INK: Vanishing Point (Book 2) (20 page)

“I don’t think it’s
testosterone that they use,” he says thoughtfully.

“I don’t give a fuck what
they use; you get what I’m saying. She’s got all these
men fawning all over her, and she loves it. She thrives on it. She
waves her pussy around, not giving it up to anyone, to keep them all
on the hook.” I’m not sure exactly why I’m so
pissed at her, but I am. I’d like to slap her. “That
stupid little bitch causes most of her own problems with her
indecision and drama. Fuck her, fuck Eli, and fuck Aiden. I really do
hope he’s dead.”

“Wow, tell me how you really
feel,” he says with wide eyes. “I thought Shay was your
friend.”

“She is, my
best
friend actually. She just pisses me off. Everything is always about
her and her man problems.” I spit the words out like they’re
moldy bread.

He doesn’t respond. Great, now he
probably thinks I’m just a total bitch. Oh well. I pull into my
parking spot in front of my apartment. He’s still just sitting
there silent. “Come on, let’s go in. You said you ‘had
plans’ for me?”

Billy turns to look straight at me. “Do
you really wish Aiden were dead?”

It’s a little creepy how he asks
me that. “Sometimes I do.” I go to get out of the car and
he puts his hand on my arm.

“Would it make you happy?”

“What are you asking me, Billy?
Are you going to kill him for me?” I joke.

He laughs a bit. “No, of course
not, I’m just curious.”

“Why?” I look from his hand
on my arm to him and pull it away.

“Just seems strange, wanting your
best friend’s boyfriend dead.” He gets out of the car and
continues talking to me over the roof.

“There’s a lot of hurt
there. The kind of hurt Shay will never recover from. He’s
never been good to her. Or me for that matter.” Memories of us
when we were younger threaten at the back of my mind.

He starts for the stairs to my
apartment. “What do you mean he’s never been good to you?
Did you two have a thing?”

“No. Fuck no. I hate him. You hear
me? I-hate-him.” I answer quickly, with disgust and loathing in
my tone.

His eyes darken. “That was a
pretty intense answer. Sounds like there’s more to this story.”

I squirm a little opening the door.
“Look, Aiden and I do have a history, but it’s not what
you think. It’s always been about Shay.”

“Tell me the story,” he
asks, closing the door behind him.

“I don’t want to talk about
it.”

“But I do.” His gaze is
menacing and puts me on edge.

“What’s the big deal? Just
drop it.” I press my hands on his chest. “Plans?”

He backs away from me and heads for the
door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“What?” What the hell is
that about?

What the fuck just happened? Did that
little bitch just cock block me without even knowing him? I kick my
heels off, looking at the shoe Eli’s fucking dog defiled with
his puke. “God damn it!” I toss the shoe aside and make
my way to the couch.

Trying to figure out what just went down
is hurting my brain. If this is over Aiden, I’m ripping that
fucker’s balls off if he ever comes back. Hell, I’m
ripping his balls off if he comes back anyway. He shot Shay and left
her for dead.

My thoughts continue down a dark path
while I lean back and close my eyes. Thoughts of Kevin are looming;
if I’m not careful they will totally sneak up on me. I’m
not going to cry for that asshole. He left me and totally pulled an
Aiden on me. So fuck him, dead or alive. I’m not spineless like
Shay, who keeps letting those two douchebags back into her life.

Shay

Aiden has fallen completely silent. He’s
just wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his head in my neck.
I can’t be sure, but he may be crying and just trying to hide
it. “Aiden? Are you okay?”

He still doesn’t say a word but
nuzzles himself closer to me. This feels so strange. He’s so
vulnerable, and the need to comfort him is so strong I can’t
resist. All I want to do is break down and have him hold me, but he
can’t. Gathering my strength and trying to think of how to
fortify him, I whisper in his ear, “I love you, Aiden.”

He releases a sob, and his body shakes
with grief. I pull him in closer; I know he wouldn’t want me to
look at him like this. “Aiden, it’s okay. I’m here.
We are together. That’s all I want is to be with you. I don’t
care where it is as long as it’s with you.”

