by S. R. Witt
But her weapon stopped in midair, banging off a metal pole tipped with a quartet of barbed spines.
“This one's mine,” another masked figure said. His face was hidden behind a glossy black crow's mask with a long, tapered beak and bulging obsidian orbs for eyes. A shock of startlingly red hair jutted up from behind the mask in a mass of blood-crusted spikes. Chase instantly recognized the man as the asshole from the hotel.
Of course, he had to be a Slayer.
“You want your ass kicked again, motherfucker?” Chase growled. She brandished the sickle and aimed its tip at the center of his face. “I won’t stop at putting you on the floor, this time. Walk away, or you die with him.”
The victim, suddenly realizing they were discussing which of them was going to carve his heart out of his chest, bolted. Chase knew she was faster than the other Slayer, but she let him lead the way because she’d rather have him in front of her where she could see him than behind her where he could shove that spear through her spine.
When her rival Slayer cocked his arm back to stab the fleeing victim with his multi-headed spear, Chase raked her sickle’s serrated blade across the back of the asshole’s right leg.
The raven-masked Slayer roared in pain as his tendons snapped apart and rolled up under the skin of his calf like a broken window shade. Off balance, he crashed into a freezer case and his shoulder smashed through its fogged-over door. The not-at-all-safety glass ripped through the Slayer’s camouflage cargo pants and black t-shirt, opening a flurry of new wounds down the left side of his body.
Chase ignored the bleeding Slayer. She only had eyes for her victim, who’d almost reached the end of the aisle.
Chase flung her sickle like a deadly Frisbee, and it spun through the air with a piercing whistle. The sickle plunged between the victim’s ribs in mid-step. His back arched and blood burst from his lips as he tried to scream, then the martyr collapsed to his knees and blood from his punctured lung spilled down his chest like a red bib.
Chase caught up to him, and tore her sickle loose from his side, tearing a gaping hole in h is left side and drenching the floor with his blood. Her teeth itched with the desire to bite the martyr, to rip into him and chew the token out of his body. She wanted to feast upon his flesh and devour him.
“The Red God calls me to his side,” the man gasped and choked as pink froth bubbled over his lips. “My duty is done.”
A Sleeper’s howl dragged Chase’s attention from her kill. A man with a bloodied chef's knife waggled his blade at Chase. Then he charged.
“Sorry, kid,” Chase growled, “no time for foreplay.”
She plunged her fingers into the wound she’d created in the man’s side, and closed her fist around his heart. She could feel the token there, pulsing against her palm, and ripped it free of his body in a welter of blood. Instinct guided Chase’s bloody hand under her tattered t-shirt, and she pressed the token against the center of her talisman’s ridged outline. Her skin opened under her hand like a greedy mouth, and a hundred tentacles slithered out of the hole to take the token from Chase. They reeled the grisly trophy in, and the flaps of Chase’s chest slapped closed behind it.
Her talisman’s image blazed with new energy, and the glowing image of a skull appeared at its top,
“The Fool,” the Sacred Martyr’s title rumbled through her thoughts like the sound of distant thunder.
A tremor rattled Chase’s body from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The slaughter of the Sleepers had granted her strength, but this was something else, something more profound. She felt a connection between herself and a greater power snap into focus. This is what she’d been created for. This was her entire purpose for being. Her eyes closed and, for the first time in her life, Chase felt like she understood exactly why she existed.
The charging Sleeper slammed into Chase. His plunged into her shoulder with a wet thunk that shook Chase from her revelation.
Despite the blood oozing around the blade and the knife’s tip grating against the bones of her shoulder joint, Chase felt almost no pain. Her Mask had protected her from the worst of the blow, turning a crippling attack into little more than a bruising blow.
The Sleeper tore his knife free of her shoulder, eyes wide at the realization that he’d hardly scratched Chase. He unleashed a scream that was no predator’s cry, but the panicked screeching of cornered prey.
