The Beast

by Shantea Gauthier

  "I love it," I gasped, honestly. It was perfect for me. Maybe she wasn't so bad after all.

  "Good," she said. "Here. This ones from Jack and Cole."

  She opened a plastic grocery bag and pulled out a bakery box with four cupcakes and a pair of stretchy bandages. I smiled. Sandra probably told them what to buy.

  "This one's from Sandra."

  A bottle of pain killers and a romance novel. I recognized the book as one she had just finished reading.

  "There's one more," Jessica said. "It says to Soda Pants from Friend. We kind of assumed it was for you because it says get well soon on the box."

  Inside the box was a necklace. The pendant was a cross made out of two fat, black nails held together with wire.

  "How weird," Jessica said, before she shook her head at her own insensitivity. "Sorry, it's just-."

  "Weird," I confirmed hoarsely. But if Simon sent it, it could mean anything. It probably meant I should put it on. "I'll wear it now."

  Jessica slipped the chain over my head and helped me take another sip of water. After triple checking that I would be okay, she set out a pair of pills next to a small cup of water and promised that she would be back at midnight. She handed me a remote for the TV that Jack moved into the room, and the last thing I remembered was the screen coming to life before I fell asleep.

  I woke up before midnight. My shoulder burned like I was on fire. My ribs felt like they were all broken. A fresh wave of pain washed through my entire body when I reached for the pills. I balanced them on my dry tongue and swallowed both pills and the cup of water in one gulp. I nervously watched the curtains blow over the open window and thought that I would never sleep again.

  I jumped and whimpered when Sandra came into the room, then tried to force my muscles and mind to relax when I realized that I was still safe.

  "I brought you some more water," she said. "Jessica didn't want you to strain yourself trying to carry a big glass."

  I smiled.

  "You saved her life, you know," Sandra said with a meaningfully lifted eyebrow.

  "So I heard."

  "Want to eat some cupcakes and watch a movie?"

  I shook my head at the cupcakes.

  "How about some leftovers? We have lots of everything left."

  I shook my head.

  "Popcorn?"

  All the head shaking and thinking about food was making me dizzy and nauseous. I must have turned green because Sandra stopped asking about food.

  "Just a movie?"

  I nodded.

  She popped a DVD into the player and sat on the floor next to the bed. I tried to invite her up but she threw her hands up defensively.

  "Oh no, I'm not going to be responsible for any of your pain. Besides, if Jess sees me up there with you when she gets back, she'll throw me out the window."

  I didn't make it through the opening credits. Before I ever knew what movie we were watching, the drugs took hold and I was asleep.

  chapter 10

  Two days of sleep and pain blurred away when I could finally move and breathe without feeling like I might die. Jessica had somehow become a friend after offering herself up as slave while I healed. On Sunday night, I announced that I would go back to work on Monday.

  "You can't," Sandra and Jessica both protested.

  "You still have a fever," Jessica warned.

  "You're still broken!" Sandra said.

  "I'm still broke," I said. "Look, I can talk again. I can sit up on my own. All I have to do is type. If I'm not fine I'll leave. I'll bring some pain pills just in case."

  "I'll drive you," Jessica said.

  "I'll drop her off and you pick her up," Sandra said. "You work early and I work late, it'll work out."

  Jessica nodded her agreement. "It's settled then. You feel too hot, too cold, or dizzy or anything at all, call someone and we'll come get you."

  I smiled and sighed, noticing a little bit of tenderness in my chest when I did.

  "You know these things take like six weeks," Jessica muttered. “Not three days.”

  I smiled. "I'm fine. Can we just eat and get on with our lives?"

  We had leftovers again, Sandra demanded that we finish as much as we could before we were forced to throw them away. I sent a text to Simon after we ate, the first contact that I'd had with him since that night.

  “Thanks for the gift, Friend. What is it?”

  I waited a long time for a response. Finally, when I was about to fall asleep, my phone buzzed.

  “Protection. Coffin nails. How you feeling?”

