Hunted Dreams (28 page)

No! WAKE UP!

With a shudder, the scene, complete with broken glass underfoot, solidified around her.

Katana was right. She wasn’t fueling them as heartily and steadily as she once had.

Good for her.

Nonetheless, Reed found himself hungry within two hours of returning home from his breakfast with Jade. Before escaping to the backyard, he swung into the kitchen for a sizable snack.

Dressed in a rumpled suit, Paul rummaged through the contents of a cupboard. He nodded and grinned when Reed entered.

Reed nodded back. He grabbed the makings for cereal.

“Bachelor fare,” Paul commented, nodding at Reed’s food choice.

“Been one all my life,” Reed said after a moment. “How about you?”

Paul plunged his hand inside a tin of cookies and nodded. “Never saw the point of marriage, myself. Kind of unnecessarily cumbersome, in my view. I mean, ‘till death do us part’ sounded great two hundred years ago, when the life expectancy was forty.”

Reed took a bite of the lightly sugared—now, with whole grains!—cereal before replying. Finally, he asked, “Quina not so fond of that perspective?”

Paul grinned at him. “You should know her better than that. Whatever Quina wants, she gets. If she decided she wanted to marry me, I’d start looking for a tux the next day. We have a much more casual arrangement.”

“How long you been here, in this house, with Quina?”

“Hmmm. Nine, ten years? Wow, I guess it’s been a dozen.” The balls of his cheeks bounced atop his cheery smile.

Reed poured himself another bowl of cereal. Leaning casually against the countertop, he asked, “What did you do before you landed here?”

“Oh, this and that. I lived off and on with another Family in Arizona while I got my degrees and applied for jobs. Eventually, I landed the job I have now and moved out here.”

Voice as calm and relaxed as his posture, Reed asked, “You’ve been in California for how long?” He took another bite.

Paul grinned. “You do ask the tough questions, especially for my arithmetic-challenged brain. Seventeen years? Eighteen?”

“Huh,” Reed said.

“Is Cor coming by today?” Paul asked him, and shoved a sandwich cookie in his mouth. Hungry, all of them.

Reed shrugged. “Not sure.” He took his bowl and spoon to the sink, rinsed them out, and put them away. Paul still stood there, chewing his cookie, nourishing himself the old-fashioned way.

The room measured approximately twelve by twelve. A pretty modest bedroom, by most standards, though big enough for two active little girls and their modest belongings. Their two twin beds lay perpendicular to one another, both pressed against adjoining walls. Kat’s bed, neatly made, pressed against the far wall. A long window spread above and beyond it. Just behind the window loomed an expanse of black sky, stirred to life by the sharp-edged winter breeze that cooled the desert.

The window had shattered into thousands of tiny fragments that glittered like jewels on the bedspread, windowsill, and the wooden floor. The cold air whistled through the screen to rake its teeth along her arm.

Mandy’s bed, propped against the other wall, lay in disarray. The fitted sheet was rumpled and the colorful quilt Aunt Ilsa had given her for Christmas sat crumpled at the foot of the bed.

The pillows lay motionless on the floor, almost touching the red pool.

Moonlight, gleaming clear and white, painted cubist scenes atop the pool. At the edge of the patches of moonlight, the pool faded from red to oily black.

It wasn’t ink.

Blood, as red as petals, as black as the night sky, as shiny and motionless as broken glass, puddled at Katana’s feet. At one end of the pool lay a yellow-haired doll, rigid, bent, broken.

Only.

It wasn’t.

But she was. Broken, that is.

Her sister, her beautiful, sweet-voiced sister who always smelled like the violet sachets their mother tucked into their dresser drawers.

Face down on the floor. She didn’t move, even to draw in breath.

Katana’s breaths whistled through her tight throat. Even knowing this was a dream, aware of the outcome of this entire situation, she knelt as she hadn’t done sixteen years ago. Her fingers—large and strong with short nails rather than small and smooth like a ten-year-old’s—trembled whitely as they descended to the broken d—to Mandy’s . . . to Mandy.

Mandy felt warm, as warm as she had any number of times they’d snuggled together on the couch to crunch sugared cereal and watch Saturday morning cartoons. Katana’s shaking hand, huge, ungainly against the smoothness of her sister’s small face, smoothed over Mandy’s cheek. Mandy’s short golden hair slipped through her fingers.

