The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation (9 page)

The phantom pain in my groin had faded away,
but the sense of arousal had only grown stronger. It was still
distinctly feminine, however, and was as odd to me as it was
pleasant. Of course, it also made me feel terribly ill.

“Gods, Gant…” I muttered to myself. “Just get
the hell out of here while you’re still sane.”

“Gant?” her honey dipped drawl floats into
my ears. “So that’s who you are.”

I am still standing at the basin, and I know
the voice has come from behind me. Without bothering to dry my
face, I pick up my glasses and slip them on then turn to look out
into the main room.

She is perched on the edge of the bed, on
the side nearest me. But, she has changed. Her hair is dark auburn
and piled atop her head in a soft swirl reminiscent of a long ago
era, which matches the high-necked Victorian dress she now wears.
What I see of her face is stern, and far more oval shaped than
before.

She is seated next to the headboard, and I
can still see the man sprawled out behind her. He appears the same
although there seems to be far more wounds on his body than there
had been before.

She flickers like a frame jumping on a movie
at the theater.

Her hair is once again fiery red and long.
She is back to being a scantily dressed mirror image of my wife.
She uncrosses her legs and re-crosses them in the opposite
direction, stretching one out as she does so. She smoothes her
stocking carefully then regards it with little emotion.

“Damn,” she says, her voice flat. “A
run.”

She still hasn’t looked in my direction, and
I begin to think that perhaps I was simply hearing things. I begin
to turn away.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I stop and furrow my brow.

“Yes, I’m talking to you, little man,” she
continues, still without looking at me. Instead she seems to be
intent on the items she has piled on the small table next to
her.

“Me?” I ask calmly.

“Yes, you.”

“How? You aren’t even really here.”

“You tell me,” she counters. “It’s your
vision, now isn’t it? Ah, there it is…”

She smiles and holds up a scissors-style
cigar cutter.

“Right now I think I would prefer to believe
you’re a figment of my imagination,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “If you want to believe
that.”

“You left it up to me.”

She counters with a question. “Yes, I did.
But you aren’t that stupid, now are you?”

“No.” I shake my head. “Unfortunately, I
don’t suppose I am.”

She giggles. My answer is
obviously amusing to her. Canting her head to the side but still
not looking in my direction she says, “You belong to
her
don’t you?”

It is a statement as much as a question,
however, I ask, “Her who?”

“The
her
who is taking what is mine,” she spits. “Felicity,
I believe is what you said.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

She carefully trims the end
from a cigar then sets it alight. Silence flows between us as I
watch her. A thin stream of blue-white smoke comes from between her
pursed lips as she blows on the glowing tobacco and inspects to see
that it is burning evenly. Placing the lit end in her mouth, she
then exhales slowly through it, sending a cloud of pungent smoke
billowing from the end. I know all too well that she is “smoking
it” for her
Lwa
.

After a moment she pulls it from her mouth
and rests it on the edge of the table.

Again, there is a theatrical flicker, and
the stern, auburn-haired woman is in her place.

“You’re lying. I think you do know,” she
says as if there had never been a lull in the conversation.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you feel it.”

“Feel what?”

She finally looks up at me and smiles
thinly, her dark eyes piercing. Reaching to the side, she takes
hold of the victim’s hand. He is securely bound so he is unable to
pull away, but a horrified squeal begins behind her as he
struggles, only to be interrupted by her careful method of bondage.
I hear a metallic snick and watch as she slips the cigar cutter
over his pinkie finger at the second joint.

“The same thing we are going to feel when I
do this,” she says and punctuates the sentence by bearing down and
squeezing the cutter closed.

The stir that had been
wriggling deep inside my body flared in that exact instant. No
longer was it simply extreme arousal; it was now tickling nerve
endings I didn’t even know I had.
The
result was a pleasure so intense as to be literally excruciating in
its scope. I now knew the true meaning of having something feel so
good that it hurt.

The room began to spin and then everything
went completely black.

I opened my eyes and the acoustically
textured ceiling filled my field of view. I felt spent in a way I
had never experienced before, and to say I was confused wasn’t
doing my current state any justice. I was completely addled. I was
in agony deep inside, but it was a pain born of emptiness. An ache
that called out, begging to be filled by the pleasure once
again.

With a groan, I started to sit up but felt a
firm pressure pushing me back down. I fell back and my head thumped
against the floor.

I blinked.

Now I not only saw the ceiling but Annalise
as well. She was leaning over me, one high-heel encased foot
pressing down on my chest and holding me to the floor.

“Tell Felicity I want it back,” she said.
“All of it.”

In that moment everything shifted, and the
three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a
bloom of light. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring
directly ahead as I had been at the beginning. I did notice,
however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy
sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the
moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that
blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I
knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to
get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the
onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.

The vision was still gone.

I stood up, rubbed my eyes, then turned and
started back toward the small room housing the vanity. I had only
made it two steps when I caught myself and came to a halt.

