Katie's Hellion (Rhyn Trilogy, Book One) (3 page)

This wasn’t a police station. It couldn’t
be.

"Mama!" Toby called cheerfully.

She turned and stared at him. He shoved the
door open with all his might, revealing the steely skies of winter
and the grey cement curb outside. Whatever this place was, she
--and probably Toby --were better off somewhere else.

Toby was agitated and shivering, skipping up
and down the sidewalk while shaking with cold. She’d been too
flustered to pay attention to the trip to the police station and
looked around, not recognizing the area. It looked suspiciously
like the warehouse district near the Annapolis port, and she
smelled the sea on the air. She twisted around. There was no handle
on the outside of the door she’d just walked through, no number on
the building.

She shivered in her wool coat, folded the
paperwork, and called her sister. As usual, the phone rang until
her voicemail picked up.

"Hey, Hannah, it's Katie. I need some help.
Can you give me a call?"

Toby’s pattering stopped, and she looked up,
startled to see a massive man a few feet away. The sight of him
struck her like a frozen water balloon. He was tall and clothed in
all black, ominous and large against the slate sky. His trench was
long and unfastened, the chilled winter wind whipping back one side
to reveal a sword tucked against his leg. He looked like death with
his dark hair and cold eyes, his panther-like physique, and gloved
hands.

"Toby," she called instinctively.

The little boy ran to her side. The man in
black approached. She took a step back, heart fluttering.

"We made a mistake. Toby, you can come with
me."

He failed to make the cryptic words in any
way friendly, and the cold glare seared through her.

"I don’t think that’s a good idea," she
managed.

"You're early," Toby said, unafraid. "I want
to go with her."

Katie turned to stare at the little boy, who
beamed a smile.

The shadow-man's hand twitched and inched
toward the sword at his hip. She stepped back even more and
clenched the purse to her body, distracted as a sleek black car
pulled up to the curb. A door opened, and Toby vaulted in without
waiting for her. She took one more look at the ominous man in black
and the sword at his hip and followed, shaking from more than cold.
The man shut the door behind them.

"Goodbye, Gabriel!" Toby called from the
interior of the warm car. He waved at the massive shadow lingering
on the sidewalk.

"You’ll be fine. I’ll take you home."

The soft, firm words of the female in the
driver’s seat were the first kind ones of the day. Katie
instinctively believed her and twisted, staring with Toby at the
man in black who watched them drive away.

"My God," she murmured.

"No," said Toby. "Death dealer."

She looked at him, and he nodded as sagely as
a five-year-old could.

"Death dealer, ha! Probably just some bum,"
the brunette driver said with a forced laugh. "We get lots of them
around here."

"At a police station?" she asked
skeptically.

"Yeah, sure," came the less certain answer.
"You know, like, you can’t have a cop station in a nice side of
town. They kinda have to be in a crappy part of town, where the
criminals are. It makes total sense, right? I mean, why would a
death dealer be
here
?"

The grey eyes were beseeching, but Katie
couldn’t manage anything verbal let alone a lie to placate the
driver. Instead she looked again to Toby, who’d begun to mess with
the buttons on his side of the car.

"Shouldn’t you have your seatbelt on?" she
asked.

"Okay, Mama," he said cheerfully, and
complied.

I’m going insane.

The driver said nothing the rest of the way
and dropped them off in front of her apartment complex without
asking for directions. Toby darted out of the car and shoved the
door to the lobby open with all his might.

She trailed, even more perplexed when the
janitor waxing the floor called out a cheerful, "Hey, Toby!"

She rubbed her head, wondering if the kid
lived somewhere else in the building while unable to shake the
sense that something was really, really wrong. Toby held the
elevator for her and pressed the button for all twenty floors. She
looked at him hard, unable to recall anything at all about the
kid.

They reached the sixth floor, where her
apartment was. He darted off the elevator and down the hall,
stopping in front of her apartment. She opened the door, and he
strode in as if he owned the place. Toby bolted to the first room
on the right, the guest bedroom.

