Scott sighed and turned his head back to the inviting darkness of the woods.
“Scotty, Jenny needs you right now. More than I do. I’m taking you home, and I’ll head down to the Troop E HQ and round up some volunteers from traffic. We’ll canvas the shit out of this town, and we’ll find a lead. You know how I am, Scotty.”
Scott managed a slight nod. “Dog with a bone,” he murmured.
“That’s right, Scotty. I’m like a dog with a bone. I’ll find Becky, and I’ll find whoever killed her.”
Scott’s head snapped around so fast the vertebrae in his neck crackled like a string of firecrackers. He glimpsed an expression on LaBouche’s face that turned his stomach. At first, he thought it was pity, but after LaBouche blanked his expression, Scott wasn’t so sure.
“Sorry, Scotty. I didn’t mean to say that. I meant ‘whoever has her.’”
Scott faced forward in the seat. “Drive,” he said.
5
When LaBouche’s Maxima drove by at the end of the lane, Drew was ready. He pulled out onto the road with his lights off and drove to the stop sign, giving the two troopers time to get a little further down Old Penfield Road before he turned the lights on.
He pulled out behind them, wondering what in the hell had them driving around to abandoned quarries. Is Lewis a part of this? Some kind of…whatchamacallit…some kind of familiar to LaBouche? But that was too hard to believe. No father would let what happened to Becky Lewis happen to his daughter, demonic pet or no.
No, LaBouche was playing with him, Drew felt sure. Although, what reason LaBouche might have for carrying on with the ruse at this point, he didn’t know. Why torment Lewis? Surely the emotions the demon had fed on while torturing Becky Lewis had sated his hunger.
6
“Who’s this idiot?” mumbled LaBouche.
Scott looked up and then glanced in the mirror on his side. “Can’t see past his lights.”
“Yeah.” LaBouche shrugged, but his eyes never left the rearview mirror. “Say,” he said, drawing the word out.
“Say what?”
“I’ve just had one of my brain tickles, Scotty.”
Lewis lifted a limp hand from his lap and let it drop.
“Do you find it strange that this happens right after we talked to Dr. Reid about all those other disappearances?”
“No, I don’t, Lee. I saw this kid. His name is Lamont, some surfer dude. He was in my living room last night. A skinny teenager. It’s not Reid.”
“So Reid paid—”
“No, Lee. In hindsight, there was something off about the kid…something, I don’t know…something smug about him, but I didn’t get a read that he wasn’t interested in Becky.” His voice broke on her name.
“Scotty, you are her dad, and…well, maybe your radar was off with the kid. I say we should check Reid’s movements. Find out where he’s been for the last two days.”
Scott grunted. “I don’t even like him for the other disappearances, Lee.”
LaBouche let air hiss between his teeth. “When did you decide this?”
Scott shrugged. “I have no idea. In the past day, I guess. It’s my gut. Besides, you’re probably right. That connection with Oneka Falls is thin.”
“Maybe not,” said LaBouche. “Might be you were the one that was right.”
Scott flapped a hand. “To be honest, Lee, I don’t give one rat’s ass right now. I don’t care about any MP except Becky.”
“Of course,” said LaBouche, but there was something off about his tone. “Well, consider it when you’re ready to get back to it.”
“Yeah,” murmured Scott.
“I think the guy behind you is following us.”
“Nah. Who’s being paranoid now?”
“Let’s pull him over, check his ID.”
“Lee…I just want to get home, man. I want to be with Jenny.”
LaBouche sighed, sounding a little weird. Frustrated or angry. “Yeah, I’ll have you home in a few minutes, Scotty.”
They rode the rest of the way with a frigid silence between them.
7
Drew drove past the Lewis house for the third time in twenty minutes. LaBouche had left fifteen minutes before, but Drew felt…hinky…about it. Like LaBouche was just baiting a trap, just waiting for Drew to pull up so he could swoop in at the last second. Demons thought like that, and it didn’t pay to get careless. That shit in Oneka Falls meant Drew had a lot of work to do. A lot. He couldn’t afford an entanglement with the State Police. To be an effective killer, he had to be off everyone’s radar. Just a geeky college professor who profiles and does postmortems as a consultant. No one interesting. No one threatening.
He drove around the block again, eyes scouring the darkness, searching for a blue Maxima or any other sign of LaBouche. It was the kind of neighborhood you expected a State Trooper to live in: quiet, respectable, friendly. The carriage and porch lights of all the houses were blazing, pushing the darkness out to the street like a bouncer dealing with a drunk.
Of LaBouche, there was no sign. Now, if he could only work up the nerve to go up to Scott Lewis’ house, ring the bell, and tell the man that a demon had tortured and raped his daughter to death. Yeah. Like there’s ever enough nerve for that.
He parked two houses down from the Lewis’ and got out. His muscles were cramped and sore from all the driving, but aside from the emotional aftermath of his trip to Oneka Falls, he felt okay. He stretched his muscles as he walked to their house, up their sloping driveway, and across their walk to the front door. There, he stood for a moment, not thinking, not even looking around, just trying to calm his electric nerves. With a shaking finger, he rang the bell.
