I stared back at my wife without saying a word, my brain desperately trying to process the contradictory information it has just been fed.
“I must not be awake,” I finally told her with a shake of my head. “I could have sworn you just said you were dying for a cigarette.”
“I did,” she replied with a shallow nod.
“How could you possibly… I mean… Come on…” I stuttered. “You’ve never even smoked one.”
“Well… I did once. In college. Sort of.”
“How did you ‘sort of’ smoke a cigarette?”
“I was at a party. I’d had too much to drink and, well, I just took a puff from a friend’s cigarette. Then I coughed myself silly and almost threw up.”
“One puff, and it made you sick,” I echoed. “That still makes my point. If you’ve only ever had just one puff, and that made you sick, then how could you possibly be craving one?”
She shrugged, the curious fear still in her eyes. “I don’t know. All I can say is that I’m pretty sure I want a cigarette. That’s what keeps going through my mind, anyway.”
The concern that had plagued me earlier in the day now returned full force.
Up until this morning, I’d had every indication that the sphere of protection I had placed around Felicity was doing its job, or so I thought. But now, I was starting to see some pretty hard evidence that maybe it wasn’t. She was quite obviously being affected by something preternatural; there was absolutely no denying it. I mean, first the sexual aggression, and now here she was, sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night swilling rum as if it were water.
Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure just how much of an issue the drinking was in and of itself. As petite as she was, she could drink virtually anyone under the table. She’d done it to both Ben and me on more than one occasion. Still, the fact that she was actually craving alcohol wasn’t good, and her choice of liquor was certainly a red flag as well. She didn’t care for rum at all. In fact, the one time I’d seen her take a drink of it-before this moment that is-she had literally spit it back out.
And now, to be telling me she wanted a cigarette-this coming from a woman who didn’t allow smoking in our house and could even be more militant about it than a reformed smoker?
No, something was definitely wrong with this picture. It wasn’t just blurry around the edges; it was completely out of focus.
Adding yet another flaw to the already screwed up family portrait was the fact that my ethereal headache was maintaining its rhythmic thud in the back of my skull. Thankfully, for the moment it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, but I was already starting to “see” things, as evidenced by the episode in the bathroom. I knew that could only mean that an escalation was a mere step or two down the road.
Whatever was happening, it was a good bet that it was all connected. Unfortunately, I was desperately afraid I knew what at least part of it meant.
“I think maybe I need to call Ben,” I announced.
Felicity gave her head a quick shake as she furrowed her brow. “What makes you think he’ll know?”
I cocked my head and gave her a suspicious look. “Know what?”
“About Wentworth’s habits,” she replied. “You’re wanting to find out if Hammond Wentworth was a smoker and a rum drinker, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“I was already thinking the same thing myself,” she offered. “You think I’m channeling him, don’t you?”
“Actually, that’s what I’m hoping for, but I don’t know if we’ll be that lucky.”
“Aye, what do you mean lucky?” she asked incredulously. “I don’t want to go through this again. It was bad enough before…”
I countered with my own query. “Well let me ask you this: Can you think of another explanation for these sudden cravings you’re having?”
“Well… No… Not really,” she replied hesitantly. “But, Gods…”
“Well, actually I can, and I think you’d like it even less.”
“What is it then?”
The old adage “open mouth, insert foot” suddenly came to mind. I knew for certain that the name resting on the tip of my tongue was one she never wanted to hear again. I couldn’t say that I was all that excited about it myself, but it was there nonetheless.
Realizing immediately that I had started down a path I should have avoided, verbally at least, I tried to backpedal as best I could. “I’d rather not say right now.”
“No you don’t,” she returned, arching an eyebrow and stabbing her finger at me. “You don’t announce something like that then just leave me hanging. What is it you’re thinking?”
“Felicity, really…”
“Damn your eyes, Rowan Linden Gant, tell me!”
“All right then,” I replied, hesitation now obvious in my own voice. “Do you remember when I started smoking again, right out of the blue?”
“Aye, I do. But that was when…”
Her voice trailed off slowly, and her already naturally pale complexion became even more pallid as any semblance of color drained instantly from her face. Her mouth curled downward into a hard frown and she spat, “When you were channeling him.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Exactly.”
