Winter's Redemption

by Mary Stone

  She’d brought punishment on herself, tarting up like she had, prancing around town in those little running shorts. Flashing those long, white legs for anyone to see. I didn’t mean to do it so soon, but she made me. Taunted me into it.

  She’d been tricky about it, sure. She’d dyed her hair a harlot’s red. And even though her eyes had been brown, she hadn’t fooled me. I saw Winter looking out, smug and evil.

  Until I’d started to kill her. The memory of the fear I’d seen in her eyes after I ran my blade under her chin made my pecker hard all over again, right there in the truck.

  Even though it hadn’t felt up to movin’ around that day for my girlie, I remembered in disgust. Fucking prostate.

  The light turned red up ahead, surprising me. I’d been woolgathering again and hadn’t even seen it turn yellow. I slammed on the brakes, almost running into the car in front of my truck.

  Bessie Lou managed to stop and rocked forward, creaking on her rusty old chassis. In front of me, in a little blue hatchback, the girl in the driver’s seat couldn’t have been more than seventeen. She looked at me in the rearview and glared.

  I wasn’t ashamed to admit, I got angry, and I glared right back, inching Bessie closer until I nudged the little bitch’s car. The Jezebel had the nerve to raise her middle finger up to me.

  My fingers itched and trembled with the need to teach her about a woman’s place. If God wanted women to drive, or use crude hand motions, he’d have given them the intelligence he handed out to menfolk as he sent ‘em out the pearly gates.

  The light turned green, and I pulled forward with the car in front of me, hanging right up on to her back bumper. The girl kept looking back at me, her mouth moving as she spewed what was probably foul language. From the distance, her eyes looked brown.

  But they could have been blue. Deep, quiet blue.

  I shook myself loose of that thought and backed off her bumper.

  Winter was dead, wasn’t she?

  I’d killed her in New Jersey.

  My head was starting to hurt a little, and I rubbed my forehead. No, that wasn’t right. The girl in New Jersey hadn’t really looked like Winter at all once I’d cornered her in her apartment.

  My girlie was a tricky one. She’d fooled me with the police officer.

  She’d looked out the eyes of the fat gal in the big, expensive house.

  Another red light.

  I slammed on my brakes again, and they made a grinding noise, taking longer than necessary to stop the truck. Least this time there was no one in front of me, or I’d have hit them for sure.

  The girl in the car in front of me was gone. I hadn’t seen her get away from me. In a daze of confusion, my heart beating hard, I watched a little black Honda Civic cross the intersection in front of me. Behind the wheel, her black hair shining in the morning sun and her face all pale like porcelain, I saw my girlie. Winter.

  She didn’t look at me, just drove past, like in slow motion. Then, the car was gone, and I was left feeling a little queasy.

  I’d been seeing—and killing—Winter Black every damn where.

  Hadn’t I?

  How many Winters would I have to kill before she really died?

  20

  It was nearing eleven when Aiden finally stopped watching the door and accepted the fact that Winter was not coming into the office.

  He left the room then, fury vibrating through him, and went to her cubicle. The thumb drive he’d given her sat conspicuously beside her keyboard, but her computer was gone.

  So was her water bottle. Her jacket. He pulled open the drawers of her desk. Empty, as if the office had been recently cleaned out for a new occupant. Or as if the old occupant had never truly planned on staying.

  He texted her for the fifth time. His hands shook with impotent anger.

  CALL ME NOW.

  Winter had been right the day before. The leverage he’d held over her had been made on the assumption he knew who she was. Again, his illustrious profiling skills had played out for shit.

  Winter wasn’t a fragile person who’d never fully healed from the traumatic wounds she’d received as a child, he told himself as he headed back to his office. Instead, she’d started showing signs of being as hard and purposeful as a battle-scarred Valkyrie on a mission of vengeance.

  And now, he’d handed her the keys to the investigation, and practically fucking dared her to slip her leash. What was the saying? When people show you who they are, believe them.

