I Hunt Killers Blood Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

sugar? You have a way with words, Jazz. Truly. Quite the fecund imagination.”
    “Is that an SAT word?”
    Howie shrugged. “Imagination? Nah.” He flashed a quick grin and — before Jazz could say anything — slid into the car, slammed the door, and gunned the engine.
    *****
    D AD WAS ASLEEP WHEN he got home, but Mom — of course — lay on the sofa in her robe and slippers, watching something on Lifetime, some movie about a woman done wrong by a man. That was the sum total of Lifetime, as best Howie could tell: Women done wrong by men.
    “How was the party?” she asked as casually as the constraints of Mom-dom allowed.
    “Great,” he said. And for once, he wasn’t sure if he was lying or not.
    “Did you drink? Because your liver—”
    “Mom. No. I’m not an idiot.” He’d never gotten a chance to sample Howie’s Reward, he realized. Either of them.
    She clicked off the TV and stood, yawning. “Wash all of that stuff off before you go to bed. I’m not buying new sheets just because you got makeup on them.”
    He watched her toddle sleepily off to bed, then ducked into the bathroom. Blood Boy stared back at him from the mirror.
    “First base isn’t bad,” he whispered to the mirror. “There’s always next year.”
    He climbed into the shower — careful not to bang his head against the curtain rod — and cranked up the hot water. In a cloud of steam, he luxuriated for a few minutes, just enjoying the sensation. Then he washed off the fake blood, watching it spiral as pink as Bobby’s kid sister’s bedroom down the drain.
    With the blood off, he scrubbed at the mottled bruise makeup, lifting it off his skin, revealing further, deeper mottling beneath, as though he’d never removed the makeup.
    Out of the shower, he gazed down at his ridiculously long body, then looked up in the mirror, twisting.
    An almost perfect circle of black-and-blue at the small of his back, where he’d jammed against the doorknob.
    A bruise under his ribs, where he’d been jabbed by some random guy.
    Another bruise, higher up on his back, where he’d been slapped with bonhomie by the human garbage bag.
    Another one along his ribs and one on his arm, from his flirting with Sexy Kid in the hallway.
    A big one on his foot, when someone had stepped on it. And along the side of his knee, from that damn samurai sword.
    His neck, a massive contusion bloom from the pressure of Sexy Kid’s insistent and glorious lips.
    His left hand, where Sexy Kid had squeezed it tight while following him up the stairs.
    His lips, from her own.
    His nose, as they banged together.
    Bobby’s kick to his ankle.
    He stared at the image in the mirror, at the horror show of burst blood vessels and subcutaneous bleeds all over his body.
    And then he grinned at his reflection and whispered, as though a secret, “Worth it.”

ABOUT THIS STORY

    This story, like the other I Hunt Killers prequels, grew out of a very natural process. When I started writing the books, I knew that the “present” of the story took place four years after the notorious Billy Dent had been arrested, tried, and convicted. Furthermore, I knew that Billy’s “career” stretched back twenty years, longer than his son had been alive.
    This meant that I had a lot of backstory in my head and in my notes as I wrote. Some of it leaked out in dribs and drabs over the course of the trilogy.
    Now, one thing authors have to drum into their heads early on is this: Backstory is not story! We have a tendency to fall in love with our backstories, which oftentimes leads to terminally dull prologues or extended, boring flashback sequences. It’s easy to forget that the audience cares about the story , not the backstory.
    But when it came to I Hunt Killers , there were bits and pieces of the backstory that I thought would be of interest to readers…as long as they didn’t interfere with the action in the story itself. How did Jazz get his nickname? How did Jazz and Connie fall in love,