Ryker Townsend – Psychic FBI Profiler Series

The Darkness Within Him

Book 4

When seventeen-year-old runaway, Bram Cross, is threatened by a vicious derelict with a machete, he wants to run but can’t. An odor on the homeless man triggers a seizure that catapults Bram to another time. He collapses to the ground with his mind under siege—forced to relive the worst day of his life.

Bram wakes up next to the corpse of a homeless man in the shadow of a haunted bridge in Washington DC. His only friend has left him behind to face murder charges and Bram is arrested for a shooting he didn’t do. In desperation he calls the only man he trusts—someone who saved his life five years ago.

Dallas fire fighter Jax Malloy receives a frantic call for help from a kid he’s never forgotten. He first set eyes on Bram as a twelve-year-old boy, the sole survivor of a horrific tragedy. His mother, Evangeline, had shot her three children before she took her own life. Jax held Bram in his arms as he clung to life. Although the kid survived, he would never be the same. Jax has only one friend in DC he would trust with Bram’s life—Ryker Townsend.

FBI Profiler Ryker Townsend is a rising star at Quantico, but he has a dark secret. When he sleeps, he sees nightmarish visions through the eyes of the dead, the last images imprinted on their retinas. After he agrees to help Jax Malloy with a teenage runaway, he senses the real damage in Bram Cross. Ryker must reenact the boy’s terror in painful detail—and connect to the dead—to uncover buried secrets in the splintered psyche of a broken child.

Excerpt

Clifton, Virginia

Bunny Man Bridge

Midnight

Seventeen-year-old Bram Cross knew what Josh Atwood meant to do would be illegal and dangerous, but that didn’t stop him from following his friend in the dark, down an eerie footpath lit only by a sliver moon. He had his own self-destructive reasons for ignoring the voice in his head.

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The night’s fragile breeze didn’t have the muscle to follow him through the ravine, where thick, fetid air stuck to his skin. From the dense underbrush alongside the narrow path, the high-pitched trill of crickets and frogs rose and fell at the sound of his unlaced boots crunching on gravel.

The grating drone put Bram on edge.

He gazed ahead at the sinister tunnel under the Colchester Road Overpass. Locals called the landmark ‘Bunny Man Bridge,’ one of the most haunted places near Washington, D.C. The creepy location had become legend—especially at midnight.

He couldn’t see the meth dealer that Josh had come to meet, but Bram sensed they were being watched. His skin bristled with goose flesh. Not even the layers he wore under his navy hoodie, or his hands jammed into the pockets of his worn jeans, could ward off the mounting chill of a foreboding adrenaline rush.

When a startling vision triggered a memory he thought he’d buried, an icy shard carved through his body The macabre and haunting face of his mother lurched from the pitch-black of his mind—her eyes, what she did.

No, I can’t do this. Don’t make me. He fought hard to stifle his childish, irrational refusal, but he had to say something.

“You’re an asshole. We shouldn’t be here,” Bram said. “Someone’s watching us. I can feel it.”

“Shut up. You’re paranoid,” Josh spat. “You said you’d come with me. Quit your whining.”

“Something’s not right.”

Josh stopped, dead still, at the mouth of the infamous tunnel. He stood on the spot where the mutilated, half-eaten bodies of dead rabbits had been found in 1904—killed by ‘Bunny Man,’ an insane prison escapee named Douglas Grifon. The bad omen made Bram step back, but too late. By sheer stupidity and bad luck, Josh had jinxed them both.

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Praise

“Rarely does an author make such an impact in such a short span of time.”
   —Romantic Times Book Review

 

“Non-stop action, hold-your-breath suspense, and terrific characters who made it all real. What more could you ask? I can not wait to have the next Jordan Dane in my hot little hands.”
   —Mariah Stewart, New York Times Bestselling Author

“Plain thriller country. Jordan Dane’s tight plotting and male characters are exceptional, bad guys and good.”
   —Publishers Weekly