I pulled my clothes on, my shaking hands dropping each piece to the floor at least once. When I finished, I pressed my back to the door and slid down to sit on the cool marble floor. Tony continued cleaning, scraping up broken glass and other debris in the apartment that I had destroyed—again. Now, even Rune’s secret inner-sanctum was demolished. Not to mention the damage to the club above us.
Marlee Burns, one-woman wrecking ball.
Rune’s restraint had been palpable when he’d returned. Come to think of it, he always restrained himself in one way or another when he was around me: to keep from biting me, to keep from drawing too much energy from me, to keep from demanding too much of me, and now to keep from hurting me out of anger. The one time he’d let go of that restraint and tried to make love to me, I’d almost killed him.
I’d almost killed my father with flying debris for numerous reasons—sometimes without a reason. How much restraint had my father shown that I’d never realized was there? How much of my father’s meanness and abusive behavior was just a byproduct of my disastrous disability?
I was a danger to myself and everyone around me. Speaking of that, I needed to call and check on my job and Mrs. Norris. I stood and spoke through the door.
“Tony?”
Sounds of cleaning stopped.
“Hello?” Tony said.
“Tony, can you hand me the phone from the kitchen counter, please?”
A knock tapped on the door a few moments later. I unlocked it, opened it a few inches and stuck my hand out. He handed me the phone without a word, and I brought it in the bathroom, thanked him, and relocked the door.
I called my cell phone’s voicemail and entered my code. The first message was Mrs. Norris telling me the house was locked back up, asking me to come home or contact her. She let BooBoo Kitty meow at me on the phone to prove he was okay but that he missed his mommy. Between the concern in her voice and the longing in BooBoo’s squeak, I had to wipe tears from my eyes to get to the next message.
The next message was from Carl. He said he got the leave of absence information from my doctor, and he hoped I was okay. I made a mental note to ask Rune what kind of malady I was supposed to have on the bogus paperwork—if he ever resumed talking to me.
At the sound of the third caller’s voice, my hand shook, and I sat back down on the floor.
“Hello, Marlee. You and I met the other night in the woods outside the truck stop. We need to talk again. In person. I know where you are. Meet me out front of the club on the boardwalk at eight Sunday morning. If you do not meet me, my men and I will come get you and deal with your friends at that time.”
Romaldo Zamora. How had he found me? Did he really know where I was? Yes. He had to. He said “outside the club.” Somehow he’d tracked me. Rune had said Zamora killed paranormal creatures. And now Zamora knew where Rune lived. Rune was in no condition for a fight, and even if I knew where Griss was, I doubted just one vampire could fight all of Zamora’s men in the daylight. Just great. Marlee, the human wrecking ball was still swinging.
A glance at the phone told me it was almost midnight. Where had the time gone? I searched back through the evening since I left the panel van, and the only place I could have lost time was when I was spacing out and levitating everything in the weapons room. Weird.
After another hour, Tony’s cleaning noises wound down to a stop.
“Ms. Marlee,” he called from the other side of the door.
“Yes?”
My legs had cramped from sitting on the floor for so long, lost in my thoughts. I straightened them and rubbed my thighs to get some circulation going again.
“I’m finished. Are you coming out?” he asked.
“Did Rune say for you to tell me to come out when you were done?”
“No.”
A sigh escaped me. I didn’t dare go out until “I was “instructed.” Not with the way he was acting. But I couldn’t stay in here forever.
“Well, I better stay in here a little longer then,” I said. “Rune told me to stay put until I was instructed to come out.”
A long period of silence stretched on the other side of the door like Tony was trying to figure out what to do. Finally, he just said okay, and left.
I lined the bathtub with the enormous fluffy towels from the cabinet, and, using one of the luxurious spa-like robes as a blanket, I settled down into the bathtub to sleep. It wound up being surprisingly comfortable, but since I’d spent the day before sleeping on moving pads in a panel van, it was probably all a matter of perspective.
Comfortable or not, I woke every hour to check the time on the phone. At 7:00 a.m., I got up and showered. Wrapped in the robe I’d used as a blanket, I unlocked the door and peeked out. No one was in the apartment, and the bookcases were closed. Tony had folded all my new clothes and arranged them neatly back on the bed.
