Amy swallowed uncomfortably. “Unground us!” she ordered, unsure what else she actually wanted right now, aside from everything to be back to normal.
“Of course, master,” Pete said.
“No, no, no,” Kate said. “Master isn’t cute enough. Don’t talk to her unless you call her pumpkin. And call me princess.”
“Yes, princess,” he said, his tone flat and even.
“Get us some beer,” Amy said, warming up to the situation just a little. What would it hurt them to have fun for just a little while? Who knew how long the hypnosis would even last? “And vodka. A lot of vodka. And ice cream. We’ve been good. We deserve it.”
“Yes, pumpkin,” he said, turning towards the door. It flew open, and Mom stormed in, dragging Kevin behind her.
“Can someone please tell me what the hell he’s on?” Mom demanded, shoving Kevin forward. He just stood there, staring dumbly. “Where are you going?” she asked when Pete tried to move past her.
“To get the girls beer and vodka,” he said. “They’ve been good. They deserve it.”
“Not you too,” Mom swore. “What’s gotten into—?”
“Hold her,” Amy said, caught up in the moment. Kevin and Pete grabbed Mom, gripping her arms. Amy pulled the metronome away from Kate and held it to Mom’s face.
“My God,” Mom said, her face turning white. “You don’t understand what that is! You have to…” Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
“Have to what?” Amy asked. All she knew was she’d been happy before the divorce, before Mom had dragged her and Kevin halfway across the country and married a near-stranger. Now she hadn’t heard from her real dad in months, and her social life had become transfixed around Kate. She’d had big dreams before all this, but now getting drunk with her stepsister was the only future she ever found herself contemplating.
“Have to… feel… relaxed,” Mom said, her eyes going wide as she was caught in the metronome’s rhythm. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
“Listen to our voices,” Kate said, leaning in eagerly to press a hand against the metronome.
“Hold on,” Amy said, her thoughts drifting once again to the mysterious book. Mom had actually seemed to know about the metronome. There had been fear in her eyes. “I’m not sure about this. What was she trying to say?”
“She was spazzing out because they grabbed her,” Kate said. “Let’s just finish this so we can raid your mom’s stash and get wasted.”
“Oh... okay,” Amy said, an uncertain feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. “When we count to three, you… you’ll be under our control.”
“Three!” Kate said, not bothering to count this time. Mom went rigid and stood frozen, Kevin and Pete still holding her in place. Kate snapped her fingers, and they all straightened, their arms falling to their sides.
“Go get our beer, daddy,” Kate ordered, and Pete disappeared without a word.
“Go order us some pizza, Kevin,” Amy said, and her brother gave her a stiff nod and hurried after Pete. “Mom… uh, give us your weed.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, turning to leave.
“And all your credit cards!” Kate added.
“Yes,” Mom replied, continuing on her way.
“What are you doing?” Amy asked, staring at Kate. She set the metronome down on the nightstand beside their bunkbeds, the needle still swaying back and forth. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick. “Credit cards?”
“What?” Kate asked. “I want to go shopping. And look at them! They’re all under our control. They don’t need money anymore. It’s ours now, everything is ours.”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “I mean, I’m all for having fun, but I think… I think we have to find a way to undo this. It was cool when it was just Kevin but this—this doesn’t feel right.”
“Uh-huh,” Kate said, her eyes darting towards the metronome. It continued ticking away, more furiously than ever, and Amy felt it calling to her again. There was some need growing inside her, an urge to grip the smooth wooden box in her hands, to feel its rhythm ticking in time with the beat of her heart.
“Don’t even think about it,” Amy said, leaning towards the nightstand. “This is a fun trick, but how are we supposed to live? Mom and Pete can’t go to work like this. We’d have to get jobs!”
“Or hypnotize more people,” Kate said. “Think about it. When we need money, we find someone who has it and make them give it to us. We’ll never have to work, and we’ll have more servants than we know what to do with!”
