by S. M. Reine
Four years earlier, Deirdre had been on the run from a disastrous boarding school experience.
It was hard to be the only shifter who didn’t have an animal. It was, apparently, natural for shifter children to establish their social hierarchy with physical conflict, but Deirdre hadn’t been able to compete. She’d already owned a gun, but she couldn’t shoot her classmates.
It had been easier to run. Easier to get a job, sign up for adult benefits, and join the real world.
Turned out the real world wasn’t any kinder to an Omega than the juvenile system had been.
“We studied her biography, too,” Deirdre lied.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Jolene said. She flashed teeth that looked like a mouthful of needles as she spoke. “You know, how the Alpha survived being moon-sick and silver poisoned. She ate something like five mundanes. Awesome.”
Jolene thought that anything involving the death of mundane humans was awesome. Most vampires did.
Her specific breed of vampire—an asanbosam—was naturally murderous, much the same way a trapping spider is murderous. Jolene’s instincts told her to lurk somewhere high, in trees or the roofs of skyscrapers, and wait for someone delicious to pass, and then…well, do what asanbosam do best, which involved the silver teeth and vicious claws on Jolene’s feet.
As far as Deirdre knew, Jolene had never gotten to satisfy her killing urges. She had only changed into an asanbosam after Genesis, the same way that Deirdre had been turned into a shifter. There was too much oversight to be able to get away with murder these days.
Many preternaturals did kill, but they also didn’t get government benefits. Jolene was smart enough not to endanger their free housing and food by going on the hunt.
Thinking of food, Deirdre opened the refrigerator. It was empty aside from a couple of thawing roasts. Gage had offered to feed Deirdre on the private jet, but she had declined. Now she regretted succumbing to pride.
Deirdre leaned her forehead against the freezer door and sighed. “What do you want for dinner, Jo? Meat, meat, or…meat.”
“How about meat?” Jolene suggested. “Or meat! Meat would be great!”
“Ha ha. Do we have any cash left on the benefits card?”
“Not for takeout we don’t. We’ve got to make that cash last for another week and a half.”
And if Gutterman was trying to fire Deirdre, there was no way she’d be getting her next paycheck.
Meat it was.
Deirdre grabbed a roast, turned on the oven, and dropped the meat on the counter to finish thawing.
The selection of groceries they were offered by food stamps was intended primarily for werewolves, who were strict carnivores. They craved meat and they craved it rare. The proportion of cheap beef they received through their benefits was insane. Jolene didn’t mind, but Deirdre always ate their paltry allowance of nuts, dairy, and grains in less than a week.
The commercials on the TV ended. The Alpha’s press conference started to play.
“The moon sickness isn’t contagious like the flu or measles,” Rylie said. “It’s a social sickness spread by solitude. It takes shifters who don’t have the loving support of a pack, pride, or flock. It preys on the most vulnerable and makes murderers out of the innocent.”
Deirdre muted it. Rylie’s mouth continued to move soundlessly.
She looked so different on the television than she had in person—so much loftier and inaccessible. But there was a spark of warmth in the tilt of her head, the way she gestured, her eye contact with the camera.
“Turn the sound back on,” Jolene said, flipping off the couch. “I want to hear it again.”
“Whatever.” Deirdre shoved the roast in the oven. “I’m going upstairs while dinner cooks.”
“Grumpy, grumpy. Did Gutterman spit in your lunch?”
He’d done much worse than that. And Deirdre doubted that he was going to give up after one failure.
She headed up the creaky stairs. There were two bedrooms at the top, along with a bathroom that had no insulation and rust-browned water in the winter. Deirdre had the bedroom on the right. It was next to their neighbor’s bedroom, so they woke her up with their active sex life two or three times a night.
Their townhouse used to be half of a single-family home. A wall had been built down the middle when it had been renovated for shifter occupancy, and that had been pretty much the only modification made to the old building. So it was noisy. It was always cold. And Deirdre could hear dripping through her window whenever it rained, which felt like every day it wasn’t snowing.
