Blood Moon Read online

  Blood Moon

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  (2013)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★★

  * * *

  ** ---- Book II in the Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI series ----**

  Twenty-five years have passed since a savage killer terrorized California, massacring three ordinary families before disappearing without a trace.

  The haunted child who was the only surviving victim of his rampage is now wanted by the FBI for brutal crimes of her own, and Special Agent Matthew Roarke is on an interstate manhunt for her, despite his conflicted sympathies for her history and motives.

  But when his search for her unearths evidence of new family slayings, the dangerous woman Roarke seeks - and wants - may be his only hope of preventing another bloodbath.

  -----

  *It is highly recommended that you read Book I of the series, Huntress Moon, first.*

  ### Review

  Book II in the Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI series

  ### About the Author

  **Alexandra Sokoloff **is the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Black Quill Award-nominated author of the supernatural thrillers *The Harrowing, The Price, The Unseen, Book of Shadows, The Shifters, *and *The Space Between*, and the new, Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI thriller series*.* The *New York Times Book Review* has called her a "daughter of Mary Shelley," and her books "Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre."

  As a screenwriter she has sold original horror and thriller scripts and adapted novels for numerous Hollywood studios. She has also written two non-fiction workbooks: *Screenwriting Tricks for Authors *and *Writing Love*, based on her internationally acclaimed workshops and blog (Screenwriting Tricks for Authors.).

  BLOOD MOON

  by

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  Copyright © 2013 by Alexandra Sokoloff

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Brandi Doane

  For more information about the author, please visit http://alexandrasokoloff.com

  Blood Moon

  Book II of the Huntress/FBI Thriller Series

  Twenty-five years have passed since a savage killer terrorized California, massacring three ordinary families before disappearing without a trace.

  The haunted child who was the only surviving victim of his rampage is now wanted by the FBI for brutal crimes of her own, and Special Agent Matthew Roarke is on an interstate manhunt for her, despite his conflicted sympathies for her history and motives.

  But when his search for her unearths evidence of new family slayings, the dangerous woman Roarke seeks – and wants - may be his only hope of preventing another bloodbath.

  Praise for the novels of Alexandra Sokoloff

  Huntress Moon

  A Thriller Award Nominee for Best E Book Original Novel

  A Suspense Magazine Pick for Best Thriller of 2012

  An Amazon Top Ten Bestseller

  “This interstate manhunt has plenty of thrills… keeps the drama taut and the pages flying.”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “The intensity of her main characters is equally matched by the strength of the multi-layered plot. The next installment cannot release soon enough for me.”

  - Suspense Magazine

  The Price

  “Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre.”

  – The New York Times Book Review

  “A heartbreakingly eerie page-turner.”

  – Library Journal

  “The Price is a gripping read full of questions about good, evil, and human nature… the devastating conclusion leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question to consider: ‘If everyone has a price, what’s yours?’”

  – Rue Morgue Magazine

  The Unseen

  “A creepy haunted house, reports of a 40-year-old poltergeist investigation, and a young researcher trying to rebuild her life take the “publish or perish” initiative for college professors to a terrifying new level in this spine-tingling story that has every indication of becoming a horror classic. Based on the famous Rhine ESP experiments at the Duke University parapsychology department that collapsed in the 1960s, this is a chillingly dark look into the unknown.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Sokoloff keeps her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators’ psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain.”

  – Publisher’s Weekly

  “Alexandra Sokoloff takes the horror genre to new heights.”

  – Charlotte Examiner

  “Alexandra Sokoloff’s talent brings readers into the dark and encompassing world of the unknown so completely, that readers will find it difficult to go to bed until the last page has been turned. Her novels bring human frailty and the desperate desire to survive together in poignant stories of personal struggle and human triumph. But the truly fascinating element of Sokoloff’s writing is her deep dig into the human psyche and the horrors that lie just beneath the surface of our carefully constructed facades.”

  – Fiction Examiner

  Book of Shadows

  “Compelling, frightening, and exceptionally well-written, Book of Shadows is destined to become another hit for acclaimed horror and suspense novelist Sokoloff. The incredibly tense plot and mysterious characters will keep readers up late at night, jumping at every sound, and turning the pages until they’ve devoured the book.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Sokoloff successfully melds a classic murder-mystery whodunit with supernatural occult overtones.”

  – Library Journal

  The Harrowing

  Bram Stoker and Anthony Award nominee for Best First Novel

  “Absolutely gripping… it is easy to imagine this as a film. Once started, you won’t want to stop reading.”

