by Joey W. Hill
He leaped onto the sidewalk through the next intersection and then shot back out behind Tyler’s taillights, hearing the scream of brakes as motorists tried to avoid hitting them both.
…he was going to make damn sure Tyler didn’t get there before him.
* * * * *
A light drizzle was falling and it was always colder on top of the building. Natalie might need her coat. Turning up the collar of her rain gear, Marguerite stepped into the foyer of the Bank of Florida building, thinking that everything around her had a surreal quality. All the colors turned up to high volume yet coated with a dull patina that made the world ugly, not vibrant.
Over the years, she had visited this building often enough that the indifferent security detail had accepted her as one of the corporate types. She’d even manufactured herself an ID that passed at a distance as one of those assigned to the major banking office housed in the building. Today her elegant London Fog rain cape worn against the outside drizzle and her determined step made her look as if she was just an employee coming in to do weekend work.
She needn’t have worried. The security officer was not there and the lock on the glass door that had to be deactivated with a buzzer after hours was not engaged. She peered over the edge of the horseshoe desk. Spots of blood were on the visitor’s log, marks that would have passed as ink stains to the unsuspecting mind. She hoped he was knocked out, dragged to a closet somewhere, but then she leaned farther over the counter, saw his body curled under the desk, his eyes staring. He clutched a note in stiff fingers, the print large enough to read, as if the guard had been turned into a macabre form of sign post.
Come on up.
She looked at the guard a full minute, reached down, closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. To him. To his family. To the children whose photos were on the desk, who wouldn’t have him as they grew up. For them, it would be a tragedy, a loss. For her, it would have been a gift from God.
She straightened, went to the elevator, set it to go to the top floor. If she had died that day, a guard wouldn’t be dead. Natalie wouldn’t be in his hands now.
Do you know how it would tear my guts out to lose you?
Tyler’s voice. Rough with need and love, desire.
Some things just weren’t meant to be. But she really wished it had been.
When she got to the top floor, she took the service staircase up to the roof, stepped out into the mist that had become a light rain, the clouds and gathering darkness dulling the earlier promise of a sunny morning. She was watchful, looking before she stepped out, but he came into view almost immediately, directly across from her. He stood at the roof’s edge, not up on the ledge, but next to it. He had Natalie standing on it, though, his hand holding on to the collar of her shirt, the nape of her neck. Her body was trembling, cheeks wet with tears, eyes round with terror. Her hair was frizzy with the humidity, streaked with the rain.
“Miss M—”
When he yanked on her collar to keep her still, her arms flailed and latched on to his side. He shook her off. “Shut up and be still.”
There were bruises on her arm where he’d handled her. She was wearing a pale pink cotton shirt and a pair of jeans on her tiny hips. Sneakers that looked no longer than half the length of Marguerite’s hand. The new earrings winked at her. She took in every detail of Natalie’s appearance and used it to steady herself before she turned her attention to her father.
Prison had changed him of course, but it surprised her nonetheless because he had lost so much weight and become lean, burning up with his hatred, far beyond that fateful turning point when she was fourteen. His hair had thinned. The lines of his face were as deep as wounds, the mouth thin and harsh. Evil had completely taken him so there was no way he could live among the world and normal people not see it, recognize the danger and shun him. She thought about the way she had described herself to Tyler, the teenager who could not be close to others, not only because of her own desires and problems, but because of what the others sensed about her. The evil had stamped them all, but it could end here. She wouldn’t, couldn’t let it take Natalie though.
“Marie.”
She inclined her head. “I’m here. And I’ll do what you want. Just let her go back down the stairs.”
“She’s special to you. I know that.” Marguerite wondered if it was fanciful imagining, the red tint that seemed to glitter like blood in the once rich golden brown eyes. His voice was a chain smoker’s voice, the vocal cords scalded by nicotine. “I know everything about you. You thought changing your name would do it, didn’t you? You’ve been my only focus for twenty years, Marie. There wasn’t a single moment I didn’t know where you were. Did you think you could carry her face, her soul and I wouldn’t come after you?”
