by S. R. Witt
The axman's eyes widened in shock as the muscles of his forearm flopped away from the exposed bones between his elbow and wrist. He screamed, a high-pitched, panicked sound as blood gushed from his severed arteries.
Chase gave the man no time to recover from the shock of the messy wound she’d carved into his arm. The hooked tip of her knife found the open wound she’d gouged through her enemy’s side, and burrowed up and into his body.
The man’s mouth flopped open and his eyes rolled back into his skull as Chase’s weapon clawed open his diaphragm and slit through the bottom of his lung.
A pink froth formed on his lips, and the edges of his wound fluttered around Chase’s forearm as air escaped from his punctured lung.
Chase caught the man before he could fall onto her and pin her to the ground. With a tremendous effort, she thrust the Slayer to the side and rolled away from him. For a long moment, she lay perfectly still and took one deep, gulping breath after another.
Her rival Slayer grunted and gurgled as the blood filling his lungs strangled him. Finally, his breath left him in a long, bubbling sigh, and he didn’t draw another one.
Chase felt a dark grin twist the corners of her mouth, along with a dull ache from the bruised muscles in her face. Every inch of Chase’s body and head ached as if she’d been pounded with a meat tenderizer. She didn’t even try to move for a few minutes, just lay in the hay and listened to the crickets chirp and the frogs croak as she tried to determine just how severely she was injured.
A cold chill settled in Chase’s skull when she noticed her Fortitude had increased to three. A minute later, Chase had regained another point for Fortitude, and she finally felt like she wouldn’t die if she tried to stand up. Within five minutes, the rune in the Fortitude sphere of the Talisman was back up to six, and Chase no longer felt like hammered crap in a paper sack. She was sore, and her head still felt wobbly on her shoulders, but she was no longer in danger of dying. Somehow, she’d healed from beaten nearly to death to lightly bruised in less than fifteen minutes.
This must be how Jason feels in those slasher flicks, Chase thought, and stood up from the floor.
She kicked the man she’d just gutted and sighed with relief when he didn’t spring up to attack her. Apparently recovering from wounds was one thing, but coming back from the dead was another.
Chase turned to leave the man, but noticed something strange. Despite his apparently Very Dead status, the axman’s aura still clung to his bloody corpse.
As she watched, the Slayer’s aura contracted, drawing inward until it was a dime-sized ball of light that hovered above his heart. Then it sank into his skin, vanishing into his chest. Three soul orbs drifted away from his body and into Chase’s pattern, but she scarcely noticed because something more powerful held her attention.
A wave of strange hunger washed over Chase. She needed whatever was inside the Slayer she’d killed. It called to her with a siren’s song that tugged at every fiber of her being, urging her to retrieve it from her enemy at any cost.
Before she could stop herself, Chase was on her knees and digging her knife in between the man’s ribs above his heart. She twisted her knife and used it as a lever to pop one of the man’s ribs free from his sternum with a gruesome cracking noise. Chase plunged her fingers into the hole she’d created and ripped it open, revealing the red warmth of the dead Slayer’s chest cavity.
Light burst from a pea-sized orb embedded in the wall of the Slayer’s stilled heart. Chase shoved her hand into the hole left by the man’s missing rib, and clawed her prize out with her fingernails. The light dimmed, but the ball was hot in her palm.
“I’ll figure out what this thing is for later,” Chase promised herself, and shoved it into her pocket. She folded her knife and stuck it back in her pocket, grateful of its comforting weight against her leg. The knife had been with Chase for most of her life, but she’d never before felt such a strong connection to it. The knife was no longer just a tool she could use to defend herself.
It was part of her now.
Chase looked up, hoping to find a clue that would lead her to the Martyr the ax-wielding Slayer had been following, but the nearest circle was miles away from her location. Cursing, Chase stomped back to where she’d hidden the van. As she opened the Dodge’s door, she saw a pale golden glow leaking through the shadows of the trees beside the road. Chase tensed, ready to spring to the attack.
