Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) (16 page)

Jackson was silent for a moment; he was in shock, but he hadn’t passed out. I was about to break his other arm when he stopped me. “Wait!” his voice was hoarse, weary. There was only so much pain any human could take. “We knew you were there but we didn’t know … how involved … you were. David was …” he flinched, anticipating my reaction to what he was about to tell me. I wasn’t in the mood for him to take his time parsing his words. I slammed my fist into his broken arm. A strangled, gurgling cry rose up from his throat, and I ordered, “Finish.”

“
To kill her! David was there to kill her!”
he hissed.

My grip on his neck tightened and his eyes bulged; I had to force myself to relax my fingers. He couldn’t die yet. “Why?”

Jackson’s eyes closed. If this fucker thought I was done with him, I would remind him who was in control now. I had been straddling him on the bed to keep him from moving, and I lifted myself just enough to bring my knee into his groin with as much force as I could manage in this position. His face turned the color of mulberry wine. I knew he wouldn’t be able to talk right away so, again, I waited. One of the reasons I rarely watched movies was that Hollywood made everything so complicated; as I watched Jackson’s face, waiting for the color to return to its pallid shade, I wondered if anyone who ever worked on those ridiculous spy movies realized how little technology was needed to torture a person. Jackson didn’t seem very comfortable to me.

The blood from his nose had crusted over, but thin drops continued to trickle down his arms from where the zip ties were cutting into his flesh, falling off onto the
creamy
ivory sheets and spreading larger and larger crimson pools around us. I had decided these were definitely creamy ivory, if for no other reason than my wedding day, my bride, had been stolen from me; but some part of her still lived, and this asshole wanted to steal her from me again. Maybe I had already fucked that up myself. I should have kept our relationship platonic, so that I could love Lottie, so that in some small way she was still in my life and I could find some new meaning to this afterlife. And by doing so, I would have still respected Kyrieana, appreciated that she was
herself
, and deserved a life of her own. But that was for her to decide – not me, and certainly not this fucker.

As his face returned to a lighter shade of pinkish-red, I asked him again, “Why?”

“You know,” he croaked, “she’s …” he paused again, but this time, his confusion seemed sincere. “I don’t know why she’s different. I swear.” He was trying to take deeper breaths, so I relaxed my grip a little more to show him that if he talked, this wouldn’t hurt so much. I was anxious for it to end soon as well. “I was told to tell her exactly what you heard. She’s dangerous for us. I believe that. She has to …” he flinched again.

“Why is she dangerous?”

“I’m not sure,
no, I swear!”
But it was too late. I broke his other arm.

“
I don’t know!
” Jackson cried. Tears were streaming down his face now, mixing with the dried blood, forming sluggish pink rivers that joined the blood ponds on the sheets.

“Who told you and David to kill her?”

“Abram. Abram, he’s in New York,” Jackson was sobbing. He was ready to die. Abram from New York was the same man who had called him in his motel room.

“Think about this again. Why do you think she’s dangerous? Why were you willing to believe him?”

Jackson sputtered, coughed, and blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. He was finished. There was nothing else I could do to him at this point – he would have told me anything he thought I wanted to hear to keep me from torturing him again. That was always the drawback to trying to beat information out of a person; after a while, most people are ready to sell their souls to you just to get you to stop.

Jackson moaned as a new string of blood spattered onto his sheets. It seemed to be coming from everywhere now. “Because people like her aren’t supposed to exist. If they know … if they find out, at home, who would risk coming? We’d be … closed. Done.”

Jackson himself was done. His voice was cracked, rough, dying. His eyes refused to stay open. Too much time was passing anyway. I needed to leave. “Jackson, one more thing,” I said, shifting my weight off of him, leaning toward him now with both hands wrapped around his throat. He opened his eyes to look at me. “It’s
Herr Kliewer
, asshole.” And then I broke his neck.

