The Thirsty Road - Book 2 - The Northern Thaw. The Thirsty Road, #2

In the diesel-drenched exhale of Vancouver's ferry terminal, where transients jettison their jagged pasts like ballast, Elmer and Lila execute a meticulously machined vanishing act, slipping across the Canadian border under Goodwill rags and forged passports bubbled by hasty steam. Elmer's facade of ennui masks a razorblade mind, his encrypted journals-a labyrinthine lexicon of forensic filigree, Creole conjurings, and unhinged eschatology-plotting contingencies for the Baton Rouge carnage that trails them like congealed blood on linoleum.
Lila, no longer mere vessel but voodoo's volatile vessel, trembles not from chill but from Marie Laveau's spectral talons raking her psyche, her gaze snaring phantoms amid the throng. Elmer's crowning cruelty-an aerosol atrocity, finer than fog, ferrying venom from nostril to necrosis in ten gasping heartbeats-claims its first quarry: a hapless hitchhiker convulsing in crimson froth across frost-laced floors.
Dubbed a "kindness" in Elmer's self-deceit, its artistry incarnate, an invisible exhalation leaving no scar save the metabolic sigil only he deciphers. Intimacy amid infamy binds Lila and Elmer. Elmer's clinical caresses ignite Lila's latent lethality, forging a feral symbiosis where trust teeters on the precipice of possession. As pursuers pierce the perimeter-FBI filaments fraying the frost-the duo delves deeper, the northern hush their hesitant harbor.
Gower's glacial gothic probes predation's poetry: is escape emancipation, or merely the prelude to perpetual harvest? A breath-stealing descent into derangement-your pulse will palpitate, your marrow will murmur for more.