Page 231 of Craving Venom
“How the hell do you know that?”
I shoot him a look.
“Duh. You’re sitting across from a true crime junkie. The Nighthawk was my Spotify Wrapped top podcast subject last year. Between him and Harlow the skinner, I barely slept.”
He doesn’t laugh. He never does when it’s real.
“Now imagine you’re not listening through headphones. Imagine he’s in your city. Imagine the nightmare you Googled is walking your sidewalks.”
“He’s real?” My voice is quieter now, but only because my lungs have stopped working. “I thought he was some urban legend like Jack the ripper or The Grin Reaper. Half the crime boards say he’s a ghost, the rest say he’s a coordinated hitman group—”
“He’s real.”
“How do you even know he’s here?”
He sighs and pulls a photo from a slim black envelope. Slides it across the table until it’s right in front of me.
I open the envelope with a flick, expecting some blurred security cam still or a blood-smeared note, anything but this.
It’s a sketch.
Just a face.
No. A mask.
Bronze-brown and brutal, shaped like a bird’s beak but all wrong. It’s too long, too sharp, too human in its anger. Cracks run down its surface like old scars. One of them starts above the right brow. It is splinter-thin at first, almost delicate, then widens like a fault line, tearing past the socket in a cruel arc. Another slices diagonally from the left temple, cuts across the eye ridge, and halts right where a cheekbone would be. They don’t look random. They look inflicted.
The hood framing it is darker than night, swallowing edges and stealing shape.
I swallow.
“A kid saw him,” Sebastian reveals. “Down by the service corridor of a hotel downtown.”
“A kid?” My stomach drops. “Is he okay?”
“He’s in protective custody. We’re making sure he forgets the mask before he forgets his multiplication tables.”
The idea of that thing standing in the same city as me, breathing the same air, existing in the same reality… it makes my skin crawl. And the idea that a child looked that mask in the eye and lived?
Unreal.
“Six states. Twenty-two confirmed kills. He’s the guy who burned the senator’s face into a Bible and stuffed it in his chest cavity in Maine. The one who butchered a lawyer alive in NewHampshire. He nailed a priest to the altar in his own church in Vermont. He drowned a therapist in a bathtub filled with his patients’ case files in Massachusetts. In Connecticut, he carved open a judge and used his ribcage to frame the scales of justice on the courtroom floor. And in Rhode Island, he strung up a surgeon by his own intestines over the entrance of his hospital.” I trace a finger along the photo’s edge. “And he just let the kid go?”
“He’s a psychopath,” Sebastian counters. “Some of his kills were… surgical. Others? Ripped open. He doesn’t follow a pattern.”
“He doesn’t follow a pattern, but he let a child live?”
Sebastian’s jaw flexes as frustration twists through him in a rare show he doesn’t usually let slip
“You think maybe…” I glance at the photo again. The mask stares up at me like it knows. “Maybe he’s not psychopath. Maybe he’s just aMisunderstood Psychopath.”
He actually snorts. “Faith.”
I raise an eyebrow. “I’m serious. The way you described it? That’s not a lack of pattern. That’s someone choosing when to be precise. He wants to be messy sometimes. He chooses it.”
“Okay, and that’s better…how?”
“It means he’s not out of control. It means he knows exactly what he’s doing. That kid? He made a conscious decision to let him walk. That’s not psychosis. That’s restraint.”
