Into the Hollow (Experiment in Terror #6) Read online

  “I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” I told her honestly. “It’s time for me to leave. To move out. I’m fucking nearing spinsterhood anyway, it’s getting pretty sad that I’m still here.”

  “No…don’t go,” she pleaded with those round blue spheres. Her plea was weak though and I knew she was on board with the idea.

  “If I stay here, I’ll just get worse. How can I function being paranoid as hell at each turn? I couldn’t. I can’t live here, with her, worrying about the next time I fuck up. I might be fine now, but am I ever really all there, especially now that I’m, what, a bloody telepath? This shit isn’t leaving me anytime soon and we both know it. I might not have a demon on my back but I can guarantee I’m not getting rid of my ghosts anytime soon.”

  She grew quiet and squeezed my hand back, her eyes dropping to the bed. We sat in silence for a minute, both in our own heads. She gave me no indication that I was in hers.

  Finally she pointed out, “But you don’t have a job. You don’t have any money. How are you going to move out?”

  I let out a deep breath. “I don’t know. But I have to leave. And soon.”

  “You could move in with Maximus,” she suggested innocently.

  I shot her a dirty look. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  She threw up her hands in surrender. “OK, well before you bite my head off just hear me out.”

  I didn’t want to but she continued on, “Look, we’re both not a fan of his. I know I wouldn’t mind shoving my curling iron up his ass and turning it to eleven. But aside from that, he did do you a favor today.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but she shushed me. “And I know it was a weak favor and that most of this is his fault and that he never had your back and yadda yadda yadda and OK, I really hate him too. But I wouldn’t suggest going with him if I didn’t think it would be better than you staying here. Move in with him, get a job and move out.”

  “No way,” I said, crossing my arms. “Not happening. Not ever fucking happening. And also, who the hell says he’d want me crashing his stupid apartment?”

  She gave me a wry smile. “Perry, it’s pretty obvious he still has a hard-on for you.”

  “Oh Ada,” I smacked her arm. “Don’t say things like ‘hard-on’ it grosses me out to hear it from you.”

  “Fine,” she said, taking her arm away from me. “I guess you do have one other option.”

  I had a queer tightening in my chest and could barely eke out the word, “What?”

  She didn’t say anything. She fished her phone out of her pocket and started to text something.

  “Ada!” I cried out. “What is the other option?”

  She put the phone down and smiled at me. She gestured to my window with her head.

  “It’s outside.”

  My legs felt like they were encased in cement. I stared at her, bewildered, my mind racing on about something I both did and did not want to think about.

  “Go on,” she said more urgently.

  I slowly got off my bed and eased my way over to the window. My heart thumped hard against my chest and the blood filtered out of my head.

  Outside, across the street, a black Highlander was running, its exhaust floating in the night.

  “How the…” I said, barely find the words.

  She got up and joined me by the window. “Maximus went to bail him out earlier. He’s still a twat, of course, but at least Dex isn’t jail anymore. It’s not like the charges were going to stick anyway.”

  I took my eyes off of the sight of Dex’s car, my heart awkwardly tumbling over itself at the thought of him outside, and looked at her incredulously.

  “How did you know? Did you plan for this to happen?”

  She grinned. “Remember that whole sometimes hearing your thoughts thing we were just trying out? I already knew you were thinking of making a run for it. Dex doesn’t know, I just told him to come here right after Maximus got out. I have a feeling though, let’s call it a hunch, that he’s got a hard,” she paused, catching my eyes flashing, “er, soft spot for you too.”

  I didn’t know what to think about that. Looking out at Dex’s car, and the answer she had given me, all I did know is that my life was – yet again - about to change in an incredibly messy way.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Well?” prodded Ada as I stood at the window. “Go say hello.”

  “Where’s mom and dad?” I asked, not taking my eyes off of the running vehicle, feeling like my chest was being torn in two different directions.

  “I think dad’s still downstairs watching Law & Order. I don’t think he’d be too thrilled to see you going out the door right now.”

  I nodded. “The window it is.”

  I put my hands underneath the edge and pushed it open. A cold blast of late February wind coated me in seconds and I felt Ada jamming a retro Kyuss hoodie into my hands.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled and quickly slipped it on along with my Chucks. I was half-way out the window, ready to put my feet on the sloping roof below when Ada called out, “Hey do you think I can take over your room when you’re gone?”

  I shot her a look.

  She shrugged. “What if I meet a guy and have to sneak out too? It’s only fair you know.”

  I sighed and couldn’t help but smile. “Sure.”

  “Awesome. Well, don’t be too long…you never know if they’ll want to check on you,” she warned, heading toward my door.

  I nodded and stepped onto the roof. I was lucky that it was such an easy escape route. When I was younger I used to sneak out all the time. In the past few weeks the route had been used twice; once when a demon had led me up there, the other when Dex came in through my window to rescue me. You know, the usual stuff.

  Now he was back. And I wasn’t sure if I was going to let him rescue me again. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do about anything. I had two options and neither looked very promising.

