CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She left him while he was sleeping, sprawled naked and stinking on top of the hotel sheets.
She vomited quietly into the toilet. Once. Twice. Then she slipped her clothes on and crept out of the door.
Marie held her body far too carefully. She was tired, and sore, and disgusted, and so, so jubilant. When she stepped into the lobby that she had only been in a few hours before, the man behind the desk raised one eye at her.
GLENN, his nametag read.
“Hello, Glenn. Would you call a cab for me? Please?”
“Certainly.”
Glenn the Polite spoke quickly and quietly on the phone. Marie leaned against the desk, aware that her eyes were starting to blacken and her face was swollen.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss?” Glenn asked her. His words were professional, but his tone said so much more. Sweet, kind Glenn. A lamb working at the desk, unknowingly serving a wolf.
She looked him deeper in the eyes, then, and realized that he knew. That there was a weariness there. Checking people in and out, seeing tiny fragments of lives that he knew built into something whole and intricate behind closed doors. Realizing he was dealing with newlyweds and happy families and potential suicides and monsters.
She wanted to grasp his hands, to kiss his knuckles perhaps. She wanted to ask him if he played the guitar, because he looked like he would, or if he wrote stories or had a small family of his own. But she kept her distance. She was a walking petri dish of evil, and she didn’t want to get any of that on her new friend.
But she smiled, and the smile was sincere and wide and, she could feel it, almost beautiful. The man behind the desk smiled back, and this gave her joy.
“I will be fine,” she said, and she meant it. She grinned at him with a monster’s DNA coating her body and mouth and most secret of areas. She wore his genetic material like a second skin.
Her smile grew even larger.
Just fine.
The cab pulled up smoothly, cutting like a shark through the noise in the street. She saw it through the window, looking grand and bright, shiny yellow, and the sheer decadence of the cab versus the bus nearly overwhelmed her. But she didn’t want to waste the time, wanted to get to her destination as quickly as she could, so the taxi it was.
But the sleekness of it, and the sheer vileness of what she wore on her skin, and the genetic material seething within her, it left her shaken.
She was afraid.
Her lips pressed together. She remembered what was on them, and took a deep breath, letting them part.
“Miss?”
Glenn had come around the front of the desk. He had a hand out as if to help, but it hovered inches above her skin. His concern helped her catch her breath.
“I’m . . . I’m going to the police department,” she said.
He nodded.
“That man I was with. He’s a really bad man.”
Glenn nodded again.
Marie licked her lips, tasted The Wolf there, and cringed.
Glenn didn’t move, neither stepping closer nor moving away. His hand continued to hover in the air.
“Would you like me to walk you to your car?”
The kindness of this stranger nearly broke her.
“I . . . I’m not worth it,” she said, and her face crumbled, and her skin crawled, and her hair was matted and she had just endured some of the worst hours of her life, listening to this mad man grunt and groan and howl as he ripped at her skin and bit at her breast. She was glad Aleta was dead. She was glad of it. Because if she had lived with these memories in her head . . .
The hunter’s shine from earlier melted and turned into tears, which ran down her cheeks and dropped onto the freshly polished floor.
“Come on,” Glenn said, and he took her hand gently. He put a steadying hand on her back and walked with her through the doors.
“But you can’t leave your desk,” Dead Marie said. “What if you get in trouble?”
Glenn laughed, and it was a beautiful thing. There was sunshine again. She could feel it on her skin, and squinted at the sky.
“I’ll be all right. And so will you. If you need anything, I’m always here. All right? I mean it.”
He helped her into the cab.
“To the police station, please,” Marie whispered, and then turned around in her seat to stare out of the back window.
Glenn raised his hand at her. She watched him until he was out of sight.