“No. I knew you would come one day.” And she realized it was true. She’d lived every day of her life holding herself back from love and friendships, knowing it. But love and friendship had been given to her anyway, offered freely. In Tyler’s case, insistently. She knew that even if Natalie hadn’t been involved, Chloe would have fought him because he was attacking and destroying what belonged to Marguerite. Just things. Ceramic cups, dolls, even the ring on her hand now… But those things symbolized something far more important. The only thing that mattered. Love. It was more important than survival.
Which is why she was glad she’d left her message with Chloe. That Tyler would know she hadn’t intended to leave him. Hadn’t wanted to, ever.
“I always knew you’d come back,” she said evenly.
She walked across the roof toward him, feeling the breeze lift her hair. Thought of Tyler’s fingers threading through it, loosening it. He loved her hair. Had loved making it tumble down. Natalie’s eyes, the irises the color of dark chocolate, watched her approach. The child’s lips quivered, the involuntary flow of terrified tears making her upper lip wet.
“Do you ever think about Mom? David?”
His fingers tightened on Natalie and she whimpered. “Don’t talk about them.”
“Me too. I miss them every day, Dad. It hurts to be without them. Like a burning inside that never stops.”
Their eyes were locked. In that one brief moment, she sensed he was unable to look away, her words reestablishing their bond. It made her think of all the submissives whose minds she’d plumbed, tearing past the curtains to find their souls and hold them against her heart. The outpouring of emotions had been a bath for her own soul which she’d thought was forbidden the same experiences, forbidden to come out into the light and love. Like a Goddess of the Underworld, she’d pulled those souls to her. Now she kept moving across the tarred roof, all vestiges of civilization far below and prepared to take the plunge into her father’s blackness.
“You…” He shook his head, breaking the contact, denying with his body language the words she’d spoken. “You always were her. You look like her, spoke like her. You were my little girl, but then you took her over, possessed her.” Natalie yelped as he thrust her forward, as if he was using her as an extension of his hand, pointed in accusation at Marguerite. “So you could infect me with your poison.”
Marguerite forced herself not to look at Natalie, clumsily scrambling for solid ground. His yanking had taken one foot off the ledge, unbalancing her. At least he’d pulled her toward the roof and not away from it. “You didn’t matter enough to Grandma, did you, Daddy? How do you ever get over the betrayal of a parent?” Bile rose up in her. Her focus slipped as his face, the thin cruelty of his lips, the curl of his chest hair in the open collar of his shirt all seemed to expand and fill her vision. Parts of him she knew in a way no daughter should, sickening her. “How do you ever forget him coming to you in the night, raping you, teaching you how gray the line between pain and pleasure is? Knowing I had to take it night after night, or you’d hurt the only person in the world who loved me?”
She remembered the nights he’d collapsed on her body, sobbing, calling her “Mother” when the pain was so in
tense she hadn’t been able to do more than dumbly stroke his hair with trembling fingers.
His lips drew back in a snarl. “Don’t pretend to be my child. Your face. Her face…you’re the same. I could see her in the things you did, said. The way you turned your head or laughed, the way you touched me. I see it even now. Had to punish her. And you stop your sniffling and squirming!” It was a hoarse scream, making Natalie’s face fold into itself as if he had blasted a dragon’s heat across her tender skin.
“Miss M…”
It was the wail of sheer panic that recalled Marguerite. She shoved her anger and memories out of the way and was lunging forward when he put one foot on the ledge and thrust the child out into space.
“No!”
“Stop.” He roared it. Whether he meant Natalie to stop crying or Marguerite to stop moving she didn’t know, but he accomplished at least one, for she came to a tense halt when she saw he had his hand screwed up in the cloth of the shirt. It gathered like a tight sling under her armpits, baring her midriff. While the sight of the child dangling over thin air was enough to stop her heart, his hold told her he didn’t intend to drop her. Not yet.