  I made it to the tree at the end of the roof and shimmied clumsily down it, my body still a bit sore from the trauma of the last few weeks. The minute I felt the ground beneath my feet, a trembling started around my heart and radiated outward. I was nervous. I was damn nervous. I couldn’t find the strength to walk away from the tree and onto the street.

  It’s just Dex, I told myself. He’s not worth having a panic attack over.

  And yet my lungs were constricting.

  I knew it was just Dex but that was the problem. I didn’t know which Dex I had or which Dex I wanted, if any of them. That’s where the nerves came from. My uncertainty. Everything had changed. And changed again. One second I wanted to run into his arms and thank him for saving my life. Then in the next second I remembered what had happened between us. I remembered the pain, the darkness, the hell I went through. I knew it wasn’t fair to blame him for demon possession but sometimes I found myself cursing him for it. If he hadn’t left me like he did, had sex with me and just used me like some old dishcloth, I wouldn’t have broken in half. I wouldn’t have seeped open and left that space for something else to come in.

  And the miscarriage. What, for one very brief time, had been a baby. That killed me in ways I never thought it would. I never thought much about kids and lord knows twenty-three is too young for me to be having them but…it really ripped at something deep inside, something I never thought I had. It was a weird sense of loss and something I couldn’t even explain.

  You’d think I’d be used to that, the unexplainable. But when it came to my feelings, when I couldn’t figure out what they even were, that’s when I was really scared. That’s when my nerves would clamp up my throat, squeeze my lungs and make me feel that standing underneath a bare tree was the safest, smartest option for me. I wasn’t in the house, I wasn’t in his car. I was just me. In-between.

  Eventually though, I found my footing. Some perverse need to choose. I walked out from under the broken canopy and made my way onto the street. There was the car up ahead, parked on the side of the ro
ad, facing the other direction, like he had driven past the house first, then turned around at the end. Funny to think that had happened while Ada and I were attempting to be telepathic inside my bedroom.

  I stepped quietly, afraid my feet would echo down the street and be carried off by the breeze and into the house. I knew my parents would flip the fuck out if they knew what I was doing. I kept going.

  I wasn’t far from the car when the driver’s door flung open. My insides whirled feverishly, my breath halting. In that moment I realized he still had that power over me, to make my body react when my mind wanted to turn away, and I hated him for it.

  Dex stepped out, almost in a hurry. I hadn’t realized I had stopped where I was and was just standing on the road, staring at him in a hiccup of time. I only had a few seconds to take him in, his black cargo jacket, his messy, wind-tossed hair and beautifully scruffy face, the flash of emotion in his dark eyes, buried under the furrow of his brow.

  Then he was running toward me and for a moment I thought maybe something was wrong and that I should run too. Then I thought maybe something was right and I should run anyway.

  He ran to me and engulfed me in his arms, holding me tight to him, raising me a few inches above the ground. I was caught so off-guard, I could only let him hold me. My breath was gone, squeezed out from the intensity of his hug. I didn’t think I could hug him back even if I wanted to.

  He held me like that, my feet dangling, his strong arms keeping me as close to him as possible. His face buried in my neck and his familiar smell draped over me like a comforting blanket while his breath tickled my skin until my hairs stood on end. I decided to ignore my brain for a second and just enjoyed the sense of being completely embraced.

  “Perry,” he mumbled, his lips grazing my throat while he spoke. “Perry...”

  He never finished his sentence. Instead he eventually pulled his face away, my skin still feeling hot from his contact, and lowered me to the ground. He kept his hands on my arms, keeping me in place, as if he was afraid I’d run away. With his back to the streetlight, his face was encased in shadows but I could still see his eyes glinting. I couldn’t read them except that they looked slightly feverish.

  I cleared my throat. “Hi.”

  A quick smile flashed across his lips. “I’m sorry for just dropping by like this, I just had to see you. I was worried sick.”

  I smiled wryly. “You were worried sick about me? You got carted off to jail.”

  “You got carted off to the hospital,” he said gruffly. I noticed then he was holding my hands in his and squeezing them. I eyed them with uncertainty and he let go, taking a step back from me as he did so, as if he was only just noticing he was intruding in my personal space.

  “I got out,” I said reassuringly. “And apparently so did you.”

  He glanced briefly over my head at my house then said to me, “Look, can we go in the car and talk? I promise not to keep you long.”

  I nodded and followed him back to the car, wondering what it was that he wanted, wondering how his shoulders got so much broader. I hopped in the passenger side and was met with a rush of warmth from the heater.

  I don’t know why things felt awkward between us when the last time I had seen him, he was holding onto me, promising that they’d never take me. Of course, that didn’t work and I didn’t fault him for that. But being apart again, even for just a few days, reminded me of how much had changed between us. And sitting in the dark car, only the familiar glow of the console lighting us up, there was a discomfort in my seat. I wondered if he felt the same.

  I tried not to study his face but now that I could see it clearly, it was hard not to. There was a line of worry on his forehead and his brown eyes were searching my face, alternating between washes of sorrow and apprehension. He never lost that unnerving way he looked at me – that would always be Dex. I just hoped he wouldn’t look too deep. I felt the walls around me going up slowly, brick by pasted brick.

  Finally, I looked away and studied the dashboard as if it were suddenly fascinating.

