Free Waking the Queen by Saranna DeWylde Page A

caught him because he was ready to be caught.
     Even after all of this, I am a good cop. I have a good reputation. I was the youngest to make detective in my squad. The FBI has invited me to consult on their serial murder task force. I am a shining star.
     And they all want to know how I hunt the hunters. What is it that lets me get into their heads and think as the aberrations think? I have no answer for them except to say it’s what I do. It’s what I was born for.
     I am a hunter of hunters.
     
     
     
     

C HAPTER ONE
     
      D ancing is much like killing.
     There is a certain grace to both, an art. Bodies moving, working in tandem toward a thing of beauty. An arch of a woman’s spine in a backless sequined dress bent over her gentleman’s arm in an elegant dip or the perfect arterial spray in bright red unfurling buds like a macabre spring shower.
     A gasp as his hand pulled her too close, or the knife slipped in too far. Anticipation a sweet, sparkling red wine—the perfect pairing to contrast with the dark chocolate bitterness of the end of all things. Or a complement to the sugary milk chocolate rush of mingled breath and a brushing of lips on heated skin.
     I was as good at dancing as I was killing, but dancing was not even my favorite part of the Policeman’s Ball. I loved to watch everyone else gliding around in their costumes of propriety. The way they shoveled themselves into suits and dresses that someone else said fit them best, but those cheap, rented tuxedos rub the most intimate of places raw and pantyhose are as binding as any chains.
     I liked to watch them because for this night alone, I wondered if maybe they had an idea what it was like to be me. Oh, the impulses they hide are nowhere near as dark as mine, but they have to hide who they are, what they are, beneath some fake, shriveled skin and mouth scripted lines they’d never normally say.
     But my enjoyment isn’t malicious. These are my brothers and sisters in arms and no matter what I am, or what I will become, I stand with them behind the blue wall.
     The chandeliers of the Westin Crown Center ballroom added to the masquerade, the soft tallow light like some glittery fairy godmother’s wand, painting a pretty shellac over the paper doll cutouts we’d made of ourselves.
     My partner and I both came stag, but we drifted toward each other—flotsam across a sea of people to stand together by the punch bowl. It’s what’s comfortable, what we’re used to. Humans are creatures of habit and in that, I am like them. I don’t have to hold my mask as tightly with Jason. Any otherness that might slip through the mask he’d see as the coping mechanism of a good cop.
     He laughed when he saw me, eyed my white Cinderella dress up and down like he would a dog with two heads. “Hey, gorgeous. Who are you and what have you done with my partner?”
     Not a very original line, but it got his point across. On the job, I’m more like Michelle Rodriguez in SWAT than I have ever been Cinderella, but again, the Policeman’s Ball is a chance to play dress up and I’m good at that, too.
     I smiled and gave him a little twirl like I used to do for my father when playing in the trunks of clothes he’d give me. But this dress had been made for me and me alone; there were no bloodstains, no stench of sweat and terror that could cling long after washing. Only my honeysuckle perfume and the cherry-almond finishing spray on my hair.
     “You look pretty good yourself, Grimes.” His tux was Armani. It’d been tailored to fit him perfectly. Jason had money, more than he could spend in this lifetime or the next—a family business in antiquities.
     I liked the way the light made his blond hair almost gold and flickered over his tan skin. His eyes were a deep blue and reminded me of the sky as it turned to dusk. For as pretty as he was and all the smoothness of youth in his skin, it was his eyes that were most pleasing. There were a few lines