by Simon Holt
“When have I ever gone quietly?” she seethed.
Immediately she felt the pull in her mind as the Vour searched for her fears and attempted to push them to the surface. But she was not a victim any longer. She pushed back and closed her mind, locking the Vour out.
Aaron was not so lucky. He crumpled to the ground as the visions swept into his consciousness. Reggie turned her gaze for only a second, but Avi used the distraction. Pushing Mom away, he dove at Reggie and caught her about the waist, but his momentum sent them both careening across the floor. Momentarily stunned, Avi lost his grip on her, and Reggie scrabbled backward to the other side of the couch. Her fingers closed around the subzero blanket as Avi lunged at her a second time, his hands going for her throat. But as he landed on top of her, she whipped the blanket over his head, smothering him with it.
The reaction was immediate, despite the blanket’s low charge. Avi jerked violently, and she could hear muffled screams coming from under the blanket, then he went limp.
Reggie stared upward at the ceiling, trying to catch her breath. Avi, whether unconscious or just dazed, was lying on top of her, and his body was heavy. She tried to push him off, but she didn’t have the strength. Just then, Aaron’s face appeared above hers.
“Kinky,” he said.
“Shut up and help me.”
Aaron knelt down beside her and rolled the Vour over onto the floor.
“Good work. Are you okay?”
Reggie nodded as she sat up. She saw that Aaron had retrieved his duffel bag from the kitchen.
“You?”
“I’ve seen a lot worse. I’ll deal with him—you should check on your mom.”
Reggie had almost forgotten about her mother. She leaped up and saw her slumped in the doorway to the foyer. There was a bloody smear on the doorframe, and blood was flowing down her face from a gash in her forehead.
“Mom!” Reggie ran toward her, and Mom hazily lifted her head. “Mom, are you all right?”
“I think I hit my head,” Mom said. She put a hand to her cheek; when she drew it away again, it was stained red. “I’m bleeding.”
“Come on, we need to clean that cut.” Reggie helped her mother up.
“He pushed me.” She sounded dumbfounded. “I can’t believe he pushed me like that. He’s never done anything like that before. He’s not a violent man.”
“Sure.” Reggie did her best to keep the sarcasm from her voice.
“Did he—did he hurt you?” Mom looked up at Reggie, genuine worry in her eyes.
“I’ll be fine. But he tried to, Mom, he tried to hurt me.”
Mom shook her head.
“I don’t understand….” She caught sight of Avi’s legs sticking out from the other side of the sofa, and this seemed to focus her attention. “Oh my God!”
Before Reggie could stop her, she ran around the side of the couch and knelt by Avi. He was lying on his stomach, and his head was still wrapped in the blanket. Aaron was in the process of restraining his hands behind his back, using handcuffs he’d pulled from his duffel bag.
“Is he… dead?” she asked.
“No, just stunned,” Aaron replied. As if to prove it, Avi’s body twitched suddenly, and a muffled moan came from within the blanket. Mom jumped back.
“Should we call the police?”
“No.” Reggie came up beside her. “Aaron, take off the blanket.”
“Are you sure?”
“She needs to see.”
Slowly Aaron unwrapped the blanket and pulled it off of Avi’s head. At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, since he was facing the floor, but when Aaron rolled him over onto his back, Mom let out a cry of astonishment.
His skin had been drained of color, except for the black veins that streaked up his throat and across his cheeks, and the inky stain that covered his lips, eyelids, and the area around his nostrils. The once-handsome face now looked ghoulish and inhuman.
“What… what…?” Mom stuttered.
“Your boyfriend isn’t who you thought he was.” Reggie watched her mother carefully. She could practically see the neon sign in her head flashing My daughter is nuts, but she continued anyway. “He’s a demon called a Vour. Most of the time he looks human, but that blanket is specially designed to weaken him. That’s why he looks like that.”
“This isn’t real. This can’t be happening.” Mom’s expression was twisted with horror, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the grotesque sight before her.
