“You didn’t see it?” Xander looked up at her slowly.
“See what?”
“Watch it again.” He backed up the footage. “Here, watch at the bottom of the...the neck.”
Sydney’s eyes narrowed but she did as he instructed. Focusing on the man’s neck, she noticed a strange movement. “Wait, rewind it again.” Xander did as she asked and she leaned even closer to the screen. Blood dripped from Connor’s neck but as the man leaned in closer one drop seemed to move in reverse. Instead of falling the gathering pool on the concrete, the drop receded back into Connor’s neck. “What the fuck? Did that drop just go backwards?”
“I don’t think it was a drop…”
“What the hell do you think it was?”
“I think it was something hanging out that went back inside.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“What the hell?” Sydney was surprised that she wasn’t freaking out. I think I’ve lost the ability to react like a human.
Xander was looking at her as if he was expecting her to panic any moment. “It was like...a-a thing. A string or…”
“Tentacle?”
“Yeah.”
Sydney sighed. “OK, so there is probably something with a tentacle in my head.”
“We have no idea if that is true,” Xander cautioned her.
“Well, I think it’s pretty hard to keep denying that.”
“I wish we could get like an x-ray or MRI of your brain or something,” he spoke softly as if he hadn’t intended on saying that out loud.
“Well, I’m glad we can’t.” At his raised brow she explained. “If I knew for a fact there was some kind of parasite in my head I would flip the fuck out. I would probably shoot myself in the head just to make sure I’ve killed it,” she chuckled absurdly.
“That’s not funny.” But that only made her laugh harder. Before long she had dissolved into a fit of laughter that had her doubled over gasping for air. He stared at her as if she had lost her mind, and in a way she probably had.
As one hiccupping laugh bubbled into the next it slowly shifted into dry sobbing and, embarrassed, she turned away. When Xander tried to pull her back to him she yanked her arm away. “Syd,” he whispered. “It’s going to be OK.”
“You keep saying that,” she gasped.
“It has to,” he pleaded and she had no idea who he was begging.
Finally, she stopped resisting and let him wrap his arms around her. She rested her face against his chest and struggled to regain control. Her heart was still pounding hard enough to make her head throb. The pounding in her head became a second heartbeat as she imagined the possibility of something living inside her skull. Self-preservation forced those thoughts away. Too much imagining a parasite in her brain and she would end up trying to claw it out with a hammer.
***
Drunk enough to finally pass out, Sydney and Xander lay in bed. Neither one of them was able to close their eyes long enough to fall asleep yet. Instead, they lay wrapped around each other. Xander ran his fingers along her bare arm, raising chills along her skin. “Do you think the man is going to come back?” she whispered.
“If he does we will be ready.”
“How?”
“If it’s just him, I’m know I can take him,” Xander chuckled and his laughed vibrated against her ear.
“But what if it’s not just him?”
“Then we go down fighting.”
“Maybe I should just give up. Let him take me, or do whatever he wants. Then we would have answers.”
“You mean let him take your head?” Xander demanded, raising high enough to look down at her.
She shrugged. “Since I’m apparently ‘different’ maybe he won’t.”
“Or maybe that’s the reason he will.”
She sighed. “Maybe. I think…”
“What?”
“I just feel like he’s watching, studying me. Seeing how I react. He must have been close to me for a while now...but doing what? Just watching?” It was stupid to pretend they had been clever enough to evade Them this whole time. She knew Xander understood and didn’t disagree since he didn’t say anything. “I just wish I knew what he was looking for.”
Sydney knew she should run—leave Xander behind to keep him safe. But she was tired of running. What’s the point? She had a feeling They would find her wherever she went.
“But why haven’t they made any effort to take you...or your head?” Xander spoke plainly and it caused her to shudder and he wrapped his arms around her tighter.
“I don’t know,” she answered. If They were watching her, where did Xander fit into all of this?
As if he knew what she was thinking, he tightened his arms around her. “You better not get any more ideas about running on your own.” Sydney didn’t respond. “You promised.”
“I know.”
“Say it again.”
“I promise.” She just didn’t know if it was a promise she could keep.
***
The next morning, Sydney woke alone. She got dressed and wandered downstairs. Stepping into the garage, the first thing she saw was a large black barrel and the fact that Connor—and his pool of blood—was gone. She stepped closer to the barrel but Xander’s voice stopped her.
“I wouldn’t open that if I were you.”
“Is it what I think?”
“Yep. And I’m kind of pissed at that guy for leaving us his mess to clean up.”
Sydney looked Xander up and down with a cocked brow. He was dressed in dingy jeans and an old tee-shirt. His hair was held back from his face with a bandana and he and his clothes were covered in paint—old and new. “What are you doing?”
“Painting,” he shrugged.
