(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (19 page)

He chuckles. “Jane, I never wanted the video. You were always the prize for me. That was their big obsession. Now come out from under there before the house falls on you.” His gray eye is gone, and the light is back.

I turn, still squinting to see better. Suddenly, a light flashes at the entrance to the cellar. It moves like it’s in a hand, swaying it back and forth at a concert.

I have two options—die in this fire or go to the man I believe is responsible for it all. It’s a no-brainer, but it’s also like selling my soul to the devil. I stumble through the smoke to the entrance, taking his hand and letting him pull me to safety. He lifts me into his arms and runs away. All my hate and anger are burning up with the house behind us. Everything becomes less painful, seeing the billowing smoke coming from the haunted house that Derek has left burning in our wake. I blink, but the view still continues to shrink away as if my body ignores my fears, and again I lose consciousness.

When I wake there is a sound, a song or humming. I recognize the tune.

“Once in a while, send me a smile. Make me see who you want me to be. If you’d only listen to the sounds of my heart beating for you.” Derek’s voice singing the tune to the taunting song picks at me. I’ve heard it before, in his voice. “Listen, listen to the wind and stone. Listen, listen to the sounds of old. Listen, listen as my hopes are drowned. Listen, listen to the sounds that bullets make of blood and bones. Where will you run today? How will you ever get away? Our love is meant to stay.”

I shudder as a memory floods my mind, taking all of me into it.

The song wakes me. I stumble from the bed into the dark hallway in search of its source. His voice is new to me for only a second as memories flit about my head and recognition occurs halfway through the darkness. He is the man I love and trust—my father.

The song is odd. I don’t recognize it. He repeats it using the same taunting melody. When I get around the corner there’s a door with a sliver of silver light shining from it. The song is coming from the crack, echoing inside the light within the room that becomes bluer as I get closer. The color makes my bare feet on the marble floor feel as if it’s colder than it actually is. I shudder as the creepy chorus plays again off the pale-blue walls.

“Listen, listen to the wind and stone. Listen, listen to the sounds of old. Listen, listen as my hopes are drowned. Listen, listen to the sounds that bullets make of blood and bones. Where will you run today? How will you ever get away? Our love is meant to stay.”

When I peek through the slit, the cool blue paint on the walls and ivory floors contrast remarkably with the spatters of red all over. My father, a man who has never shown me a moment of love or kindness, is cutting up something bloody. A hand lies on the floor, pointing at the wall on the other side of the room. There is no arm attached. It takes several seconds for the images to compute, but he hums and sings the chorus again.

“Listen, listen to the wind and stone. Listen, listen to the sounds of old. Listen, listen as my hopes are drowned. Listen, listen to the sounds that bullets make of blood and bones. Where will you run today? How will you ever get away? Our love is meant to stay.”

I gasp, backing away. When I turn I trip, making the music stop. The warm singing in the cold room ceases, and hollow footsteps take its place.

“Jane?”

I scramble to my feet, spinning around.

My eyes pop open, as I come back from my memories. The song
was his. The weirdness was never mine. The shit wrong with me—the cherry and the creepy song and the memory loss—are not mine. They are my father’s, and God help me, but I have fallen in love with a man just like him.

It takes a second to come out of the weird dream. The room I’m in reminds me of a place I’ve been. It has a soft bed with a fluffy pillow and pretty paint color, but I know it’s fake, like our sanity.

The door opens, with his smiling face poking through the opening. “You’re awake? I figured you would need a bit more sleep. You haven’t been sleeping or eating enough. You need that. You need to stay calm.”

“I need answers, all of them. I need to know now, right now, what this is. Why did you burn the house and attack Rory? Did you leave him at the house?”

He pushes the door open as if he’s freeing me, making me more comfortable, which I think is his intention. “You volunteered for this.”

“What? Where’s Rory?” He offers me his hand. I don’t hesitate—I climb from the bed and storm past him. “Stop coddling me, Derek. I’m not your fucking toy.”

