Secret Worlds (515 page)

“’Bout time you got your drunk ass down here. I’m bored. Entertain me.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of fun planned for us,” he said, his lips twisting into a cruel smile. The menace contained in that one look was enough to make me shrink back in the chair and shudder.

Taking a long swig from the bottle, he ambled towards me, looking more disheveled than ever with his shirt unbuttoned and untucked to reveal the sweat stained, white t-shirt beneath.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said, baring my teeth in a sneer. “It smells like a vampire’s asshole.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek, his fever bright eyes narrowing, but he didn’t strike me like I expected.

“It’s all right, you’ll get used to the smell. After all, you’re going to be here for a while.”

Panic swept through me, making me shudder. I was in deep shit, and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out of here in anything other than a body bag.

“What’s your deal anyway? Hurt that I wasn’t won over by your dazzling charm? Or maybe you’re just mad because you knew I wouldn’t be interested in your tiny pecker?”

That time he did swing at me.

I’d never noticed how big Johnson’s hands were, his thick fingers curling into fists that were easily twice the size of mine. One monstrous fist swung at my face, connecting with my right cheek, making my teeth rattle in my skull. He was just human, but he still packed a hell of a wallop. Pain exploded beneath my eye, the deep burn enveloping the right side of my face making me wonder if he’d broken my cheek bone. I tasted blood as the inside of my cheek ground against my teeth. Infuriated, I tried to spit the blood in his face, but instead only managed to drool on myself.

“Hit on a sore spot, huh? So that’s it, you’re a little lacking in the manhood department, eh?”

“Shut up, bitch.”

A blow to the stomach had me doubling over in the chair. I spent the next few seconds dry heaving as my abused stomach tried to expel the last of its meager contents. When I finally felt like I wasn’t in danger of throwing up all over myself, I turned an angry glare on my captor.

“You seriously need some new material. Let me give you some pointers. Asshole. Prick. Shit for brains. Should I keep going?”

“I. Said. Shut. Up. Bitch,” he snarled, punctuating his words with shots to my face.

“Dickless wonder,” I added as a last insult, spitting blood.

I knew the punch was going to hurt, bad, even before he began to swing, the gleam in his eyes switching from drunken fury to murderous.

Damn, maybe I went too far that time,
I thought a second before it landed, the impact snapping my head back.

I caught a glimpse of the ceiling as my head rolled backwards, my eyes dancing over a disgusting proliferation of cobwebs stretching between the floor joists overhead.

Spiders. Why did it have to be spiders?
I wondered distantly, and then my eyes slid shut.

***

Cold water struck me in the face, the shock of it expelling the air from my lungs in a startled gasp. It plastered my loose hair to my face, streaming from my chin to drench my shirt. Choking, I tried to shake my hair out of my eyes, but the motion made my head swim and nausea reignite in my stomach. By some small miracle, I managed not to vomit on myself.

Point for team Riley!

“Rise and shine,” Johnson crooned, all signs of his earlier drunken slur gone.

Looking up through the wet tangle of my hair, I found him standing in front of me with an empty bucket in one hand and a wicked looking knife in the other. I could smell the oily stink of the metal from a few feet away, a shudder of revulsion rippling through me as I tried to recoil from it. Silver. The bastard had a silver knife.

So, this isn’t just some random, spur of the moment kidnapping and torture session then.

“Five more minutes, Mom,” I said, yawning wide.

“You think you’re so goddamn smart, don’t you?” he asked with a growl, dropping the bucket on the floor and stepping close to me.

Pressing back into the chair, I tried to put as much space between me and the knife as I could, but the zip ties didn’t allow for much movement. Most of the stuff Hollywood spouts about garlic and vampires, weres and howling at the moon, is absolute tripe, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The talk about werewolves and silver? Unfortunately, that’s true. There’s not much you can do to a were that they can’t heal eventually, but inflicting a wound with silver is one of those things. It will blister and burn, and in some rare, horrific cases, fester and rot, resulting in permanent damage. Needless to say, I did not want that knife anywhere near me.

“I thought leaving that deer carcass in Holbrook’s room would make him see you for the filthy animal you are, but I guess he’s almost as dumb as you,” Johnson mused, testing the sharpness of the blade against the flat of his thumb.

