‘Come on,’ I said, and blood and spittle sprayed from my lips. ‘Come on!‘ I said, louder now, and I did not know if I was speaking to myself, or to whatever or whomever lay beyond the door.

‘Come on,’ I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing. Above it all sounded the wailing of the alarm.

I fired again, and two bullets tore through the door in response. One missed.

The other did not.

‘Come—’

The wolf looked up at the men who surrounded him. He had tried to gnaw his trapped paw off, but had not succeeded. Now he was weary. The time had come. He snarled at the men, the fur around his mouth wet with his own blood. A sharp bitter scent troubled his senses, the smell of noise and dying.

He barked, the final sound that he would ever make. In it was both defiance and a kind of resignation. He was calling on death to come for him.

The gun fired, and the wolf was gone.

‘Hold him! Hold him!’

Light. No light.

‘Jesus, I can’t even get a grip on him, there’s so much blood. Okay, on three. One, two—’

‘Ah, for Christ’s sake.’

‘His back is just meat. What the fuck happened here?’

Light. No light.

Light. No light. Light.

‘Can you hear me?’

Yes. No. I saw the paramedic. I saw Sharon Macy behind him. I tried to speak, but no words would come.

‘Mr Parker, can you hear me?’

Light. Stronger now. ‘You stay with me, you hear me? You stay!’

Up. Move. Ceiling. Lights.

Stars.

Darkness.

Gone.

38

The house, larger than most of its neighbors, lay on a nondescript road midway between Rehoboth Beach and Dewey Beach on the Delaware coast. Most of the surrounding homes were vacation rentals or summer places used by Washingtonians with a little money to spend. Transience was the norm here. True, a handful of year-round residents lived on the road, but they tended to mind their own business, and left others to mind theirs.

A significant number of the homes in the area were owned by gay couples, for Rehoboth had long been one of the east coast’s most gay-friendly resorts. This was perhaps surprising given that Rehoboth was founded in 1873 by the Reverend Robert W. Todd as a Methodist meeting camp. Reverend Todd’s vision of a religious community was short-lived, though, and by the 1940s the gay Hollywood crowd were carousing at the DuPont property along the ocean. Then came the Pink Pony Bar in the 1950s, and the Pleasant Inn and the Nomad Village in the 1960s, all known to be welcoming to DC’s more closeted citizens. In the 1990s, some of the town’s less tolerant residents made a vain attempt to restore what were loosely termed ‘family values’, in some cases by beating the shit out of anyone who even looked gay, but negotiations among representatives of the gay community, homeowners and the police largely put an end to the unrest, and Rehoboth settled gently into its role not only as the ‘Nation’s Summer Capital’, but the ‘Nation’s Gay Summer Capital’.

The big house was rarely occupied, even by the standards of vacation homes. Neither was its care entrusted to any of the local realtors, many of whom boosted their income by acting as agents for summer rentals, and taking care of houses over the winter months. Nevertheless, it was well kept, and local rumor suggested that it had either been bought as part of some complicated tax write-off, in which case the fewer questions asked about it the better, especially in an area swarming with Washingtonians who might or might not have connections with the IRS; or as a corporate investment, for its ownership apparently lay with a shelf company, itself a part of another shelf company, on and on like a series of seemingly infinite matryoshka dolls.

And now, with the final hold of winter upon the land, and the beaches largely empty and devoid of life, the house at last was occupied. Two men, one young and one old, had been noticed entering and leaving, although they did not socialize in any of the local bars and restaurants, and the older gentleman appeared somewhat frail.

But two men, of whatever vintages, living together was not so unusual in Rehoboth Beach, and so their presence went largely unremarked.

Inside the house, the Collector brooded by a window. There was no view of the sea here, only a line of trees that protected the house and its occupants from the curiosity of others. The furnishings were largely antiques, some acquired through clever investment but most through bequests, and occasionally by means of outright theft. The Collector viewed such acquisitions as little more than his due. After all, the previous owners had no more use for them, the previous owners being, without exception, dead.

The Collector heard the sound of the lawyer Eldritch coughing and moving about in the next room. Eldritch slept more since the explosion that had almost cost him his life, and which had destroyed the records of crimes both public and private painstakingly assembled over decades of investigation. Even had the old man not been so frail, the loss of the files would have seriously curtailed the Collector’s activities. He had not realized just how much he relied upon Eldritch’s knowledge and complicity in order to hunt and prey. Without Eldritch, the Collector was reduced to the status of an onlooker, left to speculate on the sins of others without the evidence needed to damn them.

But in recent days, some of Eldritch’s old energy had returned, and he had begun the process of rebuilding his archive. His memory was astonishing in its recall, but his recent sufferings and losses had spurred him still harder to force it to relinquish its store of secrets, fueled by hatred and the desire for revenge. He had lost almost everything that mattered to him: a woman who had been both his consort and his accomplice, and a lifetime’s work of cataloging the mortal failings of men. All he had left now was the Collector, and he would be the weapon with which Eldritch avenged himself.

And so, where once the lawyer had been a check on the Collector’s urges, he now fed them. Each day brought the two men ever closer. It reminded the Collector that, on one level, they were still father and son, although the thing that lived inside the Collector was very old, and very far from human, and the Collector had largely forgotten his previous identity as the son of the ancient lawyer in the next room.

The house was one of the newest of the Collector’s property acquisitions, but also one of the best concealed. Curiously, he owed its existence to the detective, Parker. The Collector had arrived in Rehoboth as part of his exploration of the detective’s history, his attempt to understand Parker’s nature. It was an element of Parker’s past – a minor one, admittedly, but the Collector was nothing if not meticulous – and therefore worthy of examination. The house, modest yet handsome, drew the Collector. He was weary of sparsely furnished hideouts, of uncarpeted rooms filled only with mementos of the dead. He needed a place in which to rest, to contemplate, to plan, and so it was that, through Eldritch, he acquired the house. It remained one of the few in which he still felt secure, particularly since the detective and his friends had begun tracking him, seeking to punish him for the death of one of their own. It was to Delaware that the Collector had spirited the lawyer away once his wounds had healed sufficiently to enable him to travel, and now the Collector too was sequestered here. He had never known what it was to be hunted before; he had always been the hunter. They had come close to trapping him in Newark: the recurrent pain from the torn ligaments in his leg was a reminder of that. This situation could not continue. There was harvesting to be done.