AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What?”
“The thing where you like…I don’t know exactly. You touched him, and suddenly he was spilling his guts. It was fucked up. I’ve never seen anything like it. But damned if it didn’t work.”
I didn’t have a single fucking clue what this guy was talking about. “Can I see him?” I asked again.
Detective Sexypants shrugged. “I guess so.”
He led me to the basement where a grouchy bald guy made me sign a sheet and relinquish my weapons, including a knife I’d never seen before. Tonight kept getting more and more messed up as the hours progressed. Or at least I figured that was the case. I couldn’t remember anything before waking up in the classroom, so maybe this was the eye of the storm.
The detective showed me into a room with four cells and then left me, saying, “If you need anything, I’ll be out here.” He still looked perplexed. I probably wasn’t acting like he expected me to, but I had no idea how I was supposed to act. Without my memories, I was floating alone with a whole ocean of uncertainty threatening to swallow me whole.
Gabriel was in the last cell, curled up on his side with a shoddy gray blanket half kicked off him and his arm slung over his eyes to block out the lights. It was pretty cruel to leave lights on overnight, but prisoner comfort never seemed to be a huge priority to the cops, for obvious reasons.
“Gabriel?” I approached the cell cautiously, afraid to touch the bars.
He grumbled, lifting his arm, and peered at me through eyelids gluey with sleep. His normally tidy hair was sticking up at a thousand different angles. It looked like he hadn’t washed it in a few days.
Seeing him wrenched my heart, because it was the final confirmation of how far removed from my own reality I was. It felt like only weeks ago he’d walked out of my life, and the heartbreak lingered fresh in my memory. But this Gabriel, the one staring at me from a police-station cot, was at least two or three years older than the man I remembered. He’d lost the pleasant roundness in his face and was all lean muscle and cruel angles.
“Temple?”
I wanted to cry. My bottom lip trembled, and I had to look away from him. This was the icing on the cake. Up until this point I’d been able to coast by on pretending this was weird, but there had to be a simple explanation. A spell gone wrong, something that could be easily corrected and my life would magically snap back to normal.
But my ex-boyfriend was in a cage, apparently for killing someone, and people I couldn’t remember meeting were talking to me like they knew me. It was too much. I was a simple creature, problems were meant to be killed, and there was nothing here I could shoot at since some fat, bald cop had taken my gun away.
Gabriel had risen and was standing by the cell door. He looked worried, but there was a peculiar twist to his expression. He wasn’t looking at me like I was
crazy. Instead his concern appeared to be born of the fear family.
“What happened?”
My head shook without me telling it to, and I shrugged like an idiot. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Gabriel’s face went white. Not just pale, but true ashy-white. Dead white. “What. Happened?”
“I don’t know,” I screamed, my voice bouncing off the walls and making me sound more commanding than I meant to. “I woke up at Columbia, and—”
“Come here.” He was reaching through the cell bars, and his voice was forceful.
I moved closer but stayed out of range of his hands. His eyes were a little too wild for me to trust him. Not to mention he was locked up for being a murderer. Didn’t really bolster trust.
“You know something.” It wasn’t a question. Gabriel’s reactions spoke louder than words, and he’d always been a terrible liar when he had to look me in the eyes.
“Did you talk to Mayhew?”
“Who’s Mayhew?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
Gabriel slammed his palms against the cell, making the metal door rattle. “Fucking goddamn.”
“What?”
“Did he touch you?”
I wanted to reply with some tart, indignant comment about how I think I’d remember if someone touched me, but I couldn’t. I didn’t remember anything. “I don’t know. Gabriel, tell me what’s going on.”
