My Immortal Page 3

  Instead his arms felt so empty without her, an unfulfilled promise that was never his to claim. He’d waited for her for so many years but she seemed oblivious. As he closed his eyes to drift to a place where he could love her fully and without restraint, his hopeful heart prayed once more that their day would come.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The hallway was long, unusually long. Adele could never see the end. What she could see on either side of the hallway were doors, lots and lots of doors. As she seemed to glide down the familiar path, her hands reached out on either side and brushed over each unyielding knob. None would open. None would ever open.

  She braced, and the hair on the back of her neck began to rise. She knew that he would soon be behind her, whispering to her, hissing to her, pressing her forward. And she would run until she thought she was flying down the endless corridor, in a vain attempt to escape her life-long tormentor.

  “If you love him,” the unseen stranger would suggest, seductively, hypnotically, “you will do it.”

  That was all he ever said, and the only way he would say it. But deep in her core she understood it as a threat. His ominous voice was old like the ages and crackled like paper. Deep like thunder yet soft as air.

  It ran over her body like an unwanted caress. Fear she could not even describe would strike her heart as she ran from the voice that never seemed to leave her. Each door she tried would be locked, and no matter how hard she screamed for help it would not come.

  She grabbed at the doors and would yank and pull with all her might. She did not dare look behind her. She did not want to see him. She never wanted to see him. Something in her core just knew it would be the ultimate game-changer. She’d cry, she’d scream, she’d run as fast as she could but she’d never turn around. She’d never do what it was he was asking of her.

  She pounded on the doors, one after another, her terror rising to a fevered pitch. “I don’t love him,” she’d insist. “I don’t love anyone!”

  The harder she ran the longer the hallway seemed. Tonight, unlike before, Adele was too tired to keep running. She was as weary as she’d ever been when she collapsed on her knees. She slapped her hands to her ears, her whole body tense as his words danced all over her quivering flesh. “If you love him, you will do it.”

  This was normally where she would wake up, gasping for breath and clutching at her bedside lamp to chase her demons back into the shadows where they belonged.

  But the nightmare kept her in its clutches. She couldn’t breathe, and as much as she willed herself to wake she felt like she was drowning in her subconscious. “Who are you?” she screamed as she struggled back to her feet, but each word felt caught in some sadistic bubble in her throat. She couldn’t make a sound and she couldn’t will herself to move, even though she knew she could run the length of the world and back and she’d never run far enough away to escape him.

  If running was useless, that left her only one other alternative.

  If she could not face her fears in her dreams where it was safe, how could she ever hope to overcome them in her real life where real monsters lurked?

  Her nails bit into the soft flesh of her palms as she wrenched around to face her pursuer. She gasped hard as she realized it was the gypsy from the funeral. Her hands were placed on the small shoulders of Lily Maldonado, standing quite handily for a dead girl. Her eyes were open and an unusual shade of yellow.

  “They came for me,” she stated plainly. “Now we’re coming for you.”

  A scream strangled in Adele’s throat as she jolted from her tormented sleep and sat upright on her bed, her sheets saturated with sweat. She opened her palms to find the half-moon circles her nails had carved in her skin.

  These same hands trembled as she reached over and snapped on her bedside lamp. Light spilled into the quiet room, centering her again in what was real. She gasped for refreshing gulps of air as she groped for one of the small brown bottles that lined her nightstand. Her hands shook so badly she could barely manage the child proof cap to spill out tiny pills into her hand. She shoved them in her mouth and chased them down with the glass of water she also kept by her bed for just such an emergency.

  For Adele Lumas, there had been plenty.

  The hallway dream had recurred since she was about thirteen, oddly enough around the time of her first period. It used to scare her much more when she was a kid. Adele never concerned herself with the monsters under the bed; it was the one in her mind that terrified her the most. Pills were prescribed and they worked for a time. Over the years her medicinal cocktail had increased, the narcotics getting stronger by the year, yet what lived inside her was stronger still. The nightmare would return. It would always return.

  Recently it brought unwelcome companions. Her dreams about the murdered children were more disturbing than her recurring nightmare, mostly because she wasn’t running from the menace anymore. She was the menace. She would wake from those dreams and run into the bathroom to vomit, to purge the thoughts from her head that she could ever hurt a child, while still tasting their blood in her mouth.

  For the tireless, crusading reporter, these thoughts were both foreign and mortifying. To her mind, children were the innocent byproduct of how adults hurt each other. Their plight would always be the one she’d return to, in some mission to save them from such a fate, to fight for those much too young to fight for themselves. It was why she threw herself into this newest murder case no matter how vile it was turning out to be. Someone was in her town, paving its forest with the blood of innocent children.

  It was unfathomable.

  In fact, the only creatures currently more hunted in the Darlington community were the wolves of their forest. For some reason dead wolf carcasses appeared more and more, almost as though they had been ravaged on, fed upon and torn apart. It was gruesome, even for a hunting town. And there were no leads on what could be causing it.

