Famished by Meghan O'Flynn (latest ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Something molten scorched my insides, the flick of a lighter before the flame. On the table next to me, the English muffin had long since grown cold. I reached for it blindly, registering the clatter of the plate on wood, but it seemed far away. The book sat open on my lap, the page invisible despite how hard I stared at it.

It isn’t possible.

The book closed in slow motion as if my hand was disconnected from my body. Then the bookcase was before me, the book sliding into its place, though I didn’t remember getting up.

Books. So many books.

Anyone could have that book. It’s just a coincidence.

I took the plate to the sink, scrubbed it with shaking hands, and turned to the dishwasher. The plate slipped and shattered against the marble floor.

The broom. The sweeping. Don’t think. I took slow, deliberate breaths into quivering lungs. My chest hurt.

This is ridiculous. Talk about an overreaction.

It’s okay. Just go read something else.

Yeah, something not connected to a series of violent killings.

Stop it, Hannah.

I dumped the glass shards in the trash. The kitchen was alive, pulsing in time to my heart. My legs wobbled, and I grabbed the counter. I really was crazy.

I staggered into the living room over white marble that suddenly seemed cold and rude and indignant. It’s just a floor, Hannah. The nearly invisible seam up on the ceiling watched me, waiting to distract me with the hidden television.

I need to rest. Just rest.

I awoke to a high-pitched voice talking about a flood in Indonesia. The last thing I remembered, I had been watching some game show.

I pushed myself upright and brushed matted hair from my face.

Note to self: No sleeping on leather.

Why do I feel so strange?

On the screen, a swirling torrent of water crashed into the side of a building, obliterating the foundation and washing it out to sea. The scene shifted to a woman in a newsroom saying something about requests for aid.

There are plenty of people far worse off than you.

Yeah, because nothing is wrong with your life.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

One little coincidence and I almost lost my shit.

“In breaking news,” the woman said, “New information has been released on the man responsible for seven deaths in or near the Metro Detroit area. His violent killing spree began on October first with the murder of a prostitute in Ash Park and culminated on November twenty-sixth when another woman and her young child were found brutally murdered in an abandoned school.”

November twenty-sixth…

“Channel Eight is here on the scene where sources say that Robert Fredricks died earlier this afternoon—”

I put my hands over my ears, but the thoughts kept coming. I grabbed my phone off the coffee table and pulled up my web browser.

Don’t do this again.

October first, November twenty-sixth…

I punched in keywords until I found what I was looking for. Dread bloomed in my abdomen. I ran to my purse and yanked out my journal, flipping through scribbled sleeping notes. Here, I slept. There, I didn’t.

A coincidence, just a coincidence.

My sleep hadn’t changed until I had moved in here. I ran a shaking finger down the pages.

I slept better when other people were dying, and in the days leading up to those times.

Gotta have time to case a victim.

Stop it, Hannah. You’re just a little tired today.

Does that mean someone else is dead?

It didn’t even make sense. How do you get someone to sleep on demand?

You hold their hand and bring them orange juice. Or make them dinner.

But that would mean he…what? Drugged me?

No. No way. I dropped the journal and put away my phone.

You’re crazy, Hannah.

But I couldn’t stop thinking, couldn’t stop moving. What if I was wrong? I had been wrong about Jake. Maybe I was wrong about…everything.

My feet flew through the living room and up the stairs, independent of coherent thought. In the bathroom, I tore through the medicine cabinet like a possessed raccoon, tossing bottles and scattering toothpicks, cotton balls, gauze.

Nothing.

I snatched at the drawers underneath the sink and rummaged through the linen closet. In the bedroom, I searched under the mattress, behind the bedposts, around the night tables.

My heart slowed.

This is crazy. You’re crazy. It has to be a coincidence.

But it wasn’t. I knew it in my core, somewhere unmentionable and primitive, just as I had known my love for my father was wrong. A nest of weasels in my chest scampered into my brain, into my lungs, until their clawing feet were all I could hear, feel, sense.

Then his voice. Just don’t clean my man cave.

I ran. The bright light of the workout room assaulted my eyes. I wrenched open the closet door. Bleach, towels, rags, buckets. The buckets were empty. Towels flew over my shoulder, cleaning rags ripped from their resting place. Dull thuds,