Infernal: Bite The Bullet (9 page)

I recalled what he’d said to me:
Your brother
is dead. For Mariya, there may still be a chance
. Harsh words, but true.
Nothing I did was going to bring Daniel back. Closure was as much as I could
hope for. Was I insane, risking my own life, chasing justice for my brother’s
ghost? Then again, if Konstantyn spoke true, if there were others?

There were others.

I had evidence, and it lay in the pillowcase I
upended on my duvet. I squeezed my eyes shut as the photos spilled out, and
steeled myself to look at them again. Opening one eye, and then the other, I
took up the image closest to me.

It was grainy. They all were, I discovered when I
dared to flick through them, just as they all had time stamps printed on the
bottom, along with the words Gilles de Rais.

Gilles.

That was the name of the person Konstantyn had
said would kill me.

Taking a breath, I gathered the photographs into a
pile and made myself really look, even though, deep down, I was only searching
for one face. They were stills taken from video footage, I realised, full-face
and body shots, chosen to best identify the victims.

It was painful to concentrate on the people in
them. Young, beautiful, naked and bound. Men and women, their tortured eyes
stared out at me, their bodies marked with that same symbol I’d seen on Daniel’s
neck, and on Lazarenko’s arm. The peace symbol, that maybe wasn’t a peace sign
at all, but something much more sinister, because there were other patterns
too, cut into their skin. The whole scene reeked of an occult ritual.

Each victim had been spread out on a strange metal
contraption, and it took flicking through a few different angled shots to get a
clear view of what they were bound to: a seven-pointed star. Their limbs were
locked down to four points, and on the remaining three… a candle and some
serious hardware I didn’t even have names for.

In some of the shots, I could make out other
people, mostly blurred figures on the periphery, but I could see enough to tell
they were shirtless, and wore horned eye-masks and gut-churning smiles.

One photo captured the frozen scream of a woman as
a thick-set man thrust between her thighs. Her chest was splattered with a dark
substance I could only assume was wax, though for all I knew, it might have
been congealed blood.

I shut my eyes. Swallowed hard. Carried on.

There were more shots of the same scene, taken
from an angle that illuminated something through the coarse thatch of hair on
the masked abuser’s back, something that was familiar in the worst possible
way: It was Konstantyn’s back tattoo, inked on another man’s skin. My soul
shivered at the sight. Lazarenko was in this deeper than he’d admitted. If he
bore the marks of both the victims and the abusers, where exactly did that put
him on the scale of good versus evil?

Through the silent, angry tears welling in my
eyes, the images began to blur into one another, that damned seven-pointed star
the focus of every shot, keeping the victim locked into frame, no matter how
they positioned them on it. There was no escaping the pain in the photos, and
no escape for the victims in them. None at all. Not from the camera, and not
from the abusers.

Blinking to clear my vision, I picked up another
bundle of photographs. I was so engrossed in the details that even though I’d
known his picture was in here somewhere, Daniel’s face came as a surprise.

As I looked down at the image I’d dreaded finding,
I felt as though my chest cavity was being prised open. Shocked, I saw that
just like the others, his skin had been defiled with bloody symbols. Yet there
had been no mention of them in the pathology report Oliver Dalton showed me.
How was that possible, unless Lazarenko was right, and the detective was
somehow involved?

My tears splashed onto the picture and the bundle
fell from my hands, scattering on the bedspread. This was my kid brother, who’d
covered over the cracks in our lives with laughter. Who used to overeat because
our mum was never there for us, and then got bullied for his weight. The ugly
duckling who grew into a handsome swan.

Was this how he died?

Were all these people dead? Or were they
somewhere, suffering? For the first time, I began to wonder if death wasn’t the
kinder outcome.

Is this what Konstantyn Lazarenko feared his
sister had been dragged into? No wonder he was going to any lengths to find
her.

