Chapter 4
With nowhere else to go, Audrey unfolded Skyler’s note and headed for the address.
The neighborhood was nice, but at the edge of a bad area. There was no doorman when she entered the older high-rise. All the city’s minds passed through the thin walls of the building when she walked out of the rickety elevator.
Her shield crumbled at every turn, fatigue taking over. Thoughts crashed from every direction, the mental static building until she was submerged in other people’s lives.
Walls didn’t mute anything. The noise felt closer, as if it had followed her inside.
They should’ve created distance and barriers against the barrage, but this place just trapped the noise, letting it echo endlessly.
In prison, the noise was loud but predictable, limited to a few hundred minds cycling the same routines.
Here in Tolusa, it was different; there were too many people.
Audrey knocked on the door with the number four engraved into the wood.
Her friend opened it and smiled wordlessly before letting her inside.
Audrey got the distinct impression Skyler had been expecting her.
Inside, it was a shoebox of rank smoke and bad decisions.
Clothes poured out of drawers, and takeout rotted in the sink.
Something sour—old grease and moist cloth—lingered in the air.
They sat at a wobbling table beneath a humming bulb. The light kept going in and out, just enough to be annoying. Skyler passed her a cigarette. “You look like you need this more than me.”
Audrey’s hand was unsteady as she took it. “Thanks. For tonight.”
Skyler didn’t ask why Audrey was here, and that should have bothered her more than it did. At least the former inmate hadn’t left her on the curb.
Audrey dragged the smoke deep enough to hurt. The inhale hit too hard, and her lungs contracted before the release came. She coughed.
“I got something stronger,” Skyler said.
Audrey exhaled the smoke slowly. Her lungs felt pinned under a boulder. More thoughts passed through the walls. She sensed everything in the building, the voices layering until she couldn’t finish one before another shoved in.
Where’s my phone?
Don’t forget…
I should leave…
Each one slid over the other, indistinct until they weren’t.
Then his aura tangled with hers again. The distinct sensation of another mind digging at and testing the locks she’d set made her jolt.
The killer was intentionally searching rather than leaking.
Their connection went two ways, though, and he had an urgency inside him: a determination so strong it could’ve been an obsession.
Audrey tried to shut him out, but he pushed harder, as if he was prepared for the resistance, like he already knew what he would find.
Before she could examine it further, he was gone.
Audrey became still. If another telepath—if the killer—wanted in right now, they wouldn’t have to try very hard. It was a precarious situation to be in.
She took a deep breath. “Tell me about this job,” Audrey said.
“The club is easy money. You work three or four nights a week.”
“Doing what?”
Skyler smirked. “You know.”
Audrey knew what she needed: cash, a bed, somewhere off the grid.
If Alex was gone, whatever had defended her from the world was gone, too.
She was exposed and out of control. Staying open meant she might lose control again.
Paranoia, while not baseless, threatened to choke her.
She needed a plan. At least enough to get off the radar and regain control of her powers long enough to identify who was searching for her and why. Until then, she just had to survive.
“I’ll take something stronger.”
Skyler nodded and disappeared down the hall.
Alone, Audrey let the tears come—relief and despair mingling as they fell, swift and soundless. The urge to break something overwhelmed her. Anything to force her back to the monotony of prison, where emotions had boundaries.
But prison wouldn’t give her what she wanted. It wouldn’t undo the fire. She sniffed and wiped her eyes.
Skyler returned with a zippered pouch, and Audrey’s body reacted before her mind did.
Crypt. A synthetic depressant first made in Tolusa’s government labs, now trafficked mainly on the black market.
The fact that Skyler had some was impressive; possessing it was a felony, but Audrey was grateful.
Crypt’s effects were quick and effective, silencing telepathic noise for a few hours in exchange for addiction and a loss of self-control.
Her aura contracted in response, anticipation winding into anxiety. Relief waited on the other side, but so did self-loathing. She hated how addiction's promise blended with fear and desire.
“Scared of needles?”
“No.” The answer came automatically.
Skyler held out the syringe. Audrey stared at it.
This was the moment, however small, where she could still say “no.” Her mind floated to that first haze years ago in prison, when the incessant noise quieted after the burn merged into tingles.
She remembered telling herself she could stop then, too.
“Just tonight,” Audrey whispered more to herself than Skyler. The lie came easily.
It always did.
She pushed the needle in, letting the prick sting her, followed by the bliss. It poured through her almost immediately.
