Hi! I’m experimenting with posting weekly fiction episodes on Substack. I’m sure I’ll screw things up as I go.
The smell of leather.
The taste of blood.
She’d had enough bloody lips, enough little splinters or small cuts she’d automatically sucked at, to know that metallic tang.
Anastasia felt so groggy, so… thick. She licked wetness from her lips and tasted it again. But her lips didn’t hurt. Maybe she’d scraped herself in her sleep, she didn’t know.
Something tight around her throat. Her wrists felt cold and clammy.
She tried to open her eyes. Her eyelids felt like dirty cotton, all dry and hot.
Her nose itched.
She went to scratch it… she couldn’t move her hands. Something around her wrists.
Anastasia felt a stab of fear.
Her eyes opened, narrow slits full of blurry brightness. Candles? A bunch of candles? A room, tastefully and expensively decorated — old wood, bookshelves, a Turkish rug, pricey knickknacks.
She remembered where she was. The ugly Christmas sweater party. At the brownstone of Dimitri’s friend Chuck. Anastasia had snagged her mother’s holiday lights sweater — the little bulbs actually lit up, super cute — and slipped out, taking the subway with Kate. Her sweater had a gingerbread man with squinty eyes on it, the words LET’S GET BAKED stitched on the bottom.
There were supposed to be dozens of people at the party, rich kids like her, artists and models and rappers and singers and actors, and wine, and all the nose candy she could toot, Dimitri had promised.
But there hadn’t been anyone there other than Dimitri and his two friends. Chuck and Arty. The others were coming, Dimitri had said.
He’d given her wine. Red wine. A glass for her and Kate both. Chuck had dared them to pound the first glass. He had teased: You’re not a little girl anymore, are you? Anastasia had looked to Dimitri, hoping he’d back her up, but he’d only smiled, shrugged, then drained his own glass. Kate chugged hers.
Anastasia had followed suit, because Kate was a year older, a junior, and already getting her driver’s license. Anastasia hadn’t wanted to look weak or stupid, didn’t want to disappointment Dimitri’s, so she’d forced her wine down in big gulps.
Then she’d felt sleepy. Arty had held up something. Two somethings. Circles of black leather. Connected with…
…with…
…with chains.
Another stab of fear, this one far worse. Her hands were at her waist. She tried to pull them, heard the rattle of metal and the creak of leather, but she couldn’t move them. Leather on her wrists, tight around her neck.
Oh, God…
Dimitri and Chuck and Arty had drugged her, and bound her.
She heard her own ragged gasps. Tears wet her eyes, chasing away the cotton, letting her see. Candles, everywhere. The brownstone’s living room. She was on a white couch. Lights glowed on a green Christmas tree. A small fire crackled in a small fireplace.
Someone on the couch next to her — Kate, in her brown sweater with the white trim, leaning on the arm rest, facing away. Her hands at her sides, held by black leather cuffs affixed to a gleaming chain around her waist. From that chain, a leather strip ran up her back, where a gleaming ring connected it to a leather collar around her neck.
Kate wasn’t moving.
No one else in the room.
Anastasia fought against a scream. Maybe Dimitri and the others didn’t know she was awake yet. What were they going to do to her?
“Kate,” she whispered. “Kate, wake up. We’re in trouble.”
Kate didn’t move.
Anastasia clumsily leaned toward her friend, bumped her shoulder. Kate slid off the couch, slumped on the floor.
At first, Anastasia saw only the blood streak on the couch’s cushion, on the arm rest, candle-lit red against snow-white linen. Then, she looked down at her friend.
A blood-soaked hole in the center of her chest, right through the gingerbread man’s squinty face. In that hole, Anastasia saw bits of blood-smeared, broken bone, and a hole where Kate’s heart should have been.
The taste of blood — Kate’s blood had splashed on Anastasia’s lips.
