“Is Deek alive?”
She has to know.
Howard Grosvenor Kline says nothing as the noise of the two engines wanes in the distance. An uneasy stalemate hangs—for a few more moments, the cops are still close enough to hear a scream or a gunshot. With her dwindling time, she asks again: “Is he dead?”
Silence.
She dreads the answer. Why else would the gunman have left his hostage unguarded in the living room? In her soul, she knows there are two possible reasons: either Deek has fallen unconscious or Deek has bled to death.
And it’s my fault.
The human Chucky doll’s lips curl into a smile. The sound of it—of flesh wetly tightening—makes her stomach turn.
“I’ve always been a loner, too.” The smile is wistful, vulnerable. “I’m . . . I know I’m not an alpha male. You won’t find me in a sports bar leading a pack of betas and chasing females. I’m something else, a new archetype they recently discovered: a sigma male. Just as powerful and charismatic as an alpha, but solitary.”
She watches the red taillights fade into sheets of rain. A silent countdown.
Going.
Going.
“Just like you, Emma, I don’t have a pack. A sigma male is a true lone wolf.”
The taillights are now gone.
Alone again. Emma’s nerves fizz with adrenaline, but she glimpses motion on the gunman’s cheek. Inching under his glasses, glistening through curly neckbeard.
A tear.
He’s . . . crying?
He didn’t cry.
Howard Grosvenor Kline rarely cried, even when he was a child. As the beach house sank back into darkness, he hefted his bloodied katana with a samurai’s resolve. A massacre on the front porch was narrowly averted, but Emma’s covert message to Jules hadn’t gone unnoticed. He’d seen her lips move. He knew the police would soon return in force. At that moment powers beyond his control were now converging, and the slaughter that would make Strand Beach famous was now inevitable.
With bone-chilling calm, Howard explained his plans to her.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t want to,” he sobs.
Emma can only watch in silence, an icy dread building within her. It’s disorienting. This can’t be right. The star of tonight’s nightmare is melting down in front of her, his lips quivering, his skin flushed, rubbing his watery eyes.
What’s happening?
What’s really happening here?
He wipes his nose—a snotty huff—and lifts his sword. This close, Emma sees blood diluted sickly pink by rainwater, filling cracks in the steel. The sharp edge is damaged from tonight’s hits, dulled against wood, glass, and bone.
“I didn’t want to.” His voice burbles. “I didn’t want anyone else to die tonight.”
He’d planned to take as many lives as possible that night.
The body of Jake Stanford, concealed in the tall grass with both hands severed and enough disfiguring slashes to the face to require postmortem identification via dental records, would be only the first soul taken in the night’s massacre—
“No.”
He punches the wall, leaving a splintered crater.
“No. Please.” Red-faced, he grasps his temples and digs his fingernails into doughy skin, like he’s arguing with a voice she can’t hear. Emma takes a cautious step backward, toward the kitchen. He’s changing before her eyes, mutating, a volatile chemical reaction.
“That fucking FedEx guy.” Howard sniffles. “He just showed up.”
Emma remembers the hardening look in the delivery driver’s eyes. The wet rock gripped in his knuckles, the blurred swing—
“He attacked me. And after his hand came off, I had to keep going. I had to. I couldn’t stop. And . . . I wasn’t ready for it. I thought I was. But it’s different when they’re alive. He looked so afraid while it happened, shaking his head, begging me to stop.” His voice fractures, another choked sob. “While he . . . while he came apart.”
She can still feel Howard’s scream in her bones. A hundred decibels of shock, disgust, and guilt. In the new light she can see the blood on his clothes, cast across his leather trench coat and cargo pants. Even a droplet at the corner of his hairy lips, close enough to taste with his tongue if he wished to. But he doesn’t.
The police are coming back, Emma knows. Any second.
I just have to survive until then.
But here, now, something is very wrong.
“I don’t understand,” she whispers. “You’ve . . . done this sixteen times.”
He blinks.
“Your sixteen other books. Murder Mountain. Murder Glacier. Murder Forest. All those people you’ve killed for your books, in all those places—”
“They’re fiction,” he says.
Silence.
“Really?”
He nods.
She refuses to believe this. He’s lying. He has to be lying—
“All of them?”
He nods again. “You . . . you assumed my books were real?”
Emma’s mouth is paper-dry.
The entire world seems to quietly shift underfoot, a tectonic change. So . . . Prelaw and Psych’s Appalachian nightmare never happened. The young women never existed. Neither did the seasoned, capable killer who hunted them. The blood and gore and high-heel lesbian romance read like masturbatory fantasy because it was. Howard himself is no serial killer. Even if he wishes to be, even if he writes himself as one.
He’s something worse. A wannabe.
A seething, hateful kid with nitroglycerin in his veins. A school shooter prowling the halls of his high school with a military-style rifle he can just barely operate. Jealous and needful. Red-faced and sweaty. She can feel the warmth radiating off his skin, body heat trapped in a clammy leather exoskeleton. He takes a slow step toward her.
She steps backward but refuses to look away from his fogged glasses. Like staring down a rabid dog. If she looks away, he’ll attack.
Keep him talking.
“What about . . .” She steadies her voice. “What about Murder Beach?”
Again he blinks. “What?”
“The book you’re writing about me. About tonight. About murdering me—”
“There’s no Murder Beach.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why would I write and publish a book detailing a real murder I committed?” His nose pinches, as if offended. “And if I . . . if I did that sixteen times, over years and years, don’t you think I’d have been caught by now? Is that really what you thought was happening tonight?”
