by A. P. Wayne
He entered the woods, enjoying the relative gloom.
He became suddenly aware he was only feet from where his “initiation” had taken place. He didn’t really know what else to call it. It wasn’t like there was any exchange of knowledge or anything. Their leader, the woman, had bitten him and then her legion of monsters had taken turns drinking his blood. That was a chilling thought. If they drank his blood like wine he wondered what effect it was having on Jordan.
But it was probably better not to think about that.
He remembered the large stone, now off to his right. Looking at it, he almost expected to see that eerie purplish light, smell the heady incense musk of their fire ... see the altar where he’d been restrained and initiated.
sacrificed
Yes, that may have been the intention. But before killing him they needed to use his body for something. They needed him to become one of them. But he hadn’t done what they had wanted him to do. He and Jordan had kept that other world at bay.
And now they were still paying for it.
He just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Until he heard the screams.
He’d been so lost in his own head he thought they could have been going on for quite some time.
He took off running toward the screaming.
At one time, he was probably the most cowardly person he knew, although, at that time, he would have chalked it up to self-preservation. Since his biology had changed, he found himself quicker to anger. Unfortunately, the only person he usually had to get mad at was Jordan. But something in him seemed to rise up, welcome the confrontation. Maybe so he could lash out and shed blood and drink it up and finally become what Jordan called “the inevitable.”
Nearly upon the house he became distracted by the man farther in the woods. The man was shouting “fuck” repeatedly. He looked homeless. He also looked like he was trying to destroy the woods.
Walker tried to pay half his attention to the crazy man and half his attention to the screaming.
Maybe the crazy man could help him.
“Hey!” Walker shouted.
The man turned to look at him, threw his arms up in the air, screamed like a girl, and took off running toward the Jenkins place.
Aside from the offerings left on his doorstep, it was the strangest thing Walker had seen in a while.
It made him feel alive.
He thought the screams were coming from the direction of the abandoned house.
He crossed the yard and reached the porch quickly.
It was covered in mostly dried blood. Some of it was still sticky to the touch.
Walker realized he hadn’t heard the screaming in a while.
He went into the house anyway.
Fourteen
After mercilessly butchering the whore in the hotel room, Ilya had fucked a pile of offal until her body came and went to sleep in the bloody, sticky bed. She woke up and took a shower. Put on the drab man’s clothes, got back into his boring car, and continued onward toward Lawrence. If she wanted to revert back into her spirit form and leave Patrick Fishman as a quivering, weeping mess, she could have made it to Lawrence almost instantly. But, as with other human trappings, she had developed an enthusiasm for driving.
At the speeds she chose to travel, she thought it was probably the danger she liked more than the feeling of the road under the car.
It was mid-afternoon by the time she reached Lawrence.
If there was ever any doubt this was the place, her close proximity to it immediately erased that doubt.
The body she inhabited began trembling so much she had to pull the car off the road.
She put it into park and closed her eyes. Immediately she could see the town below her. She was first drawn to the pond she had first entered through but it now resembled a blank page. Empty. Not vibrating and alive as it had been the last time, ready to be changed with their energy. She was drawn to areas that had harbored human tragedy. That pond was a place where one of the owners, Herman Miller, had ritualistically drowned each newborn his wife had birthed. No one ever found out what he was doing and most of the infant bones had still been slowly decaying in the muck beneath the water.
Now her mind went to a new place.
This time it was a house.
She knew it as well as she knew any place in Lawrence.
Three different times the owners had been foreclosed upon. Three times the man of the house had killed his wife and whatever children had been there. And, even now, with no one living there, bad things were continuing to happen. She could see stains on the porch and knew it was blood. She heard screams and laughter.
Something else.
A deep, rumbling growl.
This place was powerful.
She thought she could do good work from there.
Feed the dark desires surging through her.
She took deep breaths with the host body, calmed herself. She wouldn’t need this body for long.
She pulled back onto the state route and drove toward an old abandoned house on Suchling Road.
Fifteen
Jordan didn’t know exactly what she was looking for and was planning on getting Melanie to help her but she wasn’t at school. She didn’t know if she was looking for a specific type of person or not. She thought it would probably be a girl or a group of girls.
Lawrence was a really small school so it wasn’t like it had a lot of cliques.
It seemed like mostly jocks and cheerleaders so almost everyone else imitated the jocks and cheerleaders, making it pretty homogenous. There was a group of maybe five or six goth-type kids but she couldn’t really figure out if they were into the Cure and death and vampires and stuff or if they just shopped at Hot Topic. That seemed too obvious, anyway.