“Dad.” She brought his attention back to her, compelling him with just the tone of her voice. She had to raise it to be heard over Natalie’s cries of distress and tried to keep her heart from tearing in two from the sound. Calling on the same discipline that had made her lie still when this man pressed a cigarette into her spine while sodomizing her, she sought that stillness inside, the ability to block everything out. “It’s time for it to be over. That’s why you came for me, called me here, remember? It never could have ended any way other than this. But we need to go together, all three of us.”
“Damn right. We’ll all three go.” He abruptly jerked the child back onto the ledge, taking his own foot back off to pull a bandana from his pocket. Natalie’s tiny hands came up, ineffectively trying to block him. Holding her head with a brutal grip on her hair, he roughly forced the wadded cloth all the way in until her mouth was unable to close, silencing her cries. He kept his gaze on Marguerite throughout so she had to hold her ground while Natalie’s eyes pleaded with her for rescue, filled with bewildered terror. The past hour of the child’s life was rapidly becoming a decade of nightmares to overcome.
No. It wasn’t going to happen like that. “Yes. We’ll go together, like we should have that day. Mom should have waited, so we could have all gone together.”
With the sun obscured by even more gray clouds, she could see the brown eyes they’d once shared. And they were thinking. When he focused on her, she drew in a painful breath. For just an instant she saw him, a glimpse of something remembered in the way he looked at her now.
“M-Marie. We have to do it. You understand, don’t you? It’s the only way she’ll be truly dead. She won’t hurt either of us anymore. She won’t make me hurt you to get at her.”
“Daddy,” she said softly. “That’s why I survived, so you wouldn’t have to go alone. So we could go together.”
His hand dug into Natalie’s collarbone beneath the shirt and the girl’s lips pressed down on the cloth, registering pain.
“You weren’t with us that day, but you’ve been with me ever since.” She took another step forward. While his grip didn’t ease, he watched her, his eyes searching her face so hard she thought he might be seeking the soul he’d lost, hearing it somehow in the words she spoke to him. “Are you tired, Daddy? Are you tired of hurting?” She pulled it deep from inside herself, remembered the years of loneliness. Of wishing, time and again, that David’s body had not turned at that last moment, that she’d not been left alone in the world with no one. No bulwark against the nightmares. She’d survived, built her life. And Tyler had come and given it all a purpose in a handful of days. If there was such a thing as last wishes, she hoped he would somehow know that the joy he’d given her was timeless, eternal. And if she could do it over, she would have embraced every second they were given, not fought it with such fear. She embraced every moment she’d had with him now.
“I’m tired,” she admitted. “I have been for so long, until recently.”
She saw the man who had lifted her on his shoulders at the fair and told her he’d ride the Ferris wheel with her, that he’d take care of her, always. In whose arms she’d fallen asleep, never thinking she’d have any reason to fear him.
Natalie coughed against the gag, strangling on the phlegm that was also coming from her nose.
“You—” The memory was gone, driven away by the fury rising in the red-tinted eyes.
“Let me help,” Marguerite said quickly. “I know her crying is upsetting you. Let me make her understand, the way Mom made us understand.”
He lifted Natalie to her toes and the child’s eyes grew even wider, the coughing worse.
“Dad.” Marguerite’s tone became more firm, steady, a voice she’d used to good effect when subs started to panic. The sound of someone who was in control, who would make sure everything worked out. “Let me help.”
As she held his gaze, she stepped up to the child.
“Stop there.”
When Marguerite stopped just out of reach, a muffled sob made it past the cloth.
“Shut—”
“Natalie.” Marguerite reached out then, caught the child’s hands before her father could stop her. In the same movement she went to one knee, a non-threatening posture incapable of taking the child from his grasp. “Natalie, honey. Look at me.” Glancing at her father, she carefully reached forward, removed the gag, easing it out of the small mouth, the saliva wetting her knuckles. “I’m going to help, Dad. Breathe, sweetheart. Just breathe. Deep breaths. Watch my eyes.”
