Was this what it had been like for my dad? Did this same thrill drive him on as much as his more sadistic desires?

I shook my head and straightened. I could wonder about that shit later. Right now, I needed to get inside.

I turned the handle and cautiously pushed the door open. The one thing I couldn’t find online was whether or not Aly had any pets. I hadn’t heard barking while I jimmied the locks, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an attack dog waiting for me inside that had been trained to be quiet. Sure, I could have assuaged my worry by asking my roommate – Tyler had been here a few times, so he would know the answer – but I didn’t want him to think I was interested in any of his exes, especially Aly.

The rear of the house was dark, with only a soft glow emanating from the front room, where Aly’s Christmas tree stood proud and fully lit in a window. It was enough illumination to make out my surroundings and realize there were no dogs waiting to pounce.

I quickly shut the door behind me and locked it.

An unholy yowl split the air.

Fuck! Aly had some sort of demonically possessed canine after all, and it would probably rip through my pant leg and splash my blood all over the goddamn house for the cops to find.

I grabbed the doorknob and was about to tear out of there when a small, fluffy shape darted into the room and stopped short.

A cat. Aly had a cat.

We eyed each other in the darkness. It was pretty runty despite the long black and white hair. If push came to shove, I could take it.

“Don’t fuck with me,” I warned.

In response, it turned sideways and stood on its tiptoes, fluffing up like a skunk.

Despite myself, I grinned. The cat might be small, but it looked like a fighter, and that, I could appreciate.

I’d never had a pet. Serial killers were well known for getting their start on small animals, and I didn’t want the temptation in case I was more like Dad than I realized. I worried that if I adopted one, I either wouldn’t feel anything for it – meaning none of the protective instincts or cute aggression most pet owners seemed overwhelmed with – or I’d have all my greatest fears confirmed and take one look it and think “prey”.

As the seconds ticked by, I stood glued to the doormat, waiting for some violent urge to overtake me. All I felt was slight trepidation. Cats had claws, right? What if it lunged at me and scratched deep enough to draw blood? Even a drop was enough to identify someone.

Without warning, the cat deflated and sauntered forward.

Oh, fuck. What was it doing?

I stepped back and flattened myself against the door, weirdly mesmerized by how its eyes glowed in the darkness. This small fluffy creature would be so easy to kill, yet I had no desire to harm it. That had to be a good sign, right? Or was this such a new experience that whatever horrible response I might normally have was muted?

“No scratching,” I told the cat.

There was still a chance that some monstrous craving for blood was stirring beneath the surface, undetected, and if it attacked me, those murderous instincts might roar to the forefront of my psyche and do something terrible. I’d been taught not to trust myself, and this seemed like the perfect setup for learning just how alike Dad and I really were, once and for all.

The cat strode right up to my feet, unperturbed. I remained frozen in place, waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, but instead of biting me, it sniffed my pant leg and butted its forehead into my shin, purring so loud that it sounded like an engine turning over.

I let out a relieved breath and half fell to a squat to get a closer look at it. The thing was kind of…cute, with white patches above its eyes that made it look like it had eyebrows. Right now, they were drawn together as the cat half-lidded its eyes and butted against my leg again as if looking to be petted. Had I ever thought anything was cute before? Maybe the better question was, had I ever let myself before?

“Sorry if I fuck this up,” I said, lifting a hand to scratch the cat between the ears and then stroke down its back like I’d seen other people do on TV. This was the first time I’d ever pet an animal, and my fingers shook. Thankfully, it was from unspent adrenaline and not the rising desire to strangle Aly’s furbaby.

Crisis averted. For now, at least.

So far, I’d learned two crucial things about myself this week: I didn’t want to hurt Aly or her cat. Maybe I wasn’t a psychopath after all. They cared about no one and nothing but themselves. But that didn’t rule out sociopathy. Most sociopaths were capable of caring for a few select people. They were their rare exceptions, developing intense love and devotion for them while feeling absolutely nothing for anyone else. I cared about my mom, stepdad, and Tyler. They were my people, and I barely thought of others. But was that because of a personality disorder or because they were the only ones who had earned my trust?

I shook my head and stood, ignoring the cat’s annoyed meow of protest when I stopped petting it. I wasn’t here to bond with an animal. My time was limited, and the longer I lingered, the higher the risk of detection. I could puzzle out my mental health later.

I had a video to film and a camera to place.

It was time to find out just how serious Aly was about wanting to walk into her house and find a masked man waiting for her in the darkness.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 3Aly

Everyone in the goddamn city had lost their mind. Or at least that’s what it felt like tonight. We saw our fair share of accidents during a regular shift, but this one was different. I’d lost count of the number of patients I’d seen over the last seven hours who had hurt themselves or gotten hurt by someone else doing some dumb shit even a child should know better than to attempt.

Was there some dangerous new social media trend I hadn’t seen yet? Or a revamp of that old show with dudes crashing shopping carts into things? Something had to explain this level of stupidity. It couldn’t all be coincidental.

We were in the middle of a mini lull, not uncommon so late at night, and I was curled up in a breakroom chair, trying to get comfortable as I downed another cup of coffee. My shift was only halfway over, and if the second leg of my night progressed like the first, I’d need all the caffeine I could get to keep me going.

Tanya swept into the room and strode right to the window, so focused as she stared into the night sky that I didn’t think she’d noticed me. “And it isn’t even a goddamn full moon,” she said under her breath.

I straightened in my chair. “So, it’s not just my patients?”

She turned my way and shook her head, her long braids falling over her shoulder. “No. Something’s gotten into this city tonight.”

We shared a troubled glance and then looked away from each other. Things like this happened sometimes, odd patterns emerging that made me think humans were more connected than we realized. One week, we might see a spike in car crash victims without anything like bad weather or traffic to explain the uptick. The next, we could get more domestic assault victims than usual, and the one after that, more gunshot wounds.

Tanya and I had talked about it a couple of times, wondering if humans shared some kind of hive mind, or if it had something to do with magnetic currents or our subconsciousness’s all picking up the same subtle signals from the world around us.

I’d even mentioned it to one of the cops who regularly got stationed here, and instead of thinking I was a weirdo, he’d agreed with me, telling me he and his coworkers saw something similar. They’d get a slew of people who had almost no traceable connection to each other committing virtually the same crime one week. The next, it would be a new group doing something else.