Page 22 of Missing Piece (Neon Scars #2)

The odor of copper and rot hit him first as he opened the door, like a brick wall of stench he couldn’t avoid even if he wanted to.

It seeped into his pores, his hair, his gums, sticking to his taste buds like bad theater candy that was made from other bad candy no one wanted.

He covered his mouth and nose as Ophelia pushed him further into the house, glancing back at her to see if she had any reaction.

She only crinkled her nose for a second before shutting the door.

“Well, this doesn’t look the same as it did last night,” she said, her eyes darting back and forth.

“What about the smell?” Adam gasped, snapping his mouth shut as more of the air entered his mouth. He might never get rid of it. Humid, hot, rusty metal making its way into his mouth and down his throat.

He couldn’t tell what was worse. Breathing it in through his mouth or his nose.

“I’ve smelled worse,” Ophelia said, pulling out her phone.

Adam took a few more moments to steady himself in the iron miasma, settling on breathing through his mouth, before looking around the room.

For a moment, he thought that the old farmhouse had brownish-red carpets, but the smears on the walls and spatters on the couch told a different story. A much more violent and gruesome tale.

Nearly every inch of the carpet was soaked in blood. Dried, mostly, with only a few glimpses of the original beige fibers coming through. The room appeared to have been flooded with blood.

“What the fuck…?” Adam trailed off as he fixated on a symbol beside a toppled over bookcase, drawn messily and streaked as though fingerpainted on the wall in dried blood.

“Yeah, that’s new,” Ophelia said, walking up to the wall and snapping a picture of it. She glanced around again. “When I was here yesterday with my dad, this place was different. More like it had been staged to look like a burglary. Now it’s…something else.”

“Like the Manson family rolled through,” Adam said, wincing as stepped further into the stained room. This was wrong. They shouldn’t be here. As if he was disturbing the dead by walking through them. “This is too much to come from two old people.”

Ophelia nodded as she made her way around the room, peering into vases and moving things. “Probably animal origin.” She pulled up the couch cushions, shoving her hand into the crevice and pulling it back out with a fist full of hard candy wrappers.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Probably to freak the cops out, or to make the paper. Vampires aren’t exactly messy eaters, so to go to do something like this means they want attention from someone.

I need to make sure that it stays off a hunter’s radar.

” She opened a grandfather clock and peered inside.

“Go check the kitchen for places where you would hide something.”

Okay. Probably just animal origin. Not human blood squishing in your shoes.

Animal. It didn’t make him feel better as he walked into what appeared to be a dining room.

A China cabinet had been ransacked, each and every item shattered on the ground in front of it, the lower doors of it flung open and spilling with tablecloths.

It made his stomach churn. The carpet was only somewhat stained, as though someone had been injured and wandered through the area.

Adam’s skin crawled as he glanced around the dining room filled with memories. Pictures of children, grandchildren, a large family photo on the wall. Endless rows of knickknacks.

He couldn’t separate the room from them.

They had been people with a family that loved them.

They didn’t deserve this. Ophelia implied that this was the work of vampires.

After spending a week with them, he couldn’t imagine what sort of vampires existed out there that would leave this chaos in their wake.

He deserved his shitty life, but little old folks just trying to live their lives?

They didn’t deserve this.

He moved into the kitchen, feeling a little faint the longer he studied the pictures that still hung on the walls.

He didn’t want to think about it. He had to focus.

Focus on his task, on gaining Ophelia’s trust enough that even if she did plan on killing him in the blood-splattered house, she wouldn’t.

Then he could return to Vincent’s farmhouse and figure out a way to get out of there.

Even as the knife block on the counter came into view, he pushed away any intrusive thoughts. Acting rashly would not help. And something told him he would lose against Ophelia if he tried to surprise her with a knife to the back.

The kitchen looked stubbornly outdated, as though modernity had once knocked at this old couple’s door and told it to go away.

Even that thought brought another strange pang of sadness.

There was no time for sadness or anger or embarrassment.

He needed to find something out of the ordinary in a house that belonged more in one of those horror video games that popped up when he scrolled through social media.

There were a lot of places he would have hidden things.

Inside the jars on the counter labeled flour and sugar, in the oven, behind it, taped to the underside of the cabinet beneath the sink, inside the boxes of frozen food still in the freezer, the gap between the appliances and the cabinets.

But there was nothing. Although the kitchen was frozen in time, it was clean except for a few drops of dried blood on the hardwood.

Adam opened the last cabinet above the dusty coffee maker, hoping to find anything that caught his eye. But again, there was nothing interesting. Just a bunch of cans, floral coffee mugs with bible quotes on them, and teacups. He sighed as he began pulling the mugs down, looking inside them.

“Anything?” Ophelia called.

