Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl)

  PRAISE FOR CHRISTOPHER RICE

  Bone Music

  “A stellar and gripping opening to the Burning Girl series introduces the tough, smart Trina Pierce, aka Charlotte Rowe, who survived a childhood of murder and exploitation to discover there might be another way to fight back . . . Readers will be eager for the next installment in Rice’s science-fiction take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Bone Music is a taut and gripping thriller that’s as bleak and harsh as the Arizona desert. It never lets up until the final page. Rice has created a great character in Charlotte Rowe.”

  —Authorlink

  “A simply riveting cliff-hanger of a novel, Bone Music by Christopher Rice is one of those reads that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  A Density of Souls

  “An intriguing, complex story, a hard-nosed, lyrical, teenage take on Peyton Place.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A chillingly perverse tale in which secrets are buried, then unearthed . . . very earnest plot.”

  —USA Today

  “An imaginative, gothic tale.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Solid debut novel . . . an absorbing tale.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Tormented families . . . unspeakable secrets . . . a blood-thirsty young man. No, it’s not Anne Rice, but her 21-year-old son, Christopher.”

  —Village Voice

  “[Rice’s] characters speak and act with an ease that proves [him] to be wiser than his years.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “He’s learned . . . a storyteller’s sense of timing. And he capably brings a gay teen’s inner turmoil to life.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  The Vines

  “His best book yet.”

  —Geeks OUT

  “Does not disappoint and grabs you from the opening chapter straight to the end with plot twists that are dark and thrilling . . . The transitions between modern-day and French colonial slavery are exquisite and leave the reader intrigued throughout the narrative. Rice also creates a beautiful mythology infused with a thriller that gives you many shocks and oh-my-God moments in every chapter.”

  —BuzzFeed

  “As gothic as one could expect from the author (The Heavens Rise) and son of Anne Rice, this tale of evil vegetation that feeds on the blood of those seeking revenge for past wrongs is gruesome . . . there are dark thrills for horror fans.”

  —Library Journal

  The Heavens Rise

  “This is Rice’s best book to date, with evocative language, recurring themes, and rich storytelling that will raise the hairs on the back of the neck. It rivals the best of Stephen King at times and sets a standard for psychological horror.”

  —Louisville Courier-Journal

  “A masterful coming-of-age novel . . . Rice’s characters are complex and real, his dialogue pitch-perfect, and his writing intelligent and strong. He builds suspense beautifully . . . amid enduring philosophical questions about what it means to be human.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Christopher Rice never disappoints with his vivid people and places and masterful prose. He will hold you captive under his spell as his images and emotions become your own.”

  —Patricia Cornwell, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Christopher Rice is a magician. This brilliant, subtly destabilizing novel inhales wickedness and corruption and exhales delight and enchantment. Rice executes his turns, reversals, and surprises with the pace and timing of a master. The Heavens Rise would not let me stop reading it—that’s how compelling it is.”

  —Peter Straub, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Christopher Rice has written an amazing horror novel with more twists and turns than a mountain road. You’ll think you know your destination . . . but you’ll be wrong.”

  —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  OTHER TITLES BY CHRISTOPHER RICE

  THRILLERS

  Blood Echo: A Burning Girl Thriller

  Bone Music: A Burning Girl Thriller

  The Vines

  The Heavens Rise

  The Moonlit Earth

  Blind Fall

  Light Before Day

  The Snow Garden

  A Density of Souls

  ROMANCE

  The Flame: A Desire Exchange Novella

  The Surrender Gate: A Desire Exchange Novel

  Kiss The Flame: A Desire Exchange Novella

  Dance of Desire

  Desire & Ice: A MacKenzie Family Novella

  WITH ANNE RICE

  Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Christopher Rice.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542014724 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542014727 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542014717 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542014719 (paperback)

  Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design

  First Edition

  For my aunt, Karen O’Brien, who gave birth to Charlotte Rowe without realizing it

  CONTENTS

  I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  II

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  III

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  IV

  43

  44

  45

  46

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  1

  Dallas, Texas

  Whenever Cyrus Mattingly sees an automated ticket machine, he thinks of closed factories and good men thrown out of work, of winds whistling through the shuttered prairie towns of his youth, and he feels a combination of rage and despair so acute he usually ends up clenching his fists until the nubs of his filed fingernails make white indentations in his palms. He’s never considered himself a political man. His life affords him freedom from politics, along with many other things. But there’s no denying that the automation of the world ar
ound him and his country’s complete disregard for the places where he grew up go hand in hand. Throwing good men out of work circuit by circuit and swipe by swipe.

