Twelve Shades of Midnight:

by Liliana Hart

  I pushed back a lock of my ridiculously unruly hair. Vibrant, my mother had called it. Decadent. I called it a pain in the ass. I would have killed for straight brown hair growing up. Or black. Or blond. Anything besides the recalcitrant crimson mop that sat atop my head like a spoiled princess.

  The female detective watched my every move with purpose. Studying. Assessing. While Murphy watched my every move with something other than the most noble of intentions. There was both hunger and disgust when he leaned in to me, which did not speak well of his marriage. I wasn’t psychic or anything, just a wicked-good observer. I had trust issues.

  “Well?” he questioned with a raised brow. “You gonna show us your dog and pony?”

  “Back off,” a male voice said from behind me.

  We all turned as the man with issues and a duster walked in followed by the older gentleman he’d been conversing with on the lawn, the one who looked like he ate nails for breakfast.

  “We’ll take it from here,” he said.

  Murphy shrugged, clearly not giving a fuck. “As you wish, Special Agent Strand.” He backed away and swept his arm in a gallant gesture of surrender. Then he smirked again, waiting for the show to begin.

  Good luck with that.

  The duster, or Special Agent Strand of probably some obscure branch of Homeland Security nobody’d ever heard of, ignored him and turned toward me, stepping so close I had to crane my neck to look up at him. His sculpted mouth, the most revealing of all tells, remained impassive, making him unreadable. He took his time absorbing my features while his gave nothing away. After a long and quite unnerving stare-down, he began.

  “September, 2010. Two murders in the girls’ dormitory at Purdue. No suspects.”

  My attention snapped into place so fast, it cracked audibly in my ears.

  “August, 2011,” he continued. “Elderly man run down in Chicago with his grandson. No suspects.”

  My gaze didn’t stray a hairsbreadth from the cerulean depths of his. The world around us faded away.

  “November, 2011. Seven-year-old girl vanishes from an elementary school in Wheaton. No suspects.”

  I didn’t blink.

  “February, 2012. Woman found beaten and barely alive, dumped outside of a Des Moines emergency room. No suspects.”

  I didn’t breathe.

  “March, 2013. Teller killed in bank robbery in Grand Rapids. December, 2013. Arsonist sets fire to half of Milwaukee. March, 2014. Con man steals the life’s savings of every single resident at the Sunny Hills Retirement Home in Indianapolis.” He stepped closer, staring down at me until we were practically nose-to-nose. “Those and a dozen others. All with no suspects.”

  I stood in shock that someone had put it together so thoroughly. My mind raced for an answer of how. What did I do wrong?

  “Shall I continue?” he asked, his voice as smooth as bourbon.

  I swallowed audibly but stood my ground.

  He offered me a quick nod of acknowledgement, as though accepting my silence as his cue to continue. “All of those crimes had no suspects. Zero. Yet all were solved through a series of tips from either anonymously-delivered phone calls or letters that contained names, addresses, and even drawings of the person or persons the informant IDed as the perps. All letters dropped at the corresponding police stations by a woman who kept her face hidden from cameras. Not a single clear shot of her in the bunch.”

  His face softened as his gaze slid to a lock of hair that had stubbornly refused to stay put behind my ear. “But in one, the woman was delivering a letter during a storm and one lock of curly red hair fell out from under her cap.”

  My lids drifted shut in disbelief. One lock of my ridiculous hair gave me away. Then again, how much could they get off of one lock of hair? I lifted my lashes and stood in silence, afraid to say anything that might incriminate me.

  “No comment?”

  After a long moment in which my fight or flight response warred with the logistics of the situation—How far could I get, really?—I forced myself to calm and think about this rationally. I didn’t do anything illegal. What could they charge me with? Aiding and abetting an investigation?

  Collaboration. Of course. There were sicko serial killers who collaborated all the time. Terrorists were notorious for having an entire cell of like-minded individuals.

