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As soon as my foot hit sand, a wall of Paul’s creeping darkness slammed into me. Invisible yet palpable, heavy enough to stick my lungs together. This lake, contained inside four walls of a stairway closet, definitely belonged to him. The air didn’t smell damp, or like a lake at all, really. It didn’t smell like much of anything except that cold heaviness that dragged chills down my arms whenever Paul was near.
My flesh scurried away, threatening to sweep me back into the devil, but I rooted my foot on the beach and forced myself to take another step. I should’ve been used to this awful sensation of Paul now since we were such good friends. We tried to open doors for each other and everything. Really, wasn’t that what friendship was all about?
This friend needed to die, though, and oh my god this is why I have no friends.
Because I pretended my enemies were friends. Because I was stalling something awful instead of taking the three more steps I needed to the lake’s edge.
Even if I looked into the Lake of Truths and didn’t come back a changed woman, I might really see the truth, like a hint at how to defeat Paul. In some ways, that was even more terrifying. That knowledge would require action, taking steps forward, and I wasn’t sure I could find the inner strength to ever move from this spot again.
Could I really defeat Paul? Me, an unemployed slayer with a massive hard-on for pie who made up her own rules to explain why she fucked three vampires? He hadn’t killed me yet, so that was something, I supposed.
I took another step, my leg stiff and rubbery like it belonged to someone else. One more. One more step and then I would be peering into where Paul had come from.
How bad could it be, really?
With my heart pummeling my ribs, I took the last step and lowered my gaze. My face stared back from what appeared to be black sludge. It was impossible to tell how deep it went, even at the very edge, and I wasn’t about to poke around in it.
So...yeah, there was my face with dark pockets of sleep withdrawal under my eyes, a messy bun on top of my head with a stake through it, and an impatient grimace on my mouth. Not very original, Lake of Truths. Do better. If I wanted to look at myself, I would’ve just stayed home and not done that.
On the tail end of my frustrated sigh, my image began to shift. An eyebrow there, an ear wiggle there, yet the lake itself never moved. Curious, and also deeply unnerving because my actual face didn’t feel like it was moving at all. A cold sweat slicked my palms, and my mouth went arid.
Then, the stake in my hair began to sink in my reflection, not down into the lake’s depths, but into my head, caving it in. I bunched my fingers at my sides, refusing to fly them up to my actual head to make sure it was still intact. This was just an illusion. My mouth began to sag into my chin, my whole face melting, exactly how people looked in Paul’s nightmare reality when he took his strolls. But it wasn’t real.
And then...nothing. My reflection disappeared even though I was still standing here. I darted my gaze around the surface like an idiot anyway, though, searching. Where had I gone?
A bubble rose to the surface and popped loud enough to make me jump. Either something was coming or... yeah, something was definitely coming. Even the sand rippled under my feet with the force of it and a promise to tip me headfirst into the lake. I widened my stance and gritted my teeth together, super grateful I’d worn my turbo traction-boots instead of my usual ass-kicker ones.
An image rose up from the depths of the lake, blurry at first, mostly splotches of color like oil on water. Then, gradually, another face, this time a guy’s. He had sporadic facial hair, which made me think he was fairly young, and had a large forehead that hooded beady eyes. He was walking...walking at the bottom of a lake.
Huh.
He looked upward right at me but didn’t appear all that shocked that I was staring down at him. But then he stopped and stared straight ahead of him, his body tense. I saw through his eyes at a dark, shapeless thing that exuded the same feeling as the lake itself. The world warped and melted around it like a living, growing nightmare. And it was growing. Fast.
Paul. It had to be him, but without the skin suit and bowler shirt and shoes.
People surrounded him, trying to contain him. They kept shouting something, their voices frightened.
“It’s a god from another dimension,” one yelled.
“It’s trying to take over!” another shouted.
They tore at Paul and beat at him until they ripped a part of him free. A ball of swirling light, it looked like.
The people offered the ball of light to the guy with the sporadic facial hair, and the light sank into him. At his side, his fingers clenched around something. A thin piece of wood, one that looked suspiciously like a stake.
A slayer. They’d given him slayer power. That was the original Senate. And they’d taken the slayer power from Paul.
