The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “And you lost your cool.”

  “Yeah! No….” He caught it. “Not really. I mean I was mad, but I didn’t do it out of anger I just told her to go again—”

  “And she didn’t go?”

  “She didn’t go, so I grabbed her arm, and she flopped to the floor.”

  “So you just grabbed the back of her shirt?”

  “Dude, you are not listening!” He got close to Max’s face. Max smelled corn chips on his breath. “There were other kids in the cottage—”

  “Two.” Max held up two fingers as though Glenn needed a demonstration of the number. “Two other kids, who were not in any danger from her because the only person she was mad at was you. Why didn’t you remove them from the room? Were they freaking out too?”

  “Mitch already did that.”

  “Mitch already did that.” Max opened his arms as though preparing for a curtain call. “Well it sounds like Mitch had the situation under control. It didn’t sound like you really needed to do anything else at all.”

  “I told her to go to the cool down room!” A drop of spit landed on Max’s face. He didn’t wipe it off.

  “What was she doing after she hit the floor?” asked Laura.

  Glenn kept his eyes on Max as he answered. “She crossed her arms and got all pouty.”

  “Unbelievable.” Max shook his head.

  “I told her to go, and she didn’t go!”

  “So you grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her?”

  “No, I grabbed the back of her shirt to lift her up. It’s her fault she didn’t stand up.”

  “She is barely over five feet tall, weighs ninety-three pounds and is twenty one weeks pregnant!” Max shouted the word pregnant.

  “You don’t have any idea what it’s like to do my job!”

  “I did your job, ass clown! And I know the difference between an appropriate response to a physical threat versus a bumbling moron teaching a little girl a lesson after she hurt his feelings,” he said the last three words in a baby voice. Glenn turned red again.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. For example, this is an inappropriate take down of a hostile juvenile….” Max hooked his boot around the back of Glenn’s leg and kicked it. Almost in tandem, he jammed his open palms into Glenn’s chest, throwing his weight into the push. Glenn stumbled and fell with a roar.

  Mitch jumped up from the couch and ran to the back of the room while Laura crossed her arms and watched.

  Glenn tried to grab a chair for support, but it was too far away. Max caught his hand as he walked around the downed man and twisted his arm behind his back. Glenn yelped and cursed.

  “This is an inappropriate hold. You can tell it’s inappropriate because the subject is in pain.” Max grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt with the other hand and pulled. He slid along the floor much easier than Max expected, but he still only got him a couple of feet.

  “Okay, Max.”

  He let go and looked at Laura. Glenn rolled away and got to his feet. It took him a little bit, since he was trying to hold his hurt arm the whole time. Once he was up, he staggered away and turned to face Max. Every inch of visible skin was bright red.

  “You mother fucker!”

  “Glenn—”

  “No! He assaulted me!”

  “Glenn, shut up.” She looked at him with fiery eyes. Glenn’s body shook as he panted. “You’re lucky he didn’t demonstrate how not to drown a juvenile in a toilet.” His jaw dropped. “Go home. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  Max wiped the spit off his face as Glenn left. He didn’t look back. Laura took a deep breath.

  “Please don’t attack my employees.”

  “Why?”

  She paused. “Okay, you’ve got me there.”

  Max smiled and caught his breath. Dragging that guy even a little ways was exhausting. After Glenn was gone, she walked Max to his car.

  “Did it occur to you that Eileen may have instigated the situation knowing how you’d respond?”

  Max opened his car door. “Yeah. It worked.” He fell into his seat. “Are you going to fire him?”

  “I can’t fire people. All I can do is recommend disciplinary action…the final decision is for someone else.” She put her hand on the roof of his car and looked in. “And yes, I will recommend disciplinary action. I can’t promise anything though.”

  “Fair enough.” She stepped back as Max closed the door.

  “This is a nice car,” she observed as he started it up.

  “Thanks. I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on it today, actually.”

