“Blood on your hands,” her body slithered as she dropped her head to look through her dreary lashes. “My blood on your hands,” her words hissed through her teeth.
“What?” I could not believe what I’d just heard. I’d never had her blood anywhere near me. Now, I knew she was crazy. “Are you out of your mind? I’ve never touched you.”
“My blood on your hands. Thick, and red, and drippin’ from your body.” I felt her eyes bore into my head, searching for something in there somewhere. Seeking out subconscious knowledge.
“Are we talking metaphorically here…or…?” I was totally lost and had the feeling the tiny witch woman was growing more and more irritated with me by the minute. In a way I liked it, but then again I thought her irritation could lead to a serious ass kicking on my end.
The woman spoke not a word and simply continued her stare. In a moment, a flash of images penetrated my mind. My hands shoving a pool cue deep into the soft flesh of the overweight jolly Samoan vampy boy that bloody night in May. Flashes of random images of familiar faces and insignificant instances filled tiny voids between the important images. The images I was certain were the key points in this situation. Suddenly, I was watching myself tumbling down the concrete steps, wrestling with the lanky Diego. We landed hard at the foot of the stairs and crashed into stacks of white five-gallon buckets. They cracked, tipped and spilt syrupy red blood in a gory mess. It covered the floor beneath us, Splattering across my face, soaking my clothing, and seeping around the body of the poor vampire boy, who was unlucky enough to land on the bottom of the pile. Blood trickled and pooled along the concrete floor quickly, but I caught a glimpse of familiar symbols painted sporadically around the area.
Seeing it as if from another’s eyes opened up so many different opportunities. I watched my face contort with fear and so much rage until I almost didn’t recognize myself. I watched as I lifted a piece of broken pool cue and jammed it into the sloppy wound left over from my bullet. Being a bystander, the scene horrified me. It was even more horrifying that the murderess was me. Granted, I was fully within my right as a human being to protect myself and the lives of others by any means necessary, but that didn’t forgive the look that passed over my eyes right before I shoved that piece of wood, that makeshift stake, deep into the boy’s broken flesh. I looked…satisfied.
My vision flashed white, as if someone took a photo too close to my face, and I was back in the present. Only, the scene was a bit different. I was sitting on the asphalted driveway, a few feet from our waiting car, staring up at Cyrus and his overly concerned face. I shook my head and felt a little like a cartoon character shaking off a bad fall. Little yellow birds and stars tinkling overhead.
Azelie stood only a few feet from us now. I wondered how long I’d been in psycho-land and why Cyrus allowed that crazy woman to get so close to us. More than that, for obvious reasons, I wondered what in the fuck had just happened to my already fragile mind.
“What…?” I asked in a voice that sounded nothing like my own. I sounded like a child waking from a nightmare. So tiny. So scared. Fuck that. “What in the fuck did you do to me you evil bitch!” Yelling from your spot on the ground was really ineffective. In case you were wondering.
“It is what you’ve done, bitch.” That word did not fit that tiny girl. It seemed somehow beneath her.
“Ugh, I have no idea what you’re talking about! Please, for the love of all that is Holy, tell me what I’ve done to you so we can move on with our lives.” Cyrus held his hand out and I took it. This was not the time to question chivalry. A flash of a memory, not of the actual event, but from the images that’d just popped into my head, symbols on the floor. Symbols I’d seen wrapping around the itty bitty waist of my assailant.
How interesting.
I stood, feet firmly planted to the earth. Determination in my voice, I let the little bitch in on my theory. “What did you have to do with Diego and Sam and the lot of the dead hookers in California?” I saw Cyrus from the corner of my eye turn his head to face me so quickly I’d have thought it would spin right off his shoulders. Quite glad that didn’t happen.
She chuckled softly and looked at Cyrus. Not me. “You stay, boy,” her little crooked finger came up and pointed at him. Commanding him like a dog to stay put. The funny part was I think it worked. She turned to me, finger still aimed at Cyrus. “You come here, my house, the Loa brought you. Loa brought you to punish. My vindication.”
