Kealan Burke - Kin

And she would not let him do that to Claire.

“I’m glad you came,” Finch said. “Wasn’t sure the jailbreak would work.”

In the passenger seat, Claire smiled. There were slight wrinkles around her mouth that did not belong on the face of someone so young, but Finch knew that no matter how old it might say she was on her I.D., what those men had done to her had shoved her headlong into adulthood. They had taken her innocence, her friends, her spirit, and left her as good as dead, for he had known Claire before the trip, had often kidded around with her while he waited for Kara outside the house, and he saw now that the light that had always danced in her eyes had gone out. Had been snuffed out. Her once lustrous blonde hair was now jet black and greasy, as if she’d dipped it in oil—a clear indication of her prevalent mood. Or perhaps it was meant to compliment the black pirate-style patch she wore to hide the scarring from where they had gouged out her eye. Either way, she did not look herself, did not look familiar to him.

“Kara was in the shower,” Claire told him, looking down at her hands, absently rubbing the smooth pink nubs where two of the fingers on her left hand should have been. “So I left a note. My mother was…my mother. I’m not sure it even registered that I was leaving.”

Finch thought of his own mother, at home, watching game shows and alternating between cursing the world and weeping while she reached down beside her rocking chair for one of the many vials of pills that stood like attentive soldiers around the runners.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he told her, because she appeared as if she was waiting for him to say it. He draped his arm over her shoulder, gently, as he was not yet sure how she might react to a man’s touch. She stiffened slightly, but did not move away, and when she looked up at him, he saw the pain in her face.

“You’re going to kill them, right?” she asked, so matter-of-factly, she might have been asking a quarterback about an upcoming game.

He nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“Good.” She went back to looking at her fingers. “I want to go with you.”

“No.”

She turned in the seat and glared at him. “What?”

“I said no.”

“I don’t care. I said I want to go, and you don’t get to tell me I can’t.”

“Jesus, Claire… why would you want to go back? If what we uncovered is true, then these guys have been snatching people and murdering them for years. You might be the only person who ever lived to tell the tale.”

“A tale nobody believed,” she said flatly.

“I believed it. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I can take care of this. I’m going to. There’s no need for you to be there to see it. When it’s over, I’ll come see you, and we can talk. I’ll tell you everything. But for now you need to stay here where you’re safe.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Safe? Here? Finch…” She gestured at the world outside the car. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter where I go. Here, back there, France, the North Pole, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never be safe again. You could build a castle around me and seal it up and I’d still be what I am. And what I am is scared. What I’m afraid of…” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat, then looked at him with fiery resolve. “What I’m afraid of isn’t out there . It’s in here ,” she said, tapping a forefinger against her temple. “And no matter where I run, it’ll follow me, whether you kill those men or not.”

“Why do you want to come if it won’t change anything for you?”

“I’m alive and I shouldn’t be,” she said sadly. “And I don’t know how long I’ll be able to last with that voice telling me I should be with my friends, but in that time I’d like to see those men, and those children , understand what they did to us. To feel the pain and the fear they were so fucking eager to inflict on us. “ Her eyes shimmered with tears. “I want to know they’re dead. Maybe it will change things, maybe it won’t, but I need to be there. I need to see the world put back on its axis, things put right, even if I don’t belong in it anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“You still have people, Claire.”

“Who? You?”

“No. Your Mom, and Kara. You still have people who care about you and who’ll protect you. The rest of us have been left with nothing.”

She looked squarely at him. “Do you blame me?”

“What?”

“For what happened? Do you blame me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not. You didn’t make it happen.”

“But does it make you mad that I lived and Danny didn’t?”

He avoided her eyes for a moment. The truth was, in the beginning, he had been mad at her. He might even have hated her a little for being the sole survivor, questioned fate as to why she had been chosen above the others. But it had been a passing thing, the hate quickly redirected to the proper target, where it deepened, grew potent, became rage.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said to his silence and he quickly drew her close.

“No,” he said. “I’m not mad that you survived. Not mad at you. I blame them because that’s where the blame belongs.”

Head resting against his shoulder, she asked, “Do you think it will go away when you’ve killed them? The pain?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “I don’t think that’ll ever go away. Not fully. Not after what you’ve gone through.”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

He smiled tightly, her hair tickling his chin. “I don’t suppose it’ll go away for either of us.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because it’s how it needs to be.”

She pulled away from him, folded her arms. “So can I come?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m spoiled for reasons, Claire. Firstly, forget about those fucking lunatics down there for a minute. What do you think Kara will do if she finds out I’ve taken you back?”

“Who cares?”

“I care, and you will too because she’ll have the cops on our asses so fast we won’t even see their lights before I’m in jail and you’re back under house arrest. Christ, you know as well as I do that Kara wouldn’t stand for it. She’d make my life a living hell.”

Though she shook her head, Finch could see in her face that she knew he was right. “Plus,” he went on, “You’ve been through enough bad shit. You don’t need to be put back in harm’s way after escaping it once just to see more bad shit.”

She fell silent, almost sulking, but he understood her feelings. They were the same as his own. Behind all the pain in Claire’s face, he recognized the fear, the grief, and the kind of stark, utter hatred that could only be sated by vengeance.

“Did you bring your phone?”

Quietly, she nodded, and slid it out of her jeans pocket, then handed it over. Finch inspected the cell phone. A slim, silver Nokia. Nothing much different from the kind of phones most of the kids were carrying around these days. “Keep it,” she said.

“I don’t need it. Just the number. I have a friend who will know if we can use it to trace the signal to whoever answered it, or at least to where they were when they answered it. Danny’s phone needs to be on, I guess, for us to have any hope of tracking it. If it isn’t…” He shrugged.

“You didn’t need to see me for that. I called you. You already have my number.”

“I wanted to see you.” When she said nothing, he nudged her shoulder. “Hey.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, all right? I know why you need this. And I can’t stop you going alone. You just can’t come with me.”