[Ash Park 01.0] Famished

by Meghan O'Flynn

  I felt like I was on a bed of hot coals, skin sizzling under me. The wet throb of my heart pulsed sharp, bright pain through my skull, into my arm and down over my ankle.

  Asleep. I was just sleeping. Just dreaming. It’d be over soon.

  I opened my eyes. Glittering pieces of broken sculpture peppered the living room. I’d have to clean that up later. And someone had spilled something on the marble, dark and shiny in the moonlight. That would stain if I didn’t take care of it.

  And … his legs. Unmoving. Still. Understanding crashed through me. I pushed myself to my knees, my injured arm twitching and throbbing—letting myself hope, for one exquisite moment, that he was not dead.

  No.

  Dizziness tried to pull me to the floor. He was just sleeping. Tired. Everything would be better in the morning, if only he could take this much needed rest.

  I should get him a blanket, I thought suddenly.

  But the deep, black pool on the pristine marble was a river I could never go back across. A river that separated who I was now from the semblance of sanity I had so briefly enjoyed. The glass in my knees no longer hurt and I longed for the pain. For now, anything felt like pleasure compared to this aching, pulsing dread that had settled into my stomach like a tumor.

  Luminescent moonlight bathed the room, a room where I had been happy and in love just hours before.

  Happy, because of him.

  My scream echoed off the walls as if searching for someone else to hear, to understand that this was a loss so deep I could never truly recover. He had saved me in every possible way. He had proven to me that I was strong, and I had used that strength to cut him down with brutal finality.

  I felt it then, a visceral snapping, a break in the rope that had held me to myself, that had bound me to a world where pain meant you were alive, if only you could put up with it. Dizziness pulled. I pushed back.

  I inched forward on knees and forearms. Still-warm blood seeped into my pants, glazed my arms, my hands, my legs, until I felt like I was wrapped in a blanket of gore, coating myself in the essence of what he used to be.

  I pulled myself onto him and laid my head on his bloody chest. His body felt warm against my cheek, but not warm enough. And he was still. So still. My heart seized. I gripped his shirt with quivering fingers, listening for any murmur within the recesses of his rib cage.

  There was only silence.

  Voices began as a tingle in the back of my mind and grew to such a violent swell that I feared they might erupt from my fractured brain and alert passersby to this horrible thing that I had done.

  Run, Hannah. Run. Save yourself.

  There is nothing to live for.

  And suddenly he was there, too, a voice from the past resounding through the blackness in my soul.

  You’re worthless to anyone but me.

  Let me show you how good it feels to make me happy.

  I was five years old again, his arm around my shoulder.

  Do you love me, Hannah?

  Yes, Daddy.

  Moonlight glinted off something in the coagulating pool near my knee.

  The scalpel. I picked it up. In a way, it had ended him, but just as surely, it had ended me, or what I once had been.

  I couldn’t let everyone know he had done these things. They wouldn’t—couldn’t—understand.

  He had saved me. I had to find some way to save him, even a small part of him, in death.

  There was resistance, a rip like paper tearing, as I brought the scalpel across his belly. His insides were warm, so warm, blood and gore and pieces of him oozing around my fingers as if they were still alive. I got hold of something and pulled. A worm, a tube. I was holding his—

  Jesus.

  I skittered backwards, feet slipping, stomach convulsing. I was halfway to the couch before I realized I was still gripping his intestines.

  “I love you,” I whispered, half expecting him to answer.

  I tried to stand, but my limbs were heavy, like I was dragging myself through cement. I’d never make it upstairs.

  Help me, Dominic. I inched through the living room. In the mudroom, I wrenched the doorknob and fell onto the back porch, the frigid air biting at my face and arms. I dragged myself across the porch, panting and choking on tears. The bathroom door came into focus. Almost there.

  But someone was watching. Someone who knew what I’d done.

  I swallowed bile and peered into the blackness. “Hello?”