  – The London Times

  “Sokoloff’s debut novel is an eerie ghost story that captivates readers from page one. The author creates an element of suspense that builds until the chillingly believable conclusion.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Poltergeist meets The Breakfast Club as five college students tangle with an ancient evil presence. Plenty of sexual tension, quick pace and engaging plot.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  The Space Between

  “Filled with vivid images, mystery, and a strong sense of danger… Sokoloff interlaces psychological elements, quantum physics, and the idea of multiple dimensions and parallel universes into her story; this definitely adds someting different and original from other teen novels on the market today.”

  – Seattle Post Intelligencer

  “Alexandra Sokoloff has created an intricate tapestry, a dark Young Adult novel with threads of horror and science fiction that make it a true original. Loaded with graphic, vivid images that place the reader in the midst of the mystery and danger, The Space Between takes psychological elements, quantum physics and multiple dimensions with parallel universes and creates a storyline that has no equal. A must-read.”

  – Suspense Magazine

  Chapter One

  The dark concrete corridor stretched out before him, smelling of blood and semen and terror.

  Roarke had been here before, these stinking hellholes, cellblock rooms barely big enough for a mattress and bed stand. Twenty-five girls to a block, locked in the rooms and drugged to the gills, servicing twenty-five to forty men a day,
twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Not just ordinary johns tonight: it was a new shipment, private party for the traffickers themselves.

  He could hear the shallow breathing of the agents surrounding him, feel the warmth of bodies: four men before him, three in back, encased in camouflage body armor and hoisting riot shields, brandishing an entire armory. Somewhere down the hall there was sobbing, a young girl’s cries. “Mátame. Por favor, mátame.”

  Kill me. Please kill me.

  The number one man gestured the signal and the team shot forward in formation, then peeled off in a fluid dance, odd men to the right, even men to the left, kicking through doors, shouting: “FBI, drop your weapon! Face down on the floor!” Elsewhere in the corridor, shots blasting, more screaming, heavy thuds and the jangle of cuffs as men were wrestled to the floor.

  Roarke covered the agent ahead of him until the tiny room was secure, bad guy kissing concrete. Roarke looked once at the terrified teenage girl cowering naked on the filthy mattress, and said “Es terminado.” It’s over. Then he moved out the door, leading with his Glock, down the corridor, past doorways open to similar scenes of hell.

  He kicked open the next closed door and burst in—

  A man with his pants half off turned with an enormous, ugly AK 47. Roarke shot twice, straight into his center mass. The man’s chest opened, blooming red, and his body went down, jerking as if tasered.

  Roarke stood, his heart booming crazily in his chest.

  And then, though the trafficker was as dead as a person could get, Roarke followed procedure and turned the corpse over to cuff him.

  As he straightened he saw the girl, tiny and frozen, huddled on the floor against the mattress, her back pressed into the wall, her eyes wide and glazed with fear. This one twelve or thirteen years old at most, dressed in nothing but a cheap, stained camisole. Roarke felt a wave of primal anger he was able to suppress only by telling himself he must not frighten this child any further.

  “Estás seguro,” he told her in the softest voice he could muster through the adrenaline raging thorugh his bloodstream. You are safe. Although he wondered if any of the girls who walked out of this place, this night, would ever feel safe again.

  There was movement behind him and he twisted around… to see Special Agent Damien Epps in the doorway. Tall, dark, lithe, and righteously pissed.

  “All clear,” Epps reported. His whole body was tense. “Ten of the fucks in custody, three —”

  He paused as he glanced down at the dead man at Roarke’s feet. “Four dead.” And his face and body were suddenly tense in a different way. “Nice shooting,” he added.

  Roarke felt the jab. He had twelve years of Bureau service and before two weeks ago, he had never killed in the line of duty. The man at his feet was his third since then.

  He gave Epps a warning look, nodding at the girl huddled against the wall. He wanted to help her up, give her the shirt under his vest, but he figured she wouldn’t be wanting any man near her for a very, very long time. “Social Services?” he asked Epps quietly. They had social workers waiting in vans outside to take the rescued girls to hospitals and on to a shelter that specialized in support for trafficking victims.

  “On their way in,” Epps said.

  Roarke spoke directly to the girl. “Mujeres vienen. Usted se va a la casa.” Women are coming. You are going home.

  The girl didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge him. He stood for a moment, helpless, knowing he was not the one to help her. He moved to follow Epps out. And then he stopped, his eyes coming to rest on the bed stand.

  Just above the gouged surface of the table there was a small drawing on the wall. Roarke stepped closer… to look down at a figure scratched in the concrete, a crude skeleton wearing a flowery crown. Scraps of food and torn bits of lace were laid carefully in front of it.

  Epps was staring, too, stopped in the doorway. “What is it?”

  “An altar,” Roarke said. “To Santa Muerte.” Lady Death, Holy Death, protector of the lost.

