Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,75
whispered.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Gloria said, hands over her heart. “That’s all.”
“Please kill me,” Dag said.
I just grinned and grabbed a beignet.
When we were finally back in Dag’s bedroom, I sat on the bed, and Dag shut the door and said, “I’m going to become a monk.”
“That would be a waste,” I said.
“The kind that have to cut off all communication with their families.”
“I think you’re talking about a cult.”
“That’s right. I’m going to join a cult.” He wiped his mouth on the tee he was wearing; powdered sugar already covered most of the gray jersey. “Do you know any good ones?”
“I guess we need to talk about what happened, you know. With Zahra.”
His face hardened. “That was a mistake, Elien. Let’s not go down that road again.”
“We were wrong about Zahra. We jumped to a conclusion. But we weren’t entirely wrong. Something is killing people in that support group. The hashok is feeding off the people who are suffering, and anyone who might stand in its way—David, who was trying to stop it, and Zahra, because she wanted to help the people in group. It’s all connected to this support group. And it’s all connected to DuPage Behavioral. David was following the same trail we were, and he came to the same conclusion.”
“Elien—”
“All the victims have had a connection to the support group.”
“Elien, hold on—”
“And all the victims have had a connection to DuPage Behavioral. We’re close, ok, and if we—”
“Elien, just stop talking for a minute.”
His words rang out in the small room. The quiet activity in the rest of the house—Dag’s parents talking quietly in the kitchen, the murmur of the TV—stopped completely. Everything was holding its breath.
“They’re forcing me out of the sheriff’s department.”
“What?”
“They’re firing me. They won’t call it that. And it’s not exactly . . . I mean, it’s more complicated. But they’ve got these psych evals, and then there’s the fact that I just happened to show up at a murder scene and I can’t explain it, and . . . technically, I’m still on paid leave, but I’m done. As soon as they can make it happen, I’ll be out of there.”
I thought about this, took a deep breath, and said, “Ok.”
“It’s not ok.”
“Dag, I’m sorry about your job. I am. But that doesn’t mean we should stop. We’re so close.”
“What are you talking about? We don’t have anything, Elien. Every time we think we have a lead, somebody dies, and we’re not any closer. And we’re putting our lives in danger.”
In the living room, the TV came on again; somebody was talking about birdies, and then the vacuum roared to life, whiting out the announcer’s voice.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“We’re in danger,” Dag said. “I asked my parents. They said they’ll loan me some money. We’ll get out of here for a while. We’ll go somewhere else, just the two of us. And when things settle down, we can come back. Or not. We can do whatever we want, Elien.”
“I can’t imagine how hard it is to lose your job—”
“Fuck my job. I was shit at my job. I don’t care about my job. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about us, if that doesn’t freak you out to hear it.”
“It doesn’t freak me out.” I took another breath, releasing it as slowly as I could, blinking to clear my eyes. “Will you come over here?”
He grumbled something.
“Dag, please.”
After a moment, he stomped over to stand in front of me.
I took his hands and looked up at him. “You were not shit at your job. You are smart. You are brave. You are intuitive. You want to protect people. Losing that job, losing what you worked so hard for, I know it hurts. I’m sorry.”
“I tried to be good at it,” he said in a small voice.
“I know. And you were good at it. You saved my life. More than once, actually. And you’re working hard right now to save other people. The hashok is going to keep killing, whether you’re a deputy or not, whether we stay here or not. I’m not going to leave. I’ve been running from what happened . . . from what happened with Gard and my parents for a long time now. If the hashok had anything to do with it, if there’s even a chance, then I want to face that thing and kill it.”
“We don’t know how to kill it,” Dag said.
“But we’ll figure it out. We’ve got that book.