by Ian Hiatt
I say small in relation to the owner, because of course Sophia can’t make use of the door. Behind the tapestry, dozens of feet of thick, coiled muscle sits in the dark. Sophia is one of the last in an ancient bloodline, a creature that is―as far as I know―without equal. At her waist, the beautiful woman ends and the body of a snake begins, going back far longer than I’d ever like to know for sure.
Lawrence drags me past the gargantuan serpentine body, careful not to brush against his mistress’s scaled skin. He wraps one beefy arm around me and opens the door, bringing me through. Beyond the door, dusty stairs lead upward and Lawrence mounts them, dangling me over his forearm like I’m a wet towel. My mind is back online, and I can register everything happening, but my arms and legs just don’t want to respond.
My lips move in defiance of being handled like some child, but no words escape. Twitches and flopping seem to be my only communication methods and they’re happening without any say from my brain.
Lawrence spills me out into a room of light and air devoid of any smoke. My body hits something soft, welcoming. A couch. He grunts as he adjusts me to a sitting position.
I’m in Sophia’s home, a place I’ve only been in once before. The room is dimly lit, but with every blink, the warm light seems to blind me in pulses. Gray shapes move ahead of me as my eyes adjust.
“Layla? Layla? Jesus, what happened to her?”
Cassie’s voice undulates in the watery cavern of my hearing, finally solidifying at her question.
“Mister Nox is in the club,” Lawrence’s booming voice says.
“Nox?” That one is Garth, his glib tone of earlier replaced with bared disgust and just a taste of fear.
Cassie’s hand, ice-cold but soft, presses against my cheek. “Layla, can you hear me? How long did that bastard have her?”
Lawrence shrugs. “Not long enough to kill.”
Cassie, thankfully with well-manicured hands, peels one of my eyelids fully open. My hand, of its own accord, reaches up to swat away the pestering insect.
“She lives,” Garth says with a grim laugh.
“The fuck?” I mumble. Though, I’m pretty certain it sounds more like “da fud” to those present.
Cassie lets out a breathy sigh of relief as she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and covers my slumped form. Lawrence, seeing he’s no longer needed to haul prone women about, leaves through the door we entered.
“What made you decide to socialize with a friggin’ incubus, mystery girl?” Garth asks, standing beside Cassie, a new cheap cigarette burning away between his fingers. The smoke does more for bringing me back to my senses than anything else could have.
“Incubus?” Not unlike “phoenix,” the word is familiar to me. But this one tastes far viler in my mouth as I speak it. And as it comes across in my voice, it awakens some memory of having heard it before.
Cassie sits beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders to steady me as my stomach roils, threatening to empty itself in protest of the night’s events.
“Nox and his kind drain energy from people. Sap their life force. Humans or otherwise,” Cassie says. “Garth, go get some food from the kitchen.”
My knees shake, my legs slowly returning to use, and I hobble up off the couch. “No. I can’t stay.”
Cassie stands up, and though I hear her arguments against it, and the pointless quips coming from her boyfriend, I stumble toward the general direction of the exit I know empties out behind Naja. My drug-dealing contact is in the wind, and I still need a gun to clean up this shitshow of a hit.
shift on the cold, skeletal leaves of the woods, the snow of the previous night having melted in the oppressive fog that filled the day. The fog has left, though, and the puffs of my breath drift and dissipate before they can reach the piercing floodlights of the massive estate that lies before me. My personal clouds aren’t the only ones filling the night; the suited men patrolling the Donahue estate’s lawn leave their own exhaust trail in the night sky. One of them, cigarette twinkling even in the blinding house lights, is dragging a German shepherd behind him. Every time the balding man stops to take a drag off his cigarette, the dog tries to sit down out of complete boredom.
