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Shane was convinced that Cutter would blow us to bits before we could even turn around, even at that range.

  Right there, underneath the setting sun and the blood-red sky, our enemy stared at us with a sinister smile.

  He said, “Shane, why don’t you step inside? Join us.”

  Without even hesitating, without even missing a beat, Shane’s legs moved and he walked toward the cone of light.

  “Leave your weapons,” Cutter ordered, as if to one of his own agents.

  Shane approached the menacing FBI agent and stopped at the door. Shane’s hand reached up to the strap on his knapsack. He moved it slightly, too fast for Cutter’s liking, so Agent Cutter stepped quickly out of the light of the doorway. In one quick move, he aimed the Persuader directly at Shane’s head.

  He calmly said, “Slowly.”

  Shane slowed his movements to minimal pace. The barrel of the shotgun wasn’t touching his face this time. Just knowing that it wasn’t far was intimidation enough.

  Shane closed his eyes. I recoiled to the farthest part of his brain. I knew that we were walking into a trap and I had made a serious error. I had made an error that I’d never made before. It was a simple mistake that was going to cost us our life.

  I had no plan.

  It was this frightening thought that made me realize that my fear of caring about Sun Good was coming true. Shane and I had been so blinded by rescuing her that our only plan was to come for her and hope for the best.

  Now I faced the deadliest opponent that I had ever known. On top of that he was armed with a Mossberg Shotgun.

  Shane’s only hope for survival was me. And I was paralyzed.

  |||||

  Shane walked first through the backdoor to his family manor. Cutter followed with the shotgun. Shane stopped cold just inside the kitchen. Then Cutter shoved him with the Persuader.

  “Move!” he commanded. His voice was stern and powerful. It was just the way that the FBI had trained it to sound.

  Shane stepped forward. He continued through the kitchen and into the hallway where he laid his eyes upon Sun Good. She was sprawled out on the floor. Her hands and feet were bound with duct tape. The silvery color shimmered just slightly in the dim hallway light.

  She looked up at Shane with bewilderment and then a sudden burst of hope. Her demeanor seemed panicked, which was expected. But there was also something else in her eyes.

  I peered through my portholes, which doubled as Shane’s eyes, and I studied her. It was in that moment that I saw the sheer terror that reflected in her eyes.

  Shane reached out to her. She began to try to retreat from him. She squirmed away from him like an injured worm trying to escape the clutches of a bird.

  My scales chilled and I felt an unfamiliar feeling. No. It was more than a feeling or a sensation. I felt a cold stinging.

  Sun Good was terrified of me. She’d seen the dark side of Shane.

  She’d seen me.

  I was actually ashamed. I had started to come over to Shane’s thinking on the subject of her. She was important to him. And in a way she was important to me.

  I couldn’t tell if she was injured.

  I began to reach out to her again, to help her up, but she rejected me. She had seen the snake that lived inside of Shane and was horrified.

  |||||

  “Why is she here, Kirk? You’ve unveiled yourself to a cop. No one is going to believe your story now. You should just let her go.”

  “Don’t worry. She won’t be judging you for much longer,” Cutter said. He paused for a moment.

  Then he said, “I used one of your tranquilizers on her.”

  Shane reached inside himself, grabbed me, and gripped tight. He was furious. He knew that Cutter planned on killing them both.

  When it came to himself, Shane wasn’t that worried, but he loved Sun Good. I hated to admit it, but the truth was that I’d ignored his true feelings. Shane had loved her for a long time. Now she was going to die and it was all my fault.

  “Say goodbye. Sun Good may never be coherent again,” Cutter said.

  Shane gazed back over his shoulder. It was a slow, cold act. The piercing blackness that leapt from his eyes toward Agent Cutter would have chilled a normal man to his core.

  Of course, Agent Cutter was no ordinary man.

  “So you are going to kill us? Then why this charade? Why not just do it?” Shane asked.

  “You want to know? You want to spoil it?

  “Then let me play out the scenario for you,” Cutter said.

  “I’ve seen your records, the court-sealed ones. I know about you. Terrance Graves couldn’t hide your past from me. I know who you really are. I know about your parents. I know about the demon that lives inside of you,” he said.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “You are no better than me. You killed people. You killed Townsend Dry. No jury. No judge. No trial. You are playing God,” Shane said.

  He turned to face Cutter. Shane’s hands were down by his sides. He turned the palms of his hands away from Cutter’s view. Very stealthily he motioned to Sun Good to move away.

  It was a slim chance, but Shane planned to distract Cutter as best he could. Maybe Sun Good could squirm into a closet or a nook somewhere and hide. Old manors like the one that Shane had been reared in were full of forgotten nooks and crannies.

