by Stacia Kane
Which it would do, as soon as it was done with her. The idea pleased it so much it gave a soft laugh, a low one. “So,” it said. “What should I do to you first? What do you want me to do?”
Its free hand stroked Ardeth’s face, the tip of its claw skimming down her cheek. Not hard enough to cut the skin. Not yet. It wanted to keep her facial features intact so it could see the horror and pain, the misery, and enjoy every little nuance. It would save those until the end.
In fact, it thought, enjoying his anger, maybe it would take her soul, too. Maybe it would carry her back through the mirror with it and make her its bride. She intrigued it, the defiance in her eyes and the slow regularity of her breathing—her determination not to show fear—belied by the loud, fast hammering of her heart. His memories intrigued it even more. And it hadn’t touched a woman in a long time, not with its own talons, with lips it controlled.
Those lips still tasted like blood when the beast slid its tongue over them. “Don’t be shy. I already know what you like, you know.” It leaned in, dropped its voice to a whisper that sounded like dry leaves skittering on tombstones. “I’ve seen his memories now. All of them.”
She swallowed. “You sure about that?”
That wasn’t what the beast had expected. It wasn’t what he’d expected, either, but he hoped he’d managed to quell his pleased surprise enough that the beast didn’t notice, or that it was too focused on her to notice anything he was thinking or feeling. She had to have some kind of plan in mind, or at least had to be trying to give herself time—maybe for Majowski to wake up, or get back from where he’d gone, or whatever?
It wasn’t easy to slam down his wall and shut the beast out when it had control of his body. He tried it anyway, as much as he could. Something told him his thoughts over the next few minutes were best kept to himself.
“I’m sure,” the beast said. It tightened its grip on her neck. “I’ve seen it all. Every second. Every inch of you. I know the—”
She racked him, hard. And that was one kind of pain the beast could feel. His vision went completely black for one long second while his heart stuttered between beats, anticipating the pain that was already thundering up his abdomen and spine. When it hit his head, he’d feel it. Until then, he had that agonizing moment of waiting for it, knowing it was coming but being unable to do anything to stop it.
Of course, the beast knew it was coming, too. It didn’t even finish snarling at her. It just retreated, leaving him to deal with the brunt of it.
And that brunt was truly awful. His lungs refused to work, his knees buckled, his stomach felt like someone had thrust a jagged chunk of burning ice into it. Jesus, did she have a steel plate in her knee, or something? Did she have to put that much power behind it?
Yes. Oh, shit, yes she did, because the beast had retreated and that put him back in control.
No sooner had the thought started to form in his mind than the beast realized it, too. Its panic and rage might have amused him if the stakes weren’t quite so high; he rarely got to feel it scared, and anything that made it unhappy was worth doing, but he couldn’t stop to enjoy it. It was already sucking power out of the air—out of the mirror—again, already gearing itself up for another attempt to take over, and if it won this time he wouldn’t have another chance. It wouldn’t give up again no matter what she did to it.
Which was why she had to leave. His voice sounded creaky and strained, forced out through his raw, aching throat. “Get out.”
She couldn’t, though. He knew she couldn’t. The distance to the door was too far, the path slick with blood and littered with body parts. There was no way she could escape before the beast gained control again, and there was no way he could hold it off for long. The air was so full of evil, so full of dark energy, that the beast could suck it up like a milkshake. Already it was starting to creep out of his head again.
And all that power came from the mirror. It was the mirror, and the beast’s connection to it, that made it so impossible to defeat, that put Ardeth in such great danger. The mirror was responsible—the mirror that was going to grant him the freedom he’d been hunting for twenty years. No more slavery to evil. A real life. He could have that…and watch the beast torture Ardeth, maybe kill her. He could have his freedom if he let the beast have her.
Or he could keep the beast trapped inside him, be forced to live the rest of his days sinning and alone, and know Ardeth was alive and unharmed because of it.
It was no choice at all.
Before he could stop himself, before he could think about it, he spun around and started for the mirror. The beast started shrieking in his head, writhing and twisting so hard his vision jittered. It knew what he planned to do, and it was not giving up without a fight. His muscles shook from trying to hold it back.
The mirror loomed before him. Silver-black tendrils of magic floated off its shifting surface, long fingers of evil insinuating themselves into the air around him like they were just waiting for the right moment to close. He couldn’t let that happen, either, just like he couldn’t let the things on the other side come through to infect the world, just like he couldn’t let the beast use its power to hurt Ardeth.
The demon-sword still lay on the floor where Fallerstein had dropped it. Whether he could keep holding on after he touched the handle or not, he didn’t know, but he guessed he was about to find out, because something told him it was the best chance at destroying the mirror that he had. He lunged for it, fighting the beast for every inch of movement, his body drenched with sweat and heavy from exhaustion.
Touching the handle wasn’t as bad as touching the blade had been—he still managed to keep the beast from taking over—but it was close. So close. Stars popped before his eyes; he could barely think. It was as if he’d become just instinct, just a mindless creature that existed for only one purpose. He couldn’t hear anything but the beast’s outraged bellowing, could barely see the mirror’s outline through the flurry of images the beast threw at him. Images of horror and hell, images of sins he’d committed, women he’d been with whose faces were superimposed on Ardeth’s body, women he’d been with whose bodies the beast pictured covered with blood and made him look at. So many images. So many sins.
