Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Read online

  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 something 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

  Books By Alexandra Sokoloff

  The Huntress/FBI Thrillers

  Huntress Moon: Book I

  Blood Moon: Book II

  Cold Moon: Book III

  The Haunted Thrillers

  The Harrowing

  The Price

  The Unseen

  Book of Shadows

  The Space Between

  Paranormal

  D-Girl on Doomsday (from Apocalypse: Year Zero)

  The Shifters (from The Keepers trilogy)

  Keeper of the Shadows (from The Keepers: L.A.)

  Nonfiction

  Screenwriting Tricks for Authors

  Writing Love: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors II

  Short Fiction

  The Edge of Seventeen (in Rage Against the Night)

  In Atlantis (in Love is Murder)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Alexandra Sokoloff

  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: 9781477821626

  ISBN-10: 1477821627

  Cover design by inkd

  This book is dedicated to Children of the Night, MISSEY, and all the organizations that are tirelessly working to stop the trafficking of women and children and helping the exploited to new lives.

  “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” —Emma Lazarus

  Contents

  Prologue

  DAY ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  DAY TWO

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  DAY THREE

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  DAY FOUR

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  DAY FIVE

  Chapter 30


  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  DAY SIX

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  DAY SEVEN

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  DAY EIGHT

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  DAY NINE

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  DAY TEN

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  JANUARY

  Chapter 74

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The moon is high, spilling icy light through the pine branches.

  Roarke is in the forest again, in the clearing outside the dark house. His breathing is labored . . . his heart pounding out of control. And the night is alive . . . with a presence other than his own.

  He reaches into his jacket for the Glock—but his shoulder holster is empty.

  He stares into the night and scans what there is of the yard: dead rosebushes in a rock garden, the wooden trash enclosure, the empty spaces beneath trees, the swing set off to the side of the house . . .

  One of the swings is swaying.

  The wind? Or did someone touch it? Someone . . .

  “FBI!” he shouts into the night. “Drop your weapon and come out with your hands on top of your head!”

  The darkness swallows his words.

  He hears a whuuff . . . the deep snuffle of a horse . . . but he knows with a sudden gut-twisting certainty that it is not a horse that has made the sound. He spins toward the trees. An eerie, high-pitched giggling comes from the bushes. He shouts toward the sound, “Come out now or I’ll shoot.”

  He eases sideways, looking for a better vantage point between tree trunks, but the snaking mist and the dead underbrush obscure his view. He tenses at a rustle . . . stares through the dark . . .

  There is a sudden, animal-like snuffling, then a scrabbling that is nothing like human. He twists toward it, sees flying hair, wild eyes rolling back like a horse’s in the night, and a shadow. Bigger than he is. Bigger than a man.

  Not a man. A monster.

  Talons slash across his chest. Pain explodes in his rib cage, and he is falling, hitting the ground.

  The beast is on him, a dead, stinking, intolerable weight. The horse smell surrounds him as his own blood gushes from the deep scratch of claws; he feels it, hot and thick and pumping from his chest. He chokes through blood, the copper stink of it in his nostrils and throat. Above him, jagged teeth in crocodile jaws yawn open—

  There is a thunderous boom . . .

  And the monster disappears. The weight disappears. There is no blood, no pain, only Roarke’s own gasping breath.

  And now he sees her, standing over him, a lithe shadow against the light of the moon.

  Cara.

  She moves forward, and the light glints off her pale gold hair, and her eyes are locked on his as she raises the gun—

  Roarke sat straight up in the dark, knowing he had shouted aloud. Panic surged through his veins. For a moment he saw trees looming above him in the icy moonlight . . .

  Then he focused and recognized his own bedroom around him, the night lights of the San Francisco skyline outside the triple windows.

  He lay back and inhaled slowly as the adrenaline buzzed through his body. His heart was pounding out of control.

  Dream. Just a dream. The Reaper is dead.

  There were pills on his nightstand, an unopened bottle that the Bureau shrink had prescribed him. For post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Instead of reaching for it, he reached for her in his head.

  Fair as the moon and cold as ice.

  Cara.

  He held her until he slept.

  • • • • •

  The walls breathe.

  She lies listening to the thick concrete slabs around her inhaling and exhaling, a rasping breath. From the cells on either side of hers come the muffled cries of others It has swallowed. The stench of blood and offal. The belly of the Beast.

  And outside in the maze of halls, there is the shrieking scratch of talons on metal bars, coming closer . . .