“Yeah, but where would it end?” Amy asked. “We can’t just keep hypnotizing people forever.”
“Who says we can’t?” Kate replied. “We could rule the world. You can be president, and I’ll be queen. Everyone will do what we say.”
“You sound crazy,” Amy said, inching towards the metronome, drawn towards it as much by her own desire as the fear that Kate would beat her to it.
“You’re the crazy one,” Kate replied. “We finally catch a break, and all of a sudden you get all goody-goody on me! I thought you liked me.” She ran her hands across her body, and Amy felt her cheeks flash red. “Don’t you want to be with me?” Kate asked, her lips glistening.
“Let’s just get drunk tonight and then snap them out of it,” Amy said, struggling against the incessant tick-tick, tick-tick that was consuming her thoughts. “Twenty-four hours is enough. And if we ever need to hypnotize someone down the line, we always have the metronome.”
“Yeah,” Kate said, using that overly-sweet voice again. “I guess you’re ri—” She lunged for the nightstand, and Amy leapt for the metronome too. She grabbed it, but Kate shoved her onto the bed. They tumbled onto the ground, Kate’s faux-blonde hair flailing everywhere as they bit and scratched at one another, the metronome keeping perfect time throughout it all. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
After a few intense moments they both went limp, facing each other. The metronome lay between them, the needle swaying from left to right, again and again. They both stared at it, losing themselves in its relentless rhythm. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick. They stood up together, dropping the antique to the floor. The wooden case hit the ground and splintered, and its needle fell still.
“I understand now,” Kate said, her tone even and precise.
“Yes,” Amy agreed, speaking in the same smooth monotone as her stepsister. “It all makes sense.”
They turned to face each other, gazing off into space with eyes that glowed a cold blue-gray. Amy placed a hand on her sister’s chest to listen to the sound of her heart. She could hear it so clearly. Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
The Ghoul
Idaho, April 2014
A woman stood, tall and lonely at the edge of a field of green dotted with row after row of cold, weathered gravestones. The sun washed over them, hanging high over the sloping mountains beyond, bathing the solemn place in a joyous light. Perhaps those mourners gathered amid the field, sobbing their last farewells or choking back their tears felt otherwise, but death was always joyous to her. After all, how could there be life without death? More importantly, she noted when the coffin was lowered into the ground, how could she live without death?
She never asked for any of this, this disease that had plagued her since birth. None of her kind had. Some said their ancestors had been cursed—by whom, well that depended on who was telling the story. Some liked to claim descendancy from Cain, that long-ago patriarch to whom so many monsters revered as something akin to divine. If so, the mark with which God had branded that unfortunate son of Eve had persevered for generations uncounted, tainting the souls of thousands, perhaps millions. What crime could Cain have committed to bring to bear such an enduring and indiscriminate curse? And what sort of God would have designed such a terrible punishment? Whatever sins she had committed in her life, she had done nothing worthy of sharing in Cain’s doom.
The crowd dispersed, and she felt a rumbling deep in her stomach. Clenching her fingers, sh
e banished all thoughts of feeding. There was a time for that, and a time for this as well. She took the hands of well-wishers and kin, uttering words of sympathy and hope. Mourners piled into their cars and limped away down a narrow strip of gravel meandering through the hills. There were not many people up here, and the settlements were few and far between. Few people meant few deaths, which in turn meant she went hungry more often than not, but this was the life she chose.
There were times she thought of going away, finding another that shared her curse—or even a human. But that would be no sort of life, a life built upon deception and concealment. And what of her children? Could she bear to pass this curse onto those even more blameless than she? She wasn’t a monster—not in that sense.
In time, she was alone, standing there at the edge of the road. The sun traveled overhead and began to sink into the west, and she slowly inched her way, one glacial step at a time, toward the open grave of the recently departed. When the sun was gone and the moon reigned in its place, she slithered into the pit. This was the only lover’s embrace she ever allowed herself, the only taste of intimacy she dared pursue.
