The People Next Door Read online

  Amy exited the bathroom quietly and sat on the bed, facing the large picture window with its view of the Flatirons and the long Front Range tapering off into the night. She wore only a thick robe with her hair pulled back and she was very still. He sat on the other side of the bed, watching her back.

  ‘Don’t shut me out,’ he said. ‘I can’t live without you and the kids.’

  She answered a minute later. ‘You call this living?’

  ‘We’re still here. I don’t care about the rest. Only you and Kyle and Briela. Nothing else matters to me.’

  Amy stood and walked to her dresser in the corner of the room. She opened the smallest drawer, the top center where she kept her jewelry. She took something from within and walked back, standing above him. He looked up her. Her eyes were inflamed with a decade of sorrow. He wondered what they would look like in another fifty years. A hundred.

  ‘Here.’ She held the earring out for him and it fell into his palm. A pearl set within a silver spiral, Myra Blaylock’s. ‘I took it from her,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t remember where or when. But I remember the way her hair came out in my fists. I remember the sound of her lips when I bit them off. I remember the taste of her heart. Can you live with that?’

  He hesitated only briefly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Sapphires too,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I should have confronted him sooner, but I can live with all of it.’

  ‘I don’t think I can. Not any more. Ingrid …’ She moved away from him and he rose to catch her as she fell to the floor. She curled against the wall, shaking with grief, beyond tears. He leaned over her, tried to hold her still. She recoiled but he wouldn’t let her go. He lifted from under her legs and back, carrying her to the bed as she beat at him with her fists, raked at his cheeks. He set her on the bed and she backed away from him, pressing herself to the headboard.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he said. ‘You have and we will. Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Everything’s changed! Ingrid’s dead!’

  ‘They manipulated her. Convinced her to take our daughter. I will handle them.’

  ‘I want to die,’ she said. ‘I want to burn until there is nothing left but ashes.’

  ‘Think about the kids.’

  ‘I am. We don’t deserve them. None of us deserve to go on.’

  ‘How do you know that? Who gets to decide that? Why were we allowed to survive if we were not meant to?’

  ‘We’re freaks. There is no place in the world for us. How can there be?’

  ‘We can do better. We can change. If we work together, we can control it, learn to use it. You don’t know—’

  ‘I know we haven’t been able to control anything,’ she said. ‘We don’t even know what we’re capable of. It’s like living as two people, leading separate lives.’

  Mick crawled toward her, took her wrist. She kicked at him but he pushed her legs down and sat on top of her. ‘We were hiding from the truth,’ he said. ‘We lied to ourselves and to each other. It was destroying us because we pretended it wasn’t there, Amy. If we embrace it, if we work together …’

  ‘I wasn’t pretending! I lost my mind!’

  ‘Now’s your chance to get it back,’ he said. ‘We have a right to life.’

  ‘Whose lives? What gives us the right to take from them?’

  ‘The others deserved what they got. They hurt us. They stole from us, threatened to harm you and the others at school, they came after our family and we didn’t let them. It happens every day in this world. There are predators and victims, the strong and the weak.’

  ‘There are laws, morals. There’s no room for … this.’

  ‘I say there is. There has to be. We are proof.’

  ‘Who are you? What gives you the right to decide?’

  ‘I am as my maker made me. We paid for this life with our own. We survived. How do you know there isn’t a reason for that? How do you know we weren’t meant to come back and change everything?’

  ‘You’ve lost your mind. I don’t know you. I don’t know who I am any more.’

  ‘I am your husband and I love you.’

  ‘If we have any soul left, we will destroy ourselves.’

  He looked back to the hallway, toward the kids’ rooms. ‘What will you tell our children? That they don’t deserve to live? That they are a disease? How will you do it, Amy? Because I won’t help you. I won’t let you. You will have to kill me first and then do it alone. What is the humane way to end the only life they know? Will you burn them? Inject them? Bury them in the backyard?’

  She screamed at him. She fought him. For a long time he did not have control of her and he thought, only for a moment or two, that maybe she was right. Maybe it would be easier to end it all, end them all tonight. He imagined starting with her, doing it quietly before the kids woke up, but he couldn’t imagine what would come after that.

  Later, she was lying under him, hands pinned above her head, and she knew that she could fight him until they were both lying in bleeding tatters, but she was tired of fighting. The resistance went out of her and he was staring down at her with eyes that looked black in the darkened bedroom and she wanted to laugh now that she had ever called him a quitter. He wasn’t a quitter. Tonight he was a killer, capable of anything.

  ‘How would it be different?’ she said softly.

  He relaxed his grip on her wrists, leaned back but did not get off her.

  ‘We can go away,’ he said. ‘Tonight. Never come back. Start over somewhere we don’t know anybody.’

  ‘I can’t imagine leaving Boulder. What would it change?’

  ‘If we stay, we will always be at risk. There are too many connections.’

  She thought about that. ‘We shouldn’t have made it this long.’

