I followed him into the quaint, country kitchen and down a flight of rickety wooden stairs to a suspiciously clean basement.
“You’re much too neat, Richard. This basement screams sociopath. Where are the things that mark human habitation?”
He laughed a light and merry sound. “You say that as if you are not human. For all that we think we’re not like them, we’re still homo sapiens.”
But I wasn’t. I was a goddess. The Queen of Hel. “I forget.”
“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” he began.
“Do you think I have? This is a new experience for me, too.” Only it meant nothing to me. He’d bare his darkness for me like a whore spreading her wares and I’d slit his throat and leave him to choke on his own blood.
I’d decided his death. Every time I thought of him, it was of putting a razor to his throat. I still didn’t know how I’d dispose of the body, especially if he had a captive. I couldn’t very well let her see me or what I did to him.
Richard took a deep breath and opened a hidden door.
Manacled to a wall in that secret room hung Detective Tommy Anderson.
CHAPTER FIVE
I couldn’t stand the little bastard, but Tommy Anderson was a cop. Predator, prey, none of that mattered. He was a cop, my brother in blue.
The irony of it all was that Tommy was still an innocent. The line I’d been talking about, the one I predicted he’d cross and become a killer, he hadn’t done it yet. So he didn’t belong to me. I was as bound to protect him as I was any other, maybe even more so because he was a cop, too. I might end up killing him later, but right now, he was still under my protection.
“Me or him, Brynn Hill?” Richard taunted.
“You, of course.” I stepped out from behind him and quickly assessed Tommy’s condition. I didn’t have time to be surprised, or horrified, or anything else. I could feel those things later. I had to gauge the situation as quickly as I could and think on my feet logically and precisely to get him out alive.
Tommy’s chest rose and fell with uneven breaths, but he was still alive. Richard had sliced him with a surgical precision, drawing outlines with his blade of the different cuts of meat like he was an animal to be butchered for food. These cuts were superficial; Richard had been playing with him for some time by the state of the wounds. Some of the cuts were crusty and healing, others wept tiny blood tears orchestrated just for me.
This whole thing was just for me. I hadn’t been wrong in assuming his prey was usually female, because I’m never wrong. If that was the absolute, then the only logical assumption could be that he’d set this whole thing up.
For the first time, I was out of my depth.
Yeah, with all the supernatural shit I was way out of my depth because I didn’t know what was going on, but this was my life’s work. I was always a step, even three, ahead of these killers. I always had the advantage. I was at a loss.
Richard had known what I was before he met me and that made him much more dangerous than I’d originally thought.
I had no weapons in my immediate reach and no plan; this wasn’t the time to play my hand.
“You’ve made quite the mess of him, haven’t you?” I remarked casually, still inspecting him like I would something pretty in a window display.
“Apologies, darling. I couldn’t wait.” Richard was breathing heavily, his body exhibiting all the classic signs of arousal.
He’d known I’d want to see his work. How had he known? Dread was a twisted ball of steel in my gut. “Did you take him just for me?”
“I might have.” He touched my hair reverently. “I had to know where your loyalties lay. We’re both something special, Brynn.”
Please, don’t let him say anything crazy, I begged the universe and then I sighed. Crazy was relative. Especially since I was standing in this guy’s basement and we were discussing death as if we both did it every day the same as breathing.
While killing was as vital to me as breathing, it was a special occasion when it did happen.
“Have you been watching me, Richard?”
“Yes. For a few months now.” He sounded pleased, happy that I’d noticed.
My confidence returned. I hadn’t killed in a long time. He didn’t know everything about me. “That’s very sweet.” Yet there was a crack in the foundation of that confidence. He’d been watching me and I’d had no idea. With all of my extra senses and radar for aberration, he hadn’t set off any alarms until he’d been in The Riot Room. How many times could he have treated me like prey if he’d chosen?