  He avoids swiping now. It’s one of Mother’s many rules.

  Cash only. Nothing traceable in the days leading up to a snatch. That includes his ticket to the 7:15 p.m. showing of Sister Trip.

  Another rule: wear clothes that hide the bulk of your figure. Nothing so ridiculous as a trench coat and sunglasses. More like light waffle-print coats and baggy hooded sweaters, even when it’s a touch too warm out to justify the outfit. The whole world’s got cameras now, she constantly reminds them, and your figure can give away as much about you as your face. And she’s right. Cameras and automated ticket machines and those QR code things you can read on your phones. It’s like humans are trying to get rid of everything that requires effort. And that’s a shame. He’s found great peace in his efforts. But he didn’t find it alone.

  Dressed in a button-front leather coat and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap, Cyrus walks through the entrance to the AMC NorthPark Center, leaving the cheerful buzz of the shopping mall behind him. The crowd’s thick, but it’s not quite what he’d hoped. The movie business is also changing. He’d read an article just the other day that said the type of film he’d been using for years now, the “chick flick,” they called it, was showing up in theaters less and less. These online companies, the streamers, they called them, were making them so women could just sit at home on their sofas and watch one right after the other. No driving to the theater, no parking. No running into a man like him.

  That was all well and good, he guessed, but it made it all that much harder for him to find new seedlings.

  Used to be he could hit a multiplex on any given weekend and there’d be at least three or four to choose from. Movies about wedding planners who finally find love. Movies about sisters finding ways to get along that also snag them new boyfriends. Movies where the majority of the audience was women, most of them alone, some in the company of reluctant husbands and boyfriends and, more recently, homo friends, who seemed just as interested in the movie as they were.

  But for the past three weeks there’s been only one film in wide release that fits the bill. He’d call it meaningless, but it’s so packed full of twisted, damaging messages about what it means to be a woman, he can’t dismiss it so easily. It’s called Sister Trip. The plot concerns three sisters who go on a road trip together. At every stop along the way, their inappropriate loudmouth behavior is rewarded with either new friends or degrading sex they pretend to enjoy. In the end, they finally make it to the lookout point where they’re supposed to throw their grandmother’s ashes off a cliff, but not before disrespecting almost every man they come across and pretty much disrupting the natural order of things everywhere they go.

  He’d much rather see a film in which all three sisters came across a man like him out in the dark, a man confident enough to break their spines. But while plenty of women attend those kinds of films, plenty of men do, too, so that’s a no go.

  A small popcorn and a soda, which he pays for in cash. Then he keeps his head down as he makes his way through the thicket of moviegoers in between him and his theater. It’s like the crowd’s moving in four different directions. Another second or two and he realizes that’s exactly the case; they’re all staring at their phones as they walk, most of them completely unaware of where they’re headed.

  When he arrives at the red velour seat he picked out when he bought the ticket, he sees it’s a nice-enough-size crowd inside the screening room. Better yet, it’s mostly female, and not too many in groups.

  It’s a stadium-style theater, with a few rows of seats at floor level and a raked seating area behind. He’s second row, close to the center. Not as close as he’d like to be, but that’s a casualty of paying cash and not being able to reserve the seat in advance with a credit card.

  He tries not to eavesdrop on the chatter all around him. He doesn’t want his judgment of anything he overhears to bias his selection.

  By now he’s familiar with the chain of trailers that precede the film—a superhero saves the world from blowing up, long-dead kings and queens in some foreign country have stupid fights in expensive costumes, something with aliens but he’s not really sure because it’s really just a teaser, but in that one it looks like the world actually does blow up.

  So many damn people in Hollywood want to blow up the world.

  Frustrated souls they are. They need a way to channel and focus all that rage so they can survive in the world without twisting it to their own ways. The world has enough dark corridors for men like him to slip into and feed their impulses before returning to daylit roadways, focused and purged. You just need someone like Mother to show you the way.

  Once the lights inside the theater go completely dark and the studio’s familiar logo fills the screen, Cyrus takes out his phone, turns up the brightness all the way, and begins swiping through a random assortment of web pages on his phone. Right away he feels the ripple of tension go through the women on all sides of him, and it sets off a warm churning in his gut. They shift in their seats; a few of them mutter curses under their breath.

