Images rush at me and I can't tell if they're in my head or hers. I replay the last month. The nights we had together. The unimaginable pleasure. The sense of surrealism.
Then I remember that night so long ago when Earl was beating the shit out of me. When I lost consciousness for a split second. When I swam back to the surface and spotted her. Glared. Furious that anyone would see the truth. Livid that it was displayed so openly and under such garish lights.
But then I see her up close. Her gold eyes. Her soft mouth. And I am stunned that she is real.
She begins to faint beside me. I can't help her without giving up the ruse. I feel her limbs go slack and her mind open. Her light swallows me. Soaks inside. Illuminates every dark corner of my psyche. And I remember everything. In one great wave of enlightenment, I remember it all.
I begin with the first time I see her. A shimmering light in the vast blackness of the universe. How many centuries ago was that? How long have I been waiting for her? She turns and smiles at me and I am lost.
I abandon my mission. The one where I'm supposed to be there when the light is born a human on earth. The one where I'm supposed to kill her, the vessel, and capture her soul. The light. The portal to heaven. The preeminent power that is inherent in her kind.
I'm supposed to wrap her soul up with a bow and lay it at my father's feet. Not the retched human who pretended to be my father, but my real one. The one who sent me to strangle the vessel and capture the light for his own machinations.
Instead, I wait. I plan. I find a family and give up my memory, my identity, to be born on earth as a human as well. To be raised near her. To meet her on common ground.
We should have gone to school together. We should have been high school sweethearts. We should have lived happily ever after.
Apparently, my father didn't appreciate my changing his plan, so he threw a killer wrench into mine by means of Earl Walker. That's what happens when your dad is public enemy number one. It certainly explains a lot. But I am not my father's son. I am nothing like him. I am not evil.
If my father wants a war, if Satan wants a war, he'll have one. He never should have created me. He never should have stoked the fires of hell and forged such a ghastly thing. Such a despicable beast.
Dutch collapses and O'Connell helps her to a chair. She didn't see those last images. She doesn't know what I am, and I have no intention of letting her find out.
I smile inwardly. She's becoming a badass detective. And she wants me to wake up.
Maybe I should. Maybe she could actually help me in my quest. Help me find answers.
I've never understood how Earl died. Who did it. How I was so perfectly framed. I was hoping to get answers from Sarah. She flat-ass lied on the witness stand. Said Earl was afraid of me. That they both were. Afraid for their lives. Why would she say that unless Earl put her up to it? But why would he put her up to it? And why would she follow through with it after he died?
She didn't want to. I felt every emotion running through her alcohol-abused body when she was on the stand, and the last thing she felt for me was fear. She still wanted me, even after all the years. I guess I should be grateful she never mentioned Kim. I know now why she didn't. She liked Kim. Didn't want her mixed up in any of this. In a way, Sarah set her free.
I went to see her-incorporeally, of course-a few months after I'd been convicted, but she was killed in a home invasion. That was when the niggling in the back of my mind began.
But the postcards are what nailed it for me. The scent of his cheap cologne. The sentimental garbage strewn across one of them.
Earl Walker is alive, and I'm going to find him.