My Angels Have Demons (Users #1)

Title Page

Issue 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Issue 2

Chapter One

Title Page

Users

My Angels Have Demons

Book 1

by Stacy & Jennifer Buck

Copyright @ 2014 Stacy Buck

This book is dedicated to addicts, recovering addicts, and those whose lives have been affected by a loved ones addiction.

Part I: Issue 1

Chapter Two

Part 1

Part 1

Prologue

It never ceases to amaze me, how life can be so fragile yet at the same time so tenacious. In a brutal attack one man can get stabbed fifty seven times with a butcher knife and miraculously survives; while the next accidentally falls asleep and drowns in four inches of bathwater. One man is mauled by a grizzly bear, walks twenty miles while holding in his guts with his bare hands and survives; and then another is punched in a street fight, falls back hitting his head on a curb, and dies instantly. Who knows why one body can take such punishment, and struggle to hang on, while another lets their life simply slip through their fingers like grains of sand. Why is Mick Jagger still rocking it at seventy something after decades of rock star partying, while Heath Ledger overdoses and dies after a single night of too much medication.

These are the types of things that keep me up at night. Wondering why, after all I've done to myself, am I still alive.

"Carter," she said, bringing me back to reality.

She caught me spacing out again, my mind wandering, as it seems to so often.

"Did you hear what I said?" she asked.

"Um...I...," I stammered, struggling for the right thing to say. The clock was ticking away on our hour.

She sighed.

Not wanting to make eye contact, I stared off at the mostly bare wall behind her. The only thing hanging from the wall was a framed diploma from the University of Texas A&M, reminding me of my lack of even a high school diploma, just to ensure I felt inferior to this dark haired woman. She sat cross legged, peering down at me from behind her glasses. She was slightly overweight and just unattractive enough to make me comfortable with having to spill my guts to her, week in and week out.

Papers that held notes on god only knows what and who were stacked in two neat piles, one on each side of her desk. I tried to sneak a peak to see what she may have been writing about me, but she immediately caught me, and I slumped back down onto the far too firm couch. The cushions felt like bricks against the bones of my ass.

"How is the medication? Any side effects?"

"No, it's been fine," I lied. I was good at this. I've had a lot of practice lying to doctors over the years to get at the prescription drugs I sometimes needed, but mostly didn't.

In truth I'd been suffering from prolonged ejaculation, also defined as a struggle to climax during sex. If you call that a struggle. Some men would call that a blessing. Here they are premature ejaculating all over the place and I'm going strong like a bull, but I didn't want to tell her that. The last thing I needed was her to take me off my meds just because I was struggling to cum once and awhile. Trust me, these ones I truly did need. I was a mess without them. Shit, I was a mess with them, but without them my life was just plain ugly.

"You look like hell," she said, and I couldn't deny that fact.

The scratches and bruises covering my arms, and the black eye I could hardly see out of were the type of damning evidence that would hold up in court. Nervously, I tapped my foot repeatedly and rapidly on the wood tile covering her office floor.

"I had a rough week," I said, looking away to the window, I showed her my good side, the one without the black eye.

"Carter, you've got to get yourself together," she said, "I thought we were making real progress here, but this seems like a major set back."

"I got into a fight."

"I can see that." She leaned back in her tall backed leather chair. It looked expensive, and it better have been at the three hundred plus dollars an hour I was paying her, but with my particular problems it took a particular kind of shrink to deal with me, and that didn't come cheap. "Tell me about it."

"The fight?" I asked.

She folded her arms over her chest and for a split second she stared at me as if I had just asked the worlds dumbest question, but she quickly shifted in her seat, a true pro, to hide her disdain for me.

"Yes, tell me about the fight," she confirmed.

"It's a long story." It always was with me.

"You've still got fifty minutes on the clock. We're not going anywhere, so start at the beginning."

I smirked, lifting my cheek on the left side, the side with the black eye, and it stung as the puffed up purple skin squeezed tight.

"Okay," I said, "It all started with a phone call."

#

Chapter 1

2 weeks earlier.

The cell phone in his front pocket rang again. He didn't have to remove it to know whose name would be on the caller I.D.. It was her calling for the third or fourth time, wondering where he was.

"You need to take that?" the officer asked.

"No," Carter said.

The police officer wore a puzzled expression, but continued to scribble away with a note pad and pen.

"So can you tell me again what happened? You say you saw them exit the alleyway and approach the car from the rear?"

"I did. The tall one in the hood was holding a gun. He approached the passenger side, while the shorter one in the ball cap went to the driver side to distract her."

"And how did you disarm the man with the gun?" the officer asked. His nameplate said Hoover on it.

"I grabbed his arm through the window when the man with the gun entered the vehicle and sat down in the passenger seat. Then I punched him in the face and tore the gun from his hand," he said.

"You do this kind of thing often?" officer Hoover asked.

"No, this is the first time," he lied.

The officer, wearing his neatly put together blues, stared at him questioningly.

"Here's my card. If you remember anything else, anything you can think of, feel free to give me a call."

"I will," Carter said knowing he would never, ever, under any circumstance be calling this officer of the law again.

