PROLOGUE
Harper’s heart pounded in her chest. Her throat and mouth were dry, but that didn’t stop her tongue continually flicking out in a futile attempt to moisten her equally dry lips. It was a habit her friends and family would have recognized as a tell when she was nervous or stressed.
And she was both of those things at that moment.
Her sweat-soaked cotton t-shirt stuck to her back and chest, and it wasn’t just the hot and humid Mississippi night that caused it. For the hundredth time, she questioned what the hell she was doing there in those dark woods close to midnight.
For the hundredth time, she couldn’t give her frantic mind a satisfactory answer.
And for the hundredth time, she walked on.
The sounds of the forest were louder than she could ever have imagined. A background shrill hum of insects was overlaid by the random and often startling cries from what she hoped were birds, that seemed to come from all around her; from above in the dark canopy of treetops that blotted out what star and moonlight there was, and from beside her, in the thick foliage that crowded in on either side of the narrow, rough track she was walking down.
A flurry of wings just in front of her to the left, as a disturbed bird hurriedly took flight to avoid her approach, made her stomach flip and her breath catch in her throat. Then she looked up, along the winding path, and her eyes, as used to the blackness as they would ever be, could suddenly make out her destination.
The sight almost made her turn right round and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction. And to keep on running and running.
But she didn’t.
Somehow, she called upon the last ounce of resolve from deep inside her nineteen-year-old body, and with wobbly legs, walked towards the crumbling, decaying house.
The path widened, and then suddenly she was clear of the trees and the undergrowth. The dark house loomed over her. The moon, almost but not quite full, reflected off the three windows that remained intact, two on the upper floor, one on the ground floor.
Through the shattered window to the right of the front porch, Harper could just make out other flickering lights that made her fleetingly think of fireflies.
It was to those lights that she knew she must go. It was why she had left the safety of her family home at eleven thirty that night and driven the eight miles to the dark wood.
She was there despite all of the warnings. Against every bit of the common sense that had been drilled into her throughout her comfortable childhood,
adolescence and teenage years.
She was there despite every single one of her instincts that were screaming at her to turn tail and flee.
She walked onwards towards the house, trying to ignore the fact she was walking towards, and very soon would be stepping into, the most cliched image of a house from a horror movie imaginable.
The noises of the wood were behind her, and she could now discern new sounds coming from the house. Ones made by humans. There was chanting, the words unintelligible, rising and falling in a rhythm that quickly became aligned with her breathing.
She continued towards the house until it filled her vision, the ivy-clad wooden walls, its broken windows like blind staring eyes, blocking out everything else.
The door to the porch was open and almost without hesitation she walked through, the smell of incense suddenly assailing her senses, temporarily overriding every other sensation.
Then, as she walked slowly through the front door, her eyes and ears filled in the gaps.
And what they showed her was enough to freeze the blood in her veins.
If the house was an image from every school ghost story, the vision that confronted Harper was straight out of a nightmare.
Hooded figures formed a circle in the large shadowy room in front of her. Their bodies swayed in time with the solemn chanting that rose and fell, swelled and receded. There were perhaps as many as twenty people in the circle, and Harper found herself wondering who they were if she knew any or all of them. But it was impossible to tell. They all wore hooded robes, made of what looked like in the poor, undulating light to be made of thick, brown coarse cloth, the kind she associated with medieval monks. The faces of the swaying figures were hidden behind the cloth and deep shadow.
Then, as her eyes became adjusted to the light, and her mind with the situation, she began to notice other details. The flickering light was coming from torches held by the masked figures. Flaming torches, with orange tongues of fire that came not from candles but from a ball or rags fastened
to short, intricate sticks, or even horns.
In the center of the circle stood a man, his arms aloft. He too had a cloak, but his was pure black, and his hood was thrown back off his head. His head was adorned with a hideous mask that Harper couldn’t take her eyes from. It was that of a goat, a huge, grotesque skull, with massive, twisted horns that reached up toward the dark, shadowy ceiling.
Despite everything, Harper began to feel calmer as her eyes became fixated on the man at the center of the ring of figures. This was why she had come. This was what she had come for. For years she had become more and more convinced there was more to this world and to this life than high school and college, with its dramas, petty squabbles and superficialities. That there was more to life than working to secure nine to five drudgery, a family life that quickly turned uneventful at best, sour at worst.
The online chatrooms that she had found by accident had opened the door to there being another possibility. Another world, another life that existed just out of sight of the mainstream. One that was ready and waiting in the shadows. One that had always been there.
It had taken her two months from first stumbling upon that forum, to signing in and asking the questions she had always wanted to find the answers to, but had until then never known the words to use, or the people to ask.
It had taken a further six months for her to pluck up the courage and take the next massive leap. To come and see for herself what it was all about. As she stared, entranced at the goat-headed man, and the chanting, swaying figures around him, she knew that she had crossed a line. That there was no going back.
The rhythm of the chanting suddenly altered, the words, still unintelligible, becoming faster, more frenetic. The bodies’ movements kept pace with the new rhythm.
Harper edged closer so she was within touching distance of the figure nearest to her. Suddenly, she became aware that there were other people in the room, besides the goat-headed man and the hooded, chanting figures
Around the edge, lurking in the shadows, were people like her. No masks, no torches, no cloaks. Just regular people, watching, entranced by what was going on.
She wondered if any of those were there for the first time, like her. If one was in fact Angelwings 88, the person on the forum who had finally convinced her to take the next step and stop dreaming about it or imagining it but actually experience it for herself.
The sight of the observers calmed her even more, and her eyes stopped darting around the dark room, and instead, she found herself staring once again at the goat-headed figure, her body swaying in time with the incessant undulations of the chanting.
