Chapter Nine
AUGUST 17, AGE 26
“A man called Richard Montague…”
“Oh my god!” I waved a hand at the dinner party of three. The smell of fresh-cut onion, hot peppers, and the spice of stir-fried meat filled the home and accompanied the static hum of the television. My head snapped up at the mention of the familiar name. Nia squeezed Darius’s arm to silence him while the tacos sat on the table, untouched. It had taken invitations, then coercion, then threats before I finally agreed to abandon my cave of solitude for a get-together. They’d been kind to invite me to their house in the suburbs, and I’d given them every reason to regret it. I sprinted to the counter to fetch the remote and cranked the evening news while the reporter showed the face of my attacker.
“Who is it?” Nia whispered behind me.
I motioned for her to wait, and I knew she would.
I stood in front of the TV as if the anchor were speaking to me alone. As soon as they flashed to footage outside of Richard’s now-abandoned residence, I whipped around to Nia.
“Write down the address! Oh my god, write down the address!” My hand moved on instinct to the piece of paper I’d kept tucked in my back pocket in the months following the attempt on my life, but I would not mar it with his information.
She fetched her phone from her back pocket in hasty compliance while her husband grumbled something about the tacos getting cold. I remained glued to each word as if my life depended on it. The story ended, and I released the breath I’d been holding. I punched the downward-facing arrow repeatedly once the anchor transitioned into a fluff piece about the high gas prices.
“What is it?” Nia asked.
“I knew him,” I said.
“From…” she prompted.
She knew of my previous line of work and knew I wouldn’t be comfortable talking about it in front of her husband. If Darius couldn’t be patient enough to wait for tacos, then I didn’t have the energy to explain my years of escorting to him. To be fair, he was a good man—one of the few I tolerated, particularly now that I considered him my brother-in-law. He’d probably be fine with my covert career, but the fact remained, it was my story to share. He loved his wife deeply, and for that alone, he received a free pass for any and all minor faux pas. I nodded, and she understood.
Nia Foster had forced her way into my life like a bulldozer, and I’d let her.
She’d seen my rather public fallout with my family in the wake of the first Pantheon book. My mother’s novel-length rejection of my blasphemous lifestyle and romanticization of heathen gods on her publicly available social account had made the news. It was a little less dramatic than a six o’clock anchor reading about my attempted murder, but a few online magazines had taken screenshots of my mother’s social media posts about the destination of my immortal soul and the tearful videos I’d made in the heat of my emotional state as I’d reacted to my abandonment.
But as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
My fuckups had captured an audience, whether prospective book-buyers, opinionated pundits, or the online community who I’d come to know and love as friends.
Nia had sent me a direct message informing me that she was my sister now.
I’d left her messages on read as days turned into weeks, watching the updates roll in as she spoke to me as if we were family. She told me things like how my new brother-in-law was fixing the sink, how my new mother loved my book and spent their entire barbecue telling the neighbors about it, how my new uncle was also pansexual and was very proud of me, and sent me a few funny pictures of cute animals with the hopes that I might see them and smile. She told me that we shared a city. She sent her messages into the void, never expecting an answer. Day after day she checked in on me until one vulnerable day, six months after the release of the first Pantheon novel, tears free-flowing and in the fetal position on the kitchen floor, I opened the thread and messaged her back.
She’d won the battle against my reluctance to let anyone in, and one chip at the stone of my heart at a time, she’d become my family.
I looked at my sister now and the phone glowing in her hand. “Can you text it to me?”
Nia’s mouth twisted into a corner as she looked at her phone, then up to me. Her face shadowed under the kitchen lighting as she tilted her head, no longer interested in food as a much darker question consumed her. She was too smart to believe that I had innocent intent. “Why do you need his address?”
“I just do,” I said.
The Fosters and I had made plans to make the most of summer while it lasted. I’d planned for us to sit outside, sipping beers and playing card games. But though I remained physically present through what remained of the meal, my mind was elsewhere. I ate Darius’s take on Mexican food with polite enthusiasm, but Nia knew the instant the story came on the news that she’d lost me.
Her husband relaxed once he’d eaten, carrying on happy conversation about a sports team that I didn’t care about. His pleasant voice accompanied us through dinner, allowing me to retreat into silence as my mind raced, ignoring him completely. No matter how much I loved Nia and liked the man she’d married, I couldn’t bring myself to care about football even in the best of times. These were not the best of times.
He asked about dessert, but she went in for a hug instead, saying, “I know you have to get going.”
“Thanks, Nia,” I murmured.
“Don’t be stupid” was all she said.
I considered myself intelligent most of the time.
I’d been a good student. I’d developed the social intelligence necessary to navigate complex situations, whether playing chameleon when on a client’s arm or trying to be cool at a hipster coffee shop. I was something of a wordsmith. But no amount of education or savvy had prevented me from barreling toward what would undoubtedly be a very poor choice.
