AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d also grabbed my neck, his touch echoing through my flesh. When I’d strode to the exit, I’d been acutely aware of my nipples poking into my bra.
So? He aroused me. I was a girl; he was a hot guy with tattoos and a big gun of his own. Just the kind of man I liked to go looking for.
“Now is not the time to be kinky.”
I plucked the memory that I knew was there—Val after the bomb.
How odd, to see him from within another’s mind...
Sprawled out and unconscious, he barely twitched as the knife sewed the flesh, or whatever it was, of dream faery into his skin. When each small symbol was completed and linked, the intricate loops shone star-white. The knife moved on. The black of the imp burned equally well, but with a darkness that welled before my gaze, making his skin blister slightly then heal.
The creatures were alive and screeching.
The Cucitrice killed faeries to stitch people with these symbols.
In the memory, Val was stirring, and something was terribly wrong...
I had to... The Cucitrice tightened her grip on the knife.
The memory shredded like no other had done, flying into tattered strips, dissipating.
Then it was gone, on a final flare of light, like the glimpse of bright sunset from within as the coffin lid closes. The Cucitrice had died. No wonder that memory was cut short.
“Fairies and imps.”
Dream things. Not real.
My gaze drifted to the red pinch mark on my skin.
CHAPTER8
Val
The light had been turnedoff an hour ago. There’d been no movement behind the street-lit curtains, no noise for some time. It was time to go in.
I licked the burger sauce off my fingers then scrunched the wrapping into the bag. Two burgers and a large fries—I was starving but with a hunger that didn’t slake. Not just food…when this over I was finding a warm body and somebody I could lock in a hotel room for days.
Right now though, I wanted that knife.
Despite the three bolted locks, getting into her apartment was easy. Shorting out the alarm, ditto. That Zara didn’t understand how easily I could invade her territory pleased me, a hum of satisfaction rumbled deep inside—another foreign sensation that disturbed me.
What was this compulsion driving me?
After listening at the bedroom door to her quiet snores, using night-vision goggles I began to search her apartment, rifling through her drawers. Some things I couldn’t touch without making a lot of noise, so I left them.
Zara was a neat person. I could tell that after only a minute glancing around—neat and that she traveled light as if she could pack up and be gone at any moment, but neat freak wasn’t remarkable. The framed board on the wall in the living room nowthatwas remarkable.
I wasn’t sure it was what it was until I took another minute to study it. She’d created an evidence board. No police officer I knew of used these. Any complex crime investigation would be detailed with a computer program.
I skimmed the connected events and then the newspaper articles—both the missing report followed by the retraction. The psychiatric report interested me more, that and a summary of the police findings confirmed that the case was imaginary and falsified.
Okay. I sucked in a breath. Interesting.
Had Zara made up the story on the board? There was an earnest fastidiousness to the pinning and cataloging that didn’t seem to fit that profile.
Two and two didn’t add up here. Something was wrong.
I glanced down at the postcard lying on the table under a scattering of pins. The photograph seemed off, and not just that one.
