Strange Trouble Read online

  There was an elevator in the lobby, but she wasn’t getting on it. She found the stairwell and began climbing the steps, slowly at first, then running up them.

  It wasn’t that she was in a hurry to meet the monster waiting for her. She was reluctant. She wasn’t eager to meet the new threat. Thoughts of the witch scared the hell out of her.

  And that was why she ran.

  She’d never hidden from a monster—other than her own. She wasn’t going to start now.

  She reached the top floor and stopped to listen. There were no sounds. No whispers, no cries.

  The air was thick and heavy with expectation, making it hard to breathe.

  Funny, considering how innocuous the hallway was. Carpets and small pictures, the occasional plastic plant.

  At the end of the hall she saw a set of double doors, and realized suddenly where the witch waited. She was on the roof. Witches didn’t like closed in, airless places. They liked nature. The outdoors, storms, air…

  Beneath the sky was where the witch would caw her spells, would chant her words, would spew her curses.

  Where she would use everything she had to destroy Rune.

  Rune swallowed hard and sent out her claws, flinching at the sound of them filling the silence. But the witch would be aware of Rune’s location.

  Maybe they really were alike. Kindred spirits, as Marta had said.

  Whatever, Rune felt a certain familiarity she didn’t question. It just was.

  And then the door to the roof was before her and though she silently lamented her hesitation, she paused. Just for a second, but she paused.

  The door opened on its own, eagerly.

  Rune walked out.

  It was time to meet the witch.

  Chapter Twenty

  The witch stood at the edge of the roof, her hands on her hips, bouncing gently on her toes.

  Rune battled a bit with claustrophobia, but she had no fear of heights. Still, the sight made her stomach clench just a little.

  At the witch’s feet, Fie sat hunched and silent, her chin on her chest. She didn’t look up at Rune’s entrance. She didn’t so much as twitch.

  Damascus didn’t resemble the stereotypical witch.

  She had her straight, white-blonde hair in a ponytail. She’d dressed her slightly plump body in a too short black skirt, a blood-red blouse, and a pair of black heels. Jewelry glittered at her throat, her ears, and her fingers.

  Her lips, thick with red lipstick, were black in the moonlight. She smiled. “How do I look?”

  “You don’t look evil,” Rune said, surprised that her voice was calm. “But I can feel it coming from you.”

  Damascus tilted her head. “What does it feel like?”

  “Like a hazy, green bog full of troll shit and bubbling poison.” Rune returned the smile, hoping no fear showed. “Something like that.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Damascus murmured. She leaned over slightly to caress Fie’s head. “Is it, Stefanie?”

  Rune kept her stare on the witch. She couldn’t let her know she was terrified for the kid. As if she doesn’t already know that. “What do you want?”

  “Oh, I’m sure the deceptive little Marta told you exactly what I came for.” Again, she tilted her head. “But I have failed. I must settle for getting this tiny necromancer and you, instead.”

  “You—” Rune swallowed. “You don’t get us.”

  “Oh, but I do.” She put a finger to her chin. “And I get your power as well.” She clapped her hands, laughing. “You will be a wonderful addition to the others.”

  Others…

  Damascus sniffed the air. “From whom did you feed?”

  “I was force fed by Llodra, your little runaway.”

  At Llodra’s name, Damascus sank her teeth into her bottom lip, and to Rune’s horror, began chewing through it like a juicy piece of meat. “He was almost mine again.” The mangled, bloody lip flapped as she spoke. “I was so happy. He was right here, in my hands. I could feel him. I called with everything I had but he got away. Because of you.”

  She tilted her head, her gaze distant. “Why would my Nicolas feed you?” She held up a hand as though Rune was about to interrupt her. Then she once again speared Rune with her bottomless stare. “Bloody protection. Such bloody protection. Bloody, bloody, bloody—”

  “Fie,” Rune said. “I need you to move away from the lady.”

