Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

  Yes, her. The driver was most definitely a woman. She was parked so the driver side was closer to the curb and the passenger door meant walking in front of her. I’d been almost run over once this month and that was enough. I walked up slowly, one hand in my pocket on the gun. She held on to a cell phone, focused on whatever she heard. Inside, the car was clean, except for a can of potato chips with wires coming out of it. Maybe a microphone or a camera—I didn’t recognize it and that made me hold my gun harder.

  I knocked on the window, trying to look firm, but she rolled it down with a smile.

  “Hicks, right?” Her face was wide, all of her features rolled out flat. She lacked female curves and with her size, I understood how she could be mistaken for a man.

  “Yup, and you’re Ruby Dollern.” I didn’t want her to feel too superior.

  “The very same. Going to come talk to me?” The pleasant smile stayed on her face. She looked open, not dangerous, but warning bells were going off in my head.

  “I can talk from here. I’m just wondering—”

  “What the hell is going on,” she finished for me. She tapped the chip can. “I’ve been listening.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Edward probably didn’t know it but yes. You should come in the car. We’re going to attract attention out here.”

  “I’m fine here.”

  “But you’ll attract attention when you fall.” Before I could ask her what she meant, my face was enveloped by a spray of gas. I hadn’t even seen the can of mace and now I was coughing, falling to my knees.

  I struggled, trying to get a good breath but one wasn’t coming. My eyes stung and watered. My skin burned. A blur stood over me. I blinked the water out of my eyes and saw she was about to grab my shoulders. My finger curled around the trigger of my gun. It was a reflex shot, loud and way off, going through my coat. Her shoulder jerked back. I took the opening to crawl backward on the grass. I needed to get another shot off, but my body stopped all together.

  I slumped against the passenger seat as the car sped through some unknown street. My vision cleared up enough to see a street sign but it went by in a blur. My head somehow weighed fifty pounds.

  “Awake? Nod if you are.”

  I tried but couldn’t move my head or my arms, or anything. My whole body was paralyzed. I couldn’t even scream. Next to me, she laughed insanely.

  “Can’t nod, can you? You’re stuck in that sack of meat we call a body. Try not to think about how it could be this way forever. Always alive on the inside, screaming, trying to get out, but trapped in your own skin.”

  She said it to get me thinking of it, because she knew telling me would force my thoughts there. Knowing it was a trick didn’t stop it from working. I panicked without moving for a very long time.

  I managed to shift my eyes toward her. I was still trapped inside my own body but maybe the movement meant something. Blood trickled sluggishly out of her upper arm where my bullet had wounded her. Edward or William had probably heard it. I didn’t know yet if I wanted to live if this was my life but I wanted to have the choice. That bullet gave me something to hold on to, a reason to hope..

  “The gas you inhaled is a little OPS secret. It makes people easy to move. Don’t worry, the paralysis is temporary. It’ll wear off just about when I start cutting you open.”

  I willed myself to move. Anything. Even my tongue—just a word, just a sound. Nothing worked.

  “But I forgot your question. You wanted to know what was going on. What’s going on is a little payback. You can’t know what it’s like to have a twin. They’re always there, always a part of you, no matter what. I could reach out and feel him the way you used to be able to reach out your hand.” For that, she looked at me with a grin that was far from sane. “But they kept me from him. I could feel him, needing me, hurting, and no one would even tell me where he was. I can’t count how many nights I had to feel him going insane, the way only a twin can feel.”

  She shook the memory off, released her white-knuckle gripe on the steering wheel and turned into a driveway.

  “Edward shouldn’t have lived. None of them should have. He shouldn’t get to be happy, not when Rudy is still inside my head, screaming and insane.”

  What did she have planned? What came next? All I could do was sit and imagine a thousand horrible possibilities.

  She parked in a garage. I could almost move my head. It wasn’t the victory I wanted. No. I wanted to be able to shoot her. When she pulled me from the car, my feet dragged uselessly behind me. Wrenching me into the house, I concentrated on my fingers, on curling them around the trigger.

