open his own flesh.
The blood that welled and fell was black like oil and it glistened in the low light. As it dropped off his hand and landed on the dirt at his feet, it was not absorbed into the earth.
It sat there and seemed to stare back at him.
* * *
Jo walked fast and kept her head down. She might have been raised in a WASPy household in Philly, but she was more than good with the New York self-protection code where you didn’t meet people you didn’t know in the eye, and thus made it clear that you were not interested in any trouble.
As she went along the street, she held her purse in front of herself and kept one hand in her windbreaker’s pocket with her nine against her palm. She was very aware of how many blocks were between her and her car. Not a smart move, but then the last thing she’d thought was going to happen was her doing an after-dark 5k that took her so far away from the damn thing.
The sound of high-heeled shoes coming at her was a surprise, and it was for that reason only that she flipped her eyes forward for a split second.
Well. Her chance of survival just went way up. If anyone saw that package, and had to choose between hitting it over the head and Jo? Easy choice. The gorgeous brunette was wearing some kind of fancy outfit with a brilliant pink ruffle around her tiny waist and ropes of necklaces bouncing on her perfect breasts. Her legs were as long as a city street and shapely as sculpture, and there was nothing apologetic or deflecting about her stride. She strutted like the model she had to be, and to hell with the risks associated with being a 120-pound female out alone after dark.
Then again, maybe she was hiding a whole lot of metal under that skirt—and not of the chastity belt variety, but the point-and-shoot kind.
As they closed in on each other, Jo risked a second glance, and decided that the strut was less model-like and more like ready-to-cut-a-bitch pissed.
Jo dropped her stare as they passed, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder.
Yup, the back was as good as the front, that long, mahogany-colored hair so thick, so bouncy, so healthy, it had to be a raft of extensions. Surely no one could have all those physical attributes going for them.
Shaking her head, Jo checked the street sign as she crossed another intersection and then cut over toward where she’d left her VW Golf. The wind came at her now, and it was hard to say exactly when the scent registered. But even with the goal of getting safely to her junker, her feet slowed… and stopped.
Copper. She was tasting copper in the back of her throat.
There was only one thing that did that, and there had to be a lot of it for the smell to be concentrated in this kind of stiff breeze.
Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see what was up ahead while she went for her cell phone. Looking behind herself, she couldn’t see the woman anymore, and there was no one else around.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was…
Even though her instincts were screaming at her to come back when the sun was up, she walked forward, the smell of blood getting thicker until she felt like she wasn’t so much breathing it in as drinking it. And then she caught sight of her car, about a hundred yards away—
The dripping stopped her.
Between each of her footfalls, she became aware of a soft plunk, plunk, plunk.
Don’t look, a small voice inside her said. Don’t… look—
Up on the first landing of a fire escape, there was a tangled knot the size of an armchair, and her first thought was Why the hell would someone put a piece of furniture up there?
And then she saw the origin of the dripping sound.
There was a steady stream of something dropping from the knot, and as she went over to the fire escape, light from an exterior fixture some distance away lined up with what was falling to the asphalt.
The stuff was red and translucent.
Stumbling back, Jo covered her mouth with her palm, but then she needed to throw out her arms for balance as her foot knocked into a soccer ball—
Not a soccer ball.
What rolled off to the side was a human head.
As it came to rest, the facial features were