“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he said.
“Promise? What’s your name?”
He put a hand on my hip and swung it against his own. His lips brushed my earlobe. A tequila-tinged gasp escaped my throat.
“My name is Vincent. I’ll say it once. Walk away.”
A bead of sweat dripped down his cheekbone. I dabbed my tongue to that hot salt water. Condensation. I was chipping through. Another few seconds and Mellado’s spell over the man would be broken.
Then Vincent would be mine to control.
Chapter 9
But before I could play my card, the band abruptly quit. The whole crowd erupted in applause and hoots. I turned away from Vincent to see what the commotion was about.
All the roving searchlights converged on Diego Mellado as he stepped into the open DJ booth, his arm around an angelic but bashful young man with jet-black hair. I could see the family resemblance at once.
Mellado grabbed a microphone and called out to the crowd, “My Roberto is fifteen years old today, a grown man.”
Young Roberto was frail and morose in the midst of all this excitement, but the crowd roared in agreement anyway. Mellado encouraged them with wild gesticulations and threatening eyes.
In my moment of distraction, Vincent had slipped away.
Also nowhere to be found were the famous starlet Isabel and her gargoyle chaperon. Her absence gave me a rumbling sense of unease. Knowing she didn’t belong here, I felt bonded to her well-being.
“Give this man a drink!” Mellado roared, and young Roberto was passed a tequila shot filled to the brim.
The boy tried to sip, but Diego forced it into a gulp. The room howled with delight as Roberto coughed and spat the liquor all over his crisp white shirt.
It was like some bullish male version of a quinceañera. Except poor Roberto didn’t seem to want any part of this initiation.
The boy was bound by blood to his father’s hell. It was going to be a sickening education, and I couldn’t stop my mind from dredging up a memory of my own fifteenth birthday, my own initiation.
The day my father betrayed me.
On a farm not far from Boston, my father had only his wife, his sickly daughter, and a few stunted crops to his name. But he cherished us, at least at first.
My world was his two acres. Father coaxed me awake every morning to hear me recount my dreams. He believed he could read prophecy into them, but that was a power I’d never actually wield.
When I was fourteen, Mother became pregnant again after a string of miscarriages. It was joyous news, but as her belly swelled, she was bedridden with illness. On the morning of my fifteenth birthday, she was coughing blood.
It was late winter, but that afternoon Papa led me on a hike into the western woods. He refused to tell me why we walked for hours through overgrown forest and snow drifts as high as my knees. After a while, I cried and begged to go home.
He cursed at me in anger. The cold seeped into my hands and feet until I couldn’t feel them anymore, and still we walked, and my father never explained. I thought I’d failed him somehow, that I hadn’t loved him or worked hard enough.
By the end I was so exhausted he had to carry me on his back. We reached a spot where huge slabs of granite formed a gorge full of natural passageways and caverns.
I stood at the mouth of a dark cave that seemed hardly wide enough for a raccoon to slip through. My father insisted I crawl inside. I refused. I cried and wailed until he threatened to leave me there to die. When I tried to embrace him, he shoved me away.
The cave was damp and pitch black and full of rock crags that dug into my flesh. I was terrified we’d stumble on a hibernating bear or something worse.
Then there was light, an inner chamber open to the sky, draped with tanned animal skins and warmed by a healthy fire. After what I’d suffered, this place could’ve been heaven for all I knew. Except the hooded figure sitting at the edge of the fire looked nothing like an angel.
I couldn’t see his face, but I saw the black robes, the low-hanging necklaces of tiny bones that clattered in the wind.
This was the devil incarnate, I was certain. I screamed, I turned to run away, but there was nowhere to go except back through the cave that my father now cruelly blocked. All the affection drained from his face forever.
“I brought her in exchange,” my father said to the hooded devil. “Please, save my unborn son.”
The full weight of understanding fell over me just then. I saw it in my father’s pitiless eyes. He was afraid to lose the only thing that mattered to him, a male child. To prevent that loss, he’d sacrifice me to the devil.