  I lifted my chin with a new determination. “I asked for a lawyer three days ago.”

  “I asked for a pony when I was seven. Clearly, we’ve both been disappointed. What do you need to make this work?”

  The change in direction threw me for a moment. He wasn’t kidding. He actually expected me to do this right here and right now. I’d never dropped with an audience in my life, and I damned sure wasn’t about to start now. That was one thing my mother taught me: Never let them see your secrets.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Save it,” he said impatiently, turning from me at last.

  Relieved, I filled my lungs to the brim. His gaze was as intense as a cobra’s.

  “Clear the room.” He waved everyone but the nail eater out of the room.

  “Seriously?” Murphy said as his partner hooked an arm in his and practically dragged him from the room.

  After the two detectives and the officer who’d led me in left, the older gentleman nodded, giving the agent an okay to continue.

  He crossed to the island and leaned back against it to look at me. “We’ve been watching you for some time now, Ms. Grace. Or can I call you Andrea?”

  “You can call me a cab.”

  “We know that you go to a crime scene and somehow figure out who committed the crime. Your tips have led to the arrest and eventual conviction of ninety-eight percent of the perps you’ve IDed. Ninety-eight percent. That’s unheard of, and that’s just what we know about.” He sharpened his gaze as he tried to figure me out. “I want to know how you’re doing it.”

  “Ancient Chinese secret. And besides, Murphy—” I pointed to the door the detective just left through. “—said this was a murder-suicide. You’ve clearly already solved the crime. Why do you need my input?”

  “Humor me.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’d rather not.”

  He glanced down at his feet, his brows knitting in thought, and said slowly, methodically, “Perhaps I need to make something clear to you.”

  My throat tightened at the tone of his voice. It wasn’t angry or bitter at the moment. It was…resigned. As though he had a job to do, and come hell or high water, that job was getting done.

  “Right now you’re facing charges of terrorism and collaboration in every single crime you’ve helped solve. The way I see it, you’re looking at about 500 years. Give or take. You have absolutely no rights and,” he said, pausing for effect, “if I may say so, your ass is mine to do with as I will. Unless you prove to me otherwise, I’m going to have to assume you belong to a terrorist organization.”

  “You know that’s not true. If you’ve linked me to all these other cases, why—”

  “You’re focusing on the wrong aspect here.”

  I bit down, feeling as though my life—my freedom—was slowly slipping through my fingers. “Which aspect should I be focusing on, then?”

  One corner of his mouth lifted into a humorless smile. “Your ass.”

  “My as—?”

  “And the fact that it’s mine.”

  I took a long moment to answer, the concept so implausible. “I have no choice.”

  “Now you’re getting it,” he said with a wink that was the opposite of flirtatious.

  I couldn’t believe this was really happening. My mother had warned me. “Never try to help them,” she’d said. “They’ll squeeze every ounce of life out of you. They’ll rip out your insides for the sheer pleasure of it then toss you away like you’re nothing. Never try to help them.” At the time, she meant people in general. The gift ran in my family, passed down from mother to daughter for hundreds
of years, and in that time my ancestors had learned not to help people because they’d only come back for more. It would never end, and they would resort to blackmailing us to keep our secret—our gift—from becoming public knowledge. Then everyone would want a piece, and there were only a limited number of pieces in every soul.

  I listened to my mother. I heeded her warnings. I kept my head down. Got good grades. Graduated and got a decent job. Trusted no one. Then she died. She died and half of me died with her.

  I crawled inside of myself and stayed there for months. A darkness had settled over me and I’d felt my soul withering away. It wasn’t until I accidently stumbled upon a crime scene after going out for milk that I began to resurface. I stopped at a small house in my neighborhood covered in yellow crime-scene tape. I stepped closer, curious, puzzled, and before I knew what was happening, I’d allowed myself to drop.

