Tormented (17 page)

Augustus and I had been enjoying an uncomfortable breakfast in Roseville, following my instinct that maybe Cunningham would try something today, when we’d gotten the call that he had, in fact, tried something, and that the something he’d tried was apparently showing up to work like yesterday hadn’t even happened. We rode in silence to the scene, and just as we popped out of the elevator on his floor, we found the man in question committing an act of interpersonal arson on one of his co-workers, who was screaming and dancing like a stuntwoman from a movie before she finally dropped to the ground as the sprinklers came on.

It was a downpour, like a rainstorm going on indoors when I shouted out to Benjamin Cunningham that we were here to talk to him. I could feel Augustus on edge behind me, waiting to rumble. I was skeptical about how much rumbling he’d be able to do with the nearest dirt about seven floors down and outside, but he was chafing to act, I could tell that much. I couldn’t really blame him; we’d walked in on an incriminating scene. It wasn’t like she’d chosen that moment to spontaneously combust, after all.

“Benjamin,” I said quietly, straining to be heard over the sprinklers dousing us with cold, kind of smelly water, “we need to talk.”

“We need to help this dude into a cell,” Augustus said behind me.

I cringed, hoping that the sprinklers drowned out his pronouncement, figuring it wouldn’t do much to help Cunningham’s state of mind. “Benjamin …” I said.

Cunningham was shorter than I figured he’d be, with slumped shoulders and a distinct scorch pattern on the sleeve of his shirt. It might have started out grey, but with the soaking of the water it looked almost black at this point, and his hair had lost any distinctiveness to its shape, turning into a wet, plastered bowl that covered his forehead and ears. “I don’t … this isn’t my fault,” he said, gesturing to the burnt and blackened form on the ground next to him.

“Okay,” I said, holding out my hands in front of me like I meant peace. For most people, that might have been a gesture of peace. In my case, I was ready to blast his ass through a cubicle wall at a moment’s notice. “Why don’t we talk about it?”

His head shook in a terrible tic as he looked over at the body again, then away abruptly. His eyelids fluttered. “I … I didn’t do that.”

“Okay,” I said, opting not to point out the mounting evidence that he, in fact, had done that. “Well, why don’t we go outside or … somewhere quieter … and just talk it over?”

“I have to work,” Cunningham said, and his head shook again. “I have … work to do. This is my job.”

“If you’re planning to work in this,” Augustus said, not really helping the situation, “you might want to get a poncho.”

“That’s the fire alarm, Benjamin,” I said. “They’re evacuating the building.”

“Yes, I know that,” Cunningham snapped at me. “I’m not stupid.” His stunned persona vanished and was replaced by something that hissed when he spoke.

I looked back at Augustus and he looked back at me. I was no psychologist, but that was not normal. “Okay, well … don’t you think we should evacuate?”

“I’ve got work to do,” Cunningham said, jumping right back into that particular groove again. It was like talking to someone whose mind had completely slipped. I was instantly reminded of the circular conversations I had with my grandmother as she succumbed to dementia, like a
Choose Your Own Adventure
novel that you couldn’t get out of regardless of which conversational choice you made.

“Benjamin, no one is working right now,” I said, trying a different tack. “They’re all gone.”

“She’s not gone,” Cunningham said, gesturing to the piece of blackened human toast that used to work with him.

“Oh, she’s gone,” Augustus said, “and so are you, dude. You are
gone
.”

Cunningham’s blank eyes went past me to Augustus. “I don’t understand,” he said, and I believed him wholeheartedly.

“What my colleague means to say,” I took over, before my junior partner spoke enough truth to get us both broiled alive, “is that we’re worried about you. You’re not well, Benjamin.”

“I feel … fine,” he said, and I caught the hint of stress between the second and third words. It was subtle, but spoke a pretty big volume or two.

“Do you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he snapped, and I observed the patience lost again. This time a sheen of steam hissed off his shoulders and head as the sprinklers continued to douse us all, like the water had reached boiling point in an instant.

“All right,” I said, “but we should get you checked out by a doctor anyway.”

“A doctor?” he asked, squinting at me. “Why?”

