The Haunting of Riley Watson

by Alexandria Clarke

  I staggered to my feet, pain jolting through my knees, and tugged open the unlocked door to Lourdes’s car to look for anything that could help me get rid of the massive hit man. A bright-orange safety tool was tucked in the pocket of the passenger seat. It was shaped like a small hammer to break the glass of the car window in case of emergencies. I tugged it free and ducked out of the car.

  Lourdes gasped for air as I approached. My hiking boots rasped across the concrete, causing the man to turn his head and look over his shoulder at me. I hid the safety tool behind my back. Apparently, I didn’t look like much of a threat because he returned his attention to Lourdes, redoubling his efforts to choke her out. As soon as I was out of his line of sight, I rushed him. With one swift movement, I swung the safety tool up behind my head like a golf club then down towards the man’s head. I drove it upward as it hit the side of his scalp and caught his temple. He dropped like a fly, completely unconscious as he collapsed right on top of Lourdes.

  “Get him off!” she cried, practically hidden behind the man’s bulk. I tossed aside the safety tool, planted my knee in the man’s side for leverage, and shoved him to the side. He keeled over, revealing Lourdes beneath him. She rolled out from under him and instinctively reached for me. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “Holy shit, your neck,” I said.

  Her skin was blotchy, purple, and red. The man’s fat fingers had left fat bruises around Lourdes’s collar. She patted them gently as she took long, even breaths to test if her windpipe still worked. Then she knelt down and picked up the safety tool.

  “You helped me,” she said.

  “You’re surprised?” I asked. “I think you’re annoying, but I don’t want you dead. Who is that guy?”

  We both stared at the enormous man crumpled on the concrete. Lourdes shook her head.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Does he work for White Oak?”

  I leaned over the man.

  “Don’t!” she said.

  “Don’t worry.” I checked the label of his White Oak polo. As I suspected, it was a medium size, not extra-large as it should’ve been. “There’s no way this guy works for White Oak. Nick would never have let him go out on the floor with his wardrobe looking like this. My bet is he stalked someone in the laundry room and stole the shirt to disguise himself.”

  Lourdes nodded her approval. “Damn, Star. You’d make a pretty decent reporter yourself.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “So you have no idea why someone would want to kill you?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Then who were you on the phone with just now?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course you were listening to that. What did you hear?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “You were keeping it pretty sly, but that guy clearly thought you were in possession of some sensitive information. Are you?”

  She avoided my gaze as she picked up her laptop and camera bags. She checked the broken tail light of the BMW. “Damn it. One more thing to worry about.”

  I folded my arms. “You’re avoiding the question.”

  She checked her laptop and breathed a sigh of relief. “Not broken. Thank goodness.”

  I nudged the hit man with the toe of my boot. “Should I wake this guy up? Maybe he can get you to fess up.”

  “No, stop!” she said, nearly dropping her laptop again. “I’ll tell you, but shouldn’t we call the police first? He did try to murder me after all.”

  “Yet you seem relatively unfazed,” I deadpanned. “Does this happen to you a lot?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “So you’re one of those journalists.”

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m here to expose the truth, but you’re probably not going to like what I found out about this place.”

  “Is White Oak haunted too?” I asked, mocking her professional reporter voice. “Are you going to spread some more lies about me and Nick Porter?”

  “I’ll admit I fabricated some of the stuff about you and Nick,” she said, “but it was only to get a reaction out of him.”

  I stepped back to get a better look at her face to make sure she wasn’t pulling my leg. “Wait a minute. A better reaction out of Nick? I thought it was me you were going after.”

  “You were,” she said. “At first. But something about Nick Porter didn’t sit right with me. I mean, what are the odds that he just happened to get stuck at King and Queens during the snowstorm? Then his rival Oliver Watson is the only one who doesn’t make it out alive.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested. “Daniel Hawkins didn’t make it out either.”

  “Right,” said Lourdes. “The only detective who knew anything concrete about the recent murders at King and Queens. Hawkins would’ve been the only person with enough evidence to pin the crime on someone. From what I hear, Nick was the last person he was seen with at that resort.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That Nick Porter isn’t who you think he is,” Lourdes declared. “He’s got this whole front going for him. The perfect, generous, handsome hotelier who kisses babies and goes to ribbon cutting ceremonies and owns the best resort in Crimson Basin. But that’s all it is: a front.”

  The stairwell door opened again, causing both Lourdes and I to jump, but it was only a White Oak security guard, armed with a baton and a taser.

  “You’re five minutes too late, buddy,” I said acidly.

  The White Oak security office was small but efficient. Lourdes and I answered questions as the security officers reviewed the footage in the garage and tried to get an ID of the man who attacked Lourdes. Ten minutes later, Nick burst through the door.

  “What happened?” he demanded of his staff.

  The security officers babbled incoherently, shrinking back from Nick’s tall order of rage and discontent.

  “Some guy in a White Oak polo attacked Lourdes in the parking garage,” I jumped in. “He wasn’t an employee. Security can’t find any record of him.”

  Nick leaned over the officer reviewing the footage. “Rewind. I want to see this for myself.”

