Page 83 of Bad Medicine

“Why’d she continue thepregnancy?”

“Extremely religious family.Neither she nor her parents believed terminating the pregnancy was anoption—her parents believed the entire ordeal was punishment for something shedid. Not believing enough or…” He blew out a disgusted breath and shook hishead. “Something. It was her duty to bear and raise the kid. None of thoseGod-fearing folks seemed to think it was anyone’s duty to treat him well. Kait…”

I closed my eyes for a long,tired second. “I don’t want specifics.”

“No,” he agreed. “You reallydon’t. All I’ll say is they fucked that boy up, Kait. It’s no wonder he wantsto kill his mother.”

“He doesn’t want to kill her,”I whispered. “He wants to make her stop.”

“In his head, she will neverstop. Neither will he.”

“I know.”

“We’ll have to stop him,” hesaid, gently. “The women he’s killing. There are other ways. Some of them needhelp. Options. Education. Some of them need to lose their children.”

“Some of them,” I said, thenstopped. I’d been about to say that some of them needed to die, and I justdidn’t want to say that aloud. “We need to protect those children,” I finished.

“Catch him, Kait. I knowthere’s no way I can.”

I looked at him. “What do youwant me to do with him once he’s caught, Detective? What should I do with him?”

“You all need some supernaturalprisons,” he muttered. “You need jailers.”

“We have them. We have acouncil, which is run by elders. They send people like me to track the bad guysand bring them in.”

“And then?” He pulled into thedriveway of a small white house with two bicycles in the tiny yard. “They sendthem to another realm where they can’t hurt humans?”

“You’ve been doing a lot oflate-night reading, haven’t you?” I asked him.

He shut the car off and thenturned to watch me. “What do they do to misbehaving nonhumans? Do they controlthem?”

I shuddered as an image of Farrowrose suddenly in my mind. “Yeah,” I murmured. “They control them.”

“Then catch him, Kait. Get himout of my city. I’m sorry as fuck he was unlucky enough to be born into thatawful family, but he has to be stopped.”

“Yeah.”

“I asked for a picture of him,”he told me. “They gave me one. He was maybe eight or nine years old. It was theonly one they had in the house. They kept it in a frame on the mantel to remindthem of what Sam really was, just in case they were inclined to forget. It’s inthe glovebox.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to seeit. “What did they think he was?”

“Evil,” he said, then facedforward. “They thought he was born evil. You can keep the photo. I’d rather notlook at it again.”

I hesitated. “They couldn’thave known he was nonhuman. His abilities wouldn’t have manifested until he wasat least in his late teens. Maybe later.”

“They believed he was from thedevil.”

Finally, I opened the gloveboxand pulled out the photo. And as I stared into a young Sam’s eyes, despite thenumber of women he’d butchered, I could only feel pity. And rage. Oh yes, therewas rage. Not at him, though. And at that moment, I wanted to murder not onlyhis shapeshifter father—nowtherewas your evil—but his mother and hisgrandparents, as well.

Rick reached over to lay hissteady hand over my shaking ones. “You okay?”

“No,” I told him, “but I’mbetter than Sam.”

Everything that Sam had evergone through was there in his big brown eyes, the hungry, pale face, theunsmiling lips. His true face. “Poor kid,” I whispered.

I visited Tammy’s son andpassed on her message. He smiled and said, “I know,” when I told him his momhad loved him. Then another kid hurried into the room saying something about avideogame they were playing, and he yelled “bye!” to me and ran to play.

“He’s going to be fine,”Tammy’s sister told me.