by Gigi Moore
The information had not been nearly enough, but his parents had suffered their untimely deaths before he could get anything else useful out of them, uncooperative, unfair, and sadistic until the very end. Why had he expected anything different from them, especially when he considered these were the same people who had sent him to public school just to teach him a valuable lesson?
Despite their wealth and standing in the community and business world, his parents—mostly his father, truth be told—thought the experience would build character and make him a stronger person, capable of handling the coven when it proved his time to take it over.
Prentice had news for them. The experience had built his character all right, made him hard and planted the seeds for him to become a vengeful killer. Not that he was into the Bible or anything, far from it, but he thought it appropriate that his parents had reaped exactly what they had sowed.
Why did they have to make everything so difficult? They could have just given him the information when he had asked for it, but they had to make him work for it. Make him kill.
He only wanted what was best for the coven. He wanted it to be unsurpassed by any other, the most influential body of its kind anywhere, and he knew exactly what he needed to do to get it there.
His parents hadn’t seen things his way, had been too weak, too shortsighted, too worried about offending anyone to move the coven where it needed to go.
Prentice sneered at the thought.
His parents had worried too much about what other people thought of them. This had been their major malfunction for years now. This and they did not know how to move on.
What had happened to the Malloys had not been their fault. It had been an unavoidable Accident, and one they regretted. They had done so much since to make up for it. Didn’t they see that? They had done more than enough for those Malloy boys.
He stopped himself from spitting on the ground at all the information he had uncovered at the end, at how deeply indebted his parents had felt toward Thayne and Cade, how they had anonymously taken care of the boys financially for decades.
What made them so special that they deserved what rightfully belonged to him? What made them so special that they deserved his parents’ attention when he barely earned it?
No matter what he did, what he achieved growing up—and his successes had not been insubstantial by any means—it had barely rated a blip on his parents’ radar screen.
Prentice listened as the Priestess blessed the food and drink, glad now that the graveside ceremony neared its end.
He had the private investigator to contact as he wanted to see how far he progressed with locating Prentice’s targets.
He knew that up until a month ago, the younger Malloy had been working on retainer with the LAPD, some psychic of note helping the police locate missing people and solving unsolvable murder cases—how noble. This brother had, however, recently fallen off the grid. No telling where he had gone yet.
The older brother continued to be a lot less visible, not really leaving much of a media footprint at all from which to work.
Was he publicity shy, or had he never done anything of note?
Prentice was prone to believe in the latter. Most people, unlike him, were average or even below average—intelligence, looks, accomplishments. Most people went through their whole lives never doing anything remarkable or important. Most people just lived lives of insignificant mediocrity in obscurity.
Not him. He would be different, he vowed. He was different.
Prentice resigned himself to working from scratch finding the older brother unless this PI he had hired was worth his pricey salary or better.
The several coven members present each took a drink and poured some into the grave in turn, then ate something and placed part of the food in the grave.
When Prentice’s turn came he took an obscene kind of pleasure in pouring some of his drink and placing some of his food in the grave, knowing that his parents would never again enjoy or partake in these basic, simple life functions.
He closed his eyes, remembering their deaths, the moment when he knew that he held their lives in his hands and that they were his to do with as he pleased.
The experience had been heady, even frightening at first. Sure he had used his gifts and position to obtain a measure of revenge against some former classmates and others who had wronged him over the years, but he had never exercised his gifts to the extent that he had used them on his parents. However, as he continued pushing for the truth, pushing for additional information, pushing for more, something inside him changed, snapped…grew.
He realized with a sense of invulnerability and satisfaction that he had absorbed his parents’ powers as they’d died.
The final outcome had proved more than a power trip. It had been a serious rush, one he found himself eagerly wanting to repeat.
Prentice knew exactly who he would use his augmented, developing powers on next.
Chapter 2
McCoy, Colorado
Current day
Thayne Malloy woke up in a cold sweat, limbs tangled in his Egyptian cotton sheets as he bolted upright, panting.
He listened to the mostly innocuous noises of the modern ranch house settling around him in the night and waited to hear the commotion that he was sure had woken him out of a sound sleep.
The more seconds ticked by with him hearing nothing untoward, however, the more sure he became that a noise hadn’t woken him at all. It must have been a now-dissipating nightmare.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to reconnect with that moment when he first became aware he dreamed. He saw them, his mother and father, as they had been more than two decades ago—young and alive.
Thayne hadn’t dreamed about his parents in a long time, and it had been even longer since he had dreamed so vividly about the night of their murders. He refused to think of their deaths as the police had labeled them before closing the case—a murder-suicide.
He had never believed that version of how his parents had died. He knew his father never would have killed his mom, nor would he have committed suicide. His dad had loved his mom too much to do that to her or the family.
Thayne had been a kid though, too young for anyone with authority to take him seriously, too young for anyone to listen to what his gut told him.
