Authors: RJ Blain
No one would learn the truth about me.
I clutched the book, drumming my fingers against the dust jacket. Someone giggled nervously in the darkness. A cell phone glowed on the other side of the store.
“You know, if you have exact change, I can do the sale manually,” the cashier offered. “I wonder why the generator—”
A high-pitched sound sent shivers up and down my spine. For a moment, all I could do was freeze. Something—someone?—screamed. At least, I thought it was a scream; there was nothing
human
about the hair-raising shriek.
“Jesus Christ!” Scott’s voice sounded weak. “What wa—”
The wet, dull crunch of breaking bones silenced Scott’s voice. For a moment, I wasn’t in the bookstore, but in my twin’s car, reliving the moment I had crashed through a guardrail into a ravine. My leg, my arm, and my shoulder had made similar sounds before my screams had drowned them out.
My breath caught in my throat.
The splat of something wet hitting the floor nearby freed me from the nightmare of the past. The stench of fresh blood hit me hard. Another stench clogged my nose. I gagged, recoiling a step.
Warmth dripped down my face.
“S-scott?” the cashier gasped out. There was no answer. “Scott? Scott, damn it all, this isn’t funny.”
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The noise came from nearby, so close I feared I could reach out and touch the source. With a thought and murmured word, I severed the connection to my phone.
Silence.
I tightened my grip on the book, hugging it to my chest. At home, I would have had one of my focal stones to work with, allowing me better control of my powers. At home, there wouldn’t have been witnesses. If I turned the lights in the store on, I’d be found out.
Then I’d be killed.
“Scott!” The cashier’s voice rose in pitch.
Scott didn’t answer.
“Come on, Scott. This isn’t funny anymore,” the cashier whispered, her voice trembling.
I swallowed back my own fear and drew several deep breaths. The cashier had said the lights would come back on in a minute.
With a shudder, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t wait that long. Something had happened to Scott.
The lights flickered on, dimly illuminating the bookstore as I started to speak a word that would unleash my power. As I choked back the first syllable, my skin tingled as I suppressed the energy, keeping it from surging into the electronics nearby.
Scott was gone. Squinting in the faint lighting, I looked for the young employee. I was certain I had heard him nearby, but there was no sign of him.
Across the counter from me, the cashier shrieked, holding one hand to her mouth while pointing at the floor in front of me. “Oh god. Scott!”
I looked down. The pale lump on the ground, splattered in crimson, wasn’t large enough to be a human. It was too misshapen, colored in gray and red instead of flesh tones. I stared, unable to tear my gaze away.
With a flicker and a surge of electricity, the lights flared to full brightness.
Something warm and wet dripped down from the ceiling. My hand trembled as I reached up and touched my cheek. The tips of my fingers came away red with blood. Crimson stained the floor, the books, the tables, and had splattered on the ceiling.
I had been right. The shape on the floor was too small to be a person.
It was only part of one—a part of Scott.
The occult had dabbled with me, but it had ripped him to pieces.
~~*~~
Fake blood, the stuff they used on movie sets when the director didn’t want to use CGI, was nothing like the real thing. It lacked heat, turning a regular shoot into a sticky, shiver-inducing chore.
Scott’s blood was warm. After what felt like an eternity—but couldn’t have been any more than a few minutes—his blood still hadn’t dried or cooled. Drop by drop, it fell from the ceiling onto me, the cashiers’ counters, the tabletops, and the floor.
I couldn’t force myself to move, fearing it would shatter the quiet that had taken hold of the store. Maybe, if I stood there long enough, everything would prove to be a nightmare instead of reality.
I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t dare. What I might imagine terrified me more than the reality of Scott’s mangled body lying at my feet. His sightless eyes were fixed on me, accusing me of not having done something to save him. I shifted my stare to something—anything—other than him, picking one of the shelves filled with books I’d probably never get a chance to read.
Then my thoughts wandered to the last thing I wanted to think about. Could I have saved him? People like me—wizards, practitioners of the darkest arts—were hunted down because there were those who believed we could do anything, and that made us dangerous.
Scott had died right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do anything to prevent it. If wizards were so powerful, I should have been able to stop his death.
I survived each day by running and hiding from those who believed people like me needed to be destroyed. Maybe they were right. Maybe, somehow, I had caused Scott’s death. Had I lost control and used the powers I tried to so hard to hide? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any answers.
Someone must have had the presence of mind to call for help, though I didn’t know how they had managed to. When the police arrived, the stunned silence broke into a chaotic cacophony of everyone talking at once. Some screamed. Some cried. Others crumbled under the horror of a death too gruesome to be real.
The presence of the cops turned the nightmare into something none of us could deny.
I kept still, staring at the uniformed men as they burst into the bookstore. They stopped and stared at the cash registers, their mouths hanging open as they took in the kind of carnage that belonged in a zombie movie. One of them fainted, collapsing in a boneless heap. I drew several quick breaths, but managed to quell the surge of panic coursing through me. Fainting would’ve been smart; I wouldn’t have to see anything at all. I wouldn’t have to face the nagging doubt that I was somehow responsible for Scott’s death.
At the light touch of a hand on my elbow, I sucked in a breath, flinching away. My heart tried to escape out of my chest via my throat, strangling my shriek.
“Nicole?” It was the woman I’d spoken to before. Her dead cell phone was clutched in her pale fingers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
Gasping so I wouldn’t throw up, I waved my hand. It shook. I swallowed several times. “It’s fine. You just startled me a little.”
“Come away from there,” she replied, tugging at my arm. With more strength than I expected, she pulled me away from Scott’s body. I didn’t fight her. When she pressed my stained copy of
Among Us
into my hands, I managed not to drop it.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be. It’s terrible,” the woman replied, a faint waver in her voice. She shook her head. “I can barely believe it.” With a shudder, she turned so her back faced Scott’s body. I followed her lead. It didn’t let me forget that my sweater was soaked with his blood.
