The Sacrificial Daughter (41 page)

Officer McCew wasn't in the kitchen.

Kyle didn't wait for an explanation.
Snick
. His switchblade seemed to leap into existence as if the sinister little noise created it out of thin air.

"Officer McCew?" Ky called out in a low voice. The house was so silent that the officer should've heard. When no one replied, he whispered, "We'll check the bathroom."

Jesse hadn't thought of that. In truth she hadn't thought about much of anything since they first walked into the kitchen. The officer was gone…Mr. Mendel was gone…and soon Ky would be gone. This was such a certainty in her mind that she didn't budge when Ky started walking away. What was the point? She was going to die. This was it. She had talked about sacrifice, but hadn't known exactly what it had meant. The words had sounded noble when she had said them, they even sounded uplifting. However now the words were starting to hit home and she began to regret big time.

"Come on," Ky whispered to her, holding out his free hand. She looked at it dully while inside a foolish part of her considered running away. After all she had never taken off her boots or her coat; she could just run and never look back. She would go somewhere warm and someone else could die in her place.

Ky came back to her. Without asking he began to pull her along. "Stop freaking," he whispered. "If he's not in the bathroom, he's probably out on a call. Remember, he's the only cop on duty."

Not for a second did Jesse need to be reminded of that fact. She knew all too well that if something had happened to officer McCew there would be no one but Ky standing between her and death.

The bathroom was only around the corner. Its door stood open, its interior black. Jesse grabbed Ky's coat and held him close.

"Let go of me," Ky said in a low, urgent voice. "I want my hands free." He had to push her away twice before she stopped clinging. In all her life she had never felt this far gone on the road to panic. She had practically asked to be sacrificed and at the moment for the life of she couldn't remember why.

For love
.

Wrong! There was no love in her—there was only an overwhelming petrifying fear. It sapped her strength so that she could barely move her feet. She shuffled along behind Ky like a ninety-year-old woman and it was a struggle for her to keep up.

He went first to the front door, gave the knob a hard twist, and then slipped the chain into place. Next he went to the sliding glass doors. These too proved to be locked. He went to turn away but stopped suddenly and stared. His apple cheeks aged a hundred seasons in a second and his face went grey. Jesse followed his gaze.

Officer McCew lay face down in the snow with his arms flung out and his ankles neatly crossed. The back of his head was caved in. Grey and red mixed there making a gory soup in the bowl of skull, while falling snowflakes ended their short lives in an attempt to cover over the atrocity. They would alight on his still warm flesh, pause as if time would always be on their side, and then disappear, becoming nothing.

Jesse saw this occur a thousand times before Ky grabbed her and started moving. She allowed herself to be moved. She was a snowflake. All her life the winds of fate had blown her in every direction and in Ky she had finally found her pedestal. The one place where she could unfold the gossamer wings of her soul and rest. Yet how brief that rest. A single kiss…and now she would become nothing. She would disappear like all the rest and soon she'd be forgotten.

Ky dragged her into the kitchen. He picked up the useless phone and held it to his ear. She could have told him it wouldn't be working. Her destiny was to die at the hands of the Shadow-man—he would not forget the phone.

A noise, heavy tread upon stairs announced the presence of Harold. He came from out of the basement and stood in the doorway wearing a long black coat over his massive frame. Huge black boots were upon his feet.

"Did I kill yet?" he asked.

For an answer Ky flew at him and drove his knife into the man's chest. Harold didn't seem to notice, not even to flinch. He only reached out to Ky and pulled him in close.

"Did I kill yet?" he asked again, searching Ky's face. Ky had regained his color. His cheeks were flared a bright red and his eyes were now the brilliant green of a summer forest. He balled a white-knuckled fist and punched Harold square in the face…once and then twice before the giant retaliated with a single blow. Ky's legs buckled and he fell in a sprawling heap.

Surprisingly Harold seemed far more upset about this than Jesse did.

"Kyle!" he yelled, giving the limp form such a hard shake that the boy's head flopped around grotesquely. Still Jesse wasn't upset; her mind was too far-gone down the road of terror. Her only action upon seeing Harold come out of the basement was to press herself up against a cabinet. This was the extent of her running as well as her hiding. She could not hide from destiny.