What the fuck is a Loa?
“It was you. I can’t believe it. How? Why?” I stammered on flabbergasted at the outlandish situation. How in the world did I end up walking right into her shop? If I ever believed in fate, it was at that moment. “What in the fuck do you need gallons of dead hooker blood for?” I wasn’t even yelling anymore. My shoulders slumped and I felt a little saddened at the situation. It was one thing when I thought these were only a couple of kids who lost their way in the seedy underworld of sex, blood, and rock ‘n’ roll. But knowing there was a purpose, a specific person, controlling the operation, it felt a bit too Jonestown for my maximum level of coping with life.
“What reason do I need? You have taken it from me and I want it back,” her tiny shoulders lifted slightly and dropped with little effort. A shrug that said she cared not a lick about what she’d done. About the lives she’d cost.
“You’re a fucking lunatic,” my words were beginning to blend together with frustration and out-and-out disbelief. “I should kill you where you stand.”
Goddamned gun laws!
“Oh, but you have no sticks,” she laughed at me. I hated being laughed at.
My brows set low over my eyes and I tightened my jaw. “I don’t need a fancy stick to kick your fucking teeth in,” spit sputtered through my teeth as I spoke through a set jaw.
Her laugh grew and echoed through the quiet night air until I couldn’t take it anymore. Unhindered by my low-heeled boots, I took off in an all-out sprint toward that incessant laughter. Dress crinkling around my legs; it only took a handful of long strides to reach the tiny woman. I leapt at her and landed square in the center of her body like a seasoned linebacker. She crumbled under my weight and I was glad, for the first time in my life, I was so damn big. We landed, one on top of the other, on the cold concrete walk that circled the driveway. Unlike every catfight you’d ever seen in your life, there was no hair pulling. She’d already gotten all the hair she needed from me. Without another thought, I reared my fist back and released it with all my fury into her dainty face. I heard a crack and knew I’d likely broken her nose. She wanted blood she could have a bit of her own. Her tiny hand came from nowhere and cracked me across the jaw sending my head spinning on my shoulders. She was stronger than she looked. Must be all that hooker blood. I used both hands and wrapped them tightly through her thick dreads. Using them as leverage and pulled her closer to my face so we were eye to eye. Sitting with all my weight on her legs, I had the advantage and was confident in my positioning. I was thankful for that. I was thankful for the littlest miracles as of late. I was thankful my tit stayed right where it should be.
“Why? Tell me why? How? How in the fuck did you orchestrate that massacre?”
She smiled with bright red blood trickling down her lips from her cracked nose. “I see all. I am all. I want all.”
“Power? That’s it? Jesus, run for president for God’s sake. What makes you think hooker blood will give you ‘all’?” I spat my words into her pretty little face while I clung to her tightly coiled hair.
“Specific, very specific offerin’s,” her teeth were turning a lovely shade of red from her blood.
“Fuck you, cryptic bitch.” I released one hand from her hair. Holding her tightly with the other hand, I reared back again and came down with a crack to her face. “I am so goddamned tired of you mother fuckers being so fucking cryptic!” I screamed into her face until I felt the tender skin in my throat scratch under the pressure. My fist came down on her bloody face again and ag
ain and again until her blood splashed across my face.
Hands wrapped around my waist and life became a series of slow motion events. Strong arms held me tight as they pulled my heavy body from atop the bloody mess of Madam Azelie. My hand let go and my body went a little limp. Tiny screams came from my bloody throat and I spat red from my mouth. I wanted to kill her. I wanted my strong fists to pummel her perfect face into the pavement. She was the reason I was in this mess. It was her. It was all her. It had always been her. Why? I had no fucking clue. How? Who the fuck knew. But I for damn sure wanted to know more. Mostly, I wanted to stop her. By any means necessary.
