by Allison Hurd
Soon, I meet up with Ophelia in the central powder room. While her obsession with sunscreen makes her look a little spooky in daylight, in the dim lights of a bar, in a black leotard and Converses, she looks like she’s never met a manticore, or dug herself out of a cave. I, on the other hand, have had to put on fishnets to mask the fact.
“Wow, really playing up the flash-dance stripper look, huh Summer?”
“Bite me, Ho White.” I scowl at my reflection in the mirror. “Oh, awesome. Aaand it’s basically see through.”
“Only when the fabric is stretched that much. Damn girl, those real?”
“Why are you so gross? Also, be careful how you bend over, I think you may be experiencing a similar problem on the flip side, but at least my exposed bits are used to seeing daylight.”
It’s too much, and we both start laughing. She comes to stand next to me in front of the full length mirror while we look ourselves over. I, for one, am thankful for the roadside yoga and for the fact that this feels like a costume.
“I pick the job next time,” I say after a moment of quiet reflection.
“Maybe not the worst idea,” Lia says mournfully. “Sorry. But now we’ll have a bitchin’ story. Selfie!”
“Ophelia, NO!” Before I can finish protesting, the picture is taken.
“Maybe this can be September’s text-to-mom-so-she-knows-we’re-alive.”
“A good plan, if matricide is your end goal.”
Once we’re done confirming the worst of our suspicions about this job, we head back out to the floor where other girls are sharing in our humiliation with a lot more grace. Not to be outdone, we get it together and meet up with Maggie, who is to be our tour guide for the evening. She gives us the rundown of the place, which is like every other bar, honestly, and hands us both a tray of shots as the first of the happy hour crowd start trickling in. As she does, I notice that the charm bracelet around her wrist has the Chi Kappa Kappa emblem on it. I pass the message along to Ophelia in our secretive sister language. I don’t really know what to call it, but you probably know what I mean—that combination of motion and meaning that allows you to pass information along unspoken with someone close to you.
She nods understanding and we both start mingling. This not being our first rodeo, though definitely our most exposed one, we do well, and soon our trays are empty. We circle back to the bar, where Maggie is chatting with a bartender.
“Out already?” she asks, looking at both of us. We fork over the cash we’ve collected.
“Heavy drinking crowd,” I add by way of an explanation.
“It totally reminds me of that party at pledge week last year, remember Summer?” Lia begins.
It’s amazing how many of our work skills could be picked up in an improvisational comedy class.
“You’re so right! Put grain liquor in enough Jell-O, and you can off-load shots like candy.”
“You’re both in Greek life?” Maggie asks.
“Yeah, we’re visiting Chi Kappa Kappa,” Lia says, flashing her own pledge pin. I look incredulously at her. What happened to “not stealing?”
“No way! We’re Chi Kappa Kappa,” Maggie explains, motioning to the bartender.
The bartender comes over and we spend a few minutes bullshitting.
“Let me reload, see if the masses are thirsty again,” I say. Lia signals her understanding of my unspoken intent again and helps me refill the tray.
I go back on the floor, working the tables, pandering mercilessly for tips. My mama always said, never half-ass a job. Actually, I’m pretty sure she’s never said the word “ass.” And I’m not sure if that advice applied to jobs where literally half my ass was showing. But the work-ethic of our adolescence is hard to beat, is what I’m trying to say.
Lia eventually rejoins me on the floor.
“Learned some stuff,” she mutters to me as she passes. We begin an intricate dance, passing each other at every other table.
“You mean like pick pocketing?”
“It’s not stealing if I intend to give it back before it’s missed.” She sniffs snootily. “At worst, it’s conversion.”
“You watch too much Law and Order.”
Over the course of the next ten minutes, I learn that both the bartender and Maggie were with each of the girls the night they disappeared. They mentioned dark haired men with devilish eyes and lean bodies that met up with each victim, and with whom each girl intimated she was intending to spend the night.
“So it could be one or two guys?”
“Definitely between one and four guys, so far,” Lia confirms.
“Well, those are good odds. Do we think ‘guy’ guy, or…” I leave the rest of the sentence unfinished, wary of anyone who may be listening.
“I’m not so sure any more. I think we should try to look at the tapes.”
Ugh. Security tapes. Usually, our inconspicuous personas are valuable. People remember talking to the cops, or some other authority; no one remembers another waitress. But sticky things, like autopsy reports, security tapes, and other secured information require a higher pay grade than the one we’re clinging to, most days.
“Okay, first things first. We gotta see if Steve has them or if the bouncers are independent security.”
“Done.” My sister turns on her heel and goes up to one of the guards off to one side, making instant conversation. I would normally classify her as sort of shy and introverted, but give her a situation where she feels like she’s just playing a part, and she’s the feistiest flirt in a hundred miles.
She laughs coyly and walks away from the guard, shaking her head minutely. “Nope,” she mouths silently.
It is on me, then, to work in close proximity to Steve. After a few minutes of pretending that I’m pretending not to notice him as I work, he comes over to me.
“Hey! Just checking in. You and Lia doing okay?”
I try to smile what I would imagine comes off as gratefully, but who the hell really knows. I’ve got no poker face. It seems to work though, and he smiles back.
