by Danae Ayusso
She moaned. “No, tell me.”
“I warn you now, it is not a pretty tale,” he said.
“I have no doubt,” Akia said with a smile.
Damian chuckled and propped his head up on his hand, and visualized that he was home in front of the fireplace and Akia was sitting across from him, hugging a pillow and wearing one of his undershirts that hung off of her toned body like an ill-fitting dress. Her hair would be pulled back in a sloppy pony tail, the shorter strands framing her face making her look younger and softer somehow, and the warm glow from the fireplace painted her in golden light making her appear angelic.
“I was seventeen, captain of the football team, of course,” he dryly added the latter for her amusement, and she chuckled, “was dating the head cheerleader who was prom queen runner up. The deejay was playing the worst compilation of music in recorded history, the crape paper decorations were a fire hazard, I’m sure-”
Akia snorted. “Oh my god.”
“I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet!” he assured her. “Miss Prom Queen runner up decided to throw a complete temper tantrum because I had to dance with the Prom Queen, who coincidentally was my step-sister-”
That was it, she laughed.
“It gets better,” Damian assured her. “While we were doing the robot and running man, instead of slow dancing, since we were family, my date went and popped a handful of pills, snorted a few lines of coke, and drank a fifth of vodka. By the time I found her, she was covered in vomit and making out with the fat girl from the chess team.”
Akia was laughing so hard that she had snorted more than once.
Damian smiled; he knew that her ocean blue eyes were sparkling like the diamonds she now wears around her neck, and her skin was flushed with amusement. “Are you better now?”
Content, she sighed. “Surprisingly, yes.”
“Good. Get your firm, round ass out of the Jeep, see what’s going on with your father, so you can get home where you belong. Okay?”
“Home?” Akia whispered. “That sounds like an agreeable plan. I’ll call you once I find out what’s going on… Thank you.”
His smile fell. “There’s nothing to thank me for, you know that,” he reminded her. “If you would let me, I’d be there for you now, regardless of what family drama is going on for you. It’s okay to ask for help and to allow others to help you, Latria Mou,” he whispered, his rarely heard outside of the bedroom Greek accent flaring. “S’Agapo.”
Akia sighed. “I know you do. I’ll call you later,” she whispered before hanging up.
Damian fought the urge to throw the phone across his office and growled in frustration. “Stubborn woman,” he snarled before pulling his hand over his face in resignation.
Self-sufficient and hardheaded were admirable traits in a partner, but at the moment it was infuriating because the stubborn woman never asked for help, ever, and it drove Damian crazy. He knew that Akia could take care of herself; he’s seen her take down perps three times heavier and hopped up on PCP before and not break a sweat. But this was different, this was an emotional battle that she was facing, alone, and it killed him inside to just sit there while she was facing the demons of her past by herself.
Damian didn’t know of her family, but he suspected that it was much like his: good came with the bad. For the first year of their relationship Akia would wake up screaming or crying, and when he tried to console her she’d scrambled away from him or pulled a weapon on him. There were a few times that his life literally flashed before his eyes as he struggled to stay completely still as a blade bit into his throat, drawing lines of blood. Eventually the episodes became less and less, and instead of attacking him or trying to run, she’d curl up in his arms and allowed him to console her. He had asked a couple of times, but she’d get closed off and argumentative, and he really didn’t like sleeping alone, so he quickly learned that asking would only cause her to get closed off and turn her from him thus he stopped asking.
“The good with the bad,” he mumbled under his breath and unlocked his cell phone then flipped through the encrypted files until he found what he wanted.
Giggling made him smile as the video played.
“I’m serious, Damian. Stop,” Akia said between bouts of laughter.
“Not until I hear you say it,” he taunted; he was straddling her on the bed, torturing the stubborn woman by the worst means possible: tickling.
She glared at him and defiantly jutted her chin out. “Never,” she hissed.
“Wrong answer,” he tauntingly sang.
Another bout of hysterical laughter caused the woman under him to thrash and kick, but she couldn’t buck him off.
“Damn it! I hate you!” she yelled.
“Say it,” he said.
Akia rolled her eyes. “You suck, but you were right. You talkin’ to me was an improvised line by De Niro. There, you happy?” she sneered, making a face.
Damian chuckled. “Honestly, it wasn’t nearly as gratifying as I thought it’d be.”
The corners of her lips twitched before she laughed, smiling wide.
“Beautiful,” both Damian’s murmured before the video ended. Before he could lock his phone, a pop up reminder flashed. When he opened the notification his eyes widened. “Shit,” he hissed, silently berating himself for nearly forgetting, then started hurrying to finish his paperwork and signing off on the stack of reports before he addressed his schedule for the coming week.
“Just put it in drive and… Damn it,” Akia grumbled, smacking the steering wheel again before struggling with the lid on her prescription bottle so she could take a pill. “It shouldn’t be this hard!”
“It usually is.”
