things—it didn’t matter what it was, where it was, or whether it had been lost or stolen or hidden. Whatever it was, there was a good chance I’d be able to find it. I found you in the mountains,” he added, and it was his turn to try and pin her to the spot with an unblinking intensity that stole her breath. “Though technically speaking you’d already saved yourself, so you didn’t really need me. The same couldn’t be said for the man who came to the police with the claim that his estranged wife had kidnapped his two daughters. He needed me to find them.”
Ella watched him dig a fork into the cinnamon roll as if he had a personal grudge against it. “Sounds like he was desperate.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Tell me, Ella. Do you think there are some things in this world that should remain hidden?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“You’re probably the one person on the planet who can answer that question better than anyone. Would it have been for the best if you—or I should say Gabriella Littlefield—had remained hidden forever?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation. “I wasn’t kidding when I said Charles Rainier killed that naïve person who existed two years ago. Uncovering that part of my life now serves no purpose other than to bring agony to scars I’ve worked unbelievably hard to heal.”
Something crossed his face so quickly an average person might not have been able to identify it. But she was no stranger to pain. “Six months ago, I wasn’t nearly as careful as I was when I decided to take the case of finding you. I told you I went to great lengths to verify that the need to locate you was legitimate, and that’s absolutely true. I made sure you were the legal beneficiary of Claudine Pierpont-Rainier’s Will, and that no one else had a legal leg to stand on when it came to contesting her Will. The final deciding factor in my choosing to find you was that it would be a huge financial benefit for you. It would provide a better quality of life, the kind of life few ever have the luxury of knowing. I figured you deserved it. After going to such pains to make sure this was a legitimate case, I was certain the lesson I’d learned six months ago—the life-and-death lesson that some things should remain hidden—would never come into play.”
“Life and death?” The very sound of it made her teeth want t
o chatter, so she ground them together instead. “I suppose you’re talking about that man’s kidnapped children? Were you not able to find them?”
“Oh, I found them, all right.”
“That’s good, right?”
“That’s the last thing it was.”
She wondered that the bitterness in his tone didn’t burn his tongue right out of his mouth. “What happened?”
His expression was a masterpiece of self-loathing. “There was a hint of domestic violence in this guy’s background. Nothing huge, as no official charges had ever been brought against him. I thought at the time that whether or not there was any violence in the home, nothing justified the kidnapping of two innocent kids. There were legal ways to go about it, and in my mind the mother had proven just how unfit she was by stealing them away and going on the run.”
“Was she unfit?”
“How can any mother be unfit when she’s trying to get her children away from a monster? Thing is, the monster played by the rules. He had the law on his side, and I never questioned any further than that. I never imagined there are some things in this fucked-up world that are hidden for a reason, and are better off staying hidden forever.”
“But,” she said when it appeared he wouldn’t go on, “you found them.”
“And brought them back for a big family reunion. The man dropped all charges against his wife, insisted it was just an embarrassing miscommunication on his part, and we should go away so they could start being a family again. Twenty-four hours later their house was on fire with four bodies inside. He’d shot them all execution-style, then himself.” He looked to her with eyes that seemed to flay her alive. “By finding what should have remained hidden, I delivered three innocent people to their deaths. And though I don’t have proof, I think I’ve fallen into that same trap with you.”
Chapter Eight
Why wouldn’t she just listen?
Nate kept a watchful eye on Ella from across the gym as she guided a heavyset man through his paces on an elliptical, while he pretended to do arm curls on a bench that had a clear view of all the gym’s entrances. If anything suspicious happened he could be across the gym to protect her in under two seconds, thanks to a speed he’d been born with, a speed he didn’t usually use in public. That sort of speed had a tendency to make him look like an inhuman blur, but as of now all bets were off. Though he had no proof, he was sure he’d put a target on Ella’s back. It was now up to him to make sure that target was never hit.
Ella didn’t believe him. Or to put a finer point on it, she wasn’t about to just blindly trust whatever crap that came out of his mouth, and once he’d calmed down he supposed he couldn’t blame her for it. Even if she didn’t have the kind of past that would make most people cower behind foot-thick defensive walls, the fact was they had known each other less than a week, and under false pretenses at that. Maybe he should be relieved she hadn’t called the police on him.
What she didn’t know was that he had already gone to the police. He’d even gone so far as to call up his old captain for a character reference when doubt had crept into the tone of the investigator handling Briella Fields’s terminal allergy to an oncoming train. Absolutely nothing had been concluded in that particular conversation, though in the end Nate suspected he’d come off sounding like a lunatic. Shit. Who knew that he could pull off such a convincing impression of a paranoid ex-cop who’d broken under pressure?
His lip curled in a grimace, and he switched the twenty-five-pound dumbbell to his other hand. He did break, though not in the way his colleagues could ever guess. His meager locating ability had rolled over and died along with the mother and children he’d served up to be killed, and though he knew he should probably be grateful that albatross of a power was gone forever, he missed it. He missed it even though it had been the weakest ever produced in his bloodline, missed it even though it wouldn’t have been able to locate the danger he just knew in his bones was targeting Ella. As crippled as his gift had once been, he missed being useful.
