“Where are you?” she called. “Stop hiding and show yourself, you coward!” Her voice shook, and she hated herself for it. It made her sound like a scared little girl. With her hands trembling around the shotgun, she wondered if maybe that was all she really was.
The Dragon laughed, the sound echoing out of eight different mouths. One meat puppet stepped forward, away from the others. Its black Inkheads bandana was soaked with blood, and a long red gash stretched from its neck to its chest.
It leapt toward her. She glimpsed the other seven behind it shift position suddenly, but she didn’t have time to see what they were doing. She raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger. The meat puppet’s head exploded in red and white fragments, and the echo of the report slammed off the warehouse walls like thunder. The body dropped to the floor and stayed there.
One
, she thought. She pumped the shotgun, and the spent shell clattered to the floor. Only two left. She had to make them count or she’d die in this place.
She turned to the others, and her chest tightened when she realized what had happened. The one she’d shot had been a distraction, sacrificed so the others would have time to reach into the back of their waistbands and pull their guns. Now they stood in front of her with automatic pistols in their fists, their cracked, dead lips curling into smug sneers.
Georgia willed her legs to move. She ran for the door. A spot on the floor in front of her exploded suddenly. Cement chips flew into the air. She skidded to a stop. Smoke wafted from the barrel of the nearest meat puppet’s gun.
Georgia backed away from the doorway. The Dragon was toying with her. She wasn’t going to let Georgia get away that easily. The other meat puppets raised their guns.
She started running a moment before the shots rang out, pumping her legs like mad and diving behind one of the overturned metal tables. She crouched low against the sticky, blood-slick floor. The table jerked toward her, the metal puckering with each thudding impact of the bullets. How long could the table hold up under the attack? How long until the bullets broke though?
The echo of gunshots died, replaced with an eerie quiet. She rose to her knees and peered around the corner of the table. The meat puppets lurched toward her.
Georgia swung the shotgun up, aiming over the top of the table, and squeezed off a shot. It hit one of them in the face, sprinkling the air with blood and brain matter. It dropped to its knees, then fell flat.
Two.
She crouched behind the table again. The six remaining meat puppets squeezed off shots, but their dead hands were too clumsy and the bullets went wide, punching holes in the wall behind her. Plaster dust rained down on her hair. She risked another peek and saw them spreading out, three moving to her left, the other three to her right, trying to encircle her.
They outnumbered her, but they were slow and ungainly. That gave her a slight advantage. Her
only
advantage. If she was going to make it out of there alive, she had to keep moving.
Another metal table lay on its side just a few feet away. She hugged the shotgun tight to her side and leapt for it. A bullet whizzed beneath her, digging into the floor. She landed badly behind it, skidding in a pool of blood. Her knee banged against the hard cement floor. Her elbows felt skinned, but with so much blood on the floor, her clothes, her skin, it was hard to tell if any of it was hers. More shots rang out, and flecks of metal chipped off the top edge of the table. Georgia flinched, ducking.
“I grow tired of this game,” the Dragon said through their mouths. She sounded angry, frustrated.
Sweat dripped from Georgia’s hair and rolled down her neck. The pain in her knee was sharp and getting worse. She wondered if she’d fractured the bone. The odds of making it out of there with a bum leg and only one shot left weren’t good.
“Your father played a similar game with me, child.”
Georgia froze. Her throat tightened.
“He was a good warrior, put up a grand battle, until I slit him open from his throat to his belly and feasted on his organs. And your mother, oh how she wailed and beat me with her fists. When I devoured her, she tasted like tears.”
Georgia wanted to cover her ears, but she didn’t dare let go of the shotgun. She wished the Dragon would shut up. She wanted to
make
the Dragon shut up. She hated that voice. Hated the way it made her feel small and powerless. Hated the things it made her remember. The late night phone call from the police, speeding from her and Drew’s apartment to her parents’ house with her heart in her throat . . .
“Miss Quincey, don’t,” the police officer said, trying to restrain her at the front door.
She struggled against him. “Let me through! I’m their daughter!”
“You don’t want to see this,” the officer said. “Trust me.”
“Let her in,” someone called from inside.
The officer let her pass, and she discovered the man who had spoken was a police detective in a rumpled suit. He met her in the entrance hallway and introduced himself, but his name passed unregistered through her frightened, anxious mind. She couldn’t look the detective in the eye, kept looking at his throat instead, the spots of stubble on his Adam’s apple. There was a faded red mark where he must have cut himself shaving that morning. He turned and led her into the house.
The first thing she noticed was a bloodstain seeping into the living room carpet. The same carpet where she’d played with her dolls when she was little. The couch where she’d sat when her father first showed her the Book of Ascalon was shredded, thick white upholstery clouding out of the gashes. The picture window was shattered, furniture overturned. The shelving units along the walls were broken, and beneath them lay blood-spattered piles of books and picture frames. The shattered remains of the porcelain angels her mother had spent a lifetime collecting.
The Dragon. She must have followed Georgia’s father home and caught him by surprise. Georgia didn’t see the shotgun anywhere, no holes in the walls or shells on the floor, no gunpowder tang in the air. Her father hadn’t even had time to get the shotgun from where he kept it in the trunk of his car.
The detective led her toward her parents’ bedroom at the back of the house. The door was gone, smashed to splinters. “I don’t know if you’re up for it,” he said, “but time is of the essence if we’re going to catch who did this. We need your help making a positive identification.”
Georgia stepped through the doorway and immediately turned away from the glistening, red, lifeless things scattered along the floor. She’d glimpsed hair, a wristwatch at the stump of a hand. She felt her gorge rising.
“There isn’t much to go on,” the detective said.
“It’s them.”
