Winter’s End: Winter Black Series: Book Nine

by Stone, Mary

  I watched them clustered around microphones, smug and full of sin and themselves. A woman was in the back behind them, answering questions as if she had a right to tell anyone anything about me. The bottom of the television said “Agent Bree Stafford.” Who cared what her name was?

  I’d lost Winter’s redheaded friend. She’d out-drove me. The shame and anger from that made me shake. I hated her. I hated the woman on the television, the one who told the group of salivating, slathering reporters who I was—my other name, the bad boy name, the name no one was supposed to know—and all because I had to tell the truth to that bitch of a half-sister. The half-sister who’d simply slept while I’d been taken away.

  I didn’t remember pulling the trigger, but the gun went off. The television exploded as the bullet slammed into the Bree woman’s head. That silenced her. Somewhere, a dog started barking, but it was hushed quickly. Someone didn’t want attention from the killer next door with the bad name.

  I grabbed the keys and a box of bullets and ran for the truck, then stopped. I needed to think. After I calmed down, I knew I needed to play this smart. I needed to move or else I was a dead man. I was about to be captured, betrayed, because I’d been stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have just killed Winter and let her die instead of trying to make her fear me.

  Ignorant. Foolish. Stupid. I shouldn’t have sent the video. Shouldn’t have told. Shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have…

  After hooking the RV up to the truck, the tires squealed as I pulled out of the complex. They all knew my truck. It was Grandpa’s truck, and when he saw the dashboard, he’d kill me. Except he was dead. I reminded myself of that. He was dead.

  Only death didn’t matter. He’d still be mad. Mad from beyond the grave. I had to hide it. I was driving fast, looking for somewhere to get rid of the truck. They knew the truck. They all knew the truck. It was Grandpa’s truck, and they would find it. I had very little doubt of that.

  Simple enough to solve. I needed to replace it. If Grandpa saw the damage to the dashboard, he’d kill me, leave me hanging off the bed with blood pooling under my head. He’d done it before. He would again.

  I needed a truck with a good dash. Something without holes. If Grandpa didn’t see the holes, he wouldn’t be angry, and he wouldn’t slit my throat and watch me as I bled out. He’d liked watching that.

  He tried to save the soul, but he still liked to watch the body die. “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” He said those words a lot. Grandpa liked that verse.

  I needed to find a new place to park the RV, and I had to find a new dashboard. I threw the gun into the passenger side seat and hit the gas, careening around the corners and through the streets. The police were everywhere. Everywhere. They would have already gone through my trailer, seen the bullet hole in the television, and they would know that I had killed the Bree woman.

  There was nothing left for me now but a single thing, one thing I could do and no more, no less. Something I had to do before Grandpa killed me. I had to make things right with my half-sister. I had to make it right.

  It had been a private message, after all. I told her that she wasn’t any part of my father, that she wasn’t part of the family. She took that and spread it all over the television and spread the old name, the bad name and now everyone knew that name, the bad boy name, and it was all her fault.

  I had to take my gun and set things right with her. I had to put a bullet in her head like I killed the Bree woman. All that was left was Winter Black. She had to die. All of this was her fault. She killed Grandpa, she betrayed me, she made my message public and she…

  She gave my bad name to the world. And now the secret was out, the terrible secret Grandpa would beat into me at night, the horrible, awful lie about who I was.

  Everyone knew the horrible secret. Grandpa wouldn’t hurt me if she was dead.

  But I had to be careful. If I was dead, if I was caught, I wouldn’t be able to finish Grandpa’s destiny.

  Stop. Don’t worry about that now. I had to do this much. I had to end Winter Black.

  Then I wouldn’t be that other boy. She wouldn’t be related to me anymore, and I could be a part of the family. It was her that kept me from my family name.

  I would find another dashboard. I would take one from the street, the gun would help me. All I needed was to put a bullet in the driver, and I would have a clean dashboard and Grandpa would never know.