Perhaps I should have gone home and collected myself.
No, I definitely should have waited and formulated a plan before launching into action. Still, when the cab driver asked for an address, I repeated the one glowing from my phone screen. He’d happily complied, pointing the taxi south. It was a farther drive than I’d anticipated, and a far heftier cab fee than I was used to seeing. He eyed me as if I might bolt, but I handed him my card with a confident smile, perhaps hoping to convince us both. I compensated him well in a tip for the drive he’d have to make back to the city. He thanked me heartily as he let me out onto the cold street with nothing but yellow police tape to stop me.
I pulled out the folded piece of paper that had become a staple of my back pocket and examined the complex shape within the circle. It might have been an oversized arrow with acute angles folding in on one side, save for the proportions. If the circle had been a clock, its tips would have hit the three o’clock, six o’clock, and ten o’clock. A pointed eye at its center drew the attention, somewhat like the evil-eye ward I’d seen on many a necklace and bracelet. The final piece, puncturing the arrow and plunging into the eye, was a flame where the fletching should be at precisely the twelve o’clock position.
The sigil.
The third witch had been right. She hadn’t needed fancy bells or whistles or payment. She hadn’t made a theatrical show of hums or chants. She’d bounced the toddler on her hip, sent me a link, and hung up. Truth needed no frivolity. It had been all I’d needed.
In the absence of crystals and tarot readings and the Prime Creator, I’d meditated and failed spectacularly. I couldn’t clear my thoughts. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t relax. And so I continued on my fruitless endeavors. I tried and failed, and tried, and failed and tried. With an inexplicable tenacity, tinged with desperation for something to work, I attempted every day for nearly an hour until one day I opened my eyes and…there it was on my wall.
It had stolen my breath.
It was beautiful and terrifying and filled me with a roil of complex emotions, all questions with dissatisfying answers. The shapes, the lines, the arrow’s feather-like fletching.
Was I supposed to be happy? I guessed so. I was pleased that I’d found it, of course.
Should I be scared? Maybe. The sigil certainly didn’t look friendly.
Did I have a right to be angry? Perhaps. It had been painted above my door without my knowledge or consent, after all.
I looked up from the elaborate shape scrawled on lined paper to the house.
I possessed only two clues. The sigil and the knowledge that the man who’d tried to kill me had been marked. The psycho killer’s home was my best hope at finding answers.
I’d expected a police presence at the long-dead Richard’s home, but the neighborhood was void of any sights or sounds of life. I folded the sigil and tucked it back into my pocket, then snuck around the house only to find the doors locked.
I didn’t really have a contingency plan for locked doors. The man was dead, after all.
The ground-floor windows were also, unsurprisingly, locked. Unfortunately for those who wished to deter breaking and entering, I was both acrobatically inclined and clinically insane. The second was perhaps more pertinent as I clutched the rainspout with my hands and knees, shimmying toward the gutter on the back of the late, great Richard’s house. I’d come this far, after all. I wasn’t about to leave without exhausting all of my options.
Fortunately, given his surgical career, the man was loaded. This meant the man had not cut corners on his home. His rainspout was secured down at every possible joint and made of the sort of reinforced metal that would matter only if the sky were raining bullets. I hadn’t climbed rock walls since college. Despite my muscle memory, I had little to no grip strength.
“Don’t be a chicken,” I grunted to myself, forcing resilience where none existed.
I was seconds away from plummeting to a broken ankle at best and broken back at worst before I flailed for the second-story balcony. It was so close. I tightened my knees on the gutter, fixing my sneakers on the tiny grip afforded by the joints, and grabbed the balcony’s rods with both hands at once, trust-falling into the second floor.
Shit.
I’d fucked up.
Climbing was easy compared to pulling myself up. I had no muscle mass in my chest or arms. I groaned as I hooked my elbow around a bar and swung my knee up onto the barest sliver of ledge. I would have taken my sweet time grumbling, complaining, and bitching, if a neighbor’s light hadn’t flown on. The adrenaline gave me the boost I needed. I scurried over the railing and flattened myself on the porch until the light went off, the neighbor’s curiosity presumably satiated when they saw nothing.
And now, the moment of truth. I wrapped my fingers around the handle to the sliding glass door. Much to my relief, the second-floor balcony was unlocked.
The moment I crossed the threshold into Richard’s house, I was hit with an inexplicable sensation. It was as thick as stepping into a cloud of pea soup. I blinked against it as if I’d submerged myself through a physical wall.
But my eyes adjusted to see…nothing.
I couldn’t explain the heaviness in my chest. My muscles tensed. My body went into primal survival as all my senses urged me to flee. But the house was quiet. The room was vacant. Nothing was wrong.
