Chapter 3
3
Operatio n I n vestigatio n
E va had stayed cowering behind the bar until a police officer found her and coaxed her out. After giving a statement she was barely aware of—she was aware she said nothing of whatever she’d seen, because what had she seen?—she was allowed to go home.
The cops had told her that, miraculously, besides a few cuts and bruises in the scramble to escape, there had been no casualties or serious injuries in the gunfire. It was as if the shooter had been targeting someone in particular—or four someones, like Ash’s brother had said.
Days passed, and Eva didn’t stop obsessing over that night. She bartended at Bootleg the next couple nights, barely paying attention to what she was doing until a customer yelled at her for mixing up his drink three times in a row. After getting sent home early, she collapsed on the couch in her apartment, petting her cat absentmindedly. She stared at the wall while images of gorgeous men with wings and horns danced through her head.
She’d always had a sense that she wasn’t quite normal. Sometimes it felt like there was something dark inside her, coiled and waiting for the day it would finally break free from its cage. Nothing in her life experience could explain the root of such a feeling, however, and she’d always done her best to ignore it.
But now, she couldn’t help but wonder... was this it? Was whatever she’d seen the catalyst for finally understanding that inexplicable lack of connection within herself? Or—unfortunately more likely—was the dark thing inside her actually some mental illness causing her to suffer from vivid hallucinations?
Annoyed with her constant obsessing, she scooped Thelonious off her lap, dumped him on the couch, and sat down at the grand piano that was her favorite part of her apartment.
The gas stove in the kitchen had to be from the seventies and the wood floors were all slanted one direction or another, but she’d demanded the lease the moment she’d stepped into the place and seen that piano waiting there. Apparently, it had been brought up decades ago by some determined tenant and no one had ever bothered to move it, which had made Eva a very happy camper indeed.
Her apartment was in an old factory building that had been converted into living spaces with a few businesses on the ground floor. Bare metal pipes snaked across the high ceiling, and the balcony was just a fire escape with a spiral staircase that led to a shabby, graffiti-ridden alley out back.
She’d covered the wall of windows with hanging vines and hung canvases of her art all over the walls. Musical instruments leaned in every corner or hung from mounts, and Thelonious roamed about the funky vintage furniture like he was the king of her castle. The walls were bare brick inside, and the big windows rattled when it was windy. It broke her bank to heat in the winter, but she didn’t care. It was worth it for the piano.
Unfortunately, today, even the grand couldn’t soothe her troubled thoughts. She stroked the keys lightly and forced herself to play a few chords, but nothing came out. She gave up on the piano and tried the guitar. Then the violin. She even tried the ukulele, for god’s sake. Nada.
Sighing, she found her little cannabis stash in the kitchen and rolled a joint. Maybe a mild high would calm her down a bit. She turned on her speakers and cranked up some old-school reggae. Yeah, it was cliché to smoke weed and listen to reggae, but she really needed to chill out, damn it.
Half an hour later, she was sitting on her couch with her sketchbook on her lap, filling up the pages with drawings of bat and raven wings, ugly gargoyles, and some luminescent angel wings too. She’d been sketching with the same fevered obsession for the past two days like she was hoping that if she drew enough of what she’d seen, it would start making sense.
After another half hour of that, Thelonious jumped on her lap, sat directly on top of her sketchbook, and looked at her.
“Hey,” she scolded, slumping back against the cushions. “You can’t sit there. I was using that.”
He blinked. She swore she could hear his disdain.
“Yeah, well you try dealing with the amount of confusion going on in my head right now and see if it doesn’t drive you to this.”
Thelonious flicked his tail.
She sighed. “You’re a jerk, but you’re right. I need to talk to someone. Enough wallowing.” She picked up the sketchbook and cat simultaneously and set them on the sofa when she stood.
It went without saying that as soon as she wasn’t interested in the sketchbook anymore, neither was Thelonious, and he leapt down and stalked away. Eva grabbed her phone from the coffee table and did what she should have done the moment she got home from the club two days ago:
She called her mom.
