Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (19 page)

Kaley swallowed.  “Why are you telling me
all this?  I’ve already decided.”

“Because I gotta know that my partner ain’t gonna scram when things start lookin’ tight,” Spencer said, taking a step closer to her.  Kaley
Dupré took a step back, and put a protective hand on the back of the boy’s head.  He was beginning to tremble in her arms again.  “I gotta know you got what it takes to push through, to survive, to look right at this disgusting shit an’ not flinch, not look away.”  He took another step closer.  This time, Kaley Dupré didn’t step back.  That made him smile.  “Without your power, you’re useless to me.  I know that harnessing fear is part o’ that power, but with
too much
fear, you’re just a limp dick.”

The basement passed into another silence.  Spencer thought he heard things, more whispers perhaps, but for the moment he ignored it all.  His focus was on the little girl who had
traveled all the way from Atlanta in a nanosecond, who could somehow occupy many places at once.  If he had her power on his side…
This game might just be changing
, he thought.

“Whattaya say, little girl?” he said, raising a quizzical eyebrow.  “Stay, or play?”

Kaley Dupré appeared frozen in indecision for all eternity.  But eternity finally ended, and she nodded resolutely.  “I’ll stay and help,” she said.  Then, a cloud fell over her.

Spencer saw it immediately. 
The girl shivered, and her eyes darted around the room, then up at the ceiling.  “What is it?  What’s wrong?”

“Spencer…someone’s coming.”

The streets were mostly open.  The salt trucks and snow plow
s had done their jobs admirably; all the main squares had traffic moving through them at a right pace, and with enough control that there was never really any danger to the lawbreaking pedestrians darting across the street.

Shcherbakov was driving his own sedan now, a dark-green Lada Priora.  Zverev had
deposited him in the parking lot outside of the Grand Hotel Vidgof.  The Priora was parked in a well-lit part of the lot, in the blue section, row thirteen.  All around the parking lot were signs reading:
Все путешественники должны быть осторожны. Старайтесь не ездить в темное время суток
.  Translation:
All travelers should be careful
. 
Try not to travel after dark
.  Wrapping around the parking lot, there were more signs with the same message written in English, French, and Spanish.

There had been a spate of attacks on travelers
recently, and an increase in reports of tourists gone missing.  For some, it might’ve been strange to see such a public warning issued by the government, and know that you personally had something to do with that.  Shcherbakov had gotten over that strange feeling long ago.  He’d been in the family business almost his entire life, and was used to being part of an organization that shaped public policy and changed people’s perceptions.

Shcherbakov unconsciously checked the pistol inside his jacket.
  He’d gone up to his hotel room and gathered the duffel bags that Zverev’s people had hid under the bed for him.  He had tossed them into the trunk, checked his fuel gauge, and got underway.

The
complex where his target was staying was the Bogema Apartments, modest-to-upscale on Zvillinga Ulitsa.  An ideal location for some since it was within a five-mile walk of Pushkin Park, filled with Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and plenty of games for families affixed on a boardwalk across the park’s vast lake.

The lake was frozen, of course, and the world was blanketed in white. 
It looks like when the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man blew up in that one American movie
, Shcherbakov thought, using his knees to guide the steering wheel while he lit up another cigarette. 
What was it called? 
Ghost-killers
or something?
  He put his father’s silver bear’s-head lighter back in his pocket, took a long, grateful toke, and let it all out in a huff.  He pulled up to the front gate of Bogema Apartments, a line of forbidding, pronged wrought-iron bars, and waited.  One toke after another.  Finally, a car pulled up, and the gate began to roll open.  Shcherbakov lurched in front of them and into the parking lot, receiving a honk for his rudeness.

What little ice had melted due to
the salt trucks passing through was now becoming a slushy mix.  Shcherbakov pulled into a parking space between two large SUVs, with the largest apartment building right behind him.  He left the car running, turned up the radio, and set his eyes on his rearview mirror.  He inhaled deeply, drawing in the smoke from his cigarette.  He could be waiting a while.

Spencer bounded up the stairs ahead of her.  Kaley shouted, “Wait!  Wait for us!”  In the murky water, something slithered past her, tasted her, perhaps tried to snatch at her, and then disappeared back below.

Kaley
was moving sluggishly now, and not just because of the boy in her arms.  Kaley felt somehow heavier, like she’d gained thirty pounds.  But part of her understood that she was just wiped out from the transition from America to the Siberian wilderness, as well as the emotional baggage she had imbibed from the boy.  Whatever transferences had taken place, they played hell on the body.

The
psychopath was already up the stairs and running for the door.  Kaley was taking one step every two or three seconds, huffing, clutching the boy to her chest while sending wave after wave of love, trust, and comfort at him.  “Stay with me, baby,” she told him.  “Ya hear?  Stay with me, chil’.”

“
Fffffffffuck!
” Spencer hissed.  He was at the front door.  He’d walked clear through the pool of blood that was finally starting to cease flowing from Zakhar’s body.  Kaley whispered into the boy’s ear “Keep your eyes closed, sweetie,” and tiptoed her way around the corpse.  She tried not to look herself, but she had to in order to make sure she didn’t slip and fall.  Even though the man on the floor was inhuman and deserved no less than what he got, Kaley wasn’t comfortable with the level of cruelty, much less the cavalier way that Spencer had handled it all afterwards. 
It made him happy at first
. 
He doesn’t even care now
.

It begged the question: who was the greater monster, the dragon or the dragonslayer?  Typically it would be the former, but Spencer had taught Kaley that it greatly depended on the level of glee and heartles
sness on the part of the slayer.

