I’ll have the contents of the wine bottle tested. I’ll have a toxicology workup on my blood. I’ll take a fucking pee test—but I won’t be pulled into Kallum’s delusions.
“And when no reason can explain it away?” he asks, as if reading my rampaging thoughts. He locates his discarded shirt and shoves his arms inside the sleeves.
I meet his eyes—eyes that I willingly fell into tonight, that made me feel safe and worshiped despite drowning in fear. I craved his touch. I wanted his darkness to shelter me. I let myself go so completely…embracing emotions and sensations I’ve never experienced before. With anyone.
That’s what the darkness will do. Eclipse us in the deepest recess of our mind, where every aching desire and needy, devious yearning is hidden. Sheltered, concealed from our conscious, we give ourselves over to the seduction.
But light is always just moments away from spilling over our aftermath.
The wreck was my fault.
Kallum is my consequence, the ruin of my soul.
I hold his deceptively beautiful gaze with what strength I have left. “There has to be an explanation.”
A dangerous edge carves his silhouette against the umber sky. The black eyes of the stag skull on his chest stare into me. I can feel the shift in energy, the tide receding from the shore too quickly.
He looks through me with the callous regard of a soulless monster. “Listen to our first conversation again,” he says, a mischievous grin slanting his mouth. “You’ll hear it quite differently now.”
My blood stalls in my veins.
Dragging in a fortifying breath, I leave him to hunt down my phone. I find the device near the smoldering embers of the fire, retrieving it with trembling hands.
“What are you going to tell Alister?” he says from behind me.
Despite every fiber of my being revolting against Kallum’s claims and the images still afflicting my mind, I have to declare everything that transpired here as part of the report. Which means…
“The Cambridge murder investigation has to be reopened and examined to uncover the truth.” I light the phone screen and pull up Alister’s contact. I tap his name before I lose my nerve.
“He’s here.” Kallum nods indifferently to the body of the perpetrator. “But where are his victims, little Halen? I doubt he left behind a detailed map with X marks the spot.”
Agent Alister answers the call and, as my gaze locks with Kallum’s, I hit Mute on the phone. He’s not done. He always has something up his sleeve, just like a cunning illusionist.
He advances toward me, his lethal form stalking me like prey. “If you reopen the investigation,” he says, “I’ll let them die, Halen.”
Dread coils my body. Alister’s irritated voice sounds from the phone speaker.
“I don’t believe you.” I say. “I don’t believe you know where they are, and I don’t believe you would—”
“Then you also no longer believe I’m your devil?”
Phone gripped tight, I glance between Kallum and the dead offender, an internal battle waging.
“You know I can find them,” he says, his expression serious. “You’ll need me to find them.”
He’s setting a game board where I don’t know the rules. All I know for sure is, if he wants this so badly, then he has an endgame.
“No, Kallum,” I say, grasping for strength I don’t feel. “I won’t need you for anything ever again.”
“But there’s your Freudian slip.” He points out with a devious smile. “The locals need you . You can’t risk the victims by leaving their lives in Alister’s hands. And you can’t save them if you’re gone, awaiting a lengthy investigation. Those lives have little time left.”
A searing anger burns my resolve. “You are the fucking devil.”
“That you created, sweetness.”
I lower my gaze to my phone and end the call. My sight snags on Kallum’s ankle—on the ankle missing the tracking monitor.
There will be questions…too many questions I’m unable to answer. My phone GPS is logged by CrimeTech, and I can justify myself. But not Kallum.
I warily look over the crime scene, making a choice.
When I meet his clashing gaze again, I say, “Leave, Kallum. Go to the hotel. Just…leave.”
I can’t have my mistakes tainting the investigation to hinder the search for the victims.
One of us has to fight for a soul.
“I’ll wait for you,” he says. A glimmer of vulnerability touches his eyes.
“Don’t.”
I realize that, once Kallum walks off this scene, he could disappear. He could vanish and never be seen again. I’m torn with how that possibility makes me feel—whether Kallum Locke disappearing from my life would be a bad thing or a relief.
Kallum holds my gaze with the severity of that very threat hovering between us.
I turn away and take measured steps toward my clothes on the evidence table and dial Alister again. When I turn back around, Kallum is gone.
OceanofPDF.com
15
Hidden Wisdom
Kallum
D ay drinking has its benefits.
Like, say, when an infuriatingly maddening scent is embedded in your pores, and the only way to gain a clear thought is to drink your wits away. Ironic.
I throw back a shot of bourbon and breathe out the fumes through clenched teeth, then nod to Pal. I point down at the shot glass on the bar.
Pal—the owner who also bartends at Pal’s Tavern—gives the two special agents at the end of the bar top a wary glance before he grabs the bottle with a silver pourer.
“They don’t exist,” I tell Pal, trying to ease his worries of being reprimanded by the officials.
“Sure, buddy,” he says to pacify me, but pours me another shot just the same.
The way I see it, Pal owes me one. This whole damn town does. The proof of that scrolls across the flatscreen mounted above the rack of liquor bottles.
The ritual mangler of Hollow’s Row has been caught.
Caught isn’t exactly accurate, but I suppose the complete explanation is too long and complicated for the marquee bar. And honestly, whoever came up with that moniker should be eviscerated.
Pal turns up the volume on the TV when the updated news report starts.
The Hollow’s Row task force has officially released the name of the deceased suspect alleged to have been responsible for the two gruesome crime scenes of dissected body parts discovered in a marshland. The suspect, Leroy Landry, attacked an official while working one of the crime scenes earlier this morning. Landry died of complications during the attack. The official was taken to urgent care to treat injuries and is reported to be in good, stable condition. A new report from the task force announced Landry had the fatally lethal hemlock plant in his system. Further investigation into Landry is underway. There is no new updates on the whereabouts of the victims of the crime scenes.
I toss a sluggish glance outside the picture window. News crews from all over the country pack the narrow streets of downtown. Once the story broke, there was no holding back the circus.
Halen has been in a closed debriefing with Agent Alister for half the day. I was questioned briefly and released after the GPS data confirmed I’d been in my hotel room all night.
According to the FBI report I was able to obtain from my tagalong agents, Leroy Landry, who, besides having an unfortunately boring name for a man that wanted to deify himself, was confirmed to be the local’s prime suspect: the Hermit.
Did he become a recluse before or after he started altering his appearance to be so intimidating? The news report left a lot of interesting details out. The feds won’t be able to keep the media ignorant for long.
Not only did a sweep of Landry’s home prove his wine cellar was filled with wine-making apparatus, his home library housed a plethora of books on ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and many other esoteric research material which can all be tied back to the profile.
