“Knight,” she tried to say, but her voice faltered when he touched her stomach and traced the waistline of her pants. While keeping his gaze fixed on her, he looped his fingers beneath her pants and tugged on them, dragging them down her legs, and exposing every inch of her. She tried to shimmy away from him, but his hold on her pants was relentless and he simply reached down, slipping one sneaker off and pulling one pant leg free. With her arms cuffed behind her back, she was helpless to resist him.
“Knight, please stop,” she said again. “This isn’t the right place for this. I don't want ...”
“You don't want me?” he asked.
“I don't want to do this right now,” she stammered. “Not when things are this bad between us,” she added. Her tone of voice was so soft that it nearly disappeared on the slight breeze that wafted between them.
Vander chuckled acidly. “Things will never be good between us again, but that doesn't change the fact that I still want this.” With that, he grabbed her, pulling her against him.
She tried to push away from him, but didn't get far. He pressed her against the large, black vehicle again.
“I don't want to do this,” she whispered.
Vander didn't respond as he gripped her brassiere, using the strength inherent in his species. He simply tore it in half as she gasped. Her breasts bounced out and Vander's eyes narrowed as he stared at her, watching her breathing become vapid, shallow gasps. His eyes traveled down her face and remained on her bare breasts. He brought his fingers to one of them and pinched the nipple softly, rolling it between his fingers.
“Why,” she started. “Why are you doing this?”
He chuckled at that. “Why am I doing this?” he repeated, shaking his head as the smile vanished from his lips. “I'm doing this because I can.”
Thrusting his fingers inside her nether parts as if to prove his point, he lifted her against the vehicle before reaching down to unzip his pants. While staring at her, he freed himself and rubbed his hardness against her. Then he chuckled, and held on to both of her thighs as he stuffed himself inside her, as deeply as he could get. She screamed out against the sudden violation and bucked against him as he started to drive himself in and out of her mercilessly. Grasping a fistful of her hair, he held it tightly as he stared down at her.
“Lie to me, Dulcie,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Lie to me and tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” she said softly but there was no lie in her eyes.
His thrusts gained momentum as he bit his lower lip, driving himself as hard as he could deep inside her. He clenched his eyes shut and moaned loudly when he climaxed, grinding his pelvis into hers. When he opened his eyes again, he didn't say anything, but pulled out and lifted her by her waist before setting her on the ground.
“This changes nothing between us,” he said.
TWENTY
Bram
The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. The country, the lights, the large, black automobile, and Vander’s pathetic, empty face simply vanished in a rush of darkness. I was in the living room once again, lying down as I was before, but with a noticeably tenser posture.
Across the room, Vander staggered to his feet. He looked up, his eyes glowing, but not with any light I had ever seen in them previously. This light was darker, if it could be such a thing, and colder. The glow came from dead stars and radiation, red dwarfs and supernovas, all the dead and poisoned beings, and stale rooms without any air. He bared his teeth, blood dripping from his lips. His expression seemed haunted, but by which one of his many ghosts? I could only make a highly educated guess.
I pulled myself free of the spike, feeling nothing when the thick splinters tore through the fragile network of tissue in my shoulder, and was on him before I could even think to stop myself. I placed my hand on his throat. I lifted him and slammed him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and the wooden beams beneath it. I heard a bone snap, but I could not tell which one or whose.
I slammed him against the wall again, hoping every crack I heard came from him.
“You bastard!” I yelled, and my voice dropped several octaves, taking on the slick, unctuous quality of creatures whose only skill is to cause cruel death by suffering. I could think of no word that properly encompassed his crime, so I said it again. “She trusted you!”
“Then you must have seen the same thing I just did,” Vander answered. He glared at me before his eyes flitted to Meg.
I squeezed his throat. He paled.
“It wasn’t like that,” he protested. “Meg made you see what she wanted you to see.”
“Was what I saw the truth?” I demanded as my fangs pierced my lower lip.
