by Karina Halle
“I never asked for you to kill her. I never asked for anyone to be killed and you know it!”
“Well, you should have been more specific when you made the deal,” she said, sounding bored. She caught me staring at her and smiled very, very slowly. Her incisors were as sharp as shark’s teeth and they cut into the side of her mouth where the wounds flayed open like torn paper. “Sorry this has to be so dramatic, Dawn. We like to have fun when no one’s watching. And part of the fun is killing you in a most terrifying way. Now we know your mother died some years ago. Slit her wrists and drowned in the bathtub. We thought that was too cliché for you though.”
“But you can’t do this,” I yelled, trying to keep the raft level. Water was splashing over the sides, swamping me. “The bargain’s not even being fulfilled. There’s supposed to be a published article. I haven’t even finished writing it!”
Alva laughed. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. We found it on the bus and finished the rest for you. We mailed it to Barry Kramer today. The fact-checker can’t check facts when the whole band is dead.”
“You’re not supposed to kill him,” I sneered. I didn’t know where I was finding the courage. “It’s not in the code.”
“Screw the code,” Alva sneered back. A small, revolting worm slid out of her ear and traveled down to her chest, leaving a black, slimy trail. “The only reason we follow the code is because we’re made to. But you don’t see one of the Jacobs around right now, do you?”
“You answer to someone.”
“Yes. His name is Lucifer and I can tell you that he’s not a fan of the code either. It’s just something we have to do for that other guy.”
I assumed she meant God. How diplomatic of him to have a deal with the devil himself.
“Besides,” she continued. “You’re what Sage asked for. He wanted someone to love. We gave that to him, and now we’re taking it away, just like we took away every other person. He got off easy with his wife just leaving, but later we decided it lacked impact, you know?”
She giggled and splashed around in the water, treading it playfully, her appearance slowly becoming more monstrous. “To tell you the truth, Sage has been a fun contract to fulfill and an even funner one to collect on.”
“Funner is not a word,” I seethed. Always a journalist, even to the end.
She shrugged. “You should really choose your last words more carefully. Perhaps you should tell Sage you love him. Give him a bit of happiness before we take it away again.”
I looked over at Sage on the shore. His eyes were conflicted, probably over a million different things. Graham had a firm grip on both his shoulders with talon-like claws, and the others were standing close by. He didn’t have a chance in hell of saving me. They were going to drown me, here and now, and he’d be powerless to stop it. He’d have to watch it all. I wondered what happened on the bus, if he had to see the others dead.
“Well, you love him don’t you?” Alva prodded, annoyed.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I really did love him. I loved him before as one loves their idols. And I loved him now as a similarly damaged soul. A kindred spirit. It was a budding love, new and growing, built on attraction, on trust. I trusted him. I knew he’d try and save me if he could. But things weren’t looking in his favor.
I would have told him. But it didn’t feel right. It was a private thing from me to him. The demons didn’t deserve to hear it.
“Okay, well at least you love her,” Alva said to Sage. Her voice was deeper now as she slowly changed forms, more and more wriggling black worms coming out of her skin, bursting free of her face and neck like out of a rotten apple.
Sage shook his head.
Alva lowered her eyes. They were no longer gold. There was no longer anything beautiful about her. “You can’t hide the truth from us. I can sniff it out of you.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” Sage said. His voice was cold and steady. He looked at me, a full apology brimming in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Dawn.”
The confusion was a pleasant distraction. “What?”
“Yes, what?” Alva repeated, her voice growling.
Sage shrugged. “I...I don’t love her. I barely know her.”
Alva laughed. It was short and bursting with uncertainty.
“What do you mean you don’t love her? Of course you do.”
“I don’t,” Sage said in such a way that I believed him. “I don’t love you, Dawn, I’m sorry. I like you a lot. An awful lot. But I don’t love you.”
I heard Alva make a sputtering sound. I heard the sound of my heart breaking.
