Wren Delacroix Series Box Set

by V. J. Chambers

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but then closed it. She nodded. “Fine.” She crossed the room and gave Timmy a kiss on his cheek.

  “No!” said Timmy, pushing her away.

  Reilly could see her reacting to that, how it crushed her a little more before she managed to push it all aside because Timmy didn’t mean it. He didn’t have any sense of anyone else’s feelings. He couldn’t see that he was his mother’s world and all she wanted from him was just a smile or an acknowledgement, just for Timmy to be a little sorry to see her go.

  “He’s going to miss you,” Reilly said softly.

  Janessa straightened. Her eyes shone. “I know.”

  “Aw… Jannie,” said Reilly, reaching out for her. Then he caught himself and stopped. He shoved his hand into his pocket. He cleared his throat.

  “Please take care of him,” said Janessa.

  “You know I would never hurt him.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” she said.

  And then she left.

  Leaving Reilly alone with his son. He sat down on the couch next to Timmy and surveyed him. “Well, little man, what are we going to get into this weekend, huh?”

  Timmy gazed at the screen without even blinking. If he’d even heard his father, there was no sign.

  * * *

  Wren sat up in bed, gasping.

  She’d had another nightmare, or maybe it was a memory. She couldn’t be sure anymore, but she knew that it was something terrible, something from the dregs of her subconscious that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. It had been buried for a reason. Now it was surfacing. She had gotten herself stuck in all of this, and for what? Because she wanted to destroy herself?

  It was all fading now. She could hardly remember what she had seen. Someone scrubbing blood off his hands, talking in a high-pitched voice, his wide eyes scanning the room wildly. The pupil of his eye was so big, it threatened to swallow up his iris.

  Drugs.

  Hallucinogens.

  Vivian always made sure they were drugged up when she sent them out. Wren figured it was because it made them easier to control. Murder didn’t seem as real when the world was bent and twisted and warped. It made it all easier.

  But even if she couldn’t remember the specifics of the dream, her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in gasps, and she wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep. She climbed out of bed and put on a pair of shoes. She stepped out onto her porch, but it was chilly out there, and she went back inside for a sweatshirt. Then she took off through the woods, groping through the tree branches until she found the path that led through the compound.

  She wasn’t sure where she was heading at first. She was following her own feet as they tramped over the dead leaves. But then she realized that she was walking out to the bonfire circle.

  She couldn’t remember the first time she’d been out here. It was a part of her childhood, something that had always been. Every couple of weeks, there would be a bonfire. Vivian wouldn’t invite everyone in the compound. Only a select few. They would dance and sing and chant around the fire. They would lie on their backs and meditate while Vivian spoke in a low voice, weaving strange pictures into the sky in their collective minds’ eye.

  As a four-year-old, Wren would have assumed that everyone went to bonfires, and that everyone knew what they were.

  She emerged into the clearing, and there was the fire pit, wide and circular, ringed in stones. There were a few benches that had been built around the fire circle, and they had seemed huge and sturdy in her childhood, but now they seemed straggly and small.

  Someone was sitting on one of them.

  “Hello?” she called in a quavery voice.

  The person on the bench moved, head turning in the darkness. For a moment, the shadow twisted, she could have sworn she saw horns… like it was the Crimson Ram himself sitting there, waiting for her in the night.

  “Who is that?” said the voice of the person who was actually there.

  She stepped forward in recognition. “Hawk?”

  The figure stood up, and now she could see it was Hawk. Of course it was Hawk.

  He staggered toward her. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” she said. “It’s Wren.”

  “Wren?” His voice changed. He closed the distance between them. As he grew closer, she could see his wide, shiny black pupils, so black they almost swallowed up his irises.

  “What are you on, Hawk?” She reached out to take both of his hands.

  He gripped her fingers eagerly. “I wished for you to come to me. Major went home and left me all alone. I didn’t want to be alone.”

  “What are you doing out here? Tripping in the woods?” she said. “Is it just mushrooms or something?”

  He drew her hands up to his chest. He flattened her fingers against his shirt. He covered them with his own. “Wren, you’re the best one. You’re here to save us all. I’ve seen in it a vision in the flames.”

  “There’s no fire, Hawk.”

  “I saw it anyway.” He shut his eyes. “I saw it all. You can stop the violence, change it all.”

  “Hawk, you should probably go to bed, too,” she said. “Unless it was acid? Did you take acid?” Both mushrooms and LSD were relatively harmless drugs on their own, if a crazy woman like Vivian wasn’t mixed in to convince someone to commit murder. LSD lasted a long time, though, and it had something in it that kept the user awake. It was a twelve-hour commitment, maybe more. Mushrooms, on the other hand, lasted considerably less time.

  Hawk reached out and caressed her cheek. “Pretty little bird.”

  “Hawk,” she said. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “When you were gone, did you ever think of me?”

  “Of course I did,” she said. “I thought of you a lot.”

  “I thought of you too,” he said. “I thought about you all the time. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if…”

  “You can tell me this while we’re walking back to your cabin.”

  “Do you believe in it? Any of it?”