The boy was starting to tremble again.  Perhaps Kaley had unconsciously sent him her mistrust of Spencer?  She tried to concentrate, using both her power and a good old-fashioned pat on his back, like trying to calm a
squealing baby down.  When she made it to the door, Kaley was waved to one side by Spencer.  “Keep away from the windows,” he said.

“Who are they?”

“You tell me, you’re the one who sensed them comin’.”

There were blue curtains on the window of the door.  Kaley pushed those curtains to the side, for the moment wondering about the wonderful domestic tastes of a child rapist and killer, then peered out the window.

A large, black SUV was parked about twenty yards away from them, and about ten yards away from the shed, with its right side facing the lodge.  The SUV was still running, and the back of it was pushing out a dense cloud of white.  Three men had emerged.  The snow had let up some, so she could make them all out.  They were all in black pants and jackets, with those big Russian fur caps on their heads, black gloves, and what had to be pistols in their hands. 

Kaley had felt their presence in the same way she detected other anomalies around her—
a vibration along the same web of emotional intent connecting her and all other living things.  On some level, she even felt the tiniest little chipmunks and insects in the forest all around them, but these were “dim” feelings that usually passed by her awareness, like the various ghost itches that crop up all over the body, most of them too miniscule unless one was paying exclusive attention.  But these fellows, they were the big itches, a raging maelstrom of paranoia and violent intent.

One of them had run towards a
nother cabin, a much larger structure than the one Kaley and Spencer were in.  “Who’s cabin is that?” she said.

“Zakhar’s.”

“I thought this was his cabin.”

“They both are.  That one’s the main residence. 
This one we’re in was an old hunting lodge, one his family used to rent out as outfitters, led people on hunting excursions.”

Kaley wondered if the men would leave once they found the other cabin empty, but figured
that wasn’t likely.  “We have to leave,” she said.

“Can’t.  You saw to that.”  Spencer had his Glock in one hand
, the revolver in his other.  “I was all set to leave, an’ would’ve been clear of here if I hadn’t listened to you.  I should have my fucking head examined for hangin’ around when I
knew
this was comin’.”  Kaley’s eyes watered.  The heat coming off of Spencer was one she was familiar with; it was the same anger he’d felt that night when he thought himself disrespected by Dmitry.  In this state, he was even more volatile and unpredictable than usual.

“We have to hide
then,” she said.  “At least until they go away.”

“Can’t,” he said, pushing the curtain to the side with the
end of his Glock and peeking outside.  “Zakhar’s sittin’ dead on the floor right behind us.  They’ll fan out, search every nook an’ cranny.”

“Then we’ll go out the back! 
If we hurry we can—”

“And
then what?  Hide out there for hours?  It’s getting close to sunset.  Temperature’s gonna be droppin’ out there.  We’d freeze to death before we made it to any road.”

“We could hide in the woods, and wait for them to leave!”

“I left the
car
runnin’, little girl! Because I thought I was getting’ outta here!  I should have my fuckin’ head examined!” he repeated.  “They’ll know we’re still here, because there are no fresh tire tracks in the snow leadin’ outta here.  We’d freeze or starve to death by the time they decide to call off their search.  The road’s too far away to walk.  So no, we can’t hide out in the woods until they leave.  Besides, they’ve blocked us off from the woods to the north, and there’s a frozen lake between us and the woods to the south.  We’d never get around it in time before getting shot.”

Kaley looked back out the window, and swallowed.  It was dimmer than it had been when
she’d followed Spencer out to the shed. 
He’s right
. 
Getting darker out there
.  The three men had made it back to the shed, and were inside, probably talking and planning.  “Maybe…”  Kaley tried to think.  She was almost hyperventilating.  Her greatest fear was for the boy in her arms.  “Maybe they’ll just think he committed suicide!  We could put a gun in Zakhar’s hand—”

Spencer laughed. 
“Not a bad thought, but these are pros, little girl.  Almost as savvy as a forensics team.  They’ll know an execution-style hit when they see it.”

“What…what if we, like, pretend that we’ve got him hostage?  We could tell them to leave us alone or we’ll kill him.”

“They won’t buy that.  If we came out here just to get Zakhar, then we came out here to kill him.  They know that.  They won’t just leave him alone with us.”  Spencer moved to another window, peeked out.  His tongue was doing that thing again, where it touched his top lip and didn’t move.  He wasn’t blinking.  Lost in thought.

Suddenly, Kaley was very aware of the flimsiness of this lodge. 
It was solid.  She had never before considered solid, material objects to be so flimsy.  Having experienced both a material and immaterial body, she now had a very different concept of what objects were.  Now, almost everything around her seemed thin as paper, yet as clunky and inert as a broken down Chevy. 
Useless
. 
Everything around me is utterly useless
.

The lodge’s floors were solid beneath her solid feet, and
her feet were cold.  The lodge was very nice and done-up with rugs and cupboards and refrigerators and couches and a warm, crackling fireplace, but its walls were also just plain wood with windows made of glass, the roof likely no better than shingles or tin.

Back at school, Kaley conducted her incorporeal self to turn back away from the
classroom door and head towards the bathroom.  Very soon now, Mrs. Cartwright would send someone to check on her, and if they stepped out and saw her standing at the door, and then reached out to grab her…

Thankfully, the
girls’ bathroom was just a few steps away.  Kaley pressed the door.  It did not budge—or maybe it did?—just an instant before she slipped through it.  She felt a cold deep inside of her, like she’d just swallowed a dozen ice cubes.  The world became fuzzy as she passed through it; she didn’t see the insides of the wooden door, it didn’t work quite like that.  Instead, the world became almost black and fuzzy.  When she emerged on the other side, she felt short of breath.  This made her equally short of breath while holding the boy back in the cabin.  It was strange how one “body” was affected by the doings of the other.