The Destiny Machine

by J L Aarne

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at J.L. Aarne’s novel

  I Hear They Burn for Murder

  “We’re playing Murder in the Dark, agent.”

  Special Agent Ezekiel Herod knows the game well, but he’s never played it quite like this before.

  Rainer Bryssengur is only a professor of English and Ezekiel doesn’t expect to gain any insight from him into his case, only to cross him off the list as a person of interest. Then he meets him and gets a glimpse through the carefully crafted mask Rainer wears every day to the monster he is at heart.

  “Which one of us is the liar?”

  Sometimes even a psychopathic serial killer gets tired of killing people and that’s where Rainer is when Ezekiel walks into his office and stirs things up. The serial killer the media has dubbed The Lamplighter has been dormant because Rainer’s heart just isn’t in it anymore. But Ezekiel presents him with a new opportunity, a challenge… a game. Rainer sees in him the perfect adversary.

  They’re more alike than either of them suspect and soon Ezekiel gets pulled in deeper than he thought possible, past the point of no return.

  “Which one of us isn’t? That’s the real question.”

  Chapter 1

  Most animals would not eat human flesh if they had a choice, but Rainer’s coyotes were not like most animals. They were not even like other coyotes. They were special.

  One of the young ones crawled toward him over the ground, hunched down low in an army crawl, eyes warily darting toward the fire nearby. Rainer had allowed it to die down, but the hot coals still glowed enough to give off a ghostly light. The young coyote’s name was Aeolus, like the god of the wind, and Rainer had seen him grow from a puppy. He was one of the few coyotes that would take meat from his hand and allow himself to be petted.

  Rainer cut off a thick, red strip of meat and tossed it to Aeolus. The coyote darted forward to snatch it up and retreated again from the fire. He was less skittish around the fire than most of the others as well, but he still shied instinctively away from it. The coyotes were not domesticated; they weren’t dogs. They were wild creatures, but Rainer had cultivated a relationship with them over several years. Any other person, they would have run away from or watched from a distance. Even with him, it sometimes took a little while for them to approach.

  The man Rainer was feeding to them was bound and gagged, staked to the ground with his arms over his head and his legs together. He had told Rainer that his name was Jack at the club where they met, but Rainer had taken his wallet and his driver’s license said his name was Gregory Alan Beck.

  Gregory Alan Beck had lovely rust brown hair, deep, dark eyes and hands like an artist or a poet. He was twenty-seven, his birthday was the fifth of November and he lived in an apartment with a letter B after the number. Like Sherlock Holmes.

  Gregory Alan Beck had passed out twenty minutes ago after watching Rainer feed his left bicep to a coyote Rainer called Pied. Gregory Alan Beck was in a great deal of pain. Rainer knew it because he had been doing this for a long time and knew exactly where and how to cut to provoke the most intense pain without severing major veins and arteries. He didn’t want Gregory Alan Beck to die. Not yet.

  Pied was the leader of the little group of coyotes. He was stretched out and sated just beyond the glow of the fire where he could keep an eye on the others and on Rainer. He wouldn’t eat out of Rainer’s hand or allow himself to be touched, but Rainer thought they understood each other. It was not complicated. They had a very simple symbiotic relationship: Pied kept his group fed and Rainer enjoyed feeding them.

  The other coyotes were spread out in the dark around the dying fire, watching Rainer and the butchered man. Their eyes gleamed like slivers of black hematite, the flames danced in them, disembodied in the darkness like demons watching him work. They weren’t hungry anymore, but they wouldn’t leave until Gregory Alan Beck was dead.

  He was very close. The poor man didn’t have much left. That happened to the best of them; weak or strong, man or woman, the human body only had so much blood to spare. Soon, Gregory Alan Beck would not be able to wake up no matter what Rainer did to rouse him.

  Before that could happen, Rainer reached over and snuffed out the cigarette he had been smoking on Gregory Alan Beck’s cheekbone. He had very nice cheekbones.

  The man jerked, eyes snapping open, and screamed. It was weaker than it had been when they started, but Gregory Alan Beck had been screaming a lot in the last three hours; his throat was sore and his voice strained and breaking.

