Destiny Strikes (8 page)

CHAPTER 11

Sweating heavily, Rafael woke from a tormenting nightmare.

Heat racked his body and nothing could assuage the internal blaze, not even the central air circulating in the hotel room. He kicked himself free of the tangled sheets clinging to his lower body. Freedom from the dream and the sheets cooled his skin. Reclining on weakened forearms, it didn’t take much to recall every vivid detail. What was he to do now? The one certainty he had was how he’d die. Leaving the bed and possible sleep behind, his dream-atrophied muscles worked enough to move.

“Wha-What’s wrong?” a soft voice whispered as he staggered to the balcony doors and threw them wide.

Taking several deep breaths of fresh, crisp air, Rafael feared his latest vision more than all others he’d ever had. A smooth hand came to rest on his shoulder and a silky body pressed against his side as the woman tucked her head into his shoulder.

“Have you figured out why you keep having the dream?” his companion asked on the heels of an extended yawn. “You know it’s a part of my orders to ask.” Her hand slid around his hip.

“I’m here to help,” she continued. “Sooner or later, you’ll tell somebody what our future holds.”

“If I knew, do you think I’d still be having the nightmare?” He pushed Delilah away.

Moving about the elegant but sparsely decorated hotel room, Rafael’s palms moistened as he swept the stringy wet mass of black hair off his face. His pectoral muscles and arm tendons protested as he stretched and locked his fingers together behind his head. After his circuit around the room, he returned to the balcony glass doors, fully exposed to the outside world.

Predawn light filtered throughout the room. A longing for quiet and peace tortured his soul.

Peace wasn’t, by any account, what Delilah had in mind. Adequately named, she was every bit as good a lay as his “partners” wanted her to be. Beauty and viciousness rolled into one.

“Would you care for me to relay the message of exactly how you left the newbie behind?” Delilah asked, dressed now, “or would you like to explain it yourself later?” Her proper parliamentarian accent belonged in England, not here reprimanding him for things he could not change. She checked her phone before meeting his eyes again.

Fate apparently had other plans for her associates if he’d read Fallon’s unexpected arrival correctly. When he remained silent, he heard the room door open and her parting words. “As you know, they’ll be in touch. Oh, by the way, they’ve already sent someone else to finish what you started.”

Rafael neither turned nor acknowledged the warning as his cell phone on the nightstand beeped twice. Who sent the message, he already knew. Wallace, the best computer geek in the world had given Michael the information.

Ignoring the call, Rafael crossed his arms and widened his stance. Lovers entwined in a passionate display captured his attention from another high-rise across the street. He suspected the couple’s X-rated meeting of flesh came from a desire to be free. The couple probably expected they’d be safe from prying eyes, unabashedly satisfying their sexual desires on the balcony. Rings glinted against the sweat coating their bodies. Not immune to the sensual performance, Rafael registered no shame as the cool air caressed his sack and his hardened dick. Unlike the lustful sex he’d had with Delilah, witnessing true love and desire proved a powerful combination. Colorful rays caressed the woman's perfectly arched spine.

Rafael knew what would come next, and it wasn’t in the throes of their mutual orgasm. As the sun beat the darkness back, more shadows would appear.

He had lived for ages in shadows with just enough light to stave off total darkness. His family’s actions marred and stained the future, but had to occur without his interference.

Under the weight and pressure of his gift, he left the couple to their exhausted embrace.

His mind returned to the endless walls of fire portrayed in the prophecy he’d envisioned. Bodies burned, as the sickeningly sweet smell of flesh permeated the air. Endless cries and pleas for help left unheeded as Rafael gazed upon chaos with an unholy smile gracing his face. As a king on high, Rafael knew there was nothing anyone could do to stop it or him. It took someone evil could look upon destruction with glee in his heart.

Earth’s impending future was written in the stars, each speck a roadmap showing long-ago, and imminent, events. Their messages, his cross to bear. At five a.m., his tears mixed with water from the shower overhead. He shattered the cream color, checkered tiles, just above his head with his fist, as red rivulets of blood swirled down the drain. His forehead rested against the slick fissured tiles as he raged over being so alone with no one with whom to share this knowledge.

