Beast

It was raining. Hard. The storm made it difficult to see as they walked down the street, so Cain and Celine kept their heads down and their hoods up. Somewhere far off, sirens were blaring as ambulances and fire trucks raced down the street. This was typical in New York. It blended into the background like white noise. No one even noticed or spared it a second thought. There was an emergency somewhere close by, but as long as it didn't involve you, it didn't exist.

"What number did you say it was?" Celine asked, squinting at the numbers above the door on the gray, stone apartment building. Her skin was pale and had a waxy, sickly quality to it. Her blond hair was pulled away from her face in a knot at the nape of her neck, and her blue eyes looked tired and sad, but still had a piercing strength to them, as if they could see right through you, deep inside, all the way down to your soul.

"261," Cain said shortly, continuing to walk past Celine as she stopped to examine the numbers.

"That was 249," she said once she had caught up to him. She was tall, almost as tall as Cain, and was thin and lean from years of doing yoga and dance. Due to a combination of stress, sleep deprivation, and not eating, Celine's usually sultry, healthy glow was gone. Her face now looked thin and sunken.

Cain didn't say anything. He knew the place he was looking for.

He was deceivingly tall and well built for a man as soft spoken as he. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, as if he were trying to fold in on himself, to make himself less than a man and remain unseen.

His dark blond hair was shaved very close on the sides and was left a little longer on top. It had only been a few days since he had last shaved, but he already had a substantial beard. Without it, his round green eyes, always large with surprise at being where he was, full lips, and smooth skin left him looking like a pretty boy. He didn't like that.

Puddles were unavoidable. Both Cain's and Celine's shoes were soaked through, as were the rest of their clothes. A man on the subway had been looking at them too long, so they had had to get off eleven blocks back.

Cain thought that he might feel a sense of nostalgia, now that he was back in the very neighborhood he had grown up in, but he felt nothing.

He suddenly turned to his left and jogged up the front steps of one of the monotonous gray buildings, pushing the doorbell once.

Celine looked up. Sure enough, this was 261. She met Cain in front of the door and took her hood off now that they were sheltered.

Cain glanced over at her, "Keep your hood up." His voice was quiet and hoarse from lack of use.

She did as told, looking at him nervously. Cain's eyes were focused relentlessly on the beige colored door. She imagined his steady gaze burning a hole straight through the metal.

After a minute, they could hear bolts being undone and the door swung open to reveal a black man, a little shorter than Cain, although much more muscular. His dark brown eyes widened in shock and he took an involuntary step back, allowing Cain to quickly sneak past him into the town house. Celine automatically followed him and looked apologetically at the stranger, who was still gripping the door knob.

Cain stood a couple yards away from the man, pulling his hood down and shaking rain out of his hair.

"Wh... what?" the man stuttered, closing the door and bolting it once more. He stood with his arms wide, waiting for an explanation.

"Can we sit down?" Cain asked.

The man sighed, rubbing his eyes as if this were a bad dream he could wake up from.

"You're damn lucky Nikki's at her parent's house for the weekend. You know that, Cain? You're damn lucky," the man said and gestured for Cain and Celine to follow him as he walked down a long hallway. Cain smirked. This reception was no more than he could have hoped for. The man led them to a small sitting room filled with stylish furniture that Cain was sure his old friend hadn't picked out on his own.

"You gonna introduce me to your friend?" the man asked as he sat down in a leather recliner. Cain plopped himself down on the couch and Celine hesitantly followed his example. Cain looked very at home.

"Ray, this is Celine, and Celine, this is Ray, an old friend of mine," he said casually, resting his hands behind his head and putting his feet up on the coffee table.

"It's nice to meet you Celine. Now, tell me, how exactly did you come to meet this model citizen over here?" Ray asked her in his deep voice, gesturing towards Cain, of whom he clearly did not approve, but couldn't turn away because they'd grown up together like brothers.

"I was one of his nurses," she said quietly, knowing that this was the wrong answer, but the answer Ray had expected nonetheless.

Ray smiled coldly and looked towards Cain, "And now can you tell me why you dragged her into this mess?"

"She's sympathetic to my cause," Cain said, shrugging. He knew what Ray was getting at, but he wasn't going to play that game.

"Look, Cain," Ray began, dropping all pretenses, "I don't know what the hell kind of stunt you're trying to pull, but I can't help you. If they ask me about you, I'll lie, but I can't do more for you than that."

Cain frowned and took his feet off the table, leaning forward towards Ray, "Before I left, you told me- you promised- that when I got out, you'd help." He looked worried and lost, like he'd been abandoned by an older brother.

