Cold Cold Heart by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page B

from the unrecognizable face to her mother’s worried reflection peering over its shoulder. But her mother was standing behind
her
with her hands on Dana’s shoulders. It didn’t make any sense. How could she be behind two people at once?
    Slowly Dana had reached up and touched her mother’s hand, felt the brush of fingers over fingers, skin on skin. She stared at the mirror, watching the image in the mirror mimic her movements exactly. Just as slowly, she lifted her hand away from her shoulder and reached toward the mirror. The monster in the mirror reached out toward her. Her fingertips touched the cold glass and the fingertips of the image at the same time.
    Panic grasped her by the throat as realization dawned. She was looking at herself. The horror-movie image in the mirror was her own reflection. And she began to scream and scream and scream.
    She didn’t scream now as she stared at herself in the glass. She just stood there stiffly, staring as water dripped from the ends of her boy-short blond hair. This was what she looked like now. Just as her friends had been unable to recognize the personality that now occupied her brain, she was still unable to recognize the face that now masked the front of that brain.
    The doctors, the nurses, the friends, the family—all told her not to be too upset, that there was still much healing to be done, that theplastic surgeons still had work to do. She would be as good as new, eventually, they told her. They said it so frequently and so emphatically, Dana knew it had to be a lie. The truth was never that hard to sell.
    She reached out and swiped the gathering fog off the mirror with her hand, clearing a swatch of harsh reality.
    Her right orbital had been shattered, and the cheekbone along with it. An implant had restored the cheek in order to give a foundation for the damaged eye area, but the eye drooped slightly, nevertheless, pulling from the brow bone down, making it look like that part of her face might have started to melt from the inside out. A madman’s knife had carved a curved outline around the apple of her left cheek, gouging deep below the cheekbone, slicing flesh and muscle. A marionette line hooked downward from the right corner of her mouth.
    Picasso couldn’t have done a better job of distorting the female countenance.
    Masterpiece.
A voice whispered the word through her mind every time she stared at this reflection.
Masterpiece.
And every time she heard it, a fist of fear squeezed her heart.
    She swiped a hand across the mirror again, wiping too low to again reveal the reflection of her face. Instead, in the spotlighted area of glass, framed by obscuring fog, was what she had come to call the Mark of the Devil. No matter how many times she looked at it, her heart’s immediate reaction was always one big thump.
    The number 9 had been carved in the center of her chest, from the base of her collarbone to the midpoint between her breasts. The number had a quality as sinister as the dark voice that drifted through her mind. Coiled like a snake at the top, the number’s tail appeared to flick and twitch when she moved.
    It must have looked shocking when she had been brought to the emergency room, a garish open wound, dripping blood. From a distance it had probably looked as if it had been hastily painted on her pale, delicate skin by a messy graffiti artist. Healed, the scar wasraised and deep red and weirdly smooth to the touch. She touched it now, traced it with her fingertips.
    Masterpiece.
    She should have been dead. She should have been the ninth victim of a serial killer. But she had survived.
    Why? For what?
    To start her life all over again as someone she didn’t know.
    The mirror had fogged over again, and Dana realized the air in the bathroom had become a suffocating cloud of moisture. Water pooled around her feet. She looked down, confused, then turned toward the shower stall. She had left the water running. Suddenly