The Soul Hunter Read Free Page A

hands up.
    “Dylan. Come on, Sugar Pea. Settle down. It’s me.”
    “It’s you,” I repeated.
    “It’s me. Everything’s okay. Put the ax down, honey.” He spoke as though talking to a child. Or to a frightened pet.
    I dropped the ax, the handle slapping to the floor.
    I held out my arms. He stepped into them, holding me as I started to cry.
    He had the good sense not to say anything. He just let me leak tears all over his nicely pressed shirt. When I finally pulled away, he had a little spider of a mascara stain on his chest.
    “What happened, Dylan? Are you hurt?”
    “No, no. I’m not hurt. I don’t know why I got so scared.”
    He pulled back and looked at me, then passed his eyes around the hallway, taking in the scene. The scene of some vicarious carnage.
    “What happened?” he asked again.
    “Nothing. I don’t know.”
    “Whose blood is this? It’s not yours? I thought you were hurt.”
    “No, I’m not hurt. I don’t know whose blood it is.”
    “Well how did it get all over you?” He looked around at the blood-swiped walls, then back at me, reaching for my hands and turning them over, inspecting my sticky red palms.
    “Someone left this ax on my porch. I thought it was a present. From UPS.”
    “Dylan, you’re not making any sense.”
    “I heard something at the door. I thought maybe it was UPS or something. Bringing a birthday present, maybe. I opened the door and there was this ax. I picked it up before I knew it was—”
    “Bloody? Someone left a bloody ax on your front porch? Whose ax is it?”
    “I don’t go around taking inventory of other people’s gardening tools, David.”
    He held his hands up again. “Okay, okay. Sorry. I just meant…what did I mean?” He took a breath. “It’s not your ax, I take it.”
    “It could be mine, I guess. I don’t even know if I own an ax. Maybe someone took it out of my garage. Was the garage door open?”
    “No. It’s closed.”
    We both stood there for a minute, dumbstruck. That dumbness was contagious, it seemed.
    “Maybe it’s animal blood,” he offered. “Maybe someone killed a dog or something…”
    I recoiled.
    “…and left the ax as some sort of sick prank. To scare you.”
    “It worked.”
    “I can see that.” He looked around again.
    “What should we do?” I asked. “Call the police?”
    “Probably. This is not the sort of thing you don’t report.”
    “There’s hair on the blade,” I said.
    He squatted down and peered at the blade, careful not to touch it.
    “It looks like human hair to me,” he said. “A woman’s hair.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “It’s too long to be a dog’s. Or a man’s. Most men, anyway. And it’s too red. It looks dyed.”
    I knelt down beside him. It did look dyed. The roots were black.
    “Do you want me to call?” he said.
    “Please.”
    He turned and went to the kitchen.
    I heard him dial 911, wait a moment, and then start the conversation. “I have something a little odd to report…”
    I went to my bedroom and kicked the door shut behind me. Surely it would take the police a while to get here. This was the Dallas Police Department, after all. In a city of over a million people, they must have real, actual crimes in progress to take care of.
    I stepped into the bathroom and caught sight of myself in the mirror. My third ghastly encounter with a mirror that day.
    The wave of nausea returned, almost doubling me over. I retched into the sink, keeping my head down for a minute, letting the cold water run. I straightened back up and faced myself.
    I looked like I’d been assaulted. Violently. My face was drained of color, and my eye makeup was smudged into little black rivers on my cheeks. My hair was wrecked. Blood was smeared in little hieroglyphs all over me and all over my fluffy white robe. My hands were sticky, almost brown now as the blood dried.
    I peeled the robe off and let it drop onto the floor in a heap, vowing to myself that I would burn it at the first