Blood Harvest
A Time To Be Born. A Time To Die. A Time To Kill
It had happened then; what only hindsight could
have told him he'd been dreading. It was almost a relief, in a way,
knowing the worst was over, that he didn't have to pretend anymore.
Maybe now he could stop acting like this was an ordinary town, that
these were normal people. Harry took a deep breath, and learned
that death smells of drains, of damp soil and of heavy-duty
plastic.
The skull, less than six feet away, looked tiny. As though if he held it in his palm, his fingers might almost close around it. Almost worse was the hand. It lay half hidden in the mud, its bones barely held together by connective tissue, as though trying to crawl out of the ground. The strong artificial light flickered like a strobe and, for a second, the hand seemed to be moving.
On the plastic sheet above Harry's head the rain sounded like gunfire. The wind so high on the moors was close to gale force and the makeshift walls of the police tent couldn't hope to hold it back completely. When he'd parked his car, not three minutes earlier, it had been 3.17 a.m. Night didn't get any darker than this. Harry realized he'd closed his eyes.
Read the first Chapter of Blood Harvest
