Protect Her: Part 10 (4 page)

She ghosted up the stairs just as I imagined she had eight years ago. She pulled up short just inside the doorway, which I could see opened into the kitchen. I noticed that she didn’t have to open the door. It had been open on her approach. I moved up the stairs behind her and looked over her shoulder as she let out a shallow hiss.

Her attention settled in the direction of a place on the other side of the kitchen. Littering the floor were cans of food, vegetables, silverware and the remnants of broken dishes as well as small pools of blood. There had been one hell of a fight here. Movement in the far corner next to the refrigerator drew my attention. I saw a man on the floor who, as he looked toward us, resembled someone vaguely familiar to me. This was Paige’s father, but he had aged dramatically in the years since the scene through the window Paige showed me earlier. His face was a series of lumps, cuts, and bruises. I felt a sense of horror as several long forgotten dots connected in my mind.

The smell of spoiled milk was gaggingly oppressive in this part of the house as it combined with the smell of blood. Paige began to back up as we watched her father’s body dragged across the floor. He and Paige locked eyes, and he mouthed a single word to her. RUN. Somehow he managed to pull a piece of paper from inside the collar of his shirt and stick it to the floor as he disappeared into a black hole behind the refrigerator. Paige ran after him. I wanted to grab her but stopped myself. This had already happened. This was a memory. It wasn’t actually happening.

Paige grabbed the piece of paper off the floor. It was stuck to the floor in blood. She darted across the floor and flew out the back door. I followed her. She continued to run picking up speed as she headed for the street.

I began to jog after her. There was a long, thick hedge that ran alongside the driveway. She rounded the corner at the top of the driveway and dove behind it hiding herself from view of her old house.

Her breath came in hot gasps, and tears began to stream down her face as she looked at the jagged, ripped piece of paper in her hands. Gently, I took it from her. I was certain that whatever had been written on it was scorched into her memory banks, but I hadn’t seen it before.

I read the looping handwriting.

Don’t you dare come back here. Ever. You can’t help us. You will only end up dead or worse. Call Greg. 754.325.4402 He will help you. No matter what, know that we will always love you. We always did.

I flipped it over as Paige turned away with a grimace. The note had been written on a piece of an envelope, probably from that day’s mail. When I saw the recipient’s name and address typed neatly on it, it all came crashing back to me. I knew now why this had felt so familiar to me.

“Paige, did your parents use aliases when they moved around?”

She nodded. “Yes. Really simple ones. Jones. Smith. Peterson. Stuff that would be easy for me to remember when I was little. But since I was a little bit older, my parents decided to branch out with this move. So I was Paige Davis when we lived here. Miles Davis was one of my parents’ all-time favorite musicians. Their first date was going a concert featuring his music. Why?”

I didn’t wipe the stricken look from my face fast enough.

“Why?” she repeated.

I had no cover story, and no lie that sprang to mind that would cover the truth. My only option was to tell her. “I might know something about your parents’ murder.”

“How?”

I took a deep breath, and suddenly wished that I was sitting in a church confessional rather than about to tell the woman that I loved what I had done. Surely this was one of the reasons that I had become a dark angel. Because I had done some truly fucked things in my time.

“Because I was the one who told the Pollball demons where you lived.”

CHAPTER FOUR –
PAIGE

It was as if there was a short-circuit in my brain. The space around us slid to somewhere else, but I barely even noticed. I knew now that I could shift through time and space as easily as I wanted to because we were in my head. These were my memories. I could go anywhere I wanted to without any reason to be afraid. That idea guided where I wanted to go more than anything else. Turns out there was another memory I wanted to visit before it was all obliterated.

Where we came to rest was the cemetery where my parents were buried. I visited the place only once, and that had been several years after the murders. Someone had been kind enough to take care of all the details of burying them. I had no idea who that person was, but it had always been on my to-do list to find that person and thank them. Even if I hadn’t gone on the run, I wouldn’t have known what to do or how to plan those final details. Since I had no other relatives, my fate would have been going into foster care. My life might have turned out differently, but probably not. Destiny was one hell of a bitch.

My parents had never been church goers despite being Disciples of Eva and all. But after we left the commune life behind, I think they missed the community that came along with the idea of a large shared belief and value structure. When we moved to Flagston, they joined a local church, St. Anthony’s, and pretended to be devout members of the flock. It helped them make friends.

So it was inside the walls of St. Anthony’s cemetery where they were buried. I was grateful that they had been laid to rest next to each other for the rest of eternity. It would have killed me to see them separated. Their gravestones were small, flat and rectangular. The stones protruded a few inches from the ground. I wondered if anyone walking through the cemetery simply walked over the top of them in their travels to visit their deceased relatives. It made me sad that they didn’t have something more elaborate that better showcased their lives and how much they loved one another. I would have designed something beautiful for them, something worthy of a grave etching that would stand the test of time. It upset me to think I’d never have the chance to right that wrong. I was twenty-two years old, but my past was littered with enough regrets to fill a lifetime.