  No response. But I felt the unseen eyes burning into me like hot pokers. Whoever was there was waiting, biding their time to attack.

  Move. Now.

  I lurched into the bathroom, slammed the door, and clawed the knob, blindly fumbling for the lock. My fingers were weak, but it clicked. I stumbled into the shower and collapsed against the wall, listening, waiting for the watcher to break down the door and take me.

  There was nothing except my ragged breath wheezing in my ears. My oozing skin crackled and stung and throbbed. I braced myself against the wall and stripped off my clothes. Blood seeped from my mangled arm, but slower now. I turned on the water and whimpered, biting my lip as my skin shrieked from a thousand fissures. The basin went red.

  I choked back a sob and turned under the spray as the cascade of water took some of the smaller shards, pushed others deeper. The basin turned pink. The wall of the shower wavered.

  I turned off the water and peered out from the stall. All was quiet. The towel I wrapped around my breasts would be useless against groping fingers or a blade, but it might at least help stop the worst of the bleeding.

  I unlocked the door and scanned the porch.

  Nothing. But something. My heart surged.

  Whether I ran, tripped or floated I wasn’t sure, but suddenly my feet were on marble again. I heaved the deadbolt into place.

  Don’t look. Out the back windows, tree limbs twisted in the wind and I focused on them, let them guide me forward, past the glass, past the blood, to the stairs and up. I left the stained towel on the floor and dressed my deeper wounds with the bathroom first aid kit and a roll of gauze. Some other cuts were still bleeding but they were small, hopefully small enough to stop on their own.

  Don’t think. Just move.

  Jeans and a sweater. Underwear. Shoes. Q-tips. The hazy room twisted as I sucked in a breath.

  I watched the trees through the windows on the way back downstairs and retrieved the book from the library. It vibrated against my skin as I picked my way into the living room—or maybe I was shaking. I dropped the book on the couch and flipped to the last page. If only it were all a dream, Alice.

  I picked up the Q-tip.

  Don’t look. It’s paint. It’s just paint.

  When I was done, I laid the book and the makeshift pen on the ashes, stoking the embers with a nearby poker until a flame licked the leather cover, the orange and red caressing the pages, as sensual as his hands had been on my body. Greasy black smoke rose and disappeared into the dark void of the chimney.

  I will not fail you.

  I stood straighter, pulled by the strings of an invisible puppeteer.

  You’re stronger than you think.

  Everything will be okay.

  As the last of the leather curled and crumbled into ash, I retrieved my purse from the kitchen, pulled the duffel over my good arm, and unlocked the back door.

  Sunday, December 6th

  Focus, or she’s dead.

  Petrosky ground his teeth together, but it didn’t stop the panic from swelling hot and frantic within him. After the arrest last week, this crime should have been fucking impossible.

  He wished it were a copycat. He knew it wasn’t.

  Anger knotted his chest as he examined the corpse that lay in the middle of the cavernous living room. Dominic Harwick’s intestines spilled onto the white marble floor as though someone had tried to run off with them. His eyes were wide, milky at the edges already, so it had been awhile since someone gutted his sorry ass and turned him
into a rag doll in a three-thousand-dollar suit.

  That rich prick should have been able to protect her.

  Petrosky looked at the couch: luxurious, empty, cold. Last week Hannah had sat on that couch, staring at him with wide green eyes that made her seem older than her twenty-three years. She had been happy, like Julie had been before she was stolen from him. He pictured Hannah as she might have been at eight years old, skirt twirling, dark hair flying, face flushed with sun, like one of the photos of Julie he kept tucked in his wallet.

  They all started so innocent, so pure, so … vulnerable.

  The idea that Hannah was the catalyst in the deaths of eight others, the cornerstone of some serial killer’s plan, had not occurred to him when they first met. But it had later. It did now.

  Petrosky resisted the urge to kick the body and refocused on the couch. Crimson congealed along the white leather as if marking Hannah’s departure.

