by Lori Devoti
She looked at me, her eyes flashing the same strange blue as the gas lights outside the hotel. “I’m not playing games, kitten. Did it ever occur to you I might not like what Holmes is doing either? I’m a succubus. I love humans.”
“There’s a difference between love and lust,” I replied.
She rolled her eyes. “Save me the greeting card.”
I turned and started walking back down the hall. If Nellie wasn’t going to help me, I’d just have to find the two people Oscar sensed on my own.
“Lucinda!”
I stopped. Nellie was facing me, her legs braced and her hands on her hips.
“Don’t let your prejudice kill someone. There’s a human in here.” She tapped on the wall beside her.
Oxygen escaped my lungs like air from an untied balloon.
“Get over it,” Nellie muttered. She stepped back so she was facing the wall in question. I retraced my steps and stared at the white plastered space too.
I didn’t see a door, but Holmes was a big fan of hidden rooms. Apparently, this was one of them. I started running my palms over the wall. I’d covered half of it when it occurred to me to ask Nellie. “Do you know how to open it?” I tried to keep my tone neutral, but it was hard. I didn’t want to like her, and I didn’t want to feel like we were on the same team. But then she’d gone and helped me, and I’d almost ignored her. It was humiliating.
Her arms crossed over her chest, she angled her head back and forth studying the wall. Finally, she looked at me. “Not a clue.”
It was a relief to be annoyed again. I went back to my inspection. On my third pass, just as I was beginning to think Nellie hadn’t helped me, that she had actually just been playing a cruel joke or worse, my finger brushed over something rough—a tear in the wallpaper. I grabbed a hold of it and jerked.
Nellie shook her head. “Remind me not to invite you to my house.”
I kept tearing. Under the paper was a hole about the size of a man’s finger. I held my breath and shoved my finger inside. A small bar of metal lay perpendicular across the space inside, like a latch or a trigger. I only allowed myself to consider that for a second, then I pushed down.
There was a pop and the wall swung out. I stepped around it and into a closet of a room. The smell of urine and feces hit me like a punch to the face. My leg bumped into a metal frame. A twin bed, the kind you’d see in old movies about insane asylums, filled the space. Angie lay on the mattress face down. Her hands were tethered to the headboard; her feet to the foot board. She was wearing some kind of white uniform that left her legs bare. I crawled over the end of the bed and onto the mattress.
She squeaked, a pathetic terrified sound that caused my eyes to fill. I started talking to her. I don’t know what I said, words tumbled from my lips. I just wanted her to hear my voice and know I was a friend, not the monster who had left her here.
I used my cross-handled knife to cut her hands free first. They fell onto the mattress beside her head, useless. As I was rubbing them, trying to bring life back into them, I noticed some kind of mouthpiece was shoved between her lips. Plastic tubing protruded from it.
I searched frantically through her hair until I found the cord knotted there. It was so tight I was afraid to use my blade, afraid I’d cut her in the process, but after struggling with it until I my fingers chafed, I gave up.
“Don’t move, Angie. Please don’t move.”
She stiffened for a second and then lowered her head. I slid the blade under the cord and sliced it through. A length of blonde hair came with it, but no blood.
Still murmuring, I crawled back to the foot of the bed and cut through the straps that held her ankles. Then I shoved the blade into my pack and waited for Angie to fight her way to her hands and knees. She was shaking as she moved. So hard I thought she’d fall, but she didn’t. Slowly she turned and faced me.
Her hair was knotted and jagged where I’d chopped through the cord. And she was filthy. She had obviously been laying in her own body waste for days. But it was her eyes that got me. They were crazed.
I held out my hand, expecting her to race toward me, but she glanced around the room instead, shoved her hands up into her hair and screamed.
And I stood there like an idiot with no idea how to stop her or to help her.
Someone grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me to the ground. I jumped up, my backpack swinging forward and my hand digging inside it. I wasn’t sure what weapon I was searching for, but I needed something. My fingers hit my spray bottle first, I pulled it out and squeezed the trigger.
