by Logan Fox
Rage boiled inside her. Pearl’s cheeks heated. Her skin grew tight as if her anger had manifested into lava and was now coursing through her veins in lieu of blood. Hell, maybe her blood was on fire.
She glared up at the man through slitted eyes, catching the synchronized bob of those horned heads.
Goats.
That’s what the masks made her think of.
Big, stinking, matted goats.
Were they Satanists? Was that what this was? An actual satanic ritual where these two — perhaps even The Chair — thought they’d be appeasing Lucifer? Or feeding him?
Pearl laughed.
The sound came out strangled, nearly incoherent, but it made the brothers look at her with almost comical precision to their movements.
If they tried feeding her to the devil, she’d stick in his teeth.
Jarred stepped closer. His torso blocked her view of the two men. His other hand darted out, catching her jaw, smoothing a hank of hair from where it had stuck to the paint on her nose.
“Shh,” he whispered down to her. The sound was almost inaudible, but still unmistakable. His thumb brushed over her cheekbone — too tender, too calming to belong to a man who’d just said he wanted to fuck her before he slit her throat.
She tried to look up at him, but he folded his lean torso over her head, reaching over her shoulders. Pearl looked away, catching sight of the still struggling figures of Tanner and Caden. They hadn’t progressed very far in freeing themselves, but Caden’s hood was also around his shoulders now. They’d taken away his spectacles — the man kept squinting up at Pearl, frowning as he tried to see what was happening.
She doubted he would really have wanted to.
Then again, imagination was never something to be trifled with.
Jarred’s fingers traced their way down Pearl’s spine. She gasped when he tugged at her bonds, her head bobbing up involuntarily.
Paint smeared over the front of Jarred’s robe as Pearl’s face skidded over that smooth fabric. The man dipped down and forward, letting Pearl’s head rest on his shoulder as he began to saw through the bonds connecting her arms and legs.
“Hey!” The Chair’s voice cut through the sound of Jarred’s breath — Pearl’s own straining gasps — like a knife through fat. “What makes you think you can jus’—”
“Can’t fuck her like this.” Jarred turned his head, his upper arms cradling Pearl’s shoulders as the rope binding her legs and arms gave way with a snap. Her thighs slapped onto the marble.
There was a lot of blood under her. It had made that surface slick and wet.
Jarred was still leaning into her, body at an awkward angle as he stretched around her, sawing at the ties between her ankles and thighs.
“You leave her just how you found her.” The Chair was coming closer, voice tight with anger. “And I never said nothing about you screwing her, you coon. Get back on script—”
Jarred turned his head. His lips brushed against Pearl’s ear, his sudden inhalation raising goosebumps across her whole body.
“Get ready.”
And, while those words were still being processed by the sludge of her brains, Jarred spun away from her. Turning, his back now to the altar, the man slid both elbows onto the marble and kicked out with a vicious grunt. His sleek boots took the two goat-headed men in their chests, sending them crashing into the concrete wall behind them.
Pearl’s left leg sprang apart as the few frayed strands binding calf to thigh snapped. But her right leg was still bound — ankle to ass — and her wrists still securely strapped together.
The Chair blocked out the spotlight. He’d taken the time to pull that shapeless hood over his face, but it sat askew on his face, allowing only a single black eye to peer out at the world as he stormed toward them.
Pearl drew breath for a scream, realized it would be a wasted effort, and instead bucked her shoulder up. She rolled onto her back, fought for balance, lost, and tumbled with a strangled cry onto the floor beneath the altar.
The wind knocked out of her in a painful whoosh. She gasped and floundered on the floor, twisting her head to the side.
Through the elk’s antlers, The Chair looked like the personification of every boogey man that had ever hidden under a bed.
Faceless, roaring, monstrous.
And he barrelled into Jarred without seeming to notice the sliver of metal Jarred hoisted between them. Pearl flinched, her eyes fluttering — wanting to close — in an attempt to block out that sudden flash of confusion on The Chair’s face.
