Psycho Killers in Love

by C. T. Phipps

  Lucky reached out his paw and somehow an assault rifle dragged itself across the ground into his hands…err paws. The comically large weapon in its paws was enough to temporarily distract me before I realized he was going to hit me with the grenade launcher at its bottom. “Hasta La Vista, Baby.”

  “You’re still a frigging bear,” I said, punting the teddy bear’s head clean off.

  “Hey, no fair!” Lucky shouted about five feet from his body that swung around the assault rifle wildly, firing in the air before I grabbed it from him.

  I lifted the teddy bear’s body by its leg then hurled it into the fireplace before shutting down a metal grate. I promptly turned the gas up and Lucky’s body began thrashing around in the inferno.

  Lucky’s head bounced around on its leaking fluff. “Hey! I needed that.”

  The emergency lights turned on and illuminated the room in a warm shade of red. Much to my surprise, all the sorority sisters seemed to be alive with one of the Heathers double tapping the last of the mercenaries. Somehow, they’d all managed to come through it unscathed while taking advantage of my distraction. Well, almost unscathed as Summer was holding her stomach and looked like she’d been shot. I could sense that she’d been mortally injured for a normal woman and would have been crippled for life if she survived. Thankfully, she wasn’t, and I could see her injuries heal moment by moment. It looked excruciatingly painful, enough. Nancy was leaning over her, holding her hand.

  “It’s going to be alright,” Nancy said.

  “Shut up and carry me out of here!” Summer said.

  “Ah, the love of sisters,” I muttered. I still had to find mine, though, and had no idea where she or Gerald were. Honestly, and I wasn’t proud of it, I was alright with the prospect of leaving the vampire behind if I could get my sister out. However, he had her dog and that would never fly with her. It wasn’t a matter of hating the undead, it was simply that most people didn’t matter to me. I was here for the TAA sisters because Nancy cared for them and any help that I gave Gerald would be to please my sister. I wondered if most people only cared about others through a spider web of relationships or if it was a flaw in my bloodline.

  Mind you, I was also appalled by the sight of at least half of the mercenaries’ bodies that looked like they’d had their necks broken, bodies folded in half, and sometimes heads ripped off. That was enough to reach past my cold and unfeeling spirit to horrify me—at least a little. Had I done that?

  Yes, my child, you did, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered. I have never been so proud of you.

  Your approval fills me with shame, I replied, wondering if that would ever become a saying somewhere.

  The Spirit of the Hunt chuckled. The Red Gods have fed well because of you. Me especially. You have served your purpose.

  What? I asked.

  “Hey, a little help here,” Lucky said, angling his severed head up at me.

  I looked down at him. “Why in the world would I help you?”

  Lucky shrugged or tried to. It was hard to shrug when you didn’t have shoulders. It was more like his head scrunched up a bit. “Old times sake?”

  “No thank you,” I said, before pausing. “But I might if you tell me who the Boss is.”

  Lucky looked surprised or maybe I was reading too much into a pair of button eyes and dirty cloth. “Wow, kid, you have no idea what’s going on. In any case, I’ll see you later.”

  “What?” I asked.

  The teddy bear head went silent and I blinked. Reaching over. I picked up the dormant piece of cloth then frowned. His spirit had left the item and I cursed under my breath. The bear had never been anything more than a receptacle for his spirit and now he was going to go off to kill again.

  He will need time to reform, the Spirit of the Hunt said. But if you want to destroy him permanently, then you need to help me.

  No, I said. No.

  I tried to feel Mike’s presence but couldn’t sense it. There was a dark and eerie fuzz about the place even as I looked at my hand and saw it was now displaying Roman thirteen. The mark was blackened like it was branded into my flesh and had red cracks through it.

  Nancy helped her sister to her feet, Summer’s stomach injury almost healed. She also had a handful of deformed rifle rounds in her right hand. It was another sign of just how powerful the Artemises were. Or at least these two.

  “We need to go,” Nancy said, holding her sister up by her shoulder. “You’ve managed to come through repeatedly for us, William, but we’re not going to be able to pull any more rabbits out of our hats.”

