The Nightmare Game_Slayers Page 23

  He thinks I have more than him, Chase thought. Which means he only has two tokens and thinks I have the third.

  Chase wasn’t the underdog. Blood Plague’s aura was a hazy green glow around his body. They were evenly matched.

  Chase's thoughts were interrupted by another thrust from the crow-faced killer’s spear. She deflected the thrust with the hook of her sickle, twisting her blade around the spear’s shaft and wrenching it off to the side.

  But her deft maneuver had forced Chase to step forward, and she realized her toes were hanging over the edge of the hole in the floor. That hole was almost four feet across, which put her at a severe disadvantage when it came to reach. If Chase wanted to end this fight, she needed to get in close where the spear wouldn’t be able to poke at her from across the hole.

  Chase waited for her opponent to lunge again, and then dodged to the side. With her foe committed to his lunging strike, Chase had a split second to race around the edge of the hole in the floor and into close range.

  She raised her sickle, and Blood Plague raised his spear to meet it. But, instead of slashing with the curved blade, Chase kicked at his leg.

  Her opponent wore much lighter hiking boots that provided no protection from the blow to his ankle. Chase's steel toed boot crunched into the bone with a terrible noise, and the Slayer pitched forward.

  But the crow-faced killer didn’t fall, and he was far from out of the fight. Rather than tumbling into the hole as Chase had hoped, he twisted in the air, planted his spear on the edge of the bowl and used it to vault past Chase.

  Though he favored his good foot, he was a Slayer. A broken ankle wasn’t going to put him out of this fight.

  Chase pressed her attack, spinning toward the man with her sickle in a reverse grip. The crow-faced killer backed away, but his injured leg kept him from moving with enough speed to avoid Chase. Her slash missed a disemboweling stroke but left a bright red wound across Blood Plague’s body from his left hip to his right shoulder. The flaps of his shirt gaped open to reveal the pale, muscled skin beneath and the crimson wound that was a reminder of his mortality.

  They were too close together for Blood Plague to stab with his spear, giving Chase the advantage. She followed up her attack with a hard punch to his sternum with her right hand, then stepped forward, swinging her knee up for a brutal shot to his gut.

  The blow landed and drove the Slayer’s breath from his lungs in a choking whoosh. Chase slammed her elbow down hard on the back of Blood Plague’s bent neck. The blow staggered him, and he teetered on the edge of the hole. With a howl of victory, Chase hooked the sickle under his throat and wrenched it to the side.

  But instead of ripping the man's throat open or taking his head from his shoulders, Chase's blade only grazed his skin. His armor had deflected the worst of the attack, and Chase realized she would need to land a critical hit to one of his weak points to have any chance of defeating him.

  Enraged by the savage attack, the crow-faced killer threw an elbow that pushed Chase away from him. He backed away, spinning his spear defensively, giving himself room to use his weapon to its best advantage.

  “You are weak,” he laughed, showing Chase the thin line of blood he’d wiped off his neck with his hand. “Your strongest attack and you failed to finish me. Lay down and die, girl, or I’ll make you beg for death.”

  Chase twirled her sickle around her hand. The asshole was right—her weapon wasn’t powerful enough to defeat the armor of his mask. But the painful wounds she’d suffered throughout the night told Chase there was more to combat than raw damage. She needed to find a way to hurt him, to make him burn his Willpower to resist the effects of pain.

  With a thought, Chase moved all but two of her remaining soul orbs from the center of her talisman into her weapon’s Damage sphere. The sickle transformed instantly in her hands, becoming a full-length scythe with a brutal blade emblazoned with screaming skulls. Chase twirled the scythe, mimicking Blood Plague’s weapon.

  “Which one do you think is bigger?” she asked, taunting him.

  Her foe faltered at the sudden change in her weapon, and Chase used his hesitation to renew her attack. The scythe was longer than her sickle and much larger than her knife, but the weapon’s new form was just as comfortable to her as the knife she’d used her entire life. The scythe was part of her, and she was part of it. Attacking with this weapon was as instinctive as throwing a punch.

