During the day the Maneater had been busy with other obligations at work and hadn’t been able to spend time with Celeste, but now at last he returned to her.
She was still alive.
That pleased him.
Last night, before any of this, as they walked through the door to her apartment, she’d offered to give him, as she put it, “Perfumed whispers and sweet laughter, a night wrapped in melodies and dreams and fantasies finally coming true.”
“It’s from a poem,” she explained with a half-inebriated smile. “I learned it for this one class in college and never forgot it. Not even once.”
“That’s impressive,” he’d told her.
As it turned out, fantasies really had come true last night. And now, as he took her to the pen where the cattle used to be slaughtered back when Brantner Meats was still in business, he was confident they were about to come true all over again.
But not with perfumed whispers and sweet laughter.
No. Other sounds altogether.