I tried a different tack. “You picked up something—a sickness—in Amsterdam.”

“I was only in Amsterdam for a few hours,” he said, shaking his head in that twitchy way again. “Couldn’t possibly have picked anything up while I was there.”

“Where were you before Amsterdam?” Augustus asked.

“Before?” Cunningham’s face scrunched up as he considered the question. “Why, I was staying in Bredoccia. Why?”

I’d heard of Bredoccia, the capital city of a country in Eastern Europe called Revelen. They’d had some sort of ad campaign recently to advertise how good they were for business and tourism, just like every other third-world hellhole on the planet. Like Iowa. They had tons of billboards around the Twin Cities a few years ago talking about how wonderful they were, suggesting people move there or visit. As if a cornfield were a great tourist destination or something. Maybe if they invested in a hill, people would come visit them.

Benjamin blinked his eyes, again and again, and finally I saw him catch a glimpse of his burned sleeve. “Oh, God. What happened here?” Cunningham thrust his arm out, look of disgust burning in his eyes and horror etching his mouth into a downward line broken by the gap of his parted lips. “No. No. I … no, it couldn’t … only a monster would—”

“There are no monsters here,” I said, trying to soothe the savage, flaming beast before he could flare up again. “Just people. And accidents happen, Benjamin. They happen, okay?”

“This was no accident,” Cunningham said, turning his head and taking in the burnt corpse behind him. “It couldn’t be an accident. People don’t just catch on fire.” His hand shook, and steam began to pour off of it.

“Oh, hell,” Augustus said behind me, and I watched his hands rise into the air as—presumably—he started to bring some dirt our way. He never got a chance to finish his attempt, though.

I heard footsteps in the sprinkler wash behind us only a second before I heard Augustus’s sharp, shocked cry and watched him fly, twisting, through the air to my right. He hit a cubicle wall and it shattered around him like a bowling ball rolling through pins. He disappeared under a folded, broken segment of the furniture, and I whipped my head around in time to see a very familiar face leering at me from entirely too close.

“Here we stand again,” Anselmo said, a broad grin breaking his scorched face, identical in so many details to the body just over Cunningham’s shoulder, “eye to eye, man to man, once more …”

I’m not much for publicly attended pity parties, so when Brant asked me to go with him to the bar to “hang out or help out, whichever you prefer,” I begged off. I’d just told him more about me than I’d shared with anyone in recent memory (not that anyone but Ariadne had asked of late) and I felt … exposed. And that didn’t even factor in the recent ghostly attacks on my mind that the telepath had been staging.

So instead of going back to the bar and drowning my sorrows in the time-honored tradition of my people—by which I mean working human beings—I decided instead to sit in my cabin and stare at the walls while the snow fell outside.

So far, it was really boring.

And the flakes just kept coming, too. I had my window shades up, and I could see the ground getting covered over a little at a time, gradually accumulating. The flakes were getting more sizable, too, it seemed, and coming down at more of an angle. I could hear the wind against the side of the cabin when it blew particularly hard, and it started me thinking about the tale of the three pigs. Should have gone for a brick cabin instead of a stick one, I guess.

I sat in my wooden chair and sulked, thinking over what I’d said to Brant—and what I hadn’t. I’d bled my bitterness all over him, but he’d asked for it. At least I hadn’t just stumbled into the bar and vomited my emotional nausea everywhere.

Uh, unless I’d done that last night while drinking. It could have happened.

I realized about the time that the snow had completely blotted out the last of the green that my car wasn’t parked out front of the cabin anymore. I panicked for a few seconds until I remembered that Brant had had to drive me home last night due to drunkenness, and cursed my poor decision making—or maybe my desire to just forget for a little while. If I had Gavrikov’s flight abilities at my disposal, this wouldn’t have been an issue. As it was, town was a good five to ten minutes’ drive away, and that meant I’d have to either walk or run, or reconcile myself to being stuck … in a cabin with no food … until the snow cleared.

I’ve been called many things, but a little shrinking daffodil who didn’t eat? Never been accused of that. Had jerks in the press say quite the opposite, in fact. I hadn’t killed any of them … yet … but they were on my radar.