  I heard my mother’s words as time rewound before me. I heard her telling me to stop. To keep walking and don’t look back. But I was so curious. I wanted to know what all the flashing lights had been about the night before. What brought about such commotion. Then I came to the moment the woman was attacked. The violence ripped me out of the drop before I’d meant to leave it, but I couldn’t go back in. I didn’t dare. With bile burning the back of my throat, I dropped the milk and ran home, and that time I didn’t look back.

  But I couldn’t get the memory out of my head. The man’s face haunted me for days. The pleasure he took from what he did to her. The enjoyment. I finally sat down and drew the man’s face the best I could, all those years of art classes paying off as I stuffed my hair into a Cubs baseball cap and delivered it to the police station in an envelope with the chief’s name scribbled on it.

  And suddenly everything was better. I’d done my duty. I’d assisted in a murder case. I’d been traumatized by the violence, sure, and it still woke me on occasion, but I’d done the right thing, and I felt the sun on my face for the first time in months.

  And now this. After years of assisting the police, this. This…angry, bitter man. A man who was trying to make me do something I swore I never would. He pushed off the island and stepped close once again. With the stance of a fighter, he eyed me from underneath his thick, dark lashes. Waiting. Seeming to relish the idea of me refusing.

  “Just you,” I whispered at last, barely able to believe I was actually negotiating, the idea of me dropping with an audience impossible to comprehend. “No one else.”

  The older man spoke up. “I think that’s my cue.”

  Agent Strand nodded without taking his eyes off me and the man turned and walked out.

  “Remember what we talked about,” he said over his shoulder before the swinging door closed behind him.

  The special agent didn’t answer. He didn’t blink. He was too busy staring me down, and I was back to avoiding his gaze. But everywhere else I looked, blood.

  “What do you need?” he asked, his voice not as harsh as before.

  I shook my head, incredulous. I was actually going to do this. I was actually going to drop in front of another person. I’d actually done it at a birthday party once when I was a kid. They laughed in surprise at what I’d told them—basically that Toby McClure’s mother was flirting with the mailman—and I was suddenly the most popular girl there. Sadly, my mother found out from toby McClure’s mother, a devout Christian according to rumor, who saw what I did as sacrilegious. She screamed in my mother’s face and threw words at her like “devil worshiper” and “burn in hell.” I wasn’t allowed to go to another birthday party until I was in my teens. Until I was old enough to understand the ramifications of what I’d done.

  I drew in a deep breath and glanced around. “I just need something to hold on to,” I said, my voice thin. I often came out of a drop disoriented. I wasn’t the most graceful being on the planet as it was. Add a spinning world, and I had a tendency to lose my balance. And take things with me. Breakable things. And I wasn’t about to use the island to steady myself. There wasn’t much blood on it, but there was enough to keep me at bay.

  Sensing my thoughts, he looked around then walked into the next room and came back with a dining room chair. “How about this?”

  “That’ll work.”

  With a quick nod, he sat it on the floor with the back facing me.

  I held out my hands, indicating the cuffs still around my wrists.

  He reached into a pocket in his jeans, and I got a better look at his clothes. If I didn’t know better, I would say he was part of a motorcycle club like the Hell’s Angels. He wore a leather vest under the duster and a T-shirt under that along with jeans and heavy motorcycle boots. Watching me like a hawk watches a mouse, he pulled out a key, stepped forward, and took hold of my wrists. He didn’t unlock the cuffs immediately. Instead, he held my hands in one of his a long moment before pushing the metal up my forearm a bit and rubbing the bright pink line where the cuffs had sat. Long fingers tested the area, his hands strong and elegant at once. Lightly kissed by the sun. And warm. Much too warm.

  When I tried to pull out of his grasp, he tightened his hold and slid the key into the lock. The moment he unlocked the cold metal, I felt a hundred pounds lighter.

