Читать книгу Return Of the Fallen - Rita Vetere - Страница 6

Chapter 2

Toronto, Canada—Present Day

After finishing her evening shift, Justine pushed through the main doors of Mount Sinai Hospital and stepped into the deep freeze of a Toronto mid-winter night. She navigated the icy steps to the pavement and spotted Edmond’s car parked nearby on University Avenue, aptly nicknamed Hospital Row. Crisp snow crunched beneath her leather boots and a glacial wind pushed her along as she drew bitterly cold air into her lungs and exhaled it in tiny white puffs. A brilliant full moon shone over the snow-covered street, making it sparkle like diamonds.

She climbed into the passenger seat, closed the door against the frigid air and bussed Edmond’s cheek. “Wow, it’s colder than a toilet seat in Siberia out there.” Justine shivered from her short jaunt. “Remind me again why we willingly live in this city?”

Edmond turned up the heater. “I know, even JB couldn’t wait to get back inside after his walk tonight.”

JB was short for James Brown, the hound dog Edmond had rescued from the shelter the previous year. The loveable dog had acquired that name because he was forever jumping up on people and constantly being reprimanded to “get down.”

“By the way, you made the news today,” Edmond said.

“What?”

“The accident yesterday. The news coverage included a close-up of you helping an ambulance attendant with one of the victims outside the emergency ward.”

“Oh, right.” Yesterday, she had worked a double shift. The treacherous road conditions resulting from a freak ice storm had caused a massive sixty-seven car pileup on the highway, and more than seventy seriously injured patients had arrived at the emergency department. To make matters worse, television crews had descended on the hospital, getting in the way of things as they tried to get footage on what was being hailed as one of the worst car crashes ever. After another extended shift today, she was beat.

“Hungry?” Edmond asked.

“Famished. What’s for dinner?” She unbuttoned her heavy coat in the warmth of the car interior.

“You look awfully sexy in that uniform. Maybe we’ll just skip dinner and you can play nurse with me instead.”

“Uh-uh. Food first. I need my strength.” Justine studied his profile as he navigated through a busy intersection. His square jaw, unruly chestnut hair and intense blue eyes combined in a rugged look she had always found attractive, and his well-muscled physique added to his aura of strength. At the moment, his face wore a lopsided grin and bore a hint of excitement. “What are you grinning about?”

“What, can’t a guy be happy?”

She considered his goofy smile. “You’re up to something. What’s going on?”

Edmond laughed and said no more.

As they traveled along the frozen streets, Justine thought about what a great guy she had. His rugged good looks aside, Edmond possessed a rare combination of qualities that had appealed to her right from the beginning. He was a man whose physical strength was tempered by a surprisingly gentle nature, someone who could be annoyingly confident at times and endearingly humble at others. She’d known him for six years, lived with him for the past two, and loved pretty much everything about him.

When they arrived home—a small two-story house not far from the city center—they hurried out of the car to get inside. As Edmond unlocked the front door, Justine’s skin grew suddenly warm despite the icy temperature, and a tingling sensation began at the back of her neck. Something did not feel right.

“Wait,” she said.

“What is it?”

She looked up at the darkened house. “I think somebody’s in there.”

Edmond shot her a quick look of surprise. “What are you talking about? There’s no one inside except JB.”

“No, really—”

He turned the key in the lock, opened the door and entered.

“Edmond, wait.”

He paid her no mind and walked through the foyer into the living room. She hurried inside after him. The lights went on.

“Surprise!”

Justine blinked in shock. Dozens of people, laughter, clinking glasses and happy conversation filled the room. She glanced around at the smiling faces of the couples surrounding them—their friends.

“Happy Birthday, baby.” Edmond gave her a wink. JB bounded at them, barking and jumping up to say hello.

“Et tu, JB? You were in on this?” She laughed and scratched him behind the ears.

They all moved to the dining room where Edmond opened champagne and poured drinks for everyone. Then he held up his glass to make a toast.

“To Justine. She’s amazing and lovely, stubborn and smart. But what she does best, my friends, is cheat...and steal.”

Some of the guests exchanged uncomfortable glances. The rest stopped smiling. Justine, who was seated at the head of the table, locked gazes with Edmond and grinned.

“First,” Edmond said, “she cheated death.”