  The officer played the footage for Nick, who watched with the same hardened expression. When the footage finished, he looked right at Lourdes. “Are you okay?”

  Lourdes nodded. “I’m fine, Mr. Porter.”

  “Do you have any idea why this man would try to kill you at my resort?”

  Lourdes’s eyes flickered toward me. “No, sir.”

  Nick squeezed the security officer’s shoulder. “Get the police here as quickly as possible. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  He barely even looked at me before brushing out of the room.

  “Nick, wait up.”

  My chair scraped as I left Lourdes alone in the security room to follow Nick. He didn’t wait for me at all, his polite mannerisms covered by the stress of the event.

  “Lourdes thinks she was attacked because of you,” I declared.

  That stopped him dead. He turned slowly to face me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She knows something about you,” I said. “She thinks you’re not who you say you are.”

  To my surprise, Nick dropped his aggressive pose and his anger in a second. He kneaded the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Oh, dear. I guess the cat’s finally out of the bag.”

  “You mean she’s right?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” He dropped his hand and looked around to make sure no one was listening. “My name isn’t Nick Porter. Well, it is now, but it wasn’t always.”

  “I’m so lost.”

  He smiled, but the expression didn’t quite make it to his pretty blue eyes. “I was adopted, Lucia. My real parents weren’t anything special, so my adoptive parents changed my name to match theirs. It was a sweet gesture, but it made a few things quite confusing in the long run. There was a lot of legal mumbo jumbo that complicated the purchase of White Oak and—” He stopped h
imself from talking and grinned. “You probably don’t care about any of this, do you? My point is that Miss Calvo isn’t incorrect, but that information isn’t exactly hidden. She shouldn’t have been attacked for knowing it. My guess is she’s hiding something else.”

  “She is pretty shady,” I agreed.

  “Lucia!”

  Jazmin stormed toward me from across the lobby. She wore the lopsided frown that she reserved for when she was pissed at me specifically. I braced myself for the tornado.

  “I can’t believe you!” she hissed, closing in. “I told you to leave Lourdes alone. We’re not collaborating behind your back or whatever. I thought you trusted me. I thought we’d gotten past this. Now Lourdes is texting me saying she was attacked in the White Oak parking garage. Are you insane?”

  “Did you read the rest of her texts or did you only read far enough to think I’d done something wrong?” I demanded. “I saved Lourdes’s ass. Without me, she’d be wolf meat.”

  Jazmin checked her messages again. “Oh. Oops.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were all trying to figure out why anyone would have put a hit on Lourdes in the first place. Any thoughts?”

  Jazmin blew her bangs away from her face. “I don’t know. Even when we were hanging out, it always felt like she was hiding something from me. Hi, Nick. How are you doing?”

  “Not very well,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I don’t like all the hubbub that’s happening at my hotel right now. Do you recommend I offer Miss Calvo a ride away from the property?”

  “No, let her stay,” I said. “I bet whoever wants to kill her is going to try again.”

  “You want to use her as bait?” Nick said.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “But if she knows something about White Oak, do you really want her out in the world where you can’t watch her?”

  Nick considered this. “I suppose you have a good point.”

  “Guys, she’s just a reporter,” Jazmin said. “She’s not out to get anyone.”

  “Someone always gets hurt in situations like these,” Nick said. “Believe me, I know that better than anyone.”

  “Yes, but—” Jazmin yelped, cutting herself off mid-sentence. Without warning, her leg buckled beneath her. I caught her beneath the armpits and lowered her to a nearby bench.

  “Jazmin?” I tapped her cheek as her head lolled to the side. She was totally out of it. “Hey, what just happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Her leg,” Nick said, pointing down. “Look at her leg.”

  I glanced down. Between the hem of Jazmin’s pants and her socks, the skin was a strange color. I rolled up the leg of her pants and let out a startled gasp.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  The wounds from the basement demon’s bite had turned black, and the skin around the bite was mottled green and yellow. Pus oozed from the wounds, and her veins were darker than they should have been. It hadn’t healed. It had gotten infected. And the infection was spreading.

  28

  It was starting to feel like I lived in White Oak’s medical clinic. We rushed Jazmin to the exact same emergency room that Riley had just vacated, but the team on call was completely stumped by the wound on her ankle.

  “What the hell is this?” the first medic, a fresh-faced guy with muddy brown hair, asked as he cut away the leg of Jazmin’s pants. “Oh, God. It smells awful. Tanner, have you seen anything like this before?”

  Tanner was a woman in her late fifties with acne-scarred cheeks and a haircut like an Air Force sergeant. She leaned close to Jazmin’s leg without fear.

  “Not in my life,” she said. “It’s clearly blood poisoning. It’s traveling through her veins, but this bite mark… do you know what bit her?”

  “No,” I said. No one would believe the real story. My entire body shook from head to toe. Regular blood poisoning was scary enough. If you didn’t catch it fast enough, you were screwed. It was fatal. Demon-induced poisoning was worse. It lay in wait for several days, then snuck up on Jazmin like a snake in the grass. Her face was completely drained of color. She was the color of pasty white glue from head to toe, except for the discoloration around her ankle.