A scream erupted from Anastasia, but it sounded oddly muffled, deadened, and that, too, was terrifying in itself. She screamed again, even louder, but what came out was even quieter.
“That won’t work here, my sweet.”
Dimitri stood in the wide, arched entryway leading to the dining room. It was and it wasn’t him. His voice. His so-ugly-it’s-cute green and red checkered sweater with gold tinsel spelling out ON THE NAUGHTY LIST. His gorgeous brown hair. But not his face. Not anyone’s face. Green-black skin. Red eyes. A smile that showed pointed teeth, teeth streaked with blood, bits of raw meat stuck between some of them.
“I find gag-balls to be so cliche,” the thing said. “Easier just to turn the room’s volume down a bit, don’t you think?”
Dimitri’s voice. The same voice that had read her poetry, had sang her songs.
In his green-black hand, a hand that now had long, pointed, ice-black nails, a chunk of raw meat.
Kate’s heart.
Bits of which were stuck between Dimitri’s teeth.
“Thank you for bringing your friend,” Dimitri said. “Kate was quite trooper.”
Anastasia’s father had told her not to see Dimitri. He’d said the boy was trouble. She’d ignored her father. She’d thought he wanted to keep her locked away like some kind of pet, thought he couldn’t handle her becoming a woman.
How wrong she had been.
“Let me go,” she said, her words the thinnest ribbon of breath. “Let me go.”
Dimitri smiled, showing more of his pointed teeth.
“We will, in a way,” he said. “Eventually, you’ll get shit out just like Kate will. And some Kung Pao shrimp we had for lunch. Too spicy for me, but Chuck loved it. Kate’s our first dinner course. We saved you for last. While we eat our fill of her, me and the boys can have some fun with you.”
He stepped into the living room.
Anastasia’s legs wouldn’t move. Not from restraints, but because they wouldn’t obey her. She tried to shrink away, like a puppy afraid of the master’s angry hand, but all she did was pus her back against the couch.
“Just a little spell to keep you in place,” Dimitri said. “The restraints are Arty’s. He likes that bondage stuff.”
Chuck and Arty walked in, stood at Dimitri’s sides. The same red eyes, the same blood-smeared teeth, although Chuck’s skin was more blue-black and Arty’s was more taupe. Chuck’s sweater was blue, with a Santa peeing an arc of yellow off a snow-covered roof. Arty’s sweater had the words WHEN I THINK ABOUT YOU, I TOUCH MY ELF, complete with a smiling stuffed elf stitched on that hung over his crotch.
“Dib’s on Ana’s fingers,” Chuck said.
He had the deepest voice of the three, a man’s voice in a teenager’s body. Anastasia had wondered if he might become a voice actor someday.
The flapping of bird wings startled everyone, so out of place inside the brownstone. A crow flew into the room and madly circled near the walls, wingspan almost as wide as Anastasia was tall.
“One two three three three,” the crow said. “That’s your ass, your ass, your ass!”
With that, the bird shot out of the room, heading for the stairs that led to the second floor.
A dead friend. Heart-eating monsters. And now, a talking crow.
“Chuck,” Dimitri said, “did you open a window upstairs?”
Chuck’s monster face stared blankly. “It was hot up there.”
Arty’s red eyes widened. Monster or not, Anastasia saw the fear on his face.
“I think that was Shitbird,” he said. “We’re in trouble, you guys. I’m getting out of here.”
Dimitri used the hand holding the shredded heart to point at Arty.
“You stay right there,” Dimitri said. “If you run, I’ll—“
A loud-as-hell bang of breaking wood and bending metal. Something had hit the front door, undoubtedly smashing it inward.
The sound of booted feet on the entryway’s tile floor, calmly walking closer. No one moved.
A man stepped into the living room. A slate-grey robe covered him head to toe, its hood hiding his face in darkness.
“Dimitri Ivanko,” the man said. “There’s a price on your head. That head is coming with me. Whether or not the rest of your body comes with it is up to you.”
