‘Pride’s a sin.’
‘Everything’s a sin, Tommy. That’s why God invented forgiveness.’
‘What else did she say?’
Mark looked at his watch and put his glass down. ‘No time right now, Tommy. Sorry.’
‘Jesus, Mark. What the hell’s going on? Why can’t you talk to me?’
‘Gotta go – fundraiser. I’m coming up on an election. Time’s a little tight to come by. I’ll give you a call in the morning.’
Tommy stood, angered by the nonchalance of the politician. ‘OK, so we’ll discuss the possibility of us going to prison and/or being hunted by a killer at a more convenient time for you?’
Mark’s expression hardened and his eyes narrowed. ‘Tommy, I will tell you everything later. But I don’t know much – just that she wants you to do something for her. I’m just asking that you listen to what she has to say. For both our sakes.’
‘And why should I care about your sake?’
Mark walked up to him and placed both his hands on Tommy’s shoulders. His glare softened into a practiced smile. Tommy smelled the Scotch on Mark’s breath and it made him think of his father, who had consumed more Scotch than water in his lifetime.
‘Because we used to be friends, and I would like to think we still are. Friends help each other out. If she had wanted something from me, I would have done it. For both of us.’
Tommy wondered how the man was able to keep his face so completely still. ‘You really think God has forgiven you, Mark?’
Mark actually winced, as if the question caused him pain. It was then that Tommy saw his old friend was more than just scared about his past coming out. He was truly worried for his soul.
‘I do, Tommy. I really do.’
‘I think we’re going to hell,’ Tommy said.
Mark dropped his hands. ‘Let me ask you something else, Tommy. That day. You didn’t fuck her. Why?’
It was the last question Tommy expected, mostly because of how Mark asked it. Here was this man, this polished politician, who was so used to crafting language to appease the ears listening to him, and the word fuck just rolled off his tongue as if being muttered by the frustrated teenager from all those years ago. Why didn’t you fuck her, Tommy?
‘Because I knew if she controlled me then, she would control me forever.’
Mark’s body stiffened. ‘Is that what you think, Tommy? Do you think she controls me?’ He wagged his finger. ‘Let me tell you something. Nobody controls me. She just has better cards to play at the moment.’
‘Seems to me she controls everything,’ Tommy said. Then he took a chance, played a hunch. ‘And I’m not so sure you mind that. Maybe there’s something about her being back you like.’
Tommy couldn’t be certain, but he thought that hit a nerve. Could Mark be happy about Elizabeth being back? Did he feel a nervous excitement about who she was and what she represented? After all, Tommy couldn’t deny there was something deathly compelling about the woman, and he wondered if Mark felt it, too.
Mark didn’t answer.
‘Good night, Tommy,’ he said,
Tommy watched as Mark waited on the sidewalk. Within seconds, a black Lincoln Town Car rolled up to the curb and Mark disappeared inside, whisked away to some other Important Thing To Do.
Tommy stood alone, inside the house of ghosts, wondering what the night would bring.
FOURTEEN
Tommy walked the cobblestone streets and alleys, feeling the weight of time surrounding him. Darkness blanketed Old Charleston. The late-summer evening was temperate, enough so that many of the restaurants lining the street still offered outdoor seating.
Though the messenger bag slung over his right shoulder was light, the straps seemed to cut into his skin, the weight of what was inside bending his thoughts toward it. Inside, on his Dell laptop, was his unfinished manuscript, the one that he ostensibly came here to complete. The one that brought Elizabeth back. The one that was completely wrong.
The same feeling he had at the airport returned to him, like a low-voltage current suddenly running through him. Tommy turned his head and scanned the faces closest to him, seeing no one who looked like Elizabeth. But it didn’t matter. She was here, and she would find him. It was all part of her plan. Tommy’s only advantage was he was no longer scared of her. She wanted something from him, which meant there would be a conversation before anything else could happen. Tommy wondered if that conversation was going to happen tonight. If it was, all he could do was wait and work on his manuscript until she slithered over to him.
Tommy strolled until he found a pub that suited his mood. He took a seat outside, one offering a view of an historic inn across the street that could have been featured in any movie about the Revolutionary War. After ordering a lager from the waitress, Tommy slid his laptop from his messenger bag and powered it up.
He scrolled through the book aimlessly, feeling the weight of all the work that went into it. In terms of fiction, he considered it his best work yet.
But it wasn’t the story he was supposed to tell. As much as Tommy wanted to find the ending for his book, he knew he would never find the right one. He realized that as much as he wanted to unburden himself of the awful secret he had lived with for so long, it couldn’t be done with half-truths and substantial chunks of pure fiction. It couldn’t be done with The Blood of the Young.
He thought more about his idea, the one that depressed and excited him.
He flagged the waitress down.
‘I need a shot of tequila. Do you have Don Julio Reposado?’
She smiled at him.
‘I can check. You celebrating?’
Tommy thought about that. ‘A bit of a celebration, and a bit of a funeral.’
She seemed to accept this as a common reply, and arrived a minute later.
‘Congratulations and my condolences.’ She set the glimmering ounce of liquid in front of him and left.
