Crooked

I woke up early, before the sun was up, and slipped silently out of bed into my robe, leaving Jane asleep as I headed for the living room. I reached under the couch for the paraphernalia I needed and stepped onto the balcony. The last thing I wanted was for the numbing effect I gained from the drugs to wear off and allow me to accidentally slip inside Jane’s mind, seeing all of her dirty little secrets while she slept.

I looked to my right to see Nicole, Randy’s mother, smoking something from a pipe of her own on the adjacent balcony. We made eye contact and I stifled a laugh at the thought of what might be going through her head.

“Good morning,” I said to her.

“Morning Officer Watkins,” she replied, curiously.

“That son of yours is a good kid,” I said. “You’re doing something right.”

“Thanks,” she said, though it sounded more like a question. I looked away from her, back out over the little city, and continued to smoke my opium. Nicole, or Peach as she was apparently called at the club, was not going to snitch on me.

Later that morning, I began to make breakfast, and a strong pot of coffee. The aroma of rich, dark coffee and sizzling bacon was all that was needed to get Jane out of bed. She shuffled into the kitchen wearing just her underwear and one of my t-shirts.

“Good morning,” she said.

I poured her a cup of coffee and nodded toward the table where all the food was. “Did you sleep well?” I asked.

“Mmhmm,” she nodded.

“I don’t want this become awkward,” I said. “You know, when we’re at work. Or if we happen to spend any more leisure time together.”

“Leisure time?” Jane grinned.

“I’m not sure what to say, but I also don’t want to say nothing. Please talk so I don’t have to.” My stomach felt as if it were full of fluttering flies and I could not, for the life of me, get it to stop.

“This one time,” she began, “I went to a music festival, okay, and I got kind of drunk. Drunk enough to think I was basically Superwoman. I ended up sneaking backstage to find this band I liked, and they actually let me stay and hang out. I got my picture taken with them and everything, it was so much fun. Eventually, I was thrown out by security, and I’d scraped my knee and ripped my favorite jeans climbing over the fence. But I still think of it as one of the best days of my life.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said.

“What I mean is, I made a knee-jerk decision when I wasn’t feeling like myself, and I don’t regret it at all. Not one bit.”

I sighed. “Last night was…” I couldn’t find the words in the vast, thoughtless ghost land of my mind. Jane waited patiently, but I knew not what to say. I threw my hands in the air. “You were there. I don’t have to tell you what last night was.”

She laughed, a laugh that shattered any fear or nervousness that still held onto me regarding the events of the previous night. “It was fun,” she said. “I think it was obvious that I enjoyed myself.” Jane sipped from her coffee mug and walked toward the table. “And it’s okay if you don’t want it to happen again. I mean, if you think it was a mistake, it won’t hurt my feelings.”

I moved to stand in front of her again. “Absolutely not.”

Her eyes sparkled under her lashes as she looked up at me, a small, hopeful smile on her mouth. I bent down and kissed her gently. “I intend for last night to be a recurring event, unless you had other plans.”

Jane shook her head, her smile growing. “Nope. I’m okay with that.”

#

When I got into work that day, Adam had beaten me there. His face was screwed up with confusion as he watched Jane and I walk into the building together, laughing. I sat at my desk and tried to ignore him staring at me, but he kept leaning in closer and closer to my face until he was just inches away and it was making me crazy.

“What do you want?” I snapped.

“What were you talking to Jane about?” he asked.

“Men with motorcycles,” I replied. It was the truth.

“What?”

“I’m glad to see that you’re well rested today, Deputy,” I said, changing the subject. “I trust that we won’t have any issues like yesterday again.”

“No, ma’am,” Adam replied, slowly. “There’s something different about you today Watkins, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

I looked to see Jane coming toward me with a blue folder in her hand and a frantic look in her eye.

“There was a break-in last night at this church,” she said, handing the folder to me. “Captain Burke wants you and Bliss on it today.”

“Thank you,” I said, examining the file in my hands. I glanced up to watch Jane walking away for a moment, her shiny ponytail swinging back and forth, then I turned to Adam. “Let’s go.”

#

We arrived at the church approximately twenty minutes later. There was profanity spray painted in the grass near the front of the building, and on the walls outside. Windows were broken, the locks were busted off of the doors, and the entire entrance smelled like urine. Bliss and I searched through the church, stepping over torn and burnt bibles, waiting for an investigative crew to arrive. Some of the pews had things carved into them, nasty words or tiny drawings depicting horrible acts of violence. On the podium, a phrase had been written in Latin, in black permanent marker; invenire et occidere. My heart raced as I read the phrase, and looked below it to see a hastily drawn black symbol, exactly like the one on my wrist.

Everything felt as though it were in slow motion as I looked to Adam, and he looked back at me, having recognized the mark. He looked down at my wrist, covered with the sleeve of my jacket, and back up at my face, surely pale as if I’d seen a ghost. There was no way I could hide it.

“I have to leave,” I said.

“I’m going to need some straight answers from you, Lenore.” His eyes were wild, and a small part of me presumed that this was not the first time he’d had suspicions about me. Something in the way his lips tightened in a thin line, the way his nostrils twitched, caused a wave of shame to wash over me.