Finally, the noise in her head quieted. Instead of her control returning, it slipped further away, leaving behind both reassurance and hollow surrender.
Audrey was too tired to care. She let it take what it needed, feeling that everything and everyone had proven more dangerous. Her shoulders drooped.
“My bosses will want your version,” Skyler said, her eyes shifting toward the window as if listening for footsteps in the hall.
“Did you kill them?” For all her trained ease, a bundle of tension twisted beneath Skyler’s steady voice—like there was more at stake than a simple favor, like she was weighing what it would cost her if Audrey’s story was wrong.
The question hovered in the air. It should have been easy to deflect.
After ten years of questioning, she knew how to give just enough to stop people from digging.
But the crypt had broken her willpower—or maybe Alex’s absence had.
Or maybe it disappeared after two impossible people found her on her first day out and neither looked surprised by what she was.
Whatever had happened that night hadn’t stayed hidden. If she didn’t start saying it out loud, if she didn’t hear it outside her own head, she was going to lose control of it.
Audrey tried to make the room focus and started talking.
“I came home late,” she started. “My parents were fighting, which wasn’t new, and I was in the kitchen, listening.”
An unfamiliar aura from the backyard entered her mind.
“Then I saw a man in the backyard, watching.”
Skyler didn’t interrupt. Audrey let the memory settle for half a second too long.
“He stood below the pine tree, but he didn’t belong there.
That was the first thing I knew for certain.
” What she didn’t say was that the most upsetting part was what she couldn’t hear.
The silence wasn’t just odd—it was impossible, and she couldn’t decide if it meant he was hiding himself, or if something even worse was at work.
She let out a quivering breath and continued.
“I heard my mom say they needed to split Cary and me up. We were identical. We didn’t…
separate. I ran into the room, but it was too late.
My mom had a kitchen knife, and my sister pressed against her, the blade to her neck.
My dad moved, and so did I. One second the knife was here—” Audrey touched her own neck. “Next, my dad’s throat was open.”
Silence.
“I don’t know who cut him open. But it was on me. I didn’t get there fast enough. My mom looked at me like—”
Audrey stopped as Skyler leaned back, a subtle discomfort settling between them.
Ten years had taught Audrey to read body language: Skyler wasn't shocked, but she instinctively withdrew, caution winking in her eyes.
Something in Audrey's story unsettled people. It wasn’t just a tragedy; it was a story with too many unanswered questions.
This made people uneasy.
Audrey tried not to let it bother her.
“My mother still held my sister and had the knife in her hand again by the time I looked up from the floor. I begged her to stop, but she sliced Cary’s throat anyway. Not deep enough to kill, but enough that she collapsed onto the couch. Next, she came for me.”
Audrey’s memories were fractured here, but she plowed on.
“She didn’t even look like my mom anymore.
I barely recognized her,” she said. “The fire came next. It exploded through the walls and the floor. My mom died where she stood. So, I dragged my dad outside. That’s why there was blood on the sidewalk.
” Audrey’s voice lowered. “And I went back for Cary… but I couldn’t get to her in time. ”
The words were heavy and final.
“You didn’t kill them,” Skyler said quietly.
Audrey didn’t answer. Because she didn’t want to lie about it this time. The prosecutor’s voice slid back in.
Why did you lie?
What did you have to hide?
A fact she’d hidden deep rose in her mind. The truth was that a vital piece inside her had surfaced that night, and it hadn’t followed the rules she understood.
Skyler exhaled slowly. “The police’s version was neat.”
Audrey shook her head. “And also wrong. The blood splatter analyst was a fraud—Alex tore him to pieces during my appeal.”
Skyler studied her. “I never said I didn’t believe you. There are just pieces about that night that don’t make sense.”
Emotion choked Audrey’s throat as Skyler squeezed her hand. “We’ll figure it out, though.”
Someone else might believe me.
Audrey slouched. The drug pulled her under, her eyelids blinking closed as she melted in response to the closest thing to peace she’d felt all day.
It wasn’t perfect, though, and shame ate at her when she realized how easily she’d accepted this escape.
Every time she let herself go like this, some small, hopeful part of her diminished until resignation won out over guilt.
Freedom had lasted less than twenty-four hours. And she’d already traded it for silence.
For a moment, it worked.
Then that invasive aura touched the edge of her mind again. She tried to push it away, but the drugs made her slow, sluggish.
Unlike the other times, he didn’t fade. He lingered. Like he’d learned where to find her and didn’t need to search anymore.
It was only a matter of time before he closed the distance.