Chapter 2

My spirit woke up to the smell of bleach and stale coffee.

I was in the NOPD precinct. My father's precinct. I wasn't a body anymore, just a silent observer, a weightless presence tethered to him. I watched him move through his day, a ghost haunting the man who made me one.

I felt no pain. The terror of my last moments was gone, replaced by a hollow, floating calm. I was just... watching.

My father was at his desk, a mountain of paperwork in front of him. He was professionally detached, his face a mask of stone. He was briefing his team on a new case.

"Fishermen found them this morning," he said, his voice flat. "In the bayou, just off Cypress Creek."

He clicked a button, and a photo appeared on the large monitor. Black trash bags, bloated and tied with zip ties.

"Contents are human remains," he continued, "dismembered. The M.E. is on site now. This has all the markings of our guy."

The Cypress Creek Killer.

My killer.

A young detective, Martinez, looked pale. "Jesus, Chief. He's back."

"He was never gone," my father replied, his eyes fixed on the screen. "He was just waiting."

I floated closer, looking at the photo. Those bags held me. My arms, my legs, my life, all chopped up and discarded in the swamp like garbage. I felt a strange detachment, as if I were watching a movie about someone else.

The phone on my father's desk rang. He picked it up, listening intently.

"Yeah? Okay. Send the preliminary report over as soon as you have it. I want to know everything. Age, sex, any identifying marks you can find."

He hung up and stared at the photo again. There was no grief in his eyes, only the cold fire of a hunter. He didn't know he was looking for his own daughter. He was just looking at another victim, another puzzle to solve, another monster to catch.

I watched him all day. I watched him drink his bitter coffee. I watched him snap at his subordinates. I watched him stare at a framed photo on his desk. It was of Ethan, in his high school football uniform, grinning at the camera. The golden child.

There were no pictures of me.

Later that evening, he drove home. The silence in the car was heavy. I sat in the passenger seat, an invisible passenger on a ride I'd taken a thousand times. He didn't turn on the radio. He just drove, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

When he got home, my mother was waiting.

"Any news?" she asked, her voice a thin, reedy whisper.

"She hasn't called," he said, taking off his jacket. "She's probably at her friend's place, sulking. She'll show up when she wants something."

"That girl," my mother sighed, her hand going to her chest. "She is determined to be the death of me."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them I was already dead. I was right here. I was in pieces in a bayou. But I had no voice. I could only watch as they moved on with their lives, their anger at me a comfortable, familiar blanket. They had no idea that the monster my father was hunting had already come to their door and taken the one thing they never even realized they had.