Authors: Bryan Smith
Clayton recited the full speech from his father’s papers one last time.
The demon’s physical form began to fade.
And then he was gone.
Except that he wasn’t. Mark knew that. He was still here. You just couldn’t see him anymore. He was . . . asleep.
Jared pumped a fist and let out a whoop. “We did it! Holy fucking shit!”
And then they were all grinning and heaving sighs of relief. There were high-fives and shoulder claps all around. The removal of the threat and the burden that came with it made Mark feel lighter than air. Maybe everything would be all right now. Sure, a lot of bad shit had happened and some people had died. But maybe there was a chance he could repair things with the people closest to him. Starting with Natasha and then—
Something was tugging at his pocket.
He frowned in confusion and glanced at Fiona, who was pressed up against him again, except this time there was nothing artificially seductive about it.
Oh, shit
.
He’d forgotten about—
The gun sight ripped free of the inner-pocket cloth. Fiona backpedaled quickly away from them, aiming the gun at the center of the group. She stopped at the staircase. A weak smile quivered at the edges of her mouth. “I’m proud of all of you. You were all very brave. I have to give you that.”
Jared sneered. “Goddamn. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted you, you fucking bitch.”
Fiona laughed. “I love you, too, asshole.”
Clayton took a few steps in her direction, cautiously extending a beseeching hand. “Think about this, Fiona. You don’t want to hurt us. You’re just confused. I understand that. But we can help you if you just—”
She gave her head an emphatic shake. “You’re right. I don’t want to hurt you. Not anymore.” A single tear traced a slow path down her cheek. “But you’re wrong about the other thing. You can’t help me. No one can. There’s shit you don’t know about me. Kevin knows a little of it. Maybe he can help you understand.”
She sucked in a breath and stood ramrod straight.
She jammed the barrel of the pistol up under her chin.
Mark’s mouth came open in a scream as he rushed at her:
“NO!”
BAM!
The gun’s loud report stopped Mark in his tracks and he watched in shocked disbelief as a dark spout of blood erupted from the top of her head. He dropped to his knees and crawled over to her as she dropped dead to the floor. The others crowded around him as he cradled her limp and lifeless body in his arms. His tears blotted out the world as he wailed and rocked the dead girl.
The immensity of the loss stunned him.
One of us
, he thought.
One of us
.
Gone. Forever
.
He wasn’t alone in his grief. He heard other sobs. Felt comforting hands on his shoulders. Some time passed. When they were able, they carried the fallen member of their clan out of the basement and out of the house.
F
ORTY-THREE
With Andras contained and the spell of his influence broken, most of the mayhem taking place in Wheaton Hills came to an abrupt end, with many people coming to a dead stop in the midst of acts of rape and murder. Some were so appalled at the atrocities they’d committed while under the demon’s influence that they immediately took their own lives, adding to the already massive death toll. The fires continued to burn for a time as most of the survivors wandered about in a daze. But then a few people began to rally and work together. One of them was an ex-firefighter who coached some of the others on how to use the equipment left behind by the slaughtered Ransom Fire Department. Others began to figure out that the authorities in Ransom were either overwhelmed or out of the equation altogether, and calls went out to state troopers and authorities in other cities. It was possible to see all this as a testament to humanity’s ability to step out of even the deepest darkness and put things right again.
There were, of course, exceptions to this meager feel-good aspect of the tragedy. A few people kept right on doing what they were doing. For these few people the demon had tapped into something twisted deep inside them, something that couldn’t be reined back in now that it had been set free.
Greg Fox dropped the knife he’d been holding and let the little girl go. She got up and ran screaming to her mother. The mother drew the wailing little girl into a tender embrace, whispering words of soothing reassurance in her ear as she glared at the man who’d been on the brink of doing something vile to her daughter.
