by C. T. Phipps
“I’m lactose intolerant,” I replied. “I’d be willing to settle for cherry pie and tea, though.”
“We are going to win!” Carrie said, raising a fist to the air. “We have the element of surprise.”
That was when the intercom blared up again. My mother spoke in a deeply amused voice. “I actually have every room in the compound bugged. So, it’s kind of hilarious you think you’re getting away with anything. Still, I appreciate your abundance of confidence.”
Carrie fumed and glared up at the ceiling. She then gave it the finger.
“I also have cameras,” Lamia said. “I’ll be seeing you soon. Well, unless you want me to send Mike after you. In which case, well, a lot of those girls will have to die too.”
“I think you’d be surprised,” Summer said.
“Not really,” Lamia said. “I was displeased when Nancy escaped. I had to let you and the others go because she was the only one I thought had a chance of beating my merc and dirty cop guards. It turned out I was right.”
Summer looked offended. “Lying about Nancy being better than me won’t help your case.”
“You still think being a virgin is what lets us keep our powers,” Nancy muttered.
“It does,” Summer said, sniffing the air before doing a double take. “Wait, what? You mean it doesn’t?”
All the other women in the sorority quickly found something else to look at. Carrie, on the other hand, sniggered.
“I have reached the limit of my patience,” Lamia said. It was the same bored tone she’d used before bedtime. “Finish up what you’re doing, or I’ll send in the hounds.”
“Bark!” Cujo growled at the ceiling. It was at that point I decided there was something very wrong with that dog.
“Does she mean literal hounds or the guards we slaughtered?” Nancy asked.
“Don’t say slaughtered,” Jenna said, frowning. “I disabled mine. That was when you slit their throats.”
“Guilty,” Summer said. “Except not.”
“I find hounds to be racist,” Shinobu said. “I mean, if they’re werewolves and she really is our Dark Mother—”
“Then the entire supernatural ecology should call Child Services,” I replied. “Lamia is a terrible mother and has killed almost as many of her children as she has those of Adam and Eve.”
“Wait, are they a thing?” Jenna asked. “Because, first, I’m Wiccan and second, I’m a believer in evolution.”
“I’m going with William and Carrie,” Nancy said.
“You can’t be serious,” Summer said, shaking her head. “Nancy, you’ve known these people for a day.”
“It’s my job to protect humans from monsters,” Nancy replied. “They’re humans and their mother is a monster.”
“And that’s half-right,” Carrie said, cheerfully contradicting the idea she was human. “If she wants to come with us to help us kill the Evil Queen then that’s what she’s doing.”
Gerald looked uncomfortable. “Vampires get stronger as they age. I’ve met a few of the Ancient Ones and they’re not so much like Dracula, but more if Superman was a vampire. They look like Nosferatu and Medusa while they’re able to throw cars. Lamia is like a ten to a hundred times older than them so this is suicide.”
“So you suggest we run away?” I asked.
“Yes!” Gerald said. “Go build your slasher powers by, uh, not killing innocent people or whatever you guys normally do to build up your powers.”
“Kill innocent people,” I replied. “We’ll be fine.”
“Will we?” Carrie asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Ah, just checking,” Carrie said. “Well, it was a good run. Do you think we’ll find each other in Hell?”
“Undoubtedly,” I replied. “I think we should probably also try and find Grandpa. His heart was in the right place even if he went about it the wrong way.”
“Me too,” Carrie said. “Then we can go kill Dad for all eternity over and over again.”
“I said, I’m coming,” Nancy said, her voice low and threatening. “Neither of you are going to die.”
I moved to argue with her. To explain that this was my battle and that there was no use in her sacrificing herself for what was almost certainly suicide. One look at her eyes, though, told me that my chivalry was neither wanted nor accepted. Indeed, in that moment I was more afraid of Nancy than I had ever been of either my parents.
“As you wish,” I said.
Summer glared at me, then her sister, and then down. “Well, I’m coming with you too.”
“Then everyone here will die,” I replied. “You need to lead them out. My mother’s deal is conditional and she has no problem going back on her word.”
“Honestly, you guys are totally going to get hunted down after she kills us,” Carrie said.
“Bark?” Cujo said.
Carrie turned her dog to look at him. “Do you want to go with the nice people, Cujo?”
Cujo, I swear, shook his head. “Bark!”
“Okay,” Carrie said. “Then we all die together!”
Nancy looked at Summer and all the sisters. “Go, I’ll be fine. It’ll be just like one of the movies on Saturday night. The heroine stops running and then proceeds to kill the nasty monster stalking them.”
“Unless she’s killed in the stinger or sequel,” Jenna said. “I mean, have you ever watched A Nightmare on Elm Street. A bunch of awesome female heroes get murdered every new movie! Except the original sequel, which is about a gay man coming to terms with Freddy wanting to screw him.”
The Heathers glared at her in unison. In that moment, they looked more like the Marines that they were supposed to be than the psychic trio that I’d been introduced to.
“What?” Jenna asked.