  “Of what?”

  “The Horned Lord,” he said, turning away from her, twisting back to look at the bare fire pit.

  Suddenly, she felt cold all over. “Let’s go, Hawk.”

  He turned back to her. “I don’t want to believe. I want to be free of it, like you are. But I think it got into me too young.” He furrowed his brow. “You were younger than me, though.”

  She licked her lips. “I’m not free of it. What are you talking about? Why do you think I’m here?”

  He laughed a little. “You came back to save me.”

  “I’m no good at saving any—”

  And he was kissing her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Wren opened her mouth to Hawk’s questing tongue. She had a strange urge to let it all go, to burrow her fingers into his chin-length hair and wrap her legs around his thighs and surrender to the dark sky and the stars and the empty, cold fire pit. She would give herself to Hawk under the dark shadows of the trees above and maybe it would all stop. Maybe that was what she was missing. Maybe it was that simple.

  After it was done, she’d be free to leave.

  She could skip off into the sunrise, and she would never have to come back here again.

  And the kiss, it was nice. He had nice lips, and he was gentle, and it made her feel a bursting sweetness that traveled down her spine and set her awash in warmth like a springtime.

  But she pushed him away.

  “Hawk,” she said. “We can’t do that.”

  “Sure, we can. Then we can wallow in regret in the come down.”

  She laughed. “I’m not coming down off anything. You’re the one who’s not in your right head. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes, I do.” His voice was dark and rich.

  She shook her head. “You didn’t want me before. You told me—”

  “I alw
ays wanted you.” He was firm.

  And maybe that should have made her feel something bad, some inky feeling invading her insides, because what did that mean? Did that mean that when she was ten, when they sent her to his bed—

  But it didn’t feel bad. It felt good. It made her loose and taut at the same time, and she wanted nothing more than to throw herself into his arms again. She didn’t.

  “Little bird,” he whispered, his voice gravelly.

  “Let’s get you home,” she said. She took him by the hand and tugged on him.

  “You’ll come with me?” he said, and there was an edge of desperation in his voice. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I’ll come.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he let her lead the two of them back into the woods.

  As they walked between the trees, the wind picked up speed around them, and it whistled through the branches, raining leaves down around them. It wouldn’t be long until it was full-blown autumn, and then all these trees would be naked against the wind. The longer they walked, the closer they got, huddling together against the night chill.

  They didn’t speak, however. Maybe there was nothing to say, or maybe something about the night air stilled their tongues.

  Eventually, they reached Hawk’s place, and they went inside.

  She turned on the light and Hawk swore at her. She turned it back off and made do with the flashlight on her phone.

  He didn’t like that either, but he let it go. He sat down on the couch in his living room, staring up at the ceiling.

  “What did you take, Hawk?” she called from the bathroom. She had the medicine cabinet open. “Acid or mushrooms?”

  No answer from him.

  “Or something else?”

  “Acid,” he said in a far-off voice.

  She snatched up a bottle of Benadryl. She knew he kept it just for these sorts of situations. She shook out two pills into her hand and went to get him a glass of water. Then she brought the pills into the living room.

  “Here,” she said, giving them to him.

  Obediently, he put the pills in his mouth and swallowed them with some water. “What was that?” he said, when he was done.

  “Something to help you sleep,” she said.

  He scrunched down on the couch. “You’re killing my trip here.”

  “It’s no fun to trip alone,” she said. “Or so I hear.”

  He sighed.

  “Come on, I’ll help you to bed.”

  “Oh really?” He arched an eyebrow at her.

  “I’m putting you to bed,” she said. “You’re in no shape to…” She found herself blushing. “Look, Hawk, this thing with us, it can’t be a thing.”

  He grinned lopsidedly. “So, there’s already a thing, huh?”

  “Get up, come on.”

  “You gonna tuck me in?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He clutched her arm. “Stay until I go to sleep?” That same desperation from before. “He comes sometimes before I fall asleep, right in the cracks between being asleep and awake. That’s how he gets in.”

  “Hawk…” She wanted to tell him that there was nothing there, nothing was getting in, that the Crimson Ram wasn’t real. But in the dark, it was harder to say that out loud. “I’ll stay until you fall asleep.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sunday night, Reilly took Timmy back to his mother’s house, and the weekend had been tough. Timmy wasn’t used to staying with Reilly. He was only there every other weekend. Reilly had made sure that he had a house with a room for his son, and he’d taken pains to make it as comfortable as possible. But Timmy was a creature of habit, and he liked his own home. He was more easily upset, and there had been more tantrums, more breakdowns.

  Friday night, they’d never made it to get pizza. Instead, Timmy had eaten peanut butter and toast while Reilly made himself a sandwich. They’d gone to the pizza place Saturday, with the intention of eating there, but Timmy hadn’t been pleased when the pizza arrived at the table on a tray instead of in a box. So, Reilly’d had them box it up and they’d taken it home to eat. All seemed to be well, but then Timmy didn’t want to take a bath in the bathtub, and refused a shower as well. He was still messy from dinner and went up and down the halls, smearing grease and tomato sauce everywhere while Reilly chased him.

