It was like walking into a twisted, toy shop version of hell. Bodies were everywhere. Oskar was even sicker than I knew. He kept his kills. I made a low, pained noise that had never come out of my throat before and concentrated on not throwing up.
Bodies. Curled up in corners. Stretched out on cots. Chained to walls.
Wait.
Chained? And why did it smell like unwashed, but not rotting, bodies?
“Why do you chain their bodies?” I asked, barely able to whisper over the anguish flooding me. “And where is Leona?”
Oskar looked at like I was stupid. “What bodies? I don’t bring the targets here to my home, you moron.”
“But…but…” I could only whimper and point. I still didn’t see Leona and was trying to retain just a little bit of hope.
Understanding finally dawned in his eyes. “Oh. I get it. No, they’re not dead yet. But thanks to you, I’m going to have to kill some of them.”
“What do you mean?”
He thought about it for a beat, and then he shrugged. “What the hell. I’ve never had the chance to explain my genius plan to somebody who could appreciate it. Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s you.”
I tried to look like I was fascinated by what he was saying, and not looking around for a weapon.
“I blame those stupid toys,” he said vehemently.
“What?” I was dazed, and terrified for Leona and for myself, but I still think I would have understood him if he’d said anything that made sense. “The toys?”
Oskar pointed the gun at my mouth. “Shut up and quit interrupting, or I’ll kill you now.”
I shut up and quit interrupting.
“From the very beginning, it was brilliant. I’m so rich now, it’s not even funny. And not from the stupid toys. Real money.”
He walked over to one of the bodies and kicked it viciously, and the body jumped and yelped. I gasped.
They weren’t dead. They were drugged, maybe? Magicked?
I didn’t dare ask. Oskar was still monologuing, and he still had the gun.
Where was Jack, though? I was starting to worry that he’d fallen into a trap of some kind on the grounds. I shoved that fear aside, though—I had enough to be afraid of right here and right now.
“I never had magic, and my oh-so-wonderful father thought less of me for it. Just because stupid toys didn’t play tricks for people when I built them. My talent was better, though. I was good at the business side of things.”
Whine, whine, whine. Boo-freaking-hoo. Get to the point, psychopath.
I kept looking for a weapon, but saw him watching me with those cold eyes. I needed to sound interested. He wanted an audience. Suddenly, it came to me.
“The fleur-de-lis. That was you, wasn’t it?”
He laughed delightedly, like a parent pleased with a child’s cleverness, which was hideously ironic under the circumstances. “Yes! That was recent, though. And the collectors were too stupid to catch on very quickly. The one-of-a-kind guarantee shot our prices up into the stratosphere. Even though they weren’t. Way before that, though, I worked on packaging and branding. Collectors want to feel like they’re special. Idiots.”
Oskar pushed me down into a chair and waited for me to get it. It didn’t take long.
“You branded them as one of a kind, but they weren’t?”
“Right,” he crowed. “How could people stupid enough to collect toys ever find out? And with Father too sick to build anymore toys, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
His smile melted into a frown just then, and I had a bad feeling I knew what was coming.
“We never got along, though. Long before that, I knew he didn’t appreciate me. But then Mom planned a vacation that was supposed to be a big reconciliation, and, well…” His face twisted up in a parody of grief and anger, as if he didn’t really know how to fit authentic emotion on his features.
“She died,” I whispered, when he seemed to be waiting for an answer.
“Good,” a shaky voice called out from the back of the barn behind some boxes. “Then she never had to see what a monster her son became. Consider it your final gift to her.”
“Leona?” I jumped up out of my chair, but Oskar shoved me down to the floor.
“Shut up, you old hag,” he shouted. “Now I’m going to give you a present. I’m going to let you watch your granddaughter die before I kill you.”
Leona started to cry. Wrenching, helpless sobs that seemed—although I didn’t know her well—a little out of character. When Oskar turned his back to her, though, I saw the window above those boxes open, just a little bit.
“You know what I learned, Tess?” He started fiddling with the video equipment and monitors on the rolling cart next to him. “I learned that I had a better magic than my father. He could channel the magic of wood. I could channel the magic of people.”
He switched on the TV monitor, moved out of the way, and forced me to watch.
“She was my first,” he crooned. “The one who killed my mother.”
The woman in the video was lying on a cot that looked like one of the ones in this barn. She was screaming. Oskar had muted the volume, but I didn’t have to hear her to know. The strained muscles in her throat and face, her wide-open mouth…
I knew.
Something was wrong with her, but my mind didn’t want to see it. Refused to see it.
“I chopped off both her feet, one at a time, while she was awake,” he said in a sing-song voice, forcing me to see it. “And do you know what happened? She killed her cat with just the power of her pain and the force of her wail.”
This time I really did throw up. He waited until I was done and handed me some paper towels, as if he were a real human being and not a soulless monster.
“That’s when I knew,” he whispered. “I could use banshees to kill. I had to experiment, of course, and it takes a lot of them to achieve a true long-distance effect. But it’s easy enough to collect banshees when you’re hand-delivering toys across the country.”
I watched his mouth moving, but the words were buzzing in my skull like bees, and I was fighting so hard to get past the revulsion and horror so I could understand. “So you didn’t kill them? The banshees?”
He laughed. “No, silly Tess. Well, one. That P-Ops agent. She was clearly going to be a problem. But the rest of them are my employees.”
He sighed and switched off the video. “This has been fun. But now I get the pleasure of killing you before I move to my new ranch in the Idaho mountains.”
I shook my head, dazed with all this information coming at me so fast. “You didn’t kill the banshees. You use them to do contract assassinations?”
He suddenly and viciously kicked me in the ribs, and I thought I heard one crack. Pain smashed into me, and I fell, clutching my side. “What did I ever do to you?”
“I just got sick of hearing about you. Father liked you. Always talked about what a hard worker and self-starter you were. Like I needed something else hung over my head, bitch.”
He kicked me again, but I couldn’t fight back, because he still held the gun.
“And now I have to get moving, because I got a new contract tonight,” he boasted. “Five million bucks. The most ever. That makes this stupid toy business look like chump change.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, in spite of the pain. “You idiot. That was us. We set that up to trap you, and here we are. You’re not going to Idaho; you’re going to jail.”
His mouth dropped open. “You what?”
“You’re going to jail. The sheriff is on her way out here right now,” I taunted him. “Better run while you still have a chance, you pathetic loser.”
He started jumping up and down, screaming.
Maybe he’d been around banshees too long. Or maybe that cracked rib had punctured my lung, because suddenly I was finding it very hard to breathe.
“What did you call me?”
I tried to laugh at him, but it just came out as a bubbling noise. “Loser. Monster. Pathetic little whiner. Can’t make the toys, poor you.”
He kicked me again and the world went red and shiny for a second.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he screamed.
But I wouldn’t.
“Loser,” I whispered again.
So he shot me.
The last thing I heard before the darkness mercifully took me away from the pain was a tiger’s roar.