Wiccan, A Witchy Young Adult Paranormal Romance (7 page)

“
Cordon off this area,”
Grayson said, indicating a large area around where I’d last seen
Lisa. “CSP is on the way. If they get here before I get back, tell
them to wait. There are a couple of things I’m particularly
interested in.”

With that, he tucked the bag in his
pocket, turned toward me, put his hand under my elbow and steered
me back the way we’d come.

When we were an acceptable distance
away, I finally asked what I’d been dying to know. “What did you
see?”

Grayson didn’t look up and he didn’t
answer right away either. I’d begun to wonder if he’d even heard me
when he finally said, “A red hair.”

“
And that’s why you believe
me?”

He looked over at me as we
walked, his expression inscrutable. When he turned his head back to
face straight ahead, he hesitantly admitted, “A red hair was found
on the body. That alone would’ve made you appear a little less than
nuts, but finding one here at the scene…” he trailed off, shrugging
as if to say
You do the math.
“That either makes you credible,” he said,
pausing. Then he looked back at me. “Or involved.”

He watched me intently and I could tell
he was gauging my reaction. I looked him right in the eye, honest
and deadly serious.

“
I had nothing to do with
her death. I have an alibi, remember? I wouldn’t even be in this
position if I hadn’t tried to do the right thing. I didn’t
have
to come and talk to
you. In fact, I didn’t want to, but what choice did I have? Trust
me, if I could get rid of this…this…
thing
that makes me see stuff, I
would.”

Grayson said nothing, just looked ahead
again. We walked in silence the rest of the way to my house. When
we got there, he stopped at his blue unmarked Dodge Charger. A
little chirp sounded when he hit the button to unlock the doors.
“Do you still have my card?” he asked as I turned to walk
on.

“
Yes.”

“
Call if you think of
anything else, ok? Anything at all.”

“
I will.”

He nodded and then opened the door and
slid behind the wheel. I heard the engine roar to life as I closed
the front door behind me.

My parents descended on me as soon as I
slid my shoes off.

Mom fired first. “Where was she killed?
Is it on the route you walk to school? Do they think you’re in
danger?”

Then Dad chimed in. “Do they have any
idea who did it? Is this a serial crime? Do we need to be concerned
about getting you transferred to another school?”

“
Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said,
carrying my shoes into the living room and plopping down in Dad’s
recliner. “I can tell you right now that I don’t have the answer to
most of those questions and the ones I do have are ‘no’,” I said,
then adding as a casual afterthought, “Except the one about my
school route.”

As I knew it would, that started a hail
storm of questions, concerns, warnings and postulations.

“
Look, maybe I can put your
mind at ease, but you just can’t go telling people what I’m about
to tell you. I mean, I doubt the police want everything they know
to get out.”

“
No offense, Mercy, but I
doubt that young man told you everything he knows. The police
usually play their cards pretty close to the chest,” Dad argued,
ever the pragmatist. He’s pretty smart for a marketing executive.
“And he seemed far too intelligent and competent to make sloppy
mistakes like that.”

“
That’s probably true, but
still…”

“
Alright, alright. We won’t
say anything.”

“
Ok. They think she was
murdered in the woods on the edge of campus, and, yes, it’s the way
that I walk to school. They don’t seem to think anybody else is in
danger, though. Lisa was most likely intimately acquainted with
whoever killed her. You know, a crime of passion and all
that.”

“
But do they think it’s a
good idea for a young woman to be walking that path alone until
they catch the person responsible?” Mom’s worried frown was firmly
back in place.

“
They say it’s fine, Mom.
Really. Plus, it’s always broad daylight when I walk that route. I
would never walk through the woods alone after dark, even if this
hadn’t happened. That’s just stupid.”

They asked a few more
questions. Some I couldn’t divulge the answers to (for obvious
reasons) and some I just didn’t
know
the answers to. We talked for a
little longer then I excused myself to my bedroom. I closed the
door and flopped face down on the bed to go back over the events of
the last week and run through Lisa’s murder one more
time.

There was a tiny little tickle in the
very back of my mind that was telling me I was missing something,
but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t put my finger on it. After
nearly an hour of going around in circles, I took my frustrated
self to the bathroom to get ready for bed. I felt like I hadn’t
slept in days, suddenly exhausted for some reason.

That night, I drifted off to sleep with
visions of long red hair and women in goatees swimming lazily
through my head.

I felt like I’d just gone to sleep when
the images in my dream flickered like a television broadcast with
bad satellite reception. The sights from Lisa’s murder morphed into
a motel room, and a really crappy one at that.

Faded curtains with orange and brown
bubbles on them were drawn over a motel-style picture window that I
was standing in front of. The only light in the room came from a
single bare bulb that hung over a folding card table in the corner.
The light was swinging back and forth gently, like a
pendulum.

My point of view turned toward an old
bed. The spread was piled in a heap at the foot and a girl was
lying atop the soiled white sheets. She looked short and petite and
she was wearing low-riding jeans and a red spaghetti-strap top.
There was a black hood over her head, but I could see the tips of
straight blonde hair peeking out from beneath it.

I approached her and she reacted,
almost as if I’d spoken, but I couldn’t hear the words. It was like
watching a movie that was muted; there was absolute silence but for
a faint buzzing in my ears.

She began to thrash about as much as
she could, considering that her wrists and ankles were bound with
duct tape. She raised her hands to her head as if to pull off the
hood and I saw a tattoo on the underside of her left forearm. It
was three words, written in cursive, but I couldn’t make out what
they said.

I reached toward her with my left hand.
My arm was wrapped in plastic and my hand was gloved in latex.
There was duct tape around the wrist. My fingers fisted and reached
out to hit her on the side of the head. The hard knock effectively
subdued her for the moment.

