Blood Divine

by Greg Howard

  Betsy drew her dagger. “I said run!”

  Cooper looked around frantically, searching for anything he could use as a weapon. The curio cabinet? The coat tree? Anything! An animalistic wail drew his attention back to the stairs.

  The deformed shape of what must have once been a human man towered over them with Betsy’s dagger lodged deep in its chest. Only momentarily slowed by her strike, the creature clawed the air just inches from Betsy’s face with the longest, sharpest fingernails Cooper had ever seen. Open sores and wet, peeling flesh covered its face, hands, and arms. Crazed eyes bulged out of their sockets, filled with rage and hell-bent destruction. Betsy grabbed the thing by the throat with one hand and yanked her dagger out of its chest with the other.

  Cooper wished he’d have run when Betsy told him to, if only because his presence was a distraction. She looked over at him as she raised the dagger over her head, but that was all the time the attacker needed to knock the weapon from her hand. It skidded across the floor and bounced off the base of the grandfather clock. The creature slammed into Betsy, knocking her on her back so hard the floor shook. Pinned down with drooling jaws snapping dangerously close to her face, she managed to hold the monster back with both hands wrapped around its fleshy neck.

  Shock held Cooper’s body prisoner, though adrenaline burned in his veins. Needles of raw, virulent energy shot down his arms, begging for release. He slid down the wall onto the floor and scanned the space. The dagger was too far away. He didn’t think he would be able to reach it in time.

  The creature bore down on Betsy, and she snapped her now extended fangs right back at him, not an ounce of fear in her eyes and not giving an inch. Her transformation from warrior princess to crazed beast was immediate and terrifying. The monster had at least a hundred pounds on her and edged closer to her throat with each passing second. Cooper had to do something.

  A guttural roar erupted out of Betsy’s mouth. She pushed the creature up, away from her throat, inch by inch, putting more space between them. She clawed at the twisted face. Grabbed at a tangled clump of stringy gray hair and ripped it right out of the skull, pulling brain matter out with its roots. Fierce resolve burned in her eyes, like a lioness protecting her young. She would do anything, even sacrifice herself, to save Cooper.

  Betsy’s fearless resolve triggered something deep inside Cooper. He couldn’t suppress it any longer. Having no other options, he released himself to the malevolent rumble in his core, praying it would not fail him this time. The power exploded up from his core, filling his veins with the intoxicating poison he both craved and despised. His fingertips burned with acidic venom. He focused on the dagger lying several feet away and reached out his hand. At first, nothing happened. Then it moved. Twitched. Slid an inch toward him before his mind again filled with the image of Trevor lying on the ground, his neck twisted at a cringe-inducing angle. Motionless. Trying to expel the image, Cooper closed his eyes. He shook his head and opened them again, but the dagger would not move.

  Betsy uttered another guttural war cry. The monster’s fangs were less than an inch from her face. Every muscle in her body flexed in resistance. Her extended fangs scraped against the creature’s, causing an ear-splitting screech, but her fight was nearly lost.

  Cooper scrambled across the floor and over to the dagger. He gripped the handle and jumped to his feet. Without thinking and without a plan, he raised the weapon high in the air and charged the beast, driving the blade down into the back of its sunken skull.

  The creature wailed and buckled. Betsy scrambled out from under it. Cooper put all his weight on the blade, forcing it as far down as it could go. Cranial cracks and pops echoed around the room. Cooper released the handle and scrambled backward.

  The creature shrieked, twitched, and seized, the fight leaving its body. It rolled onto the floor between Cooper and Betsy. The monster’s eyes ignited with blue flames that quickly spread into a small explosion of bone and brains. The creature’s body crumpled in on itself and burned until all that remained was a smoldering pile of black and gray ash puddled in thick brown liquid marring the shiny hardwood floor.

  Finally, all was silent, interrupted only by the slow, steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.

  Cooper drew a deep breath into his lungs and exhaled one long airy stream of relief. Betsy pulled herself up and sat leaning against the wall opposite him, her breathing steady and her pristine appearance now savagely disheveled. They stared at each other in silence for a long time. Betsy’s point had been made for her. Loud and clear. Alexander would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, and that included killing anyone who tried to protect Cooper.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his still tingling hand. “So that was one of Alexander’s half-baked little monsters?”

  Betsy brushed the palms of her hands together. Pieces of matted hair and bloodied flesh fell to the floor. “Yes. And there will be more.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning Cooper woke up on the sofa, the sun streaking his face with rays of comforting warmth. He stretched his arms over his head and rubbed his knotted neck as he looked around the room. He was alone. Betsy was gone. Right. The day sleep. His car keys and phone lay on the coffee table. He still wasn’t sure how Betsy got his SUV back to Phipps House. He had a hard time imagining her behind the wheel of a modern vehicle. There was something definitively old-world about that woman. On the coffee table, a slip of paper rested beside the remains of his half-eaten ham sandwich. He turned on his side, picked up the note, and read the elegantly scripted words.

  Expect visitors this morning. Friends.

