Chapter 22
TOLD YOU SO
I check my phone again, waiting, but there’s still no response. I messaged Aaron before Levi and I left the shop, telling him I got sick after lunch, but that I’d be staying at Levi’s for the night and would see him tomorrow at work. That was nearly an hour ago. He hasn’t even read it yet.
The days between watching Dara flee our house and getting the news she was dead flit back to me, filled with unanswered calls and texts.
How quiet the house had become in her absence, how heavy.
Every breath laden with expectation, the very air fraught with memories and dread.
A silent countdown happening to all our doom.
“Something’s not right,” I tell Levi. “My friend Aaron, he’s not answering.”
He turns to me. “Aaron, huh? Is this a friend I should be worried about?”
“No,” I tell him. “Not like that. In fact, he’s sleeping with another friend of mine, Brennan.”
Levi’s brows lift with curiosity. “I’d like to meet these friends someday.”
“You will,” I tell him, but my confidence tanks remembering why I brought them up. “Provided Aaron actually replies at some point.”
“Maybe he’s just busy,” Levi suggests. “Give it time.”
I flash to Brennan sprawled across the hotel bed.
If he’s busy, I know who’s keeping him that way, but I have regrets about introducing Aaron to Brennan after our conversation at the Four Seasons.
Brennan’s still a part of this, which means Aaron is in danger.
But from what, I’m still not fully sure.
My head has become a swirling maelstrom of disparate information, all of it connected like the radial threads in a spider’s web, manifold paths crossing and recrossing, leading me somewhere I’m not sure I want to go.
But I’m too close to see the overall design, the spider sitting at its dark heart.
Is it Arla or the Fathom herself?
Levi lives a short ride from the store in a small three-bedroom home with concrete steps leading to the front door and modest Arts and Crafts details.
It’s cozy inside, clean enough to feel sanitary and messy enough to feel lived in, furnished with eccentric antiques like a French Art Nouveau cupboard and a red leather barber’s chair.
He draws the curtains and makes me scrambled eggs and toast, pouring me glass after glass of water.
When I’m still hungry, he makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
He wanted to take me out for dinner, but I couldn’t take the glare of restaurant lights or stomach sitting in a room full of people casually chewing their food as if nothing in the world were out of place.
We curl up on the couch to watch a movie, but before we can even get to the meet cute, I remember something Arla said. “You grew up learning Hebrew for prayers and blessings, right?”
He nods affably. “Yeah, why?”
“Is that similar to Aramaic?”
“They’re related, yes. And I studied a little Aramaic in Jewish day school, not because my family was religious but because my father and grandfather were trying to make up for the education my mother would have given me had she lived.”
“Do you know the word for gift?” I ask, expectant. Arla indicated that was the command she needed to produce the key to see the Fathom. I’ll need it if I’m going to get inside and find a way to let the Fathom out. Levi and I have been planning but I want to make sure I have everything I need.
“Hebrew or Aramaic?” he asks.
“Aramaic, actually.”
“I’ve studied Kabbalah as an adult. The Zohar—the central work of Jewish mysticism—is written entirely in Aramaic.” He smiles warmly. “Yahav means gift. Which is what you are to me.”
I lean in and kiss him hard, mouths and tongues groping as we peel our clothes off layer by layer, dig condoms out of a pocket.
Undressed, I straddle him on the sofa, burying my face in his neck, hiding my eyes from the light as I let him pierce me like a grounding rod, suck me back down to earth.
My skin ripples with sensation as if newly exposed, networked with nerve endings that have multiplied a thousandfold, so sensitive it causes me to gasp at every thrust. In the wake of seeing the Fathom, emerging changed, renewed, I am experiencing Levi, everything, for the first time.
Only more intensely and robustly than I once did, a tapestry of feeling I never experienced before.
And my mind is deliciously blank, all my attention focused lower.
The energy between us builds to a succulent boil, and I come hard and fast, shuddering against him as the orgasm grips me, and with it, vision after vision of a deep hole and dark water, the churn and bubble of something driving to the surface, the crest of fin and scales, hair and tentacles, and a scream behind it all that only I can hear.