My knee is sore, only slight less so than my ankle extended behind me. A sniper’s stance is not one I take often. With a breathy curse at the unreliability of Saturday night special dealers, I stroke the unfamiliar metal of my assault rifle, hastily purchased from a dealer on the Westside of Roch, the only side of town I’m known and welcome in. I’m no racist, but it’s probably because I stick out like a sore thumb in the East Passage. Even with my siren blood, I can’t shift my ethnicity enough to suit them, and they’re not very friendly with outsiders.
I check that the gun is loaded, safety off, but in reality I’m just praying I remember to do everything Jonah, the dealer, told me to do.
Damn his thick Irish accent.
Cigarette Puffer and his plucky sidekick lean up against the brickwork of the northern side of the mansion, and I sight him through my rifle crosshairs. The disturbing nature of my tactics tonight crawls up my body from the inside much more than the cold.
Always accidents, Layla. They can’t trace it to you.
Mommy Dearest’s instruction.
You need to be a ghost, fade away until you’re not even a memory…
Bullets are proof. Bullets are more than memories.
My heart vibrates against my ribs, the cold being blameless. I’ve been moving the sights over the windows of the Donahue home, waiting to spot the youngest―now the only―son. But thus far, the house has looked like little more than a lit-up model home. Apart from the guards walking around the outside, none of the Donahues have appeared in the windows.
After checking hospital records, I found that Thomas Donahue was checked out against medical advice early this morning. I know he’s in the house, but he hasn’t popped up yet. I feel like a kid with a BB gun, waiting for the paper target to pop up at the shooting gallery.
But instead, I watch Baldy looking away as his dog squats in the middle of the lawn.
My knee aches beneath as I take stock of what my glamorous lifestyle has decayed into. It took three separate hour-long showers to make me feel clean from my beach escapades of the night before, but whenever I start to feel comfortable again, the rotting flesh scent of the crocodile crawls along my senses like a menacing insect.
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And it has been for only four hours. I’m not at all comfortable, but as my finger strokes the trigger, I try to fall in love with the unfeeling beast in my arms.
The guards start to branch out indiscriminately, shining flashlights into the foliage of the woods, and I realize my position isn’t exactly discreet. The crickets around me, the last remnants of the autumn that refuses to die in the face of the winter, chirp as I try to back farther into the darkness, dodging crisscrossing beams from inept bodyguards.
I take up my pointless game of searching the Donahue windows for signs of Thomas.
Get it out of your head. Put him down. Clean up your mess.
Even as I recite the words to myself, I can’t help but add the menacing tone of my mother to them. When we lived closer to the Westside of town, she trained me as any predator might. By bringing back live prey.
Bootsie. I have no clue why I knew the cat’s name. It belonged to the little girl who lived in the penthouse apartment of our building. I don’t know how Mom caught it, and thinking back, I’m not entirely sure why.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat…
She was leaning over the bathtub as she said it, the cat howling and screeching in pain as she systematically taught me which joints you had to break to immobilize prey.
Hand me my knife, sweetie?
The very blade strapped to my ankle on this cold winter night.
She showed me the areas that would ensure an eventual death. Slow, torturous, but inevitable. The
se were less desirable. I had trouble hearing her over the piercing cries of the animal, our white bathtub anything but now.
And then she passed the slippery knife to me. With her hands in red liquid gloves, she motioned to my options to finish the lesson. Like a good little girl, I did.
I had to watch, she said. Watch to make sure the light was gone. That what was left was nothing but proof of my skilled work. I was never told to watch the little girl, whose name I didn’t know, putting up fliers on lampposts and riding her bike up and down the alleys of our borough, looking for her best friend. I always waited until I knew Mom was asleep to cry about what I’d done.
It wasn’t until years later, when she was bringing home vagrants, hookers, and a few random men, that I was able to look back and wonder why I cried. Of course, by then, she didn’t have to hold the animals down while I finished them off.
My neck creaks a bit as I shift, pointing the rifle about as I scan windows. I let out a sigh of relief as I note that the hired guns have moved off the lawn and around the other side of the house.
Like dawn breaking on the horizon, the large picture window before me lights up, and despite the floodlights pouring over the grass, I see figures moving about inside.
