by A. J. Locke
Micah made a grunting sound. “Guess it will be hard to pretend when you’re the one who did it.”
“She was causing trouble for Selene, I took care of it. And as a bonus I got another anchored ghost. Things with that Marcus fellow did not go quite the way I wanted it to.”
“Why were you even following Selene?”
“To keep an eye on her and make sure the treatment was holding. I’m a scientist, I have to keep observing my subjects. You should be grateful I’m looking out for your girlfriend.”
“Only because you need her. Though you won’t tell me exactly what for. Or what else you did to her when you treated her.”
“When it’s time for you to know, you will know. For now just continue being grateful to me for saving her life. In fact I saved her life twice because that crazy woman was seconds away from shooting her.”
“I can’t believe Selene went in there unarmed. Or can I…”
Renton chuckled. “At least the mystery of who’s been planting dead bodies in her backyard has been solved.”
“And what of the man who was helping her?”
“I will track him down and make sure he’s taken care of.”
Their voices drifted off as they left the room so I could no longer hear their conversation. I felt like I was glued to the rock I leaned against. Too much was trying to cram its way into my head, and I didn’t know which horrifying truth I should settle on. What I had just learned about how Renton had really saved my life won. He had infused the power of other reanimators into my body to stop the Rot, which killed the reanimators attached to that power. And in order to stay alive he would have to keep doing it. My brain just didn’t want to fully grasp that knowledge. Right now people were already dead and it was to keep me alive. And Micah knew this. And Ilyse. How could they agree to this? In the back of my mind I knew Micah had done it out of love, but that did not make it right. And Renton had Cecelia’s ghost. What was he going to do with it? What had he done to Marcus’ ghost? So Renton was behind my car accident, and the purpose of it had been to get his hands on Marcus. I felt terrible that Marcus’ ghost had been used for Renton’s experiments, which had apparently gone awry. I could only assume it had something to do with that Body Regeneration project.
What should I do? What could I do? I took a few shaky steps forward. Renton was far from who I thought he was. He was a murderer and was doing some dangerous experimentation down here, though to what end I was terrified to find out. Micah knew far more about his uncle than he let on, and he’d been lying to my face this whole time. The excuse that it was done out of love was not going to stand.
I had to get out of here. And Renton had to be exposed, but in order to do that I’d need proof. I took my phone out so I could take a few photos but it was completely dead. The damn flashlight app had drained the battery. So there was nothing to do but leave. I carefully made my way out. It was dark now, which didn’t help the horrible, scared feeling that clung to me as I left this desolate place and headed back to my car. I didn’t know what to think or do. When I got to my car I spent some time bent over the steering wheel taking deep breaths to try and calm myself, but it didn’t work.
The easy thing would be to call Tielle, explain everything, and get Renton locked up tonight. But with no proof I would have a hard time convincing her that someone she worked closely with was doing the outlandish things Renton was doing. I doubted I could convince her to trek out to his secret lair with me. Besides, Micah and Ilyse were involved as well and they would go down with Renton. The punishment for what they did would be extremely severe. Renton I could give a shit about, but despite the fact that I was incredibly angry at Micah and Ilyse, I didn’t want them in Tielle’s clutches.
So what should I fucking do? Step one would be to get out of here. If this neighborhood was seedy by day, I didn’t want to see what it was like at night. I drove off, not wanting to head home because I knew eventually I’d have to face Micah, and I knew it would not go well.
But avoiding confrontation wasn’t going to help anything. Who knew if he would even come over tonight since he supposedly had to go steal some more reanimation power for me? I could not get over the sick feeling sitting in my stomach over what was inside my body and what it was doing to other people.
Once I got home, I plugged my phone in to charge and turned it on. It started ringing while I was feeding Luna but I ignored it because if it was Micah I wasn’t ready to speak to him. After a few minutes it rang again, and when it rang for a third time I finally went to see who was calling. It was Ethan, so I answered.
“Hey, Ethan, sorry, I wasn’t ignoring your calls, I was taking care of Luna.” My voice sounded somewhat normal, good for me. I dropped onto the sofa and lay my head back. I waited for Luna to pounce all over me but she was dozing on her doggy bed.
“Selene? You’re alive? You’re OK? Thank goodness. I was freaking out!”
“Not sure if I’m OK, but of course I’m alive. Why wouldn’t I be?” I raised my head and leaned forward, frowning slightly.
“Because I can’t feel you, at all,” Ethan said. “I can’t feel our connection so I thought you might be…”
“What?” My frown deepened.
“I know the Rot and probably even the treatment affected whether or not you felt me but for me you were always there, then suddenly I started to feel you less, than not at all…”
“How is that possible? Why would that suddenly happen?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not the only thing that’s happened. I’m not tangible anymore. I haven’t been solid for a few hours. Our neighbor is a retired necromancer so I’m at his house. He doesn’t have energy runes but he dialed you for me.” To say Ethan sounded panicked was an understatement.
“What the hell.” I dropped my head back again and released a huge breath. “More bad news.”
