CHAPTER 31: THE KILLING — PART 2
The footsteps grew louder.
Marcus didn't have time to think. Didn't have time to weigh options, to consider consequences, to let the ancestors debate in the back of his skull. Chester was kneeling in front of him, broken and whimpering, and someone was coming.
He moved.
His hand found Chester's hair, yanking the man's head back to expose his throat. The blade — his own, not Chester's — pressed against the soft flesh beneath the serial killer's jaw.
"Please," Chester whispered. His voice cracked on the word. "I'll leave. I'll disappear. You'll never—"
"You burned them," Marcus said. His voice came out flat, dead, entirely his own. Not Tahir. Not any ancestor. Just Marcus Lopez, looking into the eyes of the man who had murdered children for sport. "You burned all of them. And you smiled while you did it."
Chester's mouth opened to respond.
Marcus cut his throat.
The blood came hot and fast, spraying across Marcus's hands, his arms, soaking into his already-ruined uniform. Chester's eyes went wide with shock — the final expression of a predator who had never really believed he could become prey.
Then the world disappeared.
---
Fire.
Smoke filling a hallway. Children screaming. A lighter clicking, clicking, clicking in his hand while he watched the flames spread.
No — not his hand. Chester's hand.
Marcus tried to pull back, to separate himself from what he was seeing, but the vision held him like a fist closing around his mind. Chester's memories flooded in — not surface thoughts, not recent events, but everything. His entire miserable, monstrous life compressed into a single overwhelming wave.
The first time he killed. A cat, behind his foster home. The satisfaction of feeling something stop.
Prison. The violence. Learning to read other predators, to avoid the stronger ones, to dominate the weaker.
The orphanage. Finding Marcus. Recognizing something familiar in the boy's eyes — the loneliness of someone who didn't belong anywhere.
The fire. The screams. The way the children looked when they realized they couldn't escape.
Marcus screamed, but no sound came out. He was drowning in Chester Wilson, being pulled into the depths of a mind that had never seen other people as anything but prey.
He's not a monster, some distant part of Marcus realized. He's just broken. So broken he couldn't feel anything unless he was taking something from someone else.
The understanding didn't make it better. It made it worse.
And then, beneath the horror, beneath the revulsion, Marcus felt something else. Skills. Instincts. Chester's predator training, his ability to read body language and predict behavior, his decades of experience hunting humans.
The knowledge settled into Marcus's mind like a new language learned overnight. Foreign. Uncomfortable.
Permanent.
---
Marcus surfaced gasping.
He was on his hands and knees on the cold corridor floor. Chester's body lay in front of him, still warm, blood pooling in a spreading dark lake. The footsteps he'd heard had stopped — whoever was coming had apparently turned back, or found something more interesting elsewhere.
Death Memory Consumption, Marcus thought numbly. That's what just happened. I consumed his memories when he died.
He'd known the ability existed. Had read about it in flashes of ancestral knowledge, had sensed its presence dormant in the back of his mind. But he'd never used it before. Never felt what it was like to absorb an entire life in a single overwhelming flood.
I know him now, Marcus realized. I know everything he was. Every terrible thing he ever did. Every reason he had for doing it.
He looked at his hands. They were covered in Chester's blood, dark and cooling in the fluorescent light. They looked the same as they always had.
But they didn't feel the same anymore.
His, something whispered. Or Chester's?
Marcus forced himself to stand. His legs shook. His left arm throbbed where Chester's knife had opened it earlier, and he hadn't noticed until now how much blood he'd lost. The world tilted dangerously, black spots swimming at the edges of his vision.
Move, he ordered himself. Hide the body. Clean up. Get back to survival mode.
He grabbed Chester's ankles and started dragging.
---
There was a storage room twenty feet down the corridor. Marcus shoved Chester inside, positioning the body behind a stack of broken furniture where it wouldn't be immediately visible. The blood trail was harder to deal with — he used his jacket to smear it into something less obvious, spreading it thin enough that it might be mistaken for something else.
His reflection caught him in a darkened window.
Marcus stopped. Stared.
The face looking back at him was his own — same features, same bone structure, same everything. But the eyes were different. Harder. More calculating.
Chester's eyes.
No, Marcus thought fiercely. Those are my eyes. That's my face. I'm still me.
But the words felt hollow. Borrowed. Like everything else about his existence since he'd woken up in this body.
He turned away from the window and kept moving. The Finals were still ongoing. His allies were still scattered. And now he was carrying a dead serial killer's memories around in his head, permanent passengers on a journey that was already too crowded.
I won, he told himself. Chester's dead. He can't hurt anyone else.
The victory felt hollow too.