Alva’s depthless eyes were on me, reading the shock on my face. Then they turned into tiny black points and speared Graham with terrifying intensity. “Graham. You told me he was in love with her.”
Graham looked flustered and changed back into human form, his gaping worm mouth shrinking into a hole. Everyone was looking at him, even Sage.
“What? He is in love with her. I know it.”
“I’m not,” Sage pleaded.
“Okay, can you guys stop rubbing it in!” I yelled, even though part of me wanted Sage to continue. The fact that he didn’t love me was the only thing that was keeping me alive.
“Graham,” Alva growled. She swam around the raft until she was between me and the shore and I caught long black tentacles and flickering tails drifting behind her. “Explain.”
“I..I…,” he looked at everyone, his face flickering from demon to human like someone flipping channels on a TV. “Chip. The sound tech. He said he caught them having sex on the floor. He says he talked to Dawn’s friend and she said she was in love with him.”
“I don’t give a fuck if Dawn’s in love with him!” Alva yelled, a ferocious sound that boomed across the lake, causing the water to ripple. I could hear something large and terrible surfacing behind me but I didn’t dare look. “She’s not part of the deal. The deal was we take what Sage loves. Does he love Dawn or not? Tell me you know this for a fact.”
Graham’s monstrous mouth flapped soundlessly for a beat or two. “They had sex! They’ve been spending all their time together! I’ve seen the way he looks at her.”
He was losing the argument and fast. You could hear it in his tone. For the first time ever, Graham sounded scared. And whatever scared Graham was bound to terrify me.
Alva’s stare flamed. Her voice rose. “You know, for a demon, you’re a hell of a romantic, Graham. And a fucking moron. Love is more than just sex and longing looks. Fuck…look at all the fucking time we just wasted. Now this isn’t even part of the contract.”
I had to wonder what a head demon like Alva knew about love, but I pushed it out of my head and tried to think of what to do next. With chains that would surely sink me and a monster somewhere out in the deep, there wasn’t much I could do except watch and wait.
“Maybe he’s lying,” Graham supposed, grasping for straws. My heart did a sick little dance at the idea. But his love would mean death and I wasn’t a fool.
“He’s not. I can tell,” she said through grinding teeth. The water in the lake began to shake and ripple like it was being bustled by an underwater earthquake. A thick coat of black liquid began to bleed out of holes in her body and spread out across the water’s surface like an oil spill. If I looked close I could see faces in the oily matter, screaming soundlessly at me, souls trapped in a never ending hell.
I looked away from the sight. Alava turned around in the water and aimed her gaze at me. Her eyes looked dead. “Kill him.”
Everyone on the shore looked at each other.
She whipped around and screamed, “Kill him! Not Sage! Graham! Kill Graham! Kill him now! Kill him now!”
Any wonder whether demons could be killed was gone. Graham shoved Sage to the ground and started to run into the woods, but Sparky transformed into a black worm with multiple human-like legs and leaped onto Graham’s back, taking him down. He thrashed as Sonja and Terri reached for him with their lon
g, growing fingers. There was a scream and ripping sounds, wet cracks that rattled across the lake. Sage was on the ground nearby, face down, covering his ears from the sound. Terri and Sonja stood up, a bloody limb in each arm. They took the arms and tossed them into the lake where a dozen tentacles reached out of the dark water, dragging the limbs under the surface in a feeding frenzy.
The final rip was the loudest. I closed my eyes just as I saw Sonja holding up Graham’s half human, half demon head. She brought his face up to hers as if she was going to kiss it and began to eat it instead. Talk about every rock star’s worst nightmare.
Alva turned to me, and if she wasn’t a disgusting, oozing demon, she might have looked sheepish. “Drummers are the worst.”
“So what do we do with Sage?” Terri yelled. She kicked Sage in the side and he cried out in pain. “Can we have our way with him before we kill him?”
I was about to tell her that I would rip her tiny tits off if she dared lay a hand on him when Alva calmly said, “We aren’t killing him.”