Her head lolled to one side and my
right hand appeared. In it was a wickedly-curved knife. I bent over
the girl and reached out with my left hand to touch her just below
her collarbone. I tapped a finger on her very first rib then
counted down to her fifth. My fingers dipped in the space between
two ribs and moved a couple of inches to the right. I felt the beat
of her heart banging wildly against my fingertip. And then I raised
the knife and quickly inserted it to the hilt between the ribs.
Blood oozed out from around the knife handle to saturate my fingers
and then…

CHAPTER FIVE

I woke with a start. I was trembling. I
felt both sublime pleasure and unspeakable terror all at once. My
body was flooded with adrenaline and my heart was racing. I was
panting as if I’d just run a marathon and my mouth was dry as
desert sand.

I got up and went to the
bathroom, splashing water on my burning cheeks. The dream was more
than just a little disturbing. The subject matter itself was
extremely bothersome, of course, but even more than that was the
sensation that I was
actively
involved
in the murder of the hooded girl.
And, if it was possible to be worse than that, my body was reacting
as if I’d enjoyed it. At least until I’d awakened. Now, it seemed
that the initial flood of pleasure was subsiding into a queasy,
sick feeling that I felt all over like the flu.

As I walked out of my bathroom, I
glanced at the clock. It was already 5:15 and there was probably no
reason to go back to bed. I’d never be able to go back to sleep. I
was shaken. Very deeply shaken.

I left my bedroom and headed for the
kitchen. Mom wasn’t up because it was the weekend so I started the
coffee and went into the living room to wait for it to brew. I
flung myself sideways into Dad’s recliner and got comfortable. I
closed my eyes and inhaled, the soothing scent of coffee already
permeating the air throughout the room.

I bolted upright in the chair when I
felt a hand on my shoulder. I was a little disoriented at first. I
felt like it had only been seconds since I’d sat down, but it was
daylight and the living room was bright. Mom was leaning over me,
looking down into my face. She was already dressed and made up and
her frown was firmly back in place.

“
When I saw that you were
sleeping so soundly, I hated to wake you up, but I didn’t want to
leave without telling you we were going either.”

“
Church,” I said when my
brain started functioning. “Sorry, Mom.”

She smiled her sweet, maternal smile
that was usually reserved for me when I was sick. “You needed to
rest. Why don’t you go on back to bed, try to get some more sleep.
I’ll wake you up when we get back. We’ll bring lunch.”

I nodded, sliding from the recliner and
stumbling back to my room where I fell into bed and, evidently,
right back to sleep.

A knock at my door woke me next. It was
Mom.

“
Mercy, you want some
lunch?”

“
You can come in,” I
said.

The door opened slowly and Mom peeked
inside. “Want some chicken? We got KFC?”

“
Sounds good. Give me five
minutes.”

She nodded and closed the door again to
give me some privacy. I got up and used the bathroom then had some
chicken with Mom and Dad. Lunch passed in a bit of a daze, much
like the rest of the day did. I felt like my dream had drained all
my energy away, leaving me feeling weak and lifeless.

By 8:30, I felt like a narcoleptic. I’d
nodded off three different times while trying to finish the Cosmo
I’d started on Saturday. Finally, I just gave up trying, turned my
light off and went to sleep.

Again, it felt like I’d just gone to
sleep when I found myself back in the motel room with the dead
girl, like I’d never left. I pulled the knife from between her ribs
and took her bound wrists in my other hand. I put my thumb against
her palm and pressed up at the base of her right forefinger. With a
quick strike, I sliced off half her finger. It bled, but not as
much as I would’ve expected. I assumed it was because her heart was
no longer beating.

I took her finger and dipped
it in the pool of blood that was spreading across the sheets from
her left side. I pulled the sheets tight and began to form letters,
re-dipping the severed digit multiple times for more “ink”. When I
was finished, I took a step back and surveyed my handiwork. IT’S
TIME
was spelled out in the girl’s blood on
the sheets beside her head.

The scene flickered again, like it had
when it had begun the previous night, and then it disappeared,
replaced by the restful nothingness of deep sleep.

********

The next day, I felt a little more
rested, but the dreams I’d had were bothering me in a way that I
just couldn’t shake. It was more than just that left-over haunted
feeling you sometimes have after a bad dream. It was like the dream
had somehow planted a teeny, tiny dark seed somewhere deep inside
me and it prickled like a splinter.

I was lost in my own head on the way to
school. And I still hadn’t picked a different route, so I’d decided
to just cut through the woods sooner and avoid “the scene” by a
couple hundred feet.

When I came upon the sidewalk, I looked
to my left. In the distance I could see the yellow tape that
surrounded Lisa’s murder site. One piece had come loose and its
tail was flapping lazily in the breeze. I was transfixed by the
erratic movements of the tape as it was pulled and twisted by the
invisible wind. I didn’t hear footsteps until they were upon
me.

“
Mercy, right?”

I whirled around. Jake was standing
about three feet away, looking over the top of my head. He was
staring at the cordoned-off area, too.

“
Yep. And you’re Jake,
right?” As if I didn’t remember. Ha!

Jake brought his attention back to me
and smiled. “Right.” He held my gaze for a few seconds then looked
back toward the rock where Lisa died. “Did you know her?
Lisa?”

I shrugged. “Not really. I had a class
with her, ran into her a few times here and there.” Then, just out
of curiosity, I asked, “Did you?”

Jake looked down into my face. His eyes
bored deep into mine yet I could tell he wasn’t really seeing me.
He nodded slowly, sadly. “Actually I knew her very well. We’d been
dating for almost a year.”