  He wondered if the blood was hers.

  The click of a doorknob caught Petrosky’s attention. He turned to see Bryant Graves entering the room from the garage door, followed by four other agents. Petrosky tried not to think about what might be in the garage. Instead, he watched the four men survey the living room from different angles, their movements practically choreographed.

  “Damn, does everyone that girl knows get whacked?” one of the agents asked.

  “Pretty much,” said another.

  A plain-clothed agent stooped to inspect a chunk of scalp on the floor. Whitish-blond hair waved, tentacle-like, from the dead skin, beckoning Petrosky to touch it.

  “You know this guy?” one of Graves’s cronies asked from the doorway.

  “Dominic Harwick.” Petrosky nearly spat out the bastard’s name.

  “No signs of forced entry, so one of them knew the killer,” Graves said.

  “She knew the killer,” Petrosky said. “Obsession builds over time. This level of obsession indicates it was probably someone she knew well.”

  But who?

  Petrosky turned back to the floor in front of him, where words scrawled in blood had dried sickly brown in the morning light.

  Ever drifting down the stream—

  Lingering in the golden gleam—

  Life, what is it but a dream?

  Petrosky’s gut clenched. He forced himself to look at Graves. “And, Han—” Hannah. Her name caught in his throat, sharp like a razor blade. “The girl?”

  “There are bloody drag marks heading out to the back shower and a pile of bloody clothes,” Graves said. “He must have cleaned her up before taking her. We’ve got the techs on it now, but they’re working the perimeter first.” Graves bent and used a pencil to lift the edge of the scalp, but it was suctioned to the floor with dried blood.

  “Hair? That’s new,” said another voice. Petrosky didn’t bother to find out who had spoken. He stared at the coppery stains on the floor, his muscles twitching with anticipation. Someone could be tearing her apart as the agents roped off the room. How long did she have? He wanted to run, to find her, but he had no idea where to look.

  “Bag it,” Graves said to the agent examining the scalp, then turned to Petrosky. “It’s all been connected from the beginning. Either Hannah Montgomery was his target all along or she’s just another random victim. I think the fact that she isn’t filleted on the floor like the others points to her being the goal, not an extra.”

  “He’s got something special planned for her,” Petrosky whispered. He hung his head, hoping it wasn’t already too late.

  If it was, it was all his fault.

  Epilogue

  The pre-dawn humidity covered the freeway in frozen mist. I glanced at the clock. Seven forty-five. I should be there before nightfall. I set my jaw and fingered the emerald pendant that lay against my clavicle, warmed by the heat of my body.

  A whimper rose from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, a massive black head eclipsed the back window.

  “It’s okay, buddy. Just relax. We’ll be there in no time.”

  Duke slumped onto his belly on the seat and rested his head on his paws. On the dash, the panda bobbled, silly and childish and stupidly innocent. I backhanded it. It toppled to the floor.

  I gripped the wheel tighter.

  Before me, the brilliant red and yellow glow of sunrise streaked across the road and illuminated the tops of distant evergreen trees, lighting the sky with hope, with promise.

  It’s not promise. It’s power.

  I slid my hand underneath the bag on the passenger seat and let my fingers brush the cool metal of the scalpel. I squeezed. The sharp point bit into my finger. I pulled my hand back and watched a tiny crimson drop swell and drip onto the steering wheel. I smeared it with my thumb.

  Duke whined, low and hollow.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said softly. “It won’t be long now.” The pavement whispered under my tires. I kept my eyes on the bloody dawn.

  Baby’s coming home.

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  SNEAK PEEK at Conviction

  An Ash Park Novel

  Ashley Johnson felt the hatred the moment she stepped inside the courtroom from the door behind the judge’s bench. It thickened the air, choked the breath from her lungs, and severed the hope that she’d managed to scrape together while waiting in her cell. There was no hope in this room. Just anger. The cuffs on her wrists jangled obscenely in the condemning hush of the courtroom.