She says nothing.
“Come on, Emma. A serial killer who writes books about the people he murders? That would just be stupid.”
She can’t believe any of this. This baby-faced figure is toying with her, manipulating her, feeding her falsehoods and studying her reactions. He’s a storyteller, and all stories are built from lies. Who knows how many faces he wears?
“I didn’t even kill Laura Birch,” he whimpers. “Not technically.”
She takes another step back.
No sudden movements.
He follows. Mirroring her, a python about to strike.
“I kept Laura’s teeth and her earrings and the sword I used to dismember her body behind a loose board in my bedroom wall. Above my bed. It’s still there. I suck on her teeth from time to time and look at my Polaroids and try to pretend I did it on purpose. But do you want to know the truth? What really happened to Laura?”
His voice rings uncomfortably in the confined space.
“I tied her knots too tight. And she suffocated.” He forces a jaundiced grin. “That’s it. That’s all I did. I’m basically innocent. I needed her to stay in my basement. I hadn’t even touched her yet. But when I left for school, Laura tried to tip her chair and escape, and the unlucky, one-in-a-million way Mom’s stupid antique chair landed must have constricted her airway. And she asphyxiated on the floor while I was in class. She killed herself, basically.”
Emma says nothing.
He’s lying. All of it. She has no reason to believe a word he says. She takes another slow step backward—into the living room now—as he follows.
“Laura made it all my problem, you know?” He flashes a rancid smile. “It’s like she got the last laugh. But I made it worthwhile for myself, too. You learn a lot about the female body when you’re cutting it up.”
He hesitates, as if realizing he’s said too much.
Emma thinks about Deek’s revolver. Where it must have landed in the dark room. She envisions herself finding it, turning around, and blowing Howard Grosvenor Kline’s head off. Pulling the trigger, making his insectoid brain bloom out on the wall.
If she can only get to it.
“Being close to you was nice. While it lasted.” His voice lowers and his opaque glasses level on her, a subtly alarming shift. He smiles and straightens his fedora. “I like . . . I like the way you made the house smell, Emma. I like the way you talked to your dog, as if she could talk back. I liked the way you’d sit and read for hours every day with your ginger tea and play whiteboard games with your neighbor. I liked your petite body. You were my kind of girl, you know? You were solitary, quiet. Smart. Introspective. Not at all like the other femoids. You reminded me of Laura in so many little ways.”
Revulsion climbs her throat like a squirming mass of cold maggots. She feels a visceral tug in her stomach and wants to puke.
My kind of girl.
“Then you wrote that review.” He sniffs. “And you broke my heart.”
No. Wrong.
Impossible.
She one-starred Howard’s shitty horror book before their lives entangled. Not after. There is no other possible explanation. She’s staring at a hateful creature who poisons dogs and violates corpses, a mind untethered from time and space—
“But I . . . I still want to save you,” he says with a woeful shrug. “Even after everything you’ve done to me. I guess nice guys really do finish last, huh?”
His teary eyes dance. It’s subtle but chilling.
“You’re trapped in your past, Emma. You love that dog too much. You have to learn to let go of things before they drown you. So here’s my proposal: I’ll spare your life if you come with me. Right now.”
Silence.
He’s holding out a latex-gloved hand. His gun is holstered, his sword sheathed. As if all the night’s blood and terror hasn’t happened at all and he’s just a gentleman offering her his hand at an old-timey ball. Then his palm opens and her skin crawls.
Braided rope.
“It’s just for my safety,” he clarifies. “We’ll . . . we’ll live on the road together. You and me. I have over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in my bank account. We’ll drive south, to Mexico maybe.” His needy smile widens, his eyes running up and down her body. “I can . . . I can save you, Emma. I’m the only one who can save you from yourself. You understand that, right? You’re broken and you can’t recover from this grief alone. You’re not strong enough. So come with me and be my girl.”
Silence.
His girl. Something he’s entitled to. Like Laura Birch’s body parts in his basement, useful for as long as they last.
And this is all so wrong. It’s another dizzying turn, an accelerating nightmare, but hope is within reach. Deek’s dropped gun is somewhere in the dark behind her. If she turns and bolts for it now . . . can I find it before Howard shoots me in the back?
“Now or never, Emma.” His voice sharpens. “What’s your answer?”
Before she can speak, she hears a metallic click behind her.
Her blood freezes in her veins.
Slowly, she turns.
Across the living room, sixty-six-year-old Deacon Cowl—injured but alive—has clawed himself upright against the fireplace like a slouched corpse. Using the brickwork to support his aim, his revolver clasped in his bloody knuckles. It’s here, all right, exactly as she called it, but he’s recovered it first.
And it’s aimed directly at her.
Emma’s throat tightens.
In an instant, Deek has become a stranger again. The eyeball that made her skin prickle through his telescope; the canny mind that knew her name before she ever gave it. Now, in their sum, the coincidences are overwhelming: the fact that Deek knew Howard prior to all this, the fact that he intervened only when Emma’s death appeared certain, the all-too-convenient fact that he kept a black fedora on his closet coat rack identical to Howard’s. What are the odds, anyway? Two authors on the same beach?
No, she wants to whisper. You were my only friend out here. Not you, too—
With Howard at her back and a gun aimed at her chest, she’s trapped. There’s nowhere to run. Deek seems to know this, too.
The old man’s eyes harden.
His finger curls around the trigger.