Page 21 of Unhallowed Murder (A Paranormal Halloween #2)

Chapter Eighteen

Josef settled her overnight bag on a table in a secure sleeping room, and she pulled shorts and a shirt out.

“You’ll need more covering you,” he told her. “If we’re both to be under the covers, I’ll leach too much of your heat away.”

“It’s what I brought. I sleep hot, usually. We’ll see how it goes.”

She went to the restroom to change, and he was nude and under the covers when she returned.

He’d pulled the sealed bag with her shirt out, and he opened it and smelled.

There was no magic, but scent gave off an energy, and it couldn’t hurt to familiarize himself with the man in any way easily possible.

He also looked over the rough-drawn map of the block showing where the jail was again, and then the rough sketch of the jail, with an asterisk showing where the prisoner was.

She’d informed him it was her best drawing of an asshole.

He’d never again see an asterisk without thinking of how it resembled an asshole.

Ronnie curled into him, and he wrapped an arm around her. He wanted her to be comfortably asleep before he started. Thankfully, she was exhausted so it didn’t take long.

He’d found his target while she found sleep, and once her breathing evened out, it was time to get to work.

Mick Griffin was also asleep, which helped matters, but Josef still felt the rancid, oily residue of malevolence and evil while he probed the motherfucker’s memories.

Mick had made his first kill two days after his wife had filed for divorce — a young runaway selling herself on the street.

He’d made sure no one would miss her before he’d killed her, and he hadn’t even bothered to find out her name.

He’d known Candy was a street name, and not real.

He’d buried her in his backyard while his wife was in the hospital, and had installed a patio over the top of the grave the next day.

It took longer than two hours for Josef to dig through Griffin’s memory and be sure he’d found every murder. Seventeen women.

Josef chose three to make the evil motherfucker live through, and made sure he paralyzed the bastard’s body, so his thrashing and fighting wouldn’t attract anyone’s attention.

Josef put him through hell three fucking times — right to the point of death, his body starved for oxygen in two cases, blood in another, at the point of losing consciousness.

Finally, Josef put the suggestion in Griffin’s head that he’d have nightmares for the rest of his life, cycling through his victims every time he slept, until he confessed.

The only way to keep from living what they’d felt, over and over, night after night, was to confess every crime.

Josef woke him up, had him relieve himself and shake the dreams off, and then put him back to sleep so he could make him experience two more murders.

When the dawn grew close, Josef left a note for Ronnie, and moved into a secure resting compartment before the dawn took him.