Dark Angel

by Bridget Essex

  It was for a stupid reason—I’m going to tell you that right away.

  Because I was panicking about the dream. About the way the marks were spaced on my neck.

  About the fact that it really did look like I’d been bitten.

  As I stared down at the drop of blood on my finger, I remembered the dream. I remembered the woman licking the blood from the wound in my neck, her mouth curving up into a slow, sensuous smile as her brown eyes sparkled in the dim light of the bar, as her eyes rolled back in her head in ecstasy as she drank from me. I shivered and rubbed my fingertips together, staring down at the blood.

  The wounds in my neck had been sealed last night, just before I went to bed. Just because they were open this morning meant nothing. I must have peeled off the scabs (what a gross thought) by my tossing and turning while I slept last night. That’s it. That’s what must have happened.

  But as I turned off the bathroom light, as I hurried to my kitchen junk drawer to dig through it for band-aids…I wondered.

  I went back to the bathroom after I found the band-aids. I peeled off their backings and pressed two to my neck.

  One would have been suspect for covering up a hickey. But two? I groaned and ran a hand through my hair, staring at my reflection with a frown.

  Two band-aids on my neck made it look exactly like I was trying to cover up vampire bites.

  I turned off the light in disgust and grabbed my purse and keys and made my way out of my apartment.

  I was being ridiculous. I knew that. But the dream…it had been so real.

  I managed to catch a bus going down the street that ran parallel to the one I needed to get to work, but I was still half an hour late to the office. Oddly enough, Henry, our manager, didn’t seem to mind.

  I worked at Pine Branch Realty, which sells a lot of high-end condos here in Boston. I’m not a realtor, and I don’t really ever want to be a realtor; it was never my dream to sell property. This isn’t my forever job, but it does pay the bills.

  So, yeah, you guessed it: I’m a secretary.

  Being a secretary’s not so bad, no matter what the sitcoms tell you. I mean, yes, you’re talked down to a lot—especially by the older men who come in and call me “sweetheart” and “doll” and ask me to get them coffee while they wait for their realtor to call them in and then stare at my ass as I fill up their cups. I could do without that. But Henry, the owner of Pine Branch Realty, is pretty great, and everyone I work with, including the other admin people and the realtors, are good people.

  I came bustling in, ready to beg forgiveness of Henry, who had hired me right out of college, giving me a chance not a lot of people in this economy would offer to someone without office experience, but he was standing by the coffeemaker, talking into his smartphone, and he beamed at me with a wide grin when he saw me.

  He got off the phone, sliding it into the pocket of his suit pants and regarded me with twinkling eyes. Henry Pine is in his late fifties with a potbelly gut and a receding hairline and one of the most charismatic and warm personalities you could ever come across. The second you meet him, you trust him and feel that he wants the best for you, and that he really can find you the perfect condo, no matter what your needs. Which is exactly how he built up such a great realty business in the first place. Trust, as Henry repeats pretty often, will get you everywhere in real estate.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late, Henry,” I sighed, slinging my purse off of my shoulder and behind the front desk. “I overslept my alarm—”

  “It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he told me warmly, waving his coffee cup in my direction as he smiled. “How are you doing, Cassandra?”

  “Good,” I said. The moment the word was out of my mouth, I considered the ludicrousness of my reply. Good? How could I possibly be good? Josie had broken up with me yesterday. Had I just forgotten that fact?

  But yet, somehow, my telling him that I was good was...kind of true. I was feeling good. I was bleeding from inexplicable wounds, I’d been almost killed (or something) by those men last night…but I hadn’t been killed.

  I’d met…her.

  I reached up with my hand and brushed my fingertips over the band-aids. It was so strange. Every time I thought of her, my heart started beating a little quicker, and I felt this tug in my heart. And...in other places, if I’m being honest. There was a stirring in my gut, and my center throbbed. I wanted to see her so desperately that the longing for her left me breathless.

