“So, what's Sylvia doing?” Lafayette asked, sitting up and yawning.
“She has a boyfriend. He runs a local cat adoption center.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. She says he’s really nice, but that she saw him tilt his head one time and his eyes looked like a reptile’s. I know she’s a little weird, but seriously? A reptilian shapeshifter running a cat adoption center? That doesn't seem too likely.”
“Unless he's eating the cats,” Lafayette pointed out. He curled up next to me and started to purr. He was a pain in the ass sometimes, but he was my pain in the ass.
I don’t remember waking up.
I could feel the bed beneath me and the cold of the room. But there was one thing I couldn't feel—Lafayette’s warm, furry body.
Sitting up, I looked across the bed and saw the room was shrouded in darkness except for a sliver of moonlight that fell across the bottom right-hand corner of the bed.
“Lafayette?”
I laid a hand down beside me hoping to feel his body, but my hand fell flat against the mattress.
“Lafayette?”
I listened out for any movement in the apartment but there was nothing but silence. A sense of foreboding started to grow deep inside my gut . . . a dark feeling that whispered something was terribly wrong.
“Lafayette!” I called out. No reply.
Everything felt empty. Not just the bed or the apartment, but my body too; my soul. I felt like the life had been sucked out of me.
Looking down at my bed, I tried to adjust my eyes to the dark and see if I could make out the little lump of a sleeping Lafayette in the spot he normally lay, but there was no sign of him.
Something felt wrong, terribly wrong, but I couldn't explain why. Slipping out of bed, I stepped onto the cushy carpet and felt something I wasn't expecting.
An icy chill met my feet and travelled up my legs, permeating my bones.
“What the—?”
It was a cold like no other. A cold that came from walking through a slushy sidewalk in the dead of winter.
With a shiver, I walked around the empty bed and felt the ambience of the room. It was dark . . . cold . . . and oppressive. It was like I wasn't even in my room at all. I recognized my things all around me, but this wasn’t my home. I’d been transplanted somewhere else.
“Lafayette!” I called out again.
Then a thought struck me.
He's not here. He's gone. He left you.
“Lafayette!”
I rushed to my bedroom door and pulled it open to look down the hall. The entire apartment was shrouded in darkness, with no sign of my cat. And there was that feeling again, that deep iciness mixed with a feeling that something was off, wrong, not as it seemed.
I walked down the hall and wrapped my arms around my chest as goosebumps rose up my arms.
This . . . doesn't feel right.
I couldn't shake the feeling that although I was looking at the inside of my apartment, I was, in fact, somewhere else. Switching on the light in the living room, I saw all my stuff. The sofa I sat on every night in front of the television. I saw the walnut coffee table that I'd spent five hundred dollars on and then scuffed as I dragged it through the door. I saw the big-screen TV that Bridget had thrown a fit about. Apparently when I told her I was splurging on something we could both enjoy, she was expecting it to be a couple’s spa retreat.
Here I was, looking at my home, but it didn't feel like my home. Most of all, I didn't feel welcome in it. And it was so cold. So, so cold, like I’d stepped inside a freezer.
“Lafayette!” I called out. My breath gathered into a cloud of steam in front of my face. “Fuck, why is it so cold in here?”
I saw one of my sweatshirts slung across the back of the sofa. I frowned while I slipped it on.
“I definitely put this in the laundry,” I said out loud. Living with a talking cat did that to a person. Regardless, the sweatshirt didn’t stop the chills from climbing up my arms and legs.
“Lafayette, is this some kind of joke?” I asked the empty room. Then I noticed something else.
All of Lafayette’s toys and beds were no longer spread out all over the room. But he couldn't have moved them all on his own in the middle of the night without me hearing, could he?
“This is fucking insane,” I muttered to myself. “I'm going nuts.”
Or maybe you're dreaming, entered a voice at the back of my head.
I was terrified to realize it wasn't even my own voice.