The incense that filled the room should have been cloying, but somehow it wasn’t. It helped to allow her mind to drift off, away from that abandoned house in those dark, terrifying woods, to somewhere else entirely. A place she did not how to get to, but that she suddenly knew she had always been desperate to arrive at.
She breathed in deeper and deeper, intoxicated by the whole atmosphere. At first, when she had shuffled into the room, she had felt like an outsider. That the ring of cloaked figures formed an exclusive group, one she was not and never could be a part of.
Now, she felt the exact opposite. That everyone in the room was somehow joined by an invisible bond. She felt a part of something in a way she never had before. Not in her college basketball team or her high school cheerleading squad.
Her eyes closed, as she allowed herself to be fully consumed by the rhythm of the chanting that was getting faster and faster, the voices singing out louder and louder. Her arms came up from her sides and they too started swaying as she waved them in time.
Suddenly, her eyes snapped open as she felt a sharp pain in her wrist. For a crazy second, she thought she had been bitten, and half expected to see her cat, Jojo, hanging from her arm. It took her eyes a couple of seconds to focus, and when they finally managed to, in the gloomy light, it took her brain another two or three seconds to compute what her eyes were telling it.
Blood, almost black in the half-light, was pouring down her forearm towards the crook of her elbow. Then, like a child following a trail in a puzzle
book, her eyes traced the flow of blood back up her arm to its source.
A dart, three inches in length, stuck out from her wrist. She stared at it transfixed, holding her arm out in front of her, oblivious to the blood that had started to drip onto the floor at her feet. Oblivious now also of the chanting that filled the room, of the swaying figures just in front of her.
Then she heard another sound from behind her and to her right. A pfft sound, like that of air escaping from the valve on her bike tire.
It was followed, almost instantly, by another sharp pain, this time in her neck.
Her hand, the one at the end of the wrist which held the dart, went to move towards her neck, but it never completed its journey.
Harper’s eyes lost focus, then closed. Then she toppled forward.
She was dead before she hit the floor.
CHAPTER ONE
Agent Claire King stared at the email that had just dropped into her inbox. It was what she had been waiting for, for days. In truth, it was what she had been waiting for ever since, as a twelve-year-old girl, she had been told that her mom would never be coming home to make cookies with her again.
Yet her finger hesitated over the mouse of her laptop. She felt like she was on a rollercoaster. A ride that she was only just tall enough to be allowed on. There was no way off, and there was no end in sight. To make matters worse, she had the distinct feeling that as opposed to getting her closer to the end, what the email contained would be like throwing off the seatbelt.
The last few months had been the toughest of her life, and as someone who had grown up for most of her adolescence with just one parent, a drunk, cruel and absent one at that, that was some achievement.
The case that had started everything, and in many ways had defined the woman she was now, was the one involving the Artist. Before that case, her twelve years of steady progression through the FBI ranks had been textbook. Promotions, commendations, setbacks had come and gone, but she had always felt she knew about the world in general, the world of law enforcement, and her place in both.
Then things had gotten crazy. And not in a good, high school party way. The Artist had proved to be above and beyond anything she, or indeed anyone at the agency, had faced before. She was loath to use the word genius when dealing with such a morally corrupt person, but in every other walk of life, that tag would have sat very comfortably on his shoulders.
Tyler, the first partner at work she had really connected to, and the person who had taught her so much about what it meant to be not just an agent, but a truly exceptional one, had been killed. Slaughtered in front of her at the hands of the Artist.
A short while later, she and Wilson, her new rookie partner, had tracked down the serial killer, chased him and boarded his boat. She had even managed to get the cuffs on him. For a split second, she had had her man.
And then the crazy dial was ratcheted up to eleven and beyond. An explosion on the boat had done two things. First it had allowed the Artist to escape. Second, it had killed Claire. For seventeen minutes, she was officially dead. Wilson had hauled her out of the Mississippi and worked on her chest in an attempt to keep whatever spark of lifeforce was still in his new partner, alight. It had worked. But ever since waking up in the hospital bed from a coma, she had been experiencing visions.
There was no doubt those had helped her in subsequent investigations. Even Wilson,
the only other person who knew about them, now trusted what she saw when she blanked out.
But that didn’t make it any easier to deal with what was going on in her brain. What it meant about everything she had assumed about the world.
And now there was the revelation that the person responsible for killing her mother, all those years ago could very well be the same person as the man now known as the Artist. If he wasn’t, there was growing evidence that he may have worked with him. Or still be working with him.
She took a deep breath and hit the mouse button that opened the email. It had come in after her repeated demands to have access to the evidence that had been held back, forgotten about or simply ignored concerning her mother’s homicide. Demands that had reached the ears of people with higher pay grades than she. The Chief had questioned her about it, and she had got the impression that it had ruffled the feathers of people who were not used to having their feathers disturbed.
But that was not her concern.
Her eyes scanned the one line of text and the contents. There was more than she had expected, file after file attached, though she had been in the game long enough to know that quantity wasn’t necessarily related to quality.
She took a long sip of her coffee, then dived in, quickly triaging the evidence.
Some she had seen before, or were simply different version of reports she had received earlier. There were other files that she was at a loss to see how they were relevant, and she had put them aside to wade through later. Her eyes devoured each heading, before skim reading the text, searching for anything that jumped out. Names, places, things that resonated, stuck or banged against her knowledge of the case.
On a pad beside her laptop, she made a list of what did jump out, along with the file or report they were contained in. One name was mentioned on more than one occasion. The third time she saw it, she circled it on her list with her pen, then leaned back in her chair, her lips pursed.
Devyn Sheldon had been picked up as an initial person of interest, ...
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