The Origin (35 page)

Without warning, Daniel felt a meaty arm snake around his neck. “Infected?” John sneered, squeezing until Daniel thought his head would pop. “Infected with invisibility?”

“It’s a long story,” Daniel said before grabbing John’s arms, folding forward and hurling John across the room once again. The previously untouched chintzy mirror on the wall cracked and fell to the ground, shattering into large, jagged pieces. A shard suddenly rose from the pile and shot across the room, sending Daniel stumbling backwards as the glass embedded itself into the corner of his right eye. Before he could pull the offending object out, he felt another fragment bury itself into his arm and then another in his thigh.

“Show yourself, you coward!” Daniel shouted, throwing punches wildly around the room. “Fight like a man.”

“I can’t show myself, you asshole!” came the angry reply. A second later, Daniel doubled over as a large piece of the mirror was rammed into his stomach by the invisible force, causing blood to immediately bloom on his grey Rolling Stones t-shirt. The shard twisted around cruelly, forcing Daniel to his knees, his pain tolerance shot to hell.

“This was my favorite shirt, you dick!” he cried. As he flung his fists out hopelessly, he felt another stab on the side of his neck and instinctively reached up to staunch the blood loss, a scream of agony stuck in his throat. A moment later, he was stabbed again on the other jugular vein, and then one more shard of glass was imbedded at the base of his spine.

Daniel fell to the floor, woozy from the blood loss and finding the complete lack of sensation on the lower half of his body a welcome change. Through his rapidly blurring vision, he saw John’s blood-soaked arm float closer, a large sliver of the mirror still clutched in his hand. Daniel could only watch with detached fascination as both his wrists were slit, creating two more crimson geysers. From a far away place he wondered if bleeding out was really the manner in which he’d die, if it could even be that easy.

He sensed John crouching nearby as his body began to twitch from the blood loss. “I don’t know how you survived last time, but you had better die this time,” John said and tossed the glass aside. “Then we’ll be even.”

Daniel closed his eyes, wanting nothing more than to finally rest and rid the world of an infectious freak. After all, dying was the only way he could guarantee that nobody else would contract his virus.

But even as he contemplated embracing death, he could sense the blood stop gushing from his wounds, could feel his skin starting to knit itself back together. Because even if his mind had given up, his damn body was still determined to survive.

As he cursed his DNA for the thousandth time, a memory of almond-shaped eyes flashed through his mind and pulled him back from the brink of hopelessness. After a few moments, Daniel opened his eyes and, with great effort, pushed himself up off the blood-drenched carpet. He stumbled a bit, still a little groggy but otherwise rapidly healing, and walked to the tiny bathroom where he could hear John murmuring. He peered around the corner and saw a bloody face in the mirror, a crimson mask smiling at its macabre reflection.

“Hello there, my brother. God, I’ve missed your face,” John said, touching his image in the glass. His other bloodied hand began a swiping motion in the air, and slowly the reflection of a red chest began to appear as well. “Come back to me, Rap. I need you with me,” he said with a groan.

Daniel hands clenched at his sides. “You sick son of a bitch.”

John spun around, colliding with the open door in his haste. “That’s not… How…” he breathed, grasping the laminate counter behind him in shock. “What the hell are you?”

Disgusted and worried about the repercussions of his infectious blood slathered all over his enemy, Daniel charged swiftly, pushing John into the tub, the plastic curtain ripping as both men fell. With one hand holding John down, Daniel grabbed the faucet handle and turned the shower on full, scalding blast.

John screamed in fury as the water hit him, the blood running off his face. He punched and kicked but Daniel was not deterred, impressed even that the water was at a searing temperature for a motel shower. He watched with satisfaction as the red-tinged water swirled down the drain.

“You’ve tried to kill me twice now. We’re even there,” he said through his teeth as his hands crept towards John’s neck. “But you hurt Olivia. So you have to die.”

“Olivia? King?”

“Don’t you dare say her name!” Daniel bellowed, wrapping his fingers around John’s burly neck, itching to squeeze the breath out of him. He could have ended the man’s life in a split second, but John still needed to know the reason why he was now going to die.

The invisible man continued to struggle but managed to rasp, “You know her?”

“Know her?” He pounded the back of John’s head into the tub. “I fucking love her!”

Daniel paused, momentarily unclenching his fingers as his words ricocheted around in his head.
I love her
, he thought plainly, as if the words had been inside him all along.
Too bad she’ll never know.

John coughed. “Then why the hell are you leaving her?” He fumbled around and managed to turn the faucet off, instantly filling the bathroom with thick silence.

Torn from his thoughts, Daniel turned back to his adversary and continued to squeeze the life out of him once more. “None of your business.”

“She’s better off without you,” John croaked. Finally, after several long moments, he stopped struggling as his life ebbed away through the hands of his brother’s killer.

Daniel stumbled out of the bathtub and fell onto the chipped laminate floor. He scrambled backwards, staring at the tub and the invisible dead man within, but his brain refused to dwell on what he’d done. Only John’s final words pierced his dense thoughts:
She’s better off without you.
No truer words had ever come out of that bastard’s mouth.

Daniel finally rose from the floor and began to pack his duffel bag at full tilt, wanting nothing more than to put distance between him and yet another dead body as quickly as possible. Realizing that the blood on the floor and walls would be a near impossible task to clean, he grabbed the half bottle of Jack Daniels on the bedside table and emptied it over the bloody carpet.