  I rubbed the sorest spots then looked back up. “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said, schooling him in my strange ways as he stepped back to the island. “You won’t see anything out of the ordinary. No fireworks. No gusts of wind howling through the house. No fog gathering at my feet. From your vantage, it will simply look like I closed my eyes a moment. I should know. I filmed myself dropping once. I was curious.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Told you,” I said, taking a calming breath. “That’s a secret.”

  “Meaning you don’t know.”

  I’d already closed my eyes, but I allowed a small smile to part my lips just as I felt the world drop away. “Exactly.”

  Chapter Two

  Water. It felt like warm water rushing over me when I dropped. Sometimes it stole my breath as though I’d literally jumped into a warm swimming pool. The water rushed over my nerve endings, up and up until I was completely submerged, until I wasn’t inside myself anymore. Until I was someone else.

  At first, I saw only the residual light from the room creating shadows against the backdrops of my lids. Then I could see through them as though I’d slid out of my body and was somewhere else. Someone else. That was when I knew I’d descended.

  I stepped back, out of myself, and rewound time, but only a few seconds. I’d been looking down when Agent Strand unlocked the cuffs from my wrists. This time I watched him. His face. His eyes. I watched the slight crease in his forehead as he looked at the marks the cuffs had made. I watched his expression when he pushed them up my wrists to reveal how chafed they had become. I watched his full mouth narrow as he ran his fingertips along a particularly deep groove where the cuffs had cut into my skin. I found his concern both fascinating and unnecessary. The deep grooves had happened while I was busy stumbling either down steps or up them.

  I decided to check out one more thing before rewinding the day all the way. I walked outside then reversed time to the point where I walked up with the cop. Agent Strand was talking to the Deputy Secretary Gill, but the look he gave me as I passed spoke volumes. I wanted to know what he was saying.

  “How do you think she’s doing it?” Gill asked right after I’d almost stumbled up the steps.

  “She told us,” Agent Strand said.

  “She was bullshitting. That’s about as plausible as a lunar production of Ice Capades.”

  “I read her, Gill. She wasn’t lying. In fact, it was the first time during the entire interrogation she was telling the truth.”

  How the hell did he know that? Was I really so transparent?

  “You went to a lot of trouble to set this up,” Gill said. “If for some crazy reason—one that will change my entire universe—she can do this, then what?”

  “Briarwood.”

/>   Briarwood? Briarwood, Indiana? If so, it was a tiny village of only about 16 people south of La Porte. I knew about it because I had set a story there in middle school. I needed a really tiny town and that was the tiniest I could find near my hometown on Google Earth. Either way, my teacher was not impressed with my story.

  You want to use her for that?” Gill asked.

  “I want to know how my best friend and the best agent you’ve ever had ended up dead along with Kerrigan and every single occupant of a town they weren’t supposed to be in.”

  What? The entire town? They were all dead? How was this not all over the news? Did it just happen or were they intentionally keeping it quiet?

  “Okay. I’m going to let you run with this, but just don’t be too disappointed when—”

  “I know the drill,” he said, heading inside.

  Gill nodded and started to follow when he called out to him. “You’re wrong about one thing, though.”

  Agent Strand turned to face him. “What’s that?”

  “He wasn’t the best agent I’ve ever had.” The older man’s face softened as he took in the young agent.

  Strand shook off his comment, anger stiffening his shoulders as he continued inside.

  I walked back into the house, preparing mentally for what I was about to see. I stepped past cops frozen in time and studied the owners of the house through their décor, the way they arranged their furniture, the colors they used. They were young, vibrant, and well organized. Although everything grayed and became slightly transparent when I dropped, giving the area a hazy, ghost-like appearance, I could tell they used lots of fall colors, and I wondered if they changed the décor with the seasons.

  Stepping through a uniformed cop, I made my way to a side table where the couple had let a week’s worth of mail pile up. The envelope on top had both their names on it: Rob and Veronica Padgett. Pictures on the walls and scattered about the living room would put them in their early 30s. They had fresh faces, Veronica’s much darker than her husband’s, and bright smiles.