Obey Me

Gifted: Obey Me

Paige Cuccaro

Dedication

Thanks to Anne, and cheers to our first accomplishment together! Thanks to my family for supporting me while I chase my dream. Thanks to Jen and Chris for your keen eyes. Thanks to Katie and Wetlyne for your uplifting enthusiasm. Without all of you, exploring the worlds in my head would not be nearly as fun.

Chapter One

There was a dead woman lying at the end of the alley and I had to get to the body.

“Hey.”

I knew the cop was talking to me. One of Pittsburgh’s finest. I ignored him and lifted the crime scene tape higher to duck under.

“Hey. You. Get outta there.” He cut me off with four quick strides to the other side of the alley, planting his big donut-filled body in front of me.

“It’s okay. I’m a reporter.” I held up my press pass. I’d hung it around my neck when I first saw the police cars flying down Eighteenth Street in front of Primanti Brothers Restaurant. I’d been snagging a late-night bite and my spidey-reporter sense had gone all aflutter.

“I don’t care if you’re Geraldo-friggin’-Rivera. No one crosses the tape.”

Power-high jerk
. I let go of the crime scene tape and straightened. I could’ve argued, freedom of the press and all, but I only glared at him, frustration tightening across my shoulders, my pen tapping an irritated beat against my note pad. He knew I was pissed.

This was my big break, I could feel it. My gaze left the bright emergency lights illuminating the dead body like some macabre photo shoot, and scanned up and down Smallman Street. Police were everywhere, swarming the area; their marked cars were left running, plain cars parked every which way with their single off-center lights flashing. So many police lights, they flashed off the metal warehouse walls like an outdoor discotheque.

The cops were checking chained doors, shining flashlights the size of baseball bats into car windows and stopping anyone who even glanced in the direction of the alley, asking them what they knew, who they saw, where they’d been. The crackle and hiss of radio dispatch, routing officers to other crimes and relaying info in code, echoed over the small crowd gathered to gawk. This was no run-of-the-mill mugging gone bad. Something was up. Something big.
Damn
, I had to get down that alley.

“So who is she?” I asked donut-cop. “Local celeb? She got political connections? Why the crazy calling-all-cars response?”

Here in the Strip District, a person can find fantastic restaurants, the hottest bars and a treasure-trove of merchandise at fell-off-the-truck prices. But like a coin, the Strip District has two sides, Penn Avenue, full of retail and entertainment bliss and the river side, Smallman Street where the seedier citizens of Pittsburgh find their jollies. The two streets are split by long rows of warehouses and after dark, the wise keep to Penn Avenue and the side streets.

Don’t get me wrong, murders, muggings, rapes and such aren’t nightly happenings down here next to the river, but when the call does come in it’s not exactly a surprise. It’s not the first time I came around the corner to Smallman Street where I’d parked my car, only to see a cop putting cuffs on some guy for drug dealing or solicitation or whatever. But even the occasional shooting hadn’t drawn this much attention before. So why the big hullabaloo?
Dang it
, I had to see that body or spend the rest of my career at the Tribune reporting on elementary school balloon releases, art festivals and dog shows.

“Her name’s Miss D. O. A. and she left a suicide note sayin’ if you showed up to tell ya to stay outta the way.”

“Right.”
That tears it
. I didn’t really want to use my power on the guy. It kinda feels like cheating. Plus, I’m not completely convinced it’s safe. Brain damage isn’t always easy to notice in some people. As far as I know though, everyone I’d used it on is still able to feed and dress themselves. So, I figure it’s all good.

I closed my eyes—helps me focus—and called my power, clearing my mind of everything except what I wanted most. The hairs at the back of my head tingled, a buzzing sound hummed through my brain, getting louder. It felt like I’d leaned my head against one of those vibrating chair massagers set super-low. Now all I had to do was…make a suggestion.

“C’mon, Officer…” I checked the name tag, “…Pawlicki. Don’t you think I should go down there and have a quick peek?”

Officer Pawlicki blinked as though he was struggling to understand what I’d said. He glanced down the alley where the police lights glared bright as daylight, then back to me, his dark bushy brows puckered tight over dirt brown eyes. His mouth opened and shut twice before he said, “Yeah. Right. I guess you should have a look. But stay out of the way.”

“Absolutely, Officer.” I ducked under the tape without wasting a second. I didn’t want to wait around. Sometimes they regain their will pretty fast, and I have to scramble to make the suggestion again or explain why they were doing something they’d been dead set against a second before.

I don’t know where my power comes from, or why I have it, or the biology behind how it works. I just know it’s always been there, a part of me. I’ve always been able to use it to
suggest
people obey me. And reconciling myself with those facts has taken nearly all of my twenty-seven years.

The alley was maybe eight feet wide and about eighty yards long. It was dark as pitch everywhere except around the police lights. The dim glow they let off was only enough to outline obstacles like trash bags, abandoned boxes and the occasional pile of rags. At least I think they were rags. God, I hope they were rags.

Beyond the bright lights on the body, at the other end of the alley, the glow of nightlife on Penn Avenue shone through the narrow opening. There were more boxes and debris blocking that end and a slightly larger crowd of people rubbernecking over the shoulders of cops. But the lights and the people meant safety, civilization. Maybe that’s what the dead girl was trying to reach, why she’d come down the alley. She’d almost made it.

I stopped just outside the ring of light around the body, notepad and pen ready. Two plain-clothes cops stood on the other side of the light circle speaking low to each other, gesturing now and then to the body. I didn’t want to draw their attention.

