Cold Sight (2 page)

How long had it been since the night he’d grabbed her? And when had that been?
Think!

Monday. He’d attacked her while she walked the long way home from a nighttime event at her new high school, to which she’d just transferred because they offered more AP classes than her old one. Mistake number one. Her old school had been a block from her crappy home.

“Well, if you’re sure, I suppose we can read a little more about those naughty children.”

Knowing he expected it, she managed to murmur, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, dear. I’m glad you like this story. It’s no wonder their parents didn’t want Hansel and Gretel—awful, spoiled brats, weren’t they? Most parents hate their children anyway, but these two were especially bad.”

If it wouldn’t have caused her so much pain, she might have laughed at that. Because he was saying something he thought would hurt her, when, in truth, he’d just reinforced what she already knew. Her mama had made that clear every day of her life.

Most parents would be proud of their kid for doing well in school, but not hers. All she’d said was that Vonnie had been stupid to transfer. Stupid to go to the evening event. Stupid and uppity, thinking getting into the National Honor Society mattered a damn when she lived on the corner of Whoreville and Main.

Normally she’d have been at work serving chicken wings and fending off gropey drunk guys by that time of night on a Monday. But no, she’d had to go to the meeting, had to act as if she was no different from the smart, rich white kids with their trust funds and their sports cars. She’d been cocky, insisting it was no big deal to walk home alone after dark through an area of the Boro where no smart girl ever walked alone after dark. Not these days, not with the Ghoul on the loose and more girls missing from her neighborhood every month.

The Ghoul—the paper had at first said he was real, then that he wasn’t. Vonnie knew the truth. He was real, all right. She just wasn’t going to live long enough to tell anybody.

“Hansel and Gretel didn’t know that the starving birdies of the forest were eating up their bread-crumb trail, waiting for the children to die so they could poke out their eyes,” he read, not noticing her inattention. “It was dark and their time to find their way home was running out.”

Time. It had ceased to have any meaning at all. Minutes and hours had switched places: minutes lengthened by pain, hours shortened by the terror of what would happen every time he came back from wherever it was he went when he left her alone in the damp, cold dark.

And Vonnie knew, deep down, that her time was running out, too.

“Did you hear me?” he snapped.

She swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Good. Don’t you fall asleep. I’m reading this for you, not for myself, you know.”

She suspected he wasn’t reading at all, merely Wes Craven-ing up a real bedtime story.

“Now, wasn’t it lucky that they were able to find shelter?” he added. “Mm, a house made of gingerbread and gumdrops and licorice. Imagine that. Do you like sweets, pretty girl? Want me to bring you some candy? Sticky, gooey candy?”

She swallowed, the very thought of it making her sick. Not that she wasn’t hungry, starving even. But the foul-smelling air surrounding her, filling her lungs and her nose, made the thought of food nauseating. She didn’t like to think about the other smells down here—the reek of rotten meat, the stench of human waste. And something metallic and earthy, a scent that seemed to coat her tongue when she breathed through her mouth.

Blood. At least, that was what she suspected had created the rust-colored stains on the cement floor.

Those stains had been the first things she’d noticed when she regained consciousness after she’d been kidnapped. And ever since, they’d reiterated what she already knew: This guy had killed before, and he intended to kill her. It wasn’t a matter of if; only when.

There was no escape—she was chained, drugged, and had been terrified into utter submission. She had no idea where she was, or when it was, or if the door led to a way out or just another chamber of horrors.

Vonnie didn’t even try to comfort herself with thoughts of escape. It did no good to pump herself up with the memories of all the other times she’d gotten herself out of difficult situations—put there through either her own gullibility or by her mama’s greed.

Don’t go there, girl. Just as much darkness down that path.

No, she didn’t want to think those thoughts. Not if they were going to be among the last ones of her life
.
Because so far, at least, this nightmare hadn’t included sexual assault.

