A Trip Down South 7
Okay, this is quite a big one but it's the rest of what I have written for this at the moment. I lost the inspiration for a wee while but I'm back there hopefully. This is just one of about ten things I'm juggling the now. Anyway, yeah, quite long, not as dark but gets pretty angsty at the end.
The emergency services arrived en-mass about twenty minutes later. In that time, I had sat on the front door step searching my brain for any lies that I could tell the police and have the identification to back it up. There weren’t many excuses for me breaking into a stranger’s house and lying to the neighbour that I was his brother.
I had searched my pockets for available I.D. but most of my really good stuff was in the car and I didn’t want to risk not looking absolutely distraught at the death of my ‘family’. All I had on me was my real driving license and a fake police badge registered for a district six hours away and to a ‘Noah Sykes’. I couldn’t use the badge because real police might do a check on me, so that left my own license and my real name. Great.
Say you’re a friend who Brian owed money and you thought the neighbour wouldn’t tell you anything unless you were family.
That was not a bad plan actually. Luckily, he suggested it just as the first patrol cars pulled up at the end of the garden. “Are you the man who called?”
“Yeah,” I stood up, wiped my hands on the back of my jeans before holding out my hand to shake him.
“You are - ?” he took out his notebook and pen, ready to jot down anything I was going to say.
“Logan Chase, sir,” I answered and hoped that police precincts hadn’t been alerted to my ‘wanted’ status as well as the church. “I was a friend of Brian’s.”
“Why did you come around to the house today?”
“Well, I kept tryin’ t’ call and no one was pickin’ up so I came by t’ see if anythin’ was up,” I explained, rubbing the back of my neck slightly and watching him write down these lies. It was easy enough for me to lie to an officer but I knew as soon as any detective arrived I’d start to worry. They were slightly more clued in on Hemingway’s existence and I’m sure larger stations had a specific detective for weird cases.
He looked up at me. “You’d better get that ear checked out,” he indicated with the end of his pen. I frowned and put my fingers to my right ear. Blood coated my fingertips and I groaned. Not only had I landed myself in this stupid mess, I’d left blood at the scene and everything. Excellent, I really was on top form today. “How did that happen?”
“Uh, when I found... found the kids, I tripped over tryin’ t’ get back out and fell into the television stand,” I explained, cupping my ear gingerly. Now that I had been alerted to it and was no longer freaking out about lies to tell, my ear really hurt. I looked down at my shoulder and saw blood splats soaking into my shirt. “Have you got any more questions? I really should get this checked out,” I grimaced as I prodded the wound with my finger.
The police man narrowed his eyes to get a better scope of it. “Yeah, I think that’d be best. Don’t go on any big trips anytime soon, you might need to answer some more questions.”
“No problem,” I nodded and headed back to my car, trying hard to look like I wasn’t running away. He hadn’t even asked me for a contact number.
Rookie.
“Yeah, so can you meet me outside Al’s Tavern in ten minutes? I’m just on my way now,” I said with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding the phone across my face to the side of that didn’t sting. Turns out I had scraped the skin just before my ear and that was what had been bleeding.
“See you in ten,” Wraith answered and hung up.
After I’d made my excuses to the policeman, I’d driven around the corner, parked and called Wraith. We had to find out what we could about Brian Hardy and where he might have gone. If I hadn’t run out of the place then I could’ve had a bit more of a hint to what might have killed Brian’s body and taken over. Unless Brian merely saw it and ran away like a coward, leaving the killer in the house - if it were a ghost like I had believed previously - or the killer left too. Either outcome still left me with virtually nothing.
“Come on, think,” I muttered and pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead. What stuck out in my mind about that house? Everything seemed perfectly in place minus the dead bodies. Well, the wife had been raped. I didn’t know if it was post mortem or not though...but that didn’t really make much of a difference when it came to the supernatural. Still, there was a list of beings that would never rape which meant there was one that did.
I leaned over the chair and delved into the glove compartment for a pad of paper in amongst the spare bullets and music tapes. I found one, slid the pen from the shelf above my radio into my hand and began to write down from memory what I knew would rape. Incubus topped the list but it just didn’t fit. For starters, Mrs Hardy wasn’t a virgin - which they loved - and the daughter hadn’t been touched. But the children had been killed in a specific way. That was more of a style than anything else.