  The animal rights activists of the area already pinned the blame on Nicholas Sterling of Sterling International. It was a big cooperation that bought up much of the private land adjacent to the Darlington Regional Forest to bring a logging company to their community. The environmentalists were up in arms, claiming that such an industry would destroy the balance that Darlington had always maintained between its industry and its environment. They charged Sterling International with planting the wolf threat to justify tearing down the woods. Sterling International counter-charged that someone was sabotaging them by planting all those carcasses on their land. Either way it was clear there was a murderer responsible, whether human or animal. This meant there were two monsters loose in their town: one that fed on the blood of children and one that fed on the flesh of animals.

  Adele sighed as she slumped back against the pillows and stared out into the clear night sky from her window. Tomorrow she’d have to interview Nicholas Sterling to get to the bottom of at least one of those mysteries.

  She’d much rather get to the bottom of the other. She felt sorry for the wolves but it was the children Adele felt compelled to save, children like Lily.

  She shuddered as she remembered her dream again. She shook her head to rid those cobwebs from her mind and reached for the lamp. Her hand paused momentarily by the chain before it retreated without extinguishing the light. Just for tonight she needed more than just those little pills to lull her back to sleep.

  Adele dragged herself into work the next morning, wearing the sleepless night on her face. Brian was used to it, and had a strong cup of coffee in his hand when she staggered through the door.

  “Another hot date?” he teased, knowing full well that his celibate friend had no notion of the concept.

  “Even hotter than last week,” she retorted playfully. She grabbed the coffee and plopped at her desk. She caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of her monitor as she opened her laptop. “On the bright side, at this rate I’ll probably scare the truth out of Nicholas Sterling.”

  Brian tossed a note on her desk. �
��Unless you want to take a nap this afternoon. The press conference has been moved to tonight.”

  “What?” Her brow knit together. “I thought we had an exclusive.”

  “Had being the operative word,” Brian answered. “Apparently Sterling has a death wish. He’s confronting all the press at one time.”

  “His funeral,” she responded as she crumpled the note in her hand.

  Brian leaned back in his chair. “Speaking of funerals…”

  She barely tossed him a glance as she typed something into her computer. “If you’re asking me if I went, yes, I did. If you’re asking me if I learned anything, no, I didn’t.”

  He just chuckled. “You’re so predictable, Addie.”

  She blew him a dismissive raspberry as she continued to compel questions for her interview that evening.

  That afternoon, just like clockwork, Adele let herself into her mother’s condo. Lunch with mom was as routine as brushing her teeth after every meal. Truth was, Brenda needed her one and only daughter, and Adele was happy to oblige.

  Brenda Lumas was a single mother of a daughter with a lot of problems, made worse by the fact Brenda herself had many emotional issues of her own. The most crippling of which, she was severely agoraphobic. Subsequently, Adele was her closest and dearest friend.

  When Adele shut herself away from the world in her teens, she was content to be just that. She and her mother had an understanding. They needed each other. They were grateful the past did not make them enemies, although it could have, and they were certain that the future would be much safer and happier for them both if they limited contact with the outside world.

  The only one they trusted enough to let in was Michael. Father Mike, as Brenda called him, knew almost everything about both of them.

  Adele sighed as she looked around the immaculate apartment. It was Brenda’s safe haven, guarded and protected by many ornate wooden statues that Brenda had painstakingly carved to replicate token saints, the Virgin Mary and Jesus. While her target audience purchased and collected them as a measure of their faith, these wooden statues had always given Adele a serious case of the creeps. She never said as much to Brenda. Her mother had good reason for being religiously devout, and Adele wasn’t about to pop her bubble with her own cynical version of the truth. And ironically, their polar opposite points of view had been carved by the same tragic event.

  She tossed her purse on the table, knocking a crucifix out of its base. “Damn,” she swore under her breath as the sharpened end of the crucifix designed to set into the base came precious inches from her exposed toes in her well-worn sandals.

  “Who’s there?” a panicked voice came from the other room.

  “It’s just me, Ma,” Adele called back as she scrambled to replace the statue.

  Brenda came into the room just as Adele straightened. “Hello, just you.” The two women hugged. “You’re just in time. I made your favorite.”

  Adele just smiled. “Ma. You always make my favorite.”

  She followed Brenda into the dining room where the table was set for two, and collapsed gratefully into the cushioned seat. Brenda wore her concern on her face as she brought the final dish to the table.

  “You look tired. When was the last time you slept through the night?”

  Adele smirked. “What day is it?”

  Brenda didn’t smile as she took her seat. “Adele.”

  “Sorry, Ma.”

  Brenda glanced over her daughter’s haggard expression. “How many have there been?” She knew she didn’t need to elaborate. If she knew her daughter, Adele’s mind probably rarely ventured far from the topic. A child killer. What could be worse?

  Brenda shuddered. Only she knew.

  “Four,” Adele answered the question, her tone flat. “Same method, same location, same type of victim.”

  “You think it’s a serial killer?”

  Adele shrugged. “Roman’s being tight-assed,” she shot her mother a glance, “I mean, tight-lipped, as usual.”

