A core of white-hot agony blooming in his gut.
He managed one more step before his knees buckled and hit concrete, Paige’s body thudding to the ground in front of him.
Everything buzzed, the world electrified.
He wanted to crack his head open right there on the flagstone, let the pain spill out and wash away in the rain.
Grant threw up on the stone—a violent, spewing rope of alcoholic bile—and his forehead came to rest on the wet rock. He’d let one of the beat cops tase him as a result of a bet gone wrong—this was worse by a factor of five.
Was this what Don had felt?
A whisper, barely audible, found its way to him through the downpour.
He lifted his head, saw Paige on her side, staring at him through wild, desperate eyes, her face inexplicably thinner, degenerating right in front of him as she convulsed.
“What?” he groaned.
“Get us … inside.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s gonna kill us.”
Her words cut through the gauze that packed his head and sparked a moment of blinding clarity.
We’re going to die out here.
Grant struggled up, half-standing, hands braced on his knees.
It felt like his brain was peeling away from the walls of his skull.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
No answer.
Grant pushed Paige onto her back and grabbed her wrists.
Her eyes threatening to roll up into her head.
“Push with your feet,” he groaned.
They made it six inches on the first pull, Grant lunging back toward the steps while Paige kicked at the slick stones.
Even less the second.
It went on like this, their progress measured in inches, Grant pausing between each effort to catch his breath and wince through the pain.
The rain added what felt like pounds to her body. He could hear the thin fabric of her pajama bottoms tearing as her legs slid across the concrete.
By the time he reached the first step, their clothes were soaked and hanging like lead drapes.
“Almost there, Paige.”
He dragged her up the steps.
The last pull sent him sprawling back onto the porch, where he lay for a minute, staring up at the light, trying to catch his breath.
“Paige, you okay?”
She coughed and rolled over to face him.
“Better,” she said.
The pain in Grant’s head had relented, but the fog lingered. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d just dragged what looked like a dead body across the front yard in a crowded neighborhood at God knows what time of night. The thought was enough to give him the final shock of adrenaline he needed to throw Paige’s shivering body over his shoulder again and haul her inside.
Grant shut the door behind them and stumbled into the living room.
Fell to his knees, lay Paige on the warm hardwood in front of the fire.
He sprawled across the floor beside her.
They lay shivering in a silence broken only by the crackling logs and the ticking of rain against the windowglass.
In the stillness, Grant noticed the same pressure in his head that he’d felt at the beginning of the evening as he walked up the steps to Paige’s front door—a stuffy tightness, like sitting in the canned atmosphere of a fuselage at cruising altitude. He held his nose and tried to pop his ears but nothing happened.
Paige said, “I wanted so bad to be crazy.”
“I thought you were.”
“I know.”
“When I walked in here tonight it looked like you hadn’t left this house in a long time.”
Grant’s pulse rate was dropping out of the red.
“Not in two weeks.”
“Is that when this started?”
“No, it started a month ago, every day intensifying until I couldn’t even go beyond the front steps. Until I was confined to my house like a prisoner. You went in my room, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me, Grant.”
“I swear.”
“Then why is it affecting you?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know. Don’s really dead?”
“He is.”
“How?”
“He broke the mirror in the guest bathroom and used it to cut his throat. He was a great man, Paige.” Grant could feel the emotion pressing in. “A great friend. Oh God, his wife.” A tidal wave of grief was bearing down, but he pushed it back.
Not the time. Need to think.
Grant shuffled closer to the fire. His cold, drenched clothing still clung to him, but waves of heat were washing over his face.
“I woke up one night,” Paige said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “and it was just there.”
“What was?”
“A presence.”
“In your room?”
“Under the bed. Remember tag? How when you were it you’d sneak up on me while I was hiding? Get real close. Scare the shit out of me.”
“Sure.”
“Whenever you did that, a split second before you grabbed me, I’d get this premonition that you were there. That’s what it feels like everywhere I go in this house.” She was becoming emotional again. “Like something is right behind me all the time. I swear I can almost feel its breath on the back of my neck. I dream about it constantly.”
“You’re certain this isn’t just in your mind?”
“Are you imagining this? Was Don?”
“And you sleep down here now?”
“When I’m able to sleep at all. Whatever it is, it’s made my bedroom home.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“No.”
“And all those leftovers in your fridge?”
“I’ve been living off delivery for two week. I’d have starved to death if I didn’t run a cash business.”
“How often do you try to leave?”
“I test it every day.”
“And the same thing always happens?”
“Yeah. In the beginning, I could make it to the street. Tonight, the pain started the moment I stepped out on the porch.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s worse than that, Grant.”
“This seems pretty bad all by itself.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I know what it wants.”
“What’s that?”
“People. My clients. And the longer I hold out, the sicker I get.”