There was also the odd squeaking noise I’d heard at the door upon first inspection. The ceiling fan hadn’t squeaked so it wasn’t that.
“Damnit,” I froze for a moment. What if it was still in the house? How could I have been so careless? “Daemíron, was it in the house?” I asked out loud. I waited a few moments for a reply which never came. “Daemíron!”
He was being anal. That meant he was hiding something.
I was right.
“Oh my God!” I slammed my fist into the steering wheel. “You are such a bloody -!”
A bloody what? Liar? Demon? All true chief. Why would I rat out a brother?
“A brother?” I raised my eyebrows. “So it’s a higher level demon, someone on par with what you were. That really narrows it down,” I grinned. Why would a higher demon mess with this particular family? From what I could see, there was nothing separating them from the others in this area and their house wasn’t in a hotspot of any kind. Maybe the husband had some secrets. The best plan was to go over it with Wraith, that way I could maybe convince him to go back to the house while I interrogated my brain.
“I picked up a trail but I don’t think it’s going to be much use,” Wraith told me the next day.
“How?” I asked with a frown. I measured out a perfectly level teaspoon of sugar and spilled it into my coffee.
Wraith let out a low growl. “It splits three different ways. I’m pretty sure that the husband has a little bit of something in him though, the garage reeked of demon,” he leaned back in his chair and looked up at me. “So has your little friend got anything else to say?”
“He’s been tight-lipped,” I answered as I stirred my coffee. “Did you find any solid evidence?”
“Just this,” he tossed a small, plastic wallet over to me and I caught it.
“Hair?” I frowned.
“It’s not human hair,” Wraith said. “I found a lot of it in the garage too. It looks like something’s been casting and it wasn’t the dog, although I did him find out back.”
“I don’ wanna know,” I shook my head and took a sip of coffee. “So what we gonna do? This is gettin’ too big for me t’ get properly involved, I mean if Hemingway even heard I was in this area I’d be taken in.”
Wraith nodded. “I know,” he rubbed under his eye tiredly. “How about I follow what I can and keep in contact. I’m pretty sure that your hunch will be right and I won’t be able to kill it on my own.”
This sucked. I was so restricted in things I could do and I found that more often than not, I had to pass up the really good jobs to others who weren’t on the run so-to-speak. “Okay, I’ll still be at the motel and the instant you get anythin’ - you call me.”
RAE
I was sitting curled up in a wicker chair reading a book when the buzzer went. It was raining again outside. I guess the couple of days of sun we got were all that was going to be awarded this autumn. The raindrops were bouncing off my window hard and it sent shivers up and down my spine.
There was a draft coming from under my front door. I frowned and clicked the speak button on my intercom. “Hello, who is it?”
“Rae, it’s me,” Logan’s gravelly voice said. “Can you let me in? It’s sorta rainin’ out here.”
I buzzed him up and opened the front door to watch for him. I heard him bounding up the steps before I saw him but when I did, he looked soaking and down. “Hey,” I welcomed with a small smile which vanished when I saw his face. “What’s wrong?”
His shoulders were slumped pathetically and his jeans were dripping so much that a tiny puddle had emerged around his boots in the hallway. He was shivering as well which was probably due to the fact that he was only wearing a grey t-shirt which had been drenched through and was clinging to his body like Lycra. “Two kids died,” he mumbled. “I didn’ know where else t’ go ‘cause I really didn’ wanna be alone just now with only that stupid demon in my head laughin’ at me.”
“Come in,” I ordered him more than invited. Logan looked awful but from what I could see, he didn’t have an injury which was a plus. He trudged in through the door and wiped his feet on the welcome mat before kicking off his shoes. I raised an eyebrow at him. “You been drinking?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. Logan reached behind his head, took a firm grasp of the back of his t-shirt and yanked it off. My eyes widened at seeing his upper body slick with rain. It was certainly a sight I didn’t want to go away. He found a radiator and hung his shirt over it. I watched his hands as he unbuckled his belt but he paused midway through un-doing the button on his jeans. “You don’ happen t’ have a towel I can wear do you? I don’ have any underwear on.”
Wow.
