Group Hex Vol 1

by Andrew Robertson

  Cath shrugged. “Girl’s gotta eat.” She stared past him, and he heard gravel crunching underfoot. Joe turned, his hand slipping by reflex to touch the switchblade inside his boot top.

  A fat man in black pants, white shirt, and paisley tie loosened at the neck was struggling down the steep path from the highway, a beach chair in each arm. He walked over to the stone wall and put down the chairs to rest. Nodding at Joe and Cath, he glanced at her sketches. He began to turn away but then looked back. His eyes ran over the portraits lined against the low wall like prisoners before a firing squad. The man whistled.

  Joe sighed, from regret and relief. Cath would eat tonight.

  With her mouth, she breathes you in...

  The man’s name was Harry. He haggled with Cath over the price then he sat down, and Cath started sketching. Joe glanced at the two chairs that Harry had carried, but he couldn’t see a wedding ring, so he kept silent.

  Cath worked quickly, her hand slashing at the page, pausing only to switch the color of her pencil. When only the mouth remained unfinished, she put the pad down on her lap.

  Harry looked down at the sketch. “There’s no mouth.”

  “Mouths are special, Har,” Cath said. She puckered at him, and Harry laughed, a nervous squeaky sound. Cath touched a finger of her drawing hand to Harry’s lips. He gave that little laugh again but didn’t pull away. Cath ran her fingertips slowly over his lips, tracing each curve and contour. Sitting on the stone wall, Joe thought of her fingers on his own skin at night in bed, tracing the lines of his body. Love and fear and lust--with Cath, they all mixed together, colors in a picture flowing into each other, until you couldn’t separate one from another.

  She lowered her hand to the paper, her eyes still on Harry’s mouth. Picking up a red pencil and dropping her eyes, her hand began to stab at the paper in short urgent strokes. The mouth grew under her fingers as Joe watched. She finished in seconds. Removing the sketch sheet, Cath handed it to Harry. He regarded it for a moment, grunted his approval, and paid her. Portrait under his arm, he picked up his chairs and nodded a good-bye.

  After watching Harry labor down the path toward the boardwalk below, Joe walked to where Cath sat cross-legged on the ground, her sketch pad on her lap. She carefully lifted a sheet of carbon paper from the top of the pad. A copy of the sketch she had just rendered of Harry stared up at Joe in black and white. No color, thought Joe. As if all the life’s been sucked out of it. No, he thought. Not all of it. Not yet.

  From her canvas bag, Cath removed a small rosewood box, its hinged cover carved with letters in a script Joe thought was Arabic. He’d never checked, wanting to know as little as possible about the thing. Cath opened the lid and withdrew what looked like a child’s crayon but without any paper covering.

  The crayon was as long as Joe’s middle finger but thicker, and a red so dark it was almost black. Joe remembered drawing as a kid, the crayons, the names of the colors. Midnight blue, leaf green, sunshine yellow. He knew the name that this one would have carried: blood red. It glinted in the overhead light as if it would be sticky to the touch, but Joe had never touched it, so he didn’t know for sure. He didn’t want to know.

  Hunched over the portrait copy, Cath began to retrace the lines of the mouth with the red crayon, adding color and shading. She worked with almost painful slowness. Joe remembered how once she had made a mistake at this stage, how the fury had burst from her like a wild thing caged too long.

  At last, Cath straightened. She gave the mouth one last appraising look then returned the crayon to the rosewood box. Joe walked back to the low stone wall. He knew he would turn back to watch her. He always did.

  Below, Harry had reached the boardwalk. The big man put down one chair to wave to someone on the beach. Joe’s stomach tightened. A woman waved back at Harry, and a small boy and girl ran to hug him. Jesus, no, thought Joe.

  He turned back. Cath sat hunched over the portrait of Harry on her lap. Joe rushed to her, praying that it wasn’t too late, a prayer that died when he saw the picture. It had started.

  The portrait’s mouth was moving, fat lips squirming like slick red worms on the paper. A pale vapor rose thin and wispy from those lips. Cath bent her head over the mouth and sucked in that misty thing that Joe never wanted to name.

