CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FIRST PLACE I visited after my emotional disaster? Executive Suites’ headquarters. I tried for the door, assuming it was locked and I would be forced to pursue illegal ways of getting inside the building. The door swung open.
From inside the vestibule, it was easily seen that the place was a complete ghost town full of several months’ worth of dust. The locked double doors leading inside prevented further entry.
I pressed my hands against the glass to diminish the glare. The lobby was gutted, as though nothing had ever existed in the place. Affixed to the left front windowpane was a sign: For Lease.
MY BODY WAS in a confused and constant cycle of trying to heal my emotional pain. It was the most unbearable feeling I’d ever endured.
The closest I’d ever come to an addict was in documentaries and reality shows. I now felt like they always looked; jittery, sick, and in persistent agony over what had been taken from me.
To keep myself and my head busy, I set out on a mission to see June, even though she ghosted on me after her information-dumping session in her professor’s office.
I had sent June many unanswered texts, for over an hour. Two hours later, she finally sent me a text to meet her at a coffee shop in downtown San Diego.
After an hour and a half of standing in front of the coffee shop window, chain-smoking and receiving dirty looks from bystanders, June was a no-show. My texts and calls to find out why she stood me up went ignored.
“Hey, you look okay. Have all of your limbs. Great. You do look like shit, though. Anyway, you’re alive. Means you were screwing with me again.”
My tear-clouded eyes drifted up to the stalker in front of me. “Go…away, Jake,” I gritted my teeth.
He sat next to me on the windowsill. “Public place means you don’t get to order me around. Want to grab a late dinner?”
“Of course, you want something. You have impeccable fucking timing. Everyone wants something from me, but when I need them, they go radio silent. Tell your boss he can fuck off, too.”
He lifted a quizzical brow at me. “What are you talking about? My boss? What boss?”
“Emile. I know you’re working for him, or with him. You have to be.”
He looked at me as though I was crazy. “What’s up with you?”
The aching inside my body hit me again. My cries were so loud, they were the only thing I could hear.
Jake pulled me up and tried to hug me.
“No!” I screamed shoving him backward. “I didn’t come here for you. I came for June. She said she’d meet me here.”
“You got a message from her? Because I haven’t seen her around in a few days.”
I held up my phone, flashing her last text.
He scarcely looked at it. “Well, I’m here and I’m an open book. Can we go somewhere that isn’t here?”
Startled by his covert admission that there was more to him than I assumed, I stilled. “I need to go somewhere where I can smoke.”
“My place, then?”
I slid off the makeshift seat, otherwise known as the store’s windowsill. “Don’t get any damn ideas.” I shoved a finger in his face and wagged it at him. “I’ll never fuck you. Try it and I’ll castrate you.”
BACK AT JAKE’S place, he fixed a cup of coffee for me from one of his pod brewers. He placed it in front of me and settled into a seat on the other side of the table, clasping his hands across it. “Your guy kicked you out?”
“Did Calind ever work for Executive Suites?” I asked, ignoring his question. “I can’t trust his answers.”
“He used to own Executive Suites with Claudette,” Jake explained. “It experienced a change in ownership three years ago.”
“Then Emile killed Claudette and took over?”
“Ugh…well.” He scratched his forehead and shifted in discomfort. “It wasn’t Emile who killed Claudette. Whoever told you that was lying.”
“Who’s running around, turning people?” I asked, keeping my questions rapid-fire in an attempt to keep him off-balance.
“Question isn’t who, but why. Because there’s someone here who shouldn’t be. If we have enough people with our strength—we could take them out.”
“You can’t take out someone who’s indomitable.”
“If we had control of someone who was, we could.”
My gaze fell to the black and white lithograph of the Eiffel Tower affixed to the wall. I remembered the places Calind showed me, and how I wished we’d gone somewhere tropical. I suddenly wished we’d never stopped traveling. If we never had, I could’ve died blissfully unaware of everything, playing our games, leading a life that wasn’t of this world—back when I thought he was my Experience Creator. Not that knowing he wasn’t made things worse; it made the memories genuine.
I recalled my second conversation with Michelle and what she didn’t say. She never said Calind was available. I knew why she couldn’t say it. With the inner workings of my mind like an open diary to him, Calind had access to my deepest secrets and desires.
Emile claimed that the vial he gave me should’ve removed Calind from skulking around in my head. Why, then, did I miss Calind so much?
Calind’s hold on me had disappeared—if there ever really was one—and I now knew the feelings I had developed for him were never forced. Increasingly, Calind was depicted as a hero and Emile, a villain. I didn’t buy Jake’s claim that Emile didn’t kill Claudette. No one else could’ve had a reason to benefit from her death.
Suddenly bothered by the last text I exchanged with June, I glimpsed at my phone to re-read it.