There was a natural gas leak at Dr. Jackson Garrett’s house that night while he was, as far as anyone else knew, sleeping. Around 3:30 a.m., the house exploded in a massive fireball that blew out neighbors’ windows. By the time the fire department had the blaze under control, I was asleep in my hotel room on the other side of Waco, having already figured out a way to get Abram Mirowski to Baton Rouge.

Chapter 12

Eric and Mark had been busy while I was in Waco. By the time I got back to Baton Rouge, the apartment they’d rented had been somewhat furnished, and just like the bachelors we all were, the fridge had been stocked with beer and leftover Thai takeout– and not much else. I was only somewhat surprised to see Lydia there, excitedly helping Eric hang a framed poster of Death Valley in the living area. Apparently, it had been a welcoming gift from her and Lottie. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw what she had brought.

“Did Lottie tell you we used to have a poster very much like that?” I asked.

Lydia shook her head at me, her blonde hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, bouncing as she swung her head back and forth. “Nope. But this is Baton Rouge. Who doesn’t have one of these in their home?”

“Nobody who deserves to live here,” I answered solemnly.

Eric had gone to Auburn. He shot me one of those just-wait looks, and I found myself wondering if it would be possible to fix a college football game. If we lost to Auburn this season, I would never hear the end of it now. Eric, though, never let on to Lydia that he didn’t bleed purple and gold like the rest of us. “Where’s Lottie?” I tried to ask her casually, but I wasn’t sure if I was desperate to see her or desperate to avoid her.

“Work,” Lydia chirped. She was in such a good mood, it was hard to believe that only two days ago, some asshole – now a dead asshole – had threatened to tear her world in half. Eric wasn’t stupid. Surely he knew he was the reason for Lydia’s transformation, but like everything else lately, it seemed like one more conversation we were never going to have the chance to have. Someone was always going to be around us now or one of us was going to be traveling the country – or, hell, maybe the world – trying to end this nightmare for both Lottie and Lydia. “Does this look straight?” she asked, stepping back from the wall, tilting her head with a hint of a frown at her lips. It was a little crooked but Eric answered before I could. “It looks fine. Still.”

Mark stepped forward and straightened it a little, cocking an eyebrow at Lydia to see if she approved. “Oh, that’s better!” she chirped again. It still looked crooked to me.

“Have you been to an LSU game?” Mark asked her.

Lydia shook her head again, that long, thick ponytail swinging with her head. “No,” she sighed, “who knew tickets would be so hard to get? They sell out so quickly.” She frowned again. Jamie had never frowned like that. Jamie had always been beautiful in that I-know-I’m-a-sex-goddess kind of way. Lydia was downright endearing and radiated this innocent charm that Jamie probably hadn’t even been born with.

“I can get tickets. I can take you, if you’d like,” he offered. It had sounded like a casual offer, but Eric and I glanced at each other knowingly anyway.

Lydia was glowing. “Oh, that would be so much fun! Can we tailgate? I’ve
always
wanted to tailgate! You know they put them on College Gameday. LSU fans, I mean. They say we’re some of the best tailgaters in the country. Oh, what game do you think we’d be able to see? Would it be an SEC game?”

“Auburn,” Eric and I said at the same time.

Lydia turned to look at us, the smile on her face growing wider, showing off more of those straight white teeth. “Do you think you can both come too? And Lottie? This is going to be
so
much fun!” She was positively giddy now.

“Only if Auburn’s a home game,” I responded.

“It won’t matter,” Eric mumbled.

Lydia didn’t even notice us. She was completely enraptured by this new daydream of having one of her fantasies come true. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t help smiling as I watched her and Mark continue to talk animatedly about the upcoming football season. Jamie hated football. And sports. Lydia’s fascination with one of the roughest sports in this country was another stark reminder that the only thing she had in common with the woman who used to be Lottie’s – my Lottie’s – best friend was the body she now wore.

Rolling thunder in the distance forced Eric to break up their fall tailgating plans. “Hey, why don’t we go get some dinner before the rain comes? Dietrich, you hungry?”

