by Sara Snow
He pressed his index finger against his cheek as if he was trying to dredge up a memory. His fingernails were long and thick with a brownish tinge.
“Have you seen her?” I asked again.
“Maybe. I’m thinking. Lots of girls out last night.”
Those fingernails, long as claws and flecked with a dried brown substance, made me feel slightly nauseous. He probably chewed tobacco. I imagined those fingers dipping into a can of snuff, then tucking the wad deep in his cheek. That was it, I was sure.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I did see a little blonde gal holding a yellow balloon.”
“Do you have any idea where she went? She’s missing, you see, and we need to find her as soon as possible. Something might have happened to her.”
His eyes beetled under the brim of his cap. His finger was still set in that parody of deep thought, but he hadn’t once taken those eyes off me.
I was starting to feel uneasy. But so far, he was my only hope.
“I saw her buy a balloon. Then, she walked away to look at the water. Guess she wanted to watch the sunset.”
“Down that way?” I asked, pointing toward the end of the pier.
“Yeah. That’s the way I saw her go.” He hadn’t stopped staring at me from under that hat. His thin lips, the color of raw liver, curved in a humorless smile.
“Thanks so much!” I said brightly. “Have a great day!”
“I saw her walk down the stairs to the water,” he called after me.
I stopped. “What stairs?”
“Come with me. I’ll show you.”
This guy was setting off all kinds of alarm bells in my head. There was something wrong about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I decided that he was definitely beyond creepy and that the Cubs cap only accentuated the weirdness of his half-melted features. But I was a hunter now, and he was just a guy. I had worked with Eli to destroy a powerful demon. I could handle myself if this weirdo decided to try anything.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
For a guy with such an uneven gait, he walked pretty fast. I found myself half-jogging to keep up with him. I tried to reassure myself that he was hurrying so we could find the girl faster. But as we left the mid-way behind and reached the isolated end of the pier, I started to feel nervous.
“Are we almost there?” I asked. “We’ve walked pretty far.”
“So did she.”
He had stopped pretending to be chatty, and we’d left the carnival far behind. The waters of Lake Michigan were flat and gray, offering no beauty to relieve my fear. By now, I had realized that this man, or whatever he was, knew a lot more than he had let on when we were still safely surrounded by other people.
But scared as I was, I was even more afraid that the blonde girl with the balloon would be dead before I could get to her.
We reached a flight of steps. The man in the baseball cap stopped and extended his arm.
“Ladies first,” he said.
I looked around, hoping like hell that I’d see Carter running after us. At this point, I would have settled for a rent-a-cop in a golf cart—any glimpse of humankind would have reassured me that I wasn’t alone out here with this strange, wrong guy.
No one was coming to my rescue. I could either choose to run and save my own ass, or walk down those stairs and rescue a missing girl.
I chose the stairs.
As soon as I reached the last step, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I looked over my shoulder and saw the man in the baseball cap standing over me. The bulk of his body blocked out the sun. In the shadows below the pier, his eyes turned an incandescent red.
“Keep going,” the demon said.
“You’ve killed her, haven’t you?” My question came out in a high squeak. Not exactly the kind of voice that would intimidate a demon.
“I said keep going. I’ll show you where she is.”
I stepped into the darkness under the pier. I had never been down here before, but I’d heard about it from my high school friends. It was a popular place to buy drugs or meet anonymous sexual partners. I only wished I were here to take part in such innocent activities.
Instead, I was being led to my death.
I had no doubt that the demon wanted to kill me. Maybe he was avenging the death of Mammon or some other being that the Venandi had destroyed. Maybe he was just a sick motherfucker who got off on murdering young women.
And I’m not even going to get a yellow balloon out of the deal.
We walked for what seemed like hours, although it couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet to the girl’s final resting place. I smelled the stench of decomposition and heard the buzz of flies before I saw her.
I willed myself not to scream, whimper, or cry.
I might be in the hands of a serial-killing demon, but I wasn’t going to be a wimp about it.
She appeared to me in flashes. Foggy blue eyes staring up at the bottom of the pier. Blonde hair. Trendy Converse sneakers. Skin-tight jeans. Yellow balloon floating above her head, too frightened to come down.
The pink t-shirt was nowhere in sight. He must have torn it off her body to make it more convenient when he sliced open her chest. He would have plowed the knife into the hollow below her xiphoid process, then cut through her bones and cartilage with rough, rhythmic thrusts. I wondered if she’d been alive to feel it.
The demon caught me staring at the yawning hole where his victim’s heart used to be.
“Heartless bitch,” he said with a leer.
Under any other circumstance, I might have laughed at that sick joke. Today, my sense of humor had abandoned me, along with Carter and anyone else who might have come to my rescue. I was down here below the pier, alone.
A single word floated from my mouth: “Why?”
“I did it for you,” said the demon. “Four girls, dead. Because I knew that after I killed enough of them, you would come to me.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around the horror of his confession. All of them—the blonde girl and three others—had met the grisliest end imaginable so that this supernatural freak could have his moment with me.
“What the hell do you want?” I cried.
“I want you to know what you are.”
