Destiny Calls (12 page)

Her stomach twisted and chills ran up her spine. “A handprint,” she rasped.

“Yes!” Vito cheered, a little too enthused and a little too detached. “Now look at this one.” He handed her another, and she squinted, trying to blur out some of the carnage. This was one of the ones that were tortured. “See there?”

He pointed with the tip of a pencil at another handprint. She nodded, unable to speak for fear of being sick.

“Okay, now look at them side by side. What do you notice that’s different?”

“Well.” She swallowed. “This one’s a rape victim and this one isn’t. The one that wasn’t sexually assaulted seems to have been tortured. They were both, like the others, drained of blood.”

“Right, but look at the handprints. Look how this one wraps around the girl’s hip and how the other barely fits around this girl’s arm.”

“Smaller.” She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before. Did the cops notice what her brother had? “One of the murderers is smaller. Maybe even a woman. Oh my God, Vito, this is huge! What if this is some twisted Bonnie and Clyde sociopath couple out there? This whole time the cops have been searching for either an animal or a male suspect. It never crossed anyone’s mind that a woman did this.”

“Right, but not just any woman.”

“What do you mean?” He slowly pushed all the papers off of the coffee table and revealed a collection of Destiny’s books stacked in a messy pile,
Salem’s Lot
, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, and several by Anne Rice and other fiction writers. “What the hell’s this, Vito?”

“Vampyres, Destiny, I think they’re vampyres.”

She shook her head. For a moment she thought her dumb brother was wasting his time working as a bouncer in a strip club and should maybe look into joining some sort of crime unit, but now she just felt sad for him. “Oh, Vito.”

“What? I’m serious! They’re all drained of blood. Those are human hands not paw prints—”

She reached for a hardback sitting on the table. “
Twilight?
Come on, Vito! Grow up!” She tossed the book down and turned away.

He continued to rattle on about everything from garlic bullets to the possibility of werewolves as she cleaned. By the time she had the room back in some sort of order, she had a splitting headache. She told him if he wanted to keep talking he would have to come with her because she was going to go speak to the police. He followed her out to the garage still yapping.

“You think I’m playing, but I’m telling you, whatever’s out there has been at it longer than you or the cops realize. I went to the library and pulled up old articles. Bodies of women have been turning up in those woods since the late 1920s. No men, D, all women and always in that same area. There was a spree of killings around 1929 and then they slowed, but recently they’ve picked back up again. They aren’t random. It’s after something. After someone, I think.”

She stilled. “Where the hell’s my car?”

Vito looked around the garage like an idiot looking for a mouse rather than an automobile. “Uh, did you leave it at the station?”

Destiny thought, but everything from the day she left was a blur. “I don’t know. Maybe we should stop by the hospital, V. I’m missing stuff, and for the life of me I cannot remember where I left everything.”

Chapter 10

The police station was a complete disaster. As if Destiny didn’t face enough trouble being seen as some sort of pariah due to her occupation, Vito made the entire experience worse with all his supernatural mumbo jumbo. He was a complete embarrassment.

They had spoken to an officer named Odessa who tapped the tip of his ballpoint pen incessantly on the edge of his coffee mug the entire time she explained what happened to her. When Destiny told him of Officer
Aesel
who escorted her safely home from the convent, Officer Odessa turned and pulled up some sort of database and informed her there was no Officer
Aesel
in the entire state of Pennsylvania. From that point on, he was reluctant to believe anything she said.

Destiny realized she was wasting time and anything she said wouldn’t be taken seriously. From then on she strictly kept her focus on her whereabouts and then went on to tell Officer Odessa about what Vito pointed out regarding there being two killers rather than one. It didn’t endear her to the officer when Destiny showed him photographs of the crime scenes, which he then confiscated as evidence.

Things completely derailed when Vito asked Officer Odessa if he believed in the supernatural. They were both escorted off the premises, and members of the police force who had been taking a smoke break on the brick steps of the station advised them to be on the lookout for teen wolf, unlicensed broomsticks, and
nosferatu
. She had never been more embarrassed in her entire life.

She didn’t speak to her brother the entire time she waited for the pimple-faced teenage boy, who talked directly to her boobs, to program her new phone. Being that she couldn’t find her old one, she had no contacts in her new one which made the device pretty much useless.

She called information to get the news station’s number. After briefly explaining to her boss about her fall in the woods, he suggested she take two weeks off to recuperate. She thought this likely had more to do with the fact that she had pissed off her crew than her boss’s concern for her well-being. Whatever.

She was on salary. She could use a vacation, but her vacations over the past few years had turned from fun sexcapades on exotic beaches to lonely bouts of singledom with a suitcase full of batteries. The appeal simply wasn’t there. Destiny was simply too tired to argue at the moment, but she knew she would likely show up for work on Monday no matter what her boss said.

By the time they returned home, she was exhausted. Now that she was safe and there was nothing to worry about she hoped her brother would pack up and return to his own place. Destiny loved Vito, but at the moment she just wanted to curl up with a book and veg out. One could imagine her disappointment when she came out of her room only to find Vito still sitting on her couch.

Destiny tried to stifle her irritation as she searched for a snack in the fridge, but she couldn’t help it if some cabinets closed harder than necessary. She sat down across from Vito and gave him a penetrating glare as she popped one carrot stick after another into her mouth. As she chewed the rhythm of her crunching seemed to say
get out, get out, get out, get out.