A large one, possibly Donahue senior. Unimportant.
Beside him, several smaller shapes flicker. I blink, eyes watering from the blinding lights, and lean into the rifle’s scope, praying I remember how exactly to squeeze the trigger. The largest of the shadows steps toward the window and peers out on his dominion. It doesn’t matter who he is, because he’s not Thomas.
To my left, maybe a hair farther than a hundred feet, Baldy steps forward with his furry companion, perfectly blocking the nearest floodlight and giving me clear sight.
The older Donahue stands before his family, glass of liquor clutched in his hand and wearing a suit that cost more than I was paid to kill his sons. Beside him, a woman, young enough to be his daughter, but probably his wife.
Past him, seated in an armchair that looks much more comfortable than the near frozen ground I’m sprawled on, is Thomas.
Line him up in the sights. Adjust for distance. There’s not a bit of wind.
Wait for it. Listen to your heart and wait for it. Thump thump. Thump thump. Thump…
Click.
The hammer of a pistol pulls back. And it’s not mine.
“Ya lucky the Old Man wants you alive. ‘Cause I’ve plastered many a bitch out here,” a thickly accented voice says above me. I weigh my options, and as my hand drifts to my ankle, the world erupts in stars and then darkness.
Cold.
That’s the first thing I notice. My senses are only just dancing with the idea of coming back to me, and my body erupts in shudders. I blink and my hands clench on splintered wood.
Cold. I can feel cold.
And it hurts.
“Ya keep her alive, y’hear?” the voice rings again. It’s coming from a nearby blob of gray that I can’t quite focus on.
My body aches. Pain.
Like a drug-addled co-ed, my coherence skips along with all the direction I could want.
Ouchie. Like that time you cut your finger, remember? You cried. And when Mom found out, she punished you.
Two weeks locked in the closet was easy to deal with.
But now, everything is sore. Everything burns.
“Don’t worry. She’ll live.” A deeper voice. Eastern European accent. I focus on that fact, the knowledge, because it’s some sort of foothold.
The burning increases on my arm, and my eyes snap to clarity. My arm pulses with my heartbeat, and I see blood oozing from a slice.
“Ivan sees you are awake. Is good,” the deep voice says in my ear.
When I turn my head, my field of vision is filled with a face even a mother wouldn’t be fond of. A beast of a man with burns up and down his cheeks flashes me a grin of crooked teeth and grime.
I blink, trying to chase away any lingering memories, and concentrate on my current situation. Above, a dim light swings. I’m tied to a chair. And not a comfortable chair. All along my skin I feel the pinpricks of splinters digging into me. My body is bound in almost every way imaginable, and I can only just move to look around the room.
By a nearby door, a man stands, cheeks gruff and a cigarette dangling off his lower lip, only a few cinders from the filter. “Why do ya question ‘em, Ivan? Do they ever answer?”
I open my eyes wide, letting in what little light the room has to offer.
“They always answer Ivan.” From behind me the sound of metal on metal scrapes, making my spine tingle. “Or they lose an eye.” The tip of a blade presses to my cheek, and my skin pops. A warm rivulet streaks down to my chin.
From the doorway, the thug tosses his smoldering cigarette to the ground and steps on it as the thick wooden door swings open.
“What sonofabitch had the balls to―” An older man roars as the cigarette thug leaps out of the way, dodging the door slamming into the wall.
The Old Man looks me over and stops just short of laughing at me. “What’d you guys do, pick up a Girl Scout? Did you bring her cookies, too?”
The thug snorts a chuckle, and the Old Man glares. Ivan grunts as he lifts my rifle to the Old Man. “The girl had rifle. Jessie said she was aiming for Mr. Donahue and family.”
Donahue snatches the rifle from his burly Russian’s hand and inspects it with far more skill than I ever did. He lifts it, bringing the scope to his eye and peering down the barrel.
“Beautiful piece of weaponry.” He levels the rifle at me, and even in my haze, I can see his finger twitch on the trigger. “So is the gun.”
