KALLUM
Candlelight awakens the dark shadows of the mansion library. After I light the last pillar candle on the mantle, I drop the match to the kindling in the fireplace.
The weak flame threatens to extinguish, but just as the blue ribbon of flame snuffs out, the kindling catches fire. The crackling pop of tinder summons an image of the blazing ritual circle to the forefront of my thoughts, and I lower my gaze to Halen.
She sits before the giant brick hearth, her knees drawn to her chest. A threadbare blanket drapes her shoulders. A glass of water is clutched in her hand. Her gaze is fixed on the wispy flames, yet her eyes are vacant, unseeing.
I’d say she’s in shock if I didn’t know that she’s endured far worse.
I stoop beside her and remove the glass from her hand. Wordlessly and without protest, she allows me to link her arm around my neck. I then lift her into my arms, and her body curls easily against my chest, unconcerned by the caked blood as I carry her into the bathroom.
“I’m loath to leave the one room that’s uncluttered,” I say, “but since forensics processed the house, I trust it’s mostly sanitary.”
“It doesn’t bother me.” Her tone is borderline apathetic.
I’m reluctant to uncurl my arms from around her blanketed body. However, she’s wounded and needs treatment. What occupies her thoughts isn’t shock or apathy, her injuries, or even the remnant of the drug in her system. It’s the woman she set free.
There was a choice to be made before I brought her here. Whether to go straight to town and announce Devyn as the perpetrator.
“There’s no urgency,” Halen had said. “I came here to solve a mystery, and that mystery is solved. Soon as I make a report, they’re going after Devyn.”
The heavy confliction I still sense inside her is a battle she needs time to wage.
How do you measure good and evil?
Devyn was her friend, someone she trusted. Alister serves justice, an authority figure to respect.
I’m the fiend who seduces and corrupts.
With less than three hours till sunrise, I brought her instead to a place where she could hear her thoughts. She needs to assess the line between good and bad, right and wrong—or draw her own.
I place her on the vanity stool in the center of the marble room, leaving her only long enough to collect the supplies. One good thing about a hoarder’s house? It has more than one needs.
As I set a candle on the vanity top, she says, “You discovered the mine shaft the first day we were here.” Not quite an accusation.
“Technically,” I say, uncapping the disinfectant, “I only discovered the mine on a map. I found the cellar access to the mine this morning while you and the team of feds cataloged the library.”
She nods absently. She’s still partially under the influence of the Rohypnol Devyn used to subdue her, but her logical mind can’t stop analyzing, processing.
The digital mapping software the FBI use to search the town and surrounding area doesn’t incorporate the old mines that were sealed off nearly a hundred years ago. One shaft of the mine which leads right to Landry’s mansion, and that can be viewed on the old maps in the library. A convenient way to stay hidden for years. Devyn had her very own meditation cave for her and her higher men.
“You knew where to find them,” she says, referring to the victims, the accusation more assertive in her voice now.
“I knew where to look,” I admit. “Potentially.”
“You were prolonging the case.”
“Yes.” I set the rubbing alcohol on the floor and brace my hands on her thighs. “And I won’t feel bad about that. For wanting to be with you, to have more time. Those people are lost, but they don’t need to be found, Halen. You knew that at the ravine.”
She searches my face, trying to see past the mask of a killer in her pursuit for truth.
“Did you know it was Devyn?”
I hesitate. “No. Not for sure. I suspected everyone in this town, as I’m sure you did.”
She lowers her head, drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Figuring it out sooner wouldn’t have changed the outcome.”
“Logically, probably not.” I grab the cloth. “But it would have prevented a deeper connection to her, that feeling of betrayal.”
She looks away, trying not to feel the hurt. “That’s enough.”
I make a sound of agreement. Then, rising to my feet, I head toward the clawfoot tub and twist the brass handle. Water pours from the faucet spout, and I wet the cloth before I switch the lever to the overhead shower and draw the opaque curtain closed.
When I kneel before her on the stool, I say, “Give me your arm.”
Halen delays, clearing her hair from her face, before she finally relents. “I’m not broken,” she says, thrusting her arm from beneath the blanket. “You don’t need to stitch me back together.”
