Desolation

  Goulder stormed over. “What the hell did you do?”

  “He shouldn’t have said those things to me,” Demer mumbled.

  “So you shot him? You shot him?”

  “He pissed me off,” said Demer. “He disrespected me.”

  “He was yanking your chain, man! It’s what he did!”

  Demer shook his head. “There’s no excuse for disrespect.”

  “Demer, you crazy bastard, you can’t go around killing everyone that disrespects you, man!”

  Demer narrowed his eyes, and Goulder held up his hands and backed off.

  “Hey,” said Goulder, “I am not disrespecting you right now. You have my utmost respect. I do not call you crazy bastard as an insult, or a slight. I use it as a term of endearment. That being said, you just shot and killed Bowsher for words that came out of his mouth in the heat of the goddamn moment.”

  “You gotta learn some impulse control,” said Sam.

  “That,” Goulder said, nodding. “Impulse control. That’s exactly it. I mean, I get it, man, I do. I’m a serial killer, just like you are. We’ve all got issues. But this is a very special night, one where all our dreams can come true. Now we made a deal, when we got here, that we would work together. The four of us. Four serial killers working towards a common goal. That is unheard of, my friend. We are breaking the mould. So you can’t, and I say this with all due respect, you cannot go around shooting your partners in the goddamn head.”

  “He shouldn’t have said those things,” Demer muttered.

  “I understand that.”

  “I was in a really good mood.”

  “I know, man. And he upset you. He ruined your good mood. But the three of us can only go forward if we trust each other. Do you trust us, Demer?”

  “I guess.”

  “And we wanna trust you. We really do.”

  “You can.”

  “You just killed Bowsher, dude. Killed him. He was one of us.”

  “I just … I got confused,” said Demer. “I got the red mist.”

  “Hey, brother, I know. When that red mist settles in, you’re not in your right mind, are you? You can’t be blamed for the things you do.”

  “He kept jabbing at me,” said Demer. “Poking. You don’t … you don’t poke the bear.”

  “You do not,” Goulder agreed. “You are the bear he should not have poked.”

  “I’m sorry I killed him.”

  “Hell, that’s okay. Water under the bridge, you know? But, the thing is, we need your word that you’re not gonna turn around and kill us over something stupid that we say.”

  “I promise.”

  “You do, huh? Sam, that okay with you?”

  “Sure,” said Sam. “Whatever.”

  “It’s good with me, too. Demer, we’re in this to the end, you get me? We’re in this until all our dreams come true.”

  Demer nodded, an uncertain smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “Good man,” said Goulder. He took the gun from Demer’s hand. “I’m just taking this as a precaution. We don’t want you to get overexcited again, do we? You goddamn nutcase.”

  “Hey now,” Demer said, and Goulder shot him in the heart.

  Sam shrieked and hopped back on one leg as Demer fell, dead.

  Goulder immediately turned. “You know why I had to do that.”

  “You killed him!”

  “I had to.”

  “But what was all that you were saying about us having to trust each other? You made him trust you and you killed him!”

  “Demer was unstable, Sam. Jesus, come on. How can we work with a guy who’s liable to shoot us for saying the wrong thing at any moment? Did you trust him not to kill us?”

  “No,” said Sam, “but still … that was cold. He was one of us. Four serial killers working towards a common goal. Those were your words, man. Those were your words and then you lulled him into a false sense of security and—”

  “I’m gonna need you to calm down, Sam.”

  “Or what? You gonna kill me, too?”

  They stared at each other.

  Goulder laughed. “No, I’m not gonna kill you. Course I’m not. You gonna kill me?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “So we’re okay? The two of us?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Bowsher and Demer … we didn’t need them.”

  “Bowsher was all mouth,” Sam agreed. “And Demer was nuttier than a squirrel’s jockstrap. Better off without them.”

  “Truer words never spoken,” said Goulder. “This is still our night.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Goulder turned to Kelly. “Now then, the demon girl’s number?”

  Sam put his gun to the back of Goulder’s head and pulled the trigger.

