Chapter 19
Calloway
Crunch.
I meet Jiya’s eyes across the dim room. No words are needed. In a single, fluid motion, we slide off the rug and into the deep shadow behind the sofa. The heavy furniture is now our only cover from the wide, exposed window.
“Stay here. I’ll go check.”
I tuck in my shirt with nervous fingers, buttoning it halfway before giving up. Marcel’s one dead eye stares at me from across the room, judging my disheveled appearance.
“What about him?” Her head jerks toward the corpse, which is staring at the ceiling with a rather surprised expression.
Her hair is still a mess, lips puffy and bruised from our recent activities.
“I don’t know. Throw a blanket over him?” My brain struggles to function. “Just...hide!”
Another crunch outside.
“Police?” Jiya’s eyes go wide.
“In this area?” I scoff, crawling to the edge of the window. “They’d have to get a warrant just to drive down the street. No patrols out here.”
“Then who?”
I risk a glance through the sliver of a gap in the curtains. Nothing but black. “Nosy neighbor?” I mutter. “Security patrol? A raccoon with a death wish?”
“We should kill them.” Jiya’s voice is so matter-of-fact that she could suggest we order takeout.
I whip around. “What?”
“Whoever it is,” she clarifies, nodding as if this is the most logical conclusion in the world. “We should kill them. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“We have one dead body already, and your solution is to stack them up like cordwood?”
“It’s the safest option,” she insists, completely unfazed.
“The safest…” I pinch the bridge of my nose, a headache blooming behind my eyes. “Jiya, you can’t just murder everyone who inconveniences you.”
“Says the Gallery Killer,” she retorts, one perfect eyebrow arched.
“I am selective. I have criteria. I don’t just—” I make a frantic, stabbing motion in the air, “—anyone who shows up at the wrong time.”
The footsteps are on the porch now. A floorboard creaks.
We drop to all fours and scurry toward the kitchen, me in the lead, Jiya on my heels. My knee lands on something wet and slippery. A sickening squelch echoes in the silent room.
“Fuck.” I freeze, looking down at the dark, spreading stain on my trousers. It’s Marcel’s blood.
“Stop being so squeamish,” Jiya whispers from behind me. “You literally arrange victims into art installations.”
“It’s not that. This is a five-hundred-dollar pair of trousers.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
She crawls past me and reaches the kitchen island. She hauls a drawer open with a loud, scraping groan that makes us both freeze, our eyes wide in the dark.
After a long pause, she rummages inside. Her hand emerges clutching a butcher knife. No, not a knife, really. It’s a short sword, a gleaming piece of sharpened steel you’d use to butcher a hog, not slice a tomato.
“What are you doing?” I whisper-shout.
“Getting prepared,” she says, adjusting her grip on the handle. She’s holding it like a club.
“Have you ever actually stabbed someone? Like, physically stabbed them yourself?”
Her confident expression falters. “I... No. My victims are unconscious when they die. From poison.”
“So you’ve never—”
“No.”
“Great. Fantastic.” I press my palms against my eyes. “She wants to try stabbing for the first time tonight. No practice run. Just going straight for Olympic gold.”
“She is right here,” Jiya snarls, her knuckles white on the knife handle. “And it can’t be that hard. You go in with the pointy end.”
“This isn’t a goddamn movie!” I grab a tiny paring knife from the magnetic strip on the wall. “You’ll break your wrist holding it like that. It’s an underhand grip. You want to get under the ribcage. It’s all about leverage, not—”
A shadow passes by the window. We both flatten ourselves against the kitchen island.
“What’s the big deal?” she whispers. “You’ve killed plenty of people up close.”
“That’s different. I plan. I prepare. I don’t just crawl around half-naked with a kitchen knife around a house with a dead body.”
“Well, what’s your brilliant plan then?”
I risk a peek around the corner of the island. Nothing. Just the oppressive darkness. “I got nothing.”
“Kill him, it is,” Jiya says with disturbing finality.
I grab her ankle, yanking her back down. “We are not killing random people. Just…stay here. I’ll check it out.”
“And if it’s the cops?”
I glance over at Marcel’s body, at our discarded clothes strewn across the floor, at the obvious signs of what we’ve been doing beside a corpse.
“Then I suggest you work on your innocent face.”
A dry scraping sound cuts through the silence, followed by the rustle of leaves.
“It’s coming from the back,” Jiya whispers.
I put a single finger to my lips, then point at the floor behind her. Stay. The gesture earns me a slow, deliberate middle finger, but she sinks lower into the shadows, the ridiculous butcher knife held in a white-knuckled grip.