“You’re sure? These are your parents, George and Tanya Quincey?”
She nodded. They must have barricaded themselves in the bedroom as a last resort. It hadn’t stopped the Dragon for long.
Georgia lost it then, vomiting in the corner of the room.
When she was done, the detective said, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Miss Quincey. Do you have any idea who would do this to your parents?”
She shook her head and hid her face behind her hands.
“This is overkill for your typical robbery gone bad. Usually when we see this level of violence, it’s personal. Was anyone angry at them? Did they have any enemies you know of?”
“No,” she lied. “No enemies.”
He nodded and gave a strange little grunt. “You ever seen anything like this before?”
She shook her head.
He grunted again. “Okay. We found multiple footprints on the carpet. At least three separate pairs of shoes, not to mention one set we can’t even be sure are footprints at all. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“No.”
“If we run those prints, are you sure they’re not going to come back to someone you know, someone you’re not telling me about? Maybe an ex-boyfriend with a grudge? Or maybe someone who’s not an ex but knows an only child stands to clear a hefty sum from life insurance?”
She glared at him. “You think I had something to do with this?”
He grunted again, and she realized it was the sound he made when he was sceptical about something. “I don’t know anything yet, Miss Quincey. Only that things aren’t adding up. Like how come there’s no murder weapon? How come it looks like a wild animal got at them? But most of all, Miss Quincey, I couldn’t help noticing that you may look upset, but you don’t look at all surprised.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” She felt cold and hugged herself.
He slipped her his business card. “If you think of anything that might help the investigation. I’m sure you want the culprits caught as much as I do.”
She thought she heard sarcasm in his voice.
The detective had the officer by the door escort her out of the bedroom. In the living room, her cell phone rang, and as she stopped to answer it her escort was called away by a lab tech.
It was Drew on the line, wanting to know what was going on, if everyone was okay. She told him the news in a staid, emotionless voice, worried she might throw up again if she let herself feel anything.
“Oh God,” Drew said. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I’m coming over there. I’ll pick you up.”
She looked back toward the bedroom, saw someone unfolding a body bag, and turned away quickly. “No, don’t,” she told Drew. “I’m coming home. I don’t want to be here.”
“What happened?”
She fought back tears. It felt like her chest was going to explode. She wanted so badly to tell Drew the truth so she wouldn’t have to carry the burden alone, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. Maybe one day she could tell him the truth about the Dragon, and maybe he would even believe her, but not tonight. She couldn’t handle anything more tonight. “It was random,” she whispered into the phone. “A robbery. They surprised a robber.”
It was the first time she’d lied outright to Drew, and now that she had, she knew it wouldn’t be the last.
After the phone call, there was one more thing she had to do before she left. She knelt by the remains of one of the shelving units and sifted through the items on the floor. Under the broken wing of a porcelain angel she found a small picture frame, not much larger than a deck of cards. Inside was a photo of her mother and father standing outside the house. They were smiling. Proud. Happy. Alive. The glass front of the frame was broken and a spot of blood had landed on the picture, right at her father’s forehead.
She opened the frame and removed the picture. She tried to wipe the blood away with her thumb, but it had already dried to a crust. She used her nail to chip away as much of it as she could, then slipped the photo into her wallet. There, she thought. Now they would always be with her.
She resumed her search, sifting through the debris, pile after pile, separating out the books from everything else, but she didn’t find it. The Book of Ascalon was gone.
The meat puppets’ shuffling footsteps came closer, the sound echoing off the warehouse walls. Only one shell left. Georgia tried to push away the fear that crawled in her belly like a spider. She pulled the shotgun close, her finger on the trigger, bringing the recoil pad toward her shoulder. She started counting to three, but all she pictured in her head was the horror in her parents’ bedroom. Had it hurt? She tried counting to five. Did her parents suffer when the Dragon killed them? Would
Georgia
suffer? She decided to count to ten. She stared at the barrel of the shotgun and wondered if it would be better to kill herself with it. It probably wouldn’t hurt — not as much as what the Dragon would do to her, anyway — and then everything would be over. She could have blanket peace forever.
When she reached ten, she spun and aimed the shotgun over the top of the table.
One of the meat puppets stood only a few feet away, pointing its gun in her direction. It was close enough for Georgia to see the trenches dug into its face where the Dragon had shredded the skin. The exposed jawbone made her think for a moment of Roy Dalton and his missing teeth. Then she looked at the gun in its hand.
She steadied the shotgun against her shoulder —
Don’t miss, make it count!
— and fired. The meat puppet’s head blew apart and it fell limply to the floor.
Three
, she thought. The shotgun was empty.
She crouched down again and surveyed the scene. Two of them moved through the shadows along the wall to her left. Three more were approaching from the right.
Georgia lay the shotgun on the floor as quietly as she could. She looked at the corpse lying just beyond the overturned table, at the automatic pistol it had dropped.
The others inched closer to her position.
Georgia sprang for the pistol. Her injured knee sent sparks of pain up her leg. It gave out in mid-stride, and she tumbled to the floor. Wincing, she reached for the gun. Her fingertips brushed the rubber grip, but it was too far to pick up. She heard a gunshot crack the air like a whip, felt something hot whiz past her scalp. A skull-faced meat puppet loomed over her, ready to fire again. She pulled herself forward along the floor, grabbed the gun and rolled onto her back, pulling the trigger three times. The bullets punched through its face and blew out the back of its head. It fell. She grabbed its pistol too and, with one in each hand, rose to her feet. She kept one pistol trained on the two meat puppets to her left and the other on the two to her right. She stood there, arms out like Christ on the cross, and wondered how many shots she could squeeze off before one of them put a bullet in her head, or her heart, or her belly. Her sore knee wobbled under her weight.