She hated the rain.
Her clothes felt damp and gross. Deirdre peeled her shirt off and tossed it in the hamper.
She glared at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of her door. There was no sign of her injuries other than the angry scrape of strawberry from elbow to shoulder. It was better than it had been earlier. It wasn’t bleeding. But any other shifter would have already healed it.
“Omega,” she whispered.
Deirdre shouldn’t have let herself hope, even for an instant, that her life was going to change.
The lights flickered and dimmed.
A black mood oozed over the bedroom, penetrating the edges of Deirdre’s consciousness. Her reflection twisted. She was gaunt and bruised, the color sucked from her golden irises, cheeks hollowed with hunger. Deirdre touched her face. Her fingertips told her that what she saw in the mirror was real, but Deirdre knew that her senses were lying.
Rain dribbled down her walls, puddling around her feet. Where the water touched, mold spread, making her walls crumble and leaving her bleached bed sheets looking rotten.
Within seconds, the temperature had plummeted thirty degrees. Deirdre sighed, and her breath came out as a gust of silver mist.
“Damn,” she said.
She grabbed a dry shirt and went back downstairs. The creaky steps rotted around her boots. The wallpaper peeled free, turning to ashen flakes that drifted as gently as snow.
The only light on the first floor was on the oven—a little amber dot telling her that the roast was still cooking. In its faint light, she could see Jolene squeezed into the corner, arms hugged around the bowl of popcorn. Her eyes were wide with terror.
It was black by the front door. Blacker than night, blacker than the emptiness of space, blacker than the eyes of a demon.
Gutterman had arrived.
“Hey boss.” Deirdre resisted the urge to wipe the rain from her arms. It wasn’t actually raining inside. It was just a nightmare demon’s thrall shooting illusions into her brain. “Want something to drink? We’ve got water, soda, snifter of kerosene…”
The shadows vortexed into the shape of a man. Gutterman’s stomach hung over his belt, his arms like pork roasts gone rancid. “You left work early.”
“The hell I did. I clocked out at noon, just like always.” Deirdre took the popcorn bowl gently from Jolene. “It’s okay, sweetie.”
“But the fire,” her roommate whispered. Her voice was harsh, as though her throat was torn ragged by smoke. Jolene’s family had died in a motel fire when she was a kid. She relived that childhood horror every time Gutterman came around.
Deirdre would have killed for a little fire to burn away the illusion of rain. But that wasn’t how it worked. Nightmares weren’t called “pleasant dream unicorns” for a reason.
“There’s no fire, Jo. You know that. Why don’t you go upstairs? I’ll be up in a few minutes.” That was probably a lie. Gutterman had arrived without warning or invitation.
He was there to finish the job that Colin Burgh had started.
Jolene edged along the wall to go to the stairs, evading invisible flames. She whimpered all the way to the second floor.
It would seem to be burning up there, too. It would keep burning until Gutterman left or died. Deirdre didn’t feel very picky about the outcome.
“What are you cooking?” Gutterman asked. “Are you going to share?”
> Deirdre folded her arms. Shivers coursed down her spine, so hard it felt like it might rattle her vertebrae apart. “Where’s my last paycheck?”
“Last?” He peeled free of the shadows, stepping toward her. His swollen belly jiggled with every motion. “You quitting?”
“You’re firing me.”
The black pits of Gutterman’s eyes seemed to take up half his face. His jowls wobbled. “Honey. Peaches. Deirdre, dear. Why in the world would I fire my very best repo girl?” His voice dripped with saccharine and venom.
“The last repo went south. I got spotted. Now everyone knows what I look like and I won’t be good for future grabs. That’s why you sent Colin Burgh to kill me today.”
Gutterman smiled. His lips spread across his face, severing his sagging, bloated cheeks into hemispheres. His gums were brown and rotten where teeth should have been. “I thought you would be more surprised.”
