Fall in Love

by Anthology

  So I’d stolen the gun. I’d tracked him down. And God help me, I’d fired.

  At the time, I thought I’d hit him square in the chest. But I must have missed, because I could remember Johnson rushing me. After that, things were blurrier. I remembered the terror of knowing that I was dying, and I recalled a warm flood of hope. But I had no clue what had happened between warm, fuzzy hope and the cold, hard slab that made up my current reality.

  I peered into the darkness again, and this time the velvet curtain seemed to be lifting. The room, I realized, wasn’t completely black. Instead, there was a single candle against the far wall, its small flame gathering strength against the blackness.

  I stared, puzzled. I was certain there’d been no flame earlier.

  Slowly, the area around me shifted into a reddish gray with dark and light spots contrasting to reveal a line of angular symbols painted above the candlestick.

  My eyes locked on the symbols, and the trembling started up again. Something was off, and I was overwhelmed by the frantic, urgent fear that the monster I knew was nowhere nearby, and that when I saw what I was really up against, I’d desperately wish it were Johnson’s sorry ass that was after me.

  A cold chill raced up my spine. I wanted the hell out of there.

  I was about to start thrashing again—in the desperate hope that the ties would miraculously loosen—when I heard the metallic screech of a creaking hinge. I froze, my breathing shallow, my muscles tense.

  The creak intensified and a shaft of anorexic light swept wide across the room as the door arced open. A huge shadow filled the gap. A dark, monstrous form was silhouetted in the doorway, emitting a scent that made me almost vomit.

  A monster. And not of the Lucas Johnson variety.

  No, Lucas Johnson was a Boy Scout compared to the putrid creature that lumbered forward, bending so that it could fit through the door frame. It lurched toward me, muscles rolling under an elephant-like hide. The creature wore no clothing, and even in the dark, I could see the parasites living in slime inside the folds of skin. Could hear them scurry for safety when the beast moved toward me.

  The fetid smell that preceded it made me gag, and I struggled to sink into the stone slab as the beast peered down at me, a string of snot hanging precariously from the orifice that served as a nose.

  The creature’s mouth twisted, dry skin cracking as the muscles underneath moved, thin lines of blood and pus oozing out from the newly formed fissures. It swaggered to the candle, then leaned over and breathed on the flame. As if its breath were gas, fire leaped into the air, painting the wall with flame and making the symbols glow.

  I cried out in alarm and pain, my body suddenly burning from within—the sensation passing as quickly as it had come.

  The beast turned to sneer at me. “You,” it croaked. Black piggy eyes lit with fury as it brandished a short, bloodied dagger. “Now we finish this business.”

  A piercing shriek split the dark, and I realized the sound was coming from me. Fire shot through my limbs, and I jerked upright with a fresh burst of determination. To my surprise and relief, I managed to rip my arms free, the ties flapping from my wrists like useless wings.

  The creature paused, drawing itself up to its full height. It took a step backward, then dropped to its knees and held its clawed hands high. With the dagger, it sliced its palm, then let the thick, black liquid that flowed from the wound drip into its open mouth. “I serve the Dark Lord, my Master,” it said, the words as rough as tires on gravel. “For my sacrifice, I will be rewarded.”

  The “sacrifice” thing totally freaked me out, but I took advantage of this quaint little monster ritual to reach down and tear at the ties that still bound my ankles. As I did, I noticed that I was wearing a silky white gown, most definitely not the jeans and T-shirt I’d left the house in.

  Not that I had time to mull over such fascinating fashion tidbits. Instead, I focused on the business at hand: getting the hell out of there.

  About the time I finished ripping, the creature finished praying. It barreled toward me, dagger outstretched. I rolled over, hiking up the skirt as I kicked up and off the slab to land upright beside it. There’s probably a name for a move like that, but I didn’t know it. Hell, I didn’t even know that my body would move like that.

  I didn’t waste time savoring my new acrobatic persona; instead, I raced for the door. Or, at least, I started to. The sight of the Hell Beast looming there sort of turned me off that plan. Which left me with no choice but to whip around and try to find another exit.