Her words strike deeper than any physical wound, her anger a mix of regret and humility. She allowed herself to trust and was betrayed, but she lays the blame on herself.
“I don’t want to fix you,” I say, taking her wrist in hand, a deviant enticed by the feel of rope burn on her delicate skin. “My motivation to mend your wound is entirely selfish.”
Steam thickens the room, the flickering lowlight of the candle flame softening the darkness between us.
Her swallow drags along the fine column of her throat as I stretch out her arm. My gaze drops to the crude gash torn into her flesh. The first two words of the scripted tattoo have been bitten away, destroyed.
A burn hotter than the searing flames of the underworld coils my viscera.
“She wasn’t…herself.” The hardness in her tone tempers, her words meant to diffuse my climbing fury at the woman who Halen still feels a kinship with.
“She tried to eat you,” I remind her, finding her hazel eyes amid the faint lighting. “Devyn is intelligent. Despite the fact I may hold a mote of respect for her devotion to the teachers and not the hacks, she made a choice to blatantly misconstrue a dogma for her own selfish reasons.”
“Kallum…”
I take her weary use of my name as a request to drop the matter.
“Hmm.” With delicate pressure, I begin cleaning her wound. For now, I’ll give her the time she needs to find her balance. But my clemency is temporary.
Halen demanded I spare Alister in his office, and I obeyed without question, regardless of the fact I was seconds from tearing his still-beating heart from his chest. She couldn’t live with herself if I ended Devyn, so for my muse, I let the priestess live. I let her flee into the night, taking our secrets with her. She’s still a threat.
Anything my muse asks of me, I do willingly. That’s how the muse works, after all. We must surrender to it, our incarnate force of inspiration, our guiding intuition.
But there will be a moment to come when I can’t surrender. When the ask is too high, the sacrifice one I won’t be able to make.
While her thoughts churn deeper, keeping her mind busy, I use the damp cloth to sanitize the gashed flesh. Then I sterilize the needle in the open flame of the candle before I thread the eye, prepping to stitch her wound.
As the needle pierces her skin, I lift my eyes to measure her response to the pain. Her gaze snags on mine. “Nerve damage,” she explains. “From the car accident. I don’t feel much. There…”
I rest my fingers along her inner forearm as I suture. Like the scar tissue dulling her senses, she wants to mute her emotional pain. Devyn went for the hurt by impairing the armor Halen uses to shield her psychological wounds from herself.
Her rising desire to replace that hurt with physical pain practically strangles me, and I have to grit my teeth not to deliver on command.
“I received an email,” Halen says, blessing me with a distraction. “I had requested a copy of your juvenile file.”
Needle held over her arm, I bring my gaze to hers.
“I didn’t read the email,” she says. “I deleted it.”
I let the silence stretch as I begin the second stitch.
Halen inhales a sharp breath, her forearm tensing. “You said at the ravine that family are willfully ignorant, that they refuse to see how dangerous loved ones can be—”
“I got my eyes from my father,” I say, pulling the thread taut. “Heterochromia, a trait passed down. There’s nothing insightful to learn here, little Halen. Just an unoriginal story about a bastard with impossible expectations. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I felt relieved, knowing he wouldn’t be around much longer. That my mother would have peace, that I’d be free of his constant pressures to achieve, to be him. But then I realized…” I halt my actions to look into her beautiful face. “Every time I stared in the mirror, it was his eyes staring back.”
The spray of the shower hums in the quiet stillness of the room before she says, “How dangerous was he?”
I lower my gaze and begin the final stitch. “Dangerous enough that I didn’t want him able to see my mother in his last days…days spent in a toxic vacuum of his self-loathing and vile reprimands. Dangerous enough that I stabbed his eyes out with his twenty-four karat gold pen so he’d be buried without them, and I’d never have to see him in the mirror again.”
I tie off the stitch and lean down to snap the thread with my teeth, placing a kiss over the black stitches before I draw upright.
She tucks her arm under the blanket. “Thank you,” she says, her words holding a deeper meaning to my offered truth.
I nod once. “I told you, sweetness. All you ever have to do is ask. No need to waste resources.”
