“If the satori could kill the vampires and rogue agents at any time, why did she wait until they took her to the catacombs? Why not just kill them in her apartment? Or in the van?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. And I wasn’t going to question her about it. She’d just taken out a small army with the power of her mind.”
“I guess she had her reasons for waiting,” Mallory said.
“So what happened next?” Felicity asked.
I hesitated. The next part of the story was a blur. After returning to my hotel room in Paris, I’d searched my memory, trying to fit all the pieces together, to remember exactly what had happened after I’d discovered the satori in the catacombs, but I could never seem to recall everything clearly.
“This is where it all gets a little hazy,” I told Felicity. “I think the satori may have made me forget something that happened. What I remember is that her name was Sumiko. I don’t remember her telling me that, but I know that’s her name somehow. We left the catacombs and I told her to flee the city. I told her to get as far away as possible so that the Society couldn’t find her.”
Felicity was nodding as if suddenly understanding something. “So that’s why you got in trouble. Instead of talking the satori into joining the Society, you told her to run.”
“I couldn’t have talked her into anything. And I now knew that the Society was corrupt at its highest level. I couldn’t let them get their hands on her. Someone in the Inner Circle wanted to use her for his own ends.”
“Or her own ends,” Mallory said.
“Or her own ends. I have no idea if the corrupt member of the Inner Circle is a man or a woman. There might be more than one of them, for all I know. The only thing I know for sure is that they’re now trying to kill me and I have no idea why.”
Mallory threw a chicken bone on to her plate. “It’s obvious, Alec. They think you know who they are, that you’re a danger to them in some way. Why else would risk dealing with faeries and possibly blowing their cover?”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“But they don’t know that,” she said, taking another chicken thigh and biting into it. “Maybe they think the rogue investigators told you who they were working for. You might know the names of everyone in the Inner Circle who’s corrupt.”
I shook my head. “I was questioned about all this. After I left the catacombs and went back to my hotel, the Society sent people to France to ‘escort’ me to headquarters in London. I was debriefed. They put an iron collar around my neck while they questioned me. It was an enchanted relic from the Spanish Inquisition and it made me tell the truth. I told them everything I know, everything I just told you and Felicity. There’s nothing else.”
“Nothing that you can remember, anyway,” Felicity said.
“I admit some of my memory is fuzzy, but I’m not hiding anything.”
“Not that you know of,” Mallory said, pointing a chicken bone at me. “If the satori played around with your memory, you might know stuff that you aren’t even aware of.”
“Great. So I’m going to be killed for something I can’t even remember?”
Mallory laughed. “Yeah, that’s the way the world works, Alec. You get shafted for something that isn’t even your fault.”
We ate for a while, the subject of Paris closed, as far as I was concerned. If there was something I couldn’t remember about that night in the catacombs, it was probably going to stay locked inside my head forever.
“How did you two meet?” Felicity asked eventually. I’d wondered when she was going to get around to asking that.
I looked at Mallory. “Do you want to tell the story?”
She shrugged. “Sure. There’s really not much to tell. A couple of years ago, Alec and I sort of bumped into one another at a crime scene in Chicago. The bodies of two high school students, a boy and a girl, were found in Millennium Park. They’d been murdered and the killer had inscribed occult symbols into their flesh with a knife. So, that explains why Alec was there. My reason for being there may take a little more explaining. Have you ever heard of the Bloody Summer Night Massacre?”
Felicity nodded. “Yes, of course. It was five or six years ago. Some high school students were having a party at an abandoned house and they all got killed.”
“Not all of them.” Mallory pushed her plate away and drained her wine glass before continuing. “I survived.”
“Oh, yes, now I remember. There was a girl who survived. That was you?”
Mallory nodded.
“The newspapers had a name that they gave you. The Last Girl.”
“The Final Girl,” Mallory said. “That’s the term used for the girl who survives to the end of a slasher movie. You know, the girl who sees all her friends die and then takes on the killer.”
“And that’s what happened to you? You saw all your friends die? That’s horrible.” Felicity put a comforting hand on Mallory’s. “That must have affected you in ways I can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah,” Mallory said. “The point is, the bastard who killed everyone, except for me, that night is still out there somewhere. I thought I’d killed him, but he got away. I’ve been hunting him ever since.”
“So that’s why you were at the crime scene,” Felicity guessed.
“Yeah, and that’s where Alec and I met. It turned out that the killings weren’t done by my guy and they weren’t preternatural either. The killer was just some high school kid who’d read too many books about black magic and hated his classmates. But Alec and I worked together on that case for a while and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. He even hired me to work a couple of preternatural cases with him as a consultant.”
“Mallory is good with people,” I said. “Especially people who’ve lost their loved ones. I took her to meet some victims’ families when I was working a big vampire case. She helped me break the bad news that their loved ones were dead.”
“I kicked some vampire butt too,” she added.
“Yes, you did.” To Felicity, I said, “Mallory has spent the five years since the Bloody Summer Night Massacre training in hand-to-hand and weapons combat. She’s pretty kickass.”
