Nancy, Carrie, Gerald, Cujo, and I walked through the deserted remains of the compound. The beautifully designed mansion was like something out of a movie set. Beautifully polished marble floors, elegant green wallpaper, portraits of the Cassidy family on every wall, and bodies every five feet or so. There were maids, waiters, and other guards that had been slaughtered like animals. Some had been stabbed to death, others torn to shreds, and others still looked like they’d just died of fright.
Nancy looked at me. “This wasn’t your doing, was it?”
I was offended she’d even ask. “No. Not unless every one of these people was a murderer.”
“Technically, that’s possible,” Gerald said, holding his nose and covering his mouth with one hand. “Certainly, it’s a group of people that have been facilitating mass murder.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Gerald looked at me. “Trying not to start chewing the flesh off their bones or going into a killing frenzy. Vampires are kind of like sharks. You don’t want to expose us to massive amounts of blood.”
I blinked. “Ah, never mind then.”
“I can smell it over a hundred yards away,” Gerald said. “It’s really troublesome some days.”
“Uh huh,” Nancy said, looking at Gerald. “Am I going to have to kill you?”
“I’ve tried very hard never to kill innocent people,” Gerald replied.
“Tried?” Nancy asked. “How are we defining innocent?”
Gerald looked at her battle ax then turned to stare at a portrait of Cassie Cassidy. “Wow, she was a very fetching woman. Kind of terrible that she was evil.”
“Bark!” Cujo said, giving him a warning look. “Bark-bark.”
I took that as Cujo warning Gerald to stay on the right side. Honestly, he was the least worrisome person here as far as I was concerned. I was more worried about Nancy going on a killing spree because we were entering uncharted waters. The Artemis race existed to fight monsters and my mother was the greatest one of them all. Would her powers compel her to fight my mother? Could they do anything against someone who remembered the pyramids being built? How did the Spirit of the Hunt fit into all of this? What events had led her to manipulate us into this confrontation.
Manipulate is a strong word, the Spirit of the Hunt said. I placed a piece of cheese at the end of the maze and you ran it like a champion. Well, champion rat.
What do you want from this? I asked.
You’ll find out, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Or you’ll die. Either way.
Great, I muttered.
“Pfft, William wishes he did all this,” Carrie said, holding the Necronomicon. She was flipping through its bloodstained leathery pages. “No, this is probably just Mike or mom at work. They’re cleaning up loose ends here.”
“Why would she kill her own people? I mean, I know supervillains do that all the time but this is the real world.” Nancy shook her head, stepping over an eviscerated mother clutching her son’s corpse. I had no idea how to react to the fact that people had kept their families here. From the look on her face, neither did Nancy.
“Lamia is the Mother of all Monsters,” I replied. “She’s as close to a supervillain as exists in the world. It’s her goal to unleash hell upon Earth. I mean that literally instead of figuratively. Her history has been ten thousand years of human sacrifice, plagues, locusts, war, and debauchery. All in the service of the Elder Gods.”
“Why?” Nancy said. “I mean, not the debauchery part, I get that.”
“It’s quite fun,” Gerald said, trying to look up at the ceiling rather than the corpses around him. “The vampire race turned against her in part because it’s better to reign on Earth than serve in Hell. In Hell, we’d all just be everyone’s meat while vampires are a power behind the throne here on Earth.”
That was a very interesting observation really, and made me wonder about my mother’s state of mind. She’d been trying to destroy the world for millennia, but she’d never quite succeeded in the text despite the fact she’d brought down kingdoms and empires. Did she really want to destroy the world, or had she simply set it up so that her efforts to destroy everything only came close to succeeding?
Not all the Red Gods wish the world to end, the Spirit of the Hunt said. When Hell rules over the Earth then that is the end of everything. Without good to oppose, there can be no evil. Also, imagine how boring it would be.
I’d rather not, I said.
Spoilsport, the Spirit of the Hunt replied.
