Page 25 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Drago LaChance jolted awake like a corpse shocked back to life on a slab. He found himself inhabiting a world that somehow managed to be both too bright and too dark at the same time, and for a disoriented moment, he had no goddamn clue where he was.

Drago groaned and pawed the nightstand for the pill bottle that had become his constant companion of late. Shaky fingers rattled the dregs; enough to stave off the shakes until dawn if he was lucky.

He tossed back two. Or was it four? Didn't much matter at this point as long as they did their job and brought him one step closer to that sweet black nothing.

Drago needed his phone. Needed to anchor himself in reality before he floated away completely. But the nightstand was bare save for a now-empty pill bottle.

Panic clawed at his chest. Where the hell was his cell? He needed to know what godforsaken day it was, what month.

And most of all, he needed to check that his last memory before he blacked out had been real and not some fever dream. Had Ezra been by? Sometimes his caregiver moved things around when he tidied up, though Drago could never figure out why the man bothered. The place was beyond saving.

Drago hauled himself upright, felt along the walls, stabilized himself. He rubbed his eyes until starbursts exploded across his vision, like his brain cells had committed mass seppuku in protest of their mistreatment.

But no amount of pressing thumbs to sockets could black out the images flickering behind his retinas, because what he’d seen in the news had not made sense.

Just as the first tendrils of hysteria began to curl in his guts, his hand closed over the familiar rectangle of plastic and glass.

There. On his nightstand. The screen lit up and Drago squinted against the glare.

1:14AM. So it was night, or early morning.

It didn’t matter much, because the blinds stayed firmly shut at all times.

And there, at the top of the screen was a notification. Or the ghost of one, anyway. The remnant of whatever had caught his eye before he tumbled down his most recent pharmaceutical rabbit hole.

Drago tapped it with a trembling finger, and the screen resolved into a web browser. Some trashy tabloid site, garish ads crowding the borders. But it was the headline that seized him by the throat and squeezed.

Local Woman Found Dead. Gruesome Display Shocks Connecticut City.

The words swam before his eyes, refused to resolve into anything approaching sense. But the photo below the headline told him all he needed to know.

A body. A woman. Strung up like a marionette, suspended between the steel railings of a balcony. Blonde hair clumped with gore. Arms extended in a grotesque parody of angelic welcome. And the crowning touch, that mocking halo of barbed wire.

Drago's hands spasmed, nearly sending the phone clattering to the floor.

No. It couldn't be. He was hallucinating, still in the grips of some narcotic nightmare.

Because the alternative – that the scene before him had somehow clawed its way out of his drug-addled brain and onto the front page – was too terrible to contemplate.

But no matter how many times he blinked, how hard he bit the inside of his cheek, the image remained.

It was real. All of it. The murder. The mutilation. The staged tableau ripped straight from the tattered pages of his very own novella. Somehow, impossibly, the dark fantasies he'd only ever dared commit to paper had manifested in flesh and blood and barbed wire.

Drago’s lungs seized. How the hell was this possible?

Yes, he’d written Halo of Blood in record time and barely even stopped to read the thing back once he’d finished it.

Yes, he’d written it while he was lost in the paralysis of intoxication, but the whole thing started and ended with the written word.

The book was merely an exorcism for what happened, and he knew deep in his bones that he didn’t have the want or need to bring those scenes to life.

They could call him what they liked. Deadbeat, failure, a wannabe that didn’t have the talent or work ethic to make anything of his craft. But a killer? Never a killer. It didn’t make any sense.

In his research for the book, he’d looked into psychotic breaks and all of its peripheral mental problems. Mental breakdowns, episodes of mania, schizophrenia.

He’d been looking for a way to cope with the trauma, and in the end, channelling all of his rage into a gory piece of fiction seemed the best option.

But he couldn’t deny that there’d been moments.

Occurrences where he felt the urge to become Cain in the real world.

Nothing that consumed his being, but little thought experiments; could he turn a real woman into an angel and get away with it?

If he did, what victims would he choose?

How easy would it be to gouge a woman’s eyes out or hang her from a balcony?

Drago glanced down at the phone in his shaky hand and opened a new browser tab. He searched ‘Norwalk murder angel,’ hit Go and held his breath.

Then the results pinged up. Forty-thousand of them.

CNN. Fox. NBC. Associated Press. CBS. Every three-letter media company in the United States had jumped on it.

News of the hanging angel had made its way across the country, even reached the shores of Europe judging by the Guardian’s Connecticut Woman Hanged From Balcony – Disturbing Photos headline.

Drago closed the browser as his throat worked against the rising tide of puked. But then his thumb began swiping of its own volition, fighting the full-body mortis of realization. Drago navigated to his photo gallery, even as every better angel of his nature screamed at him to turn back.

But he had to know.

The first picture said it all.

There she was. The woman from the news. But these weren't some paparazzi shots. These were up close and personal. An apartment. Not a crime scene, not an evidence locker. But the scene of the slaughter itself.

Intimate. A killer's eye view. The whole sick transformation in vivid HD. Woman to corpse to angel.

But it was her face that froze the air in his lungs. Even in death, Drago recognized her.

Martina Payne. His high school English teacher. The one who'd first nurtured his love of the written word, only to crush his fledgling dreams with a single red-penned ‘See me after class’ on his first creative writing assignment.

He clapped a hand over his mouth, breathing hard through his nose as he fought to keep the bile down. But his traitorous finger kept scrolling like an automaton pulled along by some invisible string.

More pictures. Close-ups. But this time it was of a different woman. A woman he’d never seen before but doubt he’d recognize anyway. The pictures were detailed shots of shredded skin, colorless eyes, barbed wire wrapped tight around her skull.

He had no memory of taking these photos.

Drago stared down at his hands. He expected to see them caked in blood, but they were clean. Shaking, sure. Nicotine-stained and hangnail-ravaged. But bearing no evidence of the butchery they'd supposedly wrought.

But the first two deaths from Halo of Blood were right here on his phone, and evidence didn’t lie.

He was responsible for this.

Him and his poisoned mind, the cancerous imaginings he'd foolishly thought confined to the realm of fiction. But like a malevolent djinn unleashed from its bottle, his monstrous muse had slipped its chains and stalked out into the world, hungry for blood.

A second later, Drago found himself bent over the toilet in the bathroom. He hugged the bowl and dry heaved until only dust came up. He stumbled over to the sink and stared at himself in the mirror.

‘Who are you? What have you done?’

But the reflection offered no answers. Just the dead-eyed stare of a man teetering on the edge, unsure if he was about to fall or if he'd already hit bottom and just hadn't felt the impact yet.