by S. R. Witt
The big white van wallowed to the right as Chase’s brother jerked the wheel hard away from the centerline. A Land Rover, its flawless paint job as smooth and glossy as a black mirror, roared by so close Chase was sure they were going to swap paint.
“What an asshole,” she snarked as the luxury SUV blew past them. The wave of air from its passing rocked the van on its suspension. “What kind of idiot drives a brand-new Land Cruiser like that? Especially when the other lane’s filled up by an ugly old tank like this thing.”
Paxton laughed at that, a nervous edge sucking the humor out of the sound. “He must be in a hurry to get back up to one of those big houses on the ridge.”
“What’s a truck like that doing here?” Chase asked, trying to reconcile the overpriced status symbol with its poverty-blighted surroundings.
And it wasn’t just the Land Rover. A silver Mercedes convertible prowled down a side street, vanishing from sight before Chase could get a good look at it or its driver. A lemon-yellow Porsche slipped into a parking space in front of the feed store as Paxton drove by. At the next intersection ahead of Chase and her brother, a pair of beat up F-150s swerved out of the way before a low-slung Corvette with a blatantly illegal mirrored windshield could run them off the road.
“For such a little town, there sure are a lot of assholes with too much money around here,” Chase mused. “Maybe they’re paying the sheriff to ignore whatever crazy shit they get up to, and that’s why he didn’t need your money.”
A black Escalade cruised toward them in the opposite lane, slowing slightly as it pulled even with Paxton. The window wasn’t tinted, but the fading sunlight cast a glare across it that made it hard for Chase to see through it.
What she did see, though, was a blurred, glowing outline surrounding the driver’s head. It was a stark white line, its edges fuzzed out into a cloudy haze, that throbbed in the air like a scratch on a piece of film.
Before she could call it to Paxton’s attention, the Escalade and its glowing driver were gone.
“I think I’m coming down with a migraine,” Chase said and rubbed her temples with her index fingers. She’d had bouts of headaches over the years, ever since—
—that night in Austin, when three men wearing flat black masks broke into her house. They came into her room, halos of red light surrounding them, and Chase had grabbed the knife from under her pillow and screamed and slashed—
She hadn’t remembered the auras before, or the masks. She’d thought she was just too young and too traumatized to remember the faces of the men she’d killed. Bits and pieces were crawling up through her memories, like corpses rising from a bog now that she’d arrived in Crucible.
Or maybe it was all bullshit. The stress of her parents’ disappearance, the money running out, the sheriff hassling them, the weird cars and weirder people filling the tiny town to its sinister brim. Maybe it was all just too much, and Chase’s grip on reality was slipping through her fingers.
That thought bothered her more than the idea that this town might be dangerous. Danger she could deal with. She could stab it, cut it, slice it apart.
If she lost her mind, though, there was no way to know what might happen. Chase had hurt people before. If she lost control, she might hurt Paxton.
She blinked away a hot tear in her right eye and tilted her head toward the window. She didn’t want her brother to see her worrying about him. He hated that he depended on her, and Chase didn’t want to wound his pride.
“Here we go,” Paxton said, pointing at the gravel driveway ahead of them. “I don’t recognize the chain, but the sign says motel, so I’m giving it a shot.”
Chase checked to make sure that her knife was still clipped safely inside the front pocket of her jeans. The weapon was a little longer than her hand, but not much, and when she pulled her shirt down past her waist, you couldn’t even tell she was carrying.
Unfolded, though, the weapon was nine inches long with a reverse-S blade with nasty serrations designed to flense flesh from bone. It ended in a frighteningly sharp hooked tip known as an extractor, which did precisely what its name suggested.
The knife was a gift from their father, and he had started Chase’s training when she was old enough to understand that the sharp part could cause severe injuries to anyone on the business end. Chase hadn’t gone anywhere without that knife since her fifth birthday.
