by Martha Woods
“Who are they?”
“The victims, I think. It was Jane. The most…the second-most recent victim. She came, grabbed my hand and dragged me here. It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed them,” I admit quietly. Saying it out loud nearly makes me vomit. I don’t want this to be real. “They’ve been showing up when I’m awake, too. Just…appearing in front of my eyes. It’s like reality is slowly shattering around me.”
Damon looks at me. He’s worried, but he doesn’t disbelieve anything I say. He reaches out a hand to mine and gives it a squeeze. Slightly awkward with a giant sword in the way, but I wouldn’t mind learning how to use it since my bullets seem to have done nothing.
“He was there, he saw me, so I fired,” I say.
“I don’t know what it is you’re seeing, but you’re a little more than human, Amy. If Vincent can’t get into your head, and the dead are talking to you, you’re likely a Medium.”
“Not entirely human?” I pull my hand back and sink back into my seat, bringing my knees to my chest.
“A little more than human,” he amends quickly. “Every now and then someone is born who can talk with the dead, the ghosts of the world, who can predict the future in their dreams,” he says.
“I don’t see the future; I see things as they happen. It started when I met Vincent,” I say. “The day I met you. I’ve never had that before.”
“When he tried to get into your mind he probably triggered something. Some like to call it the third eye.” He glances over at me. “I know someone you can talk to. A witch.”
“A witch?”
“A bit different than you’re imagining. She runs a trinket shop where people can buy stones and Tarot cards, mass-market books on spells, things like that. But she’s the genuine thing. She can at least help you with your nightmares,” Damon says. “She sees the future; she helps hunters with our own nightmares and with tracking the paranormal.”
“Doesn’t that put her life in danger from them?” I ask.
“No one wants to get on her bad side,” he says with a laugh.
I could use someone like that in my corner. But somehow I knew it wouldn’t be enough. “Could you teach me how to use a sword?” I ask.
“I’ll teach you anything you want. I know what you’re going through, Amy. I know what a shock it is being catapulted into this world. I’ll help you any way I can.” He clears his throat. “I’m…I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth sooner, but most girls think I’m crazy. I thought you might be different. Even that first night I met you, I felt like there was something about you. I had a feeling,” he says.
I’m a bit too shaken up to really process what he’s saying. He had a feeling. He must have somehow known Vincent was around that night. Hunter’s instinct or something. And he didn’t warn me. Probably because he thought I would have laughed him off. I can’t blame him for that. I would probably still think all of this was a trick, that he and Vincent were working together to con me or something – were it not for the horrible dreams.
“Yeah, I guess that would have been an awkward warning to give.”
We pull up to our apartment complex. It’s close to 4 a.m. Damon brings his sword in with him, seemingly unconcerned about who might see it. I suddenly remember my protection detail. Where were they? Did they follow me on my sleepwalk too? My stomach sinks. If Rick hears about this…but I don’t see any signs of them. Maybe they went home after they thought I’d turned in for the night. Or maybe…was it possible for my stomach to drop even lower? Maybe something happened to them. I make a mental note to call Rick in the morning and ask, then try to put it out of my mind. There’s only so much I can worry about at one time, and killer werewolves are a bit higher on the list.
I imagine I’m not going to see any more of Vincent tonight, which is fine with me. I just want to crawl into bed again, knowing that Damon will stay and watch over me while I sleep. We get to my front door, and I start to smell something funny, something revolting even. It reminds me of the dead girls, and my stomach does a flip again. I don’t know if it’s ever going to settle completely after all this. I get afraid the girls are on the other side of the door, waiting to tell me of yet another gruesome murder I’m powerless to stop, except Damon seems to smell or sense something wrong too and he pushes me behind him. He’s got my keys; I must have left the house without them to go wander the block in search of Elric.
