After a few days of adjusting to the new situation, though, the Headhunter started to appreciate the woman’s company. He enjoyed witnessing her quiet suffering and the new power he held over the little slut who’d tried to rob him. Even more surprising, having her sit on his mantle worked wonders for his writing. Within a week, he’d written more than he had in the previous months.
He’d never been good with women—never even had a proper girlfriend—and his few, unsatisfying sexual experiences had been nothing to write home about.
But with Angela—that was the skank’s name—things were different. He wouldn’t call it love. At least not yet; it was still early in the game. But having her keep him company in the cabin made the summer fly by.
Then the bitch foolishly decided to insult him the day he was about to return to the city. The plan was for him to leave her in the cabin and visit from time to time. He couldn’t risk bringing her back to his crowded apartment building—way too many curious neighbors for that. Plus, he liked having the woman here waiting for him. At least until she showed her true colors.
The Headhunter didn’t remember all the expletives she rained down on him, but whatever she said, it hurt enough for him to retaliate. Fueled by rage and a desire to shut up the foul head, the Headhunter tossed the still-cursing head into the lake. He regretted his decision almost immediately, but the deed was done, and there was no way for him to retrieve her from the water.
His muse was irretrievably lost at the bottom of the lake.
The following year, the Headhunter returned to the cabin. Another summer meant another book.
It took him only a few days to realize that the words refused to come this year. Each day he spent staring listlessly at the blinking cursor of his word processor. Everything he came up with was shit. Nothing would click.
And that’s when his gaze traveled to the magical ax on the wall, and a different form of inspiration hit him.
He needed another muse.
So he went hunting for one.
A week later, a new head was on his mantle. And three months after that, a new book on his computer.
By then, he’d grown tired of this lady, and realized that it might be best to start fresh every year. So he threw muse number two into the same lake where his first love had vanished a year earlier.
And so the years went by. Each summer, he started work on the next book, and each year, he got himself another head. Some proved to be better company than others, but they all accounted for his growing literary success. He was certain of it.
Perhaps soon, he could leave the city and settle down in these mountains with one head who would be the one to rule them all. His queen, his forever companion. A muse fit for his genius. After six years, he felt ready for something more permanent. He’d sowed his wild oats, played the field, and got a lot of his youthful friskiness out of his system.
Going by his impressive writing output today and the excited feeling in the pit of his stomach, Chloe might be the One. But best to take things slow. One day at a time, right?
Beaming, the Headhunter poured himself a glass of red wine, the perfect reward at the end of a productive day. He was just about to enjoy his first sip when he heard a loud thump from the adjacent living room that shook the cabin’s walls.
Chapter Thirteen
Chloe’s head was resting on the fireplace mantle, but her mind was blank.
At least the Headhunter had gone to sleep. She welcomed the night that lay ahead and not having to look at the monster anymore. Watching the bastard type away for hours on end while he mainlined caffeine had taken its toll. If losing her body hadn’t pushed her over the edge yet, three months of being the devil’s muse certainly would.
She was in Hell. And there was no escape. Only these nighttime hours of staring into the empty cabin provided some relief from her ordeal. She followed the Headhunter’s computer screen saver’s swirling patterns and allowed her mind to drift. Her imagination was the only escape left to her.
She dreamt of running on warm beaches and swimming in calm oceans, her beloved Erik and Max by her side.
As the shifting patterns on the monitor took over Chloe’s reality, she heard light footsteps. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have noticed the stealthy approach, but losing her body had heightened her other senses. She tried to look in the direction of the sound and clenched her jaw in frustration when she remembered she could no longer turn her head.
And then a figure stepped into her field of view.
It wasn’t the Headhunter.
Stubble covered the stranger’s face, the bone structure suggesting that he might once have been handsome. Black leather hugged his tall, lean frame, the long leather trench out of place in the rustic cabin.
Their eyes met, and she sensed that she had nothing to fear from this grizzled man. There was sadness and pity in his gaze.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
The man’s answer was to raise his finger to his lips and shush her.
He walked over. Leaned closer.
Weirdly, she wasn’t afraid. What else did she have to lose?
“I heard your call, Chloe,” the stranger said, his voice gruff but not unkind. “This nightmare will be over soon.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, but this time she was crying out of joy. Thank you, she mouthed.
“Do you trust me?”
There was no way for her to nod in her current state, so she whispered, “Yes.”
The stranger smiled. “Are you ready to see him pay for what he did to you? What he did to Erik?”
Another yes.
“Then let the show begin.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Headhunter burst into the cabin’s living room, furious at the disruption and wondering if Chloe was trying to spoil his evening. He’d thought his new muse was smart enough to behave following their earlier flare-up. Guess he’d hoped for too much.
His gaze flicked toward the fireplace mantle and grew still. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing—or rather, what he wasn’t seeing.
