by Jeff Hale
“Val! Behind you!”
I ducked instinctively and the girl’s knife strike only grazed my shoulder as a result, cutting the shoulder strap to my corset and digging painfully into the flesh there. I fell to the steps with a yelp, then rolled immediately onto my back so I could fend off the next strike that I knew was already coming.
It was an overhead strike, meant to hit my neck. I brought my arms up in an ‘X’ in front of me, my forearms catching her wrist well before the knife point reached my throat. I reversed my right arm so I could grab her wrist and flip her off of me. She crashed into the table at the foot of the stairs with a grunt and kipped up quickly. Then the room echoed with a loud report as Dave fired a single shot, leaving me stunned. The girl looked at me dumbly, as though asking me how I had shot a non-existent gun as she crumpled to the floor.
“Dave! You didn’t have to kill her!” I stood and glared at him. I believed in incapacitation as the first option, killing as the last.
“I didn’t know what else to do. Oh fuck me…” He walked over to stare at the body where she lay crumpled in a bloody mess. “I’ve never killed anyone before. Oh shit. I’m going to jail for this. I don’t want to go back to jail!” Dave wailed in dismay.
“Oh come off it, Dave! Jail!? This girl’s dead! And you’re worried about yourself?”
“Hell, yeah I am! I ain’t gonna feel bad for her; she was trying to kill my friend! She was trying to kill you!”
I sighed. He was right. Cut off from the Aether and with limited training in combat, she would probably have had me. I got to my feet and went to him. “Well… he did say I’d have to become a tougher person. I guess this is part of it.”
“Aerick has killed plenty. Trust me. I did what I had to, and you need to learn to do the same.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Next time stop trying to cat fight with someone trying to slit your throat, and kill them. What happened to your powers?”
“She activated some device and cut me off from my power source.”
“That Aether stuff Rick is always talking about?”
“Yeah.” I walked over to where the device lay on the ground. I reached down and hit the only visible switch on the cube, and I felt the Aether rush back to me. I picked the odd-looking cube up and examined it. It was lighter than I expected, almost like it was barely there, and it was about twice the size of a Rubik’s cube. I conjured a dimensional shadow pocket and put it in there for safe keeping.
I led the way upstairs, whip at the ready and hoping if there was anyone else up there that they didn’t have another device. As I got to the top landing I saw another girl come out of the door at the end of the hall on the right. She had dark hair like the girl downstairs, but unlike the girl downstairs, she was completely naked. Her body was slender, athletically muscled, average in the breast department, and she had a sheen to her skin and an expression on her face that suggested she had been recently fucked.
When she saw me, she screeched and made a dash across the hall to another room. She came back out a second later with a gun leveled at me. I raised my shield again and rushed at her, doing a forward roll in an effort to make myself a smaller moving target. As I did so I heard gunshots from behind me.
I came up quickly right in front of the girl and then dispersed myself into shadow energy and moved through her using the shadows of the area, and then reappeared behind her. I wrapped my whip around her throat and pulled back to throw her off balance.
“I can easily use the energy this whip is made of to disintegrate your throat. If you don’t want that to happen, drop the gun. Now,” I whispered into her ear. She dropped the gun, and I kicked it away.
Down the hall I could see Dave was having a gun battle with someone on the first floor. Bullet holes riddled the wall across from Dave, as well as the corner he was attempting to use for cover.
“Call off the person downstairs or you both die,” I threatened. She craned her neck and spat in my face. I licked off some of the spittle and smiled slightly. “You taste good, baby, but now’s not the time for flirting, really. Now call off whoever is down there.” She struggled and I realized I didn’t have much choice left; it was either play with her or help Dave. I twisted the whip and called forth its energy, destroying her throat and killing her instantly. Such a waste. Like Dave, I’d never killed anyone before, but I couldn’t dwell on it right now. Dave was in trouble.
As I approached Dave, he stood suddenly, darted to the edge of the balcony, then took brief aim before firing two quick shots. A shot from below went wild, there was a cry of pain, then a thud. I went to stand next to Dave and looked down into the living room below. There was a man lying on his back on the floor next to the body of the first girl. He was wearing a similar uniform, spattered with blood from the hole in his chest. Blood dripped into the man’s short, spiked blond hair from another hole in his forehead. I gave Dave a scrutinizing look. He not only had the gun, but someone had taught him how to use the thing, and use it well.
Time enough for contemplation later. I could hear sobs and cries coming from down the hall. Whoever was in that room hadn’t bothered to stop what they were doing over a few gunshots, or maybe they didn’t care.
“Come on, whoever is in there is still being hurt, I can hear her,” I said, turning to hurry down the hall. I opened the door and just about choked.
A small, slender girl, no more than maybe five feet tall if she had been standing, was bent over the side of a bed, her large breasts and the side of her faces squashed into the mattress and her back bowed painfully. Mounting her from behind was a dark-haired man with an athletic body that would make an MMA fighter proud. He had one hand in her long, almost platinum-blonde hair, yanking on it for leverage, and the other held a blood covered knife. I could tell that what he was doing to her could only be done from the particular angle that he was at, and with every thrust he either stabbed her in the side with the blade, or punched her with the fist wrapped around the hilt. Blood oozed from multiple stab wounds along her ribcage and abdomen, weeping out onto the blankets.
