by Amy Cross
But he's gone.
I run forward, but there's no sign of him. He's just disappeared into the night.
"Damn you!" I shout. I turn and look back at the woman's body. Isn't that what Patrick wanted? Didn't he want a son, someone who could become his successor?
I stand alone and I realize that Patrick will never accept me. He'll never let me become like him, but if I can't do it, no-one can. I won't be Patrick's successor at all. Instead, I'll hunt him down and I'll replace him. I don't know how, but I'll find a way to kill him, and then I won't be like him... I'll be better than him!
Sophie
Dedston - Today.
"He's not dead," Nimrod says as the three of us walk away from the river. "Until you have his cold body on a slab, you can't consider him dead. You realize that, right?"
I nod. After Patrick disappeared beneath the water, I spent almost an hour searching for him. The current isn't strong, so he must have made his own way. Wherever he's gone, though, I won't be able to find him. I'm quite certain he's alive, but he's also wounded and I guess he's gone somewhere so he can recover. Maybe Nimrod was right when he said Patrick is like an animal; wounded, he's gone somewhere to heal in private. Next time I see him, he'll probably be back to full strength.
"Where's Abigail?" Shelley asks.
"He's hidden her away," Nimrod says. "I have no idea where. Perhaps we'll never know where."
"We'll find her," I say. "I don't know how, but we'll find her."
"You should have let me kill him when I had a chance," Nimrod says. "Do you have any idea how long I've searched for her?"
I shake my head. "If you'd killed him, we might never have been able to find where Abigail is. I need to reason with him when he's not in pain."
Nimrod stops ahead of me and turns, clearly angry. "You can't reason with a creature like Patrick!" he says. "He's an animal. After all the things he's done to you, do you really think you can just have a little chat and make him see your point of view? He's a crazed animal, and he needs to be executed. I'm sorry, Sophie. You need to forget about Abigail. I'm afraid she's lost forever."
"You're wrong," I say, determined to find a way to get to my daughter. "I'm going to wait until he comes back, and then I'm going to find a way to make him understand."
Nimrod opens his mouth to argue with me, but then he seems to think better of it. "There's just no way," he says. "Try if you want, but I've spent years chasing Patrick, and I can promise you one thing. He can't be reasoned with. He might be old, but in many respects he's immature. When he wants something, he reaches out to take it and if someone tries to stop him, he responds with violence. He could have raised Abigail with you, but instead he stole her from you. That's the kind of mind we're dealing with here."
"I'm going to stay in Dedston," I say, "and I'm going to find Patrick, and then I'm going to get Abigail."
"And I'll help you," says Nimrod.
"I don't need your help," I reply
"You kind of do," Shelley whispers to me.
"I'll help you find him," Nimrod says, "and I'll help you try to locate Abigail. You have to understand that she might be gone forever. But if the chance arises again, I will kill Patrick, and you can't get in the way." He reaches out a hand. "Do we have a deal?"
I stare at his hand. Is this a deal with the Devil, or is it just a realistic attempt to work with someone with whom I share some common aims? Reluctantly, I shake his hand.
"You've made the right choice, Sophie," he continues. "If there's any hope for Abigail, we have to work together. I can't promise that we'll succeed, but we have a chance to rescue that poor girl before Patrick causes too much harm to her mind."
Epilogue
Dedston - Today.
As I reach my apartment, I double-check that I'm not being followed, and finally I let myself inside. I head straight to the basement, where I switch on the light and walk to the center of the bare room.
"Hello, Abigail," I say, staring down at the baby as she starts to cry. "I saw your Mommy and Daddy today. They're both very worried about you, in their different ways. Don't worry, though. Your parents are going to die painful, miserable deaths, but you're going to surrender your life to a much more noble cause."
Book Two
Shy People
Prologue
"Nice place!" says the whore as she walks into my apartment.
"Thank you," I say, shutting the door quietly behind us. "The rent's extremely high, but I'm of the opinion that one must strive to live in an environment that nourishes the soul and provides as much comfort as possible."
