Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(24)

“When it comes to resources, dollars, manpower, humanpower, the people who make those decisions make them based on how many bodies pile up and how fast. They don’t have a metric for what it means to die by the hands of a sexual sadist. Or to have a loved one who does. But I’m different, Charley. I do take those things into account. For you. And for me. And that’s why, together, we’ve built a system that marshals the resources typically reserved for tracking terrorist organizations and applied them to lone human monsters who stalk the night like sharks cruising the deep sea.”

“What does that make me?” she asks.

“A hook,” he says.

“OK. Are you eating them, then?”

He laughs quickly, nervously. Maybe the thought frightens him. “I was trying to be respectful of your personal ethics. But honestly, if you want to act more like a harpoon every now and then, you won’t get any complaints out of me.”

Cole smiles, pats the edge of the bed. “Get some rest. If you’re not running a fever in another eight hours, I’ll let you go.” He’s almost to the door when he says, “And in the meantime, I’ll find someone who can send your boyfriend a text.”

Dead, she thinks once Cole’s gone. Bled out.

The sound of Davies’s cackling laughter still rings in her ears. It chases away anything that feels like guilt. Will it always? Will she have to spend the rest of her life summoning her worst memories of their brutal encounter to keep his death from choking her with guilt? This might be the price of vengeance, she thinks. You have to spend the rest of your life living inside the memories of the worst things done to you so you can constantly justify what you did to avenge them.





19

If Luke Prescott checks his cell phone one more time, his fellow sheriff’s deputy, Pete Henricks, will probably rip it out of his hand. Maybe a little tussle would be preferable to this endless back and forth over whether they’ll ride patrol together or separately. It’s not like anyone else inside the sheriff’s station would notice. Friday nights aren’t as peaceful as they used to be. Not since the new work crews rolled in to start renovating the old resort and the term boomtown became applicable to Altamira for the first time in its history.

Back in the old days, each weekend night they’d see maybe one or two drunk and disorderlies, tops. Tonight, they had five inside the holding cell by nine o’clock.

Still, Luke’s new relationship to his phone seems to have Pete concerned, regardless of what Luke might think. Over the past few weeks—five and counting since Charley shipped out—checking his texts and emails has gone from a regular habit to a jittery compulsion. Which is silly because the two had agreed on radio silence while she was gone.

Luke’s every waking moment since she left has been dogged by the dark fantasy that he’ll soon get some cryptic summons from Cole Graydon or one of his mercenaries, demanding Luke meet them at some isolated warehouse on the outskirts of town. They’ll march into the room with guns drawn and explain in vague platitudes how something went wrong and Charley’s never coming back to him or Altamira. Maybe the drug didn’t trigger as expected, and whatever psycho they went after this time was able to mortally injure Charley before Cole’s men could rescue her.

Or maybe the drug did trigger, but in the end, it finally went haywire, sending Charley into the same orgy of self-mutilation that killed their first test subjects. In both cases, they’ll demand he be relocated and given a new identity so they can sweep all evidence of Project Bluebird under the rug. Then they’ll monitor him for the rest of his life, ready to assassinate him if he ever talks. And all the while, he’ll be left to wonder if their story’s bullshit, a cover for the fact that they’ve locked Charley up in a lab somewhere because letting her run around in the world, with him, has proven too risky.

Or inconvenient.

A man as rich and powerful as Cole Graydon can easily move mountains just because one of the mountains annoys him.

They’ve never threatened anything quite like that, of course, and Zypraxon’s successfully bloomed inside Charlotte’s bloodstream so many times now, it’s hard to believe it would suddenly stop working. But given they still don’t know why it works in her—and only her—maybe that part of his nightmare has more fact to it than he wants to admit.

She chose to go, Luke tells himself for the thousandth time. She chose to work with them. And she chose not to fight them when they said you couldn’t help.

He doesn’t want to resent her, but anger’s been a steady temptation these past few weeks. Anger can give you a false sense of direction when sadness makes you feel lost. If she’d fought harder for him to join their team, he wouldn’t be stuck here in Altamira, arguing with Pete Henricks over whether they should drive patrols together or separately.

Henricks is a few years more experienced than him, but he’s hardly Luke’s idea of a stellar cop. Or anyone’s, for that matter. He used to have a habit of volunteering for the worst assignments, which Luke appreciated, but that was back when the worst they had to do was separate a drunk couple before a bottle was thrown. Now that Altamira’s turning into a burgeoning center of Central California nightlife, Pete Henricks has turned into a strange combination of lazy and smug.

“So where is she?” Henricks asks suddenly.

“Excuse me,” Luke says.