Fever House (Fever House, #1)

by Keith Rosson

but I swear to you, I want to mitigate that. Terradyne wants to mitigate that. And there’s a way to do it.”

think we’ll be fine. And morally, I am steadfast in the rightness of this thing. But for caution’s sake, John, don’t answer your phone for the next few hours. Just in case.” His voice cracking, Bonner says, “Jack, what do you mean ‘we’?” but the line is dead.

sees a Geffen Records logo on one page—but there are others as well. Notebooks with meticulous dark ink crowding the pages. The text is small, at times veers off the paper. He squints and bends down, trying to decipher it. I will make him a house of fever and wounds and he will let me come back—

“Fuck you,” she screams at him. “You weak—You fucking—” Her rage and sorrow dissolve into a wordless shriek. She bends over, touching her neck with trembling fingers. Her hand scrabbles madly at her holster. “Weils, don’t.” She takes out her pistol, her hand rising. She sneers at him. Weeping, her face opened wide with rage and sorrow, she wipes her hand under her nose and says, “I should fucking bite you, you coward. You fucking waste.”

“Nick,” the man says. He runs a hand savagely down his filth-caked face, wiping tears away. “Nick, tell me, how did Matthew Coffin die?”

just beating the living hell out of his bass.

crazy shit. Those were his exact words. He laughed, but it didn’t sound happy, and he was like, ‘I’m into some crazy shit right now, Arthur. I got the pull after me.’ ”

“The hand, the tongue, the eye, Katherine. The hand, the tongue, the eye, all these things used at once, brought forth at once, and we might do this again, you and me and Nick, and better next time, do it right, He’s promised me, He’s promised I can come back, and I’ll be different and changed and better than I am now,” the words coming faster, and the eye in his hand had moved, had moved there in the cup of his hands, the eye casting its sight upon her,

One of his eyes was missing entirely, the optic nerve cleanly cut. A hand removed at the wrist. Tongue severed. None of those pieces were found at the loft. Found anywhere.

Tinny and quiet over Rachmann’s phone, he hears the song. His mother’s song, his father’s music. And he sees the eyes of both men, Rachmann and Bonner, go wide and uncomprehending. And then Nick doesn’t have to wait anymore, because the next thing is happening.

For now, however, the moment that the recording is sent out via Callista’s vastly latticed systems, Katherine is in Arthur’s bathroom in Chicago, gazing into the steam-clouded mirror.

Lastly, to the readers. I hope this one worked for you. Let’s do it again soon.