She held both her hands, watched the little girl try hard to follow her direction, fighting the natural flight instinct of a young defenseless creature that could easily become fatal panic.
“M-Miss M…I…I’m s-so sc-scared. I wanna go h-home.”
“We’re going to go home, sweetheart. I promise.” She cupped her hand over the side of her head, the small ear, fingering the new piercing, drawing Natalie’s attention to something other than the man at her side.
“She’s not going home. We’re not going home.”
“Yes, we are.” Marguerite looked toward him. “Don’t you think so? Isn’t that what this is about? Bringing an end to it? Peace to it? Let me tell her, Dad. Let me tell you both what Mom said to David and me that day. And it will all be clear. Do you want to know what Mom said? Her very last words?”
He blinked several times, his mouth forming a tight line. His eyes glistened. “She didn’t understand the evil. The danger.”
“It will all be clear to her shortly. Because you’ll see her and tell her. But first, I want to tell you both this.”
Marguerite pulled her gaze back to Natalie, saw she had successfully acquired the attention of both of them.
“Did you know that I was once up here with my mother? And she told me and my brother something very special, something that made us not afraid of anything. Not even of being up so high, or the possibility of falling. I want to tell you what she said, but I need you to stop crying and be a very, very brave girl. Look just at me, honey. Just at me.” She squeezed the girl’s hands, rubbed her cold fingers, willing her to be calm. The child began to hiccup. Trying for Miss M, making Marguerite’s throat hurt with burning tears. “Remember how I told you I’d always love you, no matter what? And that I’d always tell you the truth. Remember?”
She could feel her father’s growing tension enveloping her and Natalie like a suffocating stench. She concentrated on locking Natalie’s attention in the cool blue of her gaze, visualized drawing her into peace, tranquility.
“Would you like to know what my mother said?”
Natalie shook her head. “I want to g-go home.”
“I know, sweetie.” Marguerite stood up, let go of her hand and stepped onto the ledge in one motion, again arresting her father in mid-lunge as she
proved to him that she was trying to move herself closer to the ledge, not take Natalie farther from it. He held on to Natalie’s shirt as Marguerite turned, faced him over her head.
“Are you ready?” She gestured at the ledge on the opposite side of Natalie, inviting him to join them. The child was staring up at her, quieted to strangled sobs of breath. Marguerite did not know if it was her words that had brought the sudden stillness or if the little girl was retreating into the blissful numbness of shock. Her capacity for terror had to be long past overload despite the continuing dangerous menace of the man holding her.
A man who looked baffled, even deceptively docile as at last he put one foot up on the ledge, then the other, lifting himself up to stand across from her. Marguerite realized age and the hard life of prison had warped his bones to match his soul so that they were almost eye to eye. She was perhaps even a little taller.
His expression was uncertain, the aggressiveness broken for the moment as he sought the trick, not knowing where to look for it. Marguerite dared to glance down at Natalie for one precious moment, met the brown eyes.
“My mother said, ‘Don’t worry. The angels will catch us. And then we’ll learn to fly with them.’”
Ripping open the neckline of the cape, she sent the garment into open space. “You didn’t know everything about me, Daddy.”
His gaze jerked away from the fluttering cape to her, but that second of distraction was the only one she’d counted on.
Darting down, she seized Natalie under the arms, breaking his grip. As he howled and snatched at them, she shoved off the ledge. He latched on to Marguerite’s left hand and she tumbled all three of them over the edge.
* * * * *
Skydiving off most manmade structures was illegal, for valid reasons. The proximity of buildings changed the expected air patterns, made them fluky, hard to predict the right heading for the chute gear when it opened. She’d had only a couple opportunities to practice it, and both times it was off bridges, one in India, one in Malaysia. Never in close quarters with other buildings like this. And never with less than fifteen minutes in her car to repack one chute for the type of jump that typically demanded a careful half hour of gear preparation.