  The witch covered her mouth and giggled. “That’s precious.”

  Rune shot out her claws and dropped her fangs. “I like a lot of space when I kill.”

  Damascus lifted her eyebrows. “Oh. I can certainly accommodate you there.” She buried her fingers into Fie’s hair, jerked the child into the air, and slung her over the edge of the building. Fie never made a sound. “You’re welcome.”

  “No,” Rune screamed, and didn’t even realize she’d moved until her claws sliced empty air where the witch had stood a second before.

  Damascus laughed, the underlay of malevolence so strong it pierced Rune’s eardrums, filling her head with pain.

  “She gone,” Damascus cried. “She dead!” But then she closed her mouth, held a hand to her head, and frowned. “That’s different. She’s a strong little thing.”

  Rune threw herself to her knees at the roof’s edge. Roaming zombies moaned and lurched over the dark ground, converging, Rune was sure, upon Fie’s broken little body.

  She couldn’t see the child, could only silently acknowledge her regret and horror as she turned once more to face the witch. Llodra’s maker.

  It was his fault. Fie was dead because of Nicolas Llodra and his fucking girlfriend.

  There was little time for anything else—not even self-recrimination. That would come later.

  If she survived the witch.

  “That’s a disappointment,” Damascus said. “I could have trained her. Used her.”

  Rune lifted her stare from the floor and looked at the witch.

  “Oh,” Damascus said. “There it is. Death in your pretty blue eyes.” Her own eyes flashed red, then went black. “But it’s your death I see there.”

  “You talk too damn much.” Rune forced her silver claws to elongate even more. They lengthened until finally she had to rein them in. They were becoming too unwieldy.

  “Hideous,” Damascus said, and dropped the blonde façade.

  The blonde’s body seemed to implode, then peeled in layers to fall upon the roof before turning to a foul smelling gray ash.

  Rune stood frozen as she beheld the witch. The true witch.

  “I stole that body from a whore on the second floor,” Damascus said. “She came up for a smoke and I fancied her. But I much prefer my body.”

  Rune heard distant cawing, and crying, and the long dead echoes of tortured screams. Hot, putrid wind stirred the growing tufts of her hair. She shivered as gooseflesh erupted on her skin and she started to touch her groaning belly before she remembered her claws were out.

  The witch smiled.

  In that smile was every terror ever imagined, every black thing ever thought, every depravity ever invented.

  The witch wasn’t a woman, not really. She was evil wrapped in horror, tied neatly with a bow of rancid blood and sour anguish.

  Her skin was partly translucent. Made up of twisted, knotty veins and arteries, swollen, pulsating organs, and splashes of blood and rot, she was something caught between life and death, something created in the darkest depths of hell.

  As Rune watched, faces of others—victims, they had to be the witch’s victims—flashed over the witch’s skeletal face as though she wore layers of masks that blinked into existence sporadically.

  Like her body was a world, and those people were caught inside, forever.

  Screaming frozen faces with eyes that were still alive. Still aware.

  Rune wobbled as her knees weakened. “Oh, God.” Her eyes hurt. She couldn’t force breath past the fear clogging her throat. She could feel her heart beating, throbbing
, hard and fast. Too fast.

  “God can’t help you now,” Damascus said.

  Rune wanted to jump off the roof, to run screaming from the horror before her—she knew, just knew the woman was going to reach out and drag her inside that nightmare with the others.

  The witch was a concoction of all the power she’d stolen and sucked inside herself. She was everyone she’d ever destroyed.

  And she wanted to add Rune to that nasty, bloody mix.

  Rune had been afraid in her life, but never like she was right then. All the self-hatred, all the pain…it was gone. In its place was sheer terror.

  Death didn’t scare her.

  Being one of the people caught inside the disturbing landscape Damascus called a body—that scared her.

  She didn’t care about saving the world. The zombies were far away, a dream, and they were not as important as her need to stay free of the witch.

