I wasn’t sure, but as Priest turned to set up a trunk as a target closer for me to practice on and I watched his cool, efficient movements, I wondered if that wasn’t the most romantic thing anyone had ever said.
Bea
Eleven days, eleven body parts.
As if the arm wasn’t enough.
The killer placed them everywhere I couldn’t avoid going.
One day, at the mouth of the driveway to Zeus and Loulou’s house (sending Zeus and Priest into twin fits of rage, one hot with it, one cold).
The next, delivered to my lecture hall during my abnormal psychology class by a student who claimed someone paid him fifty bucks to get the gift-wrapped package to me.
One on the porch of my house, one at the library while I studied, another to the Entrance PD station while I was giving my statement to the police there, another to the parking lot of the Van PD station when I was there to give a separate telling of the events.
Body parts everywhere.
I didn’t open the packages anymore, but the cops asked me to identify the body parts through pictures when they interviewed me after each delivery. They tapped my phone, sent cops on routine routes by the Garro’s house, and informed the university of the situation.
Everywhere, people watched me, hoping to catch the killer.
In ten days, they’d come no closer.
Officer Hutchinson, a friend of The Fallen and one of the senior cops in Entrance, had told Zeus a profiler claimed the killer was most likely a middle-aged man who suffered socially, specifically with women, so he took out his aggression and repressed sexual desires on his female victims.
I’d researched murderers and psychopaths long enough in my studies and in my free time to know that the profiling was a template, one they applied to almost every serial killer before they garnered more details.
The police presence in my life did not make me feel safer.
Priest did.
True to his word, he haunted me.
Loulou didn’t like it, but Priest acted as if she didn’t exist. Where I went, he went, stalking me like it was his profession.
I knew he technically worked at Hephaestus Auto, that his exacting hands made him one of the best mechanics at the shop, but for the last ten days, he was with me nearly every moment save Sunday at First Light Church. We didn’t discuss it, but Priest made sure another brother was available for church duty. I knew there was something there, something sinister in his memory and its connection to religion, but I didn’t press. I wasn’t stupid. He was entertaining the idea of more with me only tenuously and there was no way I’d threaten it by asking invasive questions, by peeling back old scars.
It amused me to see how my university friends and peers responded to the long, red-haired man with tattoos of death motifs stamped all over his freckled flesh. Those who had the balls to look at him for longer than a second were met with those cold, pale eyes, unblinking and untranslatable. He always sat by the door to the classroom, thick thighs spread too wide in the little seat, large hands too big for the little desk attached to the right side of each chair. He whittled when he was bored, and the one professor who made a stink about it was subjected to his scathing glare. I’d had to share the note from the police allowing him in class with me in order to get her to let him stay.
Psychopaths, Professor Wells reminded me quietly after reading the note and handing it back, were chameleons mimicking our own emotions back at us. They understood feeling only in abstract, not in personal identification. Whatever trust I might have placed in this man, she urged me to reconsider.
I smiled at her, patted her hand in thanks, and flipped my curled ponytail over my shoulder as I’d practically skipped back to my seat. It was nice to know my armchair psychologist diagnosis of Priest as a psychopath was confirmed by a professional.
And when the professor looked at Priest?
He used the blade of the small dagger he whittled with to clean under his fingernails then winked––winked––at her.
I couldn’t stop the giggle in my throat, though I did hide it behind my hand.
It was a weird time.
I was scared and uneasy, constantly vigilant about my surroundings, carving out time every day to practice defending myself with Priest. I hadn’t slept in my own home or been surrounded by my things for almost two weeks. Sampson was staying with King and Cressida, and I went by every day to feed Delilah.
But I had Priest.
Finally.
If one can even claim possession of a man like Priest.
At times, he looked at me as if through me, as if I didn’t exist. At first, it hurt me to see that because I could feel the lurch of my heart every time I looked at him. But then I studied closer and noticed he only ignored me when he was focused on a task, when he was assuring we were safe.