  “Much better. Going to work tomorrow.”

  “Wow! Rest up. See you soon.”

  I wanted to reply. I wanted more of a conversation than that, but I couldn’t think of what to say.

  I slept.

  I can’t say what woke me up. Maybe it was a sense that something was wrong, or that someone was watching me.

  The billowing curtains shifted and danced and gave way to a black shadow silently slinking through. It was bigger than a cat, not by much, and as graceful. I didn't want to face whatever the creature was, but with all the creatures I’d been facing, I knew that I had no choice.

  I slapped the light switch above my bed, hoping that it was only some overfed cat who didn’t understand human boundaries. A fat raccoon blinked up at me. Its ringed tail flicked and its whole body shook like a dog shaking off water. I sighed in relief and looked for a stick or something to chase it out with. I considered throwing my pill bottle or the glass at it so I wouldn’t have to get up, but it could probably move faster than I could if I only made it mad. The last thing I needed was to contract rabies and have Sandra and Jessica calling it karma for trying to go back to work.

  I watched and almost cried as it unfolded into a man that looked a lot like Harold, with a more pointed nose and a wider jaw. He looked taller, too, but I realized I’d never actually stood next to Harold long enough to make the comparison. He had the same piercing eyes as Harold, and the same look of bored superiority.

  He was naked. I thought that he looked stocky compared to Harold's slim graceful figure until he pulled a suit out of my top drawer. It made my blood cold to think that he'd been in my room before, in my dresser, maybe when I was asleep. With his jacket buttoned, he looked every bit as willowy as Harold. If he’d come in dressed, I would have mistaken him for the dead vampire. He must have been related, and if he was in my room, getting dressed up for vengeance- I was about to die. He leaned against the wall and crossed one bare ankle over the other.

  Oh, good," he said in a voice slightly deeper than Harold's. "I don't have to tell you to stop screaming or any of that. I'm not here to kill you, obviously, or you'd be dead."

  "Why are you here?" I asked. Having strangers invade my privacy was becoming too commonplace. I was starting to sound as apathetic as him. “Who are you?”

  "My name is Charles. My brother Harold made you an offer, I believe. I am here to let you know that it still stands."

  He pulled a little bottle from his pocket. "If you require a bit of healing," he said.

  "Why do you want me?" I asked.

  In a liquid motion, he pushed himself from the wall and drew slightly closer.

  "We want you because he wants you. And we want him gone. We have very well defined territory and he is not allowed or welcome here. This is our territory and he is a trespasser. We don't want to cater to him. We'd like him to leave."

  "Why not just kill him?"

  "We are too busy cleaning up a trail of bodies to bother with adding one to it."

  Or you keep trying and dying, I thought.

  "He hasn't killed anyone," I said. "Has he?"

  "Someone with extraordinary strength is killing people and eating them like an incredibly powerful dog. No wild dog can do what the killer is doing, eating through bone in huge bites, but a werewolf can. A werewolf can eat a whole man in one sitting. Can you think of a dog big enough to do that?"

  "But they're being
found," I said. "So they’re not being eaten in one sitting."

  "Not entirely, no. But it doesn’t change the fact that something is eating them.”

  "Anything could- ah." My ribs screamed in pain when I tried to sit up. I bit my lip, irritated that I’d let the expression of weakness slip.

  He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time, and I saw myself through his eyes. Uneven hair, growing back puffy in places; a scratched shoulder, bandaged with white gauze. An elastic bandage under my night gown that peeked up through the spaghetti straps. My eyes had bags from not sleeping well. I was an herb bath away from being an Egyptian mummy.

  "You poor girl," he said. He bit his thumb until a trickle of bright red blood flowed from it. His approach looked like a mother about to wipe a smudge off of my cheek. When he got close enough to touch, he froze, eyes fixed on the crossed coffin nails. "Take it off."

  My hand flew to it defensively. "No."

