Malice (29 page)

Lysander slipped a hand into his pocket and out came a chain hanging between his webbed fingers. At the end of it was a locket. The locket.

The expression on the reverend’s face—his own, he kept reminding

himself—suddenly shifted. His milky white eyes had grown a size larger, and the lower half of his jaw was flapping open.

“You were human once,” Lysander shouted. “And maybe not so long ago. I know now what we did to you and it was wrong. We didn’t understand then, you’re right, but I do now. I know what it’s like to be hated. And judged. I know all too well.”

For a moment the reverend’s face wavered between seething hatred and something else, something softer. His head slumped between his shoulders as though some great weight had bore it down, and there it stayed. When it came back up, all the uncertainty had gone out of him. The cords in his neck had drawn tight. His nostrils flared. His hands were working like a child furious at having been fooled.

“Shoot him!” the reverend said to Samantha, his voice quavering.

A drop of perspiration tumbled into her eye, and the reverend’s form before her blurred.

“Shoot him now!” he commanded behind her.

She looked at Lysander and then at the reverend—his arms still held out protectively before him. She wanted nothing more than to shoot him, but Lysander was acting so unlike himself she wasn’t sure anymore.

The reverend said to her, “Sam, remember when you asked me if I’d ever been in love?” His voice was nearly a whisper. The gun trembled in her hands. “Remember? We were sitting over there.” He pointed down the hall to the room where Derek had been staying. “It was raining outside and you asked me if I’d ever been in love. Do you remember?”

Samantha’s hands were not just trembling, they were quaking, the gun still poised at the reverend’s head.

“And I said no, never have, never would. You asked me and I said no way. That wasn’t true, Sam. I lied that day.”

She half smiled, still not entirely sure what to believe, but then she saw the reverend’s face tense and his mouth fall open.

“Sam! Watch—”

She turned just in time to see Lysander, his right hand raised above his head. In that hand was the long blade of a knife. His lips were stretched wide with elation. She held the gun tightly in her hands. There was a moment when she could have pulled the trigger and torn away the right side of Lysander’s face. He was close enough that she could have closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have seen it happen. Only the spatter of blood hitting her cheek would have told her she had hit her mark, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The knife tore through Samantha’s shirt and buried itself into her chest. Her mouth gaped open with a shocking jolt of pain. She tried to turn and run away, but the knife would not let her go, jammed as it was just inside her collarbone. The gun flopped out of her hand and thumped onto the floor. She tried to pull herself free, but he was too strong, this demon in front of her, his arms pumping up and down viciously. He was tearing her apart. Strangely, after that initial explosion of searing pain and agony she had felt only numbness from her waist down. Lysander, the real Lysander—she could hear him stumbling forward. She wanted so badly to stand and fight, but her legs had become strands of jelly. The knife was wrenched violently from her chest and then her legs gave up completely. She crumpled to the floor, making a muffled thud as her head landed on a section of wet planking. A burst of starlight bloomed before her eyes and when it cleared, she saw two forms struggling above her. She could hear a rattling sound in her chest as she tried to breathe. A sharp blast of pain ignited whenever she gasped for air. Ten feet away was Alex. His eyes were glassy and still. She wanted to call out to him, but each breath, each rasp, was coming shorter and shorter. Her breathing became shallow. Lysander heard it too because she could see his eyes become wide with fear as he looked down at her—dressed as he was in the reverend’s skin—his arms locked in his own struggle not far above her. She wanted to smile to him. To give him courage. She willed herself to focus on his eyes to let him know she was okay.

Ignore Small’s monstrous face. Ignore that Halloween mask he was wearing.

Smile, goddammit
!

But her face refused. It was like forcing a smile onto a lump of hardened clay, and after a few futile moments, she abandoned the effort. She had to conserve her energy. She would need it if she wanted to keep breathing, shallow and partial though her breaths had become.

What Samantha Crow did not yet know was that she had already been dead for over sixty-three seconds.

