The Nightmare Game_Slayers Page 14

  Chase held her breath and listened for any sign of the sheriff. If he’d left his burning cigarette behind, he couldn’t have gone far. Had the deputies called him on the radio, and he already knew there was a problem? Or was he squatting on the toilet somewhere in the house, oblivious to the Slayer stalking him?

  Chase entered the living room and spied an arched opening on its far side. Through that opening, she saw a staircase and headed toward it. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, turned to the right, and looked down the small hallway. It ended in a bathroom, with the door open. The room was dark, and the only thing visible was the pale porcelain bowl lit by moonlight pouring through its window.

  “Up and at ‘em,” Chase whispered to herself. She climbed the staircase, one careful step at a time. She tested each of the stairs before trusting her weight to them, and didn’t make a sound as she climbed toward the second floor.

  As Chase ascended, she saw surprisingly artful frames mounted on the walls. She investigated the first one, expecting a family portrait, or perhaps a landscape painting.

  Instead, she came face-to-face with a strip of scarred leather. Her breath quickened as she recognized it as the same kind of bizarre ornament she'd seen in her grandparents’ basement. She knew it was flesh, human flesh, ritually scarred with words she didn't understand for reasons she couldn’t fathom

  Except, this time, Chase did understand them. The runes were in the same language as the words on her talisman, which was now as familiar to her as if she’d grown up speaking it.

  “And lo, the Red God rose and the Church of the Red Dawn followed him into a new age. They offered up the finest of their sons and daughters, and he transformed the worthy into guardians of the Temple of Bone. His blessed champions watched over their flocks, and heralded the rise of a new sun in the ancient sky.”

  There was more, but reading it made Chase's head throb. It was as if she couldn't get her eyes to focus correctly on the insanity held within those words, and the beginnings of a migraine had taken root behind her eyes. There was a power in the runes, but its was a strength that would twist and warp any human insane enough to try and harness it.

  Chase avoided the lure of the archaic script held in the rest of the frames. She kept her eyes straight ahead and focused her attention on being silent as a mouse.

  She paused with the top of her head level with the last stair. She’d made no noise so far, but she hadn’t heard any noises, either. If the sheriff was in the house, he was either sleeping or laying in ambush. No one would remain quiet in their own home for so long without good reason.

  Chase took the last step slowly, leaning forward until her hands brushed the carpet. She was prepared to spring at a moment’s notice, every muscle tensed for the attack. Slowly, carefully, she peeked over the top stair.

  “It's about time,” the sheriff said. He stood in the doorway of a bedroom at the end of the hall, a shotgun cradled in his arms. A yellow aura surrounded him, warning Chase that he was no mere bystander to the Nightmare Game, but a serious threat even to a Slayer. “Shit, girl, the way you talked to me on the phone, I reckoned you'd be after me as soon as you got out of that basement. From all that blood covering you, I’m guessing the Sleepers slowed you down, huh?”

  Chase stopped, straightened, and leaned against the wall. She tried to look nonchalant as she measured the distance between them. If she was fast, she might be able to get to the sheriff before he could get off a shot. Of course, if she was wrong, a close-range blast from the shotgun would probably cut her in half and spray most of her guts across the hallway. She held her ground and looked for an opening.

  “That and I had to stop and kill one of the locals. Some kid with an ax.” She looked down at the tips of her fingernails as if inspecting them for the bloody remains of the rival Slayer. “Your good old boys aren’t very good at fighting. None of you thought about giving them a little training before you turned them loose in your little murder spree?”

  The sheriff scoffed. “The Red God favors those who are born worthy. There are no tricks here. No training will save you if he finds you wanting.”

  Chase covered a step toward the sheriff with a dismissive chuckle and a shake of her head. “I always heard the good Lord helps those who help themselves.”

  She stopped and held up both hands when the sheriff raised the business end of the shotgun toward her face. “Hey, I came to talk. I'm willing to make a deal with you. Neither of us has to die tonight.”

