Protect Her: Part 10 (3 page)

“It’s Eva,” I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead. I watched as my parents broke away from the assembled crowd in the room and met my younger self before I even made it all the way down the stage’s steps. My father swept me up into his arms and twirled me around the way that he used to when I was much younger. My mom’s face was lit up with joy, and she clapped as my father completed our spin. “She’s here in my head too. She’s told me things.”

“Whatever she told you is bullshit,” Riley said. “Don’t believe a word she’s said.”

“You aren’t listening. She’s here in my head because I invited her in.” I saw Riley’s mouth drop open. I nodded sadly. “She knows everything, Riley. She knows because I accepted her three years ago.”

“What?” I knew that it was going to take a few moments for Riley to grasp what I was telling him. I knew exactly what that felt like having been in the same position not too long ago.

“It was when Bruno Proctor’s goons hit me over the head and dumped me in the Calamata Bay. We assumed that I drew on Eva’s powers to save me, but that wasn’t quite right. Apparently she had helped me out other times over the years because I would call on her. This last time, I guess she’d had enough of the freebies. She wanted out.”

“She can’t coerce your acceptance,” Riley said.

“She didn’t though. The circumstances I found myself in at the time were not of her making. But I asked her for three years. So I would give myself over after three more years of living as myself.”

“You remember this?” Riley asked quietly.

“No, that place in my memories is still a black hole,” I said.

“Then she’s making it up,” he sputtered.

I put my hand on his arm. “Riley, she’s in my head. She’s in here with me. How could she be there if I hadn’t accepted her in? She’s been waiting for the time we agreed on to elapse, but she knows and sees everything that’s happened to me since then. She knows about you and me. This was my fate. It always was my fate.” My father set my younger self down, and she was talking excitedly to the two of them. I wanted to get closer just to remember what that conversation was, but I didn’t dare. I felt that getting too close would somehow distort the memory, so I continued to watch on the periphery.

“Take me somewhere else,” he said. “Show me another memory.”

There was only one place I felt it necessary to go before I let myself wither away. It seemed only fitting that I would take Riley there with me.

CHAPTER THREE –
RILEY

I was still trying to process Paige’s revelation when the world shifted around us again. We stood in the street outside a house that looked almost identical to all of the houses around it. I felt as if I had seen it before, but I couldn’t remember where. As I slowly spun around, it seemed as if we had landed in Anywhere, USA.

“Where is this?” I asked. I needed time to think. I wasn’t going to let Paige just give up. It was clear to me now why she hadn’t fought back. Eva had her believing her fate was inevitable. We’d see about that, but I had to approach the whole thing carefully. If she got too upset, she’d be able to kick me out. I couldn’t have that.

“Flagston, Texas,” Paige said. She stared at the house in front of us. “We moved here three days before my fourteenth birthday. It was during the middle of the school year, and I was so mad at them. I had just found out that I got the starring role in the spring play at my old school, and then they whisked me away to this drab, dreary place. I hated the idea of starting over. Again.”

Flagston. That rang a bell, but I didn’t have time to think about it further. I was focused on the despondent woman in front of me.

“You were fourteen when your parents died,” I said. I had a bad feeling about where Paige had brought us in her memories. I wanted to experience the happy ones with her, but I sensed that she wanted something else from me.

“I was,” she said. She stepped forward and opened the gate. She motioned for me to follow her. “I was supposed to be home late that day because I had soccer practice after school. I wasn’t feeling well, so I came home earlier than expected. I didn’t call them to tell them though. I figured I’d just show up out of the blue. I knew it hurt my mom’s feelings when I treated them that way, but I was a full-blown teenage bitch complete with hormones and temper tantrums.”

“We all go through it.” I wanted to lighten the mood, but that wasn’t what she needed from me. Her tone was practically hypnotic. She wanted me to see this, and I would do it for her. This was likely the most painful night of her life. The fact that she wanted to share it with me made me want to wrap her up and take all of that pain away. But I couldn’t. These memories were the kind that haunted you for a lifetime.

“My mom told me to call home every afternoon when I knew I was going to be late to check-in, but this day I didn’t. I was usually so good about it that I knew not doing it would cause her to worry. I didn’t care. It made me happy to think that she was going to be worried about me. That’s the kind of kid I had started turning into.”

“I ran away for a week after my mom and Alice told me what I was,” I said. I knew that my experience wasn’t going to make her feel any better, but I had to try. “My mom was worried sick about me, and when I finally came home, she grounded me for a month.”