  The crow-faced killer deflected her first attack, but he was too slow to get his spear in front of the follow-up. The scythe’s blade whistled through the air, passing Blood Plague’s guard and carving a deep red line through the meat of his left thigh.

  Chase spun her scythe, flinging the crow-faced killer’s blood at his eyes.

  He stared at her, disbelief in his eyes. He touched his leg, and his hand came away soaked with blood.

  “Better see someone about that,” Chase taunted. “Be a shame if you bled out before you had a chance to show me what a badass you really are.”

  “You have no idea who you're dealing with,” the crow-faced killer croaked. “Remember me in Hell.”

  A bilious green cloud gushed from Blood Plague’s mouth as he spoke, every word forcing the venom toward Chase.

  She covered her nose with her hand, but the venomous tendrils of fog found a way between her fingers and into her lungs. Chase choked, wheezing as the gas invaded her body. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't think. Her heart pounded against her ribs, and her lungs ached as if they were filled with acid. She watched helplessly as the poison devoured the first of her Fortitude orbs and started working on the second.

  Chase forced herself to stand, burning a precious Willpower orb to ignore the choking effects of the poisonous gas. She wasn't going to be defeated by this asshole. She wasn't going to lose her family because she couldn't hold it together long enough to kill some backwoods hick wearing a mask.

  Surprised by his foe’s resistance to his treacherous attack, Blood Plague wasn’t prepared for Chase’s scythe to sweep his spear from his hands. He tried to retreat from the animal rage burning in her eyes, but his injured thigh slowed him.

  Chase threw herself at the red-haired man, discarding her scythe as she sprang to the attack. Her hands closed around his throat and she dragged him to the floor of the bowl. Chase straddled Blood Plague’s chest and leaned into her thumbs, pressing her weight down, down into the man’s throat. Her rage became her strength, and Chase shrugged off his attempts to buck her off.

  Cartilage crunched under her fingers, and she slammed her mask into his beak again and again. The obsidian hook cracked and splintered, then sloughed away. The gleaming black surface of the mask’s forehead shattered under Chase’s attack. Another headbutt destroyed the last pieces of the man’s mask and sent them tumbling into the hole next to him.

  Chase lifted his lolling head and stared into his unmasked eyes. “You did this to yourself,” she growled.

  She slammed his head against the edge of the stone bowl, and something crunched inside his head. Chase held tight to his crushed throat, squeezing it with all of her strength.

  But his aura hadn’t faded away. Chase dropped him to stand. She raised her motorcycle boot and stomped hard on his throat. Her scythe appeared in her hands, and she laid open his chest with a vicious swipe that peeled the flesh from his sternum in a long, wet strip.

  Discarding her scythe, Chase knelt over her foe. She grabbed two of his ribs and tore them loose from his body to reveal the throbbing heart beneath.

  With a savage howl, Chase tore the beating muscle from Blood Plague’s body and raised it overhead. She squeezed the richest, reddest blood from the thumping muscle into her mouth. She lowered the heart to her mouth and chewed markers free, swallowing them one after the other.

  Then she found his bezoar and sucked the blood from it. It was slightly sweet, and Chase knew she had been stronger than her foe at the end. She pressed the bezoar to her chest and threw her head back, screami
ng in ecstatic agony as she took the crow-faced killer’s power for her own.

  At last, Darrell Eldridge’s aura faded, and the soul orbs left in his talisman flowed out to fill Chase’s.

  Chase crawled up the side of the bowl. A righteous fire burned in her chest and set her eyes ablaze with rage. She stood before one of the crouching figures. “It's over,” she said. “This fucking game ends now.”

  But the bone mask did not move. A chorus of hollow voice echoed from behind it. “One token remains.”

  Chase grabbed the naked man by the shoulders and shook him violently. “Where is it?”

  A wisp of fog passed before Chase's eyes, and her scythe appeared in her hands, ready to attack. But she was too slow, and by the time her confused mind understood that it was Sarah standing before her, it was too late.

  The librarian pushed the barrel of an enormous pistol against Chase's forehead. “It's right here, silly.”

