Dark Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

horribly…wrong. When the creature had overpowered him, it had somehow shorted out his voluntary nervous system. Now he lay there, sprawling and crumpled, completely at its mercy. The stench of his own urine assaulted his nostrils.
    Wide-eyed and trembling, he looked up at the figure standing over him, as dark and hidden as some nightmare behind storm clouds. Only its red eyes burned.
    Why couldn’t he see what it was? His own hands, his bruised and bloody body, were visible in the dim light flowing through the window. Why not this… thing?
    Then, slowly the shadows seemed to fall away from it. It stood with its massive, scaled arms folded across its chest. Its clawed fingers dug into the swollen muscles of its own flesh, as though it was contemplating its next action. Green wings rose above its head. It was staring right at him. Madrone couldn’t seem to move his head to look anywhere else but straight into its red eyes.
    Then the thing spoke. Its voice was deep, rumbling from its chest like choked thunder, but its words were slow and quiet, softened with regret.
    “I am afraid it is necessary that you die.”
    It was the last thing Madrone ever heard. The monster reached down and rammed one taloned fist deep into Madrone’s chest, smashing aside ribs and cartilage to tear his heart from the bleeding cavity.
    Detective Jack Madrone gave one violent, convulsive shudder. Then, before the pain even had time to register in his brain, everything faded to black.
     
     
     
    The creature knelt beside the body. Madrone hadn’t felt a thing, not at the end. That was good.
    For himself, he could still feel the insane rush—the way that the rib cage bent beneath the force of his blow, the moist crunch as Madrone’s ribs broke and separated to admit his clenched fist. The warmth of the blood and the fluttery, dying movement of the still-beating heart in his claws. And then the power, the incredible power of ending a life in a single motion—the memory sang through his arm as he stood there. Wet, warm blood streamed from his talons and dripped onto the carpet. He tossed the heart, now limp and still, to the floor.
    He found the skin on the kitchen floor. He pulled the stolen time cards from the cop’s pocket. Then he picked stray scales from the sleeve of the detective’s coat and from his fingers. The creature searched for scales on the carpet and poured his finds into the skin. He wavered over the bullet casing from the cop’s gun, gleaming on the carpet, and finally decided to leave it where it was.
    The bullet had passed through him—unblessed weapons were useless against him—and was wedged in the far wall. He dug it out of the plaster, wondering where the mystery would lead investigators, sure it would confuse them, if nothing else.
    Finally he wrapped the whole mess into a loose bundle and tucked it under one inhumanly large arm. He cloaked himself in darkness again. Invisible to all eyes but those of others like him, he walked to the door. The tips of his claws closed on the doorknob and turned it.
    Had anyone been watching, the door would have appeared to open and close as if by magic.
    His mission completed, the creature who had once been—and would be again—Justin Sterling found the stairway to the roof. After a time he stood alone beneath the storm, breathing in death and rain. Then, in utter silence, he merged once again with the night.

three
     
     
    I t was well after midnight when Detective Sandra McCormick stepped out of the elevator onto the fourteenth floor and headed toward Jack Madrone’s apartment.
    “Whoever’s doing this has a lotta balls. Gotta give ’em that.” Her partner, a veteran cop named Lawdon McKenzie, kept his comments in a low undertone clearly meant for her alone. He’d pushed his way through the crowd of pajama- and robe-clad rubberneckers clogging the hall between the elevator and Madrone’s apartment to meet her. “Or maybe he’s just stupid. You don’t kill cops in