Leaving the confines of the bathing cubicle, he dropped the towel he used to dry his body, and his tears. With a heavy heart, he picked up his cell phone.

This number would change, as all the others had, for the same reason Michael had long ago given up trying to track Rafael’s location. Rafael would always be one step ahead of them, even when he did not want to be.

Rafael deleted his messages without listening. He keyed a text into the phone, but the beginning phase of Orion’s return was already taking place as he typed. He knew Michael was asleep and would not get the message until later in the day. There was a price to pay for love, and some were destined to pay more than others. Fallon was soon to learn that lesson the hard way.

With a self-depreciating smile, Rafael hit ‘send.’

CHAPTER 12

With so many unanswered questions screwing with him, Travis hadn’t gotten any sleep after he’d left Fallon asleep on her couch. In such a short time, she’d become a menace to his insides.

His hand rose to his chest, the tattoo over his chest bothering him again.

Questions.

Her move to Seagrove. Her effect on him? Surviving bolt after bolt striking her luscious body. Who the hell was she?

He’d left Palmerstone’s and hurried to the station to utilize every database he could, but his efforts disclosed nothing useful. The identification she gave him two nights ago was the key point of clues as to her existence.

Minutes later, and still staring at his computer, the phone’s insistent ring disrupted his thoughts.

“Seagrove Police Office, Officer Travis Orion speaking.”

“Travis, I might’ve found something that may clear your name. Also, because I know certain things about you, maybe you can help me figure out what the Hell-o-Pete is going on. As I see it now, no one else will believe this shit.

Not once in his seven years had Travis received so many calls from the captain. For good reason, he did not want to dwell on the last call he’d received.

“Sir—”

“Now isn’t the time for questions. Just get your ass over here to the morgue.”

For someone who attended church every Sunday and didn’t use colorful language, the captain’s use of curse words indicated his stress in dealing with Barbara’s murder. Grabbing his badge and gun from the desk, Travis headed out the office.

On the way over, he recalled the first months with Captain Harris after completing a four-year stint in the Navy. Captain Harris had always kept his cool under pressure, and wasn’t a man to raise his voice over minor issues. His patience, understanding, and dedication to the job were admirable traits. He also never saw Travis’s preference for wearing shades everywhere or the obvious pain he suffered due to migraines as a hindrance from doing any task assigned to him. It was a rarity to find someone willing to take a chance on someone with his unusual handicaps. Thirty minutes later, Travis found himself hesitating before pushing through the large stainless steel doors with MORGUE embossed on them.

Uneasy, he adjusted the utility belt tools like his gun and pepper spray housed at his waist. With one hand resting on the cold metal, he squared his shoulders, took a bracing breath of fresh air, and stepped inside.

“Sir, I’m here . . .?” he began, lowering his voice soon as he walked into the cold, sterile room. Industrial ammonia opened his sinuses.

Being here spooked the shit out him.

Spotting the captain, he saw the older man at the last body-prep stations with his arms crossed.

Travis stepped further in the room. His eyes drawn to squared chrome doors stacked four high on top of each other, containing his version of refrigerated coffins. Near the last steel bed, a tray of neatly organized tools made the tiny hairs on the back of his neck rise.

“Sir, it sounded like this was an emergency,” he stated, eager to find out why he’d been brought here of all places. In his opinion, this wasn’t a place any sane person wanted to linger.

Lifting his eyes away from the table, Travis searched the man before him for any clue to his current mood. In the morbid lighting, Captain Harris furrowed his fingers through the salt-and-pepper wavy mane. For many men in their sixties, Travis knew the captain counted it as a blessing to have that much hair left on his head.

With a sigh, Captain Harris jerked his head in the direction of the dreaded wall Travis passed on the way in. Travis followed behind him, coming to a stop in front of cold locker number twenty.

