Chapter 6
KOEN
She looks disgustingly beautiful. Her brown hair ruffles in the wind as she gets out of her car with many items in tow. She always has her hands full, which isn’t surprising. She takes items that comfort her when everything around her feels out of control and daunting.
As it should. I’m at the helm of her torment.
Two years.
For two fucking years, I’ve been salivating to watch her bleed. To eat her sins and surmise if their flavor is as heady as I’ve imagined.
For a very long time, she was my nightmare, keeping me up at night. I thought I’d never find her. She was a figment of my imagination, a vast land inside my mind, one fraught with monsters that roam freely.
I’ve toyed with her, biding my time. Kept to the shadows where men like me thrive.
She’s the only one I’ve afforded this luxury. She’s my drug.
She’s poison spreading through my veins and changing my very makeup, changing me in such a way I hate her for it.
Loathe her very fucking existence.
She’s a sickness that I can’t kick.
How many times have I stood over her bed, blade in hand, ready to end it? Ready to be rid of her. But how many times have I been unable to finish the job? Impotent and undeserving of her blood.
I need her like the earth needs rain; like lungs need oxygen, but I loathe her.
Hate her for what she did.
Hate her for how she changed me.
How she bested me.
I am the Nightstalker, a phantom, a legend, a nightmare. Yet, she flipped my world upside down the night she mowed me down with her car.
It wasn’t the accident, really, that bothered me.
It was the way she locked eyes with me in that mirror and looked into what she thought were my cold, dead orbs before driving away.
Getting myself off that pavement was a most difficult feat that took me until morning. Luckily, that stretch of road isn’t one that many travel, and it afforded me enough time to drag my near-lifeless body to the shoulder.
I knew she had to be a local. Only someone in the area would know that road even existed.
Typically, the only people traveling it at night were my kind of people: college kids with everything to lose, drunk on alcohol and a life they’re not funding themselves, reckless enough to drive through the middle of the woods and risk it all to get home without getting in trouble and having to tell Daddy.
She was my type, but something else lurked beneath her depths. Beneath her beautiful light eyes lay an equal—a killer in her own right.
Her friend knew I wasn’t dead. My pulse hammered in my throat in anger.
Nothing had ever shocked me like Greer Allen had that night. And it became my favorite obsession.
So much so that from that night on, I killed every single girl who looked like her. Not on the side of the road, not using my typical method. No, if I saw someone who resembled her, even a sliver, even if it was broad daylight, I lost it.
She broke me like the wind ripping through a door on its last hinge. She was all I could think about.
Night and day.
Sleep or wake.
I didn’t know her name at the time, and didn’t know where she lived. Didn’t know that my pretty little poison was right beneath my nose the entire time.
Until one day, fate intervened.
Two Years Ago
Coming out of the electronics store, I shove my receipt in my jacket and toss the box for the burner into the trash on the sidewalk.
The wind blows and nips at my nose as I pocket the phone.
Winter is looming, and the changing leaves down Main Street give the bleak world more color.
I scan my eyes over each passerby, out spending their Saturday keeping consumerism alive. It’s been weeks since I’ve killed, and I’m getting itchy. There’s an ache settling into my bones the longer I let Oakland settle back into their routine.
Nothing around me is suitable, however, so I grumble low in my throat and turn toward where I parked my car down the street.
The beat-up Ford from the late 1980s lent to my motive when I stopped on the side of the road, seeking help. However, I haven’t used that one in quite some time.
Not since her.
I grind my teeth, hearing my mother scolding me loud and clear as I loosen my jaw and stretch it some as if the bitch might rise from the grave and thwack me upside the head with her cane as punishment.
It’s been eight years since I crossed paths with the little poisonous creature that left me for dead. For eight years, I’ve been looking for her in the faces of everyone I pass, searching for her in the depths of lifeless eyes after I come out of delusion and realize it wasn’t her.
I’m so preoccupied with thoughts of her that I can barely function. I thought it would improve over time, but it’s only gotten worse. It only becomes more of an obsession I can’t shake.
Turning a corner without caring to watch my surroundings, I knock my shoulder into someone and hear the softest gasp that zings through my soul.
