Deathscape Read Online Free PDF Page A

it to Broslin. “Give me your phone.”
    She kept her terrified gaze on the road. “I don’t have it with me.”
    A quick look around netted no purse, nothing usable in the glove box either, just a sketchbook and a couple of sticks of graphite. He reached over and patted down her coat, ignoring when she shrieked and nearly landed them in the ditch.
    He searched the falling night around them, desperate for help, and caught sight of a farmhouse with lights in the windows in the distance. He could call for backup from there.
    “ The house.” He gestured with his head, then regretted it when everything before him went swimming. “Take me there.”
    Tears rolled down her face. “Please.”
    “ Do as I say.”
    She drove to the house, shivering, and pulled up the driveway. He dragged her up the two steps and held her in front of him as he knocked on the front door. If someone looked out the window next to it, they might not open up for a naked man covered in blood and grime.
    But nobody answered the door, not even on the second try. Maybe they were out. His body awash in pain, he rammed the wood with his shoulder. When the door didn’t budge, he rammed it again.
    “ Wait.” She drew him toward the car, and he went because he no longer had the strength to stop her.
    She was too scared to notice, too terrified to realize that if she knocked him down, he wouldn’t be able to rise. She grabbed the keys from the car, hobbled back to the door with him as he did his best to keep his hold on her arm.
    She unlocked the door, and he pushed her in, went after her. He was about to ask why she had a key when it all clicked into place in some distant recess of his pain-fogged brain.
    She lived here. Which meant Blackwell probably lived here, was probably in the house. Jack swore under his breath at the irony. He’d escaped death just to fall back, defenseless, into the hands of his worst enemy.
    He let her go and turned, his vision swimming. Get back to the car. Keys first. He grabbed after her, but she was running away.
    He blinked against the darkness that closed in on him. By the time he hit the floor, he was too far gone to feel a thing.
    * * *
    A naked, possibly dead man lay in her foyer.
    Now what?
    Ashley peeked from the kitchen, shivering against the cold that poured in the open front door. When she’d rushed off to save him, she hadn’t thought this far ahead, what she would do once she found him. She hadn’t thought he would attack her.
    Maybe she hadn’t been supposed to save him. Maybe he was the same kind of man as whoever had put him into that shallow grave, one criminal taking out another, eliminating competition.
    She held on to the broom she’d grabbed as the first possible weapon she could think of and inched toward him. When she reached close enough, she poked him in the side. He didn’t move.
    Whoever he was, he was well built, had seen either plenty of physical labor or regular exercise. He had a well-proportioned body she might have been tempted to paint another time and place, under different circumstances. He hardly looked ready to be painted just now.
    His face was swollen and bloody, like the rest of him. An arrangement of open cuts formed patterns on his skin, accented with burn marks, blue-black spots, and welts. Three of his fingernails had been ripped off; the rest were packed with blood and dirt.
    A gust of wind hurled snow through the front door. When he didn’t stir even from that, she lifted the broom a few inches and pushed the door closed behind him.
    “ Who are you?” She didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t give any, just lay where he’d fallen—skin and muscles and dirt and blood.
    No, he shouldn’t be painted, she thought then. He was a completed work of art already—a human canvas painted with violence. Some people equated art with beauty. She knew, better than most, that wasn’t always true.
    His chest rose slightly.
    Oh . She didn’t know if she should be scared or