I swallowed, hard, a memory flashing through me of hands on my head and back, my cries muffled in beer wet carpeting, loud music booming in the background, almost drowning out the laughter of multiple male voices, a hand slapping my bare ass as the guy fucking me from behind said, “See, I told ya she was easy…”
I shook my head, shook the memory away, and focused on the girl in front of me. I could deal with my own demons on my own time, but right now I had to deal with what was in front of me.
“Stop!” I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. The brutality and horror of it was gut wrenching and I could hardly move. I wanted to save the poor thing, but it was too late.
The guy looked over to me, honest surprise on his face, and I wondered if maybe he had been so into what he was doing to the girl that he just hadn’t heard the shots. That, or he figured his friends had taken care of the problem. His eyes went to my whip and he paled visibly for a second or two, then he pulled himself from the girl, who collapsed against the bed with an audible moan of relief. It was short-lived as he straightened up, jerking her up with him by her hair and putting the knife to her throat.
I looked into the girl’s eyes and noticed two things: that her eyes were the most amazing shade of emerald green, and that there was nobody home in them. I knew the feeling. She seemed to be staring at something on the wall that I couldn’t see from my angle. Even though my own memories had frozen me, Dave had been right on my heels and I was wondering what was stopping him from acting.
“Travis?!” Dave suddenly demanded in disbelief. “What the fuck? What the hell are you doing here? Why are you doing that to Serena? She’s my friend!” he yelled from over my shoulder.
“Hey, coz, I’m surprised to see you here. Come on, you know what these things are! They aren’t human! Why are you with one of them?” the dark-haired guy, Travis, asked. He pressed the knife tighter into
Serena’s throat, blood welling up around it. Her eyes were still locked on whatever it was she was staring at and she didn’t seem to notice.
“Dude, this is what you left to do? This is fucked up! This isn’t you, man!” Dave protested, still shocked.
“No. That’s where you’re wrong. It really is, and if you can’t see the truth for what it is,” he took the knife away from Serena’s neck for long enough to wave it in my direction, “then I guess we aren’t family anymore. Now if you would kindly allow us to dress and leave, I’d owe you.”
“Let her go,” Dave ordered tightly. “She’s my friend, please don’t keep doing this to her.”
“But I do so love playing with her,” Travis said, the hand pressed into Serena’s waist dipping lower to illustrate. She let out a whimper and tried to squirm free. Blinding anger rose in me and I almost lost it then and there. I was about to make a mistake and see who really was faster; me with my whip, or him with the knife.
He must have seen the expression on my face because he pulled his hand away from her and reached behind him towards the nightstand, pulling a gun from it that neither Dave nor I had seen with him blocking it. He pressed the barrel to Serena’s ear and gave me a smug smile as he began to squeeze the trigger. All bets were off now; there was no guarantee that even if I killed him, he still wouldn’t have a chance pull the trigger and kill her.
“Drop the gun, cousin,” Travis said flatly. “And you… get rid of that… thing. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not healthy for me if you hit me with it.” He indicated my whip with a movement of his brown eyes. I dismissed the whip and heard the loud thump of Dave’s gun hitting the floor beside my foot.
“That’s better. Now, we’re going to get dressed and leave, just as soon as both of you go back downstairs. If I even so much as think you’re coming back up here, I’ll just take her head off.” He ground the barrel into her ear to emphasize his point. “I’d hate to, she’s so pretty with it, but I can still play with her without it; it would get rid of all that irritating screaming and crying.”
I took several steps back, as did Dave. Neither of us wanted to leave Serena alone with Travis, but at our hesitation, he struck the side of her head with the gun and tightened his finger on the trigger. We didn’t have a choice, and much as we both hated it, we turned and walked back down the stairs and into the living room. A few minutes of tense waiting later and Travis came down the stairs, Serena still held tight to him. She couldn’t walk, and he dragged her down the steps, her toes thumping on each one. I was honestly surprised she was conscious with as much blood as she seemed to have lost and the wounds he had inflicted on her. The only thing I could think of was that he had given her something that would slow the bleeding and keep her from dying any sooner than he wanted, to prolong his torture of her.
“Don’t even think to follow me. I’ll kill her if you do.” He opened the door, then turned his back to the opening, pulling her outside with him, then I heard vehicle doors open and close. An engine started and a vehicle left the driveway at such a high speed it made squealing sounds with the tires. I ran to the door and looked outside. The Ford pickup that had been in the driveway was gone, the green VW bug still in its space. A blue Honda Civic was just coming to a stop at the curb by the edge of the driveway and Kat and Alex got out.
“Who was he, Dave?” I asked, staring at the empty spot in the driveway.
“My cousin,” he said flatly from behind me. His voice still held a tone of shock to it.
“Stay here, guard the door, let Kat and her friend know what just happened. I’ll be right back,” I said. I turned and took the steps back to the second floor three at a time. The girl, Serena, had been staring at something in the room, something that I hadn’t been able to see, and I wanted to know what it was.
