Twice Cursed (12 page)

“
Are you okay?” Ryan asked,
putting his hand on her back.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah.
It’s just a lot to process at once.”

He frowned, pulling his hand away from
her back. “This is nuts,” he mumbled, raking his fingers through
his hair. “First, the freezer section freak show, and now this.” He
pressed his lips together and glanced toward the exit. “We’re outta
here. This isn’t working, and I’m not standing around with my thumb
up my ass while you make yourself sick or whatever it is that’s
happening to you.”

She dragged in another breath, holding
it for a moment as she composed herself. The detective was
doubtless a Type A personality. With his jaw clenched, he looked as
though he was ready to bolt. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be
fine.”

He made a face. “Maybe you just need a
break, a cup of coffee or something…some fresh air,” he said,
glancing toward the exit again.

Lily moistened her dry
lips, a ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her
mouth.
Type A,
definitely
. “Trust me. I’m good. I just
need to find my center.”

Looking at his drawn expression, she
couldn’t help but feel for him. He was completely out of his
element, unfortunately, the only thing she could do was reassure
him. “There’s no other way to do this, Detective, and besides, a
hazmat team couldn’t clear away what I sense and smell.” She
studied him for a moment. “You smell it too, don’t you?”

He hesitated, giving her a cautious
nod, before turning away. “I thought so,” she said, straightening
up.

Lily regarded him. He seemed upset, as
if unsure of what he’d just revealed. So she waited, not saying a
word, and when he turned back, his professional veneer was once
again in place.

With a nod, she took a deep breath
through her mouth and exhaled. “Let’s get to work.”

Careful not to touch too much, she
picked her way through the bar. A green clock in the shape of a
Heineken bottle dangled precariously above the dirty outline where
the mirror had once hung. It was the only thing left untouched in
the entire place. Lily stopped equidistant from where it hung,
turning left, then right. “This room is not the epicenter. What
happened here took place after the fact.”

The stench of old blood and an
underlying bitter tang, she knew but couldn’t place, grew stronger
as she headed toward the back of the bar. She moved slowly, her
stomach roiling with each step. The feeling of vertigo hadn’t
subsided, and bile rose in her throat.

Lily lurched forward and gagged,
swallowing back on the sour taste. She gulped down air to quell the
nausea, but the scent permeated everything, and she grabbed the
edge of the broken bar for support.

As soon as her hand made contact, the
image of a fat man in a stained t-shirt, with a limp dishtowel
tucked into his dirty apron, shot through her mind. Missing front
teeth showed through a wheezy chuckle as he palmed money from the
bar and signaled for two girls—one of them the same young girl from
Lily’s previous vision. He watched, leering as the teenager coated
her lips with bright orange lipstick, before slinking through a
side door marked as private.

“
There.” Lily pointed from
her half-hunched position. “That’s where it started.”

Whatever remained of the private
entrance now hung suspended by a single broken hinge. Ryan pulled
on a pair of leather gloves and carefully maneuvered the door open
for Lily to enter first. She stepped through the ruined threshold
into what looked like the backroom to an illegal social
club.

Echoes of illicit partying and sex for
hire lived in the air like noxious fumes. Amid the wreckage, a pool
table sat dead center of the room splintered in half, its green
felt shredded, and covered in dried blood and chalk
dust.

A slick coating now congealed to a red
gelatinous state, covered the floor. It didn’t take much to
envision the kind of blood loss necessary to saturate the floor to
that point.

Beads of sweat formed on Lily’s
forehead and between her breasts. Ryan called to her, but his voice
was thick in her ears. The room was spinning and she gagged again,
more bile rising to the back of her throat.

With her hand over her mouth, she held
her breath, searching for an unobtrusive place to vomit. The last
thing she wanted was her DNA mixed up with anything CSI might yet
find.

“
Here,” Ryan said shoving a
plastic bag her way.

She grabbed the baggie and turned
away, retching, until there was nothing left but dry heaves. Her
back was to him while she waited for the last wave to
pass.

“
This place is pretty ripe,
despite how cold it’s been,” he said, handing her his handkerchief.
“Sorry about that.”

She wiped her nose and mouth.
“Thanks,” she muttered, glancing back over her shoulder. Head down,
she sucked in a ragged breath. “I think I threw up everything,
including my dignity.”

“
It’s all part of the job,”
he said with a shrug.

Lily frowned, sealing the top of the
zip-lock bag. “I suppose. This has never happened to me before. She
glanced down at the contained mess in her hand and sighed. “Is it
common practice for detectives to carry zip-locks around in their
pocket? Not that I’m not glad you did.”

His lips formed a lopsided smirk. “A
lot of detectives carry them, for evidence or whatnot,” he said,
lifting one shoulder and letting it fall. “But, don’t be so hard on
yourself. You’re not the first rookie to lose it at a crime scene,
and you won’t be the last.”

“
So you think I’m a rookie?
And here I thought experience was the key.”

He laughed, folding his hands in front
of his chest. “It is. That and how many times you’ve vomited behind
the yellow tape.”

“
Ha! Leave it to men to
quantify skill through bodily emissions,” she mumbled, resting the
baggie on the floor by the door and wiping her hands once more on
his handkerchief. “…and on that note, we’ve still got work to
do.”

Lily walked to the center of the room
and stopped. She took a single cleansing breath and turned her body
slowly, sending her senses out like a web. Images darted through
Lily’s mind at high speed, but this time she was ready for
them.

Laughter. Drinking. Loud music. The
room was in shambles, and its story played out in time with the
kaleidoscope of color and noise that flashed its way through her
mind.

