The thing chasing her loped forward with a casual grace. The woman spun. Her fingers slipped off the gate latch. Her shoulders sagged.
“No,” she whispered brokenly. Her hands trembled as she brought them up in front of her face. “No, please no, my kids, please my little girl—”
Her captor stepped into the light. My breath caught in my throat. Of all the things I had been expecting, I never imagined the monsters would look like this.
The thing that stalked the woman was human yet not human. A girl yet not a girl. She could have gone to my high school. She could have sat next to me in math class. She could have stood in front of me at lunch. That was how normal she looked. Her hair was brown and sleek and swept over one shoulder. Small gold hoops glinted at her ears. Her blue jeans and black t-shirt could have been worn by any teenager the world over, but her glowing blue eyes and the blood dribbling down her pale chin… well, that was where the normal stopped.
“Stop begging.” The girl had the sort of voice you might have expected from a movie actress: smooth as silk and heavy as cream. “You know I hate it when you beg. It is so very tedious.”
“Why - why are you doing this?” the woman cried. “Please stop. Please - please just leave us alone!”
Shut up, I ordered from the bushes. I had repositioned myself, flattening my body on the ground and shimmying back until my feet touched the fence. My shirt had ridden up and the dirt felt cold and damp against my exposed skin. Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Unfortunately, while it seemed crazy psycho people were a thing now, telepathy still wasn’t. The woman kept blubbering until, without warning, the girl grabbed her by the wrists and swung her around like a rag doll. The woman hit the gate with a sickening thud and crumpled to the ground. This time she didn’t get back up and I saw, I saw even when I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my mouth to keep myself from crying out, that the woman who’d begged for her life and the lives of her children wasn’t wearing red clothes at all. She was wearing clothes soaked in her own blood.
The girl sighed and perched a hand on her hip. Her fingers were long and elegant and painted a deep, dark red at the tips. “I told you to stop. Now look what you’ve made me do. Stupid creature.” She kicked her fallen prey and started to walk back towards the house only to suddenly stop with one foot in midair above the first porch step. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the air like a wolf scenting fresh blood.
My bladder filled and I had to clench my thighs together to keep from peeing myself. That’s how scared I was. There was no hiding from the terror now. No tucking it away. No pretending it didn’t exist. Not when it was standing ten feet in front of me and wearing a human face..
“I can smell you little creature,” the girl said in a singsong voice. Her head swung towards me, bright blue eyes traveling leisurely back and forth across my hiding spot. “You smell like sugar and spice and something quite nice.”
My right foot was cramping up. I flexed my toes, fighting off the pins and needles. The tiny movement nearly made me lose my balance. I rolled to the right and threw out my hand to catch myself. My fingers touched something hard in the dirt. Something metal. Slowly, silently, I dragged it closer to me, managing to identify it by touch alone.
I had found a horseshoe. The big, heavy kind people threw in sand pits during barbecues.
No, not a horseshoe.
A weapon.
“I want to play a game.” The girl’s gaze flicked across the lawn to where the woman remained crumpled in a heap of blood and twisted limbs. “But I’ve broken my toy. Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Her teeth flashed white and silver as she smiled. “I promise to be much more careful with you.”
I knew she would find me eventually. The yard wasn’t that big, and I had no where to run which meant I would only have one chance. One chance to defend myself. One chance to save my life.
Holding my breath, I waited until the girl turned away from me and with more desperation than finesse rolled out of the bushes, scrambled to my feet, and launched myself forward, catching her just below the knees. She went down with a startled shriek and I fell with her, the horseshoe clutched in my right hand. There was no time to think. No time to reason. No time to regret. I’d heard the screams. I’d witnessed the horror. Right now it was kill or be killed, and I had no intention of dying.
I swung the horseshoe with all my strength, violently striking the back of her head again and again until blood splattered up and covered my face and neck in a spray of warm, sticky red. The girl snarled and clawed at the ground, twisting this way and that until she finally managed to dislodge me enough to flip onto her back.
Her hand struck with lightening quickness, leaving five burning marks across my cheek courtesy of her nails. The scratches burned like someone had poured acid in them and I screamed, but I didn’t stop using the horseshoe. I couldn’t stop, even if I wanted. Instinct had taken over and I was more animal than human as I fought for my life.
Beneath the blunt force of the horseshoe her nose shattered, then her jaw. Her blue eyes bulged and I jammed my thumb into the left one, just like Mrs. Hamilton had taught us to do in self-defense. Who knew those boring classes I’d slept through half the time would actually come in handy? There’s a lesson for you, kids. Be cool, pay attention in school. Even if it’s gym.
The girl wailed and bucked her hips, trying to throw me off. “I will kill you for this,” she hissed, glaring daggers at me with her one good eye. Her face was little more than a bloody pulp of bleeding flesh and broken bone, swollen beyond recognition. Her chin sagged to one side, tongue lolling out out the side, blood dripping from her parted lips. Heart thundering like a drum inside of my chest I hesitated, horseshoe held high in the air as I waited to see if she was finished.
She wasn’t.
