Her head swung towards me. Those unnatural eyes searched the bushes, traveling leisurely back and forth across my hiding spot. I held my breath. Just go inside, I begged silently. Just go inside and leave me alone.
“I smell you little human,” she said in a sing song voice. “You smell like sugar and spice and something quite nice.”
My right foot was cramping up. I flexed my toes, fighting off the pins and needles. The tiny movement nearly made me lose my balance. I wavered to the right and managed to catch myself. My fingers touched something hard. Something metal. Slowly, silently, I pulled it from the ground and clutched it to my chest. A horse shoe. The big, heavy kind people threw in sand pits. No, not a horse shoe. A weapon.
“I want to play a game.” The girl pouted. She nudged the bloody woman. Sighed. “And now I’ve broken my toy. Come out, come out, wherever you are. I promise to be much more careful with you.” She started to walk in a big, wandering circle. When she turned away from me I attacked.
Holding the horse shoe tightly in my right hand I launched myself at her legs, just below the knees. She went down instantly and I swung the horse shoe without pause, striking her head again and again and again until blood splattered up and coated my face and chest. She tried to fight back but surprise and a healthy fear of not dying had given me the advantage.
I straddled her waist, pinning her down beneath me. With a strength that defied logic she managed to flip herself over and her nails, filed to points, raked out and whipped across my cheek. The cuts burned like someone had poured acid in them and I screamed, but didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Instinct had taken over, and I was more animal than human as I fought for my life.
Her nose shattered, then her jaw. Her eyes bulged and I jammed my thumb to the hilt in the left one, just like Mrs. Hamilton had taught us to do in self defense.
The girl howled like a wild animal and bucked her hips, trying to throw me off, but I clung to her with the knowledge that if I didn’t knock her out – or worse – I wouldn’t be leaving this backyard alive.
“I will kill you for this,” she snarled, glaring daggers at me with her one good eye. Her teeth snapped an inch from my face and caught my hair. She ripped a chunk of it out by the roots and spat it in the grass beside her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I kept repeating the same words over and over, not realizing until they come out all choked up that I was crying. I brought the horse shoe down again. And again. And again. So many times I lost count. When the girl went limp and her head fell back, mouth open, eye closed, I leaped to my feet, ready to run. But something stopped me. Something pulled at me.
I stared down at the girl I had beaten with a kind of horrified fascination. With her mouth open I could see her fangs. Like the man’s they were silver and looked like daggers, slightly curved and deadly sharp. I wondered if they were natural, if they were real, or if the girl was just part of some crazy cult that had decided to attack the entire town.
The horse shoe dropped to the lawn with a soft thump. Slowly I knelt down beside the girl’s head and reached out with one trembling hand. If I could just touch the fangs… If I could just feel them… They really were quite beautiful. The way they glistened in the moonlight… It was unlike anything I had ever seen before.
My fingertips brushed against one fang and it happened in an instant. One second the girl was motionless and the next she had her teeth clamped down on my hand and was shaking her head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone.
I screamed and fell back. She released my hand and I clutched it to my chest, expecting to see it ravaged beyond repair, but the only visible damage were two small pinpricks of blood where her fangs had entered the skin. Yet it burned. Oh, God, my entire arm was burning and I was screaming and the girl was laughing.
She sprang to her feet, nimble as a cat, and sauntered over to where I was rolling in the dirt, frantically trying to put out the invisible fire that was consuming my body inch by inch.
“Peek a boo, I got you,” she giggled before her lips curled into a deadly snarl and she crouched over me, a predator covering it’s prey. I stared into her eyes, glittering with malice. I looked at her face, a face that had healed itself in a matter of seconds.
And I knew I was going to die.
CHAPTER FIVE
You know how they say right before you die your life flashes in front of your eyes? Yeah. That didn’t happen for me.
I held perfectly still as the girl traced a single fingernail down across my cheek and hooked it under my jaw, poking until I felt a drop of blood slide down my neck, warm and sticky. She poked again, harder this time, puncturing another hole in my skin as if I was some sort of human piñata and my blood was the candy.
“Aren’t you going to scream?” Her lips pushed out in a childish pout. “The other one screamed. You’re no fun. I want a new toy.”
That did it. The pain in my arm had dulled, replaced with anger that burned at a fever pitch. I slapped her hand away from my face and scrambled to my feet. She let me get up, renewed interest glimmering in her icy blue eyes.
“I am not some toy,” I told her fiercely. “I’m a human being! And you can’t go around killing people. The cops are going to be here soon and -”
“Oh, cops shmops.” She waved her hand dismissively. “We took care of them ages ago.”
I remembered the laughter I heard on the other end of the 9-1-1 call and shuddered. “Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?” she repeated in a high pitched parody of my own voice. “Always the same, inane questions. Stupid humans,” she said as she began to circle around me. “So content in your little bubbles. Well I am sorry to say that your bubble has just been,” she snapped her fingers, “popped.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My name?” she said, looking surprised by the question. “Angelique. What’s yours?”
“Lola.”
Her head tipped to the side as she mused it over. “Lola… I like that. It suits you, I think. You’re feisty. So different from all the others. All they do is beg and cry and beg and cry.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you can imagine it gets pretty annoying after a while. But you… you, my darling Lola, haven’t begged once. Do you want to be my pet?” Her face lit up. “Oh, please say yes! Please. We’ll have so much fun together! I haven’t had my own pet for years and years.”
What I wanted was for this crazy nightmare to end. I wanted to wake up safe in a hospital bed, the victim of an electric shock from being stupid enough to try to hot wire a car. I wanted Travis and my father to be there. I wanted to never know what it felt like to bludgeon someone over the head with a horse shoe. I wanted to forget Angelique had ever existed. “Sure,” I said, feigning a bright smile. “I’ll be your pet. What do I have to do?”
Angelique clapped her hands together, giddy as a child with a new toy. “This is going to be so much fun. And Mona is going to so jealous. Just wait until she sees you! Of course we’ll have to get you out of those clothes and do something with your hair. Dye it blonde, maybe. Is the color natural?”
I lifted a strand of my waist length black hair and nodded.
Her fangs flashed as she grinned. “Excellent. Now I just have to -”
“ANGELIQUE!” A man’s roar ripped through the night and Angelique’s entire body went rigid.