On her breast, as it turned out. Officer Will hadn’t wanted to tell her. But after she finally forced him, saying that her imagination was coming up with horrors that dwarfed anything in reality, he relented.
She wished he hadn’t.
I will kill you. I will kill you, she sing-songed in her head. Her dark glasses protected her from looking directly at him. He was an eclipse and would burn her eyes out of her head if she made contact. But her glasses were her shield. They kept her safe from the ultraviolet rays that were his eyes.
I will kill you. Just see if I don’t.
“Excuse me.”
The voice was soft. Polite. Not silken by any means, but not rough, either. It was a perfectly normal voice that would have asked for more milk in the tea, please, or perhaps if somebody had the time. Not the kind of voice one would expect to order a little girl into a car, or to command her to beg for mercy.
The Wolf.
Marie blinked at him. She hadn’t expected him to speak. She watched his horrible, strangely pretty cupid’s bow lips move as he spoke again.
“I saw you watching me.”
Her blood did something strange then. It quit moving. It ceased bringing oxygen to her brain, stopped warming her body. It slunk away from her face and her extremities. Marie felt cold, frozen. Like Aleta’s body had been before the cremation. Like some of her pieces probably still were. But the rest were ashed down in a cheery little fire and kept warm and snug in an urn next to her grandmother. That was joy, yes? That was peace.
“You’re shivering.”
The wolfishly unwolfish voice of The Wolf. She had to do something.
“Sudden chill,” she said, and congratulated herself on speaking.
She didn’t know if she should run. If she should lunge at him and tear off his teeth with her sharp teeth. If she should fall at his feet and beg to know why he had hurt her baby.
She wished she had a cigarette. She wished she had a drink. She wished she had a skinning knife with a serrated edge.
She wished she had Aleta.
“You’ve been watching me for days now. Why?”
Because you’re a killer. Because I’m going to nail you to the wall. Because I hate you in a way that I didn’t know it was possible to hate anyone, and believe me, sir, I’ve known a plethora of hate.
“I . . . I couldn’t tell you, really.”
Her voice was calm and smooth. Like it wasn’t anything. But her body was bunching under her clothes, her fingers slipping into fists, her right leg ready to throw her off of the bench and away from him the second he tried to attack.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
She swallowed hard and answered carefully. “I don’t. Would you like to tell me who you are?”
“No.”
They sat side by side, not speaking. Marie’s mind ran in circles until it physically hurt her. He was so close that she could feel his body heat. Feel menace from under his skin. If he looked at her, she was going to scream. She was going to scream. She was going to scream.
He looked at her.
She opened her mouth, but quickly snapped it shut at his grin. A grin that knows what it wants. A sultry grin. The grin of a wolf.
“I won’t tell you who I am.”
“We established that.”
“But I’ll show you.”
“Sh-show me?”
His words were a caress. They ran down the side of her face like feathers. She felt like vomiting on her shoes. She felt like vomiting on his.
“That is, of course, if you feel like being shown, little bird?”
She stopped. Paused. Failed to breathe. Bit her lip, that nervous habit she had never been able to quit, and she heard him suck in his breath.
It was a breath of want. A gasp. The sound of lust.
She felt violently, violently ill.
“Excuse me,” she said, and hurried away. She ran down the sidewalk, pushing past people roughly, her hair flying behind her, her stomach heaving. After several blocks she leaned against the corner of a building and was forcibly ill. She retched into the garden, coating the marigolds with her sickness.
She wondered if Aleta had heard that same sound from him. What else she had heard. What other vile sounds and sights had her little girl experienced in her last few moments.
Her last few moments.
Marie covered her head with her hands and sobbed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Determined Marie had a plan.
It can never be said that she didn’t love her little Aleta. She would do anything to put her rapist and murderer and monster away.
Anything.
It took a few weeks to get her courage up. She spent nights curled up in the corner of her room, shuddering and weeping. It didn’t seem right that she should seek comfort in her warm bed with her clean sheets. She needed to suffer as Aleta had suffered. Atone for what she did by sending her daughter out alone. She needed to descend beneath it all.
She visited her ex-husband one more time, to tell him of her plan.
“Will it work?” she asked him.
She stared at her hands, tiny brown things with neat cuticles. She had just cleaned and trimmed them, buffed and shined them, just in case. As pristine as pristine could be, just in case her plan worked.
“Marie, don’t,” Lyle said. He sounded worried. Genuine worry and concern. Marie nearly laughed. He hadn’t been concerned about her before, had he? Why did it matter now?
“This is too much to ask anybody to do. Especially you.”
“Why?” she asked. She had taken special care with her toes, too. They looked so fragile, so tiny and frail, polished in a soft pink. When had this happened? Where was her strength going? Why was only innocence shining through?
“What do you mean, why? Because you’re you. This isn’t you. You don’t just . . . you don’t do this.”
She looked at him, then. His gray eyes were clouded and sad. Worried. He wore storms in his eyebrows.
“You were fine when I was going to kill him.”