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean it,” he continued. He came closer to me, his face inches from mine, his glossy, sunset amber eyes looking right through me. “No more lies, no more games. I want the truth.”

“Tonight,” I said, hearing the faint sound of two large vehicles pulling into the drive of the church. “I promise you. Meet me tonight, and I will tell you everything.”

“I swear–” he began, but I cut him off.

“I will be there,” I insisted. “I will answer every question you have for me, just please drop it until tonight.”

#

I left immediately and drove straight home. Adam told the captain that I had become ill and needed the rest of the day to recover, but I went home to smoke opium in my bathtub. I skipped lunch, pacing around my apartment, making sure everything was in its proper place, trying to distract my mind from the inevitable conversation with Adam.

At two o’clock, I climbed onto the kitchen counter and smoked again. I sat with my feet dangling and my head resting inside the open cupboard for about seventeen minutes before I heard a knock on my door.

Just like all other knocks I hear, it sent me into a mental frenzy. However, unlike all the other knocks, this one really was Wesley. Somehow I felt it. I sat still, staring at the door knob, waiting for him to let himself in as I knew he would. As I gazed, I watched all three locks slowly turn. Of course he’d already made himself a spare set of keys to my apartment. Finally, the door creaked open.

“Come right in, Wes,” I said. “Make yourself at home, although it seems you’ve already done so without my permission.”

He entered and closed the door behind him. “Yes, in fact I have.”

“If you wanted to kill me, you would have done it by now,” I suggested. “So, what is it that you want from me? Just ask already, instead of driving me mad.”

“Why is it that I keep finding you like this?” he asked, gesturing toward the pipe lying on the counter next to me.

“You have awful timing, that is not my fault.”

“I need to have a serious conversation with you, Kat. And I cannot do so with your brain functioning improperly.”

“It’s Lenore,” I corrected him.

He rolled his eyes, walking across the floor like a great, long-legged spider. “Tell me, love, why are you doing drugs in the kitchen like an inner-city teen?”

“I’ve found that it dulls the abilities,” I replied, though it did much more than that. It relaxed my anxiety, calmed my nerves that were always buzzing with apprehension and the subtle fear that Wesley was standing right behind me, always. I lived in constant fear that I would turn too quickly and see him, hovering over my shoulder, his eyes full of rage.

“Dulls the abilities?” Wesley snorted. “Why? Why, in all of Hell’s darkest caverns of punishment, would you ever do such a thing?”

“It makes me feel normal.”

“Normal?” His voice grew louder. “You are not normal, darling, and you never were. You never will be, no matter how hard you try, so you may as well give up that dream before you start to believe it.”

“I can be normal,” I yelled back at him. “With this, I can be a regular person, with trivial personal dramas, and ordinary friends who wouldn’t dream of doing the things you’ve done to me.”

“You fool,” he spat. “You do not belong to the ordinary, you are extraordinary. You were born that way, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. The longer you resist it, the harder it will be to control, you know that better than anyone. You can’t hide from your true self forever, Kat.”

“It’s Lenore,” I said again, this time through gritted teeth.

“Oh, screw you,” he screamed, “it is not. You, Kat, are capable of incredible things, and you’re shitting on it all. You’re shitting on your destiny, on all those years spent training and becoming as powerful as you are. You’re flushing your entire life down the drain, making a mockery of all the lives lost at your hands. Those people you killed, they died for nothing if you continue living in this falsehood.”

“I don’t care, Wesley.” I could feel the darkness inside me closing in, enveloping me in the safety and blackness of my own mind. “It’s better to let that life drift away and start a new one. In this life, I don’t have to listen. I don’t have to hear what they all think of me, just what they tell me. I don’t care to hear their thoughts, and I don’t care about the life I’ve wasted. I just don’t care.”

“Well I do. I watched you grow, watched you struggle and succeed. I saw every step of the battle you fought to become who you are, what you are. And I can’t stand here and watch you throw it all away. And for what? An ordinary existence in an ordinary world. You deserve better than that.” He was standing far too close to me, now, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off of his body. It made my skin crawl, the back of my throat tighten.

“I deserve nothing,” I responded. “I deserve to die a slow and painful death, at best. I’ve worked so hard to get past the nonsense that was shoved down my throat all those years, and I’m not turning back any time soon. So if that’s what you came here to do, to bring me back with you, then you’re wasting your time.”

“You’re telling me,” he said, practically in a whisper as he inched toward me, “that you’ve found a way to shut it all off? You’re telling me that, in a span of only four short years, you’ve found a way to suppress all those feelings, all of those thoughts and urges that you’ve been conditioned to respond to since you were a child? You have found the secret to erasing a lifetime of being molded into a weapon, wiping out all of the evil that’s been pumped into your brain?”

“I am not evil,” I spat.

“Oh yes you are, sweetheart,” Wesley said, with poison in his voice. “You’ve taken almost a hundred lives, some of them innocent. And now you sit here, dressed up in your little costume, pretending to be a hero. But I know the truth.”

