Never Die Alone (A Bentz/Montoya Novel Book 8) by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

prowl in your garden, no damned monster in the closet.
    But she couldn’t shake the feeling. Ever.
    Since Arianna had died, Brianna had never felt truly safe, never truly whole.
    Swallowing back her fear, she noticed the gate to the garage was latched; the bolt on the inside was in place, locking it to the concrete. Good. Taking a few deep breaths, she felt a little calmer. “Come on inside,” she called to the cat, who blatantly ignored her and went about his nocturnal hunting. “Okay. Fine. Suit yourself. You’ve got five minutes. Hear me? Five.” She actually raised her hand and spread her fingers in the tabby’s direction, then told herself she was genuinely nuts for thinking the cat understood vocal commands or her gesture or the concept of time. Feeling foolish, she went back to bed and stared up at the ceiling. The door remained cracked, a stick propped to keep it open wide enough for the cat to slip through. As she lay staring up at the ceiling, she wondered about Tanisha’s dreams of separation and how they related to her own nightmare.
    “Just a coincidence,” she said aloud, and glanced at the picture she kept on her night table. Picking up the silver frame, she studied the snapshot taken nearly thirty years before of identical twin girls, toddlers in shorts and matching T-shirts. Their arms were flung around each other as they stood at the prow of a fishing boat, the sea and sky sparking behind them. Brianna traced her finger along the small face of her identical sibling and her heart cracked a little. Arianna had been gone for so long, and yet she still missed her intensely. Especially on nights like this.
    And though she was loath to admit it, Brianna did believe there was something to Tanisha’s feelings about disturbances in the twin universe. Hadn’t she, too, experienced the pain of separation? And to be honest, she had to admit that separation played a part in her dream, in which one twin’s bones had scattered away through the desert.
    She thought about the two skeletons she’d seen in her nightmare, how she’d known they belonged to the missing Reeves brothers. She had no idea how she knew that fact; she simply did.
    Worse yet, deep in her heart, she knew more. She knew that he was out there, and he had made another move. She squeezed her eyes shut against the knowledge that filled her with dread: the 21 Killer had struck yet again.
     
     
    Exhausted, Zoe swam with the current, faster and faster, trying to put as much space between her and the freak as she could. Chloe had escaped, she felt sure of that. So in the chilly water Zoe bolstered her own spirits by telling herself that her sister was okay. Now it was her turn to find safety.
    Any normal person would give up chase at this point, but Zoe couldn’t be certain how the freak would act. So she let the current carry her on farther downstream all the while trying not to think of the alligators that lived in these murky waters. It would be awful to have escaped the naked pervert only to become gator bait.
    Don’t go there.
    Don’t freak out.
    You’ve come this far, just keep going!
    When she considered her ordeal, she felt safer facing gators than him. To think that she and Chloe has actually been kidnapped and stripped naked and held by a madman for some bizarre birthday ritual . . . it was crazy. But they’d thwarted him. Well, at least for now. Since she and Chloe could identify the psycho, he would probably keep hunting them down.
    No, the ordeal was far from over.
    She’d never make it; not without rest. A cold-blooded chill pervaded her body and every muscle ached. She fantasized about a warm bath, her own bed. As she rounded a bend in the river, she spied lights in the distance. Hope glimmered in those lights—a town on the shores of the river. There, she hoped, she would find a Good Samaritan to call the police. She would tell the authorities what had happened to her, reconnect with Chloe, and hopefully end this madness.