Chloe—his muse—was gone!
Impossible.
A severed head cannot take off on its own. She must have rolled off, the poor darling. That was likely the sound he’d heard before. Chloe needed him. He looked down at the floor and peered under the nearby furniture, yet he found no trace of the missing head.
His insides churned with anxiety. What was going on here?
Sudden laughter rang out behind him, and he whirled. His eyes landed on his writing desk. A severed head sat on a stack of pages he’d pointed out earlier, but it wasn’t Chloe. He was looking at one of his previous muses, a redheaded bitch named Shelly who had nagged him endlessly. She was wet and dripping all over his day’s work. Her skin was fish-belly white and bloated with empty sockets for eyes. The lake’s fishes must’ve gotten to them, and they had not regenerated yet.
But who had fished her out of the lake and placed her on his desk?
“Your work hasn’t improved all that much over the years, Francis Augustus. You’re still a fucking hack.”
The Headhunter glowered at the talking head’s brazen tone. How dare she talk to him like that? His whole body shook with rage.
Another voice piped up behind him. “Practice makes perfect. But sometimes, it just makes you realize how much you suck.”
He spun around, shock cutting off his next breath. A second head had appeared on the coffee table near the TV. Veronica. Another old flame who’d spent the last few years at the bottom of the lake.
How was this possible?
“How many books does it take to have a breakout success? At what point do you just call it quits?”
A third speaker. This time the voice had emanated from the mantle which moments earlier had been empty. Three other heads sat side by side now, their faces bloated and ravaged from being underwater for all this time.
And then they all broke into nasty, mocking laughter.
He swung the ax, and it chopped deep into the wood, sending shock waves up his arm. But once again, the mantle was empty. The only sound came from the crackling flames in the fireplace below.
“You missed, idiot,” another voice said. He immediately recognized the nasal, uneducated tone as Angela, his first—and worst—muse.
The Headhunter turned toward his desk, and what he saw made him shake with rage and horror. Someone had smashed his computer into little pieces, the pages of his latest masterpiece cast all over the floor.
The ax shook in his trembling arms. Where did the heads go? How were they even here?
“Perhaps the devil doesn’t appreciate you keeping all those souls to yourself, Francis.”
“He never could learn how to share.”
“And damn, he’s put on some weight.”
The Headhunter pivoted toward the voices, weapon up and ready.
Another shock. Six headless bodies stood in a row before him, shredded skin hanging down their stumps in red flaps.
The decapitated bodies of his dead muses had returned from the grave.
Shaking all over, the Headhunter struggled to stand his ground, powerless for the first time since he’d taken up the ax so many years ago.
The sudden appearance of all those heads was a mystery, but the return of their perfectly preserved bodies was an impossibility. Only the heads lived on while the bodies perished and decomposed.
That’s how the curse of the Devil’s Apprentice worked, damn it.
As the first headless body lurched toward him with its arms extended, the ax flashed out. The medieval weapon found soft flesh with a wet smack. And then the other bodies joined the first, a flood of female forms determined to overrun their murderer.
The Headhunter’s survival instinct conquered his terror, and he exploded into berserker mode. The ax sliced through the air and whistled down on the attacking mob. Steel found flesh, again and again. Time became a blur as he hacked away at the bodies.
By the time it was all over, he found himself surrounded by broken, quivering corpses. His breathing was fast and heavy, and the crimson-stained ax shook in his hands.
“This is madness,” he wheezed.
“It’s payback, Francis. Nothing more, nothing less.”
This time, it was a man that spoke.
He looked around wildly and at last spotted the man in a tattered coat who stood in the far corner of the cabin. The stranger’s merciless gaze bored into him; lips twisted in a vicious smirk. He was laughing at the Headhunter. That simply would not do.
Those black eyes promised death, but the stupid bastard was unarmed.
Francis was the one with the ax. Let’s see what would happen when the cursed steel found the stranger’s neck. He could interrogate the intruder’s head later—or maybe stick it in the microwave. That would wipe the smirk off the cocky stranger’s face.
The Headhunter drew closer, rage searing his lungs and pulsing through his veins, nerves taut
“Francis, you look like you’re getting a bit emotional,” the stranger said with irritating unconcern.
The Headhunter gritted his teeth. The bastard kept using his given name, almost as if he knew how much he hated its sound. Francis died that night when he first swung the ax. He was the Headhunter—death incarnate.
With a roar, the Headhunter rushed at the stranger, ax up high.
He almost whooped with joy when he savagely brought the ax down on the bastard whose feet remained rooted in place. The Headhunter delivered the lethal blow with strength and precision despite his blinding fury.
The ax cut the stranger in half, and the leather trench coat dropped to the wooden floor in two parts.
But the stranger wasn’t in it. What the fuck? The grizzled man had evaporated into thin air.
