Page 211 of The Wild Charge

Paula Kelly stood in her kitchen full of gleaming appliances, tried, and failed to find a scrap of hunger. They typically took dinner with the girls, but they’d been spending more and more time away from the home; revolving instead, just the two of them, inside their townhouse, largely an untouched monument until…

She didn’t like to think about it. Aboutthat thingthat had happened weeks ago, in New York.

That thing with Jack Waverly that had turned their world upside down. She and Dennis hadn’t been named, not in that horrible video the police couldn’t seem to track down, and not in any publications afterward.

But Chicago PD had come sniffing around the girls’ home anyway. The girls with parents had been pulled out of the program. More than a few employees and volunteers had quit.

And then tonight…

She took a deep, shuddery breath as she reread the note that had shown up in the New Way Home mailbox. No envelope, no address, no stamps. Printed in bold typeface text on one side:HELLO. SignedThe Six Hundred.

They’d come straight home and Dennis had built a fire in a drum in their narrow back garden. It was the source of the smoke smell slowly saturating the kitchen. Dennis made trip after trip, feet thumping up and down the stairs, as he carried armload after armload of paperwork from the office to his makeshift bonfire. Burning it all, every scrap, even the most tangential.

Paula was supposed to be making flight arrangements…but here she stood, staring at that damned note, mind skipping and whirring and refusing to believe what that one word – Hello – meant. They’d been discovered. Whoever had known about Waverly knew about them.

Dennis huffed down the rear hallway with another heavy box of papers, red-faced and sweating; his shirt stuck to his skin in the back, an inverted triangle of dark on the pale blue cotton. Paula chewed at her lip, watching him, as he passed through the door and out into the yard, wishing, too late, that she’d married Thomas Probst after college; the only travel arrangements she’d be making now would be for Caribbean vacations, and not harried flights from law enforcement.

She slipped the note in the trash and reached for her phone.

Bang.

The sound cracked across the back garden, and echoed in through the open door; pinged off her kitchen cabinets and turned her hand limp. A second sound, quieter, closer, signaled her phone hitting the floor. The first sound seemed to take forever to die away, like the tolling of a bell.

“Dennis?” She was moving before she registered it, staggering out the back door on weak knees. “Dennis!”

He’d fallen halfway to the fire, crumpled over onto his side, papers scattered across the grass, lifting in the breeze. His back was to her, and the sweat stain down his spine had become a pool of spreading crimson.

She couldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe.

Dead. Dennis is dead.

She scanned the yard, found it empty, turned and stumbled back inside.

Her kitchen, though, was not empty.

A man stood beside the island, dressed all in black, his face streaked with more black, pale lines of skin peeking through. In the day’s last, golden light, his eyes glittered the color of the sky in springtime, a clear, vacant blue. She noticed them first – extraordinary eyes, really – and the gun second. Matte, black, aggressive, aimed at her chest.

“Hello,” he said, and she had time to wonder, stupidly, why he was British.

Then…

Bang.

~*~

Foxtsked as he stood over the body. Mouth open in shock, hair like cornsilk on the dark floorboards. The entrance wound was a hair too far to the left; still a through and through in the heart, but not as precise as he would have liked. He was shooting left-handed, still. He flexed his right inside his glove, frowning as he felt the tightness of the tendons there, the slow response of the nerves. The doctor in Knoxville that Lawrence had referred him to had stressed that a full recovery would take a long time, if it was even possible, but that didn’t stop him feeling disabled.

He stepped over Paula Kelly’s still-warm corpse, into a back garden going hazy and shadow-puddled as night came on. He searched for and found the corner of rooftop he was searching for, up and off to the right: an empty townhouse waiting to be rented, an end unit, with a perfect vantage point. He couldn’t see Evan, obviously, but gave him a two-fingered salute that he’d be able to spot through the scope. Then he holstered his gun, two took handfuls of ivy, and scrambled up and over the brick wall, down into the alley below.

~*~

Providence, RI

PHILANTHROPIST COUPLE SLAIN IN OWN HOME.

The headline from theTribunethat kept playing on loop in Senator Terry Windmere’s head as he stood at the podium. One of his aides had shown it to him minutes before coming onstage at this fundraiser, and it muddled his thoughts as he stared out at the small sea of faces and camera lenses in the high school gym where he was speaking tonight.

First Jack and Nikola, Sal and Matt.

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