  There were numerous hiding places everywhere. Maybe Sun Good would get lucky. Maybe she would get a fighting chance. But I doubted it.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this, Shane. You can join us.”

  Us? I thought.

  Kirk Cutter must have been speaking of the monster within himself. Shane never spoke like that. He was aware of me, but we didn’t communicate as friends. He was my vessel. It wasn’t a partnership.

  “Join us. Join me. Together we can hunt and kill. Look at how we can turn the system on its head. I catch the criminals and you defend them. I can use all of the FBI’s resources to hunt them down. You can take on their cases.

  “Together we can kill so many killers. Think about how precise we will be together.

  “You know that Gillard Shutter was the wrong man. He was never the StoneCutter. The guilt that you must feel over that. It would haunt me. But together we can be absolutely sure that we have the right man. We can kill together,” Cutter said. He moved closer and closer to Shane.

  Then he said, “Wolves hunt together. So should we. Join my pack.”

  The shotgun was steadfast in his hands. He never flinched. The muzzle stayed constantly pointed at Shane’s center mass.

  “Although your proposition sounds enticing, I have to point out two things that you are wrong about.

  “First, you imply that I kill men like you do, like it’s out of some sick, twisted sense of justice. And I can understand how you might see it like that, but I can assure you that it simply isn’t that way,” Shane said.

  I grew inside of him. My claws retracted like switchblades. The points were razor sharp. I dug them into Shane’s brain matter. Blood seeped from the marks that I left. I was taking full and complete control over him. I wasn’t sure what Cutter had planned, but we had to make our move. We had to get that Persuader away from him.

  “The second thing that you are mistaken about is that you inferred that I felt guilt over Gillard Shutter, the man that I killed because I thought he was the StoneCutter.

  “Kirk, let me tell you that I feel nothing for anyone.

  “You have spent your whole adult life studying and chasing after my kind. You should already know that the reason why I kill is because I am a serial killer.

  “I kill for the same reason as the lion roars, the shark migrates, and the sun sets. It is my nature,” I said.

  I paused.

  Then I said, “We do have one thing in common. We both have killed.”

  He was growing angry. He was growing emotional, distracted. This was the best chance that I was going to get. So I rushed him.

&nbs
p; I reached for the barrel of the Mossberg. With all of the speed, agility, and strength that I could muster, I swiped the gun barrel toward the left and away from Shane. Cutter was fast, as I’d expected.

  I managed to move Shane out of the line of fire. At that moment, Cutter fired the gun. The blast nearly knocked me off my feet.

  I used the propulsion to advance my body into a tackling move. It was a standard NFL tackle, the kind that sent wide receivers off their feet just before they reached up to catch the ball.

  Agent Cutter was built bigger than a wide receiver. He wasn’t thick enough to be on the line, but he was still a mountain of a man. I felt all of the muscles and bones in Shane’s right shoulder scream in pain as they drove into Cutter’s chest.

  A sharp impact pain shot through Shane’s neck. It had originated in his shoulder and fired through the tunnels of his nervous system and into his neck.

  It hurt like hell, and Shane was the most disciplined human that I knew when it came to his body. He was all lean muscle, but what Agent Cutter was carrying around was genetic muscle.

  On top of his awesome genetics, Kirk Cutter was also wearing a Kevlar Vest. So his body was protected. He had his muscle and the body armor.

  Luckily for me, Shane also wore body armor. He still had the Kevlar vest that he’d found in the trunk of the FBI car.

  The tackle that we had executed on Cutter sent him back a few paces. He didn’t tumble over, not like he should have. A normal man, hell even a regular NFL player, would have tipped completely over, off his feet.

  Not Cutter.

  He was too powerful. It was more like he slid backward on his feet from the force of my push.

  I was ready for the next move, but Shane’s body couldn’t recover fast enough. It was Cutter who delivered the next blow.

  He should have cocked the shotgun and fired again. Instead, he used the shotgun and came back down on Shane with the butt of the rifle. It cracked across Shane’s face. It landed just above his left eye. Blood seeped from the wound and leaked across his brow.

  It nearly blinded me.

  I planned on jumping up and grappling the gun away from Cutter, but before I could make such a move, before I could even blink the blood out of Shane’s left eye socket, Cutter cocked the shotgun’s slide all the way back.

  It emitted a loud sound. It was a terrifying sound, the kind of sound that was universally known.

  CRUNCH!

  The shotgun was now reloaded. The spent case from the last shell had ejected into the air.

  The split second before it even bounced off the ground, I knew that Shane and I were done.

  I looked back over my shoulder to check on Sun Good.

  First, I saw the damage that was done by the blast from the shotgun. The wall in the hallway was utterly destroyed. Wood had splintered. Glass from several old, hanging pictures had shattered.

  The frames themselves were nothing but dust.

