Soultaker (26 page)

“Why?”

She shook her head ruefully. “You know better, darling. I don’t like to reveal all my secrets at once. Why ease your mind when it’s so much more fun to watch you writhe in torment?”

“You’re evil.”

“Well, fucking
duh
, Trey.” She laughed and her modest breasts jiggled in a way he would have found thrilling only a short time ago. “As for the rest of it…the seeming lack of a method to my madness…let’s just say that most of it is fun and games.”

Trey shuddered. “Murder. Torture. Fucked-up head games. Those are fun and games?”

She shrugged. “I’m old beyond your ability to comprehend, little worm.” She smiled and stroked his cheek with the back of a soft hand. “I get bored. Even a goddess, an immortal, can get bored. Maybe even especially a goddess. So many years, Trey. Endless. The centuries. Millennia. I have to amuse myself somehow.”

“You’re not a goddess.”

She lifted her chin, tilted her head. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. This goddess bullshit…it’s just your way of fooling your followers into believing you’re more important than you are.” There was contempt in his tone now. He knew he was pushing it, that he risked invoking her wrath in a big way, but he was powerless to keep this inside. It wouldn’t matter anyway—she would just look inside his head and know what he was thinking. “No, the truth is you’re just some kind of fucking demon. Satan kicked you out of hell or something.”

Her hand moved from his cheek to his neck, encircled it.

She applied pressure.

His eyes bugged out and he couldn’t breathe.

Then she released him and smiled again. “No. That would be too easy. I want you around to see everyone and everything you care about go down in flames.”

Trey touched his tender throat and smiled weakly. “Okay. But I’m right. I know I am.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. And Satan? Please. Just an idea. And I was a player long before it was even conceived. And goddess or not, I
am
immortal. Perpetual. I’ll survive the end of the world. Doesn’t that make you feel small?”

Trey didn’t have an answer for that.

Myra smiled. “Not that it matters. I’m almost done with you anyway. With both of you.”

“What does that mean?”

She touched a hand to his forehead. He felt her invading his mind again.

She said, “Forget.”

There was a fuzzy moment. Trey shook his head and looked up at her. “What…”

He frowned.

Something had happened, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It was probably just another symptom of his exhaustion.

“I’m back!” Jolene threw an arm around Myra and laid a loud, wet smack on her cheek. “Did you miss me?”

Myra smiled. “Of course.”

Jolene had returned with a largish Tupperware container. Trey frowned at the dark shape visible through its opaque side.

It was…moving.

Jolene caught his puzzled look and cackled. “Oh! That’s right. You don’t know about your daddy yet. Check this shit out, boy.”

She disengaged herself from Myra and peeled back the container’s purple top. Trey peeked inside and let out a gasp.

“Holy…”

His head swam.

He thought he might faint.

“That…it’s not…it can’t…”

Jolene loosed another burst of mad laughter. “That’s what I thought, baby, but I was fuckin’ wrong. Myra did it for me. A special gift.” She beamed at Myra. The girl’s eyes shone with amusement. “And I fetched him now ’cause I figured out what I want to do with him.” She giggled. “You’re gonna love this shit. It’s perfect.”

She hurried across the kitchen and popped the open container in the microwave. A series of beeps followed as she set the timer, followed by the hum of the machine working. Several seconds later there was a loud
PLOP!
And something wet splashed against the microwave’s little window.

There was a good deal of feminine laughter then.

Trey shoved himself away from the kitchen table, put his head between his knees, and heaved.

This elicited more laughter.

And then he did faint.

The first thing Jordan thought as she began to wake up was that she was hungover. Her mouth was dry. She felt thickheaded, engulfed in a mental fuzz obscuring memories of the night before. An ache throbbed somewhere behind her eyes. Her stomach fluttered. A taste of bile at the back of her throat hinted at a big meal her digestive system wanted no part of, probably something fried and drowned in grease.

Must have really tied one on.

