Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(120)

“But I work with the whole body, you see. Your face, I give to the world. Your body stays with me so I can remember the amount of effort I put into it. Into you, you ungrateful little bitch. Tell me.” He bends forward, looks into her eyes. “Did you have any sense of the man I really was when you turned up your nose at me in that parking lot? Any sense of the magnitude of what I contain, of what I can do?”

He keeps the bodies, she thinks. Then the bodies are here. The bodies are the evidence.

She feels acutely nauseated now. The aftereffect of the blow he delivered to her head in the parking lot throbs persistently in her skull, rings in her ears. And that’s good. That means her body’s coming back. Rousing. Her thoughts are coming quicker, clearer.

“No?” he asks. “Well, let me tell you what I’m capable of, Charlotte. I’m going to fill your system with acetone. It’s going to drive out your blood, replacing most of your body fluids, and it’s going to do it while you’re alive and awake and remembering this moment. The moment when you realized who I am. This moment, when you finally knew truth.”

She blinks, sees the IV dangling from the acetone bag, waiting to be connected to her arm. Her heart races at the sight. Something’s missing. The acetone goes in through the big IV, but her blood, her body fluids, how will he push those out?

She feels the cool air—subterranean air, she realizes—kissing her exposed thighs, and that’s when terror sends rivers of ice through her body from head to toe. She remembers a term from one of Luanne’s hospital stays, when they’d needed to draw blood and the veins in her arm weren’t strong enough. A femoral stick.

Pinpricks. Not from him. And then shaking in her bones. He sees it, mistakes it for pure fear, and smiles. He can’t hear the bone music, but she can.

“They say beauty hurts. But trust me, Charlotte. Achieving meaning hurts so much more.”

He turns to the supply table next to him. He gloves his hands, then picks up a loop of clear tubing that’s long, thick, and attached to some kind of plunger. There’s another waiting on the supply table. Two of them. One for each leg.

“And when I’m done,” he says, “you will be very, very beautiful.”

A distant, grating sound stills him.

Dogs. Barking dogs.

That’s when she quickly and silently pops her left hand free, as if the strap were suddenly made of paper. That’s when the strap across her forehead pops off as she goes to sit up, and that’s when Frederick Pemberton spins to face her.

He’s so stunned to find her sitting upright, so stunned to find them eye to eye, he doesn’t notice when she reaches out and grabs his hand. She spits the ball gag she’s bitten in half onto her lap, and he looks desperately from it to his own wrist, now clamped in her impossibly strong grip.

“You are a bad, bad man,” she whispers.

The bones inside his hand crunch like popcorn. A miserable yowl seems to emanate from deep within his belly. It turns into a high barking when she snaps his wrist.

She swings her legs off the table. His knees hit the floor. He’s shuddering, drool flying from his yawning, moaning mouth. Standing over him now, she finds her footing and squeezes down harder on his shattered wrist, drawing the limp and lifeless arm out from his body so she can keep him upright on his knees. Part of her is waiting for the same revulsion she felt when she broke Jason Briffel’s shoulder, but it’s not coming. All she feels is the bone music and, thanks to the terror in Pemberton’s eyes, the sense that she has become not darkness but a great fire, bringing a sudden, blazing end to it.

“Did you give them all that little speech, Dr. Frederick Pemberton? Did you say it to them all so that you could see their fear?”

Tears of agony spit from the corners of his squinting eyes. His breaths are wails. And the wet spot darkening his pants isn’t blood, she’s sure.

She leans in close, until they’re nose to nose. He shudders. “Do you see any fear in my eyes, Doctor?”

His answer is a trembling groan.

Another bone, possibly his shoulder, snaps as she yanks him upright by his already injured arm. His head rolls on his neck; his feet graze the floor like a dangling puppet’s.

“This is my meaning, Doctor,” she says. “This is the truth of who I am. I’m not here to show you fear. I’m here to see yours.”

She releases his arm and gives his opposite shoulder a light shove that sends him stumbling backward into a coffinlike vessel sitting a few feet from the operating table. Now that she’s free, she’s seeing it for the first time. It’s a vacuum pump chamber—just like the one she saw online, the one he probably stole from the Bryant Center. The entire thing tilts away from her. From his wheezing breaths and glassy eyes, it’s clear the impact has stunned Pemberton as badly as his blow to the head stunned her in the parking lot. The chamber’s tilting. When it goes over to one side, he goes with it like a pile of bones.

She starts toward him.



The dogs are barking their asses off, but none of the men could give a shit. Later I’ll laugh about this, Luke thinks. They’ll all laugh about how they stood in the dark outside a serial killer’s gate, ignoring vicious dogs while they watched Charley beat the living shit out of Pemberton on a tablet Luke held in his sweaty, trembling hands.

It wasn’t like they weren’t ready to break in. They were. The problem was, the damn gate didn’t have a pedestrian entrance. Just a sliding one for cars. So there was no lock to shoot off. They were trying to figure out how to distract the dogs while one or more of them jumped the fence, Luke trying to hide the tablet from the guys so they didn’t panic with each moment Charley didn’t fight her way free of the table.