But he doesn't take me seriously , she thought, watching him rolling around with Leona like a young panther, while Dorian and Celeste climbed all over him. The sight filled her with a dryness that demanded to be quenched. Anna-Maria walked over to her four siblings and they looked up as she approached. Gavin was on his knees, with a child hanging off each arm, and Leona grabbing onto his neck as if trying to ride him like a horse.
“Off,” Anna-Maria said to her ten-year-old sister imperiously. The little girl released her brother with a sulky pout. “You two—hold him still.” Celeste hesitated, glancing at Dorian, and the two of them tightened their respective grips on their brother's arms, keeping them behind his back.
Anna-Maria dropped to her knees, so her face was level with her brother's. She looked him dead in the eye and then began to unbutton his shirt, quickly and precisely. He had already started to get hair on his chest and a line of it trailed down from his navel, disappearing into his slacks. His body was far better than any boy she'd dated so far. She raked her hands nails over his exposed belly, tracing the grooves and ridges of his emerging abs.
It wasn't fair. Gavin watched her impassively and that annoyed her. Though she was only thirteen, men were already aware of her. With her long legs, tanned skin, and thick blonde hair, she turned heads. And Anna-Maria liked the feel of their eyes on her, desperately grasping for purchase. It made her feel powerful knowing that they were stripping away her clothing, layer by layer, trying to picture what lay beneath. She liked that she could play them like pawns by using her body as collateral. She liked the fact that the law was on her side, as a minor, which meant she didn't have to pay.
Gavin just looked bored, and a little annoyed. “What do you think you're doing?”
“Just getting a better look at my darling big brother,” she purred, leaning her forehead against his. “You can look just as well from afar. I'm not one of your devoted denizens,” he sneered.
“No, that you're not,” Anna-Maria agreed. She rubbed his nipple between her thumb and forefinger, slow and teasingly seductive. “I'm not sure I understand why, though.”
“Because I see right through you,” he said softly, “And you're a vain, silly creature who thinks she's a hunter but really, dear sister, you're just a harlot. Your so-called prowess is superficial.”
Anna-Maria pinched him hard. He didn't flinch. “You should talk. I know things about you, Gavin. Things about your father. Mother says he was a sick son of a bitch.” She pressed her lips against his neck, determined to elicit a reaction from him. The skin of his throat was supple and yielded to her pearly teeth as she caught his vein between them. “You take after him, supposedly.”
“I wouldn't know.”
“No, you wouldn't, would you? But mother tells me things she would never dream of telling you. Apparently he was like a tiger in the sack.” Her hand dropped from his chest and she squeezed him roughly between his legs, causing his jaw to clench. “Hung like one, too. You are sick, aren't you, Gavin? Getting turned on by your own sister? Your thirteen- year-old sister.” She squeezed him again, in a long, fluid jerk that made him gasp. “You're such a twisted fuck.”
Growling, Gavin batted Celeste and Dorian aside and tackled her, pinning her down as he had Celeste when he had been chasing her in the garden. AnnaMaria laughed delightedly. “You know you want me,” she purred, smiling into her livid brother's face. “All men do. But you, especially.”
“Wrong,” he said coolly. She laughed again, and it tinkled like ice. “Then why are you hard for me, dear brother?”
He slapped her. It was a casual slap, not meant to hurt so much as to humiliate. “You shouldn't be talking like that,” he snarled. “Thirteen is too young to be a slatternly whore.”
“Oh, don't worry, big brother. My virtue is still intact. In case you want that pleasure for yourself.”
“I don't want any woman even remotely similar to you or mother. But especially not you.”
“Ooh, could it be that big brother afraid of meeting his match?” “Even if that were the case, you would still be exempt. Look at you. Hardly a challenge.”
Her saucy look vanished, making her face look cold and hard. “Really. Do your tastes run younger, then, Gavin? Have you got your eye on Leona and Celeste?” she added, gesturing at the blonde-haired eight-year-old and the dark-haired ten-year-old watching wide-eyed nearby.
“Don't be ridiculous,” he scoffed. “There's no pleasure to be had in taking a child. I want someone innocent. Somebody passive whom I can control, and teach how to pleasure me. Not somebody who already thinks she does know, and will fight me every step of the way for control.”
“You like the fight,” she hissed.
“You don't fear me, though,” he said dryly. “Not the way I want to be feared.”
“And how is that?” Anna-Maria asked, making a face. He smiled. “The fear of wanting something you know shouldn't—and knowing you can't resist. You're not innocent enough to understand, dear sister. Not anymore. If you ever were.”
With that, he got up and began doing up the buttons of his shirt. Anna-Maria eyed him hatefully, lust and respect and scorn and fear and jealousy all warring with the innate hatred and contempt she felt for all her siblings. “Your ideal woman sounds weak,” she spat. “Like prey.”
She had meant to bait him, but he smiled and said, “Exactly.” “On the contrary. I find the thought very… appealing.”
“That's stupid,” Anna-Maria said. “You'll break her, or else turn her into a mindless slave that grants your every wish in fear of being cast aside. Either way, you'll get bored.”
“I doubt it.” He fastened the last button of his collar. “The hunt alone will keep me occupied for quite some time. And there is the matter of capturing her, taming her.” He grinned. “Teaching the lamb how to lie with the lion, without succumbing to his hunger. Should be quite the experience.”
“I'll kill her,” Anna-Maria blurted, startling herself. But the words rang true, and she meant them. “I'll kill any female you take for your own. I won't let you taint our family's blood.”