Aaron got up and quietly disappeared into the kitchen; moments later he returned with a steak knife and a couple of ice cubes. He rolled Avi back over onto his stomach and took one of his cuffed hands in his own. Slowly and calmly, he sliced through the skin on Avi’s palm.
“What are you doing?” Mom yelped. She tried to grab Aaron’s arm, but Reggie pulled her back. Red blood seeped from the cut.
“It looks normal, right?” Aaron said, looking at her. “Now watch.” He put the ice up against the cut, and immediately the broken skin began to turn black, and dark marks like the ones on Avi’s face began to creep across his palm. “They can’t handle cold temperatures.”
Mom cupped her hands over her mouth and gaped at Avi’s blackening hand. Reggie knew what she was feeling—the rational brain trying to reconcile the eyes’ impossibility. But right now, she didn’t have time for coddling.
“When did you meet him?” she asked.
Her mother turned away from Avi abruptly, startled.
“What?”
“When did you first meet Avi?” Reggie repeated.
“It was over the summer.” Mom spoke distractedly, and her eyes kept darting around as if she expected a television host to pop up out of nowhere and tell her she was on a hidden-camera show.
Reggie caught Aaron’s eye.
“When over the summer?”
“Um…” Mom paused, thinking. “It was the beginning of July. At a coffee shop. Our orders got mixed up and we started chatting.”
Reggie had to stifle a gag.
“Right after the solstice,” Aaron muttered. “It was definitely a setup. They grabbed you, and they sent him after her.”
“Mom, this is important. Since you’ve been with Avi, did you ever get any visions? Scary ones? Like nightmares, but you were awake?”
Mom looked at her blankly.
“No, of course not.”
“You’re sure? Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“I’m positive. I used to have nightmares sometimes, when I was asleep, but that was months ago. Actually, they stopped after… after Avi and I started seeing each other.”
Reggie and Aaron swapped another glance. They were thinking the same thing: Avi hadn’t tormented her, and Vours always inflicted misery on those close to them. There must have been some specific reason why he’d resisted—some order from on high, perhaps?
Mom started to sway on her feet, and she put a hand out to steady herself. Reggie realized she was still losing a lot of blood from the gash on her forehead.
“Mom, we need to get that cut cleaned up.”
“But what about—?”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Aaron said.
Reggie led her mother to the bathroom. Like the rest of the apartment, it was modern and spotless, as if it had just been photographed for a design catalog. Mom sank into a chair at a vanity mirror. She looked shell-shocked. The blood had gotten in her hair and dripped down her cheeks onto her beautiful clothes. There was so much of it, red and sticky and glistening.
Reggie wet a washcloth and began to wipe the blood away. A memory popped unexpectedly into her mind of when she used to sit like this in the bathroom at home, and Mom would cut her hair and they would talk about all sorts of things. Of course, her mother never looked like Carrie after the prom then.
“What is all this?” Mom asked. “What happened to Avi?”
“Like I said before, Avi isn’t Avi. He’s a monster.”
With that, Reggie told her m
other all about her travails with the Vours. The woman sat in stunned silence until her daughter had finished.
“This is completely insane,” she said finally.
“But true,” Reggie said. “The proof is lying right there on your floor.”
“But… but there has to be some other explanation….”
“Are you saying that you don’t believe me?”
“No… I don’t know…. You can’t exactly blame me for not believing in monsters.”
Reggie fetched some antiseptic from the medicine cabinet and rubbed it on the gash.
“Because he wasn’t a monster,” Mom continued. “He was… he was perfect. Everything I’d ever wanted. Funny, charming, attentive.” Reggie noticed that she didn’t explicitly say “Handsome, rich, and cultured,” but Reggie could read between the lines. “He’d bring me flowers for no reason. He’d take me to the symphony and galleries, and he introduced me to so many interesting people. He was exactly the person I had been looking for.”
