The Grave Between Us (A Noah & Cole Thriller, #2)

by Tal Bauer

Hunting monsters was noble, yes. But every monster hunt demanded a sacrifice, and the price was always paid in the mind, and sleepless nights, and nightmares that lived inside the bone marrow.

Silence used to cling to him, a heaviness that hung from his bones and shadowed his footsteps in his empty condo. Silence that carved him away from the rest of humanity, made up of the first steps he’d take into a crime scene, or the smell of arterial blood soaking into carpet, or dirt and mud mixing with the slip of decomp and decay. He couldn’t describe the exact way pooling blood shone mirror-black, left behind in the stillness after a murder. That knowledge lived like a hum under his skin.

No one in the world could cry like a sixteen-year-old girl. Katie cried like her life was ending, like she was taking every fear she’d ever had and letting them all out, giving voice to all the days and nights her dad had said he had to go, had to work, had to sit a stakeout or serve a warrant. Moments that were risky but that he’d always come home from.

Murder wasn’t just for the cities or the darkness. It happened on summer days and in suburban houses, in quiet neighborhoods, in basements and kitchens and cornfields.