The Soul Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

the road. The paint is a nondescript shade that used to be brown, I think. And there is nothing automatic about it. Not the windows, the locks, or the transmission. It’s three-on-the-tree, stiff clutch and all.
    I love my truck. I have sort of a twisted sense of pride in that truck.
    I cruised the lot, circling several times before I finally found a spot as far away from the pool as it could possibly be, between a Mercedes convertible and a bright yellow Hummer, the largest street-legal passenger vehicle known to man. Why a college student would have need for such a behemoth, I could not imagine.
    I had about six inches on either side after I parked. I squeezed myself out the door and scooted out from between the cars, grabbing my swim bag from the back of the truck.
    My breath hung in the air as I walked, and I could see steam rising from the surface of the outdoor pool in big, white, cloudy puffs. Normally I’d swim inside on a day as cold as today, but the indoor pool was only twenty-five yards long and I needed the full fifty meters of the outdoor pool. I wanted to put some distance between myself and the wall behind me before I hit another one.
    I changed clothes quickly. The locker rooms were chilly, but not nearly as bad as my house had been this morning. The pool, at eighty-two degrees, would feel positively balmy after the shower I’d just had. I shouldn’t have even taken that stupid shower. I should have just come straight to the pool. Even if I hadn’t decided to swim, I could have taken a hot shower here.
    Moron
, my brain said to me.
    Wearing my favorite tank suit with the peace sign on it, groovy purple goggles, and my swim cap—I always feel like a Q-Tip in that thing—I ran the distance between the locker roomand the pool. I threw my towel onto the starting block and dove into the middle lane, knifed cleanly into the water, holding a long streamline and taking my first stroke about a quarter of the way down the pool.
    The rhythm of swimming calms me, steadies my mind. I took long, slow strokes, getting used to the water, enjoying the way it felt on my skin, watching the billows of steam move around me as I looked to my right for each breath. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
    I had the pool to myself. No one else was foolish enough to be swimming in the outdoor pool at 7:45 in the morning when it was twenty-five degrees out. I let my mind go.
    Peter Terry’s reappearance confused me. I’d had one direct encounter with him a year before, a few distant glimpses, and lots of indirect warfare. He’d trashed my house and my life. At least I blamed it on him. I’d never quite figured out how much of it had been his doing.
    But I hadn’t seen hide nor hair—or scalp, I should say—since then. Not in a year. A year and a half, nearly.
    I’d started to wonder if I’d imagined him somehow.
    I thought of that thing in Hebrews. About being hospitable to strangers because you never knew when one might be an angel. It stood to reason, I figured, that demons wandered around like that too. In the flesh, so to speak. Posing as people.
    Interesting that the arrival of Peter Terry in a dream bothered me more than finding a bloody ax in my entryway. The ax was a problem, mind you. I wasn’t diminishing that disaster for one slim second. But that problem seemed more solvable to me. I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything except open my door and pick up the ax. And in spite of all I’d been through recently, I maintained an optimistic, if naive, view of the American justice system. I was certain I wouldn’t be held responsible for something I didn’t do.
    Peter Terry, on the other hand, was not a solvable problem.
    I hadn’t imagined the door slamming open, the burst of cold wind from a closed garage, the blown pilot light. I wasn’t positive about the footsteps, but I was as sure as I could be without a recording or something. Peter Terry was coming around again. And something important was