45
Kellen woke to the drone of an airplane in flight.
She knew where she was before she opened her eyes. Under her nose, she smelled expensive carpet, so she was sprawled facedown in the airplane aisle. But something close at hand emitted another odor, the reek of something burned and rotting. The stench made her want to vomit.
Her fear made her want to cry.
The truth made her want to hide.
She remembered everything. Every damned Cecilia thing.
She wished she didn’t. She wished she could forget she had ever been Cecilia, weak, broken and guilty. For years now, she had pretended to be Kellen, to be strong, fearless. But here, on the floor of the Lykke Industries jet, the only thing that seemed real was—she was an impostor.
She pulled her hands to her chest, used them to lever herself up.
Everything hurt. Her shattered sternum robbed her of breath. Her broken hand throbbed. The chemical used to drug her gave her a relentless headache.
At her first movement, Erin cackled.
Of course. This night had shone a light on Kellen’s past and in the process stripped away her future. She didn’t glance around, but she said, “Erin, you need a better air freshener to hang on the rearview mirror of your fancy corporate jet.”
Erin stopped laughing. “How could you? Make a joke? When he is sitting here like this…” She choked on tears.
Kellen froze. The hairs rose on the back of her head. Something not quite human was watching her. Slowly, inch by inch, she turned her head and looked, past Erin, who was crouched in the aisle, to the back row where a blackened hulk of a decaying human sat propped against the window. “Is that…?” she whispered.
“My brother.” Erin’s voice throbbed with devotion. “My darling.”
His teeth shone in a face devoid of flesh, smiling death’s smile at Kellen.
He had come for her at last.
Erin petted his hand.
Kellen gagged at the thought of touching that burned, flaking flesh. “How did you locate—” she nodded toward Gregory “—the corpse?”
“He wasn’t dead!”
Kellen remembered the force of the blast, the heat of the fire. “I can hardly believe that.”
“When the police didn’t find his body, I searched. I searched and I found him on the boulders by the sea. He’d been blown out of the house by the explosion and he rested there, burned, broken, the salty waves battering his rocky bed. He was alive.” Erin stood and stepped closer. “Do you hear me? Alive. I brought him home. We cared for him, Mother and I. We loved him.”
Kellen faintly heard the rhetoric, the melodrama, over the ringing in her ears. “How did you get him on the plane?”
“I carried him myself. He weighs so little now…” Tears trickled down Erin’s cheeks. “Do you not even recognize your own husband?”
Kellen muttered, “He was less crispy last time I saw him.”
Erin kicked her in the chin.
Kellen blacked out again.
When she came to, she was facedown in the aisle, her ear against the floor. The plane droned on. She heard no other movement. Yet she knew, she knew, Erin was somewhere behind her, waiting to hurt her, maim her. Her partner was a man, dead and rotting for seven years.
Foolish Cecilia feared them both.
With eyes closed she considered her situation. At the front of the plane was a small galley. A door protected the crew, whoever they were. They knew Erin had brought this rotting piece of flesh aboard. So were they crazy? Zombies? Extremely well paid? They wouldn’t help her. She needed to defend herself, to bring this to a different conclusion than Erin imagined and hoped for. Yet she was badly injured and her weapons were gone; Erin had stripped them away. Erin was taller, big-boned, sturdy—and uninjured. So what to do? How to survive?
She thought about the real Kellen, about how bravely her relative had come to the rescue of her young, terrified cousin. Would she betray the woman who had sacrificed her life by giving in to fear? No. God help her, no.
She rolled onto her side, slowly gathered herself and sat up.
As she suspected, a grinning Erin again crouched in the aisle beside her brother’s decomposing body. Their smiles were eerily alike.
Kellen needed time to get herself into position. Erin wanted to talk. Kellen was glad to oblige. “Where are we going?”
“Back to Maine. Back to the Lykke mansion, where I’ll do as Gregory wished. I’ll see that you die as he did—slowly and in agony.”
Kellen shifted to sit cross-legged. She used the knuckles of her good hand to massage her thighs, get the blood flowing again. “Did he die slowly and in agony?” Kellen knew what to say now. Knew what to do. Coolly, she said, “Good!”
Erin kicked out again.
Kellen turned her shoulder.
Erin missed.
Kellen caught Erin’s leg at the top of her kick and flung herself forward, toppling Erin off her feet.
Erin crashed backward across the seats. Her head hit the airplane’s window and Kellen heard a satisfying thumping sound like a ripe watermelon on a hot Nevada summer day. That almost made up for the slashing pain in her chest and head and… Damn it, she was supposed to be on her way to the hospital, not fighting for her life with a dead man as a witness.
God bless Mara for one thing. She’d made Kellen stronger than she had ever been in her life, taught her kickboxing, and now Kellen brought a kick around from the side and slammed Erin in the ribs.
Erin struggled to turn, fell into a seat, sat there and stared into the distance as if looking into the past. “During the whole long week when Gregory struggled to die, he said only one thing. He said you were still alive.”
Kellen had suffered nightmares about witnessing her cousin’s murder—and the look Gregory gave Cecilia when he looked up and realized his mistake. “Before the explosion, he saw me.”
“Yes. He made me swear I would do what he failed to do.” Erin lifted her head. “I’m going to fulfill my brother’s final wish. I’m going to send you to join him.”
Kellen had to finish this, and she had to do it while she had the breath and the strength. “You’re as mean and crazy as your brother. You know that?”