Crucible might not have been much of a destination for tourists, but the motel’s parking lot was almost filled to capacity. The Shepherd’s Inn wasn’t large, it only had a single floor, and Chase doubted there were more than twenty rooms, but it looked like all of those rooms would be filled tonight.
Paxton found an empty slot on the far end of the lot and was easing the van’s bulk into it when a bronze Hummer H2 with a silver bird’s skull hood ornament tried to bully its way into the same spot.
The oversized vehicle screeched to a halt inches from the van’s bumper, and Paxton shot Chase a confused look. “The fuck is wrong with people in this town?”
Chase shook her head. “Let’s just get a room and catch some sleep. I’m burned out from all the bullshit today.”
The H2 screeched away in a cloud of burning rubber as Chase opened the door and stepped out of the van, the Hummer’s front tire missing her leading foot by less than six inches. A hot spike of rage reared up inside her, but Chase choked it down with the prayer her mother had taught her after the night of the murders.
“Bless me, Mother Moon,” she whispered to herself, “that my family and I remain safe, so I don’t have to kill again.”
She repeated the mantra over and over again, chewing on the words as she walked to the back of the van and retrieved Paxton’s wheelchair from the storage space behind their foam mattress. Chase unfolded the chair and rolled it around to the driver’s side door, where her brother waited impatiently for her arrival.
“About time,” Paxton said with a wink. He leaned forward, and Chase caught him in a tight hug. She squeezed her brother, kissed him on the cheek, lowered him into his chair, and helped him get his feet adjusted on the footrests.
Paxton had never been able to walk, and no doctor could ever figure out why. Chase had just accepted it as another of her brother’s quirks and took care of whatever he needed. Paxton had grown more and more embarrassed by her attention over the years, forcing Chase to withdraw and let him find his own way wherever possible. It pained her to see Paxton struggle, but it was his struggle, and she wouldn’t deny him that.
Paxton led the way across the motel’s cracked and rutted parking lot, cursing as he had to wheel his way around missing chunks of asphalt. Chase followed behind him, repeating her mantra and trying to pull her thoughts together. She couldn’t afford to lose it in this town.
The sound of the H2’s tires squealing as it circled around the motel looking for a place to park challenged Chase’s self-control, but by the time she reached the office’s door, she no longer felt like carving a hunk out of the driver’s face.
Chase forced a brittle smile into place across her face, and then followed her brother into the motel’s office. She let Paxton take the lead, not only because he was her older brother, but because she didn’t trust her voice. The spike of anger was still hot, even if the prayer had it under control for the moment. She didn’t want it to flare back to life and cause trouble for the two of them. Best not to talk until her rage gave up and slunk back to its cave for the moment.
“My sister and I need a room, please,” Paxton began. He tilted his wheelchair backward, then forward, putting on his best smile as he did so. “One room’s fine, though two queens would be preferable to a single king.”
Chase tried not to roll her eyes at Paxton’s display. Her brother was smoother on two wheels than most people were on two legs, so pitying him seemed silly to Chase. He’d spent their youth running circles around her, but that didn’t keep him from showing off his chair to get a little special treatment from time to time.
&n
bsp; The hotel clerk smiled down at him from her side of the counter, her chubby cheeks sprayed with a shotgun blast of freckles. Even Chase had to admit her dimples were too cute for words.
The girl’s head bobbed back and forth from the computer monitor hidden below the edge of the desk and Paxton. She pursed her brow, flicked through the pages of a leather-bound ledger, and then smiled. “You’re lucky, there’s just one room left. Busy this weekend. You know, on account of the game.”
Before Chase could ask the clerk for more information about this game that seemed to be on everyone’s minds, tires screeched alarmingly close to the office’s front window. A half second later the front door blew open to admit a tall man with red hair chopped into a buzz cut.
“I need a room,” he snapped. His eyes were a strange dark brown bordering on red, like rich chocolate, and when Chase met his gaze, those eyes widened with furious recognition. “I was here before these two. They stole my parking space to beat me in here. Let me go first.”
