Chapter One 

Eric Pliskin had an hour, more or less. Probably less.

That was what the vintage watch that hung loosely over his bony wrist should’ve told him. But the watch was one of those women’s models, and Eric struggled to make out the tiny face under the dim glow of the streetlight.

Not that seeing it would’ve helped. The hands hadn’t moved for two days.

Or something like that. He couldn’t be quite certain.

He hadn’t noticed when his mother’s old Casio knockoff, with its misspelled logo and tarnished band, stopped working. Sometime in the past week in the middle of his bender. That was the last time he’d been flush, a picture of Benjamin Franklin left in his cup by a generous shopper when he was panhandling in Station Square. In all his time on the street, he’d never received that much before.

But Eric didn’t even need a watch. His body was the best judge of time. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since his last hit. The state of his withdrawal told him that more clearly than any timepiece ever could.

Midnight was coming, and he was turning into a monster. A sober, tortured monster.

Hunger poked sharp fingers into his stomach. Exhaustion dug into his bones and filled his marrow with a deep, black misery. When he stepped into a puddle on the broken sidewalk—though no rain had fallen for days—rage made him kick the wall and shadow punch an army of invisible assassins.

They were coming for him. He knew they were. The man had sent them. They hated him and worked against him, destroying every plan he had to get clean. Or get his next hit.

Eric stopped and rested a filthy hand against the crumbling brickwork of a wall on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, muttering to himself. “Calm down, dude. It’s just the crystal talking shit, man. S’what it does. One hit. That’s all you need. You’ll be back to yourself again. Get yourself straight.”

This time, for sure.

He stuffed a hand into the pocket of his overcoat and fumbled around. Nothing there but dust and fuzz. No hidden foil stashed and forgotten. Not even a ten-dollar bill he could swap for a gram—just enough to see him through this roughest of times, when his back injury flared.

The damn injury had ruined everything. One time lifting without a back brace at work cost him his income, his health, and all his savings. All it gained him was a desperation to numb the pain.

He had nothing. And soon, he’d have even less.

Once those twenty-four hours passed, his cravings would grow to the point that only they mattered. The fatigue would deepen. The city would rise, then collapse on top of him like some great black spider ready to truss him up and bleed him dry.

That was what it wanted to do. That was all they wanted to do, all of them. They hated him, and he hated them right back.

He shivered and lowered his head. A flop of greasy hair dropped over his forehead.

The symptoms were as familiar as his own skin, his own heartbeat. Usually, after he’d scored a hit, he’d try to space out his stash to make it last. Three days, maybe four. If he was lucky, he might land enough to stretch a week, and then he wouldn’t start looking for another hit for days.

But last night, he’d been too generous. He’d shared his pile with Victoria and Screwdriver. That was a bad deal. Sure, Victoria had some decent weed, and Screwdriver was never far from a bottle of vodka, but his crystal was worth much more. They’d screwed him over for sure.

He thumped the wall again, sending a small shower of rust-colored dust to the sidewalk.

Li’l Goober would have some. He always did. But Li’l Goober never gave anything away without payment up front. And Eric didn’t have a dime. If he could just find some money, anything at all, he could stave off this darkness and start again.

A pair of headlights flashed at the end of the road. A car turned toward him.

Eric scratched his temple, avoiding the scabs that ran across his forehead and down his cheeks. He’d had a clear complexion once, but now something was always erupting, his skin as dry as paper. Picking at a growing sore, he watched the car approach.

This part of Pittsburgh didn’t get much traffic. The only vehicles that came down here in the middle of the night were dealers and cops. He had nothing to offer a dealer, and the cops had no reason to harass him.

Though that had never stopped them before.

He didn’t move. The car drew nearer, as black as the night. When the driver reached Eric, he stopped and rolled down the window.

“Hey, man, how you doing?”

Eric narrowed his eyes and looked across the driver at the empty passenger seat. The man’s face was hidden in shadow, but he was alone in the car. Undercover cops usually traveled in pairs. At least, that was what he’d heard.

“Okay.” He shrugged and waited for the driver to either say something or buzz off.

The driver rested a hand on top of the steering wheel. “Listen, buddy, want to make some money?”

Now they were talking. Of course Eric wanted to make money. But he’d been around too long to expect money to come for nothing. Or for nothing easy.

“How?”

“I just need a little help. Few hours’ work. Nothing major. Five hundred bucks. What do you say?”