Exactly the person who wasn’t Dad, thought Reggie. Exactly the person who didn’t have kids to feed and clothe and listen to.
“Right. Who’d want to deal with all that tedious parenting crap when you had gallery openings to go to?” she snapped.
“Reggie, I… I don’t know how to say this, to tell you, after all that’s happened…”
In all the chaos of the day, adrenaline had pushed away the hurt, and confusion, and anger from Reggie’s mind. But now it was boiling back into her.
“If you’re going to tell me that you’re in love, I might vomit.”
“But we are, honey.” Mom rose and slowly approached her. “I can’t explain what that is lying on the floor in there, but it’s not my Avi. It’s hard for you to hear, I know, after everything, but he makes me happier than I’ve ever been in my life. We’ve even talked about moving in together, getting married….”
“Yeah, it’s a regular Hallmark card, Mom. Except for the part where your one true love isn’t human. You saw what happened to his body—to his skin. Did that look like a human reaction to cold?”
Mom had no answer to this, and returned meekly to her chair. Reggie was slightly gratified to see the seeds of doubt blooming in her eyes.
“You can deny it, Mom. You can ignore it, or pretend like it doesn’t exist, like you’ve done with everything else that you don’t like. Or you can act like a goddamned adult for once in your life and accept that these horrors are real, that you got conned, that everything in your life is a lie.”
Mom looked up at her daughter.
“Excuse me if it’s hard to accept that my boyfriend is a… a demon.”
“At least he has an excuse.”
Mother and daughter glared at each other.
“I see,” Mom said at last. “You thought I left because I was one of them.”
“Yeah. Well, who knew the truth could be worse,” said Reggie. She didn’t want the tears to come, she didn’t want this woman to see her cry, but they came anyway, traitorous droplets with minds of their own. “You just walked away and didn’t look back. You did that. Did you think, did you think at all, what would happen to us?”
“Reggie, I—”
“Did you think that Henry might turn into a basket case, afraid of the dark, afraid of everything? Did it occur to you that you were condemning me to the life of a teenage mother? I turned fifteen and got a household to take care of as a birthday present. Oh, and then, as a bonus, my little brother got possessed and I got sucked into a living horror film. So tell me, Mom, please, what were these terrible issues that caused you to abandon your family? Because I’m dying to know.”
“Reggie, I’m sorry.”
“Your apology is shit, Mom.”
“You certainly have the right to think that.” Though the bleeding from Mom’s wound had slowed, it hadn’t stopped entirely. Now she took another, clean washcloth and pressed it to her forehead. “You’re so much better than I am, Reggie. I was a bad influence in that house. I was so messed up, and I didn’t want it to infect you and Henry. No mother wants to see her daughter looking at her the way you’re looking at me now.”
“Now’s your chance to make up for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can come back with me. Come back to Cutter’s Wedge. Talk to Dad. See Henry—God, if you only knew how much good that would do.” Reggie’s voice had gone from angry to pleading. She felt like a six-year-old asking for a puppy.
“It’s not that simple, Reggie….”
“Why not? Why can’t it be that simple?”
Mom’s eyes swept over to the bathroom door. Aaron had appeared. He looked apologetic.
“I’m sorry, but his breathing’s evening out. I think he’s going to come around soon.”
Reggie sighed. The debate about Mom’s returning would have to wait.
“What are you going to do?” Mom asked.
“We have to find out what Avi knows.”
“You think he’s just going to tell you?”
“Yes,” Aaron said simply.
He headed back to the living room, and Reggie and Mom followed. He had managed to get the Vour onto the couch and had bound him to it using duct tape. He had removed his shirt and cut off his pant legs so that Avi’s arms, legs, and chest were exposed. He looked to be in extremely good shape—other than his blackened face—and Reggie wondered if extracting information from him would be as easy as Aaron seemed to think.