Carrie blinked. “Is that what the second movie was about? It suddenly makes so much more sense.”
Nancy went to the fireplace and removed a battle ax from the mantle that I hadn’t seen in my earlier scan of the room. “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubblegum and I’m all out of bubblegum.”
“Is that from a movie?” Gerald asked.
“Good luck,” Carrie said, grabbing Gerald and kissing him passionately as he struggled in her embrace.
“That would be so less funny if he was a woman and she was a dude,” Nancy said.
“Or he was a vampire,” I replied.
Gerald pulled back, confused, though not upset. “Actually, I was going to come with you.”
“You were?” Carrie asked, blinked.
“Yes, I trust my chances of survival are better with you than Summer,” Gerald said.
Summer grinned and made a slicing gesture across her throat.
“Splendid,” I replied. “The Scooby Gang is all ready to be murdered.”
Nancy put her battle ax over one shoulder. “Are you Fred or Shaggy?”
“Velma,” I replied.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nancy, Carrie, Gerald, Cujo, and I walked through the deserted remains of the compound. The beautifully designed mansion was like something out of a movie set. Beautifully polished marble floors, elegant green wallpaper, portraits of the Cassidy family on every wall, and bodies every five feet or so. There were maids, waiters, and other guards that had been slaughtered like animals. Some had been stabbed to death, others torn to shreds, and others still looked like they’d just died of fright.
Nancy looked at me. “This wasn’t your doing, was it?”
I was offended she’d even ask. “No. Not unless every one of these people was a murderer.”
“Technically, that’s possible,” Gerald said, holding his nose and covering his mouth with one hand. “Certainly, it’s a group of people that have been facilitating mass murder.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Gerald looked at me. “Trying not to start chewing the flesh off their bones or going into a killing frenzy. Vampires are kind of like sharks. You don’t want to expose us to massive
amounts of blood.”
I blinked. “Ah, never mind then.”
“I can smell it over a hundred yards away,” Gerald said. “It’s really troublesome some days.”
“Uh huh,” Nancy said, looking at Gerald. “Am I going to have to kill you?”
“I’ve tried very hard never to kill innocent people,” Gerald replied.
“Tried?” Nancy asked. “How are we defining innocent?”
Gerald looked at her battle ax then turned to stare at a portrait of Cassie Cassidy. “Wow, she was a very fetching woman. Kind of terrible that she was evil.”
“Bark!” Cujo said, giving him a warning look. “Bark-bark.”
I took that as Cujo warning Gerald to stay on the right side. Honestly, he was the least worrisome person here as far as I was concerned. I was more worried about Nancy going on a killing spree because we were entering uncharted waters. The Artemis race existed to fight monsters and my mother was the greatest one of them all. Would her powers compel her to fight my mother? Could they do anything against someone who remembered the pyramids being built? How did the Spirit of the Hunt fit into all of this? What events had led her to manipulate us into this confrontation.
Manipulate is a strong word, the Spirit of the Hunt said. I placed a piece of cheese at the end of the maze and you ran it like a champion. Well, champion rat.
What do you want from this? I asked.
You’ll find out, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Or you’ll die. Either way.
Great, I muttered.
“Pfft, William wishes he did all this,” Carrie said, holding the Necronomicon. She was flipping through its bloodstained leathery pages. “No, this is probably just Mike or mom at work. They’re cleaning up loose ends here.”
“Why would she kill her own people? I mean, I know supervillains do that all the time but this is the real world.” Nancy shook her head, stepping over an eviscerated mother clutching her son’s corpse. I had no idea how to react to the fact that people had kept their families here. From the look on her face, neither did Nancy.
“Lamia is the Mother of all Monsters,” I replied. “She’s as close to a supervillain as exists in the world. It’s her goal to unleash hell upon Earth. I mean that literally instead of figuratively. Her history has been ten thousand years of human sacrifice, plagues, locusts, war, and debauchery. All in the service of the Elder Gods.”
“Why?” Nancy said. “I mean, not the debauchery part, I get that.”
“It’s quite fun,” Gerald said, trying to look up at the ceiling rather than the corpses around him. “The vampire race turned against her in part because it’s better to reign on Earth than serve in Hell. In Hell, we’d all just be everyone’s meat while vampires are a power behind the throne here on Earth.”
That was a very interesting observation really, and made me wonder about my mother’s state of mind. She’d been trying to destroy the world for millennia, but she’d never quite succeeded in the text despite the fact she’d brought down kingdoms and empires. Did she really want to destroy the world, or had she simply set it up so that her efforts to destroy everything only came close to succeeding?
Not all the Red Gods wish the world to end, the Spirit of the Hunt said. When Hell rules over the Earth then that is the end of everything. Without good to oppose, there can be no evil. Also, imagine how boring it would be.
I’d rather not, I said.
Spoilsport, the Spirit of the Hunt replied.
