I didn’t like the sound of that. “More? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know!” the man wailed. I could smell violence on him, but it was minor. Pushing people out of his way or tripping others in crowded places. I looked at Vengeance.
“Do you want him?”
“Oh yes. Don’t let the other one get away while I feed,” Vengeance said before turning his attention back to the man he held. “Tell me about your victims. The ones you hurt the most that are still out there. Still suffering from what you did to them.”
Words poured out of the man's mouth. He wasn’t a murderer, like most of the people I hunted, but he was violent and sadistic.
I hadn’t seen Vengeance eat for a long time, and I’d forgotten what it looked like. Along with the confessions that came out of the man, his life force flowed from his mouth to Vengeance. The more he spoke, the weaker he looked. His flesh sank until the bones of his face were prominent. If I could see the rest of his body, he would look like he’d spent months being starved.
His voice weakened the longer he talked. Soon he was only mumbling his confessions. His eyes rolled back into his skull and disappeared. His lips pulled back, revealing white, receding gums. With a sigh, his words stopped and his skin dried and dissolved. It was like watching a time lapse of a body disintegrating in a hot, dry desert.
At the end, his bones fell to the ground and turned to dust. With the first man gone, Vengeance turned to the second man and licked his lips.
“Tell me what you’ve done,” he said, grabbing the praying man by the throat. “Tell me all of it.”
After he was also nothing but dust on the floor, Vengeance faced me. “I won’t be able to track the third man while he’s moving. If I were you, I’d find Willow and never leave her side.”
His words made me startle. “What do you mean?”
“He’s out there, and we know he’s capable of murder,” he said. “You might not have heard it, but that first one told us about the time Alex killed an ex-girlfriend. Then these two came in and helped make it look like a random home invasion.”
“When you find him, I want him,” I said, but didn’t wait for Vengeance’s response. I turned to mist and raced off to find Willow.
Chapter 13
Willow
The first person I spoke to after arriving at my business was a fire chief. She gave me a long explanation of what happened, the extent of the damage, and all the gory details of how quickly the fire destroyed everything in my shop.
Honestly, I didn’t really hear any of it. I kept nodding my head, but most of her words didn’t stick. I couldn’t take my eyes off the burned-out shell of Unique Finds.
Everything was gone.
All the years of saving. I’d sacrificed almost every comfort. No new clothes and rarely eating out. No fancy coffee. Jina paid for most of our rent and utilities in our shit-hole apartment so I could focus on saving money for the shop.
It wasn’t just about the money. I spent two months refurbishing the store myself. Tearing out old flooring and putting down new. Cleaning and repainting the walls and putting together all the shelving.
Whenever I wasn’t remodeling, I was contacting people and ordering stock. I pored over catalogs and websites, calculating down to the last penny what I could spend and still have enough to cover operating costs if I didn’t make money right away.
After the shop opened, I worked six days a week from 9am until 8pm. I didn’t have any help because I couldn’t afford it. Of course, work never ended at 8. I still had to clean up, restock, do paperwork, and all the hundred other things that came with owning a small shop.
I’d been happy to do all of it. Everything was a labor of love.
Finally, I was going to show a profit. By the end of this year, I could start paying Jina back the money she’d invested.
Now it was all gone.
“...and after that, you can file a claim with your insurance. Do you have any questions?”
I shook my head. What questions were there to ask? Even if I got money from the insurance company, it would never pay for all ofmethat I’d poured into the shop.
“I have to warn you that if the arsonist isn’t caught, you could have issues with your insurance,” she said, voice full of sympathy.
Behind her, some of the firefighters were walking through the rubble and poking things, while others were rolling up hoses and chatting.
“It doesn’t matter,” I mumbled. “None of it matters anymore.”