I started. “What?”
She swam back toward me, looking beautiful again. “It’s true it’s not in the contract. We don’t have to kill him.”
“You’re letting him live?” I asked hopefully, not daring to believe it.
She shrugged, drops of oily water rolling off her shoulders. I could almost hear screaming. “I think he’s got a lot of talent. He could do better than that silly band.”
I looked over at Sage, not trusting a word she was saying. Judging from the expression on his face as he pushed himself off the mud, he felt the same way.
“You,” Alva said sweetly, placing razor sharp claws along the edges of the raft and gazing wickedly at me, “aren’t an exception.”
“What?”
“I might get in shit for totally breaking this contract before it even gets off the ground, but you bother me. It must be the groupie thing.”
“I’m not a groupie.” I couldn’t help but protest. My pettiness no longer surprised me.
“Dawn Emerson’s famous last words,” she said with a smile of black shark teeth. “It’s better than ‘funner’s not a word.’”
And then she poked her fingers into the raft.
Sage screamed my name from the shore.
The GTFOs laughed.
The raft popped and hissed and the water began shaking again, waves growing and rising. The raft was deflating fast and I was sinking into a black pool of tortured faces.
Alva smiled and started swimming back to shore just as Sage was launching himself into the lake. He started doing an incredibly fast breaststroke toward me, the thick water barely slowing him down. Alva walked out of the water, stark ass naked, and sat in the red clay with the demon groupies on either side of her like they were whale-watching.
Sage got to me fast but not fast enough. The raft was almost entirely under and I was no longer floating. I could feel hundreds of slimy hands grabbing me everywhere, trying to pull me down, the Damned wanting to claim another companion.
Sage grabbed me by my shoulders and held on tight.
“I’m not letting you go,” he cried frantically. His face was close to mine and I could see the anguish in his clear eyes, the green turned silver by the moon.
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling the raft totally disappear beneath me. My legs began to feel heavy and I was pulled downward. Whether it was by the chains or the screaming souls, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
“No!” he screamed at me, trying to stay above water. “Try, Dawn, try swimming so we can make it to shore.”
“And then what?” I asked, meaning the demons who were watching gleefully. “Then what happens?”
“At least you’ve tried,” he said, straining, trying to keep both of us above water. I could tell he was losing strength fast. “This doesn’t have to be your destiny. Neither me nor they have the power to decide that.”
I nodded and tried to kick a bit. I could only move my legs like a mermaid and it was clear it wasn’t getting me anywhere.
“Come on, please, angel.”
“I’m trying,” I cried, but got a mouthful of water. I was growing so tired.
“Try for me. Please, for me. I can’t lose you. I can’t, Dawn, I can’t. You’re my hope.”
He yanked at me, giving all he had, and tried to swim for shore. I gave as much as I could but I was losing the battle. My head went under the water. A child’s voice whispered into my ear, “Play with us.”
Sage pulled me up and I gasped for breath. His face was wet, but I couldn’t tell if it was tears or lake water that streamed down his cheeks. I would have loved to see those dimples again. I would have loved to hear him laugh again. I would have loved for him to be inside me again.
“I love you,” I whispered.
He pulled me close and kissed my forehead.
“You’re my hope. I’m not letting go of that.”
He wrapped his arms around me and we both began to sink under the water.
I opened my eyes and saw only him, his eyes open too, his face glowing from the filtered moon like the statue of an angel lit beneath a ghostly heaven.
I moved in to kiss him, my lips touching his with my last breath. The bubbles around us stilled, the hands stopped, and Lake Shasta welcomed us with open arms, leading us to her silky red floor.
This was it.
My dad, Eric, Mel, my mother, Sage, the band, Jacob, even my horse, they all flashed through my brain, and with the last strength I had, I managed to shed a tear for everything I was going to lose.
All was still. All was black.
A sputtering, low drone filled my head.
