The Dying Place

To anyone who’s ever had a dream they might be afraid to follow – and to all the fans out there who continue to help me follow mine. Chapter OneSaturday, May 28Heart pounding, lungs gasping for every precious intake of oxygen, Kennedy Farmer propelled herself forward, knowing the end of her five-mile run through Coyote Canyon waited just around the corner. With her calves burning and begging for mercy, she pushed back against the pain, and with a renewed surge of energy, gathered steam until she burst onto the last leg of the trail. When she finished, a quick peek at her phone strapped on her arm showed she’d beaten her personal best time by seventy-two seconds.Hands on her knees and bent over at the waist, her breaths sawing in and out of her chest, she smiled. She loved this time of the evening with the golden hues casting a pink glow over the Sandia Mountains, giving them the watermelon color for which they’d been aptly named, when everything around her sparkled in the sun or hid in the shifting shadows of the coming nightfall. Off in the distance, a pack of coyotes yipped and howled, startling a rabbit to dart in front of her and dash the other way.With the buzzing background noise of traffic, she marveled, as she often did, at the contradictory nature of her favorite running trail, where human sightings were even rarer than wild animals. Still, despite the quiet beauty and illusion of a peaceful, hidden country solitude, she really remained just a hop and a hill away from the interstate that ran through the canyon.Overhead, a murder of crows scattered from the treetops, and Kennedy imagined they must be on their way to pick at whatever remained of the coyotes’ feast. Inhaling a deep breath of fresh mountain air, she stood still and simply appreciated the serenity of her surroundings.As she did, she heard a faint whisper of movement behind her. Excited that it might be the fox she’d spotted a few days ago trying to sneak through undetected, she started to turn around – only to find a man less than a foot away, his hard, calculated stare unblinking as he lunged toward her.Kennedy’s heart jerked once inside her chest as one word raced through her mind – run. Spinning toward the parking lot, she thought only of reaching the safety of her car. But before she could take more than a step, the man latched onto her ponytail and yanked her backwards. When his hand reached around her to clap across her mouth, Kennedy’s survival instincts took over. Struggling to escape, she scrabbled for purchase, one shoe falling off as the man dragged her along the dirt and off the trail.Suddenly lifted off her feet and thrown to the hardpacked ground, she gasped for breath as her attacker followed her down, crushing her with the heavy weight of his body. And then his thick, sweaty hands wrapped around her neck and squeezed, his thumbs pressing into her windpipe and cutting off her air. With black dots dancing in her vision, her wide eyes locked onto a pair of cold, dark ones. Staring up at his face, a flicker of recognition rippled through her.Desperate to force out the scream her throat held hostage, she bucked and twisted, her hands grasping at his immoveable grip as he leaned forward and pressed harder, his gaze never leaving hers.With the pressure in her chest expanding, anger at allowing herself to become complacent to her surroundings warred with her rising terror. Her tenuous hold on consciousness remained a hopeless breath away as her mind turned into a blurred mess of lines and hazy colors popping behind her eyes.As the fight for life began to slip helplessly from her grasp, her attacker shifted positions to straddle her body, his thighs pressing like a vise grip against her ribcage and trapping her arms against her sides as one muscled forearm replaced his hands. With his free hand, he grappled for something at his side. And then suddenly, the unmistakable touch of a cold, sharp blade pressed into the corner of her mouth.‘If you scream or try to fight me, I will slice out your tongue before I peel your skin away and leave you out here for the scavengers to pick your bones apart. Do you understand?’ The evil promise that he meant every word blazed from his murderous eyes.Desperately trying to cling to any hope for escape, Kennedy did the only thing she could: she nodded.Seconds later, when something pricked her neck, she was filled with the sickening clarity that she’d been drugged. Fighting to hold onto consciousness, she forgot she’d agreed not to scream, and so she sucked in a mouthful of air, only to have it cut off when her attacker ground his palm against her lips.Eyes bulging, heart hammering, Kennedy stared up at his dispassionate glare. With his face swimming in and out of focus, a fleeting image of this man sitting somewhere in a car flashed in her memory, but as she tried to hold onto the picture, her eyelids felt a magnetic pull to close. The siren ringing inside her head warned her that if she succumbed to the drug, she would die, and so she fought a losing battle to stay awake.When the man lifted her into his arms, she could do nothing but allow herself to be carried away, her limbs flopping in the air like a rag doll’s. Her eyes slit open just enough for her to spot her car sitting in the parking lot, waiting for her. Weakly, she lifted one hand as if she could somehow summon it to come to her rescue.Metal scraped a deep gouge into the back of her head when her attacker tossed her into the trunk of his own vehicle. The distinct ripping sound of tape breached the fog in her brain and the blood thundering through her ears as she lay there,