by Rysa Walker
“Yeah,” he says, following my gaze. “I found it on one of the bookshelves downstairs, and since I wasn’t really following the stuff about warrens and Fivers, I thought I’d give it a try. It’s really good for a book about rabbits. But I decided to turn off the light and watch the stars for a while.”
It’s easy to see why. The moon hangs above the ocean like a giant letter D, and the sky is dotted with more stars than I’ve ever seen. I sit on the arm of the chair and push the curtain back a bit more to get the complete panorama.
“It’s like something by Van Gogh.”
“I know,” he says. “Can’t see anything like this in DC. Too much light pollution.”
We sit there quietly for a while, but the silence feels heavy and awkward.
“Listen, Anna . . .” He starts in, hesitates, and then says, “I brought my bag in here, but I can move it to another room. I mean, your nightmares have gotten better, and with Porter and Kelsey here, I thought you might feel . . . I don’t know . . . weird about me sleeping in here. We’re not exactly pressed for space like we were in the RV, so . . .”
“Up to you,” I say as I cross over to the corner to retrieve my bag.
I should probably just leave it at that. Leave the ball totally in his court. But I gather up my courage and blurt out what I was thinking earlier. We have to talk about it eventually. Might as well be now.
“Maybe you should go. You might sleep better. You’ve been confining yourself to maybe a quarter of the mattress out of fear that you might accidentally touch the body that’s temporarily housing your brother in the middle of the night. If you move any farther away, you’re going to fall off the damn bed.”
He inhales sharply but doesn’t respond. I keep my back to him and start shoving my stuff into the dresser near the door.
I hear the chair creak as Aaron gets up, and then I hear the doorknob turn. But when I look over, he’s just standing there, motionless, hand on the doorknob.
And I feel like a total bitch.
“I’m sorry, Aaron.”
He turns to look at me, and I continue. “That wasn’t fair, and I—”
Aaron’s mouth cuts off the rest of my apology. His hand cups the back of my head, pulling me into a kiss. And this kiss is very different from the others we’ve shared. Those were tentative, almost exploratory. Testing the waters.
This time, it’s like diving headlong into the surf. I let the tide take me, curling my fingers into his hair. He presses his face into my neck and whispers my name, then he lifts me up to his height. I wrap my legs around his waist, and he takes a step backward, moving us onto the bed.
He kisses me again, a long, deep kiss, and then moves away, looking down at me. “I think we need to talk.”
“No.” I pull his mouth to mine again. “I like this better than talking.”
“So do I, but . . .”
I run my hands under Aaron’s shirt and slide them along the muscles of his back. His breath catches, and for several minutes, talking seems to be the last thing on his mind. Then he pulls away again.
“You don’t play fair, Anna.”
“This isn’t a game,” I say. “And we’re not opponents.”
“No, but we’re also not alone. And I don’t mean Daniel. Screw Daniel. And Jaden. But you’ve got a little kid in there, too. Are your walls up?”
To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about my walls. My entire mind and body were in the moment, here and now. If Daniel and Jaden are perverse enough to spy, then so be it. But yeah . . . Hunter. Just because I was forced to learn absolutely everything about sex when I unpacked my first set of hitcher memories, that doesn’t mean Hunter has to be subjected to it. So the walls go up.
“They’re up now,” I say, pressing my body against his side. “And, it’s not like we’d warp his development or anything. He’s a ghost.”
“A kid ghost,” Aaron counters.
Part of me—probably the bit that was shaped by Emily MacAllister—agrees, but I’m feeling contrary. “Kids wander into the room while their parents are watching R-rated movies all the time. And like I said, the walls are up.”
He leans down so that his lips hover just above my neck. “And how sure are you that you can keep those walls up if things get heated?”
This time it’s his hand sliding beneath my shirt, his palm warm against my stomach as his thumb slides along the underside of my breast. My breath hitches in my throat, and my back arches to close the slight space between our bodies.