A woman’s quivering voice came from behind the light. “Are you one of them?”
“You can come out,” Chase responded to the librarian. Chase wondered if she couldn’t see the ring in the sky because she was so close to the Martyr. If that was the case, the other Slayers could still see the ring. “I'm not going to hurt you.”
The woman appeared from around the far side of the van, a pale golden aura surrounding her. “You won’t?”
“Get in the van,” Chase said, the tension leaking from her when she recognized the librarian. She could hear other cars approaching. She and the axman had been the first of the Slayers to arrive at the scene, but they wouldn't be the last. She wanted to be far gone before anyone else showed up to hack up the Martyr for her soul token. A glimmer of a plan was forming in Chase’s thoughts, and she wanted to keep this Martyr alive for the moment.
Chase crawled into the van’s driver seat and waited for the librarian to get into the passenger’s seat and buckle up. She rested her head on the steering wheel and tried to will away the dizziness in her head so she could drive without running into a tree or crashing into a ditch.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Nineteen
The Weapon
Chase drove away from the barn until she could no longer hear the rumble of other vehicles approaching. She found a small turnout on the winding road she’d selected at random, and pulled the van out of sight. Then she killed the engine and threw open the door to let the chilly night air wash over her.
“Where are you going?” the librarian asked nervously.
Chase didn’t bother answering. Despite the restoration of her Fortitude, her thoughts were still a little fuzzy around the edges from the concussion she’d picked up having her head bounced off the barn’s wooden wall. She needed to clean up and catch her breath for a moment before she kept going.
She made her way around the van and threw open its back doors, dug a water bottle out of the supplies behind the mattress that took up most of the floor, and then took a seat on the rear bumper. She took a long drink from the bottle, then poured some of it over her hands to sluice away the sticky blood and blackened gore clinging to her fingers.
With her hands reasonably clean, Chase poured some water into her cupped palm and rinsed the blood off her face. She needed to look at the manual again, and figure out what she was supposed to do with the gruesome souvenir she'd been left with after defeating the other Slayer. She pulled it out of her pocket and splashed the last of the water over the pearl-like sphere.
It was about the same size as a pea, and its surface was pitted and ridged. It looked organic, like a kidney stone or some sort of tumor. Chase examined the sphere more closely and saw thin red veins wrapped around its glowing surface and burrowing into its mass. As she watched, a flickering pulse ran through the veins. “Well, that's fucking disgusting.”
She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that the librarian still had her ass parked in the passenger's seat. Then Chase pulled the thin blue Slayers vs. Sleepers book out of the storage space in the back of the van. She flipped past the sections on beginning the game, and “Your First Hunt”, until she found a section labeled “Trophies.”
“The bezoars are the crystallized essence of Slayers, Sleepers, and Chosen Victims. Absorbing a bezoar into your talisman can greatly increase your strength and capabilities. Care should be taken, however, not to absorb bezoars that are too powerful for your talisman to contain.”
Chase scratched her chin. “How the fuck am I supposed to tell how powe
rful a bezoar is?”
From the front of the van, Sarah uttered the first words she’d said since Chase had started driving “You didn't read the guidebook before you started?”
Chase turned to stare at the librarian. “What do you know about the manual?”
The librarian blushed as if she were embarrassed for Chase's ignorance. “Every family in Crucible has one. And we all get our own copies when we turn thirteen.”
Of course, Chase thought. There wasn’t an innocent person in this whole godforsaken town. They were all playing this ridiculous game, so it was only natural that they were all familiar with its rules. “I read it, a couple of times, but that was before I knew there’d be a life or death test covering what I read. And I haven’t had a time to reread the instruction manual between finding my dad tortured in a basement and being attacked by a bunch of Sleepers. You want to fill me in?”
