by Unknown
I slid the latch off the lock on the window and cracked it open enough so that I could hear him. My lair was less than twenty yards from Shane’s penthouse.
He sifted through his contacts and dialed one of them.
The phone rang and a voice answered.
I could not hear what the voice said. But Kirk Cutter said, “I will handle the FBI when the time comes. For now let’s keep them out of it. This means that you need to keep it a secret from your bosses as well.”
Cutter walked slowly back toward the penthouse. I didn’t retreat into Shane’s bedroom and away from the window. Not yet. I waited. I wanted to hear Cutter’s conversation.
“Sun, meet me in the morning. We have a long drive to make,” Cutter said. Then he paused as if he was listening to Sun Good’s answer.
“We’re going to check out some new evidence. I promise we’ll do whatever we can to keep Shane safe. So I’ll see you in the morning,” Cutter said, and then he hung up the phone.
The cell phone’s backlight lit up his features. His eyes were thick, black orbs. They were like the eyes of an eel.
Suddenly, he stopped, as if he’d sensed my presence, and he looked up directly at the window.
But I was already back in the room. I could have left, but I really needed some supplies.
He stayed for a moment, staring at the open window. He wondered if it had always been open. Then he shrugged it off and entered the penthouse.
I waited until he left our home. Then I went to my lair and gathered the necessary gear to face off against Cutter.
Tomorrow we would have a showdown. I hoped Sun Good would not get in the way. I felt Shane’s urge to protect her. It was strong.
His feelings for her would come in handy. I would use his attachment to her to strengthen him. Now we were back and working in a dark synchronicity.
9
Two Graves
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
–– Confucius
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The next morning he woke up with the sun. He had spent the rest of the night sleeping in a storage unit. It was owned by Shane, but listed under a different name.
The inside of the unit was comfortable enough. The floor was concrete and cold. Shane had slept on a thick comforter that he had rolled up in the corner. Before Shane slept on it, he had taken it outside and shaken it violently. It’d had a few insects on it that he didn’t want to share sleeping arrangements with.
This storage unit housed some extra furniture and things that he’d ended up not using after he’d moved into the penthouse in D.C.
It was good practice for him to sleep on a cold concrete slab. It was good because that was where he was going to end up if he didn’t get the best of Cutter. And Shane had better get used to it.
Shane left the comforter where it was and walked to the unit’s only door.
He reached down and pulled it up. As if a heavy shade had been lifted, the morning’s early sunbeams hit his face. He felt the warmth and smiled. It was a reactionary smile that humans had to sunlight. I guess it was the same feeling that I had when I met the darkness.
A throwaway cell phone that Shane had stored inside the unit began to vibrate.
The screen had a graphic of a jumping envelope. It alerted Shane that he had a new text message. The name on the screen said Sun Good. It was the only number that he had programmed into the new phone.
He had given her the number once. He never told her it was in case he was being hunted by the law. He just told her it was a backup number.
She must have decided to try it because his other phone was still powered down.
Shane touched the screen. The action brought up the text message screen and an image appeared.
At first, even he didn’t register the image. And then it hit both of him at the same time.
It was a picture of Sun. The woman he loved as much as a monster like us could love. She was asleep. Her head rested against a passenger side window. She had fallen asleep. Someone else drove.
Then the phone vibrated again. Shane received another message from her phone. It was Cutter.
It read:
She looks so good sleeping.
If you want her to live, come to the place where you were born. Come alone and unarmed.
Shane’s blood boiled. The rage that suddenly overcame him was a madness that I had never felt in him before. Sun Good was the one human relationship that he had left. It was the one thing that gave him a sense of humanity. It was a relationship that he couldn’t afford to lose.
Shane’s rage consumed him.
He dropped the cell phone.
He clenched his fists and began beating them against the metal walls on the outside of the storage unit.
The sounds of sheet metal wobbling back and forth echoed throughout the complex.
The cell phone vibrated again. He ignored it.
He pounded and slammed his fists into the wall for several minutes. Blood began to trickle from his knuckles.
Every day, I was learning more and more that there was a strong, caring person inside of Shane. Using force to control him was becoming more difficult for me. I would have to start employing other tactics. I had to use more manipulation on his thoughts.
I jerked around inside his brain, my tentacles shifting. I repeated this action until he was calmer. I didn’t want him completely calm. I just didn’t want him to lose so much control that he was rendered ineffective.
My efforts slowly sank in and Shane began to breathe more normally. He leaned his head against the wall he had been hitting. A bloodstain from his knuckles marked the spot. His forehead now leaned against the middle of it. He left an imprint in the blood.