“Sounds like you two make a great team,” Felicity said. Was that a hint of jealousy I detected in her voice? She looked at her phone. “I really should be heading home. We’re getting an early start tomorrow aren’t we, Alec? It’s a three-hour drive to Dark Rock Lake.”
“I have to go to the bookshop first,” I said, “so we don’t need to leave here until, say, ten or eleven. Did you rent a cabin?”
“Yes, I got a three-day rental.” She checked the phone again. “Anyway, I need to get home for when Jason video calls me. He’s in England, so it’s already late evening for him.”
“Jason?” I asked.
“My boyfriend.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Do you have far to go?” Mallory asked her. “To get home, I mean.”
“No,” Felicity said, getting to her feet. “I live next door.” To me, she added, “I’ll see you in the office when you’re done at the bookshop.” She looked at Mallory again. “Nice to meet you, Mallory.”
“See you tomorrow,” I called to her as she disappeared around the side of the house.
Mallory looked at me. “She lives next door? Well, that’s convenient.” She flashed me a wicked grin.
I shot her a look that told her I wasn’t amused. “Don’t even go there. Anyway, you heard what she said: she has a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, and he’s all the way across the ocean in England while you’re right next door.”
I looked at her and shook my head. “Felicity and I are work colleagues. I’m helping her get experience in the field so she can become an investigator.”
“And you’re going to a cabin by the lake for three days as part of this experience?” She winked at me.
“I told you, we’re going to look for James Robinson and Sarah Silverman. Their bodies are probably up there
somewhere in an enchanted sleep. I’m going to travel to Faerie to see if I can locate their trapped souls. There’s a time dilation between Faerie and here, so days might pass here while I’m away.”
“Well, be sure to get back here by the full moon because you need to lock up that werewolf you told me about. And track down the werewolf that bit him. Or do you want me to handle that while you take your assistant on the lake retreat?”
“You sticking around for awhile?” I asked her. You could never tell with Mallory. Sometimes she’d stay for a week, and other times, she’d disappear after a few hours.
She nodded. “Yeah, I think I will. You might need me.”
“Great. You can come to see the witches with me tomorrow and work the werewolf angle while Felicity and I go find those bodies. How does that sound?”
“It sounds fine, but there’s something I want you to do for me, too.”
I knew what she was going to say and it made me both excited and anxious at the same time. Excited because of what we were going to do, but anxious because we had been doing it for two years and I wasn’t sure it was helping Mallory at all. “Therapy?” I asked.
She nodded. “Therapy.”
“Do you think it’ll be any different to last time?”
She thought about it for a couple of seconds and then said, “I think I’ll be able to go farther than last time.”
“Okay. You want to do it now or….”
“Later,” she said. “When it’s dark. It has to be when it’s dark.”
Later, when night fell, we went wordlessly up to my bedroom and stood facing each other by the bed. Mallory’s breathing had already quickened and in the silvery moonlight that came in through the window, I could see her breasts rising and falling with each rapid breath. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking that her fast breathing was due to excitement. I knew she was afraid.
In every slasher flick, there’s a lesson that the poor victims of the killer learn too late: sex equals death. Every couple that makes out in those movies ends up dead, as if being punished for their carnal desires. For Mallory, the sex equals death equation wasn’t just something she’d seen in the movies; she had seen it happen in real life. All of the high school kids who had paired off and ventured into the bedrooms of Blackthorn House had met a grisly end at the hands of Mister Scary. The idea that having sex was deadly had been carved into the deepest recesses of Mallory’s mind.
After she and I had become friends, she’d confided in me that the thought of having sex filled her with dread and even though she knew on a rational level that her fear was ludicrous, an irrational part of her would not let her give in to desire.
The therapists she visited regularly couldn’t help her, no matter how much they tried to rationalize her fear and help her overcome it. After the therapists failed to help her, Mallory told me that the only way she could be cured was by practical means. She had to try having sex, and it had to be with someone she trusted and who would understand that the experiment was purely for therapeutic reasons and had no emotional baggage attached to it.
At first, I had jumped at the chance. Mallory was a beautiful young woman in her early twenties and her offer was the stuff of many a man’s wet dream. But when I saw how deep and powerful her fear was, I spent the “therapy” sessions worrying about Mallory’s mental state. I wasn’t sure this was the best way for her to be cured and I told her so on more than one occasion. Each time, she convinced me to continue with the sessions, saying there was no one else she trusted enough to take over my role.
So here I was, standing in front of her in a dark bedroom while she almost hyperventilated with fear.
I moved toward her slowly, reaching my hands up to touch her bare arms. Her scared hazel eyes shone in the moonlight as she looked up at me. Inwardly, I cursed Mister Scary for what he had done to my beautiful friend. She deserved better than this.
I bent my head down toward her and kissed her softly. She kissed me back, her eyes darting to the shadowy corners of the room as if she expected a killer to come bursting out of the darkness, brandishing the same knife he had used to carve up a group of high school kids five years ago.
“Do you want me to turn on the light?” I whispered.
“No, leave it,” she said softly. “Undress me, Alec.”
