by J. D. Mason
He was killing her in his own sick way. Tormenting her. Torturing her with his fingers. Teasing.
“Come on!” she growled in frustration at him as he brought her to orgasm with his touch. Marlowe’s body rocked. She cried out, and she reached for him, but her hand passed through him. He wasn’t real. But he was.
He pulled his fingers from her and raised them to the place where his mouth would be. They disappeared into him, and he moaned.
“My sweet love,” he whispered.
Waves of orgasms rippled through her body long after he’d removed his fingers. And then he mounted her. Marlowe cried out in anticipation and terror. The warm and thick tip of his dick pressed against her opening. He balanced himself on his elbows, braced on either side of her. His broad and powerful chest pressed down on her until she could hardly breathe. He pushed inside her. Pulled out of her. Pushed deeper. Pulled out again. He did this over and over again, until the full length of him, which felt endless, was inside her.
“Scream, Marlowe. Scream for me.”
She opened her mouth, but no scream came. He pummeled her, fucked her, licked and kissed her. He covered her with all of him, until the light above her dimmed. There was no name for what he was doing to her. Marlowe lay slathered in him, filled with him, consumed by him, in glorious throes of passion so fantastic that she dreamed they would never fade. She belonged to him, mind, body, and soul.
“Yessssss,” he hissed, bucking slow and hard and deep at his own orgasmic waves. “I claim you. And you claim me, too. Yessssss.”
She was his. He was hers. And the bond was unbreakable. Sealed.
* * *
Marlowe had been sleeping restlessly when the phone rang next to her bed. “Hello?” she asked, half-awake.
She’d been dreaming. Goodness gracious! Marlowe’s eyes widened as she scanned the space in her room.
“It’s me,” Shou Shou said without apology. Shou Shou was Marlowe’s aunt. “I had an intuition,” the old woman told her.
Marlowe sat up in bed. The last time Shou Shou had had an intuition, Marlowe’s twin sister, Marjorie, died.
“What it look like?” Marlowe asked anxiously.
“It look like you,” Shou Shou told her. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Say it,” Marlowe responded. “You know I’ll do it.”
“I want you to read the bones, Marlowe. Don’t wait ’til sunup. Get up and read ’em now.”
Marlowe could count on two hands how many times she’d read the bones in her lifetime. But if Shou Shou was asking her to do this, then it had to be important.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said nervously. “You want me to call you back and tell you what I saw?”
“No,” she said simply. “It ain’t for me. It’s for you. Do it now, before midnight. Don’t go back to sleep, Marlowe.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t.”
“Not ’til you read them bones. Then go back to sleep if you can, darlin’.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marlowe hung up, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and looked at the clock. “Shit.” In twenty minutes, it would be midnight. She climbed, naked, out of bed and went to the bathroom to pee and slip into her robe before heading out into the sunroom at the back of the house. Marlowe kept the bones in a black velvet bag at the bottom of an old flowerpot in the corner on the floor. Reading bones inside her house, even in the sunroom, was something she’d never do.
Shou Shou had always told her to take them outside. “Bones can bring good news, but they can bring bad news, too. Always read ’em outside in case the news is bad. The last thing you want is to let that mess loose inside your house.”
By mess, she meant foul spirits.
Marlowe knelt and spread her casting cloth out on the grass in her yard and then opened the black pouch and poured the possum bones into her hand. Cupping both palms around the bones, she shook them, held them as she took a deep breath, and watched them fall. She studied the positioning of each of them carefully as they related to each other and to themselves.
Shou Shou’s words came back to haunt her. “Sometimes you can see the devil in the bones. He don’t look like you think he looks. But you can tell it’s him.”
A dreadful feeling snaked up her spine. “Is that you, devil?” she murmured, trying not to give in to the fear rising up from that casting cloth. She had dreamed him, and the bones confirmed her fears.