  A scream rose from the beach. A woman’s cry, a thing of pain and fear. Between her sobs, Joe could hear children crying.

  He walked back to the low stone wall and looked down at the crowd gathered where Harry had fallen. Joe stood there, eyes locked on Harry’s still form, feeling the void opening below him again. “Cath, we have to get out of here.”

  Cath didn’t answer him. Joe tore his eyes from the scene below and turned back to her. She was standing now, looking south, down the coastline. “It wants to move on,” she said.

  Hope and dreams and soul devoured...

  Joe drove staring at the white lane markers slicing the dark two-lane one after another, like brush strokes by God on a long black canvas. White on black. The negative image of Cath’s secret portraits. Black on white, white on black. Just the red missing. Just that blood red.

  How long before some cop put it together? A string of deaths, all the victims drawn by a young woman with a male companion. Christ, Harry died with a sketch in his hand.

  Cath stirred beside him, and then he felt her eyes on him. He could always feel her gaze, like a physical touch, like a brush dipping into him, drawing something from him. Is that how you do it, Cath? How you take the thing you take? Capture it in your eyes, then cage it through your fingers onto the page? Have you been feeding on me, too?

  “I’m still hungry,” Cath said. Her voice was small, almost child-like in the dark.

  He knew what she meant. “We’ll hit town soon,” he said. But it would be three in the morning when they arrived. No one around. No one to draw. And she had no pictures left. Cath said nothing but looked away. After a while, he figured she was asleep. Then he felt her eyes again.

  “I don’t want to hurt people, Joe.”

  He swallowed. This was new. She never talked about it, even when he did. He should say something now, something smart, something that would lead them out of this. He should, but he had nothing left to say. He could only nod. “I know, babe.”

  “It just gets so hungry. I get so hungry.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t stop it. It keeps pulling me, making me...”

  Joe could feel her pain in those words. And his fear.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “So tired I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up. Ever been that tired, Joe?”

  He swallowed again. All the time, he thought, but he just nodded. Cath looked away, and he took a breath as if he was coming up for air.

  “I’m hungry,” she said again.

  “I know.”

  Her eyes settled on him again like a beast on his chest.

  “I could draw you, Joe.”

  Joe’s hands tightened on the wheel. Cath had said it the way a kid told you she could ride a bike or tie her shoe. The lines flashed by in the headlights. White on black, no red.

  “Don’t even need to see you,” she said. “Know you so well.”

  Joe stared at the road. Don’t look, he thought.

  “Know your face like I know my own,” she said.

  The burden of her gaze lifted. He looked at her.

  Her eyes were shut, and her hand moved in her lap, mimicking drawing motions. “Don’t even need light. Could draw you with my eyes closed.” Her hand stopped, and she leaned her head back. A few minutes later, Joe could hear her breathing slow and deepen.

  So there it was. He always knew it would come to this. This was why he had stayed, even after he learned what Cath did, what she was. Afraid that when he left, when Cath no longer needed him, she would draw him down. Draw him down onto the page from memory, then drink him in like all the others.

  The road lines flew at him like white knives out of the night. W
hite knives and blackness. Just the blood red missing. Taking a hand from the wheel, he felt inside the top of his boot, running his fingers over the bone handle of his switchblade.

  A few miles down the road, he found a wide shoulder and pulled over, turning off the engine and the lights.

  Cath still slept. Hands shaking, Joe pulled the knife from his boot. It’s self-defense, he thought. But he just sat holding the knife. It was for the best. How many more would she kill? But he still loved her. Could he do it? He was tired, so tired. He leaned back. He only slept now when Cath did, when he didn’t feel her eyes. He closed his eyes. Her breathing brushed his ears, soft and deep, soft and deep, soft...

  He awoke to the sound of scratching on paper. He looked over. Framed against the moonlight, Cath sat hunched over her sketchpad, her hand moving in short, sure strokes.

  “Kind of late for drawing, isn’t it, Cath?” Joe asked. His throat was dry. He fumbled in his lap for the knife.

  “Hungry,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “Dark, too,” he said, blood pounding in his ears.