She looked over to the passenger side and smiled. “Hey, Connie,” she whispered then patted the seat, inviting him to join her, which he obliged, closing the door behind him. “You’re the only person I know that can sneak up on me like that.”
Connell smiled wide. “It’s a talent, Sis. How are you? You look like hell!”
Akia rolled her eyes. “It honestly amazes me that you’ve practiced medicine as long as you have because you have no bedside manner in the least.” She made a mocking face before popping a small pill in her mouth, swallowing it dry.
He chuckled and pushed his falling black bangs back from his eyes. “You take offense to, as what you’ve called more than once, pussy footing around the subject so it’s safer to be direct.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Trying to find the nerve to drive up to the house?” he surmised.
“What’s going on?” she asked, instead of admitting she was terrified to drive the three hundred yards to Verulfr Manor. “Varg called and simply said Father needed me and to come home. I get that the asshole isn’t one for words, but really?”
Connell chuckled. “According to Kid he has the personality of burnt toast.”
“Adopting again?” Akia asked since Kid wasn’t a known name to her.
“Lou and Father tracked him across the Ukraine,” he explained, his green eyes moving over her appraisingly. “For being young, he is surprisingly resilient and shows impressive control. He’s been here for five years. I offered to visit every six months to check up on him, make sure that he hasn’t relapsed…the people that had him got Kid strung out on garbage heroine in order to control him. He’s been clean since he came home, but you know how Lou worries about relapsing since he was once afflicted with chasing the green dragon. Sadly, when I came for a follow up I got stuck here again.”
They were quiet for a moment, neither knowing where to go after that statement; no one spoke of the personal demons that each family member had faced or still dealt with. It was their way of not causing the inflicted to have to vanquish their demons over and over by reminding those harboring it of them.
“How are you?” Connell asked at length, eying the pill bottle she tossed in her purse. “Your follow up isn’t for another couple of months, but I’m curious h
ow it’s working since you’ve been quiet.”
She shrugged and looked out the window. “Apparently it’s regulated, almost like clockwork now, so that’s good. The combination you came up with is working for now. I have more control over her, but at the same time I have none. If it wasn’t for the pills and…my outlet, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Your outlet, that’s a person right, and not an impressive collection of sex toys?” he mused, cocking an eyebrow.
Akia’s mouth fell open before she softly smacked him, so he smacked her back. “That’s disturbing, and I’m not even going to address it with a response.”
He roared with laughter, and she chuckled. “I missed this, Sis. I know you had your reasons for going, and I understand part of the reason why you stayed, but you should have vacationed on the Island every so often instead of meeting up with me in seedy hotel rooms.”
She nodded. “Only a couple times was it a seedy hotel room, Smart Ass, but we can discuss resolving that later. At the moment tell me what’s going on.”
Connell buckled the seatbelt and motioned for her to get back on the road; she complied without question. “Nearly two cycles ago, a body was found on the beach,” he explained as Akia drove back towards town. “Drowning with an animal attack finisher was listed as the official cause of death by the medical examiner.”
“By you,” she clarified.
“I moonlight as many things, Sis, you know that,” he amusingly reminded her. “The wounds were consistent with a large animal, bear according to the official report.”
She snorted.
“Yes, I know,” he dramatically sighed for show, and she rolled her eyes over his antics, “I used to be much more creative. But don’t worry, with the second body the cause of death was listed as death by a Wendigo!”
Akia gave him a look. “Second body… Wendigo?! You’re an idiot,” she groaned, and he roared with laughter. “I honestly don’t know why they’ve permitted you to keep an adult job. You are a child in the body of sixty-five year old-”
“That doesn’t look a day over thirty,” Connell amusingly interjected.
“Yet another discussion that I will not contribute to,” she said. “Two bodies-”
“A few,” he corrected. “All washed up on shore…presumably washed up. In my non-professional opinion, they were staged, but what does the medical examiner know?”
“Not much if you’ve never been trained to process crime scenes or collect evidence…that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” she asked. “To help Father figure out what is going on in order to keep attention off of the family?”
Connell hissed out a breath. “Yeah, not exactly. Father is in custody on suspicion of murder,” he mumbled the latter quickly under his breath.
Akia slammed on the breaks and turned to look at him; her nostrils flared, eyes narrowed and darkened, and a menacing growl rolled from the base of her throat.
“Calm down, Sis,” he lovingly scolded. “Control your temper otherwise Eve will have her fun. Is that what you want?”
He was right, and she knew it, and if Eve did make an unwanted appearance, it would be bad for everyone.
Akia took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself.
“Better?” he asked.
“Marginally,” she hissed. “Why is Father being detained for this?”
Again, he hissed out a breath; he didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but he drew the short straw. “Father is the one that found each body, as if they were left purposely for him to find.”
Again, Akia growled and her hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“Calm down, Sis. One of us needs to keep a level head, and since the locals don’t know you, don’t know that you’re part of the family, I think Varg was hoping that you’d be able to sway the local authorities into releasing Father on house arrest or something until we can figure out what or who is doing this and why.”
