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The unca
Then six years ago all that changed.
Kelly woke next to the butchered body of a man, the knife in her hands and no memory of what happened.
She trusted the evidence would prove her i
It didn’t.
Now released after serving her sentence for involuntary manslaughter, Kelly must try to piece her life back together. Shu
But old habits die hard. And when her instincts tell her things are not as they appear at the scene of a routine suicide, she can’t help but ask questions that somebody does not want answered.
Plunged into the nightmare of being branded a killer once again, Kelly is soon fleeing from the police, Russian thugs and a local gangster. Betrayed at every turn, she is fast ru
But Kelly acquired a whole new set of skills on the inside. Now street-smart and wary, can she use everything she’s learned to evade capture and stay alive long enough to clear her name?
Praise for Zoë Sharp:
“The Blood Whisperer is a cracking, compulsive read: once you've read the electrifying first few pages, you’ll probably develop intense feelings of a
“Scarily good.” Lee Child
“Zoë Sharp is one of the brightest of the new generation of British crime writers.” Stephen Booth
“Zoë Sharp is a master at writing thoughtful action thrillers.” Meg Gardiner
“If you don't like Zoë Sharp there's something wrong with you. Go and live in a cave and get the hell out of my gene pool! There are few writers who go right to the top of my TBR pile—Zoë Sharp is one of them.” Stuart MacBride
“Zoë Sharp is going to be a superstar.” Jon Jordan, Crimespree magazine
THE
BLOOD WHISPERER Zoë Sharp
For Derek and Jill
who've helped to keep it all together
and
Sarah and Tim
who've been there since the begi
www.ZoeSharp.com
Cover design by www.NuDesign.co
Murderati Ink [ZACE Ltd]
Copyright © Zoë Sharp 2013
THE
BLOOD WHISPERER
Prologue
She wakes to the smell of blood.
It saturates the air to lie metallic across her tongue—so fresh-spilt it has not had time to spoil.
She knows the scent well enough to be calm and yet also terrified. It is not that she is squeamish but the implications are clear to her.
What the hell is happening here? And where is here?
She gradually returns to herself, realises she is lying face down on a hard surface. Her whole body feels gripped by the aftermath of a fever. Her head is turned slightly to the side, legs splayed as if to mimic ru
She takes a moment to examine if this makes things better or worse.
The answer doesn’t come readily.
In fact nothing comes readily, neither awareness nor memory.
Mentally she fumbles backwards for her last clean recollection. It remains blurrily beyond reach.
That alone is enough to start the panic forming a bubble in her chest. It compresses her heart, squeezing her lungs against her ribcage so she can hardly breathe.
She forces her eyes open.
From this perspective the room has tipped sideways. It seems familiar but she doesn’t recognise it. Maybe the bloody pool seeping across the boards towards her has something to do with that.
The encroaching tide jolts her out of lethargy. Her adrenal gland fires a staccato burst into her system and she flinches from the shock of it, tries to roll away. Instead she flops raggedly onto her back, gasping. It’s a start but not much of one.
Her eyes slide closed again and she discovers her limbs are not yet her own. They refuse to know her, fighting every attempt to control them. She growls in frustration-laced fury.
And all the time the smell of the room overloads her senses. She has the educated palate of a co
The kind of fear humans embrace when there is nothing else left to them.
Her own fear motivates her eyes to reopen. They do so with reluctance akin to peeling a limpet from a tidal rock.
The room is still there. She’d been hoping to blame some kind of waking nightmare but this is real.
Far too real.
A crowd of images jostle her, elbowing for supremacy. She grasps the analytical part of her brain by its scruff and shakes it into concentration. Sluggishly she notes the blood pool leads away from her.
She lies still for a moment and monitors her own body as the extremities slowly come back online. She aches right down to the roots of her hair as if from a beating but as far as she can tell there’s no specific damage.
So the blood isn’t mine.
Of course it isn’t hers, she reasons. She can recite the facts as well as anyone—that the human body holds between three-point-five and five-point-five litres. A loss in excess of forty per cent is almost invariably fatal and experience has shown her exactly what that kind of exsanguination looks like.
To have this amount of blood let must surely mean . . .
Her heart leaps into her throat and bounces there.
With a grunt of outright effort she makes it up onto one elbow. The room sways and distorts alarmingly before it steadies.
Progress, of a sort.
What she sees next is not progress of any sort.
The body is no more than two metres away. Blood haloes around it and edges ever closer as if seeking a living host. It leaches from a dozen ragged slits in clothing and skin.