Authors: A.J. Aalto
The unicorn misunderstood my position and went for his slit again, saying, “Oh, did you want—”
“No!” I said a bit too harshly. “I mean, no thanks, I'm—heh heh—saving myself for the revenant.”
“Right. ‘Revenant’. I don't blame you.” He laughed, breathy inside his unicorn head. “You can't imagine the things he can do.”
Oh, yes I can.
He made sure his penis was secure in his fursuit and I let out the lungful of air I hadn't realized I was holding, but felt no better. In fact, I thought I might just barf all over the inside of my giant squirrel head. Probably, my fever was worsening. Probably, I should be at home in bed. It was too late to call in sick, but maybe I could duck into the bathroom and call in horrified.
“It's early. Your revenant friend probably isn't even awake yet. We can make it another time,” I sidestepped. “I'll give you my number.”
My very, very fake number.
“Marnie, what's wrong?” Chapel whispered.
De Cabrera clicked in my ear, “Why are you aborting?”
I hissed back, “I saw his wiener and now I'm scared.”
De Cabrera laughed helplessly, a sharp hoot in my headphones that stabbed my ear drums.
“Stay with him, Marnie,” Chapel insisted. “Whether he's rounding up people for a revenant or just for himself, we need to find out what he's doing at these parties.”
Rogue revenant or fursuit-wearing serial-killer; I didn't know which to hope for. I made a quiet whimper of protest in the microphone.
Chapel reminded me, “Three people went missing last night.”
“I'm dying with this cold. Pretty sure it's virulent,” I told anyone willing to listen. No one wanted to hear it. The unicorn planted a hand on his flank and shook the other one at me in an exaggerated shame-shame.
“Don't go getting shy on me now, Little Squirrel. Master Malas is waiting, and he's not a patient man. Come on. I'll drive.” Using his cane to propel himself forward, he started limping down the hall, his horsey head looking over his shoulder at me. “I just need to grab my portfolio and close down the booth.” I wished I could see his real eyes, or feel anything at all coming from him, psychically. If he was capable of emotions, he had them behind a carefully constructed wall. “This is going to be so great. You don't happen to have a submissive friend do you?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said smugly, lifting my floppy hand to wave Chapel over. “I'm
positive
I do.”
C
HAPTER
2
I HURRIED AHEAD OF CHAPEL
on asphalt covered with puddles, suspecting that inside his purple cat helmet he was scowling at me. I'd never seen Unflappable Chapel scowl before; I'd be interested to see what sort of changes it made to his plain, no-nonsense features. He should have been happy. If you're about to bust a murderous unicorn, you might as well be halfway amused until the terror clubs you.
I hadn't recognized Ben as the author of the jaguar-chick Manga series, because when I'd pestered him earlier, neither of us had been in costume. We had to watch him sign a few dozen autographs before we could go.
As we got close to his car, he skillfully juggled his portfolio and cane in one hand and keys with the other. Dexterous hands, good for multitasking, I noted, and then immediately wished I hadn't. With a long exhale, he lifted his helmet off to reveal tousled, shoulder-length grey-white hair and a tidy beard on a round face softened by age. On either side of a gin-blossomed nose, blue eyes glistened in the parking lights; they damn near twinkled. Santa in the off-season. Santa with an immense white horn, the phallic significance not lost on me. Santa playing unicorn… please don't kill us, Santacorn.
“You folks got names?” he asked.
Chapel slipped into the back seat, his purple cat head bowed low near his chest and his voice barely audible. “Jim, if it pleases you, sir.”
“I'm not the one you need to worry about pleasing, Jim,” Ben said without skipping a beat. “Malas prefers to surround himself with beautiful women, but if you're compliant enough, you'll do.” He chuckled, privy to an inside joke he didn't bother sharing. “And you, gal? What's your name?”
Nutty Squirrel
.
No.
“Marn—‘
No!
’—jorie. Marjorie.”
“Don't wanna give me your real name, that's cool. I understand, Marjorie.” He smiled, all teeth. “Real names don't matter.”
Especially when you're not expected to live through the night
, I finished for him, while I pulled at my helmet.