Greg smiled at Carrie. “Oh, God, did you feel that?” He began to laugh through the tears as he drew his girlfriend into a trembling embrace. “Andras is gone. It’s over, baby. It’s over.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Greg’s eyes opened wide as she thrust her own knife into his body, angling it up under his ribs. She smiled as she yanked it out and thrust it in again. She kept smiling as Greg fell away from her, wheezing in agony as he dropped to his knees.
She kicked him in the head and he fell over onto his side.
Then she turned around, a vibrant grin on her face.
“Now, then. Where were we?”
As she walked through the streets, Suzie McGregor could still hear the occasional scream, but now the sound was a product of a deep emotional pain rather than a result of fear. She saw people hugging in the streets and in the yards, comforting one another as they wept or moaned. Suzie felt nothing but contempt for them. They were only grieving the loss of other people. Flesh and blood. What was that compared to the loss of Andras?
Nothing, that’s what.
Suzie didn’t much care about other human beings.
Never had.
Oh, they had their uses now and then. She enjoyed sex. She liked male bodies. You could do fun, physical things with them. But, ultimately, men were just things. Pleasure toys with a pulse. Only Tom Bell had come close to making her feel anything at all, but even that had been very superficial. Andras was her only true love.
And now he was gone.
Somehow someone had done something to take him from her. She felt an intense hatred for this mystery figure. If she ever figured out who had done it, she would kill them.
No.
First she would torture them. For a very, very long time.
Then
she would kill them.
But she didn’t derive much consolation from this thought. She would probably never know who had done it. They would always remain out of her reach. Which was yet more evidence of how the universe liked to toy with her. This whole thing with Andras had been just another cosmic mindfuck. A tantalizing glimpse of absolute freedom. And now it had been yanked away from her.
She raised her tear-streaked face to the sky as she reached her house.
“FUCK YOU! STOP DOING THIS TO ME!”
Derek was waiting for her inside. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the kitchen floor, in a pool of drying blood, surrounded by body parts.
“Hi, Mom.”
Suzie stared at him for a long time. It was strange to look at this body again and see her son rather than Andras. The same body she’d fucked with such feverish intensity for weeks. She ached to touch that flesh again, even with Andras gone.
She summoned a smile. “Hi, baby.” She approached him and held out a hand. “It’s been a long night. Let’s go up to your room and lie down a while.”
He stood up, ignoring her outstretched hand.
“No.”
He balled up a fist and punched her dead center in the face, snapping her nose. She tottered backward and fell hard onto her ass. Derek stepped over her and walked out of the house. Suzie curled into a ball on the floor, weeping from the pain. The physical pain from her broken nose was bad, but what she really couldn’t abide was Derek’s rebellion. He was her son and she needed comforting. What he’d done just wasn’t right. She couldn’t take his insolence anymore. If he ever dared to show his face in her home again, she would kill him.
Why wait for that?
Yes. Why not?
She got to her feet, ready to go after him.
Then she heard footsteps coming down the stairs from the second floor.
She turned toward the sound. “You.”
“Yes.”
“Come here. I need you.”
She held out a hand again, smiling, knowing this one could not resist her.
He did come to her.
But instead of taking her hand, he seized her by the throat.
And squeezed.
Suzie died knowing the universe had grown bored with her and was simply discarding her, the way a child grows tired of a once-favored toy and searches for some other source of amusement. She felt a moment of intense, righteous anger.
And then nothing.
Ella McGregor sat sobbing behind the wheel of her Bentley. She was parked in the middle of the street. She thought of her son, poor Kurt, and wondered what he would think of the things she’d done. She hadn’t quite been in control of herself, true, but that didn’t change the reality that she was a murderer many times over. She couldn’t bear the notion of her sweet son looking down on her from heaven and passing judgment on her for her heinous acts.
She glanced at the Bentley’s rearview mirror. The reflection of her age-lined face taunted her again. With the demon gone, the restoration of youth had been revealed for what it had always been—nothing more than a very effective illusion.
She was
old
.
An old, beaten, remorseful murderer.
There was only one thing to do.
Atone
.
