The maid clutches her phone to her chest like a life preserver as I pass by.
I glance back at the ruined room.
Given the state of this motel, it might not really be much of a downgrade.
“Sorry about the mess,” I say.
Then I race around the corner, across the parking lot.
Into a life I can’t remember.
A life that doesn’t even feel like my own.
Four
A breeze whips against my face as I put distance between myself and the motel. The sweat and water dripping from my neck are bone-chillingly cold, each gust of wind like an icy lash across my bloodied face.
“Everything’s fine, everything’s fine.” I repeat the mantra as I run, trying to convince myself it’s the truth.
Maybe Carter was right.
Maybe I am a good liar.
Because everything most definitely is not fine.
I’m panting and my heart is pounding like a juiced-up race horse. But not thanks to the near-death experience or the flat-out sprint.
No.
This physiological response is more of an existential crisis.
Who am I?
And what serum did I steal from a murderous billionaire named Rillo?
My mind races, searching for a memory—any memory—to light the way. But nothing cuts through the fog.
Sirens cry out, jolting me from my thoughts. Red and blues approach in the distance.
Time. That’s what I need right now. Time to think. Time to breathe. That means finding a car and putting more distance between myself and the motel. I sprint across the lot, beneath a billboard for local attorney Carrie Zane, whose slogan is A Defense You Can Trust. Her too-smug grin bothers me, even if I don’t have a clue who she is. I duck into an alley, pushing through the pain.
I’m racing past a rust-rotted dumpster when my pocket buzzes. I extract the water-logged phone. Its screen is shattered from my scuffle with Carter, but to my surprise, it still works when I slide my blood-slicked finger across the jagged glass.
“Hello?” I duck behind a pyramid of stacked trash bags for cover. My exhausted body stiffens up on me almost immediately. “Who is this?”
“Gene.” A man’s gravelly voice crackles on the water-warped line. He sounds older, but maybe that’s just the connection.
“Gene who?”
“This is no time for games, Tess.”
“How’d you get this number?”
There’s an expletive half-swallowed by static, then, “You don’t know who I am?”
My breath feels like icicle shards in my throat. “No.”
A pause falls over the line before he finally replies with, “This wasn’t the plan.”
“What plan?” I almost fall over, but manage to catch myself on the dumpster’s rim.
The mystery man is half-murmuring to himself now. “This isn’t good at all.”
“I’m a little tired to play twenty questions.” I touch my shoulder and my fingers return a dark shade of crimson. “And a little injured.”
This snaps Gene back to attention. “We need to get you help.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just shot and half-drowned. Your usual Monday.”
“So you know it’s Monday.” He clears his throat. “And you remember me? Gene? Your Navigator.”
This time, the name and title stir a faint lightbulb of recognition. Memories collide, and I almost drop to one knee from the synapses firing in my brain. This voice belongs to the man from my—vision? Hallucination? Memory?
Whatever that was as Carter nearly choked the life out of me, one thing is clear.
This is the same guy.
“I was sitting at a desk. You gave me a case.” I press myself against the brick wall as the sirens wail. “That—was that real?”
“That was an hour ago, Tess.”
“You’re the one who told me it wasn’t my day to die.” My gaze hardens, even though he can’t see me on the phone call. “Were you at the motel?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know—”
“Not now.”
“Answer the damn question,” I say, even as sirens howl around me. “And what did you mean, plan?”
“No time,” Gene says. “You need to get away from the motel.”
“No shit,” I say. “So is this just a social call, or can you help me?”
“The old tire shop. Off Memorial Square. Remember where that is?”
“I do.” And I’m not lying. The dim interior, the smell of motor oil, grease, and sweat—it all comes flooding back. Sans any actual memories, of course. Just sensory details without a corresponding story to frame them.
“Meet me there in twenty minutes,” Gene says.
“Ok.” I push off the alley wall and almost fall down, wobbling like a newborn giraffe. I can barely feel my legs.
My fingertips are cold.
There’s an old Buick parked at the end of the alley.
“Still there?” Gene asks.
I speak into the phone, reply “yes,” or at least I think I do, as I will myself to the beige sedan’s door. The handle slides out of my grasp. Nothing feels real.
Then I collapse to the asphalt, the phone buzzing like a hornet in my ear as the world fades away.
Five
Low murmurs. Flickering lights.
The world is dark and cold.
Then the blurry cloak of unconsciousness lifts, and it’s full-on sensory overload.
Rock music blares. A maze of steel framing and exposed ductwork crisscrosses the high ceiling above. The bright fluorescent warehouse lights knife through my corneas. Motor oil sears my nostrils.
Every nick and scratch on my body stings—big or small.
My neck aches from Carter’s crushing grip.
The bullet hole in my shoulder screams.
I close my eyes to escape the onslaught, only to find my pulse throbbing in my ears.
Ba-bum.
Ba-bum.
Light footsteps glide across the concrete floor and stop beside me.