Ray sighed and shook his head, "I know I did. I know. But, damn it, a lot has changed since then. Nikki and I got married. We're expecting our first kid. I can't just drop everything and leave them."

"Nikki's pregnant?" Cain asked, a line appearing between his eyebrows. This clearly changed things.

"Yeah, a baby girl. She's due in November,"

Celine remained quiet, looking around the room, as if trying not to listen in on the conversation.

"You know what, can you give us a minute?" Ray requested of Celine, looking pensive. "If you go back out in the hallway, the kitchen is two doors down on the left. Get yourself something to eat. You both look starved."

Celine got up quietly and left.

"Alright," Ray said, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. "I'll do what I can, okay? But I can't promise you much. I'm usually at the fire department six days a week and when I'm not there, Nikki always has doctor's appointments or something we gotta go to. I can't give you a lot of time."

Cain nodded, his eyes focused on something far away. "Have you heard about Jaya at all?" he asked.

Ray ran a hand over the stumble on his jaw line before saying, "Not much. Shrina didn't want me to have anything to do with Jaya after... well, after the incident. I can't say that I really blame her. She wanted Jaya to have a clean break from everything. But naw man, I haven't heard anything from her since Shrina came to pack her stuff and brought her home to Texas."

Cain nodded solemnly. He had expected this.

"I do have pictures though," Ray said, trying to remedy the situation. He got up and rummaged through a drawer somewhere. "Shrina sends them every couple of months," Ray walked back with a handful of pictures and passed them to Cain. "She says since we were a big part of Jaya's early childhood, that we deserve to see the way she's growing up."

There was more that he wanted to say, but after seeing Cain's face, Ray decided that he was better left alone. "I'll see if Celine needs anything," Ray said, then went to join her in the kitchen. Cain didn't respond. He might not even have heard Ray for all the notice he took of his absence.

Cain went through the pictures slowly, memorizing each one. There were one's of Christmases, filled with traditions passed down from himself to Jaya, which Shrina must have adopted at her granddaughter's request. There were pictures of Jaya's first days of school, and photos of her with her friends. A red headed boy with freckles came up in a lot of the pictures. Based on the notes scribbled on the back of the pictures, his name was Riley and he was Jaya's best friend.

Cain smiled. He was happy that she had a best friend, but god! Did she have to grow up so fast? From the most recent pictures he could see that Jaya was already so tall, much taller than when he had last seen her, and was turning out to be just as beautiful as her mother. Jaya's smile, missing teeth in a few places, beamed at him off the page. She had a brown and white cat in her arms, and she was snuggling it up against her chest. Her hair was pulled back, but it must have been a windy day, because a few pieces had come loose and were blowing in her face. The sun was behind the photographer, so Jaya had to squint her brown eyes at the camera. Those brown eyes, which always seemed to be smiling, were so much like her mother's, as was her small, delicately shaped nose, and her heart shaped face. There was no room left for her to bare resemblance to Cain. He was thankful for that, as if some part of his wife, Devika, lived on through Jaya in that way.

He tucked this picture, dated earlier that very summer, into his pocket and left the rest of the stack on the table. He would have taken them all, but he had nowhere to put them and they would be easy to lose.

Cain wiped his eyes, glad that Ray had had the decency to leave the room, feeling ashamed of this display of emotion, however private it may have been. He took a few minutes to compose himself before getting up to find Celine and Ray.

He could hear Celine laughing before he even entered the kitchen. It was a nice sound, and one he hadn't heard before. When he got closer, he realized that Ray was telling her one of his favorite stories, the one about Cain getting chased up a tree by their neighbor's Rottweiler when they were eight years old.

"I have never seen a kid run that fast! He didn't know until after that I'd hidden the dog's bone in the hood of his sweatshirt. He about killed me when we finally got him down from that tree," Ray said, chuckling at the old memories.

"Aw," Celine cooed, "Did he really cry though?" She felt bad for the poor little boy, but couldn't help being amused by his misfortune.

"You would've cried too if a dog twice your size came at you with his teeth," Cain mumbled, opening the cabinets and pulling out things to make a sandwich. Ray and Celine looked up, and the humor quickly drained from both of them. Cain's reappearance had a sobering effect on them.

Ray cut through the silence, saying, "Nikki doesn't get home until late in the afternoon tomorrow. You're free to stay here for the night, if you don't mind sleeping on the couch, and work out a plan or whatever. I'll try to help but I don't need to know details. If someone comes knocking on my door asking about you guys, I don't want to have to lie too much." Deniability, that's what he wanted.