“I have a theory about why my mother’s doing it,” Carrie said. “Well, if you were a woman in the Stone Age then you probably would have a fairly crappy opinion of humanity,” Carrie replied. “Or the Bronze Age, Dark Age, Modern Age. Really, there’s very few times a woman can go ‘hey, it’s wonderful being me.’ Unless you’re Catherine the Great or Eleanor of Aquitaine, your life is gonna suck in some way. Maybe not as much as some dudes, but at least a little. I know I want to burn it down some days.”
“I see,” Nancy said. “Actually, no I don’t.”
“Either that or she’s just an evil psychotic monster that gets off on hurting people. Those can be women too.” Carrie smirked and opened the Necronomicon.
“My impression is she wants to burn down the world and rule the ashes,” I replied. “Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.”
If Lamia was the Mother of All Monsters and not just our mother, then perhaps she was the source of the killing urge that we all suffered. It was a genetic urge to destroy that came from her and had been passed to all of her children: vampires, werewolves, as well as slashers. Perhaps she was the origin of the Slasher gene. Then again, maybe I was just looking for a way to pretend this wasn’t my fault for wanting to kill. Looking at the carnage around me, a part of me understood Gerald’s love of it. Perhaps that was the greatest lie of them all: that I could be anything other than what nature made me.
Will, you think too much, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
I shook away my brooding to listen into the conversation that had begun to get into bizarre subjects.
“Vampire society is very egalitarian,” Gerald said, holding his nose and covering his mouth. “Men and women hold roughly the same level of power from the Council of Ancients down to fledglings. Mostly because when you can order someone to eat their own fingers if they tick you off, you don’t have to live by society’s rules. The trade-off is that anyone weaker can be enslaved by anyone stronger at any time.”
“I think we should look for a cheerier topic,” I replied.
“The fact none of you brought any weapons aside from Nancy?” Gerald asked. “Even though there was an enormous number of guns downstairs?”
“Guns aren’t very good against monsters,” Carrie replied. “The power to slay them is inside our hearts. Also, the Necronomicon.”
Carrie ripped a page out of the book, folded it up and put it in her dress.
“That’s almost ten thousand years old,” I replied.
“Eh, it’s magic,” Carrie said. “It’ll regrow.”
“Should we be bringing the doomsday book to your mother?” Nancy asked, pointing at the demonic tome.
“Absolutely not,” I replied. “But we are.”
“Ah, good,” Nancy said, blinking.
We walked past a coat of arms hanging on the wall that bore an organization’s seal. It consisted of a circle with a Masonic square and compass over a shield with a stylized H in front of it. Passing through the H was a pair of crossed wands with the words Condemnant quod non intellegunt written underneath them. Roughly translated from Latin, this phrase meant, They condemn what they do not understand. It didn’t seem like a phrase the Fraternity of Orion would use, and I wondered it meant there was another group at work here, like the Sons of Mars.
“Do any of you get the impression there’s a lot more going on here than we’re aware of?” I asked.
“Every moment of my life since I woke up,” Gerald said.
“Hush you,” Carrie said, clutching the Necronomicon tightly. “Do we have any idea where she’s supposed to be?”
“No,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I can’t sense her at all.”
Even as a child, I’d known my mother was different from other people. Well, beyond the fact she’d never bothered to hide the fact she was a monster who considered other beings to be slaves or food depending on her mood. She was a person that had no aura I could detect, and it was a quality that I suspected had served her well in hiding from the various people that didn’t want the world to end.
I could still sense Mike’s presence about us but even he was becoming increasingly hard to detect. He moved from hallway to hallway, just inside the range of my ability to sense him. The babysitter murderer was someone that could probably kill us all but seemed more interested in watching us. I could tell Nancy could also sense him since her eyes often darted to the places he moved to at any given time. Carrie gave no sign of sensing Mike but it was possible she was just waiting for him to make the first move.
I didn’t know much about Mike and what I did was mostly from movies that were almost certainly inaccurate. My father had spoken of him as almost unstoppable, though, even more so than the Camp Killer. There were hundreds of urban legends about him and while most of them said he was an escaped mental patient like myself, there were stories that he was actually something far older. My father had even speculated he was Saucy Jack himself, though way too many slashers were associated with what seemed to me to be an all-too-human serial killer at work.