An unbelievably intense feeling
of
déjà vu
overwhelmed me as
recent memories flooded in. Though the hollowness still ached deep
inside, my rational brain pushed through the fog and assumed
control once again. I decided not to bother with a repeat of the
trip to the sink that I wasn’t even sure I had really made. I
simply needed to get out of here before leaving became
impossible.

Turning, I headed toward the front of the
room, skirting around the end of the bed then reaching the door in
two quick steps. Any sense of stealth and caution to which I had
earlier subscribed was now depleted. I pulled the door open and
stepped out into the night, almost forgetting to tug it closed
behind me. Starting up the walk, I broke into a jog, trying to put
distance between the scene and me as fast as I could.

I gave my watch a quick glance and figured
that I’d only been in the room for a little over twenty minutes. It
had seemed like much longer, but that was the way of things with
ethereal visions. They seemed to run by a clock all their own.

Nearing the office, I fished the room key out
of my jacket pocket and popped it through the mail slot, barely
stopping as I did so. Turning, I started on an angle across the lot
toward my car.

I had only made it a few steps when the
authoritative voice hit my ears.

“FREEZE! POLICE! LEMME SEE YA’ HANDS, RIGHT
NOW!”

M
y arms were starting to
go numb.

Of course, since my hands were still cuffed
behind my back, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by
that fact. I shifted slightly forward in the metal chair then
rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to
jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two
fingers on my right hand, grasped them with my left, and held
tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the
pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really
understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t
like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was
grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small
amount of relief from the biting restraints.

I glanced around at the blue-green walls in
search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this
chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed
at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By
that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply
didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my
shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but
another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this
futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was
bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see,
other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the
room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite
side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.

Settling back in, I hung my head and spent
some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with
more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even
want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your
brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set
about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own
accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.

As I sat staring at what I had decided was
most likely the fossilized remains of a coffee spill, I could hear
one of the ballasts on the fluorescent light fixture above me
humming toward extinction. It wasn’t terribly loud just yet, but I
suspected it would be in the not too distant future. Hopefully, I
would be out of here by then and wouldn’t be around to hear it when
it finally died. Of course, given my current predicament, there
were probably worse places I could be.

The officer who had brought me here
referred to the building as
The
Bureau
. I hadn’t seen much of it, but judging from
what I had glimpsed, I assumed this was where the detectives were
based as opposed to the uniformed officers. That wasn’t much of a
surprise either. Given that I had cajoled my way into a sealed
crime scene, it stood to reason that I had raised more than a few
eyebrows in all the wrong places. I’m sure I had probably managed
to make myself a suspect of some sort.

My sleep-deprived brain mulled that over for
a moment before forcing me to let out an involuntary harrumph. So
far, Felicity had been accused of the murders, new evidence pointed
to the real killer being a half-sister she never knew she had, and
now I was up to my neck in the wrong side of the investigation. I
suppose there was nothing quite like keeping it all in the
family.

I had just set my sights on identifying a
different stain a foot or so over from the first when the relative
silence of the interview room was broken by the sound of the door
swinging open. I looked up in the direction of the noise and saw a
disheveled looking man enter then push the door closed behind him.
He appeared to be somewhere around my own age, maybe a few years
older, and from the looks of him, I would have guessed he was
running on nearly the same amount of sleep as me.

He didn’t say anything initially. Instead he
simply took the few steps over to the metal table that was
positioned in front of me and stood there silently reading
something in a manila folder. After several languid moments, he
shut the folder and tossed it onto the surface of the table.

“Get up and face the back wall,” he
grunted.

I slowly rocked forward in the chair and
stood, then made the quarter turn in place, finding myself once
again staring at a panorama of putrid blue-green. It was a good
thing my stomach wasn’t bothering me at the moment, or I might have
added another stain to the carpet.

I heard the rattling of metal against metal
and felt the pressure encircling my left wrist ease up, then the
strain on my shoulders as well. After another rattle, I could feel
the bracelet being removed from my right.

“Thanks,” I muttered, not sure if I should
say anything or simply remain quiet.

He didn’t acknowledge my gratitude. Instead
he simply said, “Sit down and keep your hands on the table in front
of you where I can see ‘em.”

I complied and waited.

The detective pulled out the somewhat
matching chair on the other side of the table and took a seat. He
remained mute as he shuffled the file folder over in front of
himself then settled in against the backrest. After a long pause he
reached into his pocket, withdrew something, splayed it open and
tossed it on the table in front of me. It was my wallet, complete
with the toy badge pinned inside.

“Care to explain that, Mister Gant?” he
asked.

“It’s a long story,” I offered, knowing the
comment was stupid the moment it exited my mouth.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied.
“Neither are you.”

Keeping with my established pattern of inane
answers, I said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“You’d be surprised,” he grunted. “I’ve heard
it all.”