She turns to me, smiling. "Yeah," she says. She has a slightly high-pitched, young-sounding voice, but while she's dressed in skimpy clothing and there's plenty of make-up plastered over her face, closer inspection reveals that she's not as young as she seems. She's easily in her mid-twenties, if not early-thirties. Disappointing, but I'm sure she'll still be of some use. "Most of my clients are thick as pig-shit," she continues. "It's cool to meet a guy who's got more refined taste."
"Thank you again," I say, heading over to the drinks cabinet, although I'm not sure that this bitch is in any position to pass judgment on anyone's level of refinement. "Can I interest you in some wine?"
"No thanks," she says. "I don't drink when I'm working."
I smile as I pour myself a glass of sherry. "Of course not. I hope you don't mind if I have a glass?"
"Go ahead," she replies. "Whatever you want. You've paid for the hour." She checks her watch. "Well, there's only fifty-four minutes left, but that's no problem. We can extend it a little bit if you want, I won't charge for an extra five minutes."
"Perhaps," I say. "But perhaps I won't need the whole hour."
She smiles. "Fast worker, huh Charles?" She glances around the room. "So, er, what did you say you're doing in town again?"
"A spot of business," I reply. "Catching up with an old friend. Meeting some new people. Securing certain items and services for the future."
"Cool," she says. "Sounds like really intense work. No wonder you need to de-stress a little."
I nod. "What was your name again?"
"Natalie," she says, grinning. "But you can call me Nat. Or Natty. Or anything you like. For the money you're paying, you can even call me Mommy."
"That won't be necessary," I say, sipping from my sherry. "So... Natalie... How does this work, exactly? I'm new to this kind of transaction."
She steps toward me. "Well, Charles. You've already paid, so all that's really left to do is for you to tell me what you want. Like I said earlier, anything goes. Any hole. Any role. Any game you want, but you can't film it. I can do sweet and innocent, or I can do dark and dirty. I don't mind role-playing, and it's okay if you get a little rough." She leans in and kisses me in the side of the neck. "Not too rough," she whispers, her hot breath against my skin, "but a little's okay."
"Good," I say. "I like it a little rough."
"Me too," she says. She presses her body against mine. "Just no blood, okay honey?"
"Okay," I say. "Perhaps we should go to the bedroom."
She steps back, takes my hand and leads me over to the bedroom door. I set my glass of sherry aside and follow. As soon as we're in the bedroom, she turns around and pulls her shirt off.
"You want me to keep going?" she asks, keeping her eyes fixed on me.
"Yes," I say.
She unhooks her bra and lets it fall to the floor, before stepping back over to me and leaning close into my face. "You like kissing?" she asks.
"Of course," I say.
"Squeeze my tits and kiss me."
I stare at her.
"Come here," she says, smiling before leaning in close and planting a delicate kiss on my lips. I respond, and moments later we're kissing passionately, her tongue exploring my mouth. I reach around with my arms and hold her tight against me, and the kiss continues until finally I decide that the time has come to strike. Making sure that I have a firm grip on her, I begin
to feed. She starts to struggle, and she makes a gurgling sound as I break through the back of her throat. Blood pours into my mouth, and she fights to get away from me, but I hold her firm. It helps that I have small hooks that I've inserted via my mouth, binding her face to mine. I open my eyes and see her eyes are open too, with a look of terror. Leaning closer, I press my eyeball against hers and looks deep into the darkness of her pupil.
She gradually stops struggling as I feed on her blood, absorbing as much of her youth as possible. I reach deep, deep down into her body, desperate for every drop, but finally I realize I have everything that I'm going to be able to get from her. I let go of her body and for a moment she remains standing before, finally, she drops to the floor. I feel re-energized and ready to take on the world.
"You see, Natalie?" I say, staring down at her dead body. "I didn't need the whole hour after all."
