Like in a twelve-step program, Lori thought. She’d never gone through such a program herself, but she’d worked with clients who had. She couldn’t remember which of the twelve steps making amends was, but she knew it was an important one. Maybe Reeny had been on to something. At least it gave her a place to start. But who had she wronged to such a degree that she needed to formally apologize to them? She was hardly a perfect human being, but she didn’t careen thoughtlessly through life, causing damage to others along the way. She wasn’t impulsive, always tried to think through her actions and anticipate their consequences before doing anything. She worked hard to avoid hurting anybody. So what could she possibly have done that the Cabal considered so bad that it warranted harassing her? No, more than that – torturing her. There wasn’t anything she could think of.
That’s not exactly true, and you know it.
Maybe she thought about the consequences of her actions these days, but she hadn’t always been that kind of person, had she?
Aashrita.
The moment she thought the name, her mind fought to snatch it back, to drag it down into the depths of her consciousness and bury it once more, as it did whenever she thought of Aashrita. But she didn’t let it happen this time. There was too much at stake.
Aashrita, she thought. Aashrita, Aashrita, Aashrita.
She backed out of her parking space, then headed for the road—
—and Woodlawn Cemetery.
Chapter Six
Debra Foster parked her blue Ford Mustang – with a bumper sticker that said I’d rather be in the saddle – in front of Get Moving! at roughly the same time as Lori and Reeny left A Taste of Thai. She was pissed off, but that wasn’t anything special. She was always pissed off about something. At the moment, she was angry that she couldn’t find her goddamned reading glasses. She’d looked everywhere for the fucking things, but she’d had no success locating them. When she’d been younger, she thought that old people who wore their reading glasses tethered to a loop of string around their necks were pathetic. Obviously, they were so damned senile they’d lose their things if they didn’t keep them on their person at all times. Now she was one of those old people – although she no longer considered being in her fifties as old – and she misplaced her reading glasses often.
She wasn’t certain that she’d had them with her when she’d arrived for her physical therapy appointment with Lori, but she’d decided to retrace her steps and see if she’d accidentally left them somewhere. She was going in reverse, so she’d start at Get Moving! and if she didn’t find her glasses here, she’d return to the diner where she’d eaten breakfast this morning and see if she’d left them on the table when she’d departed. She knew she could simply buy a new pair. Non-prescription ones didn’t cost much, and you could find them at any grocery or pharmacy. But it was the principle of the goddamned thing. They were her glasses and she was determined to find them, even if she had to spend the rest of her day driving all over the fucking town.
Lori had once commented on her stubbornness, saying that if she directed it toward her physical therapy, kept up with her exercises at home, she’d be sure to see results. Debra knew the woman had only been doing her job, but she’d almost told her to go fuck herself just the same.
She turned off the car, and when she moved to open the driver’s-side door a bolt of white-hot pain lanced through her left shoulder. She’d been taking over-the-counter painkillers and anti-inflammatories like they were candy for the last several weeks, but they only did so much to blunt the pain. She drew in a hissing breath, muttered, “Fuck,” and pushed the door open. She got out of the car slowly, hoping to avoid setting off any more pain, and then gently closed the door behind her. Even though she used her right hand to do this, her shoulder gave a twinge, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as before, and she counted this as a minor victory.
She knew her injury was her goddamned fault. She’d kept horses ever since she’d been a little girl, and she’d been cleaning stalls all this time. The sawdust you put down in a horse’s stall absorbed their urine when they pissed, and when they pissed, they pissed a flood. They were big animals, after all. The sawdust grew sodden and heavy, and when you shoveled it into a bucket to remove it, you had to be careful not to put in too much at a time, or else the bucket would be too heavy to carry. Last month, there’d been a stretch of several days when it had rained like a sonofabitch – strong winds, lightning, thunder, the whole fucking deal – and she’d kept the horses, a quarter horse named Lucky and a Friesian named Gustav, in the barn until the storms finally blew over. When she let them out into the field, she had days’ worth of manure and urine-soaked sawdust to clean up. She’d been impatient, and instead of filling buckets up halfway, dumping them outside, and returning for more, she filled them up full to overflowing and struggled to lift and carry them out of the barn. She knew better, that was the hell of it, but she’d done it anyway, and in the process fucked up her shoulder big time.
She lived alone – sharing living space with another person would irritate the hell out of her, and she knew she’d be no picnic to cohabitate with either – so she had no one to help her with the chores around the farm. Thanks to her goddamned shoulder, everything took twice as long for her to do now. She was convinced her shoulder would eventually heal on its own, but in the meantime, she needed better meds to help her function. Her fucking doctor insisted she try physical therapy for a month before the bastard would prescribe heavy-duty painkillers and muscle relaxers for her, and while she resented the hell out of him for it, she was determined to get through the stupid therapy and get her drugs. The staff at Get Moving! were nice enough, if a little too fanatical in their devotion to the great god of Physical Rehabilitation, but she still hated going there, and she resented the fact that she had to return. One visit a day was way more than enough for her.
But she needed her fucking glasses, couldn’t read a goddamned thing without them.