  I looked at her. “I can’t leave without my sister.”

  Nancy stared and sighed. “Summer, I’m going to need you to go take the others out on your own.”

  “What?” Summer asked.

  “I think they’re in love!” the huge schoolgirl, Shinobu, said. She clapped her hands together. “So romantic!”

  Summer glared at Shinobu.

  “Listen, you can’t risk your life for a slasher that is almost certainly dead—” Summer said.

  “She’s not—” I started to say.

  “Bark! Bark!” Cujo said, causing me to do a double take.

  “Who is dead?” Carrie asked, walking through the door with her dog under her arm as well as the Necronomicon. Standing behind her was Gerald Saint Croix, several bullet holes in his attire without any visible sign of injury.

  I blinked. “Well, that proved distressingly easy. Is it just me or is everyone here much better at rescuing themselves than being rescued?”

  “Was I needing to be rescued?” Carrie asked, blinking.

  “Is Cassandra dead?” Nancy asked, looking over at Carrie.

  “Please say yes,” Summer said, looking more able to stand on her feet with every passing second. Mind you, I wouldn’t put her at fighting trim just yet, but the fact she’d been shot in the stomach with a three round burst and was almost ready to walk on her own was nothing short of a miracle by itself.

  Carrie shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. I managed to stab her leg a bit, but she managed to get in the panic room. Not with the book, though. Didn’t even hit an artery.”

  “What a waste of blood,” Gerald said, sadly.

  “I guess we can leave then,” I said, fully expecting a bunch of mercenaries or slashers to descend on us at any moment. Instead, nothing was happening and that caused me more worry than the opposite.

  “You didn’t happen to pass by Mike Miner on the way through the mansion’s halls, did you?” I asked. “I mean, you must have in order to get Gerald.”

  Carrie frowned. “Yeah, about that, we have a big problem.”

  I stared at her. “A bigger problem than being in the dungeon of an evil cult?”‘

  “Much bigger,” Carrie said.

  That was when I heard the whine of the intercom turning on again before a smooth husky feminine voice spoke on the other side. “The sorority girls can leave as can the Artemises. The Wild Hunt has been fulfilled. You have stalked and offered the yearly tithe to the Red Gods in record time. William and Carrie will reap the rewards of what you have sewn. For that, though, I want you to stay and speak with me.”

  “Oh hell,” I said, recognizing the voice. “It’s her.”

  Summer looked at Nancy confused before Nancy looked at me.

  “Who is she?” Nancy asked.

  “Our mother,” Carrie answered for me. “Yeah, I was sort of let go by Mike. It turns out Mom’s is the boss around here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Your mother?” Nancy asked, eyes widening. “What?”

  “Yes, she went by the name Agnes Sawney Bean Patrick, but most people know her as Lamia, Lamashtu, or Lilith,” I replied, as if I was discussing the weather.

  The discovery that my mother was involved in the Fraternity of Orion shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Perhaps it was because I’d assumed these psycho killers were all misogynist in nature and would never answer to a woman. Unfortunately, my
mother wasn’t exactly a normal woman was she? She was a horror that had stalked the men and women of the Earth for untold millennium.

  It was ironic that she’d never hidden her dark side from us but had been a somewhat normalizing presence among us, at least as far as such things went. She’d pretended to be a mother and housewife for about a decade to make sure we were socialized. Lamia had forced Billy to do no lasting harm and made sure grandfather had been there to keep us fed as well.

  I never had the impression our mother had loved us—such an emotion was beyond her—but we had been valuable in the same way a pure-bred show dog or horse was. Then, one day, she was simply gone, and we only had the frightening prospect of her return to keep Billy from disposing of us the same way he’d forced us to help him dispose of his father. Yeah, one could say that my relationship with my mother was not close.

  “Lilith,” Nancy repeated. “The mother of all monsters.”

  “Well, just vampires, werewolves, witches, lilin, and slashers,” Carrie replied, snuggling her dog as she sat the Necronomicon down on the ground. “So, most of them.”

