Pool of Crimson (8 page)

“Hi,” he said with too much energy and that bright smile. He seemed to gleam even in the harsh hospital lights.

“Hello,” I replied curtly. I didn’t have anything left in me to be cordial.

“Would you like to go out with me?” he asked simply, no preemptive conversation, no buffer, nothing. He stood there, calm and collected with a confident grin on his face that didn’t seem to waiver no matter how long I stared at him in silence with my mouth gaping open.

He seemed so sure, so confident. He threw me off my game entirely. “Wow, speechlessness. I bet that doesn’t happen to you very often. You don’t seem the type to be tongue tied,” he said, laughing to himself and a bit at me.

“Um, n-no it doesn’t,” I stammered and shut my mouth quickly.

I hadn’t been on a date in a very long time and this guy was standing in front of me with his hands in his pockets like
my
answer could crush him. No one has ever asked me out, ever.

“Okay.”

“Good.” His eyes brightened with a twinkle that brought a smile to my lips. I couldn’t imagine how his eyes actually got brighter, but they did. “How does tomorrow work for you?”

Ah ... um ...

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a small, shy smile. A flutter of awareness turned my stomach to butterflies and my skin flushed with embarrassment. “My name’s Dahlia, by the way,” I said, standing and extending my hand to shake his forcefully, pushing that other, less sure, self back down. I couldn’t let him see he made me nervous. He had a firm handshake, warm hands, and I was impressed that he didn’t ease up on me. Most guys tend to go soft when they shake hands with a woman. He didn’t.

“My name’s Danny,” he said with a smile and a quick nod. “I’ll call you about a time, and I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he said quickly. His fingers lingered lightly over mine, sending a white-hot heat through me until he released my hand, leaving his card in my palm.

He went back to his partner, who waited by the reception desk, watching with a shit-eating grin on his face.

I sat speechless and stunned as a very large Latina nurse wheeled Jade back into the waiting room from triage. The poor nurse didn’t look happy with her patient.

Jade saw me and stepped out of the chair before it stopped, pushing the chair back into the nurse. She got to her feet against the advice of the poor woman trying to stop her with a half-hearted effort. Jade limped over to where I stood without a glance back at the nurse. I met the poor woman’s eyes with a silent apology but she ignored me and went back behind the double doors of the triage unit. I had a sneaking suspicion that the nurse was secretly glad to get rid of Jade.

Jade whimpered with every step but she hobbled over to me, determined.

“Let’s catch a cab,” I said motioning toward her wheelchair. She shrugged me off and headed for the emergency room entrance, defiant to the last.

I caught her arm quickly just above the elbow and stopped her with my firm grasp. It wasn’t hard since she was already weak from blood loss and pain. “We’re not going out that way,” I said softly as I motioned toward another door. I explained as I walked with her arm tightly tucked underneath my own. “For those who know, there’s more than one way to get in and out of the emergency room. The hospital buildings are all connected by a series of tunnels.” I smiled, trying to reassure her. She didn’t smile back. She looked like she was in pain and trying to hide it. The farther we walked, the more her expression reflected that pain and the slower our pace.

“You think they followed us here,” she said with a hint of anxiety in her voice. It wasn’t a question.

“It’s just a precaution but if it were me and I’d just tried to run someone off the road, I’d wanna check. We came in the Emergency Department but we don’t have to leave that way. We’ll go up to the main hospital and leave from there. There are usually a few cabs waiting at the main entrance anyway. We won’t have to wait.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a long time as we made our way through the tunnels. I imagine it was a longer walk than she’d suspected.

The tunnels always gave me the creeps, helped by the florescent lights in a long line against the ceiling giving a greenish tint to everything. The tunnels were thousands of dark gray cinder blocks lining almost a half a mile of tunnels, giving it a cold prison feel and like prison, there was no way out except the other end.

Jade looked just as uncomfortable in the long, dreary hallway. Her eyes darted from side-to-side and occasionally over her shoulder back down the long empty corridor. The only sound in the tunnel was the click, click, click of our heels on the cement beneath our feet.