  “Don’t need light. Drawin’ from memory,” she whispered.

  Drawing from memory. Drawing him. He knew she was drawing him. “Don’t, Cath.” His thumb found the blade’s button.

  “Tired of being hungry.” She sat back, eyes on the sketch.

  He couldn’t see the picture, but he saw the red crayon in her hand. She’d finished the mouth. “Please, don’t do it,” he said. His cheeks felt cool and wet. He realized he was crying.

  Cath lifted the paper to her face. She was crying, too.

  “Don’t!” Joe screamed. The knife blade clicked open.

  “Bye, Joe. Sorry.” Cath breathed in through her lips.

  Joe saw a pale wisp rise from the paper and move toward her mouth. Saw his hand gripping the knife flash forward. Saw the blade slice her white T-shirt and slide between her ribs.

  Saw the red, the blood red, flow over the white of her shirt to blend with the black of the night and the shadows.

  Cath spasmed and fell sideways onto him. Surprise mixed with peace in her face. “Thanks...Joe,” she whispered. Her eyes closed and her head slumped back. A wisp of mist escaped her lips. That’s me, Joe thought. Sobbing, he pressed his lips to hers, sucking in the breath and the grey mist from her mouth.

  Bitter and sour, the thing burned his throat as he breathed it in. Something was wrong. Joe felt a presence of something dark, something...hungry.

  His head spinning, Joe flicked on the dome light. Blood soaked into his shirt where Cath slumped against him, the picture still clenched in her hand. Joe stared at the sketch, a scream forming in his mind.

  A familiar face stared back at him from the page, a face that Cath knew from memory. The face she knew best of all.

  Not Joe’s face.

  It was Cath.

  She hadn’t been drawing him. She’d been feeding herself to the thing that had lived in her. Cath had been killing herself.

  The emptiness that was the mouth in Cath’s pictures gaped beneath him, and Joe felt himself being drawn down.

  Lost to you, what might have been...

  A February evening, St. Pete’s Beach. Joe sat on his stool, his back to the beauty of a Gulf sunset. His portraits lay strewn on the sand around him like the dead on a battlefield. A woman and man looked them over while Joe waited. The woman held the hand of a little girl and boy. Twins, Joe guessed. Couldn’t be much more than seven, he thought. He remembered when that would have meant something to him, before Cath died, before...

  The little girl tugged on the mother’s hand. “They all look so sad, Mommy.” The mother hushed the child while the father haggled with Joe over the price. The day had been slow, so Joe agreed to do both kids for the price of one.

  Joe started sketching. His hand leapt over the paper, and the images of the children grew around the emptiness where their mouths should have been. A tear ran down his cheek, but he kept drawing.

  He had to. He was hungry.

  RAKSHASI

  Kelley Armstrong

  For two hundred years, I have done penance for my crimes as a human. After twenty years, I had saved more lives than I took. After fifty, I had helped more people than I had wronged. I understand that my punishment should not end with an even accounting. The balance between good and evil is not that simple. I expected my good deeds must exceed my evil ones before I am set free.

  Yet now, after two hundred years, that balance has long passed equilibrium. And I have come to realize that this life is no different than my old one. If I wish something for myself, I cannot rely on others to provide it.

  Reliance on Fate is the refuge of the weak. The strong know that free will is all. What I want, I must take.

  I waited in the car while Jonathan checked the house. Jonathan. There is something ridiculous about calling your master by his given name. It’s an affectation of the modern age. In the early years, I was to refer to them as Master or Isha. When the family moved west, it became Sir, then Mr. Roy.

  My newest master, Jonathan, does not particularly care for this familiarity. He pretends otherwise, but the fact that I must call him by his full name, where his wife and others use the simplified “Jon” says much about my master. I have attempted to revert to Mr. Roy, for his comfort, but he won’t allow it. The formal appellation smacks too loudly of slavery, and he prefers the illusion that I am merely an employee.

  He called my cell phone. Yes, I use cell phones. They are a convenient method of communication and I am very capable of learning and adapting.