As dead bodies went, this one wasn’t so bad. She was a young woman, close to my age, dressed in a short, golden summer evening dress that sparked and shimmered in the harsh lights. She wore gold strappy heels and held a matching pocketbook. I couldn’t make out her face well. She was lying on her belly, her face to the side with a wealth of thick caramel hair in big carefree curls blanketing over her shoulder. She had a tattoo on her neck, a few inches below her right ear, but I could hardly make it out. Looked like a closed-off “X”, or an infinity symbol with sharp right angles instead of loops on either end.

There was a piece of paper on the small of her back, a cocktail napkin, white with red scrawling letters. Couldn’t make out what it said without getting closer. Her legs and arms were sprawled wide like she’d fallen and hadn’t moved a muscle afterward, though I couldn’t see any cuts or bruises. She’d kept hold of her pocketbook, even though her gold-tone watch had slipped off and lay in a tiny pile by her wrist.

I leaned a hairsbreadth closer, trying not to cast a shadow over the body. Her ears were pierced twice, and the gold hoops and diamond studs were still in place. There was a ruby ring on her finger, a diamond tennis bracelet on her other wrist and a gold ankle bracelet looped around her slender ankle. I glanced back to the pocketbook clutched in her hand…untouched. Whatever else happened to this woman, she wasn’t robbed.

My cell phone, more a mini handheld computer, had a wicked-good camera in it. I dug it out of my backpack-slash-purse and snapped some pictures. Most wouldn’t be usable for the paper, but I wanted them anyway in case there were details I was missing.

“Hey, you. What’re you doing?” I glanced up in time to see that the cop dressed in a cheap suit and loosened tie had finally noticed me. “This ain’t no peep show, lady. Hey, Pawlicki…”

Crap. Think fast
. I closed my eyes.
I wanna stay—I wanna stay.
The hairs on the back of my neck hummed with power, electric current sizzling like a flash of lightning through my body. Someone grabbed my upper arm and I opened my eyes. “Wait a minute, Detective. Maybe I should stay. I might notice something you guys missed.”

The vise-like grip the man had on my arm loosened as he blinked over his shoulder at his partner. Even I was surprised to see the blue-jean-and-dress-shirt-clad partner glassy-eyed and confused staring back. There’s normally a distance limitation to my power and the other cop was at least fifteen feet away. Way out of range. But I’d been caught off guard and had drawn my power fast. Maybe the adrenaline boosted the output.

“We could use an extra set of eyes,” the blue-jean man said. “Let her stay. See if she notices anything we missed.”

Power still humming through my brain I suggested, “And you should tell me why half the precinct was called out on what looks like a run-of-the-mill mugging.” Except I already knew it wasn’t.

“Let her go, Daniels,” Mr. Blue-jeans said. Then to me he asked. “What’s your name?”

“Sophie. Sophie Merlo.” I rolled my shoulders to readjust my rumpled sweatshirt after Daniels let go of my arm.

“Ms. Merlo, I’m Detective John Raynor and that’s my partner, Detective Mark Daniels.” He stepped around the two big tripod lights, closing the distance between us. “You’re right. This case is of particular interest to PPD. We think it might be part of a string of murders over the last few weeks, but other than a few bizarre similarities we can’t find a connection between the victims. Can’t even say for sure they’re murders.”

The guy was spilling his guts pretty easy, which meant there was a part of him that wanted to tell me—or anyone. The case must’ve really had them stumped. “What do they have in common?”

Detective Raynor glanced at the dead girl and back to me. “They all died of severe blood loss.”

I looked at the pale body. No blood…anywhere.

“Except,” the detective continued, “there’s no wound. Not a mark on them. Any of them. Haven’t checked this body completely, but the coroner already figures he won’t find one.”

“Then how’d they lose the blood?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Raynor said.

“They all had that little tattoo on their necks,” Daniels offered, coming around me to stand next to his partner. “And before this one, all the other bodies had been posed.”

I looked to the dead girl again. “Looks like she just fell. Or someone tossed her there.”

“Right,” Daniels said.

“Hey. Lady. You can’t be down here. I don’t know why I even allowed you to… C’mon. Outta here.” Officer Pawlicki’s voice echoed off the warehouse walls as he stormed down the alley toward us. His brain was probably still scrambling to figure out why on earth he’d let me pass. Poor guy. Oh well.

I really am worried about the effect my powers have on the human brain, otherwise I would’ve pit the detectives against Pawlicki to allow me to stay longer. It takes more effort to push suggestion onto a group of people. The more people the more power needed. I’d already used enough to start a dull ache over my left eyeball. Besides, I’d learned as much as I could from the detectives. No sense to risk turning their brains to mush. So when Pawlicki hiked his thumb back toward the river end of the alley, I went without argument.

My car was around the corner on the well-lit side street in front of Primanti Brothers. It was late when I’d arrived, so finding a spot was easy. The second I was behind the wheel, I locked the doors and flipped through the pictures on my phone. Not bad. I’d caught the scene from a couple angles. But it took a second to find the one I was looking for.

I zoomed in on the cocktail napkin lying on the dead girl’s back. The deep red scrolling letters printed in the center looked like blood against the stark white napkin and read,
Il Piccolo Morso
. My Italian’s not great but I recognized the simple words, The Small Bite. There was a phone number and the name, Todd, written in black ink, and the smoothed quartered creases told me the napkin had been folded at some point.