“Yes and no,” he responded before spluttering as I tightened my grip around his throat. “Meg conveniently left out a few things.”
If any of it were true, that was enough for me. “Do you remember Jax?” I asked, spitting in his face. “Have you any sense or recollection of what he did to her?” I dug my nails into his throat, watching five neat red lines stream downward into his shirt. His pulse pounded heavily beneath me, like the thundering gallop of a panicked horse.
I dropped him, and he fell into a puddle of pathetic regret on the floor. He was coughing and gasping. He had the kind of soul one abandons, leaving it to rot in forbidden forests and graveyards. He was the the kind of man one should bury alive under the cloak of darkness.
“You nearly killed her,” he sputtered and hacked, blood dripping from his mouth to the floor where it fizzed like hydrogen peroxide. No smell has ever repulsed me so severely. The sound he made next seemed to be amused, though there was a grim edge to it. Perhaps he realized a deeply unpleasant truth, the kind that drives people to madness. He attempted a laugh, or a sour perversion of a laugh. Hysteria wrapped itself around him like a security blanket.
“I awoke with her body in my lap, and her blood in my mouth,” I responded. “I was starving and out of my mind. I was tricked into the situation. I have an alibi but you…”
My hand rose on its own accord, and shadows leapt from beneath the contorted bodies. Bits of broken furniture soared at Vander like a handful of darts, slicing his skin and pinning him to the wall. They were not Meg’s shadows, but the kinds of shadows I used to dematerialize. They swept across him like ribbons, or smoke, or ink, and as my fingers curled into a fist, my nails drawing my own blood, they closed around him, choking him the way a boa constrictor suffocates a deer.
“You raped her,” I said sharply. “Admit it, Vander. I want to hear the fucking truth from your lips.”
A pause. The whole world was on its way to hell in a handbasket, crumbling all around us, and he pauses?
“No,” he argued as he shook his head. “You don’t understand what the circumstances were. Meg didn’t want you to see all of it.”
“What she showed me was plenty.”
He shook his head again. “I told Dulcie to tell me she didn’t want me to,” he insisted, his chest rising and falling with his rapid breathing.
“It did not appear that way.”
“Because Meg didn’t want it to appear any other way.”
“Dulcie refused you more than once.”
He took a deep breath. “I asked her if she wanted me to and she said yes.”
It was my turn to shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”
He looked up at me and snapped, “Then do it!” through a ring of red teeth.
He was not challenging or daring me, as one might expect from a creature of his caliber, but rather, his words were spoken in a forlorn and loathing tone. It was not a challenge at all, but an entreaty, as genuine as I found him to be.
I wondered if the moment Meg went to so much trouble to display for both of us in the smoke was the whole truth of it. Perhaps that was why Vander would not fight me? Certainly, it must have been the reason Meg was yelling at him that he had hurt her baby?
“Do it,” he said again.
“I saw
it, Vander,” I replied. “Dulcie, pressed against your car, her hands bound behind her in the darkness. She was begging you to stop.”
His breath was raspy, clawing its way in and out of his lungs. The look he gave me was steeped in disgust and deprecation. It prickled my skin, and that was answer enough; he did it.
I would have killed him right there on the spot if Henry hadn’t come between us.
Henry swiftly knocked my hand away, and in that moment of hesitation, the shadows scattered. Vander slumped to the floor, his basic instinct making him gasp for breath he did not want to inhale. On the opposite side of the room from Henry, glowing in a golden heap beneath the collapsing fortress of broken wood, lay one of Meg’s grey creatures, its arm outstretched like a pitcher after a hard throw.
“I shall deal with you later,” I said to Vander as I charged the abomination instead.
###
Dulcie
Ooh, Meg was mad now. Real mad.
I took her by surprise, so she fell down and used her hands to lessen her impact on the floor. What was left of her hair draped over her face like a veil, the frayed edges of burnt strands dragged out into the wind. Cold air blew in shallow gusts through the open door, which creaked loudly on its hinges.