All the love he’d ever shown was swept away by that one damning condition I couldn’t change. I was a girl.
Chapter 10
My attention pulled tight again. Mellado was still beaming with parental pride, one arm slung around his boy, jostling him. And I’d just made a fatal mistake.
I’d failed to cheer. I hadn’t even applauded. It was suddenly as if one of the overhead searchlights had singled me out.
Several of Mellado’s goons locked their eyes in my direction.
How many could I take down with my hairpin blade? What if I grabbed a bottle and smashed it into a makeshift weapon? I could stop at least one attacker’s heart with a thrust of my open palm.
Many ways to kill, but no way to kill so many.
Instead I went dark. I became a shadow of myself. Surrounded by bright colored lights, roving and flashing, I could cloak my movements like a chameleon on a leafy branch.
Almost. No amount of stealth could keep me camouflaged for long. I chose the nearest escape, a long passage painted with ornamented cosmological wheels that seemed to dial like gears as I passed.
As I hurried away from the dance hall, a sense of urgency called out to me like a beacon. I stalked toward the VIP rooms. The feeling strengthened; I was catching the signal of someone’s distress.
Just as I passed a stainless steel door, a blast of psychic pain lashed out at me. It screamed at a frequency beyond sound, and it tore through my mind with such force I had to brace my hand against the wall. My stomach heaved, my eyes burned.
Someone behind that door was dying. I knew. This was what I’d been moving toward by instinct.
I wrenched open the door. Against a velvet curtained backdrop, Isabel, Colombia’s icon of purity and grace, stood stark naked with her arms splayed out like a crucifixion, yet nothing visible held her in place.
Her eyes had a distant cast. Her mouth was wide open, mute. But the worst of it, what made my knees buckle and my stomach lurch, were the dozens of disfiguring crisscrossed slashes and puncture wounds across her body. I could barely see the damage through all the streaming blood.
And that ancient little imp of a man in his ill-fitting matador’s outfit…he pranced around her, his face concealed by a devil’s mask, cutting and thrusting at the helpless girl with a bull-slaying sword.
It was like a sick perversion of a child’s game.
Each time he thrust, her body jerked, but she made no move to defend herself. How could she let herself be painstakingly slaughtered without putting up the slightest defense?
I knew how. Because Diego Mellado had possessed her mind. He’d sent her off with this trophy hunter as if she were a tranquilized panther. She was powerless to stop what was happening to her.
Only her soul resisted. It lashed out, rushing me like a blast of radiation. She begged God for help, but I was the one who heard.
Chapter 11
“Stop!” I bellowed.
Strangely, the old man complied. He slumped into a claw-footed smoking chair and pulled away his mask. Leathered with age, he looked like a corpse already. He heaved for breath and dabbed a handkerchief at the milky corners of his lips.
“You’re too old,” he grumbled, cocking his chin at me. “I told them to send me fresher meat, a Latina.”
In an explosion of pity I rushed for Isabel. She dropp
ed her pose the instant I swept her into my arms. Her limp body draped against me, the damp warmth of her blood seeping through my dress.
I had nowhere else to lay her but the cold tile floor. She was far beyond help. I could see that now. Half of her puncture wounds were mortal, spilling lifeblood with every beat of her heart.
When her eyes caught mine, a flash of clarity passed between us, a glimpse of heaven in a dream. Then her psychic anguish went silent forever.
The senselessness enraged me. Isabel was brought here tonight to be paraded on the dance floor, then murdered, cruelly and anonymously. And why? Because she was young and beautiful and spoke out against men like Diego Mellado.
The murder of innocents was tragic enough—but this? A girl so beloved and admired, who’d be mourned by millions? It was an intentional affront to all humanity.
And Mellado was so unstoppable, he could let himself be seen in public with her, just moments before her death. Nobody would ever come to arrest him.
