by Stone, Kyla
The bridge where he’d stood that day. The blizzard raging around him. The brick in his hands tied to the rusty antique key.
The key that had unlocked the cage that held Ray Shultz and the Carter brothers. The maniacs who had unleashed a rain of carnage, death, and destruction upon Crossway Church.
The shockwaves from that single devastating act reverberated through Fall Creek even now. Julian felt the tremors rocking him to his very core, vibrating beneath his feet.
Not my fault! his mind shrieked. It wasn’t his fault. None of it. He didn’t deserve the guilt and recrimination. He didn’t deserve any of it.
“Someone made you feel weak once,” Bishop said. “And now the only way you can make that feeling go away is by hurting someone weaker than you. Only it never really goes away, does it? That soulless void in the center of your chest. So you have to keep hurting people, over and over and over.”
“You don’t know me!” Julian raged.
He tore his gaze from the bridge. He searched the banks, the wide flat plane of ice with increasing desperation.
Bishop wouldn’t stop until he’d killed Julian. That fact was becoming clear with each passing second. Julian needed to figure out a way to defend himself, and fast.
Several ten-inch diameter iced-over holes pockmarked the frozen river here and there that he’d marked with a pine bough or small stack of rocks. They wouldn’t be enough to fall through. Not like he needed.
He surreptitiously scanned the ice, searching for the tell-tale discoloration, holes, and pressure ridges that indicated poor ice quality. He thought of the old adage that had guided ice fisherman for ages: Thick and blue, tried and true. Thin and crispy, way too risky.
There. His gaze snagged on the section of rotten ice he’d bypassed the last time he’d come out.
The ice was thin and ridged, a sickly yellow. He could see the water rushing beneath it. It wouldn’t hold the weight of a man. Not a man like Bishop.
Julian just needed to lead Bishop to the rotten ice. When Bishop stepped onto it, he’d fall in.
It wouldn’t be enough to drown him. Bishop would crawl out eventually, but it would weaken him, render him helpless as he struggled to clamber out. The brutal ice-cold water would drain his strength.
At his most vulnerable, Julian would come in to save him. He was a cop, after all. To serve and protect was his duty.
When Julian was close, he’d seize the knife from his boot, dart in, and stab Bishop in the chest or the throat.
Bishop would sink below the ice, the current dragging him away and carrying his body to Watervliet or St. Joe or even all the way to Lake Michigan.
He’d vanish completely, never to trouble Fall Creek or the Sinclairs again.
Anticipation quickened his pulse. Yes, that would work.
Julian moved further out onto the ice. He felt carefully with each backward step, testing the thickness before settling his weight. A breeze kicked up, sending clouds of ice crystals skittering across the river.
Bishop took three strides, then hesitated. He narrowed his eyes, as if sensing a trap. “What are you doing, Sinclair?”
He was still ten to twelve feet from the weak spot. Julian needed to distract him. Blind him with anger so he didn’t notice he was being led to the slaughter.
Bishop was a dead man walking. It didn’t matter what Julian said, what he admitted to. Bishop wasn’t leaving this river. Not ever.
The thought was almost freeing. Julian smiled. “If I tell you what you want to hear, do you promise to leave? You don’t use that gun. You turn around and go back the way you came.”
“I don’t make any promises other than that I will act justly.”
Julian made a face. “That a Bible quote?”
“Not exactly, but close. ‘What has the Lord required of you but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’”
“Whatever. Sorry I asked. Ask your questions and then leave me alone.”
Bishop watched him, his gaze cold and shrewd. Gone was the warm, gregarious pastor. This man more closely resembled a shark. “Did you send Desoto and Benner to Noah Sheridan’s home with the intent to kill Liam Coleman and myself?”
Julian sucked in air through his teeth. His lungs felt seared. One step back, one step to the east, eyes flicking to the rotten ice and then quickly away.
The air hummed with a sizzling, crackling energy.