  I didn’t consider, that morning, that this was a bad thing, wanting to see her again so fiercely. I didn’t consider that this was something that wasn’t, well, normal. I went about my usual tasks, and I thought about the woman I’d met last night, the woman who had kissed me, who had dug her fingertips into my hips, pulling me tight against her like we fit together. When I ate my sandwich at lunch, I thought about her. When I was filing new client forms, I thought about her.

  When I left work, I realized Elle was all I could think about.

  Chapter 3: The Choice

  It was strong and insistent, that tug inside of me now. It was not something I could ignore. I didn’t even want to go home. I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk in front of the office, the cool breezes—still too cold for May—ruffling wisps of my hair and the edges of my charcoal gray skirt.

  I wanted to find her.

  It was ridiculous and impossible, of course. Our meeting last night wasn’t exactly something I could advertise on a Craigslist “Missed Connections” post. And the chances of my running into her randomly in Boston, one of the largest cities in the country, were worse my odds of winning the lottery. All I knew was her first name. And there must be a hell of a lot of women named Elle in the world.

  The truth of the matter was that I would probably never see her again.

  And when I considered that thought, the probability that it was almost impossible for us to ever meet again, that I would never see her again, an ache filled me. An intolerable ache. I was staggeringly breathless. I put out a hand against a streetlamp and took several careful, deep gasps as the pain wracked through me, a violent pain that made my legs shake.

  That’s when I began to realize that there was abnormal about this whole situation.

  Obviously, this wasn’t normal. None of this was normal. I was walking briskly down the sidewalk before I’d even realized that I’d picked a direction to set off in. Worry made my heart thud loudly inside me. I ducked inside the closest fast food joint, and though the restrooms of most fast food places in Boston require an access code, to deter non-customers from using them, the door to the women’s room was standing mercifully ajar.

  Through the haze of smoke from the grill and the scent of warming tacos, I trotted inside the restroom, shut the door, and I locked it, my hands shaking so hard that I leaned against that cold, metal door for a long moment before gathering the courage to walk up to the mirror.

  I stared at my reflection, clenched my jaw, reached up and peeled back the band-aids.

  Usually, when a band-aid is soaked through, it shows on the other side, the beige of the band-aid turning an ugly burgundy. But these band-aids weren’t soaked through. They didn’t even have a tiny dot of red on the white gauze pads.

  But the wounds weren’t sealed, either.

  As I reached up and brushed my fingertips over one of the punctures, I felt a shudder go through me. As I stared down at my fingertips, at the droplet of blood that was far too bright and red for comfort, I felt a shudder move through me again.

  I pulled some toilet paper off of the roll and pressed down tightly on the wounds on my neck, as if I were hemorrhaging and needed to staunch the flow of blood. I closed my eyes and gripped the edge of the sink with my other hand; the world was spinning beneath me. When I pulled the toilet paper away, I saw the bleached white was now ruby red, really red, and stained with a lot of blood, too much blood, as if I had been hemorrhaging. I carefully balled up the toilet paper and pushed it into the trashcan, straightening and gaz
ing at my reflection again.

  I stared at my neck.

  The wounds remained open, but no blood poured out of them. With that much blood on the toilet paper, the cuts should have been practically gushing.

  But no…the wounds were open, but the blood stayed on the surface of them and did not drip down. It was as if my wounds were glasses full of liquid to the surface, but they wouldn’t spill over the edges because they were only just full. The last time I checked, cuts, scrapes and wounds didn’t work like that. Blood, you know, bleeds out of you.

  This couldn’t be good.

  Even through all of this, though, even through the alarming blossoming of blood on the toilet paper, even through my fear that there was something very wrong with me…all I could really think about was that woman. Elle.

  Honestly, it felt like I was trapped in a very bad fairy tale.

  It felt like she’d cast a spell on me.

  Like I was...bewitched.

