The Marradith Ryder Series Parts 40 & 41

Part 40, MONSTER

“Isn’t it bad juju, or something like that, to sleep in a man’s house the same night you killed him?” Marradith said.

Justin and Marradith sat together in one of Leighton’s many spare rooms; this one was furnished with only a couch and a table. The curtains were open to the balcony, and the rain was still coming in a steady downpour.

“Probably not when the man in question is Leighton. And about that. I had a talk with Will. There is a possibility you’ll inherit this house.”

“What?”

“Will says that Bruce drew up documents to that effect. He was a lawyer in his human life. Anyway, we’ll do a little search for them tomorrow. It makes sense. I don’t know if there was a clause; it may be kept in trust by your parents until you turn eighteen. We’ll see.”

“I don’t know that I want this place. I mean, it was his.”

“That said, I wouldn‘t look down my nose at any mansion. We could erase all memory of Leighton from here.”

She smiled ruefully.

“What a strange… I don’t even know what to call him. Psycho seems mild.”

“Yes. So how are you feeling about today? This was your first kill.”

She looked out into the rain, avoiding eye contact. “Not great,” she said quietly.

“Come here,” he said and wrapped his arms around her. “ Just know that you did what you had to do. And this is only the first time.”

Marradith caught the emphasis on first. It was done. She was really a Sojourner now.

He didn’t have to tell her that tonight changed everything. There would be no going back to her life before. This was only the beginning.

He didn’t have words to comfort her, so he just held on a little tighter. A flash of lightening brightened the night sky and then was gone.

“And then,” she said softly, “there’s what I did to Scott.”

“You didn’t kill him. He’s a grown man that can take care of himself.”

“Yes. But, I might have came close. I didn’t know how much he could take.”

“If you’d killed him, it would have been self defense. ”

“Yes, but tell Mama that. He’s her first born son.”

“Well, we won’t have to do that. Besides. Nora knows how things work with us. There will be punishment for Scott, once he’s found.”

She knew what that meant. But she didn’t say anything more about her brother.

“Does killing get easier?” she asked.

He paused a long moment before answering. “It will be different for you than for me. ”

“Of course. I know you kill on missions. But do you ever still…?”

“We call it Feasting,” he said. “And yes, sometimes I do.”

She listened to the rain outside. His arms were still around her and her head against his chest. It was vaguely upsetting, but then she’d guessed that this was that way it must be.

It was chilling to hear him say the words.

Some part of her wondered why it did not upset her more.

“I promised myself I’d be honest about that,” he said. I feel I owe you that much.”

She closed her eyes, listening to his heartbeat. He felt warm.

“Marradith….?”

“Yes?”

“About your other question. About killing getting easier? The answer is yes and no.  The pursuit becomes easier. Your ability to perform the physical mechanics of killing will come easier. But the feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach?  That fear, that maybe you’re the one who won’t get to walk away? That never stops. It never changes.”

He lifted her chin with his forefinger. “It’s natural for you to be upset. Sometimes your fear can block out everything else. Sometimes you defend yourself by not letting yourself feel anything about killing. What you don’t want is for the kill to ever become enjoyable. The moment that it does, you have crossed a line. That’s one of the first principles that I taught you, remember?” he said softly. “It’s part of the theory of hunting in closed spaces. Hunt to kill. Hunt for necessity….”

“But do not kill for pleasure,” Marradith repeated. “I remember.”

“You said a prayer for Leighton’s victims,” Justin said, breaking her train of thought. “How did you know that?”

“I don’t know. When I linked to him, I saw that there were many souls attached to him. Most of them left. But there were still a few vengeful ones that stayed until the end. When he died, they were waiting for him. I keep seeing it when I close your eyes.”

He tried to imagine what that must have been like for her. He had never linked to anyone before killing them.

“It was very… humane the way you did it. I was just thinking, that if I ever… was in bad shape, the way he was,” Justin said, “I wouldn’t want to go on that way. I’d want to be taken out. I’d want you to be the one that did it.”

Marradith sat up. “You’re serious?”

“Very.”

He watched her expression. Her body tensed. And then, a subtle change in her eyes.

“Yes. I could do it.”