  Then I would put a bullet into my half-sister.

  Freedom. I would be free then. I would finally be part of the family.

  Taking in a calming breath, I let my mission settle into my bones.

  It was the right path. The good path.

  I would end Winter. End her. End her. End her.

  Smiling now, I realized I felt better than I had in weeks.

  Grandpa would be so proud.

  26

  The weeds were overgrown. They covered the ground and shot through the boards on the stairs. They had shriveled in the cold, becoming nothing more than emaciated tendrils of brittle, brown grass. White paint peeled off the building like birch bark. The arctic air that whipped through the empty field around the building shook loose an old flashing on the roof that spun to the ground below. Winter watched it fall, all reflection and blinding light under the cold, gray sun.

  There were windows…several windows that lined the side of the building. Stained glass, heavy panels of it, surrounded by thick trim boards that framed them like works of art in a gallery. Bright red tiles on the roof gave way to the occasional bare spot where dark oil paper shone through where the tiles had fallen. They had slid in a small cascade down the roof to crumble on the ground by the downspout.

  Three steps led up to a wooden door with a cross carved into the surface. Just to the left of that, a large rectangular addition jutted from the edge of the building and rose above the roof to a belfry. A second cross stood atop that, defying the water-color wash of gray and orange skies while reflecting the dirty white of clouds that raced their shadows over the ground.

  The belfry was long muted. If it’d ever had a bell, it had fallen or been taken and melted down for scrap. One of the stained-glass windows was broken, a jagged hole beside a surprised looking rendition of a saint. Sharp pieces of glass jutted from the lead traces that separated one illustration from another, and bright slivers of glass scattered on the floor.

  Inside the church, pews lined up reverently, facing a small raised area, though the pulpit had tumbled and lay over the steps between the parishioners’ seats and the nave. A great tapestry hanging behind where the preacher was to have stood was tattered and rent, not from vandalism, but from age, rot, and neglect.

  Whatever image might have once been in the weft of the great cloth was now buried in dirt and disuse. Leaves scattered and chittered across the floor like flat vermin as the wind found the small hole in the window and played with the trash and leaves and dust, flinging them in all directions. The wind shifted direction again and the detritus stayed locked away in the church.

  A handful of refuse chased from one corner to another, depending on the whims of the winds that breached the hole in the glass. Inside too, there were signs that the weeds were coming in through the walls and the floors, and perhaps the floorboards were no longer the most dependable. Dry rot had its fingers in the grain and was sapping the strength from the boards.

  “Oubliette.” Winter whispered the word, letting it fall before her in the cold air. “A place of forgetting.” Historically, the word referred to a place where prisoners would be thrown and then ignored, left to starve or die of thirst. In such places, even their bones were left undisturbed, forgotten, and abandoned. Left to rot.

  Winter stood facing the defiled pulpit, leaves dancing over her boots and beating against her ankles. The boards under her feet felt like sponges, and she felt them give and flex with every step.

  The floor was beginning to collapse as muted sunlight filtered and foc
used through the bright lens of the windows. Light heated the wood in the day and then left at night so the floor could cool again. The expansion and contraction from the temperature change gave the appearance that the old place was taking long, slow breaths. Inhale under the sun. Exhale under the stars.

  Cold air seared Winter’s lungs, and her breath plumed in front of her as she turned around. The door behind her, the wooden double door with the cross deeply inscribed, swung open and the angry winds burst into the room, gathering up the dead and brittle leaves and cleansing the moldy space. It pressed the leaves into flight, and they ran up the sides of the pews and slammed into the old pulpit. They chittered to each other in dry tones of old parchment or small, sharp claws trying to gain purchase on hardwood floors.

  She began to move without moving. Her feet stayed still, her body erect and tall, but she slid along with the leaves and the trash as the wind blew her out of the building.