  The sudden scent of decay hit me and my throat muscles came back just in time for me to puke. Ruby didn’t miss a beat—she turned my head, letting me see the corpses.

  “Meet the Martins. That’s Dad, and Mom, and little Erica is in her room.”

  I had a close up view of the couple but I couldn’t tell Mom from Dad. They’d been dead at least two weeks. With the air conditioning on and the windows shut, there were no maggots, no flies, but that made the smell was heavier. My stomach emptied and clenched in dry heaves.

  “Oh, you don’t need to get sick over them! They’re nobody important. It was just a convenient house.” Ruby pulled me down the hall, unaffected by the view or the scent.

  My legs clunked uselessly behind me as she hauled me down basement steps. She was big enough to carry me but seemed to enjoy letting me drag around. At the bottom, in the middle of the debris of urban life, was a simple wooden chair. She threw me into it, then kicked my legs open.

  “It’ll take another ten, maybe twenty minutes for that to wear off.” She put a plastic cable tie around my wrist and pulled it tight, then did the same to my other hand and both my ankles. “I’m going to fix some dinner. I’ll come back when you start screaming.”

  At the top of the stairs, she turned off the light.

  Many people are afraid of the dark. They fear what they can’t see, things that hide in the shadows. They aren’t spirit witches. That sense other people didn’t have told me I was completely alone. Alone meant safe. I took deep breaths to steady myself. She hadn’t removed my jacket. When my muscles came back, if the tie straps weren’t too tight, I could reach the gun. I sat in the dark, trying to read her. I reached out, using my fear and panic, focusing my energy on her.

  It worked. The images in her head were horrible, filtered through the off-kilter lens of insanity. Rudy was dying, over and over again, but never dead. Underneath that she was making steak, grilling the meat in a frying pan while tossing a salad. The decaying corpses less than a room away stayed on the edges of her conscious mind without making a dent in her dinner.

  I worked on moving my right hand. The fake tissue on my left side threatened to cramp. I couldn’t risk that now. Slowly, the sensation in my fingertips came back. I concentrated on moving those fingers when my wrist moved. The tiny victories took too long and I tasted steak through my connection with her. She ate it rare, almost bloody, despite the blood stains in the living room. Her salad dressing was blue cheese. There wasn’t much time. My arm came back a little but she’d put the strap on too tight. I couldn’t go forward and try to slip it off the chair arm. I struggled with it for a few minutes, frustrated, angry. Fighting the drug and keeping tabs on her mind exhausted me. I slumped back in my seat and my arm moved with me.

  My arm, my shoulders, my back—I had most of my muscles again and could go backward out of the tie strap. I didn’t stop to celebrate. I focused on moving my arm back until the wide part of my hand made it impossible. I curled my fingers, trying to get them small enough to come out of the strap. Upstairs, the images in her head changed. It wasn’t dishes or cleaning up, it was a door. Shit! It was the door to the basement. She was coming down.

  I got my hand almost to the edge of the strap when the light popped on a second later.

  “How are we doing?” she sang the words at me, before she realized what wa
s going on. She yanked the gun out of my pocket. In the yellow florescent light of the basement, it looked like salvation. “No way.” She pointed to the bandage around her forearm—it was fresh and clean except for a streak of blood. “You took a good two inches out of me, Elisabeth. Two inches I need if I’m going to do this right.”

  “Do what right?” There was an old hutch, the kind that held usually held good china in a dining room. A white towel covered the top hiding a series of vaguely menacing shapes.

  “You read my file, Elisabeth. My file, Rudy’s file. Hell, you’re screwing Edward. What do you think I’m going to do?”

  “Why?” I stalled, trying to come up with a plan. “Why are you doing this?”

