“You can’t believe that.”
“Oh, no. You’re right. I mean I was only shown it in hell. Surely my sources are mistaken.”
“Swopes, people don’t just go to the netherworld, then come out unscathed.”
“The fuck they don’t. I did. Then I was dragged out by a force of some kind. And I never said I was unscathed.”
Well, if anything would affect the psyche, it would be a trip to hell. I didn’t know what to say. “What was it like?”
He waved his beer in the air. “You know. Hot. Lots of screaming. Lots of agony. I would not recommend it for a vacation spot.”
“How do you know about—? Who told you about Reyes?”
The look he placed on me was filled with a seething kind of hatred. “His father.”
I sank back into the chair. “So, you two just struck up a conversation over an open pit, compared notes on death and agony?”
“Something like that. He wanted me to see, Charley.”
“See what?”
“What his son was.” He lurched forward as though trying to will me to believe him. “What he did.”
“We all do things we aren’t proud of.”
He laughed harshly and scrubbed his face with his fingers. “You live in your own little world, don’t you?”
“Yes, and I like it here.”
“Well, let me tell you this: I know what he is and I know what you are and I know what will come down if he gets you. I am not about to let that happen.”
Oh, wonderful. “Come down? What, like hell on Earth?”
“Like the worst kind of hell on Earth. Charles, he was sent here. For you. To make all of his father’s dreams come true.”
I stood to get a drink of water. “What you saw, what they told you, isn’t real. He wasn’t sent here. He escaped. He came here on his own.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes,” I said, combing his cabinets for a glass.
“I never figured a grim reaper would be so gullible.”
Screw it. I could get a drink at home. There were few things I hated more than having my intelligence questioned.
I closed the cabinet door and leaned over him as he sat at the table. “So, you’ve been to hell, huh?” When he nodded, I offered a candy-coated smile, patted his cheek, and said, “Sweet dreams.”
10
Facing your fears builds strength.
But running away from them builds hamstrings.
—BUMPER STICKER
I drove home seeing red. Literally. A cop pulled me over and those lights were freaking bright. I would probably have red blotchy vision for days. After a little flirting which got me nowhere and a mention of who my uncle was which got me everywhere, I drove the rest of the way a little calmer and a lot slower. Despite the hostilities, Swopes’s house was a nice reprieve from my cluttered abode. I examined the area when I drove up, paying close attention to the sinister shadows and dark corners. I hadn’t been out this much in weeks. And going out at night, at such a deserted hour, felt strange. Unsafe.
I locked my doors and headed inside the building only to be struck with the need to check out every nook and cranny before ascending the stairs to my apartment on the third floor. I stepped with my back to the wall, constantly checking over my shoulder. If ever there was a time to carry a flashlight, it would definitely be at night.
After tiptoeing back into my room, trying not to wake Gemma, I opened my top dresser drawer and took out a picture. The picture. The one I’d obtained a few weeks ago and hadn’t looked at since.
I heard the toilet flush, and Cookie peeked into my room. The overhead light from the kitchen stove drifted around her, allowing me to make out her silhouette.
“Charley, is that you?” she asked, her voice rough and sleepy.
I wondered if she was still drunk. Angling the picture down so I couldn’t actually see it, I said, “No, I’m Apple, Charley’s evil twin.”
“Can’t you sleep?”
I sat on the edge of my bed. “Not really. I keep getting conflicting intel.”
She sat beside me. “About what?”
After a soft laugh, I said, “Are you going to be able to get up in the morning?”
She smiled. “I’m good. I get over inebriation pretty fast.”
“You were passed out on my kitchen floor.”
After an indelicate snort, she said, “Like that was the first time.”
She had a point.
“So, what’s up?”
“I don’t know what to think about Reyes.”
“Oh, honey, who does? He’s an enigma wrapped up in sensuality padlocked with a dozen chains of desire and topped off with a razor-sharp ribbon of danger. There are more layers to him than a billionaire’s wedding cake.”
My brows shot up. “Sensuality?”
“I know. It’s more than the fact that he is the hottest thing ever to walk the face of the Earth, but that part is just so hard to get past.” She noticed the picture in my hands. “What’s that?”
I bowed my head. “Do you remember when I went to the building I’d first seen Reyes in? That abandoned apartment building where that crazy woman was squatting?”
“Yes. She’d been the landlady when Reyes lived there. Back when you were in high school.”
“Exactly. Well, she gave me this.” I passed the picture to her, but held on to one corner and said, “I have to warn you, it’s really explicit.”
Surprise showed on her face as she took it and held it up to capture every particle of light the room had to offer. Her brows furrowed at first as she tried to make out the image; then they narrowed as dawning emerged. Slowly, the image came into focus. Her lids widened. Her mouth opened in a silent testament to her understanding. Then her eyes watered and she covered the lower half of her face with her free hand.
As though she were witnessing a car accident, she seemed unable to look away. I didn’t have to look again to know what horrors the image held. It had been branded into my brain the minute I laid eyes upon it.
The ropes. The blood. The bruises. The shame.