“Can I stay with you tonight?” Jade whispered, but her quivering voice seemed to echo in the emptiness of the tunnel, bouncing off cold walls and green tinted floors.

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a quick look over my own shoulder.

I caught a glance of her from the corner of my eye. She looked shaken, her body stiff and her breathing shallow with shock but she tried to hide it.

How could I be thinking about letting her stay in my house?
She was a complete stranger and being involved with me had almost cost Jade her life. But she could think on her feet and I liked her. I only had Amblan. I was selfish, and I didn’t care. I’d gone so long, alone and alienated. I just wanted a little time where I wasn’t alone anymore. Just a little time and then I could go back to being alone.

“I want to help,” she said softly as we made our way through the door to the main hospital. I wanted her help. Hell, I needed her help. I didn’t know shit about herbs and amulets and as blasé as she was about the subject and how she only did it to piss her dad off, she was good at it.

“I’ll think about it. We’ll see how things look in the morning,” I said after a long pause. I was too tired, more than a bit shaken, and too far out of my element to trust my own judgment. I changed the subject instead.

“That police officer seemed to know you,” I said as I watched her out of the corner of my eye.

“Yeah,” she said as she bit her top lip and quickly looked away. We’d reached the admission’s waiting room. “You know that story I told you about the bad date and the bathroom?” she asked sheepishly.

“Him, really?” I said in amazement as the laughter bubbled up again.

“Yeah,” she said, sadness deepening her sultry alto to something deeper.

We reached the hospital’s main entrance after what seemed like an eternity with the smell of ammonia in my nose. Thankfully, there was a cab already waiting. We got in quickly as I glanced over the roof of the car and scoped around for anything that sent my internal warning system off. It all seemed too clean or too sloppy, I couldn’t decide which. Maybe I wasn’t a big enough threat to worry about. Maybe they had other plans. All I could do was close the door and direct the driver toward Grandview. Everything else would have to wait.

Chapter 5

I couldn’t move. I was flat on my back, and I couldn’t move my arms and legs. My heart raced and the familiar padded restraints around my wrists and ankles irritated my skin as I tried to pull away from the table I was strapped to. The several light fixtures that hung from the ceiling with cages covering the bright white bulbs hurt my eyes. I couldn’t see anything past a few feet around me, and beyond that was darkness.

I’d been here before. The familiar ionic smell from deep in my brain filled the air. It singed my nose hair, and I struggled harder to get free.

I had to get out of here. The restraints were so strong, so tight. I couldn’t budge any of them, on my wrists or on my ankles. I lifted my head from the table to try and see into the darkness, but I could only lift myself up so far. Something was attached to my temples and the adhesive pulled painfully at my skin when I lifted my head. My eyes watered as the skin at my temples burned and tore.

“No,” I whispered into the emptiness surrounding me. “Please no,” I whimpered softly as my jaw tightened and the tears slid down the sides of my face, wetting my hair and filling my ears with warm salt water. I couldn’t be here, not again.

“Don’t cry,” a soft feminine voice cooed from the corner. I knew that voice, too. A small woman with my features and thick blond hair that had been dyed too many times to hold any remnants of her original auburn stepped from the darkness. Her features were sharp but had a softness to them that made her pretty instead of striking. She was beautiful, petite, and scary as hell.

“Mom, what are you doing?” I asked through broken sobs. I was still trying to pull my wrists free from the restraints as I spoke. They were too tight, and I couldn’t slip my hands through. The skin over my thumb burned as I stretched and twisted my hand to pull it free from the beige leather restraints.

If I can get just one hand out ...

“I’m going to help you,” she said with a self-confident smile that I recognized from my childhood. It was soft, warm, and painful.

“I’m okay, really. I don’t need help,” I said with false confidence as I sniffled and tried to pull myself together.

“No, darling, you’re anything but okay,” she said as she stroked my hair away from my face. Her fingers were chilled and clammy as they brushed my forehead. She looked down into my face and met my eyes without a speck of regret or uncertainty. It was the first time that I’d felt actual terror. “This will make all those things you think you see go away. You’ll be better. You’ll see,” she said, a confident little smile lighting her soft green eyes.

