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HUNTING GROUNDS

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HALEN

There’s a story of a monster that feeds off pain. Its fangs sink into the soul and siphon suffering like a vampire sucks blood. Misery slithers in its veins, sorrow is the sinew beneath its flesh. It’s a hollow vessel that leeches off agony the same way a creature of the dead feasts on sustaining lifeforce.

In the Greek mythos, poems were ascribed to a daemon like this, these personified spirits who embodied human pain and despair. They called them the Algea, the incarnations of our sins, and our mourning.

The human condition is such that we must give our overpowering emotions a name, even fashion them into monsters. So we can comprehend the depth of our heartache, understand our profound grief. So we can make sense of meaningless tragedies, and the pain we ourselves inflict. Then the resulting guilt.

So there’s a reason for all our suffering.

And further, so we can cast it out of our person as something abstract.

How else can we reconcile all that we endure?

The personification of my profound grief came to me in the form of a beautiful devil with clashing blue-and-green eyes and a smoldering, disarming smile.

My daemon sank his teeth into my flesh, lapped at my tears, feasted on my blood. He latched on to my soul and fed off my pain like a night terror crushes air from the lungs. He’s entwined around my bones, seeping deep into my very marrow.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t escape him. I feel him beneath my skin, his heated current sparking and burning my muscle, his destructive flame cauterizing my wounds.

Each marshy breath I drag into my lungs sears with the memory of Kallum. The electric feel of his touch, the sensation of his feverish gaze on my body. The charged moments between us are there behind every blink.

And as I work the newest Hollow’s Row crime scene, he’s the monster I’m searching for in every detail.

A deep plum tints the sky over the killing fields like the bruises marking my neck. The scent of rain drifts through the endless stretch of marsh reeds, adhering to the early morning dew.

I’ve been obsessively combing through the crime scene since I arrived on-site yesterday, searching for the one piece of evidence that will tie Professor Kallum Locke to the Harbinger killer’s latest victim.

I swipe the back of a gloved hand across my forehead, clearing away damp strands of my overgrown bangs from my brow. Any and every interference to slow me has become a festering annoyance.

Constructing the narrative of a crime scene where I already have the perpetrator in mind is a challenge I’ve never faced before. My point of view is biased. I’m envisioning everything through Kallum’s eyes, walking in his premeditated footsteps.

Which is dangerous. If I make one misstep, one oversight…

Well, I’ve already watched this play out in court once before.

I can’t let Kallum slip through the cracks of the justice system again.

As I refocus on the crime scene, I position the spotlight to project away from the victim. Kallum would have had no light to see by. There was only a sliver of moon at night.

When we were together at the ritual ground.

I chase the thought back to the dark corner of my mind. Then I shake out my gloved hands and stand in front of my tripod. Camera aimed at the intricate webbing of thread and discolored tongues strung between two eerie marsh trees, I snatch the remote from the depressed reed grass and commence the rapid-fire shutter clicks as I move through the scene.

In order to deconstruct the murder, essentially, I’m assembling the crime in reverse.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I let my senses absorb the malicious current lingering in the air as I imagine Kallum’s dark thoughts, the pitch-black savagery of his movements. Every action he took steeped in his own vicious brand of evil.

I know where and at what time I last saw him. I can place Kallum at the ritual ground at 4:45 a.m. My call to Agent Alister is timestamped. The next time Kallum was seen was by the two special agents who had been placed in charge of watching him. That was around 7:30 a.m.

To mark the time between, I’m building out from the moment the perpetrator placed the severed head next to the erected body amid the woven thread. That would have been the final touch.

While I’m estimating times, clocking the length of each individual action, I have to be mindful not to force a particular piece of evidence or outcome to tell the story I want verses what the evidence states.

For this very reason, I should recuse myself from the case—but there is no one else who will be more devoted to uncovering the truth.

Even if that ultimate truth buries me right along with Kallum.

A possibility I haven’t stopped long enough to fully absorb or process. I can’t, not now. Not when I’ve never been this close to catching the Harbinger before.

I’ll face any consequences when Kallum is locked away for good.

Fueled by anger and resentment and even humiliation, I finish logging the timeframe of displaying the victim’s body adorned as the death’s-head hawkmoth, then glance around at the crime-scene techs trading shifts.

I check my phone: 6:00 a.m.

I told Devyn seven hours ago I’d take a break.

Which I did, technically. A tent has been erected just off the boardwalk of the public hunting grounds, where portalets and coolers of water are accessible. I’ve had to stop every few hours to tend to my menstrual flow, something I haven’t had to deal with in months. Not since the accident that claimed my fiancé and pregnancy.

Every time I change a sanitary napkin, the emotional wound is scraped open with fresh pain. Only now, there is also the appalling guilt of Kallum and I together.

I may have gotten a logical answer from my doctor for why this is happening to my body, but it’s not enough to calm the rising panic every time a visual of him between my thighs surfaces, and I see him tasting me, carving my skin…

A cramp twinges in my pelvis, and I touch my stomach, willing my thoughts back onto the task before me. An ache builds behind my eyes and my vision starts to blur. I ignore the dull throb in my head and push past the weariness pulling at my muscles.

A sinister voice crawls up from the trenches of my mind to whisper that if I stop—if I allow my thoughts to drift to anything other than the obsessive need to dissect this crime scene—I’ll be dragged right down to the abyss, to those flashes of memory I’m barely holding back.

The dam can’t break.

Since the moment Kallum slashed his palms and painted my body with his blood, images of the Cambridge murder have been assaulting my mind. Each time, a fragment longer, the grainy picture becoming a degree sharper.

All from the killer’s perspective.

“I’m just tired,” I mutter to myself as I suppress the imagery of a dead man’s mutilated face.

Despite what my mind is trying to make me believe, I had no reason to kill Professor Wellington six months ago…a stranger to me.

No motive. No evidence. No crime.

When reciting this mantra starts to lose effectiveness, I read the script inked on my forearm. The verse by Voltaire reminds me that I’m here in this moment. I only have to focus on this scene.

So I immerse myself fully. I imagine the Overman’s tongue exhibit already constructed when the Harbinger brought his victim to the hunting grounds. With the time constraint, he had almost thirty minutes to kill the victim by slicing his throat, remove the antlers, sever the head, then stage the scene.