Page 9 of Cursed to Be Mine
A chorus of thank-yous ring out, and I hurry from the room before I can lose my composure.
A woman politician cannot be a bleeding heart.
Once out in the hall, Benjamin hands me a bottle of water, the lid already off. I lift it to my lips hurriedly, my fingers tight on the plastic.
“You did well.”
“I didn’t make it through the whole book,” I say…because we had to get through the posed photos first, the publicity. I take another sip, then hand the bottle back to him.
“Their sickness isn’t your fault, ma’am.”
No. It isn’t anyone’s fault, and that’s what I hate the most about doing these things. There are no monsters to fight. No one tostop. No one to bring justice to.
This place just forces you to accept death even if you aren’t ready. Even if it isn’tright, its victims innocent. Not delinquents or repeat offenders or criminals who got a light sentence or off on a technicality. It is too often little girls and boys who just want to hear the rest of a story.
Dammit.
My body burning with the need to move, I take a step forward, away from all the children I just spent the last hour with, the only hour we will ever share. As we head down the clinical halls to the main entrance, my phone vibrates and I pull it out to check the notification.
Detective Howard:We have another one.
My hand clenches around my phone. Henry Howard is one of the two men WALL has at the police department. He’s second generation, raised on the truth of the witches, werewolves, and vampires infecting the veins of this great country. He is also the one who brought me into WALL after I’d witnessed a vampire bleeding a girl dry in broad daylight in the woods of Anastasia State Park.
At the time of seeing them, I hadn’t realized what was happening. I’d thought he was just fucking her – his lips on her neck, his hand over her mouth, her silver slutty heels twinkling in the intermittent sunlight between the branches. Those heels had been splashed across the news, the police hoping someone would recognize her from them given her body had been so violently butchered, they couldn’t get an identity, her teeth and fingerprints both dead ends. She’d nevergone to a dentist. Never been arrested. An innocent civilian.
The official reports said she’d died from bleeding out after being stabbed over eighty times across her torso, limbs, neck, and face. Her body had been in so many pieces and with chunks missing that they weren’t able to discern which of the stabbings had actually killed her. But found in a pool of her own blood, matched to her DNA, her cause of death was ‘easy to discern.’
I would’ve believed those lies with the rest of the world if it wasn't for Detective Howard. He’d told me that if I wanted to know the truth, then to meet him at Derek’s Clubhouse in the middle of the city. It was a bar owned by the WALL, their secret base of operations, and perched on a stool, I listened to the truth with a sickness in my stomach.
“The blood found at the crime scene wasn't hers,” he said as he nursed a neat whisky. “Eight months ago, she filed a missing persons report on her twin. There’ve been no sightings of her, but the detective thinks she ran away to New York to become a star on Broadway. Her friends said that’s all she talked about.”
Detective Henry Howard reached down to pull out a file. Opening it, he slid a report of another young girl, Kayla Jackson, aged nineteen, to me.
“Six years ago, this victim was stabbed seventy-two times and found sitting in a pool of blood.” He tapped the file listing her family. “She also had a twin who’d gone missing in the previous year.”
Another file was pulled out. And another. And another, creating a horrible little stack in front of me. “In the last nine decades, sixty women have been murdered. All with missing twins. No killing wound able to be discerned…”
But every single case had been closed, a suspect caught with the murder weapon and charged with life in prison. The vampires were somewhere in the police department. Probably in the courtrooms too.
Inside WALL is the only true sanctuary, he told me, the only substance of truth. And with them, I will eliminate this sickness, these devil children, from my city.
“I need to powder my nose,” I say to Benjamin, then slip into a handicapped restroom. Walkingto the far end, I presscallon Howard’s number. He picks up after two rings, the sound of chewing coming from the other end.
“What’s happened?” I ask quietly, the urge to pace making my muscles itch and flare.
“A werewolf’s come in. Human form. Officially, the fucker died of a heart attack.”
Fuck, that means it was killed by the witches. Out of the three gangs, I hate them the most. Werewolves and vampires are monsters due to their biology, something they can’t change, but witcheschooseto be evil.
“And unofficially?” I ask, glancing at myself in the mirror. I jerk back, rocking onto my short heels as I see something grotesquely twisted crawling out of the glass. Black and smoking, it reaches one gnarled clawed hand through the mirror, which ripples rather than shatters. My fingers squeeze tight on my phone, and I miss what Henry Howard says over the rush of blood between my ears.
But then I blink, and the mirror flattens again, the thing I thought I saw just a trick of my hyper imagination. My skin itching, I head over to the tap. Each step towards the mirror makes my stomach clench tighter, but I ignore it, staying strong. Holdingmy phone against my shoulder with my head, I place both hands under the cold water.
“Sorry,” I say to Howard, interrupting something about dolls. “Can you repeat all that? I lost you for a second there.”
I swallow as his chewing vibrates down the phone. My pulse beating hard against my ribs, I hold my blue gaze in the mirror and tell myself the witches don’t know I’m involved. I’ve only been out on three hunts so far, and each time, we killed all the sups –supernatural creatures–we came across. None of them had been witches either.
“The werewolf had a dozen pinpricks over his chest,” Henry says, his mouth full with whatever it is he’s eating. Probably a meatball footlong. The bin by his desk’s always full of Subway wrappers.