She had no pulse at her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. The wind cooled the moisture on her face. She wasn’t sure why she apologized. She knew she’d done nothing wrong that night. “Except fail to protect you.” Irrational.

Of course it was irrational. What grief survivor is rational? What adult is logical when dealing with the death of a loved one? What ten-year-old child?

As a twenty-six year-old woman, she knew as the ten-year-old had not during this same scene sixteen years prior that her mother and father lay slaughtered not twenty feet from where she now stood. A family of four people, and she, Katana, the only survivor. Of course she wondered why she’d lived, wondered what she could have done differently to protect them all.

Grief shuddered through her. Slowly, painfully, she rose from her crouch to her feet. Her knees creaked and her arms ached; her right hand retained the stolen warmth.

She hesitated, cheeks cold and wet, body weighing a thousand pounds at least, unsure whether she should linger in this room and pay homage to this scene, forgotten for far too long, or seek out her parents and bid them farewell as well.

The sound of footsteps, slow and steady, echoed in the hallway behind her.

For the first time, Cor joined him in the backyard. Reed, scrub brush in hand, sat on a stool before a bucket of soapy water. She huddled in her oversized coat, shivering dramatically.

“Would you like to go inside?” Reed asked dryly. As usual, he wore no jacket.

“I’d rather commune with nature,” Cor snapped, mouth compressed.

After a moment, he shrugged and went back to scrubbing.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked a little too loudly.

“I have to sharpen the blades, but first I need to clean off the dried-on rust and gunk,” Reed said, lifting the wire scrub brush for emphasis. Warm, soapy water dripped from its tip and onto the curving blades of the pruning shears.

“I’ve heard cutting aluminum foil sharpens scissors,” Cor muttered.

“I was thinking of using a file, but if you’re game, I’m up for a challenge,” he said.

“Al would disown me for doing manual labor.”

He glanced at her and raised his eyebrows. “So that’s a ‘yes’?”

Her responding smile was lopsided.

Bristles scraped over metal. After a moment, Reed asked without looking up from the shears, “What’re you doing here?”

“Hell if I know.” Cor sighed.

“I’m glad you came.”

He dunked the blades into the bucket of soapy water and spent a moment drying them. Silently, he grabbed another pair from the ground, immersed them in the water, and scrubbed wire bristles over the blades.

Smoothly, casually, eyes staring downward, Reed asked, “How many fifty-to-sixty-year-old Broschi men live in the area?”

A silence fell between them.

“Is that what this is all about?”

“‘This’ what?” he asked, still scrubbing.

“Why you’re here? The Clan give you a convenient excuse for working out your daddy issues?”

Scorching words curling his tongue, Reed lifted his head. Cor’s expression stopped his words. In spite of her words, he could see she felt miserable, conflicted, angry and guilty. “I lied to you, so I owe you an explanation,” he said slowly, quietly. “But don’t throw that in my face.” Carefully, he put down the shears and rose to his feet.

“Growing up with Clan members, nobody talked about it, but the topic of my parentage lay under every single conversation. I wondered a lot about this non-entity, this being who existed only in the negative, in what never got discussed. Then, I got thrown out of the Clan, and my mother and I lived as normal a life as possible. I stopped wondering.” More to the point, it seemed like a betrayal to his mother to ponder the man whose evil act continued to haunt her life.

“I told you why I came here, and it’s the truth. I didn’t want to, but helping new Hunters seemed like something my mother would have wanted me to do.” He didn’t mention Katana’s theory that he identified with the hybrids, the abominations known as Crossovers. “But then I started helping Katana remember her past, and I started thinking about what makes us who we are.” He shook his head. “It’s not crucial, but I’m learning what it means to be a Broschi, and I find myself wondering about that half of me.”

Cor had looked away from him the moment his story had begun. She remained silent for a time, hands crammed into her coat pockets.

“You know,” she said quietly, still staring at the row of trees behind him. “Your—this guy you’re looking for might not be here. Thanks to your precious Clan, we’ve lost a few men over the years who would be in their fifties by now.”

They weren’t
his
Clan, but her dig felt more automatic than malicious. He remained silent.

“Or maybe it was some kind of rogue. They come through here once in a while.”

Yeah, he knew.

“Of those who are still alive, we have five. Our lives tend to be brutish and short, all thanks—”

“To my precious Clan. I know.”