Her parents were not typical parents. They were simultaneously the most awesome and most embarrassing parents to have ever lived. To say they were hippies was an understatement. To look for anything remotely normal about them was an exercise in futility. And yet, Jacqui and Dan were the most stable, dependable people she’d ever met, and she wouldn’t have traded them for the world.
The phone rang a few times before her mom answered. “Eva, baby, how are you?” She sounded distracted. “Hold on, let me just grab my robe.” She moved the phone from her ear and called out, “Eva’s on the phone, honey! I’ll be right back!”
“What are you guys doing?”
“Oh, well, you know that photographer friend we made at the art show in Paris last spring? The one doing that nude series called Real Bodies ?”
“Yes...” She was starting to regret asking.
“Well, your dad and I thought we would contribute some—”
“Say no more! I’ve heard enough. And please do whatever it takes to ensure I never have to view those photos.”
“Sure, honey, but they’re just bodies. We all have them. It’s wrong how our society has taught us to recoil from the sight of our own skin unless we’re shaped like an underfed model who has to maintain an unhealthy exercise regime to—”
“Mom, I know.”
“Right, sorry. What did you want to talk about?”
“You know that club I DJ at once a month?”
“Of course. How’s that going?”
Weird though her parents were, they were also very successful artists. When not traveling around the world, showing their work at major galleries, they lived in a gorgeous oceanfront house on Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Columbia.
Montreal was a long ways away, but Eva had dreamed of being a musician since she was a girl, and in her opinion, there was no better place to be in Canada. After high school, her parents had encouraged her to follow her passions, so she’d moved a few years later. She’d been there seven years now and didn’t dream of leaving, though she missed her parents. Luckily, they were free to travel a lot because of their work, and they saw each other at least once a year.
“It’s great. But um...” Damn, she should have told them about the gunfire incident right after it happened. It wasn’t like they would have found out on their own—getting her parents to read the news was like trying to give Thelonious his deworming medicine. “There was actually a sort-of shooting at it last weekend.”
A pause. “A what ?”
“Yeah.”
“A shooting? In Montreal? What is happening! Are you okay? I can’t believe this—”
“It wasn’t that bad, Mom. Not one was hurt.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Like I said, no one was hurt. Some idiot just fired a gun in the club ”
“Thank god. You should talk to Skye. Or better yet, Maureen’s daughter is a great counselor, and she does phone sessions. I could put you in touch—”
“I don’t need a counselor. I’m fine, really.” I think . “That’s not why I called. Well, I wanted to tell you about that, but I actually need advice on something else.”
“Sure, honey, what is it?” Jacqui sighed. “I can’t believe my daughter survived a club shooting. What is this world coming to?”
“Do you...” Eva winced. Thank god she’d smoked that joint or she never would’ve been able to say this out loud. “Do you believe in supernatural stuff? Ghosts, demons, that sort of thing?”
“Oh, sure,” Jacqui answered without hesitation. “It’s silly to think that what we experience with our senses is the only thing that’s out there. As I always say, we don’t know what we don’t know.”
“Right.” Eva debated what to say next.
“Why? What happened?”
“I... met a guy.”
“Really?” Now her mom sounded excited. “Where did you meet him? What’s he like?”
“We only met once, and then some weird stuff happened, and now I don’t know what to think.”
“Oh, is he a vampire? They’re very sexy these days. No one thinks they’re evil anymore, so don’t worry about that. They’re just misunderstood, of course.”
“I can’t believe you sometimes. Vampires?” Eva scoffed and then stopped dead. She was about to ask her mom if she thought it was possible to have red skin and horns. Why wouldn’t vampires be real? Oh god, were they real?
“Well, you never know. I’ve seen a lot in my day, and I wouldn’t be surprised. You know I once met a real witch?”
“Really,” Eva drawled sarcastically, and then she froze again. Were witches real? “What about demons?”
“Everyone knows demons are real.”
“They do?”
“Of course. Why? Did you meet one? Are you in danger?”
“I—I don’t think so. I think I may have hallucinated one, though. Or a few. I still don’t understand what I saw, but it’s been driving me nuts for two days and I needed to tell someone.”
