Birds of Paradise

by Anne Malcom

  Enough not to smother her with a pillow as she moaned in her sleep. Enough to brush the pads of his fingers across the top of her hand as she wept during the nightmares.

  Enough, obviously, to make sure he would be the one taking care of her in the near future. Having Evan here was a risk he couldn’t afford. It was true his clients might never figure out their contract was alive, but he didn’t live on mights.

  Wouldn’t wager her life on it, either.

  “What are you talking about?” Evan demanded, crossing his own arms.

  “I’m talking about you walking me through the processes needed to care for her so I don’t require you to come here,” Oliver clarified, voice flat. He hated having to explain himself. Especially when people said things like ‘what are you talking about’ to feign ignorance or increase dramatic effect. Evan knew very well what Oliver was talking about. Evan was the only person breathing on this planet who knew Oliver. Who knew Oliver even existed beyond a name on an account and a reputation.

  Oliver had killed everyone else with knowledge of his history. Anyone who could hurt him and, more importantly, his reputation.

  Evan barely knew anything, but he knew enough to goad Oliver.

  He obviously didn’t know enough to realize that was dangerous. Life-threatening. The only reason Oliver didn’t kill the doctor was because he was discreet and not overtly asinine like the rest of the human race. Oliver might go so far as to say he liked the man.

  That didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill him in a heartbeat, if the situation required it.

  “I don’t mind coming,” Evan said, unaware of how precarious his grip on life was.

  “I do mind now,” Oliver countered. “So walk me through.”

  Evan knew him enough to realize protests were futile and Oliver had made up his mind. So he did walk him through. Oliver was surprised at how simple all the mechanical parts of it seemed. Removed from the creature in the bedroom behind him, they seemed almost as easy as killing a person.

  He suspected keeping someone alive was much harder.

  “But this isn’t an indefinite solution,” Evan said, eyes on the door. “She can’t stay like this forever. She’s near catatonic. Either you commit her, or somehow, by some miracle, she gets herself out of this.”

  Oliver narrowed his eyes. “Miracles don’t exist. Human will does. And she can get herself out of it. It’s a question of whether she wants to.”

  Evan regarded him. “What is it about this woman?” he asked. “You have no affinity for human beauty, and beautiful she is, even crumpled in your makeshift hospital bed. But you don’t do live beauty. You certainly don’t do the hero thing.”

  Again, Evan toyed with his life.

  Oliver stared at him. “This is the opposite of the hero thing, I’m not saving her. She’s damned. I might still kill her yet.”

  Evan’s brow quirked. “Might you? Because I think you just spent the better part of an hour meticulously making sure you knew how to keep her alive.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I’m prepared for all eventualities.”

  The shadow of a grin tickled the corner of Evan’s mouth. If it matured into a full-blown smile, Oliver decided he would kill him. “Are you? How about that miracle? If she does wake, lucid, and regains her ability to think without sedation. Thought about that?”

  Oliver didn’t answer him, just continued to stare at the doctor.

  Evan had been around Oliver long enough to realize this was the only kind of response he was going to get. “Okay, well, call me if you need me,” he said, lingering at the open front door.

  “I won’t,” Oliver said. “And you’d do well to forget you were even here. And if you mention a word of that woman, you’re dead.” It wasn’t an empty threat that imbecile thugs threw around on the street. It was a promise. Evan knew this too.

  He nodded once and then walked through the door, closing it behind him.

  Oliver turned, staring at another closed door.

  Miracles didn’t happen. He knew that.

  But he found himself struggling with the strange longing for one. But that was quickly squashed when logic restrained him, as it always did.

  What if she did wake?

  What was going to happen then? When he was forced with the decision of what to do with her. He couldn’t let her go, though he had the sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t go anywhere, not even with an open door, a full bank account and an empty road.

  She was broken. Most likely beyond repair. She was in no state to put herself back together, and he certainly wasn’t the man to try, though he suspected that there was no becoming whole again from this. She couldn’t go anywhere.

  So that was a problem in itself. She had nowhere to go but here. This was his nowhere. Only dead things lived here.

  Including himself.

  His choice was whether to make her one or to put a bullet in her brain.

  Elizabeth

  I woke up again and again. Sometimes screaming. Thrashing. Fighting against the arms that held me down, to escape their prison so I could somehow run back to my own. It didn’t occur to me in my terror-filled moments that there was no way for me to run back.

  Because that would mean the outside world.

  The real outside.

  The walls might’ve been threatening to swallow me up here, and I might’ve been near catatonic, but that would be worse than this.

  In snatched moments of lucidity, I realized that. I was literally and physically catatonic from what I assumed was the intense stress of being violently taken from my own environment. But that would be temporary, until death or life snatched me up. My symbolic and emotional catatonic state was here to stay.

  So there was no escape.

  And maybe that’s what made it worse in those fleeting but also painfully long moments of lucidity.

  Until the small prick of pain followed by numbness and not-so-blessed unconsciousness. Because it wasn’t blank and soft around the edges, my oblivion. No, it was a replay reel of my past transgressions.

  Horrors.