There was nothing useful inside him now. Nothing but a stone-cold certainty he’d somehow brought Ella into the sights of an unknown hunter. It didn’t matter that neither she nor the police believed him, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around her for to wind up dead as validation that he was right. This time around, he would protect that which should have remained hidden.
Without warning his vision went so completely black he thought for a dazed moment the gym’s power had been knocked out. Then a hideous, enervating cold crept like ground fog along his nerves, freezing him from the inside out until he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Alarm sprinted through him as the disbelieving thought that he might be having a stroke hit him. Then a pale spark glimmered in the darkness, like light reflected on diamonds. His pulse thundered behind his eyes in ever-increasing pain as he focused on that flash until it came into focus—a bright circular light towering impossibly high and reflecting against a glass wall. Was it the moon? Before he could figure it out, movement behind the glass drew him in until he was standing on one side of what seemed to be a giant snow globe, with the faceless giant from his dreams on the other side only an inch or two away.
“Stop.” The voice that emanated from the featureless form reverberated in his head until the throb in his eyes was excruciating. “Stop looking at me, abomination. I can feel you watching me. I know you are there. I’ve always known.”
Abomination. Another word for the Nephilim. Nate had never felt much like an abomination, but he decided not to quibble over semantics.
“Of all things, it is your sight I fear the most. I wonder...if I show myself to you, will I no longer be hidden? Will you become blind to me long enough for me to become complete?”
Complete? What...?
Even as Nate’s short-circuiting brain reeled in confusion, the featureless waxwork lifted its arms, spreading its fingers out wide, and a ragged pulse of urgency hit him so intensely it bordered on panic. Holy crap, he didn’t want to look at those fingers. There was something...not right with them. They were spider-thin and stomach-churning in their length, with extra knuckles evident along the backs.
This is bad, oh shit, this is all sorts of bad...
As he watched in a sickening mix of disgust and horror, eight of the ten multi-knuckled fingers continued to elongate with a terrible wrongness. They twisted and snaked until the tips reached the edges of the glass walls and swelled into humanlike shapes, but there was something off with them as well. Each bodylike growth resembled a desiccated mummy, something that had been sucked dry of all life. “Just two more, abomination. Then I will no longer fear you. I will fear nothing.”
The pain in Nate’s head swelled to a frenzied crescendo and with a hiss he squeezed his eyes shut to ward off what had to be his impending death. When he cracked them open again, instead of darkness he saw the gym exactly as he’d left it seconds or hours ago, he couldn’t tell which. Numb, the pain behind his eyes trickling away like water down a drain, he stared without comprehending at the dumbbell still in his hand before jerking his gaze to where he’d last seen Ella. She was still working with her client as if nothing had happened and the world hadn’t become a nightmarish LSD trip.
What the freaky fuck was that?
“Don’t you have a job to get to?”
Dazed, and not sure he wasn’t about to puke his guts out, Nate turned to find the bristle-haired kickboxing sadist—Jacob, Ella called him—glaring at him. For a long moment he tried to prod his brain into gear, and when it finally got going his gaze swung back to Ella. She was what was important now. Whatever the hell just happened to him—an aneurysm or a tumor or whatever that was—it would have to be put on the back burner. No matter what kind of shit storm just uncorked in him, it paled in comparison to whatever stalked Ella now.
“Believe it or not, I’m happy to see you.”
After all, it was always good to have another pair of paranoid eyes on the job. Especially since his just went on the fritz.
Jacob snorted. “Oh, really? Why is that?”
“You’re not merely an instructor who knows his way around a punching bag, are you? You’re ex-military or law enforcement of some kind, am I right?” As he spoke, Nate’s attention didn’t waver from Ella’s side of the gym. Still struggling with the last vestiges of near-panic, he couldn’t quite shake the fear that if he looked away, she would vanish in a puff of smoke.
Or a gory puddle of blood.
“Maybe this is true.” Jacob stood at parade rest and stared down his nose at him. “You got a problem with that, little boy?”
Geez. “I’m hoping you can help me convince Ella to keep her guard up.”
Those bulging eyes went a little crazier. “And why should I do that?”
“Gabriella Littlefield.”
Jacob went still, which was Nate’s only warning. He shot to his feet even as Jacob went for a classic choke hold, his movements smooth and deceptively fast for someone his age. But no matter how well-trained a person was, no mere human could touch Nate if he didn’t want them to. It took less than a second for the two men to find themselves on either side of the weight bench, with Jacob empty-handed and looking surprised while Nate lightly touched the heavy dumbbell to the other man’s vulnerable temple. The rush of air behind the movement of his arm was still making Jacob’s eyes blink, and the message was received loud and clear. Had Nate not stopped his punch, Jacob would have been dead without even knowing what hit him.
“Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once.” Nate kept his tone calm as he nonchalantly dropped his arm to his side before anyone noticed their almost deadly exchange. “I’m an ex-cop who now works in the private sector. I was hired by a law firm to find the unfindable—Gabriella Littlefield—who has come into an inheritance. Unfortunately, of the three people I uncovered as possibly being Gabriella Littlefield, one is dead and the other is missing. I can’t do anything about that, other than tell the authorities all that I know. The one thing I can do is sit on Ella to make sure she stays safe until I get to the bottom of this. I can’t watch her all the time, though, so it would be helpful if you could give me a hand in making sure she keeps breathing.”
