Page 89 of Natural-Born Cullers

In the darkened kitchen, in the private talk between brothers, lyrics came on the need to send a sign of blood and bird home to show the barest cling to life on how he hoped someone, somewhere, would still hear him. Because this… it wasn’t home. It wasn’t him. Only Light, his literal way of thinking, it took all the good of Sam Tinnesz’s soft lyrics toFar From Home (The Raven)and made it ride on the back of a dead man, fashioned in every visual way to carry a message on bloodied and broken wings, where Light thought there was no other way to reach Brin….

But the killer stroke came in the quiet anger, the honest refusal to look at Seth’s body, how it called out he maybe only saw himself there—how his own wings had been clipped and broken, leaving him behind to face the nothing.

Gray groaned. Yeah, he’d failed. They all had. But it hadn’t been tonight. It had started the moment the cullers had shifted their look Light’s way.

Light sniffed and swiped at his nose. Then he packed away his guitar and got to his feet. The phone was picked up a moment later, and a noticeboard came into view.

Six bodies with their ribs pulled and given wing etched their way on different artist paper. The numberThreeandUpstairswere scrawled across them,and Gray inwardly groaned at how Light had written on something in the home, maybe a noticeboard, tying his handwriting to the scene. But Light had looked around the home and found… three upstairs. Christ. Gray frowned at the next scribbled words.

His kink, controlled.

Simon pulled the phone off Gray, his look close at the phone—then he flicked a look up, so much crashing in his eyes. “Oh fuck.”

Simon tapped at one word.

Controlled.

“Seth’s nothuntingthe Controller….” He frowned, then tappedHis kink. He looked at Gray. “He’s workingwithhim. The Controller’s pure ex-culler at heart: his kink is with seeing other psychopaths taken down, the more creative way, the better. So he sets up the Red Room to pull psychopaths in, then because he loved Seth’s art, or saw a way to exploit it and keep us away from his own signature mark, he schooled Blood Eagle to kill them, all to get his kicks from watching. He’s definitely not as young and as agile as he used to be, so maybe he lives and gets his kicks through video feed and Seth.”

Gray ran over the details, then shot a look at Simon. “Get me a fucking address for him.”

Simon shook his head. “We don’t know it, not even from crypto banking. I’m thinking he arranged everything through the account Seth app-jacked. A triple-layered protection.”

Gray held his look. “Light’s not here. He’s found something. He—”

Codes. Everyone worked with codes. Cal with MI6, his own team in MI5, and cullers. Light with his chemicals…. So an artist like Seth, one who was being controlled by another, who might be creative enough to know he’d need a blackmail point of his own to exploit if the shit hit the fan?

Gray stared down at the drawings on Light’s phone. What had Light seen as he’d stood looking at these drawings? Why had he stayed focused on them?

Gray ran a touch over the drawing of Ferg and Noah, then tugged out his phone and brought up the photos he’d taken in the tunnels. One caught a drop of dried blood on bone, but the other caught the full beauty of bird wings. Light would have seen these in the one file he opened, and….

“The drawing is different.” He zoomed in a little more on the bone on Seth’s drawings. “On Ferg’s, each rib is slightly out of angle with the left side of the ribs, then Noah’s ribs are out of alignment right side.”

Simon tugged out his phone and thumbed through it for a moment. “Christ.” He didn’t look up. “Meaning what?” He frowned and studied the drawing for a moment.

“Just mathematics in full-blown depth and colour.” Gray flicked Simon a look. “Art. Jan, he said that to me once, that art is all just mathematics given full-blown depth and colour.” He took a screenshot of Noah’s and Ferg’s drawing, then took time editing it. “He wasn’t wrong.”

In the drawing when it came to the left side of Ferg’s ribcage, each rib was shaped at a certain degree: 35, 76, 5… on Noah’s, the right: 24, 88, 36…. The rest of the drawings mimicked the same left-right degree pattern. Gray marked the degrees on the edited drawing, then pulled the numbers together at the bottom.

Oh… damn clever.

“Each drawing repeats the same GPS location in pure numeric form,” Gray said quietly. “The position of the jute rope on Ferg acts to show west of the prime meridian in the second number. Noah’s takes care of the rest on the right. Here.”

Simon looked a little closer. “The Controller’s location? What the fuck? Would Light have seen that?”

Gray couldn’t know for sure, but he wasn’t here now. He’d seensomething.

Simon shifted in the next breath, already working on thumbing in the latitude and longitude, and Gray looked at his watch.

2:30 a.m.

Seth had taken his final breath roughly over three hours ago when Light had cut into his back, but Light couldn’t have been gone that long ago—twenty, maybe thirty minutes with how long it would have taken Light to cut someone to pieces and pull out their ribs. So from how fast he was moving around, he’d jacked a car.

Gray frowned as he moved. Where, out of all his Friday night partying with Brin, had he needed to learn about carjacking?

None of that mattered.

Light didn’t face Seth now. He faced a potential ex-culler.

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