Anastasia’s mind reeled. Could this be a nightmare? It all felt so real.
“Look what the raven dragged in,” Dimitri said. “If it isn’t the Rixator-turned-bounty-hunter. You must be out of the loop, man. If you knew who you were fucking with, you wouldn’t have come. Chuck, bring me this prick’s heart.”
Growling like a bear, Chuck took a tentative step forward, stopped when the man in gray raised a hand.
“I ain’t here for you,” he said to Chuck. He looked at Arty. “Or you. You can both walk. But if you come at me, I will cut you down.”
Chuck glanced at Dimitri.
“Either you kill him,” Dimitri said, “or I kill you.”
Chuck rushed forward, hands extended, sharp claws leading the way, Kate’s blood still gleaming on them in ruby streaks.
The Man in Grey flipped his cloak aside. In an instant, Anastasia saw hints of dark-grey armor, a holstered pistol, a sheathed knife as long as her arm, but he didn’t grab those — his right came out holding a little axe.
A hatchet, she remembered, just as Chuck closed in claws-first.
The Man in Grey sidestepped and chopped down. A sound like breaking branches wrapped in a wet blanket. Chuck’s leg dropped off at the knee. He screamed the scream of a demon, tumbled into the Christmas tree, knocking it over in a clatter of ornaments and hissing branches, his blood flying everywhere. Hideous lips in a sharp-toothed howl of agony, Chuck grabbed at his spurting leg.
The hatchet came down fast and hard, thunked into Chuck’s head. The monster in the pissing-Santa sweater shuddered, twitched, then fell to his side against the toppled tree, his dead weight smashing delicate ornaments.
The Man in Grey yanked the hatchet free, turned and faced Dimitri.
Anastasia’s boyfriend didn’t look quite so confident anymore.
“Listen, hunter,” he said. “We can work something out.”
For the first time, Anastasia realized it wasn’t the hood that hid the man’s face, but rather a blackness, dense like the smoke of an oil fire. The blackness quivered slightly with his ever move, his every word.
“Too late for that, Ivanko,” he said.
Dimitri ran for the dining room.
The hatchet whizzed through the air, a blurred circle of death; the blade dug deep between Dimitri’s shoulder blades. He grunted and fell face-first, smacking hard against the floor.
The grey hood turned toward Arty.
“Um… I’ll just see myself out,” Arty said.
He walked quickly toward the wide arch that led to the foyer, his green-black monster face wincing the whole way as if he expected to be struck, but the Man in Grey ignored him. Instead, the cloaked figure strode toward Dimitri, who was crawling across the floor.
The man yanked the hatchet free, raised it, brought it down hard and final on the back of Dimitri’s neck.
Dimitri’s head rolled free, stub of a neck squirting red blood across the floor.
His back now to Anastasia, the man again reached into his cloak, came out with a box of some kind — a head-sized box, made of metal and etched with weird little symbols. In went Dimitri’s severed head. The man pulled the box close. Anastasia saw his cloak ripple, but when he stood and faced her, the box was gone.
The shadow-faced man walked toward her, hatchet still in hand. Anastasia winced, tried to lean away.
“Oh,” the man said. “Sorry about that.” He wiped the blade of his hatchet against the couch, then slid it inside his cloak. “I’m not going to hurt you. Stay still.”
As if she had any choice.
He undid her restraints, tossed them on the floor.
She stood — her legs worked again.
“Don’t run,” the man said. “If you do, that other one could get you.”
Chuck, dead. Dimitri, dead. They’d killed Kate, but they hadn’t done it alone.
“The other one’s name is Arty,” Anastasia said. “He’s getting away.”
She heard the terror laced in her words, and yet she was oddly surprised that she wasn’t a babbling, insane wreck.
“He’s not my problem,” the man in gray said.
Anastasia looked into the wavering smoke covering the man’s face, searching for eyes, for any semblance of the person behind it, found none.