“I have a theory about why my mother’s doing it,” Carrie said. “Well, if you were a woman in the Stone Age then you probably would have a fairly crappy opinion of humanity,” Carrie replied. “Or the Bronze Age, Dark Age, Modern Age. Really, there’s very few times a woman can go ‘hey, it’s wonderful being me.’ Unless you’re Catherine the Great or Eleanor of Aquitaine, your life is gonna suck in some way. Maybe not as much as some dudes, but at least a little. I know I want to burn it down some days.”
“I see,” Nancy said. “Actually, no I don’t.”
“Either that or she’s just an evil psychotic monster that gets off on hurting people. Those can be women too.” Carrie smirked and opened the Necronomicon.
“My impression is she wants to burn down the world and rule the ashes,” I replied. “Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.”
If Lamia was the Mother of All Monsters and not just our mother, then perhaps she was the source of the killing urge that we all suffered. It was a genetic urge to destroy that came from her and had been passed to all of her children: vampires, werewolves, as well as slashers. Perhaps she was the origin of the Slasher gene. Then again, maybe I was just looking for a way to pretend this wasn’t my fault for wanting to kill. Looking at the carnage around me, a part of me understood Gerald’s love of it. Perhaps that was the greatest lie of them all: that I could be anything other than what nature made me.
Will, you think too much, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
I shook away my brooding to listen into the conversation that had begun to get into bizarre subjects.
“Vampire society is very egalitarian,” Gerald said, holding his nose and covering his mouth. “Men and women hold roughly the same level of power from the Council of Ancients down to fledglings. Mostly because when you can order someone to eat their own fingers if they tick you off, you don’t have to live by society’s rules. The trade-off is that anyone weaker can be enslaved by anyone stronger at any time.”
“I think we should look for a cheerier topic,” I replied.
“The fact none of you brought any weapons aside from Nancy?” Gerald asked. “Even though there was an enormous number of guns downstairs?”
“Guns aren’t very good against monsters,” Carrie replied. “The power to slay them is inside our hearts. Also, the Necronomicon.”
Carrie ripped a page out of the book, folded it up and put it in her dress.
“That’s almost ten thousand years old,” I replied.
“Eh, it’s magic,” Carrie said. “It’ll regrow.”
“Should we be bringing the doomsday book to your mother?” Nancy asked, pointing at the demonic tome.
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “But we are.”
“Ah, good,” Nancy said, blinking.
We walked past a coat of arms hanging on the wall that bore an organization’s seal. It consisted of a circle with a Masonic square and compass over a shield with a stylized H in front of it. Passing through the H was a pair of crossed wands with the words Condemnant quod non intellegunt written underneath them. Roughly translated from Latin, this phrase meant, They condemn what they do not understand. It didn’t seem like a phrase the Fraternity of Orion would use, and I wondered it meant there was another group at work here, like the Sons of Mars.
“Do any of you get the impression there’s a lot more going on here than we’re aware of?” I asked.
“Every moment of my life since I woke up,” Gerald said.
“Hush you,” Carrie said, clutching the Necronomicon tightly. “Do we have any idea where she’s supposed to be?”
“No,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I can’t sense her at all.”
Even as a child, I’d known my mother was different from other people. Well, beyond the fact she’d never bothered to hide the fact she was a monster who considered other beings to be slaves or food depending on her mood. She was a person that had no aura I could detect, and it was a quality that I suspected had served her well in hiding from the various people that didn’t want the world to end.
I could still sense Mike’s presence about us but even he was becoming increasingly hard to detect. He moved from hallway to hallway, just inside the range of my ability to sense him. The babysitter murderer was someone that could probably kill us all but seemed more interested in watching us. I could tell Nancy could also sense him since her eyes often darted to the places he moved to at any given time. Carrie gave no sign of sensing Mike but it was possible she was just waiting for him to make the first move.
“Hey, mom, tell us where you are!” Carrie shouted.
There was no answer from the intercom system.
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Carrie replied.
“We’re being stalked and she’s playing games,” Nancy said, clutching her battle ax. “If she’s going to send her goon out then she should just do it.”
“When you’re older than dirt you have to come up with ways of amusing yourself,” Carrie said.
I tried sensing for any other life signs in this place but there was just too much blood spilled in this place to really get a proper sense of it. Mike’s presence, however far removed, also screwed with it. There could be no remaining mercenaries here or a hundred and I wouldn’t know.
“Do you think Cassie is among these corpses?” Nancy asked, finally reaching the mansion’s lounge. There was a large bar with a mirror behind it next to three leather couches and several dead men in masks spread around the place. They were wearing business suits and the masks were all of animals: foxes, weasels, and tigers. A pair of doors on the opposite wall were marked as restrooms and I finally realized what the compound reminded me of: an evil country club.
“We can only hope,” Carrie said. “We passed the panic room I chased her into a few rooms back, but it was open.”
“Do you still regret what happened between you?” I asked. “I mean, she did lead us into a trap.”
“We can’t know how much of that was of her own free will,” Nancy replied. “She could still be good inside.”
“So could Darth Vader, but I’ve always wondered why he gets to go to heaven just because he killed his boss to save his kid,” Carrie said. “I mean, most parents, good or evil, love their children. I mean not our parents but—”