  Sometimes it was altered, the way dreams played with the past and hinted at the future. My daughter’s baby head moved as I held it against my chest, her eyes open but she was still dead, chest quiet. But she was awake in her death. Accusing me. Confronting me with my failure as a person. As a mother.

  Other times, I never was let go… afterward. I just stayed. He didn’t set my broken and battered body and soul out into the world that crushed whatever was left of me. No, he kept me. And he continued with the abuse. I didn’t need my dreams to play with that to make it more horrible. He did that plenty in the past to give the worst fictional nightmares a run for their money.

  So it was an alternating horror of sleeping nightmares and waking ones. The only difference was, asleep, I was scared, panicked and tormented. Awake, I was all those things, plus there was a huge weight on my chest, yanking at my lungs, pressing them together.

  I didn’t know which was worse.

  But he was there when I was awake.

  And he was terrifying. Unyielding and emotionless, sitting as still and hard as marble, regarding me with that empty stare, devoid of anything resembling emotion. Watching me battle through the past, escape the present and wrestle with the monkey on my back, crying, screaming, sobbing. All of this he witnessed blankly, as if he was watching a television show he didn’t exactly like but was watching because it was there.

  As if my humanity, my bleeding and shredded humanity, was nothing but an uninteresting sitcom.

  I hated him. Immensely. For watching me struggle without anything that resembled compassion. For putting me here in the first place, wrenching me away from the only place left on this earth that I felt safe.

  I hated him for making my eyes jump to him in both my moments of lucidity and madness. And the rampant hate, the heat of it, was something to cling to when I was captive to his ice-cold eyes. It was my anchor in the stormy seas of insanity, somehow stoppi
ng me from being swallowed by the depths.

  I hated him for that most of all.

  For not killing me. For forcing me to witness my life, feel all the pain that had been lurking in all my cells, waiting for my tenuous grip on sanity to falter.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t despise him more, he proved me wrong.

  I couldn’t have said how long I’d been there, lingering on the precipice of the abyss. Because not only had the abyss stared back at me, it had reached out a clawed hand and ripped through my soul.

  So there was no comprehension of how long I’d been like that, time was floating around me in pieces, no longer linear. Meaningless, really.

  Until now, whenever now was.

  Wakefulness, just like those snatched moments of before, came upon me. The room so stark in my lucidity that the sharp edges of every piece of furniture hurt to look at, stabbed at my eyes with their utter realness. Everything was solid, and it stayed that way, didn’t flicker back into nothingness with the prick of a needle.

  I’d never thought I’d notice the absence of pain. Not amongst the agony that was my constant companion. A drop in the proverbial bucket. But this small amount of it, I noticed.

  “This is stopping. Now,” a hard voice said. The sharp edges of every word cut through my temples, radiating through my pounding skull.

  I turned my head to the left side of my bed. My eyes wandered up the tailored suit, charcoal gray, the black shirt underneath, open at the collar, no tie. The column of his neck was vampire white, curved, slim and smooth.

  Pleasing to look at.

  As was the rest of him, cutting out the background, blurring it. This was something more than the furniture and its sharp edges. Just like his words, he was a sharp edge. It was like I was having a migraine and he was any form of light—looking directly at him made me flinch away in pain.

  Not that he was light, not in the biblical sense of the word.

  But I couldn’t close my eyes either, that was worse. I saw too much amongst the black. Memories crept up against the edges, my paranoia and panic electrifying the air.

  “You’re getting out of this bed.”

  Again, his words scratched at my head, at my closed eyelids.

  I snapped them open again. He hadn’t moved. Not a muscle. His hands were still at his sides.

  I inspected them.

  Large. Slim and deft fingers. Nails expertly manicured. Pale, like his neck, and just as smooth. The hands of an accountant, not a hit man. I’d always thought a murderer would have callused hands, stained slightly brown with the blood that would never quite come off.

  But then again, murderers, real murderers, were never stained with blood in the first place. You’d have to be human, with a soul, in order to have the blood stick, in order to have it confront you with the sin of it.

  His watch was classy, understated but expensive. It had multiple faces on it, which I assumed were for other time zones.

  I had been watching them—his hands—in stillness, so the movement of them jolted me. Especially when they were coming toward me. I shrank back into the bed, hoping it might swallow me before the beautiful and deadly hands made contact with my skin. The former didn’t happen. And luckily neither did the latter.

  The hands instead grasped the thick and luxurious bedding I’d been confined to, that I’d used as my shield.

  And they pulled it right off.

  My response was immediate. To the nakedness of my body without it, despite me being clothed. The empty air above me was swallowing me, crushing me. I curled into a ball, covering myself away from it best I could. I hated myself more than anything in that moment, even more than him. There was no pride, no dignity left inside me. When I’d chained myself to the rooms of that house he’d taken me from, I’d known, deep down. I’d just tricked myself. But the murderer yanking the covers off me, staring at me with cold and accusing eyes, yanked the truth from underneath the layers of denial.

  I was nothing.

  A shell of a human who couldn’t handle the air she breathed in, couldn’t handle the world she existed on.