Water hissed, something sizzled and I focused in on what I’d hit. Nellie.
She was standing in the door to Angie’s closet. The side of her face and neck were a mass of bubbling red tissue, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her hands were held out in front of her, and she was murmuring or chanting.
I stepped forward, the bottle ready.
“Nellie,” I warned. Then I heard what she was saying.
“Angie. Come to me. Everything will be okay with me, better than okay. You’ll be happy. Happier than you have ever imagined.”
My stomach turned. She was seducing Angie. A girl who had been held captive for days. It was sick and unforgivable. Any good thought I’d had for the succubus disappeared.
Then Angie moved. My gaze jerked toward her. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. Her body swayed in a sing-song kind of way, and her knees were sliding inch by inch closer to the end of the bed. When she reached the foot, Nellie grabbed her hand and helped her out into the hall.
Her arm wrapped around the girl’s waist, the succubus glared at me. “We’ll talk about the makeover later.”
I took a step back.
“I said later,” she snapped. “I don’t have time to mess with you now. Besides, I need you.” She jerked her head, signaling for me to help her with the barely mobile Angie.
I stepped to Angie’s other side, pulling the girl’s arm over my shoulder as I did.
We dragged Angie a few feet. “What if the boys are like this too?” I asked.
“You’ll be lucky.”
After that we didn’t talk. The hall continued to twist and turn. I had long since lost all judgment of what direction we were going. We could have wound our way completely back to where we had started from and I wouldn’t have known it.
“Here.” Nellie staggered to a stop.
I followed suit. Angie was in some kind of succubus-induced happy place, but she was dead weight. Nellie and I backed into the wall and let her body slide to the floor.
I stood there panting for a second. I hadn’t realized how small I really was, but lugging half of a girl who outweighed me by sixty pounds was bringing it home. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get her off the floor now that I’d lowered her down.
“In there,” Nellie murmured. She was staring at a door behind me. I didn’t like the look on her face. She glanced at me. “It’s patchy. I think he’s going.”
I didn’t wait for any more explanation. We’d gone through too much. Holmes couldn’t have another one. I grabbed the doorknob and twisted. To my surprise the door flew open, and I went with it. I almost fell under the momentum, but caught myself by clinging to the doorknob.
This room was bigger and brighter than any we had been in. Modern spotlights hung everywhere and they were all pointed the same place—the metal table in the center of the room.
We’d found Holmes’ surgical room. He’d had one in his original castle too.
And we’d found another boy, but still not Brittany’s cousin. He was laying on the table, not even strapped down. There was no reason for him to be. He was the color of dirty linens, white with a grayish cast, and there were ugly black lines of stitches along his abdomen.
Holmes had cut him open and sewn him back up. Based on the jars that sat on a table near the bed, he’d taken things out too. My basic biology class hadn’t taught me much, but I recognized a few organs, a kidney and part of a liver. Things a human
could live without, if the surgery was performed by a professional in sterile conditions. This boy’s hadn’t been.
I knew the odds of him making it were slim.
“Waste of time. Let’s go.” Nellie turned toward Angie, who smiled up at her like she was a fairy godmother.
I walked into the room.
I picked up the boy’s hand and held it in mine. His fingers were cold and limp. I wished for things I didn’t have—a blanket, a gurney, a swat team.
I was stuck using what I did have. I jerked the sheet free from the bed.
“Nellie!” I had my back to her, but I knew she was still there. She had no real reason to leave. She wasn’t afraid of Holmes, and she didn’t care about saving Angie, not as much as she claimed. What she did care about was entertainment, and this drama, our piddly human struggles to defeat the monster demon was the best show playing.
“Kitten, you can’t think you’re going to carry him. Even half-starved, he must weigh seventy five kilos.” She leaned over the boy and ran the backs of her fingers down his face. “Holmes, what have you done? Look what you have wasted.”
