Chapter 15 Malin
MALIN
I’m sometimes handed cultists who weren’t a part of the New World Order Temple.
I don’t mind killing them because there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ cult.
However, they don’t mean anything to me.
I don’t know what their cult is about. I don’t know who they hurt or why. All I know is that they’re bad people.
Even when I don’t know the cultists who are from the temple where I was a victim, I know what they’re about. I know what they’re a part of and what they’ve likely done under the pretense of some god. Or maybe in the name of Ryan.
It’s that personal connection that makes me kill them far more brutally than others. Because I know. I’ve been there. I’ve seen their victims. I know how the victims’ abuse might linger for years after.
But the man’s body lying at my feet? He hurt someone, I’m sure. So, I killed him. But it was quick and without much interest. I stabbed him in his chest and watched him bleed out. I stared at him until his heart stopped and he died.
Now I turn and head for the door. It opens, but no one is there. They’re not always here unless it’s someone from the cult where I spent my childhood.
Ryan’s image follows in my peripheral vision. He’s not exactly beside me. I can’t even tell if he’s walking. He just lingers there.
It’s his voice that I hear clearly. Incessantly rambling about how I’ve turned into an awful person since his death. All these killings of innocent men. The first few times, I tried to explain why I’d killed them. Why their deaths were important.
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that Ryan is delusional. He believes the bullshit out of his mouth. I’m not sure he ever believed in God. He believes himself to be a god. His word is holy scripture.
If he’s a god, he’s a very dark and depraved one. For polytheistic cultures, their gods come in balance. There are good gods and dark gods. They each serve a purpose.
In Ryan’s world, he’s a dark god, but there aren’t any good ones to balance him out.
He sees black and white, and it’s the evil men and women that he finds innocent.
Yes, there have been some women brought in, though not from my temple.
Women were always victims. Always supposed to be submissive to men. Always the most sinful.
I shower with Ryan’s incessant commentary on how he’d cleanse me. Sometimes his tense changes from hypothetical to absolute, as if he can make it happen.
You’re not strong enough to make me now, I tell him silently. I’m stronger than you.
“Wicked boy. You belong to me! You will do as I please. I am your divinity.”
I don’t answer. I don’t even roll my eyes. He’s exhausting today. I let him ramble on as I focus on cleaning the blood from my nails.
As I step out of the shower, I glance over my shoulder at the empty stall. It wasn’t long ago that I could feel the need to cleanse the darkness from me. The sin. I’d scrub my skin raw until it bled.
I haven’t felt that in a while. Not since Gracen came into my life.
I bow my head, hiding my smile from Ryan as I dry and dress. He follows me, always there in the back of my mind as I leave the facility in the woods. As I stop at an intersection just beyond the trees, I check my phone. There’s a message from Ellory.
Ellory
We’re at the lake. Join us when you’re finished.
Hm. I wonder who watched me today. Maybe no one. Or maybe he left when I was in the shower. Was he there when I arrived?
I don’t respond, but head for the lake. There are swim trunks in my car, though I rarely put them on.
I don’t float on the lake to get wet. I use the quiet and the gentle rocking of the water to add static to my brain.
It doesn’t drown Ryan out, but he gets bored quickly at the lake and ends up…
nodding off? Is that what happens? Does he fall asleep?
It’s not just Avory, Ellory, and the twins. Imry, Haze, and Amzi are there, too. Uncle Arath, Elgin, and their kids, Xanthus and Okello.
Names are weird in this family. I think they strive to make sure that their kids aren’t victims of being the eighth William in their class.
There are some less unusual names like Sawyer, Rosalie, Emerson, and Blake.
Lyra, maybe. But for the most part, the Van Doren family has very singular names.
They are the only ones around with them.
I also think they set trends. I heard Voss say once that there are a whole lot of people with his and his brothers’ names in the years following their births. As if the world needed to be like the Van Dorens and name their kids after them, like a fanfiction story. It’s kind of funny.
I chose Malin because it’s the name of a villain from the country’s Wild West days. I don’t know why I chose a villain’s name. It’s not a common name, which is one of the reasons I chose it. It fits in as unusual with the Van Dorens.
“Malin!” Xanthus calls. He’s holding a little sand shovel in the air as I approach. The triplets’ boys and Okello are close by, sitting under an umbrella in their swimsuits. All four are in full body suits—the shorts and tee as one piece. Xanthus wears shorts and a long-sleeved swim shirt.
“Hi, Xanthy,” I greet. He jumps up and slaps my hand with his.
He always has so much damn energy. I swear, this boy could run circles around all of us for hours without getting tired.
His parents take him to the local ice rink three times a week, and he skates for hours in circles, racing around the perimeter, sprinting from one end to the other.
He doesn’t seem to have any interest in hockey like his father played, but he loves to be on the ice.
“Want to go in the water with me?” Xanthus asks.
“Sure.”
“Are you going to swim or float on your bed?”
