1
We stand outside the door to the room where they are keeping Ford’s body. Me and the two officers with their drawn faces and downturned eyes. The woman moves to touch me, and I shrink back from her reaching hand, wrapping my arms protectively around my chest.
“Are you ready?” the female officer asks in a hushed tone as the male presses his palm to the door, awaiting my reply.
Beyond the rectangular window, awaits a sterile room. Clean tile floors and stainless-steel walls and humming fluorescent lights.
Little silver handled doors checker the back wall, and within them, dead people lie chilled on slabs of metal. But what draws my eye most is squatted at the middle of the space: a lumpy form covered loosely in a white sheet.
Ford.
“We just need you to ID the body and then we can leave,” the older male officer says in a gruff, professionally-detached tone. I wonder how many bodies he’s seen. How many loved ones he’s watched cry over corpses.
“But I will warn you,” he continues when I do not reply. “Due to the…nature of his injuries and how we found him—well, it isn’t pretty.”
“I understand,” I say flatly, afraid of what other words might come out if I’m not careful. “I’m ready to see him now.”
The officers share a look before they escort me into the room. A burst of prickling cold brushes over my bare arms, making my teeth clench. But that isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the smell.
It’s faint. They’ve gone to painstaking lengths to ensure the cleanliness of this room for visits such as this. But I know the smell of death better than most ever could.
Panic lodges in my throat, and I clench my hands around my arms tighter, trying to force the horrid memories back into the dark places of my mind.
Ford said it was for my own good—the things he did to me.
He said he was protecting me. Keeping my fragile body alive by keeping me locked up tight. Severe combined immunodeficiency—they’re fancy words for saying I am weak. I can’t even stand up to the common cold and hope to survive.
The officers’ footsteps clack and echo against the tile. My only-worn-once sneakers squeak, damp from the puddle I stepped in on the sidewalk outside.
The male officer waits for my nod before drawing back the white sheet to reveal the grotesquerie that is Ford.
His swollen face looks near bursting, tinged in hues of blue, red, and green with patches that seem bleached of all color. He is nearly unrecognizable.
His hair, always meticulously combed back is disheveled, revealing more gray strands than I remember. And his nose, broken and crooked, looks strange. Worse than all the rest is the injury in the top right portion of his skull. A mean indentation, ringed in puckered and mutilated flesh.
“It’s him,” I croak, eyes welling even though my chest is light as air.
It’s really him.
The female officer rubs a hand over my back, and I try my best not to flinch away, merely stiffening at the contact.
“You did great, honey.”
The other officer re-covers Ford’s face, and I burst into a sob, shuddering at the intensity of the feeling flowing through my veins. Swelling like a geyser beneath my skin.
A grin I can’t help spreads wide on my lips.
I am free.
2
When the officers came that morning, I’d still been asleep. The sound of the doorbell echoing through the house might as well have been a gunshot in the dark of my shuttered room.
No one came to our house. Not ever.
I hadn’t even known what the doorbell sounded like.
It was almost…cheery. So incredibly divergent from what lay within. Ford’s house was a modern fortress complete with bars and security shutters on the windows and a panic room in the basement right next to the dead room.
I wait in the safe warmth of my bed, thinking I imagined the sound, but then it comes again, this time followed by a series of thumps on the door.
“Police,” a man’s voice shouts. “Anybody home?”
Police?
Hope swells for an instant beneath my rib cage before I quash it, settling myself with several deep breaths as I shakily rise from my bed.
I tried to escape before. Lots of times. Twice, I had gotten to the police, and twice they hadn’t believed me. Ford always had a better story for them—a more believable one.
That I was certifiably insane was his favorite go-to. The bastard even had the forged paperwork to prove it. And the more I ranted and raved that he was the crazy one, that he was the one who was insane, the more they believed him.
People believe what is easier. They believe what they want to. The truth is an inconvenience they can’t afford.
“Police!” comes a second shout.
Think, Paige. What should you do?
Ford isn’t rushing to answer the door. In fact, I can’t hear him or anything else at all in the house. Which means he didn’t return home last night. There’s no way he would’ve hesitated for even a second to get these people away from the house.
With trembling fingers, I change into jeans and a tank-top to the sound of more thuds at the front door. I drag a brush through my brightly hued hair and pull on a pair of socks, hopping out the door in my haste.
Halfway to the entrance though, I pause, heart in my throat.
I haven’t taken my pills yet. Ford always gives me my pills in the morning, and if there is any risk of running into other people, he always gives me a double dose. They’re in his room, but there’s no way for me to retrieve them. Ford’s door is reinforced steel with a combination lock, not unlike a door you might find on the safe in a bank’s vault.
“Hello?” A female voice calls this time. “Anybody home?”
Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I pad to the entryway, peering at the screen in the hall. It shows the view from the exterior cameras.
The one positioned over the front door shows two police officers dressed in dark colors, weaponry strapped across their waists, hands on hips.
They aren’t Nephilim. It’s easy to tell the supernaturals apart from us naturals.
Though I’ve had no face to face experience with the other beings now sharing our world, Ford made certain I had some idea what they looked like. He also took steps to make certain I’d never go near one for as long as I lived.
Nephilim are unnatural, he would growl during our lessons. Abominations. But their wickedness is nothing compared to the Diablim.
I glance toward the door only a few meters away. It too is strong and sports three different types of locks. I could open it. Ford didn’t have to keep it sealed anymore, not since he installed the new hardware on my ankle eight years ago.
Though without my pills…
I tap the intercom button beside the wide panel of screens and lick dry lips. “Um, Mr. Ford isn’t home right now.” I speak into the receiver. “Could you…could you come back later?”
I chide myself for my weakness. For my unwillingness to provoke Ford’s wrath in trying to escape a third time. It won’t work. And it isn’t worth getting the hose again. Or the chair.
The female officer scans the exterior wall for the intercom and bends to speak into it. “Paige St. Clare?”
My finger freezes over the button, trying to make sense of what’s happening. How do they know my name? What would they want with me?