I creep toward the back of the house. The crackling branches and rustling leaves grow louder, coming from the rear entrance near the laundry room. I pause at the corner, my pulse thundering in my ears.
My hand closes around the antique brass candlestick on a side table. The metal is cold and heavy, a pathetic substitute for an actual weapon, but it will have to do.
The scraping stops.
Then, the splintering crack of wood from the living room, followed by a choked, muffled scream that is unmistakably Jiya’s.
Shit.
All stealth evaporates. I launch myself, sprinting back through the house, the candlestick held like a club.
I round the corner into the living room, skidding on the expensive rug. The scene before me is a chaotic tangle of limbs.
Jiya’s on the floor, pinned beneath a man covered in black.
Her knife is buried in his upper arm, blood flowing from the wound.
She’s a cornered animal, kicking and snarling, but he has her trapped, one massive, gloved hand crushing her wrist to the ground, the other clamped over her mouth, turning her screams into muffled, desperate sounds.
“Get the fuck off her!” The roar rips from my throat as I launch myself across the room, the heavy brass candlestick raised for a killing blow.
The intruder’s head snaps up. I freeze an inch from the side of his skull, my muscles screaming in protest at the sudden stop.
“Lazlo?”
My fellow Hemlock Society member stares back at me, a torrent of blood streaming down his sleeve from where Jiya’s ridiculous knife is still protruding.
“Call off your girlfriend, Calloway,” he grunts, his voice tight with pain as he struggles to contain Jiya’s thrashing. “The brachial artery is right there, and I don’t trust the sterility of this blade.”
Jiya’s eyes dart between us. She stops fighting, her chest heaving.
“You know this asshole?” she mumbles against his palm, the words muffled but the sentiment perfectly clear.
I lower the candlestick, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.
“Lazlo, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Can I explain later, before I die from blood loss?” Lazlo snarls, wincing as he glances at the knife still buried in his arm.
For a man who once diagnosed himself with bubonic plague after a mosquito bite, he’s taking this well.
“Let her go, Lazlo. She won’t stab you again.” I hope.
Lazlo removes his hand from Jiya’s mouth and eases off her body, hissing as the movement jostles the knife. Jiya scrambles to her feet, never taking her eyes off him. She adjusts what’s left of her torn shirt.
She wipes a smear of Lazlo’s blood on her pants. “See?” she says, looking at me. “Pointy end. Not that hard.”
I drag a hand down my face. “Jiya, this is Lazlo, a colleague of mine. Lazlo, Jiya.”
“A colleague?” Jiya glares at me. “You mean another killer?”
“Let’s not get bogged down in the semantics right now,” I say, stepping between them. “I can’t believe you stabbed him.”
“He attacked me!” She points at Lazlo.
“I was trying to help. I thought you were an innocent civilian in danger,” Lazlo says through gritted teeth. “I saw a half-naked woman on the floor with a dead body.”
Jiya bites her lower lip.
“Wait.” Lazlo’s eyes dart between Jiya and me, his brow furrow. “Why were you half-naked on the floor with a dead body?”
His gaze travels from my unbuttoned shirt and the blood on my trousers, to Jiya’s bruised lips and disheveled state, to the discarded clothes strewn near the fireplace, and finally, to the very fresh, very dead Marcel.
What am I supposed to say? That we got so turned on by killing someone together that we couldn’t wait to get horizontal?
“We were...” I gesture at the entire chaotic tableau, a gesture that explains nothing.
Lazlo’s eyes widen. His mouth forms a perfect O as realization dawns on his face.
“Oh,” he says, drawing the word out.
A beat passes. His eyes grow even wider. He takes a small, involuntary step back, as if distancing himself from the sheer psychic contamination of the scene.
“Oh.” He cringes, his entire face contorting into an expression of pure disgust. “You two were… Right next to the… While he was… Oh my God! You’re animals!”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I say.
“Really?” Lazlo challenges. “Because it looks like you two were fucking next to a fresh corpse.”
I sigh. “Okay, it’s exactly what it looks like.”
“Jesus, Calloway,” Lazlo says, shaking his head, which makes him wince as it jostles his arm. “I knew you had…eccentricities, but this is next-level depravity.”
“Says the man with a knife in his arm,” Jiya counters, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Which you put there.” Lazlo points at her with his good hand, then grimaces from the movement.
“You grabbed me from behind in a dark room,” Jiya shouts.
“I thought I was saving you.”
“Children, please,” I interject, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Can we focus on the immediate problem? Lazlo, why are you here? Did Thorne send you to check on me?”
Lazlo’s eyes meet mine.
“Yes, Thorne sent me to check if you’ve gone off the grid like you promised.” He glances at Marcel’s body. “And seems like he was right not to trust you.”