No Rest for the Wicked
Krystal Jane Ruin
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2017 by Krystal Jane Ruin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
The Narcissistic Rose
www.narcissisticrose.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
No Rest for the Wicked/ Krystal Jane Ruin. -- 1st ed.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9986822-5-9
Cover Design by NajlaQamberDesigns.com
Created with Vellum
for my family, for listening to me ramble
Chapter One
In the cold silence of my room, I count the faded scars on the inside of my forearm—one for every lie I was told. Like when my father promised me that the faces in the shadows didn’t exist—that I was just crazy like my mother.
A few inches below my wrist is the last.
I rest my head against the polished cherry headboard. It has to be nearly four o’clock. Two more hours until sunrise. Five more hours until my second-to-last session with the hypnotherapist.
My eyes focus on the shadows in the corners of the room. Eight years ago today is when it happened.
All I see is their blood when I close my eyes—all over my hands and the oversized shirt I slept in. Staining the carpet. Painted across the broken coffee table.
So. Much. Blood. Why was there so much? It didn’t make any sense.
She can’t make me remember.
The old row house groans around me.
Two more hours until sunrise. Twenty-six hours until I can sleep at night again.
I wrap my arms around my knees and squint at the empty space under my closet door. The overstuffed tabby at the foot of my bed opens one eye and stretches across the purple floral quilt. She slow blinks at me and curls back into a ball.
Silence clings heavy to the walls around me, lulling me into a false sense of safety. My lids droop over my eyes.
A flash of red streaks across my mind, and my eyes widen once more and turn to my bedroom door. Inky blackness hangs in the air.
Two hours until my Aunt Tessandra wakes for her morning meditation.
My eyelids droop again.
A slender arm falls lifeless across the gray carpet in the house I grew up in. My sister’s arm. Vacant eyes stare up at me. Dark red stains her toasted-brown cheek. But she isn’t bleeding. Not a scratch or bruise on her. Where is the blood coming from?
My father.
I suck in a deep breath of cool air and run my hands over my face and eyes. They sting with exhaustion as they return to watching the shadows. I pull the quilt up closer to my chin, earning me a mew of protest from the cat.
A yawn rolls through me.
A scream echoes across the room.
My mother’s.
But she isn’t really screaming now, is she? No. I have to remind myself. The dead can’t scream. The dead don’t do anything.
Lucky. They don’t have to live with what I saw that night. Well, what my aunt tells me I said I saw when the authorities came and found me covered in blood—ranting, to hear them tell it, about the shadows that moved along the walls like snakes, taunting me with their soulless eyes. Whispering to me.
They whisper still on nights like this. Nights when I’m afraid. Waiting for me to call for them. Waiting for me to ask for help. But I won’t. I will never.
Never again.
The hypnotherapist would say that I’m imagining things. Hearing things. But I call them memories. Because I didn’t imagine my father’s blood staining the carpet. And my hands.
“It’s not your fault,” she tells me every time I see her. She thinks by telling me it’s not my fault, it will unlock the frozen images from my memory and free me from the past—give me closure.
It doesn’t matter now. I just need to get through this one day. Then I can sleep peacefully until this time next year.
Tonight the shadows are silent. They’re trying to trick me into letting down my guard. Memories tug at the frayed ends of my mind, insistent and unbidden—trying to convince me that I remember more than I’m willing to admit.
I’m willing to remember nothing.
Sleep drags at my lashes, pulls on my shoulders. But the threat of seeing crimson again keeps me upright.
A singing bird, somewhere on the other side of my curtained window, trills a few notes into the damp, frost-bitten air, heralding the approaching sunrise.
Finally, I reach over and turn my alarm clock away from the wall. The small, blue numbers read 5:45. Relief trickles up through my veins. It’s later than I thought. Or perhaps I’ve just been staring into the corners for that long.
My shoulders sag. All at once I feel foolish and angry at the same time.
But I still won’t close my eyes. Not willingly.
Not until the sun rises.
Chapter Two
Kalin Wray wakes me up by slapping me across the ass with a wet towel. The shock of it barely registers through the thick haze of sleep around me.
“What are you doing?” she snaps.
I lift my head, a task made more difficult by the fact that my head appears to have gained ten pounds of fluid in the few short hours that I’ve slept.
“You need to be at Renali’s office in fifteen minutes.”
“Cancel it.” I pull the quilt over my head.
My roommate slaps me again, this time across the back. The quilt pads most of the blow, but I cry out anyway.
“Ow!”
“This is why you can’t live on your own.” She tugs at the quilt. “Freaking twenty-one years old, and you need a babysitter.”
