I Will Come for You (32 page)

This time Isaac uses spoken words and Death turns on him quickly. It rears up over his head and descends in a shower of black rain that is as sharp as shrapnel penetrating his skin.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Monday, 3:30 pm

Isaac’s body is suspended between them. His head is tipped back, his eyes are open and fixed, his toes are pointed toward earth but not touching. It’s the same as the last time Graham witnessed this. The blood pounds in his ears, his heart beats in his throat, but he counsels himself to remain calm. Isaac will come back. He came back the last time and he was fine. Fine. Right now, where ever he is, Isaac needs him.

Graham turns on Natalie.

“Steven and Lance were like this,” she breathes. “I saw them, through the window.”

“What window?”

“Doss’s beach house. He called them, ‘Elysians.’”

Of Heaven
. Graham remembers enough from Sunday school class to make the connection.

“They could do this?”

“Yes. And Doss was taking notes.”

“When?”

“That summer.”

“You didn’t think you should mention that?”

She spears him with a sharp glance. “You don’t trust anything science can’t explain.”

She’s right. He learned to believe in the unexplained, but he doesn’t trust it. He wants his son back.

“Where did he go?” he demands.

Natalie’s reflexes jump. Her mouth thins into a frown. “I don’t know.”

“You’re supposed to know. That’s the charm in all of this. Doss filled me in. We work together. Before, during and after. Isaac went to the side of the next victim. You should know who that is.”

“Maybe there isn’t a victim. Not yet. I told you, I never get more than a few minute’s notice.”

She slips her hand into Isaac’s. “Is he Okay?”

“Does he look Okay
to you?”

She circles Isaac, coming to stand in front of him. She examines his face, strokes th
e freckles on his cheek. “Yes, he does.”

“Well, he’s not.”

“No, you’re not,” Natalie corrects. “But you better get Okay with this. And fast. Isaac was right. Things are coming together. And before you ask, no. I didn’t get that from a vision. It’s more a feeling. A gathering of expectation I feel on an instinctual level.”

“Right now I’d prefer a vision,”
he says, surprising himself.  A week ago, he would have slammed the door shut on the supernatural. Now he knows how closely vision and instinct are related. How for some, images are simply an extension of reality.

And he knows this: to save Isaac, he’ll need to trust Natalie and whatever she sees.

“Well, you’re going to get your wish,” Natalie says.

He watches her face stiffen, her expression draw blank. Her hand tightens around his son’s and she seems to fall
backwards  inside herself. She grows light on her feet until she weaves slightly. Graham reaches out to steady her, then retracts his hand. He doesn’t want to disturb her, doesn’t want to intrude upon the images projecting in her head. She seems to be staring forward with intent and at one point, warm color fills her cheeks. Her chest lifts on a startled gasp and then the spell is broken as her brain processes the information and fear flares in her eyes.

“What?” he asks. “Who is it? Where is Isaac?”

“I didn’t see Isaac,” she says. “I saw the victim. It’s Doss. Saul Doss. I was in his house earlier today. In his living room. I recognize it. He’s sitting on the couch and it is the King’s Ferry Killer.

Graham turns his head until he can see the top of Doss’ cottage just beyond the bluffs. There’s a steep trail that leads from the cliffs to the beach below. For years, erosion has eaten
away at the earth here and storm run-off from last season was brutal. Graham hasn’t looked at the trail since summer’s end. But it’s the fastest route by far. At a run, he can get to Doss’ house in under ten minutes. With Isaac at stake, he’ll make it in five.

He looks back at his son, dangling above the ground, shielded by the tall sea grass.

“He’s Okay,” Natalie says. “He’s always Okay.”

Isaac has been doing this for a year, without Graham’s knowledge or protection. Still,

he’s torn between the need to stay and protect his son--this Isaac--and run, as fast and as furious as he can, to the other Isaac. Who needs him most?

Natalie breaks his paralysis. She runs in the direction of Doss’ cottage and Graham follows. He overtakes her, finds the edge of the bluff and begins to run parallel of it, searching for the trail head. He misses it his first pass because it is almost completely wiped out. A chunk of the cliff must have broken away during one of the storms, leaving a drop of ten or twelve feet to a plateau that is riddled with rock and eroded soil.

“I can make it.”

Graham steps back, preparing to leap from the edge to the broken earth below, when he catches a glimpse of movement at the back of Doss’ house
.

“Who is that?”

But he knows. He recognizes the lithe body, the long black hair. His heart kicks against his chest. Alana hesitates at the open door leading to Doss’ kitchen. As he watches, she slips into the house, closing the door behind her.

Isaac is alone with his mother.

Alana. Did he marry his brother’s killer? Did he love his enemy?

He catches a flash of color out of the corner of his eye as Natalie makes a dash to the edge of the cliff and is airborne. She seems to float to the ground below and then begins sprinting.

Graham shakes loose of his fear and jumps, aiming for an uneven patch of earth free of rock. He’s off as soon as he makes land, propelling himself forward, his heart clutched in midair, between breaths, suspended between life and death. If he doesn’t make it in time, if Alana kills their son, he is finished.

He overtakes Natalie and makes the deck at the back of Doss’ house and then is through the kitchen door, his gun already in hand.

The scene is like scattered puzzle pieces. Doss is on the couch, his arms open, his eyes vacant. A knife wound to the chest. Not the throat.

Alana is pressed against the far wall, her face framed with her hands, her mouth open, her lips pealed back in a scream Graham cannot hear. Either she isn’t making sound, or his sense
of hearing has temporarily left him.

A dark figure stands over her, slashing the air with a knife still dripping blood. Robert Doss
.

“
father, why have you forsaken Me?”