He was so close to just dropping his jeans before he remembered. To be honest, I was a tad grateful he had or I would be picking my jaw up from the floor right now. “I can go one step better,” I managed to get out and headed through the double doors in the lounge to my room. I delved into one of the lower drawers in the dresser until I pulled out a pair of navy, male pyjama bottoms. I handed them to him with an embarrassed smile. “Remember I borrowed these one day...well, I never gave them back.”
The corner of Logan’s mouth hitched up a little into a sort of half-smile. “Thanks.” He continued fiddling with his buttons. I predicted that in his drunken state he would just whip his jeans off without much modesty and I was right. Luckily, I turned around just in time for my own sanity more than anything else. I could still see his reflection in the mirror in front of me though. He was such a gorgeously fit man. Muscles clung to him in all the right places without making him look remotely like a body builder. He just looked slender and solid. I watched the muscle in his thigh flex as he pulled up the pyjama bottoms and snapped the waistband against the soft skin between his hips. “You can turn back around,” he announced as he sat down on the couch. “Not that you even needed t’ turn around t’ begin with. It’s not like it ain’ anythin’ you’ve not seen before.”
Well for starters, I hadn’t seen that awful selection of scars on his forearm before or the Buddhist Ohm tattoo on the top of his shoulder. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have those odd spikes tattooed onto his wrist before either. I knew the scars were the reason for the phone call Lincoln had received when I told him I was leaving.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked politely but considering he had already appeared to make himself at home I didn’t feel I needed to ask.
“Do you have any spirits? Any whisky will do,” he shrugged absently as he grabbed the newspaper off the coffee table.
“Are you sure you wanna drink more?” I said warily.
Logan turned his head to look at me so I could see the seriousness in his eyes. “I’m sure,” he said firmly. I went into the kitchen, set a glass tumbler on the work surface and poured him a decent measure of whisky.
When I got back to the lounge, he was muttering to himself. “Shut the fuck up,” he snapped. “No, I don’ care. I’ve had enough of you today so just fuck off,” Logan grunted quietly. He was talking to whatever he could hear in his head. Part of me didn’t know whether to believe he really did have a demon or whatever in there, or whether he was just plain crazy. I handed him the drink and went back to my chair. “Don’ let me interrupt you, go back t’ your book.”
I felt awkward and to be truthful, I kept thinking about his half-naked body and what it could do to me three years ago and even more important, what it could possibly do to me now. Never the less, I lifted up my book and pretended to read. Instead, I watched Logan over the top of the pages as he gulped the whisky down like it was water and just stared at the window. I could tell he was aching to create some sort of noise. “What happened to the children?”
Logan’s eyes snapped to mine and he looked scared of the truth. “I didn’ get there in time,” he said simply but it was a sad and ashamed reply. “They were, uh, they were hangin’ on the ceiling fan,” he swallowed loudly. “Can I get another drink?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer before he practically ran to the kitchen to refill his glass.
I had never seen him like this. Where had the confident, irritating charm gone?
He returned but finished the drink just as he sat down. Logan wiped his mouth hastily with the back of his hand. “I think you shouldn’t have any more.”
Logan rubbed his eyes. “The more I drink, the more he shuts up,” he almost whispered, “And I don’ wanna hear him tonight.” He watched me carefully. “You’re not even readin’ that are you?”
“No,” I confessed.
“So come sit with me,” he rested his arm on the top of the couch so I could slot in easily against his side. I sat down stiffly with no real intention to get comfy next to him. That was until Logan’s arm came down to my shoulders and encouraged me to relax. I sunk under his arm and put my feet up on the coffee table. His body was cold from the rain and he was still shaking a little. It was a little while longer before he started talking again. “The mother was murdered too,” he said quietly. “She was all torn up and I just keep gettin’ the feelin’ that I’m missin’ somethin’ but I don’ know what. It’s drivin’ me crazy. All the trails ran cold,” he murmured to himself.
I didn’t know if there was anything I could say to him.
“I hate seein’ kids like that,” he said.