  Brenda sighed as she spread the napkin in her lap and reached for a serving dish. “Can’t blame him, I guess. Probably wants to avoid any copycat killers.”

  “You watch too much TV, Ma,” Adele grinned. Brenda broke down and smiled back. Adele leaned forward on her elbows. “Something has to give soon. Otherwise how many other parents are going to lose their children?”

  “You sound like you’re on another mission.”

  Adele shrugged again.

  Brenda laid her hand over Adele’s. “You can’t save the world, honey.”

  Adele’s eyes met the dark eyes of her mother. “But I can make my life count for something.”

  A moment stretched between them as Brenda pulled back her hand. “Is that what this is about, then?”

  “It’s what everything is about,” mumbled Adele, and at once Adele was sorry for the words. Brenda’s pain was palpable in the room. Adele bolted from her chair to kneel at her mother’s feet. “Ma, I’m sorry. It’s just – it’s just that… I need to do this.”

  Brenda nodded, wiped her sadness away as best she could and patted her daughter’s hand. “I know, hon. I know.” She straightened her shoulders and smiled bright for Adele. “Let’s eat. It’s getting cold.”

  A bit after dusk Brian and Adele made their way up the stone steps of the Grand Hotel Royale. It was originally built as a castle in 1890, so it looked out of place in the modern skyline of downtown Darlington. The spires dramatically pierced into the darkening indigo sky while ugly gargoyles kept watch on the cobblestone streets below. This unmistakable character made it a major tourist draw to the small town, offering the only five-star accommodations in the area. It was where all the notable people stayed when they visited Darlington.

  Adele was no stranger to the place, as she had interviewed many a politician or celebrity there. It was one of her favorite places to be, its comfortable decadence and regal luxury felt warm and familiar. She had often teased Michael that she must have been a royal in a former life, and her lifelong friend dubbed her Princess Prancypants as a result.

  It always made her smile when she walked through the ornate lobby. She met the concierge with the same contented grin. “Hi, Max.”

  The older gentleman turned around and caught glimpse of the striking young woman with the strangely colored hair. “Adele! How long as it been?”

  “The last election,” she answered, taking his hand. “Can you believe that guy won?”

  He just smiled. “I was surprised, after the way you grilled him. Are you here for dinner?”

  “Me, having fun? Are you kidding? We’re here for the press conference.”

  Max rolled his eyes a bit. “Oh, that. Yes, right this way.” He walked over to the phone and punched in some numbers. “Another one is here. Adele Lumas.” He replaced the receiver.

  “They’ll be right down.”

  Brian and Adele shared a glance. “Who’s they?” she asked Max.

  “The royal guard,” he sardonically replied. Her eyebrow rose so he elaborated. “His security detail.” He leaned over the counter for a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. They’ve taken over the entire hotel. Apparently this big wig Nicholas Sterling thinks he is royalty or something, he has disrupted our entire routine.”

  “What do you mean?” Adele asked.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could utter a word two big, burly men in suits exited the elevator.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Max whispered and then stepped away. “In the meantime, enjoy the gauntlet.”

  Brian and Adele shared a nervous chuckle as the two men approached. They regarded her with caution.

  She stretched out her arm to the man so big he dwarfed her. “My name is Adele Lumas. This is my cameraman, Brian Gray. We’re here for the press conference.”

  The big man just nodded with a grunt that Adele surmised took the place of any real introduction. The other gestured to Brian’s camera bag, wh
ich he surrendered easily. After a quick search, the bigger man gave a wave of his hand as he indicated that they should follow.

  No one spoke as they rode up to the penthouse suites. Brian and Adele inspected the two men as inconspicuously as possible while the two men looked straight ahead as if oblivious. Adele had the sneaking suspicion that they knew everything that was going on regardless. She was even afraid to think too loudly.

  The doors dinged open and the men started out without a backward glance. They led her down the hall and into the largest penthouse suite in the hotel. The ornate room draped in rich gold accents was already full with other reporters and their camera crews, including Denise Carter, who sent Adele a smug glance. It was a smile that reminded Adele the flashy blond with questionable integrity had scooped every detail on the child killer case thus far.

  It was a first in many years anyone had been able to best Adele, and Adele wanted to claw that arrogant smirk right off her face. She didn’t even hide the scowl as Denise took her place beside an elegant redhead.

  “Guess we know now why there was a press conference instead of an exclusive,” Brian whispered in her ear.

  Adele didn’t bother to respond. Her mind was already reeling how to make this work out to her advantage anyway.

  In the midst of the crowd were servants who flitted about from place to place making sure everyone’s needs were met.

  Toward the back of the room, the head servant oversaw the entire operation. He stood tall and thin and looked almost like he were European aristocracy himself. His long, thinning blond hair was pulled neatly away from his sharply drawn face. He caught glimpse of Brian and Adele and immediately came to greet them.

  As he drew closer Adele was struck by his eyes, one brown and one blue. She hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it and for a moment couldn’t even look away. She held out her hand. “Adele Lumas, Action News. This is my cameraman, Brian Gray.”