by Megan Hart
Later, when he’d spent himself inside her and rolled onto his back, both of them sweaty and breathing hard, she turned on her side to study his face and let her hand trace his body all over to see what new scars he wore. Sometimes, she kissed them so she wouldn’t cry over them.
When it was time for him to go, she packed him a lunch and made sure he had enough clean socks and underwear. Very domestic, very 1950s housewife. She sent him off to “work” with a smile and kiss, sometimes a squeeze of his ass. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever imagined having, but somehow it just felt…right.
“This is totally unhealthy, you know that, right?” That came from Lisa, who thought marriage made her some sort of relationship expert. “I mean, long-distance relationships are hard enough, but this guy…what, he just swans in and out of your life whenever he’s passing by?”
“Something like that.” Celia poured some frozen margaritas from the blender into Lisa’s glass, then clinked hers against her cousin’s.
Lisa drank and shook her head. “I thought you had a nice thing going on with what’s-his-name. Brian?”
“He didn’t like my meat loaf,” Celia said, and laughed when Lisa looked so clearly confused.
“The sex must be pretty freaking amazing, that’s all I have to say.” Lisa frowned. “But you should stop thinking with your lady bits, Celia. Fucking some…drifter…might be all sorts of sexy, but what’s it going to get you in the long run?”
Celia turned the conversation then, by asking Lisa about her new appliances, their house, the puppy she and Denny were thinking of adopting in preparation for babies. She ate nachos and drank margaritas with her favorite cousin while they gossiped about family members and friends, and she went home to her empty, dark house alone.
And when Luke opened her door, she was there to greet him.
Bone-deep exhaustion and Luke had started going steady more than a year ago, but now instead of taking it to the prom, it was expecting him to pony up an engagement ring. That was one marriage Luke wanted to avoid but found himself unable to fight against. The only real thing that kept him going was knowing that at the end of a few weeks’ travels, a few lucky kills that were getting farther and farther apart, he had Celia to go to.
Home, he thought as he pulled into the driveway of another familiar house where a woman inside waited for him. Home was Celia’s house, not this white Cape Cod in which he’d grown up. He rarely made it back here because although his parents still loved him, and he knew they did, he also knew they thought he was nuts. He’d disappointed them. It might’ve been better if he had a drug problem, had knocked up a woman or several, if he’d robbed a bank. Hell. It might’ve been better for them if he’d just died in that cave instead of coming out of it a different man. But he hadn’t died, and he wasn’t crazy, at least not in the way they thought he was, so every once in a while he made sure to stop by and check on them. Both were retired, and they weren’t getting younger. His younger sister Susanna, her husband and kids all lived in Seattle, about as far from Pittsburgh as you could get. His parents had been there for him after the cave-in, at the hospital and during his treatments, but he thought they breathed a sigh of relief when he left them. Truth was, he did too.
He let himself in the back door with a grimace at how easily it opened. They’d passed off his warnings about the locks as part of his illness—in their small rural suburb, crime was still mostly something they saw on the television news. He called out his mother’s name as he entered the kitchen.
His feet slipped.
The stench hit him a second later. The thick, meaty stink of old blood. Luke recoiled, reaching for the knife on his belt. He knew already he was too late—the things were fast and silent, but they carried their own stench that faded swiftly enough for him to be certain the only living thing in this kitchen was him. He found both his parents at the table, their throats slashed, bodies slumped over moldy cups of coffee. Two, maybe three days dead, not long enough for anyone to have started to worry about either of them.
Their flesh had been torn, but not eaten. Usually, the creatures made a feast of their victims, stripping flesh and muscle to the bone, methodic in their hunger. For one moment, Luke held out some faint hope that whoever had done this to his parents had been a simple serial killer, even a random burglar who’d been surprised into homicide. But then the footprint in the blood proved his worst thoughts as truth—human in shape, but with freakish long toes and the smaller marks at the tips that came from the claws. The drag of came from the folded wings on either side, scrapes of white in the blood that had gone brown with age, spattered on the floor.