“The way my life’s been going, nothing surprises me anymore.” Nothing but job offers from the werewolf Alpha, anyway. “You don’t have to use me for repossession. I could do more in the office. Loan issuance or something.”
“You’re no good for that. Everyone knows what you are—or rather, what you aren’t. You’ll drive business away.”
Slimy green mildew slithered down the walls. Ice water rose around Deirdre’s ankles, and it sloshed as Deirdre moved into the kitchen. She had a Taser in one of those drawers somewhere. Couldn’t remember which one. The chill slowed her thoughts to the rate of a sludgy ice floe.
“It’s not my fault I don’t shift,” Deirdre said.
“You sure? Didn’t you ever think the gods made you Omega for a reason?” Gutterman asked. “Like, maybe they’re punishing you for what a piece of shit you are?”
Deirdre planted her hands on the counter behind her. In that position, her fingers were only inches from the Ruger at the small of her back. Iron wouldn’t do anything fatal to Gutterman, but it might slow him down. “There are no gods left. If there were, they could have wiped nightmare demons off the face of the planet when they remade the world. It’s the sick humor of fate that made me what I am.”
“Either way. Can’t have you screwing with business.” The threat echoed, resonating through Deirdre’s marrow.
Gutterman was bloating, bulging, growing. He filled the cramped confines of Deirdre’s living room until she couldn’t even see the illusion of rotting walls. Just the vastness of his turgid girth.
He wasn’t really that big. The nightmare was a small thing at the core of his illusion, no bigger than a man.
She’d worked for Gutterman long enough that she considered herself immune to his day-to-day thrall. It was like living with a constant sense of nausea—unpleasant, but survivable. Now he was putting on a real show for her. Whipping out every one of his powers and focusing them on Deirdre so she wouldn’t be able to fight back.
Deirdre whipped the Ruger out. “Cut the thrall or I’ll shoot.”
“Your gun won’t do a thing, Deirdre dear. Not to me.” The words were like oil dripping into her ears, wet and slimy. His presence was sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
“The Ruger might not hurt you,” Deirdre said, fumbling through the drawers behind her, “but I have something else that will.”
Her fingers brushed smooth plastic.
The Taser.
Deirdre aimed her gun squarely at Gutterman’s swollen belly, right where she imagined the real demon would be hiding, and she fired.
The iron bullet vanished into his gut. The impact created ripples through his fat, like hurling a stone into the stillness of a marsh.
Gutterman slowed. Took a step backward. Clutched sausage fingers to his belly. Inky-black ichor dribbled over his hands and wrists where most creatures should have had blood.
The rain roared louder, soaking Deirdre’s hair, freezing her core.
And she suddenly remembered dying.
She tried not to think about what had happened when Genesis struck ten years earlier, but the nightmare’s thrall brought it back to her as vividly as though she were reliving it.
Deirdre had been only ten years old. She had been playing hopscotch with her friends, pelting them with pieces of chalk, and screaming as loudly as she could. She’d screamed out of joy, not fear. The fear came later.
It had seemed like a normal day. No different from the hundreds of days that had come before.
Then the sun had vanished, consumed by a black sky, and the teachers took everyone inside to keep them safe.
The kindergarten classes were farthest east. They were the first part of the school to be devoured by looming shadow, which crept toward Deirdre’s classroom inch by rapid inch.
Deirdre hadn’t known what was happening, but she knew she would die if she didn’t escape. She broke out of the classroom and tried to run. Even then, long before she practiced parkour, she had been great at running. Her dad used to say she practically had wings.
Her dad didn’t say anything about her anymore.
“He died,” Gutterman taunted.
The words echoed through the darkness surrounding her.
He died, he died, he died…
She felt like she was running again. It wasn’t possible for her to run in the townhouse—there was nowhere to go. The sensation of fatigue in her leg muscles was yet another of Gutterman’s illusions.