Chase grabbed the man's suit jacket and jerked him toward her, bringing her head down hard at the same time. Her forehead smashed into the Sleeper’s nose pulping it beneath the black mask. Snot and blood oozed through the mask’s wriggling fabric, dripping and soaking into the man’s pink, pinstriped shirt. Chase reared her head back and smashed it down into the Sleeper’s upturned face again.
Bones shattered around the man’s hidden eyes, and the mask stretched grotesquely to accommodate the new shape of his skull.
The Sleeper was limp in Chase’s grasp, but she wasn’t through with him. She wanted his little buddies to be horrified when they found his remains. She wanted them to understand that she was not helpless.
She wanted them to know fear.
Chase slammed her Mask into the man’s face once again, snapping his neck and smearing her pumpkin skull features with the dying man’s sticky sweet blood.
A trio of screams shook Chase free of her rage. The Sleepers had heard the distressed call of one of their own and had come to avenge him. In her blind fury Chase hadn’t heard their approach, and now she had three of them within striking distance.
“Who’s next?” Chase taunted through the bloody rictus of her devilish smile.
The Sleepers hesitated, and Chase used their fear to her advantage. She wanted to activate her Horrifying Apparition power, but couldn’t activate while anyone could see her. Ghost lights wouldn’t get her out of this mess, either, which only left her one option.
Chase triggered her Petrifying Disappearance ability. The Sleepers who saw her vanish screamed in terror, and Chase grinned wildly as she ran for all she was worth. She skidded around a corner of an aisle and sprinted for the back of the store. She’d almost reached the butcher’s display case when she became visible once more.
She took a deep breath and looked around for more Sleepers. With the Marker taken, it was time for Chase to move on to her next target. She headed for the loading dock as fast as she could run, boots banging off the tiles. She stiff-armed the swinging doors out of her way, hurtled across the concrete loading bay, and plunged through the plastic strip curtain.
And right onto the tines of the crow-faced Slayer’s spear.
All four of the savage weapon’s barbed tips punched through the front of Chase's concert T-shirt. The spikes shot through her ribs and caught fast on the cage of bones. With an enraged snarl, the Slayer drove Chase back into the loading dock’s wall.
Horrific pain scattered Chase’s thoughts. She’d never felt anything like the burning agony in her chest. A wild animal’s trapped panic blossomed inside her, making it impossible for Chase to think or act.
“Fucking bitch,” the crow-masked Slayer snarled. “Every time you show up, you’re trying to steal from me. First my motel room and now a Sacred Martyr? I'm going to rip that token out of your heart with my teeth.”
The pain was still terrible, but Chase fought through it and focused her thoughts on the only thing that mattered at that moment: survival.
The glowing image of her talisman told Chase she was wounded, but not mortally. The pain was intense, and the injury grisly, but she was no longer a nineteen-year-old girl made of flesh and blood. She was a Slayer, and that was something else altogether. She’d survive this, but she had to get away from this asshole first.
Chase closed her hands around the spear's shaft, preventing the other Slayer from ripping it free for another attack or using it to push it farther into her body. “You couldn’t beat me before I was a Slayer, what makes you think you can win now that I’m so much stronger?”
Th
e crow-faced Slayer’s obsidian eyes filled with panic, and Chase laughed. This man was a bully and an asshole, but he’d been raised to believe he was entitled to his victory. While Chase’s parents had been training her for this night, his had been coddling him, teaching him that he was one of the chosen. That he was special.
And in the shadowed concrete room, the realization that he was going to die settled over him like a barbed cowl.
Chase expected him to throw down his weapon and run. Instead, he threw his head back and screamed. As the echoes of his desperate cry died away, he shouted, “I have her. Come and finish the bitch!”
The screams of the Sleepers answered the red-haired Slayer’s call.
Chase glared at the man on the other end of the spear. “You're working with them? Pretty sure that's against even this sick game’s rules.”
