by Logan Fox
Maybe knowing that God had special plans for our Ghosts once they passed over would have inspired him.
My apartment door bursts open.
Apollo stands there in the doorway, hair disheveled, eyes wide.
I’m already on my feet, ready to attack whoever’s behind him. But he just grins at me, claps his hands.
“I love that fucking book!” he yells, pointing at Trinity’s gold-trimmed bible.
“What—”
He waves away the question, beckoning me to follow him. “We have to get to town, now!”
“Apollo, what—”
“I know how to find her, Rube!” His grin is infectious, especially paired with the exact words I’ve been waiting to hear all day.
I know how to find her.
Chapter Ten
Apollo
“Wifi password,” I bark out at the first waitress I see.
Her head moves back as she gives me a filthy stare, then she clicks her tongue. “All right,” she says. “Settle down.” Still frowning, she points with her chin. “Where you sitting?”
I’m about to frisk her for the damn password when someone’s shoulder brushes mine. The waitress turns from me, and her frown dissolves instantly.
Should’ve listened to Rube. He told me to let Cass go in first. Nothing loosens lips like Cass’s face.
“Hey, darlin’,” Cass says, slipping in front of me. “We’re outside, table twelve. Can’t pass up a chance to watch that glorious sunset, now can we?”
I don’t even know what accent he’s putting on. But it doesn’t matter, because it works. He’s barely done speaking before the waitress is fumbling in her apron. “We got these paper thingies now,” she’s saying, her eyes glued on Cass as she rummages around. “They’re changing it like every day.”
“I hear you,” Cass says. He sticks his arm around his back and pushes me away with his fingertips.
I guess he can’t work his magic when I’m glaring at his conquest from behind his shoulder and willing them to get on with it. I grit my teeth, but I back off and go back outside.
Rube looks up as I thump down on the wrought iron chair. We chose a spot a little away from the rest, although this time of day, the town is pretty quiet. Everyone looks a little tired, like the drove of students they must have had in this place earlier today exhausted them.
Redwater’s only diner is a nice enough place, but I’m itching to be on the road and headed toward wherever Trinity is. And that waitress back there has my hands tied.
Rube had to hot-wire Sister Miriam’s old Ford to get us here. No idea why she left it behind—maybe she went on the bus—but it saved us because Zach’s SUV wasn’t in the garage. We’ll have to switch cars before we leave here, of course. Rube’s been eyeing an old truck parked next to the liquor store that has dust on the windscreen. If we can get it to start, then hopefully it won’t be missed before we’re far enough along to where we need to go.
Soon as I figure out where the hell that is.
“Coffee?” Rube asks.
“Yeah. Can we get something to eat?”
He frowns, and then nods. “But no lobster.”
With Zachary gone, we only have a handful of cash between the three of us. We never figured a day would come when Zach wouldn’t be there, swiping a card for whatever we needed.
How naive.
I still can’t get over what he did, even though I kinda expected something like that to happen eventually. He’s never been on board with Trinity. He’s been treating her like the enemy from day one. And we went right along, because he laid it out so logically that it only seemed right.
I guess we’ve trusted him for too long.
Cass saunters back a minute later with a piece of paper dangling from his fingertips. I snatch it from him before he even has a chance to sit down.
I snort when I see what’s written on the back. “She gave you her number?”
Cass shrugs, lounging in his chair like he was born without a spine. “Told her I wouldn’t call.”
Reuben rolls his eyes and then watches me type in the password.
It’s one of those generated ones that are supposedly so secure. But the more random a password is, the easier a hacking program can crack it. It’s passwords made out of words or phrases that are the hardest to crack. That’s why Bitcoin wallets are usually protected with a seed phrase—a string of twelve random words that are easy enough to remember, but near impossible to crack without the use of a supercomputer.
That’s why I know for a fact that the password to Gabriel’s secret archive is some kind of phrase. My program’s still trying to crack it, but I doubt it’ll happen any time this century.
Soon as my laptop connects to the diner’s wi-fi, I start looking for Trinity.
The world dissolves as I hunt through every database I can access.
Baptism.
Reuben laughed when I told him. We all laughed. Because it was so damn basic, we should have thought of it hours ago.
Trinity was baptized. Had to have been. Catholic parents and a priest as a family friend? No way around it.
And parishes keep baptism records. They have all kinds of useful shit on them like parent information, addresses, stuff like that.
I have Trinity’s date of birth from the admin file. Her parent’s first and last names too. But the rest of the file was empty. There were a few notes sent to Social Services requesting more info, but I guess their turnaround time is longer than she’s been at Saint Amos.
All I need to know is which parish keeps her records.
I hop around the Internet, finding bits of information to add to my search.
Someone shoves a cup of coffee my way. I drink it down without tasting it, but fully appreciating the jolt of caffeine. A plate of food arrives, and it smells damn tempting, but I’m already down the rabbit hole so it grows cold beside me.
The light changes. Hues shift. Streetlights come on. The temperature drops.