It wasn’t until she was sitting with her group of friends in the cafeteria at lunch that the obvious finally hit her.
It was probably one of them.
She didn’t really talk a lot, period. And she hardly ever mentioned Walker. But still, they had to know.
And even thinking that, she thought the way they looked at her had changed. But that could be anything. It could be that she wasn’t dating anyone from high school (not counting Melanie, which she was pretty sure no one would know about) or that she had a job that took up a lot of her free time or the fact that she was kind of involved in Walker’s parents’ disappearance.
“Something wrong?” Amber asked.
This startled Jordan. “Huh? Oh, no. Just tired.”
“It sucks that you have to work.”
“Well, I don’t really have to.”
“Oh, I thought you were partially supporting Walker.”
The two guys at the table, Sean and Mike, started laughing. Jordan blushed. “I’m definitely not supporting him.”
“Then maybe you’re avoiding him.”
“Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I think that Melanie might have a little something for him. She’s been asking a lot of questions about him when you’re not around.”
“Like what kinds of questions? I’ve told her just about everything.”
“I don’t know. She was just asking if we’d ever met him, how long you two had been together. That kind of thing.”
“Hm. Melanie’s met him. She knows all that stuff.”
“Well, maybe she just wanted our opinion on him then.”
“And ...?”
“Honestly?”
“I’m pretty sure I know how you feel so go ahead.”
“Creepy deadbeat.”
Even though that was about what Jordan had expected and was, to a certain extent, how she felt herself, it still stung a little.
“I’m ... working on it.” Jordan just didn’t have the spirit to defend him today.
“Really?”
“Maybe. I still have a lot of thinking to do.”
> Amber reached out and grabbed her hand. “I really think you should. I think you’d be a lot happier.”
Sixteen
Immediately after entering the house, Walker felt like he’d made a huge mistake. Part of him wanted to immediately turn around and leave. But then there was Jordan telling him he didn’t do anything and he realized he couldn’t. Besides, there was still the matter of the screaming.
He stood still and listened.
Maybe he still heard it. He couldn’t be sure. It sounded faint, like it was coming from ever father away. Maybe it hadn’t been coming from the hose at all. Still, while he was here, he should explore it. He wished he had something in the way of a weapon but there wasn’t anything to grab. The house was completely, almost eerily, empty.
“Hello?” he called, not really expecting to hear anything.
He didn’t.
He wandered around the first floor. All the rooms were equally empty.
The house grew dimmer and he figured it was probably just a cloud passing over the sun.
His curiosity not yet slaked, he went upstairs. More of the same emptiness. Standing there, staring out at the dim woods through a missing window, he felt like the house was devoid of more than just objects. It felt devoid of a past, a history, anything. Or as though something were covering up those things.
Suddenly, deafening sound filled his head.
It started as laughter but became the same shrieking, piercing screaming he’d heard earlier.
The screams abruptly died away and he thought he heard a car.
He looked through the window and scanned the yard. A car came to a stop in the weedy driveway.
Shit. He needed to get out of here.
Pulse racing, he ran downstairs.
At the bottom he turned to run out the back door thinking whoever had arrived would probably come in the front. As soon as he turned into the kitchen to bolt for the door, he saw the man filling the doorway.
Walker had to come to a stop before he could turn around to go out the front door.
He looked into the man’s black eyes. There was no white anywhere.
The man spoke.
He said, “Hello, Walker.”
Seventeen
Jordan left the school and called Melanie before she’d left the parking lot. It was Friday and everyone was eager to be out. She waited for the line of cars, some of them filled with kids eagerly lighting cigarettes. Some of them were probably already cracking beers in anticipation of the weekend.
Melanie didn’t answer.
Jordan left a message. “Hey. It’s me. Missed you at school. I was just calling to make sure you were okay.”
Maybe she really was sick. She knew Melanie’s phone was usually within arm’s reach and it wasn’t like her not to answer it.
No need to panic, she thought.
Someone honked to let her in and she headed home to change for work.
Eighteen
Walker closed his eyes and shook his head.
There wasn’t a man blocking the door.
It was a girl.
And it made a lot more sense for her to know his name than the imaginary man he hadn’t recognized.
“Melanie?”
Did she blush? He thought maybe she blushed.
“Is that your car out there?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I, um ... I asked you first.”
Melanie smiled. “I came here to see you.”
“Me? Why?”
“To see if you’ve received our offerings.”
Walker didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think.
“That was you?”
“I had some help.”
Here it comes, Walker thought. Here comes the part where she had some help from the Fangs and then, just like that, everything would be undone. He would be the same cowering person he was a year ago.