  Still, Rainer savored the sound of it. The echo of it sent a shiver of pleasure through him. He could only indulge himself this way all the way out here in the wide-open desert where no one lived for miles around. Gregory Alan Beck could scream himself hoarse and no one would hear it but the coyotes and scorpions.

  And Rainer.

  Gregory Alan Beck watched Rainer with watery, pleading eyes. His pain had finally brought him to that transcendent threshold where Rainer stopped being a monster and became a savior. In that moment, with his body butchered out like an animal’s, his ribcage exposed beneath the moonlight and Rainer’s cigarette burn on his cheek like a kiss, he had never been closer to or more intimate with anyone. There was something more than a plea for mercy in his expression and Rainer leaned close to stare at his face, trying to understand it.

  “Kill me,” the man begged. “Please. I want you to.”

  Rainer smiled and gently brushed his sweaty hair back from his brow. “I know you do,” he said. “Soon.”

  Gregory Alan Beck sobbed. He couldn’t struggle much anymore, though he wanted to, that was clear in the tension of his body. Rainer had carved the muscles from his arms and legs, leaving mostly tendon and bone exposed beneath the loose flaps of his flayed skin. Flies had already started to land where his blood was cooling and tacky. To them, he was already dead.

  “Please,” he whispered. “Rainer, please.”

  Rainer nodded and got up to walk around him to the bag where he kept his tools. He removed a retractor from the bag and a clean scalpel. Gregory Alan Beck screamed when Rainer cracked open his ribcage, but he didn’t lose consciousness again and, with Rainer holding his beating heart in his hand, he thanked him. They did that sometimes.

  Rainer sliced into his heart with the scalpel and cut a tiny piece of it out, placed it, still beating, on his tongue and watched him die as he bit down on the pulsing tissue.

  One of the coyotes yipped. They all started to move anxiously around the fire. Rainer didn’t look up, but he heard them leave. Distantly, beyond the nearest hills and rocks, something much bigger than the coyotes howled. Its voice was deep and its howl long and loud, but not mournful. It was the howl of a wolf calling to its pack or its mate or the moon.

  Shaking with twisted, pent-up desire and sexual frustration, Rainer stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. He carefully gathered all of his tools and returned them to his kit bag. Then he doused Gregory Alan Beck’s body with a mixture of gasoline and lamp oil, lit a match and dropped it into the body cavity.

  With the light of the fire to guide him and the smell of it in his nostrils and throat, Rainer walked back to his car, put his kit in the trunk and drove away.

  He drove a few miles before he pulled off onto the shoulder of the road because he was shaking, his body humming like a livewire. He put the car in park, got out and went around to the passenger side where there was a ditch running beside the highway. It was deep and full of prairie grass. The wind sighed through it and chilled him, but he was hot like he was running a fever.

  He leaned his back against the side of the car, closed his eyes and opened his pants to touch himself. Gregory Alan Beck’s lovely brown eyes stared back at him. In his parched, scream-torn voice he begged, Please. Rainer, please. It was beautiful and he was beautiful and the wind was cold on Rainer’s belly like breath. The scent of blood from his clothes overpowered the odor of desert sage and the taste of heart meat was still in his mouth when
pleasure tore through him like claws.

  Rainer let his head fall back against the car with a breathless laugh. It wasn’t enough, but it took the edge off. The trembling need was gone and he could think about where he was going rather than where he had been.

  Somewhere across the plain a wolf howled. He wondered if it was the same wolf that had frightened away the coyotes. There were no wolves in that part of the country, hadn’t been for a long time, but it didn’t sound like a person and nothing at all like the yipping howl of a coyote. The wolf howled again and another one answered him.

  Rainer got back in his car and drove on.

  Chapter 2

  Rainer’s brother Thomas lived in a house in Hancock Park. He was the owner of and executive chef at the posh Centzon Totochtin restaurant. While he had employees to clean up and prep for the next day, he was a control freak who usually stayed until everything was done to his satisfaction. It was 3:30 a.m. when Rainer pulled into the driveway, but the lights in the living room and bedroom were still on. Even if Rainer had not stopped by, Thomas wouldn’t have gone to bed yet for another hour.

