(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (6 page)

He wraps around me as the water comes down, cold at first. I barely feel it as he takes the brunt of it but then opens us both up to the water when it’s hotter. He strokes me and holds me, like we have made love his way. But the depth of his emotion over the event feels deeper than normal.

He feels different.

He holds me tightly, as if trying to trap me there in that sensuality. But he can’t. I’ve done something different, and I liked it.

I can feel the difference in me from it.

We fall asleep that night without talking about it. I don’t know what to do about that.

In the night I stir, unsure of the date or the time or even my name. When I wake, my memory is always a little worse, as if being asleep is akin to the coma I once lingered in.

When I do wake fully, I realize a smell has found its way into my dream, disturbing my sleep. The rusty and grimy filth of the smell picks at me, poking until my eyes are open. I blink for several seconds to let the memories of the evening wash back in.

It’s still dark in the room, and he’s gone. His inhales and exhales aren’t part of the sounds in the room. His warmth is missing from the bed.

The smell becomes more important than his being gone. It’s not bleach and it’s not urine, but it’s sharp like both those smells.

I sit up, feeling glueyness on my hands and noticing the way they stick to the sheets. It takes a second for me to remember washing up after we had sex. So it can’t be from that. I wrinkle my nose and climb from the bed.

When I switch on the bathroom light it takes a moment before I see it.

The scent of the rust, the sharpness of it that cuts into my sense of smell, is nothing compared to the sight of it covering me in the stark bathroom lights.

Panicking at the sight of blood covering my hands and face, I run the taps, certain I must have had a nosebleed in the night. I wash everything, pulling off my pajamas and washing my abdomen where the blood has made its way.

I saunter into the bedroom, muttering about nosebleeds, barefoot and naked, to strip the bed. When I switch on my light I notice blood at the door, on the floor.

Like Hansel and Gretel, I follow it into the hallway, dragging on Derek’s huge robe as I go. There are several more drops and even a handprint on the wall. “Derek?” My hands are shaking when I reach the front door to our town house, but the trepidation and fear tickling around inside me are nothing compared to what I feel when I open the door to outside.

The handle on the other side is covered in blood. The front steps have several droplets that lead toward the grass, but I lose them there.

I was outside?

I was outside covered in blood?

Or was Derek hurt?

My feet won’t move and my mouth is dry, but my heart isn’t even racing. I think it might have stopped completely. I don’t feel scared anymore. I feel something else. Something I don’t recognize, so I can’t catalogue it with my other emotions.

It had to be that Derek was hurt and he tried to wake me but I was so asleep that I didn’t stir?

Did he go to the hospital?

What the hell is happening?

I grab the cleaner from under the sink and spray Lysol everywhere—the handle, the blood spots on the deck, the stairs, and even on the concrete.

My body reacts with such fervor and command I almost don’t recognize myself. The response I have to the sight of the blood is not the one I would have expected. The mess is cleaned within minutes, and the cloth is in the sink. Something comes over me. It’s an odd thing to do. I grab the lighter fluid from the junk drawer, rags from the cupboard, and the matches from under the sink. I douse the rags in lighter fluid before placing them in the barbeque and tossing a match.

There’s a pile of billowing black smoke when I realize what I have done.

But I don’t stop there. I bleach the sink and grab my clothes and bedsheets, still on autopilot, and drag them to the metal garbage can. I pull the garbage bags out and dump the clothes and sheets into the metal can. Swiftly, I get the bleach and dump it on the clothes and sheets, soaking them in the entire gallon jug of bleach. My eyes burn and my nose waters, but I don’t stop. I stir the garbage can full of bleaching linens with my broom handle and then drag the can out into the street. I pour it down the sewer drain, pushing the linens back as the bleach drains into the sewage.

I know it’s wrong but I don’t stop myself. It’s like I can’t.

I drag the can back to the house and dump the bleached laundry into the washing machine and start the load on hot.

I finally have a grip on myself when I’m spraying the can and dumping it on the driveway.