He chuckles and follows me down the hall. We’re in a hotel. It’s a suite with a large living room. I sit down on the couch, holding my hands wide. “What the hell is going on?”

He strolls calmly to the TV, hooking up a VCR.

“Is that from my father’s house?”

He nods, dropping to his knees and turning the TV and VCR on. The wide flat-screen TV, which couldn’t be more opposite from the VCR connected to it, turns on. My face, my face from before, appears on the screen, frozen. Derek comes and sits next to me, patting my leg.

I shove his hand off me, looking at him with a glare. “What is this?”

“Your VHS. I stole it first a while ago. When you were sleepwalking once you told me where it was. I let that asshole Rory take
the fake one I made from this one, missing all the good stuff, of course. Do you know how hard it was to make it dusty like that?”

I pause, completely stunned. “You are insane.”

He shrugs. “I know.” He presses “play” with the remote he stole from my father’s house with his ancient VCR, left over from when I was a kid. The picture runs clearer as he hits the button.

“You found us.” My smile is wide and coated in red lipstick. I brush my blonde hair behind my ears and nod. “I knew you would know the only place in the world I would ever hide something.” The light in my eyes dims. “It’s the only place no one would know about, unless I trusted them more than anything in the world.” I glance next to me, like I hear something but the camera can’t see it.

I look back at the camera, lowering my voice. “I’ve found something out. Something that’s big. All this time I’ve been hunting down Benjamin Dash has proved to be enlightening. He’s part of a CIA operation that takes requests or cleanup jobs as favors to other organizations. He’s part of the cleaning team for cleaning teams—part of something the world has no clue about. And the worst part is we knew all along. Our own government runs this. Dash was selected because of his theories. He’s built a team of people who can become like psychopaths, and enjoy the end of someone’s life. They all like to watch the spark go out.” Her eyes narrow, like she’s fighting emotions. “Anyway, he’s a doctor, and the intel I recovered on him and the program didn’t do what it was supposed to. Essentially, I showed up the government and its evil plotting and mind screwing with completely innocent people. The evidence against the government is in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Turin, Italy, in the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. The key is in the place where you hid from the monsters. It’s the safest place I could think to put it.” She looks down for a brief second, shaking her head. “Sam, or whatever your name is now, let the past go. No good is going to come from opening that box. It already ruined our lives. It already ruined everything. Just let
it go, trust me.” She looks up at the camera, nodding. “Let Father go. He was a weak man who preyed on the innocent, and nothing we did when we were little can be blamed on us. We were a product of our environment. That’s what I’ve learned in all of this. Learn to love and let go and be a strong person for the right reasons. It’s something we never have been very good at.”

The video ends, ejecting the VHS when it’s done. I look at Derek. “Explain all of that in really dumb terms.”

A knock at the door startles me, but he stands casually and walks to it. A man in a white jacket wheels in a cart of food, leaving us with it. Instantly, I can smell chicken Parm. Derek lifts the lids, making steam flood the top of the table. The food is incredibly hot and fresh, making my mouth water immediately. He carries over a silver tray, placing it on the coffee table in front of me. I take the silverware, nodding. “This is evil. You know how I feel about food.”

He chuckles. “I thought it was only
my
food.”

I take the first bite of the noodles after dragging it through the marinara and crispy cheese. My eyes close on their own, and a moan escapes my lips.

“That hurts my feelings.”

I nod. “It should. This is fantastic.”

“Better than mine?” He sits across from me on the floor with his silver tray of steak and potatoes. A meal more fitting for him.

“Explain.”

He cuts into the juicy rare steak. I have to look away or I’ll lose my appetite. “There is so little to explain. You know it all. We fell in love; I never lied about that.” He takes his bite, lifting his gray-green stare to mine. Watching him chew the meat, remembering the image of my father butchering the man in the stark blue room, takes my appetite away. He nods. “You fell in love with a monster. I never hid what I was or what I did. You knew it all—the only person in the world who had seen the place inside me where there should have been a soul.” He swallows, making
me gag. He points his steak knife at me. “This is why you made me take your memories. You couldn’t eat meat. You couldn’t see me eat anything. You couldn’t sleep without a light most nights, even if I was there. You couldn’t, and that was the answer to everything. We’d be in a café in France and I’d ask a question and you’d lose the color in your face, staring at a man who looked similar to your dad. You wouldn’t even hear me. You were lost in the shame you felt for it all. I tried to explain to you that sometimes we are born in a trap that’s already set and we are going to lose no matter how hard we fight it.”

