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.

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.”

She met his eyes. “You don’t think this has anything to do with . . .”

“Not officially, I don’t, and neither do you. We start talking about our little side project trying to find vampires and Dick’s going to think we’re crazy.”

As a sharpshooter went through Jo’s frontal lobe, she had the sense that she needed to ask Bill about something . . . something about the last night . . .

When nothing came to her, and the pain just got worse, she shook her head and looked back down at the photograph of the full body. The tangled, glistening mess was nothing but muscle and sinew over glimpses of shockingly white bone. Veins, like purple wires, added fine-line accents to the crumpled anatomy. And the bed upon which the corpse lay? Skin.

Well, to be fair, there seemed to be some clothes—

The familiar headache rippled through her skull, playing the piano keys of her pain receptors. As she winced, the newsroom’s back door was thrown wide. Dick Peters, as editor-in-chief of the CCJ, walked in like he owned the place, his lumbering footfalls the advance of all that was arrogant and arbitrary, as only the truly below-average could be. Fifty years old, fifty pounds over Dad-bod weight, and retrenched in the sexism of the fifties, the fat folds padding his once-handsome fratboy face were a harbinger of the atherosclerosis that would claim him early.

But not soon enough. Not in the next fifteen feet.

“You wanted to see me,” Dick announced to Bill. “Well, let’s do this.”

The boss man didn’t slow down, and as he passed by like a semi on the highway, Bill got up and motioned for Jo to follow with the pictures.

Stuffing them back into their folder, she strode after the men. As subscriptions and advertisers fell off, everything had been downsized so it was only another twenty feet to the paper-thin door of Dick’s fragile, declining temple of power.

But his authority was undiminished as he dumped his Columbo coat in a threadbare chair—and realized she was Bill’s plus-one.

“What,” he snapped at her as he took a suck on his Starbucks venti latte.

Bill shut the door. “We’re here together.”

Dick looked back and forth. Then focused on Bill. “Your wife is pregnant.”

As if the infidelity was excusable when Lydia wasn’t knocked up, but tacky for those nine particular months.

“We’re reporting this together,” Jo said, dropping the photographs on Dick’s desk.

They landed cockeyed on the clutter of paperwork, the glossies peeking out of the folder, presenting themselves for precisely the close-up Dick gave them.

“Holy . . . shit.”

“This is nothing that anyone’s ever seen in Caldwell before. Or anywhere else.” Bill checked his Apple Watch again. “Jo and I are going to investigate this together—”

Dick turned his head without straightening his upper half, his jowls on the down side hanging loose off his jawline. “Says who.”

“Tony’s still out from the gastric bypass.” Bill motioned to the closed door. “Pete’s only part-time and he’s covering the Metro Council fraud thing. And I’ve got a doctor’s appointment with Lydia in twenty minutes.”

“So you wait till your wife’s done with the lady doctor.” Dick moved the photographs around with the tip of his finger, sipping on his coffee with all of the delicacy of a wet vac. “This is incredible—you gotta get on this—”

“Jo is going down there to the scene right now. My contact with the CPD is waiting for her.”

Now Dick stood to his full height of five feet, nine inches. “No, you’re going down to the scene after that appointment is over, and didn’t you tell me it was going to be a quick one? When you asked for only the morning off?” The man motioned around at scuffed walls. “In case you haven’t noticed, this paper needs stories, and as a soon-to-be father, you need this job. Unless you think you can get good healthcare coverage as a freelancer?”

“Jo and I are doing this together.”

Dick pointed at her. “She was hired to be the online editor. That’s as far as she is going—”

“I can handle it,” Jo said. “I can—”

“The story is going to wait for him.” Dick picked up the photographs and stared at them with the eyes of the converted. “This is amazing stuff. I want you to go deep on this, Bill. Deep.”

Jo opened her mouth, but Dick shoved the folder at Bill. “Did I stutter,” he demanded.