There, on the table between his parents, a photo of Susanna and her family at the beach. Gap-toothed grins on his niece and nephew, his brother-in-law’s nose peeling from too much sun. His sister in a floppy hat and a smile just like their dad’s. At least, that was what had been in the photo. All that was left now were four torsos dressed in bathing suits, a glimpse of sand and sea behind them.
The rush and roar of the ocean pounded at his ears for a hard minute as Luke’s world rocked. He fumbled for his phone and punched in his sister’s number. He hadn’t called her in what, four or five months? Hadn’t wanted to interrupt her life. The stink of blood finally overpowered him, and he stumbled into the living room to get away from it as the phone rang and rang and rang. He was just about to hang up when the click of an answer came.
“Who’s this?” said the unfamiliar male voice.
Luke said nothing.
“This is Seattle PD. Who’s calling?”
“I’m trying to reach umm…Susanna Kent,” Luke said, voice thick, mind racing. “Or her husband? It’s about their automatic renewal—“
“They won’t need it,” said the cop. “Don’t call here again.”
Luke stared at his phone after the call disconnected, then turned it off and put it into his pocket. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He wanted to pace the floor, he wanted to tear something in half. He wanted to kill the fucking thing that had done this…he stopped dead in the center of the living room rug.
As best as he could tell, the original hive had scattered, but only within Pennsylvania and to a couple bordering towns in Ohio and New York. Never farther than that. How the holy fuck did they get all the way to Seattle?
Unless he was actively on the hunt, Luke did his best to block out the ever-present hum of the hive. He was never sure that they could hear him, though he suspected if they knew he could listen in, even just the smallest bit, they would have been able to reverse the talent and hone in on him. Now, he concentrated on that faint itch at the back of his brain. The not-words, the thought-sounds. He focused on everything he’d ever felt from one of them.
His guts surged into his throat and he spat to the side to keep himself from vomiting. Pain twisted through him. He went to his knees, hands on his belly as agony ripped at him. He focused, harder, sending out a grasping hand of thought determined to snag what he’d been doing his best to push away for so long.
Not they, he thought, seeing his sister’s face again, but this time through something else’s eyes. It. One left. He’d finally managed to almost do what he’d set out to accomplish, the complete annihilation of the creatures that had taken him into the dark. There was only one left, and it had killed his parents. It had slaughtered his sister and her family. And it would do its best to hunt him down and do the same to him as what he’d done to its family, would do to it when he had the chance.
Luke forced himself to his feet, the world still spinning. The pain in his guts spread upward into his brain, squeezing like a fist. The whispers grew louder, still no language he could determine except for the occasional flare of what might’ve been…his name. His fists clenched. He shook his head. No.
He had three thoughts. The first, find the last creature and destroy it. The second, fire. No matter how horrible it would be to burn his childhood home—his parents—it had to be done. And finally, the most insistent thought:<
br />
Celia.
The call came, late night as usual, just two rings before she answered. Celia was grinning, already sliding around in the soft sheets, anticipating the sound of Luke’s voice. Half a minute later, her smile had twisted into a far different expression.
“What do you mean, you can’t see me any more?”
“It’s not working out,” Luke said in a low voice that sounded nothing like him. Or too much like him, and that was worse.
“Not working out? What is this, high school?” He’d told her once that he liked how she never let him coast, that she poked at him. She didn’t much care if he liked it now; the words tumbled out of her, fierce and hurtful. “What does working out even mean, when you come by for pie and sex every few weeks and leave in the morning? What’s not working out about that?”
“I can’t come to see you. I can’t call you any more. I don’t want you to call me. I need you…to forget me. Just forget me,” Luke told her. “Find yourself some nice guy with a regular job, who’s not a crazy piece of shit…”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re crazy? Now? You think I’m going to buy that story now?” Tears choked her. She forced them back. Celia sat up, knees to her chin, the phone pressed so tight to her ear it stung. “What the fuck is going on, Luke?”