Bowie
We walk all night through the pouring rain, eventually reaching the outskirts of the human town just before dawn. Moving quickly, we hurry across the flooded railroad tracks and head for the dumpsters behind one of the small restaurants. The lids are padlocked shut, but we've brought bolt-cutters and soon we're going through the trash. This is the kind of stuff that usually feeds us: out-of-date food that the humans have decided is no longer fit for consumption. Unfortunately, it looks tonight as if the owners of the restaurant have realized that we're feeding from their garbage, and they've poured bleach on all the left-over food. Now that we have human bodies and human guts, we can't risk eating this stuff. It's poison.
"Damn them," Cassandra says, rain streaming down her face as she slams the lid shut. "Now what?" It's hard to hear her above the sound of rain on every surface: rain on the plastic lid of the dumpster; rain on the asphalt of the parking lot; rain on the trees; rain on the outside of the cloth hood that covers most of my head.
"We try somewhere else," I say, trying to keep our momentum going. With cold rain seeping through our clothes, it would be too easy to give up and return empty-handed, but then what would we eat? "We can't go back without food, the others will kill us. They'll starve."
"I think there's another restaurant on the other side of the parking lot," she says. "We've got time, if we hurry."
We head across the wide, open space toward the other restaurant. If anything, the rain is getting worse, belting down so hard that the whole city seems to be hissing. Trying to keep to the shadows as much as possible, we nevertheless find ourselves passing perilously close to large artificial lights. In the distance, in one corner of the parking lot, there's a solitary parked car, with two humans having sex in the back seat.
"Animals," I say, pausing to watch from afar.
"Bowie," Cassandra says with urgency in her voice, "come on! We don't have time!"
Hurrying on, we quickly reach the next set of dumpsters. Fortunately, these ones aren't padlocked and we find plenty of sandwiches that have been thrown out. It's crazy: this is good food, yet it's abandoned so freely. Sometimes I wonder how much longer the human race can last.
"Hurry," Cassandra says as she scoops as many sandwiches as possible into her bag. I'm struck by the look relief on her face. There was a time when she and I commanded the greatest banquets in the halls of Gothos, yet now we're reduced to finding pleasure in simple hauls of scrap food left behind by lowly humans. Times have changed...
Glancing up, I notice a figure walking along the street. It's her, the girl I've seen before. She seems to walk the streets of Dedston at night. She never notices me, but I notice her. She's always wearing a white dress, and she has such a pretty face. One day perhaps I'll speak to her.
"Are you helping?" Cassandra asks.
"Sorry," I mutter. Soon we've loaded up with enough to keep us going for a couple of days. Say what you like about humans, but their wastefulness means that plenty of other species are able to survive. If they were more efficient, and more careful, people like us wouldn't stand a chance.
"We should get going," I say eventually, noticing that the sky is starting to lighten. Dawn is coming
"Careful!" Cassandra shouts. We both crouch behind the dumpster as a police car drives slowly across the parking lot. For a moment, I worry that they've seen us. I'd hate to have to kill again. Fortunately, the police car drives away, its occupants apparently having not even spotted the two people having sex in the car nearby.
Loaded down with as much food as we can carry, Cassandra and I turn and hurry back across the parking lot, over the railroad tracks and into the forest. It takes us hours to make our way toward the encampment, but although some of our group feel it would be safe to move closer to the town, the rest of us insist that we must stay far away from the humans. If the people of Dedston discovered that we existed, they'd surely drive us from the area. There would be violence, and we would never be allowed any peace. It's better like this.
As we're getting close to home, Cassandra stops as something seems to catch her attention nearby. "Look," she says.
I follow her gaze down to the river that runs through the forest, but at first I don't see anything except rain, rain and more rain. The water is flowing fast, probably rushed along by heavy rain on higher ground.
"There," she says, putting her bags on the floor and hurrying over to the swollen riverbank, which is threatening to burst after several days of heavy rain. "Don't you see him?"
I look again. Down in the water, almost completely submerged, with just his head and shoulders visible, there's a man. He looks to be badly hurt and unconscious, and he's covered in thick mud from the river. The mud is so dark, it's almost impossible to see the man at all in the moonlight.
"He's dead," I say, turning away.
