by Ren Hamilton
Joey flinched ever so slightly, and the smile slipped away. “He told me what happened that night. About how he couldn’t kill you. It’s ironic, really. All these years he was afraid I would be the one to get attached to you. The way Wesley got attached to Rollie. But that never happened to me. I never gave a shit about you. I would have shot you without hesitation.”
Patrick’s stomach shuddered “So that’s it? This is who you are? Some…sociopath I didn’t catch even a glimpse of for ten years? I don’t believe it. This isn’t you.”
“Oh please, Obrien. You’ve gotten so dramatic lately. I liked you better before. You were so…simple. That’s why we picked you. You ask me who I am. Well let me tell you who I’m not. I am not Wesley Shepherd. I don’t intend to hide away for the rest of my life in some log cabin, shivering with guilt and self-loathing.”
“When did Shep get to you?”
Joey laughed. “Get to me? He didn’t get to me. I sought him out. I went looking for him. I know you want to place all the blame on Shep. You need to believe that he’s the one who corrupts and controls me. But that’s not the way it is. It never has been.”
Patrick shook his head. “Shep calmed your soul. He made it so you couldn’t feel remorse.”
“Yes. If it makes you feel better, that blood Robin gave me really did break the bonds I had with you and Shep. Kudos to Aunt Betsy, that fruity fucking witch. I didn’t think she had it in her.”
“So the pain you were experiencing was real. The remorse was real. Then why are you doing this now?”
“I don’t want to feel the pain!” he shouted, and Patrick jumped. “I don’t want to, as the therapist said, ‘explore my feelings’. I can’t live with that kind of guilt. Why would I want to? So I found Shep. I knew he was alive, I could feel it. I found him and I had him do me again. I had him give me his blood and calm my soul. It wasn’t as easy this time. He’s in pretty rough shape after that fall he took. He was barely able to save Klee from drowning. I still can’t believe you brought the FBI to our door, Obrien. I’ve been wanting so badly to tell you that you make me sick, you piece of shit. You make me sick for what you did to us.”
“No. You don’t know what you’re saying, Joey. We can fix this. Please, come with me. We’ll go see Aunt Betsy.”
“I don’t want to go see fucking Aunt Betsy! Don’t you get it? I am not a victim here! I volunteered to this when I was fifteen, and I volunteered to it again this time. This was my choice!”
“I don’t believe you. You were an innocent boy back then. Shep took advantage of you. He manipulated you. You didn’t know what you were getting into.”
“You’re wrong. Shep told me everything before he ever calmed my soul. I know you don’t want to believe that. You want to make him the bad guy, but you don’t understand. All those years ago, he gave me a choice. I could have said no and he would have walked away and found somebody else.”
Patrick shook his head. “My God, Joey. Why? Why would you choose this?”
Joey laughed. “You mean why didn’t I want to be normal? Let me tell you something, Obrien. I was never normal. Do you have any idea what my I.Q. is?”
“I’ve heard it’s quite high.”
Joey threw his head back and cackled. “Yes, Obrien. It’s quite high. That’s putting it mildly. It’s the highest I.Q. ever recorded. You want to know who Joey Duvaine is? Joey Duvaine is a fucking freak. He always has been. My life was hell before I met Shep.”
Patrick scoffed. “Oh yes. I’m sure it’s been rough on you, being a drop-dead gorgeous genius and all.”
“It has!” Joey screamed so loud that his cheeks flushed red. Patrick was startled by the reaction. Joey stepped closer, the weapon still pointed at Patrick.
“Take it easy, Joey.”
“You have no idea. You think everything is peaches and cream for a kid that smart? When everyone around you has average intelligence? It’s a nightmare. I felt like a fucking alien most of my life. Nobody could relate to me. I needed more sensory input than my so-called normal life could offer. And when the teachers wanted to move me up grades in school, my mother declined. She wanted me to be with the morons my own age.”
“I…I’m sure she was trying not to damage you, emotionally.”