When she looked at me again, her eyes were black all the way through.
“Dulcie,” she said.
“Meg.”
“Mother,” she corrected me as she reached out and tried to smile. The air around her rippled, disturbed by a sudden rush of ice. “Mother.”
I stepped back, my brain fuzzing around the edges. The noise surrounded me, shouting, snapping, roaring, and crackling in and out of focus. “No.”
Her smile curdled like milk in vinegar. “Mother.”
“No.” My tongue went numb and I wanted to go home. I longed to crawl back into bed with Sebastian and forget about everything else. Everything.
No, not Sebastian. What was happening?
“Mother,” she said.
I bit my lip until it bled. I couldn’t look away. “No.”
She pried herself off the floor and stood on her feet, wobbling. The Darkness was certainly taking its toll, or maybe it had really been a long time since she last fed. Whatever the cause, she was weak, and seeing her weakness gave me an idea. Maybe she’d be susceptible, at last, to a glamour of my own. I had no idea if I could even do that yet, but it seemed reasonable to assume I could.
She opened her mouth to speak again but I cut her off. “No.”
Meg blinked. “Wh… what?”
“You,” I said, imagining my power saturating the words from everywhere in my body, “are not my mother.”
“No,” she said, “no, no, nonono!”
I took a step forward and repeated it. “You are not my mother.”
She screamed, clapping her hands over her ears. I wondered if that meant my plan was was working, or if she was simply resisting. Maybe this would be the straw that broke the demon-camel’s back, the last nail to shatter the mirror on the wall.
I said it again, only much louder this time. “You are not my mother.” Images of Sebastian and me and Meg and the mansion appeared before me and burned until they were all gone.
“NO!” The scream split the air, a substantial thunderclap of sound that snapped bones and broke teeth, scattering the fragments across the room. The house trembled. Cracks spread like spiderwebs across the ceiling, and entire sections fell in.
“NO! NO! NO!”
I put my hand on her shoulder and pinned her against the wall. Black blood crawled like slugs over my fingers. “You.” I said in barely a whisper now, seething, “Are. Not. My. Mother.”
She looked up.
I don’t know what she wanted at that moment. Maybe to drain me so I wouldn’t refuse her blood if she offered it to me. Maybe to taste her project and remind herself how much work went into the making of me. Maybe she intended to kill me, so no one could take me away again. Maybe she just longed to be close to me, one last time.
She sank her teeth into my throat and drank.
And drank.
And drank.
###
Knight
“Knight!”
I looked up. Sam was plastered to the wall, sweating bullets. She looked exhausted. Two undead had their teeth buried in her skin, through her leg and stomach, and she couldn’t pull away.
But she hadn’t called my name. Her eyes were closed, her jaw slack. I looked around and eventually found Casey on the ground behind a couch. Smears of black gunk streamed in stripes from his mouth.
He coughed, spewing black onto the carpet. “Help her!”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. I stared at him without registering anything. The vision or memory Meg had imprinted on Bram and me played behind my eyes again and again, carving its image into my skull. Voices hammered in my head like kids inside an aquarium, walled off by thick glass. My former apathy and numbness remained static.
Vander?
He’s back. We’re close, this way!
“Knight!” Casey pulled himself forward, dragging his leg behind him. His knee was facing the wrong way. “Knight, for fuck’s sake!”
Here! In here!
I blinked and the walls burst open.
Gleaming bodies rushed in, latching onto abominations and dragging out their hearts, pulling them free as if they were merely eradicating the weeds from a cemetery. Two men pulled the corpses away from Sam while a third man caught her and lay her gently down.
“Knight!”
The Lokis fought. They stabbed, shot, tore and broke things. Ripping out the hearts of stone from monsters no worse than any of us, they burned them in their hands.