It wouldn't come off. I yanked again, forcefully this time, twisting it the way I had practiced in the van; the little latch wouldn't give. Suddenly it seemed eight thousand degrees in that helmet and I had to get it off, and I couldn't breathe, and little black dots started whirling in my vision, and small noises scratched at the back of my germ-ridden throat; though I told myself not to panic, my breath wouldn't come and my eyes started to tear up. Chapel made no move to help me; he stayed in the back seat, chin to chest like an obedient little pet.
I didn't see Ben come around the car until his hands landed on my shoulders. He lifted the helmet off my head easily and I gasped relief.
“There, now. Better?” He smiled down at me from his impressive height. To be fair, I'm only five feet tall; to me, anyone over five-seven is imposing.
“Thanks,”
for not letting me suffocate before you could kill me.
Got to respect a psycho who keeps his eye on the ball. I pulled air deep into my lungs, wishing the night was ten degrees cooler, but what did I expect, wearing yak fur in late August? I should have hydrated fully before the convention, but then I'd have had to pee. To get out of the suit, one needed to be nimble. It had taken the best part of five minutes for me and Chapel to pick up the jellybeans, and I'd re-dumped the bowl twice in the process. Nimble, I ain't.
“Say, I recognize you,” Ben said with warm surprise, putting my squirrel helmet in the back seat beside Chapel, then leaning an elbow against the roof of his green Ford Focus. “I promised you a copy of my book this afternoon.”
“You sure did.”
“You're pretty. Delicate features. Doll-like. Don't mind me saying so, do you?”
I touched my ponytail. “I don't have a wicked case of squirrel head?”
“Not a bit, no.” For a moment something dark lumbered through his eyes, something far less friendly than the twinkle let on. He let his newly-hardened gaze travel down to my Keds and back up.
“Malas is going to like you,” he promised. The humor dropped from his voice like someone had flushed it down an industrial-sized drain pipe.
“These are fake,” I warned with a nervous chuckle, cupping my costume's prominent tits. “Don't know why they added big boobs. It's kinda silly. For a rodent, I mean.”
His answering smile was wide but didn't come anywhere close to reaching his eyes, which were beginning to stir with a nameless passion; the effect on my lower belly was queasily unpleasant.
“Those big blue eyes, so disarming,” he went on, “that ski-lift nose, so charming.”
I gave the requisite smile and pointed. “Ha. You rhymed.”
“Red, red lips like sweet old port …”
I squirmed. “Poetic, that's swell.” I motioned for us to get in the car. He didn't seem to be in a rush anymore. I chanced another peek at his eyes, and despite the sparkle, something seethed there, carefully controlled, as though he were denying himself an urge that I probably didn't want to understand.
Malevolence
, I thought,
that's what I'm seeing. Pure, undiluted malevolence. Dark Lady, have mercy
.
“I've made you uncomfortable, I think.” His voice fell another degree in temperature until the words came out biting cold; warm words, but they fell from his mouth, sharp like icicles, a sensory dissonance that jarred me further towards full-on panic. “Do you taste as good as you look, little squirrel?”
I replied quickly so I didn't have to feel the words on my tongue. “Why don't you find out for yourself?”
“Later. If it's an option,” he said. I wasn't sure what he meant by it, but I didn't like it one bit. He took another wandering look, though what he could possibly tell about my body inside this puffy suit I couldn't guess. Giving an exaggerated shrug, he spun on his heels and walked around the back of the car to return to the driver's side.
When we got in, he insisted on the seatbelts. “Don't want to go before our time,” he said.
All the little hairs on my neck jumped up in alarm; at that point, anyone with half a brain would have kicked the door open and done a Mannix tuck-and-roll into the street, road rash be damned. I, however, tossed him my most trusting smile, with my chin turned artfully; Chapel wasn't the only one studying body language tricks. I even threw in the time-honored flutter of lashes for good measure.
See? I'm a good little victim, Yiff-Master
.
“We sure wouldn't want that,” I agreed, pressing my ankle against the door of the car to reassure myself that the stake was still there. “How long have you known Malas?”
“Two weeks. His previous Master of the Revels disappeared, and I took his place.”
