Watching Their Steps

by Alana Terry

  I tried not to tremble under his inspection. I felt so exposed in my tank top; there was too much skin left vulnerable to his touch, and I desperately wanted him to stop. “Stop . . . touching me.”

  His hand followed the curve of my shoulder and down my right arm, pausing at the thin strip of visible skin on my stomach. I let out a choked whimper. He leaned into me, and I felt his breath rustle through my hair as he said, “Sh, there will be time for crying later.”

  His fingers glided torturously slow across my bare skin, sending a shudder through me, and then moved down my other arm. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped my phone until his hand came to rest on mine, and I saw it lying on the floor beside me. He leaned over and picked it up with his gloved hand.

  He made a thoughtful noise as he pressed it to his ear. “Detective Marx, I had hoped we might have a chance to talk.” His voice was quietly taunting. I could hear Marx’s measured voice on the other end of the line. “Oh, I intend to do much more than touch her, Detective.”

  I saw the skinning knife as he drew it from a small black sheath in his pocket. It was just as terrifyingly sharp as I remembered. I closed my eyes and prayed he wouldn’t skin me alive.

  “She’s so lovely and vulnerable.” I felt the tip of the knife as it danced playfully across the skin of my forearm. “Such perfect, pale skin that it practically glows in the moonlight. So unfortunate for her that you’re still at least ten minutes away.”

  He chuckled softly at whatever Marx said on the other end of the line. “Come now, Detective, we both know it’s pointless to lie. I know where you live, what kind of car you drive. I know how long your commute is during traffic and when the roads are clear. Even if you speed . . .”

  I blinked and time shifted forward again. There was a thin trickle of red running down my arm, but I hadn’t felt the knife bite into my skin. There was an odd numbness creeping along my nerve endings, and I stared at the bleeding wound, my foggy mind trapped somewhere between horror and fascination.

  “Good-bye, Detective,” the killer said, and he snapped the phone shut. He tossed it behind him, and it slid under the table, well beyond my reach. “He’s fond of you.” He petted my hair slowly, letting his fingers linger in the strands as he pressed his face close enough to mine that I should’ve been able to feel his breath on my skin. It smelled like mint and moisture. “But you’re already taken. It’s time to go home.”

  No. I couldn’t let him take me. Marx would be here soon, and I needed to give him time to get to me. As tired as I was, I couldn’t let the drug take me under. I tried to remember Marx’s advice. I knew it was locked in my muddled brain somewhere, and I searched for it frantically.

  Give him reason to doubt that it’s the right time to take you.

  It was difficult to form a coherent thought, let alone put it into words. “I don’t . . . go . . . home with . . . strangers.” The effort of speech was draining.

  “We’re not strangers, you and I,” he replied gently, still stroking my hair. I wished I could bite him. If I could just fall over onto his arm with my mouth open, and somehow find the strength to clamp my teeth, I would be all set. “We’ve just been apart for a very long time.”

  “I don’t . . . know you.”

  I caught the slight stiffening of his shoulders as his hand dropped away from my hair. “You remember me.”

  “Sent . . . me . . . a . . . stuffed r-r-rabbit.”

  “Yes, I did,” he said, sounding pleased.

  “Your . . . gifts . . . suck,” I spat. His hands clenched into fists, and I hesitated to continue. I didn’t want him to hurt me; I just wanted to make him doubt that I remembered who he was. “You . . . chased me . . .” I paused to gather my breath. “Through . . . the . . . woods. Were you . . . some kind . . . of . . . child . . . p-pervert?” I knew why he’d chased me; he had intended to kill me along with anyone else in that house, except I escaped. But he didn’t need to know that.

  If I’d hoped to make him angry, I succeeded. He hit me. I didn’t feel the pain that should’ve come with it, but it sent the room spinning again. When it finally stilled, I was lying on my back on the cold floor, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Don’t insult me,” he growled. “You remember who I am.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, and I tasted something coppery on my lips. It trickled down the back of my throat. “Don’t . . . even know . . . who . . . I am.” Unbidden tears glazed my vision, and the figure leaning over me blurred into a fuzzy mass.