  Gerald looked between us. “That explains so much about you two.”

  “Why the hell would Lilith want to be with your father?” Nancy asked, expressing all manner of unstated disgust. Then again, it was a fair question. My mother had music festivals dedicated to her and was worshiped as a goddess of women despite the staggering number she’d murdered over the years. In the same way Vlad Tepes and Genghis Khan were admired, she was a figure of feminine power in certain circles. The idea someone like her would choose Billy Patrick of all people to breed with was a hard pill to swallow.

  “That’s what you’re worried about?” Summer asked, incredulously. “Not the fact your boyfriend is a half-demon?”

  “No a half-demon would be something else,” Carrie said. “Lamia was human once, I think, in like Paleolithic times.”

  “Bark-bark!” Cujo said.

  “Oh yeah,” Carrie said to her dog. “There’s like a whole bunch of lost civilizations of demon-worshipers that regular science and academia doesn’t know about. Acheron, Atlantis, Ultima Thule, and so on. I mean, sometimes Nazis and other racists are making these places up to pretend brown people weren’t capable of building pyramids, but a few of them are real. Stonehenge was created by demons, you know. Mostly because we Celts are all descended from horrifying monsters.”

  “Does the dog actually talk?” Nancy pointed to Cujo. “I mean, in a way that she can understand?”

  “He’s a very intelligent animal,” Gerald said. “Frighteningly so.”

  A part of me wondered if we should be standing here chatting away with so many bodies around us. Aside from the sheer creep factor, which didn’t seem to be affecting the women of Theta Alpha Alpha in the slightest, I wasn’t worried. The revelation that my mother was in charge here didn’t make me think I was less likely to be killed this evening—quite the opposite—

  but it did make me think she would spare us all the sacrificial knife until she’d gotten what she wanted from us. She was powerful enough to eradicate us outright. As such, promising to spare the others if my sister and I went to visit was probably true.

  You should be prepared to strike back at her, the Spirit of the Hunt said. You have the power.

  Did you lure us here as part of her plan? Are you working together? I asked.

  The Spirit of the Hunt scoffed. Your mother has warped the other Red Gods to her service. They each possess one of the slashers here and feed through them. I am disgusted by what they have become. No, I want nothing to do with that evil witch.

  Except, you have possessed me and are feeding off my kills, I replied. How are you any different?

  I am going to win, my dear William, the Spirit of the Hunt said. You will either emerge from this baptism by fire stronger and purer, or die in the process. If it’s the latter, then I will find a new pawn to make a queen.

  I think you lost the metaphor there somewhere, I said. Even if the queen is the most powerful piece in chess.

  It is the most powerful piece everywhere, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered.

  “William?” Nancy asked.

  “Sorry,” I blinked. “Didn’t mean to get distracted.”

  “I was just asking about your mother’s relationship to your father,” Nancy said. “Just to give us a sense of what’s going on.”

  “Dad didn’t always look like a blond Groundskeeper Willy,” Carrie said, cheerfully. “One time he looked a lot like William.”

  “I could have gone my entire life not knowing that,” Nancy said, grimacing.

  “My father wasn’t her partner but her slave during their marriage,” I replied, shrugging. “Lamia has a generally poor impression of men as a gender. They’re for pleasure and breeding but nothing else. Not that her opinion of mortal women is much better.”

  Lamia was a woman who believed that humans were an inferior race to demons and was one of Hell’s longest-lasting champions in the mortal world. Whether she was running bloody bordello or carrying out sinister rites to the Elder Gods, they were all just tools to her. I think the only human she respected was my grandfather, at least as far as I know, who she’d had polite disagreements with on whether to let Hell’s hordes run wild over the universe. God, my childhood was utterly fucked up.

  Don’t mention his name, the Spirit of the Hunt said. You are none of his.

  Not being part of my family is an acquittal, I replied.

  Touché, the Spirit of the Hunt replied, surprised.

  Summer blinked. “Well, at least she has some reasonable views.”

  Nancy glared at her.

