Butcher & Blackbird: The Ruinous Love Trilogy

SLOANE

FOUR MONTHS LATER…

“Damn. Am I too late? Did you win?”

Rowan shoots a fleeting glance my way as I approach on the worn path, dust coating my sneakers in a roan-colored film. His arms are crossed over his chest, the sleeves of his t-shirt straining against his taut biceps. There’s a flash of trepidation in his eyes, their scrutiny cataloging the details of my face before he turns his attention back across whatever lies beyond the rolling hills of prairie grass.

“Nope. Didn’t win.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to psych myself up.”

My head tilts with a question, but Rowan doesn’t look at me. I follow his line of sight when I stop at his side.

“Whoa… That’s just… Yikes.”

I take in the dilapidated two-story Texas farmhouse set beyond the gentle rise of the hills, letting my gaze roam the battered and bleached wood of the siding, the shattered and boarded windows on the second floor. A hole on the right side of the roof gapes at the sky like a screaming maw calling to the thunderstorm that darkens the horizon. There’s an assortment of junk on the covered patio—broken chairs and boxes, diesel cans and tools, the items strewn on either side of a clear path leading to the screened front door.

“Well…that’s a homey place,” I say.

Rowan hums a low and thoughtful note. “If by homey you mean nightmarish, I agree.”

“Are you sure he’s in there?”

Maniacal laughter and a man’s piercing scream precede the growl of a chainsaw that starts up inside the house.

“Pretty sure, yep.”

The screams and the unhinged laughter and the roar of the chainsaw crack through the air that suddenly seems too heavy, too hot. My heart rate spikes. Blood hums in my ears, a steady percussion to the symphony of madness.

“We could just go for beers,” Rowan says above the chaos emanating from the house. “That’s what normal people do, right? Go for beers?”

“Yeah…”

Part of me thinks that’s a wise idea, but I can’t deny the excitement that floods the chambers of my heart with adrenaline. Harvey Mead is an enormous brute, a beast of a man, and I want to take him down. I want to nail him to the floorboards of his horror house and carve out his eyes, knowing I’m the one who stopped him from ever taking another life. I want him to feel what his victims felt.

I want to make him suffer.

Rowan releases a heavy sigh, glancing down his shoulder at me. “We’re not going for beers, are we.”

“Sure we are. But after.”

Another desperate scream slices through the air, startling a murder of crows and a lone vulture from the thin copse of trees to the left of the path. They don’t go far, probably already aware that the sounds in the house signal an upcoming meal.

The pitch of the chainsaw rises and the scream grows weaker. There’s a hazy quality to the anguish in it. A hopelessness. This isn’t a scream that begs for mercy. This is only pain, little more than a reflex. Humanity eroded, stripped away, reduced to an animal caught in the clutch of distress.

Harvey Mead’s maniacal laughter dies. The cries of his victim grow thin until they fade away. The chainsaw continues, its pitch climbing and falling as it works, until finally it ends too, blanketing us in stark silence.

“New rule,” I say as I clear the gravel from my throat and turn to face Rowan. He stares down at me, his cheeks flushed, his navy eyes burning like the core of an alkane flame. Though he nods, I can’t find any excitement in his expression, his lips set in a grim line as a crease deepens between his brows. “If you catch him first, I get to take something.”

Rowan nods again, just once. His presence bleeds into my space. His heat. His scent. Sage and pepper and lemon envelop me.

“Just one,” he says, his words raw as though their edges have been debrided. My breath catches as he raises a folded hand to my cheekbone, drifting his thumb across my lashes as my eyes close. Everything seems more vibrant in the momentary darkness—the silence from the farmhouse, the scent of Rowan’s skin. His gentle touch. The thrum of my heart. “Just one,” Rowan says again as his hand lifts away. When I open my eyes, his gaze is trapped on my lips.

My voice is a thin whisper. “Just one what?”