Five hundred bucks!

The number rolled around Eric’s head like a rock in a barrel. Half a grand. The amount of crystal he could buy with that. He wouldn’t just be good for tonight. He’d be set for a month, be the king of the den. Sarah would do anything for him if he had five hundred bucks.

But no one gave away that kind of money for free.

He licked his lips, tried not to look desperate. “What do I have to do?”

“Nothing you haven’t done before, man. Just need you to take care of a little package for me.”

The driver dropped his hand from the steering wheel and grabbed his crotch.

Eric bit back his revulsion. The driver was right. Nothing he hadn’t done before. They’d all done it, though no one ever talked about it.

But few people had done this kind of shit for five hundred bucks. He was usually lucky to get a ten-spot.

“Yeah. Whatever, man.”

“Good for you. I’ll make it worth your while. Trust me. Just hop in the back, okay?”

Eric opened the back door and climbed inside. He didn’t bother with the seat belt, and the driver didn’t wait until the door was fully closed before hitting the gas. Eric fell against the backrest.

This wouldn’t take long. It never did. He’d close his eyes and imagine he was somewhere else. He looked out the window at the blurred darkness flying by. “Hey, where you taking me?”

“Not far. Little place I know where we won’t be disturbed.”

“No one’s coming here, dude.”

“It’s not far.”

Eric buried his hands in the pockets of his coat. The car didn’t look like much. It wasn’t a luxury model, but people who drove luxury cars didn’t ask for tricks from people like him. They had fancy escorts to hire and paid them thousands.

After less than ten minutes, the driver pulled off the road and parked in an alley. There were no lights, and the smell of rotting garbage leaked even through the closed windows.

It was always places like this.

Leaving the engine running, the driver climbed out of the car and opened the back door.

Eric shivered. He wanted this over already. He wanted that five hundred bucks in his pocket and this idiot on his way home. If he didn’t turn that cash into crystal soon, he wouldn’t be able to stop the chills. They always got to him.

The driver held open the door. “Come on. Let’s do this.”

Eric shuffled down the seat, lowering his head as he grabbed the edges of the door to ease himself out.

The driver stepped back and swung his arm. He held something long and thick, but before Eric could make out what it was, pain exploded across his skull.

His vision went fuzzy. The blast started somewhere on the crown of his head, sent a blinding white light into his eyes, and coursed down his body.

Eric toppled forward. His arms wouldn’t move. His legs had no control. As he fell out of the car, the ground came up to meet him.

Then nothing.

***

When Eric woke, his world was black. He lay on his side, his hands tied behind him. Though he was sure his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Something covered them. The ground rumbled and vibrated beneath his cheek, and his legs were bent and stiff.

His head throbbed with a sharp, brutal, stabbing pain.

This wasn’t withdrawal. Even meth wasn’t as cruel as this. He groaned and stretched his legs, but his feet rammed into something solid. He couldn’t move.

Something beeped in the darkness. A turn signal. He was in the car, in the trunk. That was what restricted his movements.

Eric whimpered.

Somewhere in his bones, his body still screamed for another fix, another jolt of crystal to set him right. But fear kept him alert. This was nuts. Stupid. There was very little Eric wouldn’t do for five hundred bucks. The driver had no reason to hit him like that and tie him up.

All he had to do was ask.

He’d better still get his money.

He ignored the internal voice that laughed at the thought.

The car stopped and reversed. The engine died. The lid of the trunk opened, and a small glow of light made its way through Eric’s blindfold.

A hand grabbed his arm.

“Out you come.”

That voice again.

“What are you doing? What…?”

Every attempt to move his mouth brought another burst of pain to Eric’s head.

The driver dragged him out of the car, and he stood, held upright only by the driver’s grip. His head ached and spun. Something dry and sticky clung to the side of his face. It had a metallic smell, and when he licked his lips, Eric recognized the familiar taste of dried blood.

A hand shoved him forward. He stumbled over a threshold, and a door slammed behind him.

At last, the blindfold was pulled off his face.

Eric blinked. The room was poorly lit. Spotlights threw an orange glow over everything—strange wooden tables, iron hoops, and something that looked like a bed without a mattress. A tall armoire stood at one end of the room, about six feet high. Its door hung open, revealing a set of metal spikes embedded in both the door and the back of the cupboard.