And, as her skin tightened around her bones and her teeth elongated into ripping fangs, she satisfied that hunger she had nursed for so long.
Umm Ghulah
Idaho, May 2014
“Thanks for letting me ride shotgun on this one,” Vera said. Demi sped down a narrow mountain road. A steep embankment of rocky red dirt rose up to their right, crowned by thin evergreens that reached high towards the cloudless blue sky. To their left, a river meandered alongside the road, another tree-covered peak rolling off into the distance beyond.
“Yeah, well, we can use the backup,” Demi said, squinting against the blinding afternoon sun.
“Seemed like you kids handled yourselves okay back at the farm,” Vera said. She reclined her seat back as far as it would go.
“We had help, remember?” Doug said. “Sure was nice having a couple of witches around.”
“Oh please,” Demi said, rolling her eyes. “What Seabiscuit means is it was nice to have a couple of booby teenagers around to stare at.”
“That’s not true!” Doug said. “Give me a little credit. Mariela was just a kid, and Cynthia… well, we had something real.”
“She did have nice boobs, didn’t she?” Vera mused, half to herself. Demi glanced at the other woman, unsure how to take the comment.
“So do I,” Demi said. “Probably why Dougie sticks around.”
“It ain’t for your winning personality, I can tell you that,” Doug groaned. “But honestly, Vera, we haven’t been able to catch a case since they left.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Demi said, maybe a little too defensively. “We chased a few false leads around the Rockies before you called us back in Salt Lake.”
“Two girls showing up dead in the same cemetery a week apart seems like y’all’s kind of thing,” Vera said. “Especially when the cops’ best guess is ‘animal attack’.”
“Definitely promising,” Doug agreed. “Thought we had a bigfoot that snatched up a family back in Wyoming.”
“No, we did not think that,” Demi corrected. “We being the operative word.”
“You thought it too!” Doug insisted. “She thought it too,” he repeated for Vera’s benefit. “Turned out the family was just lost. They did buy us dinner after we found them though. Then Demi had a few too many whiskey sours and made a scene.”
“Ugh,” she grunted. “I wouldn’t call it a scene… I just got a little carried away.”
“She started coming on to the husband,” Doug said. “The wife was sitting right there, and the kids. And I don’t mean any tame ‘hey, handsome’ nonsense. It was like reading one of them steamy romance novels. Think those kids learned a few new words—hell, I did.”
“So he says,” Demi said, her eyes on the road. “I’m a little fuzzy on the details.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Vera said. Their turn approached, and Demi pressed the brakes and pulled onto a side road. It was only a single lane with no dividing line, and Demi dreaded what would happen if she came across a vehicle traveling the opposite direction, because there was little in the way of a shoulder, just sheer cliffs towering on both sides. After a few miles, they emerged from the mountain pass out onto a sweeping expanse of grassland, more mountains visible in the far distance.
The road turned to gravel and split in two directions at the end of the field, and Demi came to a stop near the edge of a cliff overlooking a sprawling river valley, a few scattered roofs and barns visible through the forest of western white pine below. In one direction, the road continued downwards, zigzagging along the side of the mountain. The other way led to a well-weathered Victorian house. Stately and large, it looked out over the valley, the field adjacent to it occupied by hundreds of granite headstones.
But the peacefulness of the mountainside cemetery was broken by about a dozen police officers milling around a body propped against the side of large monument carved in the shape of an angel, its granite wings outstretched as if about to leap into the sky, taking the poor soul at its feet with it.
“Make that three girls,” Demi said, leaning over Vera to open the glove compartment. She rifled through a number of ID holders until she found the right ones.
“Homeland security?” Vera asked, picking up a black wallet with the department’s emblem on the front. She opened it to reveal a badge and an ID card bearing Demi’s likeness. “Nice fakes.”