She’d probably gone out to the Grill again. Their whole menu was chock-full of things the food nazis would scream about. Loaded with fat and deep fried to hell and back. She had to stop eating there. Had to change her habits while she was still young and thin. And…

Wait.

She still wasn’t fully awake. But she was close enough now to find certain things curious, verging on alarming. She became aware of various aches throughout her body. Then she felt the hardness beneath her. She wasn’t in a bed. She stretched and groaned. Her foot kicked something hard that skittered away. Maybe she’d crashed for the night on the floor for some reason. Too drunk to make it the bed or sofa, maybe. She rolled onto her back and groaned again. A frown twitched at the corners of her mouth.

Something about the hardness beneath her felt…wrong.

It was too…lumpy.

And now she felt something else. A sweet, mellow warmth on her face. It felt nice. Familiar. She knew what it felt like, but it wasn’t something she should feel crashed out on the floor of her apartment. And yet the warmth on her face felt like sunshine. Couldn’t be. Like many people her age, she liked to have a few drinks, maybe even get pretty tipsy, but she’d never been the type to get completely hammered and pass out outdoors.

Then she felt something wet and rough on her face.

She flinched away from it.

What the hell?

She felt it again. What could that possibly be?

Then it hit her.

Something’s licking me!

Her eyes snapped open.

The big dog’s lolling tongue lapped at her face again.

Jordan screamed.

She sat up and scooted away from the golden retriever. It sat on its haunches and grinned at her in its simple doggy way. The dog had company. A loose circle of animals surrounded her, all of them staring at her. A German shepherd sniffed at her feet. A squirrel sat on its hind legs and chittered at her. A big gray tomcat approached her from the right and nuzzled her hand. And there were more of them. Cats and dogs. A rabbit. A skunk. A row of gleaming blackbirds peered down at her from a telephone wire. Jordan scanned their faces and tried to tell herself this was just coincidence, all these creatures gathered around her like this. Christ, it was like being surrounded by Lamia’s minions again.

Jordan’s eyes went wide.

Fuck.

It all came back then, all the madness of the night before. The tortures she’d been forced to endure. The depravity. The cannibalism. She’d
eaten
bits of her next-door neighbor. Her stomach fluttered again and she thought she would be sick. But then she remembered how it had all changed, how the tables had turned. How powerful she’d felt while killing
Angela. That unnatural energy thrumming within her as she ripped the bigger girl apart with the knife. And then there was the matter of Bridget’s crazy claims about her true nature. About her true mother.

Lamia.

She shook her head as the memories unspooled like a forgotten reel from a long-lost film. “No. No way. Nonononononono. A lie. A big fucking lie. All of it.”

But it wasn’t.

In her heart, she knew it was all true.

And now she remembered the rest of it. How she’d left Todd’s apartment in search of her mother, with no destination in mind. On foot. Hunting by instinct. She had walked the streets of Rockville for hours, that unnatural energy awake and alive within her the whole time, steering her relentlessly toward Lamia. She’d felt the connection between them, a sort of spiritual tether that was as real and palpable to her as any physical object. A connection so intense she couldn’t understand how she’d gone her whole life without being aware of it. She walked for miles and miles, the minions accompanying her the whole way, reverted as they were now to an animal form so as not to unduly alarm the clueless citizenry. Her winding path took her out of the upwardly mobile part of town surrounding the Rockville Community College campus to the farthest outskirts of the community until she’d arrived here.

The Zone.

And she remembered how the power had swelled within her as she’d entered the streets of the sprawling old neighborhood. Her flesh tingled. Her whole body felt like a live wire. But it wasn’t a wild energy. She sensed she could focus and control it. Direct it. Shoot bolts of electricity from her fingertips if she wanted. It sounded particularly fanciful, but she’d really believed she could do it. And even now she believed it.

But something had stopped her.

Some…presence.

She shivered as she recalled how it had invaded her mind. She’d felt it initially as a darkness stealing into her mind. A malign tendril slithering into her psyche. This was followed by an overwhelming sensation of cold. Freezing cold in the near-summer heat. And within moments that incredible power had deserted her, and the connection she’d felt with Lamia began to wane. But she soldiered on, continuing for a time in what she felt was the right direction.