“Sir?” Jessie, the thug who got the drop on me, asks from behind the mountain.
Donahue turns and passes the rifle to Jessie who barely manages to hold it without looking like a kid with an oversize water pistol.
The Old Man pulls over a metal folding chair that looks much more comfortable than mine, sets it up in front of me, and straddles it. He’s a muscled man, much like my new Russian friend, Ivan. But Donahue’s got the face of a movie star. The look of a man who has slept well every night of his life and not had a care in the world.
“Has she told you anything?” Donahue asks, glancing at my interrogator.
“Girl hasn’t spoken, Mister Donahue.” Ivan slaps my bloodied arm with the flat of his knife. “But she will.”
Donahue laughs grimly. “Probably not.” He peers at me and unzips a grin that borders on grimace. “She’s not human.”
Jessie, vaguely attempting to look badass with my rifle, steps forward to look at me like I’m a zoo animal. “She’s one of them?”
Donahue nods. “Sure is. I tell you, I was just a little boy when they started pouring in. ‘Course some of them were here long before that.” He smirks. “But this is our town. Us normal people.” He extends his hand and snaps his fingers to the side of my face. “Listen up, princess. I can make this quick. I can have Ivan here put you out in a few seconds, or I can have him take a few weeks. You tell me the truth. Did you kill my boy? Did you kill Andrew?”
I stare back at him as a sharp spasm of pain spears up my arm from my wound.
“And you came here to kill me, was that the plan?”
Despite my extensive training to never give anything up―ever―a snort escapes me.
He watches me with the intent gaze of a hungry raptor. His talons―hands clawed in anger―flex on the chair’s back.
“Well… I suppose that answers the first question.”
“Sir?” Ivan asks.
“She’s here for something. And I refuse to believe my son’s disappearance last night is unrelated.”
He stands and reaches behind his back, then pulls out a pistol. Before I can make out how much this is going to hurt, he’s pressed the barrel to my forehead. My skull vibrates as he cocks the gun, chambering a round to blow through my brain and end it all.
The cold metal pulls away and a flicker of do
ubt goes over the Old Man’s face.
“Ivan. Find out who hired the little bitch. Then kill her. And be careful. I don’t know what she is, but she’s not human.”
Ivan laughs. “Will be no trouble, Mister Donahue. You will have name by end of hour.”
Donahue grins with the malice of a kid using a magnifying glass to burn ants. “Good.”
he searing pain in my arm marked by the clean cut of Ivan’s knife turns out to be my best-feeling body part before long.
“Mr. Donahue asks Ivan to get answers from you, pretty. Sooner you give Ivan answers, sooner he ends all this.”
With that, he places what looks like the Devil’s remote control to my neck. After a click, my body erupts in agony, electrical current coursing through every part of me.
I’m not ashamed to admit I scream. And piss myself.
Ivan places the Taser down and picks up a pair of cruel-looking scissors. When he opens them, I almost want to hear the metal screech, but the silence of blade-on-blade is what nightmares are bred from. He methodically leans down and starts to cut off my gear. My black tactical vest is really only held on by a zipper and some ballistic lines. He peels that off me, and after admiring it for a moment, sets it aside.
“Mmm.” Jessie smirks as he looks me over, pleased with my less mercenary look. “Ya know, Ivan, I bet I could get her to say a few things.” He leans in, sitting on Donahue’s chair to watch an interrogation/sadist’s wet dream.
My Russian friend lets out a grinding laugh. “Yes. You think Ivan should leave you alone with little boy?” He prods my cheek with my own boot knife, warmth trickling down to my chin. “He will make you wish you were dead.”
Jessie laughs, but I can see his pride is wounded. “I bed more women than you, big guy.”
Ivan smiles before holding my boot knife in his brute hand, slicing my shirt and the skin underneath. “Girl will be too broken before long, little boy. If you want her before Ivan kills her, you should get her to talk.”