“Who?”
“Some friends from school.”
“But why?”
“To help keep you alive.”
He was stumped. He wasn’t sure what he should do. He knew she was one of Jordan’s friends. Possibly her closest friend and he had no idea what Jordan had told her. Jordan had told him she hadn’t told anybody anything but if she had, and he tried to play dumb, it wasn’t going to work very well. He decided to take that approach anyway.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about but I certainly don’t drink blood to stay alive.”
Melanie moved a few steps closer to him. Tiny, blond, blue-eyed, smiling sweetly even now, he couldn’t imagine this girl draining the blood out of anything. Nor could he imagine her lying to him just to have fun with him.
“But I think you do,” she said. “Jordan and I are pretty close. Really close. Before you get mad at her I want you to know that she didn’t tell me that. She talks about you quite a bit, but she’s careful to never mention what you really are. I’ve seen the cuts.”
Walker thought about all the cuts he’d put on her body over the past several months. Maybe he should have just cut her in the same place over and over rather than cutting her in a different spot nearly every time.
“I notice you’re not trying to defend yourself.”
There wasn’t anything for him to say.
“I love Jordan,” Melanie said. Then she moved close to him and he felt a second of fear. Then he felt embarrassed by that. He doubted she was even five feet tall and probably not even a hundred pounds. “But I think I love you more.”
She was practically touching him. He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her away slightly.
“Melanie ... You don’t even know me.”
“But I know what you are.”
“That’s crazy.”
“And I know what Jordan says about you. I like that person. I want to be with that person. I want you to make me what you are.”
“You need to stop and think about what you’re saying.”
“You need to listen to me. I can’t force you. You can say no, but you need to hear what I have to say first.”
Walker’s head was a mess.
“Can we ... at least go outside?” he said. Maybe somewhere in the back of his head he was thinking he could take off running if he got too freaked out.
“After you,” she said.
“You’re not gonna stab me in the back are you?”
She let out a sound that was something like a giggle, but she didn’t expressly say no. Maybe she’s already stabbed enough people in the back, he thought.
He went out the front door, stepping into the tacky mess on the porch. Once they were outside in the fresh air, he felt a little better. It was definitely darker. Clouds completely covered the sky and he thought it could start raining soon. The weather in Ohio never ceased to fascinate him. He tested the railing on the porch and when he determined it wouldn’t shatter with his weight, he leaned against it.
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“Jordan’s trying to leave you. It’s been going on for a while. She’s tired, Walker.”
He knew things had been strained, but hearing it said like that was still shocking.
“How ...? What ...?”
“For me. She wants to leave you for me.”
This wasn’t helping a lot. He was glad he had the rail to lean against.
“Maybe ...” he stammered. “Maybe it’s just all in your head.”
“It’s definitely not. She’s told me.”
“And you want to leave her for me?”
She moved close to him again. Now he felt trapped against the railing. The temperature had dropped. He could feel the warmth coming from her.
“I told you what I want.”
Walker looked at Melanie. For so long, he’d really only thought about being with Jordan. Of course, that was helped by the fact that she was the only person he saw with any regularity who wasn’t a 300 pound man
.
Inevitable.
That word had been popping up a lot lately.
Both he and Jordan seemed to think so many things were inevitable.
Walker put his hands on Melanie’s shoulders. This time it wasn’t to push her away. He let them linger there. She was even smaller than Jordan. And yet not as bony. The difference did something to him.
He didn’t do anything.
This felt like something.
He let his hands trail down her bare arms, his fingertips raising gooseflesh on her skin.
He moved his hands to her hips and pulled her into him. He was hard, almost painfully so, and his erection pressed against her stomach. She lifted her head up to him and he bent and kissed her. Her arms were then at the back of his head, her tongue entering his mouth. He knew if they didn’t stop now, they probably wouldn’t. He quickly unbuttoned her shirt, had his hands on her bra. It had been a long time since it was like this with Jordan. Usually she came over, took a shower, and just went to lie in bed naked, waiting for him to drink her blood and fuck her so she could feel as though her duties were fulfilled before getting the hell out.
“Take off your shirt,” Melanie said.
Unhesitatingly, he did so. Jordan had probably been the only person to see him naked since he’d hit puberty.
Melanie moved her hands down his chest and stomach, opening the button on his pants. Then she turned around and pulled the hair off the back of her neck. He bent down, sucking on her ear, kissing her neck. She slowly ground herself against him. He undid the clasp on her bra, reached around and felt her small stiff nipples. He pinched them and she shuddered.