Terrorscape (15 page)

Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped.

Val froze, stock-still, tilting her head towards the
sound. She was standing outside the grove of cypress
with small chattering creatures rustling from within
the juniper.

Too small to make a sound like that?

She quickened her pace, drawing her coat more
tightly around herself. She was a little over halfway
back to the dorms, she reasoned, and therefore
moderately safe. There was a campus police station
just down the street, and several of the classrooms
nearby were still lit. North Point was a very safe
campus. Everyone said so.

But all statistics had outliers.

She was not aware of the arm at first, feeling it
only as a pinching sensation at her midsection as if
she had run into the bar of a gate. By the time she
realized what it was, she was whirled around, with
one of the rough mulberry tree trunks digging into
her lower back.

Her assailant's face was in shadow, but she knew
who it was. Knew even before that blade gleaming
with stolen starlight was at her throat, knew before
she heard his voice, dark and deep, full of anger
veiled in mockery.

“Going somewhere?”
“N—”

He forced her up against the tree with the flat of
the blade. “That was a rhetorical question. You are
going nowhere.” He ran the back of his hand down
her cheek and then, with a neat twist of his wrist,
cupped her beneath the chin to raise her head. “Do
you understand?”

Val brought up her knee. He crushed his pelvis
against hers, pressing her into the gnarled wood,
hurting her, and kissed her there, cloaked in the
seclusion of the shadows.

Scorching and carnivorous, his bruising kiss left a
minty taste that prickled and stung like the rime on
the leaves. She struggled against him, trying to
scream, and stilled when the knife bit into her skin.

“I warned you not to run.”

At this angle, she was forced to look him in the
eyes. Her bared throat made her conscious of how
easily he could kill her, here, with only darkness
standing witness.

“You should have come to me, willingly, when
you had the chance.”

Her lungs tightened and coiled in her chest, and
she wondered if they might not spring from her
mouth like a morbid jack-in-the-box.

“I'm not stupid.”

“A fine impression you do.” He tilted her head
with the knife to study something that had caught his
attention, and said, “My, my, my—what have we
here?” She stared at him, mouth working as his
leather-bound fingers brushed her skin. “Who is he?”

“No one.”

“Yet you still let him mark you. That means
you're either a liar—or a whore. Which is it, Val?”
She remained silent.

His hand settled at her waist, stroking the inch of
bare skin between hem and waistband. “You are far
too unskilled to attempt the latter, so it must be the
former, at which you are only slightly better.” He
leaned in as if to kiss her and she turned her head
away. “Tell me his name.”

“He's…nobody. He doesn't have anything to do
with this.”

“I asked for an answer. Not an excuse.”
“Please. Don't hurt him.”

His grip on her tightened. “You,” he said, in a
cold imperious voice, “will demand nothing from
me.” He moved her face back towards his. “The
name, Val. I won't ask for it again.”

She winced away from the knife. “Jade.”
“How…appropriate.”
Val averted her eyes. “What do you want?”
“Forgetful as well as fickle. Why am I not

surprised?” He wiped his hand on his jeans. Like he'd
touched something filthy. She could sense his fury as
if it were a tangible force, coated in ice and bitter as
the wind. He leaned closer, until she felt his breath
hot against her frozen cheek, and said, “It was a year
ago, to this very day, that you tried to kill me.”

There was a heartbeat of shocked silence as her
brain did the calculations. Then she lurched forward.
He seemed to have expected this exact response,
though, because his arm locked around her middle
almost before her body moved and then her backside
was flush against his front.

“I wasn't pleased with you,” he continued, as if
there had been no pause and this was just an ordinary
conversation between two perfect strangers, as if he
weren't holding a knife to her throat, “in fact, you
could say I was rather put out.”

Val
thought
this
was
an
extraordinary
understatement.

“I thought I'd laid matters to rest. Well, perhaps
this is a blessing in disguise. I was forced to deal with
you rather hastily before—and fate does not often gift
us a second chance. But what form should vengeance
take, hmm? There are so many options. I even put a
few of them into practice, but that was a pale
imitation of what I wanted: you. Your suffering.

