by Liz K. Lorde
Hunter peered through the looking glass, his shadowy outline moving as he did. Heartbeats passed, and he tapped against the window, saying nothing. When there was no response from myself, he tapped again – Barristan woofed in response for each tap, a low sort of noise where he didn’t bother to open his mouth. When something less than a minute passed and he tried one last time, Hunter moved away from the window and I presumed him to be going to my bedroom next.
Barristan tried to wriggle free but I stopped him. “No,” I whispered, “stay here, Barristan. Stay.” I didn’t want him to get up, not even for a second. I heard another set of knuckles rapping against the window, each time he did so a jolt ran through me. Listening, the sound of my name filled the night – and when that too failed, Hunter came back around to the living room window.
Fingers of warmth pressed at my chest and a painful mist kissed at my eyes.
Hunter cleared his throat, “Jessica, I see your car out here. I hear your dog inside. I can’t stand things not being straight with us, it’s killin’ me. If you’re awake,” he sighed, sucking in a breath. There was a warmth and a great sincerity to his voice. “I just want you to know, that I was wrong to act the way that I did – or if I wasn’t, I still feel terrible about it. Want you to know, that I’m so, so sorry for what I said,” his voice caught in his throat, and something squeezed my heart. “You probably can’t hear a damn word,” he pressed his hands against the pane of the window, a strained laugh coloring his tone. “But I need you to know that I’m sorry. I need you to know that I love you. I understand why you didn’t tell me…I’m sorry.”
I sucked in a hard breath, the heat rippling through my throat. The pain blossoming in my eyes. Finally, I gave in, even though I did not trust my voice – it wavered like the sea. “I can hear you,” the words came out, but I almost didn’t recognize them, with all of the hurt and against my own foolish sobbing.
“Let me in,” fresh concern filled his velvet tones, “please sweetheart. Please.”
Automatically, like I was watching myself from afar, I got up and shambled to the door more ghost than girl, and looked at my own wobbling hand as I undid the locks. They clicked free and the chain rattled off against the inside face of the door, my heart pounding in my chest and my bones screaming with a torrent of emotion.
I stepped back and the door opened, silver from the moon spilling inside and Hunter coming in with it.
Immediately our bodies came together like they were two halves split and being made whole once more. When we touched, this static field of pressure formed between us and an inferno rippled through me, my head seeking refuge against his chest. Hunter’s arms clenched tightly around me, as though another second without touching me would kill him.
Forgetting it all for just a second, I let myself give in to the weakness and wept into the strength of his chest. I think that I squeaked out his name, but in that gripping instant I couldn’t be sure.
His voice cut through all of the pain and his warm embrace only tightened all the more, “I’ve got you,” he susurrated. He said it with such caring and intensity, and said it more, as if the words could scrub clean all the agony that I felt. For every time that he whispered those sweet nothings to me, I only cried all the more. Every breath felt like pins and needles, each fresh taking of air another stab; another hitch against the glass.
Barristan loped over to us, his tail wagging softly.
I just breathed Hunter’s name over and over against his chest, letting the nails of my fingers dig into his skin against his clothes. I realized then, that it was less that I was standing up, and more that he was keeping me propped up against him.
“Baby?” He asked, pulling me back as gently as possible from him, so that he could look into my wet eyes. His intense blue eyes searched mine, crawling over me with concern and love and worry. His hand swept against my forehead and through my hair, and he dabbed at the slick little things that fell from the hoods of my eyes – his other hand rubbing and circling my back. “What’s wrong? Were you sitting here in the dark?”
“No—I,” my body felt like it was breaking, and my vision was blurry from all the hurt.
“Jess,” he husked, brushing the pad of his thumb against my face and pulling me against his muscular body. “Talk to me,” he said, “I love you. I need to make you ok. I need to make things whole, I can’t stand it. Being without you.”