“He’s not dead yet,” I said. “Grab the side of the sheet. We’ll lower him to the ground and drag him out of here.”
She dropped her hand, but stayed in her position, leaning over the boy’s face. “Down two flights of stairs? You think that will help him?”
It wouldn’t. I knew that, but it was his only chance. And dying on those stairs was preferable to being left behind for Holmes to cut into.
I grabbed my side of the sheet and glared at her.
She smiled. “I do love a kitten with claws.” She glanced at the boy and trailed her finger over his lips. “Just a minute. I can at least give him something else to think about.”
She ran her finger over his mouth, down his neck and then swirled it around his abdomen, spending extra time where he’d been cut. When her hand started to drift lower, I objected. “Really?”
She paused and narrowed her gaze. “Perhaps you should watch more carefully, see what you learn instead of playing judge. Maybe then you would be able to get Oscar to care.”
I snapped my teeth together.
She turned her attention back to the boy. I waited, edgy and embarrassed, as she caressed him. It wasn’t an overly long or intimate touch, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was necessary. Angie had followed her willingly with considerably less.
I started to say as much, but she stood and reached for her side of the sheet. At the same moment the boy’s eyes opened and his lips slipped into a smile. Nellie leaned forward and whispered something in his ear. There was something about how she did it, the gentleness as she once again ran a hand down his cheek, that made me think I’d misjudged her again and that she really did care.
His eyes fluttered shut, but the smile stayed.
When she looked up at me, the cold calculating succubus was back. “You could draw and quarter him now and he wouldn’t care. The hormones of youth. Such a gift.”
I grabbed my side of the sheet and started lifting. Blessedly, Nellie did too. We got him onto the floor. His head hit first, but thanks to Nellie’s magic, he didn’t stop smiling. Once he was down, I shifted my position to his feet and tied the bottom corners of the sheet around my waist. Then I started walking. I bent at the waist and leaned forward, put all one hundred and fifteen pounds of myself into my efforts.
It was slow going, but it worked. We moved forward one painful footstep at a time.
Angie wandered into the room. She stood just inside the doorway, staring at Nellie with a mindless lovesickness that made me want to vomit. On the plus side, she was moving under her own steam. Which was good because mine was already running low.
I lowered my head and kept pulling. The sheet cut into my midsection. A voice in my head told me I was crazy, that I’d never be able to pull the boy’s dead weight all the way out of this building—if we could even find an exit from this building. The way we’d come in was blocked, once we got back down to the main floor, we’d have to go through the maze again and find another way out.
It was crazy and I knew it, but I couldn’t think of another option. No, I refused to think of the reasonable option. I was well past reasonable. I had been since I’d seen the first boy hanging by his neck.
“Kitten!” Nellie called from behind me. I’d almost reached the door and was in no mood to hear her tell me yet again that what I was doing was a waste of time. I dug in, determined to cover the last few feet, my goal now just getting to the hall. One step at a time. To my surprise and relief each step seemed easier than the step before.
I heard the creak of old machinery moving. I glanced up, but saw nothing except Angie waiting, her face turned to look at Nellie who was somewhere behind her.
“The floor!” Nellie yelled.
I looked down. The floor had changed. It was tilting downhill. I shifted my weight, leaned back instead of forward, but it was too late. The boy’s body slid toward me, knocking me down. I fell beside him on the sheet, landing on my side. I barely had time to wrap my arm around his chest before we picked up speed and flew down some kind of shaft. The surgery room was gone and we were in darkness, moving quickly downward. The shaft angled once and then straightened. I jammed my hands into the sides, trying to slow us down, but our combined weight on the slick sheet made it impossible. My hands made a screeching noise as they dragged over the metal. I pressed harder, ignoring the heat building in my palms.
Then suddenly, we flew free and landed with a thud on something softer than a floor but hard enough that air whooshed from my lungs and my hip ached.
“So, this must be the demonologist. I’ve always wanted to meet one. Is there something inside you that’s different from other people?”