“I’m just a girl, like they are. Were.”
He shook his head slowly. Those liver lips quivered when he laughed. “You are a cambion. Know what that means?”
I remembered reading that word in Kingston’s book. A cambion was the offspring of a human and a demon. How could I possibly be a cambion?
“I’m a human being,” I said. “One hundred-percent human.”
“No. You’re one of us.”
“My mother was not a demon. A junkie, yes. A bad parent, yes. But that doesn’t make her evil.”
As I backed away from the corpse, I stumbled and fell back against the demon’s torso. He caught me, his arms clamping down onto my body like a vise. I jerked myself free and took a few steps, trying to break into a run. But he caught me by the arm and slammed me into one of the wooden pilings. I had no choice but to listen.
“Not your mother, Georgia.”
His face was so close to mine that I could smell the stench of decay that wafted from his mouth.
“I don’t know who my father was. Not even my mother knew.”
But even as I denied it, I was starting to see the reality of my childhood falling into place.
A mother too lost in her opiate slumber to take care of me. A father who was only described as a “sperm donor.” My mother had never told me anything about him. He could have been any one of the men she slept with in exchange for drugs, food, or cigarettes.
“I see that you don’t understand. Your mother was a useless scrap of flesh who sold her body for heroin. Your father is a proud and mighty demon who can move mountains and cause earthquakes under the ocean. Which of your parents do you want to follow?”
“Neither one of them,” I said.
H
e grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me so hard that my teeth rattled. I screamed with every ounce of energy I had. How long would he put me through this torture before he killed me? I’d rather be slowly torn to ribbons than subjected to the full story of my origin.
“My friends are going to be here any second,” I said. “And they have weapons. Why don’t you let me go? A demon can’t be convicted of murdering a human. You can go on your merry way, kill girls all across the state of Illinois, and the cops will never find you.”
He chuckled. “Your ‘friends’ should have told you who you are. Do you really think they don’t know you are a cambion? The Venandi have used your powers against your own kind.”
The fragile, growing confidence within me crunched and crumbled. He had a point. The Venandi should have told me from the beginning that I was half-demon. Anything less than that was a betrayal of my trust, and I didn’t give trust away lightly. I felt a surge of resentment towards Carter and Kingston, and an even stronger burst of rage towards the demon. I thrashed under his grip, kicking at his shins and his groin. The demon roared in pain, but he didn’t let me go.
“The more you fight us, the harder it will be for you,” he said in a guttural warning. “You will suffer along with your human friends who are too weak to protect you. Where are they now, cambion? If you don’t align yourself with us, you will be destroyed by us. You choose.”
He squeezed my cheeks, forcing my mouth into a grotesque parody of a kiss. His thick, crusty talons dug into my flesh, and his thin lips descended on mine.
I broke away and screamed with all my might.
Instead of putting the demon off, my screams aroused him. A hard projection of flesh pressed against my lower belly. I gagged, almost puking at the sensation.
“Hey! Where are you?”
Recognizing Carter’s voice, I screamed again. “Carter! Help me!”
The demon wheeled around at the sound of another voice. Behind the demon’s hulking shoulders, I saw Carter standing in the shadows. Relief flooded through my veins, leaving me so weak that I sagged against the piling. Carter held the flamethrower at his hip. We each had an iron stake, but I’d had no opportunity to use mine against this brute.
I stared at Carter, but I saw no sign from him that we should initiate an attack against the demon. Apparently, he was going to play it cool—distract the demon long enough for me to break free. I tensed my muscles, ready to spring away as soon as my captor let down his guard.
Carter was a smooth talker, and it didn’t take long for him to seduce the demon with flattery. Before long, the two of them were talking shop about dissecting human corpses. The poor blonde lay, her vacant eyes staring into space while Carter complimented the demon on his technique.
The stench of decomposing flesh was starting to permeate the dank space under the pier. Between that overpowering smell and my fear of what the demon might do to us, I could barely breathe. The underbelly of the pier felt as cramped and cold as a coffin. Were Carter and I going to die down here? And if we did, would anyone find us?
The demon was boasting about the butcher’s knife he’d used to carve out his victim’s heart while Carter stood by nodding, an appreciative look on his face. I wished like hell that he would wrap up this bizarre conversation and do something to help me escape. Didn’t Carter realize how agonizing it was to feel the demon’s infernal heat pressed against my body, to have to breathe in the rank odor of his breath?
“Still got the knife? I’d love to see your technique,” Carter was saying. He even made some sick comment about how the demon had carved up the blonde like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Oh, please! There had to be a limit to how far Carter would go to kiss this demon’s ass. He was piling it on so thick that I almost thought Carter might be indulging in a necrophiliac fantasy of his own.
Suddenly, I realized that Carter actually did have a strategy when the demon backed away to go get his knife. The second he lifted his weight off me and waddled off to find his weapon, I slipped away.
While the demon fumbled through his possessions, grunting and grumbling to himself, Carter and I made a run for it. I padded on tiptoe over the soft dirt, terrified of alerting the demon that I had escaped. He wasn’t going to let me go so easily, not after everything he’d done to lure me to this place.