I had been afraid to visit the cemetery before with good reason. Every time I felt as if I shook the demons tracking me, it seemed as if they turned up hot on my trail. Visiting my parents’ graves turned out to be a colossal mistake. I barely made it out of the cemetery unscathed, having been attacked as I knelt between their gravestones. It took me over a week to shake the tail of the demons after I overstayed my welcome visiting them. It wasn’t a mistake I would make again. This brought me back to the situation at hand. Had I made another horrible mistake in trusting Riley Stone?

“What do you mean you told the demons where we lived?” My voice came out strained and higher pitched than normal. Of course, it would. I felt like I was about to break apart. Riley reached toward me, but I swatted his hand away. “Explain. Now.”

Riley shifted on his feet, and then he turned away from me. “Give me a minute to jostle my memory. I want to be sure that I have it all straight in my head. I used to drink pretty heavily back then for a lot of reasons. None of them good. It was a long time ago.”

“Eight years, one-hundred forty-one days, three hours. But who’s counting?” I said sarcastically.

“Paige, you have to understand where I was in my life at that point in time. I was in a bad place. Alice had tried to help me understand what had happened to me, and what my purpose in life could be, but I was young and angry at the world. I fell in with a pretty bad crowd, and suddenly I was making money hand over fist doing some pretty shady work for the demons.”

“That doesn’t explain why you think you gave my parents to the demons,” I said. The rational side of me said that if I gave him enough time and space, he’d realize that he was wrong. Surely Riley couldn’t have had anything to do with my parents’ murder. The idea was preposterous and terrifying. If it were true, then I didn’t know what I would do. “Do what you always tell me to do. Start at the beginning.”

I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Riley might have done some bad things in his lifetime, but he wouldn’t have turned over innocent human beings to demons. What kind of person would do that? Every bad thing I would eventually have to repent for was done with my survival in mind. I had been the prize being hunted for by bounty hunters so that they could offer me up the highest bidder. It wouldn’t be the first time I trusted the wrong person. It made my blood run cold to think what would have happened if I had run across Riley back then. Would he have helped me or sold me out? Based on what I was hearing, I think it would likely have been the latter. I motioned for him to continue. I could tell that he didn’t want to, but now we were here, in a place I never expected us to be.

“Just have a little patience. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” Riley said. He dug his hands into his pockets. His eyes darted between me and the small, plain gravestones at my feet. It made me stand up straighter. These two innocent people deserved better, and I hated to think that anyone would judge them and their impact on the world by the size of those stones. It made their lives feel so…insignificant.

“I had just moved to Charlotte. Alice tried for two years to teach me how to be a necromancer, but it might as well have been a fish trying to teach a bird to fly. She meant well, but there was too much that she didn’t understand. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. Really, I was a rebellious asshole at a stage in my life where I thought I knew better than everyone else in the world. I was one of a kind, and it rubbed me the wrong way when Alice tried to tell me how I should and shouldn’t act and behave. It wasn’t as if I could go to college and get a normal job anymore. Shit, I tried that too for a while, but I was impatient. I wanted power and respect because I felt like that was what the world owed me.”

He began to pace, but I noticed he gave me a wide berth. Then he stopped and turned away from me. I wasn’t sure if he was studying the sea of tombstones and crypts that stretched out in front of us or just avoiding my eyes. “Since my early twenties, I’ve been more at home in graveyards than any place where living people felt comfortable. Back then though I was so angry at the world. Alice had her work cut out for her when my mom dumped me on her doorstep, and she did her best. I realize now that there probably wasn’t another human being in the world more qualified to teach me anything. But after she kicked me out for the third time for disrespecting her rules, I called it quits with her altogether and went off on my own.”

“You started your business,” I said. I was impatient for him to get to the part I cared about, but I was supposed to be giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he felt this context was important, I needed to listen.

“Not right away. That came later. I started out freelancing. It was something I fell into really,” Riley said. “You remember that I told you the story about how I used some of the skeletons hiding in my teachers’ closets to get better grades in classes? A little blackmail here and there, and I was able to graduate a full year earlier than the rest of my class.”

I recalled Riley had told me that story a couple of days after we met. He had explained to me what a necromancer was; that was before I had my memories back, and I had no knowledge of the dark world I had been a part of before the accident. That seemed like a lifetime ago. Our days and nights since then blended together, but all told it still hadn’t been more than two weeks since meeting Riley Stone in a graveyard not unlike this one. We had been to hell and back and come out together on the other side but not completely unscathed. Riley was a dark angel, and I was about to be possessed by a cursed, tortured, banished, pissed off goddess. These were truths a part of me wished I had never discovered. For a long time, my parents had been the barrier between me and that world. Ever since they’d been taken from me, my life had gone to shit.

