Rob Thurman - Slashback

Inside with the doors shut behind me I could still see well enough though the light was gray and dim. There was some clutter, but not as much as the other empty churches had. Jack had cleaned up. Why not? Who wanted to skin people in an untidy work area? Nik would applaud his work ethic. I swallowed with difficulty. Surprised something that automatic would be that hard to do. I swallowed again and although there was no blood in my mouth I thought I could taste it. . because I could smell it.

The air was saturated with the scent of blood. Old, recent, fresh. I’d thought Junior’s house had smelled-I’d had no idea what bad truly was. I’d fought enough over the years that the coppery tang of fresh blood had long stopped bothering me, but this wasn’t the same. Old blood was a horror I couldn’t explain to someone who couldn’t experience it. It was something I wouldn’t be rid of for at least a week. And here. . there was an ocean of rotting blood. Jack had more victims than the police had ever found. I couldn’t smell anything over what they had spilled here. I couldn’t smell Nik.

“Nik!” I shouted as I limped forward. The ribs were beyond codeine now. “Niko!” I shouted again. I wasn’t trying to be subtle. I wasn’t looking to hide. I wanted Jack to find me. I couldn’t lead him away if he didn’t know I was there. I also couldn’t forget how fast he was. I wasn’t that fast, but for Jack I’d have to be. Whipping my head back and forth, I scanned the church and saw nothing. The basement then. I’d go. . wait. Up. There was a paler glimmer. . blond hair, Nik’s hair in the balcony above. Through the ornate carved wood rail I could see him, a shadowed fall crowned with that rare recessive blond Leandros hair.

Above, like Junior’s attic. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Junior had said his master liked to watch from the sky. That could be true or it might be that Jack wanted to be either closer to what he remembered of Heaven or just free of Earth when he did his work. Angels must have wings for a reason.

Niko’s form didn’t move and I instantly ran to the back where the stairs would lead up because he was not dead. I could smell nothing but what soaked this place inside and out, not even Nik’s normal scent, but my brother’s freshly spilt blood, that I would know. . over anything at all. Jack hadn’t shown up, but he had to be here and I’d be ready for him. I reached for the handle of the door that should lead to the stairs when the blot of gloom under the balcony became something else. Knit out of the shadows, the reaped souls, and the desertion of faith that now filled this place, Jack became.

The killing gate I had planned for him took only a thought. I didn’t have time for even that. A grip of ice sank into both of my temples, through flesh and bone, and I was the storm. I was the lightning that passed through my brain. The floor disappeared beneath me as I hung in midair, arms and legs splayed as I convulsed. Jack’s incandescent glow of white-blue eyes gazed into mine. “We both come and we both go, you said.” Thick with clots of flesh and blood, the phantom of them if not the actual things themselves, the words fought through. “Now I think you, Wolf-in-the-Flock, Auphe-in-the-Flock, you will go nowhere.” He must have dropped me as I was now looking up at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to understand what he said next although I could hear it.

“Pray for deliverance. Pray for mercy. But they will be prayers unheard for I will not let them pass, half a soul or not.”

He hovered over me, but I couldn’t distinguish between the lightning-shot blackness and the electricity misfiring in the darkness of my brain. Was there a difference? I couldn’t. . think. There was the smell of freshly mown grass, the taste of metal and butterscotch, the warm sensation of Delilah’s skin under my hands. I floated on it all. It seemed strange. It seemed right. It seemed. .

I was tired.

A wolf among the sheep. Half wolf, half sheep.

There was something I needed. . It was on the tip of my. . what? What was. . now there was the smell of Oreos. Mrs. Spoonmaker’s Oreos. I smiled and closed my eyes. I was so tired.

With the taste of burned butterscotch in my mouth, I slept.

DIY electroshock therapy is not an Auphe’s best friend.

It was a while before I could link enough words and images in my head to come to that conclusion.

Before that I drifted. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been days. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. There was darkness around me and dancing lights, few and distant as the stars of a post-apocalyptic sky. That was all right, came the muzzy feeling. The world had to die sometime. It wasn’t anything as complicated as a thought-it was a feeling, warm and reassuring in the futility of it all. Best to go along. Ride the light to a world better than this. Let it all go. .

Including Niko.

That was a thought, fully formed and capable of dissipating the fog in my brain with the force of a high noon, summertime Death Valley sun. Nik. Where was Nik? I sat up, pushing against the floor beneath me. It felt like polished wood, smooth and perfect. My muscles didn’t mirror that feeling. Every single one in my body ached as if I’d run for my life for several hours, was hit by a bus, another bus, and then hit by a train before deciding to top it off with the New York City Marathon for kicks. Tiny shivers and spasms twitched. . Jesus. . everywhere as I curled into a ball, resting my forehead on my knees until it passed.

I remembered in the fuzziest of ways cold hands, one on each side of my head, and then a lightning storm inside of it. Jack, friend and pal that he was, had given me a free shock treatment. He’d zapped my brain, and the rest of me incidentally, quickly but thoroughly. The seizures that would cause were what had my muscles tied in what felt like unbreakable knots.

After a minute, all I had time to spare, I looked up and around me. My muscles continued to howl, but I told them to talk to my broken rib and get back to me. I was in a basement from the looks of it, a fancy one. The floor was wood, stained and polished to a high gloss that reflected the flickering lights of the four candles Jack had left me.

I thought it was to see the chains. Feeling them around my wrists wasn’t enough. He wanted me to see how helpless I was as well. That was the kind of dick he was. My hands were in front of me, the wrists wrapped in several tight loops of thick chain that in turn was chained around a wooden column that would be theoretically holding up the ceiling. The chain wasn’t padlocked. That would be too easy and not Jack’s style. The ends were melted into one tangled whole. Lightning, good for so much more than scrambling a brain.

The basement.

The imprisonment.

The symmetry of the chains.

I get it, Jack. Funny fucking ha-ha. Just like the good old days twelve years ago.

I hadn’t seen what Junior had done to Niko while I was in the attic and Niko hadn’t told me. He’d only said that he’d killed Junior and we were safe. I was safe. But he didn’t have to tell me he’d been chained and he didn’t have to tell me where. He’d had the smell on him as we sat in our own bathroom and he washed the blood from my chest and from around his wrists. He’d been with the dead. . in the basement. I didn’t know how Jack knew about that. He hadn’t been there for that particular show or had and found a reason not to interfere. It could’ve been Junior’s routine. Chain his victims in the basement, kill them later in the attic. Jack would definitely know that about his apprentice. He’d obviously known about two neighbor kids next door who’d disappeared after Junior’s death. Had guessed why we’d vanished.