  Naturally, there wasn’t one.

  No, no, no. So far, I had survived the most screwed-up, freaky day of my life, and I wasn’t giving up now. And if that meant I fought the disgusting Hell Beast, then dammit, that was just what I was going to do.

  The beast must have had the same idea, because as soon as I turned back toward the door, it lashed out, catching me across the face with the back of its massive, clawed hand. The blow sent me hurtling, and I crashed against the huge brass candlestick, causing it to tumble down hard on my rib cage.

  Hot wax burned into my chest, but I had no time to reflect on the pain. The beast was on top of me. I did the only thing I could. I grabbed the stick and thrust it upward. The beast weighed a ton, but I must have had decent leverage, because I managed to catch him under the chin with the stick, knocking his head back and eliciting a howl that almost burst my eardrums.

  Not being an idiot, I didn’t wait around for him to recover. The candlestick was too heavy to carry as a weapon, so I dropped it and ran like hell toward the door, hoping the beast was alone.

  I stumbled over the threshold, never so happy to be in a dark, dank hallway. The only light came from medieval-looking candleholders lining the walls every eight or so feet, but as I wasn’t sightseeing, the lack of light didn’t bother me much. All I wanted was out of there. So I raced on, down musty corridors and around tight corners until finally—finally—I slammed into the push bar of a fire door. An alarm screamed into the night as the thick metal door burst open, and I slid out, my nose crinkling as I caught the nasty smell of rotting food, carried on the cool autumn air. I was in an alley, and as my eyes adjusted, I turned to the right and raced toward the street and the safety of the world.

  It wasn’t until I reached the intersection of the alley and an unfamiliar street that I paused to turn back. The alley was silent. No monsters. No creatures. No boogeymen out to get me.

  The street was silent as well. No people or traffic. The streetlights blinking. Late, I thought. And my next thought was to run some more. I would have, too, if I hadn’t looked down and noticed my feet in the yellow glow of the street-lamps.

  I blinked, confused. Because those didn’t look like my feet. And now that I thought about it, my hands and legs seemed all wrong, too. And the bloom of red I now saw on the breast of the white gown completely freaked me out. Which, when you considered the overall circumstances, was saying a lot. Because on the whole, this experience was way, way, way trippy, and the only thing I could figure was that someone had drugged me and I was in the middle of one monster of a hallucination.

  Then again, maybe the simplest explanation was the right one: I was losing my mind.

  “You’re not.”

  I spun around and found myself looking down on a squat little man in a green overcoat and a battered brown fedora. At least a head shorter than me, he was looking up at me with eyes that would have been serious were they not so amphibian.

  “You’re not losing it,” the frog-man clarified, which suggested to me that I was. Losing it, I mean. After all, the strange little man had just read my mind.

  He snorted. “That doesn’t make you crazy. Just human.”

  “Who the devil are you?” I asked, surprised to find that my voice worked, though it sounded somewhat off. I glanced up and down the street, calculating my odds of getting away. Surely I could run faster than this—

  “No need to run,” he said. Then he stepped of
f the sidewalk and into the street. As if it had been waiting for his cue, a sleek black limousine pulled to the curb. Frog-man opened the rear door and nodded. “Hop in.”

  I took a step backward. “Get lost, dickwad.”

  “Come on, kid. We need to talk. And I know you must be tired. You’ve had a hell of a day.” He nodded down the alley. “You did good in there. But next time remember that you’re supposed to kill them. Not give ’em a headache. Capisce?”

  I most definitely did not capisce. “Next time?” I pointed back down the alley. “You had something to do with that? No way,” I said, taking another step backward. “No freaking way.”

  “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” He opened the door wider. “Why don’t you get in, Lily? We really should talk.”

  My name echoed through the night I looked around, wary, but there was no one else around. “I want answers, you son of a bitch.”

  He shook his head, and I could imagine him muttering, tsk, tsk. “Hard to believe you’re the one all the fuss is about, but the big guy must know what he’s doing, right?”