Katie looked around her apartment, eyes
lingering on a drawing done by a child on the fridge. There were
pictures on her mantle of the two of them together when he was
younger, toys piled into a box near her couch, a school lunch menu
and more pictures --these apparently from past Halloweens --on the
bulletin board on one wall of the kitchen. She took it all in,
feeling as if she'd stepped into the Twilight Zone, and followed
Toby down the hall.

The guest room was redone in race cars and
Disney characters. His energy sapped, the kid was sprawled half
asleep across the race car bed. She stared at the walls, wondering
who’d had the time to repaint her guest room. It certainly didn’t
smell like someone had painted it recently, and there were scuff
marks, crayon, and dirt on the walls.

As if it’d been a kid’s room for a long time.
She hesitated, then covered him with a blanket and walked to the
guest bathroom. It, too, was done up in a race car theme with toys
lining the side of the tub.

Head pulsing, she retreated to the kitchen
and painkillers, staring at a picture drawn by a kid, probably
Toby, on the table before her.

She didn’t have any kids. She’d never had
kids. She’d never met Toby before this day!

Her cell rang, and she stared at it briefly
through bleary eyes.

"Hey sis," she said after pressing the answer
button. "I’ve had a horrible day!"

"Oh, hon, I’m sorry to hear that," her sis
said in a distracted tone that said she really didn’t care. "Toby
still sick?"

"What?"

"Is Toby still sick?"

Katie drew the phone away from her head and
stared at it, willing herself to wake up.

"Hello, Katherine?"

"Yeah."

"Ooooh, are you having one of your…issues?"
Hannah whispered the last word.

"What issues?"

"You know…your amnesia issues."

"I have amnesia?"

"Hon, call Dr. Williams immediately."

"Who? Hannah, when I left home this morning,
I had no kids! None.
None!
"

"God, it’s getting worse, isn’t it?" Hannah
said with genuine concern. "Gio’s paying for the best neurologist
in the world. You may as well go in."

"So you’re still engaged to Giovanni. And I
work at…"

"McGillen’s, like you have for the past few
months. I think it's your third job this year."

"I remember those things. You can’t tell me
I’d forget my own child!" Katie all but shouted.

"Let me guess, you have a headache. You
probably did something stupid like leave Toby on the train."

Katie’s mouth worked without producing
sound.

"We go through this at least twice a year."
Now Hannah sounded bored rather than concerned. "Call the doc. You
keep his number on the fridge."

Katie looked to the fridge, where a small
business card was stuck beneath a cartoon magnet. She plucked it
free.

"Yeah," she managed. "Yeah, I’ll call
him."

"We’ll have brunch Saturday. Don’t be late
this time. I have to get ready for the Kingsly gala. Oh, and wear
something decent this time. You looked like you were in pj’s last
time."

"Yeah."

Katie set the phone on the table and stared
at the kid’s drawings on the fridge.

How could she remember everything but
her
child
? She felt sick to her stomach.

CHAPTER TWO

"Almost everything looks normal. There's an
anomaly in your blood test, but you’re physically healthy," Dr.
Williams said with a warm smile at odds with the cold sterility of
the room.

"Just a mental mess?" she prodded.

"Don’t be hard on yourself," he chided,
pulling a rolling chair up to the exam table. "Your amnesia is
trauma induced from the rape you survived six years ago."

"I was
raped?
"

"And beaten near death," he said with a shake
of his head. "I don’t know how you survived, but you did. To
protect you, your mind backtracks whenever you feel overwhelmed,
overly stressed, mentally threatened."

She gazed at him skeptically. Her file --two
inches thick --was yet more proof that the world that seemed
foreign to her really wasn’t.

"So my mind blanks stuff out?"

"Precisely. It’s a survival technique. The
human mind is so wonderful and so versatile." By his glowing eyes,
he loved his job. His enthusiasm and genuine warmth melted more of
her resistance.

"But how is it I remember being alone getting
on the train, and Toby got on at the next stop?" she
challenged.