Were the bones trying to warn her about Eddie? Because if they were, then they were too late. She’d married him already. He’d been inside her house and inside her body too many damn times, so she was tainted with him, soiled and spoiled, and left dirty from him. She studied the bones intensely a few minutes longer and realized that they weren’t showing her the devil who had come; they were warning her of the one yet to come.
The thought came to her, Don’t let him in. Marlowe shuddered.
Marlowe had learned a long time ago that discerning spirits wasn’t always a good thing. Looking down at those bones, she had no choice but to commit to the ugly and unwelcome truth. There was a threat in the bones, shrouded by something or someone so dark and dangerous that she trembled at the thought of him. She didn’t know who he was or why he had any business with her, but the bones didn’t lie, and Marlowe couldn’t deny their truth.
“That’s you, all right.” She swallowed fearfully.
She wanted no part of him, whoever he was, but that dream still had her shaking. These bones—and what they’d told her—made her physically ill. Marlowe had no idea how to make ready to face him, but there was no doubt that he sure as hell was coming, and he was coming for her.
The Ritual Begins
HOZIER’S “TAKE ME TO CHURCH” streamed through his car speakers. Lyrics were everything when it came to songs like this. It was a love song. The ultimate love. That sacrificial kind. That mother-child kind. Unconditional and shit.
Osiris Plato Wells wasn’t the kind of man who lived a life synonymous with love, but he dug this song, and the melody soothed him while he drove. Road trips were his thing, especially at night. In fact, he preferred driving at night, and unless time was against him, he’d get a room during the day and sleep so that he’d be ready to drive all night long if he had to.
The habits of men, especially frightened men, seldom changed a whole lot. Edward Price was being hunted, and if he was still alive, he knew it. So that meant he’d work harder to break the rules and throw the hunter—Plato, in this case—off course. What he didn’t understand was the nature of this thing he was running from. In this game, it was Plato who held the advantage. Price was no different from any other man that Plato had been hired to find. He was afraid and desperate. And after all this time, Price undoubtedly had a false sense of security, believing that he may have actually managed to escape his fate. It would be that mistake, that very assumption, that would ultimately prove to be fatal.
Ed’s shortcoming had been greed, pure and simple. Greed for money, of course, but also greed for a woman. It never failed to amaze Plato how dumb a dick could make a man. A month before leaving Colorado, Price up and married one of his mistakes. Marlowe Brown. The man had been greedy enough to take money that didn’t belong to him and to take a wife, a second wife, while he still had the first one. Price might as well have put a bull’s-eye on his back, and for now, it seemed that someone might’ve hit that target dead center. Not far from where wife number two lived, a body had turned up in his car, burned to a crisp. Authorities went ahead and started jumping to conclusions. The right one? Plato wasn’t convinced. Hence his reason for traipsing through Kansas in the middle of the night, singing at the top of his lungs until he was hoarse, on his way to Blink (And Fucking Miss It), Texas.
He’d been in Europe when he got the call.
“How’d you find me?” he’d asked over the phone.
“A friend gave me your number,” the man on the other end said.
“Which friend?”
“The one at the bookstore,
on Main Street.”
“What was he reading?”
“A scene from Ellison’s Invisible Man,” he’d stated and continued with the passage, “‘“Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?” I asked around a corner of my mind.’”
A man in Plato’s line of work needed his reassurances, his checks and balances. The book never changed but passages changed often, and God help you if you called him and got it wrong.
“What do you need?” was his next question, if you got it right.
Edward Price was the name he’d been given. Edward Price was a businessman who’d made the wrong kind of deal with the wrong kinds of people, and he’d failed to deliver on his promise, whatever that was. Plato didn’t weigh himself down with the details.
“Where does he live?” he’d asked.
“Boulder, Colorado.” The person on the phone had texted Plato the address.
“Where does he work?”
“He’s a stockbroker at a company called E&L Investments, also in Boulder.”
“Photograph?”
“You can get it off his website. It’s the most recent. I’ll text you the company link.”