“Just one eye.” Rowan drags his hard stare from my face as he turns toward the decaying farm. “I want him to suffer. But I want him to see every moment of it.”

I nod. A flash of lightning illuminates the black backdrop of an encroaching storm, followed a breath later by the crack of thunder. “No matter who wins, we’ll make sure of that.”

Pulling my Damascus steel blade from my belt, I turn to stalk toward the house, but Rowan’s fingertips graze my forearm, their featherlight touch igniting a current in my flesh that stops me abruptly. Our gazes collide and my heart folds in on itself. No one has ever looked at me like this, with so much caged worry and fear. And for the first time, it’s not fear of me.

It’s fear for me.

“Be careful, Blackbird. I just…” Rowan’s thoughts fade away on the sudden breeze as he glances toward the house. He shakes his head, drops his attention to my dirty sneakers before returning his gaze to me. “He’s a big bloke. Probably keyed up right now. Don’t take any chances.”

A half smile tugs one corner of my lips, but it changes nothing in Rowan’s severe expression.

One long look. One held breath. A handful of heartbeats and a lightning flash.

Then I walk away, Rowan’s footsteps drifting in my wake as we make our way to Harvey Mead’s house.

The path snakes between two low hills, opening to a yard of scrub grass that surrounds the buildings. To the right of the house, the land dips to a shallow ravine of shrubs and what must be a small creek that’s probably not much more than a trickle of water beneath the August sun. Between the house and the ravine is a small garden surrounded by chicken wire and tinkling charms of broken glass to scare the birds away. To the rear left of the house are outbuildings. A chicken coop. An old workshop with a low, flat roof. A barn that stands as a foreboding fortress between the house and the storm that rolls toward us. The skeletal remains of warped and rusted cars jut from between the trunks of Texas ash and desert willows.

I stop at the edge of the yard. Rowan draws to a halt at my side. “Great curb appeal,” I whisper.

“So much better up close. The doll’s head really adds character,” he whispers back, nodding to the decapitated head of a 1950s-era Chatty Cathy doll staring back at us from the porch with soulless black eyes.

“I’ll take it if he throws in the…” I lean forward and squint at a patch of gray fur stuck beneath a shattered rocking chair. “…the…opossum?”

“I was going to go with ‘cat’, but sure.”

I straighten, turning to Rowan with my fist held between us.

“Sloane—”

“Rock–paper–scissors. Loser takes the front door,” I say with a dark grin.

Rowan regards me for a long moment before he shakes his head with a resigned sigh. His fist finally meets mine.

On a silent count of three, we make our choices, my scissors losing to Rowan’s rock. He frowns.

“Two out of three,” he hisses, grabbing my wrist when I start toward the steps.

“For losing? No way. Go to the back door and enjoy your advantage, weirdo.” I smile and crinkle my nose like it’s no big deal, even though Rowan can feel my pulse surging beneath his palm until I pull free.

I don’t look back as I focus on making it up the front steps alive. My chest burns to turn to Rowan, to stay with him and hunt by his side, but I don’t.

When I set a heel on the cracked planks of the stairs, I see Rowan in the periphery as he finally stalks toward the rear of the house.

With every silent step I take, I survey my chaotic surroundings, careful not to lose my balance or knock something over. There’s no sound from the house, no movement past the screen door, no menacing shadows illuminated by a flash of lightning. The first drops of rain hit the covered porch just as I reach the door, bouncing off tin cans and debris in a metallic melody.

I open the screen door just enough to slip inside, the quiet squeak of the rusted hinges absorbed by a crack of thunder that rattles the walls.

The scent of food and decay and mold blend in a nausea-inducing swirl as I start down a narrow hallway. A living room sits off to the left, with old furniture and original features covered in a film of dust. Flowered wallpaper peels from the walls and flutters in the breeze of the storm as it finds its way through open doors and broken windows. There’s a partially-mummified body sitting in an armchair next to the fireplace, her legs covered with a crocheted blanket and a Bible laying open in her skeletal hands. Her long, white hair lifts from her shoulders, a set of dentures still clinging to her slack jaws.

