Secret Worlds (230 page)

Living the life of a Rogaire means constant moving, occasional identity changes, and a hunger I could never allow myself to quench.

Reminiscing about my past gives no comfort for the future as I pause in front of the window and silently curse the death of the berserker, Vicen. It was impulsive, stupid, and now I have no one to ask about the creature I’d just had sex with. It’s not like I can trot into Purgatory, sit at the bar, and ask around. I was in a blind rage when I entered the bar and couldn’t remember a single face in the room but Vicen’s anyway. What I did notice, what was crystal clear, was that the whole frigging place was scared shitless of me. What the hell right do I have to dream of sharing a life with another when I can strike that kind of fear in all creatures?

“Shit! Not like you didn’t know this was going to end badly when you started following the berserker. And all because you’d witnessed the confrontation he’d had with CeCe. Not like you didn’t know someone was going to die the minute you allowed yourself to take on the body of the beast.”

I sighed heavily at my own ridicule. The best I could hope for is that the body CeCe was wearing was glamoured by a witch spell, not real, or borrowed, or possessed. Because although I would kill Vicen again in a human heartbeat if I caught him threatening CeCe, I didn’t like the thought I’d killed another innocent girl.

But I saw CeCe in Purgatory...

Should I hit the bar again? Ask around? I can’t leave it like this with CeCe. Well, I could, but I sure as hell don’t want to.

Whatever I decide to do, I know it’s not safe here anymore. I just took a woman to my bed. She somehow disappeared without a trace, and I should move on and forget her.

The beast rumbles inside me.

I pull a trunk out from under a lamp by the couch and begin to load all of the personal items I would take when I left. I’m thinking Michigan would be a good place to gravitate. I believe that’s where CeCe is going to attend college in a few weeks. Didn’t she mention Michigan State?

One thing Grandmother—I mean, Mother—had taught me was how to get all the money I need to survive in the human world without any suspicion. At least I’ll never have to live on the streets.

I spread out like a shadow on pavement under the feet of the unsuspecting woman working her corner in the seven-hundred block of South Orange Blossom Trail. Her name is Jane, and I will be wearing her by morning.

As she drags me along, I watch, listen, learn … and I think about Gaire. Although I knew something was different about him, I’d never, for a moment, expected Gaire to be a wendigo. Damn, talk about having a penchant for bad boys. That little proclivity might chalk my ’no killing humans’ rule up to multiple charges of aiding and abetting before this insanity ends. And it will end, badly, if I don’t get Gaire out of my doppelganger head. I know I should just forget him—I’m sure he’s forgotten me—but Gaire is the first and only being who has made me feel real, alive, and, well, human. I’ll be damned if I’m giving up on that.

As I stare up at Jane from the pavement, I’m thinking how perfect this chick would be. I could head back to Leesburg, she would stay in Orlando on her street corner, and our paths should never cross. Unless it’s in a morgue somewhere—a street-walker’s life is a hard one.

In her early twenties, Jane is blonde and tan, wearing a lewdly short skirt and a lacy bra barely covered by a leather vest. Black boots with four-inch heels caress the undersides of her knees as she struts toward a car pulling up to the curb a few yards down from the streetlight on her corner.

I cozy up closer as Jane leans toward the black sedan, filling the window with the contents of her lacy bra.

Both hands now on the window of the car door, Jane is doing her thing, enticing, pimping her
carte du jour
, negotiating
à la cart
—palatable little
hors d’oeuvres
or entrées off the full-service menu—and distracting, while she slowly removes the pistol at her back, reaches down, and slides it into her boot.

I slither upward off the pavement, over the front tire, another moving shadow on a street accustomed to shadows.

Automobiles hedge from traffic light to traffic light, corner to corner. Pedestrians pour in and out of seedy establishments while the streetwise hawk their wares—a night like any other night on the trail.

I move, unnoticed, over the shiny bumper and onto the hood of the automobile, and there I lie, red eyes glimmering, watching, and learning.

The man inside the car wears a dark suit and tie with a white shirt. His hair is neatly trimmed, parted to the side, not a lock out of place. His randy smile displays straight white teeth, a cleanly shaved jaw-line under intense gray eyes. As he reaches over to open the door for Jane, a gentlemanly gesture during an ungentlemanly proposal, the light from the streetlamp on Jane’s corner dances off gold cufflinks. It draws my attention to his well-manicured fingernails.

