The Touch Of Twilight by Vicki Pettersson

person, if needed. We spoke once a month by videophone on a scrambled line, and whenever he geeked out and starting talking over my head, I just leaned forward and gave him a nice cleavage shot.
    Sorry, Olivia
, I’d think, as he stuttered off into silence.
But it was just so easy
.
    So Maximus X had set up a satellite security system I could access by remote, though I’d still had to go in and plant a camera and audio in Ben’s house by hand. I had full access to Ben’s accounts, and if he was pissed at me now, he’d be livid to know I could view his every keystroke with one click of my mouse.
    But it was for his own good, I thought, sighing as I typed in
Rose
, gaining immediate entrée into his private journals. At least that’s what I told myself.
    I skimmed through the early entries, a faithful retelling of a young boy’s turmoil—the emotionally absent mother, an abusive father—because it was a story I already knew. I lingered over the words detailing the dark side of his work as an officer—what he’d seen and what he’d done—and how both could climb inside you if not for the badge acting as a barrier for your soul.
    However, that line of thought had abruptly ceased when he quit being a cop, and it was then that a darker, more cynical Ben emerged. Leaning close to the screen, I could almost see in the pixels the downward spiral of his mental health, the story written between the lines. He’d once told me he wrote mysteries as a hobby, but the incoherent ramblings filling the screen looked more like horror to me. I had to close my eyes a handful of times, consciously willing myself to breathe, before I could continue. This was torment
I
had caused. Not Regan, not his parents, but me. I had to stop reading altogether when he said he’d had to get it all out on paper just so it’d stop burning him on the inside.
    I skipped forward and began reading again on a random page when his heart had clearly hardened toward me. I should’ve known Regan was telling the truth about that. She
was
getting to him—drawing on his bitterness, bringing anger to the forefront of his psyche—because that’s what Shadows did to humans. It was like watching a cat bat at a single-winged moth, toying with a life just for amusement.
    Similar, I saw, to the way Ben and his brothers had toyed with Charles Tracy.
    I leaned forward and began to read the entry with Tracy’s name. It chafed that Regan knew about him, this childhood bully Ben and I had known, though she’d probably discovered it from this very account, an entry detailing one week in my fourteenth year, right after Ben and I had banded together to make sure Charles never victimized another child in our school again.
    Of course, Ben hadn’t really needed me. I might have already developed a healthy sense of right and wrong, but I wasn’t yet physically strong. Meanwhile, Ben came from a military family; his father was retired air force, one older brother was in the reserves and working as a mechanic, the other in the marines, though at the time of this incident he’d been on leave. I’d remembered all this well because Ben hadn’t been able to hide the bruises on his torso, and though he’d grinned at me when recounting the antics of his older brothers, he’d done so with a split lip, his front tooth missing. He’d told me with a crooked smile that he didn’t care—it made him tough and built character—but then Charles Tracy made fun of him in front of a student assembly, and Ben didn’t show up to school for three straight days. It was okay, though—or so I’d thought then—because neither had Charles.
    And now I knew why.
    Ben’s father had served in Nam, and when he wasn’t using his family as a punching bag, he’d regale his boys with stories of his non-government-sanctioned activities. When Ben came home from that assembly, pissed and humiliated about Charles’s taunts, his brothers decided to test the effectiveness of wartime tactics on a