  Music was playing loudly inside the house and Rainer stood on the porch listening to it thump through the walls while he finished his cigarette and flipped his keys on their ring around and around on his finger. He examined his fingernails under the glow of the motion activated porch light and used the tip of his car key to clean the crusted blood from beneath them. Thomas was a germophobe and blood beneath Rainer’s fingernails would get him turned away at the door. He took a last drag from his cigarette and reached out to knock on the door with the back of his hand as he exhaled and crushed the butt beneath his heel.

  Thomas’s dog, Marley, barked. Rainer knocked again and Thomas opened the door while his hand was still raised. Rainer opened his hand and wiggled his fingers at him in a little wave, which made Thomas smile.

  “You have a key,” Thomas said, stepping back to let him in.

  “Yeah, but you’re here and you’re awake,” Rainer said with a shrug.

  Marley sniffed Rainer in greeting, licked his hand, then disappeared back into the house. Most animals did not like Rainer, perhaps sensing something wrong with him, but his brother’s one-eyed German shepherd knew him. Rainer’s otherness was just the way he was to Thomas’s pets, as it was to Thomas himself.

  Rainer smelled like blood and gasoline. Without being asked to, he walked by Thomas and went straight to the kitchen to wash his hands. Thomas followed him and poured them each a whiskey while Rainer scrubbed beneath his fingernails.

  “So, what’s up?” Thomas asked.

  Rainer dried his hands, took a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket and held it out to him. Thomas sipped his drink and unfolded it. He already knew what it was, but he read it anyway. Every time Rainer had himself tested, Thomas expected to see that one of the results had finally changed and his brother would test positive for one of the many STDs he routinely exposed himself to with his promiscuous behavior, but so far, he was still clean. He folded the paper back up and put it aside.

  “If I turn on the TV in a few hours am I going to see more of your handiwork?” he asked.

  “No,” Rainer said.

  The men and women he fed to the coyotes had never been found. The area where he killed them was littered with human bones, most of them burned, gnawed on and buried beneath the dust and sand. They were not the only people he killed; just those he refused to share with anyone else, including law enforcement and their grieving families.

  “Besides, you don’t own a TV,” Rainer said.

  He picked up the tumbler of whiskey Thomas pushed over the counter toward him and held his gaze while he drank it. Thomas’s eyes were dark and deep as black coffee. Thomas studied him and his eyes were full of the knowledge of things they never spoke of aloud. He knew what Rainer did and Rainer knew that he knew about it. Thomas had never come right out and asked about it though and Rainer had never openly confessed it to him. They sometimes talked around it, but it remained Rainer’s secret.

  Thomas had his own secrets that he was reluctant to share. He knew that he would one day. They both would. They shared everything and, though there were secrets, there were never lies between them.

  Rainer watched him back, jittery inside with anticipation, his nerves and muscles slicked and vibrant with adrenaline. The whiskey was warm in his throat and on the back of his tongue. It kindled to a slow burn in his belly.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Come here,” Thomas said.

  Rainer set his glass down and walked around the counter to him. Thomas met him at the corner of the counter, backed him up against the doorway and kissed him. Thomas licked the jitters away with the first familiar swipe of his tongue in his mouth and replaced anticipation with urgency. Rainer kissed him back, moving away from the doorway partition to back him into the living room, his hands pulling at Thomas’s shirt until he got it untucked, then moving to yank open his belt. On the stereo, the music changed to something with a heavy, pounding rhythmic bass. As they reached the bedroom, Thomas turned them so that Rainer’s back hit the door, throwing it open on their way to the bed.

  There was blood, dried but fresh on Rainer’s clothes, and though Thomas was used to it, he didn’t like it. He tugged at the hem of Rainer’s T-shirt, snapping the cotton material. “Take that off.”

  Rainer obediently pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it into the hamper. Then he sat on the bed to take off his boots and the rest of his clothes without being asked.

