Serpentine

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  "God, Terry, you've sat through the lectures about child pornography and what happens to those children. You've helped us find pedophiles and put them on trial, and the whole time you were one of them," Tyburn said.

  "I am not one of them. I have never, ever touched a child in real life."

  "Did you pay for the films you watched?" I asked.

  He glanced at me and then away, staring down at the woman in his arms. "Yes, the films are still popular enough that they cost."

  "Then you know that the person you paid money to used it to make more films, to abuse more children. You know that, right? You're a cop; you know how it works."

  "I do," he said and reached for his gun.

  "Don't do it," I said.

  "Terry, don't do this," Tyburn said.

  His hand was just resting on it; he hadn't even picked it up. My AR was back at my shoulder and aimed at him. "Ease down, Marshal," Tyburn said.

  "Captain, either she shoots me or I eat my gun. Remember all those old stories about dragons and monsters terrorizing the countryside back in medieval times and earlier, Anita?"

  "Yeah," I said, voice soft and careful so that I could keep my aim on his face.

  "When one of us becomes our monster half and stays there, we go after our victim of choice. Most of them go after young women, the legend of the maiden sacrifice, but it's like we chase what we're attracted to."

  "Vampires kill their nearest and dearest first, sometimes," I said. I raised my gun barrel toward the ceiling, because he still wanted to talk and I couldn't keep a rifle pointed at him steady forever. I didn't point it at the floor, because I didn't want to cross the woman in his lap with the gun barrel.

  "If I change into my monster and don't come back to myself, I'll hunt children, Captain. I can't let that happen."

  "Come with us, Terry. We'll take you in, lock you up; you won't hurt anyone."

  "You still don't understand what's happening--but you do, don't you, Anita?"

  I didn't actually, not all of it, but I asked what I wanted to know, while I watched the center of his body, waiting for him to tense, which would let me know he was moving his gun into play. "Why do your people kill women every few decades?" I asked.

  "The reason that he wants to kill these two is that the auguries were good when he gutted the first girl."

  "Auguries, what are you talking about?" Tyburn asked.

  "It was an old method of divination to read the entrails of a sacrifice. He thinks he has the gift of prophecy with reading animals' death throes and then what their internal organs look like after death. Like I said, he's crazy. But some of the others believe that he can read what the gods want, so he needed another woman that was tied to Bettina. He overheard Bernardo talking to Denny and thought a shared lover would be enough of a connection, but I knew we couldn't take one of the people from a U.S. Marshal's wedding party. I knew Forrester wouldn't rest until he found her, so I persuaded them that she was too high risk a target. They let me put her somewhere she'd be found, but on the condition that I use my powers to get two suitable victims to replace Denny. I did it, but you know they tried this twenty years ago and it didn't work. He's convinced that it wasn't the right connection between victims, and there's some astrological event tonight that will make it perfect. Helping clean up after a murder is one thing, but I can't live with myself bringing them like lambs to slaughter. I can't live knowing that just watching the videos of your fiance hurt him and hurt every child who's used like that. I can't pretend anymore. My son is almost the same age that your Nathaniel was in those first films. I think what I would do to anyone who touched him like that, that stole his childhood away like that, and I thought I'd kill them. I'd shoot them. I'd look them in the eyes and shoot them dead."

  His chest moved, his hand closing on the gun but not raising it much. It didn't matter; he had the gun in his hand. I aimed at his face. I'd normally go for a center-mass shot first, but with the woman draped across him I couldn't risk it. It would have to be a head shot.

  "I don't have a warrant of execution for you."

  "Captain Tyburn will testify that I gave you no choice."

  "You won't shoot us, Terry."

  I wondered where Edward and the other two horsemen were. Were they listening in to the confession? I pushed it out of my mind and just concentrated on the man in front of me. Yeah, he wanted suicide by cop, but that didn't mean he wouldn't shoot us to make us shoot back.