  He’s willing to bet all of them are debating whether to say something to him about his rudeness.

  And that’s good.

  Because the one who does won’t have much longer to live.

  2

  Lebanon, Kansas

  Lightning strikes so close to the end of the airstrip, Cole Graydon’s security director makes a sound like he’s been kneed in the gut.

  The blinking wing lights of the Gulfstream they watched descend out of the stormy sky have vanished, Cole’s sure of it. Heart hammering, he waits for a plume of orange on the horizon, proof that he was wrong to ignore his security director’s earlier warnings.

  Look, I know Noah Turlington could use several pieces of humble pie, but think twice before you send him hurtling headfirst through a tornado.

  Cole had pretended to indulge Scott Durham’s concerns by leaving the decision whether to land in the hands of the Gulfstream’s pilot. But secretly he’d been savoring the image of Noah—beautiful, strong, brilliant, ice-water-in-his-veins Noah, the man who’s caused him so much grief for so many years—gripping armrests while trying not to hurl.

  There’ve been several breaks in the rain since Cole and Scott stepped from the Suburban and took shelter under the overhang next to the airstrip. The wind, however, hasn’t let up once. Every now and then it drives residual droplets from the overhang’s roof into their faces with stinging force.

  Cole spots the plane again, wings canted, fighting crosswinds.

  It’s too close to the ground now to recover if wind shear drives it into the earth like an angry god’s fist. That’s when he realizes how right Scott is—Noah is incredibly valuable, maybe as valuable an investment as Charlotte Rowe, the test subject his more iron-hearted business partners still call Bluebird. Project Bluebird is the name for their collective effort to harness the powers Noah’s drug unleashes in Charlotte’s blood. Still, he’s worried his business partners have come to view her as more of a lab rat than a person. Noah’s drug might be Cole’s passport to changing the world, but changing the world becomes more of a challenge in those moments when it seems like he might have to tear Charlotte’s life apart to do it. Maybe it’s time he extended the same courtesy to Noah, despite their tortured history.

  Cole reminds himself that all of Noah’s work at the island this past year has been logged, monitored, and backed up and backed up again. His days of conducting rogue scientific experiments on unsuspecting private citizens like Charlotte Rowe are long over. So if the plane does go down, it won’t be a total loss.

  The truth is, when you operate at the level of Graydon Pharmaceuticals, there’s no such thing as a total loss.

  A few minutes later, Noah’s the first person to step off the parked jet.

  A blush in his cheeks, he descends the
staircase with steady steps, ignoring the handrail. There’s no vomit on his windbreaker, either. The security team filing out behind him is another story. The two guys in the lead grip the staircase rails like they’re battling throbbing hangovers, and Cole figures the only reason Noah was able to slip ahead of them is because the terrifying landing has left the men’s stomachs in their throats.

  Cole’s been watching Noah’s confident approach so closely he jumps at the sudden whump of Scott opening an umbrella over their heads. Head bowed to hide his embarrassment, Cole starts forward, Scott accompanying him with his customary Secret Service–style attentiveness.

  “Well, I knew you wouldn’t pull me from the lab for something that wasn’t important,” Noah says. “I just don’t know what could be so important in South Dakota.”

  “Nothing,” Cole tells him. “You’re not in South Dakota.”

  “Nebraska, then.”

  “Why would you be under the impression that you know where you are?” He directs the question at Noah’s security team, but the recovering men don’t even flinch at their employer’s suggestion they told Noah more than they were supposed to.

  “I’ve got a great sense of direction.”

  “With blacked-out windows, even?”

  “I’ve got a compass in my head.”

  “Uh-huh. Welcome to Kansas.”

  “It was the storm, then. We were doing more up and down than forward, I guess. Threw me off a bit. How are you, Cole? It’s good to see you in person for a change.”

  In their recent past, Noah would have kicked off this type of unexpected meeting with some crude reference to their sexual history designed to embarrass Cole in front of his men. But now that he’s back in his labs at Cole’s expense, he’s been all charm. It’s like he’s baiting Cole into being the dark shadow in the perpetual sunny day in which he now lives.

  “Did you get some sleep like I asked?”

  “Some, yes,” Noah answers. “I’d like to shower and change if that’s OK.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, we’re going to be up for a while, I take it.”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  “More storm chasing?”

  “You’re grounded for now, and the storm’s only supposed to last another few hours.”