  I didn’t read many fairy tales when I was a kid, but the world is full of them. They're kind of hard to avoid. I’ve seen the movie renditions and the cartoons. There’s that one woman who’s like a temptress, an evil queen who gets the guy she loves to obsess about her with an enchantment, I think, or a bewitched perfume.

  Look, thinking obsessively about a woman I’d only spent five, ten minutes with wasn’t like me. And I know that I should have been worried about the wounds in my neck. I know that I should have been very worried that they weren’t healing, that at any moment, they could gush blood, if pressure was applied to them. But I wasn’t worried about any of that. It was as if the wounds and the blood were only a curious but ultimately unimportant side note to my day.

  I tried to think about work. I tried very hard to concentrate on the joke one of our realtors, Ben, had told me at my desk that morning, the one about the ducks… But even as I conjured up the words, they slipped away from me, and I couldn’t remember, for the life of me, what the punchline had been. Because when I thought about the joke, her image came into my head, pushing away all other concerns.

  I tried to remember the name of the fast food joint I’d just walked into. But I couldn’t even recall the type of food they made, because the second I tried to summon the logo into my mind, all I saw was her face...those deep, dark brown eyes.

  The only thing I could think about was her. Elle. Every thought revolved around the mysterious woman who had kissed me like she’d kissed me a thousand times before.

  And every thought reinforced the fact that I had to see her again.

  “Get a grip,” I muttered to myself in the mirror, my eyes wide and my fingers gripping the sink tightly as I tried to wake myself up from all of this. I must just be tired. That was it. I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept well last night, especially after drinking so much…

  I blinked at my reflection, eyes growing wider.

  Wait—shouldn’t I have woken up hung over?

  Okay, now I really knew that I was edging toward the deep end of paranoia. I gulped down air and tried to make the room stop spinning. Come on... Really, why was I this upset over waking up without a hangover after a night of drinking? It was ridiculous. I should have just felt grateful.

  But I, better than most people, know my drinking limits, and I know what’s going to spell a very bad next day. And, last night, I’d been fully aware that all of the booze I was using to numb the pain of Josie breaking up with me was going to give me a really terrible, wish-I’d-never-been-born hangover the next morning.

  Except it…hadn’t. I’d woken up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as if the most taxing thing I’d done the previous night was make dinner in and pet my cat.

  It didn’t make sense. I’ve had several fewer drinks than what I downed last night, and even that lesser number had made the next day a living hell. I’d had a terrible hangover just last week after celebrating Josie’s birthday.

  So, what the hell?

  But again, even as I began to worry a lot about the fact that I really should have a hangover and didn’t…the thought of Elle came and firmly lodged itself in place. All I could think about were her full lips and her cruel smile, her dark brown eyes and the way she looked at me…

  I needed to find her.

  Yes.

  I took a deep breath as everything else seemed to fade away. The restroom, the fast food joint, the street, the block, the city… All of it faded into nothingness as the image of Elle rose up as clearly in my head as if she were standing right in front of me. And this image, even though it wasn’t real, seemed to intensify, grow stronger, pulling me forward. Pulling me toward a destination I didn’t know, only felt that I had to chase down.

  I turned on my heel and pushed my way out of the restroom. I was halfway down the block before I realized that, again, I had no idea where I was going.

  Something pulled me onward. It was as if I had a rope tied around my waist, and someone was tugging on it, pulling me down the street at a too-fast pace. I’d never felt a more magnetic sensation; I was powerless against it. I put one foot in front of the other, and I walked down that sidewalk quickly, my heels clicking against the pavement, my mind a million miles away… My mind consumed with her.

  I felt feverish. Heat poured through me, through every limb, circulated with a high and desperate pitch between my legs. I felt the wounds in my neck throb in time with the quick and intense pulse of blood through me, my heart beating a staccato inside of my chest, my lungs desperately craving air. I crossed the street, disregarding the traffic, and a taxi cab driver laid on his horn as he slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting me.

