Kiss of the Damned (Fallen Cities: Elisium Book 1), page 1
Copyright © 2020 Elena Lawson
Cover by Christian Bentulan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, incidents and dialogs are products of the author’s
imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events is strictly
coincidental.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
About the Author
Dedication
For Ryan Reynolds
It never would have worked out between us.
1
We stand outside the door to the room where they are keeping Ford’s body. Me and the two officers with their drawn faces and downturned eyes. The woman moves to touch me, and I shrink back from her reaching hand, wrapping my arms protectively around my chest.
“Are you ready?” the female officer asks in a hushed tone as the male presses his palm to the door, awaiting my reply.
Beyond the rectangular window, awaits a sterile room. Clean tile floors and stainless-steel walls and humming fluorescent lights.
Little silver handled doors checker the back wall, and within them, dead people lie chilled on slabs of metal. But what draws my eye most is squatted at the middle of the space: a lumpy form covered loosely in a white sheet.
Ford.
“We just need you to ID the body and then we can leave,” the older male officer says in a gruff, professionally-detached tone. I wonder how many bodies he’s seen. How many loved ones he’s watched cry over corpses.
“But I will warn you,” he continues when I do not reply. “Due to the…nature of his injuries and how we found him—well, it isn’t pretty.”
“I understand,” I say flatly, afraid of what other words might come out if I’m not careful. “I’m ready to see him now.”
The officers share a look before they escort me into the room. A burst of prickling cold brushes over my bare arms, making my teeth clench. But that isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the smell.
It’s faint. They’ve gone to painstaking lengths to ensure the cleanliness of this room for visits such as this. But I know the smell of death better than most ever could.
Panic lodges in my throat, and I clench my hands around my arms tighter, trying to force the horrid memories back into the dark places of my mind.
Ford said it was for my own good—the things he did to me.
He said he was protecting me. Keeping my fragile body alive by keeping me locked up tight. Severe combined immunodeficiency—they’re fancy words for saying I am weak. I can’t even stand up to the common cold and hope to survive.
The officers’ footsteps clack and echo against the tile. My only-worn-once sneakers squeak, damp from the puddle I stepped in on the sidewalk outside.
The male officer waits for my nod before drawing back the white sheet to reveal the grotesquerie that is Ford.
His swollen face looks near bursting, tinged in hues of blue, red, and green with patches that seem bleached of all color. He is nearly unrecognizable.
His hair, always meticulously combed back is disheveled, revealing more gray strands than I remember. And his nose, broken and crooked, looks strange. Worse than all the rest is the injury in the top right portion of his skull. A mean indentation, ringed in puckered and mutilated flesh.
“It’s him,” I croak, eyes welling even though my chest is light as air.
It’s really him.
The female officer rubs a hand over my back, and I try my best not to flinch away, merely stiffening at the contact.
“You did great, honey.”
The other officer re-covers Ford’s face, and I burst into a sob, shuddering at the intensity of the feeling flowing through my veins. Swelling like a geyser beneath my skin.
A grin I can’t help spreads wide on my lips.
I am free.
2
When the officers came that morning, I’d still been asleep. The sound of the doorbell echoing through the house might as well have been a gunshot in the dark of my shuttered room.
No one came to our house. Not ever.
I hadn’t even known what the doorbell sounded like.
It was almost…cheery. So incredibly divergent from what lay within. Ford’s house was a modern fortress complete with bars and security shutters on the windows and a panic room in the basement right next to the dead room.
I wait in the safe warmth of my bed, thinking I imagined the sound, but then it comes again, this time followed by a series of thumps on the door.
“Police,” a man’s voice shouts. “Anybody home?”
Police?
Hope swells for an instant beneath my rib cage before I quash it, settling myself with several deep breaths as I shakily rise from my bed.
I tried to escape before. Lots of times. Twice, I had gotten to the police, and twice they hadn’t believed me. Ford always had a better story for them—a more believable one.
That I was certifiably insane was his favorite go-to. The bastard even had the forged paperwork to prove it. And the more I ranted and raved that he was the crazy one, that he was the one who was insane, the more they believed him.
People believe what is easier. They believe what they want to. The truth is an inconvenience they can’t afford.
“Police!” comes a second shout.
Think, Paige. What should you do?
Ford isn’t rushing to answer the door. In fact, I can’t hear him or anything else at all in the house. Which means he didn’t return home last night. There’s no way he would’ve hesitated for even a second to get these people away from the house.