Sarah crawled through the van and crossed her legs on the mattress Chase and Paxton had been using as a bed since they left Dallas in search of their parents. “This is way more comfortable than it looks,” she said, bouncing on the thick slab of foam. “I'm a Sacred Martyr, so I don't know how things work for Slayers, exactly, but I read the manual, and you're supposed to be able to sense whether or not you can safely absorb a bezoar.”
Chase raised an eyebrow. “How?”
Sarah grinned. “Taste it.”
Chase's stomach tightened at the thought of tasting the bezoar, but the serious look on Sarah's face told her that the librarian wasn't pulling her leg.
“This fucking sucks,” Chase lamented. She steeled herself, opened her mouth, and rested the bezoar on her tongue.
She expected a chalky or metallic taste. She wouldn’t have even been surprised if it tasted like raw meat or just plain old blood.
But Chase wasn’t prepared for the irregular ball to be so warm against her tongue, or for its flavor to remind her of butter. It was velvety, surprisingly rich, and not at all unpleasant.
“Taste good?” Sarah asked. “It’s supposedly savory if it's close to your power level. If it's lower, it will be a little sweet. Too powerful for your talisman and it's bitter.”
Chase plucked the bezoar off her tongue. “What do I do with it?”
Sarah tapped her chest between her breasts. “It goes in the talisman.”
Chase pulled down the neck of her T-shirt to expose the top half of the circular scar in the middle of her chest. In the moonlight, it wasn't as red or angry looking as it had been in the house. It reminded her of a fading pink scar, clearly visible and raised, but healed. Chase shrugged, then pressed the bezoar to the center of the circular outline.
A horrific tearing sound echoed in Chase's head. The skin over her sternum itched furiously and then burst into fiery pain. Where the bezoar touched her flesh, Chase’s pale skin peeled away to reveal an open, tooth-lined hole. Before Chase could pull her hand away, thin tendrils burst from the mouth and wrapped around the bezoar. They snatched the glowing stone from Chase's fingers and pulled it into her body.
The raised flaps of skin slapped down over the mouth, closing it. As Chase watched in horror, her flesh knitted itself back together.
After a moment, the pain passed, and Chase felt a new strength surging through her body.
Sarah stared at Chase's chest. Her mouth hung slightly open, and the pink tip of her tongue was just visible beyond her lips. Her breaths puffed out of her mouth in soft clouds, fogged by the crisp fall air.
“That was something else,” Sarah said, her eyes locked to Chase’s exposed chest.
Chase frowned, uncomfortable with Sarah’s hungry attention, and pulled her t-shirt back up to her neck. “I don't know what the hell is going on.”
And yet, even as she said the words, she did. It was as if her mind was a cabinet filled with hundreds of secret compartments and every new discovery caused it to swing open wider, revealing more and darker depths for her to explore. When Chase looked at the talisman’s pattern, the bezoar had unlocked an entirely new section of Chase, one that glowed a familiar bilious green.
She'd grown more powerful, and new abilities were open to her. She examined one of them, and its name echoed in her thoughts. "Furious Assault,” she said, and a deep understanding of this strange new power rose to the surface of her thoughts. “Increases Strength, Rage and Weapon Damage, but lowers Willpower while active.”
Chase almost selected the power, but held off as a thought struck her. The ability to go nuts and lay waste to her foes would be pretty useful tonight, but she could already see a serious drawback to Furious Assault. She raised an eyebrow at Sarah and asked, “How long will I be stuck with a power once I take it?”
The librarian looked down at her clasped hands resting on her knees. She raised her eyes to meet Chase’s stare. “You don't know?”
Chase's attention split between the world of circle patterns in her head and the world around her. She could see both, all laid over each other like wispy mirages where they intersected. “Know what?”
Sarah fidgeted for a moment before she explained. “This doesn't end tonight.”
Chase shrugged. “It lasts until all the Sacred Martyrs’ tokens have been claimed and the sacrifice is made, right?”