I was starving, but I mostly wanted to sleep, so the three of them left, and I collapsed on the bed that I had been told would be mine. I kicked off my shoes but didn’t bother taking off anything else. Outside, I could hear the rain starting to fall. Ever since a beautiful spring day in Houston over two years ago, I had hated the fucking rain.

It had gotten much darker in my room by the time I recognized there was someone knocking at the door; I must have slept for quite a while. It was still raining. I groaned, sore and irritable, but pushed myself off the bed. All of the lights were off in the apartment and with it being new to me, I had to feel along the walls for a light switch. By the time I reached the door, I knew it was Lottie waiting outside. My chest suddenly felt pinched and tight. She had gotten soaked walking from her car to the building, and she was trying to wring the water out of her hair when I opened the door; her lips, those pale pink tender lips, spread into a wide smile when she saw me.

“Figured you must have been sleeping.” And she threw her arms around me, kissing me, and Christ, it would be so easy, so effortless, to slip into this belief that it was only Lottie here, just my Lottie, home from work, kissing me, giggling as she dripped water all over me, but not loosening her arms from around my neck or letting her lips move off of mine. I am not proud of it, but I kissed her back, I wrapped my arms around her waist and lifted her into the living room, closing the door with one foot, and as Lottie’s hands starting twisting under my shirt where she opened her hands and lay her palms flat, moving them slowly up my stomach, to my chest, pulling my shirt upward with her arms, I knew I had to stop this, I had to stop us from making the same mistake over and over again. I had been unwanted once; Kyrieana wouldn’t suffer my fate.

“Lottie,” I breathed, God, it was so hard to force myself away from her lips, from her hands. “We need to talk.” Why those words? Nothing good ever comes after those words. She knew that as well as I did.

Lottie pulled away from me, a mixture of worry and fear all over her face. I took her hand, wanting to reassure her that I still loved her, I would always love her, I would always be around to protect her, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Not now. There were so many things I should have been able to see then, but I was so overwhelmed by my own guilt, by my own past, that I could only think of trying to restore some status quo, some normal that had never even existed between us. And I was going to make certain she never thought it was her fault. “Lottie, about the other night … I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have even stayed.”

“What? Why not?” Her concern had transformed into confusion.

“Because it’s … it’s so complicated now. I don’t think I’m being fair to you, and …”

“Dietrich, I told you, it doesn’t have to be, we can make this work, I know I can.”

I pulled her a little closer to me, but not too close – I couldn’t tempt myself like that again. I was going to save her. I was going to save them both. I had to.

“Lottie, you can’t pretend to be half a person.”

“I’m not! I don’t even know what that means!”

I didn’t either, actually. “Look, I think we should just, for now anyway, be friends.”

She was becoming frantic now, angry. I was angry at myself. “No! You
wanted
her, you can’t just change your mind! Not now, I won’t fuck this up, I promise!”

I had never hated myself more than I did right then. I was trying to protect her from so many forces I didn’t even understand, and the only one that had actually ever harmed her was me. “Kyrieana, I don’t want you to die for me!”

She backed away from me and pulled her hand out of mine, eyes full of a rage that had never belonged to Lottie. “Don’t,” she hissed, “
ever
call me that again.”

I was so hopelessly lost. “Why?” My own anger and self-pity evaporated; I was emptied, turned inside out, eviscerated.

Her cheeks flushed, her fists held tightly by her side, and she spit the words out at me, “You don’t get to decide who I am.
Nobody
gets to decide who I am except
me.
I am tired of you
men
thinking you can control me! You don’t get to control me!” By the end, she was shouting at me and had closed the space between us.

I inhaled sharply, sensing this was far more about her past than about us, but as usual, I spoke too quickly, too obstinate and reckless. “I’m not trying to control you, but you don’t get to control me either, and
this
is manipulative and coercive. You can’t just …” But Lottie cut me off when she walked past me and out my door, slamming it behind her so that the crooked picture of Death Valley fell from the wall and crashed to the floor. I couldn’t hear her footsteps over the rain that still fell in torrents outside, as if Heaven itself, in all of its twisted sense of irony, had finally decided to mourn the loss of the only woman I would ever love, for the second time in my life.