His eyes were slits, almost reptilian and his nostrils flared. “Yes, you like that I watched you. That I coveted you, but you don’t like that you didn’t know I was there.”
“Of course I don’t. Would you?”
“No,” he laughed. “Should I tell you all about it?”
“Yes. When you first saw me. When you first coveted me.” That would give me time to think, to plan, and it would tell me what he knew about me. “I may be a killer, but I’m still a woman.”
“Swope Park. A spring storm. The sky was like a blanket of burned marshmallows tinged with an Absinthe green. Thunder crashed and lightning struck the ground next to you, but instead of being afraid, you danced in the onslaught of rain, even when the drops were more like icy daggers.”
I hadn’t been to Swope Park in two years. On what would have been Thora’s birthday. I watched the kids in the park, imagining what life would have been like if she’d lived. If we’d still be in that park having a picnic, or if we’d be at the zoo, or one of those family parties in that big house I’d dreamed about with all her friends in the backyard. He hadn’t touched that though, hadn’t been apart of it no matter if he’d been watching me or not.
“Are you afraid yet, Brynn?”
“Do you want me to be afraid, Richard?” I looked up at him and widened my eyes, then I thought of what it would be like to have this conversation with the Cross so my body would feel arousal and my pupils would dilate so Richard would think it was for him.
“I confess, I do. If only a little bit.”
Of course he did. Keep him talking. “You’ll have to do better than that. We’re of the same kind, remember?”
He continued to stroke my hair and tugged the jasmine from behind my ear to bring it to his nose. “Perhaps.”
Stop wriggling on the hook, fucker! I’d never had to put forth this much effort. “If we’re not, why did you watch me for two years? Why did you set this up?”
“Because Anderson wants to be like us, but he’s too weak.”
He still hadn’t answered why he’d watched me for so long. “So it wasn’t for me because he made me angry? You weren’t watching through a window when he held his gun to my forehead?”
“No.”
“Should I leave then? So you can be alone with your kill?” I prayed to whatever powers that happened to be listening he wouldn’t say yes. I’d backed myself into a corner. I couldn’t leave and abandon Anderson to this guy’s tender ministrations.
“Please don’t leave. I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s hard to admit these things to you, here in front of me in the real after watching you for so long.”
I reached out and touched his face, a universal soothing motion.
“Know that if I had seen him threaten you, he’d be praying for death for years before I gave it to him.” He inhaled deeply. “Yes, I set this up for you. I did know you didn’t like him, but he is weak.”
A smile curved my mouth. “Yes, he is.”
“I want you to kill him. Take him for your prey. Then there’ll be so much more I can show you.”
“Another test?”
“Of sorts.” He licked his lips. “And I hope you pass. Unpleasant things will happen if you don’t.”
He threatened me? I’d destroy him. “Where are your brushes? Your paints?” I asked in reference to his tools of torture.
“We’ll have to wake him up first.” Rich
ard pulled me into the room with him and he slipped a needle into Anderson’s arm. In seconds, Tommy’s eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled around in his head like a cow’s during slaughter. When Anderson’s eyes focused on me, his terror seemed to double. His mouth worked, but no sound came forth and he struggled against his bonds.
That was when Richard made his first and last mistake. He turned his back on me. There was a whole work table of gleaming instruments: scalpels, debrieding tools, and electric saws beside us.
I closed my fingers around the cool, sterile metal handle of a size twenty scalpel and in one fluid motion; I drew it across Richard’s neck just like the swipe of a paint brush.
Blood spilled from the gaping maw like I’d turned on a faucet, but he didn’t collapse immediately like I’d expected him to. Instead, Richard drove a pair of surgical scissors into my abdomen and as he crashed to the ground he tripped a mechanism that snapped Tommy’s manacles in opposite directions.
I screamed, but it wasn’t for me. There was no pain when the scissors entered my flesh, only the strange contrast of cool metal against the heat of living tissue. I screamed for Anderson. There was nothing I could do, no time to try and stop it, to save him. The apparatus ripped him apart, splashing the walls with his blood and porcelain bits of bone.