He put his palm against her cheek, and felt a tear there. He rubbed it away with his thumb.

“That’s a big question,” she said. “I’m kind of horrified. But honored.”

“I have much bigger questions for you than that,” he whispered. “If you’re to be my mate, that is only the first question that I have to ask.”

****

Part 41, JUDAS

  
Scott stood under the shower, letting the hot water stream down his back. He felt good. His muscles were loose. The aches and pains from the night before were long gone, as if they’d never existed in the first place. It was hard to believe that any of it happened. When he got out and examined his reflection in the mirror, not a trace of the burns remained on his neck. Leaning closer to the glass, he wiped away the steam from the mirror with his arm.

Keiko Yasuko stood behind him.

Standing on tiptoe, she leaned to his right. He could only see her eyes and the top of her head. He smiled despite himself. Keiko’s eyes were her most beautiful and dangerous feature. Over the time they’d known each other, he couldn’t count all the men - and girls- she had lured to their death with one attentive stare. Of all the vampires that came to visit his establishment, she intrigued him the most. She was American born, third generation, but also spoke Japanese . She’d told him that it wasn’t until she’d been turned into a vampire that she fell in love with Tokyo. In her human life, she’d never traveled there before. Here, you can do anything you like, she told him once. The sheer numbers of people moving in and out of the city, from all parts of the world, made hunting plentiful, and fun.

He’d watch her lure victims, both inside and out the den. She could be the most tender, gentlest woman… and then the most voracious, vicious creature once her prey was spellbound, and she let the hunger take her.

She put her hand on the back of his neck, stroking his flesh with her soft, cool fingers. “If you’d told me you were going to take a shower, I would have joined you.”

“There’s more hot water,” he replied. “I don’t mind.”

“No,” she teased. “Too late now. You should have woke me up.”

She moved, placing both hands gently on his shoulders. He watched her reflection as she carefully examined his skin. She was close enough that he felt her breasts against his back.

“Why did your sister do that to you?”

Scott sighed. This was the only drawback to taking Keiko’s blood. He felt the difference of it, a little hum in his veins, but it gave Keiko a front row seat to every thought in his mind. Before he could stop himself, he saw it all over again; Marradith with her hands on his neck, burning him. Later, he’d followed her and Will out into the rain and watched her with Leighton. He’d never forget the moment he saw his sister take Leighton’s face in her hands, and the resolve in her eyes when she did it. He knew then exactly what she was going to do. He watched how she kissed his forehead and then ended him.

“Judas,” Keiko whispered, seeing it as if she too had been there.

“Leighton was dying anyway,” Scott said. “Syd should have taken him out months ago, before he ever got that bad off. And I am not hurt.”

“I don’t see how that makes a difference. She tried to hurt you.”

He turned to face her. “She’s a kid. Maybe she’s not very bright, but she’s been brainwashed by Granthem, and all the rest of his group. What’s she supposed to think?”

Keiko shook her head. “You’ve changed so much. I remember when you’d barely take more than a drop of my blood. And now you drink from me, greedily. It’s good. I like it. Just remember, we’re not back at your den anymore. Here, more will be required of you. I know how you love to watch,” she paused, and for a moment Scott was caught up in his memories of the den.

All the forms of violence that excited him.

All the blood.

“Here,” she said coolly. “We take sides. Either you are one of us, or one of them.”

“You know where my allegiances are. And I told you. Marradith is a kid. If you respect me, you’ll leave it alone.”

“Fine,” she said.

He knew that tone. It wasn’t fine at all.

And then, her hands were on his chest, and she was kissing him, and he wasn’t thinking anymore…..

 ©2009 Lori Titus

Lori Titus’s The Marradith Ryder Series appears each Wednesday on Flashes in the Dark. She is the short story editor for Sonar4 ezine. Her stories have appeared on MicroHorror, Shadeworks, and The Daily Tourniquet. Her first anthology of horror stories, Tales for the Dark , is scheduled for release in 2010.

When I was ten-years-old, I dreamt I was a wolf. In my eyes I ran the miles of thicket behind my mother’s house, down the uneven porch steps, through the back gate and into the brush, for years and years. I traveled, down forest paths by dying firefly light and the winding of river beds, along the jagged western cliffs with weathered faces and open mouths. I went to where I could not be found, to crawl inside the bony ribcages of trees and hide under their weeping boughs, until crying so loudly they blocked out the sun above me with their arms. I cried with them.

