Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Ihate how I can’t hide the fact that being around Esme is a chore right now.
At least I can’t hide it from myself. I feel guilty about it, and that feeling makes me itch like no other.
But when Esme isn’t here, if she’s at work or…
wherever she’s been going lately, I feel a bit of dreadful relief that I don’t have to put up with her spiraling.
I don’t understand why she’s so upset. Alan is dead, and it’s been nearly a week since I killed him. Hell, she’s not even the one responsible. I was the one to do it, and even if the cops were to come knocking she wouldn’t be the one going to jail for life.
That would be all me.
Yoichi flicks out his tongue as he lifts his head from my shoulder, his black eyes bright and intelligent as he surveys my face. “What?” I murmur, gently leaning back against my old, comfortable recliner with my legs curled up under me. “What’s wrong, babe?”
Even for a snake, I swear he knows more than most humans. I reach out to stroke along the bottom of his jaw, and Yoichi continues to watch me like he’s giving me his own silent pep-talk or lecture.
I’m choosing to believe it’s a pep talk, and that my best animal friend wouldn’t turn against me and give me the disappointed dad look like Cassian would and did, even over the phone. I didn’t need his help three days ago, and I don’t need his help now.
Again I’m glad I haven’t told Esme about the USB stick or the ‘invitation’ I obviously ignored. If anything would’ve succeeded in breaking her, it would’ve been that. I can’t handle her worse than she is now, and that thought makes another twist of guilt to tie my intestines into knots.
“I don’t normally feel like this,” I sigh. “Seriously. I didn’t do anything wrong. I saved her, you know?” That’s what I’ve been telling myself. I just did it to save her, because the cops wouldn’t have shown up in time to help.
Right?
That has to be it. Yeah, that’s what happened. The more I remember it, the more I go over it in my head, the more I’m able to convince myself that it was purely in defense of my friend and not something…else.
Something wrong.
“I did nothing wrong.” I’ve been repeating those words to myself, though it isn’t guilt that makes my heart flutter when I say them.
I did nothing wrong.
Not this time, not last time. But if I go that far, if I let myself believe I had a reason and that I should just let it out sometimes, then what if—
A knock on the door makes me look up, and I glance toward the living room with narrowed eyes. I’m not expecting anyone, and Esme sure as hell isn’t going to knock.
Without putting Yoichi back into his cage, I get to my bare feet and pad to the living room.
It’s messier than normal, thanks to Esme’s spiral and her insistence that she wants to be the one to clean it up, instead of letting me help.
I try not to look at the pots and pans, the pillows, or the pile of clothes on the floor outside the primary suite Esme claimed a few years ago when she offered to pay more of the rent.
She makes better money than I do, and I’m not particularly picky, so it had been an easy thing for me to agree to.
I don’t bother looking through the peephole on the thick door. Maybe it’s something I should learn, though at this point, the only person who bothers me is dead and hopefully being gnawed on by marine life.
But a boy I don’t know stands outside my apartment, looking maybe twenty at most, and wearing an open jacket over an old, ratty hoodie. “I have a delivery for, umm. You?” he asks awkwardly, shifting from one foot to the other. “I-I was told to take this here. To this apartment.”
“Oh?” We stand there looking at each other, his eyes wide and face twitching.
It hits me then that he’s most definitely high and not actually a delivery boy or mailman.
The realization puts me on edge, and I glance toward the block of knives in the kitchen before I look back at him with brows raised.
Yoichi coils a little more tightly around my shoulders, and the boy’s eyes go to him, filled suddenly with appreciation.
“H-he’s a rat snake, right?” the boy asks, reaching out one trembling hand carefully, though he doesn’t actually pet the snake. “He’s got more white on him than I’ve seen before. My brother raised reptiles.” For a moment he looks completely sober until he flinches backward like he’s been struck.
If I were Esme, I’d bundle him inside, offer him food, and try to find someone to take this poor kid in.
But I’m not Esme, and I have enough problems of my own without inviting an addict into our house.