And then I have it.
An address.
I look up. Cass and Rube are staring at me. “Well?” Cass says. “Tell us.”
“It’s not much.” I grab a fry off my plate, swallow it down despite how cold it is. “But it’s a start.”
Chapter Eleven
Zach
I’m driving down the I-44—going too fast and giving way too few fucks. The joint I’m smoking helps. The bottle of whiskey in the glove compartment I sip at every now then, that helps most of all.
I never thought it would be this hard walking away from them. Or, in my case, driving away. Never thought I’d feel compelled to go back to them. To her.
But I am. And it is.
I hit the joint again. Tasteless. But I guess that happens if you keep smoking the same shit over and over.
No it doesn’t.
I could have stopped Gabriel. If I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, I could have called my brothers, warned them. They could have stopped him.
But I didn’t.
They said they’ll never forgive me for that.
Fuck—I’ll never forgive myself for that.
A part of me was grateful he was leaving. And that part of me managed to take control long enough to sit back and let him walk away. But the rest of me? Numb, because it felt like I was losing something more important than my charred and blackened soul.
“That’s because I am more important.”
I glance in the rear-view mirror. A jolt goes through me when I see Trinity sitting in the back seat.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I peer at her over my shoulder.
She’s wearing the same lacy white thing she did when we took her virginity. Except now it’s freshly laundered and her curls bounce around her shoulders like she’s just come out of the salon.
And her lips are red.
Like the Whore of Babylon.
“You should watch the road,” she says, an easy smile tugging at those cherry-red lips.
&nbs
p; I smile back, glance at the road.
And almost lose control of the car as I swerve out for a truck. It blares its horn at me, the near miss rocking my now stationery rental like Trin and me are fucking in the back seat.
I turn around. She’s not there anymore.
When I straighten and look ahead, she’s standing by the hood of the car with her back to me. A gust of wind toys with her curls as she looks over her shoulder and beckons me with a crook of her finger.
I fumble for the car door, my composure shattered by the fact that I almost died. That I almost got Trinity killed.
Impossible. She’s with Gabriel.
But that doesn’t change the fact that when I walk up to her, when I grab her arm, when I turn her to face me, she’s as real as I am.
I press her against my body, testing the theory. But there’s no mistaking the way her hips press into the tops of my thighs. Her breasts into my ribs. And she makes a sound, a protest to my manhandling, as if I’m hurting her.
So delicate, like a dandelion. One breath and she’ll scatter.
But I won’t let her. Not again. The parts of my brain that held me frozen on Saint Amos’s front steps aren’t here right now. Maybe they clocked out after the deed, I don’t know.
I grab the back of her neck and I kiss her right then and there on the side of the road.
Hard.
Relentless.
Forgetting how easy it was to break her. How much I enjoyed it.
“Here?” she murmurs against my mouth. “Right here?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about until she pulls back and climbs onto the hood. Spreads her legs.
Black underwear, which is wrong, because that’s not what she was wearing. But maybe she changed, right? Girls like her don’t go around commando.
My dick’s out a second later. Too eager, but I can’t help myself. I have to be inside her again. Feel her suffocating me. Milking me.
I thrust into her pussy with enough force to make her cry out.
Her fingers bite into my shoulders. “Harder,” she says.
Her curls bounce. Her mouth forms a perfect ‘o’. A car comes past, hoots at us. I give it the finger without looking. And then I yank down the top of Trinity’s dress so I can draw one of her nipples into my mouth.
This isn’t right.
Fuck it. I’m sure plenty of people have fucked on the highway.
No, this isn’t right.
It’s the way she rocks into me. So steady, so perfect. Like she gets paid by the fuck, blow jobs extra.
And that’s not her.
That’s not Trinity.
But I fuck her anyway, because it feels almost as good as the first time.
Maybe even better—this time there’s no strange uneasiness floating around in my head. Because back then, with her, it wasn’t just sex, and I still don’t know why.
People fucking. Sometimes consensually. Sometimes not. That’s all sex is to me. All it will ever be.
But it wasn’t that way with her.
It’s ridiculous, and pathetic, and stupid, but that doesn’t change how it felt.
Like it meant something.
Like it would mean something every single time.
Except now.
This feels different.
Empty.
Fake.
I slap her thigh, but I can’t feel that sting on my palm. She cries out though, and that helps. I fuck her harder, until her moans of pleasure become yelps of pain.
A normal man would stop. Maybe even apologize.
I’m not normal. Not even close.
Her pain is my pleasure. Nothing about that will ever change. She tenses around me, resisting me now. And that arouses me more than it should. More than what’s moral or acceptable.
When she starts begging me to stop, that’s when I finally feel a climax approaching. But it’s taking too long. Like it’s just out of grasp.
I pull back, wanting to kiss her again. Trying to capture something of the first time.