My walls are still up. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that we just created several hairline cracks in the plaster.
“Okay, okay. We’ll stop.” I start to get up, but he pulls me back.
“No. We’re not finished. I should have talked to you about this last week—”
“But I only picked up Hunter a few days ago.”
“Not . . . Hunter. He’s not the only issue, and no, I don’t mean Daniel. It’s just . . . I’ve been here every night when you dream. And you don’t dream quiet. So . . . I know what Lucas did to Molly. It’s bad enough knowing that it happened to Molly, but to hear you reliving it . . .” He shudders. “What I’m saying is that I don’t want to make things worse, to stir up any of those memories by moving too fast, especially when . . .”
“When what?” I prod after a few seconds of silence.
He sighs, and there’s another long pause before he answers the question. “The night before you escaped from The Warren, Taylor and I were walking the grounds at the Tome School, trying to figure out why we couldn’t find any trace of you when she’d clearly tracked you to that location. While we were there, I picked up a vibe. It was brief . . . There was a lot of interference. Maybe because there were so many people in that place or maybe because the compound was underground. But you were part of that vibe. I saw you. Heard you scream and saw through the eyes of someone throwing you onto a bed. You hit your shoulder against the headboard. It was Lucas, wasn’t it?”
When I nod, he says, “I could hear his thoughts, so I know . . . what he was planning. What I don’t know and what I haven’t been able to get up the nerve to ask you is whether he raped you like he did Molly. Whether those nightmares are hers or yours.”
“No.” I feel some of the tension drain from his body. “You’re right that he would have. I couldn’t have fought him off, even with that stupid plastic shiv I made. But Ashley . . . she showed up with some story about needing to take my vitals. And Lucas left.”
“It’s kind of hard to reconcile Ashley saving you with her killing Daniel,” Aaron says. “Or trying to, I guess. Maybe he was right and she really didn’t have a choice.”
“Maybe.” I leave it at that, unwilling to go into the things that I’ve been piecing together about Daniel and Ashley—or more correctly, Daniel and Ashley’s sister—right now. It’s partly because of the privacy pact I made with Daniel but also because I want to make a larger point while we’re on this subject.
“Two other things. First, I’m not Molly.”
“What? I know that,” Aaron says. “I’m not—”
“Just hear me out, okay? Molly’s memories are just one file cabinet in my head. There are nine others. You’ve just been unlucky enough to be around while Molly’s memories were being . . . assimilated, I guess. And please don’t make the Star Trek joke. Deo beat you to it years ago. What I’m getting at is . . . Molly’s memories are more recent, but now that the dreams are wrapping up, they’ll soon be like the others. Not things that happened to me, so much as things that I experienced happening to someone else.”
Aaron gives a skeptical laugh. “You do know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? At least not to those of us on the outside of your overcrowded head.” He leans down to press a kiss against my temple.
“Maybe think of it like a virtual-reality game? It’s very vivid while you’re in the game, but once you take off the headset, you don’t remember those events as something that happened to you personally. Th
ey are Molly’s memories, not mine. So you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Okay.”
“And second, you are not Lucas. When you’re touching me, I have never once thought about that night. That was about dominance and power. Violence. You know that. If his thoughts weren’t violent, you would never have picked them up, right?”
“Right.” He traces the curve of my mouth with his forefinger. “I just don’t ever want you to feel that I’m taking unfair advantage of this situation. That I’m moving too fast when you’re in a shaky emotional state.”
“So you’re putting me in control of this relationship?”
He laughs. “In control of this part of our relationship, yes. For now.”
I loop my fingers through his, and I flip him over onto his back. Now I’m on top, and I lean down so that my lips graze his.
“Better?”
“Infinitely better.”
But neither of us can entirely forget about Hunter. We make it out of PG-13 territory, but just barely, and then stop by unspoken agreement. For a long time, we just lie there, still and silent, and the fire inside me slowly recedes to a flicker. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement. We’re on the same side of the bed now, and it feels like we’re moving in the right direction.
