Page 98 of Light As A Feather
“Oh,” she says, uncharacteristically excited as she jumps out of my lap. “Wait. I need to show you something.” Sol rushes from the bathroom, leaving me with too many questions and too little patience, so I follow her to the bedroom.
When I walk through the door, she’s holding the last thing I would have ever expected…a knife.
“Is that?—”
“Yes! It’s Ivan’s knife.” She thrusts it toward me, and I jerk back, survival instincts kicking in.
“Whoa there, one of us is still alive…kind of.”
“I’m so sorry; I wasn’t thinking.” She sighs in frustration with herself.
“No harm, no foul.” I hold my hand out, taking it from her. Lifting it up to the light for closer inspection, it definitely looks like the knife he had Jayden wielding around. “How the hell did you get your hands on this?”
“That is a very interesting story, actually.” She starts pacing. “So, apparently, Ivan is a fucking serial killer—or was—I guess. And one of his victims is still haunting your house.”
“Our house,” I correct automatically. “Wait, take it back a sec. A serial killer?” Bringing my fist to my mouth, I have to take a beat to process what she’s just said. “Holy fucking hell.”
“Yeah. All this time, I had no idea.” She shudders. “Not that he didn’t really fuck up my life, but I feel kind of lucky, all things considered.
I level a look of disbelief at her. “Lucky? Come on, Sol.”
“Well, not lucky,lucky. But I’ll take my situation over getting brutally stabbed to death,” she clarifies.
“You narrowly escaped that fate.” Taking a deep breath, I sit on the edge of the bed, and force myself to calm down as the memories of her struggling with Jayden’s possessed form come to mind. “Sorry, go ahead.”
“So, yeah, this victim of his, she found me. She actually kind of lured me out into the forest, which sounds creepy, but I think she was just trying to be discreet. She was very intent on avoiding Ivan. Can’t really blame her.” She sighs.
“He hasn’t been able to get to you, has he?”
“No. You were right. I was safe. Not for lack of trying, but he wasn’t able to get close to me, let alone do anything.”
“Good.” She comes to a standstill in front of me, and I rest my head against her stomach for a moment, needing a physical connection to her. “So, you were saying, she lured you out there and just gave it to you?”
“We had to dig it up. But we also talked a bit. She said that she was the one to kill him, making her the last person he killed. He’d also murdered one of her friends, though. Apparently, all of his victims look like me.”
My eyebrows shoot up in surprise, imagining how difficult it would be to track down a group of women with green hair back when he was still alive.
“Not like this,” she says exasperatedly as she gestures to herself. “Dark hair, dark eyes, young, like when I first met him.” She laughs bitterly. “I caught him staring at a girl who fit that description not too long ago…”
“That sick fuck.” I wish more than ever that I could travel back in time and stop him from ever getting his claws into her. If only I’d known then what I know now.
I can’t change the past, but I can make sure his last moments are filled with as much suffering as some of his victims.It’s only fair.
“Yeah.” She goes quiet for a few seconds. “But at least now we have the knife. Did Zoey say what to do with it?”
“Well, that’s actually why I had to leave. I had to get the rest of the…stuff we need.”
“Which is?” Sol asks, her brow furrowed in confusion because of my vagueness. Impatient, she grabs my chin and forces me to look up at her. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You trust me, right?” I preface.
“Now you’re really making me nervous.”
“You have to trust me. Just let me explain before you say anything, okay?”
“Okay,” she concedes impatiently.
“I think we can both agree that we want to get rid of him for good, with no way of getting free and haunting anyone else.” She waves me along. Her anxiety and need for answers are palpable now. “Well, I consulted with my friend who’s a witch?—”