No one had “instructed” me to come out, but really, how long did Rune expect me to stay in the bathroom? The sun was up, so he had to be asleep, or dead, or whatever he was during the daylight. My stomach grumbled with hunger then tightened with stress. I could not stay here until sunset. I had to eat, and I had to meet Zamora out front.
“Marlee, you may leave the bathroom,” I said to myself in the mirror.
There. I’d been instructed to leave. He didn’t specifically tell me who had to instruct me. I grinned at myself in the mirror, but my bravado disappeared as I eased out the door. From the way Rune looked last night, I was sure he wouldn’t appreciate technicalities. I tiptoed to the bed, selected clothing and underwear, grabbed a shoe box, and scurried back into the bathroom. After getting dressed and drying my hair, I peeked back out to the apartment. Still empty.
It was ten minutes to eight. If I didn’t want Zamora and his men storming the place, I had to make myself move. I darted from the bathroom to the stairs, then walked as quietly as I could up to the landing. I entered the code into the security panel and a computer voice blared from it, making me jump and look around.
“Daytime security is on. Would you like to disable the hallway motion detector as well as the door?” Did the voice have to be so loud?
The display read “Yes” above one button and “No” above the other. I pressed the “Yes” button.
“Would you also like to disable the back door alarm or the entire alarm system?”
If I disabled the whole alarm system and walked out through the front door, Zamora could just walk right in. The better choice would be to go out the back door, rearm it, and walk around front. I choose the “Back Door Alarm” button. The metal door slid open and the regular door unlocked. The hallway and the club beyond were eerily quiet. A red glow from the exit sign above the outside door bathed the corridor in bloody tones and did little to dispel the creepy vibe.
I crept to the door and peered out the peephole to make sure someone wasn’t outside waiting for me. No one appeared within the fish-eye viewing field of the peephole, so I opened the door and slipped out. Making sure the door wasn’t locked, I set the security alarm. It was the best I could do for now.
Since I hadn’t seen anything of the area surrounding Perdition except the small back lot, I didn’t know exactly where I needed to go to get to the front of the club. Parked cars lined the alley running behind the strip of connected businesses. A homeless woman with her cart sat sleeping just outside Perdition’s lot next to two green dumpsters, the low cinder-block wall to her back, and a few scantily clad people traversed the narrow space in flip-flopped feet. Seagulls screeched overhead in the clear blue sky, swooping in and out of sight in search of food, and the salty tang of the ocean filled the air.
I’d only been to Venice Beach once. It had been just after noon on a weekend, and the sheer number of people that choked the boardwalk had proven unbearable. Thank goodness this early in the day, the crowd hadn’t found their way here yet. The day was even young enough that the crashing waves could still be heard above the street noise.
I walked to the end of the alley, keeping my head down and my hair around my face just in case Sarkis’s men were around. There was no way they could know where I was, but then again, how had Zamora figured it out? I turned right onto a small side street, then right again onto the boardwalk.
The colorful vendor stands were just opening for the day. Most of the hopeful salespeople set out paintings, jewelry, CDs, and trinkets on cloth-covered tables under quick-up canopies. Some of the displays were just spread out on blankets on the ground. The storefronts were mostly rustic, beachy wooden or stucco sections in a continuous line.
I spotted Zamora, standing in front of an exception to the beach theme. The structure behind him resembled a stone tomb or an old Venetian building. Excellent reproductions of sandstone arches surrounded thick, planked wooden doors. Bronze light fixtures enclosed the main entrance. Above the entryway, large, red, neon letters spelled “Perdition.” The club looked eerie during the day. It must look absolutely haunted and foreboding at night. Just the ambiance for the young partying crowd of trendy Los Angeles and Orange County.
Ten feet from Zamora, I scanned the area for any of his biker compatriots or Sarkis’s militia-looking kidnappers. Seeing none, I stopped in the shadow of Perdition a few feet from him. He smiled, trying to look disarming. With the long, wavy blond hair, dark glasses, beard stubble, tattoos, leather jacket, and biker boots, it didn’t work.
“How did you find me?” I asked, my tone not all that friendly.