“More? What else is going on?”
“More than I think I can explain right now,” I said wearily. I had an intense headache. It was like my head was caving under the weight of everything I had just found out. But Ethan sounded truly distressed so I had to try and be there for him as much as I could.
“Is anything else going on with you? Do you feel strange, different, or are you just intangible again?”
“Just intangible…so far,” he replied. “But Selene, why is this happening?”
“Our bond…” I frowned. Ethan was made tangible by his bind to me, but had that somehow been broken? Did it have something to do with what Renton had done to me?
“Do you think it’s broken?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I know I don’t feel it either, but that’s not much to go on since I hadn’t been feeling it due to the Rot.”
“Maybe Ilyse will know something, maybe she can help.”
Did I want Ilyse’s help right now? “I’ll call her and let her know what’s going on. In the mean time just try not to freak out, but call me if anything else develops.”
“Selene, I want to come back. I don’t like being here with everything that’s going on.”
“And I think the safest place for you is right where you are. There’s too much shit going on down here.”
“Like what? You don’t sound OK and that has me worried. What’s happening?”
“Murder, lies, then some more murder and lies.”
Ethan gasped.
I sighed. “I’ll give you details later, promise. Right now I just need to lie down. My head is aching.”
“OK…” He sounded uncertain, and I knew he didn’t want to hang up.
“I will call you soon, OK?”
“All right, talk to you later.” We hung up, and I wearily dragged myself into the shower then to the kitchen to look for something to eat, all the while wondering about this new development with Ethan and what it could mean. I had no answers for anything, and I felt tired and sick with having to deal with all of this.
My phone buzzed with a text message. Micah. He was ap
ologizing for having to work late but was coming over. He said he missed me. I felt hollow, like my emotions had been riding high for so long that now I had nothing left. I didn’t bother to reply, just sat at the kitchen counter eating a big bowl of Frosted Flakes and staring at the front door. I had Luna in my lap; she’d woken up and decided she needed attention. After I ate I took her for a walk.
About fifty minutes after he sent that text, Micah knocked on the door, and I let him in. He dropped his messenger bag then pulled me in and gave me a kiss that I was unable to give him back. That was his first clue. He pulled away and looked at me with a frown as I extricated myself from his arms and walked into the living room.
“Selene? What’s wrong?” Micah trailed after me. “Are you feeling OK?” There was an edge of panic to his voice. He was probably wondering if Renton’s treatment was holding. Wouldn’t he just have to count bodies to find out? I stood with my back to Micah, and when he came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder I stepped away then turned to face him.
“How did Renton save my life, Micah?” My voice sounded alien to my ears and Micah’s eyes widened.
“Selene…” He took a step toward me, but I held up my hand.
“Don’t come near me. Just talk.”
He looked heartbroken. “If you’re asking me, then you already know.” He looked away and balled his hands into fists. His body was rigid with tension.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“Why?” Micah exploded. “What difference would it make now? You know. Did Ilyse tell you? I knew she wouldn’t be able to keep it to herself. Damn it.”
“So you were all in on it?” My voice was hard and flat and my body trembled.
“We did it to save your life!” Before I could stop him he came closer and grabbed hold of my arms. His face was imploring. “Selene, please, try to understand…”
“Understand? Oh, I understand perfectly!” I pulled myself free and paced away from him, running my hands through my hair. “You let your uncle put stripped reanimation power into my body, knowing it would kill the reanimators it was taken from. How could you do that Micah? That’s murder!”
“I did it to save you, and I would do it again a thousand times.”
The conviction in his voice stopped me short. My stomach churned at the look on his face. There was no wavering in his voice when he said that.
“I love you enough that I would sacrifice anything to save your life.”
“And anyone, right? Micah, there was nothing right about what the three of you did!”
“It wasn’t about right or wrong, it was about saving you.”
“And lying to me,” I added. “And that was perfectly OK with you?”
“Did I struggle with it at first when Renton told me what it would take to save you? Yes. But I’d be lying if I said it took a long time for me to agree to it. I watched you suffer for weeks, watched you start to slowly die, and knew there was nothing I could do but bear witness to it. I would have torn my own heart out if someone told me that doing so would save you. So when Renton told me he had a way, no matter what it was, I was going to agree to it.”
“I won’t do it again,” I whispered. “I cannot.”
“Then you’ll die!” Micah grabbed me by the shoulders. “Do you fucking understand that, Selene? The Rot will kill you. This is the only way to stop it.” His face looked manic. I wasn’t sure how mine looked. “You can’t stop,” Micah continued. “After everything that’s been done to save you. I won’t let you die. I won’t.”
“How can you expect me to live with this?” Now I was yelling, and I pushed him away. “How can you expect me to wake up every morning knowing that every few weeks people have to die so my heart can keep beating? How can you burden me with that?”
“You were never supposed to find out,” Micah said. “Ilyse and I were supposed to bear the burden for you. God, Selene, please…”
“No…” I shook my head, refusing to look at the pain on his face. “You made your choice to let your uncle do this, and now I’ve made my choice to do it no more. Whatever happens, happens.”