Nodding my agreement was all I could do. If I tried to speak, I feared I’d come undone. Maybe I’d react like the poor cashier. Her shoulders shook from the force of her tears, though to my relief, she no longer screamed. Some sick and violent part of me wanted to lash out and burn away the evidence of Scott’s death.
I squished the impulse.
“I hate to ask, Nicole, but my phone died. Can I borrow yours?” The woman rubbed her hands together, the motion drawing my gaze. It was a fidgeting, nervous gesture, and my eyes focused on the blood staining her pale, perfect skin.
I blinked several times before I comprehended what she was asking. Shoving my hand into my pocket, I fished out my cell and unlocked the screen. With a swipe of a finger and several quick taps, I closed the battery-draining apps. I handed it over to her.
Blood splattered the screen, and there was nothing I could do about it. The woman grimaced, but accepted my phone, took a few steps away from me, and dialed a number.
She held my cell to her ear, and Scott’s blood smeared her cheek. “Hey, it’s Laura. I’m going to be late. Something happened at the mall.”
Something had happened, all right. If an award existed for the understatement of the year, I would have nominated her without hesitation. Still, I marveled at her confidence and even tone of voice.
“I’m fine, but we’ll talk later. It’s pretty bad. Look, I’ve got to go. The police look like they’re getting ready to question us.” There was a long pause, and she wrinkled her nose, shifting my phone to her other ear. “I told you, I’m fine.” Laura leaned against one of the tables and drummed her fingers against my phone. Her lips pressed together into a thin line.
When she caught me staring at her, she turned away, speaking in a much softer voice. “Why do you care? I borrowed the phone from someone at the mall. Mine died.”
I turned around to give her some privacy, careful to avert my eyes. The conversation was too quiet for me to make out the specifics, but there was anger in the woman’s voice. It wasn’t long before she returned, holding my phone out to me.
Offering her a forced smile, I took it back and slipped it in my pocket. “I guess it’s going to be a long night for all of us.”
“Are you okay?”
It frightened me at how easy it was to slide into an acting role, to pretend I hadn’t been at ground zero of a death that event major movie studios weren’t brave enough to show. I tried not to think of what type of person I was portraying in my effort to disbelieve what had happened.
“I’m okay,” I lied.
Deep lines creased Laura’s brow, but she didn’t question me. After a long moment of silence, she nodded. “You’re a tough woman, Nicole. I’m glad I got to meet you, although I wish it were under better circumstances.”
I wanted to run home, find the darkest corner of my cheap apartment, and curl into the fetal position, but I couldn’t tell her that. “You’re pretty tough yourself.”
Laura smiled and nodded. When one of the police officers approached us, she intercepted him. Instead of following her, I turned away. The cashier’s eyes met mine; her pupils were dilated, and she breathed in shallow pants through her mouth. Despite the crowd of people, the steady flow of paramedics, and the increasing number of officers crowding the bookstore, she stood alone.
Careful to keep my chin lifted and my eyes fixed on anywhere other than the floor and Scott’s body, I made my way over to where she stood behind the cash registers. Clearing my throat didn’t get her attention. When I touched her elbow, the young woman jerked away from me with a startled cry.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” I kept my tone quiet, though I doubted there was anything soothing about my hoarse voice. Maybe this was one of those circumstances when the thought counted more than anything else.
“Have you seen Scott?” While she looked at me, her eyes didn’t focus on anything. I wasn’t even certain she knew who I was—or cared. Her expression was slack. The sickly pallor of her skin contrasted against the red-brown of drying blood. She looked more like a zombie than a living, breathing person.
I swallowed several times so I wouldn’t throw up.
How could I tell her that Scott was dead, lying on the floor not even ten feet from where she stood? I couldn’t. Maybe that made me a coward, but I couldn’t force myself to point out what was right in front of her.
It was too cruel.
Maybe Laura, who had pulled me away from Scott’s body when I didn’t know what to do, had the right idea. No one deserved to see what had happened to Scott. Not his friends, nor his family. But what could I do to help her?
My ill-gotten powers couldn’t bring the dead back to life.
She didn’t notice when I wiggled between her and her cash register, using my body as a way to shield her from seeing Scott’s corpse. A gentle shove was all it took for me to herd her towards the front door where the police and paramedics awaited. They stared at me, but I shook my head and gave the cashier a gentle push towards one of the uniformed men.
“She knew him,” I said, gesturing with my chin at the bloody hell behind me.
One of the paramedics stepped forward and stopped me with his outstretched hand.
“You should be examined, ma’am,” he said.
I sidestepped, once again shaking my head.
There was a trick to lying, and I used it without shame. The first step in telling a good, believable lie was to look confident, so I stared at him. The paramedic’s eyes were blue, and the color stood out against his dark-tanned skin. When our eyes met, I didn’t look away.
The second was to sound sincere. My chronic laryngitis made that harder for me, but I managed to keep my tone even. “She needs help. I don’t.”
Though he looked skeptical, he nodded and turned his attention to the cashier. I made my escape from the paramedics by heading towards the other side of the store, away from the blood stains, away from the cops.
I didn’t make it far before a beak-nosed detective in his mid-forties or fifties intercepted me. “Please come with me.”
The heavy weight of expectation brought me to a halt. Dreading the inevitable accusations, I stared into the cop’s dark eyes. I wasn’t sure if they were brown or blue. Something about the man’s dark tan washed the color out. Maybe the fault was with me, because I was ready to swear there was a red glint around the cop’s pupils.