She finally spoke from behind her hand. “Is this—?” Her breath caught in her chest and she swallowed before beginning again. “Is this Reyes?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes slammed shut and she slapped the picture against her chest as though trying to cradle him. To protect him. I noticed a shiny trail spill over her lashes.
“My God, Charley. You told me, but—”
“I know.” I wrapped an arm in hers.
She hugged it to her and patted my hand.
I let her have a minute to absorb what she’d seen. To get her emotions under control.
The picture was, I believed, a trophy. According to Reyes’s sister, Kim, Earl Walker would take explicit photos of Reyes, then hide them in the walls everywhere they lived. And they were on the move constantly, so that could have been dozens of places. She said the pictures were blackmail, meant to keep Reyes in line. That could be, though I tended to think they’d be more like souvenirs. Keepsakes from his exploits. But why he would put them in the walls baffled me. If they really were trophies, wouldn’t he take them? Why leave them where they could be found—and had been, in Ms. Faye’s case—and used against him?
Then I realized that Earl probably wasn’t in any of those photos. They were all of Reyes.
In the picture Ms. Faye had given me, Earl seemed to purposely shame Reyes. That was the worst part of it. He’d tied him up and blindfolded him, though I’d had no trouble recognizing Reyes’s perfect form. His mussed dark hair. His full mouth. The smooth, fluidly mechanical tattoos along his shoulders and arms. The rope bit into his flesh. It reopened wounds that appeared to have been healing. He looked about sixteen in the picture, his face turned away, his lips pressed together in humiliation. Huge patches of black bruises marred his neck and ribs. Long garish cuts, some fresh, some half healed, streaked along his arms and torso.
I could never
erase the image from my mind, though I’d considered trying electroshock therapy just to give it a try. It would have been worth it. And yet I kept the picture. To this day, I had no idea why I didn’t burn it the minute I got it.
“I can’t imagine what his life was like,” Cookie said, staring off into space.
“Me neither. He saved mine tonight. He fought off a demon that was hell-bent on ripping my throat out.”
She tensed in alarm. “Charley, are you serious?”
“Yes. I’ve been so angry with him, but all he’s ever done is save my life. Again and again growing up. I’m not sure I have the right to be angry with him.”
“Maybe you’re not.”
“What do you mean?”
She bit down, hesitated, then said, “I know you, Charley, and I don’t think you’re really mad at anyone but yourself.”
I straightened. “Why would I be mad at myself?”
She offered me a compassionate smile. “Exactly. Why would you be? And yet here you are. As always. Angry with yourself for … for what? Because Earl Walker broke into your apartment? Because you were attacked? Because you couldn’t fend him off?”
I frowned. “You’re wrong. I’m not mad at myself. I’m great. I’m full of awesome sauce. Have you seen my ass?”
She threw an arm over my shoulders and squeezed. “Sorry, kiddo. You’re not fooling anyone except maybe yourself. So, what do you think about this guy who goes by the title of son of Satan? Any hope for him?”
She slipped me the picture back, facedown. I kept it that way. “There might just be. The jury’s still out.”
“Well, tell it to hurry. That guy needs to come around more often. He’s like a Brazilian supermodel drenched in sin.”
“That’s a good description.”
“I think so. But I have to ask: Why Apple?”
* * *
It was odd. Sleeping with Gemma and having Aunt Lil, even passed out in the belief that she’d gotten stone-faced drunk, in the other room did prove comforting. Not terribly, especially when Gemma started whimpering in her sleep or when she slapped me for being a pirate—that girl had issues—but enough to help me get some rest.
I still woke up pretty early, though. Partly because construction workers started their days earlier than God. But mostly because Gemma was rushing around, trying to find her pants. She was wearing them when I herded her to the bed, so I wasn’t even going there. But she kept running into things. Thank goodness I wasn’t terribly attached to that macaroni statue of Abraham Lincoln. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was still wasted, and I could hardly wait to see what Cookie looked like.
I hopped in the shower again, more as an icebreaker to the day than anything. Disturbing images kept dancing around my head: Garrett in hell. Reyes fighting the demon from yesterday. Cookie trying her hand at pole dancing. It might have worked had there been an actual pole, but I gave her extra points for her ability to mime it.
After dressing in jeans, a chocolate brown cowl-neck sweater, and old, faded boots that gathered at the ankles, I stepped out of my room to face another day outside my humble abode. It was too bad, really. These days, I liked the innards of my humble abode much better that its outtards. But there were cases to solve and people to bug the ever-lovin’ crap out of. I figured I’d start with Harper’s infamous stepbrother, see how bad he wanted her gone. Or to drive her insane. That possibility had been at the back of my mind for a while. He would definitely benefit with Harper out of the way. At the very least, his inheritance would double.
Wondering where Aunt Lil had gotten off to, I grabbed my bag and sunglasses and headed for the door. Unfortunately, someone beat me to it. A tap sounded a heartbeat before I reached the knob. I opened the door and found the last person on the planet I would expect to see gracing my doorstep.
Undeterred, I slipped my sunglasses on. “I was just leaving,” I said to Denise, the stepmother from hell. Then a thought hit me: Maybe Garrett never went to hell. Maybe he ended up in my parents’ house by mistake. That would explain the screams and the moans of agony.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked. “It won’t take long.”
