Blood Victory

It’s an upscale mall, and this particular section is lined with strange towering sculptures. Walking in between them now, she realizes they’re silhouettes of giant faceless men. Each one repeatedly brings a hammer down in one hand on a stone they’re holding in the other. They remind her of oil derricks. With the whole place emptying out, the slow up-and-down swings of each hammer seem ghostly and threatening.

If Mattingly is following her and he sees her look back, he might assume the sight of him, familiar now from their brief encounter in the theater, would put her too on guard for whatever snatch he’s planning. With this in mind, she walks as slowly as she can without appearing drunk, keeping her gaze dead ahead.

Kansas Command has said nothing through her earpiece since she confronted Mattingly in the theater. They’re falling back, allowing her to maintain the illusion she’s on her own with a killer. That’s good. It means Cole’s respecting her wishes. That said, she’s pretty sure if Mattingly wasn’t following her, they would let her know so she and Luke could regroup. Instead, there’s silence in her right ear. The earpiece is tiny and perfectly matched to her skin tone. It’s also capable of transmitting audio back to the command center. Like all the other gifts and gadgets Cole’s given them, it probably costs a small fortune.

But she’s pretty sure they’ve also hacked into the mall’s security cameras to watch her now, which is how they’d be able to warn her if Mattingly wasn’t on her tail.

Correction. Bailey’s hacked into the mall security cameras on their behalf.

How did Cole put it? Bailey Prescott sees a world without walls, and he’s willing to go anywhere within it he desires. Combined with the raw computing power Cole provides him, Bailey’s unstoppable. Allegedly.

Careful, she chastises herself. Thinking too much about Bailey might be a sly way of reminding herself that her boyfriend’s waiting outside.

He’s just one man, she tells herself, one man sitting inside a retrofitted SUV that could probably survive a four-story drop, with who knows what kind of high-tech weapons buried inside of it. Still, that shouldn’t be enough to kill the fear.

She needs her fear. Needs it ready and waiting, coiled like a cobra in a clay jar. But she doesn’t need it quite yet. They’ve got no idea where Mattingly’s planning to take her, and she’s determined to make the entire trip. The longer she can go without triggering, the better. It means she won’t have to pretend to be rag-doll limp as he loads her into that truck. There might come a moment when she has to block all thoughts of Luke in order to trigger, but she’ll know it when she gets there.

And in that moment, she’ll send her mind to the place where she’s learned to find pure, undiluted, and immediate terror. It’s not technically a memory, more like a construction of her mother’s last tortured bit of life—a compendium of horrifying facts about the final hours endured not just by her mother, but by each one of Abigail and Daniel Bannings’ victims.

Calling it all to mind at once feels like reaching one hand into a planter where the top layer is all the jagged rock of her desire for revenge and then, underneath, a cold, sickeningly soft soil, the touch of which fills her with the same suffocating sense of dread her mother must have felt during her final hours. Her memory rapidly assembles every photo she’s ever seen of the root cellar online—of its clawed earthen walls and dirt floor and wooden double doors reinforced with metal panels on the insides, reinforcements put into place after toddler-age Charlotte overheard the screams of one of the women inside. The handcuffs and the duct tape and the constant dread of Daniel Banning’s return and another brutal violation. A moment when she feels closest to a mother she can’t remember because she was killed when Charlotte was just an infant . . .

For now, she’ll hold those memories at bay by thinking of Luke, by remembering the tender way he kissed her neck just the other night. The way he whispered “I wish I could be the one to heal you again and again” while she swayed against him. “Maybe you are,” she’d answered. Meanwhile, “Angel of the Morning” played gently on the little Bluetooth speaker Luke had connected to his phone. The song was her mother’s favorite, so they’d decided to play it like a gentle anthem as they hunted a killer of women like the ones who had struck her down. But in that moment, it became a kind of love song.

Even though they had only another hour of downtime before they needed to track Mattingly again, Luke led her to one of the twin beds in his motel room—a room where he’d been staying alone while she went to bed each night as Hailey Brinkmann in her new rental house in Richardson. He made love to her urgently and thoroughly. He may have been the one sporting a new armor of muscle, but she was the soldier being loved goodbye in the desperate hours before another combat deployment.

Cyrus Mattingly is behind her.

The glass exit doors are just a yard or two ahead of her. She can see his reflection in them. He’s far enough away that he can tail her with a confident stride without looking too suspicious. Just like he followed the other two women. She feels his stare. It sends pinpricks up the back of her neck, across her scalp, coils tension across her shoulder blades, and constricts her chest. Her cheeks flush, too.

Fear.

Not yet, she tells herself. Not all of it, not yet.

She pushes the door open and steps out into the crisp fall night.

She walks past Luke’s Escalade without looking in his direction.

The car’s covered in some special type of paint that barely gives off any reflection. Luke totally geeked out when he described how it worked. It was cute at the time. Right now the mysteries of her own blood, of the drug that’s already coursing through her veins, have her full attention.

As she starts the car, she runs through the salient factors of her identity again.

Hi, I’m Hailey, and I’ll be your victim this evening. I moved here from California. I worked reception at a car dealership in San Jose, and maybe I’ll do that again but who knows because I’m young and life seems wide open right now. I moved because my engagement fell apart. I had an aunt who lived here when I was younger. She’s dead now, but I used to visit her a bunch when I was young, so I know Dallas pretty well.

Please don’t hurt me, Mr. Mattingly. Please just drive me to wherever you’ve committed all your crimes so I can kick your goddamn teeth out and make sure you never commit another one again, you twisted fuck.

By the time she’s finished this little speech in her head, she’s pulled away from the parking structure. On the drive down the ramp to street level, she caught more than one glimpse of Mattingly’s headlights behind her.

Excellent, she thinks.

 

As he follows his potential seedling across town, the soothing near silence of swift travel across traffic-free streets envelops Cyrus with a sense of gentle calm. Save for this whisk of tires over asphalt, it’s not quite the same sound as the one that welcomes him to open highways, but it’s close, a reminder of that eternal quiet some people call the presence of God but that he prefers to call “the enduring.”

He feels a little sheepish about the name. He’s never shared it with anyone. Maybe he told Mother once, but he’s not sure. If he did, she probably gave him one of her indulgent half smiles. More importantly, she long ago gave him the confidence to be free of any need to justify his sense of purpose to others. True, he does offer some explanation to his seedlings during their special journey. But he doesn’t do it to get validation. A man like him doesn’t need the world’s validation or approval. The great understandings he’s come to about the immutable nature of the universe, arrived at mostly during long cross-country drives, can remain his and his alone.