  He hadn’t believed Winter.

  Grabbing his spare set of keys from his desk, he decided it was time to drive. He still favored his stiff leg and had been taking a hired car to work in the mornings since he’d come back. He couldn’t waste the time on travel planning, though. He had to get to Harrisonburg. Thankfully, his Mercedes was still in the parking lot, since he hadn’t bothered moving it after his accident.

  Pushing his bad leg, and ignoring the burn in the underused muscles, SSA Parrish headed for the door.

  Closing her eyes, Winter took inventory.

  No headache. Clear mind. There was fear, but so far, it was staying banked at an acceptable level. She was as good as she was going to get.

  She got out of the car, glad to see that the street was empty. It was a school day and a work day for the middle-class, two-parent households that made up the block residents. A cool breeze tickled the back of her neck as she walked up the sidewalk that was achingly familiar and strange, all at the same time.

  The square with the signature of five-year-old Winter etched in it was still there, but one of the adjoining concrete blocks had been pushed up by the maple tree that had decided to grow wild, to the left of the little sidewalk.

  The front porch still creaked, but with a louder, groaning undertone now. Soon, if it wasn’t maintained, it wouldn’t be structurally safe anymore.

  The door was locked this time.

  She stepped back, glancing at the empty street. Setting her green and white coffee cup on the peeling white railing, she turned and raised her foot, slamming her booted heel just above the handle. She felt like Chuck Norris when the wood splintered away, and the door swung wide.

  Grabbing her mocha again, she headed inside, taking a deep breath and opening herself to any kind of vibes. It sounded new-agey, but Winter wasn’t sure how to go about summoning a vision. She’d try whatever.

  She’d had no expectations, so the overwhelming feeling of sadness that swamped her—almost bringing her to her knees—was shocking. Winter carefully moved out of the small foyer, to the flight of stairs that ran upward in front of her.

  Disoriented, she closed her eyes against the drowning tide of emotion and sank down on the step. A dried leaf had found its way in and crackled drily as she dislodged it from the stair tread.

  She tried to focus on the warmth and smooth surface of the cup of coffee she had in her hands, and not the scalding tears that washed down her cheeks. It was frightening. She had no control over the reaction.

  Focusing on her breathing, orienting herself to her surroundings, she pulled her way out of the emotional sand trap, hand over hand.

  She could smell the dusty, unstirred air in the house. Behind her closed lids, she could see a faint glow to her right, where the plywood didn’t reach all the way to the top of the window casement, and the sun pushed its way in. She could imagine the dust motes, disturbed by her presence, swirling and dipping in the stagnant air.

  The tears stopped, and the vicious press of grief lightened.

  Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

  Inventory.

  No headache. Clear mind. Fear: under control. Sadness: manageable.

  “What the hell was that?” she whispered into the silent rooms.

  She could add more items to that list, Winter thought as she stood up on legs that trembled faintly. Apprehension. Trepidation. Anxiety and foreboding.

  Before another wave of…whatever…could hit her, Winter climbed the stairs, leaving her coffee cup on
the step. Every movement upward ratcheted that anxiety up higher. Her skin seemed to crawl and shiver, like an opera singer had hit a high note and she was the glass about to shatter.

  At the top of the stairs, the window to her left showed that the sun was still shining. Birds were still fluttering. A dog barked down the street. It was a reminder that normal shit was still happening outside, even if it was as still and oppressive as a crypt in this house.

  Straight in front of her, the door to her parents’ bedroom hung partially open.

  Her feet felt heavy, and she recognized as she moved toward the room that she was consciously blocking out anything right now that might hurt. Like the sadness that had engulfed her earlier.

  Walking into the master bedroom, she took a breath. The air was fresher here, thanks to a branch that had fallen and broken through a pane of glass. A quick glance around showed that nothing had been disturbed since she’d been there last. Footprints in the dust could have been hers from her previous visit. They were scuffed and indistinct.