  He went very still, and I was afraid he would kill me right then and there. “You’re lying,” he said, but he didn’t sound certain this time. Maybe it was the tears that lent credibility to my story. “You remember that night.”

  “Woods . . . rabbit . . . running . . . a v-voice. Only . . . f-fragments.”

  “Why can’t you remember?” he demanded angrily, slamming a fist on the cement beside my head.

  “Trying . . .” I didn’t have the strength to continue speaking, and my voice fell away. Either he would believe I didn’t remember either of us at this point or he wouldn’t. But he needed to make his decision. Marx would be here soon.

  He grabbed the sides of my face and pressed his forehead to mine. He looked directly into my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything. “You will remember me. I will make you remember.” I felt a tug on my hair before he pulled back, and the last thing I saw before my eyes drifted shut was him holding a clump of my red hair under his nose as he inhaled slowly.

  Chapter 28

  A DISTANT VOICE BROKE through the fog that clung to my mind; it sounded familiar and worried. I fought my way toward it, but tendrils of blackness tried to drag me back down.

  “Holly,” a silky Southern voice called. “Come on, sweetheart, open your eyes. Look at me.” The drawl made me think of fried green tomatoes dipped in ketchup and sweet tea made with heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Sugar. Mmm.

  My eyelids fluttered open, and I glimpsed a blurry figure kneeling over me before they slipped shut again. The floor beneath my back was cold and hard, and I couldn’t remember how I got there.

  “Did he drug you? Look at me, Holly,” the voice insisted. I could feel the warmth of someone’s hands on my cheeks, a man’s hands.

  No. I needed to get away from him, I needed to fight back. I tried to move, but I felt vaguely detached from the rest of my body. I was pretty sure it was still there somewhere below my neck—my head couldn’t be rolling around on the floor by itself—but I felt anchored down.

  I tried to tell the man to stop touching me, but my voice sounded like a garbled whimper.

  “You’re safe, Holly,” the gentle sugary voice assured me. “It’s gonna be all right; you’re gonna be fine.” Something about his voice soothed me, and I stopped trying to fight my way free of the invisible weight crushing me to the floor.

  Calm slowly washed over me, and my mind began to drift: The grass was cool and soft beneath my feet, and I dug my toes into the damp dirt. I bounced eagerly and held my hands out in front of me. “Come on, Jordan, throw the ball already!” I demanded in the small voice of a girl no more than ten.

  The boy standing in the yard across from me smirked, and his sapphire-blue eyes glinted with amusement. “You’re standing like a girl.”

  “I am a girl. How am I supposed to stand?”

  He rolled his eyes and bent his knees, hunching a little with his chest forward. “Like this.” He stood up and tossed the football back and forth in his hands as he waited for me to adopt the proper stance.

  I tried it, but it made me feel like an awkward pigeon, and I almost fell forward. “I can’t. Just throw the ball,” I pleaded as I stood up and bounced on my toes.

  Jordan drew his arm back with the ball and laughed. “Stop bouncing, Holly. You’re never gonna catch it.” He flung the Styrofoam football, and I resisted the urge to duck and squeal like a girl.

  I caught the ball and hugged it to my chest. “Ha!” I grinned. “I caught it!” And then I
promptly dropped it when I clumsily lost my balance. “That doesn’t count!”

  Another voice spoke from somewhere nearby. It wrenched me from the yard, even though I wanted to stay, and back to a cold cement floor. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “I think she may have been drugged,” the Southern voice explained softly. He was seated on the floor by my head, and I could feel the warmth of his hand as he gently smoothed the hair away from my face.

  A blinding light shined into my right eye, and I flinched away from it. It flickered to my other eye immediately afterward, and pain lanced through my eye sockets and into my brain. “Her pupils are the size of saucers. She’s been given something. Holly, it’s Luke, can you hear me?”

  His voice was too loud; it rolled around inside of my skull like a bowling ball, crashing into things, and I winced.

  “She may have a concussion,” he shouted. Why was he shouting? Didn’t he realize I had a headache? “It looks like she took a blow to the head. Was it some sort of domestic dispute?”

