The StoneCutter

by Scott Blade

  "Hmmm," she muttered. She looked down at her shoes and smiled. "Let's go back to your place."

  |||||

  In Shane's penthouse, beneath a large, long abstract painting that stretched the downstairs hallway, he kissed Sun Good against the wall passionately, borderline pornographically. Sun kissed him back with equal veracity. Her silver skirt slowly peeled upward as she wrapped her toned legs around him.

  Deep underneath her skirt, not far from Shane's roaming hands, she hid a small revolver. It was tightly strapped to the inside of her thigh.

  Deep underneath his trousers, Sun felt how hard he was. This was not a shock to me since I never did control Shane's lust. The only region where his lust roamed into my lands was when it involved murder, violence, or plain old rough sex.

  Sun's concealed gun concerned me. I wanted to remove it out of her reach. In case the detective got a glimpse of me, I needed her to be unarmed, harmless.

  As she kissed Shane and clawed at his back, my claws began to protrude through his fingertips. His eyes began to turn black. My lizard-tongue replaced Shane's and slithered down Sun's throat.

  She moaned as I kissed her, my talon claws softly scratched across her skin and up her legs towards the revolver. Without her keen senses noticing, I slid the gun out of its holster and placed it on the middle of the metal stairs behind us.

  Sun felt the weight missing and quickly opened her eyes. In a blink, I was safely hidden behind Shane's skin and bones. His eyes were back to their original deep blue color.

  She surrendered and sank back into their kiss.

  Moments later, they stumbled up the stairs, past the revolver, and ended up in the master bedroom. The room was a simple decor using dark colors and steel furniture and fixtures. It was modern.

  Shane tossed Sun's half-naked body onto the king-sized platform bed. She got up on her knees.

  "I missed our sex," she said, looking up at him.

  "Take off your dress," Shane commanded. I helped him a little. After all rough sex did fall into my area of control. And Shane's sex with Det. Good was normally rough. So, I lent him a dark, wet hand.

  Sun stripped her dress down. She was down to her silver thong. Her skin sparkled from her glittery body cream. Her fake breasts were exposed and also glittery, truly sinful.

  "Take off your pants. Get over here!" Sun Good said, sitting up on her knees.

  Shane pulled off his pants and took off his shirt, revealing his muscular frame. Sun Good grabbed onto him and whipped us down onto the bed. She clawed over his chest and stomach. She would need sharper claws if she wanted to pierce through Shane's skin and into my lair underneath.

  Shane's heart began pumping faster and faster. His blood rushed through his body and across my feet and tentacles. His blood flowed like lava, rushing out of a volcano. I could feel chunks of it soaking between my webbed toes.

  Sun Good ran her lips along Shane's stomach. She made strident animalistic sounds. Shane could feel her breasts softly brushing across his thighs as she moved downward on him.

  I let Shane have his fun, but I wasn't excited about the thundering of Shane's heartbeat. Hearing his heart beating was like the echo of a subway car as it rumbled below a New York City apartment. It shook every piece of furniture that I owned.

  After a while of Shane enjoying Sun Good's lips on him; he gripped her by the tuft of her hair and moved her up towards his face. He passionately kissed her.

  I grappled onto Shane's brain, listening to the creature-like sounds that resonated from Sun and my vessel.

  After forty-five minutes of listening to their beastly sounds and surviving their thrusting movements; finally they were finished.

  "I hope that this changes things. Maybe now you can ease off of me a little?" Shane asked.

  "I'm tired. Let's go to sleep," Sun said. "We can talk tomorrow."

  Within seconds she was fast asleep.

  |||||

  The cold hardwood floors of Shane's penthouse sent goose bumps from Sun's feet all the way up her legs. She stood near the large bay window in Shane's master bedroom. She stared out of it towards the second penthouse apartment across the roof, our secret lair. She noticed the large fireplace that protruded out of the roof.

  Only for a moment did she wonder why Shane didn't have a fireplace in his penthouse.

