by J. L. Imhoff
“No, but Dr. Sohon has several.”
“Then we’ll borrow his.” Looking inside the small box on the desk, I found Roman’s knife, along with photos and the video camera. After confirming the memory card was still in it, I took the camera to be sure I left no evidence behind. With still no sign of the daggers or the money, I thought of looking further, and maybe finding my locket, but having already wasted so much time, I pushed the impulse aside.
Escape was priority. Knowing my baby needed a living mother was more important to me than my locket. My silly desire to have it back had caused all this to begin with. If I had simply listened to Roman, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I dumped the contents of the box in to my purse, including Roman’s knife. Touching the mousepad, David’s laptop came out of sleep mode. On the screen were several of the photos of me, in my old bloody and torn dress, running into the ocean. My stomach fell to the floor. “We’ll take that too then,” I whispered to myself, slamming the laptop shut and shoving it into my oversized purse. Unable to zip it closed, I wrapped my arms around the now bulging bag.
The wall clock’s persistent ticking reminded me time was slipping by. I needed to destroy any evidence. What about the samples of my body? Where are they? Crap, I don’t have enough time to do a thorough search.
“Do you know where he went and what he did with, the um, samples, he took of me?”
“I don’t know where he put those. He said he needed some more equipment, something about an ultrasound.”
“Great—he wants to look inside of me now.”
“I think we should get going,” Bobby insisted, as he fidgeted and kept wiping his palms on his shirt.
I nodded. “Where are his car keys?”
“The cars are in the garage, but I don’t know where he keeps his keys.”
Frantically, I searched the drawers in his desk and found a stack of papers with my name on them in the top drawer. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know ma’am. I don’t know anything, as I said before. I had nothing to do with this. I just want to get out of here. Can we go now?”
Quickening my pace, I flipped through the paperwork—documents for a life insurance policy, in my name with David as the beneficiary, for five million dollars. “He can’t do that, can he? We weren’t even married.”
“Do what, ma’am?” Bobby paced back and forth between the doorframe and the hallway, watching for David. Sweat trickled down his face and he wiped it away repeatedly.
“Take out a life insurance policy on me if we weren’t married?” I waved the papers in the air as if they were my death certificate—to me they oozed blood and hatred.
“I don’t know ma’am, but he is a big-wig surgeon. I’m sure he can do whatever he wants and get away with it. That’s how the world works. Not fair, but it’s reality.”
“Yeah, reality.”
“We got to get going.”
“We need keys. Look around, they have to be here somewhere.” Continuing our rummage through the drawers, we found nothing.
“Look, I’ll just hotwire one of his cars,” Bobby suggested.
“It would have been nice to know you could do that before we wasted all this time looking for the keys.” I caught myself from snapping. Taking a deep breath, I regained my sensitivity.
“I didn’t want to get into any more trouble,” he reasoned, walking through the house to the garage.
I followed, but before we opened the door to the garage, David walked in.
Chapter 25
“Damn it,” I gulped, deflating. The knot in the bottom of my belly clenched and moved into my throat.
“Going somewhere?” David demanded.
Swallowing my angst, I roared, “Damn straight. Out of here!”
“I’m not done with you yet,” he snarled, pulling out a gun and pointing it at us.
“David, this crap is getting old. Think of a new strategy,” I challenged, before I could stop myself.
“Get back upstairs,” he ordered. “And you,” he directed at Bobby. “You can’t let her manipulate you. A lot is at stake here.”
“I promised him money, I’m not manipulating him.”
“Get upstairs,” he repeated through tight lips.
Holding my purse tight, I trudged up the stairs at gunpoint. Bobby backed away, but David wasn’t concerned about him at all. Arrogance.
I wrapped my fist around Roman’s knife, and then let my purse, and the evidence, fall to the floor keeping the knife tightly secured in my hand. The second I crossed the threshold to the room upstairs, I spun and roundhouse kicked the gun out of his hands—a move I’d learned in weaponry training class. It caught David off guard and the gun clattered noisily before sliding across the hardwood floors.
Breathing hard, I aimed the knife at him. His expression of shock was quickly replaced with one of hatred.
My rage rose, bathing my being in an incomprehensible confidence. I wasn’t afraid and I certainly wasn’t going to cower anymore. I would die stronger than I lived, without fear.
David laughed—a sinister sound, sending chills down my spine. The scent of his confidence was sour in the back of my throat. As if he didn’t have to worry about me because I was inadequate, or too weak of a person, to stand up to him. He thought I didn’t have it in me.
Do I?
Maybe not before.
I do now.
I’d briefly fallen into old patterns again, doubting myself, allowing my fear and insecurity to control me, but not anymore. I knew what he was capable of, and there was no way he was going to let me out of here alive.
“What do you think you’re going to do with that?” he asked, circling, moving closer to the side of the bed where the gun had careened to a stop. “You’re too afraid to use it on me.”
“Did you take out a life insurance policy on me? How?”
David scoffed, “I told them I was going to propose to my girlfriend who was pregnant. At the time, I didn’t know it was true—the pregnant part. They were more interested in premiums than truth. A young healthy couple wasn’t a high risk for them.”