"It’s how your mind wakes up from whatever
sleep it went into. You fantasized him appearing at the next stop;
it’s how your psychosis snaps and brings you back to reality."

"That makes no sense."

"We’ve gone over this several times," he
said. "You’ll have to take my word on this."

"Do I usually do that?"

"No, but I’d like to get home to my wife
before midnight. And I called the judge on your behalf and
volunteered you to go to counseling. The judge liked that option
rather than jailing a single mom."

Jailing a single mom, like her. She managed a
nod. He gave another warm smile.

"Get dressed and take your file to the nurse.
Please call me if you experience any other problems. I'll tell my
receptionist to make you an appointment for next week. Your blood
test results were unusual."

He handed her a business card and left. The
antiseptic pine-laced air from the hallway made her nose wrinkle.
She looked at the door, the familiar scent disturbing her, then
down at her file.

Everything was documented, every visit, every
doctor-scrawled record, every prescription she’d ever taken.

It was too real not to be real, yet it didn’t
feel real at all! She followed his instructions and traded the file
for two prescriptions to drugs she’d never heard of. She considered
debating with the nurse at the front desk, whose friendly grey eyes
were familiar. Toby hopped up from his chair and waved to the
nurse. Tired and confused, Katie left without asking what the drugs
were for and stepped into the chilly fall evening. Toby trailed
silently.

The cold wind felt good against her face and
roused her dark thoughts. She breathed out fog, watching it rise to
the dark grey skies. Dr. Williams’ clinic had a blessedly late
schedule; it was nearing eight, and the lights of his building
still glowed. Having the world’s best neurologist on call was one
of the perks of the rich and famous, a world unfamiliar to her
except that her sister had been gunning for it since her sixteenth
birthday.

Hannah had succeeded in landing a big fish
blueblood, a descendant of Italian royalty, whose old money
placated the chilly welcome she received into a lifestyle far, far
different from her own.

Katie shivered and looked around for a cab.
Her eyes settled on a form across the street, so still and dark he
would’ve been a shadow if not for his presence beneath a street
lamp. She felt the cold, black glare and fought the urge to run
back inside the clinic. He didn’t move; for a long moment, she
convinced herself he was a statue, not a man too still to be human.
He was in black, unaffected by the cold or the light settling over
him, outlining him like glitter on black construction paper.

Like one of Toby’s drawings on the
fridge.

Toby.

She didn’t know why she suddenly felt near
hysterics. She felt no motherly bond to the kid huddled beside her
in a thick coat despite how adorable he was. With the living shadow
staring at her, the winter wind sucking the air from her lungs, and
the prescriptions clenched in her hand, she’d never felt less a
part of her world.

A car approached, and a window lowered.

"You need a lift? Taxis quit coming this way
after rush hour."

The voice of the friendly nurse from the
nurse’s station brought her back from her thoughts. Blinking back
tears, Katie looked toward the shadow. He was gone.

"Yeah," she forced herself to say.
"Thanks."

The nurse dropped her and Toby off, and they
trudged to her apartment.

The shadow man was on her fridge. Toby had
drawn him on black construction paper with silver glitter outlining
the shape of a man. There was no mistaking the image.

Death dealer,
Toby had called him.

Katie stared at the picture for a long
moment, then emptied her pockets on the table. She attached the
prescriptions to the fridge with another cartoon magnet and
smoothed out the paperwork she’d been given from the police
station. Toby dropped his coat in the middle of the floor and
trudged to his room with a yawn. She slumped in a chair at the
kitchen table, eyes blurring as she struggled to make out the
forms. There were biographical forms and consent forms she hadn’t
really read, all signed in a loopy, angry signature, and a copy of
Toby's birth certificate.

Wiping her eyes, she pored through the rest
of the paperwork, growing cold despite her wool coat in the middle
of her warm apartment. Biographical information on her and her
immediate family, her own medical and employment histories, all
forms she’d completed without question. Toby's birth certificate
listed her as the mother, no father, and the naval hospital in
Annapolis as his birthplace.