He shrugged.
“No. I mean it. How did you find me?” Anger shoved most of my fear aside. This man was a danger to Rune, and I had somehow led him here. Beside the trouble that Zamora posed, I wanted to make sure that Sarkis couldn’t find me the same way.
“You made an impression the first time we met,” he said.
“That’s not an answer. Did you put a tracker on me?”
He smiled and moved into the shadow with me.
“Of sorts.”
I remembered our meeting in the woods. I’d absorbed his energy, but it hadn’t dissipated or melded with my energy. I searched myself and found it—his energy—just behind my breastbone, about the size of a half dollar. I’d become desynthesized to it like wearing earrings but forgetting they were there. My eyes widened, and I put my hand to my chest.
“You did put a tracker on me. Your energy. Then you homed in on it.”
That little pronouncement wiped the smile off his face. He rubbed his stubble and took a step back. People must not usually catch on to his little trick. I pointed at him.
“You’re paranormal, just like the people you track,” I said.
He regained his composure and stepped toward me.
“No, I’m not. What I do is a gift from God. My father had it. His father before him had it.”
His revival-tent preacher tone set my teeth on edge. “That would be your grandfather. ‘His father before him.’” I chuffed. “Did he beget you, too, like all those people in the Book of Matthew?”
My father had made me read the Bible so many times, I’d memorized most of it. Then he’d beat my mother and threatened me. People who did bad things and hid behind God really irked me. My hair crackled and lifted, and I didn’t even bother to smooth it. Let the hypocrite be a little more startled. How dare he threaten Rune?
He put his hands up, palms out.
“I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot,” he said. “This is not how I wanted our meeting to go.”
“No,” I said and took another step toward him, and poked him in the chest with my finger. “You wanted to plant your nasty little tracker in me, track me down, and threaten my friends. You wanted to bully me into whatever it is you want from me. I. Hate. Bullies.”
I punctuated each of the last three words with jabs to his chest that sparked as my finger hit him. He backed up another step and rubbed his chest.
“And,” I continued, “I want this . . . this . . . thing in my chest out of me.”
My yo-yoing emotions of the last few days made my head ache. I wanted to launch Zamora into the Pacific Ocean. It was about a hundred yards to the water, and he probably only weighed about 185. As soon as the thought took root in my brain and energy started building in my chest, a green moth fluttered into view and landed on Zamora’s shoulder stopping me cold. I stared at the bug and my mouth snapped shut.
The abrupt stop to my verbal assault surprised Zamora more than its sudden start. He took another step back, hitting a faux plaster pillar and blinked.
“What?” he asked.
He looked at his shoulder, but his eyes didn’t register that he saw anything unusual. Was I the only one seeing these things? This was the third or fourth one I’d seen in the last few days. It started in the office with Carl, and then I dreamt about the moth, it was in my enclosure at Bader’s compound, and now it was here. And Bader didn’t seem to see it.
Was I losing it completely? The spots on the moth’s wings looked like eyes. Two upper wings overlapped two lower wings that narrowed into kite-tail-like pieces. The largest “eyes” sat in the middle of the lower wings. Black circles filled with yellow and dark spots where the pupils would be. The moth closed the top wings over the bottoms, and then reopened them making the eyes blink.
“Marlee?” Zamora said. “Are you okay?”
I tore my gaze from the moth.
“I’m fine.”
The rage of a moment ago effervesced in my veins, popping and evaporating like so many soda bubbles. A sigh escaped me, and my body relaxed. Zamora’s expression teetered between concern and confusion. Heck, I teetered between concern and confusion. It was like the moth had sucked the rage out of me. But that was impossible. Right?
“I can’t remove it,” Zamora said.
For a moment I thought he was talking about the moth, but he looked at me, not his shoulder.
“What?”
“The energy,” he said. “I can’t remove it, or at least I’ve never tried. It usually dissipates after . . .”
All of a sudden, he wouldn’t look at me. He watched three girls in bikinis glide past on roller-skates, a bum with dreadlocks and a guitar shuffle by, and a heavyset woman in a purple caftan setting up a table on the other side of the twenty-foot wide walkway.