“Travis,” the captain began with a gruff voice. He paused, opened his mouth briefly, then shut it, his thinned lips compressing for several seconds.

With one hand wrapped around the nape of his neck, Captain Harris tapped the fingers of his other on his hip, before raising stark eyes to Travis. “Before I show you this, I want you to understand.” He wavered yet again. “Why am I asking you to understand when I don’t is beyond me.” Clearly unsettled, he coughed into his fist. “I’ve seen some pretty weird things in my lifetime, Travis. Then again, this takes the cake. It makes about as much sense as it does for you to be a suspect, and it’s still unclear if it was an elaborate scheme she planned with that message, but everything pointed to a deeper relationship.”

“Don’t worry about it, Captain. Belief in my innocence is enough until we find the real culprit. And yet, none of that explains why we’re in a morgue, or why you’re discussing this case with me any more than you already have.”

A decisive wrench of the captain’s wrist turned a latch reminding Travis of a door handle used on 50’s model iceboxes. The catch-release echoed loudly within the silent room. Stepping away as the door swung open, the captain pulled the door wider until it rested against the close one beside it. The blast of frigid air added another layer of cold to an already-morbid room.

A whisper of disquiet worried Travis as his superior stepped to the head of the table and drew on the handle of thin metal until the covered body was clear of its cubical.

“During the ME’s post-mortem examination and documentation recording the state of the body, he confirmed the extensive damage and external bruising occurred ante mortem.” the Captain’s voice hardened, tinged with disbelief. “And yet, here’s where it gets strange, whoever killed her was brutal and caused a lot of damage, but the doc concluded that none of the injuries she sustained were the cause of death.”

Travis shifted, then dropped his hands to his weapon belt, conspicuously gripping the solid weight.

“Doc called me in over an hour ago,” the captain continued. “He’d double-checked and triple-checked his findings. When I got here, the man was beside himself.” The captain’s head bent, his thick eyebrows shielding his eyelids. “It was only through an act of the Almighty, that he believed me when I told him he needed to keep this out of his report.”

Travis expected the removal of the white sheets to be a bit more dramatic, considering the captain’s weird behavior so far, yet the action was as gentle as the woman under the cloth had been. Travis swallowed hard.

Pale as chalk, Barbara’s face was almost unrecognizable due to swelling and different-sized jagged gashes that marked her complexion. Dark blue-and-black discolored lacerations denoted signs of ripped and torn abrasions. Someone’s rage had shredded her flesh, not a weapon. His gaze fell to the markings marring her chest cavity. The pale form, silenced by death, devoid of all traces of the spirited female he’d seen almost a day and a half ago. The sight rattled him. His frustration over Barbara’s sudden interest in him seemed trivial now, compared to what she had faced mere hours later. That thought ate at his soul.

“Captain, I’m not new to death and have seen my share before now, but I’m not seeing why you brought me here?”

The respect and high regard Travis held for his superior intensified when the captain placed his hand gently on Barbara’s forehead. His eyes closed fleetingly before his thumb and forefinger settled on her sealed lids.

“I’m going to ask you to take off the shades. I saw you take your shades off after you got into your car the night we found Barbara’s body. It’s not the first time I’ve seen your eyes, but the rarity leads me to believe there’s more to the story.”

Travis found it a strange request, but there weren’t many secrets between them. He removed his dark glasses. The captain pulled back the dead tissue covering her eyes.

Wide-eyed and staring at the body like he had never seen one before, he asked, astonished, “How in the hell did that happen?”

One pupil was an exact match to his, an intense violet color. The other, a gray as hazy as storm clouds over the ocean.

“That, my young friend, is what I’d like to know.” The captain turned, facing Travis.

Travis had no answers. There were no medical record documenting the cause of his anomalies or how he’d receive the intense shade of violet.

“Travis, I’ve known this woman since she was a wee toddler. I know we’ve never talked about this, and your secrets are safe with me, but when it comes to bizarre things like sudden changes in eye color, we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands than just a murder investigation.”