A stabbing feeling in my side.
I was rising fast.
My ears popped.
Hands grabbed my shirt and struggled. I was yanked up hard by hands that were under my arms.
I was thrown into something hard and metal. A tinny sound on impact.
There was a pause. A groan.
Something else landed hard next to me. Something heavy smacked me in the face.
My eyes opened and a rush of water came out of my lungs.
I heaved and heaved, getting it all out, trying to get air back in.
“Easy now,” came a familiar voice.
I took in one clear breath and was fully conscious of my surroundings. I was on the floor of a metal boat. Sage was beside me, coughing violently. Jacob was at the helm of the boat, one leg in a cast. He grinned down at us.
“Hope you know you’ve turned me into a criminal,” he said, gunning the boat harder. We bounced hard along the water. “I had to steal some nice old chap’s livelihood. Think how much trout this boat takes in each year.”
I touched Sage on the shoulder to let him know I was okay and sat up, poking my head over the side of the boat. We were just about to ram into the shore where Alva, Sonja, Terri, and Sparky were scrambling to their feet.
Jacob killed the throttle to neutral and we coasted along gently.
“Good evening, ladies,” he called out. “How are you?”
“You asshole,” Alva screamed, blood flying from her mouth.
He shrugged. “You kidnapped my client, you cunt. As if I’d let that pass.”
“You’re supposed to be in hell!”
He gave her a dry look. “Did you really think a mere semi-truck smashing into a tour bus would kill me? Ladies, I toured four cities with Led Zeppelin and I survived that.”
Alva glared at him. “You’re getting off on a technicality here.”
“And you’re losing on a technicality. You want to try and test the code again, I’m going to be in your face. And if it’s not me, it’s another Jacob, or another Jacob. There are just as many of us managers as there are demons.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts then,” Alva sniped. Her silky eyes rested on me and I felt a vague burning in the back of my head. I hoped it was a concussion.
“Thanks, ladies. Remember to buy Sage Knightly’s solo album w
hen it comes out, it’s sure to be a real hit.”
Jacob gunned the engine to a roar and we sped away from the muddy banks. But it wasn’t loud enough to drown out Alva’s final cry.
“Be careful what you wished for, Dawn!”
I looked at the guys for confirmation but Jacob was grinning like a madman, piloting the small fishing boat at breakneck speed and Sage was coughing into his arm, his muscles tense.
I sat back and closed my eyes, not daring to fall asleep. Soon though, the lull of the waves and drone of the engine made the world fade to a gentle velvet black.
Twenty-Four
I don’t remember much about what happened next. I remember being carried out of the boat and into a car. The next thing I knew I was being lowered into a hard bed with scratchy sheets. My eyes opened briefly and I saw Sage peering down at me, his lips curled into a hint of a smile.
Then I woke up. I sat up in a strange bed and looked around a strange room. It was wood-paneled, but real wood, like the room was made out of logs. There was a chair and a table and the bed I was lying in, completely naked. My chest and forehead were bandaged up, as were a few places on my legs.
Beside me, lit by the sun that was streaming in through the single window, was Sage. He was sleeping on his back, his head tilted to the side. He was naked too, at least from the waist up, and his firm, thick chest and rigid abs were bandaged. His face looked peaceful, his lips almost smiling in his sleep.
I thought back to the night before. Jacob. He came and got us out. Where was he? I looked around the room for a sign then spotted a letter on the table.
I got up and tried to walk over but ended up limping. I’d done something to my ankle during the bus accident, or maybe it happened when Graham and the GTFOs bashed me on the head and I woke up on the raft. It didn’t matter. It hurt.
I made a mental note to try and find painkillers somewhere and snatched the letter up.
The cover said Dawn and Sage and had a heart drawn around it. It felt thick in my hands.
I ripped it open and wasn’t surprised to pull out a letter from Jacob. I peered into the remainder of the envelope. There was a small wad of folded bills.