“The damage was done the minute I was born, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was trapped, in a world without stimulation. I died of boredom every day. All of my relationships seemed shallow and false, even those with my family. And I had these thoughts. These brilliant thoughts that nobody else could understand! I had ideas, and nobody to discuss them with. My own thoughts bombarded me until I felt like I was going insane. I was the most depressed nine-year-old you ever saw.”
Patrick swallowed, his eyes on Joey’s gun. “So you were an unhappy child.”
“Unhappy? By age ten I was contemplating suicide. By age eleven, I’d attempted it twice.”
Patrick was shocked, and it must have shown on his face.
“That’s right, Obrien. My perfect loving parents swept that little tidbit under the rug. We can’t have the neighbors knowing the great Charles Duvaine has a nutcase for a son. The first time, I jumped off the roof of the house. Unfortunately, I only broke my leg. The second time, my mother found me in the bathroom with a razor blade in my hand. I’d started to slice one of my wrists.”
Patrick gasped. “Joey…I didn’t know.”
“They never even got me a doctor. They never even got me professional help. They decided they could deal with me themselves. They were ashamed of me. They didn’t want anyone, even a doctor, to know what a freak I was.”
Patrick stood in shocked silence.
“Is it beginning to make sense to you now, Obrien?” Patrick nodded. “I became an actor, because I could at least pretend to be someone else for that short time I was on the stage or in front of the camera. I could be someone else, someone without my problems. The downside was that it always ended. Then I’d have to go back to being me again. The real world was slow and stagnant. It was like a vacant repressed hell. I hated my life. I hated the world. I wanted to leave it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Patrick said. “I had no idea. You always seemed to have it so together.”
“Because by the time I met you, I did have it together.” Joey’s pale eyes looked off into the distance, then his face warmed, his lips tilted to a grin. “One day, it all changed. Someone came along who offered me the role of a lifetime. He offered to make me someone else for as long as I lived. He offered to give me an extraordinary life, where the rules did not apply and I’d be free to explore stimuli and power that went beyond the eternal dulling numbness of this world.”
“Shepherd,” Patrick said softly.
“The one and only. He was amazing. His intelligence exceeded my own, tenfold. You can imagine how thrilled I was to have met him, to have someone so above average to converse with. He offered me a life beyond the mundane confines of this world. Do you see now? He really did give me life. I’d be dead now if it weren’t for him, I’m sure of it. He is my best friend. He is my brother. He is my everything.”
“But Joey, he’s not right. He’s mentally unstable. He’s hell-bent on revenge and control of something he will never have! Did he tell you about that thing that appeared the night Allisto was killed? The way it blew up the trucks holding the crops?”
“Of course.”
“Well for Christ sakes, Joey! Doesn’t that give you pause? He’s pissing into the wind. His plan was never gonna work.”
“You don’t know anything about it, Obrien.”
“The fucking…creator of the world is his enemy, Joey. Divinity itself scorns Shep.”
Joey howled with laughter. “The Light is a force of nature, not divinity, and it doesn’t give a shit about Shep. It never did. You really think that four-headed monster was sent from the top? Down to fucking Forest Bluffs, Massachusetts to destroy a few trucks of grain? That cherubic freak you saw was there of its own free will. That and things
like it have been stalking Shep for years. For their own reasons.”
“Why? For what reason?”
“To sabotage Shep’s plan! That was one of his so-called superiors. They twisted Shep’s plan from the beginning and kept him from executing it, because they didn’t want an underling getting all that credit. If Shep executes his plan now and succeeds, he makes them look bad. That, Obrien, is why that thing showed its ugly faces and destroyed those crops. It’s part of an age-old pissing contest. Everything that crawls out of that realm is not on a holy mission.”
Patrick shook his head. “You’re as crazy as he is. You actually buy into all his paranoid bullshit. Holy shit, Joey. You really do worship him.”
“Of course I worship him! Shep gave me life. Don’t you understand that? I am nothing without him. He is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known. How could you have possibly thought that I would give him up? You should have joined us, Obrien. You could have been part of it. But it’s too late for that now.”