Tommy closed his eyes and brought the shot glass to his lips. He tilted the glass upwards and let the tequila slide down his throat, getting an oaky taste of both ice and fire.
He set down the empty glass and then did something he would never even have dreamed of doing. He closed the file on his computer and deleted it. Ninety thousand words, gone. Then he emptied his trash, assuring he couldn’t get it back.
He attached to the pub’s open Wi-Fi signal and logged on to his online backup system. He then deleted the manuscripts from all of his online backups.
The Blood of the Young was gone.
He did it all so fast he didn’t second-guess his actions, which was the point. In just a few moments, over a year’s worth of work vanished. All that remained were his memories of it, and, while that scared the shit out of him, it forced him to move on.
He was cleansed.
He would write something new. Something honest. And something far scarier than what he had just deleted.
How the hell am I going to tell Becky? Or Dominic?
Don’t get distracted, Tommy. Feel the moment. Know the truth. Write the truth. And write it all, starting from the point she came back in your life.
Tommy opened up a blank manuscript template. Chapter one was easy. All he had to do was think back to the day she had come back into his life.
Tommy Devereaux stared out from the twenty-fourth floor of the downtown Hyatt, soaking in the expanse of the Rocky Mountains, laid out before him like a painting. The Peaks Lounge was one of his usual late-afternoon writing spots. The drinks and the Wi-Fi signal were both strong, and that’s about all any writer needed. More than anything, though, the lounge always had a good buzz of energy, which he preferred around him when he was working. Ironically, a room full of people talking and laughing helped him to focus. And, when he needed the help, Tommy could look into the crowd and pluck out the perfect description for a character he was writing. Characters were everywhere; all you had to do was look.
And he wrote. Furiously. He wrote with a purpose he had
never felt before, as if he was trying to get a confession out before his last breath left his body.
Hours passed. He looked down at an empty dinner plate and vaguely recalled a steak sitting on it at one point, but barely remembered eating. All he could hear was the staccato tapping of his fingertips against the plastic keys on his laptop keyboard. All he could see were words – new words – filling the screen, page after page. He would document everything that had happened since the moment Elizabeth came back. He would use real names, at least for now. And the words would express the fear and the anxiety he was feeling, because it was all real.
Best of all, he didn’t have to think of an ending. The ending, however it turned out to be, would furnish itself.
‘I’d love to see what you’re writing.’
Tommy looked up.
Elizabeth sat down next to him.
FIFTEEN
A small breeze washed over Tommy, as if coming off Elizabeth’s body. He looked down at the steak knife lying across his empty plate. He wasn’t sure what he was planning to do with it, but he was glad it was there.
‘Hello, Elizabeth.’
‘Hi, you.’
Tommy felt a surge. A surge of what, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the voltage of nearby evil, but he felt it pulse gently and steadily through him as Elizabeth sat, sliding her body against the back of the metal chair. She looked nothing like she did that day at the Hyatt, but Tommy still recognized her immediately. She looked, in fact, like the sixteen-year-old from 1981. Hair was still long and red, the same shade it had been that day in the woods. Her face was smooth and white, surprisingly wrinkle-free considering the time that had passed. Wide shoulders accentuated her perfect posture and her breasts, which were even more full and round than he had remembered.
Elizabeth had done a hell of a disguise job back in Denver. Truth was, she was gorgeous, and Tommy hated himself for thinking it.
The waitress came over before Tommy could say anything else.
‘Are you dining tonight, ma’am?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Just a glass of Merlot, please.’
‘Certainly.’ The waitress nodded and reached down to clear Tommy’s plate. He removed the knife from the plate and placed it on the tablecloth.
‘Will you be ordering more food, sir?’
‘Not sure yet.’
She seemed ready for another question but must have decided against it. She walked away, leaving Elizabeth gazing at the knife on the table.
‘You think you’re going to need that?’ she asked.
‘I’d rather err on the side of caution.’
‘If I wanted to kill you, Tommy, you’d be many years dead by now.’
He believed her. Tommy stared at her face, wanting so much to take a picture of her so he could compare it to the pictures of all the other killers he had researched over the years. Look for the shared traits. The common evil.
‘Have you read any of them? My books?’
The waitress dropped off the glass of wine, her gaze staying on Tommy for a few extra seconds before heading back into the kitchen.
‘She likes you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I could see it in her face. She wants you, Tommy. How does that make you feel? A young little thing like that. Must make you feel powerful.’
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘She kind of reminds me of your assistant. What’s her name – Sofia? Gorgeous. She wants you, too, by the way.’
Tommy’s stomach clenched. ‘You don’t know anything about her.’
‘It’s in her face when she talks about you. If I didn’t think you were such a good little boy, Tommy, I’d assume you were fucking her.’
Tommy said nothing. He wondered if she knew the truth about him and Sofia.
Elizabeth sipped her wine. ‘Yes, Tommy. To answer your earlier questions, I’ve read all your books. Of course I have.’
‘So you’re a fan,’ he said, not sure what he meant by it.
‘I’ve always been a fan, Tommy. Of you. Of Jason. Mark.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning we share a bond few people will ever share. We killed together. Such things are not to be taken lightly.’