A hand fisted in her hair.
Pearl screamed, thrashing wildly as one of the brothers dragged her out from behind the altar. In the distance, came the scrape of wood on concrete. Pearl shrieked as that hand lifted her by her hair. She could feel strands snapping, being torn out by their roots, tangling between those fingers. But, with her arms still bound behind her, her struggles were as futile as Jarred’s.
The Chair had him pinned against the altar as he lifted a fist and slammed it into Jarred’s head again and again. The man slid down, but was hoisted up again seconds later, a fist at his throat holding him up as The Chair drove more blows into the man’s pulpy face.
Fingers wrapped around Pearl’s face. More found her lips, wrenching open her mouth.
“Suppose we’re going off script then,” whispered Owen.
This close, the mask reeked of musk and dung. Those glass eyes caught the light unnaturally, sparkling with hidden life.
Pearl bit down on his fingers. Blood spurted into her mouth but she held on, grimacing around the man’s salty fingers as he let out a wild scream of pain.
Owen tried tugging his fingers free, but Pearl just forced her jaw to clamp down harder. Blood rushed down her throat, making her gag. That, more than the fist Owen drove into her stomach, made her release him.
She slipped to the floor, retching loudly, trying to push that coppery warmth from her mouth before it drowned her.
A boot crashed into the side of her head.
Coruscating darkness swallowed her.
13
The All-Seeing Eye
Warm summer rain on her face. A cool breeze toyed over her skin, making her shiver. A cloud covered the sun, threatening harder rain — a storm, perhaps — before clearing. The rain had cooled the air, but had also stifled it with humidity. Why was she so cold now? Why wasn’t the sun returning to warm her icy…
Pearl’s eyes fluttered.
Another drop. Warm, thick. It splashed on her cheekbone and tickled her skin as it trickled down the side of her face.
Why was the grass so hard? The air so filled with noise?
Maniacal laughter tore her eyelids open.
A slim, dark finger curled an inch away from her face. From it formed another ruby drop, shivering before it fell. It splashed on the side of Pearl’s nose, jarring her.
Then another.
And another.
Faster now. A trickle. Then a stream.
Pearl shimmied out from under that tiny river of blood, heart palpitating wildly in her quivering chest. The edges of her vision were dark and cloudy, her body feeling too heavy and stupid to move. But she managed. Managed to wriggle against the concrete floor beneath her until the furious signals of pain shooting up her leg halted her.
She lay on her side, panting against the concrete as she waited for full vision to return to her. As she tried to make sense of the blood and the noise and that insistent laughing in her head.
No, not in her head.
That sound didn’t belong to her.
Sound ballooned out from nowhere, forming into one coherent phrase before returning to gibberish.
“…first time on camera?”
“In a long time, yeah.” Again, that laugh. “Guess I still got it, innit?”
Frantic whimpers. That finger, still close enough for Pearl to disentangle from the shadows hunkering beneath the altar, twitched violently.
For a moment, the rivu
let of blood that had been trickling from it stopped.
“Mandy said something about a farm. But that was years ago, wasn’t it?” Pearl recognized that voice despite her currently tenuous connection with reality.
The memory of green eyes swelled inside her.
A silver suit, gleaming in the darkness of the Doll House’s Red Room. That wide, sultry smile as Owen took a sip from his tumbler, watching her. Watching Pearl as she danced and slid around her pole.
Sipping, sipping at that tumbler.
A tumbler filled with blood.
Pearl blinked hard, trying to flush her mind from its foggy thoughts. The cold of the floor was seeping into her flesh, turning her muscles into limp meat. She rolled onto her back, grimaced, and then rolled onto her other side. Not looking at the altar anymore, at that twitching finger that kept beckoning her for help.
There was nothing she could do for Jarred. Nothing at all.
She had to get free. Had to get out.