With the ferocity of a wild animal she snapped her teeth and twisted her head to the side, ripping out a chunk of my hair and spitting it on the ground. I dropped my arms and her cheekbone made a sharp crack as it snapped beneath the horseshoe.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I kept repeating the same words over and over, not realizing I was sobbing until I tasted the bitter salt of my own tears. I brought the horseshoe down again. And again. And again. So many times I lost count, and in that moment of sheer violence and madness I lost track of who was the victim… and who was the monster.
When the girl went limp beneath me and her head fell back, mouth open, eyes closed, I flung the horseshoe to the side and staggered to my feet.
Adrenaline coursed through my veins, causing my muscles to twitch and tingle. My hands were wet with blood. My face and chest covered in it. Without a mirror, I could only imagine what I looked like. In the movies, blood is always red, but under the floodlights it was almost black.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and stared down at the girl I had beaten. Every day I witnessed death and destruction second hand courtesy of the five o’clock news, but seeing violence up close and personal - knowing I was the cause of it - filled me with a sort of horrified fascination I couldn’t explain. She was like a car wreck I couldn’t look way from. A flashing siren I couldn’t ignore. With her mouth open I had a clear view of her fangs. They were bright silver, like Giant Man’s had been, slightly curved and ice pick sharp.
Run, part of my brain demanded. Run now!
Look closer, the other part urged. She can’t hurt you.
Unable to stop myself, I slowly knelt beside her head and reached out with one trembling hand. If I could just touch the fangs… If I could just feel them… They really were quite beautiful. The way they glistened in the moonlight… It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
My finger brushed against one fang and it happened in an instant. One second the girl was motionless and the next she had her teeth clamped down on my hand and was shaking her head back and forth with the savagery of a wild dog ripping out the throat of its prey.
I screamed and fell back. She released my ha
nd and I clutched it to my chest, expecting to see it ravaged beyond repair, but the only visible damage were two small pinpricks of blood between my thumb and pointer finger where her fangs had pierced the skin.
And yet it burned. Oh, God, my entire arm was burning and I was screaming and the girl was laughing.
Nimble as a cat she sprang to her feet and circled me as I rolled in the grass, frantically to trying to put out the invisible fire that was consuming my body inch by inch.
“Peek-a-boo, I got you,” she cooed before her lips curled into a deadly snarl and she crouched over me, slamming her hands to the ground on either side of my face.
Half out of my mind with pain I stared up at her. I saw her blue eyes, both of them open wide and glittering with malice. I saw her nose, straight and unbroken. I saw her face, healed to perfection.
And I knew I was going to die.
CHAPTER TEN
The Pet That Ran Away
You know how they say right before you die your life flashes before your eyes and you see a bright light and everything is all happiness and rainbows and floating unicorns?
Yeah.
That didn’t happen to me.
Instead I held perfectly still as the girl traced a single fingernail down across my cheek and hooked it under my jaw, poking until I felt a drop of blood slide down my neck. She poked again, harder this time, puncturing another hole in my skin as though I was some sort of human piñata and my blood was the candy.
“Aren’t you going to scream?” Her lips pushed out in a childish pout and she tipped her head to the side. Her hair slid across her neck, a sleek curtain of silky brown. “The other one screamed. You’re no fun.” Another poke. Another drop of blood drawn. “You’re no fun at all. I want a new toy. This one is broken.”
If the bitch thought I was here for her own amusement she had another thing coming. I may not have known what the hell was going on, but I wasn’t about to lay here and let myself be turned into a pincushion by someone who deserved their own two-hour special on Dr. Phil.
The fiery pain emanating from my hand had subsided to a dull burn. I slapped her arm, a feeble attempt to defend myself compared to the hits I’d gotten in with the horseshoe, but the girl let me get up, renewed interest glittering in her icy blue eyes.
“I am not a toy,” I spat, drawing on every last ounce of courage I had left inside of me. “And you can’t go around killing people!” Without meaning to I glanced at the woman by the gate. The woman who had not gotten up. The woman who was definitely dead. “Well, you shouldn’t go around killing people,” I amended. “The police will be here soon and—”
“Oh don’t get me started on the police.” The girl waved her hand dismissively. “We took care of them ages ago.”
I thought of my 9-1-1 calls, and I knew she was telling the truth. My confidence wavered. “Who are you?” I whispered. “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?” the girl mocked in a high-pitched parody of my own voice. She rolled her eyes, the gesture so purely teenager I almost forgot, just for a second, that she was a crazy murdering psychopath. “Always the same dull, inane questions. Stupid humans,” she breathed as she began to circle around me. “So content in your little bubbles. So assured of your own dominance. Did you really think you were top of the food chain? That in the entire big, bad world there was nothing bigger and badder than you? Well I am sorry to say your little bubble” – she snapped her fingers an inch in front of my face – “has just been popped.”
I twisted my head to the side. “What’s your name?”
The girl seemed surprised by the question. “My name?” she echoed. “Angelique. It’s French. Do you know what it means?”
“No.”
“Messenger of God.” For some reason this seemed to strike Angelique as supremely funny. She doubled over, clutching her stomach as she dissolved into a fit of giggles. “What – what’s your name, little human?” she gasped once she’d managed to get herself under control.