Dumbstruck, I momentarily forgot the danger looming so close. All my smart ass comebacks fled from my mind at the revelation.

“That was
you
?”

I’d spent the last few days thinking that Samson was close, had watched me sleep in the woods, and had taken the remains of my kill as a sign that he was watching me. Learning that it had been Johnson was something of a relief, but opened up a whole new realm of problems. He seriously had it out for me, and I had no idea why.

“What is it about you weres anyway? Why can’t anyone else seem to keep their hands off you?”

“Just our winning personalities I guess,” I replied, rewarded a second later with a backhand to the mouth.

I tasted blood again and made a show of licking it from my lip before spitting it at him. I missed, but I didn’t care. I was testing his mental faculties, and, judging by the faraway look in his eyes, he wasn’t really seeing me. I couldn’t smell booze on him like before, but there was still something going on that made his eyes distant and his attention wander.

“You all think you’re so smart don’t you? He thought he was hot shit too,” he said, his eyes focused on some distant spot behind me. “That bastard isn’t laughing now.”

What the fuck?

“Who’s not laughing?” I asked, not really sure I wanted to know the answer.

“She’s not laughing anymore either. Serves that dirty cunt right,” he said, ignoring me. His gaze continued to dance around the room, unable to settle on anything for more than a few seconds before moving on to something else. “I do miss her though, my darling Cheryl,” he went on, seemingly oblivious to my presence. “But she shouldn’t have done it, not that. She should’ve known better. She knew I hated those filthy beasts. She shouldn’t have done it.”

“Who’s Cheryl? Who’s not laughing? What did you do?” I asked, though I was beginning to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I already knew the answer.

He didn’t answer me, and I was surprised. He was quickly coming unhinged. It made him unpredictable and a hundred times more dangerous, but it also left him unfocused and sloppy. Maybe I could use that to my advantage. Provided that I lived long enough, of course.

Before I could think of some way to use his distraction against him, he crossed the room in a couple quick strides and gripped the edge of my chair. The legs of the chair grated on the rough concrete floor as he whipped me around to face the wall behind me. Vomit rose in my throat as I stared at the gruesome trophy nailed to the wall. I wanted to look away, wanted to scream, but my horror left me frozen and unable to do anything but stare at the bloody pelt.

It was obvious that Johnson had no experience skinning an animal, but despite his shoddy attempt there was no mistaking what the creature had once been. I was sure that at one point the fur had been thick and beautiful, silken to the touch, but now it was matted with blood, dirt, and gore. Hot tears began to track down my cheeks, stinging as they dripped over my split lip before falling to my shirt.

“You sick bastard,” I said, my voice weak, little more than a whisper.

“She was mine!” he thundered. “My wife! He had no right, no right to put his disgusting were hands on her. He ruined her!”

“Where is she? What did you do to her?” I demanded, struggling against the ties that secured me to the chair.

“Cheryl?” he answered distantly. “She’s sleeping.” His eyes drifted to the large freezer against the wall. A smear of blood was stark on the white top and handle.

He’s totally lost it, gone completely fucking mad,
I thought, lightheaded.

“Oh god. What have you done?” I asked, tears wetting my eyes.

In a brief moment of numb horror, I thought it almost funny that I should weep for Johnson’s dead wife, reduced to meat piled up inside the freezer. Would I end up the same way? Or would Johnson mount me on the wall as another gruesome trophy?

“Shh. You’ll wake her up,” he answered, dragging my chair back around to face the stairs, though I couldn’t get the image of the skinned were out of my mind.

“Let me go, Johnson. Let me go and no one has to know about Cheryl or the wolf. I won’t tell anyone,” I pleaded, unnerved by the hysterical edge to my voice. I didn’t like him to see me so weak and afraid, but there was no repressing the terror that roiled in my gut like a thousand snakes twisting and turning over one another.

“Let you go?” he asked in a hollow voice, blinking several times and then turning to look at me, his eyes clear and bright as if he had just awakened from a dream. “Oh no, I can’t do that. Someone has to pay.”

“Has to pay? What the hell did I ever do to you?”