When she walked into Get Moving!, the first thing she noticed was an odd smell. She’d lived in the country all her life, and she knew the smell of meat starting to rot, knew the smell of spilled blood. The mingled odors triggered an alarm in her subconscious, but she was so damned pissed about her glasses that she ignored it. The woman who was always at the front – Debra could never remember her name – wasn’t there. Maybe she’d gone to lunch, but if so, someone should’ve been covering for her until she got back. At the very least, she could’ve left a note that said when she’d return. But there was nothing. The woman’s absence irritated her. She’d hoped to ask her if anyone had found her reading glasses and turned them in. She had no intention of taking a seat in the waiting area and flipping through old magazines with wrinkled covers and torn pages until the woman returned. Debra had things to do. She had a life.
Fuck it.
She walked around the semicircular counter, intending to look for her glasses herself, go through every drawer if she had to. But when she got to the other side, she saw that the space wasn’t empty. The office chair was pushed up to the desk, and the woman – Katherine? Kathy? – was crouched on the floor, hunched over something. Her head was pointed away from Debra, so she couldn’t see what the woman had, but she was making wet chewing noises. Debra’s subconscious sent up another warning, this one louder than the last.
Get the fuck out!
Debra heard this warning, but she hesitated. No more than a second, two tops. But it was enough for – Kate? – to realize she was there. The woman sat up on her knees and turned to look at Debra. Her nose, mouth, and chin were slick with blood, as were her hands. She held a bloody thing that was mostly a skeleton with a few scraps of fur and flesh clinging to it. The woman – Katie! Her name was Katie! – drew the mutilated remains to her chest and glared at Debra with wide, wild eyes.
“You can’t have any, bitch. It’s all mine!”
Her voice was a high-pitched shriek and bloody spittle flew from her lips as she yelled. There were bloodstains and tufts of skin and fur on the carpet in front of the woman, and Debra knew she’d been working on the animal – a cat? – for a while.
Debra no longer gave a shit about her glasses.
She held her hands palm out in a warding gesture, and she began to back up slowly. She wanted to turn and run, but she knew better than to take her eyes off Katie, and she also knew that if she started running, she might trigger a predatory response in the woman, prompting her to attack. No, she had to go slow, regardless of how fast her heart was beating (very) or how much adrenaline was coursing through her veins (a lot).
The woman continued glaring at her, but she made no move to rise to her feet. A soft sound was coming from her throat, and while Debra wasn’t certain, she thought the woman was actually growling at her.
She’d taken three steps backward when she bumped into something. An involuntary squeal of fright escaped her lips, and she whirled around to see the clinic’s director standing there. She couldn’t remember this woman’s name, but she recognized her. She was always here, and today she’d observed Debra’s entire session with Lori for some reason. Probably some kind of performance review thing, she’d decided. Lori wasn’t bad, but she could use some improvement, that was for sure.
Debra’s first response was to enlist the director’s aid, and she hooked a thumb over her shoulder in Katie’s direction.
“Do you see what she—”
She broke off when the details of the director’s appearance registered on her awareness. The woman was covered in blood from head to toe. She looked like she’d been bathing in the stuff, swimming in a goddamned pool of it. Not a lake, an ocean….
The director smiled and held up a pair of glasses, lenses speckled with blood.
“Are these yours?” she said.
The woman’s long braid swayed behind her under its own power, as if she had a large gray snake growing out of the back of her head. The sight of the thing moving independently made Debra feel queasy. It was unnatural. Wrong. It couldn’t be and yet it was, and that idea – that something that should be impossible might be real – was more terrifying than these two women combined.
The braid whipped out from behind Melinda’s back and lashed Debra across the face. The impact stung like hell, and she stepped back, shaken. She brought her hand to her cheek as if by touching it she could somehow lessen the pain.
Katie’s growling became a snarl then, and Debra felt the woman slam into her from behind. Her shoulder screamed in agony, and a burst of white light filled her vision as Katie’s weight bore her to the floor. She hit hard, and she felt something snap in her chest. A rib? She couldn’t catch her breath, and her mouth gaped open and closed like a fish on land as she tried to draw in air. She thrashed back and forth in an attempt to dislodge Katie, but the woman grasped her shoulders tight and held on.
The director knelt in front of her face and smiled, lips sliding away from blood-slick teeth.
“I imagine your shoulder must be hurting a great deal right now. Don’t worry. We can fix it. There might be a little discomfort at first, but it’ll be over in a few minutes. You’ll feel much better afterward.” Her smile widened. “In fact, you won’t feel anything at all.”
The director dropped Debra’s glasses to the carpet and then both she and Katie went to work. As it turned out, the director had lied to Debra. She felt more than a little discomfort, quite a fucking lot, in fact.
* * *
Melinda did her best to wipe her hands clean on the carpet before she stood, but there was only so much she could do to get the blood off – there was so much of it. And really, why bother? She was covered in it, her clothes dark, sodden, and heavy. Besides, she rather liked the feeling of blood on her skin, and while she hadn’t had a chance to view herself in a mirror yet, she suspected ‘blood-drenched maniac’ was a good look for her.