Silence, which she ought to have been used to, but hated now.
“I can’t be around you anymore, Celia. That’s all. Trust me on this. Just trust me.”
“I do trust you!” she cried, but he’d already disconnected.
He’d left her.
He didn’t call again, and he didn’t answer his phone. Her calls didn’t even go to voice mail. All she got was a recorded message saying the number she was trying to dial was no longer in service. That didn’t mean she didn’t know how to find him. She cross-referenced stories about fires and missing persons. About weird, unsolved murders. Cattle mutilations. She hadn’t needed to do this for a while, not with him telling her every place he’d been, the things he’d done. Now she searched….
And found nothing. He’d gone off the grid. Underground somehow, and it killed her that instead of confiding in her, he’d run away. He’d asked her to trust him, but he didn’t trust her.
Another month passed. A second. No word from Luke. Nothing she could find on the ‘net.
She ran into Brian at the grocery store, and after the first embarrassing minutes where she tried to pretend she hadn’t totally blown him off, and he tried to act like he didn’t remember, he made her laugh. True, it was a laugh at and not with him, his self-deprecating humor one of the personality quirks she always liked about him. Still, it was enough that when he asked her out to dinner, she said yes.
She said yes the next time, too. On the third date, he kissed her on the front porch. There wasn’t much sizzle in it, but when he pulled back and looked at her with earnest eyes, when he said “I really like you, Celia,” she did imagine what it would be like to pull him inside and have him back her up against the wall.
She didn’t invite him in.
That night, awake in the bed that felt too big and empty without Luke in it, even though it had been months, Celia stared up at the darkness and didn’t even try to pretend to herself she wasn’t missing him. Her hands roamed her body, all the places he’d touched, but it wasn’t the same. Nothing about her life was the same now that Luke had left it.
From downstairs came the click of a key in her front door lock. The creak of hinges. And then, the soft but heavy tread of feet on the stairs. Celia, blinking to clear away the shadows, sat up with a wild, hot grin spreading across her face. She was out of the bed, across the floor and into the hall in the time it took her heart to beat a handful of times. She was at the top of the stairs in another couple of steps, her hands already reaching for him.
It wasn’t Luke that had come home.
There was only one small spot of blood, and it had dried. Luke had gone to one knee and touched it with a fingertip. His head ached, the wound at his temple crusted with more dried blood than was on the floor in front of him. Nausea swelled in his gut from the pain in every muscle, the deep claw marks in one thigh. But mostly, he was sick with fear.
Through all of this, he’d never stopped being afraid. Those things had taken him into the darkness of the cave and done their best to kill him. He’d hunted down each and every one of them, faced them all. They’d made him into a man who could kill another creature without a second thought. A murderer. And still, the terror at facing one of them had never eased. It’s why he’d kept going, to protect anyone else from ever having to feel it.
He was terrified now. He’d caught up to the creature who’d killed his family in an abandoned mine in northeastern Pennsylvania. It might’ve made its way to Seattle, but in the end it had come home. It had been bigger than the others, maybe an alpha of some sort. Stronger, faster, more determined to escape him. Its voice had scrabbled at his brain louder than ever before. He’d have been happy to live the rest of his life without ever understanding what made these things tick—it was all blood, all hunger, all death.
He’d fought it, of course. Wounded it. But it had surprised him with a final burst of energy in its attack. Pinned him down. Luke had turned his face as the thing’s stinking breath gusted over his cheek, certain it meant to tear into his face. Instead, it had slipped a gnarled claw into his pocket and stolen…his keys.
At Celia’s house, the only sign of anything amiss was this single drop of blood, something nobody else would’ve been likely to see if they hadn’t been looking for it.
The monster had let itself into her house and taken her.