  'Strange,' she thought. 'Why such a large fireplace for such a small penthouse?'

  Those thoughts fleeted. Her suspicions died. Glancing back at Shane, he appeared to be in a coma-like sleep, but we were awake.

  A single nightstand was near his side of the bed. She saw a thin glass stand that had the time emitting from it in LED light. The time was 2:45 a.m.

  A cold breeze swept through the darkness and up Sun's naked skin. This was her chance to find out something about Shane. She knew that she had to take advantage of being inside his home while he slept soundly.

  She rose from the bed and carefully tiptoed down the steel staircase. Each step was precisely placed on the metal planks in order to ensure silent movement.

  She stopped and bent over to pick up her revolver. She wasn't sure if Shane was dangerous, but her instincts told her that she was better off with the gun.

  At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and picked up her purse, placing the revolver inside.

  Shane's penthouse was 2200 square feet with four bedrooms. She suspected that one of them had to be an office. That was where she would investigate.

  The penthouse had more windows than walls. None of them had curtains or blinds. Shane acted like he had nothing to hide, but in Sun's experience the most dangerous men were the ones who hid a secret so well that they were rarely suspicious. Shane allowed the outside world to see directly into his home at any time. In the daytime, the penthouse was filled with sunlight. That just meant that at night it was filled with darkness.

  He hid something, and she was determined to find out what.

  Sun walked through the living room, passing some very expensive looking furniture. She made her way to the hallway and found three doors. The first one led to a second bedroom, a guest room. It consisted of very plain furniture and bed covers.

  The second room was a workout room. The room was comprised of a bench, numerous free weights, ab machines, and a rowing machine.

  Sun Good gawked at Shane's vanity.

  He already works out at the Roosevelt Club. Why does he have so much equipment here at home? She thought. Then she thought about how she appreciated his hard, sculpted body. It was like an Olympic god's.

  The third room had to be the place where she would discover all of his secrets.

  Where was he keeping records of the missing clients? They must have been in this room, she thought.

  She turned the knob and suddenly froze. She felt something cold and daunting standing behind her. She heard faint breathing. Sun Good reached into her purse and whipped around with the revolver drawn.

  To her surprise, there was no one standing there. The hallway behind her was completely empty. She relaxed her revolver and turned back to the third room.

  "Bingo," she muttered.

  The room was Shane’s personal, just as she had hoped. A desk, without any drawers, rested near the back window. The only thing that sat on its flawless surface was a silver laptop.

  Sun Good felt titillation, like a child discovering where his parents had hidden the Christmas presents. She hit the jackpot. She thought that his personal computer would be the place to find his hidden secrets.

  She sat down behind the desk and turned on the computer.

  She didn't notice it. But outside of the window, we crept through the night's shadows. We watched as the detective failed to open Shane's laptop. She tried password after password. She would never crack through our password. Technology kept Shane and me safe from D.C.'s hot shot detective.

  We watched as the naked Sun Good appeared to grow frustrated by her failures to log on to our laptop. After a while, she gave up.

 
Shane breathed a deep sigh of relief. Perhaps now, she would back off of us.

  However, just then, she pulled a small jump-drive out of her purse. Shane's eyes widened. He focused on the device and noticed that it was not a normal looking jump-drive. The device was unfamiliar to us. The lights on it blinked profusely. They blinked like they were in-sync to someone's pulse.

  She inserted the device into the laptop, and the lights on the device jumped to life, pulsating even faster than before. Within moments a loading bar appeared on the blank screen of the laptop.

  Twisting my claws into Shane's frontal lobe, like turning two focusing knobs on a projector; I zoomed his eyes closer to the symbol on the screen. It was not a loading bar. It was a copying bar. The device that Sun Good had inserted into our laptop was copying everything off of our hard drive.

  How did she acquire that kind of technology? What was this device? Shane wondered, panicked.

