Promises Pt. 11

This is true. "What's to stop you from killing her once I'm dead?"

He looks at me like I'm stupid. "Because I love Teri more than anything else in the world, besides my own life," he says, the conviction total and obvious on his face. "She belongs with me, but if she's dead, we'll never be together again. At least if she's alive and I'm free, I can still find a way to make her mine."

"I don't doubt it." He's got an uncanny knack for kidnapping her.

So now I've had more than enough time to have come to the same conclusions Spencer has. To save Teri, I'm going to have to kill myself. I don't want to die, but I don't have any particular moral or religious objections to suicide. And if Teri and Kira are dead when I could have saved them, I wouldn't be able to live with myself anyway.

"Forgive me Anna," I murmur to myself. It looks like the twins are never going to meet their own father either. I slowly bend down and pick up the gun. "Toss me a round," I say. He does.

Loading the unfamiliar pistol is easy for someone with as much mechanical inclination as I have. Now that the decision is made, I know that any delay is only risking Teri's life. If Spencer sees a cop on the screen while I'm still alive, Teri dies. I bring the gun's muzzle up and take it into my mouth, aiming upward for a place where it will be quick, sure, and painless.

I hesitate for just a moment as Spencer strokes Teri's face with his free hand, waiting for me to do it. I close my eyes, hoping that there will be less chance of them popping out of my skull that way. After all, they might ask Anna to ID my body. I start to put pressure on the trigger...

I hear a woman's shriek and open my eyes, but it's not Teri screaming, it's Spencer. Teri is suddenly awake, and she's got his thumb between her teeth, whipping her head back and forth violently, apparently attempting to rip it clean off. Blood sprays onto her face, the sheets, and the wall next to her. Spencer is frantically trying to pull his digit free and has, for the barest moment, forgotten the knife in his other hand. But then he remembers, and it comes plunging down toward her naked and exposed throat.

Then I'm there, using both hands to grab his knife hand by the wrist, the blade almost touching her smooth, perfect flesh. I use all the force I can muster, yanking his arm straight up above his head, then pulling him to his feet. I feel the crack of bones as I twist, and the knife comes free, bouncing off the bed and clattering on the concrete floor.

I use my death grip on his wrist to pull him from behind the bed, then spin him into the hold that has served me so well over the years. He's still screaming from the pain of the deep lacerations to his thumb, and now some probably severe orthopedic damage to his wrist, but the sound ends abruptly as I twist. The dungeon is suddenly deathly quiet.

As it always does, the pressure on the vertebrae and spinal cord are enough to suddenly make my designated target instinctively remain totally motionless. I'm just a hair's breadth away from ending his life, and he knows it. Logically, he should want me to go ahead and finish the job, since he's going to prison otherwise, but even twisted humans like Spencer have an almost insurmountable will to live.

"Are you okay?" I ask Teri.

"I'm just fine, but what about you, Peter. You've been shot."

"It's just a flesh wound," I say, doing my best imitation of Monte Python's armless, blood-spurting Black Knight. She doesn't laugh. "Honestly, Teri, he just grazed me. I'm fine."

"Thank God." Then she gives me a look that's somewhere between wonder and censure. "You weren't really going to kill yourself, were you Peter?"

The question catches me off guard. The logic of what I almost did seems perfectly reasonable to me, even now. "Of course I was. It was the only way to keep my promise."

Her eyes are wide. "Wow."

"You know this is Bethany's brother, right?"

"Yeah," she says. "I haven't seen Spencer since I was kidnap... since he kidnapped me the first time, but I recognized his voice when you guys were talking. He was always super awkward around me back then, but I never would have suspected he had this in him."

"People will fool you," I say.

"So what are you going to do with him?" she asks.

I don't fail to notice that she doesn't say "we." She's letting me make that choice. Unfortunately, we'll both have to live with the consequences of whatever it is I decide.