  He looked at the girl, still and silent on the floor, with her old and wary eyes, and wondered if somehow her prayer had been answered and the saint had intervened.

  Social workers led the girls out of the former storage facility as dawn streaked the sky with orange over the desert. A good bust: thirteen traffickers arrested, twenty-five victims freed, hopefully before irreparable damage had been done.

  They called these prisons Residential Brothels. Many of them were race-specific; this one was an LRB, Latino Residential Brothel. The location was a former storage facility, horrifically appropriate, since the girls were no more than objects to the men who stole and then sold them. Girls nineteen, sixteen, fourteen, thirteen, sometimes even younger, were kidnapped or tricked into leaving the poverty of their native towns and coming to the U.S. expecting legitimate work. It was a thirty-three billion dollar a year industry, a rising tide of evil that no agency under the sun had the resources to control, rivaling drugs and arms trafficking for the most profitable enterprise in the world, because after all, you could only sell a drug or a gun once, but you could sell a girl to the walking vermin known as johns twenty-five times a night.

  As Roarke walked the empty corridors one last time, he felt more than emptiness surround him. It was more than the reeking, rancid smell. It felt like a darkness behind the doors, a concentration of malignance so outrageous it felt like a live thing.

  How anything resembling a human being could do that to another human being, let alone a child…

  He had to get out.

  The sun was scorching the desert, searing his eyes, as he stepped out of the facility to see agents loading the last perps and victims into vehicles. The bust would be processed and prepared for prosecution by the Los Angeles Bureau. It was their jurisdiction, not San Francisco’s. But since Roarke and Epps had made the initial bust leading into the trafficking ring, at a deserted concrete plant in the Mojave Desert, the two agents had come along for the takedown. Epps was coordinating with the Los Angeles Assistant SAC, meaning Roarke could leave, now. It was out of his hands. He ran his hands through his thick black hair, and rolled his neck to ease muscles still knotted with adrenaline. He felt relief, and emptiness.

  He’d checked every inch of the facility, but his other quarry, the mass killer Cara Lindstrom, was nowhere on the premises. And yet he felt her presence.

  Santa Muerte…

  It had been Cara who’d led them to this trafficking ring.

  She’d escaped from his custody at the concrete plant two weeks ago, and perhaps in some hidden part of his mind he had feared some trafficker had snatched her up. Her beauty would fetch any price in any number of countries. She would have killed others or herself before she’d let herself be taken, but she had been so badly wounded that night she may not have had the strength.

  Roarke dreamed her almost every night, and he always awoke feeling the curves of her body molded to his, as if she had seared into his own flesh that night that he had lifted her and carried her, wounded, across the sand past the bodies of men she had slain.

  Cara Lindstrom was in his dreams.

  Otherwise, he had no idea where she was, or if she was alive or dead.

  But she had killed thirteen men that he knew of, probably many, many more, including one of his own team. It was his job to arrest her, and he was very good at his job.

  He would find her, and he would bring her in.

  Chapter Two

  After not much sleep on his delayed plane, Roarke walked out of the Civic Center BART station into a gorgeous day. Fall in San Francisco was his favorite season, often warmer than summer. Views of the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island and Berkeley and Sausaulito were crystal clear and the brisk wind off the Bay was a tantalizing promise, but Roarke’s only feeling was unease.

  He strode on the bustling downtown streets, weaving through harried commuters and panhandling homeless and the pervasive smell of marijuana smoke on Market Street, up through the plaza betwee
n the Beaux-Arts façades of the Asian Art Museum and the main library. And he pretended he wasn’t expecting to see Cara Lindstrom at every intersection, standing across the street from him as she had done the day he’d first seen her, the day his hunt for her had begun. The day she had looked at him for one endless moment before his undercover agent exploded in blood on the street between them, mowed down by a commercial truck…

  He was spared further memory of that vision for the moment as the concrete and glass monolith of the Federal Building loomed up in front of him. Inside the lobby of blue-veined marble, he clipped on his plastic ID to bypass security and took the elevator. On the fifteenth floor he walked down gleaming halls with white walls decorated with framed sepia-toned newspaper accounts of famous busts and images of the history of the Bureau, toward the conference room the team had taken over for their manhunt. Manhunt being an ironic word for the investigation into Cara Lindstrom. There were no words for what she was, for what she had done, the Huntress.

  His team was already assembled, waiting for him: Antara Singh, a stunning Indian tech goddess and researcher; Epps, GQ handsome, towering and dark as midnight; and Ryan Jones, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, California-born-and-bred jock, a new agent whom Roarke would have to put into undercover now that Greer was gone. But that was for later.