  "When I die, my magic dies with me; Stephanie and Valerie will both know that they aren't safe. I'm sorry for all the harm I've caused. The rest of us aren't bulletproof, or blade-proof, but if you don't set fire to the wounds, they heal. I know that if anyone can kill him, it's the horsemen. Don't let him get to the water, or he'll swim away and you'll lose him." He raised his gun toward us.

  I let out my last breath and the world closed down to that quiet center. There was no doubt, no fear, no anxiety, no questions of right and wrong, just his face at the end of my gun barrel, his eyes so big and dark. I'd hit just above them. He could have tried to use his gaze on me, but he didn't. He didn't want to win. He wanted to lose. He brought his gun up and started moving his hand to aim at me, but he knew he'd never make it. He didn't want to make it.

  I pulled the trigger and the gun jumped in my hand. His head rocked back against the couch, spraying blood all over the upholstery. Stephanie woke screaming, falling off the couch, looking at the blood, at his face. Tyburn and I both went toward the couch, Tyburn to help our victim up off the floor and get her out of there, me to look Rankin in the eyes one more time and pull the trigger again with my barrel almost touching his skin. His brains blew out the back of his skull to add thicker things to the blood that was already on the couch and wall. Once the brains come out, even vampires and shapeshifters are dead. I'd had to kill him, but the thought that he'd sat in the dark in private and watched Nathaniel as a little boy being hurt, that he was a cop and he'd tried to use that authority to pin crimes on Nathaniel, that it hadn't been enough to be part of his abuse, he'd tried to take the life, our life, away . . . If I could have killed him more than once, I would have. But as I'd told Peter once, if they're dead, that's as good as vengeance gets. Once their brains are plastered all over the wall, you're done.

  The only thing that saved my hearing was the high-tech earplugs. I heard yelling, and some kind of animal sound like a bull roaring, or maybe a lion, or something I had no word for, but it was loud enough to reach through my ringing ears. We had more monsters to kill. I left the body on the couch to finish bleeding out and ran for the door and the sounds of fighting, but before I got outside I heard wood splintering inside the house, a woman who wasn't Stephanie screaming, and that bellowing sound again, except this time it was behind me inside the house. I turned with my rifle to my shoulder, putting a wall to my back, and looked down the hallway to find Edward at the end of it with a broken back door behind him, and Bernardo with the redhead from the pool in his arms. She was screaming one long, loud scream after another, but we'd found Valerie Miller. Olaf and Edward were both looking into the room that I thought they'd gotten her out of. I thought the door was closed and then realized that it wasn't a door unless it was painted black. No, it wasn't a door. There was something filling the doorway. I had a moment of Edward, Olaf, and all of us seeing one another, and then the blackness filling the doorway moved into the light of the hallway and I knew why Valerie Miller wouldn't stop screaming.

  64

  IT WAS A mass of black tentacles that had to be more than ten feet tall and wide enough to fill most of the hallway, so that it seemed to flow toward both Edward and me at the same time. The tentacles had snake heads, or maybe the entire mass of the thing was made up of hundreds of individual snakes. There were faces, or things that looked like faces, here and there, but I wasn't sure if there was a human face in the writhing mass, or if my mind just so desperately needed something human in it that I was seeing things.

  I think I heard Edward
yell at Bernardo to get the girl out. I yelled something similar to Captain Tyburn about Stephanie and knew that he got her out, even as I took an angle to shoot into the mass of snakes that wouldn't overpenetrate and hit Edward or Olaf on the other side of the house. The thing screamed and seemed undecided whether it wanted Edward and Olaf or me more. Then one of the faces in the mass opened its eyes and looked at me. For one horrible second I recognized Andy Stavros, the drunken husband and new father. Another head higher up opened its eyes and screamed at me. Was it one of the men from the pictures that Micah had shown me? Was this thing made up of more than one of the family? What the fuck was going on?

  Andy Stavros's head screamed at me again, and this time I shot it, instead of the mass of snakes. The head bled from the hole in its forehead just like Rankin had. I yelled, "Shoot the heads!" For all I knew, Edward and Olaf were already doing it, but it didn't hurt to try to share intel. The monster seemed to be retreating toward the back door. I didn't know where the others were in relation to it, so I didn't want to shoot into the mass while it was moving that way. I heard Edward yell, "Fire in the hole!"

