Without a conscious command from his mind, his hand reached out to the chisel, his fingertips traveling across the sharp end, the business end, the end that he had driven through many a soft tissue and into many a hard bone. Inside of him, his talhman roared, the horrible energy traveling from the center of his chest directly down his arm, to his dagger hand. A trembling ensued, shaky, shaky.

But not from weakness. From denied strength.

As he pictured using the chisel, the hammer… his saw and his axe… the other tools of his terrible trade… he saw the bodies of his victims lying on different kinds of floors. Wooden floors, finished and unfinished. Marble, stone, and ceramic tile. Carpets, rugs, linoleum. And then there were the outside scenes. The spongy mattresses of wet leaves. The cold gloss of iced-over ponds and drifts of snow. The grit of concrete, another set of knuckles to be leveraged. Then the ocean’s yielding sand, the rocky shores of rivers, and the greedy splash of lake water.

Syn’s breath quickened and sweat broke out across his chest, riding a wave up his throat, into his face.

In his mind, he pictured limbs bent wrong. Mouths cranked open in screams. Intestines blooming out of incisions he’d made in lower bellies.

Massaging the flat, steel face of the chisel with his forefinger, he warmed the cold metal with his body heat, stroking… stroking—

A tug on his cock made him look down at his stiffened sex in surprise.

It wasn’t a tug. His erection had knocked into the handle of the drawer between the sinks.

Staring at his extended member, he regarded the flesh as if from a vast difference. And then he stroked the blade of the chisel.

The sensation translated immediately to his arousal, the thing kicking. Wanting more.

Picking the chisel up with his business hand, he held it in front of his face. So clean, so precise, its dimensions declared by sharp, unforgiving edges.

Down below, at his hips, he found his cock with his other palm. As he began to pump himself, he stared at the blade. Harder. Faster. Sharper. Cleaner. Until he couldn’t tell where his thoughts about the chisel ended and the sexual instinct started. The two blended together, tendrils that started separate twisting up quick, forming a rope that tethered two things that should never have had anything to do with each other.

Sex and death.

Abruptly, there was a great surge within him, a rising heat and sense of urgency, and he opened himself to the twisted passion. Turning the chisel in his hand, he watched how the light from overhead played on the blade, winking, flashing… flirting, seducing. As he might have with a lover, his eyes went back and forth from the chisel to his cock, a momentum kindling, intensifying.

His talhman pulsed under his skin, the need to kill a second side of him that he suppressed as much as, and for as long as, he was able. Harder. Faster. Rasping breath, his. Pounding heart, his. Pressure in his veins, the cords of his neck popping, his head falling back as his lids squeezed shut. But it didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the chisel. He had a rich forest of images to wander through in his mind, a promenade of bloodied, torturing pleasure that was everything he couldn’t feel down below.

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.”