Sydney noticed the easel and canvas mounted facing away from the barrel. She walked towards it and Xander watched. The juxtaposition of Xander, hard, former biker and the sensitive artist Xander holding the paintbrush was almost enough to make her laugh. The mostly finished painting nearly took her breath away. “Wow.”
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
The image was of a large lake that extended beyond the edges of the canvas. The water was blue reflecting the clouds, making it hard to tell where the sky ended and the lake began. The only disturbance in the water came from the middle of the canvas where a woman was breaking the surface. She was reaching up towards the sky and the water rose with her. Her face was upturned towards the sky and she was naked from the waist up. Streams of water poured off her brown hair and ran back towards the lake. Despite the nudity, the picture wasn’t vulgar or erotic. The woman wasn’t exposed—she was free.
“It’s beautiful,” Sydney gasped.
“I’m glad you like it.”
“Thank you—for this. For everything.”
“Stop thanking me.”
“I can’t help it.”
“But thanking me implies I had a choice.”
“You did—you do.”
“No, I don’t. I haven’t had a choice since the day I met you.”
Sydney’s stomach shivered, and she pulled him closer. She had to stand on her toes, but she pressed her lips against his. Xander wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her against him roughly.
Leaning away from him, she smiled. “I like where this is going, but the dissolving body in the barrel is killing the mood.”
“Oh, yeah.”
And just like that, everything was back to business. “So, what now?” Sydney asked. She watched him pack away his supplies.
“Let’s see if we can find any others like Connor. Someone else who was at the convention but is now missing.”
“Why?” Sydney had a feeling where he was going, but wanted him to explain it.
“If we find others we might find them in a state that’s easier to communicate with. Whether we do or not, maybe it will draw out the guy. Maybe he will come for their head.”
“Try to take the fight to Them.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah.”
“That means we are kind of going in blind though. Asking for something to happen that we can’t predict how it will play out.”
“I don’t know what else to do, do you?”
“No. Not really.”
“Bottom line is, we need to find someone who can give us answers. There really isn’t much point in hiding from Them. They obviously know where we are and what we are doing.”
“You’re right,” Sydney nodded. “Other than walking outside and shouting for Them to come talk—I don’t know how else to get them to make a move. They seem pretty content in just watching me at this point.”
“OK. So, do you want to try to find someone else? I really need to put some finishing touches on this. I don’t think I’m going to be able to let it alone until I do.”
Sydney smiled. “Sure.”
She left him at his painting and returned to the apartment. She pulled out Pan’s computer and brought up a search engine. First, she searched for recent injuries and murders in Las Vegas. With his computer in her lap, she couldn’t forget about how they left Pan. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to find an article. Apparently, a woman was found dead in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. Sarah Teller had been dead for several days when found by the landlord responding to complaints of odor coming from the apartment. The victim’s boyfriend, Edward Lyman was missing.
“Damn,” Sydney muttered to herself. Either he recovered enough to run on his own, or someone came to get him. Considering the cops hadn’t found his headless body, she didn’t know whether they should assume that Pan ended up like Connor.
Unable to do anything other than feel guilty, Syd returned to her search engine. She knew she should be searching for more of the missing on Pan’s list, but she wanted to check something else first. She searched for beheaded bodies, without limiting the geographic area. A few pages of search results later, lead her to an article buried in the dregs of a British world news page. A burial site had been found in Colombia a year ago. Considering the lack of international relations, Sydney wasn’t surprised by the limited information. What was known was there was between five to ten bodies found missing their heads. They didn’t all die at the same time and the authorities suspected it had something to do with the cartels in the area.
Sydney couldn’t ignore the article. While it could be entirely a coincidence, how rare could unexplained deaths in Colombia be? Something about it gave her an eerie feeling. She wrote down the location and the date of the discovery determined to come back to these deaths. She looked over the list of missing again and searched each name. Previously, the fact that Connor was from Chicago caught their attention and they had chosen to focus on him. However, this time, Sydney paid more attention to the other names on the list. By the time she got to Randall Barnes she was afraid they would be taking a trip back west to Oklahoma to search for Tasha Crowl as no other missing person was closer.
Randall Barnes was from Ohio and she decided to try to find out more about him as Ohio was a hell of a lot closer than Oklahoma. It took some searching to find a picture of Randall but when she did, her blood turned to ice. Staring at her from the article written four months ago, identified as Randall Barnes, was Short Man.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Shit,” she muttered to herself.
“What?” Xander’s voice caused her to jump hard enough to almost drop the computer. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
“What did you find?”
“Short Man.” She turned the computer so he could see the screen.
“Damn! That’s really him, isn’t it?”
“Yep. His name was Randall Barnes. He was on Pan’s list.”
“He went from missing to found to missing again.”
“Pan is missing now too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. His girlfriend was found but his body wasn’t.”