  I blinked.

  “But look at you, staring at me like I’m talking in Akkadian. To you I probably am. You’re exhausted, right? I tell you, jumping right into the testing . . . it’s just not the best method.” He shook his head, and this time the tsk, tsk actually emerged. “But do they ask me? No. I mean, who am I? Just old Clarence, always around to help. It’s enough to give a guy an inferiority complex.” He patted my shoulder, making contact before I could pull away. “Don’t you worry. This can all wait until tomorrow.”

  “What testing? What’s tomorrow? And who are you?”

  “All in good time. Right now,” he said, “I’m taking you home.”

  And before I could ask how he planned to manage that, because I had no intention of getting into the limo with him, he reached over and tapped me on the forehead. “Go to sleep, pet. You need the rest.”

  I wanted to protest, but couldn’t. My eyes closed, and the last thing I remember was his amphibian grin as my knees gave out and I fell to the sidewalk at the frog-man’s feet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I woke up on a bathroom floor, curled around the base of a porcelain throne. My stomach felt strangely empty, and the lingering taste of bile hung in my mouth.

  Other than that, I had no general complaints, and the fact that I was alive—despite Lucas Johnson, despite the freakish monster, and despite the strange little frog-man—seemed something to celebrate.

  At the same time, I had to wonder if it had all been a dream.

  Surely, I thought, it had been a dream.

  I sat up, then dragged my fingers though my hair, frowning to find the hair longer than I expected. I drew my hand back and looked at it, only to find that it wasn’t my hand at all. Or my toenails, painted that dainty shade of pink. And the Hello Kitty pajamas I now wore were most definitely not my style.

  Bile rose in my throat again as I remembered how out of it I’d felt when I’d been running for my life, and I reached up, grabbing the side of the sink, and hauled myself to my feet.

  I pressed the heels of my palms against the countertop and stared at the face staring back at me.

  Who the hell is that?

  The girl I usually saw in the mirror carried ten extra pounds that refused to come off—probably because she refused to give up the Kit Kat bars she kept behind the counter at Movies & More. Her ears were double-pierced and she had a single, tasteful stud through the side of her nose. Her thick mousy hair was cut into a super-short, no-muss, no-fuss style.

  That girl no longer stared back at me.

  Instead, the face in the mirror had perfectly trimmed coal-black hair that hit midway down her shoulders and moved with all the grace and shine of a shampoo commercial. Her green eyes were shown off under plucked eyebrows that arched slightly in an expression of either interest or disdain. Her complexion was perfect, not the ruddy skin I was used to seeing. And tiny little diamond studs graced her single-pierced ears.

  A strange wooziness came over me, and I realized that I was hyperventilating. Purposefully, I dropped onto the toilet seat, tucked my head between my knees, and breathed.

  What the fuck?

  What the fuck is going on?

  I couldn’t be someone else. It was impossible. That didn’t happen. It wasn’t real.

  I am me.

  Me, I thought, and I could prove it.

  Frantically, I yanked the Hello Kitty top up, exposing my belly. My fingers probed taut, unblemished skin that had never once been stabbed in the gut. Confused, desperate, I shoved the waist of the loose pants down, searching for a wound but finding nothing. But I remembered it. The searing pain. The grin on Johnson’s face as he plunged in the knife. And the pungent smell of blood and bile as it gushed out of my body.

  I trembled—the kind of shaking that’s deep in your bones. This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to people. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened at all.

  I’d turned into someone else.

  Holy fucking shit.

  My body might have bled out, but the essence of me went on, alive and kicking in this stranger who was becoming more familiar by the second.

  I didn’t understand how, but I couldn’t escape the truth staring back at me from the mirror. That was me. No matter how unfamiliar she looked, that body with cutesy PJs, perfectly trimmed hair, and unblemished tummy really now housed me.

  Dear Lord, how?

  For that matter, Why?