  "I'm only trying to help you before it's too late. It could-." he stopped again, leaned close, sniffed me. "Let me help you before it's too late. Even now it isn’t too late, even though you might think so. Join us. Wouldn't you rather be on the winning team?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I think humans are doing pretty well."

  He chuckled.

  A noise outside of my door caught my attention. When I looked back at Harold's twin, he was gone.

  Sandra knocked and opened the door. "Who were you talking to?"

  "No one," I said, too quickly. "I mean, I was on the phone."

  "With who?"

  "Simon."

  "So who was the other voice? It wasn't Simon's." She stood with her hands on her hips like a suspicious mother.

  "The TV was on. I didn't think it was up so loud. I'm sorry."

  She eyed me warily. "Okay," she said, sounding unconvinced. "Go back to bed if you plan on working in the morning."

  "Yes, Mother," I said sarcastically.

  “And I don’t know if you should be talking to him, anyway, Jade. It seems like he’s involved every time something bad happens to you. I know you say it’s not his fault-.”

  “It’s not him,” I said. Why couldn’t she just accept that?

  “Well, it’s not you, Jade. All I’m saying is that if someone is hurting you it’s not your fault and it’s pretty fucked up that you haven’t been telling me about whatever is going on.”

  “Sandra,” I reached out to her and she put her hand in mine. “Sandra, I would tell you if he was hurting me. I would tell you if there was anything I could tell you at all.”

  She shook her head at me and pulled her hand from mine. “So there is something going on and you don’t feel like you can tell me. We’ve always shared everything Jade, I’ve always been there for you and now when some real shit is happening, you act like you can’t share with me.”

  “It’s not that, it’s- it’s crazy and you’d think that I was crazy.”

  “I know you’re crazy. When you come to your senses and you’re ready to tell me what the hell is going on; you know where to find me.” She shut the door almost completely, and padded back to her room.

  I stayed awake for a while, expecting the vampire to come back but he never did.

  At work the next day, the office was all abuzz when they started to notice my bandage. I was suddenly the office superstar. Everyone wanted to help me out, everyone wanted to eat lunch with me, and everyone wanted to know what happened. I lied. To everyone. I told my coworkers that I was in a car accident and I hit the steering wheel. I would eventually have to explain why my car was perfectly fine once Jessica and Sandra stopped driving me to work. Maybe I could blame a really good mechanic.

  I didn't want the attention I was getting. I wanted to be a whole person again. I wanted vampires to stop showing up in my room with vague offers. I wanted…

  I wanted Simon.

  I wanted to curl up in his big strong arms and listen to his deep voice tell me that it would all be okay. I wanted him to tell me that it was all a dream, that werewolves and vampires were still just pretend and that I was never in danger of anything.

  Except maybe the Beast of Hollywood.

  After I was reassured he would run his bare, unscarred hands down my body and-.

  "Hey!" Sandra's honking and shouting brought me out of my daydream. "Come on, we gotta go!"

  I got into the car as quickly as my body allowed. "What happened to Jessica?"

  "She got called back for some emergency case. I'm on a lunch break. Do you need anything before I take you home?"

  "No," I said. "How's the new job?"

  "So far, it is amazing,” she practically sang the last word. "I'll tell you all about it later, but it's pretty great."

  We didn’t have much time to chat before we were back home and she ordered me back into bed. It was all as if the night before never even happened.

  "You can take a chance with the leftovers or just order a pizza," she offered. "On me, with the cash behind the calendar as long as you save me some."

  "Thanks."

  When she left, I went out to the kitchen for a drink of water and to order a pizza. The leftovers weren’t a chance I wanted to take after I saw the color- or lack of color in the dish. I reached up for a glass, I felt my ribs pop and the glass rolled across the back of my hand in a horrible slow motion moment before hurtling to the ground with vampiric speed and exploding. I jumped back, feeling my rib cage pop and slipping on the blood that now poured from my feet. Cursing and panting I dropped back into a chair and started to carefully pluck slivers of glass out of my feet, before realizing that it was useless and it knocked the wind out of me to bend over.

