In This Together

Chapter Two

Hardly a week later and another murder happened, this one a little closer. A few days later it happened again. News broadcasts and police reports indicated that they were almost certainly connected with the first one, but there we still no real leads on the matter.

Delaney was kept up each night, sitting before the blue glow of the outdated desktop computer that sat on the desk in the boys' childhood room. His mother had suggested her older son stay there for a while until he was used to being back, or at least that was the excuse she tried using. Her son could tell there was something else. You could see it in the aging woman's tired eyes. She was lonely. All Delaney could do was accept her offer.

It was still odd for him. Not the being back, but the fact that everyone seemed to want him back. When Delaney had left that handful of years ago, age eighteen with the ink hardly dry on his high school diploma or his first tattoo, everyone was initially angry but then seemed to come to the conclusion that they were glad he was leaving. But now that he was back it was as if everyone was trying extra hard to play family with each other. Luke was coming around from school almost every weekend and even their father was making more appearances around the old house. It made the house feel almost livable again. Delaney had hated the big house growing up. His mother had cultivated a home that was warm and inviting. The walls were lined with family photos, tables held vases with carefully put together flower arrangements, knick-knacks and souvenirs from family vacations sat on shelves. It should have been nice to live there, but thinking about it now, Delaney wanted to smash each and every one of those things.

Delaney rubbed at his eyes, stinging from strain, the bags beneath them only emphasized in the shadowy room. These cases had too much in common, and they were too close together, both in timing and location, to be purely coincidental. Seedier sources revealed more commonality among the victims. The victims were learned to be having affairs. Cheaters. The more concerning part was the state in which the bodies were found. They had been younger men, but when found, it was like they had aged greatly, like the life had been drained right from them. He'd heard wild speculations of what caused the affect. None of this was exactly information shared on the news. Delaney had to do his own digging and investigating. He was glued to the computer, reading even the wildest theories about the case. He made a habit of constantly stepping out during the day to see what kind of information he could dig up.

"Obsessive," Luke claimed the next time he came home and Delaney tried filling him in on what he claimed to be discovering. "You are seriously messed up. What happened to you while you were away?"

The words weren't meant to cut as deep as they did, but Delaney snapped his mouth shut, his lips pressing into a tight line as he stared hard past his brother. There might as well have been a big red handprint, the way the words slapped him.

"You only know the half of it," Delaney murmured. Sure, he had tried to share one story with his brother, but after the way he was shut down, Delaney wasn't super anxious to try sharing anything else. After all, in his mind, other stories, the ones many veterans came home with, seemed even harder to believe than that one strange encounter he'd had.

Luke shook his head, ignoring the quiet words from the older of the two. "Regardless, D, you're acting crazy right now. You can't be going around like that, sticking your nose into other peoples' lives."

"There's something happening here, Luke," Delaney insisted, his eyes fixing on the other with a sudden intensity. "And I'm going to find out exactly what that something is."

Luke rolled his eyes, letting out a snorting laugh.

"I'm not kidding!" The fire lit within the older brother's words. "People are dying, and I'm not going to sit around and wait for something like what happened to Stafford and other good men to happen again."