Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

actually – had stopped her cold. That word was confess. McGuire hadn’t put any special emphasis on the word, but it had stood out to Lori nevertheless. She remembered what the woman – Goat-Eyes – had said to her. Confess and atone – or suffer.

Larry looked at her as if he expected her to stick up for him. When she didn’t, his expression fell, and he faced McGuire once more.

“I wouldn’t do anything like that to anybody, let alone a friend.”

McGuire looked at him for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. Finally, she nodded. “Have either of you touched anything since you reported the incident? The bedroom door? The patio door? The table or chairs?”

“No,” Lori said.

“Me neither,” Larry said.

McGuire jotted their responses down on her pad.

Lori heard the sound of boots on the wooden stairs outside. Rauch was returning.

He pushed his way past the blinds as he reentered the apartment. The lines of his gills were faint now, so much so that she almost couldn’t make them out. She dropped her gaze to his left hand. The nail of his pinky finger remained just as red, though.

Rauch stopped when he reached McGuire.

“The bedroom door was definitely forced open,” he said, “and the lock on the patio door is broken. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the deck or stairs. Nothing on the ground at the foot of the stairs, either.”

When Rauch finished speaking, his neck gills opened and closed one time, the action occurring so quickly, Lori almost missed it. She looked at McGuire’s face and then at Larry’s. Neither showed any reaction. Maybe she was seeing things, minor hallucinations brought on by the stress of everything she’d experienced tonight. But the shadow things hadn’t been hallucinations, though, had they? Rauch said both the bedroom door and the patio door showed physical signs of having been opened by force. If the shadow creatures hadn’t been real, then who or what had broken into her apartment?

“I’m going out to the cruiser,” Rauch said. He looked at Lori. “We need to get a crime scene tech in here to take photos of the evidence and dust for prints.”

The last thing Lori wanted was to have more strangers in her apartment tonight – especially if any of them happened to have red-painted pinky nails.

“Okay,” she said.

Rauch held her gaze a moment longer, and there was something in his eyes that she couldn’t name, but which disturbed her greatly. A coldness, almost a loathing, as if the very sight of her offended him on some deep level. Then it was gone, and he turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the hall. He didn’t close the door, and McGuire made no move to close it for him.

Lori was shaken by Rauch’s glare, and she wanted – no, needed – to get away from McGuire and from Larry, too. She needed a few minutes by herself.

“I need to use the bathroom,” she said. “There’s one in the hall. I can use it instead of the one in my bedroom.”

“No problem,” McGuire said. She smiled then, and Lori tried to gauge whether there was anything sinister in that smile. It seemed genuine, but how could she be sure?

She rose from the couch without returning McGuire’s smile. Larry looked concerned, so much so that she expected him to offer to escort her to the bathroom. But he said nothing, and Lori walked down the hall by herself. When she reached the bathroom, she turned on the light, stepped inside, then closed and locked the door behind her.

She took in a shuddering breath and let it out. The madness that she’d encountered at FoodSaver had followed her home – not just in the form of the shadow creatures, but also in the form of Officer ‘Gill-Neck’ Rauch. If one of them was a cop, who could she turn to for—

Her thoughts slammed to a halt as something registered on her consciousness. She turned toward the mirror over the sink and saw there were letters on the glass, written with a substance she couldn’t identify. It was thick and greenish-gray, like snot, and it smelled like rotting vegetable matter. She held her breath as she read the words.

You know what you did. Confess and atone – or suffer. It was signed, The Cabal.

A small whimper escaped her throat, and she began to tremble.

Chapter Four

Lori found herself once more walking through a torchlit corridor. It took her a moment to realize that she was back in the Vermilion Tower, following the crimson-robed eyeless man who’d brought her here. She frowned. She’d been somewhere else, hadn’t she? Where – her mind cleared and she remembered the shadow creatures breaking into her apartment, remembered the police coming to investigate after she called nine-one-one. She especially remembered Officer Rauch and his highly disturbing neck gills. She remembered seeing a message written on her bathroom mirror, one she thought Rauch had left during the time he’d been away from the rest of them, checking her place out. She’d considered calling for Larry and Officer McGuire to come look at the message, but if Rauch denied writing it – which of course he would – she feared they’d think that she wrote it, and she’d seem even crazier to them than she already did. She’d cleaned the disgusting substance the message had been written in, wiped it off the mirror’s surface using a hand towel and then used toilet tissue to get off the remaining residue. She’d tossed both the towel and the TP into the small plastic trash receptacle next to the toilet and then returned to the living room without peeing. If either Larry or McGuire noticed she hadn’t actually used the bathroom while she’d been in there, neither said anything about it.

The crime scene tech – a gawky guy in his late twenties – arrived to do his thing soon after that. Lori had been relieved to see