CHAPTER 3
R iding the subway after work sucked. Riding the subway after having seen my dead mother at work was downright unnerving. Although Jayda had urged me to leave an hour earlier than usual, I’d stayed a bit longer just so I didn’t saddle her with all the work.
I’d never bothered to mention the hallucination to her, even if she was more friend than coworker. And the times I did talk about my mother’s death, I never bothered to mention the black worms in her mouth, either.
Mostly because I had a bad feeling they weren’t real, either.
According to Bee’s dad, Conner, my mother had slit her wrists that night.
The story went that Bee had eventually come out of her room to find me passed out on the bathroom floor and Mom in the tub with her wrists slashed.
She’d run back into her room and called Conner, and by the time he’d arrived, she was hiding under her bed shaking and muttering to herself.
The story had a plot hole, though. A void that’d never filled after years of trying to remember the details of that night. I couldn’t recall my mom having cut her wrists. Surely, I’d have mentally clocked such a gruesome sight in the timeline.
When I’d insisted that I’d seen the worms spill from her mouth, though, Conner had denied their presence and produced the coroner’s report.
There, plain as day, her cause of death had stood out from every other gory detail: severe blood loss due to suicide .
That was when I’d first spiraled into a dark place where I couldn’t trust myself.
A place where reality and nightmares blurred.
I’d followed up with our family doctor a few months later to ask about the worms, and he’d pretty much argued with me, telling me he’d never heard of such a thing.
Which made sense, I guessed, if I’d made them up.
A number of Google searches had failed to produce anything about the worms, too, and every medical journal I’d read on parasites had lacked the complications and progression of symptoms that I’d noted throughout my mother’s illness.
I had no choice other than to accept that I’d imagined them. Trauma could do shitty things to a person’s head, after all.
By the time I finally left work, I felt like I’d run a mental marathon. Still didn’t entirely have my wits about me, which made the subway feel different tonight. Scarier.
At just after midnight, the only route open was the red line, and aside from smelling like piss, it was sparse.
The only folks out and about were the junkies and bar-hoppers, a few of whom sat zoned out, or sleeping.
Covington wasn’t the worst city in the country, but it certainly wasn’t the safest.
The potent stench of urine, stagnant with the July heat, was only a minor distraction, though, to the turbulence still churning in my head.
The problem was, I didn’t sleep much. A vicious cycle, really. I suffered horrible nightmares that kept me awake for more hours than the average person. It meant that I sometimes saw things. And sometimes, the things I saw made it hard to determine whether I was awake or asleep.
Eyes closed, I took deep breaths, clutching the rosary.
When I finally opened them again, I caught the leering stare of an older man across the aisle from me.
Had to be in his late forties, judging by the speckles of gray in his beard and hair.
Pale white skin told me he didn’t get much sun.
Only one other woman in the car, perhaps sixty, lay passed out in the corner.
The other dozen scattered about the car were men.
My social anxiety came courtesy of my mother, who’d always shunned the notion that people were inherently good. In her eyes, everyone was a serial killer until proven otherwise, and somehow, a small bit of that paranoia had manifested in me over the years.
I released the rosary and slipped my hand into my pocket for the knife that I carried everywhere–even to bed. One I’d bought for myself a while back when I’d decided to work the night shift.
As if the older man sensed my unease, he lowered his gaze toward the pendant at my neck.
Strung by a black-beaded chain, the ashes inside made up the purest form of my mother–all of the disease that killed her burned away.
The urge to clutch it again, to protect my mother from his stares, tugged at me, but instead, I looked away, although I still felt the man’s gaze on me.
The voice overhead announced my stop was next. Relieved, I pushed up from my seat, and without looking at the guy, I hustled down the aisle as the train rolled to a stop. The moment the door opened, I dashed out onto the empty platform.
“Hey!” a raspy, gravelly voice called after me. “Hey, girl!”
Stupid drunks. I dealt with them at least three times a week, and I just wasn’t in the mood tonight.
I ignored him and kept on toward the staircase ahead, my whole body shaking, knuckles burning with the grip of my blade inside my pocket. A click of the button popped the blade open and offered a small bit of comfort where I could feel it press through the fabric against my thigh.
