carefully, she opened the bedroom door with just the tips of her fingers. But it was obvious within seconds that the bed was perfectly made and no one was lurking in the closet.
That word,
closet,
rang in her head for a moment before she remembered the odd staircase in the closet of the main room. Did he have access to the apartment upstairs? Did he rent both units? The landlord had told her the place was being remodeled when she had asked about having it rented out to a friend at work, but she’d never heard any kind of construction noise from up there. Which didn’t necessarily mean much, since she wasn’t home during the day. But she’d never even seen any workers going up and down the stairs.
A sense of foreboding hit her in the chest as she took careful steps toward the closet door. What if it was his private sanctuary? What if it was where he truly lived instead of this sparsely furnished space that looked more like a decorator’s half-baked attempt at furnishing? What if he did wild, kinky stuff up there that she did not want to know about?
She laughed softly to herself as she pulled the door toward her. She highly doubted Garrett was into kink—or that he would rent a separate apartment as his sex den. Not that she knew anything about that kind of stuff, but she would trust herself to know a deviant when she saw one. She had enough past experience to trust her instincts.
She was wasting time by hanging around at the bottom tread of the tight spiral staircase. She wouldn’t get any answers standing down here and wondering. Whatever he had up there, she could handle.
* * *
“Please, Jackson, I don’t know if I can make myself turn the electricity on this time, but I need it. Whatever happened last time was an aberration. I have to be cleansed, or I’ll never be fit for society. Please.” Garrett clenched his hands and his teeth around the words. It had been both a blessing and a curse that he hadn’t needed to use the machine the previous night, because it had made him hope, just for a second, that he could use his powers without having to pay for being a good guy. But that wasn’t the way the world worked, and he knew it.
“Man, I just don’t think I can. Get that Dory girl to come over. I don’t know what she did to you, but I can’t sit here and watch you fry for the thousandth time if it’s not necessary. There’s got to be a different way. I know this works, but why not try something else?”
“There isn’t anything else, goddammit! You think I would do this to myself if I thought there was another way? I’m not a masochist. Just flip the fucking switch!” Garrett shut his eyes and clenched his jaw until his teeth ground together, bracing himself for the current to start running through his body, burning all the darkness and evil out of his system so he could breathe and behave like a normal human being again.
He was still bracing himself when a woman’s scream split the air.
“What are you doing?” the woman sobbed, yanking at the bonds that secured his hands to the chair and hyperventilating at the same time.
He opened his eyes when he recognized Dory’s voice and the feel of her soft touch. “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Leave that alone! This has to be done or I’ll rip everything around me to pieces.”
“No, you won’t. No, you won’t. No, you won’t.” She loosed the bindings on his wrists.
His mind started to swirl with images of stabbing someone in the heart, running down the street with a torch of fire and touching everything in his path, breaking glass, and stealing things. His head felt like it was going to explode, and it would in a moment if she didn’t let him complete the purging.
“Jackson,” he screamed, his head thrown back, grinding against the wooden supports that were supposed to keep him safe. But he wasn’t safe right now and neither was anyone in the room with him.
Chapter Six
“I have to get him out of here. Have to.” Dory knew
Karen Robards
Stylo Fantome
Daniel Nayeri
Anonymous
Mary Wine
Valley Sams
Kerry Greenwood
Stephanie Burgis
James Patterson
Stephen Prosapio