Carter motioned for me to follow him to a piling about fifty yards from the body. He held up his flamethrower, and I knew that he intended to blast the demon from that range as soon as we got the chance.
The thought that a demon had killed not just one victim, but four girls altogether just to get my attention made me sick with disbelief. How did he think I would respond to that gruesome bait? Did he think I would be impressed by the murders? Maybe even excited?
I wanted to vomit at the memory of being wedged under the demon’s massive torso while he told me about my history. I wouldn’t have expected my mother to tell me who my father was or where he came from. She didn’t even know her own name half the time, much less the name of the “sperm donor” who had become my father. But if I was really the daughter of a demon, she would have known. I was sure she would have known.
Then I looked at Carter, crouched beside me in the shade at the foot of the piling. He stared intently at the kill site as we waited for the demon to return.
In my relief at being rescued, I had forgotten about Carter’s betrayal. He knew that I was a cambion. If Carter knew, then so did Kingston, Olympia, Eli, and possibly even sweet Jose. None of them had told me about my origins, even though they’d had plenty of opportunity. They had praised me for my superpowers, had even used my gifts to their own advantage, but none of them had told me where those powers came from.
Worst of all, my “friends” hadn’t prepared me for the psychological shock of finding out that one half of me was demonic. Carter had warned me that the demons would try to lure me to their side of the war, but he hadn’t told me that the reason I was a hot commodity was because I already had demon blood running through my veins.
I clenched my fists to keep from pounding the shit out of Carter. If we wanted to ambush this brute, send him blazing back to Hell, we had to keep quiet.
“Where did you go? Where did you take that cambion bitch?” the demon shouted.
Carter turned to me and whispered, “Are you okay?”
The phony note of concern in his voice sent me over the top. I started to spit accusations, striking out at him with my fists as I shouted about his betrayal. Carter covered my mouth with his palm.
“We’ll talk about this later. Right now, we have to be quiet or that son-of-a-bitch will destroy us!”
It didn’t matter now whether the demon heard us. He already knew I was a cambion—that’s why this hideous string of murders had been committed. He knew that Carter and I were hiding under the pier. Once he realized that we’d left his kill site, he would know that Carter’s flattery had been a ploy, and that we were either plotting an escape or planning an ambush.
“Who cares?” I cried. “I trusted you. You knew what I was, but you kept it a big, fat secret.”
“Georgia. Stop.” He held my wrist so tightly that I felt the imprint of his fingers burning my flesh. “I would never harm you. I have always wanted what was best for you. And right now, that means saving ourselves.”
The intensity in his eyes stopped me mid-rant. He was right. The question of my identity would have to wait.
Carter held out the flamethrower and pushed it in my direction. “Here, you take this. I’m going to take on that monster hand-to-hand. As soon as I spear him through the heart with some iron, I’ll move away. Then, I want you to fire that thing at him like your life depends on it, because it does.”
I pushed the flamethrower back at him. “No. You take the flamethrower. I’ll take the iron. I want to be the one to shove that stake through the bastard’s heart.”
“I can’t let you take him on, Georgia. That demon is stronger than you could ever imagine.”
>
“Oh, I can imagine. He held me down and breathed his infernal breath in my face until I thought I was going to pass out. I know what he’s capable of. Give me the iron.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.”
My hatred for that beast churned in my gut. I hated him for what he had done to those four girls. I hated him for destroying my sense of who I was. I hated him for saying that any part of me was evil. And I hated him for turning me against the Venandi, who had been my only source of love and support in the world.
Yeah. I had a lot of good reasons to demolish this motherfucker.
The demon stomped around the kill site, kicking at the trash on the ground as he roared his outrage. In his fury, he kicked his victim over and over in the ribs—as if carving her chest open to rip out her heart hadn’t been violent enough.
“Doesn’t he see us?” Carter wondered. “We need to get his attention and stop his tantrum long enough to keep him still. You’ll never be able to strike him while he’s thrashing around like that.”
“I know how to stop him.” I gave a loud, sharp whistle through my teeth.
The demon’s back was turned to us. He stopped, his foot raised to smash his victim’s helpless body one more time. I realized that he had no peripheral vision when he had to rotate his bulky torso to see where the whistle was coming from.
I motioned for Carter to stay where he was. Then, I darted to a distant piling and hid behind it. The demon turned, growling. He began to lurch in the direction of my whistle. Quiet as a cat, I ran from one piling to another, making a half-circle around him.
The demon had told me I was evil. That I belonged with the likes of him and their diabolical army. That my friends had lied to me, and that I could trust no one.
I was directly behind the demon now, lurking in the shadows, the stake in my fist. I slid it into my back pocket—there would be plenty of time to use it later.
Time to strike.
Fueled by my anger, I rushed at the demon’s broad back. I screamed like a banshee as I jumped on him, wrapping my legs around his waist as I dug my fingernails into his eyes. The Cubs cap fell off his head, revealing a pair of hard bumps embedded in his skull. As I clawed at his eyes, those protrusions began to grow. Soon, they’d lengthened into long horns, twisted like the horns of a mountain goat.