The Slayer laughed. “You Harrows think you're so fucking smart. The old ways are dead. The Sleepers are going to help get me out of this fucking mess because I'm not going to spend the next twenty-one years of my life protecting this shithole of a town.”
Chase held on tight to the spear shaft and shoved it forward, rocking the other Slayer back on his heels. He took a step backward, and then a wide, bloody grin spread under his mask's beak. “You think you're stronger than me? Maybe you are. But it's not going to matter.”
The tapping of high heels and the slap of loafers against the linoleum drew Chase's attention. The Sleepers were coming. If she didn’t make her move soon, she’d be swarmed with masked motherfuckers. Pinned to the wall, she’d have less than no chance. She had to get away.
“Last chance, asshole,” Chase said, forcing a bravado she didn’t feel into her words. She just needed an opening. Any opening…
“Bitch, you're stuck on the end of my spear. Do you think—”
Chase released her grip on the spear and summoned her sickle to her even as she swept her arm in an arc at the crow’s head. The sickle ‘s tip racked across the mask’s eyes and splinters of obsidian shot into the air.
The other Slayer screamed, and his spear vanished. He grabbed his eyes with his hands, and Chase had her opening.
“You’re dead, you’ll never get out of this town—”
But Chase was gone before he could finish his sentence. The instant the man was blind, she triggered her Horrifying Apparition power and vanished. A split second later, Chase reappeared near the front of the store behind the Sleeper standing guard between the registers and the doors.
The Sleeper spun to face Chase, his body rigid with horror. He lifted a gore-clotted claw hammer, but fear slowed his reactions and made him easy prey.
Chase slashed down with the sickle, severing the Sleeper’s arm at the elbow. She twirled the sickle once around her hand and then drove the blade up into the man's throat beneath his chin with a crunch of bone and cartilage.
The tip of the sickle exited his skull with grisly thock, and Chase ripped it forward, splitting his face in half. Chase’s stomach lurched when she smelled the rotting meat the mask had concealed. Pale maggots the size of her thumb wriggled away from the light she’d let into their meal, burrowing deeper into the rotting mess of the man’s head. Whatever the Sleepers might once have been, they were every bit as much monsters as Chase, now. Something foul had taken root in their flesh, and they were rotting.
Tainted, Chase thought, remembering the echo of her father’s warning.
The man’s yellow aura faded, and he fell away from Chase, jellied brains leaking from the gash that split his head in half.
Three spirit orbs flowed into Chase’s talisman. She laughed as left the store with her sickle twirling around her hand. She’d burned through most of her Willpower, but the risk of going berserk had been better than the certainty of dying at the hands of a bunch of Sleepers while that asshole in the crow mask laughed at her.
Chase left the supermarket, grinning as the Sleepers screamed behind her.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Oracle
Chase made it back to the Cayenne before something grabbed her brain and shook it like a pair of dice in a gambler’s hand. She held onto the Porsche’s wheel in a vain attempt to stabilize herself, but she couldn’t keep her mind steady.
Something ancient watched her from the darkness between worlds. It’s reptilian eye, the pupil a vast red chasm that threatened to devour Chase, pinned her beneath its pitiless stare. She felt weak and helpless before the titanic creature as if she were no more than a flea viewed beneath a researcher’s microscope. Primal fear wrapped its icy fingers around her heart and squeezed until her blood lay still and quiet in her veins.
Chase knew deep in her core that she was in the presence of the Red God.
Taking the Fool’s token had been like firing a flare gun over the vast deeps. The slumbering god hadn’t noticed her before that moment, but now she had its full attention.
“Sacrifice,” it whispered, and the words rolled over Chase like the breath of a blazing forest fire. The creature’s need, ancient and never-ending, seized Chase.
“No,” Chase groaned and forced herself to face the great beast. She wouldn’t let it cow her, not in the safety of her own thoughts. She thrust her hate at the ancient god, rejecting everything it stood for and everything it wanted.
For a moment, Chase’s life hung by a thread over a precipice of infinite hunger. With the blink of its unspeakable eye, the Red God could have extinguished her life.