I don’t know what it means, or why I did it, but I have to assume being that efficient at getting rid of bloodstains has to be a bad sign.

First the aggressive sex and now this.

How odd.

I send several texts as I sit at the kitchen table awaiting Derek’s arrival home. He doesn’t answer me for an hour. It is the longest hour in my life. Well, in three years, anyway.

I can’t imagine where he is or why, until he messages me that he got called in, and he’s in the doorway a moment later. “Jane?” he calls out in the hallway.

“In here.”

He comes in, still in his scrubs. “You okay?”

I shake my head, swallowing hard. I don’t really know where to begin, so I start with a question. “Did you get injured and try to come and wake me up?”

“No. Why?”

My eyes don’t leave the square pattern in the tiles on the floor when my lips part again. “I woke covered in blood, and it was everywhere.”

“What?” He drops to his knees, looking me over. “Are you hurt? Was it a nosebleed?”

“I’m not hurt. That’s the weird part. The blood trail led me outside, where my bloody handprint was on the knob. So it seems I came into the house and got into bed covered in blood.”

He tilts my chin. His eyes are filled with something very bad, but I can’t discern what it is. I know it’s bad, I can see it, but he has never made this face before. Not in the three years I recall, anyway. “You don’t remember anything?”

I shake my head.

“I don’t see any blood.”

“I cleaned it up, like forensically cleaned it up.”

His eyes close and his brow knits. He is devastated. “I think it’s best if we go away for a while, Jane.”

I shiver with fear and the harshly suspenseful words. “What?”

“I have something to tell you. It’s not going to be easy, and I know you’re going to be very angry with me, but I need you to hear it all before you react.” Derek opens his eyes and swallows, bracing himself, maybe.

“I don’t want to know, whatever it is.”

He chuckles like he’s exhausted. “You always say that.”

“What?”

He trails a finger along my arm, tickling. “This isn’t the first time we’ve been in the situation we are now. This isn’t the first time you’ve woken covered in blood or worse.”

There is nothing I can say or want to say. I sit frozen and scared as he struggles with something until finally whatever it is wins or loses and he blurts out, “Your real name is Samantha Barnes.”

My stomach drops into my bowels.

He winces. “We met seven years ago. You were beautiful and fun and sexy and crazy. You were an amazing girl, and I loved you from the moment we met. But after a few months I started to notice things—weird things.” He gets up and pours a glass of water, leaving me with those sentences.

“You lied to me?”

He nods, drinking the entire glass in one go.

“Why?”

He turns, looking worse than before. “Because the weird things were you waking up covered in blood. It was a small town that you lived in, so when bodies started popping up, coinciding with your night walks, I knew you were the one doing it.”

Hot tears drip down my cheeks as the words refuse to make sense in my addled brain. I shake my head, but I can see the tears in his eyes.

“I faked our death. We were dating. I was doing my practicum in a town about fifty miles away, so no one knew me. I burned us up, burning the car so hot it would seem like our bodies were incinerated, apart from a few bones of course.”

“Who did you burn?” The question frightens me and I suspect the answer will more but I need it.

“The hospital where I worked. I got them from the morgue, they were going to be cremated anyway.” He has to be lying. “There was nothing left but bone chunks and jewelry.”

My trembling lips part. “Why would you do that?”

He wipes his face, staring at the wall, refusing to look in my eyes. “Because I loved you and I needed you, and I knew if you were killing things at night they would lock you up in a mental ward. I knew I could take care of you and help you keep it under control.”

“Things? Not people?”

He shakes his head, sniffling and wiping his eyes. “You never got that far. It was animals, mostly wild animals. I followed you once. You were like a sleepwalker, but you were ravenous. You killed a cat, smearing the blood on yourself, and then walked home. It was bizarre. I tried to talk to you, but you didn’t see or hear me. Classic sleepwalking.”

I cover my face in shame, wanting to block it all out. There is no way. I would never hurt a single thing. I don’t have it in me. I know that. I can feel it. Especially a cat. I have Binx.