  The sheriff sucked on his teeth and shook his head. “Only one of you Slayers gets to live through the night. That's the rule. Either the Sleepers will stop you, or you'll have to kill the others. That’s the only way.”

  “Not if you tell me where you’re holding my brother,” Chase said. “If you throw in my mom’s location as a bonus, I promise not to come back after I get them to safety.”

  The sheriff grinned, his yellow and uneven teeth jutting from beneath his bushy mustache. “You don't get it. I ain't telling you shit. If you think I know where your parents are, you’ve lost your mind, Harrow.”

  “I found my father,” Chase said, taking another step forward. “Did you torture him? Or was it someone else?”

  A grimace pulled the corners of the sheriff’s mouth down into a disgusted frown. “Your daddy shamed us all in the eyes of the Red God. What did you expect would happen to him?”

  Chase choked back a sob and shuffled her feet as if lost in the depths of her grief. The move brought her a foot closer to the sheriff and the gaping barrels of his shotgun. “You had him tortured because he broke your stupid rules? They took his arms and legs. They almost skinned him.”

  She spat the final words around another sob and took another shuffling step forward.

  The sheriff’s eyes drifted away from Chase, staring into space over her shoulder as if trying to find his way back through the years to a better time. “Your people served the Red God faithfully for longer than any of Crucible’s other founding families. Your daddy could have had any woman in this town. But he couldn’t get Eva out of his head. That bitch nearly killed us all.”

  Chase gained another inch while the old man berated her father and cursed her mother. She held her temper in check, keeping it at heel like a pit bull on a choke chain. There'd be time to release it, soon enough. For the moment, she needed to appear meek, humble. Submissive. “That’s my mother you’re talking about. You expect me to believe you people tore my dad to pieces because he loved her?”

  “He defied the Red God by letting her live.” The dark clouds of an ugly memory washed over the sheriff’s eyes. “Jack won the Nightmare Game. But he wouldn’t kill Eva, even though she was another Slayer. They cheated and made a sacrifice together. Their perversion weakened the barrier. It weakened us all.”

  While the old man was lost in thought, Chase decided to push her luck. She took a full step forward, bringing her within arm’s reach of his shotgun. “Why didn’t you all just kill him, then? That’s what assholes like you do when things don’t go your way.”

  The sheriff’s uttered a harsh, barking laugh. “Oh, we tried. It was like fighting the Red God himself. Your old man carved his way through too many good men and women that day. He and your momma were a sight to behold. She protected him, let him do his work. I still get nightmares about that pumpkin skull of his. We called him the Hack-o’-lantern. Scariest motherfucker I ever did see.”

  A spark of hope flared in Chase’s heart. If her father had survived the Game and escaped Crucible, then she could, too.

  But, first, she had to deal with this asshole and his shotgun.

  “And then your preacher decided to let you all off the hook. Called it a banishing, but really you were just letting my mom and dad go so they wouldn’t kill every fucking one of you shitkicking hillbillies.”

  “You’re pretty smart for such a skinny little girl,” the sheriff chuckled. “Too bad your daddy let you down. If he’d trained you right, the game’d already be over.”


  “He taught me well enough,” Chase snarled, her rage slipping free of her grasp. “And now I’m gonna finish what he started.”

  Chase threw herself at the sheriff with a banshee’s wail. She was so close, she was sure she could reach him before he could fire the shotgun.

  She was wrong.

  The sheriff's eyes widened in fear. His finger convulsed around his weapon’s trigger.

  The shotgun’s roar drowned out Chase’s warcry and pain turned her world red.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Showdown

  An agonizing arctic wind blew through Chase's body, and she fell to the floor. There was something wrong with her left side. Her leg wouldn't work, and a dull ache gnawed at the meat between her ribs and hip. Chase reached down with her left hand and felt the raw, ragged edges of her flesh where the shotgun slug had blasted a hole through her body. She withdrew her bloodied, sticky fingers and raised her hand toward the sheriff.

  “You fucking shot me?” Chase questioned. Her thoughts raced, and she felt the steady, draining throb of blood leaving her body with every pulse of her heart. “All you had to do was tell me where you’re keeping Paxton and my mom.”