“Who’s Mandy?” The Chair’s voice was a hesitant grate.
“Mandy McCullin,” Owen said, almost jovially. Then his voice became strained, as if he was trying to subdue an unruly pet in the bathtub. “Said your folks had you holed up in their barn. Same place—” a grunt “—they recorded all those snuff films.”
Pearl blinked again, hard, and lifted her head from the floor. A spike of pain jolted through her. She barely managed to grit her teeth in time to avoid a hiss slipping past her shivering lips.
Had to get up. Out. Free.
For a second, her eyes slid closed again.
Memory-shrouded Owen grinned at her, legs splayed wide as he sat on a silver sofa suspended in nothing. He wore his suit, but the buttons on his shirt were all open. The man took another sip from his bloody drink. Ice cubes clicked against the side. Then he used his pinkie finger to slowly draw away the edge of that pristine fabric.
Revealing faded ink. Washed-away colors. A skull. Roses. An eye, etched deep into that bony forehead. And, around it, scratches of geometry; a triangle.
The all-seeing eye.
“McCullin…” The Chair repeated slowly.
Those whimpers — Jarred’s surely — faded away.
“Your therapist?” Owen prompted. Pearl could hear the smile in his voice. “Not the old goat you have at the moment. The one you had before. The pretty one.” A low laugh. “What, you didn’t think it strange I knew about you and your… what’s it called again, Will?”
“A system,” Owen’s brother supplied.
“Ah, your system. Rex and the girl, the whole fucking lot of them.”
“Mandy…” The Chair repeated, his voice sounding a mile away. “She told you about us?”
“Oh yes. All the good bits, too. Your history. About your folks and that man that came to see them about using their barn. How they watched him make his films.” There was a wet renting sound. “How you said they began to like it. About that first girl they brought home. How they had you tie her up for them. And then get rid of her when they were done.”
Owen laughed. It had nothing on that madness-tinged laugh of earlier; the one The Chair had let out while they’d been working on Jarred. But it drove shards of ice through Pearl’s skin, burrowing deep inside her and splintering between her muscles. She stifled a whimper and forced her knees up to her chest despite the auguring throb of pain that brought from the wound in the back of her thigh. If she could maneuver her arms out from behind her back, then she could work at those knots that still bound her wrists together.
The warmth of her own flesh was a tiny comfort.
“Why would she—” The Chair began, and then cut off with a low growl. “That stuff was private.”
“We were curious,” her wolf said. “And she got over her moral code pretty soon after we’d tied her down.”
Pearl shuddered at that voice. Not a wolf now, though. Some horned abomination with a goat’s head and a demon’s heart.
Owen laughed and added, “Happened to have a craving for dark meat when I saw her leaving the Fox Pit the same time I did, one day. You’d just started working here.”
“Owen brought her back to the Plaza that night. Guess you could say we hit it off,” the wolf said. “That bitch would’ve told us anything.”
“Actually, it was getting her to shut up that was the problem,” Owen said with a laugh. “And then to stop screaming.”
Pearl flinched as something fell to the floor behind her with a wet thud.
Her skin began to crawl. She gritted her teeth, eyes squeezing shut as she brought her arms alongside her body. Her toes caught against the rope binding her wrists. She struggled furtively, scrunching up her toes and stretching her arms as far out as she could to try and get them past her feet.
The wounds on her back screeched at her in agony, the gash in her thigh sending waves of pain into her. She let out a tiny sound, despite the furious grip her teeth had on her lips.
Don’t look around. Don’t look around. Don’t you dare look around.
There was a groan. A spluttered cough.
“Fuck.” The Chair sounded almost in awe. “Never seen no one pump out this much blood and still move around.”
“Hey, hold him—” came Owen’s sudden, panicked voice.
A deep-throated roar cut him off. Pearl’s head whipped around, fixing for a terrified moment on the dismembered foot lying behind her before she could force her gaze up.