“Old Mama Mead, I presume,” I whisper to her as I take a few cautious steps into the room until I’m standing before her. “I bet you were a right bitch, weren’t you.”

Knowing that Harvey Mead follows the worn path of many other serial killers with a fixation on a controlling, overbearing, and likely abusive mother doesn’t make him any less dangerous.

But it certainly does give me some ideas…

I lean in close and grin at the leathery skin and hollow eyes of the woman in the armchair. “I’ll be seeing you soon, Mama Mead.”

With a wink, I firm my grip on my knife and leave the room, heading across the hall to the staircase that leads to the second floor.

The creaking steps are muffled by thunder and rain. It seems impossible that the house could be so devoid of human sounds after the brutal killing that just took place, but the only things I can hear are my heart and the storm.

When I arrive on the landing of the second story, the rain grows louder, the scent of it washing away the stench of the main floor. I wait for a moment, watching, listening. But nothing comes. No clues emerge about Harvey’s whereabouts as I pause before the mouth of a corridor.

I start inching forward.

First, I arrive at a bedroom filled with boxes. Magazines. Newspapers. Yellowed manuals for cars and tractors. Taking a turn in the room yields no worthwhile insights.

I re-enter the hallway and head to the next room, a bathroom with a cracked pedestal sink and a shower curtain clinging to the interior of a clawfoot tub, its formerly white plastic speckled in black mold. There’s no blood on the floor. No tracks. No unusual smells or sounds.

The next room I enter is the primary bedroom. Of all the rooms I’ve seen, this is the cleanest, though it would be a stretch to call it pristine. The window is filmed with dust and grime but it isn’t broken. The bed is a simple wrought iron frame, the sheets rumpled, a few clothes strewn across its surface and the floor. I check the room, but there’s no Harvey Mead here, so I don’t linger, deciding to go through his meager belongings once he’s dead.

I leave the room.

The next bedroom is across the hall. The sound of rain pelting metal containers dampens my footsteps as I step inside the small room. A hole in the ceiling gapes at the sky, cutting through the shattered beams of the attic. Lightning flashes overhead. Rain falls into the house to fill a series of metal pots and ceramic containers jammed against one another on a sheet of clear plastic that covers the floor. Surrounding the edge of the hole are bones that dangle from strings of wet yarn like wind chimes. Vertebrae twist and knock together in the breeze, rivulets of water streaming from their bleached bodies and wings.

I watch for a moment, pondering the psychopathy of the man who strung them here before I exit the room to head to the last door on the opposite side of the hall at the very end of the corridor.

This door is shut. I stand next to it for a long moment with my ear pressed to the wood, my blade clutched tight in my hand. No sound comes from within. No sound comes from downstairs either, though I’m not sure I’d be able to hear anything from the lower floor unless it was a confrontation. The thunder rages. The rain drives against the roof in wavering curtains.

A pang of worry fills my chest for Rowan. Maybe it’s best that I haven’t heard him, but I also haven’t heard sounds of Harvey’s suffering, and that lodges like a thorn deep beneath my skin. At this rate, I don’t care who wins. I just want Harvey dead.

I shake out my wrists to let the excitement and tension and fear slide from my limbs, and then I grip the handle of the door and push it open.

“What the fuck…”

This is not what I expected.

Three monitors sit on a desk piled with papers and strewn with pencils. The screens display the feeds from eighteen cameras. The barn. The workshop. The back door. The kitchen. A darkened room where I can’t make out any features. A brightly lit room where a dismembered body lies piled on a plastic-covered table, blood and flesh dripping onto the tile floor.

I see Rowan, entering the living room.

And then I see Harvey, stalking down the hall toward him.

The blood drains from my limbs. Ice infuses my skin.

“Rowan,” I whisper.

I yell his name as I run from the room…

…straight into Harvey Mead’s boot.