  It went click.

  Goulder turned to him slowly. “You. Dick.”

  The blood draining from his face, Sam spun and ran, and Goulder took careful aim. His finger tightened and the shot rang out and he caught Sam in the lower back and Sam grunted, staggered, reached behind himself like he was trying to scratch an itch, and then he fell over and lay still.

  “Goddamn,” Goulder whispered, then turned to Kelly and the others. “You try to build a community, you know? You try to form an alliance. This is what happens when you dream too big. I should’ve known. I should’ve known to keep my dreams manageable – like the Shining Demon granting me power. That I can do.” He pointed the gun at Kelly’s face. “Call your girlfriend.”

  He wasn’t going to ask again, she could see it in his eyes. Awkwardly, because of her bound hands, Kelly took her phone from her pocket. “She might not answer.”

  “You better hope she does.”

  Kelly found Amber’s number, pressed call. She put it on loudspeaker so Goulder could hear. The gun didn’t waver. The phone rang. Each inquisitive dial tone was a countdown to that trigger being pulled. Kelly closed her eyes.

  There was a crash and she jumped, thought for a millisecond that it was the gunshot that would end her life even while her brain was registering the sound of breaking glass. She looked up as a demon with wings – actual wings – landed through the east window. Goulder fired three times. Three times, the demon grunted, but his skin was too tough for the bullets to penetrate. He stalked forward with big teeth and a manic grin.

  Goulder fell back against a desk and the demon lunged at him, mouth open to bite, and Goulder jammed his pistol into that mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Maybe the bullet would have exited through the back of the demon’s throat, leaving him injured but enraged, were it not for the skin that refused to break. As it was, the bullet must have ricocheted around in the skull and turned the demon’s brain to grey-matter stew, because he collapsed immediately, one eye dripping from its socket.

  Goulder straightened up, got his bearings, and chuckled. He turned and Kelly drove her elbow into his jaw. He staggered and Kelly dived for the gun, but he shoved her away. She fell back and heard him shriek and there was a crash and now she could hear Two, growling ferociously. She looked to see the dog’s jaws clamped around the killer’s wrist.

  Ronnie grabbed the fallen gun and Warrick called off Two. Immediately, Goulder reared up and immediately Ronnie put him down again.

  “You should really have tied our hands behind our backs,” Ronnie told him.

  Goulder looked up, his wrist mangled and blood pumping from his nose, and managed a helpless shrug. “You just … you just didn’t look that dangerous.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ronnie said, “appearances can be deceiving,” and he clubbed Goulder into unconsciousness.

  When he was done, and as he was paying the others the money he’d lost from a month-old bet, Two came over, sniffed Goulder’s head, and then humped it to satisfaction.

  SOMEWHERE IN DESOLATION HILL there was an explosion. It was followed by hollers and cheers and howls, lauding the destruction, revelling in it. Somewhere else a car crashed. Alarms went off. Gunshots ran
g out as cops fought to keep the murders to a minimum. Madness seeped through the night like a fog, wrapping its tendrils around everything and everyone. On one end of Main Street, beyond the square, there was a riot. On the other end, Amber stood facing her parents.

  “This the part where you try to kill me again?” she asked.

  Betty shared a sharp-toothed smile with her husband. “Are you liking this new attitude? I have to confess, I am.”

  “This kind of assertiveness would certainly have made for more dynamic family dinners,” Bill said. “Instead, we had to sit there with a bored, uninterested lump who barely looked up from her phone.”

  “Always on those messageboards.”

  “Those forums.”

  “With her online friends.”

  “Well,” said Amber, “at least I wasn’t killing my own kids. What were their names, by the way? My brother and sister?”

  “We called her Carolyn,” said Betty. “We called him James.”

  “What were they like?”

  “He was … unhappy,” said Betty. “We didn’t treat him particularly well. By the time Carolyn arrived, though, we had all agreed that the best way to approach what we were doing was to treat all of you children like real, actual people. We reasoned that you would be easier to handle if you were raised under the illusion of happiness.”