The red stain of my failure.
I’d always thought tearing a man in half would take longer. There’d be screaming that wasn’t mine. Ripping and tearing, a slow torture. Not two torn halves of a skin sack sagging on opposite walls and a pile of organs like some rotten meat Jell-O in a soupy mess at my feet. My knees buckled and I crumpled in the gore, a raw sound torn from me. I wished I could cry and wail for him.
For me.
The darkness that was in Tommy Anderson hadn’t birthed itself from shadow into the world. He’d still been one of the sheep. One of the flock I was supposed to protect.
He was dead because I’d failed.
As sure as if I’d slashed his throat instead of Richard’s.
My stomach turned on itself again and I gagged. My dinner of gyros, Turkish coffee and marzipan cake came hurtling back up my throat and I vomited like a snot-nosed rookie on his first crime scene. My back arched up with the effort—a bastardized version of my morning yoga, Cat Lift. Every convulsion pulled the scissors deeper.
I wished it would hurt because I deserved to suffer for my failure.
I yanked those scissors out of my belly and watched my intestines crawl back inside my gut like slithering worms and the wound stitched itself together.
My phone rang as the wound finished closing. I was starting to hate the sound of it. It was the harbinger of something else spinning out of control, an alarm that signified something else I was powerless against.
“Hill,” I managed in a raspy voice.
Richard was still looking at me, the creepy motherfucker. I checked his pulse to make sure he was dead and I felt nothing, but stranger things had happened.
Like me.
There was a psychotic grin on his face, as if he’d just won the lottery and although his eyes were glassy with death like two round, opaque marbles, I couldn’t shake the feeling he was looking at me.
“I hate to interrupt your fun, but we’ve got a situation,” Grimes growled through the phone.
“Actually, I have a situation,” I began. How the hell was I going to explain this?
“Fuck all that, Hill. You need to get to the Capri. He—”
“There are no less than four cars on stakeout on the Capri! How did the Capri Killer do anything?” Shit. There would be no hiding another murder from the press. In three days, he’d already racked up six bodies. The city would go into a panic.
“Listen to me. He killed again, but there’s only one body.”
“I’m on my way.” I’d get details when I could think clearly enough to process them. After I cleaned this up. How was I going to—
“Brynn, there’s more. There was a second victim, but she’s still alive. And she’s asking for you.”
CHAPTER SIX
“She’s still on scene? Has EMS looked at her?” I demanded.
“She refuses to see anyone or do anything until she talks to you.”
“Is she MS-13?”
“No. Neither was the other victim. That was a good call, Brynn.”
I hated the warm rush that washed over me at his approval. I knew it was the right call to make to keep the gang affiliation of the other victims out of the reports. I didn’t need his validation.
But why had she asked for me? If she wasn’t affiliated with MS-13, she wouldn’t know about the bargain I’d struck with Dominic San Angeles. Or about the other deaths. Dread hit my gut in a series of sucker punches.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, but I have to swing by my place and clean up first. Give me thirty.”
“Thirty minutes? For fuck’s sake, Brynn. You—”
I cut him off. “I’m covered in my date’s blood, Grimes. I told you I had a situation of my own. Now, unless you want me to show up looking like an outtake from Carrie, I suggest you find a way to manage this until I get there.” I snapped the phone off before he could say anything else and my eyes were drawn back to the mess on the floor.
How in the hell was I supposed to clean this up?
This would have to wait. Sickert obviously didn’t live in this house; the only people he brought here were victims. It was unlikely anyone would come poking around until after I’d had a chance to dispose of the scene. The victim at the Capri had to come first.
“Don’t go anywhere, lover.” I slapped Richard’s cold cheek. “I’ll be right back.”
