by Hadena James
Malachi blew his smoke over my head, but didn’t speak to me. I blew mine to the side, trying to avoid blowing it into his face. His body radiated warmth but smelled like blood. My eyes searched his clothing to see what he had touched to cause the smell. We hadn’t been in there long enough to smell like death and blood; unless you had it on you, didn’t leave trace scents.
A speck of crimson caught my attention. It soaked into Malachi’s cigarette, just past the filter. I pointed at it.
Malachi looked down at his blood stained smoke and tossed it on the ground. He examined his finger, found the wound, just deep enough to create droplets. Pulling something out of his pocket, he wrapped it around his finger. It was an Arby’s napkin with grease stains that smelled of roast beef and French fries. The napkin wasn’t the most sterile thing he could have wrapped it in, but whatever he’d cut himself on was probably worse.
Finger wrapped, he lit another cigarette. Fascinated, I watched the napkin as it changed from white to pale pink. Malachi was less interested in this phenomenon than I was. He’d gone back to staring at the house.
Eventually, I gave in and turned around as well. The house hadn’t changed. Malachi was lost in his own mind. It was a talent of his. His IQ might not have been higher, but his brain worked in a different way. He could make connections that I couldn’t. He didn’t need all the pieces to see the picture. It was very annoying to do a jigsaw puzzle with him or Sudoku. He would say the same about me and crosswords or word searches.
After a long time, long enough for my feet to go numb and my legs to start to tingle from the cold, I shrugged and looked up to the taller man that resembled Death. His face was still turned towards the house, the cigarette had burned out between his fingers. I wondered if he was having some sort of episode.
“Hey, I give, what do you see?” I asked Malachi.
“Huh?” He looked at me like I had just appeared. “Oh, not much. For all the studying and profiling and hours dedicated to him, I still don’t understand him.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” I motioned Malachi close, as if I were about to give him the secret cookie recipe that would make him rich and famous. He leaned in. “Patterson is slightly crazy. Not like psychopath crazy, but like the elevator stops a few floors short of the penthouse crazy.”
“I’m not sure I understand the analogy,” Malachi whispered back to me.
“That sucks, because I’m not sure I can explain it.” I cocked my head to the side and looked up at Malachi. “Okay, let’s try this. I’m a sociopath with an anxiety disorder. The two are not compatible. In no way, shape or form should I have an anxiety disorder, but I do. Why? Because I do not actually have one, my mind just manifests one as a way to cope with not feeling anything. That’s kind of crazy and not like normal crazy, but special crazy. Patterson’s a psychopath, so you imagine that he has the same range of emotions you do, but the disorder effects everyone slightly different. Also, you never had to justify eating people. The man can butcher another human, but passes out when he cooks a steak. You only seem to see the psychopath, I see the man with serious issues beyond being a psychopath and as I said, the elevator is not travelling to the top floor.”
Malachi looked at me like bugs had just crawled out my nose. For a moment, I had to fight the impulse not to check. Surely, I would feel bugs crawling out of my nose.
“You are a genius,” Malachi said.
“Well, duh, but we knew that already. What are you blabbering about?”
“I never thought of Patterson as anything other than a psychopath. As such, his movements should have been predictable. But he isn’t just a psychopath, he’s a psychopath with issues. That’s why I can’t figure him out.”
“Glad I could give you a ‘eureka moment.’”
“You have no idea how much of an epiphany that was.”
“Maybe you should have asked me about it a week ago. I figured it out when we were hunting August.”
“Speaking of which, perhaps we should rally the FBI agent and tally forth to Kansas City,” Malachi started walking away. I stared at his back. People thought I occasionally said some off the wall things, like my recent interest in calling Gabriel “Kemosabe.” At least that had a rational explanation. I had never seen an episode of the Lone Ranger and one weekend, Gabriel had shown up with snack food, take-out menus, and the box set. We watched every episode of the old TV show. I’d been randomly addressing him as “Kemosabe” since that weekend. However, why Malachi had suddenly decided to start talking like a 19th Century British nobleman was beyond me. We all had quirks.
Twenty-Six
I was back at the hospital. It took time to set up a prisoner transfer and let Patterson get wind of it. Setting traps was akin to playing Russian roulette, sometimes it worked in your favor, sometimes you shot yourself in the head. I was hoping we weren’t getting ready to shoot ourselves in the head.
Monitors beeped, machines whirred, and the entire room was still ugly. Flowers, balloons, and cards littered the available surfaces. I moved my card, complete with gift card to the very front again. The gift card was to Amazon, she’d be off work for a couple more months. She was going to get bored, maybe. Nyleena didn’t lead the shut-in life that I did.
A book sat on the stand next to her bed. A bookmark was tucked between the pages. I picked up the book and looked at the title; Storm Front by Jim Butcher. I hadn’t read The Dresden Files, but I’d loved the TV show. I was sure I would picture Paul Blackthorne as Dresden and probably not love the book as much.
This was one of my mother’s books. She loved urban fantasy fiction. While I hadn’t seen it on a shelf at her house, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. She still hadn’t moved to the age of eBooks.