  Chapter Eight

  Pressure on the bed woke Max. He rolled over and reached into the darkness. His hand stopped at something wet and cold. He withdrew his hand and examined his fingers in faint light. What he saw in the faint glow of moonlight, filtering through the closed blinds made him snap up. He turned on a lamp.

  Eileen’s skin was as white as his bed sheets and splattered with blood. Her belly was a ring of dripping red flesh gaped with an empty black hole. Max shivered and looked into her eyes. They were glossy and white, like marbles. She stared at him from her perch on the bed, knees bent as cold blood trickled over soft, naked skin. Max looked at his hand. The blood was tepid and black.

  The empty maw in her belly called him back. Max obeyed without thought. When his wrist was deep in the moist abyss, her flesh closed. Max screamed—

  He woke up screaming. Sadie rolled off the bed and turned on a lamp. She stood at the side of the bed, naked but for a tiny pair of panties and her tattoos.

  “What? What is it?” Her breasts rose and fell with heavy breaths. Max looked down at his hands. They were clean. When he looked up, Sadie climbed on the bed and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “It’s okay, baby… it’s okay.”

  Max panted and leaned into her body. One of her nipple rings tickled his cheek as he wrapped his arms around her waist. She stroked his head and held him. She was good at dealing with his nightmares.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” he whispered into her breast. She dragged her finger gently over the hood of his ear. “I thought you were still mad.”

  “I am.” She kissed the top of his head. “It can wait. I can be mad at you tomorrow.”

  Sadie didn’t like sleeping at her grandmother’s house. She almost always slept at Max’s, except when they’d had a fight. This was their first fight since his kidnapping. She’d stayed with him every night since then. He didn’t have nightmares every night, just most nights. He hadn’t been waking up screaming as much, either. The chloral hydrate helped with that.

  “This was different.” He closed his eyes and pressed his ear to her heart. It thumped away under her pale chest. “It wasn’t about Moonshadow.”

  Her arms tightened around his head. “Don’t say her name,” she whispered. “Don’t say it.”

  Max nodded and pulled back. She was on her knees above him. Even sitting, he was almost taller than her. As he touched her face and their eyes met, she gave him a little smile. It looked cute, especially with the lip ring. She kissed his thumb as he passed it over her lips. She closed her eyes and nuzzled his palm with the side of her face. Max leaned forward and met her with a kiss.

  “You taste like those cigars,” she whispered as they parted. They stayed close so that her lips brushed his as she spoke. She gave him an innocent look. Max pressed his palm against her soft cheek and rubbed behind her ear.

  “You don’t have to kiss me.”

  “Yes, I do.” She kissed him again, this time less gently. Max laid with her on the bed. She crawled on top of him and straddled his thighs. Max slipped his hands from her face to her back, running his fingers over her spiraling red and black tattoos. He moved one hand up the back of her neck and took a handful of her hair. The other he slipped under her panties and squeezed the soft cheeks of her round little ass.

  Sadie gasped when he pulled her hair. He didn’t do it too hard, just hard enough for
her to feel it. She took her mouth from his and lifted her body as she put her hands on either side of his head. What little hair wasn’t bunched up in his hand fell around her face like a curtain.

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I am mad at you.” She adjusted her hips so her pussy was against the hardened length of his cock. He felt moisture through the thin lace barrier. She moved her hips just slightly, teasing him with the tip of her labia ring. “I said it can wait.”

  She straightened her legs as he helped her out of her panties. Once they were gone, she started kissing his neck. Max pushed his boxers down around his knees. She caught the band with her foot and pushed them off the rest of the way. Reaching between where they met, she guided him with her hand. Pulling away when he was halfway inside, moaning she lowered onto the rest of him.

  Max moaned as she rode him. Throwing back her head, she thrust her large breasts into his face. Max pressed his lips to her nipple and teased it with his tongue. The metal from her piercing tasted like blood. He had to pull back to check that he hadn’t torn her.