He unlocks the door, and the stench becomes overpowering. I very nearly throw up this time. I drop down to the ground, unable to keep my legs under me, and peer around Damon’s legs. My mind doesn’t want to process what I’m staring at; it doesn’t want to register what is laying there on my front step. Bella’s head has been pulled clean of her body, her tongue lolling out, her eyes gone. The death is so recent there is still fresh blood around her. My Bella, my dear sweet Bella. The one companion I’ve had for years. My running partner is just a head on my floor.
I think Damon is saying my name, but I can’t hear him over the sound of my own sobbing scream.
Chapter 9
Bella is gone. There is no way of saving her. I crawl around Damon’s legs. He tries to stop me, but I’m small enough to slip past him and desperate with grief. I take up the head and pull it to my chest, sobbing. My apartment has been decorated in her blood, in her entrails. There is nothing in view without a spot of blood on it. I didn’t know a dog could bleed so much. I can only imagine the pain he put her through. My sweet puppy who wouldn’t hurt a human being, my horrible guard dog but best friend. She is gone in the most horrible of ways.
I can’t stop the tears from falling. Damon is talking to me, but I can’t hear him. I just stumble through my apartment. Her legs have been left on my sofa, ripped clean from their sockets. Her tail is left in my open tea kettle. When I walk into my room, I see her ruined torso tucked into my covers, sliced open so what’s left of her entrails bleeds all over my bed. I run to the bathroom, still cradling her head, and vomit. Damon is there to hold my hair back, he’s still talking to me, but I can’t register anything he is saying. When there is nothing left in my stomach, he begins to pry Bella’s head from my hands.
“Shh,” he whispers in my ear. I try to latch onto that and not onto the horror that surrounds me right now. I want to be filled with rage, but there is so much sorrow.
“She didn’t do anything,” I sob out, turning Damon. “It hurts so bad. I feel like I’m drowning. I can’t breathe. How am I still breathing? I can’t breathe. Help me. She didn’t do anything.”
The head is out of my hands, and he places it gently on the bed. He moves to wrap me up in his arms. I let out a startled cry realizing there is blood – her blood – smeared all over my shirt. Damon picks me up, sliding one arm under my legs and the other around my shoulders. I turn my head to sob into his shoulder. Closing my eyes, I to try to get the images out of my head, but they are seared into my mind. How am I ever going to sleep in this apartment again without Bella? It’s been tainted. I want to burn it to the ground, burn the sheets, throw out the couch, and melt the teakettle. There is nothing that belongs to me left in this place without Bella.
Damon moves me to his apartment, unlocking the door and heading towards his bathroom. He sets me down on the toilet as he begins to run a warm bath. He pours something into the bath, it smells of lavender and he swirls it around the tub. I’m shivering in my clothes.
“I’ll do whatever I can to take the pain away, I promise,” he whispers as he tilts my head back for a brief kiss.
He starts to remove my clothes, pulling the shirt over my head. He has me stand as he removes my jeans, my underwear, and then he unsnaps my bra. Damon is controlled in his movements; he doesn’t touch me in any inappropriate ways. His hands are gentle, kind, reserved. I’m shivering, feeling myself going into shock. He picks me up and sets me down in the lavender bath and the warm water engulfs me; the sweet scent begins to chase away the smell of death. I can feel my muscles relaxing even though my mind is spinnin
g to the deepest, darkest hole it has ever been in.
Damon gets a large plastic cup. He fills it with warm water and tilts my head back so he can pour it over my hair. He works methodically, doesn’t talk, and I just lie there and try to concentrate on the feeling of the water. There is something else mixed into the water that is soothing, calming my brain down. The tremors begin to stop, and I close my eyes. Damon works his hands through my wet hair, massaging my scalp. The shampoo and conditioner he uses do not have an overpowering odor; they smell like the forest, with a hint of cinnamon. They come in glass bottles, specially made, not something bought from the store. I barely register these observations before my mind meanders on through its confusion; I don’t have time for analysis. He finishes washing my hair and sits on the toilet beside the tub with his head bowed, his fingers clasped tightly together.
