Protect Her: Part 10 Page 3

  My heart ached for her, but despite how she obviously felt about her parents, I was mad as hell at them. They had known all along what was supposed to happen to their daughter, and they kept her in the dark. She had been thrust into this dark world alone and defenseless. It was a wonder she had survived at all.

  I didn’t say anything. I knew that she was lost in the sensations she had felt that night. She climbed another step, and then cocked her head toward the house. She appeared to be listening intently.

  “I heard something inside. I should have been able to smell dinner. It was Tuesday night, and mom made her famous pot roast on Tuesday nights. She’d cut up all the meat and vegetables and would let it simmer overnight. By the time she scooped it into my dish, the meat would fall apart it was so tender. The house smelled heavenly. I’d hit the porch, smell the pot roast, and be transported to my happy place. But this time it was different.”

  “Different how?” I didn’t want to ask these questions, but I was curious. Somehow she had witnessed something horrible but got away and survived. Whether she believed it or not, Paige was tough as nails.

  “It was a burnt smell. Really disgusting,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I remembered thinking that maybe we’d get to go out to eat instead if she had burned dinner. That hardly ever happened. We usually went out to eat on birthdays and my parents’ anniversary, so only four times a year. I loved my mom’s pot roast, but the idea of eating in a restaurant was way more exciting.”

  “Explain the smell to me,” I said. I had a feeling I knew what she had smelled that day, and it wasn’t burnt pot roast, not even close.

  “It had an earthy note to it.” Her voice was distant. “There was something in it that curdled my stomach. It’s hard to explain. It was like when you pull a pitcher of milk out of the refrigerator and start to pour it but then realize from the curds in it that it has gone sour. It’s a stench that permeates everything.”

  I knew that Paige’s parents were killed by demons. The demons had been looking for her family because of who she was, the vessel of Eva. Christ, she had been just a kid. But the description she gave me of the demons that ended up in her tiny house in Flagston, Texas told me they were a particularly nasty variety.

  “Pollball demons,” I said with a grimace. “Their sour milk smell is quite distinctive.” What I didn’t say was the smell got stronger when they ate their preferred meal of human flesh.

  “Pollball demons,” she repeated. Her eyes fell to the ground. “I never thought to find out what kind of demon they were. I had forgotten about the smell until now. I don’t know how I could forget that kind of detail.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, trying to reassure her. “You were just a kid. This was a traumatic memory.”

  Her jaw clenched. “I should remember everything; every tiny, little detail. We’re talking about the night that my parents were murdered because of me. I at least owe them the respect to remember the details of what happened.”

  She was getting upset. I didn’t blame her. I didn’t see how we were going to get through this memory without her getting upset, but I wanted to try to help take some of the pain away. I started to pull her toward me, but she batted my arms away.

  “I’m not done yet,” she said.

  Her rebuff hurt even though I understood. I took a step back. I was invited here as an observer. I had to remember that. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  She turned back toward the house and then crept up on the porch. “The smell got worse the closer I got to the house. I thought about going in the front door, but for some reason I didn’t. So I came back down the stairs and made my way around the house to the back.” Her body imitated her words, and I followed behind her as closely as I dared.

  “The smell was bad, and now I was worried because I knew that it wasn’t burnt pot roast. I wanted to call out to my parents, but something inside my head said that was a bad idea. So I made my way along the side of the house and ducked under each of the windows. I knew someone other than my parents was inside and might see me.”

  “You were a smart kid,” I said. I watched her as she ducked along the side of the house. She put her back to the wall, and I could see that her chest was moving rapidly. She was scared out of her mind. I would have been too. Her world was about to change for the worse, and there was probably a part of her that instinctively knew it.

  “It was when I got to the back of the house that I heard the voices,” she whispered. She wasn’t really looking at me though. In her mind, she was fourteen years old all over again. “I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and they weren’t familiar. Then I heard my mom crying. In my fourteen years, I’d only ever heard my mom cry three times. Then I heard a crash and my father’s scream, but it was cut off abruptly.”

  It was uncanny. As soon as she said the words, I heard the sounds of muffled crying. It was exactly as she described. The crash of what sounded like a thousand dishes rang out, and a man’s scream was cut off in mid-yell. What Paige might not have realized then, but I knew better than anyone, was that her father’s voice carried the sharp notes of pain and agony in them. Her parents were being tortured inside.

  “I wanted to run around to the back door and find out what was happening, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that was the wrong thing to do,” she said. Her back was ramrod straight against the side of the house. She glanced furtively in both directions. “That part of me told me to run away, but the other part of me said that I had to find out what was happening. What if I could help them? These were my parents, and they were in trouble. I had to do something. But I decided to wait.

  She flipped around as she moved toward the end of the house. I could barely make out the shadow of a flight of concrete steps that went up to the back of the house. The single car garage sat back away from the house, and I could see there was a car inside. The garage door was still open.