  “What?” She hadn’t seen his face or even slowed her thrusts—she didn’t have to in order to sense the discomfort. Sex with an empath was funny that way. He met her eyes and shook his head then resumed sucking on her nipple. It didn’t taste like blood anymore. She ran her fingers up the sides of his chest, tracing the length of his scars. He kept them hidden from most people, but he couldn’t hide them from her. She’d have known about them, even if he never showed her. Sadie told him once that they were always on the edge of his thoughts, and while she couldn’t exactly read minds she could feel the colors they made. Some thoughts have a unique color, something she’d never described to him—if she even could. But she recognized it immediately, because she’d seen it in the mirror.

  Max gasped as he came inside her. She pushed down on his chest and lifted her body, arching her back and taking it all. She shivered and pressed her hips closer to his until he’d finished. He wasn’t sure if she came, she made the same sounds whether she came or not. Sadie was not overly prone to orgasms, but when she had them they were huge, the most spectacular of which she tended to reserve for their more adventurous sexual escapades. Ones involving toys or another girl.

  She fell asleep curled up by his side with her head under his arm. Her soft breath brushed against the cross-shaped scar beneath his armpit. It reminded him it was there. Thinking about it made him think about other things as well, things only loosely related to the jagged lines of unevenly healed flesh. It kept him awake.

  When he was sure Sadie wouldn’t notice, he withdrew from the bed. After putting on his boxers and a pair of sweat pants, Max went downstairs. He didn’t turn on any lights until he got to the little bedroom on the first floor he used as an office.

  He activated a lamp and opened the top drawer of the second desk. The other desk had his laptop and a pile of papers and pens. This one had a flat black mat with a few brown stains and an illuminated magnifying glass on an arm. A small set of brass punches and other assorted tools lined the back of the desk against the wall. At the end hung a small brass hammer next to a rubber mallet of similar size.

  On the black mat he set a small gray box with the word RUGER dimpled across the top. Next to the word was a logo of a Phoenix with its wings curved up like arms. He popped the lip and withdrew a small pistol with a long, skinny barrel. The smell of Hoppes No.9 gun oil reminded him of his father.

  Next from the drawer, he took a small cardboard box, well-worn and also smelling of gun oil. From this box, he withdrew a soda can attached to a black plastic coupler by a metal tie. He set that aside and took next from the box a small white PVC cylinder with threading around the end. He put that aside as well.

  After moving the plastic box, he checked the pistol to make sure it didn’t have a round in the chamber. Once secured, he set it on the black mat and grabbed the brass hammer and the proper sized punch. He lined it up with the sight pin and smacked the flat base with the brass hammer. The resulting crack wasn’t very loud, but he winced when he thought Sadie might have heard. He looked at the door for a few seconds and listened for sounds of her stirring. Hearing none, he resumed his work.

  Once the front sight was removed, he took a roll of vinyl tape from another drawer and wrapped the end of the barrel. He used a pair of scissors to cut off the end from the roll and stuck it down tight. The PVC cylinder fit snugly with a little pressure. The threads pointed out at the end of the barrel. To this, he attached the plastic coupler, making the barrel of his gun look large and silly with a soda can attached to the end. He didn’t care how it looked.

  Max loaded the gun.

  “Hey!” Tritter slapped Kearny’s arm, causing him to spill plasma on his shirt.

  “God dammit, Tritter.” He screwed the cap onto the thermos and wiped the greasy liquid off his chest. It smeared and left a wet brown stain. He gave the vamp a dirty look.

  “He’s coming out!”

  Kearney looked through the windshield. Max walked towards their car with a flashlight in one hand and the other behind his back. “What the fuck’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know…going for a walk?”

  “He ain’t wearing a shirt.”

  Tritter looked at Kearny. “Should we—?”

  “What, run? No, dumbshit…you scared?”

  “I ain’t scared of no human,” he spoke in a whisper as Max drew closer to their nest. “Is he coming to us?”

  “Yeah.” Kearney grabbed the handle and rolled down the window.