“That’s different. That’s vastly different.”
“I don’t see how.”
He fidgeted.
“That was only going to kill him. Maybe parts of you, but only small parts. Tiny little parts that would have also rejoiced in the bloodshed. Sure, Sweet Marie would have died, but Bloodthirsty Marie would have been born. And it would have been something . . . desirable. Something you wanted. Like putting your jaws to a bleeding throat. But this? This will kill all of you. It will kill your soul.”
“I don’t care about my soul. I want to know if it will work.”
“Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”
If he carried storms in his eyes, she carried desolation in hers.
“Don’t you understand that I’m already dead?”
“Marie.”
“What else can be taken from me? You tell me that. What else can they take?”
Lyle squirmed on his chair. She knew he didn’t have an answer.
“So then help me. Please. Tell me what you think I should do to make sure this turns out like I need it to.”
He sounded sick when he spoke, his voice rusty and unwell, his worlds tilting and slurring like somebody so far drunk that they weren’t connected to earth anymore.
“From the way he reacted, I’d say it will work out exactly like you want it to. You just need to be the lamb to his wolf, that’s all. It should be easy.”
Her laughter hurt. It cut her throat and fingers like blades.
“A lamb in wolf’s clothing. A hunter in sheepskin.”
“Yes, Marie. Something like that.”
She sighed. It sounded like mist and relief and horror.
“Thank you,” she said. She picked up her purse. Stood up.
“I hope never to see you again,” she told him, and hung up her large plastic phone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She used a soft lipstick that added bare color and shine. It d
idn’t add authority or boldness or blatant sexuality. It didn’t turn her into any sort of femme fatale. She didn’t need that.
The Wolf wouldn’t want that.
Her stomach ached in ways that reminded her of Aleta in her womb, of the hollowness after she was birthed, of the barrenness of her soul now that she was dead.
She felt something strange in her eyes. Not tears. No, a glitter. Something feral and dangerous. Her teeth pulled back from her lips in a snarl until she caught herself and coughed demurely. She pulled her sunglasses over her eyes to hide the predator’s shine.
She sat on the bench, trying to look fresh and plump and swollen with youth and soft, sensual things. Something to be crushed. Scented with blood and bone meal.
“You’re back,” he said as he took his seat beside her.
That voice. She’d never forget it. It spoke to her at night. It called her darling and lover and Aleta and whore. It whispered and screamed the most beautiful and obscene of things.
Once it told her where she could find the rest of her daughter.
“In gullets,” it had said. “Building the bones of strong animals. Feeding the universe. Decaying with the leaves.”
“That’s lovely,” she had told the voice in her dream, and then it wrapped around her neck like a lover’s hands and tried to strangle her.
“I’m back,” she answered him now.
“You ran off so quickly before that I wasn’t sure I would see you again.”
Casual. Nonchalant. Simply a murderer unknowingly talking to his victim’s mother, after all. A warm sunny day in the poor district of the city.
Marie wished that she had brought something to feed the pigeons and sparrows. Snacks. Small pieces of bread. Bits of The Wolf’s eyeballs when she was finished with him. This thought warmed her and her lips curved up.
“Ah, you are happy,” he said, and she heard the pleasure behind his words. Pleased to see him? Yes, in a way.
“Yes, I suppose I am. I was hoping you would be here, if I may be so bold.”
Truth has a way of lacing your words. Marie let the truth speak for her, louder and with delicate, venomous tendrils that wove around her words in the most delicious of ways.
He heard that truth, heard the gravity of it. It filled him. She watched him grow and puff and bow under the possibilities of her need.
“Hoping I would be here, my little bird?”
Her stomach wrenched again.
“Yes.”
She thought of Aleta’s eyes, which could be so warm and so terrified that it was like her body was inhabited by two different people. Aleta’s red converse, so worn on the bottoms but so cherished. She thought of her hugs, her dimples, her tears, her anger. Her shouting, her begging, her whispering, “I love you, Mom,” her promising to kill herself one day, her lovely, shy singing in the shower.
Her daughter. Her life.
Her killer.
“Yes. I was hoping to see you.” She turned to him fully and pushed her sunglasses up on her forehead. There was no longer a shield. She was nose to nose with him, so close that she could lick his mouth, bite his bottom lip off.
She raised her chin just a bit, and when she spoke, his eyes widened and then narrowed at her breath across his lips.
“Take me home. Just once. But make it good.”
“You want this?”
His eyebrows were up, his pupils widening in arousal. She could see his confusion, his wariness, but she could smell the lust on him.
No more little girls, she thought. No more Aletas.
She let him drink in the truth of her words.
“I want this so much that I can’t even tell you,” she said.
He watched her lips move. Heard her truth.
He stood up and took her hand, squeezing it far too hard.
“Come on,” he said, and pulled her roughly down the sidewalk.
She slid her sunglasses back over her eyes and followed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She wondered where he lived. She bet it was a disgusting hole underneath a rock. A dirt cave he decorated in children’s bones and chicken legs, like Baba Yaga.