  She was playing with something, clicking it. Suddenly, there was a poof of air in the room. She turned back to me holding a lit torch. For a second, the fire burned long and orange but she turned it down to a birthday candle flame. “I thought there might be a way to break the spell, but I didn’t find it in time. Rudy killed himself. He swallowed his own tongue.” She frowned but her voice was level. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel someone die in your mind. This part of you, this other half you’ve always had, just curls up and dies. But he won’t stop dying.” She stopped moving. “I don’t want to do this right now.”

  Her fist exploded into the side of my head and the world went dark.

  28

  I came around quickly, thanks to whatever she was holding under my nose. A thousand nerves screamed at me. The plastic ties cut into my wrist. My head hurt from where she’d hit me. A dozen small insults not bad enough to warrant my attention when a psycho was standing in front of me.

  “Did Edward tell you anything about OPS? Have you heard about us?” She aspirated a syringe, thin yellowish liquid squirting into the air.

  “I was in the war. He didn’t need to tell me.”

  “Ahh, but you don’t know our techniques.” She pulled the white towel off the hutch with a flourish, revealing a tray filled with shiny stainless-steel instruments, surgical and mechanical, laid out in a neat order. “With this syringe, I could kill the composite tissue in your arm, band by band. It would sting and burn, then fall out. The blood vessels won’t survive, of course, but there are some nerves are close to the bone so you’ll feel the pain. It would take them months to build you a new set.”

  The images in her head were ghastly. She wasn’t just talking about it; she was remembering doing it. I tried to pull in my power. I didn’t want to read her any more. It didn’t work. When she’d been upstairs, I’d had a choice. Now that she was close to me, I couldn’t stop.

  I couldn’t let that needle get close to my skin. “Why?”

  “Why?” Her voice went up, getting louder and louder, “Why? Why?”

  She slammed her empty hand down, making all the instruments jump, then gently rested the syringe next to them. “Are you really asking me why?”

  Speaking might set her off, so I only nodded.

  “You don’t get it.” She rubbed her lips together and shook her head in an odd diagonal motion. “There’s spell work out there, Elisabeth, spell work designed to drive my twin insane. I’ve given it exactly what it wants – every person that spell was sent after has died exactly the way the spell would have wanted. But Rudy? My brother? He’s still suffering. Because the spell is still going. It won’t stop until everyone is gone.” She began to punctate her words with a deep nod of her head, her teeth grinding together. “Every single one.”

  Her logic was clear, but her facts were way off. I needed a way to shock her out of her plan. “Rudy is dead.”

  She did another half-shake, half-nod in the diagonal, almost as if she was stretching her neck, then tapped the side of her head. “Not in here.” She paused for a long inhalation, taking the air in through her nose. “He’s been dying in my head for years. Ending the spell is the only way to get him to stop.”

  “You don’t know that! The only person who would know is the one who cast the spell, and he died the second he cast it.”

  “So what? So what if I kill you, and Edward, and that slippery bastard William, and it doesn’t stop? What have I lost?” She shrugged and reached for a scalpel. “You’re not doing me any good alive, I might as well try things with you dead.” She held up a very long knife. “I don’t know what the spell would have wanted for you. I don’t even know if you need to suffer, but I’m not going to take the chance. I’ll make a shallow cut. Go in horizontally under the surface of the skin, separate the layers of epidermis and dermis. That way, you won’t pass out.”

  “You sick bitch.”

  “You have no idea.” She put the knife down and picked up a black piece of cloth. “Guess what this is? What, no guesses? All right I’ll tell you. It’s a hood.” She drew the long drawstring out, making it into a pouch. “With some people, you want to let them see what you’re doing. For others, the closeness, the feeling of suffocation, and the not knowing is worse. Which one are you?”

  “Fuck you.” My voice shook. I could see it all in her head, her plans to hurt me slowly, keep me alive for hours. Maybe days. All in the hopes that it would be enough to quiet the phantom voice in her head.