The room was already beginning to burn, the flames sliding across the carpet and licking at the curtains, before Daniel closed the door behind him. And as he heaved his duffel bag over his shoulder and walked off into the dark night, he felt a sense of relief sweep over him, washing away all of his previous worries. Olivia would be safe from John
Mathers
now, this much he could say with some certainty. He might not be good enough for her, but at least he could leave with the knowledge that he did his best to keep the woman he loved from harm.

Still, his relief was short-lived for he knew that her face would never stop haunting his dreams and his every thought. He wouldn’t allow it. The constant reminder of his loss would be his atonement – however inadequate – for the lives he’d taken, and the knowledge that he was abandoning her was a pain he would have to suffer alone. And as he made his way on foot towards the airport, his heart weighed heavy in his chest once again, just the way he preferred it.

After all, never does a villain of the story get a happily ever after.

“I never imagined it could be this painful.”

Dr. Kara
Vogele
, PhD, leaned over, a pen in one hand and a pad of yellow paper in the other. “Would you mind elaborating?”

Olivia stared into space. “Being abandoned again.” Her voice broke, echoing the sound that her heart was making. “I honestly thought it would hurt less the second time around.”

“Your mother being the first?”

She gave a nod.

“And who was the second?”

She found it hard to breathe, to utter those words that will make it true. “Daniel. He’s gone.”

Dr.
Vogele
scribbled on her pad. “Can you tell me what happened from the start of the relationship?”

Olivia shook her head, unable to bear thinking about the beginning, and risk reliving the entire wonderful, doomed affair. So she began from the beginning of the end, speaking of the day when Daniel had asked her to flee with him and ending with his mysterious disappearance from the ballet.

“And you said you’d go with him, even though you weren’t sure he loved you?”

“At the time, I was sure he did. At least, on some level. He’s not the kind of guy who lets people get close to him. So when he said he cared about me, I believed him.”

“And now?”

She thought back to the crumpled goodbye note that sat at the bottom of the trashcan in her bathroom. “He said he left for me. For my own good.”

“And you don’t believe him?”

“I don’t know anymore, Kara. I mean, how can deserting me be for my own good?” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I went to his apartment again this morning, because I thought it might have been just a dream, but it was still empty. And then I had a panic attack right there in the middle of his living room. I really thought I was dying.” She clamped her mouth shut and stopped short of saying that she was actually disappointed when she’d continued to breathe.

Vogele
wrote furiously for a few moments then earned her steep hourly rate by asking, “Are you having suicidal thoughts, Olivia?”

It took her a while to summon a reply. “I’m not actively trying to kill myself, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And passively?”

Olivia blinked slowly, her eyelids suddenly becoming heavier. “I don’t know.”

“If someone came along and tried to kill you right now, would you stop them?”

“I don’t know.”

The doctor leaned close once again, concern written all over her middle-aged face. “Olivia, this worries me. You realize that this is not healthy, don’t you?”

She took a deep breath and imagined coating her heart with a candy shell, but no matter how hard she tried, the hurt would not remain contained inside. “I can deal with it, Kara.”

Dr.
Vogele
was silent for a long time, not writing, just considering Olivia through her brown horn-rimmed glasses. Finally, she said, “You don’t always have to
deal with it
on your own, Olivia. That’s what I’m here for. You don’t have to be composed all the time.”

“I do! I have nobody but myself in this world.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “I have to take care of myself. I can’t be weak like her.”

Dr.
Vogele
sighed and took off her glasses. “You’re a lot like your mother, Olivia. But the one thing you are not is weak. You know that.”

“And what if I am?”

“You’re not. I know that for a fact.” She paused. “Did she ever tell you that she used to see me as well?”

Olivia shook her head, her breath coming faster at the memory of her mother, at the very idea that she, too, needed a psychiatrist. “No. She and I didn’t talk a lot in the last year of her life. We were both just so busy. I didn’t know she was struggling…”

“You have to let yourself off the hook, Olivia. It wasn’t your fault she committed suicide.”

Olivia closed her eyes, unable to verbalize the thoughts in her head. She was only equipped to deal with one crisis at a time. To stave off another panic attack, she pictured Daniel at the foot of the Chrysler Building, his eyes boring into hers as he’d kissed her forehead.

Please don’t change your mind,
he had said, looking as if he genuinely couldn’t bear to live without her.

Dr.
Vogele
put her glasses back on and retrieved her writing tools. “Okay, let’s change the subject. What about Daniel. What would you say to him if you saw him right now?”

The corners of her eyes began to sting and she knew that the tears would flow if she didn’t try and tune out all tender thoughts of Daniel. She took a deep breath and eyed her therapist steadily. “I would tell him that he is a bastard for leaving me behind.”

“But remember, from the beginning, you said he wasn’t someone you could keep around for long. You knew he wasn’t going to stay.”

“Yes, I said that.” Yet she had foolishly held onto the hope that Daniel might have been the one person who would stop and linger amidst the revolving door of people in her life. “I was stupid to get my hopes up.”

“Is there anything else you would say to him?”

Olivia nodded, battling the tears that blurred her vision, making her see the world in nothing but shades of charcoal. “I would tell him that he made a mistake in leaving because, if he returns, I won’t be that same person he abandoned.”

Olivia laid her head on the back of the couch and, with her eyes closed, tried to commit to memory each word they’d said, each kiss they’d shared, wanting to remember him as he was; the secretive, formidable, passionate force of nature that left as quickly as he came. And, though it took a while, by the time the tears dried into nothing but tracks of salt on her cheeks, she had finally found the will to seal away those memories.

She felt a tiny shift inside and by the time she opened her violet eyes, she could say with some certainty that she would recover in time. But no, she would never again be that same hopeful, naive person that Daniel Johnson willingly left behind. She had changed, he had made sure of that.