“Look, I know you’re pissed, but part of you has to want to take this prick down. You’re Destiny Santos, star reporter. You’re always sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

She narrowed her eyes and popped another baby carrot in her mouth. He suddenly looked defeated. “Don’t you think it’s odd that Odessa couldn’t find the name of that officer that brought you home? Or how about the fact that you can’t remember getting here? And the fact that you don’t remember talking to me on the phone?”

“I bumped my head,” she offered, trying to ignore the niggling sense of fear that parts of her memory may have been permanently damaged by her fall. “Besides, you know I’ve always had a terrible memory.” She really should make an appointment with her doctor.

“Okay, well how about this?” Vito handed her the iPad.

She took it and read a generated list of names and addresses. “What is this?”

“It’s every convent and rectory in the tri-state area. There’s nothing around where you were. And what the hell was a nun doing in the woods in the first place?”

“A nun didn’t find me.”

“Then who did?”

Destiny thought for a moment. Who found her? She had a sudden flash of wood floors and a washcloth being dragged over her body, but the hand holding the cloth was a man’s. Her head ached, and she rubbed her temples. “I don’t know, V—”

Her new phone beeped, and she made a mental note to program some new ring tones. Although no contact name came up on the screen, she had no issue recognizing the number. She groaned. “Why is he calling?”

“Who?”

“Adrian.”

Vito looked away and mumbled, “I may have called him when I was looking for you.”

“Vito!”

“Well, how was I to know? You could have ended up there.”

“Adrian? Really?”

Vito shrugged. The phone stopped ringing only to ring again. Destiny sighed and answered it. “Hello?”

“Destiny? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Adrian. I just had a little accident in the woods.”

“Your brother said you were missing for days.”

“I was, but someone found me, and I was safe for the majority of my absence. Thanks for calling.”

As she was about to hang up he called out, “Destiny, wait!” She sighed and brought the phone back to her ear. “I’ve been thinking.”
Never good
. “I know what you said and I know you meant it, but I wanted to let you know I’m starting a new job this week, and I’ve even started to pay off some of my old loans.”

“That’s great, Adrian. I gotta go.”

“Can I come see you?”

She hung up. It would only be a matter of an hour before he showed up at her door. Why did the one ex-boyfriend who wanted her back have to be such a loser? She couldn’t deal with him today. She considered her options.

Looking to her brother, she said, “Wanna get out of here?” She shook her head when she saw how eager he was to go for a drive. He was like a dog.

Sighing, she grabbed her purse, her iPad, and her new phone and they headed out the door.

As they drove down the Pennsylvania turnpike, Destiny tried to ignore the fact that she was being dragged into a wild-goose chase for Dracula by her older brother. Her life suddenly felt unsatisfying when only a week ago she was at the top of her game.

Where had this disquiet come from? A sudden sense of shame replaced the familiar sense of pride she typically felt regarding her career choice. She didn’t want to be some sort of vulture who held no respect for the small battles people faced, just so she could get a story before the five o’clock news.

She pushed those negative notions about her career away only to have even more dreary thoughts fill her mind. She thought of her parents back in Portugal and how she missed them. She thought of how the only person looking for her was her brother and the ex who, when they had dated, had been the moral equivalent of a snake.

She had given Adrian three years of her life. Three years of her youth, beauty, and love, only to have him betray her in a way that proved he was too much of a boy to ever be a man. He still claimed he loved her on a weekly basis, but what kind of thirty-year-old man could love a woman and steal from her at the same time? But he did more than steal the majority of Destiny’s savings. That wasn’t what killed her. Money could be replaced. It was her optimism he had taken. That kind of taking left damage that would never be repaired. Adrian left her with that hollow, discouraged feeling she remembered having when she was a child and learned there really was no magic on Christmas Eve, that Santa was just an illusion created by parents everywhere. It seemed the idea that loyal, good men really existed was just an illusion as well.

After Adrian, her optimism had mutated into a bitter cynicism she couldn’t shake. If only someone could prove her wrong. She had trusted him, and his lack of responsibility and abundance of lies had left her a cold, distrusting skeptic.

Their relationship had been good at times, but Destiny was lying to herself if she said it ever had a moment of perfection, no matter how fleeting. Adrian was too dependent on her. He looked to her for everything from picking out his clothes when they shopped to making the reservations for every date they ever went on. Even in bed, Destiny had always been the one to initiate their lovemaking.

She craved a level of intensity in the bedroom she worried wasn’t normal. She achieved a mocking version of that intensity with Adrian, only the dynamic was all wrong. She didn’t want to be the one in charge, the aggressor. For once in her life she would enjoy having a chance at being the passive one, the feminine partner in the mix, the way it should be, but she was now convinced such things only existed in fairy tales.

She could be passive with lovers, if she had no issue with never coming again. There was something broken about her. She needed her partner to be assertive and in charge when it came to intimacy in order for her to have an orgasm, yet she could find no man out there who possessed such self-confidence. That left her to fill the role, but being the more dominant partner wasn’t what she wanted either.

She tried to wait for her last lover to take the reins only to conclude that the only climax she would ever have again would be by her own hand. She had been twenty-six the first time she experienced an orgasm with a man. It was the combined result of the love she had for Adrian and the intensity of the moment, but trying to recreate that chemistry was almost impossible. And once he betrayed her it turned into a distant memory.

She wanted a man to be a man and unapologetically so. She wanted someone strong enough to take what he wanted and dish out pleasure as if it were her due as much as it was his to take what he wanted.