“But he’s a monster,” she said. “He’ll do this to someone else. Aren’t you… I mean… well, aren’t you a monster hunter or something?”
Monster hunter. It sounded ridiculous to say those words out loud, like that was reality and not something from one of her little brother’s video games, but that’s what Dimitri had called the man.
That, and… Rixator?
“My work carries a price,” he said. “Are you putting a bounty on Arty’s head?”
“A… what? A bounty? No, I’m only fifteen.”
Whatever it was that covered his face receded, a spent wave sliding back across the sand and into the sea. What lie beneath was both comforting and terrifying in its own right. Comforting because he was human, something she’d taken for granted but not anymore. He was old man, maybe thirty or forty, Anastasia wasn’t good at guessing ages, with high cheekbones and a heavy jaw. Terrifying because of his bright, steel-gray eyes, or rather, what was in them — an analytical coldness that made her shiver.
The eyes of a butcher, maybe, of someone who kills without a second thought.
“Then this Arty isn’t my problem. Pay to slay, girl.”
He paused, waiting for something. Did he think that slogan was cool, maybe?
“Are you hurt, girl? Did they bite you?” He glanced down at her waist. “I mean, anywhere?”
Just the thought of that was almost as bad as Kate’s heart being ripped out. Almost.
“I don’t think so.” Tears came now, unbidden and unstoppable. Anastasia wiped them away. “If they did… do I turn into one of them?”
He smiled ruefully, his gray-peppered stubble making deep laugh lines at the corners of his mouth seem deeper, darker, only Anastasia had a feeling those lines weren’t from laughing. Screaming lines, maybe?
“They weren’t those kind of monsters,” he said. “Regular-old carnivores, with a sadistic streak.”
“There was nothing regular about them. Or you.”
The man in gray huffed. “You can say that again. You saw them as they truly are? Faces like a rhino’s ass?”
A single laugh unexpectedly slid out of Anastasia’s mouth. What a funny expression, and yet, kind of accurate. She’d seen that animated GIF with the rhino pooping.
“Yes,” she said. “They were horrible. Monsters are real. I have to tell someone. Everyone. What are they? What are you?”
“You’ve seen too much,” he said. “You won’t be telling anyone anything.”
Those cold, cold eyes. The darkness lurking within them.
Was he going kill her?
The doorbell rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“It’s all right,” the man said. He turned his head, shouted toward the door. “Fucking come in already.”
Anastasia heard the door creak, heard the clatter of small steps. Children?
They entered the living room. Five of them. They weren’t children, unless children could somehow grow white beards that hung down to pot bellies. Little people. Very little, not even three feet tall. They wore pointy, black leather hats. The one in front wore leather pants held up by sparkly pink suspenders. No shirt. Curly white chest hair. His leather crotch stuck out obscenely. Did he have a boner?
With him, two little people girls, two little people boys. The girls wore fishnet stockings and red miniskirts. One wore a tight shirt that said DADDY’S LITTLE HO on it. The boy on the left wore nothing but a jockstrap dotted with rhinestones, the one on the right a leather mask with a zipper for a mouth.
The one in front, with the suspenders, glanced at Arty, then Kate, then Dimitri.
“This is a bit of a mess,” he said. “You want the bodies removed? Property damage fixed?”
“Bodies stay,” the Man in Gray said. “Clean it all up, Bingles. The usual — make it look like nothing happened. Leave it for the cops.”
The little man — Bingles, apparently — hooked his thumbs in his suspenders.
“Gotta get real dirty to get real clean,” he said. “Job looks like seven pieces of gold, six of silver.”
The Man in Gray nodded. “Fair enough. I got to collect the bounty first.”
“On credit again, huh?” Bingles sighed. “And when can we expect payment?”
“A couple of days, maybe,” the Man in Gray said. “I have to do a job for Callista first.”
At the mention of Callista, whoever that was, Bingles’s eyebrows rose.