He’d said it earlier, but it hadn’t registered. This time when I heard him say it; it felt like wings were spreading from me, like the whole world just became a little more easier to live in under the pressure of it all. I looked up into those big, beautiful eyes that held so much sadness and regret and fire in them, and I whispered back: “I love you too.” Some maverick thought embedded in the depths of my mind came to the surface. I was tasting something metallic with my lips pressed to his. What was that?
Our heart’s confession ignited the air and the draw that we always seemed to feel intensified. My lips crashed against his, and they twisted together in a tight, wet embrace. In that crystal moment, I could feel his every need to make things right; felt every ounce of his caring for me, and I knew that he was both my sun to rise in the morning – and my moon to protect me in the night.
After our own little slice of eternity, bodies still tightly knit together, I dipped my head back, “Why are you here?” I asked, “how did you know?” I couldn’t hide the hurt in my voice from the last question. I noticed then, too, that he had a cut on his lip and splotches of dried blood from his nose that had caked on to his skin. “Your face…” I trailed off.
“Know what?” The lines of his face twisted in confusion, “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Jessica. I couldn’t take it anymore,” he shook his head lightly from side to side, “when Reyes and I got into it over you tonight—“
“You mean, you fought? Is that why you’re hurt?”
He shook his head.
I sniffled and tried to clear up all the shit that was clogging my sinuses, wanting to wipe the back of my hand across my face, “You’re really, really hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” Hunter smirked, trying to act cool. “Yeah, things came to blows,” he admitted, “told me that Holly and him had our computer guy hack your e-mail.”
I froze up, feeling my spine straighten out.
“Told him that you weren’t a rat, that you wouldn’t throw us to the wolves like that. Remembered what you said that night,” I could see the shame in his eyes, and he looked away from me.
I brought my fingers to his face and forced him to look at me.
His gaze made my insides pool with desire, “Talk,” he crooned, “now.”
I swallowed hard and felt Barristan brush along my weak legs. “Do you remember that guy you were training?” I asked, breaking away from Hunter to close the front door and press my back against it. “That day after we met.”
Hunter looked as though he needed a moment to chew on the thought, and then he stepped closer towards me, his hips and his legs moving in this confident kind of swagger. “Yeah?” His brows pressed downwards and his gaze became something pensive, “what about him?”
Breathing in through my nose, I said with disgust thick in my voice, “That’s…well, he’s my ex.”
He didn’t say anything. Just listened intently.
“I woke up tonight,” I started, the dread beginning to worm it’s way back inside of me, “or well, my dog woke me up. And I, I got up, and he – he was there, Hunter. He was in my house, and it wasn’t the first time.”
“What the fuck?” Hunter boomed, his chest puffing out in a basic anger.
“He’s been watching me sleep, and tonight, when I found him. I panicked. I locked myself in my room and told him to leave, but he just kept beating on my door – when he threatened to kill,” I didn’t want to speak the words, so I just slid my eyes down to Barristan, and then back to Hunter. “He threatened to kill him. I managed to hurt him, and he had the sense to flee. But I kno
w that if I hadn’t been so lucky to hit him,” my throat felt raw and I just wanted to sink away, “he would have—“
“No,” Hunter growled, putting his hands on my shoulders. “I wouldn’t have let him do that to you. I’d kill the coward before I let that happen to you, Jess,” he said the words like he had been there, but the truth was that there wasn’t any way he could have helped me.
I pulled away from his touch, “It’s too late,” I finally said to another human being, “the damage is already done, Hunter. He’s violated me plenty,” the anger impaled me right through my spine and I wanted to hit something. Anything.
Hunter tried to place his hands back on me.
I tried to shove him away, knowing that if anything got too close to me it would just burn up and fade away. I was damaged goods. Unclaimed baggage that nobody needed nor wanted. “You want to know why I’m like what I’m like?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with those eyes that pulled me to him natural as gravity. His hands slipped around my waist and he pinioned me against his person.