I had never heard him talk about this, ever. He had always kept me so shielded from everything. I remembered the morning so long ago, after I’d woken from an adulterous evening with him and I’d told him I knew what he did. Logan had said that he wished I didn’t know so that I’d be able to tell my children not to be afraid of the dark and mean it. I don’t even know if he told anyone about anything he had seen that had upset him. He didn’t seem like that type of guy, which was why I was out of my depth right now. Logan’s cold nose brushed against my temple as he leaned his head down to rest on mine. “How’s the trail gone cold?” I asked him boldly.
He stiffened a little. I guess maybe he never talked about that sort of stuff because he wanted to forget it. “What I suspect did it has vanished into thin air. Literally as soon as that disappeared however, something else cropped up,” he said slowly. “Echoes,” he muttered again. “I need another drink.”
Logan just stood upright and filled his glass again.
“That gonna be your last?” I called.
“Yes,” he replied and re-appeared in front of me. There was a mark on his left pectoral muscle which looked suspiciously like a bullet-wound that hadn’t healed up properly. His eyes followed my gaze to his chest and he scoffed a little. “Don’ go worryin’ yourself about me, baby. I always manage t’ put myself back together again.”
I swallowed and gazed at his toned stomach and the dragon tattoo that crept around the contour of his hip. “Did you glue yourself back together after I left?”
He forced a smile but it was full of angst. “Yeah sort of.”
“Are you lying?” I challenged.
“You seem determined t’ get me t’ talk about something tonight baby,” he commented into his glass.
“Maybe the sadist in me wants to know how much you hurt,” I told him. “If you even did, after all you were fucking someone else hours later.”
Logan raised an eyebrow at me and at the inevitable fight we were about to descend into. If he wasn’t up for talking about people he hadn’t saved then he was going to blow off steam some other way. “Why do you even care if I was anyone? You didn’ choose me so you totally wiped any jealousy rights you ever had sweetheart.” There was that stupid word. I grit my teeth. He turned his back on me and walked towards the window to gaze out at the rain. “You have no idea what it feels like t’ be rejected for an absolute cock of a man.”
“Oh, and you’re so great are you?” I asked with a sneer. “You didn’t even care about me. You were just pissed off that your overwhelming masculinity did nothing for you...and me.” Wow, low blow. His grip tightened on the glass in his hand. He finished the whisky before he set it down on the window ledge before he smashed it in his fist.
“You’re just sayin’ this t’ piss me off or somethin’,” he said slowly. Logan placed both palms on the ledge a shoulder-width apart and leaned down. “But if you’re searchin’ for some sort of honesty out of me then fine - here you go. You wanna know how much you hurt me? Rae, there are no words t’ describe how empty and cold I felt after you went away. I couldn’t sleep, I drank myself into unconsciousness ‘cause that way I couldn’ dream when I did, I started goin’ on random hunts just so I could kill something...I didn’ feel like I deserved t’ live without you. You make my life important. I don’ care that I just used the present tense because damn I’m standin’ here and just bein’ in your company makes everythin’ seem so much brighter.
“You wanna know how much you mean t’ me?” he asked rhetorically but I was so afraid of what he was about to unleash in a ramble that was so unlike him. “It sounds crazy but you’re the only thing that makes sense t’ me in this world. You’re the person who I wanna see when I’ve had a shit job, or someone’s fucked me over or I’ve had an accident. I don’ wanna call Lincoln, I don’ wanna call Alex or Charlie, I just wanna hear your voice tell me it’ll be okay.
“I used t’ wake up in the mornin’ beside you and I just, I wanted t’ stay there forever. You are so perfect and bein’ with you, in bed or just sittin’ on this damn couch just feels right. It makes sense, Rae. I don’ know why you fuckin’ chose him over me, I really don’ because I’ve always been perfect for you and you know it.”
“You - ,” I started but he cut me off, still facing the window and I suspected it was because he was crying.
“Don’ say it,” he pleaded tiredly. “We’ve been stupid tryin’ t’ think instead of feel and bein’ afraid t’ say words that needed t’ be said,” Logan suddenly turned around and stared at me with passionate, emerald eyes. “I don’ get it. I was scared ‘cause I thought I’d mess up your life but now I don’ give a damn. I’m gonna be selfish ‘cause my life, frankly, sucks without you. Do you know why that is?” I shook my head softly. He was breathing fast from the speed he’d tumbled all those words out at. “I love you.”