L.L. Foster - The Acceptance

Oh no. She couldn’t transform in that special way of hers. She couldn’t run off to do God knew what. He did need her. Here, and now.

More sternly, Luther repeated, “Come here , Gaby.” Bliss hung boneless in his arms until he lowered her to a bus-stop bench. Her arms flopped over the sides. Her loose blouse, now torn, nearly exposed a breast.

A raised, circular welt shone bright red on her throat. Hypodermic? Given the force of the needle’s puncture, not self-inflicted.

Bliss moaned, and Gaby was suddenly there, beside the bench, her knees on the rough concrete.

Luther waited for her to comfort Bliss.

Gaby caught Bliss’s face in her hands. “Who did this to you?” Her harsh, raised voice startled Luther. “Give me a name, Bliss.”

There was no answer.

Luther touched her shoulder. “Gaby, this isn’t the time.”

She didn’t relent. “Tell me, Bliss. Describe him.”

“Not . . . not a him,” Bliss said.

“A woman?”

Bliss’s fair brows pulled down and her face scrunched in pain. “I don’t know. A boy . . .”

“A boy?”

Bliss moaned. “No. I don’t know.”

Gaby gently shook her. “You’re not making any sense. Give me a target, Bliss. Man, woman, kid—you tell me, and I’ll do the rest.”

After another moan, Bliss’s head lolled to the side, as if she’d again lost consciousness.

“Let her rest.” Luther squeezed Gaby’s shoulder. “She’s been drugged.”

“I can see that,” Gaby snapped. “Someone tried to take her. Someone tried to—” Excess emotion strangled the words. She swallowed convulsively.

Bliss moaned again, tried to lurch away, and both Luther and Gaby went on alert.

“It’s okay, Bliss,” Luther told her. “Everything will be okay now.”

“I only wanted to help,” she murmured. “He . . . he said he needed help. Then he . . . she . . . oh God.”

Nudging Gaby to the side, Luther pulled out a hanky and wiped the vomit from Bliss’s face, tried to dab it from her hair. “You’re safe now, Bliss. You’re with me, and with Gaby. You’re safe.”

“I’m sick.” Pitifully weak, she curled her arms about her stomach and gagged again, but nothing more came up. “He stabbed me with something.”

“So it was a guy?”

“I don’t know . . .” She touched a hand to her head. “He seemed so nice, but then she was going to do awful things to me. She said it, but I already knew it. I felt it.” Bliss’s faint voice broke on a sob. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. ”

“Two of them,” Gaby decided aloud. “There were two of them. A woman and a man.”

Bliss continued to sob. “No. Somehow he . . . he was a she. Or . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry, Gaby, so sorry, but my head hurts.”

Gaby stared up at the sky.

Luther locked both hands behind his neck. He wanted to kill someone. He wanted to know who would do this to Bliss. Damn it, he wanted to know why .

After a moment of internal struggle, Gaby put her palm to Bliss’s cheek, and the girl quieted. Luther could tell that Gaby was unsure how to console her friend, how to comfort her. Embracing was foreign to her.

Any signs of affection were anomalous to Gaby’s austere life.

Pulling himself together, Luther held out his hand to her. “Come here, Gaby.” He had no problem with affection, and right now, he wanted, needed, to hold her.

But, of course, she stepped away, stiff, angry, unreachable in her grief.

Sirens cleaved the mundane sounds of night in the slums. Flashing lights rebounded off brick façades, concrete and odorous filth.

Giving Gaby some time to herself, Luther spoke to the paramedics as they approached. He directed the officers in the cruiser to question the people standing around, taking in the scene with the same indifference they’d give to a television commercial.

As soon as Bliss was loaded into the ambulance, he turned to talk to Gaby—and found her gone.

Rank curses burned his throat, but he swallowed them down. He didn’t want the others to know she’d evaded him. Again.

Think, Luther. He paced . . . and it came to him.

Carver. She’d go after him, Luther knew it.

Now all he had to do was find him first.

Skin still itchy and too tight, lungs heavy with lead weights, Gaby strolled the dark streets looking for her prey. She asked numerous questions, gave innumerable threats, and finally got the answers she sought.

Carver would be warned; he’d be waiting for her.

She rejoiced in that certitude.

The arcade and pool hall next door to Carver’s abode overflowed with obstreperous activity. Gaby didn’t flinch when a bottle broke a few feet behind her. She didn’t slow when a drunken sot propositioned her.

When two leering punks accosted her, she laid them out with ease. One hit his head on the pavement and stayed still. The other held a broken jaw and slunk off in haste.

Rounding the front of the building, where Carver would least expect her, Gaby looked up at the structure. The second story had fire escapes, which would make it easy for her to gain entrance if she could reach them.

The gutters running down the side of the building barely adhered to the brick. They’d be of no help to her. But pipes of some sort ran along the exterior walls, and those should support her exiguous weight.

It wouldn’t be easy, but she didn’t want easy.

She wanted proof.

Upending a garbage can without care to the clatter she made, or the mess she left, Gaby moved it close to the building to give herself a leg up. Adjusting her fingers until she had an adequate grip on the thick pipe, she strained her muscles and chinned up. The toe of her boot caught in the brick, and she pushed up higher, stretching out with her left arm until she felt the cool iron of the fire escape.

After gaining that purchase, the rest of the climb was easy.

Ascending higher and higher, Gaby made it to the correct floor, crawled in through an open window, and passed through a home of devastation and apathy. She closed her ears to the crying babies, the blaring television, the drunken revelry in the kitchen. Without anyone paying notice, she walked on through and went out the front door into the hallway.

Two doors down, her knife in her hand, she knocked on Carver’s hideaway.

The door opened to a bulldog of a guy prepped to grapple.

Gaby watched him display his discolored teeth in an earnest smile of anticipation—and she slugged him in the temple with the hilt of her knife. He collapsed forward, she moved, and he fell into the hallway. Behind him, Carver stood in frozen disbelief.

Gaby narrowed her eyes at him. “If you run, I will catch you, and then I’ll make you a choirboy. Do we understand each other?”

He backed up, hit a wall, and looked around for assistance. Finding none, he nodded.

Hilarious.

If only Luther had even an ounce of this man’s reverence for her ability. But he didn’t. He accounted her no proficiency at all.

Gaby shoved the bodyguard’s heavy legs out of her way, shut the apartment door, and locked it. Still holding her knife, she glanced at Carver and pointed toward the tattered sofa. “Sit.”

Seething, Carver swallowed hard and moved to park himself on faded, flowery damask. “Haven’t you done enough? What the fuck do you want now?”

Silvery scars showed on his ruddy skin.

Scars she’d given him.

It was nothing compared to the hurt he’d inflicted on women throughout his miserable life. “I want answers. I want the truth. If you lie, I’ll know it. Do you believe me?”

“Yeah.” His nostrils flared. His mouth pinched. “I believe you.”

“Did you murder Lucy?”