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“And then?”
“I guess I got no sleep, paced for what seemed like hours, tried the cell and finally got worried when he didn’t call. I phoned Jarrod, who got a team onto it within fifteen minutes. It was too late; of course, we didn’t know that at the time.”
“But you guessed?”
“Call it a hunch or a feeling, but I knew it was all wrong. Finally, after almost three days, we lost trace of the cult. They moved on completely and without a trace. So we started trawling the areas we knew they moved in.”
Peter’s voice was soft, tears running freely down his face, and Anton’s heart clenched in his chest. There was too much naked misery in the man before him to let him stop the cathartic recounting.
“You found him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, at first I didn’t even recognize him as human. There was so much blood, and he was naked, covered in dirt and excrement. The smell was almost enough to make me vomit. I called in for backup and an ambulance. He was already dead, Anton. They’d beaten him till he couldn’t stand, raped him till he couldn’t walk, and then gutted him like a pig and left him to die. His body was cold and his eyes were closed, but I put my jacket over him and just held him. I guess it makes no sense to be cuddled up to a corpse.” Peter laughed mirthlessly. “But I had to make him human again, Anton; they took all of that away from him and I had to make him human, do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, actually, I do, and it’s a totally normal reaction. He was a close friend, Peter, and you did nothing wrong. Maybe it’s time you stopped punishing yourself.”
“Tell that to the nightmares.” Peter dropped his head and wiped his face with shaking hands.
“Did you get counseling?”
“Yeah, I lost it, Anton. They even considered committing me at one stage. Instead, they put me on stress leave, treated me for trauma and shock, and I had some counseling. And I moved on. Left the CDC, left my friends, and ran away.”
“Until now.”
“Until now I felt safe.”
“Ah, and now you don’t because you have to confront these people again?”
“Maybe I’d made them into something unreal because I couldn’t understand how men could do that to another for enjoyment.”
“That’s certainly true; in cases like these we often make them out to be something other than what they are just to get us through the investigation. Maybe if we believe that they have supernatural powers then there really was nothing we could have done.”
Peter looked up.
“But it is time for you to stop believing that there is nothing you could have done and come back to believing that they won’t defeat you.”
“I don’t know if I can go through it again.”
“I know, and Connor is going to great pains to protect you. Maybe you need to lighten up on him a little bit.”
“Meaning?”
“Resigning without telling him? Cutting him short when he tried to help?”
“No, he didn’t want to help me, Anton, he wanted information; and what the Professor wants, he gets.”
“I’ll admit he likes to be in control and the only way he can be is to have all the facts at hand.”
“I’m not a fact, Anton, I’m not a piece of a puzzle nor are my feelings. I was getting nothing but static from him, nothing real or tangible.”
“And that he is a dead ringer for Nick doesn’t help getting close to him either, does it?”
“I don’t want to get close to him, I just don’t want to be a bug under his microscope.”
“You think he is treating you unfairly?”
“About as unfairly as I’ve treated him, I guess. I just need to sleep, Anton, but every time I do the ache is back. The pain doesn’t go away. No matter what they tell you, it just doesn’t go away.”
And Anton knew in that moment that Nick had been so much more than a friend to Peter, and in that moment he also knew that Peter probably would never admit it.
“Okay, well, if you want a clinical assessment, which I doubt, I think you need to face the problem and deal with it. Nick is not haunting you, Peter; you’re haunting yourself with ‘what ifs’. In the short term, go and eat.”
“Yeah, I’ll grab a burger.”
“I think you should grab Connor and have dinner with him. Then,” Anton stood up, “I want you to take these.” He put a small strip of pills in Peter’s hand and perched on the edge of the desk. “And go to bed. No alcohol. Just food, hot shower and bed. It’s only a temporary measure; but once you’re back to being rational, we can deal with the rest.”
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