  Shit! I had time to start backpedaling for the front door before I heard the whoosh of fire and heard the monster's mouths scream for real. You didn't have to understand anything to know that those were pain sounds. Fire kills everything, even Lovecraftian horrors like the thing that was now trying to crawl toward me. I ran out the front door as much to get away from the fire as to flee from the monster. The old house went up fast: Either the wood was ripe for burning or Edward had used an accelerant. Either way, the house started to collapse with the monster still inside it, or I thought that was what was happening, and then the black tentacles burst out of the burning house. I had a second to guard my face from flying fire and debris, and then I was firing up into a mix of snakes, tentacles, human heads like some kind of trophy stuck into the nest, and things my mind couldn't see, didn't want to remember. I was shooting as I moved backward, and didn't watch where I was going. One minute I was shooting fine and the next I was flat on my back with a huge tree branch tangling my feet.

  I didn't scream as the moving nest of burning snakes reached out toward me. I just kept firing, trying to find its heart or brain, or something. I kept firing as it blotted out the sunlight, and I thought, I wonder if I'll die from venom, fire, or just be crushed. I was weirdly calm as a hand yanked me to my feet and Bernardo was rushing us both backward out of reach of the snapping snake mouths. We got the big tree that the limb had fallen from between us and the beast, and then we put our shoulders together, snugged our AR-15s against our shoulders, and started shooting the burning beast.

  Edward and Olaf joined us. Olaf put his shoulder beside mine and he joined Bernardo and me shooting into the creature. Edward stayed on the outside and used the flamethrower again. I felt the backwash of heat from it, and the next thing we knew, the big tree that had slowed it down and helped give Bernardo time to find a safe shooting distance started to burn. I had to step wide to Edward's right to make sure that my bullets weren't in danger of hitting him. Bernardo was safe on his side. The three of us kept shooting into the center mass of it, as Edward sent another sheet of flame whooshing toward it. We had to back up from the tree as it started raining burning debris down on us like the house had. Fuck flamethrowers.

  The creature turned away from us and started trying to move past Bernardo, since he was on the end of our defense and farthest away from the flamethrower. Behind me were trees and plants that would burn if it made the tree line, but beyond that was the Gulf of Mexico, and I remembered what Rankin had said, that it could swim away and heal.

  I aimed at one of the heads nestled tight to the center of the body and pulled the trigger. The flames hid most of the damage from me, but the beast staggered. Something about the heads clustered in the middle hurt it more. I yelled, "Shoot the heads in the center!" I wasn't sure Olaf or Bernardo would hear me over the whooshing of flames, gunfire, and the beast's screams, but then one of the heads seemed to partially explode. Bernardo had heard me. I emptied my AR into the creature and yelled, "Reloading!"

  Olaf and Bernardo took a step forward and fired faster into the creature, while I popped out the empty magazine, got one of the extras to slip in place, and did one last hit to make sure it seated right. And then I moved back up with them and we fired shoulder to shoulder again, or as close as we could get with the height difference.

  Olaf yelled, "Reloading!" He stepped back to get his new magazine and I stepped forward to fire into the heads. The smell of burning flesh and hair burned my throat and eyes. The wind had changed, and the smoke was blowing toward us now. Crap!

  Bernardo yelled, "Reloading!" and we covered for him.

  Edward kept hitting it with fire, and it was hurt, but it didn't die. I knew he was out of fuel to burn it with when he stepped up on the other side of Olaf with his AR to his shoulder and started shooting with us. There was movement behind us, and it was the other police; reinforcements had arrived. They cursed and yelled about what the fuck was that, but they put their shoulders to ours and started shooting it. They'd have done the same thing if it had been a bunch of bank robbers shooting at us.

  Two mags later and I was out of ammo for the AR. I switched to the shotgun. It rocked a little more than the AR, and pieces of monster fell away where it hit.

