Useless to pretend she wasn’t terrified, both because she was about to face a killer and because it was at least possible Hailey had been right, that Kyle had lurked in her mind all these years like a cancerous growth, stealing her very consciousness, twisting her own self-image. Nell hadn’t had time enough to take in all Hailey had told her, all she had realized for herself, but that was clear, that possibility. It was terrifying, that something alien could have been with her all this time.
But it also offered a hope Nell clung to.
That the only evil in her had been him.
She had to know. She had to.
Nell stepped up to the front door and put her hand on the knob, then closed her eyes briefly.
Max. I need you.
She opened the door and went into the house, looking around with a frown, blinking in the light of the foyer, trying to give the appearance of someone waking up out of a deep sleep.
“Hey, Nell. Come on in.”
Galen didn’t bother to reclaim his watching post in the woods, because as soon as he neared the house he could see the front door standing open. His gut twisted, and he was drawing his gun before his foot hit the first step.
“She’s gone.” Max met him just inside the door, dressed but obviously in haste and pulling on his jacket even as he spoke. “Ethan’s place.”
Galen didn’t ask any questions until they were in Max’s truck barreling down the driveway, and then all he said was, “Is she telling you anything now?”
“A little, but I’m not getting everything. Bits and pieces. Something about Hailey being here, about Venable holding Ethan and getting ready to kill him. And about Venable being her brother. Christ, how did he get her out of the house past both of us?”
“I haven’t been outside for the last hour,” Galen said. “We didn’t think he’d move again so soon, and we knew you were in the house with her.”
Max didn’t waste time with condemnation of either his own obliviousness to the danger Nell had been in or Galen’s absence. He just gripped the steering wheel harder and floored the accelerator as soon as the truck reached the highway.
“A brother?” Galen said, getting out his phone and beginning to punch in a number.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got to get some new psychics. The ones we have keep missing some pretty important stuff.”
“I would have preferred to wait a bit longer before punishing Ethan,” Kyle said, gesturing with his gun to indicate Nell take a seat on the couch at right angles to Ethan’s chair and his own position near the doorway. “Let all my fellow cops stumble around in the dark a while longer searching for Nate McCurry’s secret sins while Ethan looked like an ass. But what the hell. Might as well finish it.”
Nell sat down but on the outer half of the cushion, making sure she could get to her gun. If she got the chance. “I don’t understand any of this.” It wasn’t difficult to sound bewildered about it.
“Don’t you?”
“No.” She sneaked a glance at Ethan. His head still lolled forward and his eyes were closed, but she had a hunch he was at least half conscious. “I really don’t.”
“Oh, it’s quite simple, Nell. I had to take care of you and Hailey. I had to protect you. That’s what big brothers do.”
“We don’t have a brother,” she said, not so much stalling for time as following her instincts.
“I know we were never properly introduced, which is a shame.” He was smiling, relaxed. “We grew up in different homes and with different mothers, after all. But Adam Gallagher was my father too. He didn’t know about me, you see. He didn’t know until I told him. Last May.”
“May? You mean—just before he died?”
“Well, that wasn’t the plan. I knew he was upset, losing both his girls. You’d been gone for years, then Hailey. I thought he needed to know about me, that it would make him happy. I even offered to change my name, to make sure the Gallagher name would go on.”
“And the Gallagher curse?” Nell asked.
Kyle’s smile widened, but his eyes were curiously flat. “I thought that would please him most of all.”
“It didn’t, did it?”
“No. It didn’t. He threw me out of the house, can you believe that? Actually knocked me down the steps.”
Intently focused on Kyle’s face, Nell was surprised when she got a strong flash, a harsh voice yelling. “He called you a liar. He ... called your mother a whore.”
“He never should have done that,” Kyle said reasonably but with an edge to his voice. “I had to punish him for that. Because my mother wasn’t a whore.”
“Was that when you killed him?”
“I had to. You see that, don’t you, Nell? That I had to kill him?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nell drew a breath and nodded slowly. “I guess you did. But how? Everyone thought it was a heart attack.”
“It wasn’t difficult to cause a heart attack in a man who’d been on the verge of having one naturally for years. As a matter of fact, I used digitoxia. And I had to be there, of course, because I didn’t want him calling for help.”
“You watched him die?”
“I enjoyed watching him die.”
As much as she had hated her father, Nell realized in that moment that she would not have enjoyed watching him die. Even knowing he had beaten her mother to death—
Beaten?
“I knew he had disowned Hailey,” Kyle continued calmly. “That you’d been left everything. I honestly didn’t think you’d come back here. So I did some discreet checking just to see if there was any way I could inherit—without having to prove paternity, of course.”
“Because you couldn’t?” Nell concentrated on the conversation, on him. There would be time later, she hoped, to solve any lingering puzzles.
“Because he hadn’t acknowledged me. Maybe I could have got the name legally, but so what? And I didn’t need his property. If you hadn’t come back, I might have done something about that. But you did come back.” His face darkened suddenly.
Nell, realizing abruptly what he must have “seen” when he summoned her to come to him tonight, said slowly, “I’m here tonight because you wanted me to be. Because you ... came to me. You saw, didn’t you? You saw Max with me.”