Tommy glanced around before leaning across the table.
‘I didn’t kill anyone. You know that.’
‘You helped cover it up. Just as bad.’
‘Helped cover it up?’ His voice was a strained whisper. ‘I didn’t have a choice. Your … Watcher … had a shotgun trained on me. What was I supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know, Tommy.’ Her face was glass. ‘Be a man?’
‘I was fourteen.’
‘Man enough age for me,’ she winked.
‘Who was he? Who was your accomplice?’
‘He was my first Watcher. The first of many.’
‘And what’s a Watcher?’
She winked at him. ‘Stick around for a while and maybe you’ll find out.’ She took another sip, the red wine washing over her lips like blood. ‘You know, Tommy, you were the only one who denied me that day. I thought at first maybe you were a faggot. But your eyes betrayed you. You wanted me. But you also wanted to hurt me.’
‘Of course I did. You killed Rade.’
‘He was my first, you know. You always remember your first.’
Tommy almost didn’t want to ask. ‘How … how many have there been?’
She gave a shrug and said in a faint sing-song voice, ‘Thirty-eight.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Tommy looked around at the other patrons on the restaurant patio, wondering if they saw a man talking to himself. Or, perhaps, this was all actually real.
Am I sitting across the table from a woman who has killed thirty-eight people?
Tommy accessed all the years of research in his mind. All the books, all the interviews, all the endless Internet articles about female serial killers. If she’s telling the truth, he thought, she must be the third most prolific female serial killer in recorded world history.
She seemed to have read his mind. ‘Another two and I’ll tie for second. Belle Gunness was thought to have been responsible for forty deaths.’ She gave a small laugh, as if they were sharing a recollection of a good time from the past. ‘Of course, I’ll never reach my namesake.’
‘Elizabeth Báthory,’ he said, snapping his attention back to her.
‘Very good, Tommy. You know your killers well.’
‘It’s my job.’
Elizabeth Báthory was the greatest female serial killer of all time. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Bloody Countess was said to have killed over six hundred young women, torturing them at length before finally draining their blood and bathing in it, hoping to prolong her life.
Tommy looked at Elizabeth’s smooth, strong arms and thought she looked nothing like a woman in her mid-forties. Had she found her own secret to life through her bloodlust?
‘Did you change your name to hers?’ he asked.
‘No, just fortunate coincidence,’ she said.
‘Is that what you’re doing? Are you trying to be like her?’
‘Please. Copycat killers are so vapid.’
Tommy ran his finger along the handle of the steak knife. ‘I don’t believe for a second you’ve killed thirty-eight people.’
‘I don’t need you to believe me, Tommy,’ she said. ‘But I think we both know I’m not lying. You, with all your wonderful research, should understand my behavior and what I’m capable of.’
‘I don’t know anything about you. And I don’t want to. I just want to be left alone.’
A larger laugh. ‘Oh, you know that’s not going to happen.’
‘And what’s to keep me from turning you in?’
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. ‘Gee, Tommy, I don’t know.’ She pushed her chair back from the table and scoured the streets with her eyes. ‘There you go. A cop. Right there. Why don’t you go up to him and tell him everything I just told you?’
Tommy turned and saw a patrol car. The cop driving it stopped at a red light and glanced over at Tommy, offering the slightest of nods.
Elizabeth grabbed Tommy’s arm, making him jump. ‘C’mon, Tommy, I’ll even go with you! Just think, you’ll be a hero!’
He pushed her arm away. ‘Stop it,’ he said.
Then Elizabeth changed. In an instant, Tommy saw the monster beneath the veneer. She stood and shouted as loud as she could. ‘Don’t you dare try to hit me!’
What the hell? Tommy thought.
Elizabeth’s eyes nearly disappeared behind the slits of her eyelids as she screamed again. ‘You won’t! You won’t treat me this way!’
Tommy looked around. Everyone was watching them.
Then he saw the cop pull up on to the sidewalk and get out of his car.
He hissed at her. ‘What are you doing?’
He heard her wheeze in rasps of fury. Then another volley of rage: ‘Goddamn you!’
The cop came up to the table, his thumbs hooked into his utility belt. He looked Tommy’s age but a hell of a lot bigger and blacker. He wore the calm look of someone who had kicked enough ass in his time to know not to panic.
‘Evening,’ he said, his deep voice laced with Southern charm. ‘There a problem here?’
‘No,’ Tommy said.
‘’Scuse me, sir, but my question was directed at the lady.’
Elizabeth drained about half of the rage from her face. She turned to the cop. ‘I’m just fucking tired of it all, you know?’
‘Oh, yes, ma’am. I do indeed know. I know all about that. But that doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is if you might be worried for your safety here.’
Tommy’s mind reeled as he stared at the knife on the table. Her safety? She just confessed to having killed thirty-eight people, and the cop was wondering about her fucking safety?
‘Sir, I didn’t do anything,’ he said as calmly as he could.
The cop turned to him and narrowed his eyes. ‘Well, sir, that isn’t exactly true. I did see you push her arm.’
‘She grabbed me and I pushed her arm away,’ Tommy said. ‘That’s all.’
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