Cellar Door

I hear the jangle of keys. The blade touches his throat, and I silence his surprised wail with a forearm to his mouth as I shove him to the wall.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say in a hushed tone. It’s the same thing I said to Makenna, and the realization that I’ve already come close makes me pause. Seeing Jules’ necklace around her neck… I was too close then. One second longer in the beast’s grip, and the rage that’s always simmering just below would’ve strangled her.

She’s not the enemy.

The time it takes my brain to work this out costs me. The guard gets in a quick jab to my ribs. My knife slips lower, giving him enough room to attack again, and dammit to hell, she might as well be the enemy. She’s going to get me killed.

He’s not very tall or large, but he’s a wiry mother fucker, and those guys are surprisingly strong. He wrestles the hand holding the weapon, gaining the upper hand and I drop the knife. But I follow through with a direct punch to his stomach, and he folds over. I grab a handful of his hair at the back of his head and wrangle him along the wall, forcing him to move toward the main door.

“Now I don’t have to waste time picking the lock. Open it.”

The security cop unlatches his key ring, fumbling to locate the key. “Please. I have a family.”

For shit’s sake. “You all do. Are they here? Are they in danger? No. Your dumbass life is. Open the fucking door.”

He finally gets the key inside the deadbolt, and I hold him back. “Don’t move.” I open the door and reach up, feeling for the security camera. I had the luxury of casing the morgue the day I was asked to identify my sister. There’s another camera affixed above the body lockers.

“Go in and sit at the desk,” I order him. “Make one motion for help, do anything stupid, and I’m making a visit to your home.” I pluck his wallet from his back uniform pocket. “Go.”

He does as instructed, but his movements are stiff, and he’s breathing too hard, shaking. It’s good enough, though. The cams only monitor video, not sound. Once he’s seated before the monitor, I ease along the wall toward the bank of lockers. I remove that camera as easily as the first.

Unlike the hospital morgues, there’s not a lot of security in government facilities. Who wants to rob a morgue?

I open and close drawers near the sink area. I find a roll of bandage tape, and strip off a length as I walk toward the guard.

He’s already practicing his plea, primed to beg with his hands in the air. “Please,” he says again. “I have no idea who you are. Whatever you want to do to the bodies…I won’t say a word.”

The answer to that question seems obvious. Who wants to rob a morgue? A necrophiliac, that’s who. At least, it’s the logical leap here for this guy. I can’t be too offended; I am planning to desecrate a body.

I say nothing as I wrap the bandage around his face, then I pull a couple of cable ties from my jacket pocket and link his wrists together behind his back. His rapid breathing is loud against the bandage. I should probably offer him some assurance that I’m not going to kill him. But it might be better for him if he passes out.

I’m not a bad guy. But I’m not a good guy, either. I’m not out here at night protecting innocence, or punishing evil doers in the name of justice. I’m not that charitable. There is justice, and then there is vengeance. They’re not interchangeable.

If the security cop made this difficult, if he wanted to be a hero and defend the deceased their right to rest in peace, he’d become an obstacle, and my blade would find a home in his belly just as easily as my hands snapped Keller’s neck.

I’d like to say that it takes time to slip this far, that it’s a gradual process to become a killer. But really, it’s a simple choice. And it can happen in a blink.

My watch beeps, reminding me of the body waiting in the burn barrel. Bodies are starting to pile up.

This started with one man—one devil with talons and horns that I couldn’t stop drawing. He was a ghost in this very morgue, a wisp in an Armani suit and expensive cologne, and his presence didn’t belong.

Jules and I had been on our own since she was in grade school. Our mother taken by stage four breast cancer, and then our father followed in a head-on collision. We’d already overcome the hardest of hardships. This made us close. I was the one who made sure her homework got done, and that she had enough money to buy the trendy outfits all her friends were wearing.

And that wasn’t a problem then. The insurance money alone would’ve been enough to take care of us both, but I had a job, a career. I wore tailored suits and rode elevators up to a sixth-floor office, where I was a respected information security director.

I had a long-term girlfriend who was riding my ass about marriage and babies, and I had a great insurance package, with medical and dental. I was normal. I was bland and ordinary. I don’t even recognize that Luke Easton now.

It was another life.

The switch got flipped right here, in this spot, staring at the body lockers. Dread casing my body in ice, so that the medical examiner had to ask me three times if I was ready. Ready to identify the body.

I wasn’t ready, but I didn’t really believe she was in there. It was a mistake. Jules had disappeared nearly four weeks before, never coming home after cheerleading practice. And I kept telling myself that she’d been in an accident, that she was in a hospital room, or at someone’s house, with people trying to wake her, trying to figure out who she was, to find her family…

Until the ME popped the locker and rolled her pale body from the steel unit.

I blink the memory away.

I worked hard not to remember her in that state. Instead, I see the man in the black suit. His curious gaze watching me, assessing me too closely. Right then, a brush of sixth sense adhered to my senses.