With trembling fingers, I change into jeans and a tank-top to the sound of more thuds at the front door. I drag a brush through my brightly hued hair and pull on a pair of socks, hopping out the door in my haste.
Halfway to the entrance though, I pause, heart in my throat.
I haven’t taken my pills yet. Ford always gives me my pills in the morning, and if there is any risk of running into other people, he always gives me a double dose. They’re in his room, but there’s no way for me to retrieve them. Ford’s door is reinforced steel with a combination lock, not unlike a door you might find on the safe in a bank’s vault.
“Hello?” A female voice calls this time. “Anybody home?”
Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I pad to the entryway, peering at the screen in the hall. It shows the view from the exterior cameras.
The one positioned over the front door shows two police officers dressed in dark colors, weaponry strapped across their waists, hands on hips.
They aren’t Nephilim. It’s easy to tell the supernaturals apart from us naturals.
Though I’ve had no face to face experience with the other beings now sharing our world, Ford made certain I had some idea what they looked like. He also took steps to make certain I’d never go near one for as long as I lived.
Nephilim are unnatural, he would growl during our lessons. Abominations. But their wickedness is nothing compared to the Diablim.
I glance toward the door only a few meters away. It too is strong and sports three different types of locks. I could open it. Ford didn’t have to keep it sealed anymore, not since he installed the new hardware on my ankle eight years ago.
Though without my pills…
I tap the intercom button beside the wide panel of screens and lick dry lips. “Um, Mr. Ford isn’t home right now.” I speak into the receiver. “Could you…could you come back later?”
I chide myself for my weakness. For my unwillingness to provoke Ford’s wrath in trying to escape a third time. It won’t work. And it isn’t worth getting the hose again. Or the chair.
The female officer scans the exterior wall for the intercom and bends to speak into it. “Paige St. Clare?”
My finger freezes over the button, trying to make sense of what’s happening. How do they know my name? What would they want with me?
Hesitantly, I thumb the button again. “Yes?”
“Could you come to the door? We need to speak with you.”
I release the button and back away from the wall, frantically glancing between the door and the intercom.
Why?
I want to ask, but the word is stuck at the back of my throat. My hands ball to fists at my sides. Ford would kill me if he knew I opened that door.
Even if he didn’t, the people outside could.
Making a hasty decision, I rush to press the intercom again. “Are either of you sick?”
The officers share a look before the female speaks into the intercom again. “No.”
Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway, I tell myself as I straighten my back and rush down the hall. Maybe the gene therapy worked and I’m not even sick anymore.
It’s what I’d been telling Ford for years. I begged him to take me to get re-tested at a real hospital. With real doctors. But he always refused. Too much of a risk, he would say, deep brown eyes hard and lips curling back to reveal shining porcelain veneers. Don’t ask me again, girl.
There is only one other way I know of to test the theory and it’s to go outside. If I die, then Ford is right and it didn’t work, but I would’ve finally found a way to escape him. And if I lived…
I don’t see a flaw with either option.
I throw back the deadbolt and twist the lock above the knob. Then I grip the handles of the bar lock and use all my shoulder strength to twist them into the unlocked position, heart hammering in my chest.
With a tug, the door opens without so much as a groan, brushing softly against the rug.
“Paige St. Clare?” The male officer inquires, a brow raised, making me wonder what I must look like. Pale and wide-eyed like some wild thing.
Attempting to school my features, I clear my throat. “Yes.”
The male officer removes his hat and folds it into his chest as he bends his head. His kind eyes widen for an instant as they catch mine in the early morning light.
Dutifully, I cast them away like Ford taught me. The reflective silver hue of them unnerves people, and Ford doesn’t like people to notice me at all, let alone pay any close attention.
“I’m afraid Mr. Ford won’t be coming home,” the man says, and I can’t help snapping my gaze back up, needing to better understand the implication of his words.
“What?” I snap, all my lessons on proper manners and decorum forgotten.
“Your…um,” the female officer glances at something on her notepad and then tucks it back into her belt, “adoptive father was in an accident.”
The way she says accident makes me skeptical, but if she is about to tell me what I think she is, I don’t fucking care the reason why.
My eyes go saucer wide. My hope floats. I can barely breathe the words for fear of shattering this beautiful illusion, “Is he dead?”
The officers nod in unison. The female bites her bottom lip and turns, gesturing to where a sleek white police cruiser perches in Ford’s otherwise unoccupied driveway. “We’re sorry to have to be the ones to tell you this, Miss St. Clare.” A pause. A sigh. “But we do need you to come and ID the body.”