Someone knelt in front of me, and glowed. “Dude, you dropped off the map,” said Gabe, resting his hand on my shoulder. “Came running the second you went dark. We thought you were dead.”
“I should be,” I whispered.
I stared, barely seeing him. One thought kept circling in my head like a vulture or crows over a battlefield.
Why didn’t I stop?
###
Dulcie
Meg released my neck. I hit the wall and slid.
After a muted rumble and crash, at least twenty gold-skinned Lokis rushed into the house. They tore the bodies to pieces, and the room seemed to be filled with gold confetti as the nefarious shadows were squished out of existence. Bram was on top of one abomination, driving his hand down its throat. In one swift motion, he wrenched it sideways and twisted, using both hands until the head tore off. The body folded underneath him like a house of cards in a hurricane, instantly swarmed by Lokis. A moment later and after a burst of light, they scattered, searching for another heart to extract.
I sat with my back against the wall, my lungs rattling, watching it all happen like an intruder in a dream.
Meg’s shadow fell over me. She knelt as she took my face in her hands, and the black blood smeared across them felt as cold as ice. Reaching into me with dark tendrils of power I couldn’t see, she began searching for the blood inside me that was formerly hers. The parts of me she and Melchior cultivated personally—the fairy and the vampire, which were coincidentally my strongest powers. A light moved behind her. Maybe it was Knight or Henry. Maybe an abomination Sam set on fire.
“Mother,” said Meg, as if the word were clawing its way out of her throat. Blood dribbled down her chin. “Mother.”
I grabbed her wrists and tried to pull her away. “No!” I said.
“Mother,” she repeated, more frantically this time.
I spat in her face. “No. My mother is dead. You are… you’re fucking nothing to me!”
She flinched and tried to pretend I didn’t say anything. “They will die,” she warned. “All of them. They…” Her lip trembled. “They stole you from me.” Her mouth twisted like she was trying to smile. “Not again. I will keep you safe. My sweet, sweet Dulcie…”
Suddenly, Henry was behind her wielding a sharp
, broken piece of wood in his hands.
“I’m sorry!” he screamed. Hades knows why.
He drove the stake through her back and straight into her heart.
Busting through Meg’s ribs and her breastplate with a force and fury I didn’t know he possessed, Henry proved his worth. The sound was like a storm pulling a tree out of the ground.
Meg’s eyes were wide and black-veined. Her mouth popped open as I staggered backwards and followed her with jerky, halting steps. A small, wooden point protruded from her chest, the blackish red spewing out from underneath it. There was blood, and a light, and the burning gold of whatever Henry carried within him now.
“Dul…cie…” she said.
I couldn’t open my mouth to reply. I stared at her, blinking slowly, the whole world a big, squinting blur. Around me, it was quiet. The Lokis thundered past me, destroying anything dead that still had the audacity to move, but I could barely hear them. I caught some unintelligible words, mutterings and murmurs. My ears rang with confusion.
Everything died. The abominations fell. My vision fuzzed over and the Lokis became as insubstantial as Christmas lights. One by one, they abandoned ship, slipping out the windows and the holes in the walls, chasing the ones smart enough to run. They hovered over Sam and Casey, along with the shadow fuming in the corner that must have been Bram. Knight was slumped against a wall and not listening to them. He wouldn’t move.
Then, out of the din, came footsteps. Slow, deliberate. “Meg?”
“Ezra,” she said as she reached for him.
He sat beside her and pulled her head into his lap, stroking her hair. Behind him, the house was in chaos, but among our circle of three, there was precious silence. He sighed. “Meg. My darling Meg… what has happened to you? To all of us?” The words sounded as though they were spoken under water, thick and hard to understand.
“Ezra,” she said, lifting her hand and brushing her fingers against his cheek. “Give yourself to me.” Dark water coiled out from her palm and traveled to his parted lips, going down his throat and into his body. “Give…”
What Screams May Come Page 24