Then I get a flash of memory from one of my hitchers, Didier, who was the father of twins. For a time when they were toddlers, Didier was certain that he and his wife would never make love again, that they’d never have time alone again. And even though I don’t want to screw things up, I have to be certain that Aaron understands one thing.
“Aaron?”
“Mmhmm,” he says, sleepily nuzzling the top of my head as it rests on his shoulder.
“You do know that I can’t promise we’ll ever be completely alone, right? Daniel, Jaden, Hunter . . . after they leave, there will be someone else. I’ve had maybe a year total, out of my entire life, where my head wasn’t at least double occupancy.”
“I know.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then says, “And you know that any time we walk into a restaurant, there’s a risk that I’ll go into panic mode because a chef is thinking about whacking his jerk of a manager with a meat cleaver. Is that a deal breaker for you?”
“No, but it’s not the same. Unless you’re planning to invite that chef home to hang out in the bedroom with us?”
Aaron chuckles. “No. He’s not invited.” He raises up on one elbow, and even in the moonlight I can see the intensity in his eyes. “But it is the same, Anna. My point is that your hitchers are part of you. They’ve shaped who you are inside.”
Aaron stops and presses his lips against the hollow of my throat for a long moment. That flickering candle inside me flares back into a campfire, and I take a deep breath to steady myself.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, running his hand along my bare leg. “I really like the wrapper. But I want what’s inside, too. I want the whole package.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Carova Beach, North Carolina
November 7, 2019, 9:27 a.m.
The same sliding glass door that offered a gorgeous view of the beach and the starscape at night has very real drawbacks come morning. I’ve drifted in and out of sleep since daybreak. Aaron yanked a pillow and blankets over his head at some point, and while that’s probably really effective at blocking the sunlight, I don’t know how he can possibly breathe under there. He groans when I slide out from under the covers, though, so I guess some oxygen is getting through.
I pull on my jeans and go upstairs to the great room that takes up most of the top floor. As usual, Taylor seems to be the first one up. Despite her headache the night before, she’s already seated at the bar finishing up a bowl of Cheerios. The small television behind the bar is on, tuned to one of the morning news shows, where they’re currently talking about football. Her tablet is propped up, and she appears to be reading a newsfeed.
That level of multitasking is way beyond my ability before coffee, so I shuffle into the kitchen to start a pot. When I return with my own bowl of cereal, Taylor finally looks up from the tablet.
“Is everyone still asleep?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Porter and Kelsey took the truck into Kitty Hawk to buy Kelsey some office furniture. There isn’t a single desk in this entire house, aside from that pathetic little writing desk in the hallway.”
“I guess people don’t want to think about work when they’re on vacation?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Anyway, Deo went with them to buy clothes because he only has three sets. Kelsey was going to wake you, but Deo said he does your shopping. Is that actually true?”
“Yep. Deo enjoys clothes shopping. I detest it. He knows my size and what I like, so it’s a win-win. Believe me, if I picked out my own clothes, my wardrobe would be an even bigger disaster.”
Taylor scans my jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes make it abundantly clear that she doesn’t think worse is possible, but she gives me a weak smile.
“Do you want to wake Aaron or shall I? We have a new situation.”
“Another text message from Cregg? Deo got one last night, too.”
“He told me. And yeah, I got one. It had a typo . . . all that glisters is not gold.”
Before I can tell her that’s not actually a typo, she adds, “But Cregg’s Shakespeare fetish is an ongoing issue. I said we have a new situation.”
I strongly suspect that this is another of Taylor’s dramatic flourishes, but I trudge back downstairs and wake Aaron. Once we’re both at the bar with breakfast and coffee, Taylor takes a deep breath and begins.
“To put it politely,” she says, “the excrement hit the fan yesterday afternoon. At least in Fayetteville, but now it’s spreading everywhere.”
