Page 25 of Tempt Me

“Fuck…obnoxious damn device.”

I rolled out of bed and padded over in the direction of the high-pitched ringing.

“Ouch! Who put the damn closet door there?” Rubbing my head, I winced. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The glow of the phone illuminated the pants pocket, and I followed that beacon of light. Finally making it to the correct pair of pants, I grabbed the cell out of the pocket.

“Masters,” I answered.

Silence hit my ear, making my gut sink. I hated this feeling. The phone went dead, the empty line buzzing in my ear.

“Long time…no see, Pretty Boy.” The words chilled my body, so I moved only my eyes toward that voice.

There, near my window, I could see his sickening body. His gray hair was sticking up like he’d licked a sparking socket plug, his beady black eyes swaying like a clock back and forth.

He wasn’t real.

He couldn’t be.

I watched my brother Judas shoot him point-blank in the face last year. He was dead and buried in his victims’ unmarked graves underneath the collapsed ruins of Hospital Twelve and all its dirty secrets.

They had built another asylum. This one was being held together by my other brother, Goliath, and his pipsqueak girlfriend, Ezello. They made a pair of love-sick puppies. I swear everyone around me was getting hitched.

Quinn was ‘picket-fencing it’ with a woman he’d saved on duty and even had a rugrat now. Goliath and Zee were busy making the new hospital livable and finding a way to free Judes.

I still felt so fucking guilty about leaving Judes. He was all alone now, and Goliath was too busy with his feisty midget to really give our brother quality time.

“It’s because you’re a fraud, and you know it. You’re the reason your precious wife and daughter are dead.”

I growled and threw my phone at him. It smashed through the window, going right through his wispy form.

“Maybe just kill yourself now. Make it easy on those pretty girls so they can drag your sorry ass to hell where you belong.”

I ignored him, his voice haunting me in the dark now that the phone’s flashlight went with it out the window. I didn’t want to see his ugly ass.

“Don’t shoot the messenger, kid. Oh wait, your brother did that for ya’.”

He laughed. It was eerie and raspy. He sounded more like a dying old smoker now than the cracked-out whacko he was in the asylum.

“Thought you only spoke in fucked up nursery rhymes,” I said, getting off the floor and kicking the remaining pants into the corner.

“Your dumbass couldn’t understand my clear warnings then, and you won’t now,” he said, and I frowned.

“What warnings?”

He laughed again, this time sounding every bit like the nutball we killed. “Sleeping doll, Tick-Tock. Sleeping doll, tick-tock you, sleeping doll, tick-tock soldier, too. Tick-tock, another drops. Tick-tick, tock-tock.”

I dragged my hand down my face, the confusion of his words making me every bit as annoyed and angry as he’d predicted.

He laughed, turning back into Joe, the smoker, and leaving Tick-Tock Joe behind.

“Maybe if you used your brain more, you’d stop losing your girls, you idiot.”

I frowned.

Shit, I wondered if Fallon had gotten home all right.

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