Blood Victory

“Why do you think I wouldn’t be able to understand what you are?” the woman asks.

“Most people don’t.”

“Why’s that?”

She’s not about to define her powers for this woman over the phone. Much better to fill her with the fear of the unknown.

“Because I’m from some place you don’t understand,” Charlotte says.

“I see. Well, if you came from hell, you shouldn’t have any trouble going back now, should you, missy?”

The call ends, just as Charlotte predicted it would.

At her signal, Luke pulls the Glock’s barrel from Mattingly’s drooling, half-open mouth. The man lets out a wail like an abandoned calf.

“You told her . . . How could you . . . You told . . .” It’s not the same question trying to take different forms, she realizes. It’s two questions fighting to get out at once. One, how did Charlotte know about the murders he committed on the side? Two, why did she tell his mother about them? Charlotte doesn’t plan on answering either one. But it was her plan to expose Mattingly to the terrible realization that when push came to shove, his beloved mother would cut him loose without a second thought. Maybe it was a lucky guess on her part, but only a self-obsessed psychopath would be foolish enough to believe an entire family of psychos could maintain a unified front under the slightest external pressure. She saw living proof of this in how quickly Daniel and Abigail Banning turned on each other after their arrest.

“Sorry, sweetheart. Your mother just dropped you like deadweight.” Charlotte crouches down next to the gurney. Avoiding the piss stain that stretches from his crotch to his right thigh, she runs one hand gently down Mattingly’s right shin. “Guess you’re going to have to find a new family. If I let you.”

Brow furrowed, lips clenched, Mattingly’s attempts to hold back his despair are failing fast.

Now that she’s split the bond between Mattingly and his mother, it’s possible the woman’s cutting and running. If she’s panicking, it won’t be easy for her to erase all evidence of what she’s done. And that’s exactly what Charlotte hopes she’s created on the other end of the line—an all-out panic. True, chaos could endanger the lives of the captives, but if the other option was letting this family’s terrible ritual play out unimpeded, was there any better choice?

If, in the end, the best thing she can do is lead whatever team Cole’s been forced to send after them right to this crazy woman’s doorstep, then so be it. She doubts they’ll suddenly stand down when they’re within sight of whatever horrors lie on this woman’s ranch. Unless Bailey pulled a miracle, her blood trackers have been broadcasting their location every minute since she destroyed their TruGlass feed.

“I’ve had my own experience with mothers,” she says quietly. “They can be very disappointing.”

Especially if they kill your real mother and pretend to be yours, she thinks. Which is kind of your speed, shithead.

“Fuck you,” Cyrus Mattingly whispers.

“Or fuck her. I mean, she’s the one who just picked your brothers over you, isn’t she? How hard would it have been to set up a meet and then come at me with guns blazing? But apparently, you weren’t worth the risk. So what do you think she loves more than you? Planting seedlings, or your brothers?”

“Fuck you.” This time it’s a whisper riding the threat of a sob.

Charlotte gives him a second to catch his breath, during which she places a gentle grip on his right shinbone, a reminder of her strength. Which, she realizes, is probably not going to help him catch his breath. But that’s OK.

“I need an address and directions, Cyrus, and I need them now.”

Eyes screwed shut and spitting tears, Mattingly shakes his head like a defiant little boy.

She looks into Luke’s eyes.

He stares back. She knows the expression well. Jaw slightly clenched, eyes wide and unblinking and seemingly disconnected from the rest of the tension in his face. It’s the look he gives her when he’s biting his tongue, tamping down on an acute need because he knows expressing it forcefully will distract from a decision that’s hers to make. Sometimes it’s the look of desire he gives in the bedroom, when he’s horned up but not sure it’s the right moment to instigate. Sometimes it’s the look he gives her when he knows she’s forgotten something from the grocery store that he needs for the recipe he’s cooking that very moment, but he doesn’t want to jump down her throat because she was doing him a favor by running to the store at the last minute anyway.

She knows what he wants now. He wants an enhanced interrogation, the kind only she can administer.

But will he really be able to stomach it? The last time he saw her unleash relentless violence against other humans, his life was at stake.

This time’s different.

Lives are at stake here, too. Two of them, apparently. Just not his.

Luke nods. It’s almost imperceptible. Maybe he was fighting the urge and then gave in. But he made the gesture nonetheless, and that’s all she needed to see.

With a simple twist of one hand, she breaks Mattingly’s right shin.

By the time she breaks his left foot, Cyrus Mattingly is adding information to his screams.

 

Marjorie races for the barn, seeing fleeting shadows out of the corner of her eye. Shadows of ghosts. One ghost, in particular. Her wicked mother, brought forth from the beyond by the hateful words of that woman on the phone. Killing on the side . . .

Her boy. Her boy Cyrus betrayed her, betrayed all of them. She sees him luring back-alley whores into some dirty pickup truck, fondling their breasts after they’re dead like a bargain-basement serial killer. After all she’d built for him, all she’d given him over the years, rescuing him from orphanhood at Caden Ranch, teaching him to focus and channel his dark impulses, he’d been killing on the side all this time and somehow it had landed him in the clutches of whoever that evil woman was.

It’s like her mother’s racing alongside her as she runs for the barn, hissing that strange woman’s words. Your little game ain’t workin’, Momma.

When she explodes into the barn, the boys are still filling the cement mixer and they whirl at the sound of her entry.

“Get her out of the pit and into the truck now,” she says.

“What?” Jonah says.

“Someone’s got Cyrus and it’s bad, real bad.”

“They’re coming?” Wally asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we can’t just up and leave and—”

“We have to. Now! Get her in your truck and put the Head Slayer on her and quit arguing with me. Jonah drives. You stay in back with her.”

They’re standing atop dozens of concrete-encased graves, and they all know it. Jonah looks to the ground briefly as he approaches, arm out. “Momma, you gotta calm—”

“Don’t you fucking get it?” The hysteria in her voice has amped her words to a pitch that’s terrifyingly near to one of her mother’s fatal screams. “He broke the rules! He was killing on the side and someone got to him ’cause of it.”

The shock of this seems to wash over them in a second wave. Or maybe they’re noticing the way she’s flinched at what looks like a flash of motion past the barn’s half-open back door; a flash of motion she’s sure is wearing one of her mother’s old floral-print housedresses.