  “There were stumbling blocks,” said Bill. “Carolyn proved to be just as difficult as James, in the end. But we learned. Then you came along, naïve and blinkered and so obsessed with your own self-imposed loneliness that you never for one moment questioned anything around you.”

  Betty smiled again. “The perfect daughter.”

  “Indeed she was.”

  “You can try to play on my insecurities and make me feel bad,” said Amber, “but, once again, at least I’m not killing my own kids.”

  Betty laughed. “Feisty. I like it.”

  “And it actually makes me proud,” Amber continued, “to know that my big sister and my big brother were problems for you. It helps me know them, just a little. I mean, really, are you so surprised that things have worked out the way they have? Alastair’s dead. Grant’s dead. Imelda betrayed you and helped me. When you look at it, and think about it, everything I’ve done to ruin you and your lives and everything you’ve worked for … well. I’m just carrying on the family tradition.”

  Her parents weren’t smiling anymore.

  Then something hit Amber right between the shoulder blades with the force of a wrecking ball, and she flew forward. Betty dodged out of the way as she went sprawling, and Amber didn’t even have time to look back before someone was grabbing her hair.

  “You little bitch!” Kirsty screamed, and slammed Amber’s face on to the road. Through watering eyes, she glimpsed Kirsty stand, and then her boot came in. Scales formed, but even so the kick almost took her head off. Amber tried to roll away, tried to ward her off, tried to speak even, but her body was slow to respond and Kirsty wasn’t giving her much of a chance. Another kick flipped her on to her back, maybe broke another rib, and now Kirsty was straddling her, her fists coming down like pistons.

  Then those hands wrapped around her throat. Amber’s scales formed, but it was no use, Kirsty was just too strong. At first, Amber thought this strength came from anger, but there were pieces of bloody meat in Kirsty’s clenched teeth. Kirsty was sizzling after eating, but, unlike Amber, that strength hadn’t been used up healing gunshot wounds.

  Amber tried to slice through Kirsty’s fingers, but her claws tapped uselessly against Kirsty’s own scales. She blinked away tears, looking for help, holding her hand out to her parents who were standing there, looking at her. Laughing.

  “He liked you,” Kirsty snarled. “Grant actually liked you. And you kill him? You kill him?”

  Darkness closed in on the edges of her vision. All Amber could see now was Kirsty, every muscle bunched and her eyes burning with hatred. Amber had no strength of her own left. Every moment that passed without oxygen sapped her reserves.

  Bizarrely, her mind drifted to the second season finale of In The Dark Places. Balthazar was being drowned by his brother, submerged in the stream that ran behind his estate. Their eyes locked through the rushing water and Balthazar’s final act of defiance was to flip Gideon the bird. It was a good final act. Iconic even. Back when Amber had a decent phone, that image was her wallpaper.

  Weakly, Amber gave Kirsty the finger, stuck it right in front of her face, in honour of the greatest show ever put on TV.

  But instead of ignoring it and continuing to choke her, as Gideon had – which had led to months of online speculation as to whether or not Balthazar was truly dead – Kirsty’s face twisted and she grabbed Amber’s finger and wrenched it, nearly broke it, but Amber could actually cry out in pain now that she was able to breathe again.

  Amber’s other hand found a spot on Kirsty’s right side that wasn’t protected by scales, and she grew claws and slid those in. Kirsty’s eyes widened and she gasped and moved and Amber threw her off, then rolled over, sucking in air, stumbling and then getting to her feet as Kirsty rose to her knees, clutching her side.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Kirsty said. “I’m going to rip your throat out.”

  “Now, Kirsty, just wait a moment,” said Bill. “I want you to think about this. Our plans are a tad up in the air right now, agreed?”

  “Screw your plans!”

  “We need to talk to Amber. That’s all. We need her in order to find a solution to all this. We need her, for the moment, alive.”

  Kirsty stared, incredulity momentarily overtaking her rage. “She killed Grant,” she said, like she was explaining it to four-year-olds.

