Chapter 1 #2
Behind the photos of the dead, there's another door.
This one requires a key I keep on me always, worn against my chest like a talisman.
Inside is my real sanctuary.
My shrine, Juliette would call it if she knew.
Though shrine implies worship, and what I feel for Celeste Sterling transcends anything as simple as worship.
Her books are here, but not just the published versions.
I have the proof copies with her handwritten notes in the margins.
The manuscript she submitted at twenty-three that got rejected for being "too dark for mainstream markets."
The short stories she published under a pseudonym in college, thinking no one would connect them to her.
The journal entries she posted on a defunct blog in 2015 before she got famous, when she was still raw and honest about the darkness that lived inside her.
One entry, dated October 31st, 2015, reads:
Sometimes I think I was born with a monster inside me.
Not the kind that hurts people, but the kind that's attracted to hurt.
That sees beauty in blood and poetry in violence.
Is there something wrong with me for wanting to crawl inside the darkness and make a home there?
No, Celeste.
There's nothing wrong with you.
You were just waiting for someone who could show you that darkness isn't something to crawl into—it's something that crawls into you.
My phone vibrates.
Another text from Juliette:
She just passed Plattsburgh. Weather's getting bad. Hope she's careful.
The weather is perfect, actually.
Snow starting to fall heavy enough to blur tracks, make evidence disappear, create the kind of isolation that forces people together.
By tonight, the roads will be questionable.
By tomorrow, they might be impassable.
I've waited two years.
Planned for every contingency.
Read every word she's written, including the journal entries she thinks are private.
I know she dreams about being consumed by something larger than herself.
About letting go of control.
About finding someone who sees past the successful author facade to the darkness she's been feeding with fiction because she's too afraid to feed it with reality.
I walk back to the main room and pick up the copy of her first novel.
It falls open to a page I've read so many times the spine is broken there.
Her heroine is realizing she's being stalked:
The roses were the first sign.
Not on her doorstep—that would be too obvious.
He left them in places only she would notice.
One in her mailbox between bills.
One on her car windshield, under the wiper.
One on the grave of her mother, whom she visited every Sunday but had never told anyone about.
He wasn't just watching her.
He was studying her, learning her like a language he intended to become fluent in.
I wrote notes in the margins of this copy.
Questions for her:
What makes a monster worth loving?
Is it the violence or the restraint?
The taking or the waiting?
When your heroine chooses him, is it really a choice if he's eliminated every other option?
She'll see these notes eventually.
When she's ready.
When she's here, in this cabin, wearing my marks and my claim and nothing else.
When she understands that every word she's ever written was a summons, and I'm the thing that answered.
After a couple of hours, the scanner crackles again. "Sheriff, we've got... Christ, you need to see this. It's like the others but... there's something different. A message maybe?"
I smile.
They found my gift for Celeste—the first page of her debut novel, laminated and placed under Monica's hands.
The page where her heroine meets the villain for the first time.
Where she writes:
He looked at her like she was already his, like her opinion on the matter was irrelevant, like the universe had already decided and they were just going through the motions of discovery.
Let Sterling puzzle over that.
Let him wonder why the killer is quoting his daughter's work.
Let him fear what that means.
The sound I've been waiting for finally reaches me—an unfamiliar engine, expensive and well-maintained, coming up the mountain road.
I move to the window that faces the road, though I'm too far back to be seen.
The black Audi passes, moving carefully on the snow-slicked road.
New York plates.
The glimpse I get through the windshield is brief but enough—dark hair pulled back, pale face focused on navigating the unfamiliar road, hands gripping the steering wheel like she's holding onto more than just the car.
Celeste Sterling has come home.
I walk to my desk and pick up the skull of a doe I've been saving.
Smaller than the others, more delicate.
I've painted the inside with something that will glow in moonlight—a detail she'll only notice if she gets close enough.
When she gets close enough.
Because she will.
Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.
She'll hear about the hermit in the mountains who reads philosophy and plays violin in the darkness.
She'll be curious about someone else who chooses isolation, who lives surrounded by death but isn't afraid of it.
She'll come looking for inspiration for her monsters.
But more importantly, she'll find it.
I pick up my hunting knife, the one I'll use later tonight.
Not on her—never on her.
But on the man who's been watching her father's house for three weeks.
A drifter who's been asking questions about when the sheriff's daughter visits.
He thinks she'd make a pretty victim.
He has no idea he's already dead, that his body just hasn't figured it out yet.
This is what I do for her.
What I've been doing for two years.
Removing threats before they even know she exists.
The men who would hurt her, use her, diminish her light.
They disappear into these mountains, and the snow covers their screams, and the earth swallows their bones, and the only trace they leave is another skull for my collection.
The scanner comes alive once more.
Sheriff Sterling's voice, tight with something that might be fear: "I want a protective detail on my house starting tonight. Discreet. And someone find out if Celeste has arrived yet. Don't tell her why, just... make sure she's safe."
Oh, Sheriff.
Your daughter is safe.
Safer than she's ever been.
Because I've been removing threats for two years, clearing the path, making sure that when she finally came home, there would be nothing left that could hurt her.
Except me.
And I'm not going to hurt her.
I'm going to hollow her out and fill her with something better.
Something darker. Something true.
I set the doe skull on the porch, positioned so it faces the road.
Not for her—she won't see it today, but for him. For Sterling.
When he drives past later, checking the hermit's property like he always does when he's scared, he'll see it.
He'll know something's different.
He'll feel the change in the air, the shift in the hunt.
His daughter is home.
And so is the thing he's been hunting.