  The doors slammed shut the second she was tossed onto the grass, and she turned to watch the church close itself up even as it spat her out. As the sound still echoed through the trees, Winter knew that the church had locked itself. It would have bolted the doors closed if it could.

  She could sense rather than see the hole in the window plugged, the doors and windows reinforced against her reentry. The church did not want her to return.

  Even as she stared at the building, she felt something else. Something bad. Something cold, like a knife in her side that pressed against her flesh and dug in harder, deeper, forcing into her skin until it tore at her flesh. She would have cried out if she could. Instead, she was forced to suffer in silence as the blade ripped into her, parting muscle and shattering bone, driving deeper and deeper.

  She looked up at Justin. He was smiling at her as the knife tore through her heart.

  Winter jerked awake, her hands reaching to grab the dashboard and the door handle.

  Dashboard.

  As her fingers dug into the hard material, her heart raced. Her breathing was shallow, causing pain with each inhalation. Autumn was watching her, a look of pure concern on her face as she held a tissue under Winter’s nose. With shaky fingers, she took hold of the tissue herself, giving her friend the best smile she could muster.

  I’m in a car. Autumn’s car.

  She swallowed and willed her erratic pulse to slow. Her breath caught, and she found her hand reaching for her side where the knife had pierced her so deeply, but the skin was whole. Unharmed.

  “Another vision?” Autumn’s expression ranged from concern to curiosity and something more…fear. Fear for her friend. She knew about Winter and her visions, but this one was different somehow. It was one thing to be told that someone experienced visions, another to witness the person have one.

  Winter couldn’t speak. There were no words yet for the place where she’d been. Winter couldn’t remember diving this far into a vision, to get lost in it so deeply she’d forgotten where she left her body. Coming back from this one was going to take a lot longer than most. It was so vivid, so real that she might as well have been transported to that old church.

  That old church. I know that church. I know that place.

  Winter nodded, though she was still as much in the church as she was in Autumn’s car. “Yeah, it was a deep one.” She checked the tissue and realized the bleeding had stopped, then looked owlishly through the windshield. Several cars were parked at a curb with a small building in front of them. “Where are we?” Her voice sounded rusty from disuse.

  “It’s okay,” Autumn assured her, pulling out additional tissues along with a bottled water and a small container of hand sanitizer. “We’re at a rest stop. I pulled over when I saw that you had…fallen asleep. What did you see?”

  Winter flipped down the visor and cleaned herself up before looking over at her friend. “A church.”

  “A church?” Autumn was clearly trying to understand what Winter was saying, and more importantly, what she wasn’t. “What church?” Her demeaner changed with each question.

  Despite still being a worried friend, she slipped into the professional Autumn, the woman who was an expert at analysis and ferreting out the truth. Winter might have found that to be comforting were she not so rattled. At least one of them had to be handling this like a professional.

  “The old church…” Winter pressed her fingers to her temples. She tried again. “The old church outside of McCook. The one that gave The Preacher his nickname.”

  Autumn gasped. “Oh.” Her fingers beat a restless tattoo against the steering wheel. “But that’s been abandoned for a long time. And the local police have been keeping an eye on it since Kilroy was killed. If anyone had been there since, they would know about it. Wouldn’t they?”

  Winter had her doubts. It was off the track, and the local constabulary would have to make a special trip to check on it. In those rural areas, an approaching car could be seen for miles.

  Winter took a deep breath. She knew she’d sound crazy but…why not tell Autumn the rest? Of everyone she knew, Autumn was the one who would understand more than anybody else. If she couldn’t trust her, who could she trust?

  “I saw Justin.”

  “Wait…in the church?” Autumn twisted to look at her, her expression fierce. What followed was a series of questions, meant to clarify, winnowing out every last detail right down to the way the weeds grew up through the steps. This was Autumn doing what she did best, what she was trained for—examining the witness to glean as much information as possible.

