Murder Game (GhostWalkers, #7)(22)

She closed her eyes, feeling ill. His voice drove her temperature up, but the things he said to her made her feel sick. He was lost and alone. And that person inside her that needed to make the world a better place, that had too much empathy and compassion to be able to even touch people, drove her to her knees at the naked sorrow in his voice.

I heard screams and shots and my mother’s voice pleading not to kill my brother. His name was James and he was only ten years old. He shared my room and taught me to play ball. He never minded when I tagged along after him.

She was astonished at the cool voice he used relating such a terrible childhood trauma. Maybe he believed he had buried the whole thing deep enough that he could tell it without feeling, but she knew it wasn’t so. The rage in him was frightening. The sorrow devastating. Tansy found herself moving back up the slope toward her campsite. She caught the trunk of a sapling and held on to keep from hurrying back to comfort him. Now his commands had taken on an entirely different meaning. He did need her, whether he knew it or not—and she suspected he didn’t know that any more than he knew he was still that enraged, shattered, devastated child.

Come back to me. The stars are out. Do you see them? I never thought I’d see them again. Confined in that space, with blood dripping on me and pooling all around me, I never thought I’d ever be able to be inside again. I don’t like walls.

He used the present tense. She took a breath and let it out. Her hands released the sapling and she began walking back toward camp, her feet moving her in spite of the fact that her brain was telling her no. Where was her self-preservation? Why did his voice affect her so strongly? She only knew she wept inside for that innocent child and wept even more for the man he had become.

I stayed hidden for hours, days, I don’t know. I was terrified, not so much of being killed—I think I was long past that fear—but of what I knew I was going to find. I thought the screams were the worst, the pleading, and I prayed for it to be over. But then there was silence. Nothing broke the silence. I couldn’t hear footsteps, or cries, or even breaths. After a while I wasn’t even certain I was alive.

She hadn’t lived through a serial killer destroying her family, but she’d been present, hearing the victims’ last thoughts, their fears and cries and pain-filled whimpers, their last gasps of breath and that horrible rattle she couldn’t get out of her head. She didn’t need an object to touch to bring the images into vivid detail. She was in Kadan’s head and the images were burned there for all eternity. Now they were in her head as well. She wasn’t good at getting rid of blood and death. Tansy reached up and brushed at the tears on her face.

The first thing I saw when I pushed open the door was my brother’s face. His eyes were open and he was staring at me. Sometimes I can’t sleep and I see his eyes and I know I was supposed to find them and make them pay for what they did. But then I remind myself I’m not eight and he was dead and there was nothing left of him but a vacant stare, so I can’t really blame anything on him. His eyes looked like glass. Come back to me, Tansy. I need you tonight.

She’d seen eyes that looked like glass. Too many eyes. She didn’t sleep much either at night, which is why she chose to work and exhaust herself, sleeping in catnaps during the day. If she closed her eyes in the dark the dead surrounded her, staring with glassy eyes. She hadn’t saved them. She had waited too long to volunteer. She had hesitated. She had been too slow to pick up the trail. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t saved them. Maybe she needed to see it his way. They were already dead and there was nothing left but her own guilt.

My father had tried to cover my mother. I could see that. He’d tried to protect her, but they killed her and I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t make myself touch either of them. You know how in the movies the kid always kisses the dead parent or loved one? Well, I couldn’t go near them. I was sick. And angry. And so terrified of being alone. I dug through the blood. It was so sticky. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to wash it off of me. Sometimes it feels like a second skin. I dug through the blood until I found my father’s gun and I walked out of the house.

Her heart began to pound so hard her breath came in a ragged gasp. She was with him fully now, locked into his mind, his emotions her emotions. She was that eight-year-old boy who felt too much sorrow—and too much rage. Instinctively she tried to pull away, to separate herself, but his soft, relentless voice refused to let her go.

Come back to me now, Tansy. I walked for a couple of hours. I knew where to go. I’d recognized the men. They were business associates of my father and they’d come to dinner in our home. My mother had cooked for them. One had played baseball with my brother and me. I knew them. I stayed in the shadows where no one saw me, covered in my family’s blood. I’ve been there ever since.

She was crying openly now. It was impossible to choke back sobs. That little boy, covered in blood with a gun in his hand. She saw him so clearly. Felt the rage with him. Knew the sorrow that still gripped him like a vise.

“Don’t,” she whispered aloud. “Don’t do it.” There would be no going back once it was done. No way to ever recover that sweetness, that innocence, that had been inside that little boy. “Don’t.”

I need you tonight. I’m so tired and I need to hold you close to me. I don’t ever do that. Hold anyone close. I don’t get close, but now there’s no choice and I’m too damn tired to fight it. Come back to me.