Blood Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

stars tremble around the full moon. In the split rail fence encircling the large yard the front gate stands open; as the wind moves it, the wood seems to be alive, shivering.
    He passes through the opening and moves up the dirt road, through the small grove of eucalyptus and olive trees. The spicy scent surrounds him, the leaves whisper above, a dry rattle. The house comes into sight through the trees, and he sees the front door standing open as well.
    The wind gusts around him and the feeling of doom closes in as he moves up the pavers toward the triangular arched front entrance and stops on the porch, listening…
    Nothing but silence from the darkness within.
    He steps through the open doorway, past the carved wooden door, into the entry hall with its white painted brick walls and tiled floor.
    And then he sees the blood.
    The horror comes rushing over him. He has been here a hundred times before. Every detail is as it always is, the tiled floor, the white stucco walls, cold moonlight through the tall arched windows. He can feel the presence of madness, hear the harsh breath of the unimaginable thing that is waiting for him at the end of the hallway.
    He is no longer a man, but a boy, just a boy, no match for whatever lies behind that door. The terror has turned every cell in his body to ice; his feet can barely move him forward. On the floor around him is a pool of dark, he is up to his ankles in it, and it is not cold, like water, but warm, like…
    Smells like …
    Copper. Stink. Death.
    And those crumpled shapes on the floor around him, the sleeping mounds… but not sleeping, no, the eyes are open, staring. An entire family, slashed, stabbed… slaughtered.
    He turns to run.
    In front of him a shadow looms… he can feel it reaching for him… feel the scream rising in his throat—
    It is not a monster, but a woman who steps out of the shadows. Her face is beautiful, luminous in the pale moonlight.
    The gash in her throat drips blood.
    And when she reaches for him, he does not know if it is to embrace him — or kill him —
     
    Roarke jarred awake with the queasy feeling that he had spoken or shouted aloud. He lay in the motel bed, and forced himself to breathe, to slow his racing heart.
    The dream was his past and his present, merged. An old nightmare from his childhood, that he’d had periodically since the Reaper had disappeared, never to be caught, never to be found. There was a new presence now: the adult Cara.
    As he lay still in the motel bed, he listened to the unaccustomed silence, broken at last by the distant roar of a big rig, somewhere on the freeway. He reached for his phone on the bed stand to check the time. It was just past noon, and he was somewhere in the desert off Interstate 10, east of Los Angeles.
     
    He’d gotten off the plane at LAX, picked up a car from a rental counter, then drove east. It was past midnight and the traffic was, while still astonishing for the hour, very light for Los Angeles, no impediment at all. Roarke was a night owl, so he’d pushed on past the vast sprawl of L.A., past the golden carpet of lights of the bedroom communities and the ever-increasing sprawl of Riverside into the desert, relaxing as the lights of towns grew farther apart and the black sky above him filled with stars.
    He hadn’t expect to make it all the way to Blythe that night, but he was wired from the flight and he wanted to wake up with views of mountains and palm trees rather than strip-mall suburbia. He’d achieved his goal. He was now somewhere past the turnoff to Palm Springs, close enough to the site of the Lindstrom massacre that the memories of the murders had invaded his dreams.
    And more than just the memory of the murders. He could still feel the dream-touch of Cara’s body against his.
    He threw back the blankets to stand, and moved for the bathroom to shower and dress.
    On the way back to the freeway he stopped for a burrito to go from a nearby stand, figuring the slight risk of