When the water starts to get cold, he begins to drain the tub, picking me up out of it and wrapping me in a towel. He holds me close, and I don’t protest. Damon walks me from the bathroom to his bedroom where he finds one of his shirts for me to put on. He goes to get a brush and turns me around, slowly getting all the tangles out of my hair before putting it into a tight wet braid. I wonder briefly where he learned to braid. I look around his room. It is sparse; just a bed and a night table, long wooden trunk with a lock on it. The sheets and bedspread are hunter green. A thought that feels like it’s come from outside my body observes that they match his eyes. He leaves me for only a moment, returning with a glass of water and a tiny pill.
“Take this. You won’t have any dreams. I’ll be right here all night,” he says. “And the pain will go away till morning.”
The pain will go away; those words echo through my mind. I put the pill on the back of my tongue and swallow. There is a bitter aftertaste and I drink more water because it feels lodged in my throat. Damon moves me to place my head on a pillow, bringing the covers in tightly around me as I close my eyes.
“I’m going to make a phone call, and I’ll be right back,” he whispers. He kisses my forehead and disappears out of the room but leaves the door open. Damon always stays in my vision. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but he keeps clenching and unclenching his fist. He paces back and forth, but the image of him is getting blurry. I think of how cold this bed is without my mutt to curl up next to me and the tears begin to come again. My brain is reconstructing Bella as the dog she was, not the body all over my apartment.
Damon hangs up the phone and comes back into the bedroom. He strips off his clothes. Through my growing haze I note they have a couple of bloodstains on them. Generally, I would love to take in his physique, but tonight the pain is too much. He changes into pajama pants but doesn’t bother with a shirt, then slips into the bed behind me. He draws me in close to him. I feel his warmth through the shirt I wear. It is the only thing that feels real.
“I’m so sorry I failed you, Amy,” he whispers into my ear before kissing my cheek.
I want to respond, but whatever was in that pill has hit. My eyes close and I fall into a pit where I feel nothing. There is no pain here, there is no joy. It is just a numbingly fantastic sleep.
Chapter 10
I sleep until the sun is at its highest point in the sky. At first when I wake, I’m not sure where I am. I jerk to sit up. Damon is there, sitting on a chair by the window, sharpening the silver blade he had drawn against Vincent that night in my apartment. That night – last night? It feels like years ago. My brain is fuzzy from whatever pill he gave me. I can’t quite grasp why I’m in here, but then Bella’s face pops into my head, and I have to choke back a sob. Damon is there in front of me, caressing my face and planting a kiss on my forehead.
“Shh, it’ll be okay,” he croons. I can feel his empathy. He seems sad, not just because I am hurting, but because he’s been hurt too. How much have you lost dealing with the supernatural, Damon? I wonder.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe in my apartment again,” I choke out. He draws me in to hug me.
“It’s clean now, you can go get your clothes and stay with me until you find another apartment or until you’re okay going home.”
My apartment is clean? I remember the phone call he made last night. Maybe he had been calling friends in to remove all the blood. Maybe he worked in a network of hunters that deal with messy situations. No wonder Damon doesn’t have a dog or a cat. He seems like an animal lover, though I’ve never really seen him interact with one. His first time in my apartment was so violent that Bella hid under my bed. But something about his sweet, soothing nature makes me think he’d be likely to own a Golden Retriever or something. He probably never makes those kinds of attachments, though, for fear that they could be used against him. I start to think about all the attachments I’ve made, all the people that Elric could hurt, and I start to tremble again.
“We have to kill him,” I say.
“I know,” Damon says, running his hand over my braid.
“I’ve got too many people he can still hurt,” I say.
Damon pulls me back to study my face. I know my eyes are red from crying, but I’m determined. I’ve never wanted to kill something so badly in my life. Bella didn’t deserve to die like that. She probably greeted the damn monster when he came into the apartment, her little tail wagging before he cut it off.