Someone had killed his parents. He didn’t know who, how, or why, but he knew that his mother and father had not died by their own hands despite seeing his mother’s blood and his father holding a smoking gun in his dreams that night.
He remembered his aunt and uncle coming to his and Cade’s room the morning after he and Cade had spoken to their mother. They had ominous looks on their faces. Aunt Aura even had tears in her eyes. He knew then that something had happened to his parents, something too terrible to be believed.
Thayne had pitied his aunt and uncle for having to deliver the news, but he’d pitied himself and Cade even more for having to live the rest of their lives without a mother or father.
He stacked the pillows up behind his head now and leaned back against them, not ready yet to try and go back to sleep. In fact, he remained wide awake.
A ride would probably be just the medicine he needed to help him clear his mind, but one look at his bedside clock told him it was too early to attempt one and still maintain safety.
Eight Ball suddenly barked, then growled.
Thayne knew he hadn’t been going crazy. Someone was in his house.
He glanced at the large German shepherd standing beside his bed, ears perked up and guard hairs raised. “Go get ’em, boy. Go see who it is.” Thayne untangled his legs from the sheet and slowly slid from the bed. He paused at the threshold of his master bedroom and grabbed the Louisville Slugger leaning against the wall behind the door.
He followed Eight Ball’s path down the carpeted stairs as silently as possible, glad the house was new enough not to have inordinately creaky steps.
He could hear his d
og barking up a storm at someone. It wasn’t an aggressive bark, however, more a happy bark of greeting as if he recognized the intruder, at least on some level.
Thayne reached the bottom of the stairs and headed through the great room toward the kitchen, still gripping the baseball bat in both hands just in case. He opened the swinging door and froze just inside it at the welcome sight of his brother sitting at the kitchen island, feeding Eight Ball a piece of leftover broiled bluefish from his hand.
Cade lifted his glance from the dog to look at the bat before arching a brow at Thayne. “I thought the weapon of choice out here in these parts was a rifle.”
Thayne set the bat against the wall by the swinging doors. “You could at least warn a guy when you’re going to drop by.”
“What fun would that be?”
“Evidently, none.”
“Besides, I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, you did that.”
“You make it so easy, leaving the key where anyone can find it. Under a rock in the garden, Thayne? Really? Who knew people did trusting things like that in this day and age?”
“This isn’t LA.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
Despite them both growing up for the bulk of their lives on a horse ranch with their aunt and uncle, Thayne knew very well of his brother’s disdain for the “simple country life.” He’d survived The Lively Horse Ranch, working hard and doing what he needed to get by before escaping the dust bowl as soon as he reached seventeen and went off to college.
No matter how much Thayne extolled the virtues of uncluttered “country living,” Cade claimed country life wasn’t for him. It was too quiet and too far away from everything.
Thayne had tried over the years but couldn’t get his brother to come around. This didn’t stop him from letting Cade know, every chance he got, that there would always remain room for him on his ranch. That was, of course, whenever Cade was ready to settle down, stop running from his problems, and stop abusing his gifts.
“It’s not abuse. I’m just exploiting the talents that God gave me. You of all people should respect that.”
Thayne didn’t care what his brother called it. Cade needed to settle down before he burned out.
He peered at his brother as he moved to take a seat opposite Cade at the island and wondered if Cade had arrived in the wee hours because he had already neared his tipping point. If this was the case, Thayne hoped it wasn’t too late to help.
Cade returned Thayne’s stare, and Thayne fidgeted beneath his brother’s look. He wondered if Cade could tell he’d just woken up from a nightmare, but before he could say anything to dispel suspicions, Cade beat him to the punch and asked, “Are you all right?”
“Fine, now that I know a serial killer hasn’t broken into my house.”
“For a quiet and mature guy, you can be such a drama king.”
Thayne gave him the finger and reached across the island to pilfer a piece of fish. He enjoyed the taste just as much as he had when he’d pulled it out of the oven yesterday evening.
“Maybe you wouldn’t be so jumpy if you didn’t live out in the boonies.”
“I like my privacy, not to mention the peace and quiet.”
Cade silently nodded but said nothing as he scratched Eight Ball behind an ear.
Thayne enjoyed the silence for a moment, waiting his brother out. He knew Cade had something on his mind, and when he was ready to talk about it he would.
“I worry about you,” Cade muttered.
Thayne raised his eyebrows and did a double take, not even bothering to voice the obvious response that rested on the tip of his tongue.
“Yeah, don’t be such a smartass. I can’t worry about you because you’re older than me?”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“Well, I do worry. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve worked too hard.”
Thayne shook his head. “I don’t work any harder than any other doc—”
“Oh please, tell that to someone who doesn’t know you. You’ve always given a thousand percent to your patients, leaving little to nothing for yourself.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
No, Thayne didn’t, but he was sure he would get an earful anyway.