The body.
Ford’s body.
Because he is no longer living. Because he is now a dead thing, like the dead things he tortured me with.
Unable to fully grasp the meaning of it all, I find myself nodding, in a sort of daze. I need to see him dead, I ration with the part of my mind trying to shy away from the outdoors and from the possibility of illness.
I need to see for myself that his heart isn’t beating. Only then will I allow myself to feel the rush of relief trying to balloon beneath the cage of my ribs.
For now, it is merely speculation. A fantasy.
They are Hagrid come to take me to a faraway place where miracles are real. Where villains get their due.
Who am I to say no to that? Consequences be damned.
“All right,” I manage. “I’ll come with you.”
I take a step out the door and the heavy tracker on my ankle chirps, disturbing the silence. I step back, a hot flush clawing up my neck as I lift the hem of my jeans. “Do you know how to take this off?”
The female officer’s lips part as she takes in the chunk of black plastic strapped around my limb. The tiny light pulses green, a constant reminder that the thing is armed. That I can’t leave.
Beneath the device, bruised and sallow skin catches the cloud-covered sun’s gray light. Scars from years of wear shine silver, and more recent sores and shallow cuts streak around the edges of the cuff.
“Oh, honey,” the officer reaches out, but draws back when I flinch, her hazel eyes confused and horrified all at once. She kneels down in front of me and gestures to my ankle, drawing a sleek black blade from her belt. “May I?”
It’s only plastic; I know she can cut it off. I’d thought of doing the same a million times before, but tampering with it sent an alert to Ford. Tampering with it meant I would be punished.
…but if Ford is dead…
The device clatters to the cement stoop after one easy slice of the officer’s blade. The cool morning air stings the sensitive skin around my ankle bone, and I grimace, but the pain is nothing compared to the utter satisfaction gained from listening to the tracker chirp five times and then sputter out, crushed under the boot of the male officer.
I watch, enraptured as the blinking red light wanes until it goes out entirely.
3
“Would you mind coming back to the precinct with us for a few questions?”
The officer gives me an encouraging, albeit strained, grin as she tucks a loose strand of dark-brown hair behind her ear. With one last glance at the shape of Ford beneath the white sheet, I draw the back of my hand over my watery eyes. “Okay,” I say and turn away.
I don’t get more than half a step. A strange pressure slams down onto my chest. I clutch it, pulse quickening at the foreign sensation.
For an instant, I wonder if I’m having a heart attack and gasp a breath, unable to choke out a plea for help. It’s crushing. I can’t breathe.
Sputtering, I reach out, looking for something to steady me as my head begins to spin, my mind fogged and disconnected without oxygen. I stumble, confused and suffocating until finally, I catch myself.
My hand curls around cold flesh and bone, and I start, my squinted eyes flying open.
A muffled exclamation floats past my ears, but I can’t make out the words. The world is fuzzy and unfocused. Everything a blur of white and steel gray under the flickering lights overhead.
Everything except Ford.
He stands in blazing clarity. A myriad of color in a monochrome world. He hunches at the head of the gurney where his deceased body still lies beneath the cloth. His dark eyes stare deep into my soul. His sneer is strong enough to curdle dairy.
A scream lodges in my throat, stoppered by my inability to breathe.
“Run, girl,” he says, the words a whisper trailing on a phantom wind. Then louder, more urgent, his face contorting into the blistering red fury that always preceded one of his more zealous punishments. “Run!”
The high-pitched peel of a scream burrows into my ears, choked off only when the officer rips my hand from Ford’s twitching, putrid flesh. The instant I let go, fingers aching from the force of my grip, the phantom Ford vanishes in a puff of curling black smoke.
Color returns to the room.
Breath returns to my lungs.
The sharp edge of reality chases away the grainy distortion of a moment before. Crystalline lucidity slams back into place, sending me staggering backward.
The only evidence that anything happened at all is the raucous pounding of my pulse thudding wildly in my ears, and the cold, clammy sweat coating my palms and beading over my chest.
The pressure in my lungs fully eases only when the officers drag me from the room. Every step away from Ford granting me another small breath until we make it outside.
I jerk myself away from the officers, and helpless to stop it, I bend with my hands planted firmly on quaking knees and retch onto the street.
“She’s in the system,” I hear one of the officers whisper just outside the door to the small room where they deposited me. “Looks like she has some mental health issues. Bi-polar. Schizophrenia. Paranoid psychosis. You name it, it’s in the file.”