I turned back to the old degenerate, heaving furious breaths through my teeth. In this raw moment, that feeble old bastard embodied all the power I was determined to destroy.
“Why?” I asked.
He smiled, licking his lip. “I killed the legendary Isabel! I paid a king’s ransom for that pleasure. Worth every penny, too. Now run off and get me a bitch who won’t ask questions.”
I pulled my hairpin from where it was tucked above my ear. My dress slipped upward along my thighs as I straddled him. The seat leather groaned against my bare knees. “I’ll give you just what you need,” I said.
His final breath came through the new orifice I cut in his throat. Slowly, a wet red bib mushroomed across his shirtfront. The matador, gored.
I licked the single stray drop of blood from my fingertip and slipped the hairpin back into place. But killing this shriveled old soul was an empty thrill. I still craved, still ached for a more substantial reckoning.
The steel door opened again. A girl tumbled inside as if she’d been pushed. Meat thrown to a lion. The door slammed shut behind her.
She fell to her hands and knees in front of me, a trembling thing in a tight sequined dress. Barely fifteen, by the looks of it. A fresher whore. Her huge wet eyes darted from Isabel’s corpse to the old man’s.
Her scream filled every corner of the room.
Chapter 12
Any second, this room could be flooded with armed men, and we’d have no escape. Both of us would die if we didn’t make a move.
The girl scrambled to her feet and backed against a wall. She was panting with fright, warding me off with her hands. For all she knew, I’d murdered both these people and would do the same to her.
“Shhh…” I told her. “I won’t hurt you.”
The poor girl was plastered with lipstick and eye shadow, a sad parody of a grown woman. A sex slave for Mellado’s cartel, no doubt.
I held her narrow face with both my hands and thumbed the running mascara from her cheeks. She was just a wisp of a thing, but I caught a healthy defiance behind the terror.
That dead pervert in the chair had been expecting her. He’d wanted her to witness Isabel’s slaying. Her fear would’ve been his aphrodisiac, and when he was done with her, he would’ve killed her, too.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Gloria,” she whispered. Her eyes fixed firmly on mine, her muscles loosening, like settling into a warm bath. An understanding passed between us, between women.
“Let’s get out of this room,” I told her.
I slipped my toe under the hilt of the sword and kicked it up into my grasp. For good measure, I gave it a quick twirl at my hip. Then I yanked open the door.
The slick-haired guard out in the hall suddenly found himself leaning against thin air. He threw out his hands to grab for the doorframe. I ran the blade through him from behind, center mass.
He’d die quickly, but he’d spend his last living moments on the floor, grasping fruitlessly for the hilt lodged against his back.
Gloria deliberately kicked him in the back of his skull as she passed. This girl had a fire in her. No doubt she’d seen too much human debasement in her life already.
We raced back toward the main corridor. My only viable exit route took me past the dance hall again, past all those guards. Drenched in blood, I wasn’t going to slip by unnoticed. I desperately needed a distraction.
Just as we entered the rumpus of lights I swung the girl in front of me and grasped her shoulders. “Listen, Gloria. This is Roberto Mellado’s night. He just turned fifteen. Every girl in this place will line up to dance with him, but you…”
The girl was transfixed as I spoke to her. Much like Diego Mellado, I could also be convincing.
Neural pathways rewired as her whole understanding of herself reversed course. In her mind, she was the most beautiful woman in the room, the best dancer. Roberto would be honored to share a song with her.
No, I wasn’t proud of what I did to this girl, but all is fair when your life’s on the line. When there are many lives on the line.
Gloria rushed back onto the dance floor, shoving club patrons aside. At the top of her lungs she wailed, “Roberto Mellado! Dance with me!”
Just as I hoped, she instantly stole the room’s attention. Mellado’s men locked their mental radars on this crazy kid prancing toward their pater dominus’s boy.
The entourage parted. Young Roberto stood baffled, pinching another tequila shot, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his hairless chest. Gloria charged at him, wobbling on her precariously high heels.