“Nope.” He grabbed one of the cans and paused, staring at the label as his mouth began to water. Peaches in heavy syrup.

Would it be rude to take a dead person’s food?

“Why are you staring at that can like it owes you money?” Ophelia’s voice came from behind him.

Startled, he jumped, slamming the can down on the counter hard enough to rattle the mugs against each other.

He turned to face her, backing against the counter when he realized she was disturbingly close to him, knife in hand, her head cocked like he had seen Vincent do before.

Be honest. “I, uh, like canned peaches,” he said, looking away from her.

“I like Fruit Roll-Ups but I don’t look at the box like you were staring at that can.” She took a step back.

“It was the only thing I could keep down when I first got sober,” he admitted. “I could spend the whole day throwing up, but if I had peaches, I could keep the juice down.”

“That’s cute, but like in a really sad way,” she replied.

Adam sighed and scanned the kitchen again, trying to think of what he had missed, if anything. This whole thing seemed like a wild goose chase dreamed up by a bored teen.

He glanced up, a strange creaking sound coming from above, but the source of the noise gave way as soon as he noticed it.

The ceiling was a drop ceiling. All the times he had managed to hold down a job, they came in handy for hiding his stash instead of keeping it on him where it could be discovered.

They were slightly warped, probably from humidity and never being replaced, but he spotted one with an almost perfect circle of dried blood on the tile, as though someone had used one finger to push the tile up.

Ophelia glanced up the longer he stared, following his line of sight. “Climb on the counter and check up there. A hundred bucks says that there’s something up there.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I’m too short and I don’t trust you not to stab me in the calf,” she deadpanned. “Now get up there. There’s still a second floor and an attic to check out.”

There was no point in arguing with her, so he just pushed the coffee mugs on the counter back and climbed up.

There was always something nerve-wracking about messing around with ceiling tiles.

It was usually the fact that even if he had been up in one before, he never knew if there would be new bugs or some vicious wildlife that had made its home up there.

Or what if there were body parts up there?

Please don’t be something dead. Please don’t be something dead. He pushed the tile up and to the side, peering into the space. “I can’t see shit up here.”

The ceiling creaked above him again. It was a small sound, but it was definitely there. The house settling as the sun went down? He knew a lot of old houses groaned and creaked, but something about it made the hair on his arms prick up. “Give me your phone, I need a flashlight.”

“If you try anything funny with this, I’ll cut your Achilles on your good leg,” Ophelia said as she placed her phone into his outstretched hand.

“Yes, yes, I get it,” Adam muttered as he pressed the button to turn on the flashlight.

He let out a small sigh of relief as the only thing that lit up in the space between the tile and the original ceiling was an endless array of spiderwebs.

Nothing human, no dead critters, just a spidery graveyard that made his skin crawl.

“I don’t really see anything-” he began, then squinted. No. There was something there, small and reflective. He grabbed it quickly, the cobwebs tickling the back of his hand.

“You got something?”

“Yeah.” That was all he managed to get out as the hidden phone began buzzing in his hand, catching him off guard. He grabbed the metal framing for the drop ceiling, trying to steady himself as his entire body tried to squirm off the counter.

It was no use. He found himself on his back, staring up at the dust and pieces of ceiling knocked loose from his attempt to catch himself. Ophelia’s round face leaned over him for a moment before she studied the gaping hole he left during his graceful descent to the kitchen floor.

“It’s ringing?” Ophelia’s voice brightened a bit as she snatched her phone back from Adam and pulled the vibrating phone from his other hand.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Adam groaned. His shoulders and lower back screamed at him as he pulled himself up, more dust and pieces of ceiling tile falling into his lap as he felt along his already sore head.

“Should I answer it?” she asked as she crouched beside him. She brushed some of the dust off his shoulder, still staring at the phone as it continued to ring.

“Do whatever,” Adam grunted.

The ceiling above them creaked again. Adam stared up at the hole in the framing, his jaw aching as he clenched his teeth. That sound. Something wasn’t right. “Ophelia—”

“I heard it,” she said quickly, focused on the same spot. “It’s an old house.”

“We should probably leave. You have your hidden object, let’s go before-”

There was another creak, louder, accompanied with the sound of metal on hardwood. Adam winced. He knew that sound. It was all he heard for that last week every time he got up to move around in that windowless room Vincent kept him locked in.

A chain.

“That’s not an old house noise,” Adam insisted as he scrambled to his feet. The bottom of his foot was beginning to itch again. Something was wrong. His whole body wanted him to book it for the front door, burning with the desire to run.

Ophelia just continued to stare up at the hole, as though she was trying to force herself to see through the material into whatever room was above them.

Then the shrieking started. Guttural, pained, blood-curdling screeching that seemed to finally get her attention. Ophelia shot to her feet.

“It might be time to go.”