“Um, I think so! I’m a little nervous though that table seventeen maybe left without paying...do we have tape?”
“Very thorough,” Steve says, his eyes beginning to wander a little south. I try to keep my smile going but ugh...sometimes my work requires more effort than others.
He motions for me to follow him towards the back of the restaurant, and I allow myself a therapeutic grimace once his back is turned.
By the cash register there are a few cycling camera feeds, and a shelf of DVD’s labeled by the date. “So to watch the tapes, you just control it like this…” Steve presses a few obvious buttons, using it as a pretense to slide closer to me. I am going to punch Lia when our shift is over.
“Okay! Think I got it!” I try to sound like I really learned something from him, and while he seems to buy it, another waitress turns to me when he leaves.
“Think you can remember all that? Fast forward? Stop, rewind, play?” she asks teasingly.
“Why, however will I manage?” I ask in my best Scarlett O’Hara impression.
Once she leaves, I quickly switch the tape to the one from the most recent abduction, and fast forward until I find footage of Melanie, the girl in question. I watch it at increased speed as she and her friends drink a surprising amount of alcohol for a bunch of people who weigh maybe a buck twenty sopping wet. I speed it up a little more as I watch some peel off to dance, as men walk up with pick up line swagger, and there! Finally. Someone dark and lean coming to talk to Melanie. Even on grainy security footage, it’s clear this guy is denim-wrapped sex. I’ll take two, please, serial killer or not.
The waitress who had seen me looking at the footage earlier starts to walk back towards the cash register, so I quickly switch the DVD back and duck out of the area.
“So? Everything all right?” Steve asks right in my ear.
I jump involuntarily and then force myself to laugh, uncurling the fist that automatically spr
ings up when I’m startled. “Oh, yeah! Looks like Maggie got the tab and I just didn’t see! I’ll double check that from now on.”
He claps my shoulder and moves away to handle something else that’s caught his attention.
I think about the video feed. Not to disrespect the many fine human specimens out there, but it’s my experience that beings that pretty are usually more thing than human. Especially if they’re in some place like Finnegan’s in Roanoke, Virginia.
Which means the hunt is on.
CHAPTER 3
Around ten o’clock we’re told that training is over and since we’re new, we can go home for the night. This is good news to me because the heeled booties I’d decided to wear today were not what I was intending to work in. Ah well. Blisters are a small price to pay for looking good—and I did look good.
“So, where do we find mystery hottie?” Lia asks after I fill her in.
“Well, he and or his co-conspirators are obviously lurking around liquid courage, so we should keep staking out Chi Kappa Kappa events and Finnegan’s. Seems more than likely we’ll be able to spot him eventually.” I think for a second. “But I’d still like to know more. If he’s a booga baddie, what flavor? Even which pantheon he hails from would be helpful.”
“I feel like it says something that ‘hot, abducts women’ isn’t really that helpful a clue in the puzzle.”
“We don’t know if they’re being abducted. They could be eaten, for example. Or turned or...yeah. I want more information.”
I mull it over, thinking of next steps.
“Well, there’s nothing for it. I think we just need to watch Chelsea’s tape,” I say, flashing the disk I’d managed to lift before leaving.
“And you’re gonna lecture me on stealing?” She scrunches up her face, examining the uniform. “Where the hell did you hide it?”
“Ask no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
“No but seriously….”
We enter our room and I go straight to my laptop, preparing to watch the disk from four weeks ago. Ophelia comes and lounges next to me as I fast forward until the Chi Kappa Kappa clique shows up.
“Can you imagine if all of our ‘friends’ went to a bar together?” she asks absently.
“Lord. It’d be end times. Cthulhu would be upon us.”
She looks at me searchingly.
“You...you don’t actually think the elder gods are based on something real...right?”
I shrug noncommittally. “Dude, I have no idea. I ain’t borrowin’ trouble. In the meantime...what do we make of this?” I slow the video back to normal speed as a lean, dark haired man walks up to the woman who appears to be Chelsea. He looks slightly different than the other guy I’d seen, but they could be brothers, or cousins. There’s definitely a resemblance in build, and animal magnetism.
“Daaang! I can feel his pheromones caressing me from four weeks and a camera screen away,” Lia observes.
“Why do you always have to take things to a weird place?”
“Like you wouldn’t do nau—”
“Please, if you ever want to thank me for saving your ass so many times, do not finish that sentence.”
“Prude.”
I let the recording run through. “Hmm…”
“See something?” my sister asks. I go back through the footage again.
“Two things seem weird to me. First, look at what happens when he first touches her arm.”
I play the recording again. They’re talking, obviously flirting. He leans in to say something to her, his hand resting chastely against her bicep. From the moment his skin makes contact with hers, she goes limp. Her left hand gravitates to his waist, almost possessively. When he pulls back away, she sways, like he had just planted the world’s best kiss on her.
“Is she drunk?” Lia asks.
“I mean, maybe, but either the booze just hit her all at once, or there’s something else going on.” I watch it a few more times, trying to see if I can see some sort of needle, or spray, or hypnosis—really any sort of tell-tale for what could make her suddenly dissolve into a puddle.