The smiles returned to their friends’ faces.

Edmond moved to where she sat. “And then...she stole my heart.”

He leaned over her and delivered a sensual kiss that she felt all the way to her feet. When he reluctantly drew away, he said, “Happy sixth birthday, love.”

Laughter erupted amid cries of “Hear, hear.”

Edmond disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later, balancing a large, rectangular cake that bore six lit candles.

“Make a wish.” He placed the cake on the table in front of her.

Justine laughed, downed the rest of her champagne and blew out the candles in one breath.

Their friends gathered round the dining room table, chatting and filling their plates from the tempting buffet of salmon and wild rice, Mediterranean salad and roasted chicken and pork with vegetables. As she rose to join the others, the room suddenly felt hot and too small. The noise seemed to intensify and the faces surrounding her appeared distorted. Her cheeks burned and beads of perspiration formed on her forehead as a pounding headache erupted at her temples.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said to Edmond. “I want to change my clothes.”

“You look a little pale. You okay?”

“Just a headache. I’ll take something before it gets worse.”

She climbed the stairs to their second floor bedroom, got out of her nurse’s uniform and into a pair of soft jeans and a cashmere sweater. In the bathroom, she grabbed a couple of headache tablets from the container in the medicine cabinet and swallowed them. Justine glanced at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Haunted eyes stared back at her. She brushed away the wayward tendrils of hair that clung to her face then ran cold water on a washcloth and pressed it to her temples, relieving some of the dull ache that had blossomed there.

For the zillionth time, she wondered how old she really was. She looked to be in her late twenties, but there was no way of knowing for sure. She had been born exactly six years ago today, entering the world as a grown woman, and fully dressed—on the night Edmond had found her, half-dead in a frozen alley.

The unsettling sensation washed over her again that the face staring back at her was nothing more than a mask, behind which a dark stranger lurked, waiting to come through.

Her hand automatically traveled to her forehead as she traced the strange scar just below her hairline. As far as scars went, it wasn’t so bad. But it had healed in the most unusual manner, forming a series of connected lines and curves—almost like a symbol. It was another enigma on her list of unexplained facts, none of which provided any clue as to who she had been before. All she knew for certain was, whatever had caused the peculiar scar had not only robbed her memory, but had damned well nearly killed her.

The doctors called it “retrograde amnesia.” No identification had been found on her, and no one had come forward to report her missing following her injury. The police had done all they could, and her own efforts to uncover her unremembered past had proven an exercise in futility.

Justine stared hard at her reflection, once again willing the stranger within to make herself known but, as always, her efforts to remember proved fruitless. A short time later, laughter drifted up to her from downstairs and she snapped out of her trance. Edmond would wonder what had happened to her. She adjusted a thick lock of hair so it covered the scar, and did her best to shake off her frustration at an unremembered past which had haunted her like a ghost for six years.

She had a good life and a terrific man with whom to share it. Whoever she had once been, the time had come to say goodbye to that woman once and for all. Turning away from the mirror, she headed downstairs to rejoin the party.

* * * *

Later that night, lying in bed next to Edmond, warm after their slow round of lovemaking despite the bitter cold outdoors, he placed his arm around her and kissed her softly.

“Justine?”

She looked at him, his features tinged silver in the moonlit room.“Hmm?”

“How did you know?”

“Know what, sweetie?”

“That there was someone in the house earlier tonight.”

She hesitated, wondering how to explain the warning signs her body had given off. “I don’t know... I just kind of felt it. Intuition, I guess.”

He smiled. “You’re a little weird, you know that?”

She felt his strong arms go around her and buried her face in his neck, breathing in his musky scent until she drifted to sleep.

* * * *

The following evening, Edmond dropped her back home after they shared dinner at their favorite local restaurant. She kissed him deeply before she exited the car in front of their house.

“Win big,” she said.

Some of Edmond’s friends at the insurance company where he worked had lined up their annual poker tournament for tonight, a ritual for the past five years, and he’d looked forward to it all week.

“I’ll try not to lose the house. Look, it’ll probably turn into an all-nighter. You sure you’ll be okay on your own? Luke said Jessica would be glad to come over and spend the night if you want company.”