He shakes his head back and forth. “No,
baby, no. It can’t be like this. You can’t be here. I
don’t think this can work the way it is.”

I struggle with the urge to look him
square in the eye and tell him that it doesn’t matter where we
are. “Listen to me.” I take hold of his shoulders and
push him back. “We’ll figure this out.”

His honey-brown eyes are watery and
tired. His face shows the wear of many years and trials, yet it’s
barely been a month since he’s held me last. I run my fingers
through his cropped hair and smile. “We can do anything
together. I’ve gotten out of here before, and I’ll do it
again.”

He presses his lips into a thin line,
then looks down, avoiding my gaze. “Shay, this is Hell. Nobody
gets out of Hell.”

“It can’t be Hell; we
wouldn’t be together if it were.” I guide his eyes up to
meet mine.

He snorts an exaggerated laugh. “That’s
contrary to what you’ve said before.”

I shake my head. “Aiden, you
weren’t listening. I’ve told you it’s hell for me
when you leave, never when we are together. I love you. I need you.”

He looks up at me voluntarily this time.
“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you love me? I’ve
been so cruel to you.” He pauses in his lamentations. “You
deserve so much better.”

“Aiden, you are a part of me. When
you leave me, I die inside. I used to spend every day, every hour,
hoping that it would be the day that you came back. That’s why
I could never stay angry with you, because my heart belongs to you.”
There’s honesty in my words, hopefully honesty he can feel.
There’s also apprehension, because I feel like he’s
looking for more from me than I have right now and I don’t want
him to see my deception. Aiden needs to believe it if we are going to
get out of this; he needs to have faith in our love. That is the key
to escape.

“How can someone like me have the
love of a woman like you?” he asks, still defeated.

“It’s silly questions like
that, which will spoil a moment.”

He puts an arm around me, and we look
out over the grim waters in this dark land of desolation and fear.
This place can only be described as the proving grounds for
nightmares. Lifeless bodies dangle from the trees like haunted wind
chimes that make no sound. The shadows mock us, and I dare not focus
my eyes on what’s floating in the water. We’ve all but
filtered out the sounds of screaming coming from the distance, both
knowing that right now we are bathing in hopelessness. But at least
we are doing it together.

My mind is racing for some idea on how
to get out of here. There has to be something I can latch on to. I
know we are going to need to start walking, that the exit is nowhere
to be found on this dock. Aiden’s emotions are running so
strong that I can feel the despair ripping through him. If I can’t
give him hope, we may not get out; he has to feel my love.

“Aiden, let’s talk.”

He looks at me forlorn. “What
about?”

“The future,” I say
optimistically as though we have one.

“The future,” he huffs.

“The past, the now?”

He shrugs his shoulders and lays his
head in my lap. I’m overcome with a feeling of power and
strength in being able to calm him. After a long silence between us,
I can’t stop myself from asking the one burning question that’s
been in my mind. “Aiden?” It comes out quiet, and my
voice breaks.

“Yes?”

“Why did you shoot me?”

Eli

Standing stunned at the door in the wake
of Trish’s proclamation of violence has me wondering what the
hell that was supposed to mean. “Bad things can happen?”
That can only be taken one way, and I’m taking it as a threat.
Everything is a threat, including that little shit that whacked me
with a bar stool.

“Eli?” McNab calls from
behind.

He’s standing next to Pitch. “Eli,
you two got off on the wrong foot. Let’s try this again. This
is Pitch, he’s one of my techs. Pitch, this is Eli, Shay’s…”
He pauses a little longer than I would like, but then again I guess
it really isn’t clear what Shay and I are to each other.
“Friend.” There it is, the “F” word.

“Let’s start over, dude,”
Pitch says, offering his hand.

“Yeah.” I dismiss him and
walk back toward the fog that continues to flow from the hallway.
“McNab, what is with the fog?”

“The fog? We’ll get to that
in a minute. I want to talk about what happened to you,” McNab
says, sitting on the edge of the couch. “You were in some sort
of trance, which is why Pitch hit you with the chair. Can you tell me
what was happening right before you got hit?”

“I don’t know what it was.”
If there is any memory of what happened, it’s not readily
available.