At first, neither did Lysander. He was weaponless and locked in a struggle against―of all people in the world―himself. It was worse than any nightmare he had ever known. The knife Reverend Small held came swishing through the air barely an inch from his face. He could feel the rush of air brush his cheek. Somehow in their scuffling, Small had managed to free his right arm from Lysander’s grip, and he was swinging the knife wildly, that maniacal expression of pleasure plastered across his face. They spun in circles. One of them kicked the gun across the floor, and it slid under the table of seated corpses. Lysander caught the sleeve of his arm and stayed the horrible hacking motions at least temporarily. He could see Samantha lying on the floor, her right leg curled under her, her clothes saturated with blood. Blood had even crawled up her neck because of the strange position of her body. The reverend was struggling to get the knife free. He was trying to knee him in the balls. He missed by a hair and sank his knee instead into Lysander’s left thigh. Grimacing, Lysander tightened his grip. If that knife got loose again, he would be finished.

He looked at Samantha again. Her chest, jerking before in shallow spasms, had stilled. Her blood glistened from the blade’s edge. Lysander’s vision fogged as hot tears filled his eyes and tumbled down his cheeks. She couldn’t be dead.

The reverend was laughing now. That bastard knew. But she could be brought back. It had happened before. Dead wasn’t always forever, and the thought filled him with hope and then something else, a feeling almost alien to him: rage. The world stretched out before him into a long narrow corridor. At the far end of it was the reverend. And beyond that, Samantha alive and well.

Lysander snapped his head forward and brought it down on the reverend’s nose. He saw his own nose, the nose he had looked at in the mirror for seventeen years, explode before him in a gush of red. The reverend’s eyes watered from the pain. Lysander maneuvered him over to the table and whacked the knife out of his hand against the table’s edge. It fell away and he kicked it into the corner of the room. He went to work then, letting fly a hail of fists. Bashing the reverend’s face…bashing his own face. Past was the time for thoughts of self-preservation. He would continue until he was dead, damn the consequences. He was turning that face, still smiling, into a red pulp. The tears on Lysander’s cheeks had dried, and now there was only hate. Now there was only loathing. He spun the reverend in a circle like a discus thrower, gaining speed and momentum and then released him toward the doorway. The wall trembled and the lantern that was hanging precariously from a hook beside him, swung wildly. On the floor, Alex let out a quiet moan and fell over onto his side.

Lysander’s eyes flared. If the lantern fell, he realized, they would all be engulfed in flames. That thought seemed to strike both men at once: Lysander, from the other end of the room and the reverend, leaning against the wall beside it, his eyes little more than puffy slits. The grin on the reverend’s face returned. With surprising agility, he snatched the lantern off the hook and flung it at Lysander’s feet. Lysander had tried to leap out of the way, but he was too slow. An explosion of glass and metal engulfed him as the kerosene in the lamp ignited and burst into flames. A thick yellow inferno clamored up his pant legs. He slapped at the flames, but the suit jacket he was wearing had also caught. The pain was excruciating, like a thousand stinging bees. As he flung himself to the ground, trying to beat out the flames, a single thought coursed through his mind: No one should ever have to feel this much pain. From a great distance, he could hear himself screaming. Through the flames he could see the reverend, convulsing. He was dimly aware that the fire had triggered a seizure, and Lysander’s body had flopped to the ground jerking and twitching. As Lysander tried to fight free of his burning clothes, everything went black. Slowly, the room grew still, and the world was suffused with an orange glow. The distinct lack of pain was the next thing he noticed. The third was the reverend’s body below him.

Lysander hovered overhead the body dressed in what had once been a gray flannel suit, but it was now mostly charcoal strips, exposing areas of blackened and charred skin. The muscles in his left leg, the wounded leg he had been dragging behind him, tensed and released in spastic fits. Near the door he saw his body—his real body—lying face up on the ground. He recognized it only because of where it lay. The face was so mashed he couldn’t have spotted himself in a crowd.