  Cooper dropped the note and rubbed his eyes. His head was still foggy from the lingering effect of six cups of chamomile tea he’d drunk to help calm his nerves after the attack last night. He hadn’t had any luck finding Lillie Mae’s secret stash of Jim Beam, and the tea only assisted him in roughly three hours of uninterrupted sleep on the lumpy sofa. He remembered Betsy sitting as still as Phipps House itself, watching over him after she insisted he get some rest. “You’ll need it,” she’d said in her naturally ominous way.

  Letting his head fall to the side, he stared into the empty space of the room, his mind swirling with all that Betsy had told him as well as the questions she’d left unanswered. He wanted those answers. Needed them. Anything that would help him save Lillie Mae. The open Bible on the coffee table drew his attention. A pen stuck out under a folded over page. Cooper slid his legs off the sofa and sat up. He reached over and pulled back the page, exposing the marred family tree. The bloody letters had browned and seeped into the thin paper. Fresh blue ink filled the formerly blank lines above and beside Sally Parker’s name, names written in the same elegant penmanship as Betsy’s note.

  Above Sally’s name.

  Jonathan Parker - Father. Elizabeth Parker - Mother.

  And, on either side of Sally’s name.

  Andrew Parker – Brother. Stephen Parker - Brother

  Betsy must have done it while he was asleep, though he wasn’t sure why she would. It was like filling in answers to someone else’s crossword puzzle uninvited, something that made him crazy. Except for Stephen Parker, they were just more names that Cooper did not know from a distant family he never knew existed just twenty-four hours earlier.

  He picked up his phone and unlocked the screen with the swipe of his thumb. No calls. No messages. What he wouldn’t give for one of Lillie Mae’s rambling middle-of-the-night messages when she’d failed to reach him. How many times had he seen her name on the caller ID and let it go to voice mail? Too busy with his own life to give a lonely old woman who adored him a few minutes of attention and conversation.

  He closed the Bible and stared at it. “Just don’t fail her again.”

  Staring back at the home screen on his phone, a search engine icon caught his eye and sparked an idea. He hopped up and went into the foyer, fishing his iPad out of his bag. Hurrying back to the sofa, he open
ed up a web browser and searched the word Anakim. The return of information was shockingly instant. Just under the always-expected Wikipedia result were several biblical source links. He clicked on the first one, an online version of the King James Bible. The screen quickly populated with nine entries. Nine scriptural references to the made-up-sounding word. Five in Deuteronomy and four in the book of Joshua. Cooper’s heart thumped noisily against his chest cavity, its beat matching his stunted breathing. He repeated the exercise for the online versions of the Revised Standard and New International translations of the Bible, flipping back and forth between tabs, devouring the results. A few stood out.

  Numbers 13:32-33 (NIV) And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

  Deuteronomy 1:28(KGV) The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.

  Deuteronomy 9:2 (KGV) A people great and tall, the children of the Anakim, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak!

  And finally,

  Joshua 11:21 (RSV) And Joshua came at that time, and wiped out the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel; Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities.

  Cooper placed the iPad on the coffee table beside the Bible and stared at them both, chewing on the tip of his index finger. Damn if Betsy’s story hadn’t given credence to a book he’d long ago discarded as a collection of fairy tales. Covering his face with one hand, he desperately racked his brain for the last known location of that bottle of Jim Beam. Who cared that it wasn’t even noon yet? Certainly he’d get some kind of pass for apocalyptic biblical revelations. Maybe a hot shower and some caffeine would help. Besides, he needed to get going soon anyway so he could make use of every ounce of sunlight possible.

  Cooper stood and drew his elbows behind him, stretching the kinks out of his back. Retrieving his luggage from the foyer, he headed to the guest bedroom. After a quick shower, he pulled on a well-worn pair of jeans and a white button-down Oxford. The scent of clean cotton soothed him, the smell of normalcy in the midst of chaos. He gave himself an once-over in the mirror and styled his damp copper hair with his fingers.

  With his index finger, he followed a line of reddish-brown freckles from his cheek down to his neck—to the spot where Alexander had grazed his skin with fangs. He shivered, shaking loose the insane memory.

  After scrounging around the sunlit kitchen for a few minutes in search of coffee, he finally found a jar of instant. It was the same brand he’d seen Lillie Mae drink his entire life, with three spoons of sugar and a healthy pour of whole milk. He made quick work of getting a kettle of water heating on the archaic gas stove. His stomach rumbled, and he touched his hand to it. Half a ham sandwich hadn’t cut it. A hastily constructed peanut butter and jelly sandwich and three cups of weak coffee later, a woman’s voice drifted through the house. No. Two voices. Almost whispers. Alarm prickled the hairs on the back of his neck. He sat the coffee mug down on the counter and eased over to the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the sitting room. Pressing his ear against the cool wood, he listened.

  “Do mind your manners with the boy, Sister.” The woman’s voice was low and throaty.

  “Me? You’re the one who unnerves people to no end.” The second woman’s voice was high-pitched and scratchy. “And he’s not a boy anymore, Dora. He’s a grown man now.”

  “It is nice to be back at Phipps House, isn’t it, Eunie?”

  A huff sounded. “The place looks ghastly, if you ask me. Like an indoor flea market. Mother would not be pleased.”