I began reading. Reading aloud wasn’t my thing. It required me to read slower and my brain would disengage from time to time. When it did get distracted, my mouth would continue to move, working on autopilot, while it thought of other things. This kept me from getting interested in most books that I was reading to my comatose compadre.
Storm Front was no different. I’d read a handful of pages when my brain disengaged and my mind tuned out what I was reading. Instead, it focused on Malachi Blake.
Malachi was an odd duck, to say the least. His need for me was mirrored by my need for him. It wasn’t exactly the same sort of need, but it was similar. If I could look at him, I could reassure myself that I wasn’t that far down the rabbit hole. There was something to be said for that. Maybe not much, but something.
For a moment, I understood how Dr. Frankenstein felt. Malachi was a monster, but he was my monster. In many ways, he was my creation, I kept him in control by not letting him have control over me. It was a circular logic, but there wasn’t a better way to explain it.
My mind never stayed focused on Malachi for very long. It always found a new subject to explore. I didn’t know the reason behind it. Some sort of mental block kept me from thinking about him too intently, perhaps it was afraid of what I would find behind the mask that he wore.
“How’s she doing?” My mother’s head appeared in the door. Her voice was soft, harmonious.
“The same,” I told my mother. Mom entered the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
“How are you doing?” She asked.
“It would be better if she were awake and Patterson were in custody. Unfortunately, I only get to control one of those things.”
“How very confident of you,” my mother frowned and I got the impression that “confident” was not the word she had wanted to use.
“But?” I asked her.
“Don’t be too quick to believe that you control the situation with Patterson.”
“You know him,” I looked at my mother with a new feeling.
“Sort of, I’ve met him, once. After your brother did what he did. Patterson came by the house, not as himself, but as a friend of the family. However, his eyes. Your father had those same eyes, as do you. We spoke for maybe
twenty minutes and I realized that your father had been concerned for no reason. Eric might have been like Patterson, but you weren’t. You would never follow in your grandfather’s footsteps. You have too much heart.”
“I do not have much heart,” I told my mother.
“No, you don’t think you have much heart, but you do. Look at you here, reading to Nyleena or running all over the state with Malachi attempting to catch a serial killer. If you were heartless you wouldn’t do those things. Same for Malachi. We’ve been trying to explain that to the both of you for ages. While you may not feel what I feel, or even what your dad felt, you do feel Aislinn, both of you do and you can both love. You love me, Elle, the kids, Nyleena, your SCTU team members, even Malachi. You may not think of it as love, because it’s more familial than romantic, but it is still love and that’s a powerful emotion.”
“So is hate,” I told my mother.
“True, but how many people do you honestly hate? Callow? You can’t even hate your own serial killing grandfather.”
My mother had a point. I didn’t hate my grandfather. I should have. He was a serial killer, after all, and I’d been staring at his carnage for over a week. But hate required a lot of effort. Long ago, I’d learned I was emotionally lazy as well as emotionally challenged. As such, I only had enough energy to hate one person at a time and that hate was still focused on Callow, despite his death.
Strange that death didn’t really change my opinion of him. If I could resurrect him and kill him all over again, I would. Multiple times. I’d just spend the rest of my life resurrecting him and finding new ways to kill him. As such, I didn’t have room to hate anything else in my life.
It was probably what kept me sane. Since I only had the ability to hate one person, I couldn’t hate the rest of the world. Bizarre, sad, and pathetic, but true. My encounter with Callow had changed me and for the first time, I saw exactly how it had changed me. It had saved me from myself.
In turn, I had saved Malachi from himself. A twisted form of paying it forward, my act of kindness and acceptance, had kept him from giving into his urges. As we aged, my unwillingness to let him control me, like he did everything else in his life, kept him intrigued by things that weren’t born of the darkness inside him.
My mother’s voice brought me out of myself. It was soothing, rhythmic, and soft as she read to Nyleena from the Jim Butcher book. As she read, I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between her and Nyleena. There were definite differences, but they had the same blue-grey eyes. The same smile. Looking at the two of them, I could see Nyleena as my mother’s daughter.
She didn’t look much like my father’s side of the family. Until recently, I had assumed she had looked like her mother, a woman I had never known. I had met her a few times, but like everyone else time had faded her features. She had disappeared one day, either the victim of something tragic or simply a women seeking escape from the chaos of her life. Either was possible. Nyleena hadn’t mentioned her in a long time. I think she had given up on finding her, dead or alive. She spoke of her in past tense.
For just a heartbeat, the green-eyed monster reared its ugly head. In that heartbeat, I had wondered if my mother loved Nyleena more than me. It was a ridiculous thought. My mother loved just about everyone. She’d accepted the damage members of the SCTU just as she had Malachi. Even if Nyleena hadn’t been her biological daughter, she would have loved her like one.
That was my mother’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. I felt almost no love and she felt only love. She could love anyone, forgive anyone, and accept anyone. It seemed surreal that this woman filled with love had spawned a mass murderer and me. It made sense that she would give birth to Nyleena and my sister, Isabelle. They were good people. In a world where the genetics was still part of the equation in what made a monster, my parents were an interesting sample.
