Chapter 34
How does an entity choose who to possess? Perhaps there’s an emotional resonance required. An entity might need to feel a kinship with its chosen host, or see a part of itself in them. From what I can tell, the reason varies.
I want to tell Donny to go to hell. I want to scream at him for bringing me into this house, for putting me in danger, for lying to me, but all I do is wipe my eyes with my sleeve and nod.
In the kitchen, he drops tea bags into two plain green mugs that don’t have anything funny written on them.
“Chamomile,” Donny explains. “It’s soothing.”
Cool. I need some soothing. There’s nothing quite like a nice herbal beverage after discovering the guy down the hall daydreams about murdering you.
Bob positions himself at the door, sitting and guarding the entrance. I drop into a chair at the table, and Donny places one mug in front of me, sliding into the chair across from me. The smell is sweet and herbal, and I wrap my hands around the ceramic.
“Seven years ago,” Donny begins, “when I was still with the FBI, my team was called to Maine to investigate a series of murders in Camden.”
The tea scalds my tongue as I sip it. I’m glad for the pain.
“Our profile became clear. We were looking for a white male in his teens to early twenties. Had access to a car. Organized. A psychosexual sadist with extreme rage. But we were hitting walls. None of us could reconcile the extreme violence of Allison Chambers’s murder with it being a young man’s first kill. ”
He removes his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“As soon as I considered the involvement of an entity, the crime scene made sense.
I thought of vulnerable populations that would fit our profile, which brought me to Camden High School.
I used a prototype of a residue scanner through the building and got an exceptionally strong reading at the locker belonging to one Nicholas Grady, who was not in school that day.
I drove to the Grady home, where I found Nico in the living room, alone and covered in blood. Billy was still possessing him.
“I had a prototype containment cage with me. It was crude, but enough to trap Billy long enough to buy us some time. When Billy left Nico’s body, Nico collapsed. He had ectoplasm all over him. He didn’t understand what he’d done. He was so afraid.”
I stare at the steam curling off my tea. I, too, would be terrified if a ghost forced me to murder seven people. “You helped him escape?”
“I chose to help him instead of watching him be tried as an adult, convicted of murders he had no control over, and sentenced to life in prison, yes.”
I try to imagine a world in which the police never arrested Stanley Daniels, where he was still out there somewhere sleeping in a comfortable bed surrounded by friends who care about him.
I have to let go of the mug because I’m gripping the handle so hard I’m scared I’m going to flip it on the table.
Stanley Daniels was different. He was evil. Nico was possessed by evil.
“Is it possible that Nico wanted to hurt those girls?” I ask.
“Or he might have been an angry, confused teenager filled with hormones and unprocessed grief after losing his grandfather the month before.”
What happens when Nico loses Donny? He clearly won’t be as vulnerable to possession as he was when he was a teenager, but will Donny’s death make him revert to a similar place as he was when he was possessed? Will I be in more danger then?
“Did Nico have violent fantasies?” I ask.
“Many people have violent fantasies. They simply do not act on them. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you honestly have never considered what it would be like to kill another person? Perhaps someone you don’t like, or someone who wronged you?”
Obviously not. I still have dreams about driving a knife into Stanley Daniels’s eyes until his eyeballs are liquefied. I call those good dreams.
“I can vouch for Nicholas,” Donny says. “If I believed he was a danger to anyone here, I wouldn’t have him in the house.”
I stare at the cooling chamomile, watching the tea darken as the bag steeps. That was ballsy of Nico to say those things to me, knowing how easy it would be for me to turn him in.
“You’re thinking about the reward money,” Donny says.
I’m not surprised he can tell. Even aside from the fact that Donny is, well, Donny, Dad used to say I had a terrible poker face. He always knew when something was bothering me before I opened my mouth.
I don’t want to believe Nico is a monster. I want to believe he’s as much a victim as those girls were, but what if that’s not true?
I try to picture him doing it, wrapping his hands around some girl’s throat, but all I can picture is him standing at my door, holding that mug of soup.
How can he feel nothing?
“I wouldn’t blame you if you turned Nico in.” Donny’s smile is sad. “A sum like that is life-changing money for someone in your position. If you want to make the call, I won’t stop you.”
“Is this some kind of reverse psychology?”