And it makes sense.
All of it. Robert Doss spent a good deal of his childhood, and breaks from the Marines, here on the island. He knows its geography and culture well. And has reason to hate it. His mother, drunk and loose on the town, made his life hell here. Her behavior gives Doss motive.

“Isaac?”

He doesn’t see his son. Isaac told him only the dying can see him. He calls again anyway.

Robert Doss swings around.

“You can’t save him,” Doss says.

“You can’t touch him.”

“Not true,” Doss corrects. “I got to your brother, didn’t I? He was at least half as good as your son.”

“Isaac. Get out of here.”

Robert Doss laughs. “It doesn’t work that way. The call of the good works the same way as the call of evil. You can’t deny it. You can’t control it. You just have to go along for the ride.”

“You can’t see him.”

“But I know he’s here. I always know. Be careful where you aim that thing, chief. If you shoot me, I’ll just slip into another body. The closest body. What do you want to bet that’s Isaac?”

Graham won’t gamble with his son’s life. But it turns out he doesn’t have to. Natalie slips around him. She moves as though driven by the wind and
arrives before Doss, shimmering in a cloud of radiance.

And then things happen that he can’t explain. That he decides in that moment to never examine too closely but to accept as Grace.

“I could have killed you,” Doss says.

“No.” Natalie reaches her hands toward him. “You couldn’t.”

Doss pulls back.

“I could have,” Doss insists
, his voice reduced to a plaintive wail, “I should have. I tried to.”

Natalie places her hands on his face and Doss begins to weep. They are heartfelt tears of loss. Doss falls to his knees and Natalie stays with him, absorbing his sorrow, his fear. White light pours out of her hands and Doss responds as though he’s been scalded, shrieking, lifting his hands to tear at hers, but where they touch her light they lose substance.

Natalie turns to Graham. “You have to do it,” she says.

“Do what?”

“Use your gun.”

“Kill him?”

Natalie shakes her head. “Me. You must shoot me.”

“No.”

“I’m the connection. Don’t you see? I’m the one common factor. The man in the woods. Doss. Lance and Steven. It all stops here.”

“No. I can’t.”

“I was meant to die. From the beginning. I was living on borrowed time.”

“I won’t kill you.”

“I can’t keep him like this,” she says.

Graham lift
s his gun and aims at Doss’ head.

“Move your hands,” he orders.

“I can’t release him.”

Graham lowers the gun and steps forward on his right foot, aiming now for Doss’ heart, through his rib cage. He will easily blow the aorta right out of the man’s heart. Stop the flow of blood, of oxygen.
Dead.

“You’re running out of time,” Natalie says.

Her face is pale, strain fanning out from her mouth and eyes. Graham feels his palms grow slick with sweat. The King’s Ferry Killer. He’s shooting a serial killer. The man who murdered his brother. Who would kill his son if he had the opportunity. Graham squeezes the trigger and watches the bullet explode from the end of his gun. The barrel snaps back and the bullet advances, tears through the flannel of the man’s shirt and then, with a crack of bone, breaks through the rib cage and lodges in Doss’ heart.

Mission accomplished.

Doss falls backwards and Natalie’s body tumbles with him. Her hands are still pressed to his face, though the light is receding. Graham steps over to them.

Doss is dead. His eyes are a fixed and vacant stare. His chest is still.

“Natalie?”

Graham places a hand on her
arm, to pry her loose of Doss, but her body grows slack and heavy.

She looks at him, “Isaac is here. He’s safe.”

“You see him?”
But only the dying see his son
. And then realization swamps him and he reaches for her. “No. I didn’t shoot you.” He rolls her over and looks for blood.

“You didn’t shoot me,” Natalie agrees. “I had to subdue him with my heart,” she says. “It was the only way.”

Graham feels a part of him break off and scatter. Ashes. Of his brother. Of his childhood. Of the life that led him to this point.

“Steven is here, too. They’ve been waiting for me. I was supposed to die that day—“

“But you didn’t.”

“I wasn’t alive, either.” Her breath thinned. Her words became a whisper. “
We’re finally at peace.”

Those are her last words. Graham holds her for a moment longer, her body growing
weightless in his arms. Then he stands up and holsters his gun. He looks down on the monster that terrorized his town and shattered his childhood, and on the woman who arrived seeking a justice she could live with or die for. Her goodness sticks in his heart and makes it hard to swallow.

Police procedure.
It kicks in. He walks into the kitchen and lifts the phone off the hook. He identifies himself to the dispatcher and calls in the scene. Then he stands in the middle of the room and watches as Natalie’s body slowly disappears.

Epilogue

Ten Weeks Later. . .

The dead man in the woods that triggered the beginning of the end for the King’s Ferry Killer was identified as Xavier Maughn. He was a patient of Doss’ sixteen years before, when the KFK was birthed. The Sonoma Police Department has no leads in the case and Isaac’s father left it at that. His father believes Saul Doss killed the man and left him for Natalie’s discovery. It didn’t take police work to figure that out. One telephone conversation with Natalie’s mother confirmed that Doss was in Sonoma at the time the body was found. Why Natalie received a vision of Isaac’s father while she stood in the woods, alone with the dead body, is anybody’s guess. Isaac thinks it was directional. Natalie was meant to seek out his father. Together, the three of them were meant to face and eliminate the KFK.

Isaac thinks it was pretty easy to break down Robert Doss’ morality. He was the product of a broken home, like Isaac. Of a mother of questionable mental stability, like Isaac. And he is too aware now of how one is pulled to either good or bad. That it’s a conscious choice we make daily. And he’s grateful for his father’s influence that makes it easy for him to walk that thin line.