But she did, and her actions speak so much louder than her words. Despite her obsession to prove I’m her serial killer, she deleted potentially damning evidence to reaffirm her theories.
And she wants me to know.
“All right,” she says. “Now tell me everything else.”
So I do. I tell her what she needs to hear to make the connections, to link the pieces together mentally and see the bigger picture of the puzzle. The digital recorder I took from the police department, making a recording of speaker feedback from the conference room to use as the chirping sound of the moth.
While the ankle monitor is water resistant; it’s not waterproof. A decisive difference that will prove beneficial when Agent Hernandez is required to inspect the bracelet I left in the holding cell for its malfunction, to be determined that a day-long trek through thick marsh waters shorted the receiver when it became submerged.
As the ascension ritual requires a certain level of intoxication, I knew that in Devyn’s inebriated state, her delusion wouldn’t be difficult to manipulate. I’ve had a little practice at that with Dr. Torres.
Halen takes a moment to process what I tell her, then: “How did you know…that—” she nods, indicating the blood skull I used to depict the death’s-head hawkmoth “—would work on Devyn.”
“You,” I say honestly to her. “You told me the Overman would incorporate the Harbinger into their delusion.” I tow the cover off her shoulder to inspect the cut there. The sight of the bite mark fans an ember of fury in my chest.
“Show people a reflection of what they fear,” I say, “and they will question their convictions.”
She nods slowly. “It’s fine,” she says, trying to recover the mark. I keep hold of the blanket, forcing her to meet my eyes. “It’s not as deep.”
Reluctantly, I release the blanket. The desire to sink my teeth into her and deface the mark is a demon throbbing beneath my flesh.
“You nearly beat a man to death,” she says, shifting the topic, “and I almost let you. It’s my convictions that are questionable.”
“For hurting you.” I tip her chin up, not concealing the rage still fueled at the memory. “And I’ll always be that man, Halen. The one who will spill blood for you. I should have torn out his entrails and let Devyn feed them to her minions. If that makes me a monster, I have no quandary in that regard. I might have stormed the castle and swept the princess into my arms, but I’m not the knight in shining armor.” Forcefully, I push my hands past the blanket and palm her waist. “In fact, I would destroy that fucker to steal the girl.”
She wets her lips, and I track the sweep of her tongue across her mouth like a starved beast. “Neither am I,” she confesses, stilling my breath. “I’m not some saint. I stole the murder weapon. I stole the knife, Kallum.”
The reason why she went back inside the police building to begin with. I nod knowingly. “You still have time to return it.”
Pulling her lip between her teeth, she shakes her head. “I have no quandary in that regard,” she fires back at me.
My nostrils flare, her admission stirring a temptation to do bad, bad things to her—to show her exactly how the rules don’t apply to us.
She pulls my hand from her waist, holding it in hers. Her fingers lightly touch the bruises, trailing over the split skin of my knuckles above the inked sigils. “You really would have killed him.”
My jaw tightens. “You didn’t want him dead.”
“No,” she says, stroking the ruined flesh. She brings my hand up and places a tender kiss to my knuckles. When her gaze flicks up to mine, her eyes swirl with molten heat. “I wanted him to suffer. Then I wanted him dead.”
The chasm between us falls away…and she’s so close, I can taste her on my lips, feel her tangled around my bones. I want her fully, wholly, no secrets between us.
Halen gauges me carefully. “You left out how you managed to escape from the holding cell to begin with.”
I free a strained breath. “I won a bet,” I say, withdrawing my hand from her waist to remove the key from my pocket and hold it up. Halen’s eyes track the bruising along my jaw from Alister’s fist. “Only issue now is, what to do with the key once I’m back inside the cell.”
Her gaze holds mine and doesn’t waver. “Swallow it.”
A thrill courses along my veins, and I thread my fingers around hers.
There’s my dark muse.
Pushing the key into my pocket, I let a wicked smile curl my lips. The dry blood feels tight on my stretched features, and I’m sure the skull looks fiendish. Halen confirms this when she reaches out and traces her fingers along my cheek.
“I’ll remove it.” As I go to stand, she catches my arm.