Cyrus cradled my body in his arms as he dragged my lifeless feet across the asphalt and toward the waiting car. The car, whose driver had never left his position at the wheel, was right where we’d left it in the drive. My eyes never left the lifeless body of the tiny witch woman. She lay sprawled on the cold pavement, bleeding from her pretty little face, and I wanted to go back for more. My body didn’t fight Cyrus; I knew in my subconscious I supposed, that I’d never win that fight, but in my head I was right back there with her, stomping her fucking murderous head into a pile of meat.
I watched her as Cyrus opened the car door and shoved me into it. He didn’t bother pushing me across the seat; he crawled right over the top of me and took the seat behind the driver. My eyes stayed focused on the bloody heap on the ground a few feet ahead of the car. Cyrus mumbled something to the driver, it sounded French maybe, and the car began rolling forward. We were leaving. Driving away to safety and leaving this bloody mess behind. The car crept forward and moved past the body.
Air filled my lungs and stayed there. As we passed the bloody mess on the pavement, her little hand lifted. Wiggling her tiny fingers, she waved at me as her white teeth flashed in a sardonic smile through a mask of blood.
I blinked my eyes hard and when I opened them again, we’d passed her and were on our way out of the driveway and onto the main street. I twisted and tried to look out the back window, but my attire didn’t allow that much movement. In a last glimpse through a minuscule look out the back window, Azelie was gone.
I am fucked.
Chapter Seventeen
My breaths were coming in ragged, half choked, spurts. All the rage and homicidal urges were ripped away the moment I watched that pretty bloody face smile through all that blood I’d left behind. If she was strong enough to torment me after a beating like that, she was certainly strong enough to come back with a vengeance, and beat the living shit out of me. If not worse. Shit, likely worse. She was, however, a murderess in her own right.
Like the Goddamned pot calling the kettle a murderous bitch, eh.
“Eh, he, eh, she…she fucking smiled at me,” I choked out in the general direction of Cyrus who was diligently checking every direction he could for further danger.
“You are an idiot, Dylan Hart.” His words actually hurt my feelings. It’s was rare I allowed that to happen, but it did. My defenses were down, I guessed.
“Well, fuck you too,” I sputtered as I forced my corseted body to twist and turn to see in every direction.
Fear was making its way up the back of my throat and threatening to burst from my lips in the form of vomit. Or maybe it was the corset.
I leaned forward and looked out the front window in an attempt to calm my heaving stomach. There were no traffic lights, or traffic for that matter, and I knew we had to be close to home. Or the temporary home I’d left my shit in for the weekend. The headlights shined along the white line in the center of the road and I focused on that for a minute or two.
Fifty feet ahead or so, I picked up the silhouette of what looked like a dead animal in the road. If the driver didn’t see it, we’d run it right over and spread the carnage even further. The car sped along and we grew closer to the image in our headlights. It was a body. It was a woman. Her naked chest obvious in the bright lights of the car. The driver watched straight ahead, as hired drivers tended to do, your business was rarely theirs, seeming to not see the figure in the road. We barreled down the lane as I watched his foot never lift from the pedal. He was going to plow right into the woman in the street. Less than ten feet from the body, I saw the inevitable. Atop a lovely set of shoulders lay a bloody stump where a head should have been.
I thrusted my body through the center of the bucket seats and screamed, “You’re gonna hit her!” I pointed through the windshield directly at the headless body that lay flat along the darkened street. I was too late. The driver never had a chance to even try. We plowed right through what should have been thick meaty flesh without even a thud. Through the front window, light fog spewed up over the hood and reflected the light from the headlamps.
Dead bitches popping up everywhere. Mike had said eight, right? Eight mother fucking foggy dead girls to trip over? Fuck my life!
“Dylan!” Cyrus called from behind me.
“Miss, would you please take your seat. There is nothing in the road.” The driver remained so calm I wondered if he was on drugs.
My body flopped back into my seat and I felt a sob threaten to reveal itself. “What’s happening to me?” I asked in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Dylan, it’s time to go home,” Cyrus said without any precursor.