Her gaze fell on the coffee table, on which Aaron had placed a series of small, Band-Aid-like adhesive patches that had wires protruding from them. Reggie assumed these were more of Machen’s “sweet gear.” She wondered what they did.
Like Aaron had said, Avi’s breathing had slowed considerably, though it was still shallow. A few minutes later he groaned, and his eyelids fluttered open. Black ooze seemed to float across the whites of his eyeballs. Mom winced and turned away.
Avi blinked a couple of times, discombobulated. But when he saw Reggie, he began to struggle violently. He looked down and realized he was half-naked and taped to the couch.
“What is this? What have you done to me?”
“Surprised?” said Aaron. “Didn’t think a couple of kids could take on a big, bad Vour like you?”
Avi glared at him for just a moment, then relaxed. The mellow fluidity returned to his voice as he spoke, but his eyes darted about, taking in the details of the scene, belying his calm demeanor. He saw the wired strips on the table close to this head.
“On the contrary. I heard you both were crafty. But I thought these kinds of extracurriculars went against your high moral standards.”
“We’re not going to kill you.” Aaron spoke very matter-of-factly. He picked up one of the patches.
“What is that?” Mom asked tremulously. “What will it do to him?”
“It’s called a nerve pad.” Aaron held the patch up with one finger in front of Avi’s face. “The electrified gel simulates the feeling of cold, like that blanket did. It fools your nerves into thinking that you’re being exposed to freezing temperatures, but only at the point of contact, as if you were holding an ice cube against your skin. To humans the nerve pads are merely uncomfortable. But to Vours…”
Avi was breathing more heavily now. He looked like a cornered animal, searching for escape.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Just tell us what you know.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Why were you with my mother?” Reggie demanded.
“Because of the scintillating conversation.” Avi’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Oh, and she wasn’t a half-bad lay.”
Reggie heard her mother sniffle. Aaron leaned over the Vour and planted the nerve pad on his shoulder. The reaction was immediate. Avi cried out in pain and his arm convulsed, but after a minute he forced himself to regain his composure.
“You Tracers have some good gadgets,” he said through gritted teeth.
> “I’m not a Tracer,” Aaron said, preparing another pad. “Answer Reggie’s question.”
“I’d rather face you than them, thanks very much. I think you’ve seen what they do at that institute.”
“Have it your way.” Aaron placed the pad on Avi’s other shoulder, and again he moaned in pain but was able to control it.
“I can… do this… all day.”
“So can I.”
A sob racked Mom, and the Vour heard his opportunity. He turned feverish eyes upon her.
“Rebecca, help me! Make them stop, make them stop!”
“Her name isn’t Rebecca,” Reggie said coldly, but Avi kept his gaze fixed on Mom’s tear-streaked face.
“Rebecca, I love you. From the moment we met, I’ve loved you. We can be together, forever, away from all this.”
Reggie grabbed her mother’s hand.
“They’re all lies, Mom. Everything. He can’t feel love.”
“Don’t listen to her, Rebecca. I’ve given you everything you wanted. We can live any life you desire!”
Mom shook her head, backing away. She pulled her hand from Reggie’s grasp.
“I—I can’t deal with this!”
She ran from the room. Aaron glanced questioningly at Reggie.
“It’s okay. Let her go.” She turned back to Avi. “She believes me. She’s not going to help you. Help yourself and tell us what you know.”
In response, Avi spat at Reggie.
“Have it your way,” said Aaron, and he continued placing the nerve pads on Avi’s skin, one by one—on his chest, his wrists, his thighs, his stomach. The Vour howled and writhed but still refused to speak. Reggie was surprised to see how calmly and methodically Aaron conducted the torture. Despite her abject hatred of the Vours, it was hard for her to listen to the agonized screams. She had to keep telling herself that this was the monster, and the human body would be fine.
As the Vour’s yells grew louder, Aaron paused.
“We should amp up some music or something to cover his screams. We don’t want the neighbors to hear.”