  “We realise that,” said Betty. “And we know we’re asking a lot.”

  “She dies now,” Kirsty said, turning back to Amber. “She dies right now.”

  Kirsty started to lunge, but there was suddenly someone behind her, holding her in place with a grip she couldn’t break. It was Glen, it was dreadfully pale Glen, and Amber only had time to glimpse his dreadfully pale face before he clamped his mouth down on Kirsty’s neck.

  She stiffened, tried to cry out, but nothing came, and blood started trickling to her collarbone as Glen drank. Bill and Betty stared, too shocked to move for a few seconds. Then Bill rushed forward, and Betty followed, and Glen wrapped his arms around Kirsty, turned his dead eyes on Amber for a moment, and then took Kirsty up with him, and they vanished into the night sky.

  FOR A LONG MOMENT, nothing was said.

  “There’s something you don’t see every day,” Bill muttered.

  Betty grabbed Amber, hurled her off her feet and she smashed through a sheet of plywood and the store window it was put up to protect. She hit the ground and rolled and lay in the dark for a moment, getting really sick of people throwing her all over the place.

  Bill and Betty stepped into the travel agency office after her.

  “You have a vampire friend, do you?” Betty asked. “Not smart, sweetheart. You can’t trust them.”

  “You mean like I can trust you?” Amber said as she got up. Glass fell from her hair.

  “We’re not having this discussion right now,” Betty said. She was a mere silhouette against the street lights outside. “There are two keys that will take us to Naberius. A shapeshifter has one of them – we’ll leave it with him. Your little friend Austin vanished with the other. Where would he have gone?”

  Amber frowned. “Did he use it? The key, did he use it?”

  “He used it,” said Bill. “Where did it take him?”

  Amber sagged against a desk and shook her head.

  “Amber, where did it take him?”

  She looked up. “Naberius needed a sacrifice to set off Hell Night.”

  “So?” said Betty. “What does …? Oh.”

  “He’s dead?” Bill asked. “The little brat got himself killed? What happens to the key?”

  “It’s probably still down there,” said Amber. ??
?Looks like your plan is screwed, Dad. You may as well start running again.”

  “Don’t talk to your father in that tone,” said Betty.

  Amber couldn’t help it. She laughed.

  “Well, there appears to be only one way of salvaging the situation,” Bill said. “We have to bring her to Astaroth.”

  Betty looked at him. “You don’t think he’ll find out we tried to betray him?”

  “I think he already knows, but, if we present her to him on a silver platter, he may overlook our … eagerness.”

  “I always hated when you did that,” said Amber. They looked at her, waiting for an explanation. “Talking about me like I wasn’t there. It made me feel invisible.”

  “Childhood is a difficult time,” Bill said dismissively.

  Betty touched her husband’s arm and he turned, and they all looked out through the broken window as a demon with skin the colour of moonlight staggered into view and dropped, gasping, to his knees.

  And then a Hound appeared behind him.

  Bill and Betty ducked down and Amber dived behind the desk. She waited a moment, then peeked out as the Hound, big and bearded with tattoos on his bare arms, laid a hand on the demon’s shoulder. The demon screeched, his body locked in agony. The Hound’s hand glowed and the demon started to sizzle. Steam rose from his skin, his eyes, his mouth …

  He was being burned from the inside out.

  The screech was cut off. The demon sighed and died, and fell forward, and the Hound turned his head, looked right through the window.

  Suddenly Bill was grabbing Amber and hauling her to her feet. “We have her!” he called. “We have her for you! We did as Astaroth commanded!”

  Amber tried to pull away, but Betty smacked her across the face, and when her thoughts managed to rearrange themselves into some form of coherence she was already being dragged out on to the street.

  The Hound stood waiting, and when she was close enough he reached for her – and for Bill.

  Amber jerked rigid at his touch, so fast that she almost snapped her own neck. She screamed, was only dimly aware of Bill’s screams adding to hers. Her body burned. Every nerve ending was on fire. She could feel her insides starting to boil.