  Even still, it wasn’t the worst weekend ever.

  But Reilly was relieved to be taking Timmy back to his mother, and he felt guilty about that. After all, nearly all the time, he missed his son. He thought of him often. He loved him. But when he was actually with the child, he didn’t feel close to Timmy. And life with the boy was exhausting.

  He went to bed early Sunday night and was up bright and early Monday.

  He and Wren were heading to northern Virgina first thing to talk to Kyler Morris, the man with the website who knew about the initiates.

  “How was your weekend?” he asked her.

  “Fine,” she said. “Yours?”

  “Fine,” he said. He found himself wishing that he had a normal kid, one whose presence didn’t flood him with shame. He wished he could say that he and his son had filled the weekend with things that fathers and sons did, like fishing or going mini-golfing. Hell, he would have been happy to have had a weekend arguing with the kid about playing video games.

  In Reilly’s darker moments, he worried that he didn’t love his son at all, but only loved the idea of him. He loved that he had a son, but he couldn’t connect with the actual child himself, because Timmy was so locked up inside his own head. How could he love someone he didn’t even know?

  He would shove that aside and assure himself it wasn’t true. He did love Timmy. He loved him as best as he knew how. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing was.

  And even people with normal kids had problems.

  Since he didn’t want to volunteer any information about his weekend, he didn’t press Wren about hers, but he wondered what she had been up to. She struck him as the kind of person who would have been working all weekend, holed up in her house, bent over her laptop screen. If so, and if she’d had any insights, he sure as hell wished she’d share them with him.

  They didn’t talk much on the drive, which was only about a half an hour.

  Eventually, they arrived at Kyler Morris’s house, which was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. There were signs that told them not to trespass, to beware of the dog, and that there was a closed circuit television system in use. Smile, you’re on camera!

  “Paranoid much?” Wren muttered.

  Reilly laughed. “Yeah, he seems a little anxiety ridden, eh?”

  They pulled up the driveway, and then had to park outside the fence, because there was a gate keeping them from going any further. They got out of the car and surveyed their surroundings. Inside the fence was a house, a sizable yard, and a few outbuildings, but no sign of the aforementioned dog.

  The gate was locked, but there was a buzzer and a sign that said, Ring for entry. No solicitors.

  “What are you thinking?” said Reilly to Wren. “How’s this jive with your profile?”

  She considered. “Well, on the one hand, psychopaths don’t feel anxiety. They don’t think people are out to get them. They take crazy risks without any thought of failure, and when they do face consequences, they tend to be completely blindsided by the fact it’s happening to them. So, it doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “So, you’re saying we’re wasting our time?”

  “On the other hand,” she said, “maybe this display isn’t here out of paranoia. Maybe it’s a display of dominance. Trying to show anyone that comes onto his land that he’s in control. And if so, it’s pretty spot on for the profile.”

  Reilly nodded slowly. “Makes sense. And how do we know whether this is fear or dominance?”

  “I guess we talk to him,” said Wren. She pressed the buzzer.

  A voice immediately crackled out from
a speaker mounted next to the gate. It was a female voice. “Press the button on the speaker to reply. Identify yourselves.”

  Reilly spied the button on the speaker. He pressed it. “I’m Detective Caius Reilly. This is my associate Wren Delacroix. We’re here to speak to Kyler Morris.”

  “Kyler doesn’t want to speak to the police,” replied the woman immediately.

  “It’s only a few questions. We just want to see—”

  “He says he knows his rights, and you have no right to be on his property. He doesn’t have to talk to you. Please leave.”

  “Could you, uh, put him on?” said Reilly.

  “He will not speak to you,” responded the woman. “He knows who you are, and he thinks that the task force has too much blanket power. No one organization should be given carte blanche from three different state’s police departments. You hold men’s lives in your hands and you abuse your power. Leave the property.”

  “And what’s your name?” Wren spoke up. “Are you his wife?”

  “Yes, I’m—” The woman broke off in a crackle of static. Then she was back. “He would rather I only relay his messages to you, not reveal personal information.”

  “Do you two have children?” said Wren.

  “Leave the property,” the woman repeated. “Leave now.”

  “Okay, look, if we could get some information about a few dates?” said Reilly.

  “Leave the property.”

  “If we know where he was on those dates, we can eliminate him as a suspect.”

  “His whereabouts are not your business. The government has become too far-reaching. A man like Kyler is a private citizen. His comings and goings are not a matter of public record. He will not cooperate with you. Leave the property.”

  “Does Kyler ever scare you?” said Wren. “Does he hit you? Does he call you names?”

  “Leave the property now. Kyler says that if you do not, he will be forced to use deadly force against a threat against his property and person.”

  Reilly sighed.

  Wren spoke just to him. She didn’t press the button to address Kyler’s wife. “He can’t just do that, can he?”

  “Virginia has castle doctrine,” said Reilly. “I don’t know the exact specifications of the statute, but he could make a case that he felt sufficiently threatened, he could be justified in using deadly force against an intruder.”