26. Calliope
Calliope
Otto looks at me with eyes too wide. Too much white, just… too much in a way that creeps me out in an uncomfortable way. But I can’t quite place the weird. As though it’s a cloud that hangs around him.
His whole vibe is just off.
“Otto.” I roll the name in my mouth and instantly decide I hate it. And it has nothing to do with the fact he’s marginally attractive but weird.
“I like the way you say my name.” He leans heavier on the counter.
“Right.” Calypso grips my arm, her nails digging into my skin. “We were just leaving, Otto.” She practically spits his name.
I don’t have to look at my sister to know she doesn’t like this guy.
Which is fine by me.
“Oh but girls, we are just getting started here.” It’s the way he says it. The way his eyes drift from brown to amber then back again. The way he’s so fucking confident that sends warning bells to cascade in my head.
Calypso slides off her stool. “Danny!” He looks over at her, and she points to the bar.
“Go.” He waves us off.
“Free drinks.” I slide off my own stool.
“Danny loves me,” she says but her eyes scan the room, goosebumps prickling her arms.
Something is off, and I’m not picking up on it.
I don’t feel like I’m in danger. But then again there are days when I’m absolutely in danger and I miss it, so I’m inclined to take Calypso’s lead on this.
“Sit,” Otto says, and it’s so casual that I also miss the command simmering under his words until my ass is back in the chair. And to be honest, I don’t like that, I don’t like that one bit. “Let me buy you girls a drink.”
Calypso is still holding on to me, but she’s no longer looking at Otto. No she’s looking around the bar and the others in this biker gang. She must see something I don’t. A danger I don’t feel. Because she slowly sits back down.
“There we go, now that wasn’t so hard, was it, girls.” He snaps his fingers at Danny who brings more drinks and shots for us.
“Oh I’m okay.”
“Drink.” Just a word. One. One word and it sends chills to race through my body with no outlet, nowhere to end. So they race on a loop.
I face the bar, Calypso is still to my left, a buffer between me and this Otto guy.
She grabs the shot, takes it and drinks her chaser beer. All while glaring at him.
“You said you’re friends with Vex?” I twist the shot glass in a circle, feeling more eyes on me now. Between my shoulder blades, at the base of my spine, my forehead. My legs itch to run, to get as far away from this space as possible.
But I have to do it right. I don’t know how I know that, but I can’t just run away. I feel trapped by a pack of wolves, and I have no idea how to handle that. All I can do is watch, listen, and take my cues from Calypso.
So I grab the shot and toss it back, but I know what Calypso does when she’s around people she doesn’t know, she spits the shot back into her beer.
So that is what I do and hope like hell no one noticed what I did.
“Yeah,” he says. “Vex and I go way back.” Otto knocks on the bar top once, resting his head on his fist. “Almost became his brother-in-law as a matter of fact.”
“Oh.” I can feel my phone buzz in my purse where it sits unhelpful to me in this moment.
I don’t dare reach for it. Not with Otto’s eyes on me like that. Like he can see through the leather of my purse, through the case, through the screen itself.
“Vex’s brother-in-law?” I repeat, trying to keep my voice steady. “That’s... interesting.”
Calypso squeezes my arm again, a silent warning. I can feel her tension radiating through her fingertips. The dim lighting casts strange shadows across Otto’s face, making his features shift in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
“That’s right,” Otto continues, his smile widening. “Almost family. And family takes care of family, don’t they?”
I nod, not trusting my voice. The beer in front of me sits untouched now. My throat feels too tight to swallow anything.
“Now, where were we?” Otto leans closer, and I catch a scent that doesn’t belong in a bar. Copper. “Ah yes, I was telling you about Vex.”
My phone buzzes again, more insistent this time. I want desperately to check it, but I’m afraid to move, afraid to break whatever fragile balance we’ve established.
“You know,” Otto continues, swirling his drink, “Vex and I had a falling out. A shame really. But business is business, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I manage, my mouth dry.
Calypso shifts beside me, and I notice she’s angled herself slightly away from Otto, toward the door. Her hand has moved from my arm to my wrist, her grip like iron.
“So when I heard you girls were looking for him,” Otto says, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “I thought, what luck! I can help.”
We weren’t looking for him.
“With Vex, your almost brother-in-law.” It’s the almost part I’m hung up on. I knew he had sisters. I didn’t know how much baggage they came with.
“Almost brother-in-law,” he continues, and there’s something in the way he says it.