Never give your name to strangers.
I didn’t know why my mother’s voice would choose then and there to echo in my head, but it served to refocus me. I couldn’t waste any more time with Angelique. Not when Dad and Travis were still out there. But how was I supposed to get away? I was fast, but I was willing to bet Angelique was faster. Stronger too, especially now that I didn’t have the element of surprise… or a weapon. She was also self-healing. Having a horseshoe driven repeatedly into their skull would have killed the normal person, or at least significantly impaired them. Yet Angelique stood before me as though nothing had happened, and were it not for the dried blood on her face I might have been tempted to think I had imagined the entire thing.
“I asked you what your name was,” she said, the hard edge in her voice reminding me that even though she looked like a regular teenager – minus the fangs and the bloodstains – she was anything but. “Don’t you know it’s rude to keep people waiting?”
“Don’t you know it’s rude to bite?” I snapped.
“Oh, I like you.” Angelique skimmed her fingers across my cheek. I jerked back, but her grip only tightened, her nails sinking delicately into my flesh. “You’re feisty. So different from all the others. All they do is beg and cry and beg and cry.” Her sigh was long and suffering. “I’m sure you can imagine it gets pretty annoying after a while.”
If there was ever a time to keep your mouth shut, it was when a crazy person had a hold of your face. I really needed to work on my impulse control. “Yeah, I bet people begging for their lives is a regular snooze fest.”
“Oh, you’re positively perfect,” Angelique said with a delighted laugh. “Do you want to be my pet? Please say yes!” She released her death grip on my cheek and clapped her hands together, jumping up and down like a little kid on the playground begging to be picked for dodge ball. Her earrings danced, reflecting off the light still glaring from the side of the house. “Please. I haven’t had my own pet for years and years. I really want you.”
What I wanted was for this crazy nightmare to end. I wanted to wake up safe in a hospital bed, the victim of an electric shock from being stupid enough to try to hotwire a car. I wanted Travis and Dad to be there. I wanted the past forty-eight hours to have never happened. I wanted to never know what it felt like to bludgeon someone over the head with a horseshoe until their nose cracked. I wanted to never feel fear so intense and so crippling I was paralyzed from it.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be your pet.”
Angelique shrieked and threw her hands in the air. “This is going to be so much fun! And Mona is going to be so jealous. I can’t wait until she sees you! Of course we will have to get you out of those awful clothes and do something with your hair.” Her nose wrinkled as she picked up the end of my scraggly braid.
I held perfectly still as she examined me; a living doll. My hand itched to slap her across the face, but for once I controlled myself. I needed her to trust me, or I knew it would only be a matter of time before I ended up like the poor woman she’d slammed against the gate.
“Tell me your name, little pet,” she ordered “or I’ll have to pick one out for you. Actually, that might be even better! Suri,” she said. “No… Harper! No, no, you don’t look like a Harper… I’ve got it!” Her fingers snapped together. “North.”
“You’re just naming famous people’s kids.”
“I do love tabloid magazines. I suppose you could it my guilty pleasure.” Her lips curved in a smile even as her eyes glittered with malice. “One of them, anyways. Do you want to know the others?”
I had a feeling it wouldn’t be too hard to guess. “Lola,” I said grudgingly. “My name is Lola.”
“Lola,” she repeated, rolling the second L on her tongue. “I like it. It’s quite… spicy, isn’t it? Now, about your hair…” She held my braid out, examining the length before she let it drop and rubbed her hand on her jeans as though my hai
r had offended her in some way. “Definitely a cut and color. Have you ever—”
“ANGELIQUE!” A man’s roar ripped through the night. Both Angelique and I flinched.
“Oh drats,” she breathed. “He found me and I’m not even in the right sector. He’s going to be so angry.”
“Who’s going to be angry?”
She tossed her head. “None of your beeswax. I’ll only be gone for a minute. You’ll wait here, won’t you? I would invite you inside but, well, it’s a bit of a mess and I know how squeamish you humans can be.”
She was leaving me? “I – uh – no. I won’t go anywhere.” And if you believe that you’re dumber than you look.
“That’s good because if you did run off I would have to find you and torture you and that wouldn’t be any fun at all.” Angelique leaned in close and I felt the whisper of her words like a soft, cold caress against my neck. “For you, at least.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I lied. “I’ll stay right here and keep the dead woman company.”
Her gaze flicked carelessly towards the gate. “Is she dead?”
“I’m pretty sure she’s not taking a nap.”
“You really are delicate creatures, aren’t you?” Her hair rippled as her head shook from side to side. “Be careful, little pet. I don’t want anything to happen to you. At least not yet.”
Faster than my eyes could follow she disappeared into the house, her body moving like a blur across the lawn and up the porch steps. I stood in place and made myself count to twenty before I sprinted to the gate, half expecting to be dragged back any second. The woman’s body was slumped up against the gate, preventing me from pulling it open. After a few helpless yanks I made a gruesome decision.
The Lola Chronicles (Book 1): A Night Without Stars Page 7