  To her surprise and relief, she noticed that the dust was completely undisturbed near where the bed had been. In the sunshine, it turned into a grayish, opalescent film that lay thick over the brown stains in the hardwood.

  Okay. It was time. She took in another gulp of the cool, wet-smelling air that wended its way through the room from the broken glass of the window.

  Open up to it, Winter told herself silently.

  With a rushing noise like the beating wings of a thousand bats, darkness swept down on her, clawing her to the floor.

  “Turn here.”

  It was Bree’s turn to drive, and she glanced over at Noah. Her brown eyes were bright with curiosity and the thrill of the hunt. They were close. The Preacher was in town, and they both could feel it.

  “I thought we were going to the Harrisonburg police station.”

  “We are. I just want to see something.”

  He directed her to the Krueger Motor Inn.

  “Nice place,” she snorted, pulling up in the parking lot in front of the decrepit-looking hotel. “But I don’t think I want to swap out our reservation at the Motel 6 for this.”

  The parking lot held only a couple of cars. It was after check-out, almost one, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t look much busier around peak hotel hours.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling after he’d spoken to Winter this morning that she was a lot closer than Richmond. Like The Preacher, he could feel that she was here. He didn’t like it. He thought about going into the office, talking to Alma Krueger. But picturing her avid, wrinkled face—and the way she had of undressing him with her eyes—he chickened out.

  “If you turn out of here and go left, there’s a Starbucks just down the street.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Bree’s hands were smooth and capable on the wheel as she pulled a rapid U-turn at the back of the lot.

  In the drive-through, he still couldn’t get Winter out of his head. She liked iced mochas, he knew. Skim milk, no whip. Sometimes, she’d get a hot one, but he’d never seen her order anything but mochas.

  “Ground control to Major Tom,” Bree said, waving one slim hand in front of his face. “To the sheriff’s office?”

  “No. Turn here. To the right.”

  “Some notice would be nice,” Bree mumbled, whipping a tight turn and rolling her eyes. “Like, more than none. Anything particular we’re looking for on this nondescript residential street, Agent Dalton?”

  “That.” His tone was grim. “That’s Winter’s Honda Civic.”

  “Fuck.” The curse word was hushed, drawn out. Bree picked up the pace, pulled around and parked behind it at the end of the street. “Is this her old house?”

  He was already out of the car, moving toward the house and didn’t answer. The door was closed but pushed open easily. It had been broken in, and only lightly pushed closed so that it didn’t draw the attention of neighbors.

  A white and green cup rested on one of the lowest stairs. She’d gone with a hot mocha today, he thought inanely.

  Bree huffed to a stop beside him. “That’s hers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?” She reached out, laid her fingertips against the side. “It’s cold. Could be from this morning or a week ago.”

  He moved quickly up the steps at a run. In the upstairs hallway, fresh smudges marked the dusty floor.

  The door they led to was closed.

  He jiggled the handle.

  “Winter!” he roared, hearing Bree climbing the stairs. “Stay back,” he yelled at her, pulling out his service weapon.

  The door slammed against the interior wall after one solid kick, hard enough to wedge the door handle into the drywall. In the center of the room, crumpled facedown on the grimy floor in a puddle of bright sunshine, was Winter.

  “Jesus Christ, Noah, is she dead?”

  He holstered his gun and dropped into a crouch.

  The pool of blood that surrounded her head had dried to a thickish, viscous mess. It was unpleasantly sticky under his hand when he braced himself beside Winter to take her pulse.

  He held his breath, feeling sick with regret. Remorse.

  Rage.

  Until, under his fingers, he felt it. A pulse, fluttery and faint like the insubstantial brush of a moth’s wings. He let his breath out on what sounded like a sob, too relieved to care what Bree thought.

  “911?” Bree asked shortly, taking in the surroundings in focused, trained movements. She was looking for signs of a struggle. Blood on the walls. Scripture or crosses. The Preacher’s calling cards.