  They might as well kill her now. It would be preferable to the slow agony she would suffer imagining every major event in her daughter’s life—her birthdays, her college acceptance letters, her wedding—from inside stone walls.

  The jury’s eyes burned into Ashley from their box on the right side of the room, and her legs tried to buckle. Maybe she deserved some of their judgment. It was true that she’d made some bad choices.

  The choice to be with Derek was the worst one of all.

  She tried not to look at the front of the courtroom as she passed, tried not to see the stand where Derek’s dead body had been turned into a poster, his sightless eyes watching and accusing her even through the film of death. The wall behind him was splattered with the bloody remains of his skull. Every time, she tried not to look, but every time, she failed.

  Frank Griffen sat, shoulders square, mouth set, his black-rimmed glasses frozen halfway down his nose. But his pinky fingers twitched like he could feel the energy too. Not that he ever sat perfectly still—his mouth or fingers or eyes, something was always moving. He wouldn’t have been her first pick for a defense attorney but she was broke. And he was good enough. If he got her out of there.

  Eyes forward, don’t look at the jury. Don’t look at the poster. Don’t look.

  Behind Griffen, Detective Eddie Petrosky frowned, squinting—agitated. Griffen said the detective’d had that look since some serial killer had gotten away on his watch last year, but to Ashley, those lines of irritation on Eddie’s forehead showed that he gave a shit. Down the row, Dr. McCallum, the shrink who’d interviewed her before the trial, sat watching, his enormous belly squished against the back of the pew in front of him. He had deemed her depressed; testified that she’d likely been suicidal the night Derek died. He hadn’t been wrong. She had often prayed for death though she’d never come close to acting. It was a fantasy, slipping away when things got too hard—but not a fantasy she wanted to embrace.

  Her feet seemed stuck to the floor as she scanned the rest of the crowd. Her caseworker, Diamond’s caseworker, sat in the back. Some lady in a short skirt sat across the way, maybe a hooker waiting on her own court appearance. The one person who might’ve offered her hope or at least a reassuring smile was nowhere to be found. He’d visit on his own time, he�
�d said, and if she tried to stir things up without his consent he’d leave her to die in prison. She couldn’t even think his name for fear it would tumble out of her mouth. The guard behind her coughed, probably annoyed that she’d stopped in the middle of the courtroom, or maybe he was trying to remind her to move.

  Then she saw her. Diamond entered the courtroom, her baby girl, already grown bigger in the months since Ashley’d been locked up. And with her, Ashley’s dead boyfriend’s mother: Lucinda Lewis, Diamond’s grandmother, if you believed the birth certificate. Lucinda glared at Ashley.

  Ashley resisted the urge to run to her baby, to kiss her and hug her and tell her everything was going to be okay, that her mommy was coming home soon and they’d be a family again. She wanted just one moment with Diamond. To smell her. To hold her. Instead she watched her baby pass her by and disappear behind Lucinda as the woman turned to the seats. Ashley’s chest constricted.

  Derek’s idiot brother Trey had shown up today too, his red bandana tucked haphazardly into his jeans pocket. Derek’s aunts held hands as they followed down the aisle after Lucinda and slid into one of the long benches that held families like church pews—the law’s last shot at redemption in a city where there was more blood than holy water.

  The guard prodded Ashley forward so hard she stumbled into the table where Griffen sat. He jumped up and helped her to her seat, and she sank into the chair next to his, noting that Griffen’s bony nose was leaking again.

  He swiped at his forehead and then his nose with an orange handkerchief, then shoved it into his pocket more violently than seemed necessary. He didn’t look at her, but she could see the tightness of his mouth. Not a good sign.

  Tears burned behind her eyes though she wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of watching her cry. Not the jury and definitely not the prosecution. She didn’t want everyone to head home tonight feeling superior because of her pain. It was bad enough they were all free while she was locked in a cage, especially when she didn’t deserve to be there.