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Your parents should have told you all of this. Listen, no one comes back from this. The people who die in the Nightmare Game, they stay dead. The Sleepers don't wake up just because the sun rises. The Sacred Martyrs don’t live to see the glorious future their deaths make possible. And the Slayer who survives won't stop being a Slayer just because the game’s cycle ends.”
Chase felt like she'd been punched in the gut. “That's impossible. How long has this been going on?”
“Centuries,” the librarian whispered. “The first Nightmare Game took place in the 1700s. Some think the Native Americans who lived here before the settlers arrived may have played some version of it, too.”
Chase shot up off the bumper. She rubbed the circle on her chest with her thumb as she paced back and forth behind the van. “And no one from outside Crucible ever noticed supernatural psycho killers roaming these woods for the past three hundred years? You’re full of shit.”
Sarah let out a long, sad sigh and her shoulders sagged. “People have heard about the Slayers. We’re a small town and we don’t get a lot of visitors, sure, but the legends get out. Not the whole story, of course, but where did you think the urban legends about killers with hooks for hands or movies about an indestructible man wearing a hockey mask and attacking campers came from? Outsiders have always known about Crucible, even if they’ve never understood the truth.”
Chase couldn’t take any more. She took a knee and clasped her fingers around the back of her skull. “Even if I believe that slasher movies grew out of this twisted game your town’s been playing for the past few hundred years, I don’t believe that winning will make me a Slayer forever. My dad—”
“Your father?” Sarah stared at Chase for a moment and recognition kindled fires in her eyes. “You’re Jack Harrow’s daughter?”
Chase didn’t trust her voice, so she nodded and kept her silence.
A soft laugh drifted away from Sarah’s lips. “He was a Slayer. But he and your mother cheated. They wouldn’t fight. They made the sacrifice together. It weakened the Red God’s altar, but it still completed the ritual. That’s why they were banished.”
“Then there is a way out of this,” Chase said, retrieving her bottle of water from the ground and standing up. “Because whatever you think about my dad, he never killed anyone after he left this crazy fucking town.”
The librarian lowered her voice and looked away from Chase, hiding the warring emotions that distorted her features. “After what they did, the Red God changed the ritual. Only one can complete it now. Only one can survive the Nightmare Game to become Crucible’s champion. And they will remain here to protect Crucible as long as the Red Altar exists.”
Chase drank the last
of the water from her bottle. It washed the rich taste of the bezoar out of her mouth, and Chase almost missed the flavor. Almost.
She didn't want to be close to Sarah, not then. She didn’t want to be close to anyone. She wanted to run screaming into the woods and let one of the other Slayers finish her off. What good would she be to her family if winning the Nightmare Game turned her into some sort of bloodthirsty serial killer?
“This is what my parents were trying to stop,” she said to herself, the words barely louder than a whisper. And her father seemed to think there was still a way for Chase to end it, if she played along. She still wasn’t sure how she’d do it, but if there was even a chance at making these assholes pay for what they’d done, she was willing to give it a shot. Giving up wasn’t an option.
“We should go,” Sarah said. “We should go find another one of the victims and get their marker before one of the other Slayers finds them.”
“Aren’t you worried that I’m going to kill you, now that I know how this all works?” Chase asked Sarah.
The librarian frowned for a moment, and then flashed a chubby-cheeked smile. “I’m not afraid to die. I’ve known my role for a long time now, and I know how important it is to sacrifice my life for the lives of countless others. This is the Red God’s work, Chase. Plus, I think you’ll probably want to keep me around for a while. I know stuff, and you seem like you could use someone like me around to help you.”
Chase grunted at the truth of that. “Deal. I’ll save you for last.”
Sarah’s face brightened with a smile. “Good. If you’re ready for some advice, then I suggest you use the bezoar you gained from killing that other Slayer to activate your first power.”
Chase turned her attention back to her talisman’s pattern and flicked through a list of other powers, passing by Morbid Beauty, Undying Thirst, and dozens of other supernatural abilities that promised to turn her into a near-indestructible dealer of death.
