Free Pretty Little Dead Girls by Mercedes M. Yardley Page A

waiting, and the almost unbearable pleasure of hearing his victim gasp and fight, and eventually the consuming silence that occurs afterward. That silence, untouched by breath, unstained by the constant beat, beat, beating of a heart hidden under clothes and skin and ribs and tissue.
    Oh. There is nothing quite like it on this earth.
    It is time. It is time.
    The murderer scooped the star necklace into his pocket, ran a comb through his dark hair, and set out into the fine, fine evening.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
    Eddie on Edge
    Eddie didn’t sleep that night.
    This was for many reasons.
    One, he was extremely nervous about playing at the station in the morning. Had he chosen the right songs? Would Bryony be moved by the one he had written especially for her, the one teased from Jasmine the Guitar on that fine, moon-magic evening? He had never played it for her before, and he could imagine her eyes growing starry and luminous with her joy, and hoped she would be bouncing eagerly from foot to foot, impatient to hug him, impatient to cover the bottom half of his face with kisses, ready to slip her anxious hand into his as she stood stalwart beside him. There would be interviews and maybe even autographs, and they would network and make small talk and schmooze, and do all of those necessary, yet sometimes delightful, things of making and selling music.
    This was, quite honestly, enough to make him nervous on its own, but something else had Eddie on edge.
    It was the feeling of dying, the feeling of: “Oh no, how can I possibly do this again?” that coursed through his veins like love or venom, from time to time. Bryony’s siren call for death meant monsters would come, and that’s how it would end for her, and he knew it. He felt that perhaps he could withstand a tragic Accident, whether it was a car or fire or a confused-yet-angry bear from the woods. He would stand resolutely by her casket, managing not to shed a tear, as though he had turned to stone inside.
    “I’m so sorry that Bryony fell off of the hiking trail and landed in a den of rattlesnakes,” somebody would whisper, an old woman, maybe, and she would hug Eddie fiercely, leaving grandma perfume and outdated lipstick on his fine white lapel.
    “It is all right,” he would answer tersely, although ever polite. “These things happen, you know, and it isn’t anybody’s fault. It was a terrible, terrible Accident.”
    And that is how he would comfort himself. If she was eaten by sharks or hit by a meteor, of course he would go through the “If only I hadn’t said: ‘Yes, Bryony, I do believe you are correct, and today is the day you learn how to hang-glide!’ Then surely she would be alive.” phase. It would be almost inhuman not to. But at the end, as he curled up with his memories of her, he would be forced to admit he is not a god, and doesn’t have power over the universe. If something so unusual were to happen to her, then who is he to stop it? He can’t see the future. He can’t alter the cosmos. Will that lessen the pain? No, not really, but at least it would be a fluke of the universe, and not something more sinister.
    Of course our Eddie is tormented by thoughts of Rita, and the pictures of her body the police shoved in front of him. The things that were done, the liberties that were taken, made him furious, they turned him into the kind of man he never planned to be. A man who hated, a man who hunted something and somebody to better hate.
    It’s the intent of the thing that really got him.
    That a monster sought out a person to hurt. He lay in wait for somebody full of vibrancy and life, and then perversely enjoyed bleeding it out . . . Well, that wasn’t right. It was downright wrong . And although Eddie was the kind of guy to let people choose their own idea of right and wrong, according to what suited them, he was unafraid to stand up and publicly declare that, hey, killing people was wrong , and torture was wrong , and pulling the living