I had been too shocked by what was going on in the room the first time to notice all that much of the rest of it, including the smell. Now that I wasn’t distracted by more important things, my nose went into overdrive, almost causing me to gag and lose what little food was still in it. The room smelled awful, like sex, blood, and an outhouse, all rolled into one. There was blood on the carpet, splattered on the walls, darkening the navy blue comforter to black in some places. Mixed in with it on the blanket were smears of white, lots of them. There was a black garbage bag on the floor a few feet from the bed, cut open and laid out like a plastic sheet. It, too, was covered in various fresher liquids and I had no desire to inspect it any closer.
I pressed the back of my arm against my nose and walked further into the room, ignoring what I could, and turned to look along the wall the door was on, towards the area that had so held Serena’s attention. At the far end of the wall, almost in the corner, was a small table, and sitting on the table was a small color TV monitor, like the kind used for security surveillance. It was still playing, and when I saw what it was showing, I let out a horrified gasp.
It was Aerick. He paced back and forth in the confines of a small cell, limping on bare feet, his hands fisting and unfisting, his movements almost animalistic. His hair was loose and wild about his face in some places, matted with blood in others, and his dark t-shirt was torn and frayed. Streaks of brown and red covered his face and upper body, what I could only assume was dried and fresh blood. As he moved I could see ragged tears in his jeans, the denim stiff and tacky with more soaked-in blood. Dark purple bruises marred his skin, leaving only a few untouched patches.
This was more than just a beating, though. Someone had tortured him. He looked once at the camera and let out an inhuman scream at it then went back to stalking the cell. But I’d seen his eyes. There wasn’t anything human in them; just something dark and fierce, and a lot more primal.
What I couldn’t figure out was why he hadn’t escaped, how someone had even managed to get that close to him and inflict that much injury upon him. Then it hit me. That fucking cube the girl downstairs had used to cut me off from the Aether. I would be stupid to think it was the only one they had. They probably had him imprisoned at one of the Purity Movement facilities and more than likely had one of those cube devices keeping him helpless and under control. But if he was there, and it was transmitting to this monitor….
I checked the back of the monitor for a cable and found one. It disappeared through a hole cut into the wall, but what caught my attention was that it was joined by a second that came down the wall from the ceiling. I followed that cable with my eyes to where it attached to a camera mounted in the corner of the room above the monitor. It was aimed so that it had a full view of the bed and either side of it, including the floor, and I realized that it was transmitting a feed from the bedroom to somewhere else.
Based on Aerick’s behavior I was almost certain it was a two way feed. He was too out of control to recognize me, probably assuming I was one of the two other girls, but I knew he had to have seen everything else, had to have had a front row seat to Serena’s suffering and humiliation. And she’d been watching him, had seen his reaction to everything they had done to her, had maybe even seen what they had done to him. I couldn’t even imagine how mentally excruciating that had to have been, for either of them, to witness each other’s pain and be helpless to stop it.
I bit back tears and anger, then conjured my whip and destroyed the cables and the monitor. Then I took a steadying breath, squared my shoulders and headed back downstairs to where Dave, Kat, and Alex were. Dave was sitting on the couch staring blankly ahead, while Kat stood with her arms crossed over her breasts and leaned back against Alex’s chest. He had his hands resting on her shoulders as though trying to reassure her, or comfort her, and his body language suggested she might be more than just a friend to him.
“Come on, Dave, snap out of it. I need you,” I said, stopping in front of him. “My car’s back at your apartment, and we don’t have time for you to drive me back there so I can get it. I need to get to the Velvet Flame as fast as possible.” He didn’t respond and I slapped the side of his face li
ghtly. Still nothing. Despite the gravity of the situation, I did the only other thing I knew of that was a guarantee to get male attention. I leaned forward and tugged the top edge of my corset down, baring my breasts. That got a reaction. From everyone.
“I’m sorry what was… that…?” Dave asked in confusion, his eyes now focused on my chest.
I pulled the corset back into place. “Velvet Flame. Need you to drive me there,” I repeated.
“Was that really necessary?” Kat asked, almost as though she disapproved. Her eyes met mine and they seemed darker than usual, almost sapphire. I got that idea that something was bothering her, and it wasn’t my bare flesh.
“Rather look at those than this mess,” Alex muttered, gesturing around the room.
“It got his attention, which is what matters. Shall we go, Dave?” I asked. Maybe they were right, maybe flashing Dave had been a bit uncalled for, but I didn’t have time to waste and I was of the opinion that you use what works.
“You got it.” Dave shook his head as though to clear it, and stood up.
“What do you want me and Alex to do?” Kat asked, looking around the room uncertainly.
“Go see if you can track Aerick down. There was a monitor upstairs. Two way feed. He could see what was going on in the room, and they could watch him from here. They can’t be too far,” I told them.
She nodded almost absently. “Anybody care to tell me why Kevin and Tiff are dead?” Kat’s eyes went to the bodies and I saw a little shiver go through her. “I’m not overly broken up over it, but… you killed them. What exactly were they doing?”
