Chapter 32 When Neighbors Come To Call
When Neighbors Come To Call
I'm cocooned in bed, my dreams a swirl of indistinct voices and dark shapes. Scraping noises and an insistent pressure against my skin penetrate my subconscious. My nose wrinkles, tickled by the cloying stench of smoke.
When I crack my tired lids, I find two dark figures looming over me. Red embers cut through the darkness as one of them sucks on a cigarette, followed by a fresh wave of smoke billowing in the air.
Before I can even get out a cough, two pairs of hands seize me. I cry out.
"That’s right, girly. Scream," Elijah hisses in my face, hot spittle hitting my cheeks as he manhandles me. "It’s why we’re here, after all. Your goddamn ruckus that gives us no peace. All that crashing and banging, your slutty wails getting me hard and pissed."
In minutes, I’m duct-taped and tied to one of my rickety dining chairs and a filthy rag is crammed into my mouth. He rips off the oversized sleep shirt, leaving me only in my panties.
"Caroline," Elijah barks.
Elijah’s wife clicks on the bedside lamp, a cigarette still hanging from her mouth. The dim light washes over my cold, horrifying reality, sending a chill slithering down my spine.
"There we go," Elijah sneers, gripping either side of the chair and getting in my face. "Now I can get a good look at you, girly."
Unfortunately, I get an up close and personal view of him as well.
The scruff on his face resembles dirt more than facial hair.
Bulging bloodshot eyes bore into me with open hatred.
His gut matches the same heft of his cheeks, and I can’t escape the stink of the meat stains on his shirt as well as the sour yeast of too much liquor wafting from his pores.
My skin crawls with invisible pinpricks of fear as my stomach churns with something hot and sour.
"You’re skinny," Elijah observes, his eyes openly taking in my body with hungry, lecherous eyes. "Don’t even have a decent pair of tits," he scoffs as he reaches out and roughly grabs at one of my bare breasts hard enough to cause pain.
When his hand dives down to pinch at my crotch, I jerk. He lets out a booming, hideous laugh.
I’m on my own. If Shadow was going to come, he would have been here by now. There is no use relying on him, I can only count on myself.
Despair snakes around me, coiling and squeezing. My life is a never-ending nightmare. Anything good in my life is either yanked from my slippery grasp, or I ruin it myself.
Maybe if I’d tried harder with Miguel, tried to be normal, this wouldn’t be happening. But I rejected my chance at a happy, normal life with him. This is my punishment. If I want to live in darkness, in the muck, this is what people like me get.
Still, I turn my gaze to Caroline, silently pleading with her.
From what I’ve heard of their knock-down-drag-out fights, she often accuses Elijah of sleeping with whores and giving her crabs.
Surely, she’s too jealous to let this happen.
She must be aware of him unbuckling his belt and pulling it from his pant loops with a sickening slide of leather against fabric.
But her grayed, sallow face doesn’t react to his lewd attack or my silent plea. She sucks harder on her cigarette and crosses her arms. Caroline hums as she sways back and forth a little to some tune only she can hear.
Stubby fingers grip my cheeks, turning me to meet Elijah’s face. "Don’t look at her. She’s not going to help you. She’s too busy riding her own high. Isn’t that right, baby?" he calls to her.
It’s then I notice her eyes are dilated, cloudier than normal.
Closing them, she draws on her cigarette long and hard again, as if experiencing some type of private bliss.
I don’t know what drugs she’s on, but she's half in this world, half in another. Though when her gaze catches on me, I know she’s aware enough.
So she’s fine with him fucking other girls as long as she’s in the room?
Something splits wide open inside me. Not a crack, not a spark—a rupture. Hot, brutal rage pours through the breach, drowning everything else in its path. Fear, shame, helplessness—all of it swept away in a tidal wave of white-hot certainty.
"If you’re going make so much noise," Elijah spits in my face again, pinching my cheeks so hard the metallic taste of blood slides across my tongue. "If you’re going to groan and moan like a slut so we can’t watch our game shows without me getting a chubby, then you aren’t being very neighborly, are you? "
I jerk my head. If I had even an inch of freedom, I would tear his fucking throat out with my teeth. I don't want to survive him. I want to destroy him.
I can feel what’s left of my humanity incinerating, like a fragile sheet of paper consumed by a blaze of searing orange sparks and thick, acrid smoke.
I’ve told Shadow so many times that I’m a monster just like him, but I was wrong.
It’s only now that I feel some powerful, and terrifying muscle its way out from the depths of my being. With it comes hellfire, paradoxically cold and yet fiercely controlled.
"No, that’s not neighborly at all. And you’re not being a very good host right now either."
When he releases me, I cough through the rag, flexing my face to help release the ache left by his fingers.
"Maybe I should take out that rag so you can show me how neighborly you can be."
The hiss of his zipper cuts through the air. My blood doesn’t chill—it heats, boiling in my veins until I feel like I could burn the whole room down just by breathing.