"No," Cassandra replies. "He's breathing."
"Barely," I say, looking back. "We don't have time to help stray humans. If he's not dead now, he'll die of pneumonia in a couple of hours. Come on." I turn to walk away, but I quickly realize that Cassandra isn't following. I stop and look back at her. "There's nothing we can do!" I shout over the rain. "We have to go!"
"He's not human," Cassandra says.
I sigh. "Come on," I say, "we have to get out of here."
Instead of listening to me, however, she starts scrambling down to the water, making her way carefully over to the injured man. With the riverbank reduced to a pile of mud, she's taking a hell of a risk going down there. Sometimes, I think she forgets that we're not what we used to be. She acts like she's still invincible, but one wrong step and she could fall straight into the current, and I'm not certain I'd be able to save her. How ironic it would be, if the great Cassandra were drowned while trying to help some pathetic fool in the middle of a storm.
"I'm not helping you!" I shout down to her. "We can barely look after ourselves. We certainly can't nurse some idiot back to health just because we happened to find him in the forest. We don't need another mouth to feed."
"He must have been washed away by the river," she shouts back at me as she examines him. "He's lucky to be alive. He's bleeding, and..." She pauses.
I wait as the rain pounds down on us.
"What?" I ask eventually.
She turns to me, a look of shock on her face.
"What?" I ask again, becoming increasingly impatient. It's time for us to get out of here.
"It's him," she says, her voice filled with fear.
"Who?" I ask.
"Him," she says simply.
It takes me a moment to realize what she means, but finally I feel a knot tightening in my stomach, as if some long-buried anger is starting to work its way back to the surface. "It can't be him," I say, my voice weak, betraying fear. After all these years, it's simply impossible, although my heart reminds me that Cassandra is not often wrong about important things. "You're wrong," I continue. "It's just some human. Leave him."
"It's him," she says, wiping some of the bloodied mud from his face. "Oh God, it's really him." With the mud gone, I can see that she's right. It's that same face th
at I see whenever I close my eyes; that same face that pursues me in my nightmares and eludes me in my dreams. "Are you sure?" I ask, even though I know the answer.
She nods.
"Then we definitely have to get out of here," I say. "We don't owe him anything. He deserves to die like this, like a common rat. He left us to die, we should return the favor."
"No," she says, trying to pull him out of the water, but failing. She hauls him up again, but she falls back into the mud. She's not strong enough to pull him out. "Help me!" she shouts.
I don't reply. I just stand there, watching as she struggles. Slowly, she manages to get him up the river bank until finally she drops his body next to my feet. Staring down at him, I find it hard to believe that I'm seeing his face against after all these years. The last time I saw him, he was tearing the Silk Prince to shreds while the armies of Sangreth marched closer and closer. Perhaps Cassandra can forgive him for everything he did to us, and for how he left us all those years ago, but I refuse to lift a finger to help him. Stepping closer, I lean down and spit on Patrick's face.
Sophie
"Dumpster divers," Shelley says, peering into the trash. "Fucking scavenging assholes." I watch as she unscrews a bottle of bleach and pours it onto the food waste she's just thrown away. All that good food being ruined for no reason.
"Do you really have to do that?" I ask, grabbing a sandwich that escaped the bleach. "That's food. There are hungry people around. Maybe -"
"I know!" she interrupts, seeming irritated. "It's not my idea. The boss says it's for insurance. If some hobo grabs a baguette from our dumpster and gets a bad stomach, he could take the restaurant to the cleaners. Don't blame me." She puts the lid back on the bleach. "Blame our fucked-up, blame-centric legal system. Fucking lawyers. Fucking everyone and everything."
"You're in a good mood today," I mutter.
She shakes the dumpster to make sure that the bleach gets down to the bottom, and then we walk back around to the restaurant's side door. Shelley's on a ten-minute break, which she's using primarily to swear, smoke and generally vent her frustrations about life. She's been working these dead-end jobs for years, but I think she's getting to the age where she's starting to worry that she'll never break free.