  “I saw him!” The memory of a barely ghost rushed back to me. “Rudy came to me. He warned you about me. So that voice in your head isn’t him. It can’t be, he’s moved on. This won’t work, I can-”

  She slapped a piece of tape over my mouth and ignored every word. “Of course, if I use the hood, I can’t play with your face. Eyes still work if you pop them out gently. Did you know that? Bet you didn’t.” In her memories an eye dangling out of the socket but still moving, left and right, still seeing. “But I think I’m going to leave your face alone. Leave it perfect for Edward to see. Maybe he’ll have an open casket?”

  Nothing would stop her. Oh God, she’d done it all before and nothing was going to stop her.

  “Okay, time for the hood. Bye.”

  She got it over my head and blackness engulfed me. I reached out with my magic and focused on her. Through her eyes, my body was stiff, frozen to the chair with fear. Her head turned to catalog her instruments, each one of them ready for me. I screamed behind the tape.

  “You’re definitely a hood person, Elisabeth. And here I thought I was going to have trouble getting to you. Just goes to show you: simple is best.” She picked up a small portable circular saw and pressed the button. It whirled and the sound filled me with such dread I stopped screaming.

  She was going to take my arm off at the elbow. My right arm. The good one.

  The hood lifted and she tore the tape off my mouth. She put the blade only inches from my eyes and hit the button so it raced. “Guess what I’m going to do?”

  Should I tell her? Would it piss her off? Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea—get her angry enough to kill me quickly. I was trying to decide how I wanted to end my life when she dropped the hood back over my head. My heart raced searching for what to say when a cold presence entered the room.

  Before I had a chance to think, it grabbed her. The connection we had showed a blur of stone and wall before our link ended. Her scream came immediately after, a long sound that chilled me. The noise cut off abruptly, and I strained to hear whatever sounds were left. There was nothing, only silence. It was even worse now that I couldn’t see through her eyes. My mind tottered on the brink of insanity when a familiar voice broke through.

  “Elisabeth, you’re going to be okay. I’m taking the hood off.” Edward’s voice. Thank God. I’d never needed him so much.

  “Touch me, please.”

  He touched my hand and I could see through his eyes. For once I was grateful for the way he could turn off his emotions and become a blank slate. No fear came back to me. No worry. He grabbed a pair of tin snips without having to look. In his head, the set-up was familiar. He knew where the tools would be because he’d used them on people.

  The dark hood came off with a whoosh and I took a long, deep breath.<
br />
  “Look at me,” Edward commanded. “Two more straps and you’re out of here, okay?”

  I nodded, craning my neck to see what had happened to Rudy. Edward blocked my view as he clipped the straps at my wrist. “Don’t. You don’t want to see. You’re safe. That’s all that matters. Focus on that.”

  Nodding again, I was empty of anything that could help me speak. He walked me up the stairs, deliberately stopping me from seeing what was in the corner.

  29

  Outside in the glorious air I never thought I’d get to breathe again, I started to shake. I stumbled with the force of it and Ted grabbed me, holding me close. Tears streamed down my face and as my scream began again. Somehow he held me up, my body trembling as I yelled and cried. I’d gotten free, he’d saved me, but I was breaking down anyway. It didn’t make any sense but I lost control and beat on him. He held me the whole time.

  “Should I?” It was William, suddenly appearing out of nowhere to stand by us. He’d been the dark presence in the basement.

  “She’ll be fine. Just give her a minute.”

  I didn’t need a minute though—seeing William cleared my head. I took a few deep breathes.

  “We have forty-eight seconds,” William said, without telling me why or what was going to happen then.

  “Where’s Ruby?” I asked the most important question in the world.

  “Dead,” the vampire replied.

  “I want to see her. I need to see her.”

  Neither of them looked at me.

  “Sorry.” Edward opened the car door. “There just isn’t enough time.”

  I was going to protest, to insist, when William touched me. My mind filled with memories of him destroying her. It was so powerful, her throat crushed beneath my lips, her blood filling my mouth. Her life ended beneath my bite. I shivered, caught up in the memory. He’d enjoyed it. A lot.