“You know three. The other two are Elijah Branham of Family Tailor—he’s in his mid-fifties—and Vaughn Eltsin, who’s sixty-some. He’s Family Tailor, too.”

“All white?”

“Except Elijah, yeah.”

“All around for the past thirty years?”

“I think so.”

Not Paul, but she likely didn’t know that. That left three men: Izek Delgado, Alexio Greco, and someone named Vaughn-something.

“Thank you, Cor,” he said quietly.

She shrugged.

“There’s—”

“You know, what happened to your mom thirty years ago sucked. I’m really sorry for her.”

Reed waited for her to continue, to add some kind of clause. After a long moment of silence, he said cautiously, “Thanks.”

“This war thing between the groups—it’s so damn stupid.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. Katana was proof the Broschi could do horrific things, but the Clan wasn’t blameless in perpetuating the violence, in hurting innocents like Cor, like Alberto. He grabbed her hand, and she finally looked at him. “When I leave here, you should come, too.”

She stared hard at him for a moment before cracking a huge grin and batting her eyelashes. “You flirting with me, tall, dark, and unfortunately male?”

He’d lost her, at least for the moment. He hadn’t expected anything different; these people were not only her Family, but her family.

Knowing it was futile, he still told her, “If you change your mind, I’ll always help you.”

“Yeah, yeah. But in the meantime, how about we soap down that giant tool of yours?”

Chapter 15

Katana stumbled forward, away from the sound, before whirling around. Her foot kicked something soft. Looking down, she saw Percy the teddy dog skidding across the floor. Heart drumming, she wondered how to flee, how to leave, where to hide. Her gaze flickered to the dark space beneath the window and she twitched toward it.

But wait. Wait.

This is a dream
, she reminded herself. At worst, she would feel pain and grief before moving on to another. At best, she would finally conquer this final memory, perhaps winning in the process permission from her subconscious to awaken.

But he hurt Mandy.

Katana’s breath skittered across her tongue, and she put a hand on the sword swinging sedately against her hip. She was an adult, an armed one, armed and big and strong. She could hurt him, too.

One deep, shaky breath later, she adopted a defensive position a few feet from the doorway.

And waited.

The footsteps approached. A dark shadow filled the doorway. Sparkles of ambient light glinted off his teeth as he smiled.

He stepped forward until they were only three feet from one another.

Katana couldn’t see his face very clearly, but she saw enough to recognize the warm smile on his baby-smooth face. This man, or at least the ghost of his memory, the one who had slaughtered her family, who had plucked her loved ones, her innocence, her very sense of safety and well-being from her at the tender age of ten, stood unarmed before her, gazing directly into her eyes. He was exactly her height and only slightly stockier.

She could kill him, pull her sword from its scabbard any time she wanted and plunge it into his warm belly. The knowledge comforted her.

“Welcome back, Kat,” he said.

What the hell did that mean?

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, extending his hands palm-up to her.

“Don’t expect me to say the same,” she grated.

He laughed shortly, more a small bark. “You have every right to be grumpy with me.”

Teeth clenched, she corrected, “I have every right to slaughter your carcass.”

His exhale seemed close to a sigh. “So different now than you were just sixteen short years ago.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I am.”

He took a small step toward her.

Katana twitched backward in something not quite a flinch. Her nostrils flared and, after a moment, she leaned forward, reclaiming the ground she’d given him.

“But still,” he said. “I value our reunion. I’ve been waiting a long time for your visit.”

Her breath left her in a puff. “I’m here now,” she said. “So let’s chat.”

Moonlight slashed across his teeth as he grinned at her. “I’ve been looking so forward to catching up with you. Tell me, how much do you remember about our time together? Oh, and no need to keep your hand on your pretty sword. The very last thing I want to do is cause you any physical damage.”

She caught the
physical.
“Unlike last time,” she ground out.

He wiggled his head from side to side. “Well, yes and no. You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“My parents are dead,” she said. “Lying in bed, my mom on the right, my dad on the left. Last time, you . . . stayed for a long time.”

“I’m a big believer in quality time,” the man said, smiling. “It wasn’t nearly long enough for my tastes, but I suppose it seemed lengthier to you than me.”

Katana’s eyes smoothed over the rumpled form of her sister. She wanted to talk to her, to tell her she was sorry for forgetting, but
he
stood before her, far closer to her than Mandy’s broken form.