Now that he thought of it, there were a heck of a lot of spikes all over the place.

And is that a camera?

The driver—in a hoodie and a black scarf covering his face—dropped a hand onto Eric’s shoulder. “So which do you like?”

The question didn’t make sense. “W…what?”

“Which do you want? I’ve got the whole range of options here. All the pain you can imagine. What’s your poison?”

A chill passed through Eric. He wasn’t into pain. The opposite. He wanted to numb the pain. Always. This wasn’t him.

He tried to step back, to leave. The driver gripped harder, holding him in place.

“Hey, hey. I’m not doing this. This isn’t my thing, man. You can take your five hundred bucks, and you can…just give me two hundred for the trouble, okay?”

With a gravelly chuckle, the driver dragged him deeper into the room. Eric’s elbow brushed a nail-studded club. He shuddered.

“Okay, fifty. And I won’t tell anyone.”

The driver’s fingers dug into Eric’s thin flesh. His voice was a growl. “Choose. Now!”

“No, I—”

A blow sent Eric flying. His head smacked into the side of a table, and he dropped to the floor. The pain was electric, pulling him from his mental fog.

The driver grabbed Eric by the collar of his coat and hauled him to his feet.

“I said choose.”

Heart hammering in his throat, Eric examined the room. Each item looked worse than the one before it. There were screws over gaps just big enough for fingers, a large wooden wheel, a post with a hoop and another thick screw.

One of these things had to be less torturous than the rest. Maybe he could put up with a little pain, for a short time—take his money and run. Five hundred bucks. He just had to get through the next few minutes, the next half an hour.

He pointed at the thing that looked like a bed. It looked harmless enough. Bare slats. Rope attached to the corners, presumably for wrists and ankles. The boards were a little rough and splintery, but he’d slept on worse over the last few years. He could just lie there, thinking of all the things he could buy with five hundred bucks, while this creep got his jollies.

“That one.”

“The rack, huh?” The driver laughed, a sound that sent a chill down Eric’s spine. “Let’s see what my audience makes of that.”

Chapter Two

It had been a long, boring, and frustrating day. FBI Special Agent Journey Russo was at a crime scene, and she had nothing to do.

She stood in the hallway outside her apartment, forced to act as a victim and not as an investigator, since the crime scene was her own apartment. The entire building stank of smoke and burned plastic with the slightly sweet hint of something petroleum. Her door was open, though blocked with yellow caution tape. What had once been her living room was now a blackened mess of soot and charcoal.

The cabinet that had held her television was little more than charred doors and a half-collapsed frame, the television itself melted into a fallen heap. Half the sofa was a pile of springs and ash while the other half remained inexplicably untouched.

And all of it sodden from the liquid the firefighters used to extinguish the blaze.

Nothing through that door was what it had been when she’d left for dinner with her adopted sister Special Agent Michelle Timmer and her partner Special Agent Lucas Sullivan the previous evening.

Nothing would be the same again.

Michelle and Lucas, sporting a calf-height medical boot to support the ankle he’d injured when taking down their last suspect, were with her. Her sister put an arm around Journey’s shoulders and pulled her close.

The hug helped. But only marginally.

After the fire department had arrived, Journey and Dracula, her beloved black cat, had spent the night at Michelle’s apartment, though she’d gotten better sleep on a midday stake-out. Every time she’d closed her eyes, the sight of the fire roared back across her vision. Flames leaped up the walls. Black smoke rolled across the ceiling. Journey had sat up with a jolt.

There had been too many fires in her life.

Her parents and younger sister Elaine had died in a house fire. A cult called The Chosen had destroyed her family because they’d taken in friends who’d tried to leave the organization. Journey had only survived because she’d snuck out that night, returning to find the house ablaze.

A recent case had seen mental health patients burned to death in a series of murders intended to look like suicide.

And now her own apartment had gone up in smoke. The Chosen had done that too. Journey was sure, though she had no proof…yet.

She rubbed the back of Michelle’s hand with her thumb and peered through the open door.

Michelle pulled her back. “You don’t want to go in there. Let the investigators do their thing.”

Journey gave her a small nod. She didn’t want to go inside. This place was alien now. Strange, and nothing to do with her.

And contaminated.

Most of the wall in her small foyer was charred black. When Journey had returned from dinner last night and rescued her cat, that wall had been covered with words sprayed over the wallpaper.

