I imagine you don’t want him to die either.
Jamey had seen Stensby two days later, with her own eyes, in a bloody fight with scientists at Polaris and almost certainly under thrall himself.
Alex Grayson’s thrall.
She rolled the phone in her hand for a moment, then opened her text chain with Stensby and began to type.
Jamey:I think Alex Grayson has this phone now. And if I’m right, I have a message for you.
Jamey:I know Reece didn’t kill that security guard. Someone is framing him and I’m going to find proof.
Jamey:You helped me save Reece once before. Help me again now.
Jamey:I am not your enemy.
She sent the texts and then leaned back against the kitchen chair, exhaling.
Alex Grayson was the reason Evan Grayson couldn’t feel hope.
But Jamey could feel it for them.
Alex and Cora had gone, having the new thrall, Officer Kosler, drive them in his cruiser and leaving the F-150 in the garage. The house was quiet in their wake, no emotions emanating from the sedated Traynor in the bedroom, just the endless patter of partially frozen rain against the window. For the first time, Reece felt completely alone in the house, and the solitude seemed to amplify the prickling on his skin, like the black lightning in his veins was now on the outside too.
He tried to shake it off, heading back into the kitchen and sliding into one of the booth seats at the table. The sky outside the window was a silvery shade of white now, the clouds thick with the winter rain that speckled the surface of Lake Washington.
“All right, Reece,” he said to himself out loud, reaching for Grayson’s laptop where it lay on the table. “Time to be something other than useless.”
As he pulled the laptop close, his phone chimed. He glanced down.
Grayson:Fine by me. Next time we meet, you’re gonna get the real Dead Man. The one that doesn’t play games.
That arrogance was not going to help Reece’s temper.
Reece:I’ve met the real Dead Man already.
Reece:He’s a dick.
The flash drive Reece had stolen from Stone Solutions Canada was also on the table. He picked it up and inserted it into thelaptop, then opened the drive. He carefully avoided the spreadsheet. If he saw those extra columns again, the suggestions for how to make Jamey suffer in order to heighten Reece’s own paranormal abilities, he would absolutely lose his already tenuous grasp on his anger. Instead, Reece opened another file, the one he had caught glimpses of in Vivian Marist’s Vancouver office.
It’s a broken instruction manual, more or less, Grayson had said that day.How to make a Dead Man.
Yesterday, the mere threat of Grayson’s presence had meant Reece couldn’t risk thralling Smith. And now Smith was dead, and they’d been forced to think of new ways to interfere with the glove manufacturing.
Reece was going to make damn sure Grayson didn’t fuck up their plans again. Reece could fuck things up on his own just fine, thank you very much.
The file opened, filling his screen. Reece took a picture of the cover page and attached it to a text.
Reece:Remember when you didn’t think your precious little Care Bear could handle what was in these big, scary files?
Reece:Can’t stop me now.
Reece began to click through the manual. The first few pages were biographical information on both Alex and Evan Grayson: birth certificates, high school diplomas for both of them and a college diploma for Evan Grayson. Was Alex going to be thrilled that Reece was going through his past? Well, if Reece could find a weakness in the Dead Man, it would be worth it.
And he’d just try very hard not to look at the comments he remembered had littered the margins, from the likes of VictorNichols and Holt Traynor. No, he very definitely shouldn’t look at those.
His phone chimed again.
Grayson:You want my past, you go right ahead and dig. You could learn everything in that manual and more from Alex himself anyway.