  It hurt, the knowledge. But it didn’t make me move from the fetal position.

  I expected him to say something. To yell, maybe. To hit me. Drag me to the floor.

  Maybe put a bullet in my brain, I thought hopefully.

  He did none of those things.

  He just stood there. Even though my eyes were squeezed shut behind my clenched fists, I knew he was there. His shadow crept through the gaps in my eyelids, assaulting me with the chill of his presence. Of his stare.

  And he waited.

  For however long I retreated into the darkness like the coward I was, there were no sighs of impatience, no tapping of the foot, not even a rough exhale.

  And just like I knew he was staring at me, I knew he would stand there for however long I was clenched in that ball, bearing witness to one of the lowest moments in my life.

  It was one thing to break down into nothingness on your own. The shame of such a thing was heavy enough with solitude. It was something else entirely to have a stranger watch.

  Not just a stranger.

  Him.

  He was something much more than that. Than a stranger. How could the man meant to murder you be a stranger? He was closer to me than any lover I’d ever had—not that I’d ever had a lover—for the very fact he held my meager survival in his bloodless hands.

  Slowly, I uncurled myself from the ball, my muscles aching as they were relaxed from their tensed position.

  He waited, silently, as I pushed my lead body upward, struggling with the weight of it all as I sat up. He didn’t move to help me, didn’t even blink.

  The palms of my hands settled into the mattress, pushing at the soft fabric so my spindly legs hung limply down the edge of the bed, a few inches shy of the floor. They were covered in luxurious fabric, black pajamas I didn’t put on myself. The bones of my knees protruded through the fabric, skeletal, like it was encasing a corpse instead of a living breathing human. Though was I? Human? I didn’t feel it. A corpse was closer to the definition of what I was.

  I regarded my chipped toenails for the longest time. The broken threads of color, crumbled like whatever was left of my sanity. My eyes slowly moved upward to his thighs, the blazer of his suit.

  “I don’t know your name.”

  I didn’t know if I said it to distract myself from the crushing weight of his initial words and his obvious concrete resolve at getting me out of the bed, or if I really wanted to know his name. If I needed to suck up all the information I could about this terrifying, magnetic and lethal man. So he could fill the empty spaces.

  His eyes flickered with maybe the barest glimpse of surprise before they shuttered. “What’s the importance of knowing my name?”

  I blinked. “I think I’m entitled, if not required to know my would-be murderer’s name.” I paused. “My captor’s name.”

  He regarded me. Not in that absent sitcom way from before that had grated me so much. No, he gave me all his attention, and that was heavier than the air of the outside world crushing against me. “You want to know your captor’s name?”

  I nodded once, even though the motion was near impossible with the weight of his stare.

  “Elizabeth Helen Hades is the name of your captor,” he said, his voice smoothing over the name fluidly.

  My name.

  I frowned at him.

  He didn’t need me to speak to know what I was going to say. He merely stepped backward so the open door was in sight.

  “You are not my prisoner,” he said. “You are free to leave.”

  I don’t know who stared at me harder, with more accusation, him or the open door.

  Silence reigned, as it always did.

  But it was bowing to him. He was in control of it, the empty air; he could fill it up or take it all away at any moment.

  “You are your own prisoner. If anyone is the captor here, it’s you.” His eyes we
re razor blades, tearing through me painfully. “You are your own murderer too. If you hadn’t been hooked up to fluids, you would’ve died.”

  I bit my lip. Hard.

  Metallic blood flowed through my mouth. It relaxed me, that pain. I read somewhere that some people bit their lips because their bodies released a certain calming chemical with the gesture.

  The people who needed pain to be at peace.

  “Names are just labels other people give us. They mean nothing,” he said, watching my teeth move against my lips. “What changes when you know mine?”

  “You know mine,” I countered. “And it’ll give me something to call you.”

  His eyes moved from my lips to my eyes. “And why do you need to call me anything? I’m nothing to you, just like you’re nothing to me.”

  I stiffened. “If I’m nothing, then why am I here?” I asked, my voice weak.

  “Because this is nowhere,” he said. “And I’m no one. If you want to survive, you’ll remember that.” He stepped back. “And you’ll get out of this fucking bed. If you don’t, I will kill you.”

  And with that promise, as concrete as his resolve, he walked out.

  He didn’t storm, didn’t stride with the fury that lay behind his even words and blank gaze. No, he strode purposefully, calmly, closing the door quietly behind him, leaving the promise of my death over my head.

  I didn’t know him, so it made no sense to taste the certainty in his words. But sense had long abandoned me, just like hope and God. So I knew. If I didn’t get out of this bed I was going to die.

  At his hands.

  I just had to figure out whether I wanted to live.

  What kind of life awaited me beyond that door.

  With him.

  5

  I got out of the bed.

  It took a long time to build up whatever meager strength was left within me, but I did it.

  When my feet first touched the ground and I put weight on them, my legs collapsed from under me and I crumpled to the floor.

  I lay there for a long while, my cheek against the rug, toying with the threads, tracing the intricate pattern. My mind tracing around the idea of just staying there, letting my body wither away, decay against the expensive fabric of the rug.