THE CAT IS THE LAST THING YOU’LL SAVE.

She’d barely had time to read the message before Dracula jumped into her arms and they’d fled. Journey assumed that threat was about her, more than it was about the public she worked to keep safe.

She also knew the message wasn’t about Dracula. It was about Mittens, the cat she’d managed to save from the fire that killed her family. When she’d held Dracula, watching her apartment burn, she’d felt thirteen and helpless again.

When the time came, she would not be able to save herself. That was the message.

Ducking under the yellow police tape, a tall man in a white Tyvek suit—now begrimed with soot from the smoke-damaged scene—emerged from her apartment. The man’s hood was down, revealing an afro cut into a neat fade above small, round ears. A gold stud glinted in his left lobe, a quiet but determined middle finger to uniform rules.

Lucas hooked a thumb in the man’s direction. “This is Special Agent Dexter Rose. He’s the arson investigator with the ATF. Dexter, this is Special Agent Journey Russo and her sister, Special Agent Michelle Timmer.”

After pulling off a pair of nitrile gloves, Dexter took Journey’s hand. He had a firm grip and long, strong fingers that wrapped around her knuckles.

“Pleased to meet you. This place yours?” He lifted his chin toward Journey’s apartment.

She nodded. All that soot and charcoal and mess on the other side of the tape was hers. “If I’d known I was getting company, I’d have cleaned up.”

“Good you didn’t. Nothing’s been touched, right?”

Michelle answered for Journey. “This isn’t her first rodeo. Or even her first fire.”

Dexter eyed Journey, as though wondering what kind of person was followed so closely by flames. Journey doubted she’d like what he was thinking.

She forced a smile. “At least no one was hurt this time. Not even my cat.”

“That’s the most important thing.” If Dexter had a sense of humor, he wasn’t displaying it. His tone was flat, all business. “I’ve already documented the scene and spent most of the day collecting evidence. We’re almost done here.”

Journey took a deep breath. The idea of an investigator looking through her things and treating parts of her life as evidence made her a little nauseous. “Find anything?”

Dexter donned a fresh pair of gloves. They snapped over his big hands. “Not yet. But it’s still early.”

That was the answer Journey would’ve given. And the dissatisfaction she felt was the same she’d seen on the face of every victim every time she’d given it.

Dexter noticed. He softened. “Listen, I can tell you we’re probably looking at arson.”

He lifted the tape over his head and stepped inside. Journey didn’t follow him. She couldn’t enter the crime scene and had no desire to walk on the remains of her possessions. And yet, there was the fire investigator, more at home in a space that had once been hers than she now was. A deep sadness rippled through her, a loss turning into a vacuum.

Dexter pointed to a patch of bare wall above the electrical socket where a half-melted cable ran stiffly from the socket to a mess that had once been the television. “If the fire had started here, this wall would’ve been scorched. And you see these burn patterns?” He crouched in front of the remains of the cabinet.

What had once been white paint was now a strange collage of different shades of smoke.

“This mixture of heavy and light burns, the inverted cone shape? They’re all indicative of an accelerant.”

Lucas peered around the doorway. “You sure about that?”

Dexter grunted. He returned to the corridor and pulled a device out of the pocket of his suit. It was bright yellow, about the size of a radio, and had a small screen and a long metal rod protruding from the top. “You see this bad boy?”

Michelle removed her hand from Journey’s shoulder to pull the device toward her and eye it carefully. “VOC monitor. That’s the MiniRAE 3000, no?”

Dexter tilted his head, clearly impressed. “Huh. That’s right. How do you—?”

“She’s a forensic analyst.” Lucas drew closer to Michelle. “One of the best.”

“Okay, then. So yeah, this detects accelerants, and we got some positive results from under a few of the floorboards. You can probably smell it if you breathe deep enough.” Dexter held up a hand. “But I don’t recommend that.”

Lucas snorted a small laugh.

Dexter did not. “Someone burned your apartment down, Agent. I’m guessing you’ve built yourself a list of enemies in your time.”

Journey knew someone had burned down her apartment. She’d literally seen the writing on the wall and smelled the fuel in the air. And she knew who her enemies were. “I have a security system. Was there any—?”

Dexter shook his head. “Wires were all burned through. There’s nothing.”

Journey gave a short nod. She’d expected nothing else. The Chosen wasn’t dumb enough to leave their prints on a surface or their faces on a screen.