“You can tell me anything any time. What did you see?”
She took a breath and then blurted out the entire story from start to finish. “Please tell me I’m delusional,” she said when she was done. “I need to know I didn’t actually see what I think I did.”
“Hmm.” Jacqui was silent for a while, thinking. It was something Eva loved about her parents. She could tell them anything, no matter how unbelievable, and they would take her seriously. They trusted her and were just open-minded enough not to immediately write her off. Some would say they were too open-minded, but it was something Eva had never been more grateful for than she was now.
“You’re right,” Jacqui finally said. “It’s important to figure out whether you hallucinated it or if it actually happened.”
“Should I go to a shrink?” Forget that she’d said not five minutes ago that she didn’t need one.
“I don’t think so. A counselor will assume you imagined it, no matter what. They won’t consider the possibility that it was real. No, you need to investigate this for yourself.”
“Okay, but how?”
“Did you make plans to see your mystery man again?”
Eva’s mouth dropped open. “I just told you I thought I saw him as a giant red monster, murdering an ugly troll thing! Shouldn’t I be avoiding him at all costs?”
“You also said you had incredible chemistry, and he was the most attractive man you’d ever met. And he carried you out of the bar and used his body to shield you from gunfire.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a...” She couldn’t even say the word. “He said his name was Asmodeus , for god’s sake!”
“That is interesting. I still think it’s important to investigate. You need to figure out what you saw or you’re never going to get past this.”
Jacqui had a point. Eva hadn’t been able to think or concentrate on anything in days, and it was driving her nuts. If she kept up this level of distractedness, she’d be fired from Bootleg, lose her ability to write music, and probably have to take up a career as an artist who could only draw bat wings and gargoyles and sexy men with obscenely long hair. “So what do I do?”
“If he calls you, agree to go out with him, but go somewhere public where you’ll be around other people. While you’re out, drill him with questions. Ask where he grew up, where his parents are, that sort of thing. Look for holes in his story. You might not need to see the wings again to figure out if you hallucinated them.”
“I probably did hallucinate them,” Eva said with a sigh. “There’s no way it was real.”
“Did you take anything that night, honey?”
“Mom!”
“Well, I’m just asking!”
“I didn’t take anything. My party days are long over, and I was working anyway. Can’t exactly play a set if I’m tripping on acid.”
“What about any other pills? Maybe it was a drug reaction. Or food? Did you eat any GMO products?”
“Seriously, Mom?”
“There could be chemicals in processed food that you reacted to.”
She did have a point. “I didn’t eat or take anything unusual, how’s that?”
“All right. Then we’ll stick with the investigation plan for now. I want all the details, Eva. You’d better call me first thing after you see him and tell me everything.”
“Fine, I will. If he even calls. Chances are high he forgot my number—he didn’t even write it down.”
“Honey, I’d better go. Your dad is nagging me to get back downstairs and finish the shoot. He says it’s cold, and the photos aren’t going to be any good if his balls are shriveled u—”
“Mom!”
“Right, sorry. TMI. Call me, okay?”
They hung up, and Eva felt considerably better. Leave it to her mom to come up with a semi-reasonable plan to figure out if she was hallucinating or not. Anyone else would have told her to go straight to a shrink and start popping some heavy medication. Plus, she couldn’t help but notice the plan meant she would get to see Ash again, which made her heart race a tiny bit.
If he called. It had been two days, and so far, nothing.
It would be better if he didn’t, she told herself. Until she’d met him, her life had been normal. Okay, her parents were artists, and she was a musician who talked to her cat, so she wasn’t that normal, but she’d certainly never had any para normal experiences.
Which were probably just hallucinations, she reminded herself for the hundredth time.
Strangely, though, she felt a flare of disappointment at the thought. Even if the alternative meant that monsters were real, she supposed she didn’t want to believe that life really was as ordinary as it appeared, and that red-skinned demon men only existed in fantasy.
Maybe it was because then she would have to accept that she, too, was as ordinary as she appeared... no matter what that little voice inside whispered in her ear.