The Sinner

by J. R. Ward

  Building… building… building—

  Until…

  Clicking. He became acutely aware of the clicking as his fist went back and forth along his shaft. And then he started to feel the burn of friction and not in a good way, in an abrasive fashion. Further below his stroking, his balls stung as they crawled up close to his body, like they were trying to discharge themselves in whole if they had to.

  Stimulation turned to strangulation, as that which had been called forward was denied exit. Buildup became pent up. Culmination became frustration.

  The alchemy he had created now turned against him, the abandonment with which he had released the hold on his head gone now, a gritted grimace righting things such that he saw himself in the mirror.

  His reflection was ugly, the features that were harsh when composed now tormented by a sickening denial he was well familiar with. And then there was the chisel, right by his mouth, like a lover he had been kissing. And his hand pumping, the head of his cock purple from the squeezing and the dry rubbing.

  Pain now. But like the pleasure that had come from thinking of killing, the origin of the agony was all mixed up. Was it the yanking on his cock? Or something so much deeper… going back to very beginning of him.

  The very origin of him.

  Giving up, Syn tossed down the chisel, disturbing the orderly lineup of hammer and rope and duct tape. With a grunt, he fell forward and gripped the edge of the countertop. His breath wheezed up and down his throat and whistled through his teeth, while sweat dripped off his chin, landing on the top of one of his bare feet.

  There was nothing worse than chasing a release.

  You never could catch.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The following morning in the Caldwell Courier Journal’s much diminished newsroom, Jo’s knees went loose and her butt smacked down into her office chair. As her hands started to tremble, she made like she meant to put the glossy photographs on her desk instead of having fumbled them into gravity’s greedy clutch. The stack of images fell in a fan, different angles on the gruesome face repeated until it was like her vision was stuttering: The eyes open in terror. The features frozen in a scream. The exposed teeth like those of a wild animal.

  No longer anything human.

  “Sorry,” Bill Eliott said. “Didn’t mean to ruin your breakfast.”

  “Not at all.” She cleared her throat and shifted the top image on the pile to the bottom. “It’s fine, I’m—”

  Jo blinked. And saw the all-wrong body glistening under police lights on the backs of her lids. As her throat closed like a fist, she thought about running out of the newsroom and throwing up by the back door in the parking lot.

  “You were saying?” She sat up taller in her crappy chair. “About where the body was found?”

  Bill crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his own chair across the aisle. At twenty-nine, and having been married for a year and a half, he straddled the divide between hipster and adult, his shaggy black hair and black-rimmed glass and skinny jeans more the former, the seriousness with which he took his job and his wife the latter.

  “Seven blocks away from that techno club, Ten,” he said.

  “What the hell… happened to him.” As Jo looked at the next picture in line, she willed her stomach contents to stay put. “I mean, his skin…”

  “Gone. Taken off of him like someone had stripped a cow. A deer.”

  “This is… impossible.” She looked up. “And this would have taken time—security cameras. There have to be—”

  “CPD is on it. I have a contact. He’s going to get back to us.”

  “Us?”

  Bill rolled over on his chair and tapped the stack of horror. “I want us to write this together.”

  Jo looked around at the empty desks. “You and me?”

  “I need help.” He checked his watch. “Where the hell is Dick. He said he’d be here by now.”

  “Wait, you and me. Writing an article together. For publication in the real paper.”

  “Yes.” Bill checked his phone and frowned. “It’s not like we haven’t been working with each other already on you-know-what.”

  She met his eyes. “You don’t think this has anything to do with…”

  “Not officially, I don’t, and neither do you. We start talking about our little side project trying to find vampires and Dick’s going to think we’re crazy.”

  As a sharpshooter went through Jo’s frontal lobe, she had the sense that she needed to ask Bill about something… something about the last night…

  When nothing came to her, and the pain just got worse, she shook her head and looked back down at the photograph of the full body. The tangled, glistening mess was nothing but muscle and sinew over glimpses of shockingly white bone. Veins, like purple wires, added fine-line accents to the crumpled anatomy. And the bed upon which the corpse lay? Skin.

  Well, to be fair, there seemed to be some clothes—

  The familiar headache rippled through her skull, playing the piano keys of her pain receptors. As she winced, the newsroom’s back door was thrown wide. Dick Peters, as editor-in-chief of the CCJ, walked in like he owned the place, his lumbering footfalls the advance of all that was arrogant and arbitrary, as only the truly below-average could be. Fifty years old, fifty pounds over Dad-bod weight, and retrenched in the sexism of the fifties, the fat folds padding his once-handsome fratboy face were a harbinger of the atherosclerosis that would claim him early.

  But not soon enough. Not in the next fifteen feet.

  “You wanted to see me,” Dick announced to Bill. “Well, let’s do this.”

  The boss man didn’t slow down, and as he passed by like a semi on the highway, Bill got up and motioned for Jo to follow with the pictures.

  Stuffing them back into their folder, she strode after the men. As subscriptions and advertisers fell off, everything had been downsized so it was only another twenty feet to the paper-thin door of Dick’s fragile, declining temple of power.

