Rosalee looked up with her remaining eye, not at her killers but past them, past the insects flitting against the streetlamp to the dark cosmos beyond.

Blinking blood from her good eye, she searched the heavens for any sign of the God children who grew up in Barrows Bay knew had turned a blind eye toward them.

All she saw was an endless galaxy of lifeless, indifferent stars.

As her vision waned along with the last of her breath, the Midwives broke the circle, vanishing into the chilly midsummer night.

1

True Crime

KILLER. THE GIRL actually called him Killer.

She looked him straight in the eye, grinning suggestively, expecting him to sign something nice in the copy of Mirror Man the stamp on the inside identified as property of Carnegie Library's Homewood branch. Not even a hardcover—she held a heavily abused paperback, likely salvaged from someone's private collection, read once and tossed to the curbside or willed to the library in a deceased widow's estate.

All that and she had the nerve to call him "Killer," the insult Martin Savage despised more than any other. It took every ounce of willpower to twist the lower half of his face into a smile. "Who should I make it out to?"

"To Tish." Excitement caused her to bounce on the balls of her feet. An ankh necklace jingled on its chain between the curves of her breasts. "I'm a huge fan."

Martin stared at them for a moment, pressed together under the stretchy fabric of her low-cut top. He wasn't sure if he was staring at her tits or the shiny silver trinket dangling from her necklace.

Something about the ankh made him uneasy, had him cringing behind the card table at the front of the store, behind stacks of his nonfiction books and a standee ad for his first fiction novel, Dead Weight.

He swallowed hard, forcing himself to resume eye contact. "Huge, huh?"

She raised her arched eyebrows. "Major huge."

Martin knew her type. She wasn't so much a fan of his writing as the genre. True Crime junkies like her were the bane of his career. They wore black clothes and dour, I've-seen-it-all expressions. They carried worn copies of Mirror Man, never his latest book and never Witch Hunter, not even the subpar collection of short stories he vanity-published fresh out of college.

Not these types. These so-called fans were ghouls. Serial killer groupies. Drawn to Martin because of his close contact with maniacs. As if that evil, that danger, might rub off on them by proxy.

They were self-harmers or drug addicts and most often women, the type who'd make a prisoner into a pen pal with the potential for conjugal visits. He suspected some might be hybristophiliacs, masturbating to signed photographs of Richard Ramirez or burnt hairs belonging to Ted Bundy, plucked with tweezers from the floor under the electric chair and sold for fifty dollars a pop on eBay. Some might even assist their psychopathic crushes, committing crimes and violent acts for them, to prove their love.