The moon was my halo, my eyes sharp and teeth like white daggers in its full blush. It held my secrets and my face. I was no longer a child and I would never be a woman, even when my breasts swelled in the following summer and I first felt the flush of adolescence between my thighs. Boys would never look at me like a cheap distraction, with their knobby bodies and hungry hands. My father would never look at me.

As the wolf, sheep and white rabbits lay down with me. They bowed their heads before me as my supper and I knew no fear. The sparrows picked clean the seeds and insects from my fur. Their beaks pulled out the stitches that held my human skin together, sewn in pieces of my mother’s smile, my grandmother’s eyes, and the bruises on my elbows and knees. These things were forgotten, shed like a winter’s coat with the purple outline of my father’s rough palm across my cheek. The forest held me as I slept and made me forget them. As my father had forgotten me, my face and my eyes, when he closed the door to my mother’s house and never returned. 

When I see my father again I’m twenty-four-years-old. I wear heels and a short yellow sundress that looks like summer, and find my father in a phone book, like a ghost or a memory that shouldn’t be. Ghosts shouldn’t have names in phone books, but I follow the trail he leaves behind him to a bar on the edge of town. My father stinks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey and old sweat. He stinks like this bar stinks, looking at me under the flicker of blue neon signage, and smiles, greasy, all teeth. He doesn’t know me anymore.

“You’re a pretty girl,” my father says. His eyes squint when he looks at my hips instead of my face, and he licks the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. It’s a nervous habit. “I can show you a good time, you know.”

When he touches my arm and asks me to come home with him, I only smile. He doesn’t recognize my mother’s mouth on me. I’m glad.

Home is a trailer down a bumpy road in a dusty red pick-up truck. It is the same truck I was laying in the first time my father was inside of me, in the thicket down the road from my mother’s house. Time doesn’t change him. His trailer is small, tired and beige, filled with cheap wooden furniture and old photographs on bookshelves. There are no pictures of me.

My father takes off his jacket and takes me to the bedroom. He puts his hands on my waist and squeezes the bones under my dress, licking his lips again. He isn’t nervous.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” I ask when he tries to put his hand beneath my skirt. I feel sick, my limbs heavy, thin and useless. I hate him for it.

My father is almost laughing. “Does it matter, baby?” he asks. “I know a lot of girls.”

From across the room I see the swollen white moon in slits of light through the bedroom curtains. I can smell and taste his blood through his skin. He tries to kiss me, which he never did before, and stops when he sees me beginning to change.

My fingers extend, followed by my toes, the bones in my arms and legs lengthening under my skin, which gives in the rip-tatter-pop of fresh stitches. The shaggy gray pelt grows into place as my mouth stretches into a muzzle, my teeth growing and vision sharpening. I drop to all fours, my skeleton contorting to fit the shape of the wolf’s body, ligaments tearing, snapping, realigning, and making me more than what I was. I’m no longer my father’s daughter. I’m something else entirely.

He runs and I give chase, out the front door, down the ramshackle wooden steps and dirt driveway. The clearing around the trailer gives way to a sparse patch of forest, the earth soft and cool beneath my feet. Into the thicket I find him, following the scent of his blood and sweat and fear, sticky-sweet and hot in my snout and on my tongue. He’s pathetic, now as he has ever been, towering above my head and in my dreams in his sickness.

I move between the trees. The moon is my cover, to hide my face and keep my secrets in silhouette on the forest floor. Its light cuts through the brush and swallows us whole. He doesn’t see me coming. When I find him, crouched, panting like a frightened rabbit against a tree trunk, I open my jaw. I snare his throat between my teeth, hearing the sick twist-crunch of bone and sinew as I tear it out. He doesn’t scream. There is no time, only his blood in my mouth and on my fur and the moon above my head.

What my father takes from me dies with him, and for it I’m free.

–

©2009 Magen Toole

 
Magen Toole is a student and odd-jobber from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror and The Battered Suitcase. She can be found online at http://magentoole.wordpress.com/