  But his authority was undiminished as he dumped his Columbo coat in a threadbare chair—and realized she was Bill’s plus-one.

  “What,” he snapped at her as he took a suck on his Starbucks venti latte.

  Bill shut the door. “We’re here together.”

  Dick looked back and forth. Then focused on Bill. “Your wife is pregnant.”

  As if the infidelity was excusable when Lydia wasn’t knocked up, but tacky for those nine particular months.

  “We’re reporting this together,” Jo said, dropping the photographs on Dick’s desk.

  They landed cockeyed on the clutter of paperwork, the glossies peeking out of the folder, presenting themselves for precisely the close-up Dick gave them.

  “Holy… shit.”

  “This is nothing that anyone’s ever seen in Caldwell before. Or anywhere else.” Bill checked his Apple Watch again. “Jo and I are going to investigate this together—”

  Dick turned his head without straightening his upper half, his jowls on the down side hanging loose off his jawline. “Says who.”

  “Tony’s still out from the gastric bypass.” Bill motioned to the closed door. “Pete’s only part-time and he’s covering the Metro Council fraud thing. And I’ve got a doctor’s appointment with Lydia in twenty minutes.”

  “So you wait till your wife’s done with the lady doctor.” Dick moved the photographs around with the tip of his finger, sipping on his coffee with all of the delicacy of a wet vac. “This is incredible—you gotta get on this—”

  “Jo is going down there to the scene right now. My contact with the CPD is waiting for her.”

  Now Dick stood to his full height of five feet, nine inches. “No, you’re going down to the scene after that appointment is over, and didn’t you tell me it was going to be a quick one? When you asked for only the morning off?” The man motioned around at scuffed walls. “In case you haven’t noticed, this paper needs stories, and as a soon-to-be father, you need this job.
Unless you think you can get good healthcare coverage as a freelancer?”

  “Jo and I are doing this together.”

  Dick pointed at her. “She was hired to be the online editor. That’s as far as she is going—”

  “I can handle it,” Jo said. “I can—”

  “The story is going to wait for him.” Dick picked up the photographs and stared at them with the eyes of the converted. “This is amazing stuff. I want you to go deep on this, Bill. Deep.”

  Jo opened her mouth, but Dick shoved the folder at Bill. “Did I stutter,” he demanded.

  * * *

  Mr. F stood in front of the house and double-checked the number that was on its mailbox, not that he knew where he was or why he was here. Looking behind himself, he didn’t know how he’d gotten to this cul-de-sac with its seventies-era split-levels and colonials. No car. No bike. And there was no bus service in this part of town.

  But more to the point, he had only hazy memory of… fuck.

  Something that didn’t bear thinking of.

  He had to go inside this particular house, however. Something in his brain was telling him that he was supposed to walk up the driveway and go into the garage and enter the fake Tudor.

  Mr. F glanced around in case there was another explanation for any part of this. The last thing he remembered with any clarity was being under the bridge downtown with the rest of the junkies. Someone had approached him. A man he didn’t know. There had been a promise of drugs and the suggestion that sex was involved. Mr. F wasn’t that into the grind, but at the time, he had been too dope sick to panhandle, and he’d needed a fix.

  So… something awful had happened. And afterward, he’d blacked out.

  And now he was here, wearing combat pants he’d never seen before, a flak jacket that seemed very heavy, and a set of boots that belonged on a soldier.

  The morning was gray and dull, as if the world didn’t want to wake up—or maybe that was just Caldwell. Everyone in this neighborhood, however, seemed to have gainful employment and school-aged children. No one was moving around in any of the windows of any of the homes. Nobody in any of the yards. No dogs barking, no kids on bikes.

  Regardless of the mood the dour weather put them in, they were all out in the world, gainfully employed, properly enrolled in school, participating in society.

  He had grown up in a zip code like this. And for a while, when he’d been married, he had lived in one. He hadn’t been back for a lifetime, though.

  As he started up the driveway, he was limping, and he knew he’d bottomed for someone. There was also a funny buzz in his veins, a sizzle that didn’t exactly burn, but wasn’t pleasant. He was not in withdrawal, however, which considering it had been—

  What day was it now anyway?

  Focusing on the front door, he noted the scruffy bushes and the lawn that was littered with sticks and a stray branch the size of a dead body. The mailbox nailed into the stucco was stuffed with flyers, its flimsy maw open and drooling envelopes, and there were three phone books on the welcome mat, all ruined by the elements. The neighbors must love the neglect. He imagined all manner of frustrated knocking and no answers. Notes tucked into the storm door. Whispers at community cookouts about the bad seeds who inhabited 452 Brook Court.

  He didn’t go in through the front. A voice in his head told him that the side garage entry was unlocked, and sure enough, he had no trouble getting into the one car. Inside, the crinkled carcasses of dead leaves lay across the oil-stained concrete floor, their entrance granted by a window that had been knocked out by yet another fallen tree limb.

  The door into the house proper was locked so he kicked it open, the new strength in his body something that was a surprise, but not reassuring. Catching the panel with his hand as it flew back at him, he stayed where he was, listening. When there were no sounds, he cautiously entered the back hall. Up ahead, there was a small kitchen and eating area, and out the far side, a dining room.