This was... I couldn’t believe it.
The slayer guy marched toward the battle, but his perspective had changed somewhat. Other creatures pressed in close to Paul and the people, things with fangs and red eyes, things he’d never seen before. He killed everything with fangs, but not Paul. Paul lurked away from him, just out of reach, weakened but not dead.
The image shifted then to a different time and place. The slayer guy seemed to be patrolling, but instead of fighting like a good little slayer, he stood still, and a rush of blood stretched toward his feet. A gleeful smile twisted his lips while a half-naked woman slumped down in front of him, a vampire attached to her neck. The slayer laughed, the sound like old bones scraping together as they rose out of the water.
A loud bang sounded behind me, pulling my attention away from the lake. The open closet doorway at my back had slammed. Closing me in with the lake. Where had the devil gone? The house shook violently. My stomach tightened. I stopped breathing and listened to the quiet in the space between my heartbeats. Something was definitely wrong, but the images hadn’t finished playing underneath the lake. I turned back, willing them to hurry.
Other slayers flashed below the surface, one right after the other, all of them with stakes in their hand or tucked somewhere on their bodies. A thick black shapeless thing followed them around, and—
Oh. What?
The slayers. The slayers were killing non-vampires. Humans. Violent, vicious acts played out in front of me, one right after the other. One image in particular stuck out, sharp enough to pierce me right through the heart. A little girl, blonde, with a beautiful face hauntingly similar to Eddie’s. She lit a match, the match that would kill her entire family except Eddie, the flame glinting across her cold smile.
She had started the fire.
Oh god, did Eddie even know?
The dark thing followed the slayers, hunted them, haunted them, until finally, the slayer died. Either they killed themselves or the town turned on them. All the slayers died young—none of them seemed to be much older than me—and Paul stashed their bodies in an underground lake.
This lake. A shiver wracked my entire body, scurrying goose bumps over my skin. This lake that the devil had moved out from under the trapdoor in the mausoleum—the lake of dead slayers.
But...why? Why did he keep them here?
The closet shook around me hard enough to snow down plaster flakes from the ceiling. From somewhere far off, Cleo barked, wild and frantic.
Shit. Shitshitshit.
In the images under the surface of the lake, one slayer tried to stop Paul. He looked just like Ronick with his short dark hair and facial scruff, so it had to be Ronick’s brother, Roseff. He threw a trapdoor over Paul’s lake and then a familiar-looking mausoleum surrounded by a graveyard. But while doing this, Roseff looked into the lake. Just as I was now. And it broke him to see the truth—that Paul was all of us, all slayers. And eventually, the power inside us made us lose our minds. Turned us into monsters capable of burning houses down with families inside.
I had no chance of defeating him if I lost my damn mind. And how could I not lose it? Being the slayer was a ridiculous responsibility, especially when it had been dumped on me when I was only nine years old. No training. No instruction booklet. Honestly, I was surprised I wasn’t licking the walls long before now.
But...I wasn’t. Or if I was on my way down that particular slippery slope, I was still lucid enough to realize that yes, my brain was still intact.
That completely changed, however, when the closet shook so hard that the overhead bulb blinked out.
The utter darkness pressed in, dragging the heavy, oily air into my lungs, slicing panic up through my ribs. I scrambled backward, away from the lake of dead slayers. My fingers splashed into liquid, and I recoiled, thinking my useless sense of direction had spun me about. I froze. Sank my hands into the sand. Squeezed my eyes shut. Died a little on the inside.
But see? I was still sane enough to feel fear. That had to be worth something.
Somewhere over the surface of the lake, a bubble rose and popped, its echo like an explosion.
Terror surged up the back of my throat and fell out as a cracked sob. I tore away from that sound and threw myself in the direction I thought the door should be. My hands fumbled, pushing, pressing, searching for an opening along the wall.
There.
The door popped open. Water rushed through from the other side, as well as the sound of river rapids.
Another massive wall blocked my way out, lit only by the light outside the closet. One with watery blue eyes. One with striped shoes and striped sleeves on a shirt with a nametag that read Paul.
Paul, right in front of me. With the Lake of Dead Slayers right behind me.
If there was ever a time to go insane... Well, licking the walls had to be better than this.