“Yesterday?” Aaron says. “I thought you were monitoring the news.”
“So I’m the only one who’s supposed to check the news?”
“No,” Aaron says. “It’s just that you’ve been the one doing it, and we were kind of busy yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, we were in the car all day, and you know I hate reading in the car. I already felt lousy due to my headache, so there was no way I was giving myself motion sickness on top of it.”
“So ask someone to cover for you next time.”
She glares at him, then shoves her tablet toward us and heads for the kitchen, the door swinging to and fro in her wake.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” I mutter as I tap the tablet screen to wake it.
“Something with Deo, I think.”
“Again? They were getting along so much . . .” The rest of the sentence dies on my lips as I read the headline: New Lead in Area Child Killings?
The picture on the left side of the page, just above that headline, is a shot of the wall at Overhills. WE DO IT FOR YOU, scrawled in reddish-brown letters, with two of the bodies just beyond. The others, including Hunter’s, are mercifully obscured.
On the right side of the screen, Bernadette Pruitt’s angry face stares back at us.
Aaron sighs. “Exact same expression as when she was about to dial the police, just before Daniel nudged her.”
Using the word nudge for what Daniel does always kind of bugged me. Hearing Aaron say it out loud, however, pushes what was a minor pique into full-fledged annoyance.
“It’s not nudging. That’s Daniel’s euphemism, and it’s really not accurate. He brainwashed Pruitt. Imperius-ed her, if you want a literary analogy. It may have been necessary, but nudge makes it sound like he politely reminded her about an event on her social calendar. So, you can call it whatever you want, but I’m boycotting that word.”
Aaron chuckles bleakly. “Point taken. Whatever you want to call it, it’s clear that Daniel’s effect was only temporary. Otherwise, Pruitt wouldn’t be talking to reporters.”
I feel Daniel stirring, but I ignore him for now so that Aaron and I can read the rest of the article. Pruitt’s account is very close to what actually happened in the p
arking lot. Her memory of Aaron is a bit vague, but she remembers me well enough to give a fairly accurate description—the type of skirt I was wearing, approximate height and weight, hair and eye color. I’m guessing I stuck in her memory because it was my mouth issuing the commands Daniel gave her.
Pruitt believes we drugged her. She can’t remember everything that she told us, but she’s adamant that we were asking questions about the missing kids.
“And they asked about the psychic stuff, too. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about. Half the people in this town know what I mean, and I can promise you that every single educator and reporter does.”
The writer then goes on to note that several of the children whose bodies were discovered at Overhills were rumored to have unusual abilities. The article even links to the earlier pieces on Nicki Clary and Hunter Bieler with Dean Skolnick’s byline, and notes that all of the children’s parents were, at some point, in the PSYOP unit at Fort Bragg.
“Wonder why they changed their mind?” Aaron says. “Skolnick said they wouldn’t touch the story before—”
“Probably the dead bodies,” Taylor says, dumping a second teaspoon of sugar substitute into her cup. “Skolnick was only talking about psychic kids cheating on the Quiz Bowl and maybe some dirt on the military. That’s not a big enough story to be worth the trouble it could cause for a newspaper in a military town. But now there are dead bodies, and people will demand answers, even ones that sound crazy. Maybe even especially the ones that sound crazy. And Skolnick turning up dead was probably the icing on the cake.” She glances over at my sharp intake of breath. “Ohhh. Sorry. Guess you hadn’t gotten that far. They found him in his car.”
Aaron scrolls down. “They’re presuming a link between his murder and the others, so I’m guessing it’s the same gun, even if they don’t say that explicitly.”
The article states that the investigation is ongoing and police offered no comment. It ends on a slightly skeptical note, adding that Pruitt’s daughter confirmed that two people matching the described abductors dropped her mother off at home after she reportedly fainted in a grocery store parking lot. But she also added that those two people seemed concerned about her—an uncommon trait for a young couple on a killing spree.