book title

It’s been many years since I last looked like myself. When you can change your appearance, it’s surprisingly easy to forget. And since I said goodbye to my birth face at fourteen, I likely wouldn’t even recognise myself twenty years later. But it’s my best weapon, looking like someone you know. The scariest monster doesn’t have fangs or claws. No, the scariest monster has the face of a friend.

The first time I ever killed someone, when I was fourteen, it wasn’t for money. I’d made friends with a girl at school, Brianna, and I found out her dad abused her. And not like he smacked her around, like some people I know; he was a legit psycho. Brianna refused to tell anyone else, to go to the cops; that’s how much he scared her. And she didn’t know I was a pùca, didn’t know I could change my face, my body, my entire appearance.

I took on the appearance of a woman I’d met years ago, and it barely took any effort to get him into the bar’s bathroom. And it was easy to kill him. Too easy, if you ask me. I sucked him dry, pulled every drop of life force out of him in less than a minute.

That’s something I never did again, though. I realised that leaving a trail of pùca-drained bodies would have been stupid, would’ve made them too easy to link together, and likely someone would track me down. Sometimes I’ll drain them unconscious if they’re too much for me to take down, or if I need to be quiet and discreet, but I’ll always finish the job with something like strangulation or a knife.

I almost made a mistake recently. And once you’ve killed someone, there’s no going back, so how close I came to that mistake will haunt me for a while.

A contract and payment appeared at one of my dead drops a little over a week ago. It had thorough information on the target, and since people only get my name from someone who’s used me before, they know the procedure. There needs to be a real cause for the death, a real justification. Hate isn’t enough. Money isn’t enough. I need to be helping someone like Brianna.

This one was a woman married to a man who had everything. Wealth, renown, a lovely family to take photographs with for the articles covering his philanthropy. He had a wife and two daughters, one daughter in college, one nine years old.

Whenever I saw photographs of them, they all looked so happy. And I did see many photographs. Even if you don’t keep up with that sort of thing, you see the covers of tabloids in line at the grocery store or on commercials for news segments where he was interviewed. It was impossible to avoid.

The wife had reached out to me. She left the cash, my standard fee, and that thorough dossier.

The husband was your textbook sociopath, and from what she gave me, he was as good at hiding it as all the others. Any wounds were in a place no one else would see them. Cigarette burns on her stomach. Smacks on her back. And of course, the wounds that never left scars. She listed all the injuries, some with photographs, in all their horrifying detail.

My process takes about a week, just to do enough reconnaissance to ensure there’s no sign of foul play when I drop the body. I don’t have to worry much about a trail back to me, since I ceased to exist long ago. But any connection between my crimes could mean the start of an FBI task force, and that could be my downfall.

Always taking on the appearance of a different person, I tailed him on multiple occasions. Heading into the airport for a first-class flight. Going to a meeting at some high-powered executive’s office. Or stopping for a drink at his favourite bar before heading home after a long day of work.

After eight days, I made my daily stop at each of my dead drops and found a single envelope. And I received the biggest shock of my life when I opened it at home. In an envelope was $23.42 and a note, handwritten, clearly by a child.

My mommy hired you to kill my daddy. I heard her on the phone with a friend talking about it, and I found where she wrote down the instructions. She says my daddy hurts her, but she’s lying.

My heart dropped into my stomach as I read the next line.

I reached out for the back of a chair, unsteady, and sat down.

I hope you get this in time. I want to go to the police, but if they don’t believe me, I’ll be in even worse trouble. Mommy’s never hurt me. She only says mean things, but if she gets mad enough, she might. I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of money, and I know my mommy already paid you. I can steal some from my mommy if you really need it. Please help my daddy. Please don’t hurt him. Please kill my mommy instead.

I read the note in its entirety three times before putting it down. My head spun, my chest hurt, and it took a few minutes for me to get past the anger and start planning my next move. I’d inadvertently done a decent amount of research on the wife while checking out the husband, so I wasn’t in that bad a place to move the job in a different direction.

There was now emotion in this job, though. I needed to be more creative. I needed her to feel remorse before she died. For almost causing me to kill an innocent man.

Like many others before her, it wasn’t difficult to get close to her. She had a book club every Tuesday afternoon, and all I had to do was wait until everyone left and then come back up to the door as one of her friends. I was careful to come up from the street as someone else, though. It wouldn’t do to frame an innocent woman for the murder.

Wearing another face, I rang the doorbell. She smiled as she greeted me.

“Hey, you forget something?”

“I hope so,” I told her. “I can’t find my phone.”

She motioned me inside and closed the door behind me. She turned back to me and I took her by the throat, draining enough energy to make her go limp. Her eyes bulged in shock and fear, barely managing the strength to grab my wrist with both hands. I held her, cutting off her air flow, for long enough for her to panic and start flailing, then slowly lowered her to the ground.

“You’ve got a great kid, you know that?” I whispered. Her eyes twitched in confusion, trying to take in enough air past my grip on her throat. “You shouldn’t have written those directions down where she could find them, though.”

Comprehension slowly dawned on her face. Then anger. Then, as she suddenly grasped her situation, cold, stark fear.

“I’ll pay you more,” she whispered. “I just want him gone. But if he’s gone, everything’s mine. I can get you as much as you want-“

Her voice choked off as I squeezed. “You made the worst mistake of your life, coming to me.” She kicked at me weakly, her mouth gaping like a fish out of water, and I drained her some more, enough to sap most of her strength. “I hurt people who hurt people. That’s my job, and I’m pretty good at it. But I want to thank you for teaching me to follow through on my research. I almost killed the wrong person, and it won’t happen again.”

I stared into her eyes. “Do you think I’m going to kill you?” Her lower lip trembled, her wide eyes staring back at me. “Your daughter asked me to kill you instead of your husband, but I wouldn’t have put that on her. Living with something like that is too heavy a burden, especially for a child. It would eat away at her.” I paused. “So, I’m going to do the next best thing. I’m going to…take your life from you instead. I’m going to make you as helpless as you made them. And every day when you wake up and think of hurting them again, I want you to realise that I can always come back again and do worse.”

With that, I turned her around and onto her stomach, took out my knife, and sliding her shirt up, found her C6 vertebrae. And I slid my knife neatly in, severing the connection. As she lay on the ground, limp and helpless, I took her phone from her pocket and unlocked the Emergency option, dialling 911. And I left the phone there. The nine-year-old would be home from school in an hour, and it wouldn’t do to have her be the one to find her mother, even if she’d probably survive until then.

Standing up and shifting back to the woman I’d walked up the driveway as, I left through the front door, leaving it wide open behind me. I didn’t rush, walking calmly down the street and around the corner to my car.