“Any suspects not noted in the police files?” she asked, pulling back onto the road, and went into police mode.
“None. Can’t pick anything up, at least I couldn’t,” he admitted. “The first was reported right away, for obvious reasons, so the others didn’t get a chance to see the body. The second, third and fourth bodies were absent of anything useful. There was something there, but most likely the tide washed away anything that might have been traceable or I was imagining things.”
Akia nodded, processing what he said. “Water submersion is a means to remove trace evidence, so I can’t fault you for finding it odd that multiple victims, all apparently attacked by a wild animal, would randomly wash up on shore. But there are no bears in the area, or Wendigos, Smart Ass.”
He smiled wide.
“On the flipside of that forensic countermeasure,” she continued, “the water shouldn’t have been able to scrub the body, in a sense, of traces that would only be detectable to the family. Seff has a suspect list drafted?”
Again, a hissed breath came from between Connell’s teeth. “None. We didn’t pick up anything on any of the bodies or the dumpsites, or even the woods around the manor, at least not anything that was familiar. Once you smell it you never forget it, you know that, but none of us recognized what wasn’t there.”
“I hate it when you speak in riddles.”
“I know,” he said with a chuckle.
“Was it the same with each victim?” Akia asked, going down the checklist in her head.
Connell shrugged. “Honestly, it was hard to tell. There was something masking it, an agent that I couldn’t identify. It was natural, not a chemical, but the results back from the crime lab were useless. The mass spectrometer…it was a report longer than your arm, but it didn’t make any damn sense to anyone, myself included. I have Lou looking into it, but he’s getting more and more distracted lately. I fear it might be early onset Alzheimer’s.”
She made a face. “Lou just needs to get laid. The last time he got laid was in the eighties before his last wife died. Did you neglect to notice that the anniversary of her death is coming up? Get him drunk and find him an older lady that understands French and likes animalistic, slightly romantic in a deranged way, sex, and he’ll be fine.”
Connell looked at her with wide eyes before he roared with laughter.
“Once again, you are a child in a man’s body,” she said. “The victimology?”
“They are all dead, does that count as a common denominator?” he said, wiping away the tears of amusement from the corners of his eyes.
She smacked him upside the head. “Grow up.”
He playfully smacked her back. “Where would the fun be in that?!” he beamed with a face-consuming smile.
“Father being detained is not amusing in the least,” she snapped at him, and his smile fell. “You should have called me sooner. You should have called, not left it for Varg to do when no one was looking.”
He shrugged. “Father didn’t want to bother you. He figured it’d blow over, the next time a body washed up while he was locked up would prove his innocence-”
“But one hasn’t,” Akia interrupted, getting a nod in return. “Have there been any Strays in the area as of late? Anyone that might perceive the family as a threat?” she pressed.
Again, he shrugged. “Last Stray in the area was right after Kid joined the family, and Lou took care of it because he’s really protective of the blue-haired brat.”
“Blue hair?”
“Yeah, Kid is really young. He claims that he’s twenty, but I think he’s only sixteen at the most…bone development doesn’t lie, but I’ve kept my mouth shut about it since it doesn’t matter either way.”
Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel as they waited at one of six traffic lights in Haven. “Could Kid be the source?” she asked.
Connell laughed. “No. Believe it or not, he has complete control. Is he mischievous? Yes. Has balls of steel…he even pulled a few tricks on Varg, and yet he lives to tell the tale. For being found on the streets in
Eastern Europe, he’s extremely smart…genius level smart when it comes to computers and everything they entail. He’s been bugging Dad about digitizing the library, but Dad is old fashioned and likes the feel of parchment.”
She nodded her understanding; as much as she detested the stale smelling library where the archives were housed, she missed spending hours at Father’s side creating a sense of organization to the extensive collection that the family had acquired over the years. While working side by side with the man that saved her, that she eventually called Father, she felt special and loved, two things she had never known before, and the months spent in silence simply compiling and rearranging the library Father was so very proud of, allowed her to find her voice for the first time.
“You got your badge on you?” Connell asked when they parked outside the small police station.
Akia nodded. “Always. Debating on being armed or not,” she admitted.
He shook his head. “Don’t go and get yourself arrested as well. We need at least one member of law enforcement on our side for this little incident.”
She pulled her sidearm from the glove box, chambered a round then secured the holster to the back of her jeans before getting out of the Jeep.
Connell rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why I bother, I honestly don’t,” he complained, joining her.
“Because you’re a glutton for punishment,” Akia reminded him, sliding into a distressed leather jacket that was slightly fitted but would hide her sidearm without hindering her from pulling it if needed. “Make the introductions, but keep the family relation out of it.”
He nodded his understanding. “Of course. What do I tell them?”
“You’re creative so you’ll figure it out,” she reminded him, motioning for him to lead the way.
When they entered the small office, the officers hanging around the bullpen, appearing bored, looked at them curiously. Akia quickly took inventory and assigned a value to each person, none of which looked as if they could write a parking ticket let alone solve a multiple homicide.