That was the six-eyed owl.
I’m living in a weird age. What else is out here? Teletubbies? I’d rather those than Chucky the vengeful doll or a six-eyed owl.
Twisting my wrists gets me nowhere, though I’ve learned and I’m quiet. I’m not trying that hard. A purr interrupts me. Squiggle cat emerges, stage left, carefully stalking across the fallen foliage while making almost no noise except for that comforting purr. It headbutts my side, gives me a suspicious and unhappy look as if to say,why no pats?
“Sorry. No can do.”
It pads across my thigh, wanders to the right, sniffs a bugor something among the leaf litter, then leaps away chasing moonbeams or mice.
“Alone again. That’s a song, isn’t it?” I whisper.
And Kail is off burying the dead.
If he comes back and lets me go, I will talk to him about…everything.
If he returns and does something bad to me, I am fucked.
That makes me try to get free again. I hiss through my teeth at my ankle, thinking. Can a person ever really regret not sawing off a leg to get loose?
I have no saw.
That movie sucked anyway.
17
REARRANGING THE DEAD
That was oddly satisfying.
Is biting necks a thing I used to do to mark my women? It felt familiar and yet not-so familiar. It feltright,though. Themyis the sticking point. She isn’t that.
I crouch above the opening to this charnel pit that is now my private graveyard. Decomposing Corpses R Us. My chewed-on finger barely hurts. I wriggle it, eyeing where the taping over the joint shows, even as I register the scent wafting upward. The Handler is smelling quite rank. From the rustling and squeaking, the rats are happy I gave them extra food. I stepped on a few when I took the new bodies down the tunnel. The wriggly gristly crunch will live in my mind, forever.
Have I done everything I need to do? The phones—dismantled, crushed, and thrown away. Just in case the signal carries further than I calculate, I threw the pieces hundreds of yards across a ravine or dropped them into running water. Everything I found in their pockets is lost in dirt or water.Unless they have some magic implant, no one should be able to trace them.
Or unless a tracker is used—a bloodhound type dog or a human. That is possible.
I cannot account for everything, as I don’t yet fully understand Hailey’s world. There are going to be differences I haven’t yet encountered.
I’ve now killed three men for her. Honestly, the Handler was for me as much as her.
I fumble blindly on the ground for a pebble and toss it into the opening then listen as it bounces off the sides to the bottom.
Hailey is downslope and near enough that I will hear if she calls out. I should return to her. She’ll likely be frightened. Most people would be. With both hands, I hold my head, rocking in place, trying to sort things out, to be sure, staring down into my makeshift cemetery.
How much can I tell her? I cannot conceal everything forever. The truth will out. If I fuck up and say the wrong thing, I will lose her…make that, I will fail to gain her trust, because she does not understand who I am.
Though she is tied up and can’t get away.
“So, losing her is the wrong phrasing.” I nod to myself, being wise as fuck.
Or stupid as fuck.
I pull the cover over the hole, straighten. Do I need her trust?
I can just keep her.Frowning at that ridiculous faux pas from my brain, I recall that I promised myself, if not her, that I’d help find her father’s killer. That was so I could lose that scary monster label she stuck on me. Leaving her tied to a tree with my teeth marks on her neck is probably the height of idiocy.
Helping her find the killer might not be enough to make her see me as a saint.