“In your bed. Did he even bother to scrape the cow shit out from under his fingernails first?”
She chose her words carefully. “He didn’t corrupt me, Kyle. He didn’t spoil me.”
“Of course he did.”
“No. I love Max. And he loves me.”
“That’s not love,” Kyle said scornfully. “Wrestling between the sheets? Rutting like a couple of animals? Have you ever watched, Nell? Seen what it looks like when two naked, hairy bodies do that? It’s ugly. Unspeakably ugly. At least I didn’t have to watch you do it. But Hailey ...”
“You followed her. You watched her.”
“I had to. She was sick, from the time she was a child. Sick. Randal Patterson infected her with his own sickness. Down in that basement of his, when she was just a little girl.” His mouth twisted. “I wanted to kill him then. But I was just a kid myself, so I couldn’t.”
He shrugged and frowned down at the gun he still held with seeming negligence in one hand, and Nell took the opportunity to glance quickly at Ethan. She saw his eyelid flicker, his head move just a bit, and knew he was fully conscious now.
But it wasn’t time. Not yet. Not yet.
She said the first thing she could think of to Kyle to keep the conversation going. “There were other men after Patterson. How could you keep blaming them rather than her?”
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Kyle said, spacing every word carefully for emphasis. “But they did. They took advantage of her. I know she was upset when your mother went away, but—”
“Our mother didn’t go away, Kyle. He killed her. You saw him do it.”
Kyle looked at her for an unblinking moment, then smiled. “So did you.”
“And you made me forget.”
“I had to. With her whorish blood in you, I knew all it would take would be a trigger. Seeing her being punished, hearing her cry and plead and tell him she was really good when it was so obvious she was lying through her whoring teeth—that might have been enough.”
Nell felt her stomach heave and fought desperately not to show the reaction. “Why didn’t you ... try that with Hailey? Why didn’t you try to ... to cure her sickness that way?”
“She never had the Gallagher gift. Oh, I tried, more than once. To reach her, to touch her mind. Even to go visit her while she was sleeping, the way I could visit you. But it never worked with her. I guess she was already ruined then, even though I didn’t want to admit it.”
“You visited me? While I was sleeping?”
Kyle smiled again. “All the time, before you ran away from Silence. When you ran away ... I don’t know. I lost you somehow. I wasn’t even sure I could do it again when you came back, but it was really easy. Maybe because I knew you were there in the house. That must have been it, don’t you think? That I knew where you were?”
“I ... guess so.”
“I had no idea I could make you do things. Started small, at first, telling you to turn over in bed. To get up and brush your hair for a while. To go up into the attic and find your doll.”
“I wondered how she got onto my pillow,” Nell said, forcing her voice to remain calm even though her very skin was crawling.
“You didn’t figure it out, honestly? You had no idea it was me?”
Nell shifted her weight slightly, putting both hands on the cushion on either side of her hips as if to brace herself. Quietly, she said, “How could I guess? I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know I had a brother. And you wouldn’t let me remember what you had done for me.”
“There was no reason for you to remember.” Kyle frowned. “I wonder if that’s why you let Max Tanner into your bed, because you remembered you had the blood of a whore in your veins. Was that it?”
She ignored the question. “What was the final straw with Hailey? Why did you begin ... punishing the men she’d had sex with? Was it because she ran off with Glen Sabella?”
Kyle laughed. “She never would have run off with him, Nell. She didn’t care any more about him than she had any of the others. He just fed her sickness, don’t you understand? After Grandmother died, Hailey used her house as a meeting place so they could rut. But that’s all she wanted from him.”
“You watched them.”
“Sure. That last day, they had a fight about something. And he hit her. She just laughed, but ... I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. She always got dressed and left first, so I waited for that. And as soon as she’d gone, I went in. I had my nightstick. He was strong, but I caught him by surprise.”
“You—”
“I hadn’t really meant to kill him. Just punish him. But he wouldn’t stop moving, wouldn’t shut up and stop groaning. So I kept hitting him.” He sighed. “Hailey had come back for something, I don’t know what. She saw me. Saw what I’d done to him. That was when she ran.”
“What ... did you do with Sabella?”
“Buried him. And it was so easy, so simple. I thought it would feel different, killing someone I knew, but it didn’t. It was just the same. Like swatting a fly.”
“If he looks out one of the windows,” Galen said in a voice hardly above a whisper, “we’re screwed. With that huge moon, it’s bright as day out here.”
“He’s not looking,” Max said, keeping his voice just as low. “Nell’s keeping him talking.”
“That direct line you’ve got is coming in handy,” Kelly Rankin said, double-checking her weapon for the third time. “Somebody want to explain that to me?”
“Later,” Justin told her. “Max, how much longer can Nell keep him occupied?”
“I don’t know. A few minutes, maybe.” The past quarter of an hour had provided Max with ample understanding of just why the door Nell had flung open might be better closed most of the time; it was incredibly difficult for him to concentrate on two places at one time, let alone sort through the jumble of thoughts and emotions that were both his and hers.