Boy, is this guy going to be so totally unaware when I, doppelganger, walk out of the hotel room wearing a post-coital grin, and Jane. The surprise will come later when he tries to take a shower and finds Jane—not the carbon copy, the real thing—lying in the tub. One thing is for sure: he’s about to have mind-blowing sex and a night he’ll never forget.

As I slide into the front seat with Jane and pool into the shadows under the dashboard on the car floor. I amuse myself with a notion my mother is gonna hate my new outfit.

“So, what’s your name?” the guy in the suit says. “Or are we not supposed to ask that?” He chuckles tensely, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road as he coasts down Orange Blossom Trail.

“Oh, you can ask, sweetie, long as you got two big ones, you can ask anything you want. Name’s Jane … you?”

Without hesitation, he answers, “How about you call me Dick?”

I almost laugh, not like they can hear me if I do, but still.

Jane laughs and I revel in it. “Cute. So, Dick, where ya takin’ me?

“As far as you’ll let me.” Again with the edgy laugh.

Jane reaches down and pats the Smith & Wesson 9mm stuffed in her black boot and resting nicely against her right calf. “If you got the money, sweet cheeks, I got all night.”

Jane’s words, the ones that had attracted me to her earlier tonight, play over in my mind. “The only way to a man’s heart is through his chest cavity” she’d told another hooker before they’d split and headed toward their respective corners on the trail.

“You kill me, Jane,” the other hooker had said over her shoulder as she laughed and walked away.

Oh, cold and retched life of a doppie be damned, what if I’m choosing a serial killer, or worse, a man hater!

I feel the car hook a right and take a small bump before it makes a hard left and then comes to a stop. Purple and green light blinks on Jane’s face as she says with disgust, “Haven’t been to the Ambassador in a while. You paying by the hour or night, hon?”

When Dick gives Jane nothing but a smile, she adds, “Full night’s cheaper if you wanna spend some time, is all I’m sayin’.”

Her nose wrinkles and her mouth tightens. She turns away, opening the car door. Together we step out, Jane dragging me along, a dark shadow under her feet. We head toward a bottom-of-the-barrel hotel on the nastiest block of West Colonial Drive in Orlando, but hey, it’s less than a mile from Jane’s corner and most importantly, her car.

Dick has a key, looks like he knows where he’s going as he gets out of the car and takes the lead.

We walk through a lobby—I glide—and past a murky aquarium with no fish, water lines descending with evaporation. But the fish tank is larger than the television balancing on a microwave table beside it.

Dick nods at a questionable character behind the desk. I can smell him from the heels of Jane’s boots, sickly sweet cocaine-sweat, bad personal hygiene, and day old sex.

The furniture in the lobby is Salvation Army Naugahyde and the walls are dark green. Everything else screams “rooms by the hour.” West Colonial Drive at its finest … drugs, sex, filth, and destitution. Ashtrays overflow onto faux wood tables, yellowed newspaper scatters the floors, and duct tape partially seals holes in the walls. I would think the tape is a bigger expense than plaster, but hey, given the frayed edges, I would say it gives roaches and rats easy access to the soul of the place where they can wander in and out of the rest of the hotel.

As we head into the elevator, I spy a sign that reads “free breakfast”—most likely stale coffee, but this clientele probably doesn’t even notice. Shady-looking men, the kind that are interested in really bad things, linger around the sign. Before the elevator doors close, one guy tells another he had invited the little girl in 219 to his room to see his horsey, and I make a mental note to return here through the sewer system with a few of my friends from Down Under.

As Dick presses the number 2 on the elevator wall and Jane turns to face the closing doors, I sidle around back of her and my head rolls over a shoe-twisted cigarette, red lipstick halfway up the filter.

A few minutes later we all step into a nightmare—the room is purple, bright purple—with tracks of humidity-driven grime running down walls from a window-shaker trying to keep up in ninety degree temperatures outside this box of debauched delights. The carpet is void of color from years of wear-and-tear, along with numerous ejected, projected, ejaculated, and exsanguinated bodily excrements I care not to fully entertain. A mottled burgundy spread is thrown haphazardly across the bed, and sheets hang from beneath in wrinkled wads. Pillows in gray and rumpled cases scatter against a black, leather headboard, bearing one of those metal boxes that charge four quarters to shake the bedbugs awake.