Ten years later, she still remembered the acid taste of fear as her school’s walls were chewed into dust a few hundred feet behind her. She remembered realizing that the school was gone with her friends inside of it. And she remembered searching the horizon for the mountains, only to discover there was no horizon left.
The roaring of the darkness was a terrible sound that Deirdre had never heard before or since. Nor had she ever felt the choke of such helplessness as when she realized she had nowhere to run. Her neighborhood was already gone, taken by the same shadow that devoured the school.
Gutterman had wrapped her in the darkness again, entombing her in the hopeless void.
“Let me go!” she shouted.
Never.
There had been blackberry bushes by town hall that Deirdre liked to eat from during the summer. Nobody else knew they were there—they grew in a hidden place behind a sign. She ate herself sick every year when those berries came in.
That was where she had chosen to die, hidden under the thorny bushes.
Deirdre was back under those bushes again. She was staring up at the leaves as the darkness closed in on her. Knees hugged to her chest, eyes squeezed shut, she listened to the other people in town as they screamed.
And she listened as those screams terminated one by one.
Her hands had still been dirty from throwing chalk. The taste of apple juice from her morning snack lingered on her tongue. The blackberry bushes shivered as darkness came over Deirdre. It roared and roared and roared, and she opened her mouth to roar back, tears burning her eyes and blood hot with bitter grief.
Then she had died.
She remembered it perfectly. Deirdre wished that wasn’t the case, but it was, and that was just something she had to live with.
Ten years since Genesis and she still couldn’t forget.
It’s not real. None of it is real.
The shock of reliving her death was enough to make her tear free of Gutterman’s illusion, just for a moment.
She wasn’t under the blackberry bushes—she was still in her kitchen. Gutterman pinned her to the linoleum with his bulk.
Deirdre thrust the Taser blindly upward and pressed the button.
Electricity sizzled. Gutterman screeched.
For a heartbeat, Deirdre could see the townhouse as it truly was. The walls weren’t mildewed. The floor was dry. The television was still playing Rylie’s speech, and the Alpha’s lips moved without making a sound.
The heartbeat passed and she was blind again. Engulfed in the depths of Gutterman.
The roar of the Genesis void thundered through
Deirdre.
“Come on, asshole,” she grunted, swinging the Taser wide, seeking physical contact. “Get out of my damn house!”
She pressed the button again. Lightning arced between the metallic prongs without reaching anything, and the darkness only grew thicker.
Fear weighed heavily on her chest.
It crushed her. She couldn’t inhale. Her head was spinning.
“Move, Deirdre!”
She wasn’t imagining that voice.
Light blazed around her, brilliant and white. Electricity snapped through the air. Deirdre’s arm hairs stood on end.
Gutterman screamed, and it was a thousand voices at once—every bully who had ever taunted Deirdre, every family member and friend who had died in Genesis, every furious victim whose belongings she’d repossessed.
She fell to her knees, hands clapped over her ears, and tried not to hear. She tried not to let it hurt.
It’s a nightmare. It’s just a nightmare.
And then it was silent.
Deirdre lifted her head. The apartment was back to normal—but she had new company.
Gage Cicerone dropped a spotlight the size of a briefcase to his side. He was wearing a battery pack slung from one shoulder. Metal wire looped between the battery and light, providing the electricity that had destroyed Gutterman.
Deirdre looked down at her body. She was completely dry. The Ruger was on the linoleum a few inches away.
Gutterman was nowhere to be seen.
“Is he dead?” Deirdre asked.
“Probably not. Nightmares are hard to kill.” Gage thumbed the switch on the battery pack off. “But I don’t think he’ll be bother you again any time soon.” The timer on the oven dinged. He grinned. “Can I stay for dinner?”
Long after Gutterman had vanished, Deirdre still had no appetite. Being cold and wet had a way of doing that to her. She pushed a forkful of meat around her plate, drawing a hash mark with the juices on the cheap white plastic.
“In our house!” Jolene fumed, waving her fork through the air like it was a sword. “In our damn castle.”