"This isn't a book, dammit."
"Yes, I know. The guns are real." Hailey reached inside her jacket and produced a pistol, holding it rather gingerly as she handed it to Nell. "He didn't let you bring yours, so here. I think the FBI agent should always get the gun, don't you?"
"The FBI—How did you know about that?"
"Never mind now. The point is that you have to get your ass in there, and armed is probably better than not."
Nell automatically checked to make sure the gun was loaded and the safety on, then said, "Why the hell didn't you tell me all the important stuff sooner, so I could call out the troops? I'm at least two miles away from a phone I could use, from any backup. Kyle has a marksman's medal—I remember that from the background check—so even if he does believe I'm under his control, it won't give me much of an edge."
"Just stall him, keep him from killing Ethan. I'm going after that partner of yours."
"Galen is—"
"Not him. The other one."
Nell blinked. "I still want Galen. He's a pit bull when he's pissed. Or even when he isn't."
"I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, you might try calling Max."
"Calling—"
"Oh, hell, you could always call him, even before you two carved your initials in that tree. Call him. You might be surprised how he can help you now that Kyle can't get in."
Nell would have said something to that, but Hailey gave her a somewhat mocking salute and hurried off through the woods back the way they'd come, leaving Nell to mutter to herself.
Hailey had always been able to do this, dammit. Answer only the questions she chose to, manipulate people into doing what she wanted without bothering to explain herself. So damned typical.
Even with the tensions and strains between them, she'd had the knack of carrying Nell along in a rush, overwhelming any objections or protests, do this, do that, hurry now—and Nell always found herself in trouble at the end of it.
There was entirely too much about the situation Nell found bewildering, but as she hurried cautiously across the cultivated field toward the lighted house, the last of the fog cleared from her mind and both her training and instincts finally kicked in.
The situation was definitely not a good one. She was one agent alone, and even if she was well trained and experienced, it would require more than surprise for her to get the upper hand against a psychotic killer who just happened to be not only a cop but also a half-brother.
And psychic.
She needed help.
Maybe Hailey could get the cavalry here quickly enough and maybe not. Nell had to assume the latter and make her plans accordingly, that's what her training and experience told her. She was alone, and—
Was she alone? She thought about that as she crept closer to one of the lighted windows and very cautiously peered through the narrow opening of the curtains and into the house.
The first window showed her nothing but an empty room, what looked like a den. But the second, the living room, was definitely occupied. Ethan was sitting in a dining room chair, his hands cuffed behind him. His head lolled, and Nell could see blood on the side of his face, though from her angle she couldn't tell how bad his injuries were.
Kyle Venable was also in the room. He was at the doorway of the room, leaning against the door frame. There was a length of rope in his hands. He was knotting a noose.
Was that what he intended for Ethan, suicide? If he set it up right, it could certainly make sense. The FBI could provide their profile indicating the killer was a cop, and there was, after all, no solid evidence clearing Ethan. Just Nell's certainty, and if Kyle had brought her here to witness this death, it was unlikely he meant to allow her to live long enough to testify on Ethan's behalf.
A body found with a note, the motives for murder and suicide painfully apparent, and who would question? The sheriff, last of Hailey's lovers still in Silence, killing himself after murdering all the men who had corrupted his love.
Nell saw Kyle look at his watch and frown, and she immediately drew back from the window and began making her way around the house to the front door. She checked the gun again, then stuck it down inside the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, hidden under the tail of her jacket.
She knew she could get her hands on it fast, but would it be fast enough?
Useless to pretend she wasn't terrified, both because she was about to face a killer and because it was at least possible Hailey had been right, that Kyle had lurked in her mind all these years like a cancerous growth, stealing her very consciousness, twisting her own self-image. Nell hadn't had time enough to take in all Hailey had told her, all she had realized for herself, but that was clear, that possibility. It was terrifying, that something alien could have been with her all this time.
But it also offered a hope Nell clung to.
That the only evil in her had been him.
She had to know. She had to.
Nell stepped up to the front door and put her hand on the knob, then closed her eyes briefly.
Max. I need you.
She opened the door and went into the house, looking around with a frown, blinking in the light of the foyer, trying to give the appearance of someone waking up out of a deep sleep.
"Hey, Nell. Come on in."
Galen didn't bother to reclaim his watching post in the woods, because as soon as he neared the house he could see the front door standing open. His gut twisted, and he was drawing his gun before his foot hit the first step.
"She's gone." Max met him just inside the door, dressed but obviously in haste and pulling on his jacket even as he spoke. "Ethan's place."
Galen didn't ask any questions until they were in Max's truck barreling down the driveway, and then all he said was, "Is she telling you anything now?"
"A little, but I'm not getting everything. Bits and pieces. Something about Hailey being here, about Venable holding Ethan and getting ready to kill him. And about Venable being her brother. Christ, how did he get her out of the house past both of us?"
"I haven't been outside for the last hour," Galen said. "We didn't think he'd move again so soon, and we knew you were in the house with her."
Max didn't waste time with condemnation of either his own obliviousness to the danger Nell had been in or Galen's absence. He just gripped the steering wheel harder and floored the accelerator as soon as the truck reached the highway.
"A brother?" Galen said, getting out his phone and beginning to punch in a number.
"Yeah."
"We've got to get some new psychics. The ones we have keep missing some pretty important stuff."
"I would have preferred to wait a bit longer before punishing Ethan," Kyle said, gesturing with his gun to indicate Nell take a seat on the couch at right angles to Ethan's chair and his own position near the doorway. "Let all my fellow cops stumble around in the dark a while longer searching for Nate McCurry's secret sins while Ethan looked like an ass. But what the hell. Might as well finish it."