“Are you telling me there’s more than one dead man upstairs?”
“I don’t know what happens to them.” Paige rolled over and faced him. “I tried not to. Tried to resist. But the longer I did, the sicker I got. I was dying.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I take a client upstairs. While we’re doing our thing, I black out. When I wake up, they’re gone. I have no idea what it does with them.”
“How many men have you taken up there?” Grant asked.
“Two.”
Two.
“But it wants another one. It wants it now. You’re the first appointment I took in three days, and I took it with no referral because I’m desperate and couldn’t reach any of my core clients. I didn’t want to, but this thing … it’s killing me.”
Are these Sophie’s and my missing men?
Seymour and Talbert?
The cases that brought me to Paige’s doorstep in the first place?
Maybe better to sit on that piece of news for the time being.
Grant forced himself to sit up. “I should make some calls.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Do you understand what’s happening here?” she asked.
“No.”
“So what makes you think someone else will? You’ll just get them, or us, or everyone killed.”
Paige struggled to her feet.
“Where are you going?” Grant asked.
&nbs
p; “My little black book.”
Grant managed to stand. He reached into his inner pocket, took out his phone.
“Are you crazy?” Paige said.
He was already scrolling contacts for Sophie’s cell.
“Grant, did you hear what I said?”
“What exactly do you propose we do here, Paige? ‘Cause I’m at a loss.”
“Call a client.”
“Come on.”
“It doesn’t kill them.”
“You don’t know what it does. Taking more people into your room isn’t a solution.”
“I’m not looking for a solution, Grant. I’m just looking to survive the night. I just want this pain to stop.”
“Paige—”
“Do I look well to you? If I don’t get someone upstairs tonight, I won’t be alive in the—”
Paige bent over cradling her stomach.
“Paige?”
As Grant moved toward her, she turned and ran.
He limped after her, shouting her name, and as he passed under the archway into the kitchen, he spotted her hunched over the toilet in the bathroom, puking her guts out.
He stepped inside and stood behind her, holding her hair back as she retched into the toilet.
Wasn’t the first time.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re gonna feel better after this.”
She shook her head. She was spitting now, her back heaving up and down as she clambered for a decent breath.
She said, “Hit the light.”
Grant did.
The inside of the toilet bowl and everything in the vicinity was dotted with specks of deep burgundy, and over the pungent reek of bile, Grant caught another smell.
Copper.
Blood.
“I’m calling nine-one-one,” he said.
“No.” Her face was still in the bowl. “They’ll try to take me to the hospital. I can’t leave the house.”
“You just vomited blood.”
“Help me get cleaned up.”
“Paige—”
“It’s either me or someone else. Do you get that yet?”
“We can’t go down that road.”
“We’re there.”
Paige sat up and fell back into the wall. She said, “It’s that white knight complex that killed your friend. Listen to me for once. Please. You and I are not in control here. I call a client, they come over, I get better. If you bring people to this house, they’re going to die. Let me handle this.”
Grant looked down at the gore in the toilet. Hard to believe that his sister, small as she was, had that much inside her. Sprawled on the bathroom floor, sheet-white and still dripping with rain and sweat, she looked like a full-on heroin addict.
“All right,” he said. “Until I figure out what we’re dealing with.”
“Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“So I’ll know you’re one hundred percent with me. So I don’t have any more surprise guests showing up at my door.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“After that stunt you pulled with Don?”
“I’m not giving you my phone.”
“Why? Planning on making some calls?”
“It’ll make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
He tugged his phone out of his pocket, dropped it in Paige’s lap.
“Thank you,” she said.
She tried to stand, but her arms didn’t have the strength to push her onto her feet.
Grant reached down and pulled her up by her hands.
“You know, there’s an upside to this approach,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Now that you’re here, you can see what happens to my clients after I black out.”
Paige left the bathroom, and Grant stood at the sink, holding his hands under steaming hot water while he scrubbed every last speck of blood off his hands with a furious focus.
He finally shut off the tap and looked up into the mirror.
He flinched.
Don stared back at him—his face frozen in that moment of grimacing purpose just before he’d opened his throat. His lips didn’t move, but Grant heard his voice as clearly as if his friend had been standing beside him, whispering into his ear.
You don’t know anything.
You don’t know anything.
Chapter 11
Grant changed into dry clothes—loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt belonging to one of his sister’s clients. He helped Paige clean the wet floors, the bloody upstairs hallway and downstairs bathroom, and generally return the brownstone to the jazz-brimming, candlelit brothel that had greeted him ninety minutes prior.
When the doorbell rang, Grant slipped into an empty closet beside the wet bar, pulling the door closed as Paige moved into the foyer.
