The Dark Need by Stant Litore Page A

like driving on black ice. You can’t see it. Can’t know when you’ll lose control and slide and crash. But you know it’s there. Beneath you. Waiting.” She glanced up at him, and the look in her face tore at his heart. No wonder shehad made love so desperately in the barn. Anything to hold her mind back from that abyss of despair.
    “At first,” she said, “it was so much worse because it was new. I’d feel it, like a surge of… like a drug, a dark need overwhelming me. And I thought… I thought for sure I’d end up killing someone. That I’d just walk into the next apartment, kill someone, and drink. Just to make it stop. And I… I got so good at controlling it. For a while. But now it’s too much. It’s just too much. He’s killing so often now. And I’m sliding, sliding over the ice, Samaritan.” She closed her eyes. “Stop me. I don’t want to.” There were tears in her voice, but none escaped her eyelids. “I don’t want to.”
    “You won’t, Adette. Stay on your feet.” He gripped her shoulder. Anger, a slow burn in his chest. The evil he’d seen in so many faces—he’d seen how it destroyed not only lives but hearts and souls. Twisted once good people into devourers and carriers of rot. He couldn’t let that happen to her also.
    Matt needed information. He stepped away from her, took the medical bag, upended it. A clatter of objects onto the bed: a mirror, pens, two scalpels, a dog-eared Stephen King novel, a stethoscope, a Swiss Army knife, four credit cards under different names (none of them from recent victims), a pair of lace panties, a pair of socks. Matt turned these items over in his gloved fingers, shook his head. None of this was helpful. None of it told him where Oslo might be going. A map with destinations circled would have been useful and considerate of Oslo to leave behind, but no such luck. For a moment Matt peered inside the bag, wondering if he’d missed something. An inner pocket, or… no. Nothing. And no exotic desert artifact, either, whatever one of those looked like. But of course there wouldn’t be. If the artifact was empowering Oslo’s face-changing act, he probably kept it on him.
    If it even existed. He cast a doubting glance at Adette, then tossed the bag aside onto the Turkish rug and rubbed his temples. Think. He had to think. The killer could be anywhere by now. Hell, the killer could be anyone by now.
    Matt stopped, his eyes widening. No, not “anywhere.”
I know where you are, you bastard.
    He knew what he had to do.
    Matt glanced at Adette, then swept up the cuffs from the bed and grabbed her wrist. A snick of cold metal, and she was gazing in horror at her wrist shackled to one leg of the heavy bedside table.
    “What?” she cried.
    “Wait here.” He couldn’t trust her. Couldn’t risk her, either. He was the one who saw maggots in men’s faces. That made this his job. More than that, his purpose. If he was right, he wouldn’t need her help to find her brother, and he could return for her after he did. Matt grabbed his ax from the bed, a tool his grandfather had used to chop up nothing more evil than an especially resistant knot in a block of wood.
    “Unlock this! I’m coming with you!”
    “No, you’re not.” He didn’t look over his shoulder. “I will come back after this is done. I promise.”
    “Samaritan!” she screamed as he strode to the door and through it. He heard her kicking wildly at the floor, heard her shouting after him—“Samaritan! Matt! Matt!”—but he kept walking. Took the stairs two at a time. No more innocent deaths.

10
    Opening the back door a few inches, he gazed out at the wood. Watched the trees for a few moments. He didn’t see anything, but he was certain he was right. He turned and strode with purpose toward the kitchen.
    He doesn’t move after a kill,
she’d said.
He stays with the body.
    And that medical bag, the equipment, that cup of blood upstairs. Spilled now, dark on that Turkish