Cain nodded. That was fair. He understood Ray's desire to be able to protect himself. He was already doing more than Cain had any right to ask for.

Later that night, as they sat around the table after the dishes from dinner had been cleaned and put away, Cain began to explain his plan.

"The first thing we need to figure out is where we're going to stay after this. If we're sleeping on buses and in train stations, we'll never get anything done." As he said this, he glanced over at Celine who'd already become worn out and exhausted after just three days of traveling.

Ray thought for a moment, biting the tip of his tongue, sifting through all the places he could think of. After a minute, he snapped his fingers, "My brother-in-law has a place on Bolton Lake, in Connecticut. He only stays there during the summer. The kids went back to school a couple weeks ago, so the house'll be empty."

"Are there a lot of neighbors? Will people notice that the house is being lived in?" Cain asked, trying not to get excited, although the prospect of having a whole house to stretch out in was a welcome one.

"Well," Ray shrugged, "most of the people on the lake live there year round, I think. But it's all woods across the street, so no houses there. The guy who owns the property on the left doesn't live there anymore, I think he's in a retirement home or something, so it's pretty much deserted. There's not a lot of activity on the lake in the fall and winter, so that's not really an issue. The only problem could be the neighbors on the right. An older couple and their dog live there. They're nice, but they might stop by to say hi if they notice someone coming and going. I think from October to March they go down to Florida though, so they won't be there for much longer. Keep a low profile, don't put the lights on at night. You could get away with it."

"I don't think we'll be able to come up with something much better than that, do you?" Celine asked, looking at Cain expectantly.

He shook his head.

"That's settled. Next, we need to find Ari," Cain said in the same monotone voice as before.

"Who the hell is Air-ee?" Ray asked, looking confused.

"Details you don't want to know," Cain explained. Ray nodded.

"Will he know you're out?" Celine asked Cain, then said to Ray, "You didn't know Cain had escaped, right? So if Ari doesn't know, he won't even know to look for us," she reasoned. Ray agreed, even though he didn't know who Ari was.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that. He's in a different circle. If anyone knows by now, it'll be him," Cain said, sounding surer than he had about anything else.

Ray wanted to ask what Cain meant by, 'different circle,' but restrained himself, keeping in mind what he had said about deniability.

"Still, how will he find us? Or how will we find him? No communication for four years? He could be anywhere!" Celine said, stating the facts as she knew them, trying to be realistic.

Cain looked up at Ray, who immediately understood that Cain didn't want to answer Celine in front of him.

"It takes three hours to get to Bolton Lake from here. If we leave early enough, I can drive you guys there before Nikki gets home. If you're okay with that, I'm calling it a night. See you in the morning," Ray announced loudly, pushing his chair back from the table and stalking off towards his bedroom, even though he wasn't tired and it wasn't that late.

Once the sound of his footsteps disappeared, Celine turned to Cain once more and asked, "So? How are we to meet Ari?"

Cain had that far away look in his eyes, as he often did, like he was focused on a distant memory somewhere no one else could see.

"I knew about my arrest a few days before it actually happened. Ari and I agreed on a meeting place if and when I got out, and I saw Ray. I asked him to take care of Jaya if he could, told him I was innocent and asked him to help me prove it."

"And Ray, you trust him?" Celine asked earnestly. She was trying to sound calm, but her face betrayed her, showing her timidity and worry.

She could tell the moment the words left her lips that Cain was angry, perhaps not at her, but angry about something. "I trust Ray completely. That should be good enough for you." Celine knew that she would be unable to push the matter further, and although she understood the bond between Cain and Ray, she was sure that Ray would betray them if it meant protecting his family. She didn't fault him for that, but was afraid of what it meant for Cain... and for her.

"We should try to get some sleep," Cain said with a sense of finality. "We can't do much more than guesswork before we see Ari."

Ray had set up a spot for them in the guestroom. He and Nikki had been meaning to take a weekend off in order to turn it into a nursery, but they hadn't gotten around to it yet, so Celine was to sleep on the bed while Cain took the couch. Celine had offered to switch with him, but Cain insisted that she needed the rest more than he did.

They both changed into clothes Ray had lent them while their own wet ones spun in the dryer. Neither of them said a word to each other as they turned off the lights and set the alarm clock for five the following morning.

As Celine lie awake, listening to the rain continue to patter against the window and the sound of Cain's deep breathing as he fell asleep, she couldn't help but wonder what she had gotten herself into and whether it would be worth it in the end.