I turned my torn shirt inside out and while the bloodstains weren’t hidden, they were less obvious and weren’t easily identifiable as blood. Exhaustion wrapped warm arms around me as I stepped out into the night air and retraced my steps back to downtown Westport and to my car. My eyes felt like someone had dumped spoonfuls of sand into them and my muscles were rubber, but I couldn’t stop. Not yet.
When I got to my car, I pulled a spare piece of plastic out of my trunk and used it to line the floor and seat. I didn’t want any trace of Sickert’s or Anderson’s blood in my car. Then I looked at my hands and realized it didn’t matter. Dark lines had caked under my fingernails and my hands were a rusty copper.
I was getting sloppy. Even as recently as a week ago, I would’ve made sure I’d gotten rid of the clothes I was wearing and had washed my hands before going anywhere near my car. Just because I’d gotten away with everything so far didn’t mean I was infallible. I had to remember that. Richard Sickert had been a big, glaring reminder. And still, somehow, I’d managed to tuck my head as far up my ass as it would go.
When I got to my building, I took off my boots before using my keycard to gain entry. And as much as I loved them, I tossed them down the garbage chute into the incinerator, along with the plastic sheeting from my car. I couldn’t chance tracking any blood, hair, or fibers into my apartment. I’d have to do the same with the clothes I was wearing.
After I showered I’d have to bleach everything, including the drain. I’d be longer than thirty minutes, but I will choose my own survival over catching another predator any day.
My loft smelled of pine and snow inside. Not the tinny, perfumed pine scent of those tree air fresheners, but like the woodsy outdoors in the middle of winter. It was crisp and fresh, sharp. It was me. I inhaled deeply and let the scent fill me with a renewed sense of self.
The last letter from my father was still on my bed where I left it. I hadn’t been home to read it. Part of me wanted to tear into it now, but it was only the desire of the child I’d once been for immediate gratification. Reading them had never been just a simple matter—a tearing of paper and gluttony. His words were meant to be tasted—savored. Like fine wine and wisdom.
I peeled my leather pants off and my shirt, making sure I touched nothing but the tile and countertop in my kitchen, where any traces of tonight
could be easily bleached away. My panties and bra were next.
Just as I unhooked my bra, the fireplace roared to life and a strange sound hummed in my ears. It was the buzzing of a thousand flies, but as it ebbed, a figure materialized before me.
The Cross.
Something black and dark burned in his eyes—they were like pools of oil that had been set aflame.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Leaving you a gift. Obviously, I didn’t expect you’d be home.” His gaze raked over my nakedness and my body responded, nipples tightening and a rush of heat between my thighs. Then his eyes narrowed and I realized he recognized my lust. “I’m going to fix this reaction in you,” he promised. As if my desire for him were some kind of sickness.
And maybe it was.
But if I was infected, so was he. I could see the hard ridge of his want in his black fatigues.
“Fix yourself while you’re at it, handsome.”
His scarred face twisted into a sneer, and I expected him to lay hands on me as he had before, but instead of touching me, he sang. A note so clear and pure it hurt my ears to hear it.
The letter from my father that had been on my bed flitted through the air—a happy butterfly on an unseen current. I knew what he meant to do and the bloody clothes, Sickert, the Capri, everything else was forgotten in that moment but my letter.
“Put it back where you found it, assassin.” I’d managed not to let any fear creep into my voice, but it was there inside of me. Panic because it had been so easy for this enemy to root out the only thing that would hurt me and the sure knowledge that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t be able to stop him.
“Why?” Half of his mouth twisted into a malicious grin. The letter came to rest in his scarred hand and I had no answer to give him. Not even a lie.
“Poor little Helreggin is lost without her daddy,” he mocked.
The worst part of what he said was that it was true. I was lost without him—his guidance, his knowledge, his protection. For the first time since I’d lost Thora, I felt weak. Vulnerable. Afraid. These feelings were unacceptable and my father would have known how to root them out like the cancerous blights they’d become.
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