“I am so sorry. I have to be better about watching where I’m going,” the raspy voice says, catching my attention when I’d usually keep walking.
My eyes lock with those of my killer—the girl who nearly ended the Nightstalker.
“That’s alright, sweetheart,” the term of endearment from my lips sounds cunning and dipped in malice.
As if she senses the danger of me, she clears her throat and steps back, swallowing hard and looking for her exit.
“Sorry again,” she sputters, turning and racing for her car.
Her hair is a beautiful brown, with streaks of sunlight bleeding through it. Her eyes are a gray color that almost looks white in the sunlight.
As she slams the door on her Chevy. I pull out the burner and take down her plate number.
All this time, she was right here, in Oakland. Living so close to where I stalk, breathing my air, haunting my streets.
Looking up, I see that she’s come from the nail salon. She takes care of herself. I like that.
Shaking my head free of the notion, I find my truck and sink into it, watching her red car get further away in my rearview.
“Where are you going, pretty poison?” I whisper.
It doesn’t take me long to use the systems I’m hacked into to run her plate and find her address, and to my surprise, she lives in the middle of nowhere; the only neighbor is a ranch across the street, but the house sits far up on a hill, and the driveway has to be nearly a mile long.
No one will hear her screams.
She hurries inside as if the Devil is on her heels.
In her case, I guess he is.
I grin as I drive past, plans to return after dark already working through my brain.
I’ll come back when she’s unaware, with rope and my blades.
A giddy thrill sets into my teeth, and I grind them again.
Hours later, I’m back. My truck is parked off a dirt road I found a mile down from her house, an entrance into the cow pasture beside her property.
My bag is slung over my shoulder, the ski mask with the menacing skull painted on it over my face, gloves on my hands, and titillation is growing in my stomach lining.
Her door only has one lock, and there’s no dog to get in my way.
She thinks she’s safer than she truly is out here alone in the backcountry. Her house sits on the very outskirts of town, miles from help.
She’s such a pretty little recluse, hiding away from the scrutiny of the city.
She’s in her bed, sprawled on her back, with a book forgotten in her right hand. She’d been reading.
Clicking off the light, I veil the room in case she rouses. Slinking into the shadows is as easy as breathing.
I’m more comfortable in the darkness.
Reaching down, I move some of her hair off her face that hides her from me.
Devastating.
What is the matter with you? Bind her!
I shake the inner voice away, not giving it life as my hand reaches for the easily accessible four-inch fixed blade sheathed at my side.
Popping the button on the sheath, I grip the hilt, encasing it as I watch her take a deep inhale, a moan escaping from her perfect, cupid-bow-shaped lips. It stops me in my tracks.
She unhands the book, turning onto her side, and the thin-strapped nightgown slides one way and her perfect breast the other.
Crouching, I scan my eyes over her rose-pink nipple, licking my lips as I wonder what they’d taste like with blood spilling from them.
This isn’t helping!
The voice that steers my delusions is loud tonight, and I’m typically more accepting.
When it comes to her, however, I don’t care for what it has to say.
She’s beyond reason. Beyond its reach.
Searching her home while she rests, I find her name on a piece of mail: Greer Allen.
Even her name is intriguing.
I Google her and find that she works in the local library as the head librarian. I try, and fail, not to find that fascinating.
It only adds to my toe-curling preoccupation with her, which helps neither of us.
One day, she’ll be splayed in the forest, a masterpiece I unveil to the world.
They’ll call her a tragedy, a beautiful life cut too short at the hands of a psychopath who couldn’t help himself.
I find a bit of paper in the kitchen drawer and a marker on her desk, and leave her a little note.
Did you know your gray eyes sparkle in the sunlight?
It’s enough to let her know I’m watching.
After using benzodiazepine to dose her stash of tea on the counter beside her teapot, I ensure that I’ll find her laid out for me to have fun with each night when I come to visit her.
Until her eventual end.
On my way out, I leave the note inside the mailbox, taping it to the top of a bill so she finds it.
And now my favorite game will become not only thinking about her but also following and toying with her.
She’s the pretty pussycat at the end of my laser beam, and I’ll have her spinning in circles in no time.