“Well, maybe the candy shouldn’t be too sticky,” he said, tutting a little, like a loving, concerned parent, not that she had firsthand experience with one. “I know your jaw must hurt from when you made me hit you the other day. Maybe I could chew it up, make it nice and soft for you, then spit it into your mouth just like a mama bird with her little chick.”

Though she hadn’t figured there was anything left in her stomach, she still heaved a mouthful of vomit. But she forced herself to swallow it down. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that his mere words had made her sick. Nor could she let him know just how disgusting she found the thought. Giving the monster ideas to try on her when she finally did pass out was a stupid thing to do, and Vonnie Jackson might be beaten and chained, she might be poor and the daughter of a drug-addicted prostitute, but nobody had ever called her stupid.

“Why was she doing it, do you suppose? Why did she want them to eat all those sweets?” When she didn’t reply, his singsong voice rose to a screech. “Answer me!”

“Fattening them up,” she said, the words riding a puff of air across her swollen lips.

“Yes! You’re so clever; that’s what they say about you. Such a smart, clever girl who was going to escape her pathetic childhood.” He
tsk
ed, sounding almost sad. “And you nearly made it—didn’t you, Yvonne? Oh, you came so close! High school graduation next May, then off you’d go to college on one of your scholarships, never to see your slut mother or the hovel you call home again. All that work, all that effort. Wasted.”

She didn’t answer, didn’t even flinch, not wanting him to see that his words stabbed at her, hurting almost as much as his fists. Because getting out was all Vonnie had worked for, all she had dreamed of for as long as she could remember. And the fact that this filthy monster had taken that chance from her made her want to scream at the injustice.

“Ah, well, back to our story. Yes, indeed, the witch was fattening them up,” her captor said. “But do you know why?” He hummed a strange tune, repeating himself in discordant song. “Why, why, why? Do you know why?”

Her eyes remained open as she listened to that crooning voice deliberately trying to lull her into much-needed sleep. Her body wanted to give in to it, to let go. If she thought there was a chance she might never wake up, she would have gladly embraced the chance.

But she wasn’t that lucky. And she knew she would regret it when she awoke and found out what he wanted to do to her. So Vonnie forced herself to shake her throbbing head, knowing the sharper the pain the less she’d be inclined to give in. “Why?”

He laughed softly, not answering. Just as well. She probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question, given the way he was turning these nightly stories into tales from his twisted crypt of a mind.

“You’ll just have to wait and see. Patience, sweet . . .”

His sibilant words were interrupted by the sound of banging coming from somewhere above. Before Vonnie could even process it, she heard a clang of metal. The small sliding panel in the door, through which he watched her, talked to her, and tormented her, was slammed shut. The narrow column of illumination that had shone through it, one single beam of blazing light in the darkness, had been chopped away like the head off a snake.

Another bang from above. She tried to focus on it, tried not to let the relief of his leaving make her give in to exhaustion. That noise, the way he’d reacted to it, was important, though it took a second for her to process why.

Then she got it. He had been startled. The creature had been surprised out of his lair by something unexpected. Or someone?

Oh God, please
.

Hope bloomed, relentless and hot. What if someone else was out there? For the first time in days, she realized he hadn’t taken her to the bowels of hell but to somewhere real, a place that other people could come upon. A mailman, a neighbor? Anyone who could help her?

An internal voice tried to dampen her hopes. That might not have been someone banging on the door at all, but merely a loose shutter or a tree branch. Besides, it was dark out, maybe even the middle of the night—no mailman worked these hours.

The police. Maybe they’re looking for me
.

It was a long shot. But long shots were all she had right now. “Help me. Somebody, help me,” she whispered. “Please, I’m here!”

She didn’t think about what he’d do when he came back. Didn’t stop for one second to worry whether he’d find some new way to punish her.

No. Vonnie Jackson simply began to scream as if her life depended on it.

Chapter 1

Thursday, 6:05 a.m.

Aidan McConnell awoke to the smell of gingerbread and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman’s scream.

The scream ended the moment he opened his eyes. The smell did not.

