A Breath Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

twenty-five, originally from Memphis, Tennessee. She had light blond hair, green eyes, was five feet nineinches tall and weighed approximately one hundred thirty pounds. She’d been last seen leaving her dorm room at the college, heading toward the library. She’d been wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt.
    Violet hoped they found her alive. The coed was too young to die.
    Taking a flyer for her store, she cut across the square, keeping her distance as she passed the graveyard near the parking lot where she’d parked her Civic. She hated cemeteries, had ever since her father had taken her to visit her mother’s grave when she was three. It had been a cold winter day in the mountains, and a bristly wind had rustled the bare branches of the trees, heavy with ice from a recent hailstorm. She’d dropped rose petals on the slab of marble, not knowing how to feel as she tried to picture the faceless woman who had died giving birth to her.
    Although giant azaleas, neatly trimmed hedges and jonquils flanked the iron gates of this cemetery in Savannah, disguising the morbid interior, the hair on the back of Violet’s neck stood on end. Suddenly a whisper broke through the haze. “Help me.”
    Violet hesitated, wheeled around to stare at the tombstones. She could almost see the ghosts of the dead in the sea of monuments. And she could have sworn someone had just called to her. A woman’s voice…
    A storyteller from one of the walking ghost tours was spinning a tale for a group of tourists. Slowly, the faces and storyteller’s voice faded.
    Dizzy, Violet stumbled toward a park bench and dropped onto it. She yanked at the neckline of her shirt as the voice whispered to her again. Images played in her head like an old movie trailer….
    * * *
    H E WAS WATCHING HER , playing out his sick twisted game, dancing around the fact that he was going to kill her with platitudes in that singsongy voice that had grated on her nerves for hours. He enjoyed seeing the terror in her eyes.
    And she was helpless to stop from showing it.
    She did not want to die.
    His olive skin looked pale beneath the harsh fluorescent light. Bluish veins bulged in his arms as he stalked around her. She struggled against the bindings holding her down, but the drugs he’d given her were slowly paralyzing her limbs.
    â€œYour blood is rich and thick, and in some ways perfect,” he murmured. “But you aren’t the one.”
    His face loomed like some kind of distorted monster. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said in a soothing voice. “I wanted you to be it. I really did.”
    She moaned and tried to scream, fighting to escape. But a gag captured the sound, and her movements were stilted and slow, only token gestures of the will to survive.
    He brushed a tendril of her wiry, tear-soaked hair from her face. “You let me down.”
    She shook her head violently, silently pleading for him to spare her. But anger darkened his already poisonous-looking eyes.
    â€œIt’s not my fault. Father needs you. But you can’t help us. Don’t you see that?” His voice grew edgier, his eyes like marbles cut from ice. “I’m doing it all for him. I shall pray for your soul, and the angels will carry you to heaven. We are all children under one blessed father.”
    He ran a steady finger over the sharp end of a piece of bone he’d carved earlier. Then he slid the blade of apocketknife along the jagged edge, scraping and shaving off more brittle bone. The rhythmic sound crawled over her skin. He scraped and whittled, painstaking in his task. Perspiration rolled down her breastbone as he held the bone up to the light and tested its smoothness. Then he raised it to his lips and began to blow.
    â€œThe tune of the bone whistle,” he said softly. “The song that tells the story of sacrifice. Pin peyeh obe, my sweetness. Then you must die.”

CHAPTER THREE
    A MAN WAS DEAD .