Soul and Blade (3 page)

3. RADIO NOWHERE

R
ory’s snoring. It’s so bad I can feel the vibration in my skin. I roll away from him and wrap my pillow around my head. But that doesn’t help. The moment I close my eyes, I hear the numbers again and again, on a loop, and somehow it incorporates into his snoring, making a song.

I might kill someone if I don’t get some sleep.

Finally, defeated and dejected, I get up and slip down the hall to the bathroom. I sit on the toilet and listen to him snoring. Even peeing doesn’t mute it.

I think he is an animal.

Thinking about him evokes Maria, my client from earlier. I can’t help but wonder how she’s doing.

The strangest feeling washes over me as I think about her—one of envy. If she divorces him, if she says no, she wouldn’t have to do all the things he requires for his life to run smoothly, and work on top of that.

Her life would get very uncomplicated.

The notion is enticing.

867-5309

The stupid numbers are stuck in my brain. I stare at the bathtub and then realize, they might not just be numbers. I count it out on my hands, getting
hfg-ec0i
. If it was a word scrambler, I would replace the
0
with an actual
o
. So the letters are
hfgecoi
.

I rearrange them, realizing there isn’t a single word in the English dictionary that comes from using all those letters.

Drumming my fingers on the tub, I space out.

Fiocheg
,
gif-echo
,
hc-fogie
. . . there is nothing.

The letters mean nothing. I get up and walk into the kitchen, picking up my phone and entering the title of the song in Google, “867-5309/Jenny.” That has no significance to me other than that memory of the woman singing it.

My brain makes up a hundred word combinations, but none of them works. I happen to glance back at my phone and smile at the name of the artist.

I whisper it, almost wondering what a silly name like that feels like on the tongue: “Tommy Tutone.”

A flash instantly hits me like a ton of bricks. I heard the song on the radio awhile ago. I was in the bathroom looking for something. Yet I can’t recall it clearly.

Movement catches my eye, but what I see has no explanation. A vision of me is walking down the hall, holding something and looking all around the house. I step back, expecting the air to go cold or my heart to leap from my chest.

But I’m not scared. The thing in my hands has me mystified or entranced.

She/me walks right across the room in front of me and out the door—through the door.

I hurry back to the bedroom and pull on clothes and a sweater. I slip on shoes and rush out the door and down the street.

I run to catch up to her. Rory’s right; I do walk fast. I run my hand through the air the ghost of me is in, but this version of me must be made of my dreams and exhaustion and walks like she is in a different world. Somehow the two worlds are crossing, like she’s a ghost reliving her version of our death as it happened wherever she is from.

Or a foreshadowing of my death?

Will I die tonight?

I laugh at myself, concluding that the ghost is more likely to be a reflection of my day, based upon the varying clients and the lack of sleep. Or even more likely, I am in my bed sleeping at this very moment and it’s all a dream.

But she walks exactly where I think she will. She doesn’t knock on the door but walks right through it, proving she is indeed a ghost or a dream. I grab the hide-a-key and open the door quietly. Binx comes running to me, weaving in between my legs.

“I never thought you would finally understand it all.”

I jump when Mrs. Starling speaks into the dark hallway.

“Understand what?”

“How you came to be here.” She lifts a flashlight to her face like we’re at camp and she’s trying to tell me the end of the creepy story about the man with the hook hand. I wince and step back.

“Why am I here?” I can’t tell her that I followed a ghostly version of me, but my eyes dart around, looking for me.

She opens her mouth, but the song comes from her lips instead of an explanation. My scientific mind tries to explain it all, and I haven’t got the fancy words I expect. I should have theories as to what’s wrong with me. I am a therapist after all.

Binx purrs and snakes my legs, weaving in and out of them as Mrs. Starling sings softly, as if doing an acoustic version of the song that has been plaguing me all day.

I’m having a dream. I need to go with it. The dream will lead me to the answers.

My head jerks to the right, as I notice the stairs to the second floor. Binx runs to them, standing on the landing and meowing at me. I follow him without asking her. I know I’ve cat-sat for her more times than I can count, but I don’t ever recall going up the stairs before this moment.

They creak with an unfamiliar sound. When I get to the top of the stairs, only a small night-light plugged in near the floor illuminates the landing. I creep past the closed doors, inwardly telling myself I need to go home.

When I open the door to the bathroom, it matches the one from the memory I had, just before I saw the ghostly version of me. This is the bathroom I was searching.

In the dark shadows I cast, I miss her at first, but when I step back, the light catches her—me. She’s kneeling on the floor in the dark. She lifts a finger to her lips and pulls the grate off the heating vent at the bottom of the cabinet. She puts the box, which I now see was the item in her hands, into the vent and puts the grate back over the top. She smiles at me and even in the dark I can see that her eyes don’t match in color.

She puts her finger back up to her lips and vanishes. I jump, looking around, but she isn’t there. I turn, jumping again when I see Mrs. Starling in the hallway, casting a shadow over me. She smiles, still whispering the friggin’ song.

Binx rubs himself against her bare ankles, getting lost every couple of seconds in her nightgown.

I panic as I look around and the light flickers. Finally I can’t take it anymore and I scream.

I blink and realize I’m in my bed naked and covered in sweat.

Rory is gone.

This was easily the worst dream I have ever had.

“Rory!” I call out, but no one answers.

My heart is racing and my mouth is dry, but my mind is reeling.

I get up, flinging the covers and skidding along the floor to the bathroom, slamming the door when I get inside. My back is pressed against the cold wood, but I’m still coated in sweat—cool sweat—the worst kind really.

