Slave: The Ghost of Cambria - Book Two

Chapter Fourteen

The ladies fell into silence after Kristen revealed the circumstances of the two "accidents" that took place in her house. The quiet continued after they left the restaurant to drive back to Sunset Villas. It wasn't until the car had stopped in the forecourt of the retirement center and Pamela was preparing herself to exit Kristen's sedan that she spoke again.

"You mustn't believe him," said Hill with a tempered resolution in her voice. "I understand why it will be difficult for you to resist, to step away from his power, but you mustn't believe a single thing he says to you."

Pamela opened the car door and gradually stepped up from the passenger seat, steadying herself with the door frame when she was finally standing.

"I don't know if you're a person of faith," the woman said weakly, "fewer and fewer young people are. But he's not a man, and he doesn't love you. He's a demon, and a demon is capable of any evil while you feed it with your attention. You've got to get away from there."

Kristen didn't know what to say to the woman, silently holding her gaze.

"God bless you, Kristen," Pamela said finally, then closed the car door behind her before returning through the facility's front doors.

As she watched the woman move out of sight, Kristen turned her attention back to the task before her, pulling out of the driveway to head back to Cambria.

Something didn't feel right about any of it, she thought. Indeed, the anger Kristen had eaten through at lunch now made her nauseous, and it took all her composure to drive the car safely through the small town of San Luis Obispo back to the highway. Her every thought circled around the feeling of certainty Pamela had given her. Kristen felt now that her father had been murdered. Kristen felt that truth echo through her every attempt to rationally analyze the facts she was now possessed.

Still, Kristen continued to look for other answers. The psychologist had long ago been trained to analyze a puzzle from every conceivable viewpoint. Long before she'd been formally trained, it was a method for thinking her father had insisted upon from his daughter. Whenever she was angry or jealous or impatient or saddened by anything, Richard Cole asked Kristen to explain to him why it might be possible her emotion was mistaken. It was an exercise in logic that required empathy when it was the very last thing she felt capable of in the moment, and it invariably infuriated the child. That fury threatened to break the Kristen now as she feebly attempted to break out through each wall that guarded the inescapable truth she believed with every fiber: Kristen's father had been murdered by Valon, just as Ryan had been. Whatever Valon was, be it a demon, as Pamela insisted, or merely the spirit of a man attached to the house, Kristen was confident of one thing, and all the analysis in the world wouldn't change her mind.

Valon was a murderer.

At the last red light before entering the 101 Freeway, Kristen reached in her bag to grab her phone, finding a message waiting for her when the device's screen lit up. Managing to start the playback over the car speakers before needing to turn toward the on-ramp, Kristen listened to her supervisor at Sharp Medical confirm that she had been granted a one-month leave of absence. The man repeated twice that she would be expected to confirm her return to work at least five days before the period was up. It was the last thing Kristen gave a damn about now, but it was still one less practical thing she needed to be concerned by.

When she arrived at home, Kristen found Tony seated in the back yard on a patio chair eating his lunch and listening to music on a small Bluetooth speaker. Penelope sat beside him but jolted when she smelled her mother at the gate, the sound of Kristen's approach having been masked by the violence of Parkway Drive's raging vocals.