  ‘They’ve been cleaning up after us,’ Mick said.

  ‘Not all of them, though,’ she said, thinking of the disposals. ‘What did you do with yours?’

  ‘I used the restaurant. Late nights, in the kitchen. It’s all a blur but I remember … I remember the tools. Taking out the trash.’

  She shifted beneath him, not minding the pressure on her hips. Her eyes were wide, her voice very low. ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I must have. I think … yes, I did. I felt stronger after.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there was always a hangover. The come-down.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I couldn’t focus on anything. Work was hell.’

  ‘Everything was hell.’

  ‘I kept seeing them,’ he said. ‘They started following me to work.’

  ‘In the classroom,’ she added.

  ‘Roger was here, in the house. I followed him into the yard. He was trying to warn me about the new people. He saw it coming.’

  ‘It was a vision. A warning. You saw it coming,’ she said. ‘Like Briela’s tantrums. She knew. We see things others can’t. It’s like holding down three jobs. The real job, then finding them and doing it, cleaning up after, reentering the regular world. And then the burden of pretending, carrying it inside. I don’t want to do that any more, Mick. I can’t.’

  He rolled off her but his leg stayed draped over her thighs. She didn’t want him to go away. When he was close like this, she almost felt warm. It had been three years since she’d felt any warmth at all.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘If we stay, we will do it all differently. We’ll have more resources.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Vince has some kind of plan,’ he said. ‘He said the other families that are like us are working with him.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we must be worth a lot to him. He offered us the house and everything else.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Millions.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’ she said. Her right hand rested on his thigh.

  ‘He helped me. That night, after Briela’s party. I was attacked by three junkies trying to rob the restaurant
. I handled the first two but the third took me down and Vince finished him. I saw him do it. He’s serious.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said, pulling him closer.

  He held her tighter, kissed her neck, her ear, pressed his nose into her hair, trying to remember the way she used to smell. The bigger question occurred to her then, and perhaps to both of them as they lay in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘There will be others,’ she said. ‘If we don’t end it ourselves, it will spread.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘Unless there’s a cure,’ she said.

  ‘There won’t be unless one of us is caught. Imprisoned, studied, cut into pieces.’

  ‘Whether we stay or go, someone will find out and we’ll be hunted down, Mick. They’ll take the kids away.’

  ‘I will never let that happen.’

  ‘Promise?’

  He crawled back on top of her.

  ‘Hold my arms again,’ she said.

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Above my head.’

  He raised them up and pushed against her. Held her wrists with one hand and opened her robe with the other. He looked into her eyes. She did not look away. They had never been this close.

  ‘There’s nothing left to hide behind,’ she said.

  ‘No. You know the worst things about me. You know everything.’

  ‘No one else knows me the way you do,’ she said. ‘They don’t know what we have.’

  ‘It’s ours.’

  She arched under him and he kissed her neck, her breasts, her belly.

  ‘Is it disgusting?’ she whispered.

  ‘This is all I want. You are all I want.’

  ‘Don’t ever turn away from me again,’ she said.

  ‘Keep me warm, Amy.’

  Their bodies could not generate heat on their own, but the things they shared replaced all the cold inside and closed the distance that had grown between them.

  After, when his mind was empty and the house was silent and she was stretched across him and licking the blood from the cuts she had made in his chest, he slid his fingers into her hair and cradled the back of her head. He massaged the base of her neck and she became still, more content than he had known her to be in years.

  ‘What happens if we say no?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. He might try something, but it wouldn’t involve the police.’

  ‘He planned this for a long time,’ Amy said. ‘He must have a plan to deal with us if we refuse.’

  ‘On the other hand, what is the downside to agreeing? How would it be any different than our lives now?’

  ‘That house.’

  ‘The security.’

  ‘It’s like a compound,’ she said. ‘With a view.’

  ‘We already have a view.’

  ‘We need to find out everything.’

  ‘He said midnight,’ Mick said. ‘He’s not going to wait. I need to go back soon. You can stay with the kids.’

  ‘I love you, Mick.’

  ‘I love you, Ames. I’m sorry it got to be this way.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘At least we’re not alone.’

  ‘Never again.’

  60

  Kyle lost track of how long he had been standing outside her window when he heard the latch open and the window began to slide, opening for him. He could not see her inside the black rectangle. She did not speak. He had nothing left to lose.

  He climbed through, his feet sinking onto a soft surface. Her bed. He crouched low, one hand steady against the window sill.

  ‘June?’

  A form sat up in the dark and a warm hand took hold, pulling him down. He fell on top of her, the heat coming off her in waves as she pushed the bedding back and his cold body pressed against her warm skin. The softness of her thighs and breasts, the heat of her breath against his ear. She was shaking, writhing against him.

  ‘Hurry,’ she whispered. ‘Before they come back to check on me.’

  ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

  ‘Do you promise to wait for me? Will you take care of me after?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No matter what comes next? You won’t leave me alone?’