I drop to my knees, my eyes avoiding the mirror. If she’s there in the reflection, I might actually stroke out on the floor, and no one wants to be found naked.

Behind the white grate under the bathroom vanity, I see it. There’s no mistaking what I see. My left arm tingles, no doubt from the heart attack I am actually having. I ignore the warnings from my body and scoot forward enough to drop to my elbows and stare straight.

Behind the grate there is exactly what she said there would be. A four-leaf box—a box with a four-leaf clover. I know the box; I clearly hid it in some fugue state. But I don’t want to touch it.

It feels like it’s more than just a box. It feels like a memory filled with joy and sadness. I was unhappy for the clover being trapped forever, but she was pleased that it was always going to be perfect, trapped there.

Who is she? Who is the voice in my head that says the clover will be beautiful forever, protected?

The mystery woman is one baffling notion, but the other is why I hid the box in the first place. Why am I dreaming about it and yet not remembering any of this?

My fingers creep forward, tiptoeing along the tile like legs might walk it—miniature legs. I loop two of my very expensive gel-tipped nails into the grate and use them to pull it forward.

I can only pray Rory doesn’t come home and open the door to find me bent over naked.

I tilt my head to the side as I drop the grate to the tile and stare at the ominous little box. There must be some meaning to it beyond the strange image it pulls up in my mind, the one of the lady with the different-colored
eyes smiling at me. She laughs, tucking one strand of
my hair behind my ear
, and she helps me stand up. Her arms encircle
me, but it isn’t her that’s clinging, it’s me. I’m clinging to her in my mind.
I open my eyes, hardly aware that I closed them, and reach for the box.

A noise in the house stops me from reaching. I turn back, staring at the door. Rory’s back.

I don’t relish the thought of him finding me. Not because I look insane, but because there’s something about the idea of him in my mind that’s changed.

I turn the lock and stuff a towel under the door so he can’t see in.

His footsteps vibrate, but I ignore it and look at the box. As I do, I drop back to my knees, and the handle turns, clicking and jerking against the lock. “Andrea?”

That’s not my name.

I don’t remember everything, but that is not my name—I know that.

My hands shake and my thighs tremble as I lean forward and clutch the small wooden box.

“Andrea!” The door rattles and the lock clicks, but I drag the box out, focused solely on it.

“What are ya doing in there? Are ya all right?” His body slams against the door, shaking the entire house. “
Andrea!
Bloody hell!”

I tilt back the lid and instantly I know it all. There’s a face with green-gray eyes and perfect lips inside. I lift the picture and know him. Dash!

I glance at the underside of the lid and whisper the words that seem foreign and familiar at the same time. She was the sugar and I was the spice. “Tell me about the swans, the way the swans circle the stars and shoot across the sky.”

The cupboards blow up and away from me. The walls of the house where I am become nothing more than debris and particles, making dust in the air. I step into the nothingness, the black and swirling vortex. I don’t float like the particles or the cracked mirror that reflects things to me. I drop and fall into the blackness, where I see and feel nothing.

“
Jane
!” he screams, but I blink and leave the screaming there inside him. Something beeps and something swirls, and my blinking eyes convey still images as if in a flip-book, trying to give me a moving picture.

I cough and gasp and stare at the white-tiled ceiling of the bright room. Everything is moving too rapidly, but I now know where I am—just barely.

I’m in Rory’s head because he abducted girls and kept them in cells. He used them in a brothel built for powerful men around the world. Leaders. I am on a mind run trying to find answers and to see if he has other secrets he isn’t sharing with us. The memory of the girls in their cells and the torture Rory inflicted upon them gives me chills. He is a rapist and a murderer, and, worst of all, the best CIA agent I have ever met. And likely the better mind runner.

I reach for Dash, the one who will bring it all back.

His hand closes around mine, but when I look, it’s Rory, not Dash. He’s smiling and holding me.
“Get away from me!”
I scream in a cracked and croaking voice.

He drops to my side, patting my hand and shaking his head. “I only want to love ya, Jane. Let me love ya. Only you can save me.”

I try to swat and fight, but my hands are restrained and my muscles are weak, atrophied from my lengthy stay on the bed. He stands and nods at someone I can’t see. “Take her to the ward.”

I scream and cry, everything coming out in dry pieces as my throat feels like it’s bleeding. I need to wake up. I need to find Dash.

I chant the things I need to remember.

“I am marrying Dash. I am happy. This isn’t real. None of this is real. I don’t live here. I live at 1707 Girard Street North in Washington, DC. I am Jane Spears. I am military. I handle mind runs and special ops. I am not Andrea. I don’t live in Manhattan. I am not married to Rory. I am not in love with Rory. The love of my life is Binx.”

Angie walks to me, glaring with her cold gray-blue eyes. “Shut yer yap, ya wee harlot. Going after my man like that. I know it was ya who corrupted him. Yer Jane Spears all right. Yer the reason Rory is a bad man. It’s all yer fault.”

“No!’ I scream, but the bed is already rolling, the walls flying by. The ceiling. The ceiling indicates the distance I am going. I count the tiles, seventeen. A door opens and the light changes, turning gray and dank with a smell of something I can’t quite discern—musty but sweet. We are still in a hallway.

A woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform walks to me. She has a clipboard and a pen. She clicks it and glares at me, pursing jammy pink lips that remind me of a B-movie villainess. “Dr. Dash will be here any second. He will want to assess you.”

At her words, I blink, and the world gets hard to focus on. When I tilt my head to the right, it tilts with me, twisting and roiling like I do.

She transforms from Nurse Ratched into a sweet older woman the moment I hear his voice from behind us. “I want her in a private room, fully restrained. I will examine her before I administer any meds.”