“Yeah, sure, Linc,” he said. “No problemo. But just once, maybe, when you call us, you could have money on-hand? No big whoop. You want us to get started? My cock’s so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it.”
The Man in Gray’s eyes narrowed. “Reel in the language, Bingles. This girl is underage.”
The bearded little man shrugged.
“Well, this orgy ain’t gonna suck itself,” he said. “Say, you want in on the action this time? Timtom here’s been talking about what a fine ass you got.”
The one in the jockstrap grinned wide and pointed to, well, to his jockstrap.
The Man in Grey shuddered. “No thanks. You got a forget-me-dot on you, by chance?”
“Puh-leeze,” Bingles said. “I don’t, and even if I did, I wouldn’t sell it to you on credit. Work on your cash flow, man.”
The Man in Grey’s cold eyes again locked with Anastasia’s. He reached into his cloak, came out with a small silver flower, five teardrop-shaped pedals angling up slightly from a bumpy central ring.
“It’s going to be okay,” he sad. “You’re not going to remember any of this.”
Anastasia stared at the delicate, gleaming bit of silver.
“What is that?”
“It’s complicated. They’re crazy expensive. This is my last one. After what you’ve been through, I think you deserve it.”
Anastasia glanced at her dead friend, at the two monsters bodies leaking blood across the hardwood floor, soaking the Turkish rug.
“My friend was just murdered,” she said. “By a monster I thought was my boyfriend. You killed a guy with a hatchet. There’s little people dressed up like some Wizard of Oz porno. Forget? I doubt it, mister.”
“Stay still,” he said. “This won’t hurt.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed just hard enough to silently say this is happening whether you want it or not, then gently pressed the silver flower against her forehead.
Anastasia Wainwright felt the metal’s chill, then it warmed, became a buzzing tingle. She couldn’t see it, but she felt the flower slide through skin and skull, felt it expand inside her brain. The sensation put coke to shame.
The room filled with white light. The last thing she saw was the black cowl washing over his face, hiding away the heartless grey eyes.
•••
Anastasia woke to someone gently shaking her shoulder.
Her eyes felt like the were filled with cotton. All dry and itchy. With effort, she opened them to find a woman staring at her. The woman wore blue rubber gloves. A paramedic?
“Take it easy,” the woman said. “Bad things happened.”
A white sheet on the floor, covering a body.
Anastasia knew who it was.
“Oh, no,” she said, her soul suddenly hollow. “Is that Kate?”
The paramedic nodded. “Yes. She overdosed. So did two of your friends.”
Anastasia remembered them taking the pills. She’d refused.
“I told her not to take it,” Anastasia said. “Kate told me not to be such a nerd.”
And now she was dead. If Anastasia had taken it, she would be dead, too.
“Do you know what they took, miss?”
“They were blue. Dimitri said they were fentanyl. Medical grade. Dimitri, is he…”
The paramedic glanced to her right. Anastasia looked in time to see Dimitri’s face and that crazy Christmas sweater of his just before a man in a windbreaker pulled a white sheet over him.
“He’s dead,” the paramedic said. “So is a boy named Charles.”
Anastasia felt like all reality had just drained from her body.
“Chuck,” she said. “What about Arty? Is he dead?”
“Just the three of them.”
The paramedic said looked off, beckoned someone over. A man in a brown sport coat walked over.
The man knelt down next to the paramedic.
“You’re a minor and you have the right to have your guardian or legal representation present when you speak to me,” he said. “But if you wait for that, it might be too late for anyone else who was here. Are you willing to talk to me?”
If Arty wasn’t here, the poor boy was out there, somewhere, and he’d taken the same pills. Anastasia had to help him.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you what know.”
The detective nodded. “First, was he wearing anything distinctive?”
WHEN I THINK ABOUT YOU, I TOUCH MY ELF.
She told the detective everything she knew, and hoped that Arty was still alive.