  Thomas stood in the open doorway, his shirt and belt open, and watched him undress. Rainer was uncommonly attractive, a fact that served him well both as a predator and as a lover. Thomas admired the sinuous slide of his pale, flawless skin over the muscles of his shoulders and the unconsciously graceful movements of his body as he stripped each piece of clothing away. He itched to touch Rainer even as he calculated the likelihood of contamination from the blood on his clothes. The smell of it lingered on his skin and it was impossible to believe that it hadn’t seeped through the thin fabric of his shirt. He didn’t look bloody, but Thomas knew better.

  Rainer glanced up as he slipped out of his jeans and caught him watching. He smirked and got up to toss the rest of his clothes in the hamper and leaned in to kiss him.

  Thomas put a hand to his mouth to stop him and shook his head. “No. You are filthy,” he said.

  Rainer blinked at him. “Seriously? You’re going to do this after I’m already naked?”

  Thomas shrugged and left him standing there to go into the adjoining bathroom. He returned a moment later with a wet washcloth, which he gave to Rainer. Rainer rolled his eyes, but he took it and wiped his chest and stomach with it until Thomas was satisfied.

  “We can always fuck in the shower. There’s no dirt in there,” Rainer said. He tossed the cloth in the hamper on top of his clothes and hooked his fingers in the front of Thomas’s pants to pull him toward him. “You know, I had them run those tests a week ago, right?”

  Which meant he’d had plenty of time to pick up a stranger for a little casual exchange of body fluids between then and now.

  Thomas rested his hands on Rainer’s shoulders, his expression stern. “Have you been with anyone since then?” he asked.

  Rainer smiled, bright eyes alight with teasing. “No.”

  He had been involved in a casual sexual relationship with his friend and mentor, the professor and writer Cosra Melmoth, for a couple of years and that had come to a spectacular end a week earlier. Before that, it had been Thomas. Gregory Alan Beck had been the first person since then that he had picked up intending to spend a casual evening with, and the only penetration involved in that particular tryst had been with a scalpel.

  “You swear?” Thomas asked.

  Rainer pressed his smiling mouth to Thomas’s and gently tugged at his fly, pulling him back toward the bed. “I swear,” he said, “but if you don’t trust me, you can wear a condom.”
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  Thomas shook his head and went with him to the bed. He shrugged out of his shirt and shoved Rainer down on the mattress so he could crawl over him. Rainer pushed his hands down Thomas’s sides, under the loose waist of his pants and grabbed his ass to pull him against him. They kissed and Rainer moaned insistently into his mouth, restless and wanting, while Thomas felt blindly along the nightstand for the drawer handle. He fumbled it open, nearly dumped it on the floor and finally had to break the kiss to find what he was looking for.

  Rainer bit nipping, sharp kisses into his skin, down his chest. He pinched one of Thomas’s nipples between his teeth and ran his tongue over it and Thomas cursed, pleasure snapping like lightning to the pit of his stomach. While Rainer sucked and rolled his tongue over his painfully sensitive nipple, Thomas took a little bottle of lubricant from the nightstand, opened it and squeezed some onto his fingers.

  Rainer wrapped his hand around Thomas’s cock and he hissed a breath through his teeth. “Jesus, Rainer.”

  Rainer slowly but firmly drew his hand up. He smiled into the side of Thomas’s neck when he caught his breath and shivered. “You can make love to me slow and pretty like I’m your girlfriend later, Thomas,” he whispered, panting. “Come on. Right now.”

  Thomas growled against his shoulder and lightly bit him. He felt between them, slipped a finger inside him and Rainer gasped, opened his legs wider for him as he pulled him down to kiss. Thomas pushed a second finger in beside the first and worked them in and out of Rainer’s ass while they kissed, tongues mimicking the sliding, thrusting movements of his hand.

  Rainer rocked up against him, matching the thrust of his fingers with his body, moving with him. He rubbed the pad of his thumb along the head of Thomas’s cock, rubbed the wetness of his precome into his sensitive skin and smiled at Thomas’s responding moan. Rainer panted into his shoulder and Thomas shivered and worked his hips into the tug and squeeze of Rainer’s consummate hand on his cock. They knew they could finish exactly like that; it had happened before.