He reached out to grab the mirror’s frame. Another burst of power hit, and this one he couldn’t fight. He felt ready to die, like every bit of life in his body had been funneled toward holding the beast at bay and now he was empty and it was too late.
Something wrapped around him. Something—the Molyous Rope. Ardeth. Ardeth had grabbed the Molyous Rope and thrown it over his shoulder, pulling it so it crossed his chest. It was what he needed. Just that little bit of help, that little bit of extra strength to keep the beast down long enough to do what he had to do.
The mirror exploded when he drove the tip of the blade into it. A rain of black glass, a blizzard of trapped screams and voices from hell and images, more images, of his life, his past. The mirror knew what had happened. It knew Speare. It knew him, it knew the beast, and it knew how the beast had gotten into his body. It showed him everything. All of it, its laughter a vicious soundtrack to the worst movie he’d ever seen.
The beast made a noise so loud and so terrible that he thought it would drive him insane if he had to hear it much longer. So much rage, so much grief…he hadn’t even known the beast could feel grief, but it could. For a second he almost felt sorry for it, until it retreated and all he could feel was pain and exhaustion.
His knees gave out. His entire body gave out. Dimly he realized that Majowski was there just inside the door, yelling something, that Laz was headed straight down the center aisle toward him as he collapsed to the floor.
And there he was: Uncle Laz. The man his mother claimed was his father, standing over him with concern all over his wizened face. Reaching for him.
Every ounce of strength he had left went into shifting away from that touch. He looked up, looked Laz straight in the eye. His words were a croak fuele
d by rage, and he said the only thing he could think of—the only thing he had to say. “You did this to me.”
Fear. That was what he saw in Laz’s eyes, and that fear confirmed everything the mirror had shown him in that horrible second.
“You did this to me,” he said again, the last words he could utter before darkness encroached, obscuring his vision, and this time he didn’t fight it. He let it take him and hoped he would end up somewhere better.
—
He hadn’t expected that better place to be his house, but he supposed it qualified. He couldn’t complain, anyway, although every movement hurt and the thudding in his head made him feel sick. That wasn’t a headache. It was the beast taking revenge, slamming itself against his skull over and over again in a steady monotonous rhythm. It had been doing it for hours. The dull repetitive hammering had chased him through his dreams and half dreams and had been there on the few occasions he vaguely remembered waking up throughout the night—the day? Another night? He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but the beast obviously didn’t think enough time had passed. And it was hungry.
That awful pounding wasn’t the only vague sleep-tinged memory he had. He remembered being in a car, passing streetlights that washed the interior in slow waves. He remembered jerking awake in the darkness at some point, sick from the beast’s slow-drip torture and the realization that he’d never be free of it. Sick from knowing that he’d jumped the gun, he’d gotten Ardeth involved and now they were both going to pay. Sick, especially, from the beast’s vicious dreams of how it wanted her to pay, dreams in which her pleas for death went on for hours and her blood coated his hands and poured onto the floor.
And he remembered her there in the bed next to him, little more than a warm soothing presence who’d stroked his shaking body and made gentle reassuring noises, but that had been enough. Shit, she’d stayed there the whole time, however long it had been. After what happened at the Silver Bell, what she’d seen him do, she’d still stayed with him while he slept. He wished she hadn’t. It would have made it easier.
Majowski poked his head through the doorway. What was he doing there? “Oh. Good. You’re awake.”
“Yeah, how—” he started, but Majowski was gone. Shit. That meant he’d probably gone to get someone, and Speare wasn’t ready to see either of the two people who might have wanted to see him. Probably because he had to have variations of the same talk with both of them.
Ardeth was the one who walked through the door. Damn it. Laz would have been easier.
“Hey.” He had to give her credit; her voice didn’t have that how-ya-doin’-sport tone that people seemed to think conveyed sympathetic optimism. “How do you feel?”
Like shit was how he felt, and her presence made it worse. He wasn’t ready for this. Especially not when she looked so great, back in those tight jeans with a black tank top over them. He remembered how the skin of her exposed shoulders had tasted, how smooth and soft it was. “Okay.”
“You look better,” she said, crossing the room to sit on the edge of his bed. She still smelled amazing, too. “Of course, just having your eyes open is better.”
An awkward pause followed, during which he knew she was wondering why he didn’t speak. Then she said, “I reburied the pieces of the mirror. I put them in a tub of holy water, and Majowski helped me put them back where my dad hid them.”
“Good idea.” He wanted to touch her. He couldn’t. Especially not when the beast kept sending him unpleasant little images of what it would like to do to her. Best to focus on something else entirely. “How—what was Majowski doing? At the Bell, I mean. How did Laz end up there?”
“I uncuffed him right after I got free.” Her wry smile made his chest hurt. “Our guards tried to come at us after you—when everything started going off, but they weren’t that tough, really, especially not for Chuck. He’s pretty good with his fists.”