Tears run down my cheeks.

“At least you can cry now. That’s a new development.”

I sniffle, wiping my eyes. The plate of food in front of me is delicious—I know it is. The man in front of me is devoted—I know he is. The world is so large we could get lost in it if we wanted to—I know that. But the trap has still got me. I am still losing against it. Only this time I’m not going to keep losing. I refuse. I push the plate away, determined this will be the last time I lose anything. “I want to end this, all of it.”

“Then you have to go to Italy and open the box.”

I cock an eyebrow. “You saw the video. I told myself not to do that.”

“That’s the only way for this to end—take away the thing they want.”

I shake my head. “There has to be another way.”

The look in his eyes turns grave. “You and me dead is the other solution they have.”

“The stuff in that box is protecting us from death.”

He sighs. “No it isn’t. We aren’t safe as long as we have it. It needs to go away, and then
we
need to go away.”

It just doesn’t seem like the right choice. I shake my head again. “What if the people who want the information against you are all dead? Will you be free then? Who is it?”

He looks a bit defeated when he sighs and says their names: “Randall, Rory, and my contact, Don Nobleman. The files in the system on us are all blank. They don’t keep work orders on the things we do, and every death looks to be an accident, so there is no proof.” His eyes narrow with amusement as if he’s laughing at a joke on the inside. “Apart from the evidence you gathered. You were the only one who was ever able to do it.”

“So if they are gone and we destroy the evidence in the safety-deposit box, technically you and I are free?”

“Technically.”

One thing picks at me. “Why did I keep the evidence?”

The grin he’s been playing with finally spreads across his face. “Because you were going to do the right thing and bring me in. You needed to gather as much evidence of my sins as you could manage before bringing me in. It would make my insurance I keep on the government null and void. No one believes a guilty serial killer about anything. With proof I was a savage, they could lock me up, and anything I tried to use against them would look like the mad ravings of a lunatic.”

My stomach drops. “Did I start a relationship with you for the job?”

He nods slowly, and the humor leaves his face. “That, and you found out something in those files that made you realize you couldn’t kill me.” There’s a small part of me that fears he took me as his trophy when he found out who I was. It’s a logical fear in a situation like this one. I don’t think I will ever know if he forced me into sacrificing my memories and past so he could keep me his prisoner. I have to assume he’s on my side.

“What happened at my father’s house? Why did you light the fire?”

He shakes his head. “I never. I drove like a madman to the house, arriving as he had set the fire. Randall was there. They had the VHS. Rory wanted to bring you in, but Randall said you had betrayed
them and were nothing more than a loose end. They had released you to find the VHS. It was all they needed. They left you there to die.”

“How did you know about the notch hole?”

He swallows hard. “There was a notch hole at my house too.” He has never spoken of his life before. “We discussed our worst sins once.” He leaves it there. I can see he’s not going to talk about it more. “I think you should go to Italy and get this over with.”

“No.”

He shrugs. “Then what’s the plan?”

“No, we kill Rory, Randall, and that Don guy. Then we go back to the West Coast and we start over. I’m never going to Italy, and I’m never opening that box. It’s my insurance.”

His eyes widen. “You want to start over again? It’s the third time.”

“I know, but maybe it’ll be the lucky time.” There are a thousand things hovering in my mind that I need to know or argue over, but this isn’t the time for it.

“What about the evidence? Leaving it there is a mistake.” He gives me a look.

“We leave it there until I think we are safe to go and see what it is.” Part of me is scared to even look.

He nods. “Sounds like a plan.” He looks down at his dinner and groans. “What a waste.”