My bottom lip trembled in fear and I ripped my head away from her touch. I had to get free. I wouldn’t let her do this to me again.
Not again.

“Struggling, darling, will only make it hurt worse,” she said, an irritated tone to her singsong voice as she stepped away. Deep down, I knew she was right, remembered that she was right.

The first jolt of electricity ripped through my body like lightning. All my muscles tensed in shock, and I bit down to grit my teeth to bare it.

“ERRRRRGGGHHHH.”

I opened my eyes and sat straight up. My breath was quick and shallow as I looked around a familiar room, a familiar bed, and the familiar peace and quiet of my bedroom. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I brushed the tears from my cheeks. The all-too-familiar smell of burnt flesh and hair filled my nose.

I’m okay. It was just a dream. Just a stupid God damn dream.

My face scrunched up in remembered terror, and I cried. I cried until I had no tears left and I was exhausted from the effort. It had been a long time since I’d dreamed of those sessions. It had been a long time since I’d even thought about the electroshock therapy. I’d managed to push it, and my family, from my mind, my life, and my reality. I’d shoved them deep inside myself into a tight black box to seal them away so that the horror of what she’d done to me wouldn’t ever show.

I’d grown up in a small town in Eastern Ohio and being different in a small town wasn’t something I advertised. I’ve seen spirits since the age of five. I knew I was different at around five when I asked my mother if the guy standing next to her in our kitchen could have a lick of the brownie mix from the spoon, too. She looked at me in horror, I knew I had done something wrong. I tried never to mention them again. In fact, I got really good at ignoring the spirits to the point where I didn’t even notice them anymore. They had turned into a soft gray blur at the edge of my vision. The other night in the attic had brought all of my painful past back to me with a vengeance.

I’d been fine all through childhood and adolescence, managing my strange ability, no one the wiser, until I was sixteen. Brennan, my high school boyfriend, had decided it would be fun to try and scare me and probably get a chance to cop a feel. The whole night had been a bad idea. I usually avoided cemeteries if I could and from the moment we stepped onto the consecrated soil, I had been completely bombarded by spirits from every angle. They screamed, cried, laughed, poked, and prodded at me the entire night. Brennan had had no clue until I touched him.

He’d been trying to open something and had a knife in his hands. I’d wanted to leave. Once I’d touched him to get his attention, he saw what I saw. He swung his arm, swatted at a spirit and cut me in the process. My blood bubbled to the surface, coating my skin with its warmth. The scent of fresh blood drew something quick and primal out of the darkness of the woods surrounding the cemetery. The thing attacked us, latching on to my arm with its small razor sharp teeth, sinking them into my skin. Its small childlike hands gripped me for dear life as I screamed and tried to shake it off. I instinctually gripped the creature’s head in my other hand without a thought and twisted until I heard a quick snap of its neck. The creature fell to the ground, dead. It had been such a tiny thing, no bigger than a toddler but the marks it had left on my arm gushed blood. The wounds burned, making me lightheaded with pain and blood loss. I’d managed to catch up with Brennan as he ran. We got the hell out of there and never went back.

Once we were safe, I told my parents everything and paid for it. To this day, Brennan kept what had happened to us hidden. He’d turned to God instead and the priesthood.

I had to live with the agony of knowing that my parents thought I was crazy. The psychiatrist they’d forced me to see had said electroshock therapy would help. All it did was teach me to keep my mouth shut and keep what I saw to myself.

I pushed the covers away and got out of bed. There was no way in hell I was getting back to sleep after that nightmare. The morning was young. The clock flashed 4:45 a.m. in an angry red digital font. I knew exactly how it felt.

I trudged down the stairs in my flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top with some hesitancy. I remembered that Jade was sleeping on the couch. I made my way into my dining room where my corner desk and computer were set up.

Might as well get some work done.

I fired up the computer and started with Google. I searched for ‘demons’, ‘protective amulets’, and ‘Ahriman’ with no results and was pretty frustrated when I heard a scuffle at the door.