I scrubbed the wet tracks from my cheeks with the
back of my hand and opened Konstantyn’s laptop. The thing took forever to boot
up, and when it did, I was met with a formidable looking log-in screen. No
surprise it would be encrypted. Flexing my fingers, I tried a few passwords:
Mariya, Lazarenko, a few serial killer names for good measure. Every variant I
could think of. Nothing. I scrunched up my face in frustration, ready to give
up, when I decided to take one last shot. I typed in Gilles de Rais. Nope.
Still locked out and all my attempts had frozen the screen. I snapped down the
lid of Lazarenko’s laptop and reached for my own.

I got into my own easy enough and ran a search on
Gilles de Rais. Wikipedia threw up a detailed article about a French aristocrat
from the time of Joan of Arc. Some dude from the fourteen-hundreds wasn’t going
to help me. Except as I read through, it became apparent this wealthy Baron and
his sidekick priest had dabbled in alchemy and witchcraft, and had sexually
assaulted, tortured and butchered hundreds of innocent children in the hope of
summoning a demon named Barron.

That was just creepy as fu –

My apartment buzzer went off and I yelped, leaping
out of my skin and off the bed in a scatter of photos. My heart thudded hard as
I crept out of my room to the video entry monitor.

Oh, shit.

The screen showed Detective Dalton standing on the
porch, looking twitchy.

He pressed the bell again, and again more urgently,
and I jumped every time. Twitchy was contagious and I was already on edge.

What the hell did I do now?

I was going to have to answer the thing, before he
broke down the door and caught me red-handed with Konstantyn’s pictures. I
double checked the lock on my door, just in case, before pressing my finger to
the intercom button.

“Detective,” I said. “Sorry, I was in the bath.
This isn’t a good time.”

He looked up and I could see his eyes seeking the
camera on the porch. When he found it, he looked straight into it, and my spine
shivered at the mask of concern on his face.

“Neva, I got your voicemail. I called you right
back, but you weren’t answering your phone.”

That was a lie. He hadn’t called right back. There’d
been no call-back in the time between my leaving the message and the police
bearing down on us. It was as though they’d been lying in wait all along.
Damn
it
.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I seem to have lost my
phone.” I laughed airily, while cursing Konstantyn for making me apparently
justifiably paranoid. “But I’m fine, really.”

“You mentioned a name? A possible suspect?”

“Yeah, about that,” I said, forcing some
embarrassment into my voice. “I may have overreacted. My dance instructor,
Konstantyn, invited me back to his place for a drink after work. I showed him a
picture of Daniel and he said he had videos of him. I realise now, I totally
flew off the handle. He obviously meant the MTV videos my brother danced in.” I
sighed, like I was the stupidest girl in the world, while my heart was twisting
into a knot.

“I see.” Did he sound disappointed? He was
frowning again and he seemed to realise it, his face composing itself right in
front of my eyes. “So he
didn’t
show you pictures of Daniel?”

“No. I panicked and ran. I feel like such a fool
now, honestly. He won’t get into any trouble, will he?”
Like you beating on
him?
Whatever the police had done to him, I didn’t think it would be just
an interrogation. Not from the sounds of things before I’d fled.

“Not if he’s done nothing wrong,” Dalton replied,
his jaw sticking out like he was grinding his teeth. “We’ve taken him in for
questioning, and if we find anything relating to Daniel, you’ll be the first to
know.”

“I appreciate that, Detective. What will happen to
him?” My hand shook on the button as I waited for the response. Surely they
couldn’t kill him? Even dirty cops had limits.

Dalton ran a hand through his hair. “If his story
checks out, and you’re not prepared to press charges, then we’ll have no option
but to release him.”

“That’s good,” I said, trying to disguise the
relief in my voice. “I don’t want to press any charges.”

He breathed heavily and the sound was a hiss
through the intercom. “I suggest you stay away from that man.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” I shook my head
even though he couldn’t see it, but he arched a brow at me through the monitor.
“He kicked me out of the dance troupe,” I explained, and strangely, that didn’t
sting as much as it had done. “I didn’t make the cut.”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry.” Detective Dalton nodded
but he didn’t move, and his presence was grating on my nerves. What did he want
from me? I had to get rid of him.

“I think the offer of a drink was his way of
letting me down easy,” I said.