After a moment of thinking of only breathing, Shane stood upright. The bloodstain was smeared. Some of it was across his forehead.
He reached down and picked up the phone. The glass was cracked from where it had hit the concrete.
The text message read:
Be There!
Shane would be there.
We would both be there. He would be there for Sun Good, and I would be there to pull the monster out of Cutter and strangle it to death.
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Come to the place where you were born, he had said.
How Cutter knew where we were born was not a surprise. Shane’s childhood records were sealed by court order. Shane’s departed guardian, Terrance Graves, had made sure of that. They were sealed to everyone, including law enforcement.
But it was not hard to imagine that FBI Agent Cutter had all kinds of ways to circumvent the law. He knew how to get information, and he had gotten hold of those records.
So the place where we were born was the literal location where he held Detective Sun Good.
Shane drove a 1993 Jeep Wrangler. It was all black and chromed out. He saw it parked in front of a bar. The place was closed. The car had most likely been left overnight. The owner might have been too drunk to drive and he had decided to leave it until the next day.
He had decided to do the responsible thing and not drive drunk and his vehicle been stolen by a serial killer.
How ironic the universe is? I thought.
With some luck, it would not be reported as stolen until later today.
Shane drove the Jeep onto the interstate and headed north.
Cutter and Sun were at least an hour ahead of us. They were headed to where Shane and I were born. They were headed to the place where Shane’s parents were killed. They drove to Shane’s family estate.
Shane concentrated on the road. He avoided police cruisers as best as he could. One time Shane even pulled off the road and into a gas station just to let a trooper pass by.
Shane drove until the late morning and slowed close to the street where his family’s house was.
The house was on a lake. The water came right up to the backyard.
Shane didn’t want to drive on his street in broad daylight. So he circl
ed around the lake. Driving the roads around the lake was more like zigzagging.
He passed through the streets and admired the homes. Most were huge. The garages alone were big enough to be someone’s house. Shane could only imagine the cars that were stored inside.
The farther he drove, the bigger the houses got.
Shane had forgotten the last time that he’d driven to the other side of the lake. I remembered that one time Terrance had driven us around to the other side when Shane was a small boy. But that memory was not one that Shane retained.
He never imagined that his side of the lake would be the poorer side. Then again, the houses on the opposite side of the lake were bigger, but the lot sizes were smaller.
The Lasher house was on a large piece of land. It had high property value. So I’m sure that Shane’s father, Sebastian Lasher, had paid a very nice amount for this land. It was probably equal to one of these other larger houses.
Shane parked the Jeep on a patch of grass that was near the edge of a neighbor’s property line. Then Shane jumped out of the Wrangler and opened the tailgate. He grabbed a black knapsack with only one shoulder strap. He flung it across his back. Before closing the tailgate, he reached into the cargo bay of the Jeep and pulled out a pair of binoculars.
Shane closed the Jeep, locked it, and tossed the keys onto the driver’s seat. The vehicle was unharmed. The police would eventually find it and return it to the owner in the same condition it was when stolen, except it now had a nearly full tank of gas.
Shane had the rest of the day to wait until nightfall. That was when he wanted to be at his house. Cutter would wait. He wouldn’t kill Sun Good until he had Shane. I was sure of this. If she died, then he would lose his leverage over us.
Cutter knew that I was coming. He had an ambush planned for me. The best that I could do was approach undetected.
Shane used the binoculars and studied the rear of the house. There were many points of entry to cover: windows, doors, ledges, and even a cellar. There was no way for Cutter to guard them all by himself.
In no way did I expect that Cutter planned to guard them all. In fact, he probably wanted the house to look as penetrable as it could, so it would be inviting.
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Shane endured through the anticipation of waiting out the daylight, which was very hard for him. He wanted nothing more to do than to rush the house and save Sun.
I held us back.
We had spent the entire day slowly making our way to a boathouse that was across the lake from Shane’s manor. Shane took great precautions in making sure that he wasn’t seen.
As the sun set behind the trees and the sky filled with tones of reddish colors, Shane picked the lock on the boathouse. Inside he found a twenty-foot boat. It was well-maintained, a personal project of the owner. It glistened from a brand new paint job. The primary color was royal blue. Yellow-colored words were written across the side. They read:
Lake Red
Next to it was a small Zodiac inflatable boat. It was probably the smallest motorized Zodiac ever created and sold in the marketplace. The Zodiac was colored in woodland camouflage. It was a dark shade, so it would blend in nicely with the water at night, perfect for crossing the lake undetected.
