Blood Lite

by Jim Butcher

  Holding his glasses on with one hand, Jess went to help Dave, as well. Dave accidentally kicked him in the throat. Jess fell against the wall, clutching his neck and wheezing. Sam's robe, hanging from a hook on the door, strangled Jess with its sash.

  Sam's vision was blurry from the tears and the shock, but he couldn't let that stop him. He spit blood off his lips, reached for Dave.

  The lid of the toilet tank flew at his head. He ducked and it shattered against the shower stall. The shower curtain wrapped around him like a flour tortilla. He wrestled one arm free.

  Dave's legs thrashed less and less; the bubbles began to peter out. Jess was about to pass out, too.

  Sam lurched forward—the shower curtain yanked him back. So he lunged, put all his weight into it, his free arm outstretched, and the shower curtain tore away from its hooks. He flew past Dave, his hand slammed the toilet handle, and then he fell between the toilet and the vanity, the plastic trash can jabbing his ribs.

  The toilet flushed; Dave gasped and fell back, sitting his bare ass in the tub. The shower curtain loosened around Sam and the robe quit strangling Jess. The only sound was heavy breathing and water rushing into the toilet tank.

  Sam lifted himself and shucked the shower curtain. Jess, his eyes a little watery, was picking himself up and rubbing his neck, hacking dryly. Sam went to Dave and bent over him. "You okay?"

  Dave glared; his hair dripped toilet water and brown smears sullied his cheeks—one of the smears resembled a penny, complete with Honest Abe. "Fuck you," Dave said. He pushed Sam out of the way and climbed out of the tub. He yanked up his pants.

  "Dave," Sam said, "I'm sorry. He never comes into the bathroom, he—"

  "I'm leaving," Dave interrupted. "I've had enough of your spook house." He shoved Jess aside and reached for the door.

  "Dave, no!"

  But he had already opened it.

  Somewhere in the hall, the fishbowl rattled its egg-beaters. And suddenly knives darted into the room. Dave ducked and Sam dove into the tub, but Jess didn't react in time—he was too busy adjusting his glasses.

  One of the blades stabbed into his arm. Two more sank into his belly. And the last one—the last one sliced open his neck and severed an artery. The blood, bright and red, sprayed the vanity mirror. Jess fell against the back wall.

  Dave ran screaming and Casper didn't stop him. Sam heard his DVD dresser crash to the carpet, heard Dave run out the front door, screeching into the night.

  Sam got out of the tub, his hands and knees shaking so badly he could barely stand. "Bro," he said, kneeling next to Jess. "Shit—hang in there, bro. I'm going to—shit, fuck—I'll get you an ambulance."

  Jess stared at him, his eyes glazing, his body squirming less and less. He took Sam's hand, greasing it with blood, and pulled him closer. He opened his mouth as if to say something.

  "What is it?" Sam said. "What?"

  Jess started to speak but cleared his throat, choked up blood, swallowed, licked his lips, pulled Sam closer and closer and closer still, until Sam could smell iron in the blood, and with the whispery wisdom of those legendary last words, Jess said, "Twat." He exhaled and his head fell to one side.

  "Jess," Sam said. "Jess!" He wanted to shake him, shout at him, rouse some life in him, but the eggbeater chortled and something pressed against Sam's throat: a steak knife.

  He tensed and began to shudder and weep. "Please," he said, "I'll do whatever you want. Just—let me have one call. Just one. My friend"—my only friend—"he needs help."

  There was a pause. Then in the scum and dust on the bathroom mirror, two words formed: "Beast frend."

  "Yes." Sam nodded. "Best friend. Please

  The knife pressed into his neck, forcing him to stand. It led him to the love seat, back in its original position. Street Fighter idled on the character select screen, cursors highlighting Ken and Ryu. And in Jess's ass-kicking zone, with both controllers floating in front of it, Gold Bond's fishbowl waited; a fish's skeleton, swabbed in cobwebs, floated in kegerator beer.

  "Holy shit," Sam said. "You're . . . you're not Casper. You never were."

  The bowl stared at him. It gestured for him to sit down.

  "I need to call—I... my friend needs help." The bowl just stared at him. The knife pressed into his throat and forced him to sit. He smashed himself against the arm of the love seat, trying to get as far away from the fishbowl as possible, but he still felt a chill, like a cold leg brushing against his—or like when something swims past you as you're wading up to your neck.