She’d skimped down into something so lacy and see-through he could barely bring himself to look at her. But she’d somehow managed to work magic with makeup and foundation, upgrading her appearance from heroin addict to the sexy emaciation of a Paris runway model.
Muffled sounds reached him through the closet door.
Hinges creaked in the foyer.
An exchange of voices, barely discernible, but low and seductive.
Approaching footsteps moved into range, followed by laughter.
Grant heard the clink of ice dropping into empty glasses.
A cork sliding out of a whiskey bottle.
Liquid pouring over cracking ice.
Paige and her client stood at the wet bar, three feet away.
“You look tired, baby,” she said, her voice pure saccharine.
“Here’s to hoping you can fix that.”
Grant’s stomach twisted.
“Cheers,” the man said.
“Save any lives today?”
“No, actually. Car accident. Couldn’t find the hemorrhage in time.”
“Sounds like a bad day at the office.”
Grant had been fully prepared to despise whoever entered this brownstone with the intention of fucking his sister, but as he eavesdropped from the closet, he couldn’t find the rage. He’d stood in this man’s shoes countless times. Paid for sex with women who were undoubtedly sisters of other men. Whatever brotherly anger he felt was doomed to be laced with hypocrisy.
“I don’t know how you do it, Jude. Life and death every day.”
“The good days make it worth it. Also, they pay me a fortune which helps my fragile ego. How you doing, Gloria?”
“Aces.”
“Yeah? ‘Cause you’re looking a little peaked, as my grandmother used to say.”
“I’m fine. It’s just—”
“Eleven o’clock at night.”
“Exactly.”
They moved away from the wet bar and Grant heard the squeak of leather as they sat down on the sofa cushions.
In the darkness, he reached down, palmed the doorknob.
Waited for their voices to start up again, then turned it slowly.
When the latch had cleared the housing, he nudged the door open half an inch.
He couldn’t see them directly with the door blocking his view, but he could watch their reflection in the big mirror that hung over the fireplace—his sister cuddled into the embrace of a handsome man twenty years her senior. Even sitting, Grant could see that he was tall and endowed with the kind of longish, wavy-gray locks that were made to be windblown behind the wheel of a topless 911.
Grant listened to a conversation that could’ve unfolded in a confession box—Jude’s failing marriage, his suffocating mortgage, his ungrateful children—and all the while Paige gently prodded him along with a sincerity so genuine it made Grant simmer with jealousy. This man was closer to his sister than he was. Eric had been right. She was in a different league. Blue label all the way.
At last, Paige stood and took Jude’s hand.
“Come with me,” she said.
Jude smiled and rose. “Sure you’re up for this tonig
ht? You really look tired,” he said.
Paige took a few sultry steps back and waved him on with a finger.
Chapter 12
Grant finally heard the floor upstairs strain under Paige’s and Jude’s footsteps.
He opened the closet door and headed to the foot of the stairs.
Climbed.
Paige had righted the table in the second-floor hallway and returned the lamp to its original place.
He stopped beside it.
Your friend is dead in a room right around the corner. You should at least put a blanket over him. Something.
Already, he could hear a collection of sounds coming from behind the closed door to Paige’s bedroom.
A wooden headboard slapping against the wall.
The low, breathless mumblings of Dr. Jude and his sister.
He involuntarily turned his head.
Despair.
Nausea.
Anguish.
How did you sink this far, baby sis?
He backed away, his eyes locking on the first door he saw, the floor groaning under his weight as he moved toward it.
Get out of sight.
The glass doorknob was freezing to the touch, and while it turned without a problem, the hinges screeched bloody murder. He stared into a linen closet—bare shelves coated with dust and just roomy enough, he hoped, for him to squeeze inside.
Grant stepped in and ducked down, his back flush against the shelves. He reached up and tugged the door shut, but his body blocked it from closing all the way.
The darkness seemed to magnify the labored breathing and muffled friction of the bed frame emanating from Paige’s room.
Paige was getting loud and so was Jude.
Grant had just brought his fingers up to plug his ears, when out in the hall, the desk lamp flickered three times.
For a microsecond, it burned as bright as a new star.
Bright enough to blind him and scald the walls with radiance.
It exploded.
The hall went dark.
The acrid stench of ozone and scorched glass filling the air.
Grant strained to listen.
Dead stillness.
His retinas slowly recovering from the overload of light.
He started to push the door open but stopped himself when the bedsprings in Paige’s room exhaled a slow groan.
No footsteps followed.
No voices.
The brownstone held its breath, and the longer Grant stood in the closet with the door pulled against his chest, the harder it became for him to move. Fear swept over him, its mass doubling with every pregnant second. He wanted desperately to call out to Paige. His legs began to tremble. A cramp shot through his quads. Sweat beaded on his forehead and slid down into his eyes with a salty sting.
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