Page 176 of Mind Games

“I think I know the answer to the last part.” After staring down into her coffee, she pushed it aside. “He got into a dream I had. It happened right after Ty and Bray moved here. And, Rem, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep any smart-ass comments to yourself.”

“I’m not feeling especially smart-ass at the moment.”

“I dreamed about sitting on the back porch on a pretty night, and Ty sitting with me, playing the guitar. It was nice, innocent, just a pretty, harmless dream. Then Riggs walked out of the woods. He had a gun, and he shot Ty.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “It felt so real, all so real. And Ty … I could feel his blood on my hands, and Ty said it was my fault.”

She pressed her hands to her face, dragged them through her hair.

“It upset me, it scared me, it infuriated me. So … I decided to pay him back. I thought, if I scared him, made him feel pain, really feel all that, he’d back the hell off. He’d leave me alone. Because he hasn’t, Grammie. More times than I’ve told you about.”

“We’ll get back to that. What did you do?”

“I built a dream. A game I’d pulled out of my one-of-these-days file. I built the game, practiced. Then I built it into a dream, and I pulled him into it.”

As she told them, Rem sat again, shook his head. “That’s the game you designed, the one I beta tested. Perilous Island, snake pit and all.”

“More or less, yeah. Actually, the one I made him play was a lot more violent—limited to two players—and more simplified.”

She lifted her hands. “I kept it straightforward. And I liked making him play, seeing him fail, hearing him scream. I used my gift for that, even knowing it’s given to help, not to hurt.”

“I wish I’d heard him scream.” Reaching over, Rem took her hand. “You fought back, that’s how I see it.”

“It did scare him, and he backed off for a while. He left me alone for a while, but…”

Because Rem couldn’t understand in the same way as her grandmother, Thea looked to Lucy.

“You won’t get blame from me either. He came after you, and you stood up to him. But you took a terrible risk, Thea. More, you didn’t tell your family.”

“I just didn’t want to bring it here anymore, Grammie. I just didn’t want that goddamn cloud always hanging over us. I wanted, just wanted to deal with it.”

“Just you?” Lucy countered. “By yourself?”

The hurt in her grandmother’s voice cut deeper than Riggs’s mind knife. “I believed, I honestly believed I could handle it. I thought I was.”

“No more holding things back from us. Let’s make that clear.”

“I won’t, and I’m sorry I did.”

She looked to Rem now. “I’m sorry because both of you had a right to know. What he did, he did to all of us. What he’s doing now may be aimed at me, because he can, but it’s still about all of us.”

“Don’t forget that. And the next time you come up with a way to hit back at him, we talk about it first.”

“All right. I think what I did with the game scared him, hurt him. But I’m afraid it also gave him another way in, a way that lets him see more of me. He called me Foxy Loxy.”

“Like Dad used to sometimes.”

“He knows more about me now than I realized. He probably knows…” She paused, sighed, gave up. “I spent the night with Ty.”

“This calls for a movie quote,” Rem decided. “We’ll go with ‘There’s a fuckin’ surprise.’”

Lucy just cast her gaze to the ceiling.

“Hey, look, I found my smart-ass again. Hell, Thea, anybody who didn’t see that coming wasn’t looking.”

“Does Ty know any of this?” Lucy asked.

“No. I’m not—we’re not … No. Aren’t I entitled to start a relationship, see where it goes, without dragging all of this into it?”

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