Later that night, as we lie together in his bed, I wake and run my hand between his thighs until he rouses and pulls me to him.
We make love slowly this time, every second something to be cherished, every breath and touch.
Our bodies ache for each other, for a release we’ve only begun to feel.
And when we finally pull apart, it is all I can do to roll over, checking my phone one last time before falling into a sleep so deep, it defies dreaming.
But Aaron still hasn’t responded.
I FORCE MY eyes to open wider as I walk into the office, scanning the room for Aaron’s tall, lanky frame, his crop of dark hair.
He never replied to my text last night, never even read it.
The photosensitivity I experienced yesterday has lessened enough for me to drive to work after Levi dropped me off at my car, still parked near the store, but it causes me to squint.
Almost immediately, Calvin is in my face, standing a smidge too close, his breath a brew of stale coffee and cheap mints.
“Jude, so nice of you to join us. I guess lunch breaks are open to interpretation now.” When I don’t immediately clap back, he says, “Or should I call you Judeth?” His smile has his teeth straining so hard against each other, I think they might crack.
“What?” My heart lurches, does a free fall inside my chest.
“You heard me,” he says savagely. “And in a minute, so will everyone else.”
“Calvin.” I reach for my most soothing voice, the one I’d use when new animals came into the shelter, terrified and unsure. “We should talk. This has gone on too long. Let’s go somewhere, sort this out.”
“No,” he says flatly. “I don’t think so. I want to talk in my office. With Jessica and Doyle.”
David Doyle is our CEO, a man I rarely have the privilege of seeing, much less speaking to, being a low-level creative hire.
I should have left this job. I should have quit the day after I put that money on Sue’s desk.
But it would have made it all the more obvious it was me.
At least, being here, I’ve had something of a heads-up on the investigation.
“I’ve found some fascinating documents I think you’ll be interested in,” he says now.
“And Eric in accounting has provided me with copies of some very intriguing records. I believe Jessica has some footage to show us as well.” He gleams with spite.
“Did you know Eric and I spend Saturdays at the golf club together?” Calvin leans in.
“Between you and me, his swing is garbage, but he could never afford a membership on his salary.”
Heat rushes through me, but it’s not shame or fear this time.
It’s anger. I am sick to death of this man’s shit.
And I have much bigger concerns than Calvin’s embezzlement scheme.
Like finding my coworker who’s gone inexplicably missing (the story in the Seattle Star buzzes at the base of my brain stem) and breaking into my new friend’s penthouse to steal a century-old journal so I can release the primeval entity she’s keeping in her basement—without wiping this city and its surrounding coastline off the map.
“I’m not surprised,” I say dryly, something searing and sticky pumping through me, taking control. “You always looked like the kind of man who masturbates into a golf towel.”
Calvin’s face puffs out like an adder, a red wave creeping over it. “In my office. Now.”
I fold my arms, feign surrender. “Sure, if that’s how you want it. But you should know, this may not go well for you, Cal.”
He narrows his eyes and points toward his office, unable to utter a response.
With a satisfied smirk, I turn and march down the hall to his waiting door.
His clopping footsteps are behind me, feet punching down like the hooves of some oversize draft horse.
I don’t know what I’ll do to get out of this or where my assurance is coming from, but I woke up on the other side of the moon this morning, feeling stronger than I have since I was a little girl in San Francisco.
Whatever the Fathom tore open inside me has been knit back together in my sleep, stitch by painstaking stitch, into another person entirely.
Things will never be the same again. I will never be the same.
I am different today than I was yesterday.
I am new. And I am better than this six-foot lying sack of shit behind me.
And I’ll make sure everyone knows it. Especially him.
Maybe I did steal from the company, but I didn’t do it to buy expensive scotch or an impressive watch.
I did to help someone. One of our own who desperately needed it.
And if management weren’t so blind, they might have figured out a way to beat me to the punch.
The painting is another story; call it severance pay.
Inside, Jessica is waiting with David Doyle, seated before Calvin’s desk, my chair empty on the other side—the hot seat. Jessica’s laptop is perched open, ready to clamp down on my future and cut off the circulation.