“I’ve saved people.”

“I’m sure not near as many as you’ve murdered in cold blood.”

“Get out.” I tried to remain calm, knowing that Wesley wanted me to explode more than anything. He wanted me to let go of my composure and attack him, reveal my true nature, show who I truly was. But I wouldn’t be manipulated, not by him, not anymore.

“But you haven’t heard the rest of my pitch,” he smirked.

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. I’m not going anywhere with you, especially not back to Vic and the rest of them.”

“Vic’s dead.”

My heart must have stopped for at least thirty seconds. It felt as though I’d been punched right in the diaphragm, all the air knocked out of my body. I was soaring through the vacuum of space, or so I thought, and the room spun around me.

“You really didn’t know?” Wes asked.

“How would I know?”

“He’s dead,” Wes shrugged, “I don’t know, I guess I thought you’d read it in the paper or something of the sort. But then again, I buried him in an unmarked grave in the mountains, so it wouldn’t be in the papers, would it? He’s been dead quite a while, almost six months now.”

“I don’t care.” I shook my head, remembering that I was waiting for him to leave.

“We’re leaderless, now. Free will and all that, which is why I’m here. We want you back, Kat. You’re part of the family, it doesn’t feel right without you.”

“I’m not coming back with you,” I growled. “Leave now, or I’ll bury you in an unmarked grave in the mountains… Alive.”

He smirked. “As you wish.” Wesley started toward the door, stopping short to throw one last comment at me before leaving. “You’ll never be a normal person, Kat. And you will never, ever be rid of me.”

#

By the time I arrived at the restaurant, only two minutes late, Adam had already consumed enough alcohol to stun a small horse. But he was still somehow coherent and seemed adamant on hearing what I had to say. I wasn’t all that surprised to hear that he’d been investigating me a little bit on his own for the last few months.

“I found it strange that you were practically non-existent before coming to work at the station,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me, but down at his dripping glass of beer. “At first, it was just general curiosity. You know, you Google someone because you’re curious, and then you either turn up something strange or nothing at all. And in your case, I turned up less than nothing.” He sighed heavily before finally lifting his gaze to look at me. His eyelids were drooping heavily. “I can’t even find a birth certificate, Lenore. It’s like you don’t even exist.”

“I was born under a different name,” I told him. It was true. Most of what I was about to tell him was true, though I needed to keep a lot of details out of it. “When I was adopted, at age six, I changed my name. My first name, as well as the family name. I changed it all again when I was emancipated at sixteen.”

Adam continued to frown at me, and I wasn’t sure if he believed any of this, but I hoped he would. I felt a clawing panic rising in my chest at the thought of him dismissing my explanation and turning me into the Captain.

“The family who adopted me were so evil,” I continued. “They were very cruel to me, and I was determined that they never find me. I educated myself and worked under the table to avoid any sort of documentation.”

“And what about the tattoo?” He reached forward and grabbed my hand, gently, pushing up the sleeve of my jacket to reveal the black mark. There it was, just beneath the thumb on the inside of my wrist, a small, swirling symbol that meant one thing and one thing only; Monster.

“It’s a gang symbol,” I said. It wasn’t entirely untrue, I supposed. “As a teenager, struggling to find consistent work and a place to live, I fell in with the wrong crowd. I got this mark, and joined them in all their crimes. It was a mistake.” Adam swallowed a big mouthful of beer. “I became a police officer as an attempt to make up for my mistakes, and was just as surprised as you were upon seeing that particular symbol marking a crime scene earlier today. I’m so sorry to have kept these things from you, but I was only trying to remain safe. I’ve been scared to death that they’ll find me, and it looks like they finally have.”

“And that’s the truth?” said Adam. “That’s all of it?” I could tell that he was still mulling it over in his mind. He wanted to believe me, because he liked me, but he was also a cop and had to follow his instincts.

“There’s something else,” I continued. I felt awful for telling him so many lies, and I needed to be truly honest with him now. “The man who’s behind the church vandalism is the same man responsible for the ordeal with the Shaw sisters. He’s been doing what he can to get my attention, to try to get me to come back.”

“To the gang?”

I nodded. “Yes. And I need you to help me find him, before he hurts someone else. He’s already broken into my apartment more than once.”

“He has?” Adam gasped. “Watkins, what the hell? Why would you not tell me if someone broke into your apartment?”

“This man is very, very dangerous, Bliss.”

“Then tell me who he is, and I’ll go get him.”

“I’m afraid it’s not that easy,” I said. “I know him as Wesley, but he goes by many names, as I did. I don’t know where to find him, but I know I can.” He shook his head, not ready to take my words seriously just yet. “Please trust me, Adam.”

“Trust you?” he frowned. “I don’t even know your real name.”

I hesitated a moment, remembering the rule; I was not allowed to tell anyone my name. I hadn’t spoken, heard, or even thought of my name since I was six years old. Forget your name, Vic had said. Forget who you were and who you thought you’d become. My little monsters choose their own names.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said, “but if it makes you feel better… When I was born, my mother named me Lyla Thomas.”