“You didn’t have the good grace to die when that mangy dog Reed tore you open. Everything would be so much better if you had just died.”

The doctors had considered it a miracle that I survived the attack since the rate of virus transference was so rare and the severity of my injuries so great. Johnson, however, appeared to see my survival as some twisted cosmic oversight. There was nothing I could say in the face of such unbridled hatred that would change his opinions. So I did the only thing I could—I let my smart mouth run free.

“Aw, come on, Johnson. We’re not all that bad. After all, once you go were you never go back. Even Cheryl knew that,” I said with a crooked, leering smile.

“Don’t you dare say her name!” he bellowed, his hands shaking with rage at his sides.

“Who? Cheryl? Your dead wife that you crammed in the freezer because she liked wolf dick more than yours? That Cheryl?”

“I said, don’t say her name. Your filthy mouth doesn’t get to sully her name!” Johnson snarled, spittle flying from his lips.

“But you’re the one who chopped her into pieces. Your logic is a little skewed, Harry.”

“Stop talking,” he muttered, his gaze once again shifting to unfocused mania.

“I mean, I’ve never killed anyone. How many people have you killed?” I rambled on, ignoring him.

“Don’t you ever stop talking?”

“Not really. I tend to babble when I’m about to be turned into sushi. It’s a nervous habit. But then, I guess we all have our faults, eh Harry? I babble, you skin weres. Looks like we’re both a little flawed.”

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he chanted, pressing his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut.

I was pretty sure that if I pushed him anymore he would crack and either crumple into a broken ball and weep, or gut me like a fish and mount my head on the wall next to the poor unfortunate were who’d been unlucky enough to sleep with his wife.

I hope she was worth it, buddy
.

“I won’t ever shut up, you sick bastard. While I’m still breathing I will make you regret ever laying a finger on me,” I said, the calm iciness of my voice surprising even me.

I was beyond sadness now, beyond anger and frustration, beyond fear. I hovered somewhere in the realm of pure blistering fury that reduced the world to crystalline clarity. I don’t think I’d ever experienced such focus as I did in that moment, strapped to the chair in Johnson’s grimy basement, unsure of whether I would ever see the light of day again.

Well, I’ll be damned if I go down without a fight. No matter what, I’ll always come out swinging.

Evidently, so would Johnson. A single swift blow to the side of my head cut through my brief moment of insight, plunging me into darkness. Before I fully sank down into unconsciousness I was able to utter a single grating “Bastard.”

WHEN I AWOKE, I found my right eye swollen shut, and my vision blurred in the other. I tried to reach up and explore the state of my eye, but instead found my hands strapped to the arms of a chair with zip ties that bit into my skin viciously. Then I remembered Johnson’s ham-hock fist arcing towards me and my inability to evade the punch.

My body wasn’t going to be able to withstand much more of this punishment. Every breath hurt, and the dizzying thumping in my head added credence to the thought, while the white spots dancing on the edge of my vision gave me pause.

I’d had plenty of time to envision my untimely demise over the past few days, but not even in my wildest imaginings had I thought I would go down like this. It seemed cruel somehow, to have suffered through so much only to die from internal bleeding in a dark, dank basement, never having had the chance to say goodbye to the few people in my life who actually meant something.

I wonder if depression is a symptom of cranial bleeding.

“Fuck this,” I muttered to myself, shaking my head to clear some of the dizziness. “I’m not going down like this.”

Swallowing against the lump in my throat, I huffed a lank string of hair out of my face to look over my surroundings once more, hoping against all odds that I’d spot something close at hand that I could use to escape. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing there except the same dusty and useless crap as before. The only potentially useful items were spread out across the workbench, across the room.

I spied the shaft of a screwdriver, miraculously untouched by the passage of time and disuse. I was sure that if I could somehow get my hands on it, it would work as an effective weapon.

And therein lies the problem, idiot. You’re tied to a chair. How exactly do you plan on getting around that little snag?
my internal voice asked with no small amount of bitterness, the thoughts full of cynicism.
Johnson will let me out,
I answered, a plan beginning to formulate in the back of my mind. I just wasn’t sure which was more repulsive—the thought of my plan succeeding or failing.