Fury’s Kiss (3 page)

“Tara, are you ok?” Rachel asked as she burst through the door. I flinched at the sudden noise. “What happened? You sounded terrible on the phone.”

“I’m OK. I just…needed you guys.” I tried to stay calm but tears welled up in my eyes and my voice hitched in my throat.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Alex demanded, taking in the defrosting gel pack in my hand.

“Something…happened at Spyder’s last night.”

“What do you mean?” Rachel stepped closer and sat on the bed. “What happened?”

“Did somebody hurt you?” Alex asked, correctly interpreting my tears and the way I cradled my arm. Her voice shook and she clenched her hands into angry fists. “Who did this?”

I opened my mouth, but closed it again when nothing came out. My face crumpled and more tears slid down my cheeks.

“Never mind.” She shook her head and reached for my phone. “I’m calling the police and then we’re taking you to the hospital.”

“No! Wait.” I held out a hand to stop her. “I’m not hurt. Not that badly, anyway. And I can’t go to the police.”

Rachel smoothed my hair back. “Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It’s not that.” I shook my head. “This guy attacked me and I…” I swallowed hard and the rest came out in a whisper. “I killed him.”

“Tara, whatever you had to do to get away from that guy, you did the right thing.” Rachel took my hands in hers. “And I’m sure you didn’t kill anyone. You’re just feeling guilty and confused right now, which is totally understandable.”

Alex echoed Rachel. “No one will blame you for fighting back.”

“You don’t understand. I didn’t just fight this guy off. Something weird happened. Something I can’t explain to the police.”

“What do you mean?”

I let out a frustrated breath of air. “God, I don’t even know how to explain it. This guy tried to force himself on me and I pushed him off of me. But it wasn’t, like, an ordinary push. It was like I had this crazy strength that came out of nowhere.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“But that’s not all. I…” It was hard to say the next part, hard to remember what in the world I’d been thinking. “I kissed him.”

Alex pursed her lips, clearly surprised, but she remained supportive. “Honey, no one can predict how they’ll react in a situation like that. And if you’re really embarrassed about it, you can leave that part out when you tell your story. But I’m not hearing anything that should make you afraid to talk to the cops.”

“It was the kiss that killed him. I don’t know how, or what I did, but when I kissed him, I somehow…I don’t know, sucked the air out of him.” I raised a hand to my mouth to bite at my thumbnail, a bad habit that asserted itself whenever I was stressed out or overwhelmed.

“Tara, that’s just not possible,” Rachel said. Her voice was gentle, like she didn’t want to provoke me in my fragile condition. She exchanged a glance with Alex and I could see neither of them believed me.

“Fine, I’ll prove it to you.” I leaned over the edge of the bed and grabbed the laptop I’d left on the floor next to it. I flipped it open and quickly navigated to the Hawthorne Herald website, our local daily newspaper.

The story I was looking for screamed at me from the front page.
Mysterious Death at Local Bar Baffles Police
.

“There.” I turned the laptop to display the screen to my roommates. “I knew there’d be something about it in the paper.” There was a picture under the headline, showing what must have been every cop car in town gathered at Spyder’s.

“I made the front page.” My voice quivered as I got out the words.

“Tara, this is crazy,” Alex said. “Come on, put the laptop down. You’re shaking.”

“Read it.” I forced the computer into her hands.

Reluctantly, she took it and began to read out loud. “A body was found in the parking lot of Spyder’s Bar and Grill early this morning by bartender Nora Katsaros, when she literally stumbled upon it. Sources tell us that Katsaros described the remains to police as ‘grotesque’, citing the body’s distinctly purple hue and severe bloating.”

She paused to look up at me, and I waved her on.

“The deceased has been identified as twenty-nine-year-old Clinton Miller, an ex-convict employed by DeVille Developments. Although the death does not appear to be related to Miller’s employment with the company, police urge anyone who knew or worked with Miller to come forward with any information they might have, however unrelated it may seem. The cause of death has not been released.”

“So, what are you saying?” she asked when she’d finished reading. “That you had something to do with this?”

I nodded, still sniffling.

“Tara, look at the article,” she tried to reason with me. “There’s no way you did this. The guy was bloated and purple, like he’d been strangled or…I don’t know, drowned. And we’re talking about a grown man here—you’re like a hundred and twenty-five pounds soaking wet. It’s physically impossible.”

“It couldn’t have been strangulation if the body was bloated,” Rachel pointed out. “Or drowning, either. The color and bloating are signs of hypoxia, but a strangulation victim wouldn’t be puffy. Neither would someone who’d drowned, unless they’d been left in the water a while.”

I just looked at her. “Hypoxia?” I had no clue what she’d just said, but at least she wasn’t trying to persuade me I was crazy.

“Oxygen deprivation,” Rachel clarified. “Whatever happened to him, you couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

“I’m telling you,” I insisted, “
I did this
. I killed this guy. He tried to rape me and I sucked the life out of him somehow.”

At the word
rape
, Alex jumped up and began to pace. “You’re just confused, maybe feeling guilty about what happened last night.”

She was only half right—I
had
been feeling confused all morning, but I damn sure didn’t feel guilty. Clinton Miller had gotten what he deserved. I thought of what the now-dead attempted rapist had tried to do to me and my thoughts went red with rage, like they had the night before. My muscles contracted, ready for a fight, and I welcomed the angry tension that thrummed through my body. It felt better than the fear that had kept me hiding in my bedroom all morning.

“I’m not confused.” I jumped up too. “And I sure as hell don’t feel guilty. That bastard got what was coming to him.”