Joey lifted the gun, and Patrick didn’t like the hostility in his eyes. “You know, Joey, I’ve had a lot of guns pointed at me lately. It’s getting tiresome.”
“I’m not going to kill you. That would displease Shep, although I can’t quite understand why. But he’s still heartbroken about losing Allisto and I don’t want to add any pain to that. I’ll have to subdue you until I’m safely out of here. Then I’ll send someone to free you.”
“Subdue me?” Patrick said warily.
Joey moved toward him, and Patrick backed up defensively. When he was backed against the wall, Joey holstered the gun in his jeans, then grabbed Patrick under his arms and lifted him up over his head. Feet dangling, Patrick looked down in shock. “Oh, right,” Joey said. “I forgot to tell you. Since you’re not the Shield anymore, Shep gave me your strength. I hope you don’t mind. After all, you weren’t using it.”
Joey slammed Patrick’s head into the wall and everything went dark.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Robin still wasn’t sleeping. Sure, Patrick was better, and Joey seemed to be getting back to normal, but she still couldn’t seem to get through a night without waking every two hours with nightmares. If she didn’t get some uninterrupted sleep soon, she’d lose her mind. She’d already started hallucinating a bit in the car, imagining a bug crawling up her arm, only to jump and discover there was nothing there. That’s when she decided that sleeping pills were in order.
It was only six in the evening when she put on her nightshirt, swallowed the two pills and settled on the couch. She was drawn down into a deep sleep almost immediately. It was not even full dark yet when she stirred and opened her eyes a crack sometime later. “I’m not done sleeping yet,” she said groggily to whoever had touched her face.
Her eyelids felt like they had weights tied to them, but she forced them to open fully, sensing she was not alone. She glanced at her phone, which read 7:15. She’d only been asleep an hour. Lifting her heavy head, she glanced around the room. The apartment was quiet and empty. She decided she must have been dreaming. Curling up onto her side, she started to drift into sleep again.
That’s when she felt the weight shift on the couch and the soft curls fall onto her face as Shep kissed her. It had to be Shep. No one else smelled like that. I’m dreaming, she thought. “You’re dead,” she whispered through the haze of sleep.
“I’m not dead. I’m right here,” the familiar voice said.
She started to cry. “No. Not this. I can’t take anymore. I just can’t.”
He stroked her face. “Shhh. It’s all right.” She felt his weight lean over on her, and smelled his skin as he trailed his lips along her cheek. “Do you love Patrick?” he asked.
“Yes,” she slurred.
“Does he love you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He loves me.”
There was a long pause and she thought Shep’s voice was going to go away and let her sleep. “Do you love me?” the voice asked after a long silence.
She didn’t answer. She was beginning to come awake now and fear was rising in her heart. Shep in her apartment? Shep on the couch with her? Impossible. Shep was dead.
“Robin?” Her body jerked at the sound of her name. “Do you love me?”
She felt his hair brush her face, felt his weight pressing against her side, and she wanted him there. Of course, he was only a dream. “Yes,” she whispered, even softer this time. “I’ll always love you.”
“Then you’ll come with me.” It was a statement, not a question. His voice had stopped being soft and dream-like. It was loud and commanding. “You’ll come with me, if you love me.”
She came fully awake and sat up. Shep was there on the couch. She gasped when she saw him, and the condition he was in. This was no dream. “Shep!”
He had cuts and horrible bruises all over his face. Broken blood vessels trailed like purple spider webs down the right side of his cheek. His left eye was swollen completely shut, and one of his wrists had a cast on it.
“Stay calm,” he said, taking her hand.
“You’re alive. Jesus Christ. What is happening?”
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked, touching her hair. She couldn’t stop looking at his swollen eye. “Do you love me, Robin?”
Mouth agape, she took in his entire appearance. He wore gray sweatpants with a black hooded sweatshirt. In his right hand, he held a pair of dark sunglasses. On the coffee table next to him was a black baseball cap. He looked at her pleadingly, waiting for her to respond to his request that she go with him. Go with him where? She knew she should be running for the door but she was still pleasantly hazy from the sleeping pills.