She put the Bentley in gear and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The car quickly picked up speed, the speedometer’s needle rising past seventy. The street was coming to an end. She kept her foot down on the pedal and sent out a final prayer for forgiveness. Then she jerked the wheel hard to the left, aiming the front of the Bentley at a utility pole. There was a rending crunch of metal. Ella went flying headfirst through the windshield.
The ride back to Wheaton Hills passed mostly in silence. With Fiona dead, their triumph over the demon felt hollow. They made a detour to her house, where they left her body with the bodies of the rest of her family. Seeing that entire family laid out like that, all violently dead, was almost too much for Mark. He had another sobbing fit. They then said a few parting words to their dead friend and got out of there.
Back at Clayton’s house, the boys collapsed into chairs in the kitchen, emotionally and physically exhausted from their ordeal. Clayton fetched a bottle of his most expensive bourbon from his liquor cabinet and poured each of them a stiff drink.
Clayton raised a glass. “To Fiona.”
The others echoed the toast and sipped their drinks.
Mark looked across the table at Kevin. “Okay. Out with it.”
Kevin frowned. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“Fiona said you might know something about why she did it. So whatever you can tell us . . . I think we need to hear it.”
Kevin stared at the forest of empty bottles, his eyes unfocused. Then he shook his head and leaned forward to brace his elbows on the edge of the table. “There’s only one thing it might be. I mean, it’s not like she said, ‘Hey, Kev, I’m gonna off myself and here’s why.’ But there was one thing she told me a while back, something she said she never told anyone else.”
Mark prodded him. “Yeah?”
Kevin knocked back the last of his bourbon and set the glass on the table. “She . . . she told me she was sexually molested by both of her parents when she was younger.”
Mark’s headache was coming back again. Yet again. “Fuck.”
Kevin nodded. “She said it went on for years, and then it stopped about four or five years ago, when she was starting to hit puberty.”
Jared scowled. “Those sick fuckers. I’d kill them now if they weren’t already dead.”
Clayton’s expression was just as grim. “You’d have help.”
Kevin stared at his empty glass. “She told me the thing that pissed her off the most was how they acted like it never happened. The whole family played this big ‘let’s pretend’ game of everything being normal for years. In the end, I guess, she just couldn’t live with it.”
Clayton refilled their glasses again.
They drank in contemplative silence for a while, each of them lost in their own reflections about what they had lost. Mark closed his eyes at one point, felt himself drifting toward unconsciousness. He heard footsteps on the kitchen tiles and assumed someone had gotten up to go to the bathroom or find a place to crash.
Then Kevin said, “Oh. Hi, Mr. Bell.”
Mark’s eyes snapped open.
He spun out of his chair and stood facing the thing wearing his father’s body. He had reclaimed the gun from Fiona before carrying her body out of the Hollis house. He tugged it out of his pocket now and aimed the barrel at Flauros’s chest.
At his father’s chest.
Mark’s friends came out of their chairs and took up positions to either side of him.
A slow, smug grin spread across the demon’s handsome face. Tom Bell’s face. “Fool. By all means, kill this body.” He thumped his chest and laughed. “Kill your father. It will only leave me free to take another host.” He smiled. “Perhaps I’ll abandon the father and inhabit the son. You’re young and quite fit. Your body would serve me well.”
Jared groaned. “Should’ve known this shit wasn’t over. We got rid of Andras way too easy.”
Kevin looked confused. “Anyone wanna tell me what’s going on here? That’s Mark’s dad. Isn’t it?”
Clayton shook his head. “Nope. Demon. Tell you later. If there’s a later.”
Flauros laughed. “Andras was arrogant. He never imagined anyone would know how to draw him back to his prison. The mortals who’d put him there were all dead and he assumed their knowledge was gone with them. I was happy to allow him his arrogance. I’ve spent too long chained to him. Now that he’s contained, I can truly be free.”
Mark fought to keep his aim steady. There was only one way out of this. It wasn’t fair. He’d already lost so much. God was a right bastard to put him in this position. He couldn’t do this. He just couldn’t.