  I couldn't reach the broom to clear a path. I couldn't navigate through the field of broken glass because of the pain in my chest. I was trapped on a kitchen chair, all because I wanted a stupid glass of water.

  I couldn’t bother Sandra or Jessica with this or they’d call it karma and if I tried to get Jack or Cole they would call Sandra and Jessica. Anyone else I knew was too far away to be of any use. I pulled out my phone and sent a text to the one person I really wanted to see.

  “I need you.”

  chapter 11

  “You keep coming to my rescue."

  "At least this time I didn’t get you in trouble,” Simon said from the doorway. “What did you do?”

  “I was thirsty.” It was such a tiny answer compared to the huge mess I was trapped in. He crunched his way over the broken glass, navigating it with no problem in a pair of boots, to the chair I was in and gently gathered me in his arms. My ribs protested, but my mouth stayed silent.

  “Are you okay?”

  I bit back tears and nodded. “I was just thirsty,” I whispered.

  Simon carried me into my room, kicked the blanket off of the bed, he set me down on it.

  “Look at your feet,” he said.

  I didn’t respond, too focused on filling and emptying my lungs now that the pressure was off.

  “I’ll be right back.” He left the room and came back armed with a spray bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a first aid kit.

  “Thank you,” I breathed.

  “Shh, don’t try to talk. I’ll get this cleaned up for you.”

  He went to work with a big pair of tweezers. I didn’t felt the glass going in, but it hurt like hell coming out. I wrapped an arm around my face so he wouldn’t see me cry. When I tasted blood, I forced my jaw open to release my tongue.

  “Have you eaten?” Simon asked, alternating spritzing my feet and plucking glass, like I was in some kind of demented day spa.

  I shook my head, still covered by my arm.

  “Have you eaten at all today?”

  My face, guided by my elbow, went side to side. He gave a final spray to both feet and started to wrap them.

  “Have you been taking your pain meds?”

  I nodded my elbow.

  “I’m going to run out and grab something to eat,” he said, cutting the gauze.
He started to stand up.

  “No!” I tried to reach for him, but I fell back down and screamed in pain instead. I clenched my teeth and pounded my fists like an angry child.

  “Shh, shh,” He stroked my hair and put his face close to mine. “I won’t go anywhere. I’ll call for a pizza. You should eat something. It only makes everything worse to not eat.”

  I grabbed his wrists and some far off part of me heard his voice like a whisper, telling me to calm down, an echo of something he hadn’t said yet.

  Jade, poor Jade. Calm down little fighter. You’ll heal and then I’ll leave you forever. I want to kiss you and stay with you now, but I can’t keep letting you get hurt.

  I squeezed, digging my nails into the skin of his arms.

  “Calm down, little fighter. I’ll go order some pizza and sweep up. You don’t want anyone else to get hurt, do you?”

  It will hurt us both, but I’d rather hurt us both than kill you.

  I released him with a whimper. It didn’t make sense. I was delusional and I should have listened to Sandra and even Jessica and stayed home to heal. Now the pain and the drugs had me hearing things.

  He called for three large pizzas from the kitchen and came back with a plastic cup full of water and a prescription bottle.

  “Here, if it’s time, I think you’ve earned some drugs. We’ll get food in you soon enough.”

  I swallowed one huge pill at a time; each pull of my throat echoed into my chest and made me feel sick.

  He left the room again and I heard the tinkling of glass being guided by a broom, and finally the clatter and thump of it all going from dustpan to trash can.

  By the time the pizzas arrived, I felt much better. The drugs had taken hold and started to numb my pain. After about half of a pizza, I felt well enough to stand up.

  “Don’t try to get up,” Simon’s deep voice grumbled.

  I turned my head to him in slow motion. “Why? I feel fine.”

  “You are on pain killers. You aren’t qualified to make these decisions for yourself.” He climbed into the bed and laid on his side, looking at me. "How are you feeling?"