“Hey, mom, tell us where you are!” Carrie shouted.
There was no answer from the intercom system.
“Well, it was worth a shot,” Carrie replied.
“We’re being stalked and she’s playing games,” Nancy said, clutching her battle ax. “If she’s going to send her goon out then she should just do it.”
“When you’re older than dirt you have to come up with ways of amusing yourself,” Carrie said.
I tried sensing for any other life signs in this place but there was just too much blood spilled in this place to really get a proper sense of it. Mike’s presence, however far removed, also screwed with it. There could be no remaining mercenaries here or a hundred and I wouldn’t know.
“Do you think Cassie is among these corpses?” Nancy asked, finally reaching the mansion’s lounge. There was a large bar with a mirror behind it next to three leather couches and several dead men in masks spread around the place. They were wearing business suits and the masks were all of animals: foxes, weasels, and tigers. A pair of doors on the opposite wall were marked as restrooms and I finally realized what the compound reminded me of: an evil country club.
“We can only hope,” Carrie said. “We passed the panic room I chased her into a few rooms back, but it was open.”
“Do you still regret what happened between you?” I asked. “I mean, she did lead us into a trap.”
“We can’t know how much of that was of her own free will,” Nancy replied. “She could still be good inside.”
“So could Darth Vader, but I’ve always wondered why he gets to go to heaven just because he killed his boss to save his kid,” Carrie said. “I mean, most parents, good or evil, love their children. I mean not our parents but—”
That was when the door of the men’s room opened and a man in a long red coat walked out with long black hair as well as a winter beanie. He smelled of reefer and was carrying a joint in hand. Gerald immediately pulled out a pistol he’d managed to steal from one of the Sons of Mars along the way, Nancy lifted her ax, and Carrie pulled out a pair of knives. I just blinked.
“Ah, fuck, it’s medicinal!” the man said, raising his hands.
I blinked. “Uh, who the hell are you?”
“Winston!” the guy said. “I’m like one of the people these guys were going to sacrifice before vampire Naomi Campbell killed everybody. I decided to hide in the bathroom.”
I blinked. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t be a slasher movie without a stoner,” Nancy muttered. “It’s probably the first time one ever lasted to the end, though.”
He is not what he seems, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered.
Oh, you think? I asked, aware of the situation’s absurdity. Whatever would have given you that impression?
Sarcasm suits you, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Much better than acting the part of the dutiful son.
I have never been dutiful, I snapped.
“You were kidnapped, survived a massacre, and now you’re getting baked?” Gerald asked, incredulous.
“Yeah,” Winston said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” Gerald said, desperately pleading and frightened. “Please tell me you have enough for everyone.”
“Agreed,” Nancy said, looking exhausted.
Winston smiled and pulled out two bags thick with cannabis.
“You are the worst Artemis ever,” Carrie said, looking at Nancy. “I can’t think of a reason not to partake, though.”
“You can’t?” I asked, stunned. Was there some kind of magic at work here or had everyone just gone insane in the last few minutes? Well, not that any one of us was particularly sane.
“You never bummed a hit off the guards?” Carrie asked. “Possibly in exchange for sexual favors if they weren’t creepy and not breaking their fingers if they were?”
“No,” I replied. “Winners don’t do drugs.”
“Pfft!” Carrie said. “It’s a plant not a drug.”
Nancy and Gerald nodded.
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t suppose you happen to know where the vampire who carried out this massacre is?”
“You’re looking for her?” Winston said, rolling joints for everyone on the top of the bar.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Why?” Winston asked.
“To kill her,” I replied.
“Oh,” Winston said, handing out a trio to my group. “Well, no I don’t, but the eyeless guy in the bathroom does.”
I blinked. “The eyeless guy?”
“Yeah,” Winston replied. “He’s been asking for you for about an hour.”
My companions all blinked before Carrie took a long drag.
“Somehow this started insane and just happened to get more so as time passed,” Carrie said. “I wonder if we’re all still in the asylum at this point.”
“Don’t even joke,” I replied. “It makes more sense than what we’re currently doing.”
That was when a bloody faced man in a business suit smashed through the restroom and collapsed at our feet.