My eyes snap open, and I try to will myself up, fight whoever’s come to finish me off. But a soft hand rests gently on my good shoulder and eases me back to the table.
“Goddamn.” It’s a young man’s voice, the single word brimming with bombastic confidence. “They sure did a number on you.”
“Where—who...” My own voice sounds like a tinny, scuffed up record.
“Just give her some damned water, already, Finnegan.” It’s Gene, but he’s nowhere to be seen. The younger guy winks, dark bangs waving over his forehead as he reaches for a glass. He presses the rim to my lips and I drink greedily.
The pain subsides as the cool water washes down my throat.
“Whoa, whoa.” He pulls the glass away. “Not too much.”
“I’m thirsty.” With great effort, I roll over to survey my surroundings. I’m on a countertop in a large office breakroom. Fading posters of pin-up models grace cinderblock walls, along with a smeared whiteboard listing daily tasks.
“Where…where am I?” My pulse hammers so hard that it feels like my blood is trying to rush out of my veins. I look around for razor blades or circular saws just to make sure that this kindness isn’t all a pretense for harvesting my organs.
“The Tire Kingdom.”
Right. From the phone call.
“I made it?”
“Not quite,” Finnegan says with a chuckle.
“How—how did I get here?”
“You passed out cold in a parking lot next to a rusted-out Buick,” he says. “And I picked your ass up off the ground.”
“How’d you find me?”
“There’s a short answer to that question and a long one.”
“I’ll take whatever answer’s the real one.”
The young guy opens his mouth, but then I hear Gene say, “Finnegan, a word.”
Finnegan shrugs and smiles. “Back in a sec.”
He slips o
ut of the breakroom. Their hushed discussion is muted by the glass and closed door.
A minute later, he returns, and says, “We can’t stay here long.”
I stare at him for a moment, a memory stirring.
Then, a sudden realization surges through my fried synapses.
I sense that our fates are all intertwined. His. Gene’s. Mine.
I know it.
But the feeling fades before I can catch hold of it.
One little thing remains, though.
Most people don’t call him Finnegan.
“Something on my face?” He says it with the relaxed cool of someone who knows damn well it wouldn’t matter regardless.
“They call you Finn.”
I don’t know where that came from.
But I know it’s right.
His gaze narrows as he runs his hands through his long, dark hair. Finn is young, but his face has little scars and nicks when I peer closer. Each line on his face is a story, a map to a rich life that only he knows.
“Who’s they?” Finn asks with an amused grin.
“I don’t know. People.”
“Well, it ain’t everything, but it’s something.” Finn wipes stray water off my cheek. His fingers are soft. “Our plan might not be so fucked after all. If you have the serum hiding somewhere on whatever you’re wearing.”
I look down at the leather catsuit and really examine it for the first time. Black leather from head to toe. No idea what I was thinking with this fashion choice. And, absent my memories, I can’t tell if I dig it or not.
“This thing look like it has a bunch of secret pockets?”
“Then it seems like we’re back to square fucked.”
Despite the bad news, Finn’s candidness makes me trust him a bit more. Some of the tension in my body evaporates.
I even manage to sit up, which I take as a good sign. I reach for the bullet wound on my shoulder, finding a soft bandage.
“Whoa there, tiger,” Finn says.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure, sure.” He saunters over and leans against a workbench littered in tools. “But you could take a minute or two to rest. Before we all die horrible deaths.”
“You’re the one who said we couldn’t stay here long.”
He laughs. “I did.”
“And I’d rather not die a horrible death.”
“If you say so.” Finn holds his hands up in faux surrender. “But there’s one last thing before we head out.”
“Let’s get to it.”
He points at my stomach. “No easy way to say this but…”
I look down at my midsection. “You can’t be serious.”
His cool is momentarily shattered. “Oh—not like that. No. Not a weight thing.” He backpedals. “Your body is fine.” He gives me a thumbs up, then thinks better of it and shoves his hand in his pocket.
I glare.
Finn coughs and scratches his ear. “What I was trying to say is there’s a tracking parasite that we need to kill.”
Panic courses through my aching chest. It would have been much better news if he’d told me the catsuit wasn’t flattering. “What the hell do you mean parasite?”
“Tess, you—we—were working for a guy named Dominic Rillo.” Finn reaches into a satchel and extracts multiple plastic bags of herbs. If I didn’t know better, he could be the guy on a college campus with the good weed. And a different hot girl lounging on his beanbag chair next to him each week.
A forest-y aroma not unlike pine needles blankets the breakroom.
It’s not exactly pleasant, but it beats the hell out of motor oil.
Finn takes out a mortar and pestle and begins measuring out the herbs.
“You mean the billionaire Rillo?”
“The one and only.” He pinches out a handful of herbs, then rubs his eye and sighs. “Reclusive weirdo. Ring any bells?”
“Not really.”
“Long story short, he’s a very bad dude.” Finn reaches into another one of the bags. “And we made things worse by trying to make things better.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Backstory later.” He sprinkles a few more herbs into the bowl. “For now, we have to get rid of the locus worm. Tags all his employees with them.”