  The gun roared, and Chase's brain exploded, pitching her body back, down the smooth slope of the bowl, and into the pit beneath.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Bone Pit

  Chase's body slithered down the slope of the bowl and vanished through the hole in its bottom. Her corpse crashed into the pile of bones and then tumbled down its side like a discarded rag doll. Jagged shards of bone tore her dead flesh and ripped her clothes. Her corpse lay still on the muddy bank of a flowing river of clotted, viscous blood.

  A rat, its body covered in oozing sores, crawled toward the fresh meat on its belly. It scuttled forward until its nose reached the tips of the corpse’s outstretched fingers. Its lips peeled back to reveal yellowed, razor-sharp teeth set into bleeding gums.

  The rat sniffed the flesh, and hunger drove it ahead. It lashed out, clamping its fangs onto Chase's finger and shaking its head side to side as it attempted to savage a gobbet of flesh free from her finger.

  The corpse’s hand convulsed around the rat, snatching its head between her thumb and forefinger. Chase squeezed its thick skull until it whimpered and released its grip on her. She considered crushing the rat’s head, then decided against it. It was hungry, she had been meat. No harm, no foul. “Get out of here, Willard, before I change my mind.”

  Chase’s head throbbed, and there was something wrong with her left eye. It kept wanting to drift away, rolling toward the ceiling instead of staying focused. She checked her talisman’s pattern, and saw that her Resilience was down to one. She still had one left, but it wasn’t much of a cushion against the great eternal darkness. “I'm like a fucking cat,” she whispered to herself, “but only one life left.”

  Looking around, Chase didn't think that life was going to last long. Everything around her was covered in blood or offal. The pile of bones that led up to the pit had collapsed under her weight, extinguishing the green bonfires she’d seen, but leaving her stranded in the belly of a cavern.

  “You can't run forever,” Sarah called down from the hole in the pit’s ceiling. “The Sleepers have almost broken the seals protecting the Temple of Bone. Before the night is done, I’ll lead them down into the tunnels to find you. To kill you.”

  Chase didn't say a word, but cocked her hand back and flung her scythe with all her strength. It spun toward Sarah's smug face but missed the librarian by a handful of inches. “Come down where I can reach you, you traitorous bitch. I saved your life.”

  “Is that what you think happened?” Sarah asked. “The way I remember it, I taught you the ropes. You were the one who was too trusting to question me about why the marker had gone out while I was still alive.”

  “I’ve learned a lot since then.” Chase jabbed her finger at the crow-faced killer’s corpse dangling over the edge of the hole. “What I did to that guy? That’s nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”

  “Keep it up,” Sarah chuckled. “Once the Sleepers have you subdued, I'm going to crack your chest open and take your tokens for myself. Then I'll be the last Slayer.”

  “And then what?” Chase called. “You spend the next twenty-one years of your life huddled in this stupid town waiting for the next Nightmare Game?”

  Sarah laughed. “You have no idea what comes next. You think you're so smart, but you've never understood what was really going on here, Chase. Things are about to change, and for the little people like you and your family, that change is going to be very much for the worse.”

  Sarah waved, and then backed away from the opening. “But don't worry, you'll get to see everything that happens. I’ll keep your soul with me, next to the souls of your brother and your mother. You can all watch as I help the Sleepers tear this world apart and remake it in my image.”

  Crazy bitch, Chase thought. What was the deal with these people always thinking they could somehow turn evil to their own ends? Didn’t they understand that this vile shit always turned on the hand that wielded it?

  Chase moved away from the pit's opening. If the Sleepers were coming, she needed to get out of here. She needed to find her parents and clear a path back to the surface. If she didn't, they were all as good as dead.

  If they're not already dead, she thought, glumly.

  There was every chance that crazy bitch Sarah or the Sleepers had already killed her family. Why would they keep them alive?

  Chase hunkered down out of sight of the opening in the ceiling and took a long look at her Talisman’s power. She still had four spirit orbs trapped in her talisman’s power, which was just enough to increase her Willpower again. But, as she still had three Willpower left, Chase didn’t think that was the best use of her last dregs of stolen power.