  But she was not created to hide, shaking as her fear choked her.

  That left her one option.

  She would kill the witch.

  There were no other choices.

  The witch watched her, exposed eyeballs glittering. She wore a knowing smile, somehow, though there were no real lips to prove it.

  But it was there.

  “I do like a challenge,” she said.

  “Then you’re going to love me.”

  And Rune became her monster.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Would her monster be enough this time?

  No.

  She would have to become something more, something she’d never been. It was inside her. She just had to figure out how to drag it screaming from the shadows of her psyche.

  She could.

  Llodra had said so. And if he knew her father, he knew her.

  The witch came at her, her freaky, fucked up face changing every couple of seconds.

  She was fast—faster than anyone Rune had ever seen.

  Rune flew through the air and had her claws reaching for the woman before she was near her. She forced them longer and they blasted from her fingers, right into the witch’s head.

  And there they stuck.

  Damascus howled with laughter, shaking her head from side to side like a crazed bull. “Fun,” she shrieked. “Fun!”

  Rune tried to wrench her claws free, yanking desperately in a frenzy of horror and disbelief.

  But Damascus held her soundly and began to slowly reel her closer, her monstrous head gulping at Rune’s claws like a snake swallowing a deer.

  She was a hideous sponge, and she was absorbing Rune, her monster, and her power.

  Did that mean the witch would be Rune?

  Rune forced herself calm. She found the darkness inside her and embraced it greedily.

  And then, instead of fighting to free herself, she began stuffing her claws, her hands, even her arms, deeper into Damascus. “Eat this, bitch.”

  Damascus stopped laughing.

  Rune was up to her elbows inside the witch’s head. She swam in there, exploring, gathering information. “I see you,” she said, her voice a singsongy whisper.

  The witch didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all.

  “Get out,” she screamed, and began frantically trying to dislodge Rune. “Out!”

  Rune was powerful and full of a strange magic the witch had wanted to taste, to steal. But she was no longer eager to do anything more than survive.

  Rune smiled into the bulging, glistening eyes. “Got you. Now what will happen to you when I take your power?”

  But Damascus wasn’t going to be that easy.

  She gathered her own darkness and desperation and fought back, as Rune had known she would.

  A power like Damascus would never be easily defeated—but it was enough that she understood Rune was just as strong.

  And then Fie flashed across the witch’s face.

  Rune moaned. “You fucking…”

  “She tasted sweet,” Damascus crooned.

  Damascus had already taken Fie before she tossed her shell of a body off the roof. Most likely she’d killed her long before Rune had even stepped inside the building.

  They both began to fight in earnest. No hesitations, no talking.

  Rune dug her claws inside the witch, trying to scoop out something vital.

  Damascus ran her fingers over Rune’s arms, and where she touched, she left chaos. Rune’s skin began to crack, like mud left to dry in the hot sun.

  Her claws, deep inside the repulsive witch, began to peel and snap. Once again, fear lit her mind and she pulled away, slicing at Damascus as she fought to drag her claws free.

  This time, Damascus didn’t try to stop her. She pushed as Rune pulled. Finally Rune popped free with a savagery that propelled her across the floor, where she lay dazed as she tried to reclaim her mind without the connection to the witch.

  She shuddered, sloughing off the invisible fingers of the witch’s vast and dark mind. Her skin began to repair immediately. Her claws zipped back inside her, and she felt them healing as well.

  Something brushed her cheek and she reached up to shove her hair out of her face. There was no time to be shocked about something so mundane as hair.

  The witch was coming. She glided toward Rune, her face full of determination.

  Rune jumped to her feet, shooting out her claws. “I’m not getting trapped inside that darkness,” she murmured.

  But Damascus believed otherwise. She lifted her hands, her lipless mouth moving as she muttered words Rune couldn’t understand.

  A green-tinged fog appeared, swirling between her palms. Then she blew, gently.