“So no one found him and took his head?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Why are they only taking some people’s heads and not others?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have a theory?”
“Not really. But what if they aren’t dead?”
“Well, we know Pan wasn’t dead when we left him,” Xander shrugged.
“Right. But I assumed someone would find him or he would die before they did.”
“Me too,” he admitted. “But I am sure Short Man—Randall Barnes—was dead. I could see his brain.”
Sydney tried not to shudder. “I found something else.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She told him about the Colombian deaths.
“It could be a coincidence.”
“I know. But it doesn’t feel like a coincidence.” Xander didn’t answer and they sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said finally.
After he left she returned to her Colombian search. Her hands hovered over the keys trying to figure out where to even begin. Finally, she shrugged and typed “weird things in Colombia South America 2014.” Surprisingly, it didn’t take long to find something unusual enough to catch her attention. A local blogger wrote about a small archeological dig that had been conducted in early 2013 was one of the top search results. Thanks to Google translate, she was able to read the entry. The site was believed to be the location of a Quimbayan building they thought was a place of worship. Having never heard of the people, Sydney searched for more information about the Quimbayas. She wasn’t able to find a lot with a quick search other than the fact that the people were goldsmiths, and seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth.
The hair raised on the back of Sydney’s neck. She returned to the blog about the archeological dig. The reason the blog was hit in her search was because the blogger thought it was weird that there were so many “doctor looking people” on the site. He didn’t give names, probably because he didn’t know them. But he had apparently seen some kind of canister looking things before removed from the dig.
Who the blogger was to be able to get this close to the dig, Sydney couldn’t tell. She sat back and glared at the computer as if it had intentionally only given her enough information to make her more worried but not enough to know what to worry about. She tried searching for Colombian archeological digs in general but just got information about Columbia University archaeological department. She also searched for more from the blogger since his posts ended abruptly about a year ago, but without his real name she hadn’t been able to find anything.
Xander came out of the bathroom with just a towel around his waist and for a moment Sydney was distracted enough that she forgot what she found. At the look on her face, he grinned. “See something you like?”
“Um...yeah,” she smiled tentatively. She had to take a deep breath but was proud of saying what she was thinking, even if she also knew she shouldn’t. Xander’s face lit up and he came towards her but she held up a hand. “But you have to see what I found.”
His scowl told her he wasn’t thrilled about being redirected. “I have a feeling this is bad.” He sat next to her, closer than necessary and she tried to not stare at how low his towel had fallen around his waist. He took the computer from her and began reading the blog. She stared at his chest and his damp hair and fought the urge to reach out and touch his skin. Her entire body was doing its best to distract her. She remembered his saying he hadn’t had a choice since he met her and she smiled a little. She realized he was right. She hadn’t had a choice either.
The chances of her ending up where she was currently had to be astronomical. Then why did I? Of all the terrible things that had happened, everything could have been worse. Feeling like she was jumping without a parachute most of the time had kept her alive so far. Whatever primal instinct pushed her to survive was also pushing her towards Xander and she was getting tired of fighting it.
His bristly jaw clenched as he read the entry. �
��This could be completely unrelated.” Sydney let him keep reading as he switched tabs and read the same information about the Quimbaya people she had. “I don’t know, Sydney,” he muttered trying to piece together the same puzzle she had been struggling with.
She was tired of puzzles and mysteries, her brain was closing up shop on weird. Besides, they could be attacked by a beheading creep at any time really. She needed fun a distraction. She need to feel normal. Alive. Reaching out she grasped a strand of his wet hair with her fingertips and pulled it gently. She saw him raise a brow but otherwise he ignored her and it only encouraged her to do more. Pinching the lock of hair she ran her fingers down and a drop of water came away and gathered on her fingertip. Her mouth had suddenly gone dry and her heart was beating harder. She placed her finger against Xander’s shoulder and ran it gently down the length of his arm. A smile spread across her face when she saw his chest still as his breath caught in his chest.
“You better be ready to finish what you start.” he murmured.
Sydney took the computer away from him and set it on the table. She felt like she was spinning out of control but refused to let her own fears stop her. She wanted to feel good. Using her foot she pushed the table further away and slid to the floor on her knees. Positioning herself in between Xander’s legs she looked up. He was staring at her wide-eyed and his fingers were digging into the arm of the couch. She grinned up at him as she ran her hands along his thighs and under the towel. She couldn’t remember if she had ever even done this before, but she just did what felt natural.
His skin was warm against her hands and she rested her cheek against the inside of his leg, closing her eyes for a moment. She didn’t look up at him as she untucked the towel and tossed the ends aside. The only sound as he slid his waist forward was his panting breaths. She didn’t know if she had ever been with a man or not and she didn’t care. She was just glad that she seemed to be doing damn fine job with her seduction.
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