Shane rubbed his shaven head. His hair had always grown fast, and now his head was already covered in stubble.
He felt the stubble beneath his fingers. It tickled. The sensation penetrated through his skin and filled his nerve endings.
He realized that he knew nothing about boats. Even though he had owned a mansion on a lake in New Hampshire, he had never really had much experience on the water. There were so many things that he had spent his childhood learning, but sailing was not one of them.
Luckily, the Zodiac seemed elementary, so he jumped into the vessel and studied the motor for a moment.
Don’t run the motor, I said to him.
He backed away from it and saw a pair of medium-sized plastic oars. They were around five feet long, possibly shorter.
The lake wasn’t too wide, so rowing across wasn’t going to require much effort.
Shane untied the Zodiac from the ledge of the wooden pier that ran inside the boathouse.
He tossed the line into the boat. He picked up the oars and pushed away from the pier. The Zodiac cast off.
He drifted from the boathouse opening and onto the lake.
The reddening sky cast a myriad of dark orange and crimson colors across the surface of the lake.
Shane’s house appeared still. There was no sign of Agent Cutter or Sun Good.
Slowly, Shane rowed the Zodiac across the lake. The act started to take a toll on his arm muscles as he passed the halfway point.
He took his time. He tried to go as slowly as he could without simply riding the current. Then when the Zodiac reached three-quarters of the way across the lake, the current seemed to switch directions. It rushed against him.
Shane began to row harder. His arm muscles burned. Shane’s efforts produced more waves, and with them, a little noise.
After another twenty minutes or so of rowing at a more brisk pace, Shane approached the edge of the lake.
The trees near the shore had swayed and wallowed. Their movements emitted whistling sounds that sounded like distant screeches, like banshees.
It was all quite peaceful actually. At least it was to me, but then again I liked screaming. In that moment, Shane regretted not visiting this place more often. Perhaps he never visited because of the sad, dark memories that these grounds held.
Right then he imagined spending summers here. Then his mind was flooded with images of fathers teaching their young sons how to fish. He saw mothers teaching their sons about gardening. He even imagined parents punishing their children, teaching them how to become better people.
A thought hit him square in the mind. Shane had missed out on all of these normal family moments. In fact, he was abruptly reminded that he was anything but normal. He was reminded that he was born here. He was born into darkness. And he was not alone in his time of birth. He had been born in the darkness of a coffin and he had brought something with him. He had brought me.
Shane was never going to have a normal life. Not then. Not now.
Sun Good could never be his wife. How could he expect to hide me from her forever?
Suddenly, I felt something, even though I was a creature of darkness, even though I was a stone cold killer. I realized that if I had rubbed off on Shane, then it was possible that he had also rubbed off on me. It had happened. It had happened slowly, and I was only now realizing it, but I wanted Sun Good to remain alive as well. Part of me was becoming good.
Shane stopped rowing. The Zodiac drifted into the shallows. The moment that it touched the edge of the water, Shane stepped out and pulled the vessel in. He peered around the backyard, looking for any signs that Agent Cutter had seen him. There was nothing.
So Shane towed the Zodiac onto the sand, then the grass, and finally all the way into the brush surrounding the trees.
He didn’t want the owners of the Zodiac staring across the lake and noticing it resting on the shoreline. He didn’t need the attention.
Satisfied with the Zodiac’s hiding place, Shane released it and headed toward the house.
As he carefully stepped through the trees and into the backyard, he heard the winds cry again through the branches. This time it was much louder than it had been from the water. The breeze picked up and the leaves that had survived into the winter rustled.
Shane smiled. He hadn’t expected to get this far. He had covertly invaded his own property. He had successfully circumvented the training and astuteness of FBI Special Agent Kirk Cutter.
Then suddenly, as if it were a straight punch in the solar plexus, the backdoor to Shane’s house swung violently open. A stream of bright lights flooded out, casting a lit cone across the grass.
Shane looked up and stared at a figure that stood in the open doorway.
Kirk Cut
ter stared back at Shane. He held a solid black Mossberg 500 Shotgun Persuader with a stock, a powerful weapon.
Agent Kirk Cutter was a good twenty-five feet from Shane, but trying to run would have been useless. Shane was fast. He probably could have made a run for the trees and avoided the blast from the Persuader. If the man holding the shotgun were an amateur, then this would have worked. But he wasn’t going to run while a career FBI agent held the weapon. And there was no way, not one chance, that Agent Cutter was an amateur with that weapon.