Edge of Black. J.T. Ellison

brethren.

      Of course, they were all dead now, too. He was the only one left from his tight-knit unit, and he felt the absence of his comrades keenly. When he mustered out, he found a quiet place in the mountains, away from everyone, his family, his friends. He led a monastic life on the land—something his parents could finally get behind.

      The Savage River forest was kind to him. He fished and hunted when he needed meat. He brought vegetables and herbs from the ground when he needed flavors. He picked fruit from the trees when he needed something sweet. He watched the breeze wind sinuously through the trees when he needed a distraction, and used the sun and the moon as his guide when he needed to establish time. He was happy alone, felt safer that way. Since he’d been trained to kill, to be able to take a life without a second thought, he felt the need to repent.

      The joke among his brethren, what do you feel when you kill a terrorist? Recoil.

      And not the kind that meant your stomach was turned.

      Repent wasn’t the right word. Recalibrate was more like it. He was a dangerous man, and he knew it. His mind needed to adjust back to the world where threats didn’t linger in the shadows, where he could sleep without his hand on the trigger.

      He wasn’t quite there yet.

      And then Samantha paraded into his life, and turned his world on its ear.

      Samantha was more than his lover; she was his savior. He hated the circumstances that brought them together, but he’d fallen in love with her almost immediately, though he hadn’t shared that information with her. He hadn’t needed to—she’d felt the same pull. A connection, however faint, however strong, had been made in their first meeting. Pheromones, maybe, or their beings acknowledging kindred spirits. Regardless, something about her made his soul sing. He’d had other women—not many, sex was still a sacred act for him, another anomaly he’d developed in spite of his exceptionally liberal upbringing, where sex and nudity were as natural as the sun rising in the east—but enough to know the difference between lust and love. But Sam, beautiful, smart, good Sam, was different. He finally understood how his father could abandon his entire life and legacy for a woman.

      And with that understanding came another—he’d been on the path to becoming an empty soul, devoid of feeling, of being unable to find the splendor in the world anymore. Sam was more than just the aesthetics. She’d brought him back from the near-dead. He would do anything for her.

      Which was the reason, while watching the top of the hourly news update and waiting for Sam to confirm why she’d been rushed away by Fletcher, he felt compelled to reach out to a group of people he was familiar with.

      The answers were out there.

      And Xander might be able to help find them.

      Chapter 7

      Washington, D.C.

      Dr. Samantha Owens

      Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”

      Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”

      She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.

      “Good luck with that.”

      “Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”

      “I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”

      With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.

      Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.

      So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.

      What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and more edema present. She began the dissection. His enlarged heart was otherwise healthy for a man his age, with little cholesterol plaque built up in the arteries, so cardiac arrest wasn’t the culprit. She started to work on the block of lungs and quickly realized Leighton was suffering from an underlying disease. His lungs were distended and the air pockets diffusely enlarged, ravaged most certainly from a lifetime of asthma. Bronchiectasis. Which made her wonder—why hadn’t he used his inhaler? In a case of fulminant pneumonia, surely the congressman would have been sucking hard on his albuterol. And if that didn’t work...

      “Hey, Murphy, you have his clothes?”

      “Sure.” She pulled out the plastic bag and held it up. “What do you need?”

      “Look through his pockets for an inhaler. He’s asthmatic. Just curious what he was using.”

      Murphy dug in, but came up empty.

      “That’s weird. I guess he could have dropped it at his office, right?”

      “Sure. In the heat of the moment, absolutely. It’s not something we would grab to bring in, either. What are you thinking, Doc?”

      “He’s had asthma for a long time. He definitely had an attack quite recent to his death. The airways are reddened and swollen inside. His inhaler would have started to make at least a little dent in the swelling in his bronchial tree, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Honestly, I’m not seeing anything that indicated he tried to arrest the attack at all.”

      She went back to the body and looked him over carefully. On a man who had a normal spread of hair on his body, a needle mark could be concealed and missed on the initial examination. On skin as smooth as the congressman’s, though, an injection site should show itself easily. She couldn’t find one. He was in shape, no extra folds of fat to hide the marks. His thighs were clear, as were his buttocks, arms and stomach.

      Interesting.

      She thought about how the situation must have gone down. The attack would have started small. Staying calm and not hyperventilating is the key to keeping a mild asthma attack from becoming a major event. The congressman might have breathed into a paper bag, or something equally calming. But that didn’t work, so he brought out the defenses—his inhaler, maybe a nebulizer. Perhaps even popped a bit of prednisone, knowing the anti-inflammatory would help. Toxicology would tell what medications he’d taken. A witness would be of help, too, especially since the tox screen wouldn’t show the corticosteroid.

      When none of the usual treatments worked, he should have called 911 and broken out his EpiPen. Jammed the lifesaving medicine into his thigh and gotten his ass to the hospital.

      But he didn’t have a mark on him.

      But he did have massive pulmonary edema. His lungs were yellowish and heavy, and the