“You know my rates?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll forward you the account information. You’re to deposit half now and half when the job is finished.”
“Yes. How will we know it’s finished?”
Plato had made a mental note. The caller had said “we” and not “I.” This person was calling on behalf of someone else.
“You’ll see it on the news,” he’d said before hanging up.
Plato had initially flown into the Denver International Airport after accepting the job, starting at the beginning of Price’s trail—at his home—but there was nothing there except for a distraught and flustered wife, concerned parents, and gossiping neighbors. Edward Price was in the wind. According to the person who’d called Plato about the job, Price had been missing for almost six months, undoubtedly on the run from what he knew was coming for him.
Plato had done his homework. A few weeks before Price’s disappearance, a man named Charles Harris was found dead in a cabin he owned in the mountains just outside a town called Cripple Creek. He’d died from a gunshot wound in an apparent hunting accident, they thought, then changed their findings from “accident” to “homicide.” Charles Harris was one of Ed’s colleagues and apparently was a close friend. Price had given the eulogy at Harris’s funeral. Coincidence that Harris was dead and that Ed had taken flight? Plato wasn’t buying it. The two were connected. He didn’t care how. Harris had conveniently died at a time when shit was just starting to hit the fan. And that’s what sent Price’s ass hightailing out of town.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything. His namesake, the philosopher Plato, had said that, and it was true. That Plato was a smart dude. Enlightened. And enlightenment was everything.
* * *
The next morning, Plato arrived in Blink, Texas, and even before checking into a hotel room, Plato searched for and found the house of the infamous Mrs. Marlowe Price live and in living color. One side of the house was marred with the words Killer-Niger-Witch in red spray paint. Plato pulled up and parked on the street opposite the house and watched as a reporter, followed by a cameraman, emerged from a van with the 10 News logo painted on the side of it and rushed toward her porch as the shapely woman emerged from the house with her hand raised, stopping them all dead in their tracks. She believed she had the power to do so, and she made them believe it, too. Plato was mesmerized. The golden, full-moon afro caught him by surprise. The short, black dress, low cut and revealing mouthwatering cleavage, filled him with awe, and thick thighs and shapely calves made him smile. Silver bangles dangled from her wrists, and she was barefoot. And she stared at each one of them, daring all to cross the invisible force field she’d created around herself and her property. Marlowe Price never said a word. She held a small black bowl in her hands, walked out onto her porch and down the stairs, then poured out the granular contents in a half circle at the base of the steps. And another one around the flower bed.
She moved like spirit and smoke. She was regal and determined, unwavering and proud.
Even from across the street, he could see the conviction in her eyes, the smirk on her full, pretty mouth. A mischievous, almost dangerous look in her eyes persuaded some to take a step back, fearful of the rumors circling this woman. Stories about her were all over the Internet, mostly told by the locals who claimed to know her personally, or who knew of her. He studied her sexy fluidity from a distance and wondered if she really could put a hex on you if you pissed her off or on someone else if you paid her enough. Were her love potions as powerful as people claimed they were? Was it true that she’d once sprinkled dust on a woman’s belly and changed the sex of the child from a girl to a boy?
Marlowe Price had a reputation in this town, and it wasn’t necessarily a good one. It certainly did feed the rumor mill, though, and very few Blink residents doubted that a poor burned-up white man, her husband, had fallen victim to her magic because she’d found out about his other woman. It was the stuff that the best horror movies were made of, and he would be disappointed on some level if none of it were true.
She was delicious-looking, even from where he stood. Whether or not she really was a witch or hoodoo priestess or any number of other names they called her was neither here nor there. The essence of her was potent enough to stir his interest and not just as a lead to finding Ed Price.
“Mrs. Price,” the reporter said, talking into the microphone, “would you mind answering a few questions?”
She ignored him and slowly ascended the steps to her porch, then abruptly stopped, turned, and looked across the road to where Plato was parked and stared, momentarily and directly, back at him. She looked at him like she recognized him, or maybe she looked as if she’d been expecting him. Whatever the case, an uneasy feeling rose up in him, and if he didn’t believe in black magic before, he was starting to believe in it now.