“Hey! Girl!” The voice was closer than before, but I didn’t dare turn to look at him. “Stop!”
Heart thundering in my chest, I ran for the stairs, and the moment I hit the first step, a firm grip of my arm jolted my muscles. Twisting around showed the man from the subway, and I swiped the blade out of my pocket, holding it with a trembling hand between us.
“I suggest you let me go. Now.”
He did, at the same time lifting my canvas bag up. “You left this.”
Eyes flicking to the bag and back to him, I stood dumbfounded. The tension in my muscles loosened, and I let out a shaky breath. I snatched up the bag, tucking the blade back into my pocket. “Thanks.”
The man’s bushy brow winged up. “Stay safe.”
At that, he hobbled off, back toward the platform.
Once out of sight, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Get it together, Lilia .
* * *
T he flashing marquee sign of the Luminet Theater cast a bright light across the sidewalk, as I made my way down Prather Street to the unremarkable door just past the theater’s entrance.
The apartment complex where I’d basically grown up most of my life, situated above the theater, had been built in the early twenties, when theater was booming in the city.
The building itself was something of a landmark in Covington–the place where the first known serial killer in Massachusetts had left his victim, a well-known actress back then, carved up in her dressing room.
In spite of its infamy and history, the building hadn’t been well-kept over the years.
Just wasn’t enough money to properly restore it, I guessed.
I climbed the narrow staircase, their tired bones creaking under my boots.
Not even the heavy scent of mold and mothballs could erase the odor of piss still clogging my nose.
When I finally reached the apartment, the sound of voices sent a pulsing dread through me, particularly when I recognized one of them belonging to Conner’s friend, Angelo.
He’d shown up about four years ago and stuck around like an ugly mole on my ass–the kind with a cancerous core.
“I don’t know, man. Those guys have ties to the cartel,” Connor said through the door. “I got my daughter to think about.”
My mom had gotten in touch with Connor for Bee, mostly, before she’d passed.
For the first two years of Bee’s life, he’d lived with us, until Mom had kicked him out and he’d ended up in New York, living with roommates in some crappy neighborhood.
A couple years before mom got sick, he’d agreed to move back in with us, to help out and attempt to establish a relationship with his daughter.
Considering I wasn’t an adult at the time she died, we would’ve probably gotten thrown into foster care, since my mom didn’t have any family that I knew of.
Conner was an absolute jerk at times, but at least he’d kept us together, for the most part.
“It’s a fucking grand. Look around,” Angelo spat back. “You’re not exactly living the high life here.”
Sometime after Mom had died, the two of them went into some covert business together that Conner claimed was nothing more than selling scrap metal they’d scrounged.
I didn’t buy that for one second, not since the time I’d watched the two of them beat the shit out of a guy in the back alley of our apartment.
Any time I brought it up, though, an argument would ensue, always ending with Conner telling me to mind my own business.
I didn’t like it, and I sure as hell didn’t like Angelo. The guy was a creep sundae with a rotten, moldy cherry.
Frowning, I entered the small apartment and found Angelo kicked back in one of the kitchen chairs, while Connor chugged a beer beside him.
Conner straightened, likely surprised to see me home a half-hour earlier than usual. “Hey, Lil, what’s going on?” Just a few years shy of forty, Conner was a mess, with his grease-stained hands and shirts courtesy of the auto shop where he’d worked the last six years.
His friend, on the other hand, came a bit tidier, but carried an odor that reminded me of freshly churned dirt mixed with a hardware store.
As he sipped his beer, Angelo’s beady black eyes tracked me to the opposite corner of the room, where I kept my distance.
“Had a maintenance issue at work.” Glancing between Connor and Angelo, I pulled my bag up higher onto my arm. “Found a dead rat in one of the restrooms.”
“Nice.” Conner snorted and downed another long swill.
“Surprised you didn’t bring it home for dinner,” Angelo said, his lip only half curved with a smile.
“Had I known you were going to be here, I would have.”
His lip twitched. Angelo didn’t like to be challenged, particularly if it made him look like a fool. “Think your daddy needs to do something about that smart mouth of yours.” The implication in his words had me swallowing back my repulsion.