I didn't know what a Master of the Revels was, or if this guy was a garden variety sociopath who would say anything to get victims alone. But a stake in the chest will stop a human even easier than it will a revenant. A human will bleed to death even if your aim is sloppy. With the undead, you had to hit the heart. And, while I preferred not to kill anyone, human or otherwise, if left with no recourse, I wasn't going to hesitate. I'd sworn off over-thinking death; New Year's resolution.
If Ben noticed de Cabrera's unmarked van following us, he gave no indication; he rarely used his mirrors, hurtling through backstreets, pausing at stop signs and running yellow lights. He drove powerfully, pushing limits, taking corners without hesitating. Any attempts I made at small talk were rebuffed, apart from him confirming he was expecting “others.” His manner had gone from solicitous to distracted, except when I was forced to clutch the seat during one of his forceful turns. Then, he smirked. A man who liked to see the effects of his control in all sorts of situations, no matter how small.
When I tried to pull up the Blue Sense again to feel his emotions, I finally got something, if only the obvious:
arousal.
Didn't have to be psychic to notice the erection straining the crotch of his outfit. Would there really be a revenant at the end of this ride? (
“Malas is going to like you.”
) Would the revenant share, if he liked his little gifts? (“
No humans in the furpile
.”) Was the furpile going to include something truly furry? That'd be a bad shock: that giant costumed wolf is actually — surprise! — a werewolf.
When he pulled into the suburbs, I relaxed; surely, whatever he had planned for us wasn't going to go down in one of these cute little houses with the picture-perfect lawns and yellow marigolds. Ben took a quick left turn uphill on a hard-to-spot side street, slipping behind the rows of cookie-cutter bungalows, winding up into the high red rocks; the instant he did, the pressure building in my forebrain
kersploded
and the psychic headache vanished. I quietly wished that I was having an aneurism and was seconds from my untimely death. Better to expire flopping and drooling than flinging myself into the lap of a homicidal revenant dressed like Huckleberry Hound, right? I waited for my brain to stutter to a halt, but my brain hates me, so it kept chugging along.
The road became steep enough to make the car strain to hold its speed. Both shoulders were treacherous, one side a crumbling hill dotted with deep green scrub and conifers visible only as dark splotches in the failing light, the other side a black drop-off above a twinkling suburban paradise.
When the house finally came into view at the top of the hill, I thought,
That's more like it
. It was a house ordered direct from Central Casting for murder and mayhem. Norman Bates and his single-minded mother would have been right at home, and there was room left over to have the Addams Family over to visit. If I was going to die on a dark and stormy night at the hands of an undead pervert and his horse-cocked unicorn of an assistant, I wanted it to happen in a horror movie mansion like this one. I sniffled, took a tissue from Ben's console to dab delicately, and wondered if Harry would appreciate my manners. I was ready to go, screaming and flailing, but I wasn't gonna do it snot-nosed; that simply wouldn't do.
The house's appearance had a palpable effect on Chapel; from the back seat I felt a splinter of dread vigilantly contained and quelled by logic, which surely reminded him that a house is a house, even if it looks like it should be the domain of unspeakable evil. While Chapel's gut told him
bolt, get out of the car, run
, I could count on the fact that, no matter what he was feeling on the inside, he'd do and say exactly what was needed. That gave my own courage a boost.
A veritable Second Empire Gothic manse, the house loomed beige and tall and narrow, much like Agent Chapel, and was just as serious
across the face. It lurked in the dusk as a dozen discreet solar-powered lights shaped like small Parisian streetlamps started to light up the long drive. Cloistered by mature trees on three sides, the house towered above the highest branches. Jutting mansard mansion roofs of patterned slate cut the night sky. Dropped into the suburbs below, the house would have appeared a prince among peasants, its wrought iron cresting like a dragon's black spine along the upper cornice, its tall, empty windows the melancholy eyes of a captive audience witness to foul deeds and ghastly times.
Ben settled the Focus in the driveway beside an old yet immaculately maintained black Bentley, its piano-black clear coat buffed to a high shine. Harry would approve. There were tiny sparks of light in the hedgerow. I swallowed, heard a dry click in the back of my throat.
“Your revenant friend, he likes to leave the Christmas lights on all year, huh?” I commented, more to hear myself talk than to get an answer. Christmas in August. Christmas all year long for Santacorn and Master Malas. “I thought there would be others. Are we the first to arrive?”