“How long?” she demanded, throat dry.

His chuckle breezed over her face. “We spent three days together, you and me.”

Three days.

Katana stepped back from him and moved to the doorway. “Show me,” she said.

Kat halted several feet from the bed. Her pink nylon nightgown fluttered about her ankles before falling still. She was a big girl, practically a teenager, as she’d often told Mandy and her parents. Still, her forefinger traveled to her mouth.

The room spread around her, dark and silent. Her mother, a fan of natural light, always kept the blinds open, and a pool of blue moonlight washed over the bed and lapped against the far wall.

The room was more silent than she’d ever heard it. Even empty, even on other nights, the silence had never felt like this. This silence had the air of sound spent.

Kat shivered. The wood floors chilled her feet, the air cool in Acton, a Southern California desert town. She hadn’t felt chilly before.

King-sized, enormous, eating up much of the master bedroom’s square footage, the bed loomed before her. Even at five feet or so, Kat had found crawling into it somewhat difficult. Her dad had joked about placing doggy steps alongside it. On any normal night, she could see her parents sleeping, her mom tucked neatly on her side, beige covers folded beneath her chin, her father sprawling on his side of the bed, sheets tangled around his limbs.

Tonight, they lay spooning, something Kat had never before seen. Her father’s arm carefully crossed her mother’s substantial waist, and their heads rested lovingly together atop the same pillow. The covers, folded neatly beneath their arms, lay dark and shiny atop them.

The room stank.

A heavy hand came to rest on Kat’s right shoulder. She did not flinch, did not move, did not acknowledge it in any way.

“They look peaceful, don’t they?” the man asked, his tone gentle.

The moonlight glazed the ceiling, frosting the textured peaks. To the left of the bed, giant red numbers proclaimed it just after midnight.

“They are now, but they weren’t earlier,” the man said in his soft, sympathetic tone. “Your mother took an especially long time to die. I don’t mind saying I broke into a sweat holding her down and keeping her mouth shut while I cut her, but then again, I’m not in the best of shape right now. Your father was dead by then. Warm and peaceful, but definitely dead. He died in his sleep, you’ll be happy to know. But not your mother. Her noises woke up poor little Amanda.”

Above the bed loomed a framed print of Klimt’s “Garden with Sunflowers in the Countryside.” Kat had never liked the painting. Against the teal background of leaves, the flowers seemed to fall endlessly downward. In the darkness, she could make out the sunflowers near the top of the print and the cluster of white flowers near the bottom.

“Amanda called for you all, wanting some reassurance. None of you answered the poor little lamb. I heard her, though. I was here, and I responded.” His hand on her shoulder trembled briefly.

Kat gnawed on the tip of her right forefinger. Her bottom teeth scraped the whorls of her fingerprint.

“Don’t worry, little Kat,” the man whispered. “We’ll talk about that later. We have a lot to talk about, you and me. May as well get comfortable, right? Pull up some floor, as my dad used to say.”

Under the gentle pressure of his hand, she lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the floor. Her nightgown stretched between her knees. The man sat behind her, his bare foot nudging her hip as he moved or spoke.

Ten-year-old Kat stared straight ahead at the foot of the bed.

After a moment, the man’s kindly voice, a voice that abraded her ears with its normalcy, cracked the silence that had settled around them. The room didn’t smell very good, did it? Did she know why? It all boiled down to the science of death . . .

“We spent hours in here,” Katana said, gesturing around her parents’ room. From a vantage point of over half a foot taller, she could see the carnage even more clearly than she had on that dark night sixteen years ago. The scene looked identical. However, this time the killer stood beside her rather than behind. And she held the weapon.

“We had a lot to talk about, you and me,” the man said.

She turned to him in surprise. “You said that before.” She stared into light eyes—gray, she thought, or perhaps blue.

“Good memory,” he noted, smiling.

“Are you just an echo of my memory?”

His smile widened into a grin. “What else would I be?”

“I—” She shrugged, unsure what to say. What else
could
he be? “My, um, Jungian shadow aspect? A ghost?” she wondered aloud.

The man tsked. “You don’t believe in ghosts,” he reminded her. “Besides, you have no idea whether the real me is alive or dead.”

“Some kind of guardian to waking,” she mused. “Every time I tried to escape, to wake up, I came here. You’re trying to keep me here.”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” the man said. “This whole setup is all you. I’ve been waiting for you, but only because you’ve kept me here to do so.”