Me: Hey. Need to meet at the place we went to before.
June: Don’t remember where it was. Meet at coffee shop on J St?
I pressed her name on the screen, calling her.
“What are you doing?” Jake jolted upright and neared me. “Who are you calling?”
“My nanny,” I said to a visibly nervous Jake.
Her phone rang on my end, and I could’ve sworn I heard a chime sound off inside the house.
From the look on Jake’s face, I knew it was time to get up and run.
I raced toward where the sound echoed the loudest—upstairs. Jake grabbed me, making me tumble down the stairs. I landed hard on my ass. The chime stopped the moment my phone fell to the ground, and the screen shattered.
Struggling to stand, I glared at a guilty-faced Jake.
“I can explain.” He attempted to look sheepish.
I angled my knee upward and brought my foot into his face. My gold spiked pump collided with his nose, eliciting a crunching sound. It was too easy to make him bleed; he had to have been human.
Human. As opposed to… I was thinking in fantastical terms currently.
“Ow! My nose! My nose!” Jake yelled out. “I think you broke my nose.”
I stood and ran up the darkened upstairs hall, closing in on where I heard June’s phone chime. In a bedroom, June’s familiar, colorful peace sign-printed bag sat on the chair.
Hearing his footsteps close in on me, I glanced back at Jake. The broken nose was healing before my eyes, the blood having ceased its trickle out of his nose and onto his lips and chin.
No. How could I have hurt him much if he was a human Vorarei? “What are you? Are you one of them? Why do you have June’s bag? What did you do to June?”
“None of it makes a difference now.” He reached for me.
I kneed him in the groin and brought a fist into his throat, subduing him again. He mewled and cowered, giving me a path to escape.
I rushed past him, disappearing farther into the hall. A faint, rancid smell made me sick to my stomach. With Jake at my heels, I searched the rooms until I came upon the final bedroom on the right. The scent was stronger there and a cross between rotten food, unwashed ass, and human waste. I covered my nose and mouth with the chiffon scarf I’d thrown on hipster-style around my neck before I opened the door.
I bowled over at the sight.
From the state of the body, it was hard to tell if it was June. The dark, curly hair splayed beneath her on the bed? The remnants of her torn, hippie-chic clothes? I confirmed it was her, and she’d been in that state for a while. Her face contorted in horror, and her body was quickly decaying. A gaping hole extended from her neck to abdomen. A blackened red substance surrounded her, which if I had to guess, was her blood.
I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming and backed out of the door. I took off my scarf and wiped the doorknob with it. “Who killed her and why?” My head snapped back at a hobbling Jake. “I know you’re too weak to have done it. You’re a wannabe-Vorarei, but still human.”
“I’m not human. You’re just stronger than you know.” With a sick smile on his face, he picked up his phone, poised to call someone.
A strange wind kicked up behind me. Motions were nearly a blur. Unlike in the alley, I saw the events unfold in front of me. Calind stood behind Jake with his forearm pressed against Jake’s throat. Jake blubbered as though he was a five-year-old who skinned his knee and pleaded for his life. His pleas grew quieter as Calind brought the palm of his free hand across Jake’s face.
Calind angled Jake’s chin away from his shoulder. His head tilted, leaving only the top of his head to view, and he drew closer to Jake’s neck.
On the cusp of a grotesque gnashing sound, Jake bucked, and his eyes rolled backward, revealing only the scleras. His skin transformed into a chalky hue and puckered, sinking against bone. His mouth drew open and cracked, as though drained of moisture and blood. Lifeless and pliable like a rubber doll, his body hung motionless in Calind’s arms.
Calind moved his hands in opposing directions as they rested on what was left of Jake’s throat and face, ripping Jake’s head apart from his body as though it were taffy. The head and the limbs fell in separate places.
A dead Jake rested in several piles of flesh on the floor. The color of his skin was sallow, as though drained of every drop of blood. His head and body remained apart from one another. Bone and flesh stuck out awkwardly. Not much of him contained enough blood to bleed out.
The look on Calind’s face reached beyond satisfaction. It was an orgasmic expression.
I turned around and dry heaved, holding my stomach. I couldn’t help it; I vomited on the floor, leaving my DNA at a murder scene. A searing heat rushed at my back. I turned around to glance at the dead body.
A flicker of a flame had dropped on Jake’s corpse, engulfing it in fire. Smoke filled the air, choking me and set off the automatic sprinklers, but the water did nothing to dissipate the fire.
The rational side of me thought what happened was impossible. The irrational side of me couldn’t make sense of why Calind bothered if Jake was human. Was he liable to turn if he died?