Luke got to his feet, pushing past the pains and sickness threatening to send him tumbling down the stairs. He put his hand on the railing to keep himself steady, and at the bottom, by the front door, he stopped. He forced his mind to grasp at the thing’s whispering voice, so much softer now that it was the only one. To hold it tight, listening for any clues about where it had taken Celia.
Luke began to track it.
Blood.
Celia tasted blood. Her tongue ached when she rubbed it against the roof of her mouth; had she bitten it? Her head throbbed with pain, not quite a headache but more like…yeah, there at the back of her head, under her hair. A huge knot. Something had hit her in the head.
Slowly, blinking but finding nothing but black in front of her, Celia woke up. It was hard to move, her every joint on fire with pain, but she didn’t appear to be tied up. The ground under her butt was hard, rough. Like concrete. But damp. A trickle of icy water struck her forehead when she looked up, still unable to see even the faintest hint of light. She drew in a mouthful of cold, clammy air.
She still wore her pajamas, but when she passed trembling fingers over the front of her shirt, it felt stiff and gross. Dirt or maybe more blood. Her chin stung, the flesh scabbed under her exploring fingertips. It hurt too much to do more than brush the cuts, so she tucked her fingers between her knees and tried to warm herself.
She didn’t know where she was, but she knew what had happened. She remembered a flash of teeth and claw, the gray skin of the thing looming over her. The brush of its leathery wings trailing behind it. She hadn’t even had time to scream before it had covered her face with its huge hand. One of those things that Luke hunted had taken her. Panic threatened, but she eased it off with one strong thought.
Luke would come for her.
Sitting in the dark getting colder and colder, the only noise her chattering teeth and nothing to see, not even her hand in front of her face, Celia thought a few hours passed. Maybe only minutes. Hell, maybe time didn’t pass, maybe she was stuck here in some sort of limbo.
She smelled it before she heard the hiss of its breath. A carrion stench, like roadkill. She gagged on it, especially when she felt the heat of it along her body. She couldn’t see it, but she flailed out at it anyway, punching into a sickeningly soft body again and again before it grabbed at her hands and held them
tight.
It leaned against her like a lover. Nuzzled her neck. Celia screamed and fought, kicking, writhing, but when it sank its teeth into the tender spot between her neck and shoulder, a disturbing lassitude spread through her. Venom, she thought woozily as her body relaxed despite every effort she tried to make. Poison. It was killing her.
Except she didn’t die.
She woke in darkness, to pain, the taste of blood still on her tongue. Her body still freezing, every muscle aching. The wound in her neck had ragged edges and had leaked hot blood all down her front, but as with her chin, it hurt too much to explore, so all she could do was lean back against the hard wall and try to pass out.
Celia no longer tried to track the passing of time. The creature came. It fed. Sometimes it caressed her with its claws, up and down her body, between her legs, though she couldn’t tell if its intent was truly sexual or if it just wanted to fuck with her mind. Sometimes it brought her water and made her drink it. Other times, some sort of food, always the sort found in truck stop vending machines. Every time it bit her, that awful sense of floating took her away from the pain, until one time she realized that, just as all her various agonies had started to reach their crescendo, she was actually hoping for the thing to come back and put its poison in her.
It was enough to make her fight it again, albeit weakly, the next time. She thought it laughed, though she couldn’t be sure she really heard it, or if the sound had only echoed in her mind. Either way, it subdued her with no effort and fed from her again.
When the light came back, Celia covered her eyes against it. Too much, too bright, it stabbed her eyes. The sound of shouting after so much time spent with silence hurt her ears; she covered them too. She rolled herself into a ball and waited for this time to be the one that ended her.
Heat splashed her, stinging. The stink of it familiar. Blood, not her own. A cry, not hers. More shouting. The clang of metal on stone and the thud of it in flesh. The floor shook. Something hit the ground beside her, and she rolled away as best she could.