“They took Bella to be cremated,” he tells me. “I’ll have her ashes ready for you in the morning.”
Her ashes. That is all I have left. I plan to spread them across her favorite running trail – our favorite running trail – once Elric is taken care of. For now, I need to think about ways to make him disappear permanently so he can’t hurt anyone else.
“How do we stop him?” I ask, straightening myself up and bringing the palms of my hands to my eyes to try and drive the tears from them. Revenge, think of revenge. The anger will drive out everything else. I need it to drive out everything else.
“I believe that you can track him down,” Damon says carefully. “I want to take you to meet the witch.”
A witch. A real, spell-casting witch, who apparently works in close collaboration with the hunters. I shiver a bit thinking about it. It’s not that witches themselves scare me, exactly. I know that the whole myth of witches being worshippers of Satan or something like that was probably just a hateful rumor someone spread about something they didn’t understand. But I’m not sure I am ready for yet another supernatural element in my life. But given how Damon talks about her, she must be a good witch, and I guess that’s something I need in a world where there are vampires and shamans and werewolves and ghosts.
“Okay, when?”
“When you’re ready. Let’s get you something to eat first, and a change of clothes,” Damon says. “Want me to walk you over to your apartment?”
I nod uncertainly, and he helps me out of his bed. My legs are shaky, but he is there to lean on. We head over to my apartment, and I try to convince myself I can go in, I can face it. He unlocks my front door. It looks like it did before Bella was murdered; it must have been a massive job. Everything seems in place. I glance to the kitchen, afraid I’ll see my sweet girl’s tail sticking out of the kettle, but there is nothing. It’s a new kettle, I notice absently. I can’t explain it. If there’s one thing I know about, it’s blood. It shouldn’t have been possible to clean all of this up so thoroughly, so quickly.
Nothing is comforting about this place anymore. Even though the floors, the walls, the furniture have been wiped clean, the memory still remains. I squeeze Damon’s arm, and he leads me back to my bedroom where I can find clothes to wear.
I feel like I might pass out just standing in that painfully empty bedroom. I don’t know if I ever really noticed how grounding, how comforting Bella’s presence in my world was.
“Will y—” My voice cracks. “Will you talk to me? Will you distract me? I can’t…I need?”
Damon nods. “It’s okay. I understand.” He sighs, and suddenly he sounds so much older than his yea
rs. “I decided to become a hunter when I was 17,” he says as I rummage through my clothes. He has his backed turned to me to give me some privacy. I am glad, not because I am embarrassed to be seen, but because I want to study him without him knowing. His normally straight shoulders are hunched forward, his head down, his hands in his jean pockets. He looks so small. I know that he is about to tell me something awful, something painful to even think about, let alone say aloud. But he’s doing it anyway. For me.
“I grew up on a farm. We were…pretty isolated. It was almost an hour drive just to get to school. I had a sister,” he pauses and draws in a ragged breath.
Had. I think, with a pang of sorrow on his behalf. He said “had.”
“She was a year younger than me,” he continued. “My family kept a lot of cattle, chickens, a few ducks. All for eggs or milk, never meat for consumption. My sister didn’t have the heart to slaughter an animal. She loved them. And my parents couldn’t bear to see her sad. It was probably a big sacrifice, actually. Financially, I mean. But she was special. We would all have done anything for her.”
He stops again, but I don’t prompt him. I know he’ll continue when he’s ready. And anyway, I’m not sure I can bear to hear the rest. My heart is aching for him.
“Anyway, one night I heard her screaming. It had to be close to 2 in the morning. I grabbed my shotgun and ran out to the barn to see what was the matter, but I was too late. The werewolf was dumping her dead body in a pile of manure like she was trash to be taken out. I shot at him, but nothing that would do lethal damage. They’re hard to kill, werewolves. Then he was just gone. He had sliced up my sister’s stomach, her arms, her face, everything. She was completely disfigured. I could barely be sure it was her, but it was. He made sure to cause her as much pain as possible.”