“Stop pacing,” my mother snipped between lines in the book. I looked at her, unaware that I had been pacing. My feet stopped moving. “Now, you’re glaring.”
“Sorry,” I looked at my feet. The boots made my feet look small and round. I wasn’t often aware of any of my body parts and staring at my feet was strange. It was like seeing my reflection, I knew they were mine, but my brain felt disconnected from them.
“Why don’t you go help Malachi?” My mother suggested.
“Because at the moment, Malachi does not need my help. He is a more convincing liar than I am.”
“That’s true,” my mother began reading from the book again. I sat down in another chair, putting my feet up in the final, empty chair. My eyes closed as Harry Dresden argued with a character I hadn’t caught the name of. My body relaxed. It was a side effect of being around my mother. It was hard to stay on high alert all the time, especially with my mother’s library voice reading aloud.
I drifted off to sleep. Not my normal fitful sleep with deranged dreams and haunting serial killers, but a deep sleep free of the dreadful terrors my mind could conjure. Few people put me at ease like my mother. It was strange that she could do it, I felt the need to protect her and yet, with her around, I felt like no evil could touch me. This conflict raged in me only when I was awake. My sleeping mind instead created images of fields full of butterflies hunting for nectar among the wildflowers while a large, lazy dog panted steadily in a patch of sunlight.
Twenty-Seven
Several Marshals had their guns drawn, held down near their legs, ready to be brought up and put to use in the space of a heartbeat. Two walked in front of us, two walked behind us and there was one on each side of us. It was a standard protection formation when dealing with a prisoner of high risk. Malachi and I held my great-aunt Gertrude between us.
The protection formation was great, unless there was a sniper around. If there was, Malachi was screwed, he towered over the rest of the Marshals. On the other hand, I disappeared among them.
We were nearing our destination and yet, there was no sign of Patterson. I tried to stop my mind from jumping to conclusions about choosing the wrong target. It screamed that we should have moved August, not Gertrude. That part of my brain was irrational and I wouldn’t give into it. I knew that August would not elicit the response that Gertrude would. Patterson had tried to kill the man before, but he hadn’t tried in Columbia. That meant there was something else to his end game and the logical part of my brain told me it was Gertrude.
One hundred feet between us and the courthouse. At the door, we’d have to hand her off to the courthouse Marshals. All capable, trained federal officers, to be sure, but I didn’t like the idea.
Fifty feet. My gaze scanned the crowd in between the bodies of the Marshals. A large group had assembled to watch us walk the mother of the Columbia Cannibal into court. This moniker, earned in the last two weeks, was incorrect. August wasn’t a cannibal, telling that to the press was a lost cause though and I knew better than to argue with the press. We didn’t have good history.
Forty feet. Still no signs of the older man with the elaborate cane. Malachi made eye contact with me briefly, then returned his own gaze to surveying the crowds. His height gave him an advantage over me.
Thirty feet. My hand wanted to grab my own gun. I fought the urge. It hung loose at my side, but only through a sheer effort of will.
Twenty feet. I’d been bait before. I’d never been so jittery about it though. The calm that kept me alive hadn’t come over me. The darkness that I depended on to keep me in control was absent.
Ten feet. I took a breath and held it. My feet moved automatically. My hand tugged at the arm of Gertrude Clachan, ensuring that she moved with us. Our pace had to be agonizingly slow for Malachi. The doors of the court house opened. Gertrude pinched me. I didn’t look at her. If I were in her shoes, I’d be relieved.
Hand off. The two Marshals in front took up positions to the side. Malachi and I both let go of Gertrude, handing her to the new Marshals. Both men took firm hold of her. They moved forward. Malachi and I, determined to
see her in the court room, followed.
A flash of black hair. My gaze caught the head for just a second, then it was gone, lost in the throng of Marshals and court house attendees. The press had been allowed into the hallways. Cameras flashed, someone took a picture only a few feet from me, blinding me for a moment.
“He’s here,” Malachi answered, pushing forward. I followed, shoving past the Marshals.
“Get down!” I shouted, pulling my gun on the small, elderly man with black hair. He raised his hands as he sunk to his knees. The hallway went silent. An echo of something metal hitting the floor rang loudly off the walls and floor. There was blood on one of the hands. I looked up. Gertrude sagged between the two Marshals. Blood gurgled out of her mouth and streamed from under her chin.
Malachi’s gun was also aimed at the small man. Malachi faced him. I could only see his back. My need to see his face was overwhelming. I carefully stepped around him, moving in front.
He looked nothing like the identi-kit sketch. My father’s face flashed in my memory. They looked a lot alike or would have, if my father had aged. The same small nose with its sharp point, the same smile with full, almost pouty lips. He wasn’t ugly. Actually, for an older man, he was very attractive. He also didn’t look a day over sixty.
However, it was his eyes that caught my attention and held them. My father had dark eyes, like milk chocolate. Patterson’s weren’t the same color as my father’s. They were the same color as mine, a little lighter than milk chocolate with a tinge of darker brown around the edges. Technically, it was too dark to be considered hazel, but the ring was rare in people with brown eyes, so they were often mistaken as hazel.