But something else bothered her, gnawing away at her stomach.

She pointed at the device in Dexter’s hand. “Tell me something. How long have those things been around?”

“PIDs?” He lifted the monitor. It looked so small and easy to use. “Three or four decades, but I couldn’t give you a date. They’ve gotten a lot better since the start, though. Had to carry the first ones around in suitcases. Why d’you ask?”

Journey didn’t answer, though she could see in Michelle’s curious gaze that her sister understood the reason for her question. The ATF arson investigator who’d looked into her family’s death should’ve been able to detect accelerant. His PID should’ve found it.

And yet, it hadn’t.

Journey had smelled the same smell that night. The odor had lingered in the air as she’d stood at the door and called for her mom and dad. It had gotten stronger as she’d rushed in to save Mittens. A test, a probe with that machine or one like it surely would’ve found gasoline on the floorboards and over the furniture, in the remains of the carpet, maybe even on the walls.

But the investigation had found nothing.

The ATF agent had reported nothing.

Dexter excused himself. He lifted the caution tape again and disappeared into the apartment. Michelle leaned in close to her. “You’re thinking about the fire that killed your family, aren’t you?”

Journey sighed. The words were in her head, but she didn’t want to release them. Didn’t want to make her suspicions real.

Lucas frowned. “Journey?”

“Why didn’t the arson investigator back then find anything?” The question was out there now, released into the world to do its harm. “I know that fire was arson. Aaron Harris confirmed it. And the fire marshal must’ve submitted the possibility of arson for the ATF agent to even come out there. But he didn’t report the same conclusion.”

“There could be a ton of reasons.” Lucas shot a glance at Michelle, like he was looking for her support. “Equipment wasn’t as sensitive then as it is now. Dexter just said that. Or the arson investigator might not have been competent.”

“Or he might’ve been paid off.” Journey looked back and forth between them, daring them to try and quell her suspicions. “Or maybe he was frightened off. The Chosen just murdered my parents and twelve-year-old sister. Not hard to show they mean business.”

Anger rose inside her like smoke, threatening to choke her. All these years, her family’s murder had been ignored, swept under the carpet. The fire should’ve been investigated properly. It had to be investigated.

“Their house smelled just like this. Fragrant, almost sweet smell of burned gasoline. I remember this exact odor. It’s called the Proust effect. Our olfactory system and the memory hub…they’re sitting right next to each other in our brains—”

“Journey.” Michelle rubbed her arm. “You can’t think about this now. I know you barely slept last night. You’re exhausted. All that matters right now is that you’re okay. You and Dracula. Your family’s fire has waited twenty years. It can wait a few more days.”

Lucas shifted so that he stood in front of Journey, blocking her view into the apartment. His face was full of concern. “She’s right. You need time to process all this. There’s probably a perfectly good reason the ATF agent—”

“I’m fine.” Journey yanked her arm out of Michelle’s grasp. She stomped away from her apartment and stopped by the elevator, ready to leave the remains of her burned-out home behind her. As she jabbed the down button, she turned back to her sister.

“I want to talk to that ATF agent. I want him to tell me why he didn’t report the case as arson.”

Michelle exhaled slowly. “Journey, that was…even if you could find him, this isn’t the time.”

Journey knew that usually her sister was right and suggested the logical thing, but whether it was the exhaustion or the shock or the build-up of twenty years of rage or her damn canine sense of smell, she didn’t stop.

“It’s never the time, is it? And there’s never going to be a time. The best time to find the bastards who killed my parents and sister was when it happened. Which means the second-best time is now. I’m going to—”

Lucas’s phone rang. Michelle’s pinged. As Michelle read her message, Lucas put his phone on speaker.

“Hey, Boss. I’m here with Journey and Michelle. What do you need?”

Not for the first time, the voice of SSA Victoria Keller, Journey and Lucas’s direct supervisor, echoed in Journey’s apartment building.

“We got a body. Local cops need an assist.” Keller hesitated. “Journey, you want to sit this one out? No shame in it, after what happened last night.”

Journey chewed the inside of her cheek. Sitting out a case meant leaving Lucas to handle it alone. Worse, it meant dealing with the ruins of her life.

“Fuck, no.”

“All right.” There was a chuckle in the SSA’s voice. “I’ll send you the address.”

Michelle waved her phone. “I’m on it too. See you there.”