  “Home invasion.”

  “Sexual assault?” he asked in what was clearly his outside voice.

  The answer came slowly. “I don’t know. He was alone with her for maybe fifteen minutes, and part of the time I was on the phone with him.” At least he wasn’t shouting. His name floated up from the depths of my mind, and I clutched at it before it could slip back beneath the murky surface of my thoughts: Detective. Detective . . . Sugar.

  The room descended into a moment of blissful silence, and all I could hear was the echo of thunder between my ears.

  “Holly,” Luke called again, and his voice triggered another earthquake of pain inside my head. I was pretty sure all the neural pathways in my brain had just caved in under the violent quaking. I was officially brain-dead. “Can you hear me?”

  “I hate your voice,” I forced through my sticky lips. My words came out hoarse and oddly slurred. My throat felt like sandpaper.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “How are you feeling?”

  My head hurt, and there was an uncomfortable prickle in my extremities—like thousands of tiny hot needles trying to pierce through my skin. Beyond that I couldn’t feel much of anything. I peeled my eyelids open to see a pale smudge of a person above me. I blinked to try to clear his features, and two faces came into a hazy focus. “That’s . . . a stupid question. Which one of you asked it?” I looked between the two identical men in confusion.

  The men held up fingers in front of my face and asked, “How many fingers am I holding up, Holly?”

  I squinted and tried to count them, but they kept moving. “Stop moving them. You’re cheating.” Both of the men frowned—it was really weird how their brains and faces seemed to be connected. “Sssix.”

  They dropped their hands into their laps and announced, “She’s seeing double.”

  I tried to wiggle my fingers in front of my face, but I couldn’t find them. I stared down at my body, perplexed. “Where did my fingers go? Did you take them?” Maybe I was lying on them, but surely I would feel that. Maybe they fell off . . . down the drain. That could happen.

  “Nobody took your fingers,” the silky Southern voice said from somewhere behind my head. I tilted my head to look up at him. The sight of him soothed away the last of my anxiety, and a little happy laugh bubbled out of me.

  “Hi, Sugar.”

  He blinked. “Hi.”

  “You’re sweet . . . like sugar. Even though . . . you’re a cop . . . and sometimes you’re a man . . . I don’t hate you at all.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then looked up at the other two men and asked with a hint of worry in his voice. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Could be the concussion,” one of the other men offered. “Or a side effect of the drug. I can’t be sure, but she’s obviously disoriented.”

  “I know exactly where I am,” I said. I looked around at my blurry surroundings, trying to find something familiar, but all I could see was the ceiling. “I’m on the floor.”

  “Yes, Holly, you’re on the floor,” the sugary voice said patiently.

  I flicked my eyes toward the man behind my head and giggled, “You sound funny when you talk. So . . . Sssouthern. Southern sweet tea. Can I have sweet tea? I like sweet tea.”

  “Nothing to drink until we get you checked out,” one of the other men said. He was wrapping something white around the wound on my arm.

  “Am I a present? Are you wrapping me? Can I open it?” I tried to lift my head to see if he was going to put a bow on it; he didn’t. “No bow?” I pouted.

  “We’ll draw a bow on it later,” the sugary voice promised.

  I smiled dreamily and then blinked in confusion when I looked down my body. “Who stole my toes?” I couldn’t feel them, and they were nowhere in sight. I tried to twitch them, but nothing happened. They’d vanished!

  One of the identical twins in the blue uniform plucked something fuzzy and green off the bottom of my leg that looked like a moss-covered rock and said, “Your toes are right here.” Both of the men frowned, and then plucked a green, moss-covered rock off my other leg. “Detective.”

  The man behind my head shifted and moved down by my legs. There were suddenly two of him. Whoa. That was a neat trick. “Two cubes of Sugar,” I said, giggling.

  “Holly, what happened to your feet?” the two cubes of sugar asked.

  “I don’t know. Are they missing too? Maybe they went to the market with my toes.” I giggled until tears spilled out of my eyes.

