“Deceiving everyone.”
She nodded slowly, her gaze fixed on the table now, eyes distant. “The weird thing is, after taking all the time and trouble to deceive everybody around him for such a long, long time, when it came right down to it, it didn’t take much at all to start revealing the beast inside.”
Rafe was very much afraid he knew where this was going, and it required an effort to hold his voice steady when he asked, “What did it take?”
“No. Just that. Just one little word.” She looked up, focused on him. “That was the beginning. He asked me to a school dance, and I said no.”
“What did he do, Isabel?”
“Nothing then. I told him I didn’t feel like that about him, that he was more of a brother to me. He said it was a shame, but he understood. A few days later, I saw him in the bushes outside my house. Outside my bedroom. Watching me.”
“You didn’t call the cops,” Rafe guessed.
“I was seventeen. I trusted him. I thought he was just… taking the rejection badly. Maybe I was even a little bit flattered on some level of myself, that it mattered so much to him. So I just closed the curtains. And kept them closed. But then he started… turning up wherever I was. Always at a distance. Always watching me. That was when I started to be… just a little bit afraid.”
“But you still didn’t report it.”
“No. Everybody loved him, and I think I was half afraid nobody would believe me. I confided in my best friend. She was envious. Said he had a crush on me, and I should be flattered.” She laughed, again without humor. “She was seventeen too. What do you know, at seventeen?
“I tried to feel flattered, but it was getting more and more difficult to feel anything but scared. I could take care of myself, I knew self-defense, but… there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before. Something angry. And hungry. And I didn’t understand why, but it terrified me.”
Rafe waited, unable to ask another question. He wished they were somewhere more private yet had a strong hunch that, if they had been, Isabel wouldn’t have been willing-or able-to confide in him about this. He thought she needed the insulation of a semipublic place for this. There were people here, even if not close by. Food and music and an occasional quiet laugh from another part of the room.
Normality here.
He thought Isabel was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold it together enough to talk about this if they were alone. Either that or she had chosen, quite deliberately, to tell him this without even a shadow of intimacy. With a table between them in a public place, where the ugliness could be softened or blurred or even discarded at the end with a game shrug and a bland But it happened years ago, of course.
Depending on his reaction to what she was telling him.
Depending on how well he held it together.
“Of course, it wasn’t talked about so much in those days, stalking.” Her voice was steady, controlled. “I mean, that was something that happened to celebrities, not ordinary people. Not seventeen-year-old girls. And certainly not involving boys they’d known their whole lives. So when I finally did tell my father, he did the logical thing in his mind. He didn’t call the police-he confronted the boy. Very reasonably, no yelling, no threats. Just a friendly warning that I wasn’t interested and he should, really, stay away.”
“His trigger,” Rafe muttered.
“As it turned out, yes. My father couldn’t have known. Nobody could have known. He’d hidden his true face all too well. If my father had gone to the police and everyone had taken the threat seriously, maybe the ending would have been different. But after it was all over, they told me… it probably wouldn’t have. Delayed things, maybe, but he hadn’t actually done anything, and he was such a good boy, so they couldn’t have held him for long. So it probably wouldn’t have changed anything if I had acted differently, if my father had. Probably.”
“Isabel-”
“It was a Wednesday. I came home from school, just like always. Rode with a friend, because my father didn’t believe I was old enough to have a car yet. She let me out, and then she headed home while I went into the house. As soon as I closed the front door behind me, I knew something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Maybe I smelled the blood.”
“Oh, Christ,” Rafe said softly.
“I went into the living room and… they were there. My parents. Sitting on the couch, side by side. They were holding hands. We found out later from the note he’d left that he had forced them in there at gunpoint. Sat them down. And then he shot them. Both of them. They hadn’t even had time to get really scared; they just looked… surprised.”
“Isabel, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She blinked, and for just an instant her mouth seemed to quiver. Then it steadied, and she said calmly, “The story could have ended there. If it had, maybe I wouldn’t have come out of it psychic. I don’t know. Nobody knows.
“But that was really just the beginning. I turned-to run or call the police, I don’t know. And he was there. He said he’d been waiting for me. He had the gun, a silenced automatic; that’s why the neighbors hadn’t heard. I was too scared to scream at first, too shocked, but then he told me he’d kill me if I made a sound. So I didn’t. All during those hours, all night long, I never made a sound.”
Rafe wished he could drink. He wished he could stop her from finishing the story. But he couldn’t do either.
“Looking back, knowing what I know now, I think if I had made a sound he might not have gotten so crazy. I think that’s what maddened him, that no matter what he did to me, he couldn’t get me to scream. Or even to cry. Without even understanding how or what it would mean, I was taking away his power.
“He-right there on the living-room rug, in front of my dead parents, he tore my clothes off, and he raped me, holding the gun jammed against my neck. He kept saying I was his, I belonged to him, and he’d make me admit it.
“He did things to me I didn’t even know were possible. I was just seventeen. Just a kid, really. I was a virgin. I’d never had a boyfriend serious enough to-to do more than kiss. I wasn’t ignorant about sex, but… I couldn’t understand why I didn’t die, why what he was doing didn’t kill me. But it didn’t. I bled. And I hurt. And as the hours passed, the beautiful face he’d worn for so long got uglier and uglier. He started cursing me. Hitting me. He took the gun and-hurt me with that too.”
She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Cracked ribs, a fractured jaw and wrist, a dislocated shoulder. Too many bruises to count. Raw inside. At the end, he was sitting astride me, both hands holding my head as he slammed it against the floor, over and over again. Screaming that I was his and he’d make me admit it.”
Isabel didn’t shed a tear, but her eyes were very bright, and her voice was very soft when she finished. “And his touch burned. He had red eyes, and horns, and scaly flesh, and his breath smelled of brimstone.”
Travis was more pleased than he wanted to admit-or show her-when he found Ally waiting for him outside the police station after work. Waiting on the hood of his car, actually, and wearing a very short skirt.
“You shouldn’t be out alone this time of night,” he told her, trying not to stare at long legs that looked great even under garish outside lights.
She lifted an eyebrow at him, amused. “I’m in a brightly lit parking lot. At the police station. Other than being inside the building, I doubt there’s a safer place right now.”