Stop it,I chastised myself. Of course, you’re afraid of the man’s house. He tried to kill you. But he’s dead. He can’t hurt you. Now grow a pair and calm the hell down.
But I couldn’t calm down. My hands shook as I tiptoed through the home.
There was an eerie sterility to his house, even in the shadows. Everything was reminiscent of a showroom, as if no one had ever lived here. If it hadn’t been for the evidence tags in yellow that intermittently dotted the residence, there would have been no reason for me to believe that a human had ever stepped foot in this house. The furniture was too perfect. The floors were too clean. The pictures on the wall were too perfectly spaced. Everything was in monochromatic shades of black, white, and gray. If I hadn’t known he was a psychopath before entering his home, this would have confirmed it. I paused at a single picture to stare at the stock photo of a happy family of models smiling back at me.
Oh, yeah. This guy was definitely nuts.
My guts twisted, muscles tensing as my heart raced uncomfortably. It continued to pick up speed as if the erratic organ knew something I didn’t. I should be relaxing now that I’d confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the space was vacant. I was being stupid. I was being irrational. I should be brave.
But bravery was rarely in the cards for me. Stupidity, however…
I debated turning on the lights, but wisdom won out. I was sure someone would call the cops if a curious neighbor spied evidence of someone snooping through an active crime scene. Instead, I turned on the flashlight on my phone and began to pick my way through the house’s blue-black shadows, every forward step filling me with thicker dread. I followed the feeling like a thick mist as I wandered down the stairs and through the late surgeon’s home. I paused at a closed door. I couldn’t explain why, but a sinking gravity told me this was the entry to his basement.
The man is dead,I repeated to myself. Don’t be afraid of a dead man’s basement and squiggles on the wall, you coward.
The antagonistic pit in my stomach urged me once more to run. It told me to get out of the house. It begged me to grab for the front door, to tear into the yard, to sprint down the street until I could flag down a car.
If the fear was growing closer, then so were the answers.
I opened the door and peered into a solid black rectangle.
I swallowed and checked for a light switch. Yes, if I shut the door behind me, I could flick on the lights so the neighbors wouldn’t see. I lifted my phone to the wall, heart thundering so hard that it caused my hand to shake. I forgot to breathe as I took a single step into the basement.
He’s dead,I reminded myself. There’s no one here. He’s dead.
I eased the door closed as the light switch flickered with an audible buzz. The fluorescent light blinked once, then twice as it flooded the space below me. A large cement floor with a single drain in the middle was the only thing I could see.
I took one step down.
Run! Run, run, run!whined the voice within me.
I shoved the voice down with two invisible hands, then took another step.
A sturdy workbench dotted with yellow evidence markers populated my view as I got lower and lower. The thrumming in my ears was so loud that I wasn’t sure if I could hear someone even if they were in the room screaming my name. My head spun, stars dancing in the center of my vision before I realized I’d been holding my breath. I took a steady breath in as I finished the descent and made my way to the center of the room.
What did I plan to do here? Meditate?
It had taken me weeks to comfortably settle in, relax, clear my mind, and see through the veil, as Xuan had called it, even in the comfort of my own home.
This room was wrong. The walls were flat and glistened with the strange high-gloss enamel of waterproofing. Deep below the antiseptic scents of bleach and paint ran an undercurrent of iron and rust. It was too bright for such a small space. And with each new observation, the balloon of dread swelled until it reached carrying capacity.
A sensation like ten thousand centipedes crawled from the floor up my spine and urged me up the stairs. I gave myself over wholly to the fear, bathing in the tingling dread as I conceded to its pleas. I’d had enough. I turned on my heel and sprinted to the top step, hand flying for the handle. I turned it and met instant resistance.
My eyes flared wider than they’d ever been before as I sucked in a breath. I looked down at the keyhole where a smooth surface should have been.
“Fuck!” I shouted at the locked door. I rattled the knob several times, then banged my palm against the barrier in quick, helpless succession. I twisted it time and time again until my hand pinked against the metal. My jaw nearly popped as I ground my teeth, panic and fury striking like lightning.
“No!” I cried out. I rested my forehead against the door for the barest of moments while I shoved every feeling, every fear, into an airtight box within myself. I couldn’t panic. I couldn’t cry. I needed to find a way out.
But I was allowed to be angry.
Of course, this psychopath would have installed a door set to lock upon closure.
“It’s okay,” I said to the empty room as I slowly rotated from the door, facing the staircase, the workbench, the single drain at the room’s center. I forced myself to voice every thought as I soothed the caged animal that clawed within me. “It’s fine. No one is here. I have time. Richard is gone. No one is coming for me. I can figure this out.”