I decided to just stick with what I was already wearing, since it was dirty from the day before, and pulled on the light jacket I had in my suitcase. It wasn’t exactly a winter coat, but it was the best I had available. It was a fall coat, and here winter was showing up months early, the rude bastard. Reminded me of another jerk named Winter I’d dealt with in the past who’d showed little consideration.

I put that nasty trip down memory lane out of my head and walked toward the door, the steady clicking of my thin, steel-toed boots against the linoleum. I paused, listening, as the echo of my footsteps … kept going?

I turned around, looking around the dimly-lit cabin as the light from the windows began to fade. It went quickly, like someone had drawn the shades, and suddenly I found myself steeped in darkness just inches from the front door. I sighed and fumbled for the light switch, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the door frame on either side of the door. The light from the windows was down to nil, and I narrowed my eyes in hopes that it would widen my pupils and allow me to see better. Futile hope, but that was all I had at that moment in the dark.

Then I heard the sound of footsteps again. I couldn’t tell if they were coming from over by the little kitchenette, or the bathroom, or even somewhere beyond the back wall. They were crisp, slow, measured, like someone was strolling with soft shoes on a hard surface, the rubber soles kissing the ground as they peeled off with each step.

“What the hell,” I muttered under my breath as I renewed my search, sliding my hand along the wall for a foot to the left of the door. I thought about cracking the door, but given that the light outside had just died—which happened sometimes in howling snowstorms—I doubted it would do much other than sweep a ton of wet snow into my cabin.

My fingers ran across the ridges of the wooden wall paneling. It was smooth, save for the normal knots and pits in sanded, varnished lumber. I gave up after searching three feet out from the door in a two foot radius near my hand level. There was no light switch on this side, I’d have bet my life on it.

I shuffled over to the other side of the door, pausing to listen again. That sound came again, that noise like footsteps. But it couldn’t have been footsteps; this cabin was small. Like, one room. I would have smelled someone if they’d been in here with me, would have heard them breathe. Maybe the noise was coming from the roof. It certainly wasn’t coming from behind the back wall, because the sound was all wrong for footsteps on snow, and there was nothing but snow out there.

I ran my palm across the wood on the left side of the door, more urgently now. I found the same imperfections in the wood as I found on the other side, and in my haste, I sped up my search. I jabbed my hand up and down, and felt something bite right in the middle of my palm, drawing a sharp sting right in the center. I yanked my hand back and clapped it over my mouth in surprised. As I extended my tongue, I tasted blood.

Great. Either my hand hadn’t healed properly, or I’d just reopened yesterday’s wound. Of course, I was reopening all sorts of wounds today, but so far they’d only been metaphorical.

This one was more than metaphorical. Blood dripped down my hand in lines that I could taste and smell. It was a grim feeling, standing in the dark, holding my cut and bloody hand up to my face. It never took this long for one of my wounds to heal, not even when I was a plain old vanilla meta, bereft of Wolfe’s healing abilities.

“Messing with my head,” I said to the darkness, “messing with my abilities. Let me tell you something—that’s not going to end well for you. Mark my words.”

The darkness in front of my eyes shifted, like smoke blown from a strong wind. It was one of the spookier things I’ve seen; pure eeriness brought to life, like something straight out of a ghost story. I saw it move, coalesce into blurred features, like the face leaning out of the mirror, but it held only a little better clarity. A low rumble shook the cabin as power channeled in from some unknown source.

“
Get … out
…” the voice said, and the windows rattled at the force of the suggestion.

Maybe I was supposed to feel scared at that suggestion, but I let more than a little of my irritation slip out as I opened the door and a blast of frigid wind hit me full in the face. “Way ahead of you there, dickfish.” And I stepped out into the storm and slammed the door shut behind me.

“You’re not much of a man,” I said to Anselmo through the artificial rain that poured down between us, and watched as my attempted goat-getting did, indeed, get his goat, as well as the rest of his petting zoo. Anger flashed through those partially obscured eyes, the scarred flesh hanging around his eyes darkening as he flushed to the shade of a tanned piece of leather.