Page 1 of Beautiful Prey

PART 1

SO NICE TO MEET YOU

CHAPTER ONE

Rain pelted against my car, blurring the massive building in front until the wipers swiped the water away, only giving me a brief view of the gated facility. I stared at it, wondering if I would have the strength to leave my car and walk inside or if I would drive away and blow this chance.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Five years, ten months, four days.

All starting on that day. Halloween Eve.

My sixteenth birthday.

I can still remember the smell of garlic mixed with iron, making my stomach turn. The flickering flames, the red soaked floor, my brother’s body, my father’s face.

And the fear. The absolute, pure terror. High octane dread that made me want to jump out of my skin.

The shadow, the demon in a mask who butchered every family member in that house but missed me.

People called him the Devil of Harper Pointe, or the New Venice killer, because that was our street’s name. Some even called him the Birthday Boogeyman to scare the kids, saying if you don’t appreciate your gifts, he’ll come knocking. Some local teenagers took it even further after the incident. If you were stilla virgin by your sixteenth, you were a goner and he’d come for you.

It had started as a real massacre turned into an urban legend, even though it had happened nearly six years ago. Those who weren’t there didn’t see the aftermath. Didn’t witness what I did.

The only real evidence anyone got that night was of the statue in the town square of a local founder, Sir Marcus Leer. After the killer left my house, I learned days later what he used my father’s gin for. No one saw him do it; they just found the statue burning, a beacon in the night, with the pumpkins around him smashed to pieces.

The melted face of the statue is still there. Every year, the mayor promises to redo it. But replacing the statue wouldn’t change anything. The town was already scarred. Parents didn’t let their kids roam around on the anniversary of that night. Didn’t celebrate birthdays until the week after. Some called it Harper Devil’s Night after the infamous night that sparked in Detroit just down river. The killings had left the town shaken, divided between those who wanted to keep the myth alive as some bizarre remembrance, and those who wanted to forget.

I should have been one of those who never wanted to look back.

And yet here I was, in front of the very facility where the devil was housed.

I opened my eyes and tightened my hands on the steering wheel.

Every day I wondered what the hell I was thinking. In the beginning, I didn’t think much about anything at all. I stayed with a family friend after the massacre and went to therapy. They tried to put me on medication, but I refused. I went to my therapist and skipped a semester of school, hoping to lead a normal life again.

Yeah, right.

“Find something you’re passionate about,” my therapist had said one day when she wasn’t particularly getting through to me and I told her I had no interest in my schoolwork.

There was only one thing ever in my mind, in my dreams. My nightmares.

The masked man.

So I got a crazy thought. Learn everything I can about him. Understand why. The more I understood, the more I could get past it all.

They had caught the Harper Devil two nights after the incident in an abandoned park near the river.

It was as if he wanted to get caught. In the trial, he was found criminally insane. Too dangerous for a regular prison, they sent him to a special facility in the wilderness—west to a place in Alaska—for psychopaths just like him.

I went down to the station many times, talked to journalists. But refused to give my side of the story. I didn’t want to share. I just wanted to disappear.

But they told me what I wanted. They told me what little they knew about him. The Devil of Harper Pointe had a name.

Emery Blakmor.

Funny how one’s curiosity can turn into an obsession. I finished school, took advanced courses, and headed straight to college with a full ride to Michigan State, into their forensic psychology department.

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