  “No. It wasn’t him. I know what this is. She’ll be okay.”

  Judging by the size of the blood spill, this vision made the previous ones look benign. The blood alone showed she’d suffered more of a hemorrhage than a nosebleed.

  He rolled Winter over and slapped lightly at her cheeks, calling her name. She didn’t show so much as a flicker of a reaction. Behind him, Bree stood in watchful, worried silence.

  “It’s this house. Let’s get her out of here,” Noah ordered. He scooped Winter up in his arms. She was all bones, it felt like. She had a tall, leanly muscled build, normally, but she’d definitely lost weight in the past weeks. She was hardly heavier than a ten-year-old kid.

  “I’ll explain once we get her out of here,” he told Bree, meeting her eyes. She was apprehensive. Confused and frightened, though you never would have been able to tell from the expression on her smooth face. There was no FBI SOP manual that would cover a situation like this.

  They left the house, the fresh air outside a balm after the sick, clammy atmosphere inside Winter’s childhood home. He’d made it to the top of the steps, when a black Mercedes roared down the street, rocking to a stop in the middle of the turnout. The door flew open, and Parrish climbed stiffly out, favoring one leg.

  The normally immaculate profiler looked disheveled. His tie was gone, wrinkled dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His hair was rumpled and his face stubbled, hollowed cheeks tight with pain.

  “Is she alive?” he barked out, the fear in his voice obvious.

  “Yeah.” There would be plenty of time for animosity and finger pointing later. “She’s not coming out of this one like normal, though.”

  Noah moved carefully down the steps, trying not to jostle Winter, meeting Aiden at the bottom. When Aiden called her name, she stirred a little, and Noah had to stifle a flick of jealousy. Not the time.

  She opened her eyes with a quickness that startled a gasp out of Bree.

  With blazing hot eyes, looking almost feral, Winter glanced around wildly, struggling in his arms. “Let me go,” she screamed, her throat working to force out the words. She started in with her fists, and Noah flinched when she caught him just under his left eye.

  “Winter. Knock it off.” He didn’t yell it, but he said it loud. He let her feet slip to the ground and pulled her into a bear hug.

  Whether it was the commanding tone or the resonan
ce of his voice, or maybe the restraint of his arms, something snapped, and Winter went boneless in his grip. He had to adjust his hold, so she didn’t collapse completely.

  “Sweetheart, hush. You’re okay, darlin’,” he whispered against her hair.

  “You’re all dead,” she moaned, wrapping her fingers tightly in his shirt. The forlorn words sounded broken.

  Aiden and Bree watched silently as Noah rubbed Winter’s back and let her cry.

  21

  Blackness. Cold. Death.

  Bloody, gory images of crosses and viscera and sinew and bone. Gleeful pictures of violence overlaid by what sounded like the shrieks of a thousand demons.

  Winter wanted to put her hands over her ears, just to block out the memory of the sound.

  Underneath was a sibilant hiss, like the sound of a record when the song was over, and the needle was left spinning in the dead space at the center.

  Kill them all. Exorcize their Godless souls from their bodies.

  “Winter, dammit, look at me. Don’t drift off on me again!”

  The voice was loud. Louder than the malevolent whisper, and she grabbed on to it like a lifeline.

  Pulled away from the thought of her little brother, too young to even walk to the end of the block without one of their parents, taken by a human being capable of that kind of savage brutality.

  Her eyelids drifted lower, even as sadness rushed up in an overwhelming wave and her eyes filled with tears. The same sadness that had swamped her when she’d opened herself up inside the house the first time.

  Little starbursts of sensation sparkled across the sides of her face, and her lashes flickered open. Noah’s scowl wavered into focus, and the darkness receded. His eyes locked with hers. Deep green, like grass in the shadows, with little flecks of gold near the irises that she’d never noticed.

  Familiar, compelling, they brought her fully back to the light.

  “Winter.” He stopped slapping at her cheeks. “You back with me?”