I sit up with a groan and rub at my eyes. “What crawled up your butt this morning?”
She scowls and scoops her fat cat into her arms. “Early client got on my nerves.” She buries her face in the cat’s gray fur and kisses it before dumping it to the scratched hardwood. “Get up. I’m driving you.”
My feet feel like sand as I swing them over the edge of the bed and touch them to the floor.
“Didn’t sleep again?” Kalin moves across the room to pick through my closet.
“Obviously.”
She throws a black tank top and a long, multi-colored, layered skirt onto the chair by the window and gets to making up my bed.
“It’s
twenty degrees outside.” I pull on the tank top anyway.
“It’s eighty, and it’s humid, and the air conditioning is broken in the back.”
“Well, crap.”
“We have a couple of fans going, but it’s barely enough.” She checks the ends of her neat, stick-straight auburn hair and frowns down at the invisible flaws.
I slip my feet into some jeweled flats, throw on some silver bangles, and run a brush a few times through my thick waves before twisting the waist-length locks into a low side ponytail.
She fluffs the pillows on my bed and steps back, satisfied. “I made you a sandwich. You can eat it on the way.”
“Awesome.”
She stops downstairs in the kitchen we share with my aunt and her daughter, Gretchen, and presses a warm paper towel bundle into my hands. The scent of toasted bread and melted cheese drifts up to my nose.
“Oh, wow! Still warm.” I beam at her. “You’re the bestest.”
“Shut up,” she says, laughing. She ushers me outside and locks the door behind us. We pile into her rusted blue hatchback, and after a couple of false starts, the old car finally sputters to life, coughing exhaust onto the pebbled driveway.
“You’re going to get arrested by the environmentalists one day,” I say before biting into my sandwich.
She slides a pair of sunglasses on. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Golds and reds blur past the windows on the quick drive. And as the car groans up the last steep hill that drops down to the shop, I wonder if this is the day the car dies and rolls back onto the car behind us.
Dr. Renali Willox’s office is in the same crusted building as my aunt’s store. A hypnotherapist’s office and a crystal shop that gives readings out of the back are both nestled together within walking distance of Asheville’s historic Riverside. It’s good for business being so close to the cemetery. Especially in the fall. People always want to stop by and play with the psychics after their ghost tour.
After parking in the back lot, Kalin disappears into Tessandra’s shop, and I, begrudgingly, drag myself into the hypnotherapist’s waiting room. Overstuffed pea-green pillows line the overstuffed seafoam-white sofas in the small space.
One other woman is in the room, older, probably mid-thirties. Brown hair hangs neat and straight behind her shoulders. Her light-colored eyes skim over my outfit and a grimace presses into her lips. She doesn’t make eye contact and goes back to staring at the magazine in her lap – Yoga Journal – pretending to read and doing a right bad job of it. She doesn’t even bother to turn the page.
Dark circles press around her eyes, though I can tell she’s tried to cover them with makeup. Her shoulders sag under the freshly ironed seams of her blouse. She seems uncomfortable. And slightly desperate. She shifts under my gaze and swallows hard. Nervous tension clings to her like a second skin.
Lighthearted laughter travels down the stairs.
Renali’s office is on the first floor, but she rents out the top space to a couple of yoga instructors.
A large tanned hand slides down the railing and pauses for a moment, keeping the owner just out of view.
“Thank you so much for stopping by on such short notice.” Renali’s voice dissolves into some age-inappropriate giggles.
My turn to grimace.
“Nonsense,” says the owner of the hand. “You’re keeping a roof over my head.” Emmerick Wolfangel, the drifter currently taking up residence in my aunt’s basement, steps down into the waiting room and stops when he sees me. Dark blond hair, slightly wavy and a little wild, hangs just above his collar. He’s been here for three weeks, but he acts like he’s lived here all his life.
I turn and stare at the painting to my left. A too-pink lotus flower floating in a too-blue pond. I hate this painting.
“Well, I’m going to head out and get some supplies,” Emmerick says. “I’ll have that ceiling patched up by lunch.”
“You’re my hero. Really.” Renali’s voice drips syrup. I dare a peek out of the corner of my eye and see her squeezing his bare forearm—strong from working with his hands and dusted with golden hair. She leans into him some, and being quite shorter, she rises up slightly on her tiptoes to take a playful swipe at the light scuff along his jawline.
Oh, please. I suppress the urge to roll my eyes.
The door jingles, and I turn to face Renali.
Nope. Not Renali. Emmerick holds the door open for one of the yoga instructors. He hangs half in the doorway after she passes, a lopsided grin plastered across his face as he tries to catch my eye.
