Detective Magone caught his eye in the distance, walking casually about in no hurry, eating an apple. He hadn’t seen us yet because he seemed fascinated by a mural on one of the building’s walls and took a pic on his phone. It was a mural I had barely looked at, but on this angle, all I could see was long pink arms attached to a blob.
“I have to go,” Ezrah blurted, then grabbed my face before I could react and forced his mouth on mine, shoving his tongue aggressively inside, kissing me like an enemy who just won a battle, while I pressed my palms against his chest, trying to push him away.
My body melted under his touch, hands running up and down my back, tongue running over my teeth, dancing with my tongue, triggering an unwanted heat between my legs. “If I had my knife,” I snarled into his mouth, “I’d stab you right now. Plunge the blade into your shriveled, black heart.”
He sniggered into my mouth, “Then I’d bled all over you, rub my blood through your hair, cheeks, and in your mouth.” He pulled away from the kiss, and I gasped, taking in air, breasts heaving from the titillation claiming my entire body, annoying the crap out of me. “I’ll be taking you down with me, sweetheart.”
The jock stepped away, taking two large strides with those long legs, heading in the opposite direction to where the detective was. I didn’t know where Magone had gone, but I hoped he didn’t see me kissing the Warwick, or more accurately, the Warwick kissing me.
Ezrah stopped to turn back as I wiped the taste of him from my lips. “Don’t even think about running, sweetheart, because we’ll find you. Wherever we go, we’ll find you, and once we do…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence as the message was loud and clear. If they were capable of breaking into my house, interfering with the security system to kidnap and drug me, then they were capable of anything.
I waited until he was gone before I gathered my things and walked to where the mural was that had infatuated the detective. I’d walked past this wall a few times and hadn’t taken much notice of it, and assumed the detective just liked it for the artistic side. It was of a pink creature, a cross between an alien and anoctopus, with several long arm-like tentacles. And in the grasp of each tentacle was a person strangled, struggling to breathe, meeting their deaths perhaps.
The artist’s name, written in brushstrokes at the bottom of the mural, was Theo Abbott. It wasn’t someone I had heard of, and I brushed off the idea that it mattered to the detective. I was about to walk away when my shoes froze on the pavement at the sight of one of the people caught in the monster’s inescapable grip. A boy with brown, curly hair who looked eerily like the student on the train—the student Ezrah was threatening in the bathroom, the same student who was found dead.
It might be a coincidence, but I searched for Theo Abbott on my phone, and two pics of him came up on Google on social media pages. He looked like the same man on the train and the same man who painted this mural. I searched some more for media statements on a death at Castlehill and found only two short articles in two different publications. Neither dropped a man of the deceased, but both said that the death was suspicious.
“Are you okay?” someone asked, and I turned to find mean girl Carrie.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered, walking away from her.
“No, I mean…in class when you had a panic attack,” she added, and I turned back. “I used to get those all the time. At least Ezrah was there to help you.”
“Yeah,” I replied firmly, wondering if she was being authentic because I thought she had a mad crush on him. Maybe I was wrong, but I was in no state to talk about it and politely said goodbye and walked away.