“I’ll always love you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re alive. But I can’t go with you.”
He looked down, nodding.
“You understand. Don’t you?” she asked.
He sighed deeply, fiddling with the bottom of his wrist cast. He looked at her with one green eye, the other swollen shut. “No,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
He covered her mouth and nose with a wet rag. She tried to pull away but he pressed it down harder, forcing her to breathe through it. It smelled like the gas she’d gotten at the dentist’s office as a child. She tried to scream, to speak, to strike out, but then the euphoria came over her and she fell back onto the couch. She was vaguely aware of Shep carrying her toward the door, then there was nothing.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Someone was pounding on the door and calling his name. Patrick awoke and found that he could not move. His head was throbbing. He looked around in confusion. He was in Joey’s apartment. The events preceding his blackout came back to him. He looked down at himself. He was on the recliner, bound with bungee cords. He looked over at the couch. Joey’s bags were gone, and so was Joey.
“Patrick! Are you in there?”
It was Agent Litner’s voice. “I’m in here!” His voice cracked. “I’m in here, Litner!”
“Can you open the door?”
“No.”
There were a couple of thuds, and then the door flew open. Litner came storming into the apartment with his gun drawn. He stopped dead when he saw Patrick tied to the chair. “Oh no,” he said, holstering his gun. “What now? What is this?”
Patrick winced. “Could you untie me please?”
Litner went to him and began to struggle with the bungee cords. “Who did this to you?”
“Joey did.” Litner stopped moving and looked at Patrick. Patrick shook his head. “Don’t say it. I know you told me so. How did you know I was here?”
Litner sighed and finished untying Patrick. “Joey left me a message. He said that you were at his apartment and you needed my help. What the hell happened here?”
“Shep is alive,” Patrick said.
Litner went rigid. “What?”
Patrick moved from the recliner to the couch, which still smelled like Forest Bluffs. He told Litner about what happened. Litner sat down on
the recliner. “So we really have no proof that Shep is alive, then.”
Patrick looked him in the eye. “He’s alive, Litner.”
“Are you sure? Did you see him with your own eyes?”
“Joey said—’’
“You just told me that Joey is a lunatic. But you’re going to take his word that Shep is alive? Did it ever occur to you that Joey could have bloodied that shirt?”
Patrick sat silently, rubbing the back of his head where a nice egg was forming. Litner stood up. “What’s wrong with Robin anyway?”
Patrick perked up. “Robin? What do you mean?”
“Well, on Joey’s message, he told me to make sure we stopped by Robin’s place.”
Patrick stood up. “Shit.”
Litner had Patrick drive the car so that he could use his computer. He sat in the passenger seat tapping away at the keys while Patrick hammered the car up the narrow streets toward Robin’s apartment. Litner shook his head. “Son of a bitch,” he said, staring at the screen.
“What is it?”
“Shep is alive.”
Patrick glanced at him. “How do you know for sure?”
Litner sighed. “Because Joey’s file has been wiped clean. Also, he left me a…greeting.”
“A greeting?”
Litner turned the computer toward Patrick. “My screen name has been changed to Agent Fuckhead.”
They reached Robin’s apartment. Patrick had a key now, which he dropped twice upon storming up the narrow stairway. Finally, they reached the door and the two of them stepped inside. The apartment was empty. Patrick raced through the place calling Robin’s name, to no avail.
Litner stepped into the bedroom behind him. “I’ve found something,” he said. Patrick turned and saw the candy necklace he’d given Robin, dangling from Litner’s fingers. There was an envelope pinned to it. “It’s addressed to you.”
Patrick sat down on the bed, his legs shaky. “You read it. I can’t. I just can’t.”
Litner opened the envelope, pulling out a piece of lined paper. “It’s the same handwriting from Shep’s journal. Yes?” He turned the page around to show Patrick.