I can almost feel my blood pressure rising. Locus worms unfortunately do ring a bell. They have a distinct magical signature that can be tracked like a GPS. “So he knows where we are right now?”
“Yup.”
“Why not remove the worm earlier? Before our plan?” Whatever that plan was.
“Excellent question,” Finn says as he finishes his measurements with a flourish. “That would have tipped him off and ruined the whole thing. Weirdo billionaires are also paranoid billionaires.”
“Because it went so well anyway,” I say as he starts to grind the herb mixture into a fine powder.
“Yeah, it could’ve gone better,” Finn says with a nod.
“Is the worm how you found me in the parking lot?” I asked.
Finn says, “We have a bond, you and I. That’s how I found you.”
“Bet you say that to all the girls.”
A brief smile flashes over his lips. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
There’s a rhythmic scratch to the way he crushes the herbs, the pestle rolling against the bottom over and over again. A silence hangs over the breakroom until he finally says, “So you really don’t remember anything?”
Dread rises like a kraken from the depths of my stomach.
I try to stuff down the anxiety. That sensation of being in the wrong place. In the wrong life.
It’s not working.
My heart hammers as I reply, “Remember any of what?”
Finn stops grinding for a moment. “Don’t know what’s worse. Remembering all this shit or forgetting.”
“Then tell me what I’ve forgotten.”
Finn shakes his head and keeps working. When he’s finished with the mortar and pestle, he pours the fine powder into a glass of water. “Just take this.”
“What’s in it?”
“Freedom.”
“Maybe I take my chances with the worm.”
Finn speaks softly. “Your other option is Rillo finds you again.”
“I survived the first round just fine.”
He points at my shoulder. “That’s gonna look like a flesh wound if that happens.”
I stare at the glass like it’s potentially radioactive.
“Trust me.” He presses the glass into my hand, letting his fingers linger. “I saved you from that parking lot, right?”
I look at the water. It now smells like a forest. “Allegedly.”
“I put something in there for your memory, too.”
I peer into the water, but see nothing. “Everything will come back?”
Finn says, “I don’t know.”
“You could just tell me,” I say. “About the plan. Who you are. About Rillo.”
Finn jerks a thumb toward the garage. “Old man says it’s better if you see for yourself. He’d know. Guided you through more than a few Soulwalks.”
“Soulwalks?”
“Drink it and see.” Finn shrugs. “Or don’t. Up to you. I’ll be right outside.”
“Promise?”
He holds up my shattered phone. “My number’s in here in case I’m outta earshot and you wanna text.”
“Thanks, Casanova.”
“No problem.” He takes out a .22 and presses it into my hand.
“What’s this for?”
“Trust,” he says before heading to the breakroom door.
I call out, “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna kick your ass if you leave me here alone.”
Finn nods like a sage. “Of that, I have zero doubt.”
I take a deep breath and down the mixture.
Before I can take another, the entire world disappears.
Six
1
Year Ago
Denim sticks to my thighs in the soggy May heat. Sweat trickles through my matted hair. I feel a mouth move, but I don’t control the words.
It’s like watching a VHS tape: immutable, written in history.
Hard to explain the feeling.
I’m in the swamp, amid mosquitos and thick vines, reliving the past like it’s the present.
I’m watching. I’m experiencing.
But I can change absolutely nothing.
Detective Javy Diaz drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he pulls into the parking lot beneath the lush trees. Moonlight slices through the forest canopy, gleaming off the sedan’s black paint. We’re beyond the city limits, out here in the Groves. This is the one section of asphalt for miles. Everything else is just marshland.
He adjusts his boot after cutting the engine. “How the hell did someone find a body out here?”
His deep voice resonates in my ears like smooth whiskey dipped in velvet.
“Dispatch didn’t say.”
“What’s the location?”
“A few hundred yards beyond here,” Tess says.
Or I say.
It feels like me.
The heartbeat. The damp smell of sweat and old leather in the car.
But there’s a fog between my life and this one.
Javy’s steel-blue gaze scans the darkness beyond the windshield. His shoulders, normally languid, are stiff. “Caller say what they were doing all the way out here?”
“That’s all the captain said. Dead body, young woman, head to the Groves. About a quarter mile north of the parking lot.”
“So it wasn’t dispatch that sent us out here.”
“Dispatch, the boss. What’s the difference?”
Javy rubs his chin, eyes still scanning the swamp. “I don’t like it.”
“You mean you don’t like her.”
“Tess…”
“Look, if you got some problem with the captain, tell you what.” I check my Glock. Full magazine. “Just tell her you politely decline to investigate. Sure she’ll accommodate.”
From the look on his face, Javy’s seriously considering it.
“Doesn’t feel right,” Javier says. “Out here. At midnight.”
“The captain interrupting your roaring social life, Javy?”
Drop Dead (Tess Skye Book 1) Page 2