  Working both controllers, the ghost began the match, Ken versus Ryu, the classic fight. The second-player controller floated over to Sam. He frowned at it, glanced at the phone sitting on the milk crate.

  The eggbeaters growled and the house thrummed; the timer on the match counted down.

  "Fucking carpet stretcher," Sam said. He took the controller and prayed Dave would bring back the cops, or the Ghostbusters, or John Edward, or that short lady from Poltergeist—anyone who could deal with a ghost.

  The spirit held out its controller the way Jess used to do. Sam glowered. He tapped his against it, toasting. "I'm going to eat you for dinner," he said. And then, with a knife against his throat, tears on his cheeks, and blood on his shirt, he began to play with the goldfish.

  I Know Who You Ate Last Summer

  Nancy Holder

  "That should be 'whom,'" Carla M. said, "and that's part of the problem. It's too convoluted and it puts the emotional throughline on the victim. And frankly, who gives a shit about her?"

  "Whom. 'I Know Whom You Killed Last Summer'," Angelo read off the screen of Carla M.'s state-of-the-art flat-screen monitor in her cool North Hollywood bungalow; bitch thought she was all that. Which she was.

  "Wow, you're right. It sucks," Angelo said happily.

  "It's all about the Big Picture," Carla M. rambled on. "How all your artistic choices flesh it out."

  Flesh.

  "It's so obvious," Angelo cooed.

  On the couch, away from the action, Dwight rolled his eyes. All Angelo had talked about on the drive from their Spanish Revival mansion in the Hollywood Hills was how great his title was. How much he loved it. Now he was betraying it because Carla M. had dropped it back into the Bottomless Well of Artistic Choices.

  "Big picture. You're a genius. You're better than Robert McKee." Angelo gazed at her like she had invented the space-time continuum and tossed back his black shoulder-length curls.

  Dwight stared at Angelo's hair and ground his teeth. Last night, Dwight got told by Tawni, the hairdresser who came to their mansion to style them and give them blow jobs, that shoulder-length curls were just too eighties rock star. It was almost too late to even go for the bald look, but luckily....

  So once Dwight was shaved like a fucking cue ball, in walked Angelo from somewhere he went alone and had not told Dwight. And then he proceeded to laugh at Dwight's head and get a curly perm like he was going to tape an infomercial for A Tribute to Dan Fogelberg.

  And when it was all done, Tawni oohed and aahed and spouted some bullshit about Angelo's sharp profile and rugged chin line; and wondered aloud if maybe she had been hasty about the death of curly and long. And by the way, Dwight should lay off the Botox injections and hire a personal trainer to correct his body mass index. She lectured him about colonies, which were enemas.

  So after she left, Dwight made an ultimatum: his ego, her life.

  "We can't eat her. She's the best haircutter in Hollywood," Angelo argued. "Plus, we gotta stay off the radar." Dwight pouted and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He looked like a young Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. He was going to have to buy a wig.

  Plus, he was starving. Angelo was so caught up in his movie thing that they hadn't devoured a chick in forever.

  Sweating in his black leather pants, Dwight crossed his legs, put his dusty boots on Carla M.'s Danish modern "find" (as opposed to a "couch"), and text-messaged with the president of their fan
club. God, he was so hostile. It would be nice to go to a therapist, but shrinks were clever bastards: When did you stop eating your wife? Rule Number One of the Cannibal Code was No One Knows.

  Besides, wives were for wimps. Dwight had never been married. It was just him and Angelo, not in a gay way, not even vaguely metro. When you were busy and famous, you had relationships with nobodies. And ate them, too.

  Except now they were busy at the home of Ms. Somebody, who they had met in AA. Despite nearly losing her liver to booze, she was still a player. So Angelo played her. One minute they were listening to her war stories about Demon Tequila and the next, Angelo was informing her that he and Dwight wanted to be the next Rob Zombie, which was total news to Dwight.

  And now they spent every single Saturday night at her trendy NoHo bungalow, working on Angelo's creative genius piece-of-shit serial killer movie while she groped Mr. Curly Top. Which was the most insane, self-destructive thing they could possibly do, because, hello? Cannibals? What about "No One Knows"?