“Carl said he was unable to read
you,” McNab says.

“Yeah, well I’m still not
really buying into all of this supernatural bullshit. There has to be
a reasonable explanation for all of this.” I’m shaking my
head and can’t take my eyes off the hallway.

“That’s fine, Eli, I would
welcome someone being able to explain the fact that your guest room
is fast becoming a marshland. Shay has disappeared into thin air and
there’s a breast implant in my pocket,” McNab challenges.

Harry comes off the patio carrying a
Blood-borne backpack. “This was in the yard.” He looks
like he’s aged.

Carl enters the room. “That’s
not Shay’s.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Her backpack is in the bedroom,”
he says.

“So whose is this? And why was it
in your back yard?” Harry asks.

“Unless there’s something in
there to identify the owner, there’s no way to tell who it
belongs to. There are literally hundreds of those in circulation,”
I say not sure if it makes me feel better. I look at McNab and
finally process what he said. “Wait, what do you mean by
‘marshland?’”

“The backpack is secondary. Let’s
address the problem in the bedroom.” McNab leads us all to the
guest room drawing Harry’s attention away from the backpack.

We walk through thick fog that smells of
the river. “I can’t see shit.” I trip over some
cords and wires strewn across the hallway from the other rooms.

“Sorry, we didn’t want to
plug the equipment in there; it could have interfered with our
readings,” Pitch says as we walk in. “Quag, are you done
calibrating the spectrometer?”

Through the fog, I hear a nasal voice.
“Yeah, I have, but I’m still getting strange readings.
We’ve never seen this before.” The body that goes with
the voice emerges; this kid’s the poster child for geekdom.
He’s holding a small black box with a series of lights flashing
on it.

Looking through the fog, I can see the
bottoms of tripods and strange grids of light shining off different
points. It looks like a Goth show at Halloween in here. “McNab,
what is all this shit?”

McNab doesn’t look at me; he’s
busy surveying the room. “I don’t really have time to
explain everything. I need to check all of the readings and see if I
can figure out what happened to Shay.”

“Sir?” Quag hands McNab a
tablet with a series of graphs and charts on the screen. “Here
are the initial readings. There are some very odd fluctuations here,
the likes of which I’ve never seen.”

McNab studies the tablet. “What do
you make of this?”

“There are multiple cold spots
throughout the room. In a space this small, it seems to be an
indication of a series of open portals or fissures. The EMF readings
are off the chart, but only in this spot next to the bed.” Quag
stands next to the bed and points to the floor.

McNab nods, not looking up from the
tablet.

“The spectrometer readings are
within a normal range, but the fluctuations aren’t,”
Pitch chimes in.

“What does all of it mean?”
I ask anyone who might answer.

McNab hands the tablet to Pitch. “I
want all of these readings recorded. Do we have the voice recorders
and IR cameras set up?”

Pitch nods to three different points in
the room. “There, there and there.”

“Quag, get me the i3 infrared
camera.” McNab is totally in control of the crew. I’d be
lying if I didn’t say I was impressed, but I’m sure they
all have some fanboy hard-on for Mr. Paranormal. Carl is hanging back
in the hallway.

The smell in there is too overwhelming,
so I join him. It’s not much better out here. “Pretty
crazy in there?”

Carl just nods, his jaw set tight with
tension. “I guess McNab does this all the time.”

Carl nods again. I look up at him, which
is strange for me since I’m usually the tallest person in the
room. “Are you okay?”

He shrugs. He must feel responsible
since he effectively left her alone and instructed me to do the same.
“You know this isn’t your fault.” Not that I think
it’s his fault directly, but whether it would have happened if
he hadn’t left will forever be a mystery.

“I could have stopped it.”
Carl finally speaks.

“Why didn’t you?” I
ask.

“Because I wasn’t here and
didn’t realize this would happen.”

“What exactly is
this
?
I mean it seems like everyone has stopped looking for her, including
me. Isn’t it just plausible that she went out the window?”
There’s no way. The window hadn’t been disturbed, and
neither had the flower beds or holly bushes right outside. It’s
not as though Shay has developed the grace of a gymnast.