"You're free to go." Officer Hoover waved him off, and as Carter turned away the phone in his pocket rang again.

He casually strode to the end of the street and as soon as he turned the corner, he ran in an all out sprint toward Mercer Street. He didn't wait for the crosswalk to signal him to go as he approached the next street down, he just ran straight through. A Buick honked as he was almost clipped from the side.

"Watch it!" Carter shouted despite his jaywalking.

He was almost there. The corner cafe's sign hung, swaying in the breeze, over the open door. A slight drizzle, the kind Washingtonians were so used to, made his slide to a stop interesting. The damp concrete was slick and he nearly slid past the open door. The sky was nowhere to be seen, just a blanket of gray as far as the eye could see. He glanced at the waterfront past Pioneer Square, at the ferries lined up at the pier, waiting to take passengers away from this dreary city, and he felt a pang of jealousy.

A wave of steamy air slapped him in the face as he entered through the open portal and into the cafe. The espresso machine behind the counter was boiling hot, he knew how it felt.

"Carter," a voice called, her voice.

"Nancy, I'm sorry," he said recognizing the look of agitation written all over her face. She shook her head and chuckled as he approached.

"You're almost an hour late," she said sliding her coffee away from her to the center of the table in disgust.

"I had to stop a car jacking," he exclaimed.

"You had to? No, you didn't have to, but ya did," she said, "and now you're late as usual."

"There was this cop, and he-" She stopped him with an upraised hand.

"Save it for someone who cares."

"Oh, so now you don't care? Is that it?"

"Yes, that's it. That's all of it," she said. "I'm leaving you."

"That can't be it." Then it hit him. "What do you mean you're leaving me?"

"I've had it Carter. I'm sick of you coming home with black eyes, I'm tired of you always being late, and most importantly I'm through with you putting me second, behind you're pathetic obsession with trying to save the world," she said.

Carter's blood began to boil. A decade of using drugs and alcohol had left him with a void he needed to fill. A decade of lost time that he desperately needed to make up for.

"You...you can't do this to me," he said, "I need you." And he most certainly did, she had been key in getting him clean.

"Carter, there's someone else," she said.

There it was.

Slowly, he slumped into the seat on the opposite side of the table from her. Carter hung his head in his hands. A clink on the table made him look up. She was standing over him with her hand on the table.

"Here's your key. I already cleaned my stuff out of the apartment," she said, "Goodbye, Carter."

He didn't respond. His stomach was a flaming inferno. Fumbling with the button on his jacket pocket, his shaky fingers finally undid the button, and he reached for his pills. He squeezed the cap down to undo the child safety lid and poured a few tiny white pills into the palm of his hand. He didn't bother counting how many as he slammed them into his mouth, reached for Nancy's discarded coffee cup, and poured the lukewarm liquid down his throat. Taking a deep breath, he fought his anxiety for a brief second, but lost.

His insides were ablaze. His heart, the source of the flames, pounded so hard it was like someone was beating a snare drum inside his skull. Up from the seat, through the door, he stumbled into the alleyway. He fell to his knees behind a beat up, grease covered, old dumpster. His throat burned, not like the acid reflux from the bile of a normal persons stomach, but like true acid was searing his insides.

Molten hot vomit exploded past his teeth. The fiery liquid flamed to life as it hit the pavement. His lips caught on fire, but he hardly registered the pain. He had an extraordinary tolerance when it came to burns, and his skin was almost flame retardant.

The lava roiled like a river of fire under the dumpster, and it too was soon ablaze. The flames bit at the coffee shop's wall. Carter wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and the skin sizzled. The smell of burnt hair and charbroiled skin, like melted plastic, assaulted his nostrils. No matter how many times he smelt it, he would never get used to that horrid smell.

He checked the hair on top of his head, it was still there. It had finally grown out to a decent length and his day would have gone from bad to worse if his hair had been burned off...again.

*****

He stumbled into his dingy apartment, full of rage and despair. His gaze darted around the now mostly empty living room. The pictures hanging on the wall, the sofa, the coffee table, all hers, were now gone. A stain ringed the carpet around where the couch had been like some kind of fucking cartoon. She had cleaned the place out of all her belongings, leaving only bare, yellow smoke stained walls.

It only fueled the fire within him. His heart beat five times faster than a normal heart, super heating his blood. He had seen his heart via an x-ray once as a child. Its exterior was blackened with a layer of charcoaled crust with veins of red hot lava between the cracks like a flowing volcano. He had not been to see a doctor since.

Anger, depression, anxiety, all negative emotions only made controlling it worse. He grimaced in pain and gripped at the burning inside his chest. The power that welled within him caused discomfort at the best of times and pure agony at the worst. He struggled to hold in the fire, to keep it from bursting out his pores. His extremities, feet, hands, and head were the most vulnerable. The points where his magma like blood reached its ends.

He had to get to his pills. He slammed open the bathroom door and practically dove to the medicine cabinet. His fingers trembled as he pulled back the mirror, but he was still careful to avert his eyes to avoid his own reflection.