Gavin raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a threat, Anna.”
“It is. I'll do it. Maybe not by my own hand, but she will die.”
“And you think one of our siblings will oppose me?” “We both know I'll most likely marry rich. I'll have a stupid husband who will be generous with his money and lax in attention to what I do.” She smiled; it was a beautiful smile and filled with cruelty. “You remember Snow White, right, Gavin? I'll be the wicked stepmother. I'll hire a huntsman. He'll kill her and bring her heart to me in a metal box filled with ice.”
“Is that a fact?” Gavin said, taking a step closer. “And what makes you think I'll let you do that?” “Do you think you can stop me, big brother? Compete with my wealth and resources?”
“You haven't got either of those things, yet.” “And you don't have a woman,” she pointed out.
“Yet we speculate. Why? This isn't really about the blood, is it? You don't seem to have any qualms about mother whoring it up where she pleases.”
“You're the male,” she hissed. “You carry on the family name.”
Gavin laughed. “I can't believe it. You're jealous. Of me.” “You're everything I want in a man. I see no reason why I should settle for second best.”
His smile faded and he folded his arms. “Well. It seems we have the makings of a bet.”
Anna-Maria smiled. “Yes. And it begins when I take a husband and you take a mate.”
“What happens if I win?” She paused to think. “I'll give your female a generous dowry—if you don't kill her, first. The amount will depend on that of my future husband, but it should fancy any foolish whim she has.”
“And if you win?” Anna-Maria put her hands on her brother's shoulders and brushed her lips against his. “If I win,” she whispered, “You, big brother, will fuck me in ways my undoubtedly impotent husband-to-be could never dream of and get me with chi
ld. Our child.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” he growled. “Like father, like son,” she whispered.
They shook hands, both of them squeezing as hard as they could to force the other to let go. AnnaMaria used her nails, which were quite long, but that didn't seem to faze him. His grip was like steel, however, and she was forced to let go when the bones in her wrist felt like they might snap. She massaged her hand. “Don't get too attached to your pet lamb, Gavin, dear.”
And then she turned and went back inside the house. After a moment's pause, Dorian and Celeste hugged him in a silent show of support, and followed along with Leona after their older sister. Casting a disgusted look at his mother, with her victim wrapped up in her arms the way a black widow spider lures her mate into her web, he, too, went inside. He had never lost a game before.
He was not about to start now.
Forward
One of my most common requests was people asking me about the essay Gavin wrote in high school (referred to obliquely in Fearscape).
I didn't include it in the original for several reasons. 1) I wanted people to use their imagination; 2) I'm lazy, and am secretly using reason #1 to rationalize it; and 3) hey, you guys read for fun. I didn't think you'd want me to put pseudo-schoolwork in here! This isn't literary analysis 101.
But you insisted, and I believe in the maxim “Give the people what they want.” So here it is, by popular request—Gavin's Essay.
Gavin's Essay The Most Dangerous Game , by Richard Connell, asks a question many wonder but few dare vocalize: “In a fight of man versus man—who would win? And would morality ultimately triumph over our more bestial instincts, or would we succumb to our bloodlust?”
Connell seems to think, no, we cannot. We cannot escape the beast within us. The leitmotif of predator and prey, of hunter and hunted, of man versus nature —his nature—is evidence of this. Heavy symbolism shows what happens when human beings—homo sapiens—are put into situations so frightful that they defy all convention.
And what do people do? They regress. Not in the Freudian sense: this is a far more ancient regression. Evolutionary, rather than developmental.
In times of acute stress humans revert not to children, but to animals. Predators.
Prey.
While a work of fiction, there are many parallels between The Most Dangerous Game and real life. What is fiction, if not a warped mirror image of reality? Connell distorts and deceives, and the antagonist is duly vanquished to give one a concrete sense of ending, but his short story is, at heart, a portrayal of man's animal instinct and its unending battle for control of the dichotomy.
Like any other animal, human beings can be both dominant and submissive, and sometimes act in ways more befitting of animals.
Take the school shootings that one occasionally hears about on the evening news. Our society acts so shocked when its youth perpetuates acts of violence, but one grows quite weary of being the hunted. It is a tedious role to play; eventually, the strain becomes too much, and the persecuted individual becomes, like Count Zaroff, a hunter of men.
What does an animal do when cornered? It fights back.
The cheerleaders would probably be the first to perish, because, despite their natural athleticism, they have never known what it is like to truly need to run.
The brawnier athletes, overconfident in their limited physical prowess, would also be quick to die. Their rigid adherence to social norms, and superciliousness, would render them unable to be innovative. Scientific studies have even shown that dominant animals grow depressed and inert when placed in subordinate roles.
The social trend-setters, with their adept mimicry, will be quick to conform. But theirs is a superficial ability, and will not have been honed by any real skill. A flame engulfed by its own sense of splendor.
Indeed, the most likely individuals to survive would be the quiet intellectuals, cunning and vindictive. Their apparent weakness would cause many to write them off in the initial sweep: a mistake one would not live to regret.
Acknowledgments
Well, this is it, folks! My first completed trilogy! I can't even begin to tell you how great it feels. • Louisa—my cover designer, and a total peach. She's just an all around amazing person and I heart her so much.
• My fans from Fictionpress. They supported me when I was just a little sixteen-year-old with a humble dream, and I was surprised and elated when so many of them found me again after I went the route of self-publishing.
• The PH whoars, and my partners in crime.
• My family, for their wary encouragement.
Terrorscape (Horrorscape) Page 24