  No furniture. No stench of trash or clutter on the counters. Nothing in the living room to the left, either.

  There was a lot of dust. Some mouse turds in corners like coins collected. Spiders up around the ceiling and dead flies on the windowsills, especially over the dry-as-a-bone sink.

  As he walked around, the floors creaked under the boots that were on his feet. He was sure that the air was musty, but he hadn’t been able to smell anything since he’d been tortured at that abandoned outlet mall. Probably a good thing. He had some hazy flashbacks to it when it had been going down, and he remembered retching from the stench. Maybe the shit had killed his nose, too much funk knocking out a fuse somewhere in his sinuses.

  Up on the second floor, in what had to be the master bedroom, he found a laptop next to a jar. And a leather-bound book.

  The three objects were set together in the corner by the cable TV hookup, the Dell connected to the internet and still plugged into the wall. Everything was covered with more dust, and he wasn’t surprised as he tried to turn the PC on that it didn’t work. No electricity in the place. Obviously no cable, either.

  The jar was weird. Blue-enameled, capped with a pointed lid and in the shape of a vase, it was curvy in the middle, like a woman. As he held it in his hand, turning it, turning it, he found his total lack of sex drive, as well as his complete absence of hunger for food, as troubling as this power in his legs and arms.

  Something was inside of the vase, banging on the sides as it was rotated, but the top was sealed, glued into place.

  “Leave it alone,” he said out loud.

  He did not. His feet took both him and the jar into the dim bathroom, over to the sink and the mirror. When he looked at his reflection, he stumbled. The skin on his face was all wrong. He was too pale, but more than that, it was like he was wearing granny powder, his features slipcovered with a matte, waxy outer layer that didn’t look right.

  And he shouldn’t have been able to see this clearly in the darkness.

  Absently, he shook the jar. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk—

  With a slam, he drove the thing into the counter, shattering it. As the shards fell away, what was revealed horrified him.

  He was no anatomy expert, but he was well aware of what he was looking at. A human heart. Shriveled and black, the organ that was the seat of humanity, literally and figuratively, had been violently orphaned from its rib cage, the veins and arteries ragged, not cut.

  As if it had been ripped out.

  Tearing open his shirt, he looked at his sternum. The skin was marked with tattoos, some better than others, but he didn’t notice his ink.

  He had no scar. There was no evidence that he had been violated. But something had been done to him there…

  With trembling fingers, he pushed into the sides of his throat. Where was the pulse? Where was his pulse?

  Nothing. No fragile, sustaining beat in the jugular.

  Wheeling away from the mirror, Mr. F lurched back into the bedroom and fell to his knees, dry heaving. Nothing came up his throat. Nothing came out of his mouth. No half-digested food. No bile. No saliva.

  He was just like the vase. A container for something that was ruined.

  As reality twisted and contorted, revealing a new nightmare landscape his brain could not comprehend, he let himself fall face-first into the carpet.

  I just want to go back to before, he thought. I want to go back and say no.

  The sense that he had been claimed and there was no breaking up with his new spouse was a curse that even all his previous bad deeds had not earned. And what’s more, he had not asked for this. Had not agreed to this. A bargain might have been struck, but there surely had been a bait and switch.

  Even in his worst moments of being dope sick, he never would have consented to an unholy rebirth. And the one thing he knew for sure about his new incarnation?

  It was irrevocable.

  You didn’t come back from shit like this.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As night fell on Caldwell, J
o was alone in the newsroom and typing furiously at her desk, her coat still on, her need to pee something she had been ignoring for hours now. When her office phone rang, she let it go to voice mail. When her cell rang, she picked it up on the first ring.

  “How’s Lydia?” She stopped what she was doing. “Everything okay now?”

  There was a long pause. Which said enough, didn’t it.

  “No.” Bill’s tone was sad and hollow. “They lost the heartbeat. And now she’s starting to bleed.”

  “Oh… God, Bill,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. Do you need me to do anything?”

  “No, but thanks.” He cleared his throat, and then spoke briskly, as if he were determined to be professional. “How’s the story coming?”

  Jo leaned back in her chair and looked at Dick’s closed door. The boss had left at three-thirty, which had been a relief. With all the other staff gone and Bill not at his desk, she’d hated being in the office alone with the guy.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m about to finally meet your contact, Officer McCordle, down at the scene. And I did end up interviewing the guy who found the body. I also got a non-statement from the Pappalardo family. I’m just spell-checking the update now. Do you want me to send it to you before I put it up on the website?”

  “I trust you. And make sure your name’s on it.”

  “It’s better to just leave it under yours.”

  “You’re doing all the work, Jo.” There was another pause. “Listen, I better go back in there with Lydia.”

  “Take care of your wife, and tell her I love her and am thinking of her.”

  “Thanks, Jo. I will. And I’ll text you when we’re home.”

  As she ended the call, she stared at her phone. Then she put it face down on her desk. Rubbing the center of her chest, she forced herself to hit spell-check on the file. No mistakes. She spell-checked again. Re-read the three paragraphs.