  The sheriff stared down at her from the other end of the shotgun. The tips of his boots were less than a foot away from Chase's outstretched hand. The shotgun smoked, one barrel leaking gray-blue plumes like a sleeping dragon. “I been trying to tell you. That ain't the way this works. The Nightmare Game is about blood and sacrifice. It’s about protecting this world from the one below and doing whatever it takes to make sure the darkness stays where it belongs. Shit, you can’t talk your way outta that.”

  Chase rested her cheek against the rough carpet and let out an exhausted sigh. The dull throb in her side had become a sharp, stabbing pain, and a glance at the circles of the talisman showed her that three-quarters of her Fortitude was gone. Parts of her body that were never meant to be exposed to the air were horribly chilled, as if someone had split her open and filled her abdomen with crushed ice. “I just wanted my family back. My mom.”

  Every word felt like it took a monumental effort to utter. It hardly seemed worth the trouble to explain to the sheriff why she'd come. He’d decided to kill her, and now he was going to finish the job. Chase wondered how long it would be before she bled out.

  She wondered what would happen to Paxton and her mother when Chase was no longer able to play Crucible’s twisted game.

  The sheriff clucked his tongue at her. “You should have just gone after the Sacred Martyrs, girl. Shit, you didn’t even bother to get your mask. Didn't you read that manual of your daddy’s that I mailed you?”

  The mask. Like the phantom weapon waiting for her call, Chase could sense the mask her father wore. She could call to it, and the mask would come to her in the same way the knife found its way into her hand when she needed it. Maybe that would save her from bleeding to death on the sheriff’s dirty carpet.

  But the mask was all that kept her father alive. She couldn’t sacrifice him for a chance to save herself.

  A burning ball of hate settled in Chase's stomach, pushing back against the chill permeating her torso. “Maybe I'll just take yours,” she mumbled into the carpet.

  The sheriff stepped forward, bending at the waist. “What did you say?”

  Rage burned through Chase. She lashed out with her left hand, and the curved knife appeared in her grasp as if by magic. The hooked blade buried itself in the lawman's calf, spearing through the muscle from his right side and bursting out on the left. The bloodied metal glistened in the light of the hallway, and the sheriff screamed.

  An ancient hunger rumbled in Chase’s belly as she hauled the sheriff off his feet. He landed hard, and the shotgun bounced from his grip and slid into the room behind him. Chase grabbed one leg of the sheriff's worn denim jeans with her right hand and hauled herself forward. “Maybe I’ll wear your face for a mask,” she taunted him, relishing the fear she saw bloom in his eyes.

  Chase wrenched the knife free of the sheriff’s calf, then buried it in his shoulder. She used the knife to pull herself forward, dragging her body up the lawman's body to stare him in the eye. Something slopped out of the wound in her side, but Chase didn't care. She glared down at the man. “Where are they?”

  The officer, his face contorted with pain, gasped for air. He exhaled a tobacco-haunted breath that made Chase turn her head to the side it was so foul. “I don't know,” he said. “And I wouldn’t break the Red God’s law to tell you if I did.”

  Chase twisted the knife deep into the meat of the man’s shoulder until he howled with pain. “You're lying. You locked me in that basement. You took Paxton. Where is he?”

  The sheriff blubbered, whimpering as blood leaked from his wounds. “They'll kill me if I tell you. Play the game, and you'll see your brother again.”

  Chase dragged her knife down the lawman’s body, opening a wet red seam in his torso from shoulder to hip. Curdled yellow fat oozed from the sheriff’s belly, leaking out of him and onto the carpet. Chase pressed the knife’s serrated cutting edge under the officer’s chin, tightening it until a thin ribbon of blood leaked from the folds of his throat. “I'm not playing, old man. If you want to live to see your next breath, tell me where my brother is.”

  The sheriff gasped, and the curved knife rubbed against his Adam's apple, peeling off a sliver of flesh that curled up into the stubble below his jaw. A welter of blood streamed from the wound, rich and red. Chase licked her lips.