I stared at the door numbly for a while, thinking surely she would come back through it, this was all a nightmare, because Lottie –
my Lottie
– would have never done something like this. That little voice that so often tickled the back of my mind about the differences between Lottie before and now reminded me,
this isn’t your Lottie
but I didn’t want to listen. Even if she had come back, what would I have told her? Nothing had changed. For whomever she was and wasn’t, she was an extraordinary woman and I had hurt her and I was certain now that I was the biggest fucking asshole on the planet.

I very rarely drank so much that I got drunk; that night, I was absolutely, completely, totally shit-faced. Eric and Mark had come home – apparently, they had gone to see a movie and had sent me a text message I had never bothered to read – and found me halfway through a bottle of Danzka vodka. I don’t even like vodka but it had been in the apartment. Accessibility beat out preference. After the first few drinks, though, I couldn’t taste it anymore anyway.

One of them took the bottle away from me – I’m sure I tried to stop them – and I’m a little more sure it was Eric who led me to my bed that night, putting an empty waste basket on the floor, knowing I would need it later. I don’t know how long he stayed, but at some point, I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night, ready to make good use of the trashcan Eric had placed by my bed. He must have been awake still, because he heard me, stood silently in my doorway, took the trashcan away when I was finished, and came back a few minutes later with a clean bag in it. Not only was I the world’s shittiest boyfriend, I was the world’s shittiest friend. I wouldn’t have thought to do that for him.

He sat on the edge of my bed, careful not to move the mattress too much, and set a glass of water on the nightstand. How had they gotten so much furniture in here so quickly?

“Something happen in Waco?” he finally asked.

I moved my head as little as I possibly could to tell him no. He was quiet again and I was starting to drift back toward sleep when he spoke. “Lottie?”

I opened my eyes. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton. “One week,” my throat was raw and sore but I wanted him to know. He had to know his best friend was the biggest fuck-up in the universe. “I lost her in one week.”

Eric didn’t respond right away. When he did, it wasn’t the best-friend-pep-talk I had been expecting. Or maybe that was just the vodka making me think I deserved some best-friend-pep-talk. “Get some sleep. We’ve got a judge coming to town soon.”

If I had been sober, that probably would have alarmed me, or at least registered with me, but instead, I really just wanted my fucking room to stay still and my stomach to stop heaving.

In the morning, I pulled a pillow over my head and started wondering if it were possible to convince Mark to suffocate me. I knew Eric wouldn’t do it. Mark could maybe be bribed. I lay as still as I could, every movement sending shockwaves of pain through my skull, but my bladder was a turncoat. “Goddamn traitor,” I mumbled into the pillow.

“I’m guessing that wasn’t directed at me,” Eric quipped. I was so fucking hungover, I hadn’t even known someone else was in the room with me. That was the kind of mistake that got people like us killed. I groaned and moved the pillow away from my face. “If you’re really my friend, you wouldn’t let me suffer like this.”

“It’ll pass. You’ll be fine.”

I snorted. Fine? I would be a lot of things, but I would never be fine again. “So who’s the traitor?” Eric asked.

I sighed. “My bladder.”

“Ah,” Eric walked into my line of sight since I still hadn’t moved. “I have my limits, Dietrich. I’m not helping you with that.”

I don’t know why, maybe I was still drunk, but I heard myself asking, “What if I were paralyzed?”

“I’d hire you a nurse. A hot one. Now go pee, we need to talk.”

I heard him leaving my room, and I groaned again as I sat up, that throbbing stabbing in my head intensifying, and I had to wait for the room to stop spinning before I could stand. I thought about peeing in the trashcan and just going back to sleep, but Eric’s “we need to talk” echoed in my head, and I forced myself to get up.