The Dark Need by Stant Litore Page B

carpet, soaked in like dye. Expensive carpet, one that probably village girls had woven by hand in some distant place in hills whose names he didn’t know. Something that had taken a year to make, an hour to buy, a moment to destroy.
    Oh yes. He knew where the killer was.
    That cup of blood. He hadn’t been done with the body. Not yet.
    Matt didn’t bother to flick on the kitchen lights. By the faint starlight through the window, he made his way to the fridge, pulled it open. Took him only a second to find what he needed, then an opener from one of the kitchen drawers. Then he was back to the door, a cold beer in one hand, his ax in the other. He thought a moment, then set the ax aside, propped against the wall by the door. For this to work, he’d have to leave the ax behind. And he’d have to make damned sure he made it back—for both the ax and Adette. He got the keychain from his pocket, opened the beer.
    Smelled good.
    Focus, Cahill.
He looked out through the window again. Under one of those cedars within sight of the house, but only God knew which one. He took off his medical gloves andtucked them in a pocket. Swung open the door with his foot and staggered out—deliberately lurching a bit as he walked out into the crunch of the new-fallen snow. The bottle cold in his hand. His head down, watching his feet, as though placing one step ahead of the other took effort. In this snow, he would rely on his ears.
    I must be insane. This will never work.
    Didn’t have any better ideas, though.
    He swayed uneasily, step after step, toward the dark thickness of cedars. “Ah God,” he moaned. Slurring his words. “Too much. Too damn much. You sick bastard…”
    He stumbled to the left, caught himself. Took a good swig from the drink. Yelled toward the dark, snow-heavy conifers. “Come on out, you fucking coward! Come on out!”
    No answer from the cold trees.
    Very well. Showtime, then.
    He lurched slowly into the wood, every sense alert. He felt the heat and aliveness of his body, as high on adrenaline and other chemicals now as it had been when he slept with Adette. He took another drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Keeping up the pretense. The killer probably didn’t buy it.
    But he might still attack a pursuer who was stumbling unarmed through the trees.
    If there was one thing Matt had learned from the past months of hitchhiking and bloodshed and survival, and from his endless hunting of Mr. Dark, it was this: anything can be a weapon.
    He kept a tight grip on that beer. Peripheral glances, scanning the wood around him. The killer could come at him from any direction, and he couldn’t see in every direction at once.The snow beneath his feet was loud, the only sound in the night. Under the trees it was quite dark, a shadowscape of dim silhouettes. A chill went through him.
    He almost didn’t see the branch swinging at his head.
    Almost.
    He got his arm up just in time, blocked it, and in one smooth, sober movement, swung the beer bottle at Oslo’s head. The killer no longer wore Andy’s face, but another face, the one Matt had seen by chance across a traffic-choked street, a face not from his own past that must be the killer’s own. Blond hair, eyes blue like chips of ice, square jaw, absurdly handsome features. Scandinavian.
    Oslo snarled and ducked, the bottle catching him behind the ear, but only a glancing blow. He ducked back, and Matt followed, the bottle still clutched in one hand, intact. With his other, he caught hold of the branch. Oslo yanked on the branch and swung a left hook, and Matt dodged it, but his foot slid in the snow, and the bottle sprang away into the dark. Matt stumbled but came back up in a quick crouch.
    Oslo wasn’t there.
    Through the roar of his own breathing, his own blood in his ears, Matt heard footsteps in the snow, receding toward the lake. Damn it. The man was running.
    Matt surged to his feet. Took off after Oslo in a run, dodging low branches and half