It's One of Us(64)

But time is running out.

He’s not stupid. He knows that if it comes down to it, if he is caught, if he says the right things, chances are he’ll go back to the hospital. But in case they want to go the trial route and try to send him to jail, he needs something, anything, that will make him look innocent. He can’t do that to his mom, can’t go to jail. It would break her. The hospital is a different story. People can forgive insanity.

Circumstantial as it is, the cell phone pinging in the proper places while women are going missing forty miles north gives him a defense. Today he needs to attach it to another car, of a former friend who is going to the mountains, and let that be his alibi.

He hates having to think like this. But he’s always been self-aware. Too much for his own good, his doctor told him once.

Time is running out, but he can forestall a little while longer.

Campus is quiet in the dark. He finds the car, gets to work. Thinking. Always thinking. He can still smell the blood on his hands. Blood, and flowers.

When Scarlett told him about the Halves, he made up a name and sent in his DNA. Matched to her, and to all the others. He is known in the program as Male Sibling 13, though he is really number one. The first of his kind, the first of his name.

Of course, putting his DNA in ended up being a mistake, but really, maybe it was for the best. This lifestyle isn’t sustainable. And it drove him to find his father, and that was how he found her. His darling Olivia.

Oh, her pain. The tears. The strength she shows. He’s known no one like her before, his blessed soul mate. It was bound to happen; he’d always known he’d find someone who understood him. That’s why he did so much introspection. He wanted to be right for her. To do things she likes, to make her happy.

He’s only curious, after all. About himself, about his mind. In the hospital, after talking to his doctors about why he was experiencing such violent thoughts and urges, he’d done copious amounts of research about the MAOA gene, the warrior gene, and its link to aggressive behavior. The sexier, and less accurate, name was the murder gene. According to one study he memorized, of nine hundred criminals in a cohort in Finland, the group had committed over eleven hundred murders. Were they destined to kill? Compelled? Was this murder gene a real thing? He didn’t know, but wow, he was fascinated by the possibility.

He’d always been convinced the urges he was feeling were organic, though he held back with the doctors on just how intense the impulses were. He was smart; they all knew he was smart, so they dug, deep, into his psyche. They tried everything to pull out the seeds that were germinating inside of him, but he was able to control what he told them, what he said. He didn’t want to spend his life in the hospital, and he knew he could control his compulsions if only he understood himself. This was a dopamine thing. A serotonin thing. A coiled snake that lived in his head, not created by his environment. He’d had a fantastic upbringing with a wonderful mother, so where did his darkness come from?

His genes.

His father.

Yes, there was free will. Yes, there was socially acceptable behavior. Yes, he could be conditioned to not hurt people.

But in order to quell a craving, first you must slake the thirst.

It took him forever to get the name out of Winterborn. He’d befriended a woman who worked there, seduced and cajoled and flattered and begged and maybe did a tiny bit of threatening until she finally broke the rules and gave him the details.

He’d left her by the side of a quiet Georgia road, inside a thick field of cotton. An inelegant solution, but as far as he knew, her body had never been recovered. He missed her sometimes. She’d been so nice to him, in the beginning.

Once he had the name, it had taken him all of ten minutes to find his father. Living in Nashville, only miles away from his childhood home. Not a huge surprise; Winterborn was a popular regional sperm bank. He’d probably seen his father in the store or driving downtown sometime.

He followed. It’s what he did.

His father and stepmother were a typical Nashville couple, did all the typical Nashville things. It was fun watching them, getting to know their tastes and patterns. Until he trailed them to Charlotte and 23rd Avenue North and saw them enter the building that would change all their lives forever.

His father, with his beautiful fragile, lovely wife, at a fertility clinic.

Olivia had given Peyton a tremulous smile in the building’s elevator, and Peyton fell in love with her in an instant. Fell, hard. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. The more he watched, the more he wanted her. She was his ideal. Perfection, in so many ways.

Oh, and their terrible problems. His heart really did go out to Olivia. She wanted it so much. She wasn’t all that different from the women who were pouring out their hearts to his mother online, night after night. They wanted this commonality, they wanted to carry, bear, and raise children. Some didn’t want a partner; some had a partner who couldn’t give them what they wanted. Some were gay, some were straight. Some had no kids, some full families they wanted to add to. One who needed to get pregnant again with a genetically matched child who didn’t have the crippling disease her other kids suffered from so “it” could be used as a bone marrow donor. She figured a different genetic stream might provide a healthy child or two. She had actually called the possible child “it.”

That bothered him, the harvesting of other children, but it wasn’t his problem.