I hooked my thumbs under the dress straps and pulled them off her shoulders. Mallory wriggled her hips and the dress whispered down over her body to the floor. She began tugging at my T-shirt. I removed it and took Mallory into my arms, feeling her soft breasts pressing against my hard chest.
“Remember,” I whispered to her, “we can stop any time you want.”
“I know we can,” she said. “That’s why I trust you.” Her finger traced over the outline of a magical protection tattoo on my torso. Her touch was light, her finger shaking. “Let’s get on the bed.”
We climbed on to the bed, Mallory holding me tight as if I were a life raft on rough seas. Her breathing was even quicker now and I wondered if there might be a hint of excitement among all the fear. I was excited, of course, but I tried not to think about that and to focus on Mallory’s need instead.
I slid her panties down her sleek legs while she pulled my jeans down to my thighs. I kicked them off on to the floor. We were both naked. This was as far as Mallory had ever gone without having to stop, overwhelmed with terror.
She was trembling like a tiny leaf about to be blown away by a violent storm.
I nuzzled her neck, kissing her soft skin lightly. Mallory’s head darted from left to right and back again as she tried to watch all the shadows in the room around us. I felt a scream rising inside her and before she could let it out, I moved my face away from her neck and looked into her eyes, keeping my arms around her. “Do you want to stop?”
She nodded, her eyes scanning the dark corners of the room, tears welling up in them, making them glisten in the moonlight.
Then she began to cry.
I held her close, whispering to her that everything was going to be okay. Eventually, she fell asleep in my arms. When I felt the slow and calm rise and fall of her breasts against my chest, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to fall asleep, too.
In my dreams. I searched an old abandoned house, looking for a killer known only as Mister Scary. I had my sword in hand and knew that when I found him, I was going to cut him in two.
11
When I woke the next morning, Mallory wasn’t in bed beside me. I sat up, squinting against the sunlight pouring in through the window. I really needed to hang the drapes sometime soon. The smell of coffee drifted up from the kitchen and I could hear a noise somewhere in the house that sounded like a rhythmic thumping.
I swung my legs out of bed, put on my boxers, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, I found coffee in the pot and poured myself a mug full, which I took down the basement with me. That was where the noise was coming from.
I descended the wooden steps to find that Mallory had hung the heavy bag and was currently punching and kicking the shit out of it. The training dummies were scattered over the basement floor as if they had been hurled to their resting places. One of them had the hilt of a dagger protruding from its forehead. Another had two daggers embedded in its chest.
Mallory sensed my presence and turned to face me, wiping perspiration from her face. She was wearing a tight, black Tapout top and training pants which I assumed she’d gotten from the back of her Jeep. Because she traveled around so much, Mallory tended to take a lot of gear on her road trips.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m just working off some steam.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Looks like these guys got the worst of it.” I nodded at the training dummies scattered over the floor.
She grinned. “Yeah, I used some of your weapons. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. You know you can use anything of mine.”
A serious look crossed her features. “Alec, I feel like I’m using you, not just your stuff. Last nigh
t was a disaster. I thought it would be better than last time, but it wasn’t any different. I hate that I put you through this shit every time I turn up.”
“Hey,” I said, going to her and putting a hand in her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Making a big thing out of it is only going to make it harder the next time. You have enough to deal with without worrying how it’s affecting me.”
“Is it affecting you? Because if it is….”
“Nah,” I said nonchalantly, “I’m cold as ice. Hard as rock.”
“Well, yeah, hard as rock is the problem I’m talking about.”
“I’m fine. You still up for going to see the witch sisters this morning?”
She nodded. “Of course, I’ll do what I can to help. I should hit the shower first, though.”
“Yes, you should. You’ve worked up quite a sweat.”
“Want to join me?” she asked playfully. “You look a little hot and bothered yourself.”
“Not me,” I said, “I’m….”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, cold as ice,” she said as she sashayed to the shower room, swinging her hips a little more than normal.
“And hard as rock,” I said, sighing as I ascended the stairs, coffee in hand.
We got to Blackwell Books at just after nine. It was another sunny morning and Main Street was bustling with townsfolk going about their business. I’d left the Land Rover in the same parking space as yesterday and Mallory and I had walked down to the bookshop from there. She was dressed in tight jeans, a loose, light white sweater, and running shoes. I was in my usual jeans, T-shirt, red flannel shirt, and boots.
There were a couple of customers inside Blackwell Books when we pushed through the door into the gloomy, musty-smelling interior of the shop. The shop was large and seemed to consists of more than one room. Book shelves had been arranged in a haphazard fashion over the available floor space. Every wall had shelves running from floor to ceiling and every shelf groaned beneath the weight of paperback and hardback books, as well as occult items like fake skull candles and goddess statuettes. The Blackwell sisters obviously monetized their witchcraft. I just hoped the sisters weren’t all style and no substance. My senses had told me otherwise when I’d bumped into Victoria Blackwell yesterday, but those same senses had told me that Dearmont was a preternatural dead zone, and that obviously wasn’t true.
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