“If I have to tie you down and treat you, I will.”
I had never heard Micah’s voice sound so savage. His face was hard and determined as he faced me.
“I will not let you die. Not if there is a way to stop it.”
My anger shot through the roof then, and I grabbed the lamp off the end table and threw it at him.
“Get out!”
He dodged the lamp but didn’t move toward the door. I picked up something else, one of Ethan’s game controllers, and threw that at him next.
“I don’t want to see you, Micah. Get out of my sight!”
This time he stood there and let the controller hit him on the chest. I shoved him back, hard, almost making him fall.
“Get out. I won’t say it again.”
Micah headed for the door and snatched up his messenger bag before yanking open the door. He turned back. When he spoke, his voice was low and raw with emotion.
“If you love me even half as much as I love you, then you cannot honestly say that you would not do exactly what I did if things were the other way around.” He left before I could say anything or find something else to throw at him. I stomped to my room and flung myself into bed, having a long, nasty, body racking cry that only served to exhaust me further. All the while though, his parting words kept replaying in my head.
Would I have made the same choice for Micah? Deep down I was afraid of the answer.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I didn’t sleep all night. Luna, who I’d brought into bed with me, did the sleeping for the both of us. Not even my sobs roused her. In the morning I reluctantly got up and prepared another bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast. The sun was only now starting to rise, so it was extremely early, but I just couldn’t stay in bed any longer replaying the events from yesterday over and over. So I figured I’d get up and do it.
I had a lot of missed calls and texts from Micah but I wasn’t ready to talk to him. At some point I’d turned my phone off so I wouldn’t have to be notified every time one came through. That had been the nastiest fight we’d ever had, and Micah and I were no strangers to fighting. I dropped my head into my hands and squeezed my eyes shut because tears were threatening to fall and I’d had enough of crying. I hated every single aspect of my life right now, and the one person who I would turn to at a time like this was one of the biggest sources of my misery.
I wasn’t sure what the hell to do with myself. Going to work was out, there was no way I wanted to face anyone in that office. Renton was who I should be focusing on. It was definitely worse that Micah knew Renton was up to no good and didn’t do anything about it. Because somehow it all came back to me. Renton saved my life, so Micah was indebted to him and had to turn a blind eye to whatever else he did. I felt sick all over again. Then there was Ethan and whatever was going on with the bind between us. Maybe I would just crawl back into bed.
Or maybe I would stop sitting around feeling like shit and do something about the massively huge problems I had on my hands. If I was going to stop Renton, I had to build a case against him that went beyond revealing his secret lair, because I had a feeling he’d be able to talk his way out of it.
I needed to do research on Renton in order to prove he was dangerous. I stood there chewing my lip for a while, wondering exactly how I should tackle this, when Ilyse popped into my mind. She seemed to know a bit about Renton’s past, maybe she could help me delve into him a little more.
After I told her exactly how I felt about what she and Micah had done.
* * *
About forty-five minutes later I was sitting on Ilyse’s super comfortable plush sofa in her downtown Manhattan apartment. She’d lived there since before it was trendy to live in this part of the city, and though her apartment wasn’t very big it was cozy and well kept. I always loved coming here. Ilyse kept the air scented with fragrances that were not too
overpowering and had a very relaxing effect, much like her teas. Her artwork was eclectic and showcased that she’d done some traveling, and the fact that there were runes all over the place added to the décor in a positive way. Today though, I felt tense instead of relaxed despite the aroma and the tea.
“Selene?” At the sound of her voice I looked up and realized I’d just been sitting there staring into my cup of tea. “Are you all right?” Her expression told me she already knew I wasn’t.
“I know how Renton saved my life,” I said, voice low. “I know what Micah did, and I know that you agreed to it.”
Ilyse’s eyes momentarily widened, then sadness took over her expression. She put her cup of tea down.
“I’m sorry, Selene,” she said. “I fought hard to find another way to save you. I did not want it to be this way, but it was the only way. If we hadn’t done it, you would have died. How did you find out? Did Micah tell you?”
“I’ll recap for you. I found out Cecelia was the one who created anchored ghosts from Isabelle and Marcus. I tracked her down and confronted her, where she knocked me out and was about to shoot me, only when I came to she was the one who was dead. I used a rune to track her killer and came across Renton’s secret lair where I overheard a very interesting exchange between him and Micah.”
“Oh, Selene…”
“I understand that you and Micah love me and did not want to see me die. But now that I know this horrible truth, how can I continue to accept the treatment? I don’t want to die, but how am I supposed to live with this?”
“You weren’t supposed to find out…”
“It doesn’t matter! Being in the dark about it isn’t any better. It’s actually worse. That I could be walking around living my life, letting Renton or Micah treat me every so often but meanwhile people drop dead? That’s beyond terrible, Ilyse.”
“I know. I don’t know what to say, what to do.”
“Micah and I fought. I told him I would not do another treatment.”
“But you’ll die!”