The motel clerk stammered, inclined her head toward Paxton and said, “I was just about to complete this gentleman’s reservation,” she said.
The man bulled past Chase, who deftly bent out of his way to avoid the shoulder he threw in her direction. Paxton, on the other hand, couldn’t dodge the ill-tempered idiot quite so easily. He had just started to turn when the intruder grabbed the handle on the chair’s right side and yanked it away from the desk.
The sparks of rage that Chase had almost tamped down flared to life, and a wave of red crashed over her vision.
“Get your hand off my brother’s chair,” she snapped. Her voice was low and harsh, a guttural growl that reverberated through the tiny office.
A sensible person would have stepped down and raised his hands defensively, because no one wanted to be on the wrong side of someone who sounded like Chase at that moment. But the buzz cut asshole had far less common sense than the average person. He doubled down on his idiocy by putting his left hand on Paxton’s chair and started dragging the wheelchair off to the side.
“Chase!” Paxton snapped, but his sister wasn’t listening to his warning.
She stepped forward, slid her body in between the intruder and her brother, and threw her arms up and out. The sudden move surprised the intruder and knocked his hands off Paxton’s chair. It also put Chase close enough to render his greater reach a moot point.
Buzz cut swung his arms at Chase’s head, but she’d anticipated that move and easily dodged the clumsy attack.
Chase thrust her left leg between the man’s legs, hooked her right foot behind his left knee, and slammed her shoulder into his sternum.
Off balance, the man toppled backward over Chase’s foot. He flung one hand out to grab Chase, and she obliged by catching his wrist in her left hand and his thumb in her right hand. As he plummeted toward the floor, she twisted her arms clockwise, as if spinning a pair of jump ropes for Double Dutch.
Chase’s leverage turned the man violently as he fell, and he crashed to the tiles face down.
“I’ll kill—” he started, but he never had a chance to finish the sentence. Chase raised his hand to her chest to keep him pinned to the floor, and then dropped all of her weight onto her right knee. The bony spear of her bent leg slammed into the man’s back and drove the wind from his lungs in one explosive burst.
With no air left in his body, the man offered no resistance as Chase twisted his arm up behind his back until the back of his hand was flat against his shoulder.
“Paxton, pay for the room,” she said, her voice relaxed and calm. Inside, her emotions boiled, and she struggled to keep her cool. But to the rest of the world, Chase appeared to have turned to ice.
She kept her knee buried against the man’s spine and his arm bent hard. Chase wanted him to move. She wanted him to struggle. She wanted any justification to yank his arm up and tear his shoulder apart.
Maybe he has a knife, Chase thought, licking her lips.
Or a gun. Something deadly that would give Chase an excuse to draw her blade and carve this asshole into bite-sized chunks for the neighborhood mongrels to feast on.
The clerk’s voice, hoarse and a little ragged with fear, pulled Chase back from the edge. “Here are your keys, Mr. Harrow.”
“Harrow?” the man on the floor asked. “What kind of bullshit is this?”
Chase leaned in close. “You ever let my family’s name drool out of your fat mouth again, I’ll cut your tongue out. You ever think about my brother or me again, I’ll carve your heart out of your chest and feed it to you.”
The man struggled, just a little, and Chase responded with savage force. She twisted his arm until she felt the bones of his wrist creak in her grip. “Be still. I’m going to let go of you. Don’t get up until you count to a hundred. Move before then, and I’ll come back and stomp your guts out of your ass.”
The man groaned, but he remained motionless as Chase stood up and released her grip on his arm. She opened the door for Paxton, then stood with it open to the bitter autumn wind.
She smiled at the clerk. “If he moves before he gets to 100, call my room. I’ll take care of him.”
They were halfway back to their van when Paxton reached out and tugged Chase’s belt loop. “You could have torn that guy apart. Really made an example of him so the rest of the town would get the picture that you weren’t to be fucked with. Why didn’t you?”