"Honestly," I say, "if you were still unconscious, I'd have killed him by now. He's hurt you so many times and he'd have killed you without remorse just to avoid life in prison. I believe he's much too dangerous to leave alive. The thing is, I don't want you to have to live the rest of your life with the image of my killing Bethany's only family in cold blood."

I glance up at the TV just as a police car rolls to a stop in the alley. Shit, that had been close. If he'd arrived thirty seconds earlier, Spencer would have seen him and slit Teri's throat. A cop gets out and looks at Marsha's minivan, then at the garage. He disappears for a moment, evidently checking out the broken window, then comes back into view, looking at the house and talking animatedly into his shoulder mic. His hand is on the butt of his holstered gun.

"They'll be here soon," I say. "I'll hold him until then." I'm not happy about it, though. Spencer hasn't killed anyone that we know of, so he'll likely be out in just a few years, if he doesn't escape first, Houdini that he is.

"Peter," Teri says calmly, "I think he's got the knife in his hand. You can't allow him to stab me with it."

I twist just fractionally harder to cut off Spencer's protest. I don't need any input from him at the moment.

"Teri, the knife is safely on the floor, in the corner." Maybe she's not fully lucid yet.

"I'm not Teri, I'm Kira."

Whoa. That rocks me back on my heels, but then I think about it for a moment.

"I should have seen your transition coming," I say, mentally kicking myself. "The way you were acting in the greenhouse should have tipped me off."

She smiles, which is kind of incongruous, considering how she's spattered with blood, still chained, naked and spread-eagled, in her abductor's basement dungeon.

"Yeah, the full switch happened when he grabbed me. I was Kira when I woke, which was at about the time he was finishing up on my restraints."

"You've been awake this whole time?"

"Yeah, and just waiting for my opportunity. I knew you'd come for me."

"Then you've got more faith in my abilities than I do. How do you feel? I know your transitions can be rough on you." I'm also thinking about the idea that if she's not completely stable yet, she might not be able to keep what I might do to Spencer a secret.

"Well, this one was quick. It probably had something to do with knowing exactly who my nemesis was, right from the start. I didn't need to make up any extraordinary scenarios because Spencer had conveniently provided one for my use."

"Nice of him to do that for you," I say with a nod.

"He's a hell of a guy, but now I think it's time to free Teri forever."

"So it's okay with you if I kill him?" I want to make sure I'm crystal clear on this.

"Look, I don't like giving you my blessing to kill a helpless human being, but I'll only have to live with the guilt for a week or two. Then I'll forget. On the other hand, you were willing to end your own life to save mine, so the least I can do in return is to put my squeamishness aside for a few days to allow you to remove this monster from our lives forever."

I find Kira's logic impeccable, but... "Spencer put up cameras to watch the outside of the house," I say, nodding at the flat screen. "What if he's got them in this room and we're being recorded?" Shit, we've been discussing first degree murder. Even if I don't kill him, we could be in trouble if I don't find and destroy the recordings. And that would look majorly suspicious.

"Not an issue," Kira says. "As he was cutting my clothes off, he was muttering to himself about forgetting to start recording. I think we're safe."

"Good," I say. "Now, you're really sure you want me to do this?"

"Yes. He somehow got his hand on the knife and you had no choice but to kill him. I'll be your witness to that of course. But before you do, you're going to have to promise me that you'll never tell anyone, especially Teri, what we've agreed to do here."

"I promise," I say. "I figure on everything else, though, we tell the exact truth. We don't want any variation in our accounts of what went down here."

"Okay," she says. Kira closes her eyes and turns her head away. I consider dragging Spencer out of the room to do the deed so that Kira doesn't have to hear, but that might create evidence that it didn't go down like we're going to claim. No, it's going to have to happen just like this.

I take a deep breath, then twist. Hard. I don't want to do it halfway. The sound of tearing ligaments, cracking bones, and a spinal cord being separated is amazingly loud in the confined space. Kira screams as I drop Spencer's limp corpse to the floor.

Then I turn and vomit in the corner.

End of Part Eleven

Next: Part Twelve -- Resolutions