“I didn’t say I’d be happy about it, but I cannot force you to stay here,” Donny says. “And I’m not stupid enough to think you can be controlled, but I sincerely hope you’ll consider this issue from all perspectives.”
I drum my fingers against the side of my mug, hating how well he seems to understand what would get to me.
Donny may not think I’m in danger, but I feel like I’m in danger. At least I did in the library.
“Before you make any decisions,” Donny continues, “there’s another thing you should consider.”
Fantastic. Is it another secret? What’s next? Griffin’s actually a werewolf? DJ’s a vampire?
“I’ve never encountered an entity like Alan Morrow,” Donny says.
“The way he has planned ahead and shown how he can regulate his emotions—he’s operating on a level beyond anything I’ve documented in forty years of study, and he’s hunting you.
If you leave this house, I can almost guarantee that he’ll find you. ”
I have to stay here. I don’t have a choice. Choosing between a guy who thinks about strangling me or the very real risk of the Game Master is easy, but I still don’t like it.
“Can you assign someone else to be my bodyguard?” I ask, standing up from my chair.
“DJ can replace him,” Donny says.
Good. I carry my half-empty mug to the sink, then clutch my forearms because I don’t know what else to do with them. “Thanks for the tea. I feel so soothed.”
“Eden.” Donny stops me in the doorway. “You should know Nico wanted me to tell you everything as soon as you arrived.”
“If he wanted me to know so badly, why didn’t he just tell me himself?” I ask.
“I told him not to. I was trying to protect him, but I see now that was a mistake.” Donny sighs, suddenly looking every one of his many years.
“I can only imagine what he said to you. Whatever it was, I suspect it was designed to frighten you into leaving. I believe he’s been trying to protect you, in his own misguided way.
Nicholas is… a complicated person, but don’t decide he’s only one thing.
People are more than the worst thing that ever happened to them. Or the worst thing they’ve done.”
“I need to go upstairs,” I tell Donny.
He nods, and I walk out of the kitchen, not stopping until I’m safe behind my closed door. I deadbolt the door and slide the desk chair under the knob.
I want to believe Donny. I really, really want to believe Nico was just trying to push me away and didn’t mean what he said, but wanting to believe something and believing it are two different things, and I don’t know which side I’m on.
If that were me? If I had killed somebody else, damaged some other person’s family the way Stanley Daniels did mine seven times, and if I had to live with knowing what I’d done?
I couldn’t do it. I’d rather be dead.
I spend a couple of hours reading some articles on my reading list because I don’t know what else to do with myself. By mid-afternoon, the walls feel like they’re closing in, so I grab Bob’s leash and head for the door.
Griffin catches me on my way past his room. “Where you headed?”
His color’s back. I haven’t been hearing him cough through the wall for the past couple of days. As glad as I am that he’s feeling better, seeing him standing there all nonchalant like he hasn’t been keeping a huge secret from me makes me mad.
“Outside,” I say.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know, Griffin, how about you tell me?” I ask. “Maybe about why you neglected to mention I’ve been living with someone who loves strangling brunettes my size?”
The easygoing expression drops off Griffin’s face. “You found out.”
The ease with which he says it pisses me off even more, like he was waiting for this, and it’s not a big deal to him. Probably because he’s not Nico’s type.
“Yes,” I snap. “I found out all by myself, with zero help from any members of the team I was supposed to be able to trust.”
“It wasn’t my place to tell you,” Griffin says.
“You realize my life could be in danger, right?” I ask.
“He’d never hurt you.”
“Are you sure about that? Because he told me that he thinks he could snap and hurt me at any second, and he has to stop himself from killing me every time he’s around me.”
Griffin shakes his head, his forehead wrinkling. “What?”
“Do me a favor and leave me alone.”
As Bob pees on the front lawn, I fish the bottle of Jim Beam from under the passenger seat of my car. Drinking might not be the smartest decision right now, but this is supposed to be a goddamn safe house, and I don’t want to be smart right now.
The wooden steps creak as I settle on the porch, unscrewing the cap and taking a long pull. The whiskey burns all the way down.
I reach for the dog tags around my neck. I wish I could figure out what my gut is telling me to do past the stomachache.
The sun hangs low behind the trees, casting long shadows across the yard. I take another drink, letting the alcohol blur the edges of everything that happened today.