Paige turned toward me then. “What made you come back?”

I shrugged with a sheepish half-smile. “I was hungry.”

She nodded. “I was thinking about running away then. I thought I could go back to my old town and stay with my best friend, Clarissa. I’d re-enroll back in my old school and star in the play, and everything would be hunky-dory. God, I was so stupid.”

I took her hand. The more we delayed, the more painful I thought this memory would be for her. “You came home early, and you didn’t call your parents like you normally did to tell them you were going to do that. What happened then?”

“It was so quiet,” she said. She looked at the house, and I sensed what she meant. Despite the fact that it was dusk, there weren’t any lights turned on inside the house. The street was eerily quiet. No dogs barking or kids laughing. It seemed like a strangely empty world almost more reminiscent of our time at Slinky Pete’s on the other side of the veil than the memory of a living place.

“It didn’t really dawn on me until I came through the gate.” She paused and looked back at the metal gate as it swung closed behind us. “I was so focused on all the smart things I was going to say to my mom when she scolded me for not calling her that I missed some of the obvious signs.”

“Like what?” This whole scenario had ‘proceed with caution’ flags all around it. I felt a pit of dread growing in my stomach. I knew the outcome, but that didn’t stop the irrational sensations of knowing that something bad was about to happen.

“My dad would take his whiskey out on the porch after work.” Paige pointed at the two white wicker chairs sitting on the porch. “He’d bring the newspaper out with him because he left so early in the morning that he didn’t have time to read it. My dad always preferred to read the news versus watching it on TV.”

I could tell she had drifted backward in time and was relating more to this memory than the present time with each passing second. I didn’t want her to have to go through this again, but I wasn’t going to interrupt it either. It seemed important to her, and if bearing witness to it was what she needed me to do, then I would gladly do it for her. I just hoped that on the other side of it, I’d be able to talk some sense into her.

She stepped away from me toward the porch. “From five-thirty until seven my dad was a permanent fixture on the front porch. Around six-fifteen or so my mom would come out with a fresh drink for him. She’d kiss him on the side of the temple, and he’d murmur a thank you even though he was fully engrossed in his paper. Then she’d go inside to finish dinner. Dinner was served in our house at 7 pm promptly every night. I knew that. So I was coasting on thin ice by arriving home just before dinner.”

Now she put her foot on the first step. She pointed at the wicker table between the chairs. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to see there. It was empty. “My dad always forgot the paper when he came in. He’d set his glass on top of it before he’d wander inside to wash his hands. I think he always meant to come back out and get it, but it’s something they’d pick up when they came home from their walk.”

“Still an evening walk every night then?” I asked gently.

“It was their thing,” she replied. “We didn’t have a lot of money for fancy dinners and entertainment. My parents had their evening walk. They were simple people really. There weren’t a lot of fancy things they required to be happy. My mother always said that as long as she had my dad to talk to, that was all she needed. He was her best friend.”

My heart ached for her, but despite how she obviously felt about her parents, I was mad as hell at them. They had known all along what was supposed to happen to their daughter, and they kept her in the dark. She had been thrust into this dark world alone and defenseless. It was a wonder she had survived at all.

I didn’t say anything. I knew that she was lost in the sensations she had felt that night. She climbed another step, and then cocked her head toward the house. She appeared to be listening intently.

“I heard something inside. I should have been able to smell dinner. It was Tuesday night, and mom made her famous pot roast on Tuesday nights. She’d cut up all the meat and vegetables and would let it simmer overnight. By the time she scooped it into my dish, the meat would fall apart it was so tender. The house smelled heavenly. I’d hit the porch, smell the pot roast, and be transported to my happy place. But this time it was different.”

“Different how?” I didn’t want to ask these questions, but I was curious. Somehow she had witnessed something horrible but got away and survived. Whether she believed it or not, Paige was tough as nails.

“It was a burnt smell. Really disgusting,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I remembered thinking that maybe we’d get to go out to eat instead if she had burned dinner. That hardly ever happened. We usually went out to eat on birthdays and my parents’ anniversary, so only four times a year. I loved my mom’s pot roast, but the idea of eating in a restaurant was way more exciting.”

“Explain the smell to me,” I said. I had a feeling I knew what she had smelled that day, and it wasn’t burnt pot roast, not even close.