I scrambled to a sitting position and jerked my backpack onto my lap.
Sitting behind a desk staring at me was Holmes.
Chapter 17
Sitting there behind his desk in his bowler hat and handle bar moustache, Holmes looked innocuous, but his words sent a chill through my center.
“Is that Charles with you? How is he doing?” Holmes stood and started around the corner of the desk. I held the holy water out in front of me.
He stopped and smiled. “What do you have there? You aren’t afraid, are you? There’s really no reason to be.”
I pulled the trigger. Water dripped down my finger. Somehow in its journey the nozzle had gotten turned to off.
Holmes leaned against the edge of his desk. “I help people, you know. Give them jobs when they can’t find work. Medical care when they can’t afford it, or have issues they don’t want others to know about.” He brushed his fingers over his moustache. “Then, of course, there is research. Research is very important. It’s a noble thing to give of yourself in that way.” He turned toward his desk. I used the time to scrabble through the items I’d stashed in my backpack and came up with chalk, a candle, and my knife. Before I could find a lighter, he’d turned back to me. He held some kind of device, a stick with a button, like a joystick.
“I’ve been watching you. I had to go out for a bit. It was a terribly disappointing trip, but when I came back look what I found.” There was a click and pictures appeared on a screen that hung to his right. It was flat and dark, easy to miss before it was lit with images of me creeping through the maze, Brittany sitting in the circle and Nellie walking up to her and talking. He clicked some more, whizzed through our day. Oscar wandering the halls, stopping now and then to listen. Brittany leaving the circle. She and Nellie opening the door to the stairwell.
I had watched for five minutes before I realized he was watching too. He seemed mesmerized by what was playing out on the screen. I gripped the nub of chalk, torn with what to do. I needed circles—one for Holmes and one for me and Charles. I probably only had time to draw one before Holmes caught on to what I was doing, and that was if I was lucky.
If I chose the one for myself and Charles, it would leave H
olmes free to escape.
Not an option.
A new scene came on the screen, one I hadn’t seen. My breath caught in my throat. Joshua, Brittany’s cousin, was alone in a room with padded walls. He fell to his knees and clasped at his throat. I touched my throat too. He was suffocating, or inhaling something. In his past, Holmes had pumped chemicals into victims’ rooms and watched through peep holes as they suffered. He was doing it again, but with a modern twist, cameras.
Holmes was fully turned toward the camera now, entranced.
I jerked my gaze away because I knew I had to. It was the only way to stop what I was seeing on that screen, Joshua’s only chance, mine and Charles too. I moved onto my hands and knees and started drawing. It only took me a few seconds to complete the circle. It was small, but would have to do. To draw a bigger one, I’d need more time and have to move more which would increase the odds that Holmes would see me.
“Then there was this.” He glanced back at me. I squatted on my heels and tried to look as if I had been watching all along. Brittany and Oscar appeared on the screen, in the room with Joshua. Brittany immediately started gagging. She pressed her folded arm against her mouth and tried to breathe through the cloth of her long-sleeved tee. Even hampered, she moved forward toward her cousin, yelling at Oscar as she did, but he was lost again, I could see it on his face. He stood by the door, his expression hollow. She glanced back at the demon and cursed, then grabbed hold of Joshua and tried to jerk him toward the door. He outweighed her by seventy pounds. There was no way she was going to move him on her own, but true to her nature, she tried. She tried with everything she had until exhaustion brought moisture to her eyes and tears streamed down her cheeks.
“This is where it gets interesting.” Holmes leaned forward and pushed another button. Suddenly, Brittany’s voice spilled into the room. She was afraid and angry, but anger was winning out. She yelled at the boy and bumped him with her hip, but he didn’t move. He seemed unable to.
“It’s the demon,” Holmes said. “Joshua’s time here, or perhaps the gas, has weakened his resistance to him. He doesn’t want to leave; he doesn’t care.” He glanced at me again, his face open, excited, like he was sharing some bit of knowledge that would change the world.