  Instead, she chose a defensive option that could preserve her last life against physical attacks. She increased her mask’s Armor by two points, raising it from four to six. That used up the last of her spirit orbs, but the orbs weren’t all she’d taken from Blood Plague.

  The bezoar she’d stolen gave Chase access to another power. With the impending threat of the Sleepers limiting the time she had to make her choice, Chase decided to unlock a power she had first-hand experience with. She chose the Envenomed Blood power, which gave her access to its first ability: Choking Mist. The power’s range was limited, and it wasn’t useful against large groups, but it was particularly effective against those with strong armor or other damage resistances.

  “Getting better,” Chase said.

  But that didn’t come any closer to getting her out of the pit she was trapped in. If she didn’t think of something, soon, the Sleepers were going to catch her with her pants down.

  With a laugh, Chase realized she already had the solution. She activated her Horrifying Apparition ability and stretched out her senses to find the nearest victim.

  Chase detected eight victims within seconds, all within range of her location. They were gathered in a loose circle around something that glowed with a hellish light.

  “Ready or not,” she cackled, “here I fucking come.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  A Second Offering

  The hairs on the back of Paxton’s neck rose as if a black cat had just crossed his grave. The cold fist of mortal terror gripped his heart, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that something horrifying had just appeared directly behind him.

  With a shout of raw, animal fear, Paxton spun his wheelchair in a tight circle and drew the pistol-grip shotgun from its hidden holster. His face contorted into a mask of unspeakable fear as a grisly threat materialized from thin air. Accompanied by a tortured moan, the terrifying creature loomed out of the shadows, and Paxton squeezed the shotgun’s trigger.

  A solid slug slammed into Chase's stomach, driving her to her knees. Blood splashed out of her wounds and onto the bones covering the floor.

  “Goddamnit, Paxton,” Chase cursed, examining the extent of her injury with bloodied tips of her fingers. The wound was painful, but not deep. Thanks to the enhancement she’d made to her mask’s Armor, she’d only lost two points of Fortitude, and she hadn’t su
ffered any internal injuries. She’d heal in a few minutes. “It's me. It's Chase.”

  The fear slowly washed away from Paxton's face, and he lowered the shotgun. “What’s with the fucking mask? You scared the shit out of me. I could have killed you!”

  Chase staggered back to her feet, hand clasped to her bloody belly. “Point that fucking thing somewhere else before you do kill me. Let me catch my breath for a second.”

  Chase leaned against the wall and looked around the room. There were seven others in the room, besides Paxton and her. “Hi, mom,” Chase said, greeting her mother. It felt wholly inadequate given the circumstances, but Chase didn’t know what would have sufficed. She doubted there was a Hallmark card for newly-minted monsters reuniting with their kidnaped mothers.

  Chase looked at the others. Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. “Let me guess. Each of you had a son or daughter playing the Nightmare Game?”

  Chase's mother stood and clasped her hands on Chase’s masked face. “We never wanted this for you, Chase. I’m so sorry. We tried to save you, but…”

  Chase bit back on her sorrow, letting the feeling fester into rage at those who’d harmed her family. “Not now,” she managed to choke out and pulled away from her mother. “Right now, I need to get you all out of here.”

  Paxton wheeled his chair around and pointed at the only exit from the subterranean, bone-lined cavern. “They did something to us, paralyzed us with some voodoo or something. That’s why they didn’t take my shotgun—I was no threat to them, and they figured I’d be stuck down here until the end.

  “And I guess they’re right because nothing short of a battering ram is going to get through that door of bones.”

  Chase approached the door, cracking her knuckles. But before she could reach it, a powerful chill rushed through her. The cavern shook, and Chase realized her time was running out. Sarah and the Sleepers had opened a way into the Temple of Bones. Soon, the tunnels out of here would be swarmed with masked Sleepers and one very pissed off Slayer. “We’re running out of time. Let me get this damned thing opened so I can get you all out of here.”