  An old rug that lay near the baseboards was torn up. Some of it was even on fire. Small areas of flame had erupted from the blast.

  Then there was Sun Good. She had taken the opportunity to squirm away. But she hadn’t made it very far. The tranquilizer that Cutter had injected into her had taken affect. She was motionless, but breathing.

  I saw that the radius from the shotgun blast had missed her legs by just inches.

  Cutter stood up. His chest heaved as he recovered his breath from the exertion of our short fight.

  “Now let’s talk about…,” he said and then waited to take a couple of deep breaths before continuing,

  “What happens next? Thirty years ago, the StoneCutter killed your parents and tried to kill you.

  “Tonight, I am going to succeed where he failed. You will bury Sun Good alive and then you will meet your own demise.”

  “And if I refuse, Cutter?” I said, noticing that my breath was back. It seemed that Shane’s body could recover faster than Cutter’s. Perhaps Shane’s core strength made his endurance higher.

  “If you refuse, then I will blow her into bits right in front of you,” he said.

  He watched my eyes.

  “If you go along with it,” he continued. “If you bury her alive, I will give you a fighting chance. I will not shoot you. I will bury you alive. If you can manage to escape again, you can dig her up and possibly save her life. If you choose to fight me, I will simply shoot you both.”

  “That’s the same lie that the StoneCutter told his victims! Then he shot them.”

  Kirk Cutter smiled and said, “What choice do you have?”

  I could feel Shane’s inner self, his human side, his soul. He looked to me for a solution. He looked to me to consume him in darkness and save Sun Good. But even I couldn’t attempt to take on Cutter again. He had the advantage. He was the better killer.

  “Pick her up,” Cutter said. He pointed the shotgun at her and made a gesture with it.

  As Shane walked to her, I began receding into his background. My darkness seeped back into his pores, under his finger and toenails, and back through his eye sockets.

  Shane reached down and picked Sun Good up, and like a husband carrying his new bride across the threshold of their house, he carried her out of his.

  |||||

  Shane carried Sun Good across his backyard for several minutes. He weaved through the trees toward the west side of the property. He didn’t even ask Cutter for directions or instructions. He already knew where they were headed.

  Shane felt the sting of defeat inside and out. His muscles began to ache from carrying Sun Good. At this point her muscular, toned body was nothing more than dead weight. But somewhere inside her, beneath the muscle tissue and organs, rested a woman and a soul that Shane needed in his life. She had become his closest attachment to his humanity. And although I was a lizard, Shane’s stability was important to me.

  Shane walked on. He reached the plot where his parents were buried.

  There were a couple of headstones surrounded by an old, spiked fence. It was no more than knee height. The whole thing looked like something from a Tim Burton movie. It was old and gothic.

  There were two open graves.

  “Stop here,” Cutter commanded.

  Shane stopped at the edge of the graves and turned slightly. He peered down into the open graves and saw a human-sized trunk. He glanced at Sun Good. She drifted in and out of consciousness.

  Then Shane looked back at Cutter.

  “I know it’s not a coffin. I am not as talented as the StoneCutter. I can’t make a coffin. I wouldn’t have the first idea where to begin.

  “And I wasn’t going to purchase one. They are very expensive and traceable,” he said.

  Shane said nothing.

  Cutter held the shotgun one-handed and pointed at the open grave, the one with the trunk.

  Then he said, “Put her in.”

  With a very sudden feeling of despair, a feeling that Shane had never emitted before, he looked deeply into Sun Good’s face. Her eyes were shut tight. He stared at her like he was reading the headstones of his dead parents for the first time.

  Memories flashed across his mind.

  He remembered one time when he dated her that she had taken him out to the gun range. The range was crowded with cops, most of whom knew Shane’s reputation. Most of them loathed him.

  They hated that they worked hard on a high-profile case and then he came along and saved the bad guy.

  However, this never stopped Shane from having a good time.

  I watched his memories of Sun Good replay through his head. The one that dominated was her smiling and laughing.

  It was more than that. It was more than attraction. Shane loved her. Even a dark, reptilian creature like me could see that.

  And now he was going to bury her alive.

  “Please,” Shane muttered. The word slipped from his lips like a puff of air.

  “What? Speak up!” Cutter demanded.

  “Don’t make me do this,” Shane
begged. He turned to look at Cutter. A single tear slid from his eye and down his face.

  Cutter raised the shotgun. He leveled his aim straight at Shane’s face, and then he lowered it slowly, taunting us. He stopped the gun’s aim straight at Shane’s center mass, directly where Sun Good’s body was.

  One blast from the Mossberg 500 Persuader would completely rip her in half. It would tear through flesh and bone. It would tear through all of that and still rip through enough of Shane’s Kevlar to destroy most of his major organs.