“You need to stop and smell the roses before you suffer a heart attack or stroke. You know you’re not too young. Yeah, yeah, you eat right and exercise, but stress can get you, too.”
This time Thayne couldn’t hold it in. “Look who’s talking.”
“You know what I mean, Thayne. You need to get a life outside of that hospital.”
“We can’t all be footloose and fancy-free like you.”
The temptation to tell Cade about Maia just to get his brother off his back was almost unbearable. His brother was a serial dater and master of one-night stands. Talking to him about a woman who might be important in Thayne’s life, however, would be like serving his and Maia’s embryonic relationship up to the wolves for vivisection. Thayne was not ready to hear all the atta-boys and it’s-about-times from his worldly, jaded younger brother. He didn’t think he would ever be ready for that scene.
It wasn’t as if he and Maia were serious or anything anyway.
They had only been out on a couple of dates since he’d gone to her sister’s thirtieth birthday party a couple of weeks ago. He liked her and enjoyed her company but hadn’t tried to pursue things any further than casual friendship.
He’d be lying to himself if he said there wasn’t more, an attraction—on both their parts. Despite Maia’s own differentness, however, he wasn’t sure that she could accept or even appreciate every weird facet of him once he introduced her to them. Not many people could. He knew he used his “specialness” as an excuse for not getting closer to her, but this was where things stood for him in a nutshell, pretty much unattached.
He plain acted the coward, and he knew it.
He used to face off against gangbangers during his ambulance ride-alongs in LA. He had never flinched at the sight of blood or tattered limbs and splattered brains before. When it came to a woman, however, he was too frightened to commit. Scratch that. Not just any woman but the alluring and sensual Maia Jensen.
Thayne closed his eyes and stopped himself short of groaning at the memory of her café au lait skin and slightly slanted, espresso eyes. Everything about her, from her beautiful face to her petite, sexy body, drew him. Yet he couldn’t, refused to, pull the trigger and get with her the way they both wanted.
Thayne realized he wasn’t much different than his brother in this instance. They both shunned intimacy, just went about it in different ways. Thayne escaped to a ranch house, practically in the middle of nowhere, and Cade continued to be a loner and alone in a sea of people in the big bad city.
He couldn’t help thinking the two of them were a pair who really deserved each other.
“So, how are things going for you, man? Really?” Cade asked
“Really? Things are fine.” Thayne opened his eyes to stare at his brother as if to convince him. “The question is how you are, and what brings you out here?”
“Does there have to be some ulterior motive for me to visit my only brother in the whole wide world?”
Thayne put up his hands as if in surrender. “Hey, I just wondered. Don’t go all melodramatic on me.”
Cade chuckled and got down from the high barstool to head for the fridge. “You got anything besides fish and vegetables in this bad boy?”
“I’m sure you checked earlier when you came up with the pan of bluefish.”
Cade sighed and pulled his head out of the fridge to scowl at Thayne. “Yeah, I did, and I am still amazed that a grown man, a grown man who lives in the middle of cattle country and ranch land, can possibly be a vegetarian.”
“I’m a pescatarian, and it’s a lot easier than you think.”
“I mean, you even feed Eight Ball vegetarian. Excuse me,
pescatarian. What kind of crap is that?”
“I eat healthy, he eats healthy.”
Cade got down on his haunches and grabbed the German shepherd’s muzzle between his two hands. “I bet you’d love a thick, juicy steak once in a while, wouldn’t you, boy?”
Eight Ball barked as if in agreement.
“Stop trying to poison my dog with beef-industry propaganda.”
“Hey, it’s what’s for dinner.” Cade laughed and went back to his stool to sit at the island again, breaking off another piece of bluefish and popping it into his mouth.
“Admit it. It’s not bad.”
“If I’m going to live on fish, this one’s a pretty meaty one to go with.” Cade finished chewing and swallowing before adding, “I thought I was a jack-of-all-trades, but how the hell do you find time to cook a meal like this working at the hospital so many hours? Or do you have someone come in to cook for you like a housekeeper maybe or even…a girlfriend?”
Thayne grinned at Cade’s hopeful tone, refusing to fall into the trap. “I like to cook.”
“You are such a stubborn ass. What’s going on with you on the relationship front?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
Cade shrugged. “Hey, you know me.”
“Yeah, I know you. That’s why I asked before how you are and what brings you out here.”
His brother took a deep breath, and Thayne waited a moment before Cade pierced him with a hard gaze. “You really want to know why I came out here?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“I…I just needed a break.”
“Okay.”
“Just okay? You’re not going to rag me for burning the candle at both ends and living so fast and wild?”
“I told you whenever you needed a place to escape from all the madness, I’m here. I’ll always be here for you.”
“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You’re my brother, Cade. You’re not a bother.”
“Thanks, Thayne.”