The fire ignited by the lantern was spreading fast. He floated toward his body. He would get back in, if he could, and drag Samantha and Alex to safety. He was crossing the room when he noticed the tiny black dot against the far wall. He paused for a moment. The dot, which seemed to be hanging in midair, was growing. In that split second that he stopped, it became the size of a beach ball. A voice was calling his name. It sounded a lot like Samantha’s. The hole was reaching out in all directions, and Lysander could see swirling movement within it. Tiny pinpricks of light were turning over like some great cosmic whirlwind. From here they looked like tiny galaxies. Then he felt the tugging. A strangely curious sensation at first, like holding your hair up to the end of a vacuum. And as the black mass stretched to the ceiling, the pull grew stronger.

Lysander, get to your body fast!

That thought thundered in his head like an order from a drill sergeant.

Samantha, is that you?

He started to move toward the doorway, but each step was becoming tougher and tougher—like wading up to his armpits in a tidal pool.

Someone was standing close to his body. He couldn’t see them so much as feel them. They were disoriented, confused. He increased his pace, fighting every step of the way, leaning forward as if battling a great wind. Behind him, the churning mass had turned into a vortex. Oddly enough, nothing in the room was affected by the suction, which was growing more powerful by the second. The table with the corpses was perfectly still. The remains of tattered curtains against the far wall lay undisturbed. The flames, however, were bending toward the vortex, as though some black hole were greedily devouring every last ounce of light.

As he approached his crumpled form on the ground, he caught the reverend, now a dark shadow, scrambling to reenter Lysander’s unconscious body. Lysander grabbed him by the ankles and jerked him back. He was surprised to find substance there, surprised that his hands did not just pass through him. The reverend fell forward, his legs and arms pumping furiously. He was crawling crablike on his hands and knees. Lysander yanked harder on his ankles, careful not to let go of his grip and be sucked into the vortex. The flames had begun climbing up the far wall, only feet now from Samantha’s body.

Come on!
he shouted.

With a final jerk Lysander sent the reverend smashing against the back wall.

The edges of that violent black mass had disappeared beyond the floor and ceiling, but the pull it was exerting was like being in a wind tunnel. The elastic flesh of their nonphysical bodies flapped away from them, dangling before that gaping mouth. Lysander’s legs flopped out behind him. Even the reverend was having difficulty. It was then that he saw Samantha’s dead body. He knew for sure because he could see her soul coming slowly unhinged from her body and spilling out onto the floor. She was sliding for that open mouth and she was picking up speed. If he went physical now, she would surely be sucked into the jaws of that churning beast and be lost forever. He turned away from his body and clambered to cut her off. Small would have it any minute now, but he had never had a choice in the matter, had he? She was less than five feet away and moving fast.

“Samantha!” he cried.

She stirred slightly but did not look at him. He lunged for her, wary not to overdo it and end up pushing her in. Shadowy tendrils began lashing about her ankles. He could see her squirming, trying to free them.

“Stay calm, Sam. Stay calm.”

She looked up and found him, her face a mask of fear. She held out her hands, and by the time he found them, her knees had disappeared.

Her expression flickered. “I can feel it draining me.”

“Let go of me, Lysander,” she said. What looked like tears were spilling over her lids and down her cheeks. “Do it or it’ll take both of us.”

Lysander pulled with everything he had. The force sucking her in was so great. Then she screamed. When he looked back, Small was slinking toward them. He had forsaken the safety of Lysander’s body as well for one last chance to dispose of them both forever. He scrambled onto Lysander’s back, slithering up his spine until he was level with his head. His lips peeled back, revealing a set of crooked teeth, and he sank them into Lysander’s right hand. He felt a strange burst of electrical energy and his grip slackened. Sam screamed. She was gone from the mid-chest now. Her eyes looking vacant and dull.