  “What are you doing? You’re gonna talk to him?”

  Kearny gave him another nasty look. “Don’t have much choice,” he muttered. “Relax, what can he do?”

  “Hey, guys.” Max held the flashlight like a club, bulb under hand. He lifted it to the window and hit Tritter in the face with the beam. When the vampire flinched at the light, Max withdrew his other arm and displayed an unusually modified pistol. He squeezed the trigger. A soft pop filled the car, and Tritter flopped back against the car seat with a tiny red hole in his head.

  “Shit!” Kearny turned to Max just in time to get the blare of a flashlight and the ruptured end of a soda can silencer in his face. Tritter spasmed and drooled, and the hole in his head sealed behind the narrow ribbon of blood trickling down his face. “What the hell, Max?”

  “Put your hands—”

  “Yeah, yeah…” Kearny pressed his fingers to the steering wheel. Max lowered the flashlight enough that Kearny could see his face again. “You didn’t have to shoot him…now I’m gonna have to dig that thing out of his brain with a pair of pliers.”

  “I want you to give her message.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to give her a message,” Max said it slower.

  Kearny nodded.

  “Tell her I want to meet.”

  Kearny furrowed his brow. “Are you insane?”

  “Tell her. Or I’ll keep this up until she does. And next time I’ll shoot you both and let the cops find you in the morning. Won’t that be fun?” He forced a grin. “I’ve got a lot of empty cans.”

  “Yeah…next time she might send more than just us.”

  “I’ve got more bullets, too.”

  Kearney nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Be here tomorrow night, same time with her terms.” Max backed from the car, keeping the light in Kearny’s eyes and the gun leveled at his head. He didn’t turn off the flashlight until he was on his porch.

  Kearny looked at his shuddering, drooling car mate. Rolling his eyes, he started the car. This was going to take a while and involve a lot of screaming and blood. It would be best if he did it outside the city.

  “You’re cold ...”

  Max ignored her and pulled the blankets over his shoulders.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “Why are you cold?” She put her hand on his back. He curled up his legs. One of his feet brushed her leg and she shuddered, “Ga
h! Your feet are freezing! Did you go ice skating?”

  “Sorry. I went outside.”

  “Barefooted?”

  He yawned. “I had slippers. Go back to sleep.”

  She was silent, almost like holding her breath. He knew what that meant.

  “What did you do?”

  “You know those two vampires that are always watching my place?”

  “Mmm hmm…”

  “I shot one of them.”

  “Mmm.” She scooted up behind him, pressed her breasts to his back and threw her arm around his chest. Her body was warm. He couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate it. “You should have put on some shoes,” she finished that with a yawn. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  He thought about saying, ‘Yes, mother,’ but refrained.

  He was just about to fall asleep when she asked what his dream was about. “It wasn’t about her.” He patted her wrist. Most of his nightmares were about her. Those had become the more pleasant ones as of late.

  “I’m sorry.” She kissed between his shoulder blades. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  He knew she could tell when he was lying. Not that he wasn’t a good liar…he was an excellent liar. He had to lie all the time in his job. But he couldn’t lie to her. No one could. That was kind of her curse. It was why she hated so much. Why she lived with her grandmother and not her mom and stepfather. Why she had never had a successful relationship with anyone but Max—if what they had could even be called that.

  She let it drop. An obvious lie was a safer way of saying he didn’t want to talk about it than just telling her he didn’t want to talk about it. It conveyed more than just disinclination, but also a desire to obscure. Neither of them believed in God so they knew no one was watching them. Nonetheless, they liked to maintain the illusion of a normal couple. So they let lies work, even when they knew they weren’t true, because if they were normal they would have passed.

  Sadie fell asleep a few minutes later. He could tell by the change in her breathing. Max didn’t fall asleep until much, much later. By then it was too late, there would be no chance of having another nightmare. He wouldn’t be asleep long enough before the alarm to reach that point.