  Paige noticed my glance. “We only had one car. Dad took it to work, so that’s how I knew he was home before I heard his scream. Something was terribly wrong.” Her hands went to her stomach, and she gulped. “My stomach was twisted in knots. My dad told me that if anything strange ever happened that I couldn’t explain or understand, that I was supposed to run away.”

  “Run where?” Again, I felt a flash of rage at Paige’s parents. They had to have known the danger that their daughter was in, that they themselves were in. Yet they had done nothing to prepare her adequately for an entry into this world if the worst case scenario happened.

  “I didn’t really pay attention, so I never thought to ask,” she said. “As I came around the house, I could hear sounds that didn’t make sense to me.”

  She crept to the steps, and I strained my ears to hear what she was hearing. At first, there was nothing, but then I heard it. It sounded like a cross between scratching and a general pawing against wood. I had a terrible feeling for what Paige was about to witness. I wondered how many times she had relived this moment in her dreams.

  “I stayed as close to the wall as I could,” she breathed. “Then I climbed the stairs into the house as quietly as possible. That’s when I saw him.”

  She ghosted up the stairs just as I imagined she had eight years ago. She pulled up short just inside the doorway, which I could see opened into the kitchen. I noticed that she didn’t have to open the door. It had been open on her approach. I moved up the stairs behind her and looked over her shoulder as she let out a shallow hiss.

  Her attention settled in the direction of a place on the other side of the kitchen. Littering the floor were cans of food, vegetables, silverware and the remnants of broken dishes as well as small pools of blood. There had been one hell of a fight here. Movement in the far corner next to the refrigerator drew my attention. I saw a man on the floor who, as he looked toward us, resembled someone vaguely familiar to me. This was Paige’s father, but he had aged dramatically in the years since the scene through the window Paige showed me earlier. His face was a series of lum
ps, cuts, and bruises. I felt a sense of horror as several long forgotten dots connected in my mind.

  The smell of spoiled milk was gaggingly oppressive in this part of the house as it combined with the smell of blood. Paige began to back up as we watched her father’s body dragged across the floor. He and Paige locked eyes, and he mouthed a single word to her. RUN. Somehow he managed to pull a piece of paper from inside the collar of his shirt and stick it to the floor as he disappeared into a black hole behind the refrigerator. Paige ran after him. I wanted to grab her but stopped myself. This had already happened. This was a memory. It wasn’t actually happening.

  Paige grabbed the piece of paper off the floor. It was stuck to the floor in blood. She darted across the floor and flew out the back door. I followed her. She continued to run picking up speed as she headed for the street.

  I began to jog after her. There was a long, thick hedge that ran alongside the driveway. She rounded the corner at the top of the driveway and dove behind it hiding herself from view of her old house.

  Her breath came in hot gasps, and tears began to stream down her face as she looked at the jagged, ripped piece of paper in her hands. Gently, I took it from her. I was certain that whatever had been written on it was scorched into her memory banks, but I hadn’t seen it before.

  I read the looping handwriting.

  Don’t you dare come back here. Ever. You can’t help us. You will only end up dead or worse. Call Greg. 754.325.4402 He will help you. No matter what, know that we will always love you. We always did.

  I flipped it over as Paige turned away with a grimace. The note had been written on a piece of an envelope, probably from that day’s mail. When I saw the recipient’s name and address typed neatly on it, it all came crashing back to me. I knew now why this had felt so familiar to me.

  “Paige, did your parents use aliases when they moved around?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Really simple ones. Jones. Smith. Peterson. Stuff that would be easy for me to remember when I was little. But since I was a little bit older, my parents decided to branch out with this move. So I was Paige Davis when we lived here. Miles Davis was one of my parents’ all-time favorite musicians. Their first date was going a concert featuring his music. Why?”

  I didn’t wipe the stricken look from my face fast enough.

  “Why?” she repeated.

  I had no cover story, and no lie that sprang to mind that would cover the truth. My only option was to tell her. “I might know something about your parents’ murder.”

  “How?”

  I took a deep breath, and suddenly wished that I was sitting in a church confessional rather than about to tell the woman that I loved what I had done. Surely this was one of the reasons that I had become a dark angel. Because I had done some truly fucked things in my time.

  “Because I was the one who told the Pollball demons where you lived.”

  CHAPTER FOUR – PAIGE

  It was as if there was a short-circuit in my brain. The space around us slid to somewhere else, but I barely even noticed. I knew now that I could shift through time and space as easily as I wanted to because we were in my head. These were my memories. I could go anywhere I wanted to without any reason to be afraid. That idea guided where I wanted to go more than anything else. Turns out there was another memory I wanted to visit before it was all obliterated.

  Where we came to rest was the cemetery where my parents were buried. I visited the place only once, and that had been several years after the murders. Someone had been kind enough to take care of all the details of burying them. I had no idea who that person was, but it had always been on my to-do list to find that person and thank them. Even if I hadn’t gone on the run, I wouldn’t have known what to do or how to plan those final details. Since I had no other relatives, my fate would have been going into foster care. My life might have turned out differently, but probably not. Destiny was one hell of a bitch.