Like he’s savoring the words, rolling them around his tongue the same way I rolled his name around mine.
Except where I hated it, he loves this. “Your boyfriend’s sister almost married me.
Would have, too, if she hadn’t gotten herself killed. ”
The air leaves my lungs. Just gone. Like someone reached in and pulled it out with a fist.
I didn’t get the whole story. Only that she overdosed but Otto is telling it like something else happened, something I’m not privy to.
Calypso’s hand finds mine under the bar. She squeezes my hand twice in warning. Her nails are back in my skin, but I barely feel it over the thundering of my own heartbeat.
“I didn’t know that,” I lie, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect. Steadier than it has any right to be, given that my knees are shaking hard enough to rattle the barstool.
“No?” Otto smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. His eyes are doing that thing again, the brown-to-amber shift. I realize now what it is, it’s not a trick of the light. The color is actually changing. “Vex doesn’t tell you much, does he? About his family. About what he really is.”
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
He leans in and whispers to Calypso and I, “It’s because he can’t.”
The buzz I had earlier disappears.
“I need to use the restroom.” I smile and slide off my stool, my head swimming. I lock down the facts about Vex, I’ll ask him about those later. But I have to get to later first. “I think I drank too much and need to puke now.”
“Of course.” He chuckles. “Go, I know how hard it is for your kind to hold it.”
Okay, what the fuck.
I blink at him and move toward the back.
“Yeah, I’m not letting her go alone.” Calypso gathers her things but Otto reaches out grabbing her wrist. My heart drops through me, to the floor.
But Calypso is Calypso. Unhinged and insane and I love her.
She leans in and whispers something to him that he actually rears back from like she slapped him.
Slapped with words, that’s a new one for me. Then she turns to me, anger rolling off her in waves.
Focusing I beeline past the tables and pool tables where every one of Otto’s friends watches.
We get to the bathroom where Calypso shoves me inside and she begins to pace.
I leave her because I do in fact have to pee and there’s a perfectly good window I plan to climb out of. Finished I find Calypso still pacing before glaring at the window then the door.
Washing my hands I finally ask, “What’s the plan?”
She slaps a hand over my mouth and shakes her head. “Shh.”
“They can’t hear us,” I whisper back thinking she’s mad.
She shakes her head, fear bleeding through her pores. “They can.”
I look past her, at the door. Someone must be listening. Lingering. Maybe they have a glass pressed to the door.
Chewing on my lip I struggle to think of something.
“Back door?” I mouth.
Calypso shakes her head, her eyes darting toward the window. She mouths “Too obvious” and then points to the ceiling. I follow her gaze to a vent above the toilet.
“That’s our way out,” she whispers so quietly I can barely hear her, her lips barely moving.
I look at the ac grate. There’s no way we’ll both fit through there. I’m already calculating our odds when Calypso pulls something from her pocket. A small Swiss Army knife.
“Seriously?”
“Stand on the toilet,” she ignores me, already unscrewing the vent cover. “I know this shaft is big enough for us to crawl through.”
“Want to explain how you know that?”
“Absolutely not.” She juts her chin up. “Go.”
I do as she says, balancing precariously on the porcelain seat while she works. The screws come out easily, as if they’ve been loosened before. Well, that’s horrifying.
“Go,” she hisses once the cover is off.
I hesitate. “What about you?”
She shoves me upward. “Just go. I’ll follow.”
I reach for the opening, pulling myself up with more strength than I knew I possessed. The metal bites into my palms as I drag myself into the darkness of the ventilation shaft. It’s tight, but not impossibly so.
I hear a toilet flush, then she turns on the sinks, all of them. To cover the sounds of us trying to escape. Then she does the strangest thing. She grabs the air freshener and sprays it, everywhere.
Once I’m inside, I turn back to help Calypso, but she’s already hoisting herself up. There’s a frantic energy to her movements that wasn’t there before. Her fingers shake enough to tell me she’s honestly afraid of these men.
“Something’s wrong,” I whisper.
She nods, her face pale in the dim light filtering through the vent. “Go.” Her eyes plead with me, I swear I get the feeling she doesn’t want me to speak or ask a single question until we are out of this building.
I don’t like it, but I trust her.
I look back as she pulls the vent tighter then props the air freshener up so it continuously sprays outward. How… odd.
I crawl forward through the dusty vent, my knees scraping against the metal. Behind me, Calypso follows, her breathing shallow but controlled. The space is tight, forcing us to move on our bellies, and every sound we make seems amplified in the metal tunnel.