“What is happening?” I asked, feeling so weak, so suddenly, like someone had hit me with a tranquilizer dart. Not that I would know what that felt like.
“You are being cursed.” His words hung in the air so thick, I thought perhaps I could reach out and touch them.
“That’s not true,” I argued, hardly able to open my eyes anymore. Tears were imminent. I felt them, and my body was doing everything it could to prevent that. Soon, the anger would come back and stay for good until the threat was gone. It’s was a vicious cycle that had allowed me to live a mostly normal life, thus far.
“At this point, turning your back on her magic will do you no good.”
“She killed those girls, Cyrus. It was her,” a tear squeezed from my closed lids and trailed down my cheek.
“I know,” his hand touched along my face and stealthily wiped the tear away.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll inform Malcolm. But first, I am putting you on a plane back home. You are going to call Mike.” I scoffed and rolled my head toward him. “You are going to call Mike, you will need him, and you are going to tell him to pick you up at LAX and take you to his house. You will wait there until we get back.”
“Isn’t going home enough? The bitch can’t get me five hundred miles away.” Seemed legit.
“Just do it. Until now, Dylan Hart has done whatever Dylan Hart has wanted to do and it has put you into a position you may not get out of unharmed. Now, you will do what I tell you to do and maybe you’ll survive this mess. Until then, consider yourself cursed,” his hand gripped my arm as his words spewed through clenched teeth.
“And who in the fuck are you? I don’t see any shining armor lying around anywhere, so I doubt you’re here to rescue me.” My eyes were open now. Here came the anger. “I would’ve never gotten into this mess had it not been for that bitch in the first place. I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t know you. None of this shit would even exist to me if it weren’t for her murderous greed. Malcolm, Dominika, you, all of this vampire bullshit would not even be a thought in my head without her. That bitch. Now, now, I’m seeing headless things lying about. I’m flailing around on the floor bleeding to death from phantom wounds.” His eyes squinted. “Waking from dreams of bloody children and dying from your bite amongst shiny coffins in the basement.” Cyrus clenched his jaw and shifted his brows and I knew I’d struck a chord. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You’ve been hallucinating.” He waved his hand through the air as if waving away my words.
“But how much of that was surrounded by truth?” My chest heaved up and down with each eager brea
th that found its way passed my lips.
Seconds passed with no further response from Cyrus. The car was quickly approaching the macabre antebellum where we’d been staying. I stared at the man, clenched jaw, flared nostrils. He was hiding something.
My hand was perched atop the handle of the door when the car rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the house. I didn’t give Cyrus another second to react before I flung the door open and bolted up the walk. Stopping for a millisecond to open the iron gate, I ran as fast as my fat little legs could carry me. I ran up the walk, through the beautiful darkened landscape, and onto the shadowed porch. It’d never occurred to me that the door would be locked when I started running, but feet from the door it dawned on me it might be a problem. Not risking the chance of looking back, I stuck my hand out and grabbed hold of the brass knob. It turned freely and I swung it wide open.
My feet slid across the slick floor as I tried to gain traction through the entryway and toward the door below the stairs. I’d left the door open, but I didn’t care. In fact, it was the only light I had to show me the way. No one was home. They were all still back at the banquet hall enjoying their fancy dinner and comradery. I, on the other hand, was running through the empty, dark house of the Primus of the House of Porte, in search of a basement full of caskets likely there to house the undead. Or, the supposedly undead.
I slid to a stop and slammed into the adjoining wall next to the door under the stairs. It was very obvious someone had gone a little overboard with the floor buffer. I had to see for myself. During my weekend of the endless night, I had to know if there were coffins in that basement. It really didn’t do me any good, I knew. It didn’t change much. Only proved my dream was spot on. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. Nothing changed unless it proved that all along, these harmless Sanguinarians had in fact been the real deal. Then, of course, that changed everything.
Endless Night (Dylan Hart Odyssey of The Occult Series) Page 17