I was itching to confront the detective about
those symbols cut into Daniel’s skin, and ask why they’d been absent from the pathology
report he’d shown me. At the morgue, he’d been the one to stop me from looking
beneath that sheet. And when I’d asked about the peace symbol, he’d passed it
off a popular tattoo that probably meant nothing. He’d said the symbol was
popular with Gay Pride supporters. I was formulating the questions in my mind,
but how could I ask, without giving both myself and Konstantyn away? “Look, I’m
sorry,” I said eventually, “but I’m dripping all over the floor here. Was there
anything else?”

He frowned with a shake of his head and then
offered a smile up to the camera. “No, Neva. You take care, and get yourself  a
new phone, okay.” Lifting his hand in a wave, he finally stepped off the porch
and I slid down the door with a hard, shaking exhale.

Shit.

After I’d stuffed all of the evidence back in the
pillowcase and hid it under my bed, I decided to have the bath I’d lied to
Dalton about taking. The revelations of the night had left me feeling cold and
unclean. An hour later I emerged from the steamy bathroom wearing fresh yoga
pants and a purple tank top, and I was finger-drying my hair when I realised
something was moving in my hallway. A slow drip, drip sound – like the rain had
come in from the outside – preceded a shuffling step across the rug in front of
the door.

Shit. I had locked it, hadn’t I?

I palmed the gun I’d taken from Konstantyn and
crept forwards. Paused. Rethought what my fear had me doing. I was arming
myself with a weapon I didn’t know how to use, against an intruder I hadn’t
identified, and I really was stupid.

If it was Detective Dalton coming back to unpick
the lame story I’d fed him, then greeting him stolen gun in hand wasn’t going
to help my case.

I peeked around the wall, bringing the gun up
quickly as I confronted the man slumped against my door jamb.

It wasn’t the Detective.

“How the hell did you get in?” I demanded.

My hands shook and I was swallowing my tongue in a
bid to get some kind of threat out.

He beat me to it, his accent rumbling through the
quiet of my apartment.

“Put the gun down, Neva. I just came for my things
and I’ll be out of your life for good,” Konstantyn said.

That’s what every murderer said, right before he
had his hands wrapped around your throat. But his voice did make me lower my
gun. It was broken and ragged, and I frowned, peering closer. I flicked on the
hallway lamp but immediately regretted it.

“Oh my God. What happened? You’re bleeding.” The
man before me was badly beaten, his clothes torn, and he was dripping blood as
well as rainwater on my welcome rug.

Shit.

Konstantyn weaved on his feet, and that was the
decider. I set the gun on the hall table and moved towards him, one palm
pushing the door shut as my other hand gripped his arm in a paltry show of
support. He was clearly weakened, the strength that normally radiated from him
now puddling in a crimson stain on my floor.

“Come on,” I said gently, trying to lead him
inside. It was like moving a bull, even weak as he was. He shrugged me off, and
my hand came away bloody.

“It’s not safe for you with me. I take the stuff
and go.”

“You won’t make it past the threshold. Now sit
down before you keel over.” This time when I tugged at him, he let me get him
as far as the living room before he put the brakes on.

“I will ruin your couch,” he said. He held out his
hands to me and they were red, wet. I was probably insane, but my heart
clenched in sympathy for the pain he must be in, for the pain he was hiding.

“Here.” I grabbed the throw from the back of the
sofa and flicked it out to cover the cushions. “I’ll use it to wrap your body
if you die on me.”

That got me a smirk. It was a comforting sight. If
he was strong enough to be amused, hopefully he was strong enough to not die on
me. Moving his body would be a bitch.

Reluctantly, he sat down.

“Let me look.” I motioned at the blood seeping
through his t-shirt, the same one he’d had on from earlier.

“It’s nothing,” he gruffed. “Superficial wounds.”

My ass they were superficial. “Who did this to
you? We have laws in this country about police brutality, you know.”

He shook his head and his soft smile told me I was
being stupid, like he’d dealt with this before. “Dante respects no law but his
own.”