Again the giant yelled, "Kyle!" Then he looked around and saw Jesse for perhaps the first time. He straightened and came for her. "Did I kill yet?" he asked grabbing her shoulders. The answer was both yes and no. He had killed, but he hadn't killed the right person...the person he was meant to kill.

"Am I supposed to kill you?" Harold asked her.

Somehow Jesse managed to let out a whisper, "No."

"Then who? Who do I kill?" he demanded.

For some reason Harold wasn't at all what she was expecting. Confusion and insanity lay behind his eyes, but surprisingly she didn't see even a touch of evil. Jesse thought for sure she would see sick depravity, blistering hate, and a fire of rage in his eyes but instead she saw fear and puzzlement.

The way he asked
who do I kill
? Made it seem that he was really unsure. Was he so far gone mentally that all she had to do was name a proper substitute and he would leave her alone? Faces flashed through Jesse's mind; a long list of everyone she had met in Ashton. Who would she name to die in her place?

"Who?" he asked, growing angry, and Jesse was shaken into a daze. Faces came to her, but her tongue refused to pronounce names. Jesse looked down at the linoleum and waited for her doom.

"It has to happen," Harold told her, after he had waited as long as he would. "Everyone says so. They all say so." He brought his thick fingers to her throat. They were surprisingly warm and strangely clumsy. He gripped her about the throat but at such an odd angle that when he began to squeeze she feared that he would break her neck rather than strangle her.

Jesse's face went redder than Ky's ever had and then instincts took over and she fought back. She could breathe, but only in tiny gasps and her first action was to pull down as hard as she could with her right hand on Harold's left thumb. It gave her enough room to make one great gasp of air. When she exhaled, the words "I…forgive…you." Came hissing out.

In truth, she didn't forgive him. She hadn't had time to even contemplate forgiving this monstrous creature. She only knew that forgiving Tricia, Amanda and John had practically worked miracles and Jesse had never been in more need of a miracle than at that precise moment.

Unfortunately, her words backfired this time.

Harold wasn't looking for forgiveness.

His eyes went wild and in a flash he threw Jesse across the room. She hit a cabinet
above
the stove, dropped like a stone, clipped off its sharp-edged surface, and then crashed to the floor.

Every part of her burned with fresh pain, but it wasn't enough for Harold. He lifted her to her feet and then smashed her head into a cabinet. The wound above her eye opened up, sending a splash of blood running down the fake wood panel. She could barely breathe from the pain in her back and ribs, while her left hand was useless from the elbow down. She would have collapsed if Harold hadn't kept pressure on her head against the cabinet.

"I don't need you to forgive me!" Harold raged. "I didn't do anything. I never killed anybody!"

The way her face was pressed against the wood she had a blurry vision of Ky on the ground. He lay unmoving; she would not be saved. "Look what you did to Kyle. Ask his forgiveness," Jesse demanded through her bruised lips.

Harold did look and as he did his hand relaxed against her face. "I didn't mean it. I never meant any of it." He let her go completely and she was barely able to hold herself up especially with one useless hand and the other digging in her pocket for her pepper-spray.

Smooth and easy as a gunslinger the little can slid out of her pocket and the lid flipped off before her arm was all the way around. And then she paused with her hand extended as if she were the snowflake and had all the time in the world rather than a girl seconds from death. She waited until Harold turned back to her and when he did she shot a line of the foul liquid into his face.

In a second his face went red and his eyes watered as he grunted. With one arm he scraped at his eyes and with the other he reached for Jesse. She didn't move. She could barely move. Instead, she allowed him to grab her and as he pulled her in close she dropped the pepper-spray and plucked Ky's knife out of Harold's chest. Ky had stabbed far too high to cause any real damage.

Jesse didn't make the same mistake. Before Harold knew what danger he was in, she stabbed the blade straight up under his sternum, galvanizing the man. As if attached to a live wire Harold went stiff, going straight up on his toes to try to pull himself off the blade, but Jesse pushed the knife up with him. For seconds he grabbed at her wrist with his way too large hands, but they lacked strength and purpose. All at once the giant collapsed in a thunder onto the linoleum, shaking the kitchen. He laid next to Ky, making a little hee—hee sound high up in his throat.

The knife was still stuck in him. With his chin up, Harold looked at it as if unsure exactly what it was. Eventually he got the nerve up to pull it out and when he did, his breathing relaxed a little. He held the knife up to get a better look at it and then slid it over to Jesse.