  In some ways it was helpful. On the other hand, whatever comfort Winter had taken from her attitude evaporated in the frustration of trying to remember every last excruciating detail from the vision. No matter how many answers she came up with, Autumn pressed her for more. The fact that it was as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard to someone still trying to come back from a vision didn’t matter. This was necessary. Winter knew this and tried to answer Autumn’s questions as fully as possible.

  In the end, there was little left to say. She went through the whole thing again in detail, ending with Justin’s part in it. “Well, no. He wasn’t exactly inside the building. It was after that, I felt this presence.”

  “But you’re sure the presence was him?”

  “Yes,” Winter insisted, wondering just how many times she was going to be asked the same question. “I saw his face.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought you said you felt him. You saw him there?”

  “Yes, I mean…” Winter held up a hand for Autumn to give her a minute. She’d forgotten this particular detail until this very second, proving Autumn’s battering at her had a point, after all. “At first, I only felt him, but then…later, I saw his face.”

  Autumn seemed to consider this a moment. “Where was he?”

  “I think…maybe just outside…I’m not sure.” Winter tried to place Justin in the vision.

  “So, Justin wasn’t in the church?” Autumn asked, her expression intent.

  “No.” Winter wracked her brain to get the memory of the vision clear. “No, I was already ejected by the time I saw him.”

  “Ejected?”

  Okay, maybe she hadn’t been explaining things well. Winter went back over the feel of the place, the idea that the church was alive, the feeling of being unwelcome. When Autumn fell silent, Winter thought she’d run out of questions, that maybe they could leave now, but Autumn still had not moved the car.

  “What was Justin doing?” Autumn asked again.

  “Pushing a knife into my side,” Winter said ruefully, “very, very slowly. He cut into my heart.” She gripped the place to show her where and almost winced, expecting to feel pain. The memory of that was so clear, it still came as a surprise to find herself uninjured.

  She pulled up the edge of her shirt. Her mind and memory told her that there was a large gash in her side, between two ribs, but the flesh was uncut. She remembered the sensation, though, the feel of the blade as it cut through her.
>
  “Where are we?” Winter repeated. She had her mind firmly rooted in the here and now, and “rest stop” wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

  Autumn seemed to understand. “We’re about an hour outside of Richmond.”

  “Autumn…” Winter looked at her hands in her lap, being the one to look away so Autumn wouldn’t have to. “I can’t…it’s not fair to ask, but—”

  Autumn held up a gloved hand, a small smile playing on her lips. “Do you know how to get there from here?”

  “Thank you,” Winter whispered and sat back in her seat.

  It seemed imperative now that she go there. The church would welcome her or not. Either way, it was where she needed to be.

  27

  Bree’s hand on his upper arm startled him awake. It showed the concern she had for him that she woke him so gently. There were others in the department that would just as soon blow an air horn behind his head. Not for the first time, Noah was thankful to her as a partner.

  Now, if she would only go the hell away and let him sleep.

  “Noah.” She spoke each word gently but clearly, almost like she was soothing a small child. “Go home. Take a nap. You know the DNA won’t be back for a while, and you don’t need to babysit putting Kilroy back into the ground. You only needed to be there for digging him up. Get some rest while you can.”

  He considered the possibility for a long moment. Laying down on something that was long enough for his frame was tempting, to say the least. The couch he’d been catching naps on wasn’t all that comfortable. Either the arm dug under his ankles, or he had to fold himself into the confines of the seats, meaning he wasn’t able to sleep on his back or stretch out. The idea of being in a real bed, if only for a few hours, held a certain appeal.

  Bree had an excellent point too. The test results wouldn’t be back anytime soon. They’d only delivered Kilroy that morning, and it wasn’t yet three-thirty. Even with a rush, it could take up to twenty-four hours to hear anything. There were no new leads, and going through the old Preacher case files again was wholly unappealing. Noah nodded and carefully set the reports of the Ulbrich murders on his desk and reached for his coat.