  Olaf yelled, "Empty!" and had to step back from the line, because he'd actually run through all his ammo in all his guns. Edward, Bernardo, and I closed the gap where he'd been standing and fired into the still-burning, smoking, screaming creature. The cops had formed a line on either side of us like some sort of impromptu firing squad.

  I pulled the trigger and came up empty. I felt for more ammo, but there wasn't any more for the Mossberg. I dropped it and pulled the Browning, knowing I didn't have the stopping power I needed, not for this monster. I used it anyway, until I was empty again. "I'm out!" I yelled and stepped back from the line; Edward was the last of us standing with the police when the monster stumbled and then slowly collapsed to the ground. It was still burning and they were still shooting into it, but it had stopped bellowing.

  Edward hesitated, lowering his rifle. The rest of the police kept shooting until they ran out of ammo, too. We shot it long after it had stopped moving, or screaming. Normally, I might have encouraged people to conserve their ammo, but I didn't know how to be certain that it was well and truly dead. It had three heads and seemed mostly made of tentacles. I had no idea where its heart might be, or if those were all really heads, or if there was only one real head and the others were sort of decoys, like the tip of a lizard's tail that looks like a worm to predators so they won't attack the lizard's head. The creature smoldering on the ground by the still-burning shed was so alien that we couldn't even decide when it died, or if it had.

  I don't think I was the only one flashing back to all those old monster movies from my childhood where the big monster was never really dead; it only seemed dead until the next movie. The fire department got there, alerted by the smoke, but they were just as puzzled by what to do as we were. The only thing we all agreed on was that we weren't going to try to save it.

  Epilogue

  THE LOCAL AUTHORITIES have the monster carcass, and several museums and zoos have sent experts down to look at it. So far no one knows what it is, but they also can't prove that it was ever human.

  Edward using his crime-busting superpowers to save one of Donna's oldest and dearest friends made her take another look at her views about his job. She decided that being jealous of his work and especially his closeness with me was just another way of repackaging her old jealousy issue about our "affair." She owned it, she apologized to all of us, and when Denny got out of the hospital with a clean bill of health, the wedding went forward, with plans for serious couples therapy. Donna and Edward both want to make this work badly enough to work at it, which is more than I can say for most of the couples I know.

  The hotel and all the rest o
f the wedding business agreed to Nathaniel's request that they delay everything until Denny and Peter could be with us. There were no extra charges and they felt badly that a relative had caused so much harm.

  I was standing beside Edward when he looked down that flower-petal-strewn beach at his bride-to-be. His face showed everything that you could ever want to see on your groom's face. The love, the faith, the hope--all of it was there in Edward, the most cynical person I'd ever met. In Donna he'd found all the naive, impossible things that he'd wanted when he was younger, before he became Edward. For that look on his face, it was all worth it. I didn't have to understand it. I didn't have to be in love with Donna. I just had to stand there and see that my best friend adored her above all other women on the fucking planet, and that was good enough for me. The second-best face at the altar was Peter's. He damn near glowed with happiness as he watched his mother walk up the aisle and take Edward's arm. I don't know if Donna would have kicked Dixie out of the wedding or not, because Dixie took the choice out of her hands. She went home early, too ashamed of what she'd done to Peter to face everyone. I'd like to think that she would be getting therapy, too, but I'm not holding my breath.

  Since I didn't have a warrant of execution for Rankin, the shooting had to be reviewed, but Tyburn backed me up and it was eventually declared a clean shoot. He's pretty sure that the "us" Rankin kept talking about was his extended family, but we have no proof. Rankin chose to die rather than betray them, and the ones who showed up to slaughter the women were absorbed into the monster we killed. The murderers are all dead. Cleo might have seen jail, or even been executed for real, but we'd violated her civil rights so badly, it gave her a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  Nathaniel, Micah, and I talked about what Rankin told me. Nathaniel took it better than we did. Rankin isn't the first person to see the films that his abuser made of him as a child and then seek him out. He'd never told either of us that. Strangely, he had told Jean-Claude, as owner of Guilty Pleasures.