Although I’m quite comfortable Down Under in the sewers where my kind subsists—thrives, even—I don’t feel right using Jane’s body for sex in this bacteria-breeding, petri-dish of a room. Problem is, if I don’t, she will. I would have to watch while I wait for the opportunity to double up on her.

What to do, what to do? I’m tossing around ideas, none workable, when Dick turns the locks on the door, walks across the room, and drops his car keys on a nightstand.

All pleasantries gone, he asks, “Want a drink?”

He reaches for a paper bag in a cubby beside the bed. I slowly shrink my form under Jane’s feet until it’s barely discernable.

“No thanks, hon, but you go ahead. I’m gonna hit the toilet and freshen up,” she tells him, and I think, that’s my girl, as Jane turns toward a dingy door in a dark corner of the room. “Oh, and put the cash on the dresser, will ya?” she says with a wave of her hand.

Wearing a deadly grin, Dick watches Jane’s swagger as he pulls a distinctively squarish bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon out of the bag and works off a seal of wax that looks like blood dripping down its sides. I spread out and freeze. I know the bottle and the brand because the first prostitute I doubled up on tonight propositioned an undercover cop. At the police station four hours ago, I had seen the same bottle of bourbon in three pictures—three crime scenes—in an open case file on a detective’s computer screen. The file also displayed pictures of butchered and bloody women.

Jane isn’t Dick’s decadent fantasy of pleasures. She’s his next victim.

When Jane flips on a light switch outside the bathroom door on the other side of the room, I realize I’m looking all doppelganger—thick black cloud hovering over the floor by the end of the bed—and should probably duck and disperse. But then she pauses to check her makeup in the mirror over the sink. Jane’s eyes share a flicker of sadness with her reflection, and it seals my decision.

Before Jane even gets the bathroom door shut behind her, I’ve risen, thickened, and shocked Dick backward. The bottle of Maker’s is airborne. Wide-eyed, he falls onto the bed, and I’m straddling him. Bourbon pours, and topples its way onto the floor. The smell adds spice to an already heavily scented bedspread. I cover his mouth with mine and latch on, sharp teeth retracting. He tries to fight me, but that ends as soon as I begin to draw the air from his lungs and the spirit from his soul.

I pull deeply and close my beady red eyes, feel the transformation begin, and wait for his heartbeat to stop. When it does, his meaty human skin hangs from me. I jump off, before I draw his last breath, just barely aware that I am filling the murderer’s skin like a helium canister, its nozzle plugged into a balloon.

Instinctively, I watch for the real Dick’s chest to rise and fall. The adrenaline rush is the strongest now, and my new body vibrates as I see he’s still alive. It doesn’t register that I failed to kill a murderer, just that I’ve kept my vow to not to kill my victims.

I stretch, blink, open and close my new hands, and treat myself to one glance in a clouded mirror propped against the wall atop a maltreated dresser. The body I now wear feels wrong, odd, like I’m not really in charge of it. I feel an intoxicating degree of rage, the kind of wrath I’ve seen Down Under, unworldly. Yet his mind starts to grow in mine like any other human I’ve doubled up on.

An involuntary shudder races up my spine. There are things trapped inside this person’s head, things shoved deeply below the anger that covers them. My body quivers with unknown feelings. The toilet flushes, a human gesture that makes me think of Jane, then Gaire. I immediately shed Dick’s body. It sparkles and pools around my doppelganger form before winking out like a trillion shooting stars swallowed by waxing clouds.

As I slither into the filth under the dresser and entertain one second of familiarity with my surroundings, Jane walks out of the bathroom in nothing but a triangle of red lace and her black boots.

When Jane sees Dick spread across the bed, legs hanging over the edge, and the bottle of bourbon emptying onto the floor below him, she tosses up her arms.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, ya betta not be dead, damn it! Think you’re gonna bring me to this friggin’ pigpen, then just up an’ die on me? Shit. Shit. Shit!” She takes long strides toward the bed, eyes jerking from him to a prescription bottle on the floor next to the bourbon. “I ain’t spendin’ the whole damn night explainin’ this shit in no police station.”