By a quarter to two, I'd hit rock bottom. Or, well, my energy level had. A sleepless night in a freezing car did little for my self-esteem or my skin tone. Thankfully, Reyes didn't seem to mind. At least he wasn't repulsed by me.
Bobert had come in, but we were too busy for me to get a word in. I'd have to try to catch him later and explain the whole situation. I was in so far over my head, it was unreal. At the moment, we had only fifteen minutes left on our shifts. I planned on spending that time stealing and invading someone's privacy. Unfortunately, that meant venturing into the storeroom again.
I walked past Reyes, who was finally taking a break. The café wasn't dead, but the rush was over at last. I turned the knob to the storeroom, carrying a box of condiments from the delivery guy to give me an excuse to go in there. Not that I needed one. If anyone found out about the phone, I could plead innocent. Say the mustard made me do it. In the storeroom. With a candlestick. That was such a cool game, and yet I couldn't remember ever playing it.
Holding my breath, I peered around for billowing smoke. I so didn't want to be sucked into some alternate dimension where spiders were the size of elephants. Seeing no smoke of any kind, I hurried in and closed the door. Her purse hung from a hook in her locker. That she never locked. I rooted through it until I found her phone. A thud sounded outside the door. I paused. Waited. Peed a little. When no one came in, I woke it up and thanked the heavens she didn't have it code locked.
Finding her pictures was easy. They were inside an icon titled PICTURES. I thumbed through picture after picture, each one more hideous than the next. The departed woman was in every one. Creepy as ever-lovin' fuck. Her white eyes glowed, and her toothless scream showed off a gray tongue and blood-soaked gums.
I pressed the button to end the agony. I'd seen enough. But why was the woman following them around? From what I understood, Erin's babies had passed away in two different houses. One was her mother's, and one was the house she and her husband lived in before buying the one they had now. They'd moved out of each one following the heart-wrenching deaths.
I simply couldn't imagine what she'd gone through. How she'd survived.
The room began to spin with the thought. The senseless loss of life sparked a familiar feeling for the second time in as many days, and before I could stop it, panic slammed into me. Stole my breath. Ripped at my throat.
I looked down at my hands. At my arms. They were empty. They shouldn't have been. I could feel the weight of that emptiness like a boulder in my stomach. It pulled me farther down below the surface. It suffocated. I had something once, but I forgot where I put it.
I forgot. I forgot. I forgot.
It was so small. So fragile. Yet it held such power, this tiny thing that I'd promised to protect. It was like a single atom that would someday split and spark a nuclear reaction. It would set the world on fire. It would free the mentally ill. It would ignite the fires of revolution like nothing the human race had ever seen. And I'd misplaced it. I'd lost it.
I scratched at the linoleum floor. It had to be here somewhere. It couldn't have gone far.
No. Wait. It was a dream. I was simply dreaming again. I blinked. Tried to focus on the present. Tried to get a firm grip on my sense of time and place.
When I finally kicked my way back to the surface, I shook uncontrollably. Nausea took hold, and bile scalded the back of my throat. I tried to swallow it down but choked on it instead, doubling over as it racked my body.
"Janey?"
I shook out my agony at the sound of Cookie's voice.
"Crap," I said as she rushed in and knelt beside me.
"What happened?" she asked, frantic.
"Nothing. I dropped a bottle of mustard."
"Oh, sweetheart." She wrapped her arms around me, and I remembered that she was psychic. She probably saw me coming from a mile away. Luckily, she didn't run in the opposite direction.
"I'm okay. Thanks."
When we walked out, Francie was sitting across from Reyes in the booth he'd taken. She was doing her darnedest to flirt, but he seemed preoccupied. His head down. His mouth a firm line. Until I walked past.
"What's wrong?" he asked, his voice harsh.
His question surprised me, but his tone surprised me more. "Nothing. Why?"
Francie looked back and forth between us, trying to gather as much intel as possible, to assess if I was a real threat or not.
"So, anyway," she said, apparently coming to a conclusion, "he calls me Red. Right? Like he had the right to call me Red. It's natural, by the way."
He hadn't taken his eyes off me, and I wanted to melt into him.