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The kid’s head turned at the gruff sound, and his round eyes landed on me. His mouth formed a big “O” to match his eyes. “He’s bigger than Aquaman,” he said in a loud whisper as his eyes ping-ponged between his action figure and me. “Are you a superhero?”
I was the furthest thing from a superhero that you could get. More like Thanos, ready to destroy anyone who gets in his path.
Jaeg chuckled. “Yeah, he’s kinda like a superhero, isn’t he? And you know what?” The kid shook his head. “He catches the really, really bad guys. But he doesn’t wear a cape or Spandex. At least not in public.”
Bastard. And he was lying to the kid. I didn’t catch bad guys. I killed them. Sometimes tortured them first if I needed something from them—or simply because they deserved it.
Jaeg continued, “That’s Vic Gate. He’s a friend of mine.” He nodded up the hill to the right. “He lives in the house over there.”
Friends? I wouldn’t call us friends, exactly. Friends called. Kept in touch. I didn’t. Friends also didn’t use a bloody marker phrase we hadn’t used since our teens.
The kid’s gaze shifted back to me, and I recognized the dark shadows hidden beneath it. I knew them well, and I knew what they came with.
Shit.
“Do you really… catch bad men?” the kid asked.
I gritted my teeth and offered him a curt nod.
I glared at Jaeg, who tried to control his chuckle by clearing his throat and failed.
No way was my sanctuary going to be infiltrated by ocean eyes and her kid. A kid who looked at me like I was some kind of superhero.
I wasn’t. Far from it.
I was the monster in the closet.
The bogeyman under the bed.
I tortured and killed without thought.
They should be running for their lives.
Not living a hundred yards away from me.
And yet I found myself saying, “One week.”
I turned and walked away.
Macayla
Vic was intense, and even that was too domesticated of a way to describe him. Extreme raw power seemed more appropriate. Or maybe godlike, except there hadn’t been anything forgiving or merciful in him. Then again, he’d given us a week to vacate his cabin instead of the remaining seven minutes.
I watched him make his way to the tree line, his long, muscled legs, eating up the ground like a bulldozer. I was surprised when the saplings didn’t uproot and get out of his way.
“Are we going to go away again?” Jackson asked.
I jerked my gaze from Vic to Jackson, then I crouched in front of him. I went to take his hands in mine, but realized what I was about to do and lowered them to my lap. “No, Jack-o-bite. We’re staying. Just maybe not in the cabin.”
I’d nicknamed him that after I caught him watching Braveheart at one of the motels we’d stayed at on our drive here. I’d come out of the shower to see him standing two feet from the screen, mesmerized by Mel Gibson covered in blue war paint sitting on his black horse and giving his war speech.
The next morning, I woke to find Jackson standing on a wobbly chair in the bathroom and peering into the mirror while coloring his face with blue marker from the set I’d picked up at the dollar store the day before.
When he saw me, his body began to shake so badly, he nearly fell off the chair. I’d grabbed him before he fell and plopped him down on the edge of the counter, then picked up the marker he’d dropped in the sink. “What about if I help you?” He hesitated before he nodded. While I colored his face blue, I told him the story of the Scots’ fight for independence, and then about the Jacobite rebellion.
When I was done, he looked in the mirror, and for a second the dark shadows in his eyes muted. Okay, it wasn’t much, but my chest squeezed so tight I couldn’t breathe. That had been the first time I’d seen a flicker of life in them.
Jackson peered in the direction Vic had gone, then back at me. “Does he not like me?”