“I think they’re real,” Demi said. “Cynthia had a whole bag of them, blank. We took some pictures at the drugstore and she had a guy in LA fix them up real nice.”
“Even better,” Vera said. “I’m not sure if you look like an Agent Mondaine though.”
“I didn’t pick the name,” Demi said, although that was only half true. Cynthia had offered to let her choose her own alias, but something about the surname the cartel had assigned her just felt right, so she kept it. “It’s French, and I’m fashionable.”
“You are?” Vera asked, her eyes slowly scanning Demi’s outfit, a dark pantsuit. If she weren’t posing as a fed, she probably would have been wearing leggings and a denim jacket—and something would have been leopard-print. “Of course you are,” Vera declared, although Demi couldn’t feel much confidence behind the words.
“Okay, no one asked you,” Demi said before Doug could jump in and kick her while she was down. “Let’s just do this.” The three of them climbed out of the car, and Demi stretched her shoulders, cramped after hours of driving along perilous roads. Two officers in tan shirts and army green slacks immediately descended on them.
“Help you, folks?” one of the officers said, an aging, round-faced man with a lean frame but oversized belly.
Demi and Doug held up the badges she’d selected from their collection. “Special Agent Demi Mondaine,” she said. “FBI. This is my partner, Agent Doug McKnight, and this,” she added, glancing over to Vera. “Is…”
“Vera Hatford,” the blonde identified herself. “Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.”
“Manhattan?” the officer said. “As in… New York? Little out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?”
“Not ours,” Demi said, arching an eyebrow. “Care to fill us in here?”
“Mike McGill,” the other officer said, extending a hand to Demi. He was younger than his partner, with a wholesome, clean-cut look. He might as well have had the word “good” scrawled across his forehead. “This is Sergeant Pete Sturgis, Valley County Sheriff’s Office. What’s a couple of feds and an out-of-state PA doing poking around an animal attack?”
“Three animal attacks in the same exact spot?” Vera asked. “The victims all single women in their early to mid-twenties, fit and attractive?”
“You think we got some kinda psycho on our hands?” Sergeant Sturgis said, frowning skeptically. “Unless he’s got claws for hands and bear teeth, I don’t think so.”
“Still,�
�� Doug said. “You know how it is. We go where the bosses tell us.”
“It is weird,” Mike agreed. “The timing and all, and the same profile. I get why they’d send you up to take a look. But trust me, this is an animal attack. No human could have done this.”
“You’re probably right,” Demi agreed. “You check out the owner of this place yet?”
“Course we did,” Sturgis grumbled. “But you can talk to Miss Carathis yourself if you want. That’s her just over there.” He pointed to a thin, olive-skinned woman talking to another pair of deputies about twenty yards over, her black hair fluttering in the strong mountain breeze. The sergeant waved her over.
“Got a couple a feds want to talk to you, Cara,” Sturgis said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She was older than Demi, but with an agelessness that made Demi hesitant to classify her as old. She was forty, or maybe fifty, it was impossible to say. She was trim and fit, her face unwrinkled and her hair free of gray.
“How can I help?” Cara asked, her voice low and smokey. “I see all the excitement has earned me some attention.”
“Guess we shouldn’t try too hard to solve this,” Demi said, looking the other woman up and down.
“Why do you say that?” Cara asked, returning Demi’s gaze with piercing black eyes.
“Looks like you’re doing a pretty brisk business here,” Vera said.
“Making a killing is how I’d call it,” Demi said. Cara narrowed her eyes at the remark, and a young man appeared at her side. He was tall and spindly, so lean that Demi thought she might break him across her knee. He wore a pair of black skinny jeans that struggled to stay on his frame and a tight band t-shirt, his chin hidden beneath a dark goatee. He put his arm over Cara’s shoulder and pulled her to him, and she raised herself up on her tiptoes to kiss the much younger man on the lips.
“Excuse me,” Cara said. “This is my boyfriend, Vathak.”
Demi Mondaine: Volume One Page 8