It took him a minute to place the scent, which had invaded his head and his dreams as he tried to grab some sleep just before dawn on Thursday. At first, in those early moments between asleep and awake, he assumed he’d been dreaming of some long- forgotten holiday visit to his grandmother’s house; her kitchen had always been rich with all the delicious aromas any sugar-deprived kid could desire. But when he sat up on his couch and realized the cloying, sickeningly sweet odor of ginger and spice was truly filling his every breath, he knew he wasn’t dreaming.

He was connecting.

“Damn it,” he muttered, not wanting this, not now, not again. Not so soon after last night’s mental invasion. Bacon, for God’s sake. The reek of fatty, greasy bacon had seemed to permeate every inch of air in his house a few hours ago, and now it was gingerbread.

Forcing himself to focus on his other senses, he stared at his huge, antique walnut desk, which sat in the dead center of the room. Its surface was hidden as completely as the top of a freshly buried casket. Files, notepads, research books, his laptop—they consumed almost every inch of space. A few random items finished the job: A coffee mug that read, “Psychics do it when they’re not even there.” A colorful sand pail filled with pencils in varying lengths. A paperweight. An old-fashioned wind-up clock that dinged violently when the alarm went off.

Aidan stared; he focused; he thought about the coolness of the brass on the clock and the heft of the stone base of the paperweight and the way freshly brewed coffee tasted when sipped out of that mug. He thought of the thousands of doodled sketches he’d made with those pencils, trying to capture images he’d seen while mentally connecting with someone before they shortened and finally disappeared from his mind like a shadow at high noon.

It didn’t work.

Spice. Cinnamon. Sugar. But bloated, vile, thick, and putrid like the remnants of a Thanksgiving pie buried in a garbage heap with rotting turkey and moldy stuffing.

He focused harder, rubbing the tips of his fingers across the grain of the leather couch, craning to hear the faint tick of that clock, staring at the desk, ordering his other senses to combine and smother the smell. But still the stench enveloped him. He could taste it now, the sting of too much ginger, the vile, rancid sugar melting on his tongue. His stomach rebelled.

Closing his eyes, he gritted his teeth, resorting to his oldest tricks against the familiar invasion into his psyche. He visualized a sea of sturdy cement building blocks. One by one, he began piling them up, erecting the psychic barrier between his mind and the one with which he was unwillingly connecting. Building mental walls in order to protect himself wasn’t just an expression when it came to Aidan; it was pure survival. He’d have gone insane long ago if he hadn’t learned how to protect himself.

His maternal grandmother—the one who’d slipped him usually denied sweets—had taught him the trick when he was eleven or twelve. Teaching him how to survive in a world that didn’t like kids who were “different,” she’d given him just about every coping skill he had. She had been strong-willed, had fought for him when nobody else would and Aidan was too young to do it for himself. They’d made quite a team. The old woman had been different, strange, had seen things she’d never truly seen, known things she couldn’t possibly know.

Like him.

In another era, she would have been burned as a witch. In modern-day Georgia, however, she’d been deemed a quack and hidden away like the proverbial skeleton in the family’s closet. She was seldom spoken of, but would never allow herself to be completely banished. When she felt like it, she inserted herself into her family’s lives, whether they wanted her there or not.

That was lucky for him. Because she had been the only one Aidan could talk to about his unexpected, unwanted abilities. The only one who’d understood and helped him. She was also the one who had never called him a demon from hell when he was eight years old.

That’d been his oh-so-devout parents. Who said radical Southern Baptists didn’t know how to raise a kid right? They’d reacted by locking him away with his grandmother . . . who made the best gingerbread.
That smell
.

“No, build, damn it!”

He mentally built—row by row, layer by layer, foot by foot. His head ached, but he forced every brain cell into submission. The cement wall was almost touching the clouds by the time the spicy stench began to gradually dissipate like steam off a mirror. Until finally he could breathe again without smelling anything but the normal leather of the couch and the faintly old air of the closed-in house in which he lived.