  We were both worried. No surveillance device that we were aware of was capable of hacking beyond a password protected hard drive. It recorded everything that was in our computer's memory. This device had to be some kind of CIA technology that Sun Good had somehow gotten her hands on.

  Even though there should not have been anything on it that incriminated us. We could not let Sun Good copy Shane's hard drive. There was no way to be sure that Shane hadn't missed some clue. Perhaps she would find something in his past Google searches. Perhaps she would find records of Shane's financial transgressions. Maybe she might find a receipt from when we stopped to gas up the Mercedes not far from the asylum on the morning that we picked up Gillard Shutter and killed him.

  We had to take action. I couldn't take the chance that this woman would ruin us. Sun Good would have to die. She went too far. She crossed the line.

  I dug my claws into Shane's psyche, beyond the layer of his ego, and forced him to listen to me, to do my bidding. For the first time that I could remember, he fought back. He resisted my attempts to convince him kill her.

  Sun Good peered behind her to the window. For a fraction of a moment, she witnessed a struggle between a creature and a man, Jekyll and Hyde. Before her eyes could adjust to the struggle that went on outside of the window, we were out of sight. I gained control over Shane and we returned to the master bedroom.

  Sun Good slid open the glass doors and looked outside. She searched around the side of the penthouse. There was no one there. A sense of uncertainty fell across her. She had witnessed something evil.

  Silently, she returned to the master bedroom. She peeked over at Shane. He appeared to be fast asleep.

  She decided to leave. She picked up her clothes and slipped them on. She squeezed the jump-drive device in the palm of her hand. She dropped it into her purse and left our presence. Grabbing her shoes at the bottom of the stairs, she snuck out of the penthouse.

  After the elevator doors closed; Shane's eyes popped open. They grew black, marking his full transformation into the monster inside of him. My claws dug deep into his brain, fortifying my control. He would not fight me this time. This time there would be blood––Sun Good's blood.

  |||||

  The Mercedes trailed far enough behind Sun Good's taxi to be unnoticed by the perceptive detective. We pulled off to the side alley near her apartment building. We watched as she paid the cab driver and exited the taxi.

  She entered her apartment.

  I pulled up closer and parked the car across the street. Wearing a black t-shirt and leather gloves, I picked the kill-case up off of the passenger seat.

  Silently, I walked up to Sun's front door and picked the lock.

  Her apartment was messy. She left food lying out. Makeup was sprawled out everywhere. Numerous case files and pictures of Shane were fanned out across her kitchen table, like she was some kind of sick stalker. I appreciated her obsession with my vessel. She even had Shane's Vanity Fair issue. It must have come out already. She left it sprawled out across the edge of her dining table.

  Sun Good sat in the next room. I crept up to the doorway. I was well out of sight.

  She faced the other direction, staring at her computer. The jump-drive was plugged into it. She ran some program that I had never seen before. Then suddenly, Shane's desktop appeared across her screen.

  How was she doing that? What kind of program could copy entire desktops? Where did a cop from D.C. get this kind of technology? If the police possessed technology like this, then our job killing creatures like the StoneCutter would become extremely difficult.

  She was going to finger us in our crimes for sure. She had to die.

  I returned to the kill-case and opened it. Our gloved hands removed a syringe and tranquilizer. I jabbed the syringe into the bottle and filled it with the tranquilizer.

  Most of Shane's private desktop had appeared on her computer.

  Suddenly, she felt the same cold breath behind her that she felt back at Shane's penthouse. Then, for a brief moment, she saw me in the reflection of her computer screen. Before she could spin around, I injected her neck with the powerful sedative. She would be unconscious for hours, if I had planned on leaving her alive.

  I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back.

  This was it.

  I drew a large, sharp hunting knife and placed the blade across her throat. I had waited to spill the inside of her neck for a long time. Now was the time. The cold, steel blade began to slice. Suddenly, I stared at Shane's reflection in the screen of her laptop. His human reflection stared back at me. Ordinarily, I saw my own, but somehow there he was, staring at me, begging me to stop. All of Shane's frailty stared directly into my eyes.