  “This is beyond my capabilities,” Tanner said as she squeezed pus out of the wound. “White Oak isn’t fully equipped. We don’t have the resources to take care of her. She needs a hospital. Stat.”

  “The roads are still bad,” the intern said. “Emergency services are taking hours to reply to each case. What are we going to do?”

  Nick, who had accompanied us to the ER, chimed in. “There’s a helipad on the roof of the main building. We could have her airlifted.”

  “Excellent,” Tanner said, nodding her approval at Nick. “Lucas, call Crimson Basin General for an airlift. Go.”

  The muddy-haired intern rushed from the room to follow her orders. Jazmin moaned, her eyelids fluttering open and shut. I pushed her sweaty hair away from her face.

  “Hey, it’s going to be okay,” I whispered, my voice shaking with uncertainty. I didn’t want to lie to her, but at times like these, a little encouragement went a long way. “Jazmin, we’re going to get you to a hospital so they can take care of you. I’ll be there with you the entire time.”

  “No,” she rasped. “Stay here.”

  “You don’t want me to go?”

  “I want you to, but you can’t.” Her breath wheezed in and out of her lungs like an asthmatic without an inhaler. “You have to stay here. Take care of Riley. Talk to your mother. If you don’t—”

  The intern returned. “The airlift’s on its way,” he said. “They said they’d be here in five minutes. We’re supposed to get her on a stretcher and take her to the helipad.”

  “Let’s get moving then,” Tanner said. She jumped into action, shoving me away from Jazmin’s bedside as she popped open a portable stretcher. With the intern’s help, she transferred Jazmin from the bed to the stretcher, and they wheeled her out of the ER in a whirl of stress and IV bags.

  Nick took the lead, and we rushed through the halls of White Oak to the private elevator in Nick’s office. Once Tanner wheeled the stretcher into place, there was only room for one more person.

  “Get in, Lucas,” Tanner told her intern. He did so. Tanner cast us an apologetic glance. “I need him, but don’t worry. I’ll keep you posted on her status.”

  “Good luck,” Nick said.

  Jazmin used all of her strength to lift her head off the stretcher, but before she could say anything, the elevator doors began to close. I waved goodbye right before she disappeared from sight completely. Then she was gone. I hoped it wasn’t the last time I’d ever see her. Nick’s smooth palm found my hand, but I didn’t want his comfort. I quickly stepped away.

  “They’ll take good care of her,” Nick assured me as I tried to evade him. His office was stuffy and dark. I needed to get out of there. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  I ducked around him and headed for the door. “You don’t know that.”

  “Not to be a bother,” Nick said, “but it sure seems like trouble follows you everywhere you go. Is that a side effect of being an Internet celebrity?”

  “It’s a side effect of being me,” I replied as I left his office. “I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t mean to bring all of this down on you and your resort. It’s better if we don’t interact much anymore. It’ll be easier on everyone.”

  “Lucia, wait.” He took my hand and drew me close. “I hope you know that it doesn’t matter to me what you’ve brought to my hotel. I want you to be able to trust me.”

  I gazed up into his blue eyes, wishing I could unload all of my problems into his capable hands. “Nick, I just met you, and you don’t know the half of what I’m dealing with.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  I tugged my hand out of his. “I can’t. I have to go. Promise me you’ll call if you hear anything about Jazmin?”

  “I promise.”

  In the suite upstairs, I lost it. With both Jazmin a
nd Riley down for the count, the enormous apartment was empty except for me. It was like walking into a void. All of the most important people had suddenly vanished. They were hurt, and it was my fault for not taking care of my problems in the first place.

  “Stella!” I yelled, my voice echoing around the apartment. “Stella!”

  “This is not A Streetcar Named Desire,” she replied sardonically as she popped into existence near the kitchen. “Why are you howling my name? I got enough of that from my husband while he was still alive.”

  “Have you been paying attention to what’s happening?” I demanded. “I tried doing it your way and now Riley’s hurt, Jazmin might be dying, and my mother thinks I’m a terrible person.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Stella asked. “That it’s my fault? Your presence at King and Queens triggered this chain of events. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that you’re the only person who can make things right again.”

  “But you haven’t told me how,” I reminded her. “Other than to look into my past, which so far has been awful advice. Did you know about Jazmin? About the bite on her leg?”

  Stella shuddered from head to toe, her red dress fluttering beneath her. “He’s getting stronger. To be able to affect a non-psychic like that.”

  “Of course you already know who he is,” I said. “But you’re not going to tell me, are you?

  Stella, as I expected, pressed her lips together and did not reply. I slammed my fist against the countertop, rattling the neatly stacked dishes that Jazmin had washed before her fainting spell.

  “You aren’t like Odette,” I reminded her. “No one’s making you relive the moment of your death over and over again, so why can’t you just tell me what I need to know?”

  “Because I’m in danger too,” she said, quaking. “He wouldn’t hurt Odette—not for long—but he has the power to send me to a place so terrible you can’t imagine what it’s like to reside there.”