“You bought all of this… stuff… with blood money from my death.”
“Yes, I did,” he gloated, inching closer to the gun.
I advanced.
A tidal wave of rage, awakened and powerful, coursed through me. I lunged at him, the knife pointed straight for his heart. David skillfully dodged and hit me on the side of my head with his elbow as I stumbled. But when I fell, I managed to kick the gun further away.
Dammit—I sucked at fighting. It looked easy on television, but in real life, I wasn’t a warrior. Rolling away, I regained my footing, pointing the knife at him again.
He chuckled, “Give it up, Anna—you’re no match for me. I only need to do one more test and then you can go. Relax.”
I wasn’t so stupid as to believe him this time. “I want to ask you one question, David.”
“What’s that?”
“Why? Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Kill me?”
I leaped at him again but as he moved out of my way, he seized me by the hair and hauled me back. Excruciating pain ripped through me as I fell backward, but I did not give up my grip on the knife.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes,” I answered, one hand grabbing for my hair while the other desperately clutched the knife.
“Because it was easy,” he boasted, laughing.
Desperate, I spun around fast and slashed at him, cutting across his stomach. Only a superficial wound; he jumped back.
Furious, he released my hair as he brought the hand to his bleeding abdomen. “Now, you’re going to die.”
High on adrenaline, I rushed him again in the seconds he was preoccupied with his wound. David instinctively deflected by latching onto my wrist, the one holding the knife, and spun me around. He slammed me against the wall, knocking the wind from my lungs, wrapping his other
hand around my throat, raising me off the floor.
Breathless, I tightened my hand around the knife hilt, refusing to let him have it.
His grip, like his rage, was unrelenting. As darkness closed in on me, I used the last of my awareness to reach out. To find Roman.
For the briefest of seconds, I connected, and he seemed close. But not close enough.
As I lost my link with him, the darkness gained. Without warning, a surge of energy and strength coursed through me. I sensed Lily, and all the people in Poseidia, sending me strength.
It filled me with light and pushed the darkness away. As though he were nothing more than a paper doll, I shoved David slamming him into the opposite wall.
Coughing and gasping for air, I grabbed at my throat. I needed to get out of here before he regained his footing. In my haste, I didn’t see David retrieve his gun. A loud blast, then a chemical scent reminding me of nail polish remover burned my nose, and finally searing hot pain tore through my leg. On instinct, I twirled and ran at him before he could get off another shot. I moved as fast as any other Mer now and I dove onto him before he had time to register my change in direction. Or the knife aimed straight for his heart.
It tore through his flesh. His eyes widened as shock and realization dawned on him.
David underestimated me for the last time.
I made the mistake of locking eyes with him, as his corrupted life drained. When his soul started to fade into the darkness, I experienced his confusion, anger, and fear as he lay dying underneath me. He saw into me as well, and learned the truth about our baby.
Dark tentacles seized onto me then, snarling, trying to take me with him. I tumbled into the pit of his hell, two smoky arms entangled around my soul. A scream swelled within me and then unleashed as I struggled to regain my footing in the real world, and force his energy out of mine. I screamed until my ears rang. My throat burned, as if I was choking on the ashes of my own scorched flesh.
With every ounce of strength I had left, I held onto the light and life within me. I thought about my unborn baby, and Roman, the sweet joy of the Connective, Ruby, and everything I’d gained since my death. With a force of will, I ripped his ethereal limbs from my soul, clawing my way back from the black, unending abyss of death and darkness. Drawing positive energy from Roman, and the Connective, helped me finally destroy David’s hold.
The last emotion I experienced from him, as his soul was swallowed by the black desolation, was a pure, choking hatred. His stare became blank and lifeless as he slumped, death taking him.
For a few minutes, I laid there, recovering from the shock. As I regained my hold in this world, I touched my shirt, now soaked with his spurted blood. Breathing deeply to slow my heart, sweat, fear, sulfur, and copper struck me in a foul potpourri. I struggled to stand, but had to sit down on the bed before I fell. My vision wavered as the adrenaline faded.
Bobby burst through the door and saw David’s body at my feet. He ran over to check his pulse, then looked up at me and shook his head. Without a word, he pulled Roman’s knife out of David’s chest. For a minute, I was scared—he could turn it on me and in my weakened state, I wouldn’t be able to put up the fight I had with David.
“We got to get out of here. Now,” he said, holding the handle out to me.
I nodded as I took the knife from him. Whew.
Exhausted and weak, I tried to stand again and almost fainted as the blood rushed from my head. Bobby offered me his arm, and then walked me to the bathroom, helping me bandage my leg with supplies David had left in there earlier. Trembling out of control, I cleaned off Roman’s knife in the sink. Nauseated, I watched the blood swirl in macabre strands down the drain. What have I done?
Almost as if he could read my mind, Bobby assured, “It was self-defense. He was going to kill you.”
“My head knows that, but my heart is less certain.”
“Your leg is bleeding through the bandages. We need to get you to a hospital.”
“No, I need to go home. They’ll take care of me. Will you help me get home?”