“Wait.” She looks at the cloth and holds out her hand. With a furrowed brow, I place the damp cloth in her upturned palm.
I lower to one knee before her, arms braced on my other, absorbed in the flickering light cast across her ethereal features. That’s where I’ll always find her, there in the flicker. Every chaotic, malicious need of my nature is set to stasis when she captures me for even the briefest moment in her light.
She brings the cloth to the medial zone of my cheek and lightly sweeps my skin, removing a layer of the skull to find the man beneath. She repeats the motion, her strokes tender, following the contours along my face as she wipes away the blood.
“What Devyn said back there…” She trails off. Then, as her eyes fuse with mine through the heavy vapor insulating the room, her hand stills. “You’re not the Harbinger killer.”
My gaze solders to hers, unwavering.
I don’t voice a confirmation. I let her read the answer in my eyes.
Silence suspends us amid the dancing candlelight, a charged current the only thing animating my heart that threatens to stop fucking beating.
The cloth drops to the marble floor to break the spell. Keeping her eyes locked on mine, Halen presses her fingertips to the freshly carved sigil scored into my chest. Gingerly, she traces the deep cuts. “Was this for me?”
“Yes.”
“How are you the most intelligent person I know and yet you believe in the power of sigils.”
The arousing feel of her exploring my open flesh summons a deviant craving to have her crawl beneath my skin.
“Quantum physics,” I say simply. When she doesn’t balk, and I sense no confusion or dismissal of this, I continue, “Change how you view the world. When you no longer see it as merely material, then the ability, or the power, to invoke a belief comes naturally. If you want a thing badly enough, are willing to plead for it, die for it, kill for it—” our eyes clash “—then your only limitation to mastering causality is how far you’re willing to go to possess that thing.”
Her eyes track the swirled antlers of the inked stag as her fingers probe my slashed skin, her touch becoming more forceful. Her nails drag over the scored flesh to deepen the wound, drawing fresh blood. My heart scrapes cartilage when she brings a blood-stained finger to her mouth and slips the tip past her lips.
My fucking body ignites. Blood thunders in my ears, muting the sound of the shower. My heart is a feral beast rattling the cage of my chest as my vision darkens around the edges and narrows to a pinhole, predatorily trapping her in the center.
As she touches the stitches on her arm with those same blood-tipped fingers, she says, “You told me before that Voltaire is the philosopher you would have chosen for me.”
My hands grip either side of the stool, holding me back.
She glances at the marred skin of her tattoo, at the black thread stitched into her flesh, before lifting her gaze. “But what if you’re the philosopher I want branded on my skin, Kallum.”
Whatever restraint I held shatters.
I have her in my arms at the same time she pushes off the stool to take me to the floor. She straddles my thighs, her mouth sealed to mine. I meet her frantic kiss with ravenous, covetous need before any sane thought has a chance to break through.
I turn my head and issue a harsh curse, trapping her face between my palms. “You’re drugged, Halen. I can’t—”
“That’s a requirement of the ritualist, the seer. Right? To be intoxicated.” Her heated words drop to my mouth as her fingers seek out the sigil again, and I’m rock-fucking-hard at hearing my little Halen use sex magick terminology.
I drag my thumb over her bottom lip, entranced by her. “Fuck, you lie so pretty.” That moment in the library, of course she’d already done her research. “You’re the only one to ever surprise me.”
I called for her, and yet, I still never saw her coming.
“Maybe…” She pauses to nip my thumb. “I just want to hear you talk about things. You give a lot away when I let you talk.”
A savage yearning shreds my restraint. “I’m done talking.”
Her swallow is hard, the plea in her liquid gaze flaying the pitch-black tar of my soul. “Then unlock me, Kallum. Unravel me. I don’t want to be blind anymore. I want to see.”
“Goddammit,” I mutter. Her scent sears my lungs, the shower steam infusing the aphrodisiac notes of ylang-ylang into my fucking pores, and I’m all but drugged on her. She writhes on top of me in search of friction, making my fractured control nonexistent.
I band an arm around the small of her back and lift her against me, flinging the blanket away. “Fuck it,” I say as I take her to the shower. “I’m no fucking saint, either.”
