“Why are you still taking care of kids?”
I heard a bunch of them through the open window, laughing, running, being kids.
“How could I be happy without little ones to care for? These here had their lives ended too soon. They need somethin’ extra.”
Trust Ruthie to find lost souls to mother even in the afterlife.
“Ah, Ruthie,” I whispered. “What am I gonna do without you?”
“Go on. That’s what everyone does.”
“Not sure I can.”
“You have to. Jimmy needs you.”
My head, which had been sagging with grief, jerked up. “Jimmy’s never needed anyone but himself.” And a little sugar on the side.
“That’s not true. He’s always needed more than any of the others. He just refuses to say so. Doesn’t think he deserves happiness. Anything that might be good in his life, he makes sure he ruins, because he hates himself more than anyone else ever could.”
“I doubt that,” I muttered.
Her eyes narrowed. “You will help him, Elizabeth.”
She’d put the E in my name. I didn’t have much choice.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded, satisfied. “I gave you all that I had.”
I remembered what Hammond and Landsdown had said about Ruthie and Jimmy arguing. Had she really left me her house, her bank account, her everything?
“What about the kids?” I blurted. “They should get something.”
She smiled softly. “You probably won’t want this gift, but I’ve known it would be yours from the moment I met you.”
Not want it? Whatever it was, if it came from Ruthie, I definitely wanted it.
“You’ll hate me for this—” she began.
“Never.”
“You don’t know yet what I’ve done to you.”
Tome?
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will.” She looked up, and then past me, as if someone had called her name. Fear crossed her face and I spun around, but nothing was there.
“They saw you,” she whispered. “They know who you are.”
“Who’s they?” I asked, but suddenly I understood. “Who killed you, Ruthie?”
She shook her head, still gazing past me. “Doesn’t work like that. I can guide you, but the truth is something you must discover for yourself.”
“Great,” I muttered, although it would have been too much to hope for to have Ruthie’s ghost—or whatever she was—tell me her murderer’s name so I could tie this all up neatly by sundown.
“You have to go,” Ruthie insisted. “They’re coming.”
“The people who killed you?”
Her gaze met mine, and what I saw there scared me.
“They aren’t people,” she said.
Chapter 5
My eyes snapped open. I was in my room, my bed. The covers were still pulled over my head, and there was someone moving around in here besides me.
My Glock resided in a small gun safe beneath the kitchen sink. I left the weapon there unless I had a damn good reason to take it out. In retrospect, not the best decision I’d ever made. Right now, I wished I kept the thing in my nightstand.
If I chose to believe dream-Ruthie, the people who’d killed her had come after me. Except they weren’t people.
What in hell did that mean?
And what did they want? I hadn’t seen them. I had no idea who they were. Unless they thought Ruthie had told me something before dying.
Shit.
I was starting to get twitchy. They could shoot me, stab me, pretty much anything me, and I wouldn’t know about it until too late. I could feel the bull’s-eye on my back already.
Slowly, trying not to rustle the covers, I crooked a finger in the sheet and drew it downward.
A man knelt by my bed, or at least I thought he knelt. Either he was extremely short and standing, or freakishly tall and kneeling. From the breadth of his shoulders, which blotted out most of my room, I figured the latter was a better bet.
He was also naked, at least from the waist up, and that piece of info disturbed me almost as much as his being here in the first place.
Despite the shadows, his hair shone eerily white, a towhead at an age when most had darkened to muddy blond. His eyes were spooky too, seeming to reflect the silver light of the moon when the moon had already risen past the apex and started to descend on the win-dowless side of my building.
In other words, no possibility of a reflection. His eyes appeared to glow from within.
The cops were not going to believe any of this—if I lived long enough to tell them.
The intruder grinned, and I saw something else the police wouldn’t believe. His teeth had been filed to spiky points. What a nut.
I erupted from the covers, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table, a book, a paperweight, anything to bonk him over the head with.
He grabbed my wrist, moving quicker than anyone I’d ever known. I froze as images tumbled through my mind—what he’d done to people, what he was.
A monster.
And not the Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer type of monster, not even Hannibal Lector; he was a…