Until an implacable voice spoke in her mind:
STOP.

She obeyed immediately and without question. Whatever this presence was, it was many times more powerful than she. Defiance was not an option.

The voice spoke one more time:
IT IS NOT YET TIME. NOW YOU WILL SLEEP.

The minions took over then, guiding her to the backyard of an uninhabited house, where she had spent the night. Jordan looked beyond the circle of animals and surveyed her surroundings. She saw the back of a small, one-story house. Some of its windows were boarded over. The barren backyard would need to be reseeded should the next owner wish to have a proper lawn. A sagging chain-link fence surrounded the rear of the property. The gate through which she and the minions had entered stood open. Another German shepherd crouched near it like a guard. No. Not
like
a guard. It actually
was
a guard. Jordan felt certain it would have ripped to shreds any intruder during the night. She wondered about this. Lamia didn’t want to see her, not yet, but she wanted her to be safe.

I came here to stop her.

Maybe to kill her.

So why not just kill me?

Maybe the answer was as simple as maternal love. Maybe Lamia did care for her in some twisted way. She supposed it was possible the creature did not relish the prospect of a confrontation with its daughter, one in which it might be forced to harm or possibly kill her. Jordan wasn’t at all certain this was true. It didn’t feel quite right. Whatever the truth was,
she was left now with the matter of what to do next. And where to go.

She looked at the big golden retriever. Its grin widened and its tongue slopped out the side of its mouth. She sensed a genuine joy from the creature at her attention. A strong intuition told her this was the animal form of the beach ball creature from last night. She sighed at the thought. This whole situation was miles beyond fucked up. She couldn’t imagine a possible future beyond this day. Couldn’t imagine how she might slip back into her old life, the one devoid of strange creatures and grounded in everyday reality, a world that now seemed as distant and unreachable as the gates of heaven. But there was an odd comfort in knowing that this creature felt this simple, stupid love for her. That she was being looked after, guarded and kept safe.

She held out a hand and the dog came to her eagerly, smiling broadly as she patted its head and scratched its neck. “You’re a good boy. Christ, what am I saying, you’re not…look, could you do me a favor and stay in dog mode full-time? No offense or anything, but I really like you better this way.”

The creature’s only answer was to lick the back of her hand.

“Good enough.”

Time to get rolling.

Jordan still didn’t know what her next move should be, but she did know she couldn’t stay here all day. So she got to her feet and brushed herself off. She started toward the open gate and her new entourage followed her. The German shepherd guarding the gate greeted her with a friendly bark. She paused a moment to scratch the animal behind its ears, then continued through the gate.

A moment later she was standing in the middle of a narrow residential street. She saw a few cars parked in driveways and at the side of the street, but other than the distant buzz of a lawn mower there was little evidence of human activity. Of course. The kids were in school and the adults were at work. The emptiness creeped her out a bit. Knowing the reason for it didn’t help at all. After the shrieking madness of the night
before, she craved the company of normal human beings. Stranger or friend, it didn’t matter. She’d be happy to encounter absolutely anyone unconnected with Lamia and her sick schemes.

She caught a flicker of movement in one of the parked cars. The Oldsmobile was parked a house down on the other side of the street. She moved a few steps toward it and was able to make out a human shape behind the wheel. It was hard to tell more about it because of the glare of the sun on the windshield. She couldn’t swear to it, but she was almost certain there’d been no one there a moment ago. This was a little strange, she supposed, but she wasn’t too worried. Nothing too bad could happen in broad daylight. Besides, she was tired and not up for another long walk back across town. Maybe she could hitch a ride. As she continued slowly toward the car, another shape popped up in the backseat and leaned through the gap between the seats. She still couldn’t make out much, but the person in the backseat seemed to be speaking in an animated fashion, gesticulating wildly for a moment before pointing a finger straight at Jordan.