Free Caught Forever Between by Adrian Phoenix

 
     
    Table of Contents

    Beginning
    Scene2
    Scene3
    Scene4
    Finale
    Afterword
    About Adrian
    Other Works by Adrian
    Excerpts
    Connect with Adrian
     
     
Caught Forever Between
     
    Adrian Phoenix
     
    T earing down the yellow crime-scene tape, Cass keyed open the door to INNER EYE TATTOO and stepped inside. Closing the door, she glanced around the shattered shop she and Alex shared.
    Broken glass from the windows glittered like mica on the stone-tiled floor and on the sofa; night-glo inks, their pungent odor lingering still in the humid air, smeared the walls, ceiling, and floor in neon-bright Rorschach designs. Almost everything had been bashed or ripped apart — the computer, the phone, Alex’s patterns and sketches and, behind her . . .
    Cass turned, glass crunching beneath her Doc Martens, and looked past the remains of the sterilizer and the tat gun scattered on the bloodstained floor.
    Alex’s blood. Clotted and dried into eerie designs that rivaled some of his best work —
    Throat tight, Cass looked away. Whoever had done this had hated Alex, hated him in secret until it had finally burst free, spattering the shop with a bitterness so thick she could feel it still; smell it bile-rank beneath the spicy-sweet odors of boiled shrimp and cayenne, magnolias and chicory coffee drifting in through the broken windows.
    A week since That Night and Alex remained in a coma at Charity Hospital — would her Michelangelo dream forever? Never again open his eyes? — and nothing had been done.
    Just like nothing had been done when her mother was murdered fifteen years ago in Boise.
    Switching on the fan, Cass sank down onto the client lounger. She sighed in relief as the fan’s breeze dried the sweat on her face and throat. The warm rush of air plastered her black mesh tank top against her perspiration-dampened skin and fluttered the hem of her red plaid skirt. From outside, jazz and faint laughter from Dumaine Street floated in to mingle with the fan’s determined hum.
    Another sultry N’awlins night. Her seventh night in hell. And counting — until Alex opened his eyes again.
    If, a traitorous part of her whispered, repeating the doctor’s words. If. And even then, he could remain in a vegetative state, blue eyes open, but empty. Forever.
    Cass pulled her feet up onto the lounger and wrapped her arms around her fishnet-clad legs. She shut her eyes and rested her chin against her knees. She felt like a little kid again, no longer eighteen, longing for the comfort of embracing arms.
    In the darkness behind Cass’s eyes, an image of her mother formed — the only one she had — bending over Cass’s bed, long red hair shadowing her face, but something glittered — fairy sparkles? magic dust? tears? — on her mother’s cheeks as she reached for Cass and shushed her, saying in her husky voice that everything was all right.
    Cass often wondered what had brought her mother in to comfort her — a nightmare? fever? simple love? She’d asked Helena once. Her sister had stared at her, dark eyes shadowed by long red curls, looking so eerily like their mother in that moment that Cass’s heart had started pounding hard and, for a split second, she’d been terrified of what Helena might say. In the end, though, Helena had shaken her head, and said, her voice low and taut, “Geez, Cass, I don’t know. I was on my own then.”
    Cass half believed that Helena still wished she was on her own, not saddled with a kid sister. Helena had followed the free trade South, teaching Cass the Art along the way and with the years. They’d always had to hide since Helena refused to go legit, refused to join the Tattoo Artists Union, refused to be anyone’s apprentice. Preferred to be an ink-slinging outlaw.
    They’d settled in New Orleans when Cass was thirteen. That was the year they’d discovered that Cass was an Intuitive — an artist who could see into and symbolize the inner person.
    Helena had abruptly stopped teaching her,