Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(5)

That’s why, even though the Pacific Motel is long gone, he still needs to feel the magnetic tug of the land on which it stood. He doesn’t slow down much, just enough to suck in a few breaths of the tainted air so his lungs can cleanse it with his new wisdom.

Before his first and second hunts, he made it a point to remove his license plates. Back then, he was more worried about his truck being captured on a security camera than he was about a traffic citation. But he’s got enough experience now to know the real worst-case scenario—getting pulled over for driving without plates while he’s transporting prey.

He could give two shits about being busted for solicitation.

Who’s going to judge him? The deer who visit his farm? The other vendors at Pike Place Market, who can’t remember his name? (Which, by the way, is exactly how he likes it.) At worst, an arrest for something that petty would mean he’d have to find another hunting ground. That would hurt, given his historical connection to this grim avenue of broken-down whores, but he’d make do.

He’s pulled five prey from this place in three years. He’s well past the point of restoring his father’s honor and into . . . something next level. He’s not sure what, but he’s a little afraid of it, because it comes with urges that are harder to control.

The manifesto, he reminds himself. Put your focus back on the manifesto.

He’s only outlined a few pages of it, but more passages come to him every time he visits here.

The beginning of the end of a man is when they come for his land.

His destruction is hastened when his woman seizes this opportunity to blame him for her weakness.

Once it’s written, he’ll upload it to some blogging site but won’t actually post it. If law enforcement ever comes for him, he’ll tap a button to make the post live. Not a bad end—sharing his father’s real story right as he goes down in a hail of bullets just like a character out of the paperback Westerns his dad used to love. Before he lost everything.

But right now, the manifesto serves a more important purpose.

It’s a place to channel his energy when the urge to hunt comes on too soon and too strong. Or when he gets crazy ideas about taking a girl like Stephanie.

Before his first hunt, he researched dozens of the mavericks and outlaws the world has called serial killers, and he could trace their downfall to two things: their impatience and their need for attention. And he vowed he wouldn’t fall victim to either.

But he couldn’t predict then how he’d feel once he advanced.

Once he became good.

In the beginning, the thought of following a hunt through from start to finish seemed so momentous, he could envision no greater goal. But after a year of handling his exquisite work in the solitude of his cabin, a childish desire for recognition began to set in.

That’s when he started visiting the stores. And now, it looks like those visits have inspired a craving for younger, prettier victims. Women in whom the flaws and weaknesses of his mother have yet to fully blossom.

But the most dangerous urge has been harder to control.

He’s tired of waiting six months.

He doesn’t doubt this delay has been key to his success, though. Six months between hunts keeps him from becoming a regular on Aurora Avenue North, which keeps the cops and whores from chalking up the disappearances of his victims to anything other than an overdose or a woman who somehow left the life.

Having the cops looking out for his type of truck would be bad. But a bunch of whores spreading the word to their diseased sisters that his truck could mean the end of a girl? That could seriously jam him up, here or anywhere else he chooses to hunt.

He doesn’t have money for another vehicle; he’s spent way too much on the other implements of his hunt. And he doesn’t need hesitant bitches slowing down his extractions with a lot of bullshit negotiation through the open car window.

In and out quick. That’s how it has to work.

Six months.

In and out.

That’s how it’ll be tonight, he’s sure of it.

And he needs to remember what got him here. The patience, the deliberation, the control. Even if he does think Stephanie’s firm young skin would make an amazing belt.





4

“Is there time to get me to Seattle?” Cole asks as soon as the door to the control center hisses shut behind him.

“No!” his security director barks. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

Ed Baker’s standing a few feet away, arms crossed, looking at Cole as if he’s an annoying distraction and not his boss. Cole shoots the man who was his late father’s security chief a withering look, then turns his attention to the two sunken rows of surveillance stations lighting up the otherwise dim room. There was a time, a few months earlier, when it felt to Cole like Ed was his only real loyalist. All that changed with the sudden reawakening of Project Bluebird, and they’re long overdue for a conversation about it. Right now, they’ve got work to do.

Their backs to him, the techs continue to ignore his arrival.

As instructed by Ed, Cole thinks. If I let Ed have his way, we’d all be wearing stocking masks so we couldn’t testify against each other later.

A few days before, this place had been home to just two people watching a constant feed from several tree-mounted cameras angled at Richard Davies’s farm and its long, rutted driveway. With their target on the move again, there are now twice as many techs monitoring three times as many screens.