I give her my undivided attention, every nerve ending flaring with an electric current. “I’m curious,” I prod her.

“Chaucer,” she says. “My professor was obsessed. Made us read The Canterbury Tales without the translated cliff notes. Have you ever tried to read Middle English? Pure damn torture. And I just remember how boring those stories were. Like, I’d rather watch the dullest shade of vanilla paint dry on a wall.

“Anyway,” she continues, “one of Chaucer’s proverbs was: the trees have eyes, and the fields have ears .”

A flash of beautifully disarming blue-and-green eyes…his gaze so arctic and devoid of feeling I can still feel it raking over my body with malicious intent.

Then his final words to me: “Time and tide wait for no man.”

A quote he delivered from Geoffrey Chaucer.

A twisted apprehension sinks down to my marrow and pits out my bones.

I’ve tried for six months to bar him from my thoughts, but he’s like a dark silhouette caught in the edge of a film flare, some demon affixed to my soul that follows me like a shadow.

“Chaucer,” I repeat, the name like acid on my tongue. After Kallum’s departing words, I searched the quote, then—with difficulty—attempted to read the author’s works. “This was a philosophy class?” I ask her.

She nods skeptically. “Yes, obviously. Halen, what’s wrong? You look ill.”

I am ill. A deep-seated sickness twists my insides like the gnarled trees staring down on me, and it’s done so since the moment I stepped foot on the university grounds and laid eyes on Kallum Locke. For three months after the court trial, I obsessively worked the Harbinger case to find a connection, any link, to tie back to him.

“I have to go,” I tell her, shouldering my bag. “Thanks, Devyn.”

“Sure… See you tomorrow?”

I glance around the scene, wondering how long I have before the techs and officials start removing the remains. “How much sway do you have with your department?”

She cocks an eyebrow. “That depends on whether or not you’re going to let me in on whatever you’re up to.”

“I know someone who can offer insight to this scene,” I say. “But, he’s not easily accessible.” A severe understatement.

Devyn looks at the barren trees. “I might be able to postpone the dismantling until tomorrow afternoon. But I won’t push out longer. We have to preserve the evidence, Halen. And the victims could be…” She trails off as she looks at me, an imploring depth in her brown eyes.

“I know,” I say, nodding my understanding. “I promise, if it doesn’t pan out, you’ll be the one I call. Thank you.”

“All right. Don’t let me down, fed.”

I smile, deciding I’ll eventually let her in on the whole truth of my involvement here. She’s more assertive than Detective Emmons, and seems to have a more open mind. Something this case will need.

The sky has darkened, a midnight-blue bleeds into burnt umber, hindering my navigation as I maneuver back the way I came through the reeds. My phone chimes with a text, and I dig it out of my back pocket, already knowing who the message is from before I tap the screen.

Aubrey: You’re done already? I haven’t received an updated report.

I call him rather than have this conversation over a text. “I have to make an impromptu trip. I need you to get me a plane ticket.”

Silence clogs the line before he says, “You’re in the middle of a wetland on an active investigation. Where the hell could you possibly have to suddenly go?”

I wish I didn’t have to answer that question. Not for the first time, I wonder what it would be like to work freelance and independently away from the company. There are pros and cons and risks on both sides, of course, and right now, I’d miss the security of the full-time work which keeps me busy.

Placing the call on speakerphone, I light my phone flashlight. I grip my bag strap and sidestep the picked-clean carcass I passed earlier.

“These trees have eyes, Aubrey,” I say into the line.

“Yes, I know. That’s why you’re there,” he says, his tone incredulous and short.

“No, not literally. It’s a proverb.” I drop my gaze to the reeds. “It may be nothing, or there may be some connection. I don’t know. Philosophy was never my strength. But that’s why I need to find out.”

“Wait…philosophy?” His weighted beat punctuates the air with uncertainty. “Halen, don’t go there. Don’t do this to yourself again.” Aubrey’s desperate tone bleeds into my own doubts. “I thought this obsession was over—”

“I don’t have an obsession,” I fire back, my jaw clenched around the words. “Can you find me a philosophy scholar with extensive knowledge in Western esotericism?”

“I’m sure I can,” he says.

“One who can also think like a killer?”

He expels an audible breath across the line.

The Harbinger case remains unsolved, a suspect never named. But I know exactly where that likely suspect is right now, and I know he will eventually charm his way to the outside world.

My forearm flares with a heated itch, and I rub at the ink over the top of my shirt, then touch the pendant around my neck to center my diverging thoughts.

Focus on the present.

“This isn’t going to go over well,” Aubrey finally relents.

I release a cleansing breath, exhaling the tension from my chest. “Look. I’m not looking at him for this…not directly. And I’m not working the Harbinger case. I’ve put that to rest. But he’s an expert in his field—the expert—and I need his insight on this.”

“And what makes you think he’ll be willing to help you?”

My field manager makes a logical point.

Despite the humidity, the evening air drops a degree cooler, the darkness encroaching. I think about his question in earnest. Not because I don’t know the answer—but I’m not sure how to phrase the answer aloud.

Kallum will be all too willing to help. Whether or not his participation will actually be helpful…well, that’s a risk I have to take.

But he will help me, because he’s a narcissistic sociopath who’s been locked away for the past six months, and my asking for his help will feed his starved ego.

“I don’t know, Aubrey,” I say as I come up on the rental car. “But if you get me that plane ticket, once I get there, you’ll be the first to know.”

I end the call, knowing once the evidence confirms the eyes were removed perimortem, the priority of this case will escalate drastically. The FBI will then take over and may even push me out. Media will descend and congest the town. I have a limited time to work, and I need specific answers.

Answers only a deranged philosophy scholar can give me.

Yes, evil exists.

And I have to look evil right in his beautiful eyes and ask for his help.

OceanofPDF.com

3

Wicked Eyes

Kallum

M ost obsessions start small, harmless. A tiny niggle in the back of your mind, an innocent fixation. The obsessive thought crawls under our skin and we begin to pick and pick until the desire overwhelms and we have no choice but to tear into it, claws raking and drawing blood.

The wound is a form of relief.

All great minds suffer this affliction. A torment that damns us to a monotonous existence.

But what is art and beauty if not pain? Anything which comes too easily is an insult to both the creator and the consumer.

With pain, we feel, we tear ourselves wide, and we allow the wound to heal over. We accept the scar. With obsession, we mutilate the skin until it’s destroyed, never allowing the damage to repair.

Blood never clots. We want it to flow, to keep feeding the passion, the desire.

Little Halen St. James didn’t start as a tiny niggle. From day one, she flayed my skin wide and buried herself deep.

And I can’t stop scratching.