It wasn’t long afterward that the two women had gone to Dr. Maddy, at Elena’s suggestion and with Cayce’s money. Not that she’d had much back then, but she’d had more than Elena. And they’d both been in such need …
Kenneth had had access to her early designs. Not from her safe over the recent years but from many years earlier, as she had created them. “What happened to you?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Nothing. I’ve developed my skills, the same as you have. Of course I started from a bit further behind, but I’m there now.” He sat back, rolled his shoulders, and said, “It was hard after I saw what happened to you. And Elena. I made a point of trying to fix things. But when I killed my stepfather for what he did to Elena and then I killed your fiancé, for what he did to you, I realized that, by doing so, I was bringing in my soul thing, … people I didn’t want to have there.”
She studied him closely. She could see flashes of the younger man she’d known and flashes of a strong very together man, but they were hard to see with his fanatical gaze locked on her.
“How did you learn that soul thing?” she asked slowly, not sure she wanted to know. But anything she could do to delay the inevitable gave her more time for Richard to reach her. Surely he’d be here soon. When she heard something from the other side of the apartment, hope surged. Surely that was him?
“Heath showed me the initial path. Then you showed me the rest.”
She stared him in confusion. “Heath?”
“Yes, he killed our mother. She deserved killing, you know?” he said in a contemplative voice. “She was worse than him. She abused all three of us but only the two of us sexually. Still, she was our mother—or all we knew as a mother. We loved her. After Heath killed her, he kept a part of her soul inside. And she’s in his head all the time now. I keep her close but not like he does.”
At that, a face appeared around the corner from the kitchen. A scarred face with tormented eyes.
Kenneth turned and said, “Heath, why are you here?”
“Evil,” he whispered to his brother. “Evil.”
“I know. I’ll save her. I don’t want you to be a part of this. You’ve got Mom, and you got overwhelmed,” he said crossly. “I’ve got Dad and Elena and the others. You’ve got all you can handle with Mom. You don’t get Cayce too. I do. And we’ll paint together forever.”
*
Those words of reality, Cayce’s current reality, repeated in Richard’s mind, bringing with it fear but also a wave of relief.
Cayce was still alive and, from the sound of her voice, not badly hurt. But, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he sucked in his breath in horror. Andy reached out and grabbed his arm, pointing …
Not only were many stretching bars all around the place but it was obvious that they contained some of the pieces missing from the corpses in the morgue that Richard was looking for. Indeed, he saw far more pieces than he had bodies. He exchanged a hard glance with Andy as they realized just what the hell was going on. When they crept ever closer, Cayce’s voice called out, “You didn’t have to hurt everybody.”
“I wasn’t hurting them,” Kenneth said. “Not at all. I was capturing them, so they could live forever in their paintings and in me.”
“But you killed them,” she said quietly. “How was that capturing them?”
“Evil,” said that other voice which Richard struggled to identify. Heath? And then it hit him. That ugly dark energy he had seen wrapped around Cayce’s ankles that night not long ago. It was close to but not exactly the same broken black energy of the homeless man called Halo.
Was he Heath? Brother to Kenneth?
God. It wasn’t hard to see it now, because the darkness wasn’t necessarily coming from the closed-off windows but from the energy coming from the man bending over Cayce, who was lying on the floor of a room off the kitchen. The second man was curled nearby on the kitchen floor, whispering in a singsong voice, “Good boy. Bad boy.”
That confirmed Halo’s identity, and, after what Kenneth had just explained, might even explain the nightmare that had damaged Heath’s childhood. Obviously Kenneth was equally damaged.
Richard crept closer, and when Kenneth straightened and stepped away from Cayce, Richard jumped forward. “Hands up,” he said.
The man in front of them froze. Halo’s voice rose in a high-pitched song, repeating the same phrase over and over again, adding to the din.
Then Kenneth looked at Richard, dropped to his knees, and held a needle against Cayce’s throat. “Don’t come any closer.”
Chapter 26
Cayce couldn’t believe Kenneth was behind all this madness and couldn’t believe what he’d done, but her gaze landed on one of the paintings against the wall. Hard to not recognize it, as she’d last seen it at the masterpiece party where she’d painted the van Gogh on Elena. Cayce’s eyes filled as she recognized the image and the skin.
But something else was here that neither Kenneth nor Heath could see.
And Cayce could use it right now.
She closed her eyes, hearing the men argue, and reached out with her energy to the painting on the wall. She hadn’t been joking when she’d told Richard about the energy of the model being important to Cayce. And blending Cayce’s energy with her model’s to make the painting come alive.
Just then Richard said, “Oh, I’ll come closer,” he said to Kenneth. “Then