Chase blew out an angry snort. “That’s not who I am. You know what mom said. Defend when you need to, attack only when you have to. Tearing that guy apart wouldn’t have proved anything. It wouldn’t do anything but drag our family’s name through the mud.”
“I’m starting to wonder about that,” her brother responded. “People get real nervous when they find out we’re part of ye olde Harrow clan.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Chase said.
“You think maybe they’ve heard about you and what happened in Austin?” Paxton asked, his voice low. “Maybe those guys were from Crucible.”
Chase almost tripped over her brother’s words. “That’s not funny,” she snapped.
Chase had struggled to put that night when she was five behind her, and her mother had struggled to help her with that. There hadn’t been any more incidents, but it was as if that night had unlocked something inside Chase. The murders—even if they were in self-defense, they were still murders—changed Chase. Spilling blood had fertilized the seeds of something dark and malignant within her soul. It had been growing for the past thirteen years, looking for the moment when it could reach up and take the reins from Chase once again.
If those men had come from Crucible, this could all be some twisted revenge plan. Maybe their relatives had just found out where her parents were.
Or maybe they’d been waiting for baby Chase to grow up enough to put up a fight.
Chase looked back at the office and the red-haired man glaring at her from behind its bug-splotched glass. The dying sunlight transformed his face into a featureless smear behind the window, but it couldn’t hide the aura that snapped into place around his form. A brilliant yellow glow surrounded the man, and Chase knew their next fight might not be so lopsided. He hadn’t expected the attack, she knew that. Next time, he might be the one launching a sneak attack.
Chase shook her head. She was spooking herself. It was just the migraine, making her see things.
Still, she couldn’t deny the feeling that something was coming.
And it wasn’t going to be good.
Chapter Five
Rules of The Nightmare Game: The Harvest
When a Slayer takes a life, it is his prerogative to choose how that life will be used. It is most common for the Slayer to take the soul orbs given to him by the Red God, but there are times when the Hunger is upon him and he must choose a different course.
When a Slayer wills it, his holy weapon may harvest the victim’s soul. This feast of blood replenishes the Slayer’s Willpower, Fortitude, and Wits by an amoun
t equal to the Slayer’s Vengeance.
But the Slayer must beware, for supping too often upon tainted souls or those that do not fulfill his sacred mission may lead him down dark paths where his spirit shall wither and his strength fade.
Slayers must always remember they are instruments of the Red God, and none may stray from that path without suffering the utmost penalties for their transgression. Choose your victims wisely, Slayer, lest you fall prey to dark hungers which may never be sated.
—Alexander Shibley, 1743, from The Great Game of the Gods
Chapter Six
Fair Warning
The motel room was small and cramped, and it reeked of mildew and the specters left by decades of cigarette smoke. Water stains had spread across the ceiling like a spilled mug of coffee. Less identifiable stains marked an erratic trail from the door to the bathroom. Antique pictures hung from the wall at odd angles in asymmetrical positions that made Chase feel like the floor was tilting beneath her feet.
She dropped her backpack on the bed nearest the door. “This is quite the palace we’ve found for ourselves. I do hope the servants will be sure to have breakfast delivered on time in the morning. I am so famished.”
“Sorry about that,” Paxton offered, “all they had left was a smoking double.”
“Better than sleeping in the back of the van, I guess. Especially around here.” Chase shouldered out of her backpack and tossed it on the one bed. “The way that sheriff was looking at me, he’d probably try to track me down and do something naughty.”
Paxton snorted. “Nah, he’d probably be more interested in somebody like me. You know, a hot person who can’t run very well on gravel. Chubby guys don’t like to run.”
Chase pulled a small padded case out of her backpack and unzipped it. She extracted a black TracFone and its charging cord from the pouch. She placed the phone on top of the dresser and plugged its power cord into the wobbly receptacle on the base of the lamp jutting from the wall above it. The phone still had 50% charge, but Chase wasn’t taking any chances. It was the only connection she had to her missing parents, and she wasn’t going to let it die, even for a few minutes.