  I turned away from the mirror, my whole body shaking. Then I saw the crumpled white gown on the floor, and the shakes turned into near convulsions. A bloom of red spread out from the bodice, and my mouth went dry. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  I turned back to the mirror and ripped the T-shirt off over my head. As with my belly, my chest—or, rather, this chest—was unblemished, the skin marked only by a small tattoo on her left breast. I looked closer and realized the tattoo was a small dagger. Not what I’d expect from a girl who wears Hello Kitty jammies and keeps bubble bath above the toilet but hardly nefarious.

  There was, in fact nothing about this body that suggested foul play. Certainly nothing that suggested she’d recently been cut by a knife or stabbed with a dagger. But how could that be possible? She’d been covered in warm blood. I’d been covered. A sacrifice strapped to a cold slab. A feast for a monster.

  There had to have been a cut. A stab. Something.

  But there was nothing. Just my own memories, and those were faded and spotty.

  I sank to my knees and bent forward, resting my forehead on the cool bathroom tile, the sacrificial gown clutched tight in my hands as I fought to remember. To organize my thoughts and bring some semblance of normalcy to a completely not normal situation.

  My memories. My life. My own personal nightmare.

  Lucas Johnson. Rose. The haunted terror in her eyes. My rage. My promise to keep her safe.

  The taunting snarl on his tattooed face before I’d pulled the trigger, intending to blow him away. And the icy glint of steel before he shoved the knife deep into my flesh. The horror of knowing that I was dying and that, despite my best efforts, he would live on.

  Something new teased at the edge of my memory—the sensation of falling, the thrum of wings beating against the stale air, and a brilliant light that both warmed and blinded me. A soft voice had emerged from the light. A voice with a beautiful face and gossamer wings. An angel, and it offered to let me live. Offered to pull me back from the nipping flames of hell.

  Offered me a future and a chance to atone for my multitude of sins. Lying. Stealing. Drugs. Larceny.

  And, yes, attempting cold-blooded murder.

  I didn’t fully understand the bargain I’d made, but at the time, I made the only choice I could.

  I chose life. But as I stood up and once again faced the reflection in the mirror, I had to admit that this wasn’t exactly what I’d expected.

  CHAPTER THREE

>   My body’s name was Alice Elaine Purdue. Appropriate, I thought, because I’d definitely entered Wonderland.

  I’d learned this tantalizing tidbit of information the old-fashioned way: I’d snooped, poking around in the medicine cabinet until I found something with my body’s name printed on it. A good plan, as it turned out, because Alice was the proud owner of both birth control pills and a prescription cream for athlete’s foot.

  I grimaced. Considering the firm state of Alice’s ass and the fungal state of her feet I assumed we’d been working out regularly, then showering in the public stalls without wearing flip-flops.

  I scowled down at my toes, which thankfully didn’t itch, then decided that it was time to leave the bathroom. It opened, conveniently enough, into a bedroom, and I stepped inside the darkened room, lit only by the single bedside lamp. The room was sparse, but still looked lived in. Two paperbacks were tossed carelessly onto the floor beside the bed, both Jane Austen novels. A variety of pastel necklaces hung from a hook glued near the top of the bureau mirror. A pink leather jacket lay balled up on the floor, half in and half out of the closet.

  Beside the lamp was a small snapshot, snug in a cheap, plain frame. In the picture, a huge black cat sprawled on the back of a sofa, two adolescent girls snuggling against it from behind. I recognized the face that belonged to Alice. Or, rather, to me. The other girl seemed older, but so similar in appearance I assumed she must be a sibling. Serious brown eyes with long lashes above high cheekbones. Thick black hair pulled back in a high ponytail. A firm, strong mouth that seemed determined not to smile, though Alice was locked in an expression of perpetual amusement.

  Who was she, this serious girl? I stared into her eyes, thinking of Rose and searching for answers. I found none until I took the more practical approach of sliding the picture out of the frame. On the back, in a delicate hand that I assumed belonged to a parent, someone had written Alice and Rachel snuggle with Asphalt. No year. No convenient notation—“sister” or “cousin.” Tears pricked behind my eyes. Somewhere out there, Alice had a family that knew nothing of what had become of her.