“So you’re like my marionette? I pull the strings, and you dance?” Kat grinned back at him, showing teeth.

He laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Katana stared at the bed, at the two people lying side-by-side, motionless, their skin white and greasy in the moonlight. Their bedclothes smoothed wetly over them, hugging each fold of skin. She couldn’t see it now, in the unlit room, but she remembered the room in the daytime, the blood that smeared across the bottom of the Klimt print, spotted the wooden floor, discolored the arms lovingly intertwined.

Her mother and father.

“We talked for hours in here that night,” she muttered through numb lips.

“Well, more precisely,
I
talked for hours. You were quite the attentive listener.”

Katana’s eyes narrowed, and she took a step toward the man. He stepped backward but kept his smile stapled firmly in place.

“You tortured me for hours, telling me all about the murders, about the state of my—of their bodies. You got off on emotionally torturing a little girl.”

He shook his head, and his eyes shone with a mockery of regret. “I’m a very bad man.”

A few shallow breaths later, she shoved him out of the bedroom. His body felt warm and soft against her hands. She wiped hers against her jeans. They stood in the muddy-dark hallway, no more than a foot from one another. “And then . . .?”

“Then,” he intoned, leaning toward her and widening his eyes. “Then . . . we
ate breakfast
.” He pulled back, grinning.

She had a vague memory of sitting at the dining room table, staring into a bowl of congealing cereal, while the killer nattered on, describing myriad theories of the afterlife. And afterward . . .

“Afterward, we sat on the bed in my bedroom and talked about Mandy,” she remembered.

“Once again, for the sake of accuracy, I talked and you listened,” he said. “I didn’t get you talking till the third day.”

She stared at him, into the perfectly ordinary eyes of the man who had killed her entire family. After a moment, she asked, “What did I say?”

It was difficult to tell in the opaque darkness of the hallway, but she thought he knotted his lips into something other than a smile. “You told me to die.”

On the evening of the third day, the killer asked Kat to make dinner. At ten, she knew nothing fancier than grilling cheese sandwiches and heating up canned soup. Eyes staring straight ahead, movements wooden, she shuffled through the kitchen while the man chatted from his seat at the dining room table.

He paused long enough in his diatribe on the merits of stabbing versus strangling to call out, “None of that American stuff! Use some of that white cheese I saw in the fridge yesterday.”

Kat dropped a stick of butter and a block of Jack on the counter. The man had hidden or disposed of all the sharpest knives, so she used a geriatric steak knife to hack pieces of cheese from the block. While the butter sizzled in the pan, she grabbed wheat bread from the pantry. The man had already lectured her on the benefits of wheat versus white.

Not, he’d mentioned this morning, that it would matter much to her, since he planned on killing her soon, too.

His voice swept ever onward, debating the psychological benefits of murdering with one’s own hands over using tools. As she’d found in the three days they’d spent together, her silence didn’t seem to matter.

She watched the edges of the cheese grow soft, sag downward into the comforting dough beneath. The butter popped in the pan. She flipped the sandwiches over and stirred the tomato soup.

A few minutes later, she brought him a bowl of soup and a golden-brown sandwich, cut neatly into two triangles.

“Looks yummy,” he commented, his ever-ready smile beaming forth. “Could I possibly get a soup spoon?”

Kat disappeared into the kitchen and returned a moment later. Inside the dining room, her eyes focused on the glass door opposite her. Beyond, the night glowed a dark, quiet blue. The moon burnished the tips of craggy rocks and tumbled over pebbles and grit.

“No escape through there,” the man said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Kat’s mother would have scolded him. He replaced the half-eaten sandwich triangle on the white plate. “You’re stuck with me, I’m afraid. Till tomorrow, anyway, when I conclude this business and move on. I wish I could stay longer, little Kat. You have no idea how relaxing this is, our together time.” He patted his stomach, which sported a paunch. “I haven’t felt so content, so full, since I left home.”

“If I thought you’d be more compliant, I’d take you with me when I left. But I know all those fizzy feelings bubbling up under that silence. You play the shock victim well, but I’m not someone you can fool, little one. If only I could stay longer. But as we’ve discussed, your family isn’t holding up so well. The smell alone—whoowee! The cat litter isn’t doing the trick the way the books say, is it?