“Of course, but we need to go now, in case someone heard the gunshot. Let me carry you, it’ll be faster.”
I remembered how I refused to let Roman carry me on the beach. Bobby was here now because of my stubbornness.
“Yes, please. Thank you,” I relented.
As he set me in David’s passenger seat, I clutched my purse as if my life depended on it.
“We need keys, I’ll be right back. I bet they’re in his pants pocket.”
“Can’t you hot wire it?”
“It would be easier to have to keys.”
“Okay,” I said. “But hurry.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed, sprinting back into the house.
I now knew where my locket was—in David’s briefcase in the back seat. Among other jumbled thoughts, it had flickered through David’s mind before he died—he’d tried to sell it but learned it was fake gold. Note to self: Take his briefcase with me back to Poseidia.
While Bobby was gone, the smell of petroleum permeated the less desirable odors, and it occurred to me what I needed to do.
I limped out of the passenger seat and picked up a full gas can sitting against the garage wall.
A mounting sense of hysteria pushed at the edges of my emotions. It took all my energy to maintain my faculties. My mind was quickly slipping into a fog of shock. Vestiges of adrenaline kept me going for the moment, but soon it would run out, and I would have to deal with reality.
I’d made my way into the living room when Bobby returned from upstairs.
“We need to go,” he insisted.
“I need to do this first,” I protested. “But I need a lighter. Do you have one?”
“You’re in luck,” he grinned, reaching into his pants pocket. “I keep trying to kick the habit.”
Thank you.
“Will you help me?”
Bobby hesitated, then took the can from me, and sloshed it all over the floor and new furniture.
Transfixed, I watched as if time stood still. Taking two deep breaths, I flicked the lighter on and as we headed to the garage, I threw it over my shoulder. The fire roared to life, engulfing all of the living area within seconds.
We were out of the garage and heading down the road to freedom a minute later. Turning, I grabbed David’s briefcase out of the back seat, pulling it and my purse in close. Roman’s knife. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at it again.
“Turn left,” I instructed. “Head to the interstate, and I’ll guide you from there. I’ll get you your money—I promise.”
“We need to get rid of this car.”
Lightheaded, I panted. “My car is back at Stanford Hospital. I have the keys, but we’ll end up on security cameras in the hospital garage if we take David’s car there.”
“What do we do?”
“We’ll go to a house where I can get help. Get on the highway, and head north.” I leaned back in my seat and reached out with my senses. Where are you, Roman?
As soon as I reached out to the Connective, I sensed Roman, and his frustration. He was across town looking for me.
Roman sensed me and I let him know we were heading to the house in San Francisco.
I’ve lost too much blood. I won’t make it.
If I could have a few minutes of sleep, it would all be better. I closed my eyes and slipped away into the darkness.
The next thing I knew someone was shaking my shoulders. I opened my eyes a sliver.
“Where are we headed?” Bobby asked.
I considered the interstate signs briefly. “Take the second exit from here, and then turn right. It’s the big house on the hill.” Spent, I faded again.
Someone shook me and slapped my face. My eyes opened, but I remained disoriented.
“There you are. Don’t die on me, Anna,” Roman ordered, fear etched in his voice.
“Roman?” Softness cradled me, as if I was lying on a couch.
>
“Are you expecting someone else? Should I be jealous?” he joked as he inspected my body. “You’ve lost too much blood. We need to get you home and in a healing tank.”
“Roman?”
“I’m taking you home. I’ve done as much as I can. All I could do was stop the blood loss, but you’re too weak. Injuries aside, you’ve been out of the water too long.”
“Wait,” I shouted to interrupt him. “Where is Bobby? And… and… the Mercedes is at Stanford. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll deal with it later. A security team can clean up the mess. We need to get you home. Now.”
“Wait,” I repeated.
“What is it?” he demanded, not hiding the irritation and impatience in his voice.
“Give Bobby some money. And I want to talk with him in private.”
“This isn’t the time to have a heart to heart.”
“I’m okay—give me a couple of minutes.”
“You have two,” Roman conceded and then walked out of the living room.
Bobby entered. “I think you need to listen to the man. You need a hospital.”
“What I need is to know you will keep my secret.”
“I don’t know anything about secrets,” he winked. “No, I don’t know what you are, so how can I tell anyone? No one would believe me anyway. They would think I was crazier than I am already. You don’t have to worry about me.” Bobby smiled. “Meeting you is enough.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“You have no idea.”
“You’ll delete any pictures you have?”
“I can’t promise that. But I will promise no one else besides me will ever know what happened today. As I said, no one would ever believe me. Now you get going, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll see you again someday.”
Roman returned then and ordered, “Time’s up. Let’s go, no arguing.”
He handed Bobby a full black duffle bag. Then Bobby left in one of the cars, which Roman told him to keep.
Roman picked me up in his arms, touched his ear clip, and the portal opened.
“Wait. My purse, my portal key, your knife… and David’s briefcase?”
“I got it all,” he assured, pulling the purse around from his back, and giving the briefcase a swing from the hand under my knees. “The bag’s not my color, but seeing how you can’t carry it, I guess I have to.”