Page 93 of Lights Out

“Cool. Just leave the door unlocked then.”

I raced out of there, glad to have the frigid winter air on my too-hot skin once I was back outside. Somehow, I hadn’t paused to think about what staying at Josh’s place would do to me. So far, it was a strange combination of emotions. I had fantasized about doing the darkest, most lascivious things with a man I was obsessed with in one bedroom, while in the other, I’d had real-life, boring sex with a man I had no feelings for.

Josh said Tyler was fine with everything, but now I wondered if I was. Was I adult enough for this situation? Or would the awkwardness of it prove to be too much? I wanted to be chill. Hell, I thought I could be, under normal circumstances, but after the night and morning I’d had, I’d just about reached full mental capacity, and making small talk with a guy I used to get naked with felt like a step too far right now. I’d have to avoid him until I could catch my breath.

I popped the car’s trunk and was just reaching in for my things when my phone rang inside my jacket pocket. I whipped it out.

“Josh? Are you okay?”

“Uh…not Josh,” a woman’s voice said.

I pulled the phone from my ear. It was Veronica, my lab tech friend.

“Shit, sorry, Vern,” I said, grabbing my bags and shutting the trunk. “I thought you were someone else.”

“No worries,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you I finished your bloodwork early.”

“Vern,” I whined, punching in the apartment door code. “I told you not to worry about it.”

“I know,” she said. “And you still shouldn’t feel guilty. No line jumping occurred. I stayed an hour late the past two nights to finish it.”

“Vern!” I yelled, my voice echoing up the stairwell. “That makes me feel just as guilty.”

“You’ll live,” she told me. “Want to know the results?”

“Let me guess: they didn’t match?”

“Ding, ding, ding!” she said. “We have a winner.”

I rolled my eyes and let myself back into the apartment, making a mental note to ask Josh how he’d pulled that off. “I’m sorry I put you through all this for nothing. I feel like a dick.”

Fred was waiting for me at Josh’s door, and I almost tripped over him on my way inside. “Jesus, Fred. Watch out.” I could hear Vern talking, but the phone was away from my ear while I juggled the bags and tried to keep my cat from sprinting past me to freedom. “One second, Vern.”

Finally, I got everything inside, and Fred corralled back where he belonged. I lifted the phone to my ear. “Sorry about that. What did you say?”

“I said I did some more digging.”

Something about her tone had me sinking onto the edge of Josh’s bed. It sounded like she was about to give me the kind of news you should hear sitting down. “Okay?”

“Like I told you the other day, you made me curious, so I decided to look past a simple match and see if I could find anything else.”

“And?”

“Uh, I don’t know a good way to tell you this,” she said.

I gripped the phone, starting to get worried. Was there something wrong with Josh’s blood? “Rip it off like a band-aid,” I told Vern.

She took a deep breath. “I checked the sequencing from the bloody rags against the open DNA database we use, and, well, the contributor shares 50% of their DNA with the Ken Doll Killer.”

I shook my head. “Wait. What are you saying right now?”

“That the man who bled on the rags is the son of a serial killer, Aly.”

The phone slipped from my fingers. I could hear Vern calling my name, but a low buzzing filled my ears that drowned her out. The edges of my vision went fuzzy, and my head spun. I was going to pass out. I’d never fainted in my life, but I knew all the symptoms, and after all the shocks I’d suffered today, this last one had clearly pushed me over the edge.

My nursing kicked in, and I laid back on the bed while the room blurred around me. The man who had stalked me, broken into my house, and killed someone was the son of a serial killer.

Oh my god, he filmed himself covered in blood. Did he want to be his dad or something?

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