  "Also, since the Echo Park Killer is still at large, it looks like you're rifling off the murders. It comes off cheesy," Professor M. continued.

  "Carly-car," Angelo moped. "Then we've got nothing." He sighed and glanced over at Dwight with his patented

  "Maybe you're right, maybe we should just eat her" look.

  He shifted around on the find/couch, squishy with sweat. He wished she had air-conditioning. Summers in LA could be brutal. All the chrome and glass; sometimes the freeways started to melt, no lie.

  Rock stars like them couldn't be caught dead in shorts.

  "Don't panic. This is the most exciting part of the creative process," Carla M. told the guy who was in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. "The artistic choices. There are so many."

  "So little time," Angelo joshed. They put their heads together and chuckled. What goes hahaha—thud? A cannibal cat laughing his head, off.

  "You break it down, you build it up," Carla M. went on. And on.

  You knock her out, you chew her up, Dwight thought.

  CannibalDwight2CCatsPrezie:SHOUTOUT

  2 JACKIE ON HER BDAY! CCatsPrezie2CannibalDwight:

  OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! U remembered!

  Then a new text message came in. Not from CCatsPrezie but from someone named Unregistered. What the heck; they had to be cool if they had his number. Dwight read it.

  I NO WHO U 8 LAST SUMMER

  Dwight nearly fell off the couch. Instead, he gasped as his phone clattered onto Carla M.'s state-of-the-now retro turquoise linoleum floor.

  "Dwight?" Angelo asked, swiveling around on Carla M.'s desk chair. "Zup?"

  The people with hair were both staring at him. Dwight bent down—his black leather pants needed to be let out a tad—grabbed up his phone, and very carefully did not look at the faceplate again.

  "Wow. Sorry, dozed off, it's so fucking unbearably hot in here," he said.

  Angelo gave him a look. Dwight wanted to return it. Dwight wanted to tell him to meet him in Carla M.'s bathroom, with her vintage Serenity Prayer plaque on the wall and a pair of Praying Hands from some little town in Tuscany called Nostromo or something like that. He wanted to tell Angelo they were either in big trouble or Angelo was a douche bag for sending him a tasteless practical joke.

  However, he and Angelo had not survived decades of living as rock star cannibals without becoming very, very good at covering their tracks. You eat a couple little runaways or an insecure, unreliable backup singer, that's one thing. You accidentally devour the wife of the guy who runs your new label, that's quite another.

  Yeah, and you gobble up Alice, the one girl in all the world who your partner loves....

  He knew he was panicking. His mind was zooming all over the inside of his skull like a pinball. Feigning a semi-apologetic, mostly not-giving-a-shit look, he slipped the phone into his wretchedly tight leather pants and shrugged. "We should go."

  "Dwight" Angelo said tiredly. "Dude, we're working here. Well, at least Carla and I are working."

  Dwight's heart thundered. He didn't want to work here. His stomach was a bowlful of acid. NO

  Dwight hadn't peed in his tight black leather trousers yet, but he was about to vomit all over them.

  "Angelo, we have to go now," he blurted, and there went the expert covering of their tracks. He was too scared. He had to get out of there before he had a panic attack. "We really, really do."

  "Maybe your blood sugar's low," Angelo said. "Maybe you need something to eat." He waggled his brows. From where she sat, Carla M. couldn't see the smirk on Angelo's face; and for all her highly touted writer's powers of observation, she didn't even know there was a joke, much less that it was at her expense.

  "It's not funny," he insisted. "I, uh, have a sudden emergency."

  "Okay. Jesus." Angelo rolled his eyes at Carla M. "Musicians."

  "Hey, at least you guys never go on strike," she replied, and they both chuckled.

  Dwight was doing no chuckling. He didn't wait for Angelo to finish elbowing Carla M.'s boobs while he dug out the keys. He was out the door and down the walkway by the time Angelo caught up to him.

  "What the fuck is your problem?" Angelo demanded. "We were closing in on a title!"

  Dwight kept walking. Angelo beeped open the Jag and Dwight slid in, black leather on black leather. Angelo stomped around to the driver's side and despite everything, every single motherfucking thing, Dwight enjoyed seeing Angelo being pissed off by him.

  "Okay, here it is," Dwight said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone. He handed it to Angelo, who glanced down at it while he started the car. Baby purred. Angelo stared.