  “I’m surprised the car is still holding up,” I remarked, remembering how it had crashed into a tree only days before, bashing the front side and the headlight. It almost hurt to remember when I was wrapped in duct tape, with a terrible darkness inside me trying to get out.

  “I’ll get it fixed when I go back home.”

  “When are you going?” I asked, keeping my voice light, still avoiding his eyes.

  I felt him pause, growing tense for a second, and I quickly added, “Not that I’m trying to get you to leave.”

  His smile was tight. “Tomorrow, probably. I just…wanted to see how you were doing. You look better.”

  “Do I?” I looked down. “I thought I looked slimmer in the duct tape.”

  Again, that pained smile. “How are you feeling?”

  I shrugged. “I’m tired. Sore, still.”

  He nodded absently, his thoughts elsewhere. I wanted to tell him what Ada and I had discovered but for some reason I couldn’t find the words. It was ludicrous but Dex was always the one to believe me when no one else would.

  I opened my mouth to give it a shot, but he beat me to it and said, “Listen…”

  He looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. The atmosphere in the car changed dramatically from the strange awkwardness to full-on jangled nerves. I watched him closely. He did in fact look really nervous, biting his lip, blinking fast and at nothing.

  “What?” I asked.

  I could hear his breathing intensify.

  “You need to get out of that house.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out we were on the same page, but I was. I tried to hide it by eyeing him uncertainly.

  “What do you mean?”

  He lowered his eyes and voice. “You know what I mean. Perry, you can’t stay there anymore. After everything that’s happened…it’s not safe.”

  “The demon is gone.”

  “Your parents aren’t. And frankly, my dear, I wouldn’t be surprised if some other supernatural hitchhiker came and found a ride through you. You’re too weak-”

  I glared at him. “I am not weak.”

  He looked at me steadily. “You’re the strongest woman I have ever known. Ever. But it, they, found a way in. I can’t risk that happening again. And like hell I’m going to let you stay in a house where your parents are jonesing to put you away like some animal.”

  “I wasn’t aware you had control over my life.”

  He sighed and leaned in closer. “I know you’re still angry-”

  “Huh!” I exclaimed, folding my arms. But he quickly went on.

  “But putting that aside for a moment,” he continued, “you know you can’t stay there. I know you know it. I know your sister knows it. Your grandmother sure knows it. We all do.”

  “Well what do you suggest I do then?” I asked carefully.

  He bit his lip, a gesture I used to find adorable. Now, it didn’t do anything for me. Not much, anyway. He let his eyes roam out along the empty street. Either he was deep in thought or biding his time.

  Finally, he asked, “Did you like Seattle?”

  I sucked in my breath. He wasn’t asking me what I thought he was asking me…was he?

  His eyes were guarded in the dark but I could read sincerity on his expressive forehead, like part of him was taking a chance that the other part didn’t dare take.

  “What?”

  There he went, biting his lip again. He ran a hand through his thick hair, giving the ends a bit of a tug. I remembered tugging at that hair, vividly.

  “I mean,” he ventured, looking at me with a hint of anxiety, “I think you should come live with me. In my apartment. In Seattle.”

  Now, I know it was just what Ada and I had been discussing but I was not prepared to hear the offer come from his own mouth. Dex was asking me to move in with him? What the hell kind of sorcery was this?

  He quickly continued, “I don’t mea
n like you have to be my permanent roommate or anything. Just until you get on your feet. It can be a place for you to stay in the interim. Or longer, you know, if you wanted to.”

  I looked away from him, my eyes widening, heartrate speeding up. This was all kinds of right and wrong. Especially wrong. So much wrong.

  “Perry?”

  I shook my head and struggled for words. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Saying yes would be a start.”

  “I need to think about this…”

  “Please, don’t think long.” His voice had dropped another register and was laced with a kind of urgency that made my skin feel tight.

  He reached over and grabbed my hand and I let him. I looked down at it, at his long, strong fingers wrapping around mine, feeling like his hand was different in some way. But that was crazy. It wasn’t. He was still cocky, self-assured Dex…asking me something I never, ever dreamed possible.

  I knew my choices but I didn’t have to like them. If I went with Dex, I knew I’d be safe. But would my heart? How could I ever trust him again? How could I think that living with him, even as his roommate, even for a short while, wouldn’t be emotionally damaging in some way? After everything that had happened to me, I was sick of my heart being stomped on and would do whatever I could to prevent that situation from happening again.

  But then there was Maximus. He was less messy for my emotional well-being. But let’s face it, it’s not like there was nothing between us. I had sex with the man. Several times. And no, I wasn’t really in my right mind when I did it, but it still happened. It still made things awkward. It still put another well-hung elephant in the room. Not to mention that I didn’t really trust Maximus. Sure he bailed out Dex, but that only made me question why? At times he seemed to be my greatest supporter yet he could rat me out to my parents in a heartbeat. I just didn’t know where I stood – with either of them.

  Dex squeezed my hand hard, bringing me back to earth.

  “Don’t you dare move in with Maximus,” he warned, his eyes shining dangerously.

  “What?” I exclaimed. Could he hear me thinking? “Why did you say that?”