Bishop was already dead, he reminded himself. Anything Julian said now was like shouting into the wind. His words tore from his mouth and sailed out into the great wide nowhere.
“Yeah, I did,” he said finally. “And I stand behind it. Liam Coleman is a murderer and deserves the death penalty. And so do you!” Anger boiled through him. He practically spat the words. “You’re a dissenter and troublemaker. We’re trying to keep the peace and protect the town and all you do is rile people up. You exaggerate and spread rumors. You’re a fear-mongerer. You deserved everything you had coming to you.”
Bishop’s mouth tightened. His neck constricted, tendons straining. He matched Julian’s steps. One forward, one to the east. “And the night of the massacre? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you,” Julian said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
50
Julian
Day Thirty-Four
Julian swallowed. He flexed his stiffening fingers, imagined the knife in his hand. Pictured himself stabbing it straight through Bishop’s heart. “They were there for you.”
Bishop’s face contorted in a rictus of pain, an agony like Julian had never experienced. Or ever wanted to. “For me.”
“You were the perfect target.” The words were easier to speak than he’d thought. Actually, it felt damn good to get it out. “You wouldn’t shut down that stupid food pantry. Why it was so precious to you, I have no idea. It wasn’t even a big deal until you made it into one. You always have to go against the grain. You always have to make yourself important somehow, don’t you?”
“What happened, Julian?”
“The council wouldn’t vote the militia in. We needed them. Anyone with half a brain could see that. Chief Briggs was too bull-headed to see anything but his own agenda. Noah was too weak to go against the town.”
Julian shrugged. “It fit together like pieces to a puzzle. Ray Shultz had it in for you. Let him out, and he and his goons would take care of you. That was the deal.”
“The gold,” Bishop said, his voice raw.
“Shultz was happy to do it. He’d have done it for free. The gold story was a bit of insurance. To make sure his goons were on board, too. To make sure it happened. It was stupid, in hindsight, but those meth heads weren’t exactly geniuses. It kept them from looking at their benefactor with suspicion or too many questions. Money talks, you know. It always talks. It was a currency they understood.”
Bishop made a sound in the back of his throat like a wounded animal. “You unlocked the door. You let them out of the cell in exchange for the death of myself and my family.”
Julian stifled a wince. “Not your family. Just you. I didn’t know what they would do. I had no idea they’d go and shoot up the church and hurt all those people. How would I know that?”
Bishop’s booming voice went ragged with grief and rising fury. “You unleash a tiger and then cry ignorance when he does what he was born to do, what is in his nature? Ray Shultz, Tommy and Billy Carter—they were killers!”
“Now, wait just a minute—”
Bishop raised the pistol with both hands and pointed it at Julian’s face. He flicked off the safety. “You are as guilty for every single one of those forty-seven deaths as they are. You are culpable for the deaths of my wife and daughters!”
Julian averted his gaze. He couldn’t bear the righteous fury radiating from every fiber of Bishop’s being. He was a father wronged. A widower bent on avenging the death of his family.
His shoulders quaked, his jaw bulging, the cords standing out in his neck. Even fro
m five feet away, he loomed over Julian. “Because of you, I am a husband without a wife! A father without children!”
Julian cowered before his wrath. Trepidation filled him. In that moment, Julian feared Bishop really would shoot him. “You don’t want to do this, Bishop!”
Bishop’s features twisted with rage and grief. His expression broke, full of loss. A man unmoored, untethered from everything he’d ever believed in.
“Please!” Julian cried.
Bishop surged forward. “I should do it! I should kill you!”
The ice popped and creaked.
Bishop halted. The muzzle of the gun aimed at Julian’s head. The gun trembled in his hands. “You deserve to die!”
Dark energy thrummed through Julian’s veins—fear and dread and a terrible excitement. They were five feet from each other. Bishop one step from the rotten ice.