"Fin—ish—the—job," he said in between wheezes.

Jesse pushed in the switchblade, so that it looked again like nothing more than a little brown stick and then she lowered herself to the floor. Her foot was only inches from his. If he wasn't everything that she had expected, his feet sure were. The tread on the bottom were as wide as a snow tire. She looked at the little grooves and notches. They were dry and dirt free so that they looked new.

"I can't do that to you," she told him.

He turned his red face to the side and looked at her down the length of his body. "Please—every—one—hates—me."

The words struck a chord in her soul, amazingly she felt sorry for him. "Everyone hated me too…but…I…" Harold wasn't going to find acceptance the way she had. His road was going to be much harder. "You're just going to have to try. You're going to have to ask for forgiveness…"

"I—did—not…"

Just then the garage door opened, she could hear it rattling up. Was that Mr. Mendel? What time was it? How long had he been gone? Jesse tried to blink away the cobwebs of her mind and she wasn't quite done when he came in as silent as a cat.

"Harold!" he exclaimed. Jerry walked up and stared down at the bleeding giant. He glanced once at his son and then turned to gaze in amazement at Jesse. "What the hell happened?"

Jesse could barely lift her eyes from the floor and could only shake her head.

"Jesse, I'm talking to you," he demanded.

"Why are you back so soon?" she asked. His boots had left a damp track from the garage.

He came to stand over her. "What does that matter? I forgot my wallet. I…"

For all of three seconds the girl fixated on the damp tracks from the garage, and then Jesse let the switchblade sing free and in a quick motion mingled Harold's blood with Jerry Mendel. The blade entered his thigh midway up and when the man jerked back in surprise the thin metal snapped off.

"What the hell?" he screamed before falling to his knees.

"That's for Mary Castaneda and for Officer McCew and for Gregory Matthe…"

"Don't say his name," Jerry growled through clenched teeth. His eyes had become nightmare dark.

Jesse eased back away from Mr. Mendel. "I'll say his name if I want to... Gregory Matthew Johnson." Everything that she had expected to see in Harold she now saw in Jerry Mendel. "You're the evil one here. You're the deceiver. You've been killing all this time and pinning it on Harold. You've driven him mad."

Jerry laughed, pushing himself to his elbows. "Yes. How did you know?"

The fact that Harold had clearly been set up after Gregory Matthew Johnson died was the first thing that had Jesse wondering...though at the time her fear had limited her thinking. Then there was the fact Jerry was always so 'worried' over where Ky was when in truth Ky was the safest kid in town. It was the perfect excuse to hunt victims:
Are you a friend of Kyle's?
How many times had that been asked? Then there was the fact that Harold supposedly escaped to kill so easily time and again.

All that added up to strong circumstantial evidence, but the real kicker was: "His shoes were dry and his hands were warm," Jesse said, getting her strong right arm under her. "He didn't kill Officer McCew and drag his body out into the snow. Harold looked dazed coming out of the basement; I bet he's been down there since yesterday waiting for Ky to…"

"To lead him to whom he's supposed to kill?" Jerry sat up. "It looks like he almost beat me to it." Jerry grimaced and laughed. "I can't believe it. You stab someone over a pair of wet shoes. You're even worse than my ex-wife."

"I didn't stab you for that," Jesse explained. "It was how you looked at Ky. It was so evil. Every time you kill I bet you picture his face."

His eyes went to slits. "The one boy I want to kill the most," he snarled, "is the one boy I can't. But he has his uses; he leads me to the perfect victims, every time."

"Except he led you to me." Jesse hopped up just as Jerry lunged at her. He came away with nothing but an end of her scarf and this she ripped out of his hands.

This made Jerry smile. "Good one. Almost got you. I'm glad he led me to you. You'll be the best of them all. The town manager's daughter…the girl who stood up to the crowd. You don't know how badly I wanted to kill you right there in front of everyone. But I resisted and I'm so glad I did."

"Dad?" Ky stared up at his father. His handsome face was marred by confusion. "What...what's going on?"

Jerry had turned to his son at his first word, but then he looked back at Jesse. She could see him eyeing the distance. He would make a jump for her any second. What was the best course of action? Did she run and leave Ky in the hands of his psychotic father? Or did she try to stay and fight.

Run. Ky is safe as long as you're alive.

Jesse didn't hesitate.