“Maybe I'm dreaming . . . ”
I felt the need to look down at my hands. They were tinged blue. For a long moment, I stared at my fingers like they weren't mine at all but someone else's attached to me.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked myself, lifting my fingers closer to my face to inspect them.
Everything else about me looked normal except my hands, which were growing bluer by the second. I didn't know if it was from the cold, or if I was going crazy, but they were definitely turning a deeper shade of azure blue with every passing second. Then, to my horror, the color spread up my hand and reached my wrist where it started to snake its way up my arm. I pushed up my sleeve and saw long tendrils of indigo and cobalt reaching up to my elbow.
“What the fuck?”
I ran towards the front door, my heart thumping in my chest. I needed to get out of my apartment. It felt hostile, hateful, like it was turning against me.
I grabbed the doorknob with my now solid blue hand and tore the door open, desperate to free myself from the terror of losing my fucking mind. I was expecting to see the familiar, bland beige safety of the hallway, but all I saw was darkness. At first, I thought the lightbulbs had burned out, but then I realized it wasn't the kind of darkness that meant there was no light.
This was a kind of darkness that signified a thousand unspeakable things. The end of the world, the end of life, the end of humanity.
I looked into the darkness and it seeped right into me. It didn't just enter my eyes. It seeped into every pore on my skin. It wrapped itself around my neck, choking whatever light I still clung onto. It entered my very soul.
I could feel it suck the air from my lungs. It drew at the oxygen in my blood, traveling closer to my heart with every second that passed. The darkness in the hallway wasn't darkness at all. There was no hallway. There was only a void. I knew if I stepped into it I would never come back.
I felt a shiver creep over my back and I turned around to face my living room. For a second, I was sure I saw something blue flickering in the darkness above the coffee table. I blinked a few times, hoping I was imagining things, but I soon realized I wasn't. Floating in mid-air were the waving digits of a bright blue right hand.
“Lafayette!” I yelled, looking around frantically for any sign of him. “Tell me you see this!”
No reply.
A scream escaped my mouth. It was a sound I didn't even know my body was capable of making. It resonated through my skull while somehow managing to come from somewhere far, far away.
The darkness wound a death grip around my heart and squeezed. Immediately, the last of my breath was forced from my lungs and I felt every ounce of life drain from my body. I clenched my eyes closed as the pain overwhelmed me. The darkness consumed every fiber of my being, then I felt nothing at all.
I was weightless.
I was nothing but air.
I didn't exist at all.
3
Elena
“It wasn't just a dream,” Logan said. We were standing in line at Drip & Sip, our regular coffee shop. It had become a ritual of ours to meet at the Drip every morning before heading to the office. “If it was, it was the most vivid dream I've ever had in my whole life. It was . . . it was different than anything I've ever experienced before.”
“Shit, you're really scared, aren't you?” I looked up at him and he pouted. Men didn’t exactly appreciate being called out when they were scared, and Logan was no excepti
on.
“I’m not scared, I’m just . . . ”
He stopped speaking long enough for us to place our orders. Caffè Americano for him, and a hot chocolate with a blueberry cake doughnut for me.
Logan’s behavior this morning felt like total overkill. On the job I'd faced enough monsters and mysteries that would land most people into a straightjacket. Logan had worked at the OCD long enough to have gotten a taste, and I’d watched him transform from a hard-ass skeptic into a paranormal investigator to be reckoned with. That’s why it didn’t make sense for a dream to be messing with him so much.
“Look, try not to dwell too much on your dream,” I said after I took a sip of my hot chocolate. I wrinkled my nose, then walked over to the cream and sugar station to sweeten it up a little more.
“Try not to dwell on it?” Logan said as he followed me, Americano in hand. “How am I supposed to do that? It wasn't just a dream, Elena. It was something else.”
“Like what? A hallucination? An out of body experience?”
“I don't know. But I was freezing my ass off. And I saw that big blue hand. I saw it and I wasn't dreaming.”