  ‘Never. I promise.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘I loved you the first time I saw you.’

  ‘Make me feel good first, Kyle. Make me feel good and do it quickly.’

  His kissed her face, her nose, felt her wet tongue in his mouth, the plump pressure of her lips. She pulled his shirt over his head and he felt his bones against her softness. He traced his fingers around her smooth edges, his touch delicate. She breathed harder, pulled his hair, pushed him down. He licked her neck, her chest, pulled one nipple in his teeth. June moaned and pushed her hips up. The rough surface of her pubic hair was warm against his hip, her leg wrapped around him and squeezing. He moved lower, tasting her skin, the warm salt taste and smooth soft hairs around her navel, taking her hips in both his hands. He pushed his tongue into her, tasting, tasting, filling with her heat and when she began to cry and tighten against his mouth he turned and bit into the soft inside of her thigh, tearing her open in a clean, deep pull and held to her while her blood surged into his mouth. He sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed.

  June screamed and thrashed and he reached up and clamped a hand over her mouth. She fought free and he let go of her leg to keep her body still. He held her down and ate more of her, taking from the neck and breast and rolling her in the sheets, sinking his teeth into her hind flanks, soaking the bed and drinking from her until they were sliding wetly as fish. She shuddered in his arms and fought him. He held on, amazed at the force of her resistance, her body clinging to the life her mind had forsaken. He kissed her again, fighting with her to get past it, until she went still. He rose above her, her blood dripping from his lips onto her chest. He looked into her wide eyes, the glass of them shiny in the dark. She seemed to be glaring at him for the longest time, but finally the lids lowered and she wilted beneath him.

  I’ve killed her. I’ve killed my flower girl.

  Kyle pressed his face between her breasts until he could no longer feel the heartbeat and they were at peace together. He sobbed. He buried his mouth in her bedding and sobbed for what he had done. He felt the warm blood soaking under his mouth. He turned and began to clean her then, lapping at her wounds and bathing her, drawing his mouth along her calves and thighs, around her hips and under her arms, tasting every part of her and securing her warmth in his memory, savoring that which he would never have again, cleaning and loving her while he waited for her to wake up.

  Wake up wake up wake up …!

  Kyle shook violently on the floor and stared up at the blinds, not remembering where he was. Then he saw his sister’s bed and remembered. He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes. The sky outside B’s window was still black. He hadn’t gone yet. June was still alive …

  But she wasn’t warm. She was cold, like him. She wasn’t a real girl, he wasn’t a real boy. He understood her attraction to him now. It wasn’t because of who he was. It was because of what he was. She was using him for some purpose. Recruiting him, following her father’s orders. His whole family was being adopted into some cause, one that Kyle did not understand and cared nothing about.

  Except, maybe there was more to it than this. Maybe she did care about him. She had tried to warn him, hadn’t she? Talked about running away? She said they weren’t her real parents, they were monsters. She wasn’t comfortable in her new life, in this condition they had in common. Maybe there was still time to save her, save her from them. Maybe they could be together, in their own way. If she loved him the way he loved her, she would leave with him. But it had to be soon, tonight.

  His parents had not come out yet. He’d heard them fighting a while ago, but now they were quiet. In there together, determining the fate of the family. He couldn’t wait for them to say no, to re
fuse, to pack the car and flee. If he waited until his parents came to the wrong decision, he wouldn’t have a choice. He would never see her again.

  Kyle stood and waited at the door, to see if Briela would stir or open her eyes. As softly as his feet would carry him, he went down the hall, into the living room and kitchen area. He let himself out the back door, over the growing summer grass, toward the only thing that mattered in his cold world.

  I have to be with her. We have to be together, otherwise there is no point to living this way, none at all.

  61

  When they came in to check on Briela, Kyle was gone. He wasn’t in his room either.

  ‘Where did he go?’ Amy said.

  Mick rubbed his face. ‘Where do you think? You saw the look in his eyes. He loves her.’

  ‘But what’s he going to do with her?’

  ‘Whatever they want him to do,’ Mick said. ‘I have to go get him. Now.’ He turned to leave but Amy stopped him.

  Briela was stirring before them, moaning as she opened her eyes.

  ‘Hey, baby,’ Amy said. ‘We’re here. Everything’s all right. The monsters can’t hurt you any more.’

  Briela’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened as if she were attempting to scream and her body began to shiver.

  ‘Briela? What’s wrong?’ Amy said. ‘Mick? Do something.’

  They kneeled at her bedside, hands on her chest and legs, smoothing her hair.

  ‘Briela,’ Mick said. ‘Talk to me. I’m here. What is it, honey?’

  Slowly she stopped shivering and her mouth began to close. Her eyes focused on them.

  ‘Is it your arm?’ Amy said.

  ‘She saw something,’ Mick said. ‘What is it, honey? Is it Kyle?’

  Briela shook her head, no. She looked terrified.