Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
But the desert vistas on either side of the narrow road came to an abrupt halt against a sweeping rise of rock and stone ten minutes later. Adam’s car was nowhere in sight. The only signs of life were the cacti that stood sentinel in the desert behind her, not a single pair of wings in the sky, not even an insect’s breath stirring beneath the winter sun.
Chapter 6
Be careful—especially now that you’re working on your own. It’s clear that your target’s been watching you even before you became aware of his crimes.
—Message from Bram Priest to Eleri Dias (6 January 2084)
Getting out, Eleri walked to the apparently impenetrable barrier…and saw that the road continued between the rock walls. The shadows there dropped the temperature in a precipitous dive, a reminder that the desert wasn’t always hot, that once discarded by their murderer, the victims of the Sandman spent night after night blanketed in nothing but the cold air.
And she knew she’d ask Adam Garrett to stay her execution until after she’d finished this, brought the killer to justice. She’d never spoken any promises aloud to the dead, but she’d made them all the same, each and every time she found one of his victims. Because it was always Eleri who found the abused and violated remains.
The Sandman made sure of that.
The space narrowed as she drove on, the desert being eaten away by stone and rock, the road progressively less well maintained, until she found herself on a gravel track that led into a much more constricted canyon than the one that housed the town of Raintree.
Despite every instinct she had telling her to turn back, she didn’t. Those instincts couldn’t scream anymore. Nor did her heart race or her palms become sweaty. The involuntary reactions had stopped one by one after her fourth…or perhaps it had been her fifth reconditioning, the wall between her and who she’d once been so opaque that Eleri could no longer see through it.
Five minutes of driving over rugged terrain brought her to a small flat area—and Adam’s dust-coated vehicle. When she exited her own, she saw that he’d walked down a cascade of jagged rock to stand next to a waterway that reflected the red and orange of the rocks all around them.
The shadows thrown by the canyon walls created an artificial twilight on this side of the waterway, while the sunlight on the other side glittered off minerals embedded in the stone.
Truths and lies.
Shadows and shine.
Eleri and Adam.
She walked down to join him.
“This is Blood Canyon,” he told her, with a nod to the water that, from this angle, rippled a dark red. “I thought it appropriate. Locals—including most of my clan—avoid it due to superstition passed on from generation to generation, so we won’t be interrupted.”
Eleri drew in a deep breath of the crisp, clear air and asked a question she hadn’t known she was going to ask until she spoke. “What’s it like, living in so much space, no one pushing down on you from every side?” That was what it felt like in her mind if she ever slipped in maintaining her telepathic shields, as if she was one breath away from being crushed by an avalanche of other people’s dreams and thoughts, nightmares and horrors.
His facial muscles tight, Adam set his booted feet apart as he faced her. “You don’t get to ask the questions here. Tell me why you think Raintree might be home base for a serial killer.”
Perhaps she wouldn’t have to ask him to let her finish this task after all. While she didn’t know how changeling packs and clans functioned except on the most basic level, she did understand that the people at the very top of the hierarchy were highly protective of those who looked to them for leadership.
Of course Adam Garrett would want to excise the Sandman out of the place his clan called home.
“It’s easier if I show you.” Eleri gathered up a few nearby bits of rock and stone, put them in a pile, then cleared a section of the sandy ground.
The dust and grit clung to her gloves, tiny flecks that highlighted her inability to protect her own mind.
“This is Raintree.” She put a gray rock in the center. “This is where the body of Vivian Chang—his first confirmed victim—was discovered.” A small black stone to mark the place where Eleri had brushed sand off the body of the cellist whose hands would never again create music soaring and haunting.
“This is where the body of Kriti Kumar, his second confirmed victim, was found.” Another petite young woman with dark eyes and hair. That was all Kriti had been to the killer. He hadn’t known or cared that she dressed up as a fairy for her much younger siblings’ birthday parties, or that she was the bubbly, vibrant center around which her friends spun.