The manufactured rain cleared the smoke, revealing a sprinkler-soaked Calind on the other side of Jake’s body. He stared straight at me as he wiped the blood and a pleased smirk from his mouth with the back of his hand.
I was speechless, because what the fuck could I have said?
He took a delayed breath. “Did you put yourself in danger to spite me, or to bring me here?”
Stuck on stupid, I couldn’t respond.
He grabbed his phone, bowing his head to serve as a shield for his cell against the onslaught of water raining down on us from the fire deterrent system.
“We can’t be here when the authorities arrive.” Calind walked toward me, stepping over Jake’s remains, and I recoiled. Singed bone and flesh had turned to ash at his feet. Remaining embers touched Calind’s heel and bounced off his shoe, leaving him unscathed.
I continued to reel and shook my head when he offered his hand.
“Regan, there’s no reason for you to stop trusting me.”
“You killed someone…I mean, you didn’t just kill him. You mutilated him, and I think you damn near came in your pants over it.”
“And you think it’s the first time?”
I blinked at him.
“I was referencing murder, not the ejaculation. For clarity, I’ve never ejaculated in my pants.”
“You’re telling jokes right now? This whole situation isn’t fucking funny,” I said, my voice losing its cadence. “I always assumed…” My breath caught, and I stepped farther back. “A-are you admitting it was you in the alley that night? Admitting it was you in all the places we’ve gone where the bodies were piling up? Admitting it was you doing those things, all along?” I swallowed hard. “Were you the serial killer running around mutilating people in San Diego?”
The color drained from his face, and the frigidness made a return. “My next step will include dragging you, kicking and screaming, back to the car.”
When I hit a loose floorboard, my heel slipped on the slick wood. I fell and found myself in Calind’s arms within seconds. His sleek strands shielded his eyes. Between the strands I could see his water-soaked eyelashes, clinging together and drawing his eyelids over his eyes. I couldn’t help my ill-timed thought: How could this man be a monster?
I scrambled, struggling to get out of his arms. My soaked body gave me enough lubrication to get away and make it to the bottom floor.
“I believe you’re being willful because you’re clamoring for a different form of discipline.” Calind measured his steps as he traipsed down the stairs. “You won, sweetheart. You’ll receive the attention you crave, and much more.”
“Get away from me, or I’ll scream.” I grabbed the biggest, sharpest knife I could find from the butcher block in the kitchen and held it up to my wrist.
Calind stopped movement, concern pinching his features.
“I really want to wake up from this nightmare. I really, really want to fucking wake up. I don’t know if I’m living a fictional fantasy or reality. I don’t know if you’re a monster or a man.” Placing the knife to my wrist, I prepared to make a deep cut. “You told me you didn’t love me anymore. It went away. Poof, like fucking magic. Like it never existed. It’s a word you play up, to make me think you loved me. Like your feelings and everything between us was just a dream.”
“I lied to you to hurt you as you hurt me.” He approached me with delay. “Nothing has truly changed. Put the knife down.”
I winced as it pierced the flesh of my arm and the cut bled. “I want to wake up.” My voice cracked on the emotion. “I want to fucking un-see what I watched you do to Jake.”
“What do you think you’re doing, Regan?” he asked, eyeing the blood trickling down my arm.
“I went to Executive Suites before I came here. It’s gone. The injections? The injections I stupidly gave you permission to shoot me up with, and the vial I took from Emile that gave me that horrible nightmare—or a glimpse of the past? Were they blood, or was it something to make me hallucinate and feel like I’m going crazy? Is seeing things that are nonexistent Executive Suite’s angle? Well fucking done. Maybe I’m hallucinating this. Pain makes you wake up, right? If I cut myself, I’ll wake up from the dream.”
His eyes were soft, and pleaded with me. “Don’t force me to do something I’d rather not.”
I gripped the knife’s handle, ready to slice up my arm. A mysterious force stopped me, an invisible hand closed in on my wrist. The harder I fought, the stronger it grew. It manifested into a burn inside my head, thumping and raging.
Calind stared at me in deep concentration. His eyes darkened in hue, spreading the darkness to the scleras.
My fingers loosened their hold on the knife as though someone pried my fingers away. Pain wrapped around my wrist and forced me to drop the knife to the floor.
“This day and the day before never happened.” Calind’s voice was an echo inside my head, making me believe everything he said. Memories became fuzzy pictures until they were no longer recognizable.
“You never found June dead or the empty building of Executive Suites,” he continued. “You never met with Jake or Emile. The last time you saw Van, he was pleasant, and he never told you anything you wanted to know. Van died of natural causes, and you had nothing to do with it. You love me despite knowing what I am and will never have any reason to fear me.” His voice no longer flooded my head as he whispered, “Nothing that terrifies you is real. Please come back, Regan.”
My body went airborne as Calind cradled me in his arms.