Denise was one of those women that other people thought was sweet. She had a nice smile and a great sense of theatrics. But she was about as sweet as a starving pit viper in a basket of rats. At least to me, the step-fruit of her loins.
We’d never really gotten along. She’d started openly disliking me when I kept bugging her to tell me stories about her childhood, what it was like to run with the dinosaurs. After that, she’d give me these glares made of liquid nitrogen that could instantly freeze the best of intentions. I’d learned my most effective glares from that woman. That was something to be thankful for, I supposed.
With a long, taxed exhalation, I stepped to the side and invited her in with a gesture. She stopped short when she saw the condition of my apartment, and I secretly begged her to say something. Anything. Any excuse to kick her ass out of my apartment. I had to put up with her at family functions, and I did so willingly around Dad and Gemma, but not here. Not in my sacred space. She could bite me if she thought I was going to grin and bear her condescending glances under my own rented roof.
She seemed to recognize this fact. Her survival instincts kicked in. She recovered with a blink and eased farther inside, sidestepping a box and a pair of khakis.
Trying not to wonder how Gemma was faring without her pants, I led Denise to my living area—about five steps from the door—sat down, and offered her my best scowl. “What can I do for you, Denise?”
She sat cattycorner to me and squared her shoulders. “I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”
“And your phone isn’t working?”
She bristled under my sharp tone. It wasn’t like her to endure my attitude without a fight. Demureness was not in her blood. She must really be desperate. “You aren’t accepting my calls,” she reminded me.
“Oh, right. I forgot. So, what can I do for you?”
She took a tissue from her bag, took off her sunglasses, and made a show of cleaning them.
Finally, and with great care, I opened. I let myself feel the emotions coursing through her. Most of the time, I kept myself closed off. There was simply too much out there. I’d learned to control what and how much I absorbed when I was in high school. Before that, life had been … challenging. Especially around the step-beast.
Emotion rushed through her in spades, the worst of it like a lightning strike, knocking the breath from my lungs. Fear. Doubt. Grief.
Someone had died. Or someone was going to die. Those feelings were way too strong to be associated with anything other than death.
“First, I want you to know that I believe in you. In what you can do.”
So the woman who made my childhood—my abilities—a living hell now believed in them. Oh, yeah. Someone was going to die. Maybe it would be her, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
“Awesome!” I said, faking enthusiasm. “Now we can be besties.”
She ignored me. “I’ve known for a long time, Charlotte.”
She’d always refused to use my nickname. The gesture would make us seem close, and we couldn’t let that happen. Her friends might look down their noses at her.
“You have to understand that it was hard raising you.”
I couldn’t help it. I snorted. Loud. Then laughed. “Raising me? Is that what you call it? What you did to me?”
She ignored me my entire childhood. Unless I’d embarrassed her in front of her friends or was bleeding profusely, I was of no consequence to her whatsoever. I was nobody. Invisible. I was dust beneath her feet.
Not that I was bitter or anything.
“You don’t have children, so I don’t expect you to understand.”
I decided to share an anecdote with her to help her better grasp the situation. “Anyone with children should know, sometimes when you ask little Charley who broke the lamp and she says she doesn’t know, wh
at she’s actually saying is, ‘It was a guy with pale, see-through skin and bad hair who may have died from the blunt force trauma to the head but more likely bit the dirt from the multiple gunshot wounds to his chest.’ But that could just be me projecting.”
“Your circumstances were unusual,” she acquiesced, examining her sunglasses.
“Ya think?”
She bit back a retort and I almost smiled. I wasn’t sure when I’d become so cruel. She was clearly in pain. But payback was a cold, hard bitch. I’d have to be one more often.
Ever the stalwart soldier, she marched onward and asked, “Will you give me the message? The one my father left for me?”
I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open and I almost scoffed aloud. Now? After all these years she decides she wants to join the club and I’m supposed to remember a message given to me by a departed when I was in the low single digits? What the bloody hell?
“Okay, well, I was like—” I lifted my eyes to the big calculator in the sky. “—I don’t know, four or five, so that was how many years ago? Math isn’t really my thing.”
“Twenty-three,” she offered.
“So, I was four.”
“I know,” she said. Her fingers tightened around her bag. “But I also know how amazing that mind of yours is.” She looked at me pointedly. “Clearly you never forget anything.”
“You do have a point. I still remember quite profoundly the slap you gave me in front of the crowd at the park. And the time you dragged me off that bike at the beach. By my hair. And the time I tried to tell you what your father said and how you went ballistic on my ass, screaming at me as we drove to Dad’s bar.” I leaned in. “You spit in my face.”
Her lips thinned in regret. Damn, she was good. If I didn’t know her better, I’d say she was actually sorry for what she did.
“I was in shock at the park. What you did was—” She inhaled, then let that accusation drop and moved on to the next. “And your hair caught in my ring. I told you not to get on that bike and you disobeyed me.”
If the heat of anger could manifest outside my body, she’d have been nuked right then and there. A charcoal briquette in the shape of Hitler, because she really did resemble him in an odd, disturbing kind of way. What I did? How dare she.