An old woman opened the door to the extent of the chain. She had a scar around her right eye, and unless Drew missed his guess, her right eye was a prosthetic. “Yes?” she asked.
“Er, is this the Lewis residence?”
“I’m Melinda Carmody. What is it you want, young man?”
“I’m looking for Trooper Lewis. He’s…I have…I have something I have to tell him.”
“And you are?”
“Tell him it’s Andrew Reid.”
She closed the door, and Drew stood there fidgeting, trying not to sprint back to his car. Footsteps sounded on the other side of the door, and the chain rattled. The door opened, and Trooper Lewis stood there, pointing a gun at Drew’s face. “Talk,” he said in a cold, cold voice. “This had better be good.”
“It’s not, but it’s something you should know.” Trooper Lewis looked at him hard, his eyes scanning Drew’s face. He moved the pistol, letting his hand fall to his side.
“Who is it, Scott?” The woman’s voice slurred over her consonants like a drunk’s would.
Lewis glanced over his shoulder and stepped through the door, pulling it shut behind him. He looked back at Drew and frowned. “You’ve got five minutes. After that…”
“Right,” said Drew. He pulled the ID card out of his back pocket. “This will not be easy for me to tell you, but I imagine it’s going to be much harder for you to hear.”
Lewis’ eyes opened wide, and he snatched the ID with his free hand. His eyes scanned back forth between the picture and the text. When he looked up again, fury raged in his eyes, and he leveled the pistol at Drew again. “Where did you get this?” he demanded.
“Oneka Falls. There’s an old church there with ‘Play Time’ painted over the front doors. The cellar is—”
Lewis stomped forward and pressed the gun under Drew’s chin. “Where is my daughter, you fuck?” His shout echoed back and forth across the street.
“Scott?” The slurred voice of the woman wormed its way through the front door. “Scott?”
Drew raised his hands, his movements deliberate and slow, careful not to jostle Lewis. “I’m sorry to say she’s dead.”
Lewis’ knuckles blanched as his hand tightened on the pistol butt. His eyes blazed and blood flooded into his cheeks. “What did you say
to me?” he hissed.
“Trooper Lewis, I’m so sorry. I found that ID on the body of a teenage girl in the cellar of a fucked-up old church in Oneka Falls. But that’s not all. I saw—”
“What do you mean, that’s not all? What the fuck else could matter?” The man seemed to deflate, to shrink or implode, but the anger blazing in his eyes remained constant.
“Your partner came out of that church,” Drew said.
Lewis cut his gaze away, looking out at the night sky. “LaBouche was in Oneka Falls?” he asked, voice mild.
“Yes, I saw him around ten this morning, and again this afternoon. That’s when he came out of Play Time. But listen a second, Trooper Lewis. There’s more you should know.”
Lewis shook his head and sank into a deck chair on the front porch—or rather he fell into the chair as if the bones in his legs had dissolved. “What?” he breathed. “What else could matter? My daughter’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, Trooper Lewis. I would have saved her if I could. But listen, your partner…the thing calling himself Lee LaBouche, he’s not who—not even what—he pretends to be. This will be hard for you to—”
Lewis surged to his feet and grabbed Drew by the shoulders. The Trooper spun, slamming Drew into the wall, and pressed his pistol into the base of Drew’s skull. “Don’t fucking move,” he whispered.
“I’m not moving, Trooper Lewis—not resisting in any way.”
“I will ask you this one time, and one time only. You’d better not lie to me, you understand?”
“Yes, Trooper. I understand.”
“Did you kill my daughter?”
“No, Trooper Lewis. I did not kill your daughter. I found her body, and I came here of my own free will to tell you about it.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“Yes, I did. I called the Oneka Falls Police Department anonymously and told them where to find her.” The pressure exerted on the base of his skull by Lewis’ pistol lessened but didn’t disappear.
“I can confirm whether or not that call happened.”
“Yes, I understand that,” said Drew. The calm in his voice surprised him. The calm he felt astounded him. “I didn’t kill her, Trooper. But I know who did.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Your partner.” The gun pressed harder into his neck, but Drew didn’t so much as wriggle. “LaBouche hung around Oneka Falls all day, Trooper. And the condition of… Your daughter’s murderer…spent a lot of time with her.”
“Tell me.”
“Trooper, I don’t want to tell you. You don’t want that image in your brain. I don’t even want to have it in mine, and I never met your daughter. She was restrained in a tiny room—a cell. There were…tools…hanging from the walls. You don’t want to hear the rest.”
The pressure on his neck disappeared, and Lewis sobbed a single, gut-wrenching time. The deck chair creaked under the sudden application of Lewis’ weight. “It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered, voice hitching and breaking.
“It only makes sense once you come to terms with the truth about LaBouche.”
They were silent for a moment, Drew leaning against the wall where Lewis had pinned him, Lewis in the deck chair, neither man moving. Lewis sighed, and the sound was horrible—hopeless and lost. “So, what? LaBouche is some kind of…some kind of serial killer?”
“Much worse than that, I’m afraid,” said Drew.
“Tell me,” said Lewis.
