Kellen saw the crack in Erin’s devotion, and she pressed her advantage. “You approved of everything he did. You had to approve of me.”
Bitterly now, Erin said, “You didn’t deserve him.”
“That’s for sure. No one deserves to be hurt, humiliated, killed. He was a murderer, but you’re not. Not yet!”
Erin laughed. She laughed, all merry and amused. “My mother wanted to warn you I was coming for you.”
Kellen stood still for a critical moment. “Your mother wanted to warn me?”
“I couldn’t let her do that.”
“So you…killed Sylvia? You killed your mother?”
Erin smacked Kellen with a roundhouse to the jaw.
Kellen dropped to her knees, her head ringing. Every time she inhaled, pain knifed her lungs. Every time she lifted her hand, the swelling intensified.
“I smothered her with a pillow. She was senile, babbling about how she had bred monsters by a monster. She was talking about me and Gregory, and about our father!” Erin swayed back and forth like a charmed cobra. “She said she loved us, but she called us monsters.”
Kellen cradled her aching jaw and collected bits and pieces of consciousness. She opened her swollen eyes and with her left hand pulled herself to her feet. “Erin Lykke, you’re going to hell.”
“No.” Erin had the audacity to look hurt. “She deserved it. She was going to betray Gregory!” She started toward Kellen.
Kellen backed up, drawing Erin farther into the galley.
Erin laughed. “You’re puffing like a freight train gasping its way up a mountain. What good do you think retreat will do you? You’re almost at the crew quarters. You’ve got your back to the wall.”
“And you, my dear Erin, are a sucker.” Kellen leaned her left hand on a counter, lifted herself and flung her legs in a circle in the roundhouse flying kick that Mara had taught her. The flying kick she’d never been able to perfect before.
Her foot caught Erin on the side of the neck. Erin gagged. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She stumbled backward down the aisle, then fell on her rear next to Gregory’s charred remains. When she opened her eyes, she stared at Kellen in round-eyed wonder. The Cecilia she remembered had been weak, feeble, a weeping wimp of a girl who Gregory abused in body and mind.
This Cecilia had fused with her cousin, Kellen. They were one, and they were strong.
Head outthrust, eyes intent, Kellen advanced down the aisle. “If your own mother said you were a monster, if she said Gregory was a monster, that tells you everything. He was barely a human being. He was a demon.”
“Then we were monsters together!” Erin surged out of her seat and right at Kellen.
Kellen used her elbow under Erin’s jaw to snap her head back. “I’m not going back to Maine, and you’re not, either. I’m not going to die on this plane, and you’re not, either. I’m going to survive, and you’re going to go to prison.”
Erin collapsed onto the floor again. Her nose was bleeding, her cheek bruising. She crawled backward, her eyes fixed on Kellen. “They’ll know who you are…Cecilia.”
“Then it’s time the world knows. Most certainly, it’s time the pilot understands what’s at stake.” Kellen started for the front.
“Cecilia…” Erin sang the name in a horror-movie voice.
Kellen swung around, ready to defend herself.
Erin was on her knees. She pulled Kellen’s Glock from the seat pocket in front of Gregory. She held it in both shaking hands, released the safety and pointed it at Kellen.
No. Kellen had done so much, come so far. It couldn’t end like this. “Look.” She held both her hands up. “You don’t want to shoot at me. If you hit any of the electrical or the hydraulics, the plane could go down.”
Erin hoisted herself into the seat beside Gregory, leaned her head against his charred shoulder and touched the barrel to the window beside him. “I won’t hit the electrical,” she promised.
“This is a pressurized cabin. If you put a bullet through the window, all the air inside here will blast out of the plane like a giant explosion.” Kellen spoke slowly and gestured, trying to convey the scope of the calamity. “You’d be in big trouble. You’d go shooting out into the upper atmosphere, never to be seen again. Your pilot probably wouldn’t be able to control the plane, and he’ll die, too.”
Erin laughed, and she sounded so much like Gregory a chill rippled up Kellen’s spine. “You’ll die, Cecilia, and somewhere, Gregory will be happy.” Erin’s finger squeezed the trigger.
The bullet shattered the window.
Kellen threw herself to the floor, grabbed the metal legs of a seat and held on. Air pressure blasted out the window, peeling away a two-foot-wide chunk of the plane’s fuselage from ceiling to floor.
Erin disappeared into the void. The reeking wreck of Gregory’s body vanished out the hole with Erin.
The plane rocked, out of control.
Kellen careened back and forth, helpless, caught in forces beyond her control. Her injured hand slipped and slipped again. She clutched with her good hand, but…
No air.
No gravity.
No strength.
She fought to again grasp the metal leg with her swollen fingertips.
The plane spiraled downward.
She couldn’t breathe. She was losing consciousness.
She was going to die.
46
As dawn faintly lit the eastern sky, the plane touched down…somewhere.
Kellen sat buckled into a seat as close to the cockpit as she could get. With her injured hand, she held a yellow oxygen mask over her face. With her uninjured hand, she clutched the arm of the chair. With every fiber of her being, she prayed.
All too clearly through the puncture in the fuselage, she could hear the squeal of the brakes, the roar of the reverse thrusters. She felt the pressure that slammed her against the seat and the skid and crash as the plane lurched to a halt, crooked in a ditch.
She looked out of the hole in the plane. Seven feet down, she could see asphalt. A two-lane road with a yellow dotted line down the middle. She could jump the distance.
She did.
She stumbled, fell onto her hands and knees. Sheer blinding pain from her hand made her rest her head on the cool pavement, but as the agony retreated, she lifted her head and laughed.
She had to. She was alive.
More than alive. She was free. The fears that had lurked within her had vanished. No, not vanished—been vanquished. By her. All those years, she’d been afraid of Gregory’s ghost. She’d been afraid of Gregory’s family. She’d been afraid that somehow, somewhere they would find her, that a wave of corrosive acid Lykke family craziness would crash over her and she would again be helpless, belittled, broken.
Well, Erin, cruel and crazy Erin, had found her. She had done everything to break Kellen. She had used the name Cecilia against her as if it was an insult. And today Kellen had discovered Cecilia was smarter, braver, funnier than she had ever imagined. It hadn’t really been Kellen who escaped from the horror of Gregory’s murder/suicide, survived the Philadelphia streets, saved a child, learned to love… It hadn’t really been Kellen who joined the Army, learned hand-to-hand combat, to carry a weapon, to fight in battles against an unseen enemy, to save her comrades from death, to be wounded and live.
Cecilia had stood alone and defeated Gregory’s ghost and the terror that tainted her days and nights.
Cecilia had become the person her cousin, Kellen, had wanted her to be. At long last, she was worthy of the sacrifice Kellen had made.
She looked around. The world was flat here, a great plain of prairie dotted with farmhouses surrounded by mountains and covered by a grand, wide sky. A breeze whipped up and brought a crackling sound and the scent of something burning. That brought her to her feet. Behind her, the plane’s wheel was buried in a roadside ditch, the plane’s wing pointed toward the vanishing northern stars…and smoke curled from the engine.
A quarter mile away, a man stood on the porch of a farmhouse, filming the scene with his phone. She walked toward him, staggering from pain and shock. When she got close, she looked up at him—he was still filming—and she asked, “Where are we?”