Along the wall, a wide rolling bar had
been turned on its side, its chrome edges bent, and its frosted
glass countertop and LED panels smashed. She reached out and slid
her finger over what was left of the counter, bringing it to her
tongue. A rush of euphoria flew through her veins, and she was
numb. In a flash, there were crack pipes and methamphetamines, or
Ice, as it was known on the street, piled high across the bar. The
scenes were sordid, filled with images of drug-induced
sex.

Lily turned toward the far wall and
the broken couch pushed against the chipped paint. Her skin grew
cold to the point of shivering, and panic bit into her gut. The
images in her head turned even uglier, and she cried out, covering
her face as she felt each blow, the tearing between her legs and
warm blood flowing along the inside of her thighs.

It was the young girl with the orange
lipstick—paid for, beaten, raped.

Her head whipped around as rage, white
hot and deranged poured through her from behind. As if compelled,
Lily turned toward the tiny window to the side of the small bar.
Shattered glass covered the floor beneath the twisted metal window
casing.

“
This is where the
perpetrator entered the room.” With each step, Lily’s body shook
against the storm of rage that flooded her body. Her words pushed
passed clenched teeth as she moved toward the window. “I’m
positive. This is it.”

Ryan stood to one side, his arms still
folded across his chest. However, instead of the casual stance he
affected before, now he just looked defensive. “Lily, what the hell
is going on here? A blind man could see you’re getting a reading,
but you haven’t said a thing, despite all your gyrations. You gotta
cut me some slack. I’m out of my element here, and I don’t like it
one bit.”

Was he for real?
Lily just looked at him.

He exhaled. “CSI didn’t find anything
to support a point of forced entry besides the shattered glass. No
fingerprints, no blood—other than from the victims—no fibers, no
epithelial tissue, no hair. So what do you see that they didn’t, or
couldn’t?”

Lily didn’t answer. The closer she
moved to the window, the more the anger raced through her mind—red,
black, and craving vengeance. She fell to her knees in front of the
hollowed out square, glass biting into her skin through her jeans.
Hands at her temples, her pulse throbbed beneath her palms as her
fingernails raked her scalp.

She was in the perpetrator’s mind. The
taste of blood, metallic and slick coated her tongue, and the taste
wasn’t as she expected. It was heady and thick, like honey. She ran
the tip of her tongue over her own teeth, but the sensation was
that of razor sharp fangs.

Her vision narrowed, and a veil of red
descended across her line of sight. She scrambled to her feet and
into a crouch, her head jerking from side to side and her nostrils
flaring.

“
Lily! What the fuck?” Ryan
said, taking a step toward her, but jumped back when she snarled
low in her throat like something feral. She was out of time and
place, looking through the vampire’s eyes as events
unfolded.

Her head whipped around again, the
scent of fear making her mouth water. Through the vampire’s eyes,
she saw the boy, Patrick, standing over the girl, his friends
laughing as another rode her hard, biting her breast so hard he
drew blood. The girl cried out in terror and agony, and the vampire
smiled as it coiled to attack.

The image shifted, and Lily watched as
if in a trance. The window shattered, and the vampire landed on its
feet in a spray of glass and concrete. Covered in blood, the
vampire ripped the boys to shreds, choking on bits of broken bone
and cartilage as it drank, the bitter tang of their absolute terror
scoring its throat.

Lily tried to free her mind, but the
vampire’s gnarled thoughts wrapped themselves around her perception
like mutant vines—its thought processes saturated with one word.
Kill.

Savoring the last of them, the vampire
lifted its gaze toward the mirrored wall, its bloodied visage
reflected back like a nightmare. A face so white and so thin, the
cheekbones looked as if they would rip through the pallid skin, yet
stark against the dark red smears streaked across its mouth. Fangs,
long and dripping with yellow saliva, were stained with blood and
pieces of gore.

As if shocked, the creature’s hand
rose to touch its hair, the long, dirty strands hanging from a
white scalp, like a corpse. A vicious screech echoed through Lily’s
mind along with the image of a beautiful woman, tall and elegant,
with long, lustrous blond hair and pearl white skin…the only thing
shared with the creature in the mirror was that she too had
fangs.

The vampire’s mind was a
swirl of incoherent thought, but one word escaped through the haze
of rage and murder.
Why?
And for one lucid moment, the vampire’s mind held
the creature and the woman superimposed, and Lily knew. The two
were one and the same, and the question now begged, not only why,
but how?

***

“
If you don’t tell me what
the fuck is going on, I’m calling it…game over, got it? I’m not
here to scrape you off the ceiling, or the floor for that matter,”
Ryan shouted, his arms hooked under her armpits as he dragged her
to standing. “What gives? And I want it straight. No more dancing
around and telling me you’re not sure.”

He dragged his hand across his
forehead, his face furious. This was not what he’d expected when he
said he’d take this on.

“
You have two minutes, so
start talking,” he said, folding his arms across his chest again.
This time it was neither casual nor defensive, the move was pure
self-preservation.

“
Ryan…I…”

“
No. If I wanted tap
dancing, I’d get assigned to the Broadway beat. I want answers.
Now.”

Lily took a deep breath, rummaging
through her pockets. “Okay, Ryan. But I’m telling you right now,
you won’t believe what I have to tell you.”

After what he just witnessed, he
didn’t doubt it. She was still fishing through her pockets, her
face beautiful, but drawn. She probably needed a cigarette. After
this, even he wanted one, and he didn’t smoke.

Whatever Lily smelled, he smelled it
too, but you didn’t need a degree in psychology to know that she
not only smelled it, but saw whatever it was that had caused this.
He took a breath and exhaled. “Come on. Let’s get out of here and
go somewhere we can talk.”

She picked up her baggie full of puke,
and the two walked out onto the street. She dumped it in a trashcan
near the corner where Ryan was double-parked. Wiping her hands on
her slightly bloodstained knees, she stood on the sidewalk waiting
for him to finish with the uniformed patrol.