At the last moment, Gloria threw herself at Roberto. The boy thought fast, dropped his drink, and grabbed for her hips.
It was a better diversion than I could’ve possibly dreamed. Nobody could look away, especially as Roberto lost his footing and collapsed with Gloria still riding him.
The band stopped cold and the roar of laughter started. Hundreds of fools who should’ve known better.
I weaved to an emergency exit through the converging audience, dropped down the stairs, pushed through the exit door. An alleyway. Cool night air and welcomed silence. I inhaled a calming breath.
From behind, a pair of arms grabbed my stomach and wrenched me upward with such force that my feet came out of my pumps. My mind reeled. After a daring escape, one man had managed to ambush me. How could this happen?
“Hold it, darling,” he grumbled. Vincent from the bar. The feel of his chin bristle against my bare shoulder gave him away.
I could’ve severed his carotid with my hairpin, but I didn’t want it to be that easy, that fast. Vincent was pulsing with a forceful life. If I was patient, he could be so exquisitely satisfying.
I slipped into a crouch and swept my leg around clockwise. The lightning-fast move struck his calf and knocked him against the Dumpster with a resounding metallic clang.
I squeezed his bolo tie in one hand and pricked the hairpin knife against his throat.
“I warned you…” he grunted. His irises quivered, searching me. Then he winced as if a sudden harsh light had broken through the darkness.
Vincent had a willpower that those other goons didn’t. A passion. He was desperately fighting against Mellado’s mind control trap.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
“I’m the girl who’s going to break you out of prison.”
He shook his head, like trying to dispel a mirage.
“It’s going to hurt a little,” I added.
“What will?”
“This,” I said, and smacked my forehead against his.
Chapter 13
I dragged Vincent behind the Dumpster where he’d stay unconscious long enough for me to escape through the alley behind Sapa Inca.
My pumps wouldn’t help me run, so I left them behind. Barefoot, I had a clear path of escape through a pay parking lot next door. Once I started sprinting, nobody would be able to catch me.
But I was stopped cold by the sound of a woman
’s tearful pleading as it echoed across the buildings: “No, please, I didn’t mean to do it. Please! It was a mistake!”
Gloria’s voice.
I crouched behind the unmanned lot attendant’s booth and watched a pair of men drag Gloria toward a black Lincoln MKT. The poor waif twisted and thrashed against her captors.
The trance I put her under was worn off by now. Panic replaced it. She knew she’d humiliated Roberto Mellado, but she hadn’t the faintest clue why she did it. An impulse she couldn’t resist. She was dragged by an invisible chess master’s hand.
Her apparent prank wouldn’t go unpunished. The men shoved her in the car and positioned themselves on either side of their captive. Most likely, they’d take her into the desert, execute her or worse, then bury the body.
A pang of guilt tugged at my throat. I’d caused this. I’d seen enough collateral damage, sacrificed enough pawns. Justifiable losses. But tonight something caught me. Maybe it was Gloria’s young age, maybe it was the raw ache of losing Terra.
The Lincoln turned into the alley I’d just left. I had only seconds to react before they stole that poor faultless young woman away forever. I couldn’t just let her be murdered because of me.
Even through the tinted windows, my sharp vision caught five silhouettes. A driver, a passenger, and Gloria in the backseat, flanked by her would-be executioners.
If I miscalculated, if I gave them even a hair’s breadth of time to react, they’d kill her right there in the car.
The narrow alley kept the driver moving slowly enough for me to slip into a walking crouch beside a passenger door and test the handle. Locked.
So I leaped catlike onto the glass vista roof and slid far less gracefully down the windshield, offering the men inside a racier view of my backside than they deserved.
The driver slammed the brakes, and I planted both feet down on the street just ahead of the car. In unison, both back doors flew open to form shields for the two men raising their handguns at me. At least I’d lured their attention away from Gloria for a moment.
Diary of a Succubus Page 3