I took another sip of hot chocolate. Satisfied with the taste, I pressed the lid on my to-go cup and turned to my partner. He wasn’t usually so irritable in the mornings, but today was different.
“You don't believe me, do you?” he asked as he opened the door for me.
It was a little after eight-thirty in the morning, but the sky was gloomy and dark with no sound of birdsong. I was starting to get sick of this long winter that refused to give way to spring. I wrapped my chilled fingers around my coffee cup.
“Of course I believe you. It sounds like you had a really shitty dream. I'm just saying that you shouldn't spend too much time thinking about it. Most of the time, dreams are just a collection of random shit that your brain couldn’t process during the day. What’s the big blue hand from? A commercial on tv? A YouTube video? An old cartoon from when you were a kid?”
He glanced towards me, a slight look of annoyance pulling his eyebrows down.
“I have no idea.”
“Okay, so you should probably let it go.”
“Seriously? You're the one who's supposed to believe in all the crazy stuff and you're telling me it was just a dream.”
“I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying, if that's what you mean. I'm just saying, it was a dream. A really fucking weird dream and it was obviously awful, but you can't let it get to you.”
“Hmmm . . . ”
We walked along E Street towards FBI headquarters, dodging pedestrians with ease. That was one nice thing about having such a tall partner. People saw him coming and they got the hell out of our way. A gust of damp, chilly air blasted me in the face and I let out a sigh. Although I loved the rain, I was not a fan of this cold, somber shit. The only good thing about February was the massive influx of Valentine’s candy that went on clearance two weeks into the month.
“Listen,” I said, gulping down more of my hot chocolate. “My mom used to tell me about a dream one of her ancestors had. A long time ago Rhonabwy lay down on a yellow ox skin and dreamed of meeting King Arthur. The first person he met was Iddawg the Churn,” I laughed, remembering my mom's vivid description of the villain. “He got his name because of all the things he'd done when he started the great War of Camlann by telling lies to his mortal enemy, Medrawad. Unfortunately, when he met King Arthur, the man was waaaay more interested in playing a game of Gwyddbwyll when—”
“Yeah . . . I'm gonna stop you there,” Logan interrupted. “I understood about three words of what you just said.”
I didn’t bother to hide my grin.
“I'm just saying that dreams are convoluted, abstract, ephemeral things. Sometimes they mean something, but sometimes they don't.”
He made a low grumbling noise like Marge Simpson and stopped at a crosswalk.
“I thought you would’ve been more understanding,” he said, waiting for the light to change. “What with the dream your mom visited you in. You know, the one where she told you how to find the spell that defeated Solana.”
“I think you’re confusing the word ‘understanding’ with the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ if you think a big blue hand is out to get you.”
“Thanks for making it clear how you really feel,” he snapped.
“Sorry,” I said, raising my hand and placing it gently on his arm. “I'm not trying to shit on your scary dream. I'm just trying to let you know that not everything has to be some kind of meaningful mystical experience. This job can make you think everything is paranormal, but sometimes dreams are just . . . you know, random bullshit.”
“It wasn't a dream!” he insisted. “Not like one I've ever had before! And that hand. That blue hand just floating and waving at me. I was awake then, Elena.”
I didn't know what to say, so I just stared straight ahead and watched the sun rise on another shitty, rotten, gloomy day. It made the headlights and taillights of the cars on E Street and 10th Street more intense, like a Lite-Bright with only two colors to choose from. The light changed and we stepped into the crosswalk with a steady stream of pedestrians.
“Dude, I’m sorry,” I said eventually as I took the last sip of my hot chocolate. “I believe you. You know I do. I just don't want you getting sucked down a rabbit hole. This job, it can really mess with your head. It can make you think there's a monster behind every corner. I don't want you thinking that you're not even safe in your sleep. Especially in your own home.”