“Tara, what’s wrong with your eyes?” Rachel took a step back and raised her hands in a placating gesture. There was nervousness in the lines of her forehead and the tension around her mouth, but it just made me angrier.

“What do you mean, what’s wrong with my eyes? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“How badly were you hurt last night?” Alex backed away a few wary steps. “Did you get hit in the head?” Her eyes darted to the door.

I growled, remembering how Miller had shoved me into the hard brick wall. “Yeah, I did. Along with having my arm nearly broken and almost being raped. So what’s
your
problem?”

They were my roommates, my supposed best friends, and they were looking at me like I was insane.

“It must be broken blood vessels, from being hit in the head,” Rachel murmured.

“Yeah, sure,” Alex muttered back. “And they decided to go ahead and pop a day later.”

With every step I took closer to my roommates, they took another in the opposite direction. Alex gnawed at the inside of her cheek, clearly working up the courage to approach me. Finally, she took a deep breath and grabbed my good arm to propel me into the bathroom, where she turned me to face the mirror. When she let go of my arm, she wiped it subconsciously against the leg of her shorts, as though I might be infected with something contagious. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and she held her breath as she stepped away from me again.

“Look.” She nodded at the mirror. Her whole hand trembled as she raised it to point at my reflection.

“Fine,” I hissed through gritted teeth, turning toward it. “But just so you know—”

Oh. My. God.
My eyes were something out of a horror movie, the usually hazel irises now a dark, orangey red surrounded by black. My pupils were an even darker, true red.

Blood red.

My hair danced like someone waved a static electricity wand over my head, long strands weaving and tangling around themselves. If you watched for a minute, it kind of looked like… I turned my head sideways.

Like snakes.

Alex’s reflection next to mine was pale-faced and breathless, and it made me inexplicably furious. She and Rachel were like sisters to me, and this was what it took to convince them I was telling the truth? Some friends they were.

I had a mental flash of Alex and Rachel lying in the living room, still and swollen like the man from the parking lot, and I tore my gaze away from the mirror. What was I doing?

With intense effort, I forced myself to calm down enough to remember the meditation classes I sometimes went to at the local rec center and pictured a door slamming shut, cutting off my anger from the rest of me. Immediately, my hair went limp and my anger faded away. I braced myself against the sink, breathing heavily. When I leaned closer to look at my eyes again, my irises were back to the same familiar hazel they’d always been.

I met Alex’s frightened gaze in the mirror, then turned to look at Rachel as I asked the question we all had to be thinking. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

No one volunteered an answer, so I staggered back into the living room and made it as far as the couch before my legs went rubbery and gave out. Alex braced herself against a bookshelf, and Rachel sagged weakly onto the arm of the cushy old chair we’d found at a yard sale the summer before.

“You really did kill that guy, didn’t you?” she whispered.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” My voice began to rise again, but I forced the panic down to a more manageable, gut-churning level of anxiety. I rubbed my temples with my fingertips as if I could massage away the memory of what had happened the night before.

Then I dropped my hands to stare down at my left wrist. “My arm doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“So what?” Alex said. “Come on, Tara, focus. We’ve got a big problem here.”

“It’s just, whatever happened last night…” I flexed my fingers and my skin tingled. I looked up at her with wide eyes. “When I changed just now… I think I healed myself.”

I bent forward to hide my face in my hands. “God, what am I going to do? I’m turning into some kind of freak and the cops are going to come looking for me, probably sooner rather than later. Nora and this guy, Jackson, saw me leave the bar at the same time the dead guy and his friend showed up.”

I purposely avoided saying the dead man’s name—Clinton Miller—out loud.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell the police what happened?” Alex asked. “I mean, I’m not the biggest fan of cops, but this is kind of a big deal.”

A montage of every police procedural I’d ever seen flashed through my head and panic rose in my throat again. I thought about having to endure the questions that would follow my report, the medical exam I would be subjected to, and shook my head decisively. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to report what had happened. Hawthorne was a small town and if I wasn’t pegged as a criminal, I would always be a victim. I couldn’t face living that way.

Rachel took a deep breath. “OK, it’s your choice. You know we’ll support you whatever you decide.”

I reached for her and Alex’s hands. “Thanks, you guys. Seriously.”

Rachel smiled weakly. “So I guess the important thing now is to figure out how we’re going to keep the cops from finding out you had anything to do with what happened last night. If you’re up to it?”

She looked at me questioningly and when I nodded, she grabbed the pad of paper and pen we kept on a small table next to the landline. Her action was totally true to form and made me feel a bit better. If Rachel’s first instinct was still to diagram the problem, my world hadn’t changed so much, after all.

“Obviously, you’ve been through a lot and you’re not going to process it all in one day, but it might help us come up with a plan if we list all the information we have,” Rachel said, scribbling as she talked. “First of all, there’s the thing with your hair.”

“And those eyes,” Alex added. “Yikes.”

I surprised myself by letting out a short
ha
of laughter. Alex was blunt, as always.

“Whatever’s happening to you seems to come and go,” Rachel said, still writing. She paused to look up at me. “Why?”

I shrugged. “You guys know as much about this as I do.” Which was basically nothing.

“There must be something causing it,” Rachel mused. “Think about it. When that guy attacked you, you were scared, in self-defense mode.”

“But I don’t feel threatened by you or Alex,” I pointed out. “So when I went all Marilyn Manson on you guys, what brought it on?”

The three of us lapsed into silence, trying to think of a connection. Rachel gnawed on the end of her pen and I fretted at the ends of my long, tangled hair.

After a minute, Alex snapped her fingers then pointed at me. “It was anger. You got mad when you were telling us what happened and we didn’t believe you. That’s when you got all snaky.”