Page 116 of Behind the Shadows
A flicker of unease coiled in my chest. If the Pied Piper still had hooks in me … what else had I done?
“No. I’m not sure how to break that connection, honestly. Do you?” Hope flickered to life in my chest. “Do you think I can break free from him, Holland?” I was so busy spinning outover betraying my friends, it hadn’t occurred to me that he could still control me. The cross meant nothing if I was still under his power.
“I can help. I don’t know if it will work, but I had a similar experience with a patient. He broke free. I trust you can too.”
“Okay. What do I have to do?”
She took my hand in hers. “First, I wanted to tell you that I was with Ella and Dope at his house. We verified that the Pied Piper is my biological father. Well, as Dope said, it’s not a DNA test, but he found old chat threads where the Pied Piper had claimed me as his … then sold me.” She closed her eyes, and I squeezed her hand, wishing I could erase all the pain. Holland looked at me. “So, there’s that. But.” Her voice trailed off. “Something else happened.” Worry flickered through her expression. “There was an image of a boy, and he had a tattoo on his arm. A tattoo of a rabbit with its neck snapped.”
I stared at her, hard. My thoughts whipped around inside my head. “I know that tattoo.”
“I do too, now. Dope said he got the tattoo when he was drunk one night, but he didn’t remember anything. It was somehow there the next day.”
“Fuck.” I jumped off the couch. “This was in the thread with the information about the Pied Piper?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck!” I grabbed the back of the couch, shaking with anger. “Dope is mixed up in all of this somehow?”
“That’s my best guess. When Dope thought Ella and I weren’t looking, he saved the file. He pretended it was no big deal, but something happened. That rabbit tied him to the Pied Piper. So even if you did spy on them for that motherfucker, Death and Dope were already connected, Kip.”
I resisted the overwhelming urge to send my fist into the wall. Instead, I paced the living room with my arms glued to my sides so I wouldn’t hit something.
“What time is it?” I asked, more to myself, as I looked at my watch. It was almost nine at night. Even though I was exhausted, I was too wired to sleep.
“I can’t sit by while the Pied Piper is ruining everyone I care about. I need to talk to Dope and Death and face the consequences.”
“I know that won’t be easy, babe. What do you think about seeing if we can break the connection first and then you’ll have something positive to bring to the table? The betrayal won’t sting so bad that way.”
“Is it wrong to say that your brain is as sexy as your body?”
Holland laughed. “I love that you said that. Thank you. And I promise after this is over...” She stood and walked over to me, slipping her arms around my waist. “That I’ll reward you.” Pushing up on her tiptoes, she kissed me. “I think nighttime will work best to see if we can break the hold over you. Basically, we have to take you back to the night it happened.”
I gritted my teeth, all the years of thinking I’d killed Samantha, all the horrible things I’d done were about to end. A part of me knew the truth, and I hoped it was enough to set me free from the Pied Piper’s control. There was only one way to find out.
“Do it,” I said. “Let’s rip the monster out by the root.”
51
KIP
We stood in front of the door and stared at it like it was a mouth waiting to devour us.
Holland didn’t say a word. She turned and looked at me. Her eyes shimmered, not from fear—but from the weight of knowing what we were about to walk into.
Mother’s house hadn’t been touched since her body had been removed. When we stepped inside, the stench of mildew and dust smothered us; it seemed the walls themselves had started to rot now that she was gone. The silence felt unnatural. As if the home knew it had been abandoned by its master and left to die too.
The basement door creaked louder than I remembered as Holland opened it. She flipped on the light switch at the top of the stairs. This would be the first time she saw where I was hidden like a shameful secret. Tortured.
“Are you ready?” Her voice was steady, confident.
I wish I felt the same. What if this didn’t work? I hesitated while my fingers clenched the old wooden railing. The bulb at the top of the stairs flickered and buzzed like it knew my name. It did.
“She can’t hurt you anymore,” Holland said softly behind me.
I wished I believed her. The scars on my back burned with each step, the descent into hell gripping me by the throat and refusing to let go.
We reached the bottom, and my boots hit the concrete with dull thuds as I walked to the middle of the room. The air grew colder the deeper we went.