  “Amrita?” he said, as if someone else might be answering my phone. My name is not Amrita. My name is not important. Or, perhaps, too important. I have never given it to my masters. They call me Amrita, the eternal one.

  “The coast is clear,” he said. He paused. “I mean—”

  “I understand American idiom quite well,” I said. “I have been living here since before you were born.”

  He mumbled something unimportant, then gave me my instructions, as if I hadn’t been doing this, too, since before he was born.

  I got out of the car and headed for the house.

  As Jonathan said, there was an open window on the second floor. I found a quiet place away from the road, not yet on the property of the man I’d come to visit. Then I shifted to my secondary form: a raven. Fly to the bedroom window. Squeeze through. Shift back to woman.

  There wasn’t even an alarm on the window to alert the occupant to my intrusion. Quite disappointing. These jobs always are. I long for the old days, when I would do bloody battle against power-mad English sahibs and crazed Kshatriyas. Then came the murderers and whore-masters, then the Mob, then the drug dealers. It was, with the drug dealers, that the Roys began to rethink their strategy. Getting one alone was not easy. On the streets, they came with well-armed friends. I may be immortal, but I can be injured, and while my personal comfort is not a concern, my income-earning potential is. They tried targeting drug dealers at home, but there they were often surrounded by relative innocents. So, in this last decade, they have concentrated on a new source of evil. A dull, weak, mewling source, one that bores me to tears. But my opinion, like my comfort, is of little consequence.

  I took a moment to primp in the mirror. I am eternally young. Beautiful, too. More beautiful than when I was alive, which was not to say that I was ugly then, but when I look in the mirror now, I imagine what my husband—Daman—would say if he saw me. Imagine his smile. His laugh. His kiss. I have not seen him in two hundred years, but when I primp for my target, it is still him I imagine I am readying myself for.

  I found the target—Morrison—in the study, talking on his speaker phone while punching keys on his laptop. I moved into the doorway. Leaned against it. Smiled.

  He stopped talking. Stopped typing. Stared.

  Then, “Bill? I’ll call you back.”

  He jabbed the phone off and shut his laptop. “How’d you get in here?”
>
  “My name is Amrita. I am a surprise. From a very pleased client.”

  I slid forward, gaze fixed on his. For another moment he stared, before remembering himself.

  “But how did you get—”

  I smiled. “I would not be much of a surprise if I rang your front bell, would I?” I glanced back at the door. “I trust we are alone?” Jonathan said Morrison was the only one in the house, but I always checked.

  “W-we are.”

  “Good.”

  I sidled over and pushed his chair back, away from the desk and any alarms under it or guns in the drawers. That was all the security men like this had.

  I straddled Morrison’s lap. I could see indecision wavering in his eyes. He was a smart man. He knew this was suspicious. And yet, as I said, I am a beautiful woman.

  I put my arms around him, hands sliding down his arms, fingers entwining with his. I leaned over, lifting our hands . . . then wrenched his arms back so hard he screamed. I leapt from his lap, over the back of the chair, then bound them with the cord I’d used as a belt on my sheer dress.

  I have subdued lapdogs that gave me more trouble than Morrison. By the time he recovered from the shock and pain of that first strike, he was secured. He fought, but my bonds have bound warriors. He was no warrior.

  Next, I tortured him for information. It was a bloodless torture. Necessity, not preference. There are ways to inflict pain without leaving marks. Mental pain is the most effective of all, and with the power of illusion, it is easy for me to torture a mind. I can make a man believe he is being rent limb from limb, and scream with imagined agony.

  As for the information I needed, it was a simple accounting of his misdeeds. Details on the financial scam that paid for this mansion. I had him write out those details, in a confession. Then I tortured him for the location and combination to his home safe.

  With my help, the Roys kill—sorry, eliminate—the basest dregs of the criminal bucket. This is their divine mission, handed down to them millennia ago, when they were granted the ability to harness the powers of my kind. They seek out evil. I eliminate it. A very noble profession but one that, as you would say, does not pay the bills. Finding targets, researching them and preparing for my attack is a full time job. So the Roys, like other isha families also have divine permission to take what they require from their victims.