It didn’t even sound like my voice anymore. “I opened up too much.” I could feel the hard breaths that Hunter was taking as they licked across the dip of my neck. “I told him, that when I was a little girl, I used to love to go swimming. Right?”
With a thoughtful and wanting look, Hunter leaned in and pressed his lips so softly and yet so hard against mine, trying to fill me with all of his light.
When he pulled his head away from me, I continued. “Dad was tired a lot. And one day when I was in the pool, he just kind of fell asleep. He’d been drinking. I wasn’t supposed to be swimming alone without his watching, but I wasn’t ready to get out yet – I knew better, I knew better. I thought that I could swim in the deep end, and for a little while it was okay. It was okay, but my legs started to cramp up and suddenly nothing was making sense because I found my head underwater. I was in so much damn pain and I don’t even know how it happened.”
Hunter’s eyes glossed over with this wetness.
Inhaling a breath, I finished the story that I’d only ever told one other person. “I drowned. Everything went black and,” I felt my eyebrows rise, my head shaking and my chest aching, “I drowned. I woke up in the hospital. They said I was legally declared dead for two whole minutes, and that it was a miracle my heart started itself again.”
“I’m sorry, Jessica,” he offered so sweetly, so sincerely.
“Jerry wasn’t,” I hissed, “do you know what he did? After he got tired of me telling him no. After he got bored of taking me against my will; when things got too dull with calling me names and laughing at me behind my back. He slipped into the bathroom when I was taking a bath one night. Barristan was locked up in the bedroom, and I’d lit some candles. Listened to some music. Jerry? He sat on the edge of the tub, trying to get me to go down on him. Except I was tired,” I took in a breath. “I was exhausted from working so much OT, to try and pay for my mother’s medical bills. For her treatments. Well, that night, he snapped. He grabbed me by my hair and I swear some nights I can still feel the way he pulled, yanking me up and looking at me with such disgust.”
Hunter looked pale as a ghost and completely horrified at what I was telling him.
“I’d never felt my heart race like that before. When he slammed me down against the railing of the tub and everything became fuzzy, I was certain that this was it. I was going to die. He pushed me beneath the water and held me there with a smile on his face. He thought it was funny,” my words drifted off into the crushing silence, “he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, and that it was all okay because he was just joking. It was just a game. He held me underwater for god knows how long, the bubbles breaking the top as I screamed – my arms flailing and my hands grabbing, the waves crashing against the tub and all I could hear was my heart hammering and hammering away. My feet slipped up against the end of the tub and I remember bashing my toe against the faucet, the blood immediately smearing all across the railing and coloring the water. I sliced it good. But the pain I barely felt. It was the fear,” I swallowed, and then sunk myself against Hunter. “I’d never been so afraid, Hunter. At least when I was a girl it’d all been new. When it happened again, every familiar terror and sense of doom punched right through me. I couldn’t bathe for weeks, and for a long time it was even harder for me to use the shower.”
His hand found the back of my head, and he pressed me firmly against his chest, planting kisses on the crown of my head, letting me sink into him.
But I felt something. It radiated off of him like the hot winds of hell. He stiffened and broke apart from me, a wild, singular determination dancing in his eye. His hand shot for the handle of the door and he promptly swung it open.
The hairs on my neck stiffly bristled and my heart sunk into my stomach at the prospect of him leaving. “Wait!” I called out, grabbing tight his wrist.
He craned his head to look at me.
“Where are you going?”
“Wherever I have to; to put a bullet in this trash,” his words were cold as ice and smooth as smoke.
“No,” I shook my head and rejected, “not tonight. I need you. I need you here with me. Please, don’t leave me alone?”
There was a great struggle taking place within the man. Could see the turmoil raging inside by the lines of his face, and I felt the pull of his arm, wanting to break free from me and set out on his bike into the night. But he didn’t. He pushed out a hard breath through his nose and closed the door, setting the locks and wrapping his arms around me.