“Yeah. He’s a black rat snake. He just turned three,” I explain, deciding to at least be a little nice. “You said you had something for me?” I don’t know what he could have, but I hold out my hand when he digs around in the pockets of his heavy jacket.
“Yes. Yep, I—” He brandishes a manila envelope with a flourish, and my heart suddenly sinks when I see the curling script of my name on the front.
Sierra ‘Tova’ Morwen.
The last letter had just had my middle name, Tova, on it. Not my first. The sight of it makes my blood run cold, but I numbly reach out to take it from him. When I don’t say anything, the boy mumbles something and starts turning, but the one kind bone in my body has me calling out to him.
“Wait. Please?” I dig in my pockets, glad that I always have my emergency cash in my phone wallet. My fingers curl around the paper, and I pull out two twenties, which I hold out to the boy.
He freezes, looking awkward. “He…already paid me,” the boy admits sheepishly, though he has his eyes on the money.
“I’m paying you for something else.” The idea hits me suddenly, and I hold up the cash just a little higher when he reaches for it. “Tell me who gave you this.”
“Oh, that? He was…” The boy blinks a few times and looks around the hallway, like he’s afraid the man in question is going to jump out from behind the wall.
“He was sort of scary,” he admits, and shifts his weight from one side to the other.
“Tall. Like, over six feet. Fit, but not too muscular, you know? Black hair, dark eyes—he was Asian. That’s vague, I’m sorry.
But I’m not sure…maybe Japanese? He had a hood on. I think he had tattoos on his wrists.”
“Scary how?” I almost cut him off, my curiosity getting the better of me.
The boy doesn’t answer right away. He lowers his eyes and slowly shakes his head, brows knitted together.
“I can’t really explain it,” he says at last. “Just scary. He didn’t do anything like threaten me or get in my space.
He was polite as fuck. Paid me more than you are.
Sorry.” He glances up sheepishly, but I shrug.
“Thanked me and walked away like he knew I’d do it.
And I did do it. I don’t know why. I could’ve just taken the money, you know?
But there was something about him that made me think that would be a bad idea. ”
We stand there silently, with him staring at the floor and me pondering the information.
Finally, I lower my hand, pushing the money in front of his face, and he takes it gingerly before pocketing it with careful, slow movements.
“Could you maybe not spend it on drugs?” I suggest, knowing I won’t get that promise from him.
“I don’t know…don’t you think food would be better?
Or something warm to drink? It’s cold as fuck out here, kid.
” I’ve determined from his mannerisms he can’t be even eighteen, and some half-dead part of me feels bad for his situation, though I had nothing to do with it and can’t offer him a way out.
When he looks up at me, his eyes wide and guilty, I know he’s already trying to figure out how to lie.
But I sigh and shake my head. “Whatever. It’s not my life.
Thank you for telling me, and for delivering this.
His…uh, his name is Yoichi, by the way.” I gesture at my snake with my free hand, who’s happily resting across my shoulders like he belongs here.
“He’s pretty.” The boy glances around before shoving his hands in his pockets. “Thanks, lady.” He turns to walk away, then pauses, and I just barely notice before closing my door.
“He was scary like you,” the kid ponders out loud at last, turning to glance back at me.
“A little bit different, but not really. You both seem really similar, though I can’t really explain it.
” He doesn’t give me a chance to reply as he walks away, his shoulders up around his ears as he jogs back to the elevator and leaves me with more questions than answers.
Scary like me?
Once he’s gone, I head back into my apartment, already groping for the expected USB stick in the envelope. Sure enough, when I open it, the small drive and a card fall out into my hand. This time, I read the card first.
Meet me tonight.
Ten pm.
Where you dumped Alan’s body.
A chill goes through me when I read his name written out. Is it supposed to be a threat? Is whoever sent me this trying to remind me he knows about Alan, from his death to his identity, and could turn me in?
Probably.
The card goes in the trash in my room before I sit down on my recliner, legs curled up under me as I drag my computer up and over my lap.