“It had an earthy note to it.” Her voice was distant. “There was something in it that curdled my stomach. It’s hard to explain. It was like when you pull a pitcher of milk out of the refrigerator and start to pour it but then realize from the curds in it that it has gone sour. It’s a stench that permeates everything.”

I knew that Paige’s parents were killed by demons. The demons had been looking for her family because of who she was, the vessel of Eva. Christ, she had been just a kid. But the description she gave me of the demons that ended up in her tiny house in Flagston, Texas told me they were a particularly nasty variety.

“Pollball demons,” I said with a grimace. “Their sour milk smell is quite distinctive.” What I didn’t say was the smell got stronger when they ate their preferred meal of human flesh.

“Pollball demons,” she repeated. Her eyes fell to the ground. “I never thought to find out what kind of demon they were. I had forgotten about the smell until now. I don’t know how I could forget that kind of detail.”

“That’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure her. “You were just a kid. This was a traumatic memory.”

Her jaw clenched. “I should remember everything; every tiny, little detail. We’re talking about the night that my parents were murdered because of me. I at least owe them the respect to remember the details of what happened.”

She was getting upset. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t see how we were going to get through this memory without her getting upset, but I wanted to try to help take some of the pain away. I started to pull her toward me, but she batted my arms away.

“I’m not done yet,” she said.

Her rebuff hurt even though I understood. I took a step back. I was invited here as an observer. I had to remember that. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

She turned back toward the house and then crept up on the porch. “The smell got worse the closer I got to the house. I thought about going in the front door, but for some reason I didn’t. So I came back down the stairs and made my way around the house to the back.” Her body imitated her words, and I followed behind her as closely as I dared.

“The smell was bad, and now I was worried because I knew that it wasn’t burnt pot roast. I wanted to call out to my parents, but something inside my head said that was a bad idea. So I made my way along the side of the house and ducked under each of the windows. I knew someone other than my parents was inside and might see me.”

“You were a smart kid,” I said. I watched her as she ducked along the side of the house. She put her back to the wall, and I could see that her chest was moving rapidly. She was scared out of her mind. I would have been too. Her world was about to change for the worse, and there was probably a part of her that instinctively knew it.

“It was when I got to the back of the house that I heard the voices,” she whispered. She wasn’t really looking at me though. In her mind, she was fourteen years old all over again. “I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and they weren’t familiar. Then I heard my mom crying. In my fourteen years, I’d only ever heard my mom cry three times. Then I heard a crash and my father’s scream, but it was cut off abruptly.”

It was uncanny. As soon as she said the words, I heard the sounds of muffled crying. It was exactly as she described. The crash of what sounded like a thousand dishes rang out, and a man’s scream was cut off in mid-yell. What Paige might not have realized then, but I knew better than anyone, was that her father’s voice carried the sharp notes of pain and agony in them. Her parents were being tortured inside.

“I wanted to run around to the back door and find out what was happening, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that was the wrong thing to do,” she said. Her back was ramrod straight against the side of the house. She glanced furtively in both directions. “That part of me told me to run away, but the other part of me said that I had to find out what was happening. What if I could help them? These were my parents, and they were in trouble. I had to do something. But I decided to wait.

She flipped around as she moved toward the end of the house. I could barely make out the shadow of a flight of concrete steps that went up to the back of the house. The single car garage sat back away from the house, and I could see there was a car inside. The garage door was still open.

Paige noticed my glance. “We only had one car. Dad took it to work, so that’s how I knew he was home before I heard his scream. Something was terribly wrong.” Her hands went to her stomach, and she gulped. “My stomach was twisted in knots. My dad told me that if anything strange ever happened that I couldn’t explain or understand, that I was supposed to run away.”

“Run where?” Again, I felt a flash of rage at Paige’s parents. They had to have known the danger that their daughter was in, that they themselves were in. Yet they had done nothing to prepare her adequately for an entry into this world if the worst case scenario happened.

“I didn’t really pay attention, so I never thought to ask,” she said. “As I came around the house, I could hear sounds that didn’t make sense to me.”

She crept to the steps, and I strained my ears to hear what she was hearing. At first, there was nothing, but then I heard it. It sounded like a cross between scratching and a general pawing against wood. I had a terrible feeling for what Paige was about to witness. I wondered how many times she had relived this moment in her dreams.

“I stayed as close to the wall as I could,” she breathed. “Then I climbed the stairs into the house as quietly as possible. That’s when I saw him.”