“I don’t know why or how, so please don’t ask me those questions. Ever since I was a kid, I could perceive…things…things that pretended to be humans. No one else I’ve ever met can see past the…well, I don’t know what to call it…the illusion. But I’ve always had the ability. At first, I believed I was crazy like the shrinks all said, but I realized that what I was seeing had to be real.”
Lewis sighed again. “Why? Why would you think that?”
“I watched one of them—a real loner, a real anti-social type. Anyway, I watched him whenever I had free time. I figured that if he was just a man—if I was delusional and hallucinating—that I’d never witness him do anything out of the ordinary.
“In the third week of watching, I followed him to a bad part of town. I watched him pick up a prostitute and get her in his car. He drove her to an abandoned building, and they went inside. An hour later, he came out, but the prostitute didn’t. I waited until he left, and then I went in the building. He’d…He’d killed her and gutted her like a deer. Parts of her were missing, cut away like meat.”
“You expect me to accept this guy was a serial killer?”
“No. At least not in the way you mean it. Not a human killing other people for fun.”
Lewis drew a deep breath and released it all in one big whoosh. “What then?”
“He was a demon. He was feeding on her. Oh, I didn’t know it then, but the more I watched him, the more I learned about them.”
“You are insane—you’re aware of that, right?” Lewis’ voice sounded dejected, horrified, and despondent.
“No, I’m not, Trooper Lewis. I’m not.”
Lewis scoffed.
“I’ve spent a long time—years—learning about these demons, Trooper. I’ve tracked a lot of them. They all share one thing in common: they feed off us humans. Some physically, like the first one I watched, but others seem to feed on emotion—fear, anger, despair. Some of them—the oldest of them—have developed into master manipulators. Like your partner.”
“You expect me to swallow that Lee LaBouche, my partner for the last eight years, is what? A psychotic, flesh-eating monster?”
Drew sighed. “May I sit?” Lewis grunted, and Drew moved to sit beside him in the other deck chair. “Listen, I can’t make you see them as they are. I’ve never met another person who can, but I can show you their den in Oneka Falls. I can show you their dungeons, their torture cells. And if OFPD moved fast enough, they can take you to your daughter’s body.”
Lewis stared up at the night sky, lips pursed, gun cradled in a loose fist in his lap. “Tell me something, Reid.”
“Anything.”
“Are you the man we’ve been looking for? Are you behind the disappearances of those people we spoke to you about?”
Drew pursed his lips, unsure of how to answer. If he said yes, he’d be admitting to killing twenty-two of what Lewis considered people. If he said no, he was certain Lewis would know he was lying. “Let me take you to Oneka Falls, let me show you—”
“Tell me, or I’m collaring you, and you can tell it to a judge.”
“No matter what I tell you, you’re going to arrest me anyway, and if you do, then I can’t help you. Not with Becky, not with LaBouche.”
“Stand up,” Lewis commanded in a tone that brooked no argument. Drew complied. What else was there to do? “Hands behind your back.”
As Lewis snapped cold handcuffs around his wrists, Drew tried one last time. “Trooper Lewis, you and your wife are in grave danger. LaBouche has been playing with your family for a long time. There’s a reason for that. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a reason. LaBouche is getting something out of it. He’s—”
“Enough!” snapped Lewis. “Just stand there a second with your trap shut.” Lewis moved to the door and then glanced back a Drew. “If you make me come out and chase after you, I’ll take you to jail instead of Oneka Falls.”
“You believe me?”
“Fuck no. You are a lunatic, but if you have any information, anything real, about my daughter’s whereabouts, I’ll put up with your bullshit for a few hours.” He turned back to the door. “But trust this, Reid. If you are wasting my time, I will make you regret it, crazy-ass fuck or not.”
“Fair enough, Trooper Lewis.”
Lewis put his hand on the door knob. “I’ll be a minute.”
“That’s fine. I’ll wait right here.”
Lewis opened the door.
“I’m not, though—wasting your time. Or a crazy-ass fuck.”
“If you are, you are. Whether you are will become clear in the next few hours. We can wait that long to find out.” Lewis stepped inside and closed the door.
I’m committed now, thought Drew. I hope I can make him accept it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to Oneka Falls and are dying to see what happens next. Blackened picks up where this novel leaves off and you can find it here: https://ehv4.us/4blackened.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I first wrote Demon King, I should have been doing something else…at least according to conventional wisdom. I should have been finishing my Blood of the Isir series, but Toby Burton was in my head, and he was banging on my brain with all of his strength. I couldn’t seem to get him out of there—at least not without writing a story.
Nightmare contains the first half of the tale told in Demon King, while Blackened contains the second half. Both books are being published more than a year after the collection. This may seem strange, but there is reason behind the rhyme. Demon King was originally written as a standalone book, but many readers enjoyed the story and requested a continuation of the tale. I am both honored and delighted to grant that request.
Some readers prefer longer works and are willing to wait for publication, while others prefer shorter works published faster. To that end, the series, The Bloodletter Saga, will contain shorter novels like this one, and the companion series, The Bloodletter Collections, will feature collections of the shorter books (such as Demon King). Both series will develop simultaneously.
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