“Hey. You’ve watched that like fifteen times now. If it hasn’t changed the past five times, can you please tell me what the second thing was you found weird?”
“Oh, right.” I let that pot simmer on the back burner a second and fast forward to the new couple leaving. “Watch him walk.”
Ophelia tilts her head a little. “Mm-mm.”
“No—come on, horn-dog, get it together. Watch him walk like you’re a detective, not like you wanna be his next vic.”
“Sorry.”
I rewind and we go through it again. He’s got swagger, capital “s”, but it doesn’t seem to be just his Brad Pitt-like heat.
“Looks like his shoes don’t fit,” my sister comments.
“Yeah, or something like that,” I agree.
“And we’re positive that this guy is actually a monster in the literal sense?”
“Only fools are positive, Lia. But I’m fairly convinced that this is a monster, yes.”
“And you think the shoe thing is relevant to learning his make and model?”
“Since it’s all we’ve got right now, might as well add it to the suspect profile.”
Ophelia nods. “So, then our inquiry is limited to creatures that can intoxicate and have small or misshapen feet,” she summarizes. We reflect on that a second.
“It’s more than we had before,” Lia says, watching the video one more time. “I mean, there’s still lots of those. Satyrs, several types of fae, a vampire with broken feet.…”
It’s my turn to look at her quizzically.
“You don’t know. We can’t go crossing off theories yet,” she responds defensively.
The next day, we let ourselves sleep in a bit. I’m feeling a bit better rested than I have been in a while—think I even got a REM cycle in there with only a few nightmares. Things are coming up Summer for once.
We decide to go to a diner for breakfast. My first cautious sip of coffee reveals it to have been made by someone who didn’t hate coffee beans. Another score.
“So, dude with weird feet and some sort of soporific, or contact high-like ability,” Lia reflects as I do a little happy wiggle at my coffee. I even put just the right amount of cream and sugar in. Manna from heaven.
“Yes. Looks like a man, mostly, and aside from the intoxication part, doesn’t seem to change the environment around him very much. That means I think we can safely put the Shinto and Germanic pantheons aside for now.”
She nods. The Shinto pantheon of course have their gods and goddesses, but the kami are forever doing things like pissing rivers into existence, or infecting an entire room with merriment or wrath, or whatever it is they embody. The Germanic pantheon, on the other hand, always looks evil, only just managing to appear humanoid: vampires and crones and gnomes, oh my.
“So, Nordic, Celtic, Greek...What do we think of the various aboriginal pantheons: Maori, Incan, et cetera?”
“Eesh. Let’s hope not them,” I say. Most of those groups may be a little “smaller” in terms of current influence in these United States, but they make up for it in the amount of gore they produce when they do show up. “But we should also keep Mesopotamian and Hindu on the table. I think we can also put the rest of the African based pantheons to the side on this one…seems unlikely any of these girls have ancestors who may be disappointed in them.” I pause and waffle a bit on that assessment. “Well, not ancestors from that side of the school yard, anyways. And, as there is not a trail of obvious death, it seems likely the various African creator gods didn’t directly intervene. So, yeah. Nordic, Celtic, Greek, Mesopotamian, Hindu seem the five most conspicuous on this pass.”
“You thinking a god or just some sort of lower thing? Or could it be some local talent, maybe?”
I shrug. “I mean, odds are it’s not a god. Four girls in a month is pretty bad, but if it was Zeus or something, I think we’d know
. He sort of has a fetish for getting caught.”
“Subtlety is not one of his names,” Lia agrees. “I think I’m with you, but that might be mostly because I hope it’s not a god. That feels over our heads.”
I don’t disagree. It’s one thing to know the stories and modus operandi of the pantheons’ bigwigs, and another to deal with them direct. I’m really hoping not to have to fact check the myths personally for a while yet. The fewer gods in my day, the better, I always say.
“And as far as it being something local, I suppose it could be any of dozens of pantheons, technically. But I’d like to focus our search on big players now and if we bust, we can start digging into more regional pantheons,” I add in response to her second question.
“Look at you, being all rational and sleuth-like,” she teases.
“Shut up and eat your pancakes.” She gives me a wicked smile and purposefully steals the first bite of my omelet. “You really put the ‘ass’ in ‘sass,’” I inform her while she giggles gleefully.
After breakfast, we take care of a few errands and head to the university library to research. We cross reference things on the internet with whatever mythology we can find on the creature we’re contemplating in the shelves. The list we come up with is overwhelming, but it allows us to begin finding most probable types of weapons and rituals to take care of whatever it turns out to be.
It’s Friday, and the Chi Kappa Kappa mixer is this evening. We don’t have to work again until tomorrow, so after getting a couple of meals to go, we head back to the motel room to get ready.
I can imagine a world in which getting ready just means trying on clothes, curling hair, pre-gaming…. It’s a little more intensive for us.
“Lia, what are you doing? Don’t get dressed yet, we have to make a few shot gun shells, and get together spell components and….”
“I was gonna get ready and then spend the rest of the time preparing.”
“Yeah, but then you’re gonna get machine grease all over your clothes,” I remind her.