He carried me to bed and we peeled off each other’s clothes, not even in a sexual way. I braced myself against him and we twined our hands together, talking and cuddling with one another until I finally drifted off from exhaustion just as the sun peeked across the sky.
My last thought was that it must have been fate for him to come to me when he did.
32
Hunter
All the angels below, and all the demons above can’t keep me from feelin’ for this girl. Rage and anger boiled beneath me as I stepped into Alister’s bar with Jessica’s hand in my own. Every moment that I spent with her last night, trying to soothe her fragile, tortured but irresistible soul, I ached with the pain in my bones to avenge her. Fucking inhuman pig.
How could anyone hurt her like that? It was beyond me. “Wait here a sec, babe,” I instructed, and she nodded dutifully, most of the pain washed from her face. Still, I knew she kept it bottled up – and now I knew why. I said my hellos to the brothers in the bar, gesturing with my chin to Mozz that I was heading downstairs, to have a little chat with D’Angelo. Positioning myself behind the bar, directly in its center, I rubbed my fingers along the floorboard, feeling for the raised bit that indicated where to pull.
Got it. Pulling up on the raised wooden bit, I revealed a thin, but sturdy string with a circular metal loop at its end. I pulled the loop back and opened up the basement, ascending down the steps and closing the way behind me. This was D’Angelo’s domain. His home. It was dark, a dark blue mostly, with only a scant few lights from the above floorboards bleeding through. Any and all other light came from the electronic devices of Dee’s technological church. Kid was a wizard, but who wouldn’t be with a setup like this? He’d been set up with his own tiny bathroom that was secluded in privacy, even though nobody came down here – and Brad had fashioned a comfortable cot for the kid too.
Dee turned around from his bright computer monitor, his face giving away nothing. He looked even darker than his skin suggested in the pale blue light, appearing something akin to a tree scrubbed in coal. He removed his luxurious headphones, his one constant that I saw him with. “Did I do something wrong?” He asked nervously. Supposedly, we’d gotten the kid on medication, but his social anxiety was crippling all the same.
My eyebrows came down in confusion, “Wrong? No, no man you’re good,” I started, only coming a few steps closer, not wanting to get too c
lose to the young man. He’d been picked up by Brad on one of his road trips through Montana; said that when he found D’Angelo he was slumming under a bridge in some no-name town, that he couldn’t even talk. Or rather, that he didn’t want to. I hadn’t heard him speak for a good long while when Brad brought him home, but after a while he opened up a little. Felt sorry for the kid, though the Hell Reapers had brought him in and gave him a place to stay – it was Dee’s decision to stay in here at all hours.
D’Angelo nodded his head, but remained lounged in his black computer chair.
“Would you be willin’ to do me a favor?” I asked the kid.
“S-sure,” he replied in that typical quiet tone of his. He was a good guy, no doubt, a wizard of the keys, but socializing butterfly he was not. “What info you got on ‘em?”
“Looking for where Jerry Stanopolis currently resides,” I also instructed him on where he worked, based off of what Jessica could tell me. Said that she never found out where the bastard lived after being kicked out of her place, on the count of he was a subhuman being. “Call me on my burner when you find something? You don’t need to dig too deep, I just want his possible whereabouts. Speak to this shit to no one.”
Dee just nodded his head and slipped his headphones back on, turning in his chair and facing the bright blue monitor. He sank back into his world of wires, data and cyber masquerades. “It’ll get done,” he mumbled.
Leaving him to his thing, I silently thanked the boy and made my way back upstairs, carrying myself back to Jessica.
Her eyes were partially rounded in surprise, “I knew there was something down there,” she said, “is there someone down there? I didn’t hear anything…”
“Yeah, but you don’t need to know him – all you need to know is that when there’s a problem that needs fixing, we go to Dee.”
“Dee?”
I nodded, “He’s our go to man for intel. Now follow me upstairs, I don’t want to chance anything.” I took Jessica up into my room, and kissed her on the lips.