  My parents had never been church goers despite being Disciples of Eva and all. But after we left the commune life behind, I think they missed the community that came along with the idea of a large shared belief and value structure. When we moved to Flagston, they joined a local church, St. Anthony’s, and pretended to be devout members of the flock. It helped them make friends.

  So it was inside the walls of St. Anthony’s cemetery where they were buried. I was grateful that they had been laid to rest next to each other for the rest of eternity. It would have killed me to see them separated. Their gravestones were small, flat and rectangular. The stones protruded a few inches from the ground. I wondered if anyone walking through the cemetery simply walked over the top of them in their travels to visit their deceased relatives. It made me sad that they didn’t have something more elaborate that better showcased their lives and how much they loved one another. I would have designed something beautiful for them, something worthy of a grave etching that would stand the test of time. It upset me to think I’d never have the chance to right that wrong. I was twenty-two years old, but my past was littered with enough regrets to fill a lifetime.

  I had been afraid to visit the cemetery before with good reason. Every time I felt as if I shook the demons tracking me, it seemed as if they turned up hot on my trail. Visiting my parents’ graves turned out to be a colossal mistake. I barely made it out of the cemetery unscathed, having been attacked as I knelt between their gravestones. It took me over a week to shake the tail of the demons after I overstayed my welcome visiting them. It wasn’t a mistake I would make again. This brought me back to the situation at hand. Had I made another horrible mistake in trusting Riley Stone?

  “What do you mean you told the demons where we lived?” My voice came out strained and higher pitched than normal. Of course, it would. I felt like I was about to break apart. Riley reached toward me, but I swatted his hand away. “Explain. Now.”

  Riley shifted on his feet, and then he turned away from me. “Give me a minute to jostle my memory. I want to be sure that I have it all straight in my head. I used to drink pretty heavily back then for a lot of reasons. None of them good. It was a long time ago.”

  “Eight years, one-hundred forty-one days, three hours. But who’s counting?” I said sarcastically.

  “Paige, you have to understand where I was in my life at that point in time. I was in a bad place. Alice had tried to help me understand what had happened to me, and what my purpose in life could be, but I was young and angry at the world. I fell in with a pretty bad crowd, and suddenly I was making money hand over fist doing some pretty shady work for the demons.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you think you gave my parents to the demons,” I said. The rational side of me said that if I gave him enough time and space, he’d realize that he was wrong. Surely Riley couldn’t have had anything to do with my parents’ murder. The idea was preposterous and terrifying. If it were true, then I didn’t know what I would do. “Do what you always tell me to do. Start at the beginning.”

  I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Riley might have done some bad things in his lifetime, but he wouldn’t have turned over innocent human beings to demons. What kind of person would do that? Every bad thing I would eventually have to repent for was done with my survival in mind. I had been the prize being hunted for by bounty hunters so that they could offer me up the highest bidder. It wouldn’t be the first time I trusted the wrong person. It made my blood run cold to think what would have happened if I had run across Riley back then. Would he have helped me or sold me out? Based on what I was hearing, I think it would likely have been the latter. I motioned for him to continue. I could tell that he didn’t want to, but now we were here, in a place I never expected us to be.

  “Just have a little patience. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” Riley said. He dug his hands into his pockets. His eyes darted between me and the small, plain gravestones at my feet. It made me stand up straighter. These two innocent people deserved better, and I hated to think that anyone
would judge them and their impact on the world by the size of those stones. It made their lives feel so…insignificant.

  “I had just moved to Charlotte. Alice tried for two years to teach me how to be a necromancer, but it might as well have been a fish trying to teach a bird to fly. She meant well, but there was too much that she didn’t understand. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. Really, I was a rebellious asshole at a stage in my life where I thought I knew better than everyone else in the world. I was one of a kind, and it rubbed me the wrong way when Alice tried to tell me how I should and shouldn’t act and behave. It wasn’t as if I could go to college and get a normal job anymore. Shit, I tried that too for a while, but I was impatient. I wanted power and respect because I felt like that was what the world owed me.”

  He began to pace, but I noticed he gave me a wide berth. Then he stopped and turned away from me. I wasn’t sure if he was studying the sea of tombstones and crypts that stretched out in front of us or just avoiding my eyes. “Since my early twenties, I’ve been more at home in graveyards than any place where living people felt comfortable. Back then though I was so angry at the world. Alice had her work cut out for her when my mom dumped me on her doorstep, and she did her best. I realize now that there probably wasn’t another human being in the world more qualified to teach me anything. But after she kicked me out for the third time for disrespecting her rules, I called it quits with her altogether and went off on my own.”

  “You started your business,” I said. I was impatient for him to get to the part I cared about, but I was supposed to be giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he felt this context was important, I needed to listen.

  “Not right away. That came later. I started out freelancing. It was something I fell into really,” Riley said. “You remember that I told you the story about how I used some of the skeletons hiding in my teachers’ closets to get better grades in classes? A little blackmail here and there, and I was able to graduate a full year earlier than the rest of my class.”