“Give me five minutes,” Renali drawls, snapping her fingers to get my attention.
“Sure.” Whatever.
“Hi, Tatum,” Emmerick says.
I give him a tight smile and a nod and resume staring at the lotus flower.
“That’s it?” he says. “You’re not gonna speak to me today?” He abandons the door and walks over to my sofa. “Hi,” he says again, nudging my sparkly shoe with his dusty boot.
I bite down on my lip to keep from smiling and stare hard at the little ripples in the painted pond. He slides down onto the cushions and leans over until his shoulder is touching mine. God, he smells good. Like sawdust and something spicy. The heat from his body spreads down my arm. It feels good because it’s freezing in here, but I lean into the arm of the couch and pull my shoulder in closer to my body.
“Aren’t you busy?”
“Extremely,” he says, his voice low. He flicks my ponytail. “Can I get a reading later?”
“I don’t do charity.”
He laughs at this. “I’ll pay you.”
I look at him over my shoulder. “With what money?”
“I didn’t say I’d pay you with money.”
I push him over to the other side of the couch. “Go away.”
“Yes, but your eyes say, ‘stay.’”
A smile breaks over my face before I can stop it. “You need to shave.”
He rubs a hand along his jaw. “This old thing? I know you love it.”
Renali sways into the waiting room and taps the thirty-something on her shoulder. “Evangeline, start the relaxation techniques we talked about. I should be able to squeeze you in for a quick session after this next appointment.” Her eyes dance back and forth between me and Emmerick for a moment. “Tatum.”
Emmerick and I stand up at the same time.
Miss thirty-something scrunches up her face.
“See you later,” he says with a grin. He strolls towards the door, and I follow Renali down the hall.
“What’s her problem?” I say as I step into the small, dimly lit room Renali calls her office.
Renali closes the door. “She’s one of those boring normal people.” She brushes her dark bangs off of her forehead and gestures for me to lie down on the stiff tweed sofa against the wall. She takes her place across from me in a matching chair wide enough to sit five small children.
Once I’m as comfortable as I’m going to be, she crosses her legs and folds her hands on top of her knee.
I’ve never realized how dark it is in here before. Shadows stretch along the neutral painted walls, long and wide. My spine stiffens. I’ve also never noticed how quiet it is in here. There’s only the faint buzz coming from the lava lamp behind my head. It throws eerie blue light and shadows that slide lazily along the wall, making me feel like I’m underwater and in a cave.
Renali frowns at me for several seconds, lightly creasing the faint lines around her mouth.
“What?” I peel my eyes away from the walls.
“Are you going to cooperate with me today?”
“Sure.”
She sighs. “Just close your eyes.”
I hesitate for a moment before complying. I’ve never had a session on the day before. Instantly, dark hair matting in a pool of blood fills my vision.
A door crashes in. My father is shouting.
I open my eyes and sit up. “I—”
“Lay back
down.” She holds her gaze steady on my face.
Confusion trickles down my forehead. It’s the middle of the day…Something is wrong; I shouldn’t be seeing anything. “Renali—”
“We only have two sessions left. If nothing happens today or next week, I’ll leave you alone.” She reaches over and pushes me back into the hard cushion. Orange-polished nails dig into my shoulders, and her chin-length bob brushes against the side of her face. “I’m only asking you to be open and receptive to treatment.”
“I am.”
Her large amber eyes narrow as she studies my face. “You look like crap.”
“Thanks.”
“Why didn’t you sleep last night?”
I shrug. There’s no point in pretending like I did.
She reaches for her clipboard on the desk behind her. “Tessandra tells me you refuse to sleep this time every year. Are you remembering something?” She scratches the tip of her perfect nose with her pen. “Tatum?”
“I’m just…not tired.”
She scribbles something on her board and places it back on her desk. Dipping her head to the side, she says nothing and watches me for a little while longer.
There’s a tan line on her ring finger. Just three weeks since her third divorce in seven years. Not that she was ever all that broken up about them. Divorce settlements have made her wealthy enough to move her practice into a larger office and in a more affluent part of town. But she and my aunt have been like sisters their entire lives, since they were children together in Turkey.
“Upon our last session,” she says, breaking the silence at last, “Tessandra has asked me to make a recommendation based on your mental status.” When I don’t respond, she straightens out the wide hems of her beige pants and continues. “Your age doesn’t entitle you to freedom.”
“I told you,” I say. “It’s just not working.”
“I don’t think you understand. If we don’t make a breakthrough in these next couple of weeks, your case won’t be eligible for review again until you are twenty-five.”
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