  It was the horn that drew my attention, made me blink quickly, glancing forward the moment my feet touched the sidewalk again.

  I’d reached an art gallery.

  It wasn’t the big art museum in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a smaller place, an independent art gallery that probably housed local artists. I stepped into the lobby. There were paintings hung along the white walls inside, and more centered over the windows, hanging from hooks over the glass. The halls were crowded with people in cocktail dresses and suits, mingling together with drinks in hand under the bright lights as they stared at the paintings.

  Elle was there, too.

  It was like a dream, really. There was no one else around her; the patrons gave her a wide berth. From this vantage point, I could only see her long, straight back, but I knew it was her, as much as I knew that my own name was Cassandra Griman, as much as I knew that current circumstances in my life were beginning to get...strange.

  It was her, Elle.

  And if I knew what was good for me, I would not, under any circumstances, walk into the room she was occupying. I would turn around and go back outside.

  I walked into the room.

  The thrum of after-work traffic, of brakes and horns and motors faded to nothingness the moment I moved through the glass door. It closed shut behind me silently, and I was swallowed up by the quiet sounds of glass clinking, of soft laughter, of people speaking, their heads bowed together as they gazed up at the paintings, sounds that slipped into the background as everything else in the room faded away, and all I could see/hear/feel was her.

  My blood roared through me. My heart pounded like it was about to burst out of my chest. And that was a possibility. After all, it was because of my heart that I was being tugged into the gallery, pulled, irrevocably, toward Elle.

  I aimed for her. Dimly, far away, I was aware of the fact that there was a string quartet nearby, playing a nice classical piece. Dimly, far away, I was aware of the fact that there were people talking and laughing, these talking, laughing people giving Elle, the woman who stood in front of the largest painting, an odd solitude.

  She stood there with her back to me, her arms folded, staring up at that painting that was taller than she was. The canvas itself was about ten feet square. It was a painting of a woman’s face, very minimal—just her eyes, her nose and her mouth in an almost cartoonish styl
e, with no color at all. But still, even though that’s all there was to the painting—a few jagged black brushstrokes—those simple features conveyed everything.

  The woman’s eyes were wide open. Her nostrils were flaring. Her mouth was open in a contorted scream.

  The woman in this painting was terrified.

  The woman in front of the painting, the woman who had saved me last night, stared up at that canvas, transfixed. She was wearing black slacks and a satiny white blouse under an tailored suit coat. Her nails were blood red. As I stood behind her, as I cleared my throat, I noticed the large diamond post earrings that were glittering at her pale earlobes.

  She stood at attention, her feet hip-width apart beneath her, her back long and straight as she stared up at the painting with her chin raised.

  I was right behind her now. I cleared my throat.

  But she didn’t turn to face me.

  I frowned, cleared my throat again, walked around her to stand within her line of vision. Still, she didn’t move her eyes from the painting, only cocked her head a little to one side and considered it. Her brooding, dark brown eyes were traced expertly in thin, black eyeliner. Her golden eye shadow glimmered and glittered in the overhead lights and from the sunshine streaming through a window, and her full lips were tinted a floral red.

  I was too aware, acutely aware, of the fact that she didn’t even seem to see me, or didn't care to. She continued to gaze up at the canvas, motionless save for her chest rising and falling with slow, shallow breaths.

  I felt as if were standing next to a statue.

  “Excuse me,” I finally managed to mutter, the words sounding so strained and small that I wondered if she’d even be able to hear me. I almost couldn’t hear myself, since my heart still pounded so loudly inside of me, banging against the cage of my ribs. I licked my dry lips, breathed out, realizing that every inch of my skin was too hot; I felt feverish.

  It was only then that she acknowledged me. Her eyes flicked from the canvas, taking me in without a glimmer of recognition. A single, elegant eyebrow raised, and she frowned slightly, her full lips curling downward.