Erin came off the seat as if she’d been stung and swung her fist at Kellen.
Kellen leaped backward down the narrow aisle and into the galley. “You’re the one who sent the snake!”
“As a warning.”
“Gregory’s face in the window—that was your doing.”
“You went to a man’s rooms to betray your husband!”
“First of all, I didn’t—” Kellen stopped herself. “I can’t betray Gregory. He’s dead. Look at him.” She gestured at that grotesque, blackened, grinning body. “He’s dead. He has no wife. He has no life. He’s dead.”
“Every time you look at another man, you betray Gregory’s memory. He loved you. He loved you so much that when he realized you were going to leave him, he wanted death at your side.”
“Do you approve of his love for me?”
Erin glanced away.
Kellen saw the crack in Erin’s devotion, and she pressed her advantage. “You approved of everything he did. You had to approve of me.”
Bitterly now, Erin said, “You didn’t deserve him.”
“That’s for sure. No one deserves to be hurt, humiliated, killed. He was a murderer, but you’re not. Not yet!”
Erin laughed. She laughed, all merry and amused. “My mother wanted to warn you I was coming for you.”
Kellen stood still for a critical moment. “Your mother wanted to warn me?”
“I couldn’t let her do that.”
“So you…killed Sylvia? You killed your mother?”
Erin smacked Kellen with a roundhouse to the jaw.
Kellen dropped to her knees, her head ringing. Every time she inhaled, pain knifed her lungs. Every time she lifted her hand, the swelling intensified.
“I smothered her with a pillow. She was senile, babbling about how she had bred monsters by a monster. She was talking about me and Gregory, and about our father!” Erin swayed back and forth like a charmed cobra. “She said she loved us, but she called us monsters.”
Kellen cradled her aching jaw and collected bits and pieces of consciousness. She opened her swollen eyes and with her left hand pulled herself to her feet. “Erin Lykke, you’re going to hell.”
“No.” Erin had the audacity to look hurt. “She deserved it. She was going to betray Gregory!” She started toward Kellen.
Kellen backed up, drawing Erin farther into the galley.
Erin laughed. “You’re puffing like a freight train gasping its way up a mountain. What good do you think retreat will do you? You’re almost at the crew quarters. You’ve got your back to the wall.”
“And you, my dear Erin, are a sucker.” Kellen leaned her left hand on a counter, lifted herself and flung her legs in a circle in the roundhouse flying kick that Mara had taught her. The flying kick she’d never been able to perfect before.
Her foot caught Erin on the side of the neck. Erin gagged. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She stumbled backward down the aisle, then fell on her rear next to Gregory’s charred remains. When she opened her eyes, she stared at Kellen in round-eyed wonder. The Cecilia she remembered had been weak, feeble, a weeping wimp of a girl who Gregory abused in body and mind.
This Cecilia had fused with her cousin, Kellen. They were one, and they were strong.
Head outthrust, eyes intent, Kellen advanced down the aisle. “If your own mother said you were a monster, if she said Gregory was a monster, that tells you everything. He was barely a human being. He was a demon.”
“Then we were monsters together!” Erin surged out of her seat and right at Kellen.
Kellen used her elbow under Erin’s jaw to snap her head back. “I’m not going back to Maine, and you’re not, either. I’m not going to die on this plane, and you’re not, either. I’m going to survive, and you’re going to go to prison.”
Erin collapsed onto the floor again. Her nose was bleeding, her cheek bruising. She crawled backward, her eyes fixed on Kellen. “They’ll know who you are…Cecilia.”
“Then it’s time the world knows. Most certainly, it’s time the pilot understands what’s at stake.” Kellen started for the front.
“Cecilia…” Erin sang the name in a horror-movie voice.
Kellen swung around, ready to defend herself.
Erin was on her knees. She pulled Kellen’s Glock from the seat pocket in front of Gregory. She held it in both shaking hands, released the safety and pointed it at Kellen.
No. Kellen had done so much, come so far. It couldn’t end like this. “Look.” She held both her hands up. “You don’t want to shoot at me. If you hit any of the electrical or the hydraulics, the plane could go down.”
Erin hoisted herself into the seat beside Gregory, leaned her head against his charred shoulder and touched the barrel to the window beside him. “I won’t hit the electrical,” she promised.
“This is a pressurized cabin. If you put a bullet through the window, all the air inside here will blast out of the plane like a giant explosion.” Kellen spoke slowly and gestured, trying to convey the scope of the calamity. “You’d be in big trouble. You’d go shooting out into the upper atmosphere, never to be seen again. Your pilot probably wouldn’t be able to control the plane, and he’ll die, too.”
Erin laughed, and she sounded so much like Gregory a chill rippled up Kellen’s spine. “You’ll die, Cecilia, and somewhere, Gregory will be happy.” Erin’s finger squeezed the trigger.
The bullet shattered the window.
Kellen threw herself to the floor, grabbed the metal legs of a seat and held on. Air pressure blasted out the window, peeling away a two-foot-wide chunk of the plane’s fuselage from ceiling to floor.
Erin disappeared into the void. The reeking wreck of Gregory’s body vanished out the hole with Erin.
The plane rocked, out of control.
Kellen careened back and forth, helpless, caught in forces beyond her control. Her injured hand slipped and slipped again. She clutched with her good hand, but…
No air.
No gravity.
No strength.
She fought to again grasp the metal leg with her swollen fingertips.
The plane spiraled downward.
She couldn’t breathe. She was losing consciousness.
She was going to die.