Did Majowski know what had happened, though? What he’d done? He wanted to know, didn’t want to ask.
Luckily he didn’t have to. Ardeth must have seen the concern on his face, because she quickly added, “I told him to go call Doretti right away, as soon as the guards were down. I told him he’d better wait out front, in case the doors were locked or there were more guys outside or whatever. He found our phones and made the call, and I guess there were some more of Fallerstein’s guys who needed to be taken care of, too, so they couldn’t come into the theater.”
“So he doesn’t know what happened.” It shouldn’t have been as big a relief as it was. He shouldn’t have given a damn what Majowski thought—well, he really still didn’t. Not much, anyway. But Majowski was a decent guy, and at the very least it was good that he hadn’t been implicated in anything he really wouldn’t have felt comfortable with. And it was good that he apparently didn’t know what lurked inside Speare’s head—what would lurk there the rest of his life.
Her eyes, so deep and so direct, met his for a long, shattering moment. “What did happen?”
He looked away. He couldn’t keep that eye contact with her, not when they both knew what her real question was. She knew what had happened. She wanted to know how he felt about it, and what happened next.
And he couldn’t tell her that. He couldn’t. He shrugged. “Some pretty shitty stuff, I guess. Stuff we ought to forget about, that won’t happen again.”
She didn’t speak right away. She didn’t need to. He’d heard—the beast had heard—that tiny intake of breath before she forced her lungs to behave; he and the beast both caught the sudden faint hint of salt in the air from her eyes before it disappeared.
She got up from the bed and stood with her back to him. “That was pretty intense, you know,” she said finally. As he’d expected, her voice didn’t shake. “Kind of a lot to deal with. Kind of scary.”
“Very scary,” he said. “This—it’s all scary.”
He wasn’t just talking about what happened at the theater, and he was pretty sure she knew it.
“I didn’t think you were a guy who’d run from something because you’re scared.”
Damn. Yeah, she definitely knew it.
But she was wrong, too. She was wrong about what that meant, and about why it was making him do what they both knew he was doing.
“Not just scared.” He was sitting straight upright, leaning forward and grabbing her hand so she turned to face him, before he even realized he’d started to move. It just happened, the same way his mouth just opened and his next words just poured out. “Not for me. It—it waits, don’t you understand? It waits for a weakness, any moment of weakness, to come out. And it makes me watch. It makes me watch what it does, it makes me watch even before it does it. Do you know what it was going to do to you in that theater?”
He looked her in the eyes, trying to see only them instead of the images the beast had shown him, was still showing him. He didn’t entirely succeed. “I do. I know, because it showed me. I can still see what it had planned for you. Every detail. I can still hear you screaming from it—and it wanted you to scream for a long time. For hours. Days. You think I want to watch that for real, hear it for real, just because I forgot to fucking steal a drink one night or because I stumbled across something like what Nielsen had in his study, or that sword, or because somebody decides to come after me? Do you think I can—” His head was pounding. The beast, on the other hand, had stopped. It was listening. It was eager to get as much pleasure as it could out of his misery, especially since it knew this misery was its fault. It practically purred, thinking of that.
He ignored it. Once again, he’d pay the price if it meant she might walk out of the room with her feelings a little less hurt. “If something happened to you because of me—if it got out it would go for you first. It would find you. Because it wants you, and because it knows how that would make me feel. And I can’t…take that. I really don’t think I can.”
He fell back against the pillows, needing to lean on something. It turned out big emotional shit
was just as exhausting as the big physical shit; who knew? And as long as he was exhausting himself—embarrassing himself, by saying it all—he might as well finish. “This isn’t what I want. But I can’t put you in danger like that. I can’t. So I—I think you’re right, that you shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. You shouldn’t have to be afraid. I understand.”
The silence went on for so long, he started to think he’d imagined the whole conversation. Maybe he wasn’t the only one thinking that this was a bad idea, and maybe he didn’t need to get this out before he changed his mind. Maybe she’d been honestly freaked out and didn’t want to be involved with him any further. Maybe she hadn’t been interested in being involved with him past the ending of this case anyway.
After all, she’d seen the beast. Not him struggling to lock it in, but the beast, for real. She’d watched it tear grown men apart like a child pulling the legs off a spider, and had seen it laugh as it did. And its face had looked like his while it did that. How many women would be eager to spend time with that guy again?
Maybe what he’d felt had been all him. Maybe she saw him as nothing more than a casual fling, a guy she liked okay but didn’t have any real attachment to. And it wasn’t like he was in love with her, not after a couple of days. He liked her a lot. He wanted her, still. Wanted her bad enough that it took every bit of willpower he had not to leap out of the bed and kiss her. But it wasn’t as if the world was ending because he wouldn’t see her again.
So why did he feel so awful, and why did he want to turn away and close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to watch her walk out the door?
She was waiting for him to say something. Maybe she was waiting for him to tell her to forget everything he’d just said and get undressed. He wished he could. Instead he said the only thing he felt like he could say. “I’m sorry.”