I couldn’t blame her for the reaction. The him to whom she was referring wasn’t on her short list of favorite people. He wasn’t on the long list either, for that matter. The hard and cold fact about him was that he was a serial rapist who had ended up murdering two women-one of them a college cheerleader.
But, as bad as that was, it wasn’t the thing that made Felicity’s skin crawl the most. That was another matter entirely. You see, what set his crimes apart was that they were all by-products of a lurid fantasy he had built directly around her. In some ways, the effects of his actions still plagued her to this day.
As for me, well, channeling the sorry bastard had been one of the worst experiences of my life. It had even brought me dangerously close to committing murder myself.
I watched my wife carefully as she continued to brood in silence.
I sighed heavily and wondered about the logic of having let her press me this far. But, there was nothing I could do about it now. “So… I think you know where I’m headed here…”
The hard frown continued to crease her features, but I could also see the light behind her eyes that told me she had already turned to the same page as me.
I continued. “Put it all together with the violent sex and…”
“Do you really think that I’m channeling the killer?” she asked, cutting me off mid-sentence.
“I hope not,” I told her. “But I’m really afraid you might be. Especially if the killer actually is female.”
“Gods…” she muttered then took another drink of the rum.
“Yeah,” I mumbled in return. “All of them.”
After a moment of the two of us sitting and staring at one another in the nervous silence, Felicity spoke up again. “So… Is that what you were going to tell me?”
“Huh?”
“Earlier, when you started to say something happened.”
“Oh, that.” I shook my head absently, still mulling over the ramifications of what we’d just discussed. “No, it was something else.”
“Okay, so what happened?” she pressed.
“It was kind of strange,” I replied. “When I was in the bathroom I started getting dizzy, like maybe I was going to ‘zone out’, and then I saw this flash. It was an outline of a heart, and it kind of looked like something was floating behind it.”
“You mean like what was carved into Wentworth?”
“Well, kind of, but not exactly.” I shook my head again. “I suppose the stuff I thought was behind it could have been the same. But, it also had a dagger piercing it.”
She summed up the imagery. “A heart with a dagger piercing it? Sounds a lot like a tattoo to me then.”
“Yeah, that kind of makes sense,” I agreed. “Maybe the killer has a tattoo similar to it.”
“I could call Duane tomorrow… Ummm, I mean later this morning I guess,” she offered, referring to the tattoo artist who had done her own pieces of body art. “We could go down to his shop, and you could look through the books.”
“That might be a good idea,” I mused. “If nothing else, it might trigger something if I run across a similar design.”
“So…” she started again. “Are you still going to call Ben?”
I reached up to rub my eyes and let out a sigh. Not only was my head still throbbing, but the exhaustion was working on me too.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s after midnight. I’m beat. It’s nothing that can’t wait till morning I don’t guess. What about you?”
“Aye, what about me?”
“Are you going to keep boozing or have you had enough?”
She twisted the now empty tumbler in her hand and gave the bottle a long stare before reaching out and picking it up. She unscrewed the lid and tipped it toward the glass.
“I don’t even feel a tingle yet,” she mused aloud. “You’d think I would get at least that.”
I shot her a glance and quipped, “At this rate maybe we should be signing you up for AA.”
She simply frowned back at me and continued pouring a healthy measure of the alcohol into the tumbler. After twisting the cap back onto the bottle, she shot me an annoyed glare and thumped it down on the table in such a way as to tell me my comment was unappreciated. Without a word she began sipping the rum, not even bothering to refresh the ice cubes that by this point in time had all but disappeared.
Before I could offer up an apology, the ringer on the phone pealed into the room. I slid out of my seat and started toward the wall where it hung.
“Maybe that’s Ben,” Felicity said.
“Yeah, maybe,” I replied as I stepped across the room. Leaning in I squinted to read the block letters on the liquid crystal display of the caller ID box. What I saw actually made my heart skip upward into my throat.
I snatched the handset from the base and fought to keep the panic out of my voice as I spoke. “Helen? What’s wrong?”
“Rowan,” Ben’s sister replied, her own voice tense. “Is Benjamin with you? It is very important.”