Thinking of his name sends me into a panic, wondering if he is the thing I killed. I lift my head, but my panic is instantly deflated as I see him crashed on the couch. He’s sleeping and fine.

I close my eyes, shaking my head and wishing I could shake the words away. Wishing I could take them from my memory.

He walks to me. I hear his footsteps on the tiles. He drops to his knees again, wrapping himself around me. “You’re Jane now. You’re different now.” It isn’t the response I expected.

“But I was her. I was a girl who had a life. I had a college education. I knew Ronald.”

He rubs my back, kissing my head. “You did. You are a smart girl—no one is disputing that. But you have a disease, a sickness. So until there’s a cure, I keep you safe as best as I can. No stress, no
anger, no worry, no problems. You can’t handle a job more intense than being a shopgirl. You need familiarity and calmness all the time. We will pack up and leave tomorrow, go on a little trip.”

I freeze, stilled by the words he has spoken.

My blood is still and my heart stops, so every single aspect of this moment is untouched, untainted by anything else. I need to be able to remember everything.

My stomach falls somewhere inside me, making an instant ache.

I went to Berkeley? My name is Sam?
I feel like throwing up. My past has finally caught up to me, and all along it was hiding here, with him. I trusted him, and he hid all of it from me.
Why would he keep lying all these years?

I gag back the heave in my throat. I feel like I’m standing in the desert and he is across from me and the ground is breaking off, separating us. There is a massive split in the earth in front of me, and he is on the other side.

Tears splash down from my eyes as the reality of it all hits. Everything moves as if there is a delay, just like it did when I first opened my eyes from the coma. I see the memories I have of the last three years. They are all of him—him and Angie and me. Is Angie in on it? Does she know me? Did a man really come in looking for me, or was she trying to help me remember?

“What are you thinking?” His voice is panicked.

“That I don’t know you or me. That the dead guy in the park knew me better than either of us.”

“Don’t say that.” He lifts my hands, kissing them. “I love you. I just wanted you to have a chance to start over.”

I lift my head. “You almost killed me with the car accident on purpose?” I open his robe I’m wearing, revealing my scars and naked body. “You did this to me to protect me?”

He shakes his head. “You really had a car accident. You really did almost die.”

I don’t know what to say or do or think. I don’t know what is true. Killing cats sounds pretty far-fetched to me. It doesn’t ring true inside me. What if he’s lying about that just like he’s lied about everything else?

His eyes and the look on his face are killing me, but I can’t get past it all. It’s too much.

He walks to the bathroom, not closing the door all the way. I don’t know why that bothers me but it does. He always closes it. Is he in there watching me? Or am I becoming paranoid?

Something inside me, an animalistic instinct, perhaps, takes over. I stand, without thinking, and pull on my dirty clothes from the floor, a habit he hates but tolerates.
How many of those are there? How many habits do I have that he just looks past? How much of this is real love, and how much is lying to protect us?

When I get into the hallway, I place my cell phone on the desk at the front door. I don’t want to talk to him. Not yet. I need to sort through the things he’s said and the possibilities in every statement he made.

I back up to the door, snagging my Chucks from the shoe rack on my way out, and slowly close the door.

I don’t know what to do or where to go or why.

All I know is that when I start to walk toward the backyard, my body goes into something I assume is survival mode. It’s no longer animalistic but more as if I already know how to do it.

When I get past the stairwell on the side of the building behind us, I’m sheltered from the view of the house. I pull on my Chucks and run between the buildings to the alley at the end of the road. It feels colder, and I feel more alone than I think I ever have.

I turn toward Angie’s place, but my earlier thought dawns on me that she might be involved. And even if she’s not, he will likely look there first when he realizes I have left. I turn around and walk toward the only other place I can think of—the bus station.

I pay for the longest ride I have cash for, and sit in the warmth. My brain gets stuck on his smile, repeating it over and over. Without him as my safe place I have nothing, almost literally nothing. I can feel Jane dying off inside me, but Sam is still a distant blurry image. I don’t know how to be her. I don’t want to be her.