  Trapped. Trapped . . .

  Her eyes fly open. Her breath comes quick and hard in her chest as she orients herself. Lying flat. Thin jailhouse mattress beneath her. Stained concrete walls around her. And a presence . . .

  Her eyes scan the space, searching the dark.

  Through the metal bars, she sees the glow of rabid eyes. Jagged teeth in jaws dripping with foam. A man. A beast. It.

  Watching her. Waiting.

  She is trapped in this cage with the monster, and they both know it. It will toy with her until she is spent, and then It will sink Its teeth in. She stares back through the dark and knows that she will use her nails, her jaws, every muscle in her body, whatever it takes to fight. Or she will use her teeth on her own wrists, die in blood, before she will let It take her.

  Its lips curl back from Its teeth, a feral promise . . . and the guard turns away from her cell.

  For now.

  DAY ONE

  Chapter 1

  It all comes down to one,” said Singh.

  The team sat in the conference room of the San Francisco Bureau, four of them at the long mahogany table. Special Agent Damien Epps: tall, fierce, and black as midnight; Special Agent Antara Singh: luminously calm and strikingly exotic, with her gold wristbands and shimmering fall of hair; Special Agent Ryan Jones: young, blond, buff, and as laid-back as a surfer. And Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthew Roarke. Their leader. Though more and more lately, he doubted he’d continue in that role much longer. Or in his job, for that matter.

  Roarke said nothing in response to Singh’s pronouncement. But Epps looked like he had plenty to say.

  “One? One fucking case?” He was a study in outrage, and you really didn’t want to have Special Agent Damien Epps pissed.

  Singh looked back at Epps calmly. “In terms of legally actionable evidence, yes. There is only one case among these that can be prosecuted.”

  All of the agents looked automatically toward the whiteboards surrounding the conference table: three eight-foot-long panels filled with dates, crime scene photos, news articles, and photos of dead men. A detailed chronology of mass murder.

  Thirteen men slain that the team had documented. Many more that they knew were out there. A years-long rampage by the woman pictured in the center of the middle board: blond and slim, with fine features and high, carved cheekbones. As beautiful and feral as an animal. And far more deadly.

  Cara Lindstrom.

  The timeline was a concrete representation of a vortex of a case. A case Roarke knew he was far too personally involved with to approach with anything near rationality. And he knew that it would all come down on him soon enough.

  “No way that’s right,” Epps said. “One?”
/>   Roarke cut in before the other agent could continue. “Take us through it,” he told Singh.

  Singh rose from her chair with the elegance of a dancer and stepped to the first board. “The cold cases: Edwin Wann, in Salt Lake City. John ‘Preacherman’ Milvia in Portland.”

  They were the first of Cara Lindstrom’s murders that Roarke had discovered. Wann, a Salt Lake City construction engineer who had mysteriously fallen to his death from the twentieth floor of his own unfinished building, and Preacherman, a homegrown Portland anarchist whose throat had been cut while he was sleeping off a drunk in a culvert.

  Local law enforcement agencies had been stumped by the deaths. It was Roarke who’d made the connection to Cara Lindstrom, who’d discovered that Wann was the molester of his own fourteen-year-old daughter, that days before his murder, Preacherman had been planning the bombing of a downtown street fair.

  Roarke hadn’t expected any charges to come out of the cold cases. He’d discovered only the most slender thread of connection between Cara and the deaths.

  “That was never going to happen,” he said aloud. “There’s no evidence in those cases.” Other than the slightest possibility that a mentally ill, homeless person could identify Cara as being in the same city on the day Preacherman died. It was vapor. It was only in his own soul that Roarke was certain.

  Epps looked to the second whiteboard. “The trucker in Atascadero,” he said. “Hartley.”

  “They cannot prosecute that case,” Singh said, and Roarke was surprised to hear an edge under her characteristic serenity.

  Epps countered. “She slashed the man’s throat—”

  “He came after her in the women’s bathroom of a rest stop,” Singh said without raising her voice, but Roarke thought he saw a flash in the dark depths of her eyes. She did not add what the team knew. Hartley had had a record for aggravated sexual assault.

  Epps took a breath, visibly containing himself, not an unremarkable thing in a man who stood six feet three. “I’m talkin’ ’bout evidence. There was print evidence on that Honda she stole that got picked up in Pismo Beach. We got her on tape stealing the fu—” He stopped. “Stealing the thing. It proves she was there.”