  The fog or gas or whatever it was whooshed toward Rune, and she barely had time to get her claws up to block it before the witch released another round.

  “Fie,” she yelled, as she blocked another ball of the noxious green gas. “Can you hear me?”

  Damascus stood still suddenly and tilted her head. “Of course she can hear you. They all can.” She giggled, then stopped abruptly. “I tire of play. I’ll have you now.”

  “How romantic.” But her voice shook. She ignored her fear. She wasn’t ready to give the child up, not yet. “Stefanie!”

  There was, of course, no answer.

  And Damascus hadn’t lied. She was done playing. Her next ball of fog was larger and faster, and broke open to splash upon Rune’s arm when she blocked it.

  It sizzled on her skin and the pain was so intense she couldn’t help but scream. The fog, like acid, began to eat away her flesh.

  She slashed at the witch, gratified when her long, silver claws sliced off one of Damascus’s arms.

  But it didn’t matter. The arm fell to the floor and began to shrivel, crawling across the roof. The blood congealed and turned black, the bones belching little puffs of smoke before turning to ash.

  The witch regrew her arm. In seconds.

  Llodra and Marta had been wrong. Rune couldn’t defeat Llodra’s maker, and she couldn’t send her away. No one could.

  The witch lifted her newly formed arm, pointed her fingers at Rune, and began to make a stirring motion.

  The air itself became the green acid fog.

  “Fuck,” Rune shrieked, and ran. She ran with every bit of the speed being an Other gave her. If the fog enveloped her, it’d devour her skin and meat and leave only the clean bones to drop to the floor.

  And she could only hope if that happened, somehow she’d be dead, not a part of the witch’s horrible little internal commune.

  So she left Damascus behind. Fie and the others souls were lost to her. She couldn’t save them, and she couldn’t defeat the witch. She didn’t know how to.

  She ran toward the edge of the roof, acid mist sizzling at her back, and prepared to jump.

  But at the last second, she threw herself to the side, let the fog roll over her, and turned to drive her claws through the witch’s eyes.

  Right into her brain.

  It wouldn’t kill her, but it would s
low her the hell down.

  And as Damascus screamed and scratched furrows into Rune’s arms, trying to dislodge the silver claws, Rune did the unthinkable.

  She began to feed from the witch.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was like drinking poison.

  Damascus tasted of madness, depravity, and a killing rage worse even than the berserker’s.

  Those inside her tasted of deadly sorrow, and pain, and overwhelming depression. Despair was so sharp it was smothering, and Rune couldn’t stand it.

  Nothing matters. She remembered. Nothing mattered. Life was a joke.

  Feeding had been an impulse, and it had been a big fucking mistake.

  She could have handled the witch’s taste, but the broken, grieving sadness of those trapped inside her was too much.

  Their reality was too much.

  And Rune could not handle it.

  She gagged on tears and yanked her fangs from Damascus’s thinned-skinned throat. She’d punctured the visible, pulsating artery, not even thinking about it—it’d been the simple reflex action of a vampire.

  The blood had squirted down her throat in strong splashes, and it didn’t matter that she stopped feeding. She couldn’t get the taste from her mind. The horror inside the witch was something she’d never known existed. Something she’d never imagined.

  She’d been through shit. She’d been hurt, and she’d experienced horror.

  But not like that.

  Not even from Llodra. Not even living with the knowledge that she’d slaughtered her adoptive parents was as unspeakable as what was inside the witch.

  And that changed her mind about everything. She wasn’t leaving until Damascus was dead or gone.

  She couldn’t.

  Nicolas Llodra was right. That was why she existed.

  She destroyed the monsters—true monsters.

  Damascus pinched her artery and it sealed off with a hiss. She stared at Rune with curiosity and satisfaction, which quickly turned to shock, and then hatred.

  “It’s not possible. You cannot live with my blood inside you.”

  Rune wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “It would appear that I can.”