alone as long as she could.
When they f irst met, Detective Pete Mondragon asked, “This a vengeance gig for you?”
“Not exactly.” It was not the truth but also not a lie.
Even then he knew better than to push her to elaborate. He knew when to keep his mouth shut. Besides, it had started as an accident—the investigating, that is. The poking and prodding of people and facts, the uncovering of stuff that wanted to stay hidden, like evil men with no obvious motive forcing poison down a teenage girl’s throat. But it became something she was good at, something intimately personal, more than something that just passed the time.
Sometimes, a murder or a disappearance caught her eye for no other reason than a gnawing ache at the sheer senselessness of it all: this undef ined despair that told her if she didn’t investigate, no one else would. There were a lot of people out there—young, rootless girls in particular—whom the world saw as disposable. Or whom the world didn’t see at all. Which was worse.
But Emma saw them. In those moments, investigating and solving crimes felt like penance—even when none had ever borne a connection to Glen Walters. She wondered if she would ever stop what he had unleashed. If you’d believed him back in 1913, his “church” had already been around for centuries. He claimed the faith traced its roots back to the Druids on one side of the Atlantic and the denizens of a lost Atlantis on the other.
In a word, bullshit.
The same type of bullshit that attracted people decade after decade, convinced it would make them safer or happier or righteous. They drank the poison Kool-Aid. They waited for aliens to whisk them off during the return of a comet. They holed up in compounds and bunkers. Or worse.
The problem was, some legends weren’t bullshit. Like the one about the girl named Emma O’Neill who celebrated her f irst seventeenth birthday six years before America granted women the right to vote.
The sheaf of police reports on the front seat next to her wasn’t a product of faith, either. It was real, and it was tragic, and it was very likely the Church of Light’s doing. Bullshit disguised as faith had a way of making reality very ugly.
Ironic that Glen Walters was decades gone himself, but had become even more powerful somehow. Dead heroes were like that. His followers might have been mortal, but collectively, they were eternal, just like her. They’d put their faith in his bullshit. They would sink into the background. Vanish for a decade or two. Then she would breathe easier, thinking it was over—only to discover again and again that it wasn’t, that it never would be, unless she found a way to stop it.
As the traff ic slowed to a crawl once more, she wondered, not for the f irst time, if she could put an end to Glen Walters’s mission without having to sacrif ice herself. She’d considered that option once or twice over the years: just taking an ad out in the paper, or later on the Internet, begging the Church of Light to come f ind her. It’s me, Emma O’Neill, you bastards!
Wouldn’t that surprise the hell out them?
But she never would, and she knew it. She couldn’t go the way of her family or those poor innocent girls or even Glen Walters until she found out what happened to Charlie. Best to focus on the present, as always. Someone knew she was in Dallas. Someone was leaving a trail of missing and poisoned girls, trying to f ind one specif ic girl. Her. And unless she was mistaken, it was the same group that had destroyed her family and Charlie’s family, that had destroyed them, Charlie and her, over a century ago.
•
“Exit in six hundred feet,” the bossy GPS lady intoned. “Make a right at the intersection. The destination is on your left.”
Her mother would have loved GPS. Emma almost smiled at the idea of her mother behind the wheel of a slick automobile with a back-up camera and Bluetooth. And with the smile came a wince, because part of Emma always squeezed in pain, the part that refused to forget or toughen up. Maura O’Neill had been dead and gone for almost a hundred years. But Emma’s mother would have bitched—politely, but still—about Dallas traff ic.
Emma exited. Checked for oncoming cars. Made her right turn. Dallas Fellowship was on her right; you couldn’t miss the huge-gated entrance