But the face of the thing I’m fucking is no longer recognizable. It’s still wearing the dress, but that fabric is dirty and tattered. Stained with blood and cum. The dead thing’s face is bloated, disfigured, brutally beaten.
I push away from it, a yell trapped in my throat, but my dick is stuck inside it.
It’s drawing me closer, arms wrapped impossibly tight around the back of my neck.
Its puffy, scarlet lips pucker as if for a kiss.
And then I’m coming inside it. The feeling goes on and on. Hollowing me out. As if it’s not my semen I’m ejaculating, but my organs, and my bones, and my flesh.
My eyes fly open, a horrified gasp rattling deep in my throat. I push into a sit, clamping a hand over my heart. I can feel every violent clang as it pumps adrenaline through my body.
Jesus.
My body’s stuck in some corporeal purgatory between Heaven and Hell. A dopey kind of pleasure from coming on the sheets. A skin-crawling horror from the memory of what I was pumping my load into.
I stumble out of bed, and almost crash into a wall I didn’t expect so nearby.
Where the fuck am I?
Then my memories settle, and I’m back in the real world.
A motel room on I-44. I’d driven until I’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, and then driven some more until I’d found a place to crash that wasn’t my rental car.
Christ, that dream. No, that fucking nightmare.
I hit the shower before I’m even fully awake, washing the dream and the feel of decaying pussy off my dick.
I almost puke, but manage to choke it back.
Then I slide down the wall and curl into a ball, letting the water pound onto the top of my head until my scalp feels numb.
Until I feel numb.
It doesn’t help. Body and mind, they’re two separate entities.
I wish I could say the basement taught me that, but it didn’t. Mom and Dad taught me that. They believed in discipline of the corporal kind. Mom with a wooden spoon. Dad with his belt.
I wasn’t a naughty kid, I was high maintenance. Energetic. And they weren’t. When I wanted to play outdoors—they’d lock me in my room. I’d end up breaking things, and then they’d punish me, even though I knew they had enough money to replace anything I ruined.
Only years later did I figure out what the problem was. I had ADHD, and an acute sensitivity to sugar. They never gave a shit about what I ate in between meals. And they’d keep replacing the sweets I ate. Maybe they didn’t realize how bad it was. How it fueled my disobedience.
I guess I’m partly to blame. I never told them how it made my muscles ache and ache and ache until I had to move. Until I ran in circles, or threw things, or bounced on the bed.
My young body was a hormonal shit show. I either couldn’t concentrate, or couldn’t stop concentrating. Especially when I was punished. It was like my brain was working overtime to figure out why I invited pain.
It took years for me to realize that I was inviting it because I did enjoy it to some extent.
Because when they punished me, I wouldn’t let any of the hurt show. And that confused them. And their confusion brought me great, great pleasure.
I was in my teens before I figured out that I enjoyed causing people harm. Emotional or physical, it didn’t matter. They were the same thing, but experienced at different frequencies.
Cass was the one responsible for that epiphany. He claims the basement turned him into a masochist but I think he was probably one all along.
When Cass ran out of dope or wanted something different to tune out to, he sought out pain. The others refused to give it to him. Me too, at first. Back then, my brothers didn’t know about my darker side. The side that wanted to inflict suffering.
And I resisted him, until he goaded me past the point of no return.
Somehow, he’d figured out my secret.
So I hit him, just like he wanted. But a lot harder than he’d anticipa
ted. I’ll never forget his gasp of pain, and the shock in his eyes. Watching the confusion on his face as he tried to figure out what had happened? It felt fucking amazing.
That’s when things changed. When I began to understand who the mind inside the body was. Me. My soul.
My brothers led me to that discovery, each in their own way…and I’m grateful.
But I still betrayed them and they deserve better.
That’s why I left. Because my brothers deserve a life without me.
But not like this.
Not while the thing they—we—so dearly want has been taken from them.
I know they’ll never forgive me. I knew before I read Reuben’s message. But I don’t need their forgiveness.
I need them to accept my help this one last time.
When the water turns cold and I start to shiver, I know it’s time to get out.
I leave that place feeling like a dick for not cleaning up, but I couldn’t stay a second longer.
I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to realize it, but I’ve been heading in the wrong fucking direction this whole time.
“Black coffee,” I say as soon as the waitress behind the counter looks up at me. I immediately break eye contact, but I see her watching me for a second longer before she goes to get my order.
Because I look like shit.
I didn’t dare stop again, so I’ve been relying on caffeine and sheer willpower to keep me awake. It’s been a rough road, like trekking up a crumbling mountain track, and I’m sure the downhill’s even worse. But hopefully, by that time, I’ve found them again.
I didn’t bother calling. Knew they wouldn’t pick up. But technology has its perks.
The coffee arrives, and I blow on it to cool it faster. I order a sandwich—not because I’m hungry but because my body needs fuel.
I could have carried on driving to California. Set myself up in a hotel until the transfer papers for the house were signed. Until they gave me the key.
But then I’d have resigned myself to a life of misery. Probably a short one, at that.