  I tried, but I couldn't move his hand any further. He froze. Forcefully, I dug my claws into his mind, twisting and turning the wrinkles of his brain until he gave into my urges, but Shane's hands remained steady. He stalled out.

  I don't know how, but he resisted me. Never before had he ever withstood my commands to kill.

  Kill her! I screamed in his head. Kill her!

  I couldn't get him to do what was necessary. I couldn't make him kill her.

  What was it about this woman that gave him the strength to ignore me? I slithered around in his head and simply grabbed the reigns once more.

  Fine. She can live. I thought. You will regret this. But she can live.

  We snatched up the jump-drive and replaced it with a replica. Within a flash we were back in the Mercedes and on our way back to the penthouse, back to bed.

  Shane won a small battle, but I was still in control. He still needed me to kill the StoneCutter. He still needed me to survive.

  I let him have his little fling with the detective. Even a well-trained dog needs a bone, and she was his bone.

  At least it seemed that she was finally off our backs.

  I retreated to the dark, dry caverns beneath Shane's thoughts and waited until my strength returned to full capacity. Then I could come back at him and overpower his restraint. Never again would he be able to resist me. Never again would he deny my commands, or the next time I would break his precious bone.

  8

  Tag

  "In this hole, lives the wicked king."

  ––David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam.

  |||||

  The morning sunlight beamed into Shane's penthouse apartment, engulfing the downstairs with a bright light like a fiery inferno of orange colors. The light wrapped around the staircase and fluttered up the walls. It slowly penetrated Shane's bedroom.

  The light swept across his face, some of it into his ear canal and into my secret dwelling. I was wide awake, but I let Shane sleep. He slept in. Normally, I sank my teeth into his brain matter, turning on his ignition. This time, I purposefully let him oversleep, messing up his usual routine.

  He denied my controls last night. That angered me. He wanted to resist me. Fine. Then he would have to do things without my help. He was on his own.

  Finally, Shane opened his eyes and saw that the clock read 9 a.m. The time was
later than usual for him to rise from his sleep. I served as Shane's internal alarm clock. Today he would learn a valuable lesson. Today he would learn that he needed me. He was my dog, my faithful pet not the other way around.

  "Shit....the time," Shane muttered, sitting up in bed.

  He forced himself to get up and rushed to the closet. He picked out an outfit that I wouldn't have dared selected. He dressed and left the penthouse.

  By the time we made our way down to the lobby of our building, Shane realized what I already knew. He left our floor unlocked. Now anyone could hit the penthouse button and enter our domain. He stopped in the doorway and peered at his watch. He was far too late to be concerned with locking the penthouse floor. I would have made him go back up, but I took the day off.

  Shane signaled a taxi. It pulled over to the side of the road and he stepped in and instructed the driver to hurry to his office plaza.

  At the office, Shane found Ally Embers in a state of distress, which was highly unusually for such a well put-together woman.

  "Why are you so unraveled?" Shane asked.

  She looked him up and down, almost not recognizing him because of his unmatched ensemble.

  "Shane, the Secretary has been calling all morning. And now you have a special phone call," she said. "And they've waited on hold awhile."

  Shane watched as a bead of perspiration slowly ran down her cleavage. Never before had either of us seen Ally so nervous. It made Shane nervous.

  "I know that I'm late, but I just walked in the door. Tell the Secretary that I will call her back. She is not my client after all, her son is. So she can just wait."

  "The caller on the phone is not the Secretary of State. I think that you had better pick it up in your office."

  Shane sighed and stepped into his office. He picked up the phone and quickly changed his demeanor to a professional attorney.

  "Shane Lasher," he announced to the caller.

  "Hold for the President, Mr. Lasher," a female voice demanded.

  Curious, neither of us had ever heard Terrance's assistant call him the president before. I guess that technically he was the president of our firm. Then again her Hungarian accent was gone. It must have been someone else.