  “We won’t know what she was given and what kind of effect it will have on her until we get her to the hospital,” the identical twins pointed out. “Help me get her on the gurney.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you . . . either of you,” I said, frowning at the two identical men in blue uniform. “I’m in a relationship. In fact, I’m in two relationships, so you’re both out of luck.” I tilted my head to the side to look up at the Southern man who bent down beside me. “Isn’t that right, Sugar?”

  He exhaled with a pained expression. “Holly, you gotta stop callin’ me Sugar.” He moved behind me. “Let’s get you on your feet.”

  “But I can’t feel my feet,” I explained, and then giggled. Jace couldn’t feel her feet either. “Sugar . . . go steal Jace’s wheelchair so I can go for a ride. She won’t mind.”

  “The only place you’re ridin’ to is the hospital.” He scooped me up seemingly effortlessly and cradled me against his chest.

  I closed my eyes with a contented sigh, enjoying the sensation of flying. In my mind, I landed on one of the fluffy clouds and sank into the softness. It was peaceful.

  I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a mattress. “Let’s do that again,” I suggested. I tried to climb off the floating bed, but I could barely move. I managed to get one leg over the edge before someone straightened me out. Fine, I would climb off the other side.

  “No, Holly,” Detective Sugar said as he maneuvered me back into the center of the floating bed. He gripped the bed on either side of my waist to keep me from moving while someone else pulled a belt over me and snapped it in place.

  “But flying is fun.”

  “You’re already flyin’ pretty high,” he stated evenly. “It’s time to come back down to earth.”

  “Earth is boring.” I sighed. The fog crept along the back of my mind, trying to lure me back, and I smiled as I melted into the mattress. I blinked groggily at the comforting face above me and murmured, “You came.”

  “Of course I came.”

  “Nobody ever comes.”

  He frowned as he stroked my hair. “Nobody ever comes when?”

  “When Collin hurts me.”

  “Who’s Collin?” Luke asked.

  “My foster brother. But he’s not really my brother.”

  “What do you mean he hurts you? Hurts you how?”

  I parted my lips to answer, but Sugar put a finger against my lips and said sharply to one of the other men, “You
start askin’ her personal questions when she has no inhibitions, and you and I are gonna have a problem.”

  Protective, Detective Sugar.

  “If someone’s hurting her . . .”

  “Then I’ll take care of it. Do your job, not mine.” He sounded angry, and it made his voice sound more like vinegar than sugar.

  “Because you’ve done such a great job so far? She was just drugged and assaulted on your watch.”

  “Don’t push me, Luke. I am not in the mood . . .”

  “Am I dead?” I asked as I stared at the bright light above me. Was this heaven? Heaven was chilly . . .

  “No, you’re not dead,” he replied, the vinegar disappearing from his voice and leaving only sweetness. “He just put somethin’ in your drink to make you sick.”

  I licked my parched lips. “He was scary. I was scared.”

  He closed his eyes and exhaled a quiet breath. “I know. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

  “I did what you said.” He stepped aside briefly as one of the other men threw a blanket over me and tucked it in to keep me warm against the chilly air. “I’m a terrible liar ‘cause I don’t like liars, but I lied ‘cause you told me to.”

  “Good.”

  “He was really angry.”

  His jaw tightened. “I see that.”

  I let out a musical sigh and closed my eyes. “I’m tired.”

  “We need her to stay awake. She has a concussion,” Luke explained.

  “Holly, you have to stay awake.”

  “Mmm hmm,” I moaned, snuggling deeper into the blanket. I heard his soft Southern voice calling my name in the distance as it faded away behind the heavy fog that drifted over my mind.

  Chapter 29

  A VIOLENT THROBBING in my head woke me, and I stifled a moan as I dragged a hand from under the covers and rubbed my forehead. It felt as if someone had hit me with a two-by-four. I cracked my eyes open and immediately regretted it as light sent fire sizzling down my optic nerves and into my brain.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and curled into a ball beneath the blankets. It didn’t feel like my bed. The blanket was knitted, and the pillows were too fluffy. Ambient sounds came into focus, and I heard the familiar beeping of machines and the distant sound of coughing and crying.