  Then he said, "I know who you ate last summer?" "I think that should be 'whom,'" Dwight said snarkily, which was stupid but he didn't care. He was shaking. "I have to throw up."

  Angelo pulled over and Dwight leaned his head out of the air-conditioning and into the overheated, smoggy night. Because they were rock stars, they had to pull over a lot. Their limo drivers were all trained to take it to the curb ASAP if they got the word.

  But there was nothing to throw up. Dwight's dry heaves made him dizzy, but that was about it. Sighing and wiping his forehead, he slumped back into his seat and rolled up the window. The air-conditioning made his nipples hard. Angelo resumed driving. He wasn't going anywhere near their Spanish Revival mansion up in the Hollywood Hills.

  "Someone's watching us. Someone knows," Dwight said.

  Angelo took his eyes off the road, not a good idea when you are going ninety-five. Worse when you are going a hundred and seven. They were rock stars. They had to speed.

  "Dwight, if this is a misguided cry for attention .. ." Dwight wanted to choke him. Goddammit, sometimeshe had just had it up to here with Angelo's condescension and his cooler-than-thou bullshit. Okay, okay, Angelo had been Angelo Leone back in Upper Mayonnaise, Iowa; and Dwight Jones had been the son of a man who had beat his wife to death, and was going to come after his kid next.

  And Angelo was the one with the trust fund, who got him the hell out of there (without graduating from high school) and rented a mansion close to where the Grateful Dead lived; and bought them equipment and lessons and all the clothes.

  But Dwight was the one who found out that living human flesh tasted better than any other delicacy on the planet. And Dwight was the one who had nearly devoured Angelo on not one but three separate occasions, and then relented and let him live. And of course self-absorbed, arrogant, stupid Angelo didn't have a clue, not a clue, that he had come so close to death at the hand—make that teeth—of Dwight "the Loser" Jones.

  "Let's go to Maria Begsley's house and score some blow."

  "Maria's in AA now," Dwight reminded him.

  They had joined Alcoholics Anonymous as a metaphor, so they could stop eating people—okay, women—but Dwight had never wanted to—join, or stop. Raw human flesh was all he could eat anymore, and all he wanted to eat. Then Angelo had become addicted to making connections throug
h their AA meetings, so they had to keep going.

  Maybe that anonymity shit worked back in Sheboygan, but in Hollywood, if you were getting your act together, you wanted everyone to know it. You went to a party, you

  strutted around saying things like, "No alcohol for me tonight, thank you. I'll just have an Evian and some St. John's Wort. I am in the program. I am a friend of Bill W." "Is this for the movie?" Dwight asked. "Like, you sent me the message to see how I would react?"

  Angelo flashed him a look. "Dwight, please, would I do anything so idiotic?"

  Yeah, actually, you would, Dwight thought. And he also thought about that brain disease that Hawaiians or whoever got, kurukuru, from practicing cannibalism. It came from eating people's brains. There were parasites. It couldn't be Hawaiians. It happened in the 1960s. Okay, maybe it could be Hawaiians. Hawaiian hippies or something. Some Hawaiian hippies ate roadkill.

  Kurukuru tossed you into the Well of Bad Judgment. Maybe Angelo had it.

  "Did you text me?" Dwight asked. And before Angelo could flash him another "how dareth you question moi" look, he said, "Just tell me."

  Angelo swerved around a slow-moving vintage Corvette and nearly took out a guy on a motorcycle. Guy looked like a Hells Angel. Flipped Angelo off.

  "Who might know?" Angelo asked. "Hey, you didn't, like, tell your sponsor about us, did you?"

  "Are you insane?" Dwight snapped. Then a horrible suspicion dawned on him. "You didn't tell Bob V., did you?"

  Bob V. had been Angelo's AA sponsor. Who Dwight had managed to kill in a fire. That should be 'whom.'

  "Jesus, Dwight, give me some credit," Angelo said, but there was a catch in his voice. A guilty little catch.

  He did. Dwight knew it as sure as he knew the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner," which they had sung last Saturday at Angels Stadium.

  Angelo had told his sponsor that they were cannibals. Sponsors were these guys who took you through your Twelve Steps and overstepped your boundaries. Tried to become your new best friend.

  "Anyway, he's dead," Angelo went on.