Instead, it judged Chase.
And it did not find her wanting.
“Hunt,” it commanded, and then it closed its hellish eye and vanished back into the lightless depths from which it had emerged.
But it left Chase with parting gifts. A glowing golden line unspooled before her, and she knew that it would lead her to the nearest Chosen Martyr. It also completely restored her Willpower and Fortitude and filled her with a supernatural vigor that made Chase feel like she’d her blood had been replaced a slurry of Red Bull and nicotine pills.
The Screamers had emerged from The Lucky Pig, and their savage voices reached Chase’s ears.
It was time to hunt.
She fired up the Cayenne and kept her foot on it’s gas as she followed the glowing trail to her next target. She pushed the Porsche hard, slamming through the gears and drifting around corners like she was born behind the wheel. For the first time in a very long time, Chase felt as if she was in her element. She hated the monster she was becoming, but she could no longer deny she was very, very good at being a masked killer.
She clung to the memory of her brother and mother, desperate to keep it at the front of her mind until she could free them from the assholes who’d taken them. It made her feel human, at least a little, and gave all this madness a sense of purpose. She just had to hold it together long enough to get them to safety.
After that…
Chase didn’t know what came after that, and she didn’t have room in her head to care. The future would take care of itself.
It always did.
The glowing trail led Chase around the western edge of Crucible to the truck stop where she’d had breakfast what seemed like an eternity ago. The golden ring in the sky shed its radiance on acres of empty asphalt and the dilapidated main building. The tractor-trailers were gone, the maze formed by their boxy cargo rolling on its way to Kansas City or Springfield or further to Tulsa, Oklahoma City, maybe even Dallas. Chase tried to imagine people going about their lives outside Crucible. Drivers on the road, parents picking up groceries from Whole Foods, kids Snapchatting and avoiding their homework.
She couldn’t get her head around that kind of normalcy anymore. Things had changed. She’d changed.
Unlike the barn and the Lucky Pig, there wasn’t much cover for an approach to the truck stop. The parking lot was so large there was almost no way to cross it without someone seeing her, and the border fringe of skeletal trees that separated the station from the homes scattered on the hills around it would barely hide a l
arge squirrel, much less a person.
Chase hoped the Cayenne would disguise her as a Sleeper at a casual glance because she hadn’t seen anyone else driving such a high-end set of wheels. She tested her theory by rolling down the service road past the truck stop, sticking to the speed limit and watching for activity through the Porsche’s tinted windows. A moment later, Chase was glad she hadn’t decided to drive on up to the diner.
On the far side of the station, hidden from the approach from Crucible, the parking lot held thirteen luxury vehicles. Sleepers stalked through the shadows between the cars and SUVs, heads bent together in conversation, weapons resting on their shoulders or dangling from their hands. Chase saw innumerable rifles and shotguns, along with more makeshift weapons. Spiked baseball bats, golf clubs with the gleam of sharpened heads, tire irons, even a few claw hammers.
At least no one's decided to use a chainsaw, she thought and stifled a crazed grin before it could turn into a hyena’s hysterical laugh.
A few of the masked Sleepers turned their dark, featureless faces in Chase’s direction as she passed, but none of them made a move to come after her. She breathed a sigh of relief and kept on rolling down the service road as she tried to come up with a plan of attack.
A half-mile later, Chase turned the Cayenne onto the overpass and headed back toward the truck stop. She didn’t have a plan, yet, but she could feel the first rumblings of one forming in the back of her mind.
By the time Chase had turned around and approached the truck stop again, the Sleepers had moved from their hiding place behind the building to gather on the parking lot facing the service road. The crowd of masked Sleepers had gathered around a black Escalade and were hooting and hollering, growing more agitated by the moment.
The lights were on inside the truck stop's main building, but Chase couldn't see anyone through its fogged, greasy windows. The rotating golden circle in the sky told Chase her prey was still inside.
