She scuttled backward, trying to open up a little room between herself and this young man who had barged into her home with bad intent written all over his face. He wanted to hurt her, she could tell he wanted to hurt her and somehow she knew he wanted more than that. He wanted to hurt the daughter she had just met for the first time in thirty years, she knew that, too, and she was not going to allow it to happen. She would crab-walk away from him and then she would pull the gun out of her pocket and hold it on him, she would hold it on him to stop him from doing whatever he was planning on doing and then she would call the police and—
—and she slammed into the hallway wall with her back. She slammed into the wall because after all it had been half a century since she had crab-walked and what had seemed natural and easy when she was ten years old wasn’t quite so natural or easy anymore. She slammed into the wall and the impact jarred the little S&W out of her pocket and the intruder saw it on the floor and his eyes widened in surprise. She reached out and grabbed the gun and flicked off the safety and prepared to blast him to hell, but he wound up and kicked it before she had a chance to pull the trigger. He kicked it and it skittered away across the floor and into the living room where it disappeared under…it disappeared under…it disappeared under…
And then Cait understood.
Despite her near-unconsciousness and her wooziness and the fire burning in her arm and her fear of Milo and what he was doing to her, despite all of it, she finally understood. The Flicker disappeared, vanishing from her head like the popping of a soap bubble in bathwater.
She understood it all with a clarity that bordered on mystical. It wasn’t a typical Flicker she had been fighting off all afternoon. Typical Flickers were random and held absolutely no meaning most of the time. They were pointless snippets of people’s lives.
This had been different. Cait realized now that this Flicker had come from Victoria purposely, it was something she had been trying desperately to force into her daughter’s brain because it was something she needed her to see, but in Cait’s determination to concentrate fully on fighting off the monster that was her brother Milo, she had forced it away, time after time.
But now she understood. She understood Victoria’s desperation. Because when the monster had seen the gun fall out of Victoria’s sweater pocket and had kicked it away, it had sailed down the hallway and skittered into the living room, eventually coming to rest under the couch.
This couch.
The couch currently serving as Cait Connelly’s combination prison/torture chamber.
And Victoria had remembered.
Far off in the distance, Cait heard an explosion and felt the house shake. She wondered if it had been hit by lightning, or whether perhaps an airplane bound for nearby Logan International Airport had fallen out of the sky and crash-landed on it. She waited for her life to be snuffed out like some insignificant bug’s from the airplane explosion but when nothing happened, she snaked her left hand underneath the couch, feeling around on the floor with the back of her hand for the gun, for the little Smith & Wesson revolver waiting patiently to be found.
And against all odds she found it. Her knuckles brushed the cold steel plating of the gun and pushed it a little farther away on the varnished floor and Cait, incredibly, chuckled. It would be the very definition of irony, she thought, to find the gun, the object of her salvation, only to push it out of reach before being able to use it.
But it wasn’t out of reach. She strained and stretched, doing her best to ignore the horrible fiery pain in her right arm, the arm Milo had skinned from wrist to elbow, and when her hand brushed that cold steel plating again she wrapped her long, delicate fingers around it like a drowning swimmer grasping a life vest.
She secured the gun in her hand and then, with the advancing form of her attacker approaching rapidly in her peripheral vision, pulled it out from under the couch and curled her hand under her breast and closed her eyes just as he skidded to a stop in front of her. She hoped the pistol was hidden from his view by the angle of her body but could not be sure.
There was noise and what sounded like an approaching army and Cait realized the crash that had jarred her awake moments ago was not an airplane falling from the sky onto Victoria’s house, it was the police breaching the door and coming, finally coming, to rescue her and Victoria and Kevin.
But they were too late, despite the fact that they were in the house, or at least about to be in the house. She risked opening an eye and when she did, she saw Milo, the man who had begun torturing her and was going to continue torturing her until she was dead—it was all true, everything her mother had told her this morning about Flickers and her bloody family history of twin murdering twin was all true—standing right above her, not two feet away.
In his hand he held the knife he had used to peel her skin from her bones, only this time he was not going to use it merely to torture her and cause intense pain. This time he was going to use it to slit her throat. He leaned down, thinking she was unconscious, and swiveled his wrist and brought the knife blade forward and—
—and Cait swiveled her own hand, her left hand, the hand holding her mother’s snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver. She pulled the weapon out from under her body and she pointed it at Milo’s face and suddenly everything ground to a halt. The sounds of the police forcing their way into the house faded away to nothing and somehow Cait’s fear did the same. She was no longer a helpless victim, no longer cowering in fear against an attacker with intentions she could not comprehend.
Milo froze, the lethal knife poised inches away from the delicate, tender skin of Cait’s throat. And for seconds that seemed to stretch into hours, nothing happened and nobody moved. This nightmare day had come down to a deadly standoff.
Cait spoke, her voice somehow strong and steady despite the pain hammering her right arm and the adrenaline coursing through her body. “It doesn’t have to end like this. It doesn’t have to end at all,” she said, and for an instant she saw regret and longing share space with the madness in her twin’s eyes.
But only for an instant. Then it was gone, replaced by a cold hard calculating shrewdness, and Cait knew it was over.
He opened his mouth as if to speak but no words came out. And then he half-smiled and lunged with the knife and Cait felt the tip of the blade gash the side of her neck just under her ear, and she expected more white-hot pain, but there was no pain, there was nothing at all, just an emptiness she knew she would never be able to fill.
And she pulled the trigger.
The Smith & Wesson roared in her hand and she watched with a kind of numb, horrified fascination as a gaping wound opened on the side of her brother’s head. A red mist appeared like a halo around his skull and she wanted to close her eyes but could not.
Mr. Midnight wavered over her, swaying like a skyscraper in a hurricane, his hand still grasping the knife he had used to carve and slice her flesh. His eyes were absurdly large and he furrowed his brow as if he could not quite comprehend what had just happened.
He lifted the knife again in his now-trembling hand and began to lunge forward and she pulled the trigger a second time. More blood spurted from her brother’s head and this time he fell. The knife clattered to the floor and her brother’s eyes glazed over and then he dropped straight down and lay still. Cait dropped the gun like it had given her an electric shock and it thudded to the floor next to her injured arm.
And of course at that moment the police rescue team flew around the corner, four men dressed in fatigues and body armor, guns drawn, entering the room prepared to do battle. The men skidded to a stop directly in front of the murdered police officer’s prone body. Their weapons swept side to side as they covered the room, alert for any threat.