“Are you kidding? All I want is a hot bath and then I’m going to bed.” Between working overtime again and the party last night, she was all in. “You go ahead and have fun,” she said through the open car door. “I’m going inside. It’s freezing.”

“Okay, call me on my cell if you need anything.”

She closed the car door and watched him pull away, then turned and hurried up the driveway. Grateful to be out of the cold—it had to be thirty below tonight—she quickly entered the house and shut the door behind her. JB was not at the door to greet her, and she stopped unbuttoning her coat. He was always at the entrance whenever she arrived home. When she heard him barking furiously from the back of the house, her hackles rose. With a growing sense of unease, she walked the few steps to the kitchen, put her hand out and flicked the light switch on the wall to her right. She tensed and took a step back in surprise.

A behemoth of a man stood in the center of the kitchen. She took in his massive shoulders, straining against the fabric of the overcoat he wore, a neck as thick as a tree trunk then looked directly into his flinty eyes. There was a sense of barely suppressed menace about him. He looked as lethal as a cocked gun. JB continued barking frantically from behind the closed mud room door.

Justine shivered inside her heavy wool coat as if the icy wind had suddenly found its way indoors.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, certain she sounded a lot braver than she felt.

The man’s meaty hand traveled to his midsection and he unbuttoned his coat. He moved his considerable bulk in her direction without answering.

A kind of blind intuition seized control of Justine before panic had a chance to enter and make itself at home. She surprised herself by streaking to the counter on her left, moving like a blur. Her gaze locked onto the sharpest of the knives in the wooden rack. In the next instant, the knife flew into her open hand, its rubber handle slapping neatly into her palm, blade up. She stared at it for a second, unable to understand how it had gotten there. Her eyes watered as a dull pounding began at her temples. A trickle of warm blood oozed from her right nostril onto her upper lip.

She operated purely on instinct and her arm went back as she took aim, then let fly the knife. With uncanny precision, it embedded itself in the upper part of the man’s arm, just as he reached inside his overcoat for something.

Justine barely had time to acknowledge the impossibility of what she had just done when the man, uttering a cry, stooped to retrieve the gun he had dropped. She moved again, faster than before, and darted back to the front entrance. Bullets ripped through the air around her, whizzing by her head to slam into the door, which forced her to veer left. She flew up the stairs and reached the second floor landing just as the man arrived at the foot of the staircase. Now what? She had managed to trap herself on the second floor. With nowhere else to go, she raced through the first doorway on her right, entered her bedroom and locked the door behind her. She ran for the phone on the nightstand, but a hail of bullets ripping through the door stopped her in her tracks. A burning sensation swept across her ear and the air stirred next to her cheek as a bullet grazed her. She had to get out of the house, away from this maniac, now.

Her arms went up in front of her. She hurtled through the window overlooking the street and followed fragments of glass out into the bitter night. The pavement rushed up to meet her, and she had just enough time to wonder how many bones she was about to break when, incredibly, she landed on her feet in a crouched position on the driveway, unharmed.

And just how the hell had she managed to do that?

The man appeared at the broken window two floors above.

“Israfel,” he called out.

Justine’s vision went dark. She felt the air leave her lungs, making it hard to breathe. Her heart turned over then raced.

Memory returned, arriving all at once, and rolled over her like a tsunami. With it came vivid images that swirled all around her, dancing like bright colors in front of her eyes. Her vision doubled, then trebled, as past and present attempted to meld, making her head spin so badly she collapsed onto the snowy pavement.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them and shook her head to clear it. When she regained her feet, the man had disappeared from the upstairs window. In another second, he’d burst through the front door after her.

Justine ran, jumbled memories flapping all around her like swarming bats. She barely registered the glacial wind, or her next door neighbor, Carol, who opened her front door and called out to her as she flew by. She raced blindly along the icy street, the single word the man had uttered roaring like thunder in her ears.

Israfel. He had spoken her name. Her real name.

As she barreled through the frigid night at breakneck speed, tearing along the dark and deserted streets, her past and the man in hard pursuit, the first clear and terrifying memory crashed through. She, a small child, lay on a dusty road. Her mother, backlit by a red summer sun, towered over her. In Mamma’s raised hand a butcher knife glinted in the sunlight, about to descend, to strike her dead. And the words Mamma spoke, “Abomination...not suffered by God to live.”