“Blackmail is hardly giving innocent human beings over to demons,” I said.

“Oh, doesn’t that kind of thing all start so innocently?” I didn’t care for his sarcastic tone. He still had his back to me. “Once it started getting around in the creature circles that there was a new necromancer in action, I had entities other than ghosts suddenly knocking on my door. Alice had prepared me for that inevitability. You’d have thought that she’d have done a better job and not dumped me in the middle of all of that considering what she knew about my destiny to became a dark angel. I have to say, thinking back on it now, my family was, or is, pretty fucked up.”

I understood Riley was still processing the fact that the parents he had always known weren’t his birth parents. Viho and Alice had tried their best to protect him from his destiny when he was born. But Viho was kidnapped by archangels, and Alice sent him to her childhood friend to raise before going into hiding in the most unlikely of places, a Catholic convent. Riley and I had just discovered those truths in the last few days.

“It was your destiny to become a necromancer. It’s in your blood. You know that now. You couldn’t hide from it any more than I could hide from what was supposed to happen to me,” I said.

Riley gave a short laugh. “Destiny. I never believed in destiny. I thought that as long as I wanted something to happen, it could happen. I wouldn’t let anyone tell me any different. I was different, after all. I didn’t fit in the human world anymore, and demons and angels came to my doorstep looking for favors, but it was obvious they always thought they were better than me. I had a little bit of power but no respect, so I settled for the next best thing. I decided that at least I could get rich off them in the meantime.”

“That sounds ugly and petty,” I said.

“Perhaps. But when I was twenty-one, I couldn’t have cared less how it looked to anyone if it meant dollars in my bank account. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the nastier the job, the more money I’d make. Sure, there were times when I felt a little uncomfortable, but the number of zeros on the check dulled all of that. For a while, I actively went out looking for those types of jobs. Alice tried making contact with me once she heard what I was up to. She laid the guilt on pretty thick, but I was too far gone to give a shit.”

“This context isn’t making me feel any better for what else you have to tell me,” I said.

Riley turned to me then. His face was grim. “No, I didn’t think it would. It’s important for you to understand what I was like back then because I hope you can see how I’m different now. I fucked up a lot of things, but I learned that wasn’t the right away. You’ve helped me see that. We can’t always be held accountable for the sins of our past.”

“Our past defines us and makes us who we are.” I was growing tired of his avoidance of the topic at hand. “Stop beating around the bush, Riley. We’re both adults now. Tell me the truth. How were you involved with my parents?”

“It’s not a long story. That’s the point,” Riley said slowly. “I did hundreds of jobs just like it over the years. At some point, I’d get bored and restless, so I’d jump into my car and drive. It didn’t matter where. I’d blow into a town and find the nearest demon bar. I’d spread the word that I was in town for a week or two, and I was open for business. It was first come, first serve. Demons would show up and give me a lead or tell me what they wanted from the dead. I was particular about what I accepted, and I had a steep fee. It had to be worth my time. That’s why I remember the job at all. The Pollball demon who set it up was willing to pay me three times my normal fee.”

I wanted to strike out at him then. “Don’t ever describe my parents’ murder as a job ever again.”

Riley shook his head and grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to be factual and neutral. I know this is hard for you to hear. It’s hard for me to tell you.”

“Why would you think that?” My laughter was almost uncontrollable. “I met you and fell in love with you before I think I even knew who you were. I think it was because I trusted you with my life because you kept saving me for some reason I didn’t understand. I’ve followed you with barely a question because I thought you knew the right way. Now, I find out that you were part of the plot to kill my parents. There’s nothing remotely emotional or hard to hear about this situation at all.”

Riley stepped toward me, but I stumbled backward. I put out my hands as he reached out to help me as I faltered. “Don’t. Tell me the rest. Spit it out.”

“I was in the Midwest. Christ, I don’t even remember where,” Riley said. He closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face before continuing. Suddenly, he looked years older than his twenty-eight years. “I was drunk as a skunk that night. A demon official came around looking for me, and that was still new to me. Demon officials had the jobs that paid by far the best. He told me he was trying to find a guy who sold his soul to him, but had skipped out on the deal.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“He had a picture of your father, and that was the story he gave me along with a guarantee of a fat paycheck that would practically buy me a house anywhere I wanted,” Riley said. “Do you think he told me he was searching for the future vessel of a goddess who had been dead for a thousand years? It was a cover story.”

“Would it have mattered?” The question hung in the air between us. I gave it ten seconds before I continued my clarification. “Say the demon official told you exactly who he was looking for, a human teenage girl and her parents. And that once he found them, he would let his demons torture and kill the parents before whisking the girl away to an unknown, terrible fate. Would you have done anything different? Turned him down? Told him to take his money and shove it up his ass?” The silence after I finished my tirade was deafening. I held up my hand. “I don’t want to hear any more.”