I immediately looked to my phone but knew before my eyes hit the corner of the screen that there would be a flat line where service was meant to show perfect bars. I’d expected it, but it didn’t make it any easier. The thick cement walls canceled out even the strongest of city signals.
I forced myself to descend the stairs. The police had already been here. They’d found every earthly horror. There couldn’t be anything bad…which also meant if there were any tools or keys, they would have bagged them for evidence.
“Marlow.” I tried speaking to myself as if I were my own friend. “You can do this. You’ve been through the worst things that can happen to a person, and you’ve survived. Everything has an answer, and you’ll find it.”
But my parental voice lacked believability. Bile rose in me as I moved away from the door, stepping deeper into the basement. Maybe there’d be a small glass window I could break and scramble out of. I crossed to the vacated workbench, searching for a tool, a clue, for something. Maybe…
My breath caught. My heart stopped. I froze as I caught movement from the corner of my eye.
I spun on my heels and gaped at what I saw.
I tilted my chin down, staring into the messy hair, the pale face, the too-wide, Cheshire-cat smile of an inhumane child.
I choked on the chaotic nightmare, the hallucination, the impossibility.
The cup of my insanity had tipped over, violently splashing into every aspect of my life. I was alone. I’d been trapped in frantic solitude between four walls, a drain, and a single bench. There had been nowhere for a kid to hide.
I shook my head against the horrendous apparition as something clicked within me. Hallucination or not, I recognized the toothy, feline grin. Several months prior it had been burned into my mind by the now-dead man who’d grinned in my living room. I gaped in horror at the figment. I summoned courage, therapy, psychiatry appointments, and wasted hours of grounding exercises as I addressed the child.
“Please don’t be real” was all I could say. I’d spent months convincing myself everything was true. Now, I needed to be wrong.
Four feet tall, waifish thin, and in little more than a potato stack stood a beautiful, terrible ghoul. He positively sparkled as he said, “My, don’t humans say the funniest things.”
I locked onto the enormous, sky-blue eyes and stumbled backward. There was nowhere to go.
I lifted my hands as if to fight him off, demanding, “Who are you?”
“You smell delicious,” the little boy said, eyes twinkling. “What is that smell? So good, so good… What a flavor, what a flavor…”
He was real.
I was in my apartment all over again, helpless, looking for knives that weren’t there, wishing for a phone even if it didn’t work, knowing I couldn’t make it to the door in time to escape. The tornado of déjà vu whipped me in its violent winds until I was so dizzy, so nauseous I could scarcely breathe. Except, at least in my apartment, I’d known my enemy.
I had no frame of reference for the kindergarten nightmare that faced me now.
“Oh!” He gasped with boyish wonder, smile widening until it was bigger than his face. His teeth seemed to sharpen to a point as he looked at me. “Here I thought I wouldn’t be fed any longer after ten years of meals…and now my food can see me. What a delightful dessert. So delightful.”
I skidded backward until I slammed against cold cement. A sickly-sweet smell rolled off him, like the sugar and flesh of an infected wound. I searched for something familiar, something that made sense. The Cheshire boy looked no older than six and no younger than six thousand. There was a terrible ancientness to his bright, childish voice. The corners of his mouth reddened as if scabbed from cracking, breaking, and bleeding as his lips pulled far beyond his ears. The fluorescent light overhead flickered as if the very wiring in the home knew I was doomed. Though he stood a head and shoulders shorter than me, I knew that I would not survive him.
“Tell me who you are,” I gasped again.
He clasped his arms behind his back and took a step to the side, then another. He eyed me all the while as he said, “I think you know.”
“Who?” I asked again, though the question was useless. The answer didn’t matter. I was going to die.
“Call us legion, for we are many.” He winked and giggled with the high, bright twinkle of a death bell. “You’re just our type. How kind that my host sent a treat, even in death.”
“Stay back,” I said, voice quivering. I raised my hands uselessly as the little boy advanced.
The world screeched to a halt on its axis at his reply.
“No,” said the child, aquamarine eyes glinting with predatory glee, “I don’t think I will.”
Three things happened at once. I crossed my forearms over my face to brace for impact, squeezing my eyes shut. The boy lunged. And a sound—a loud, resonant clanging—cut through the basement.
He had taken less than a half-step toward me before a flash of blinding, glittering light flooded the basement. The brilliant sheen was scarcely recognizable between my tightly shut lids. The child cried out as the high, metallic ring of a sword pierced the air. My arms folded, hands shielding my eyes from the white light as a sizzle and pop bounced off the walls of the room.
Then it stopped. The only noise was the explosive sound of my heart in my ears.
I lowered my hands the moment the blinding passed and saw a tall, muscled figure standing just above the drain in the center of the basement. My eyes widened with recognition. We locked eyes for a horrified moment.
“Silas?” I gasped.
“You can’t be fucking serious.”