He led her to a motel. Not cheap. Not nice. Just a thing. A place. An anonymous hidey hole squirreled away in an odd corner of the city.
“This is where you live?” she asked, trying to keep her nose from crinkling.
“No,” he said simply.
And her heart dropped. How was she to lead police triumphantly to his home if they weren’t going there? She had worked hard on memorizing the way, the street numbers, but they were just In The Middle Of Nowhere, USA.
“Do you . . . stay here often?”
He stopped and dropped her wrist abruptly. The look in his eyes made her swallow. Hard.
“I don’t bring people to my home and I don’t answer questions. Do you understand?”
She nodded. He was suspicious. She was losing him. She knit her fingers together and bit her lower lip.
“I’m sorry. I just . . . I’m nervous. This isn’t . . . I mean, I don’t-”
“You are married, then?”
It didn’t take much for her to flush. The idea of sleeping with this monster mortified her. But if she couldn’t find his home, she needed his DNA somehow.
She nodded. He looked amused. She tasted hot sickness in her throat and swallowed it back down.
“I’ve never done this before,” she confided, and again. Truth. She had never slept with a man she wasn’t married to. And now, a monster. Two of the three men had been monsters.
His eyes rounded. She knew they would. Suddenly she was desirable again, a conquest. Something sweet and innocent to crush. His little bird.
“I won’t promise to be gentle,” he said, and grabbed her hand again. She nearly wept with relief as she hurried into the lobby after him.
He paid for his room in cash and gave his name as Tom Jones.
“Tom Jones?” she questioned, and he winked at her.
“Is that what you want me to call you? Tom?”
“You don’t have to call me anything. In fact, it’s better if you don’t, little bird.”
He groped her in the elevator, sliding his hands roughly up her skirt and sticking his tongue in her mouth. She nearly gagged, but thought of Aleta, and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I can hardly wait for this, baby,” she whispered in his ear, and then bit the lobe.
“You’ve been thinking about this?” he asked. His breathing was already strained, and Marie thought this was a very good sign. No turning back, she hoped. No suspicions. She just needed to play her part and endure this. She could do it. Could she do it?
Aleta.
She could do this.
She moaned and nibbled The Wolf’s ear again. The elevator stopped and the door dinged open. She pulled herself away from him and smoothed her hair.
“Come.”
She hated the way he tugged at her, pulling her down the hall like she was a child. Like she was Aleta. Had he dragged her into a motel? Had she been awake or drugged?
She dashed at her eyes. Turned her head away from him and wiped the tears again. She couldn’t do this. Not now.
He slid his card key into the reader. It beeped and turned green. Marie had never seen anything so ominous. She had never seen anything quite so hopeful. She felt her eyes flood with color, felt the carnivorous need spark and shine behind them.
The door opened into a dark room.
The Wolf turned to her and grinned.
“Are you ready? Step into my lair.”
No, it was her lair.
Marie stepped inside, grasping The Wolf’s hand tightly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She left him while he was sleeping, sprawled naked and stinking on top of the hotel sheets.
She vomited quietly into the toilet. Once. Twice. Then she slipped her clothes on and crept out of the door.
Marie held her body far too carefully. She was tired, and sore, and disgusted, and so,
so jubilant. When she stepped into the lobby that she had only been in a few hours before, the man behind the desk raised one eye at her.
GLENN, his nametag read.
“Hello, Glenn. Would you call a cab for me? Please?”
“Certainly.”
Glenn the Polite spoke quickly and quietly on the phone. Marie leaned against the desk, aware that her eyes were starting to blacken and her face was swollen.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss?” Glenn asked her. His words were professional, but his tone said so much more. Sweet, kind Glenn. A lamb working at the desk, unknowingly serving a wolf.
She looked him deeper in the eyes, then, and realized that he knew. That there was a weariness there. Checking people in and out, seeing tiny fragments of lives that he knew built into something whole and intricate behind closed doors. Realizing he was dealing with newlyweds and happy families and potential suicides and monsters.
She wanted to grasp his hands, to kiss his knuckles perhaps. She wanted to ask him if he played the guitar, because he looked like he would, or if he wrote stories or had a small family of his own. But she kept her distance. She was a walking petri dish of evil, and she didn’t want to get any of that on her new friend.
But she smiled, and the smile was sincere and wide and, she could feel it, almost beautiful. The man behind the desk smiled back, and this gave her joy.
“I will be fine,” she said, and she meant it. She grinned at him with a monster’s DNA coating her body and mouth and most secret of areas. She wore his genetic material like a second skin.
Her smile grew even larger.
Just fine.
The cab pulled up smoothly, cutting like a shark through the noise in the street. She saw it through the window, looking grand and bright, shiny yellow, and the sheer decadence of the cab versus the bus nearly overwhelmed her. But she didn’t want to waste the time, wanted to get to her destination as quickly as she could, so the taxi it was.
But the sleekness of it, and the sheer vileness of what she wore on her skin, and the genetic material seething within her, it left her shaken.
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