  “You're not hearing me. I'm not playing your game, and I don't care what kind of fairy tales you tell your kids here. I don't believe this is some cosmic ritual played out to satisfy your bloodthirsty inbred god. I'm leaving this shitty little town, and I'm taking my family with me.”

  “You don't understand,” the sheriff said, careful not to move his jaw against the biting teeth of Chase’s knife. “You can't leave. Once the game begins, the Red God’s power seals the town. You can try to run, but you won't get very far. You'll just waste your time and end up back here.”

  Chase realized talking to the sheriff wasn't going to get her anywhere. He was too afraid of his precious Red God to come clean with her, and she was willing to bet the rest of the townsfolk would be the same. No one was going to tell Chase anything that might jeopardize the outcome of their sacred game. The people of Crucible thought holding Paxton would force Chase to play along, but they'd sorely underestimated the depths of her rage and her desire for revenge.

  “Your phone. Where's your fucking cell phone?”

  The lawman groaned and bit his tongue. Chase tightened the blade against his neck until more blood drooled from the wound. “Where is it?”

  The lawman’s right hand fumbled at his waist until he found the front pocket of his jeans. He pulled out the thin black rectangle of a newer iPhone. “Here.”

  “Unlock it,” Chase demanded.

  The officer pressed his thumb against the silver ring on the phone's face, and it popped to life. Chase snatched it away before the msn could try anything funny, and navigated to the phone's settings. She flicked through the menus until she found what she was looking for and browsed through the sheriff's location history. “You know, the government uses these things to track you. It keeps a log of everywhere you go. And it looks like you've been going to the same place quite a bit. Ha, look at that. Here you are at my grandparents’ house. And here you are in downtown Crucible. Where’d you go, sheriff?”

  “You're dead,” the officer gasped. “I don't know how you got past my boys, but they’ll be coming after you.”

  “Your boys are chasing ghosts in the woods, sheriff. And I’ve got what I needed here. I really wish you’d have decided to talk instead of making everything go down the hard way.” Chase dragged the knife sideways, slitting the sheriff's throat from right to left. She pushed away his dead body as blood gushed and he clawed at his throat with nicotine-stained fingers.

  Chase crawled away and slumped a
gainst the wall to watch the sheriff die.

  A cold shudder ran through Chase’s body as the yellow aura around the dead man faded away. A trio of spirit orbs flowed out of the dead sheriff and into Chase’s talisman, filling in three of its smallest circles.

  Her Fortitude was restoring, but slowly. She’d been down to two from the shotgun blast, and had healed up to three in the past few minutes. But Chase could hear the voices of the deputies approaching the house outside, and knew she wouldn’t have time to fully heal before they arrived.

  “Let’s see how badly fucked I really am,” Chase groaned. She reached down and discovered there was no longer a gaping hole through her gut. Instead, she had a crescent shape carved from her flank, sticky and bloody, but her guts were no longer dripping out of her.

  Chase struggled back to her feet and stumbled down the stairs, still weak from her ordeal. She wasn't in immediate danger of dying but she was in bad shape. If someone got a lucky and shot her in the next few minutes, she’d never survive.

  Chase limped through the house to the back door. She unlocked it, and it swung open to let the chilly night breeze wash over her. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and crossed the threshold.

  “Freeze, bitch!” a man barked, and a flood of blinding light burst over Chase.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Into Thin Air

  Time froze. Chase knew if she didn't do something, and do it very quickly, she was going to end up on the wrong side of an impromptu firing squad.

  With a thought, Chase flicked three of the spirit orbs still locked in her talisman into the symbol representing her Phantasm power to unlock its second ability: Petrifying Disappearance.

  Chase triggered her new power and hurled herself over the edge of the porch. The world flickered around her, filling with gray and black skeletons devoid of color and populated by harsh flashes of light and shadow. The terrain was muted and indistinct, but the angry, frightened deputies stood out in her vision with startling clarity.