Julian raised his hands, palms out, in a gesture of supplication, of surrender. “You win, Bishop! Arrest me. You take me in. Throw me in that jail cell and feed me through the bars. Whatever you need to do, man. You don’t want to kill me. I’m unarmed. Won’t the guilt eat you up inside? Don’t you preach about mercy?”
“Sometimes death is the mercy,” Bishop growled. A shadow moved behind his eyes. A flicker of doubt, of hesitation.
“Here! Take my handcuffs. There’s a pair in my pocket. You can slap ‘em on me right now.” Julian moved his hand slowly to his coat pocket. He pulled out the cuffs and held them out. “Here. Come get them. Put them on me yourself.”
A long, tense silence stretched between them. Bishop wrestling with his conscience, Julian breathless, humming with that dark, nervous energy, sensing the thin ice between them, silently begging Bishop to take one more step. Just one.
The river made no sound—not the ice, not the dark water beneath it. Julian could feel it flowing like his own blood, rushing dark and cold and silent.
Only a shelf of frozen water between Bishop and a watery grave.
Something shifted in Bishop’s demeanor. His shoulders slumped. His face cleared.
He lowered the pistol. “You deserve to die, but not by my hand.”
Julian stared at him in disbelief.
“I’m not going to kill you. But you will face justice. Your fate will be up to the council—and to God.”
Bishop gestured with the pistol. “Put the cuffs on yourself. But you come to me, Sinclair. You don’t think I see what you’re doing? Make sure you skirt that weak spot right in front of me.” He gritted his teeth like it pained him to say it. “You wouldn’t want to fall in.”
Despair filled him. Bishop hadn’t fallen for it, after all. Julian was out of plays. He had no plan, no way to get out of this.
Julian wanted to believe his mother would save him, but he didn’t believe in anything anymore. Not even her. If only—
Crack.
The sound stopped them both cold. A sound they felt as much as heard—a great popping in the floor of the world.
Julian’s heart stuttered. He strained his ears, listening hard for any creak or pop or crack.
He could hear his breaths, Bishop’s shallow gasps. The wind whistling through the boughs of the pines and scouring the wide flat surface of the river.
And then—the shifting, crackling ice soft as a whisper, as a lover’s sigh.
That same popping sound. The ground beneath his feet shuddered.
“We’re out too far,” Bishop said. “We need to go back. Nice and slow—”
A terrible groan shattered the air. The ice splintered, exploding in blasts like gunshots. The ice beneath their feet shifted, rising on its axis, slanting dangerously.
Julian’s boots slid sideways as Bishop skittered backward, leaping back as the ice split between them, a great crack opening up, a fissure like a mouth grinning wider and wider.
The ice sighed like it was taking a breath. Julian squatted, arms wide to balance himself, terrified to move in either direction lest the ice crumble beneath him.
They were fifty feet out. The water was deep, the current strong.
Terror gripped him. If the ice collapsed, he could get pulled under the ice. He wouldn’t be able to break through from beneath. He would drown and freeze simultaneously.
The chunk of ice he stood on pitched beneath him. A sharp edge rose up like a huge fin. He felt his boots slipping down the incline, the traction failing, the grade too steep.
Dropping the handcuffs, he fell to his chest and clung like a barnacle to the upended slab. It was maybe the size of a car, not much more.
The angle tilted to ninety degrees; he slid into the water legs-first. He plunged downward, struggling frantically to cling to the ice, to keep as much of his body above the surface as he could.
He sank past his waist, his ribs, then his chest.
The brutal shock of the cold stunned him, squeezed the breath from his lungs.
He released the smaller slab and beat at the water with arms that already felt like blocks of ice, splashing and kicking, sputtering and flailing for the closest ledge of solid ice.
The broken slabs scraped and knocked against each other. The current shoved him against the ledge and yanked at his legs. His coat, snow pants, and layers of clothing filled with water. Everything suddenly felt fifty pounds heavier, his boots like anchors.
He clutched feebly, desperately at the ice. Up close, the ice was thick and bubbled and fissured with dozens of hairline cracks. Ugly and yellowish and harsh.