“If you want to win a fight, Francis, you can’t afford to lose your head.”
The voice emanated from his right. Without even turning, Francis brought the ax around. Steel bit into the wooden wall, the powerful vibration of the impact shooting up his arm. Fuck!
The Headhunter struggled to free his ax from the cabin’s wall, but it was embedded deep within the wood.
“Need some help?” The stranger popped up behind him and grabbed the handle of the ax.
Before the Headhunter could react, the stranger had pulled the ax from the wall in a rain of splinters.
Francis glared at the intruder who was now wielding the ax which was rightfully his.
“Give that back,” he demanded.
“Whatever you say.”
With these words, the Hexecutioner brought down the cursed ax on the Headhunter’s neck, and the world went dark.
Chapter Fifteen
The darkness lifted, and the world slipped back into dizzying focus.
The Headhunter blinked repeatedly and tried to make sense of where he was. Moonlit trees blurred past him. Slightly up ahead, he made out the old well in the back of the property. Reality spun drunkenly around him, and he experienced pressure at the top of his head, almost as if someone was pulling his hair. Gripped by a terrible suspicion, the Headhunter’s gaze dropped, and he realized with horror that only a few feet separated him from the forest ground.
There was no sign of his body.
No…
“How does it feel to know that you’ll live forever?” the man in black asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” the Headhunter gasped as he bobbed back and forth in the man’s steely grip.
“Let me tell you a story,” the stranger said. “Someone wrote that the Nazis tried in Nuremberg weren’t sadistic monsters. That they were ordinary, unassuming men who loved their children and were kind to their pets, yet they committed unspeakable crimes. The banality of evil, you know? They lacked the empathy and imagination to grasp the suffering they were inflicting.”
The stranger suddenly stopped, and the wild bouncing subsided. He lifted Francis’s severed head until they were eye level and fixed his withering gaze on him. It felt like the stranger was staring right into his soul.
“When you took those women’s heads, was it a lack of empathy and imagination that made you ignore their terrible suffering? Could you not imagine what they were going through? Or did you just not give a shit?”
The stranger lifted Francis’s head even higher and held him over the well. The black abyss yawned. Not even the moonlight could illuminate the darkness below.
“No, please,” the Headhunter whispered.
“You can’t be too good of a writer if you don’t have imagination or empathy, that’s all I’m saying. I think we need to rectify that.”
A series of loud squeaks emanated from the shadows below.
The man in black whistled. “Hey, are those rats down there?”
“Please… don’t…”
“Give me one good reason why you deserve better treatment than your victims.”
Terror flooded the Headhunter’s brain as he scrambled for an answer.
His captor turned to look at something Francis couldn’t see. “What do you think, ladies?”
The stranger waved his hand, and the six heads of Francis’ victims materialized along the lip of the well.
Weylock dangled the Headhunter’s head in front of them so they all got a look at their tormentor. Their eyes blazed with hatred; their features contorted vengeful masks. Mercy would not come from these women who’d suffered the agonies of the damned.
“Angela, baby, I swear, I was confused.”
The blue-haired bitch said nothing. His gaze flicked to Veronica, then Shelly. There was nothing but the fury of hell in their eyes.
“Chloe, please. I had no idea what I was doing. You have to believe me.”
> “Then perhaps it’s time you learned,” the man said. “Maybe after a few centuries of being down there in the dark, you’ll see the error of your ways.”
Before Francis could further protest, the stranger dropped his head into the shaft. He plunged through the darkness end over end. He prayed his head might explode into a thousand pieces as it hit the bottom of the well.
The destruction wasn’t quite that spectacular.
The impact shattered enamel, pulverized the cartilage in his nose, and broke his jaw.
Yet he remained conscious.
And alive.
And in pain.
Within hours, the damage to his shattered visage would repair itself, and he would be whole again.
An eternity of solitude awaited.
A loud squeaking sound cut through the blackness. Followed by rapid scrabbling sounds and shuffling of little clawed feet moving through the wet darkness.
Seconds later, the rats’ sharp teeth found his face.
Chapter Sixteen
The Headhunter’s screams rang through the night, and the dead rejoiced. The heads of the women Weylock had fished out of the lake had waited for this moment for years.
Tonight, their suffering had ended thanks to the Hexecutioner’s swift vengeance.
The only thing left was for them to move on.
“Are you ready?” Weylock asked, his question directed at all of them.
“We’re ready,” the severed heads of the killer’s victims said one after another.
But Chloe didn’t speak. He gave her a curious look, but first he needed to help the others.
His eyes went supernova. There was a blinding flash of light, and then they were gone. Five smoking craters stood in their place.
Only Chloe’s head remained untouched by the destructive blaze.
Something was holding her back.
The Hexecutioner gazed into Chloe’s terrified features, and he gently caressed her hair. Then Weylock turned toward the figure that had materialized right behind him.
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