“How many times do I need to watch Alan’s body dump?
” I grumble, jamming the stick into the side of it with maybe a bit too much force.
Sure enough, it shows a video file, and I roll my eyes before clicking on it to let it play.
Static flickers across my laptop screen, causing me to tilt my head in confusion. I don’t remember static in the other video, and—
Voices murmur, then the person holding the camera pushes open a wooden door to a small cabin. My eyebrows knit together in confusion, and I tilt my head until the door swings open enough that I can see the inside of the house.
“Fuck,” I whisper, just as the officers step inside. One of them gasps, and the camera pans to the television in the corner, where there are VHS tapes scattered around and a home movie plays on the screen.
And there’s a man on the floor who is very, very dead.
He opened the door with his wide smile and false concern. He held out a hand to me, not even asking why I looked so fucking wretched. Never questioned why I was covered in blood, or dressed in my pajamas with only a pair of boots and no jacket on.
“Come in, darling. You must be cold. I can—”
The video pans further around the room, then zooms in on the man lying in a pool of his own blood. There are claw marks on his face, one of his eyes is ruined and the other is wide, staring at the ceiling above with a look of permanent terror on his features.
“What the hell?” one of the officers whispers. “I know the neighbors said they heard screaming, but what do you think did this? Some kind of animal? His eye is gone. Literally—”
The other officer shushes him and I hear a noise in the video that prompts the officers to whirl around—
Initially, I was too out of it, too far in my fugue state, to realize what he wanted until he started trying to take it.
His hands on my arms had turned rough, and his fingers gripped hard enough to bruise.
The man had murmured in my ear that he could make everything okay, and he could make my problems disappear.
All I had to do was be good for him.
“Stop,” I’d whispered as that cold feeling creeped through my veins. “Please don’t. You don’t understand. You don’t—”
“I won’t hurt you,” he breathed against the shell of my ear, the air hot and moist and awful. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain, with my fingers curling around the shattered, bloody flashlight in my hand that he somehow managed to ignore or not care about. “I’m not the one in danger here.”
The little girl in the corner of the video looks feral. Covered in blood and with wide eyes full of nothing, she stares up at the officers blankly. The officers whisper something, but my heart is pounding too loudly in my ears to hear or understand.
“Hey,” one of them soothes. “Hey, we won’t hurt you. We’re just trying to figure out what happened here. Can you help us—”
The little girl screams.
And screams.
And—
I slam my laptop with cold, shaking hands and get to my feet. My movements are methodical as I walk around my room, putting Yoichi back in his terrarium before going to my closet to find real clothes.
My mind is foggy, and more than once I find myself confused about where and when I am.
The cabin.
My closet.
The TV playing home movies of other little girls around my age, smiling up at the man with wide, trusting eyes.
I need to check Yoichi to make sure he has everything. I need my keys, my phone, my—
As soon as I pick up my phone, it vibrates, and as if summoned by my sudden spiral, I see a text from Cass on the screen, like the kind of divine intervention that only exists in fairy tales.
“Don’t go down the well again, Sierra.”
I blink once. Then again. I stare at his text with eyes that don’t quite want to focus before checking the time.
Seven thirty PM is too early to leave, but I can’t sit around.
I can’t ignore this invitation, since whoever sent it has access to something they shouldn’t. I’m out of my room, dressed in joggers and a hoodie, before I really even know it. My sneakers are on and silent on the hardwood floor, but I don’t go to the door. Not at first.
Instead, I swing into the kitchen and open the drawer near the sink. Rooting around for a few seconds gives me what I need, and I shove the box cutter into the pocket of my zipped-up hoodie, my lips pressed tight.
I’m cold.
But it isn’t the bad kind of cold. No, not in the least. It’s the reassuring cold, the kind that helps me in situations like this.
Whoever is sending me ‘invitations’ and videos is going to regret it. I’ll make sure of that and teach them how to interact with people in the future.
Not that they’ll have a future after tonight.