Nell sat down but on the outer half of the cushion, making sure she could get to her gun. If she got the chance. "I don't understand any of this." It wasn't difficult to sound bewildered about it.
"Don't you?"
"No." She sneaked a glance at Ethan. His head still lolled forward and his eyes were closed, but she had a hunch he was at least half conscious. "I really don't."
"Oh, it's quite simple, Nell. I had to take care of you and Hailey. I had to protect you. That's what big brothers do."
"We don't have a brother," she said, not so much stalling for time as following her instincts.
"I know we were never properly introduced, which is a shame." He was smiling, relaxed. "We grew up in different homes and with different mothers, after all. But Adam Gallagher was my father too. He didn't know about me, you see. He didn't know until I told him. Last May."
"May? You mean—just before he died?"
"Well, that wasn't the plan. I knew he was upset, losing both his girls. You'd been gone for years, then Hailey. I thought he needed to know about me, that it would make him happy. I even offered to change my name, to make sure the Gallagher name would go on."
"And the Gallagher curse?" Nell asked.
Kyle's smile widened, but his eyes were curiously flat. "I thought that would please him most of all."
"It didn't, did it?"
"No. It didn't. He threw me out of the house, can you believe that? Actually knocked me down the steps."
Intently focused on Kyle's face, Nell was surprised when she got a strong flash, a harsh voice yelling. "He called you a liar. He… called your mother a whore."
"He never should have done that," Kyle said reasonably but with an edge to his voice. "I had to punish him for that. Because my mother wasn't a whore."
"Was that when you killed him?"
"I had to. You see that, don't you, Nell? That I had to kill him?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nell drew a breath and nodded slowly. "I guess you did. But how? Everyone thought it was a heart attack."
"It wasn't difficult to cause a heart attack in a man who'd been on the verge of having one naturally for years. As a matter of fact, I used digitoxia. And I had to be there, of course, because I didn't want him calling for help."
"You watched him die?"
"I enjoyed watching him die."
As much as she had hated her father, Nell realized in that moment that she would not have enjoyed watching him die. Even knowing he had beaten her mother to death—
Beaten?
"I knew he had disowned Hailey," Kyle continued calmly. "That you'd been left everything. I honestly didn't think you'd come back here. So I did some discreet checking just to see if there was any way I could inherit—without having to prove paternity, of course."
"Because you couldn't?" Nell concentrated on the conversation, on him. There would be time later, she hoped, to solve any lingering puzzles.
"Because he hadn't acknowledged me. Maybe I could have got the name legally, but so what? And I didn't need his property. If you hadn't come back, I might have done something about that. But you did come back." His face darkened suddenly.
Nell, realizing abruptly what he must have "seen" when he summoned her to come to him tonight, said slowly, "I'm here tonight because you wanted me to be. Because you… came to me. You saw, didn't you? You saw Max with me."
"In your bed. Did he even bother to scrape the cow shit out from under his fingernails first?"
She chose her words carefully. "He didn't corrupt me, Kyle. He didn't spoil me."
"Of course he did."
"No. I love Max. And he loves me."
"That's not love," Kyle said scornfully. "Wrestling between the sheets? Rutting like a couple of animals? Have you ever watched, Nell? Seen what it looks like when two naked, hairy bodies do that? It's ugly. Unspeakably ugly. At least I didn't have to watch you do it. But Hailey…"
"You followed her. You watched her."
"I had to. She was sick, from the time she was a child. Sick. Randal Patterson infected her with his own sickness. Down in that basement of his, when she was just a little girl." His mouth twisted. "I wanted to kill him then. But I was just a kid myself, so I couldn't."
He shrugged and frowned down at the gun he still held with seeming negligence in one hand, and Nell took the opportunity to glance quickly at Ethan. She saw his eyelid flicker, his head move just a bit, and knew he was fully conscious now.
But it wasn't time. Not yet. Not yet.
She said the first thing she could think of to Kyle to keep the conversation going. "There were other men after Patterson. How could you keep blaming them rather than her?"
"She didn't know what she was doing," Kyle said, spacing every word carefully for emphasis. "But they did. They took advantage of her. I know she was upset when your mother went away, but—"
"Our mother didn't go away, Kyle. He killed her. You saw him do it."
Kyle looked at her for an unblinking moment, then smiled. "So did you."
"And you made me forget."
"I had to. With her whorish blood in you, I knew all it would take would be a trigger. Seeing her being punished, hearing her cry and plead and tell him she was really good when it was so obvious she was lying through her whoring teeth—that might have been enough."
Nell felt her stomach heave and fought desperately not to show the reaction. "Why didn't you… try that with Hailey? Why didn't you try to… to cure her sickness that way?"
"She never had the Gallagher gift. Oh, I tried, more than once. To reach her, to touch her mind. Even to go visit her while she was sleeping, the way I could visit you. But it never worked with her. I guess she was already ruined then, even though I didn't want to admit it."
"You visited me? While I was sleeping?"
Kyle smiled again. "All the time, before you ran away from Silence. When you ran away… I don't know. I lost you somehow. I wasn't even sure I could do it again when you came back, but it was really easy. Maybe because I knew you were there in the house. That must have been it, don't you think? That I knew where you were?"
"I… guess so."
"I had no idea I could make you do things. Started small, at first, telling you to turn over in bed. To get up and brush your hair for a while. To go up into the attic and find your doll."
"I wondered how she got onto my pillow," Nell said, forcing her voice to remain calm even though her very skin was crawling.
"You didn't figure it out, honestly? You had no idea it was me?"
Nell shifted her weight slightly, putting both hands on the cushion on either side of her hips as if to brace herself. Quietly, she said, "How could I guess? I didn't know about you. I didn't know I had a brother. And you wouldn't let me remember what you had done for me."