“Mrs. Price? Please. If we could just have a moment. Have you retained a lawyer yet, Mrs. Price? Do you feel you need one?”
Moments later, the pretty, caramel-colored woman went inside and closed the door behind her, leaving the reporter no choice but to giddyup and go back to the news station. If there really was such a thing as falling in love at first sight, it had just happened to Plato. His heart gave one curious and resonating thump as she disappeared, almost like it was broken. But before declaring his brand-new love for this Mrs. Price, he needed a shower, to brush his teeth, a nap, and something to eat. In that order.
Shaking This Tree
“PEOPLE STARTED ASKING ABOUT HIM, and at first I lied and said that he was out of town. It bought me some time,” Lucy admitted. “A few weeks after he’d left, I had no choice but to report him missing,” Lucy explained to the private investigator she’d found online. “I knew that if I didn’t, the truth would catch up with me, and then I’d look like I had something to do with his disappearance.”
Her husband had loosened several of her teeth and lacerated the inside of her jaw when he’d hit her. Ed’s reaction to her confronting him about Chuck drove the point home of what he was truly capable of. He could’ve killed her. He would’ve if it hadn’t been for Bruce showing up when he did.
Roman Medlock looked polished and poised, wearing a lightly starched, pale-blue button-down tucked into narrow, navy-blue, European-cut slacks, and brown leather cap-toe oxfords. Lucy guessed him to be about six feet tall. He had a lean, athletic build and waves of chestnut-brown hair that he wore cut short and brushed back. She found his eyes most striking, piercing green eyes that bored into Lucy like lasers.
“What made you suspicious of your husband, Mrs. Price?” he asked, locking his gaze onto hers. “You said that you’d felt uneasy around him for a while,” he reminded her. “Why is that?”
“
A few weeks before Chuck Harris died, he called me at the university,” she reluctantly explained. Lucy was careful with what information she shared with Roman. In fact, she’d been selective with what she’d told everyone, including Ed’s parents, and most certainly with what she’d told the police. “Chuck was Ed’s friend, not mine, so I was surprised to hear from him.”
“Why’d he call you?”
“At first, I thought that maybe something had happened to Ed. They worked together and were good friends, so … he assured me that Ed was fine. Then he explained that he’d been assigned to do random audits on some of the client investment accounts and that he’d audited several of Ed’s. Chuck was concerned that he’d discovered some things that alarmed him.” She shrugged. “Senior brokers like Chuck are trained to notice certain red flags when it comes to those accounts. Things that most people might take for granted.”
“What did he find?”
She hadn’t told this to anyone else. Not even Ed knew what Chuck had told her, but she needed Roman Medlock’s help, so she had to tell him the truth. “He believed that Ed was laundering money,” she reluctantly admitted.
Roman seemed to let her revelation linger for a moment. “Did he tell you how much money was involved?”
“Chuck tallied accounts totaling forty-seven million.”
Roman nodded calmly and kept his eyes fixed on Lucy. He acted as if people threw figures like that at him every day. “Why would he tell you about this?” he probed. “Why not tell upper management or report it to the Federal Trade Commission?”
“I asked him the same thing,” she said, nearly faltering. Lucy quickly recovered. “He said that he wanted to talk to Ed first before taking it any further, but he was worried about how Ed might respond when he confronted him about it. I guess he just wanted someone else to know. He made me promise not to tell Ed that he’d called or tell anybody unless … unless something happened to him.”
“He was afraid of Ed?” Medlock probed.
Lucy slowly shook her head. “Chuck sounded concerned about approaching Ed, but I think that he was hoping that it was just a mistake on Ed’s part. He did mention how people behind money laundering could be anyone from terrorists to drug cartels. So maybe he was more afraid that it could be something like that. I don’t know.”