Rotten ice. Nothing beautiful about it at all.
He blinked water from his eyes, the droplets already freezing his eyelashes together. Shivering violently, he gazed up at Bishop, who stood six or seven feet from the hole in the ice.
Bishop stared at Julian with shock and something like awe on his face. His pistol hung limply at his side.
“Help me!” Julian screamed. “I’m drowning!”
Bishop said nothing.
“Give me your hand! Save me!”
Very carefully, Bishop took a step back. Then another.
Panic constricted Julian’s chest. He was so cold. Colder than he’d ever been in his life. He could feel his cells freezing, the cold scalding his nerve endings.
“You can’t do this! You can’t leave me to die!”
Bishop just watched him, his expression impassive, unreadable.
He wasn’t going to help. He was going to stand there and watch Julian die.
“Where’s your faith, Bishop?” he cried. “Where’s your God now?”
“God is love. Love is just,” Bishop said like a chant, a prayer. “God is justice. This is justice.”
“No!” Julian screamed. “NO!”
“Daphne Bishop,” Bishop said, his baritone voice clear and deep and booming. The sound echoed across the ice. It filled Julian’s ears and ricocheted inside his skull. “Zoe Bishop. Juniper Bishop.”
Julian scrabbled at the ice with numb fingers, but it was useless. He was dying. He was going to die.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” Bishop said. “For I have none left to give.”
The blood roaring in Julian’s ears turned slow and sluggish. He couldn’t wrap his foggy brain around it. It made no sense. This was all wrong.
It should be Bishop dying on the ice, not Julian. It shouldn’t be him.
He stared at Bishop in shock, in growing despair, but Bishop offered him nothing. Nothing at all. He simply stood and waited—a silent witness.
Like the cold and brutal landscape, the vicious winter, the greedy river sucking at him, pulling, pulling, eager to drag him under.
The seconds ticked away like a bomb counting down to zero. The cold was a vise squeezing the strength and vitality from him, draining the very life from his veins.
He’d stopped shaking, he realized dimly. His teeth had stopped chattering. He was no longer cold. He felt nothing below the ice, not even the current pulling at his legs.
He couldn’t feel his limbs. They were dead. His legs, dead. His a
rms, dead. His heart, dead.
“It wasn’t…just me,” he forced through numb lips.
Maybe it was the guilt talking. Or a deep-seated rage. A hatred he hadn’t been able to acknowledge, even to himself.
He was going down. He didn’t have to go down alone.
“Tell me,” Bishop said.
“S-she knows…everything. She’s always known. S-she acts like she d-doesn’t to make her f-feel better about h-herself. She’s the o-one who approved it, approved everything. W-who sent me to the prison cell that night.”
Bishop went absolutely still. His iron gaze drilled into Julian’s soul. “Say her name.”
The cold was taking him. His brain thick, stuffed with cotton. Everything growing distant and fuzzy.
The current was pulling harder and harder at his concrete legs. His numb aching fingers barely able to grip the ice.
He thought of the key, still tied to a brick somewhere in this same river. He thought of his hated brother, who was dead, too. He thought of Noah, the best friend who’d betrayed him.
His mind clouded around a single bright splinter, one last thing.
He said, “M-my mother. Rosamond Sinclair.”
Julian let go. The cold dark water drew him down, down, down into its shadowy depths. Down and away.
51
Rosamond Sinclair
Day Thirty-Five
Rosamond Sinclair’s sons were dead.
Both of them. First Gavin, maliciously murdered. And now Julian, lost to the ice.
His death was no accident. She was sure of it. One of her still loyal police officers had spotted Atticus Bishop at the river with him two days ago.
Julian had been murdered as surely as Gavin had.
Shattering grief ripped through her. Grief, loss, and a terrible black rage. She shook with it. Trembled with it. Her whole body thrummed with feverish fury, with hatred, with a relentless desire to destroy everything she could get her hands on.