He said nothing and focused on our imposing office building as it came into view. His frown hadn't faded all morning. Breathless by the time I reached the front door, I flashed my ID badge to the same security guard I'd greeted every morning for the last few years.
“Morning, Davante. How’s it going?” I asked, shoving a bite of cake doughnut into my mouth as I stepped through the door. Behind me, Logan looked about as hospitable as the gray clouds outside.
“Fucking Monday mornings,” he mumbled, and pulled his badge from his long wool coat.
“Is there any other kind?” Davante laughed as he let us through the security barrier. “I heard on the weather forecast that it’s supposed to start raining tomorrow and won’t stop for the next week. They’re saying it’s going to flood.”
“Ugh, really?” I groaned while Davante returned to his seat. “The last thing we need right now is a flood.”
“If you run into trouble, I’ve got a boat,” he said, going back to filling in his crossword. He twirled his pen around his fingers, then cast his quizzical eyes on me. “What's another word for mystery? Six letters.”
“Enigma.”
“Nice! Crushed it like always, Agent Rivera.”
“Glad I could help. Have a good one, Davante.”
“You too.”
Pressing the button for the elevator, I checked the time and felt a slight pang of panic.
“Shit, it's already nine!”
“No way.”
We both dashed into the elevator and shared a glance. Neither of us wanted to deal with what was about to happen, but it was pointless.
“I've been dreading this meeting all morning,” said Logan as we stepped out the elevator.
“Why? What could possibly be worse than meeting two new colleagues hell-bent on proving your job is bullshit?”
“This is going to sound awful, but I wish Harris had a trap door in his office.”
We both laughed and the tension between us started to fade away.
“We'll scare them with the truth,” I said, taking his hand. “It'll be all right. All we need is another nasty werewolf case and we’re set.”
Logan smiled for the first time that morning and I fell into the abyss of his deep blue eyes.
“I see you’re not wearing ripped up jeans today. Looks like you got your nails done, too.”
“Yeah.” Instead of looking up at him and blushing, I examined my fingertips, which were now adorned w
ith sleek, shiny black cherry polish. “I threw down for a gel manicure so it would last longer.”
“Nice. Thanks for taking my advice. I appreciate it.”
As we approached Harris' office, we could see the vague outlines of two people sitting through the half-shut blinds. In front of them, Harris was standing as he read from a binder like he was a kid giving a book report. Reaching his open door, we peered in and saw him listing off cases we'd worked on with an unemotional, mechanical voice.
“Sorry we're late,” I interrupted. “Traffic was crazy. A family of geese was crossing E Street and had cars backed up for miles.”
Harris looked up from his binder. He didn’t believe my lie for a second. Instead of calling me out on it, he gestured for me and my partner to take a seat.
“I was just informing the new agents here about your colorful job history.”
“Yes, it’s certainly been quite . . . entertaining,” came a thin, shrewd voice from across the table.
I looked down, dying to see the face behind such an unattractive voice, and I wasn’t disappointed. My eyes fell on a man who looked like a small, wet toad thrust into an oversized suit. His mouth seemed too wide for his narrow face, and he was looking up at me with complete derision, judging me from behind coke-bottle glasses. They made his eyes appear unnaturally small, and were so heavy that he had to wrinkle his nose constantly to hold them in place. With an insincere smile on his full lips, he reached out a hand towards me.
“Agent Johnson,” he said, his voice so nasal it was downright comical. “Carl Johnson,” he continued. “And this is my partner, Agent Katrina Kozlov.”
With a grin befitting a weasel, he shook my hand with a limp lobster claw . . . the kind of handshake I loathed, and nodded his head towards Agent Kozlov.
Katrina was everything he wasn't. A natural born Amazonion with the build of a Russian shot putter, her bear-like body was contained by the hardest working jacket buttons in existence. She looked up from beneath a thick, bushy unibrow and glowered at us.
“Good morning,” she said in a voice so low I could feel it in my gut like a bass drum.
Catnip & Curses (The Faerie Files Book 2) Page 3