I laugh. “Bed, huh?”
“You fall asleep on it,” he points out. “That makes it a bed.”
“I see. Would you prefer if I swam with you?”
“Yes!”
“Are you going to abandon me if Dax shows up?”
Xanthus looks toward the cars and then his parents. “Is Dax coming?”
“Dunno,” Arath answers.
“Can you call Uncle Oxley, Dad?”
“Can’t you play with Uncle Malin for a while?”
“No,” he answers. “I need Dax.”
Arath meets my eyes, sighing. Daxton and Xanthus have been inseparable since they were two and three years old, respectively. It’s rare that one is somewhere without the other.
“You had to mention Dax,” Elgin says, laughing.
“Sorry. I like to prepare myself for abandonment.”
“Want to take Sawyer on the water?” Ellory asks.
Sawyer twists to look at me and immediately holds his hands up. Sawyer loves the lake. Brodrie is terrified of the water.
“Okay. I’m going to change.”
I’m not surprised when Ellory follows me back to my car. He stands around the side and asks, “You okay?”
He asks me this after every kill. I nod as I shove my pants and underwear down to step out of them. “Yeah. He was nobody.”
“He was somebody’s predator,” Ellory says. “You did a good thing.”
“Killing someone,” I muse as I tie my swim shorts.
“Killing someone who has hurt thirty-one people—that we’ve found. Someone who has slipped through law enforcement’s hands countless times with shady alibis. Someone who would have continued to hurt others if he weren’t dead,” Ellory says.
I nod as I change into my own swim shirt, though mine is short-sleeved. I slip into water shoes, too. When I close my trunk, Ellory hands me the bottle of sunscreen I didn’t see him holding.
For the next several minutes, I coat my exposed skin with sunscreen. Ellory watches me, though his eyes aren’t exactly on me. I’m not sure what he’s looking at. I half expect someone to be there when I follow his line of sight, but the road is empty.
Handing him back his sunscreen, we walk side-by-side to the water.
“Where’s Gracen?” Ellory asks.
His question makes Ryan’s voice in my head mutter angrily. “Working, I think. He’s still looking for Emily.”
It’s troubling that she seems to have simply vanished. Just as Jonathan Clark said she did. “Do you think her parents sent her away or something?” I ask.
He hums. “We’ve searched missing people and police reports following her family’s moves. She was pulled out of school, though that was three years before she disappeared. When she was on record as being ‘homeschooled’ by Jonathan at the temple.”
I was homeschooled through the temple, so I frown. “I never saw her there.”
“Yep. The temple’s school is specifically listed, though I suppose she could have been homeschooled at home, but it appears as though both of her parents worked, so… we’re not sure yet.”
“You’re working with Gracen?”
“I am. Ave, Imry, and Voss are too. We’ll find her.”
“I think she’s dead,” I confide.
“There’s a chance,” he says gently.
“How will you find her then?”
“Right now, we’re proceeding as if she’s alive. There’s no evidence pointing to her death.”
“There’s no evidence pointing to her being alive,” I counter.
“True. But there’s something in the way Jonathan said she disappeared that makes me believe she’s alive.”
“He said he doesn’t know what happened to her.”
“I don’t think he did,” Ellory agrees.
He’s talking in circles, and I don’t understand his line of thought, so I drop it.
“Go grab a float and I’ll get Sawyer in his lifejacket.”
I nod and head for the float house. There isn’t a boathouse on the lake. It’s not that big. Instead, we have a shed tucked off to the side, hidden in tall vegetation, so it blends into the surroundings, that’s filled with various floats.
I pull out a tube with a seat in it. The kind where he can be independent and kick around, though I’ll never leave him out of my reach. They’re designed so that a child’s body keeps the float upright, but it wouldn’t take much to keep them headfirst in the water, either.
Ellory meets me at the water’s edge, and I help Sawyer into the float. Ellory follows us until I’m waist-deep and stops me, gripping my wrist. I meet his eyes.
“Do you want to find your biological parents, Malin?”
My chest gets tight, and I shake my head.
“I won’t continue to ask. I promise. But think about it. We’ll find out how Johnston got hold of you if you want to know.”
“You looked,” I point out. “When you brought me home.”
“We did,” Ellory agrees. “But you seemed disinterested at the time, so we dropped it. You’re ten years older now.”
“It was circumstantial,” I say, turning my attention to Sawyer as he splashes around. “If he knew, then good. I was never going to come across someone else who might know.” I shrug.
He wraps an arm around my chest, hugging me to him for a minute. “Think about it. There’s no pressure, Malin. At all. Ever. And yes, we can look in ten more years or twenty. Forty. Whenever, if you ever want to know. But something made you ask Clark, so just think about it. Okay?”
I take a deep breath and nod. He kisses my cheek and lets me go. I watch him from the corner of my eye as he walks back to shore before turning my attention to Sawyer. I bring him deeper into the water, Ryan’s image following.
“You were always mine.”
I sigh.