I should be afraid. Maybe the old me would have been.
But I am not prey anymore. I am not a victim. I am the nightmare they should fear.
Caroline lets out a strange, tittering laugh. "She’ll bite your dick off, E."
I will. I’ll bite it off and spit it back into his face.
Blood rushes to Elijah’s face, turning it almost purple. As if he heard my thoughts, he raises his hand. The explosion of stinging pain across my face makes my eyeball want to leap from its socket. My groan of pain is eaten by the cloth.
Tears leak out, but they aren’t from fear. The spark has turned into a ball of fire, a blazing star in the pit of my stomach that heats my blood with rage. The kind of rage that could crack the world open and drink from its bones.
The thought is cut short by another near eye-exploding slap across my other cheek.
Caroline’s unsteady pitch of laughter grows louder. Elijah pulls something from his back pocket before flicking it open with a metallic gleam. A knife.
He grabs the end of the rag and yanks it out of my mouth. I dissolve into a coughing fit as I fight to suck fresh air back into my lungs. My cheeks burn and ache as I convulse.
When I come back to myself, I find Elijah holding his dick in his hand.
As soon as my eyes land on it, he pushes the knife against my throat.
His knife flashes in the dim light. He presses it against my throat, clumsy, too hard, splitting my skin with a sharp bite.
Blood slides down my collarbone in thin, hot lines.
"Again," Caroline says, her spine ramrod straight, eyes growing as big and round as an owl’s. "Cut her again, E. Make her bleed. Make her bleed for Mama." Her throat contorts with a visible swallow of anticipation.
A dark smirk pulls at one side of Elijah’s mouth. The knife bites into my cheek and I cry out in pain.
Caroline’s chest heaves almost violently as she watches him with rapt attention. Elijah pumps his meaty fist around his dick.
He watches her even as he lowers the knife to my naked thighs and cuts me once, twice, three times. I grimace, refusing to whimper in pain or beg him to stop.
Not only do I think Caroline might get off on that, but I know it won’t do any good. I grit my teeth, suffering the stinging, shallow wounds.
When his knife finds the center of my panties, I look up at him from under my lashes. "I will kill you."
My voice is low and certain. It is not a threat. It is a fact.
If I were free, I would show him what kind of monster this world has made me. I would carve the flesh from their bones and hold it in front of their eyes.
He only smiles at me, as if I’m a dumb child.
The pressure of the knife against my sex shatters the last remnants of the girl I was.
"Let’s get you wet," he hisses.
Tentacles explode from beneath my bed, coiling and snapping angrily.
Elijah stumbles back, his jaw going slack with surprise.
The room fills with Shadow’s enraged presence.
"GET AWAY FROM HER." The words boom around us like a thunderclap.
My fear and rage cartwheel in exaltation. Hatred and outrage simmer in my soul, a dark, bubbling mixture.
"You’re fucking dead now," I spit at Elijah. The knife slips from his hand, clattering on the floor.
"E?" Caroline asks, her voice shaking. She likely thinks she’s having some drug-induced hallucination.
A shadow tentacle snaps out and grabs Elijah, slamming him into the ceiling. Elijah’s face crashes into the dingy surface over and over again. Shadow crawls out from under the bed. With an unnatural creaking of bones and eyes like fire, he swells into the room like an apocalypse made flesh.
Caroline watches in wide-eyed terror, my bedside table the only thing supporting her trembling weight. She screams and screams and screams.
Shadow rips away my restraints. I’ve seen him angry, upset, and furious, but right now he is unhinged. Raw, explosive fury born of hell itself
I’ve only seen him this way one other time in my life—right before he disappeared for four years.
"Shadow," I breathe. Suddenly, the cuts don’t hurt. They only intensify the feelings I have in Shadow’s presence. Lust. Power. Need. A need to be near him, to be touched by him, wanted by him.
Still screaming, Caroline makes a run for it, but a tentacle snaps out, wrapping around her foot. She slams to the floor, fingers clawing at the carpet even as he jerks her back into the room. He lifts her up by one ankle, her cigarette falling to the ground as she’s held prone.
Satisfaction swells inside me so intensely, my breath comes in ragged heaves.
Shadow’s claws grip my arms, yanking me up. My head jerks as I’m pulled against his hard body with a possessive force that makes my chest ache.
"You’re bleeding," he snarls.
For a moment, there is no one else there but me and my Shadow. Two monsters united.
I grip his hard shoulders. "Taste it," I command in a raspy voice.
Shadow’s mouth splits into a fang-filled smile, surprising me. "My little animal." Then he licks up my throat, the snake split of his tongue tickling my cut flesh. I close my eyes and tip my head back, offering him anything and everything.
Caroline’s cries surround us as she dangles helplessly along next to her red-faced husband who squirms and snorts as blood leaks heavily from his nose.
The violence, the screaming, Shadow unhinged. It all transports me to another time.
The last time I saw my monster before he disappeared.