  “Manners, Sister.”

  Cooper placed a hand on the door and hesitated. Betsy’s note said to expect visitors—friends—but didn’t these people knock first? He finally pushed through the door.

  Two elderly women sat in the sitting room, like wax figures in an antebellum museum exhibit. Both wore full-length, intricately laced black dresses with high white collars. One sat on the sofa with her nose in a book and the other knitting in the occasional chair by the window. Their odd vintage attire was identical in design. Mirrored faces bore the same pale skin sprayed with faded freckles, framed under nests of thick red hair awash with light streaks of gray. The only difference in the two women was that the one knitting was rail thin and tightly pulled together, while the other was a bit plump and a little less pulled together.

  Cooper stood frozen in the doorway staring at them, completely at a loss for words. He’d honestly thought things couldn’t get any more bizarre than they had last night. Damn if he wasn’t dead wrong. With their matching pursed lips, they glanced up at him like he was no surprise to them at all.

  “Close your mouth, young man,” Knitting Twin said before shifting her attention back down to the project splayed over her lap. “You’ll catch flies.”

  Reading Twin shot a scowl of reproach at her, then turned back to face Cooper with a warm smile. “Good morning, Cooper.” She had a disarming air about her, and Cooper already knew he preferred her to the other one.

  “Betsy’s friends, I presume?” He stepped into the room, trying to maintain an authoritative edge in his voice. “Break and enter much?”

  Knitting Twin snorted without looking up. “Betsy’s friends.” Another snort and a shake of the head.

  “Do forgive our intrusion,” Reading Twin said. “I am Eudora Phipps.” She nodded over to her counterpart. “This is my sister, Eunice.”

  Eunice grunted without looking up.

  “Please. Come in and sit.” Eudora patted the cushion beside her.

  Cooper hesitated, sizing her up and taking note of the last name she’d given. Phipps. Obviously they had some connection to the house that he was unaware of. Intrigued more than anything, he crossed the space, choosing to sit in the wingback chair opposite her. “Seems there’s no need to introduce myself.”

  Eudora chuckled, her smile widening. “No need at all. It’s been a long time, though you still look the same. I would never forget those sparkling hazel eyes and those freckled dimples. You were always such an adorable child. Positively angelic.”

  Cooper studied her, trying to recall her face. Other than some strikingly similar traits she shared with Lillie Mae, he did not recognize the woman at all. But he felt something off-putting about them both, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “This is not a social call, Dora,” Eunice Phipps barked. She trained her antiseptic gaze on him. “We were told you needed our help, and we don’t have all day to lollygag around.”

  Eudora smoothed the wrinkles from her lap and cleared her throat. “My sister is as impatient as she is correct.” She looked up at him, her smile failing to put him at ease. Her skin shimmered in the bright sunlight pouring through the windows, so pale it was nearly translucent one moment, then perfectly natural the next. A palpable energy buzzed around the women. He didn’t think they were like Betsy, nor did they seem like him. They were different somehow.

  He shifted in his seat, sharing Eunice’s impatience. He didn’t have time for this. He needed to be somewhere. “I’m listening.”

  “We apologize for barging in unannounced.” Eudora inspected the room in a wistful daze. “We lived in this house all our lives. Still feels like home.”

  Cooper stared at her, words escaping him. He had no clue what she was talking about and didn’t really give a shit at the moment.

  She leaned forward, her heavy bosom sagging down to her lap. “Betsy said you are having a little trouble accessing your powers. She thought we might be of assistance since we know a little something of the matter
.”

  Cooper leaned forward, mimicking her conspiratorial posture. “Unless you can assist me in finding my grandmother, you’re wasting my time.”

  Eunice snorted. “Lillie Mae. A piece of work, that one. Was always trouble if you ask me. Couldn’t keep her legs together long enough to take a piss.”

  Heat rose to Cooper’s ears, and he shot Eunice an icy glare.

  No one asked you, Sister!

  Eudora’s voice rang out in Cooper’s head, though her lips hadn’t moved. He was appreciative of the rebuke, though unnerved by the delivery.

  Yes, Cooper, we shared your gifts, Eudora told him, smiling with her lips closed.

  Cooper cocked his head. “Shared?”

  “God’s balls!” Eunice screeched, dropping her knitting needles to her lap with an overly exaggerated huff. “Before we kicked the bucket, you idiot.”

  Eudora rolled her eyes at Eunice. “Yes. As my sister said with the refined delicacy of the lady she is…” She cleared her throat. “Before we passed from this world into the half-light of eternity.”

  Cooper looked back and forth between them, landing on each three times before he broke the awkward silence. “So you’re ghosts. Like Blue. You’re telling me I am sitting here talking to two dead old ladies.” He covered his face with his hands. “Awesome.”

  “Blue,” Eunice huffed. “You can thank that nigra for this mess you’re in.”

  Cooper winced at the archaic racial slur. But she knew about Blue, so he needed to keep her talking. He lowered his hands and looked up at Eudora. “You don’t look like ghosts.”

  “We prefer spirit. Ghost is such a trifling word.”

  “Everybody’s so damned sensitive about labels around here,” Cooper mumbled.