  “I think we should—” one of the Heathers spoke.

  “Get out of here,” the second finished another’s sentence.

  “You should visit your mother,” the third replied.

  “Even if she’s going to kill you,” the original said.

  “No offense,” all three of them said simultaneously.

  I blinked and looked confused. “Are they clones?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nancy said, looking at her friends. “They’re just sisters with a gestalt psychic connection.”

  “And now the Midwich Cuckoos arrive,” Gerald muttered, shaking his head. “Now all we need is a werewolf and we have a whole Monster Mash.”

  Shinobu let out a very wolf-like growl. “That’s racist, Leech.”

  “Irony is not your strong suit, is it?” Gerald asked.

  Carrie blinked then went, “Oh, it’s because leech is a slur. Ha-ha. That’s hilarious.”

  Shinobu gave a very dog-like look of embarrassment.

  Cujo laughed at her. I swear the dog did.

  Gerald rolled his eyes. “I blew up the power station of the compound. I got shot repeatedly in the process. I had to eat someone. As far as I’m concerned, I think we’re even for all this. If you don’t mind, I’m going to depart and try to find my way back to civilized country. A place with vampires and nightclubs.”

  “You haven’t been given leave to depart, slave,” Carrie said, her voice low and threatening.

  Gerald looked sideways at her and met her gaze. “Yes, mistress.”

  “I’m a nature witch,” Jenna said. “My mother said transwomen couldn’t be witches, but I proved her wrong. The Earth Mother knows her own.”

  “Wow, they just picked the wrong sorority to mess with, didn’t they?” Carrie asked.

  Or did they? I wasn’t sure.

  “I must go to her,” I replied, interrupting them. “You need to leave, and I’ll handle her.”

  Mind you, I had no idea how I would handle my mother, a being so feared and powerful that she was the Chosen of Hell’s Queen as well as her avatar but that seemed a secondary concern at the moment. I felt like it was time to do the right thing and, while I had no actual idea what the right thing was in virtually any sort of circumstance, I’d seen enough movies to know that offering to heroically sacrifice yourself
seemed approved of by most societies.

  “Hahaha,” Carrie said, chuckling. “Oh Lord, brother, you are hilarious.”

  I’d been hoping for my offer to be met with a bit more tears and weeping than scorn. Mind you, the only time my sister ever cried was over dead animals so maybe I was barking up the wrong tree. To use a metaphor that Cujo would have approved of. I puffed up my chest, unhappy. “I’m not joking. You guys need to leave now. I believe Lamia when she says that she’s satisfied whatever evil quota she’s needing to meet and will let you go if I go visit her.”

  “If we go visit her,” Carrie corrected. “Mom isn’t going to settle for halfsies. Also, you’re a goddamn moron if you think I’m going to let you play the role of the self-sacrificing hero.”

  “Carrie—” I started to say.

  “No,” Carrie interrupted. “I tolerate you doing this sort of thing because it’s cute how much you want to be the good guy. However, there’s no such thing. We’re slashers, Will, and that’s all we’ll ever be. We might slash people who are really, really awful, and I think that’s a good thing, but we’re not good guys. We’re the children of the Mother of Darkness and the world’s worst Santa Claus. So, stop trying to act all noble because I know you get off on killing as much as I do.”

  “What incredible friends you have,” Summer muttered to her sister.

  “Says the woman they’re sacrificing themselves for,” Nancy said.

  “We’re not sacrificing anybody,” Carrie said, correcting her. “No offense but it was a choice between your bitchy sister versus my brother and I, that’s not much of a choice. No offense.”

  “Some taken,” Summer replied. “I understand the urge, though. Personally, I’d love to kill you both now, but Nancy wouldn’t forgive me for that.”

  Nancy put her hands on her hips. “You’re right about that.”

  “You didn’t mind me killing your last boyfriend,” Summer said.

  “That was different!” Nancy said.

  “Wait, what?” I asked.

  “We’re going to go to visit our mom, kill her, and then go for milkshakes,” Carrie said, ignoring the sisters’ fighting. “Are we clear?”