Nell was trying to help him and he knew it. She was concentrating intently on Kyle Venable and what he was saying, not allowing herself to think too much about what that psychopath was telling her. And she kept her emotions damped down, refusing to give in to the horror and revulsion his revelations created in her.
But it was still distracting and not a little confusing for Max. He expected he’d get better with practice, and he was damned glad that door was open now with Nell in there confronting an insane killer, but he had to admit this could easily be more of a hindrance than a help.
“Just the two doors.” Lauren Champagne eased up beside the others where they crouched in the shadows of some farm equipment at the edge of the field. “But there’s a window I think I can get open on the other side of the house. That’ll give us three ways in. Three chances.”
Even with his attention split, Max looked at her and said, “That’s your partner in there.”
“If you’re wondering if I can kill him if I have to, stop wondering.” Even in the shadows of the equipment, there was enough light to show that her lovely face was utterly composed. “I have no problem disposing of rabid animals.”
“And she’s a crack shot,” Justin murmured.
Lauren looked at him, one brow rising.
“The shooting range,” he explained. “I saw you practicing a few weeks ago.”
“Ah.”
Galen said, “Max, you’re the only one here who isn’t a cop. If you’ve got Nell’s gun, hand it over.”
“Forget it.”
“Max—”
“I’m also a crack shot.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Galen told him politely. “This is potentially messy enough without having a civilian involved in a shoot-out.”
“There isn’t going to be a shoot-out,” Max said. He swore under his breath. “Nell’s in there. Do you really think I want bullets flying?”
“We’re running out of time,” Lauren said.
“And time is the issue,” Galen added. “Or timing is. We’ll only have one chance to get this right.”
Max went still for an instant. “We have to move,” he said. “Now.”
“Killing ... someone you knew? You mean Sabella wasn’t the first?”
Kyle shrugged. “He was the first local. But Hailey had gone out of town sometimes, and I couldn’t let those filthy bastards off scot-free, could I? They all had to pay. They infected her with more and more sickness, and they had to pay.”
Nell, conscious of the clock ticking in her head, shifted slightly on the couch and said, “Which, I guess, brings us to Ethan. Why kill him, Kyle?”
“He’s no different from the rest.”
“Isn’t he?”
“No. He just used her and tossed her aside like the others did. He fed her sickness. I have to punish him, just like I did the others.”
“And what about me, Kyle? What did I do?” She kept her gaze steady on his face.
“You let Tanner into your bed. You’re infected too, Nell. I thought the Gallagher gift would save you, but it hasn’t. Don’t you see that the infection is everywhere? I’ve tried and tried to cure it, and I think—I think the only way to do it is to cut it out.”
“You mean to kill me.”
“I have to cut out the infection,” Kyle said, his tone chillingly reasonable.
“You’ll kill me without giving me a chance to ... repent? To change?”
For the first time, Kyle looked hesitant. “I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t.” Nell rose to her feet, careful to make no sudden movement that might startle him into using the gun he still held in one hand. She managed to turn just far enough so that the fingers of her left hand would be visible to Ethan without Kyle being able to see them move s
lightly.
Beginning with a fist, she began to very slowly extend one finger after the other, pausing briefly between each. Counting to five. She only hoped Ethan saw it, and got it, because she hadn’t been able to think of any other way to warn him.
“If you kill the only family you have left here in Silence, you’ll be all alone,” she reminded him. “Is that really what you want?”
Kyle shook his head, more in reproach than negation, and his free hand reached for the rope he had set aside on a nearby table when Nell had arrived. “All I want is—”
Nell caught the flicker of movement in the foyer beyond Kyle in the same instant that she reached the count of five. She felt as well as heard Ethan wrench his chair sideways even as she went for her gun.
“Drop it, Venable!” Galen’s voice rang out.
Maybe it was training or instinct that told Nell that Kyle would not obey the command. Or maybe it was simply the Gallagher blood or the Gallagher curse they shared that told her what he would do.
She saw him start to turn, to swing the gun toward her. Even saw, in one of those peculiar telescopic views one often saw in critical moments, his finger tighten on the trigger and his mouth curve in a smile.
It was as if time had slowed to a crawl. She was moving, leveling the gun Hailey had given her, throwing herself toward a chair that was the only possible cover nearby. She saw Kyle jerk before she heard the gun’s report, saw scarlet bloom on his uniform shirt, then saw a second bullet hit him and wrench him around so that he was ironically in a better position to fire at her. Her gun bucked in her hand just as she saw the recoil of his own gun.
And then something slammed into her with the force of a train, and everything went black.
As soon as Nell opened her eyes, she knew that time had passed. A lot of time. She had that heavy, sandpapery-eyes sensation that told her she had slept for hours, yet felt remarkably well for all of that. At least until she moved.
“Ouch. Dammit.”
“Serves you right. Don’t move and it won’t hurt so much.”
She turned her head cautiously to see Max sitting beside her bed. Her hospital bed. Her head throbbed a bit, and she was conscious of a restricted sensation in the region of her left shoulder and arm. “What happened?” she wondered.