Vicki Pettersson - The Touch of Twilight

Fortunately, Olivia’s more obvious talents had recently come to good use. Two months ago I’d managed to secure the contact information for a well-known hacker in Switzerland, and had flown him in on Xavier Archer’s private jet, plied him with wine and women and other latent adolescent fantasies-come-true, and a story about needing a partner in my expanding business. Actually, I could’ve probably spoon-fed him SPAM and sent him back to Europe on a dinghy, and still met with the same enthusiastic results. He took one look at his voluptuous “partner,” a second at the bankroll, and readily agreed. So we determined he would take over the web business while I would meet with the big players in person, if needed. We spoke once a month by videophone on a scrambled line, and whenever he geeked out and starting talking over my head, I just leaned forward and gave him a nice cleavage shot.

Sorry, Olivia , I’d think, as he stuttered off into silence. But it was just so easy .

So Maximus X had set up a satellite security system I could access by remote, though I’d still had to go in and plant a camera and audio in Ben’s house by hand. I had full access to Ben’s accounts, and if he was pissed at me now, he’d be livid to know I could view his every keystroke with one click of my mouse.

But it was for his own good, I thought, sighing as I typed in Rose , gaining immediate entrée into his private journals. At least that’s what I told myself.

I skimmed through the early entries, a faithful retelling of a young boy’s turmoil-the emotionally absent mother, an abusive father-because it was a story I already knew. I lingered over the words detailing the dark side of his work as an officer-what he’d seen and what he’d done-and how both could climb inside you if not for the badge acting as a barrier for your soul.

However, that line of thought had abruptly ceased when he quit being a cop, and it was then that a darker, more cynical Ben emerged. Leaning close to the screen, I could almost see in the pixels the downward spiral of his mental health, the story written between the lines. He’d once told me he wrote mysteries as a hobby, but the incoherent ramblings filling the screen looked more like horror to me. I had to close my eyes a handful of times, consciously willing myself to breathe, before I could continue. This was torment I had caused. Not Regan, not his parents, but me. I had to stop reading altogether when he said he’d had to get it all out on paper just so it’d stop burning him on the inside.

I skipped forward and began reading again on a random page when his heart had clearly hardened toward me. I should’ve known Regan was telling the truth about that. She was getting to him-drawing on his bitterness, bringing anger to the forefront of his psyche-because that’s what Shadows did to humans. It was like watching a cat bat at a single-winged moth, toying with a life just for amusement.

Similar, I saw, to the way Ben and his brothers had toyed with Charles Tracy.

I leaned forward and began to read the entry with Tracy’s name. It chafed that Regan knew about him, this childhood bully Ben and I had known, though she’d probably discovered it from this very account, an entry detailing one week in my fourteenth year, right after Ben and I had banded together to make sure Charles never victimized another child in our school again.

Of course, Ben hadn’t really needed me. I might have already developed a healthy sense of right and wrong, but I wasn’t yet physically strong. Meanwhile, Ben came from a military family; his father was retired air force, one older brother was in the reserves and working as a mechanic, the other in the marines, though at the time of this incident he’d been on leave. I’d remembered all this well because Ben hadn’t been able to hide the bruises on his torso, and though he’d grinned at me when recounting the antics of his older brothers, he’d done so with a split lip, his front tooth missing. He’d told me with a crooked smile that he didn’t care-it made him tough and built character-but then Charles Tracy made fun of him in front of a student assembly, and Ben didn’t show up to school for three straight days. It was okay, though-or so I’d thought then-because neither had Charles.

And now I knew why.

Ben’s father had served in Nam, and when he wasn’t using his family as a punching bag, he’d regale his boys with stories of his non-government-sanctioned activities. When Ben came home from that assembly, pissed and humiliated about Charles’s taunts, his brothers decided to test the effectiveness of wartime tactics on a thirteen-year-old. They abducted Charles on the way home from school, told him they were going on a little desert camping trip, and pulled out a sleeping bag to prove it.

They used military grade twine to bind him inside that bag, laid him out at the base of an old Joshua tree, and rigged a water cooler to release one icy droplet at a time onto the center of Tracy’s forehead. According to the entry Ben didn’t have a hand in this, but he didn’t try to stop it either. It was only water and it couldn’t really hurt, right? Besides, it was just as likely he would end up in Tracy’s position if he said anything at all.

Who was the bully now? his brothers wanted to know, laughing as they prodded the immobilized Tracy with sticks from their campfire. By morning Charles was unable to form words, moaning incoherently, and he had a welt on his forehead the size of red walnut. While the elder Trainas brewed instant coffee and ate bacon over a campfire grill, Charles still begging and moaning like an animal behind them, Ben was sick behind a giant saguaro.

The following week rumors of torture circulated around school, but the Traina brothers denied it, their father backed them, and Ben said nothing at all. I finally cornered him in fourth period gym class and asked him about it outright. He looked me in the eye, sincere and earnest and intent, and he lied.

Charles Tracy, once one of Olivia’s greatest tormentors, returned to school like a ghost of his former self. His harassment of her-of everyone-abruptly stopped, and I’d thought it was because Ben and I had finally set him straight. Eventually I’d stopped worrying about him, stopped seeing him as a threat, and finally-like a ghost-he disappeared altogether.

So what did this confessional entry say about Ben’s actions? What explanation did he have for allowing the torture, then lying about it afterward? Had he hidden the truth from me because he was afraid I’d judge him or because he was ashamed of what he’d done?

No. He’d hidden it because he wasn’t.

“It’s exactly what Regan is looking for,” I murmured, lacing my fingers beneath my chin. These words were the smoking gun Shadow agents looked for in the mortals they targeted as beards, allies, or victims. And yet I was having trouble reconciling the boy portrayed here with the man I’d left sleeping in my bed a month earlier. As for the drug dealer in Dog Run, I didn’t care what it might look like-what this entry alone might hint at-there was no way Ben could kill another human being, take a shower, and then make love to me only hours later. It would mean he’d been caressing me with lethal fingers, and that just didn’t compute.

But the entry on Charles Tracy forced me to consider one thing that’d niggled at me since Ben’s reintroduction into my life. What else, in the name of justice, had Ben decided to take into his own hands? What else had he done behind the shield of his badge and not felt ashamed about? And did I really want to excavate the answer to those questions?

You’re going to lose him. It’s only a matter of time.

I could feel the chaotic energy balling inside me, and swallowed hard, closed the file, and calmly shut down the computer. I sucked in a long breath, holding it before letting it spiral out of me like a string of yarn, then left the room to put on some tea. I was determined to put the issue aside until Warren could do his research to confirm for sure the dealer, Magnum, was dead. I walked back to Olivia’s bedroom, reasoning that even if he was, Warren’s account would be markedly different from Regan’s. Opening the closet doors, I stepped inside to the scent of cedar and expensive leather, and gently pushed aside a wall of little black dresses.