With so many eyes on me, I had no chance of pulling the gun before someone stopped me, but there was no fucking way I was going to let this man cling to a fantasy where he hadn’t stabbed my mother eleven times, hadn’t stood over her as she bled out, as the cops and the paramedics came, far too late to do any good.
I leaned over the cold metal surface and caught his grey eyes with mine.
“She’s not coming, asshole. You killed her.”
He paused in mid-yell, and gave me a confused look. “Killed who?”
“Elora Banach. My mother. Your wife. Her blood. Your knife. Don’t you fucking sit there and tell me you don’t remember! You don’t get to do that!”
This time, the guard’s hand was on my shoulder, though I didn’t remember having risen from my seat. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down and lower your voice, or this visit is over.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” I dropped back down into the chair and made a show of unclenching my hands, and laying them, palms-down, on the table. Twenty-some minutes left, and I’d already managed to get a guard’s personal attention. This was going all wrong.
I lowered my voice, and spoke to my dad. “I need you to remember. Not just what you did but why. It’s important.”
“What I did?”
I gritted my teeth and tried again. “You came home from work early that day. You went to your closet, and you dug out a knife that Mom had never seen.”
His eyes sharpened, and for just a moment, I thought I had him.
There was more coughing from the woman with the photo… the longest and loudest bout yet. She brought a handkerchief to her mouth, and hacked into it like a smoker on her last lung. My father’s eyes danced away to focus on the new distraction. “Why did I want a knife?” he finally asked.
“This isn’t a story,” I told him. “This is what happened. This is why you’re here. I need you to think. Think about Elora.”
“Yes, Elora.” He nodded slowly, and I watched his face go even paler. “So much blood.”
Those three words almost did me in.
“Yes,” I finally managed. “There was blood everywhere.”
“On her dress. Her pretty yellow dress.” For the second time, tears glittered in my father’s eyes. He started to rock back and forth in his seat.
“Yes. You told her that you were going to kill me. You said—”
“You don’t understand, Elora,” he interrupted, eyes drifting away from my face again. “I’m doing this for you. I don’t know how I forgot, and I don’t know how she made me remember, but our son is meant for horrible things.”
I swallowed, but before I could ask the questions I’d come to ask, he kept going.
“I’m so sorry, my love. I should have told you about the visions. I should have told you about the headaches, but I thought I was going crazy. Then she came, and it was like a fog had been lifted. I remembered what he’d done to me. I remembered why. I knew what I had to do.” Tears streamed down his gaunt face in dirty rivulets. “But it wasn’t supposed to be you. I swear it wasn’t!” He reached out with both manacled hands, not to me, but to someone past me.
I turned and saw Mom’s ghost standing behind me. For only the second time ever, she wasn’t smiling.
When I turned back, that same guard was back, pinning my father to his seat. I made sure my own hands were where they were supposed to be, and tried to catch my father’s attention.
“Who are you talking about? She came? She who? What he did to you? He who? Tell me why. Please…!”
“I’m sorry, Elora,” he said again, voice low but desperate, “I don’t know how she found me. One moment I was alone, the next she was there.”
“Who?” I hissed. “Who was there?”
For the first time in minutes, he looked in my direction, his eyes wide and empty. “Sally Jenkins, pale and wary, seems to be so ordinary.”
My blood went ice cold. “What did you just say?”
“But all the bodies she could bury,” he moaned, “would fill the whole world’s cemetery.”
My mind went blank and still, but before I could even begin to grapple with the enormity of what he had just said, I came to another realization… one that had nothing to do with my father’s words.
We were in the Hole, with its military grade dampeners.
There was no way my mother’s ghost could be present.
I looked to the guard behind my father, my own eyes suddenly wide. “Something’s wrong—”
A low snarl echoed through the room and Jaws sprang out of his chair. Thick coarse fur sprouted from his exposed skin, his jaw lengthening into a snout. Manacles snapped like they’d been crafted of tissue, and in one long, loping stride he was on top of the closest guard, tearing out the man’s throat with teeth that had become razor sharp.
For a moment, time came to a halt. I watched the dead guard’s body start to fall, as Jaws turned towards the next guard on the perimeter. I watched a second prisoner surge to his feet, fire issuing from his fingertips. Most of all, I saw Jaws’ wife, still seated, and the handkerchief that held the round object she’d just coughed up.
If it wasn’t Legion tech, it was one hell of a knock-off.
Then things really went to shit.
CHAPTER 71
I’d spent the last year training at the Academy. No matter what Backstreet said, everyone else knew it was the best place in the Free States for a Cape to learn. Our instructors were all top-notch, and from day one, they’d worked to train us for battle.
None of it prepared me for how quick and brutal a fight with Powers could be.
The guard at my table went up like a torch, one of many as a
