“What exactly am I supposed to do?” I looked at Gabriel with a mix of horror and fear.
“Sit and wait for her to wake up.”
“Okay, I do not deal with living people, especially victimized living people. What am I supposed to say?”
“Ask if she remembers something,” Gabriel said.
“Why can’t Fiona do it? She is better with people than I am,” I argued.
“True,” Gabriel agreed but didn’t pull me off the hospital. “But if her attacker comes back, you will be better protection.”
“Okay, I will sit in the hall, Fiona can sit inside. It will be safer for everyone,” I told him.
“Cain, just do this.” Gabriel turned to walk away.
“I am a sociopath. You cannot leave me with a victim, I will traumatize her.”
“She’s been traumatized. You might look like Mother Teresa by comparison,” he continued walking. I stopped arguing. I was stuck on this and I didn’t know why I was being punished.
Valerie McGregor lay in a hospital bed with wires, tubes, and monitors surrounding her. Huge bandages covered most of her body. My desire to catch this monster had just tripled. McGregor had been victimized once before. She’d been found in a warehouse, strung up from a rafter with chains, and someone had taken a very large knife and cut into her.
This time, she’d been found in her apartment, the water running in her shower, soaking her bathroom floor and leaking into the ceiling below. The bed had been covered in blood. A machete had been found in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, her blood still drying on it. They had cut off several of her scars from her previous attack. Also, she’d had some tattoos inked onto her skin to hide lesser scars from it and these had been removed as well.
My guess was the person that had attacked her in LA was the same son of a bitch that had attacked her in New Orleans. Maybe he had been here hunting for her. Maybe he had stumbled across her and Mr. Headless together and attacked them both. The details had yet to be filled in. It did explain why Mr. Headless’s tattoos were intact. He hadn’t been the primary target.
I had to give it to Lucas and Xavier. I had been wrong. We had been dealing with a psychopath the entire time, a psychopath who had been picking victims who probably had some imaginary connection to Valerie.
Of course, I still had no idea what I would do when she woke up. I could protect her, but I wasn’t going to be able to comfort and coddle her. I also didn’t think I could question her. Her injuries were great. He had even rammed a portion of the blade into her genitalia.
Seven hours of surgery and they were still pumping her full of blood. It was a miracle that she was alive. I was going to catch this monster and make him pay.
Killing someone, I understood, but doing this to a person was unthinkable. Her self-esteem was probably shattered from the first incident. Worse, she worked as a counselor to victimized women. Her list of enemies could be very long. I intended to visit each and every one of them as soon as someone relieved me from this assignment. She worked with cops for a living. I wouldn’t be the only one searching for her abuser. He’d better hope like hell someone else found him first.
Night had settled on the city again. We’d been here a few days now, but I wasn’t sure how many. Time was the sociopath’s enemy. I couldn’t keep track of it. Days blurred together. Most of the time, I wasn’t even able positively to tell a person how old I was. I had to be reminded from time to time.
This floor of the hospital was quiet. Even the nurses were quiet as they went about their duties. Their shoes never squeaked or clicked. It was as if the ICU was somehow impacted by the lingering threat of death and breaking the silence might mean that Death would break the truce and send monitors screeching. I settled into the chair that had been provided for me. It was about as comfortable as a medieval tortured device, and since that was actually, what my expertise was in, I would know.
For me to be stuck in a room that did not have much more than the rhythmic beeping of monitors set my nerves on edge. I didn’t like hospitals. The principle was fine. They did save lives. However, they were petri dishes for bacterium that was antibiotic resistant, and I walked a little too close to death on normal occasions to feel entirely at ease in a place that tried to save people from it.
Proverbs say that idle hands do the devil’s work. I wasn’t entirely convinced of that, but I did know a bored sociopath was never a good thing. My tablet was tucked in a small bag that sat on the floor next to me. However, that nemesis had already caught hold of me and I was thinking about me.
As a general rule, I’m a narcissist. It’s a side effect of being a sociopath. We’re all narcissists. Nyleena and a few others in my inner circle kept my ego in check. Yet, lately, they had all been feeding that ego. This concerned me, not the ego stroking exactly, but the fact that they all knew better than to feed my narcissism, and had been anyway. I was sick enough to enjoy the flattery, but not so twisted that I recognized that it meant something really bad. How broken had I actually become?
Most psychologists and psychiatrist would tell you that the demented personalities of sociopaths and psychopaths couldn’t be broken. They would be wrong. I had seen it on more than one occasion. Malachi had broken once. He had gone into complete meltdown mode. He had ended up in the hospital having his toes reconnected to his foot. His excuse was that he had been bored and wanted to know what it felt like. For some, this made sense, but not to me, Malachi had been shot before he shot himself. So whatever led up to him shooting himself in the foot had to be more than just curiosity. Shooting himself had not improved his funk. It had lasted for months, and then just as suddenly as it came on, it was gone.
The circumstances around it were still mysterious. I knew the trigger, but not the cure. There was no understanding for me as to what he had experienced during that time. He wouldn’t talk about it no matter how much I pried. Could I have been on the verge of a mental break, like Malachi had experienced? What exactly would have happened if I had reached that point?
If a migraine and brain tumor could make me hold a gun to my head, anything seemed possible at this point. My eyes fell on the figure in the bed. She was in a coma. She would probably require a skin graft or two. Having been there myself, all I could say for them was that they hurt like nothing else on the planet and she was better off in a coma than awake. If she were really lucky, she would remain in the coma while her body healed. If not, she’d better hope she had doctors willing to put her into one.
Looking at her made me angry again. It surged through me and brought down the darkness. I fought it and lost.
Few things penetrate the darkness, emotionally speaking. Rage builds up there. Any imagined injustice can suddenly fuel an endorphin amped rampage. When I wasn’t on the verge of a rage, I felt very calm, too calm. It was an unnatural feeling. The entire world became just a little less interesting. Time seemed to slow down or stop entirely. My thoughts became more logical. It also sometimes felt like a dissociative state. My body moved. Words formed in my mouth and spilled forth when needed. However, I watched it all, detached, even more so than when I looked in a mirror on a regular day. My face was unable to maintain the mask of sanity it wore under normal conditions. The mask seemed to look constantly annoyed, but it was better than the blankness that existed behind it.
I had seen it on the faces of others, but had never seen my own face during this time. As soon as the thought struck me, I got up and walked to the small sink. There was a mirror over it and I looked.
The face that stared back was familiar to me. I recognized it. It was me. It had scars, lines, wrinkles, and eyes that would have caused a normal person to pause. They weren’t dead looking, but said I was mildly amused. Seeing myself made the corners of my lips turn up. Some of my teeth became exposed as my lips spread apart. My cheeks blanched, causing my eyes to appear darker and the eye sockets too deep for my face. My nostrils flared with each intake of breath, as if I were sniffing the world for some unknown scent. My cheekbones seemed to stand out more. My jaw muscles clenched behind the smile, forcing the skin to stretch across the now defined edges of my face.
I remembered people telling me I was scary when this happened. There was some merit to this. I had gone from being an unrecognizable entity to staring into the visage of a predator. One that was toying with its prey because it found it entertaining.
I looked at my monster and recognized it more than I did the human. I had seen other people’s demons but never my own. I found it amusing and the laugh that came from my throat was rich, deep, and anything but sane.
Someone was going to pay for everything that had happened to Valerie McGregor and all the others that they had mutilated to get to her. Of that, I was certain. I hoped it involved bleeding.