Shadows moved behind the altar, tangling and bleeding into each other. Metal scraped over marble. A shape fell over the side, light glancing from its surface as it tumbled end over end.
The knife clattered a few feet away from Pearl’s shivering body.
Her eyes shot up. She let out a strangled scream at the sight of that horned mask peering over the side of the altar. Pearl jerked her arms up, letting out a wail as the thick ropes sloughed skin from the balls of her feet.
“Fuck! She’s awake!”
Owen’s boots scraped over the concrete as the man dashed around the altar toward Pearl.
She threw herself to the side, her fingers fumbling over the knife’s blood-drenched handle. Grabbing it, tugging it closer.
Owen’s boot crunched down on her hand. Pearl yelled as the knife fell from nerveless fingers. Pain pulsed through her hand. Her eyes slammed shut, teeth gritting as Owen twisted his heel from left to right, grinding her soft flesh into the concrete.
No more…
That hiss, surely uttered through a pair of gleaming canines, rifled through Pearl’s mind. All that anger, that sullen fury that she’d felt when Jarred had pressed that knife to her throat, returned. Anger boiled inside her — evaporating pain, obliterating fear. It was as if something malicious and deadly had poisoned her, leaking into her blood stream. Tainting her. Possessing her.
Pearl screamed.
Not in fear.
Not in pain.
But in outrage.
Her head darted forward. She caught a mouthful of Owen’s calf in her teeth. Fabric squeaked against ivory as she bit down.
The man yelled wordlessly above her, tearing his leg free. He immediately kicked back, his boot slamming into her mouth.
A sharp pain — immediately dissolved under that torrential rain of fire pelting down inside her — flashed through her mouth. Blood filled it, but Pearl spat it out. She grabbed the knife, twisted it point down, and slid its edge against the ropes binding her ankles.
Owen tried to grab the knife from her but she rolled away, kicking out her unbound leg to squirm away from him.
His hand found her hair. Jerked it.
Tears filled Pearl’s eyes as she yanked her head free. The final thread of rope parted under that knife’s persistent edge.
Perhaps Owen hadn’t noticed she was free. Perhaps he was so fixated on bringing her back to him so he could bring his boot down on her face or her stomach—
He grabbed her hair again. Hauled her up.
Pearl stuck out her elbow, yelling as sh
e brought her arm out above her in a wide arc.
The knife, still pointing back, whispered over Owen’s wrist.
For a moment, she thought she’d missed.
And then blood sprayed over her face. Her head fell down, cracking against the concrete before she could stiffen her neck.
Lights flashed from the darkness of the room, swarming over Pearl. She choked as blood drowned her tongue. Something jagged caught in the back of her throat, and Pearl lurched forward, retching violently. Blood splattered onto the pale floor. Pearl stared in amazement at the tooth where it lay in a splattered puddle of her own blood. She lifted a hesitant finger, sliding it between numb lips.
He’d knocked her tooth out.
Her fucking tooth?
Pearl let out a cry of rage. She drove the knife down, slicing through the ropes still trapping her leg in a sharp V. Pins and needles raced through her limb, but it was a distant sensation when compared with the intense, molten pressure inside her chest. Pearl staggered to her feet. She swung around, stumbling on legs where circulation was by now a foreign concept.
Owen leaned with his hip against that majestic elk’s flank, wrist cupped to his stomach. Blood stained the fabric black, making it shimmer as he spun away from her with a grimace on his face.
“Get her!” Owen yelled, voice sounding strained and muffled through the goat’s head he wore.
The Chair was already coming around the altar. Whatever wound Jarred had inflicted on him didn’t seem to make a difference to that lumbering stride, that determined face… those penetrating eyes.
Owen’s brother didn’t seem to think his presence was necessary — he turned his attention back to Jarred’s limp body. There was blood on that goat’s head. More on Will’s hands as he drove down another knife.