“And now, I have you.”

 

“Someone will find me,” she said hoarsely.

“I doubt that.” His laugh made her flinch; she
could feel the rumble of it against her back, like the
thunder heralding a storm. “I don't plan to settle
matters
here
.”

I am 'matters.' He has reduced me to a thing, an
object.
There was a name for that. Dehumanization.
It was the first step one took when committing
oneself psychologically to murder.

She tried again. “My roommate is expecting me.”
“Yes, I'm sure you've taken every precaution. For

today, at least.” He tugged at a lock of her hair, hard,
and she let out a small gasp. “But what about
tomorrow?”

“I—I don't know what you mean.”

With the hand holding on to the knife he slipped
something into her hand. Her fingers tightened
around the object, which yielded in her tight grip.

Paper.
A card.
“What's this?”
“Read it.”

She looked down, with effort, as the knife dug
into her throat once more. She saw what looked like a
hotel's room number printed in laborious script.
There was also a time.

Val swallowed. Her tongue felt like a lead slab.
“Pennyroyal. Is that—” she wet her lips “—is that a
hotel?”

“Inn, actually.”
“I—I've never heard of it.”
“You wouldn't.”
“What—”

“Pennyroyal means 'flee' in the language of
flowers. Victorian, you know. Quite appropriate, I
thought. I suggest not fleeing too far, lest I feel
compelled to come after you.”

His arm fell away from her waist and he took a
step back from her. “Mustn't keep the roommate
waiting.”

“W-what are you going to do?”

 

“One
or
two
things
do
spring
to
mind.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled. It was a cold smile, hard
and forgiving, and yet almost salacious. “I don't
suggest going for help. You will receive little from
that quarter, and only make me angry.”

He rocked forward, head tilted up in thought.
“A few of them were still alive when I used this.”

He lifted the knife for her contemplation. Over the
sharp blade, he regarded her with eyes only slightly
duller by comparison. “If you do turn to the police, I
might use it on that little paramour of yours. I think
I'll start with his face.”

Val flinched, stumbling back against the tree.
“You're psychotic.”

 

“Mm, yes, and twisted, and sadistic, and cruel—
isn't that right?”

 

She flinched again upon hearing her earlier words
flung back at her.
He was there.

“You cannot pin me down with words, my dear;
you
cannot
pin
me
down
at
all.”
The
knife
disappeared back into his jacket pocket. He began to
walk away, pausing only to look back over his
shoulder and say, “If you do come, come alone. But as
I said before, it's only a suggestion.”

(Don't make me hurt you.
Don't make me hurt your friends.)
He was wrong.
It was a threat.
(Only if you make it one.)

▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
Jade glared at his computer screen.

His roommate's annoying friend was over and
apparently he couldn't take a hint or five because he
was talking Jade's ear off about some dumb chatroom where he spent all his time arguing in the
forums with other butthurt-dwellers half his age.

Jade closed his eyes and wished he could do the
same thing with his ears.

 

Where the hell was Mitch? This was his guest.

A thump drew Jade's attention to the door. He got
up, grateful for a polite excuse to walk out on the
monologue about memes and their various origins.

“Hello?”

He frowned when no response was forthcoming.
A prank? Some of the other freshmen were inclined to
play a bit of ding-dong-ditch, but they were usually
unable to contain their drunken snickering and their
stampeding could be heard clear through the wall.

He opened the door slowly, some instinct making
him keep the safety latch fastened. The corridor was
empty save for a small brown box sitting in the
doorway. The box looked innocuous enough but there
was a wrongness about it he couldn't quite put his
finger on, brought on by countless warnings from bus
terminals and airports about unattended baggage.

Not that he thought it was a bomb, but still, what
was it doing there? Mail and package deliveries were
handled by Student Services at the front office. They
certainly didn't do door-to-door. So who had left it?
And why? Was it a prank, or something more
sinister?

Post-9/11 paranoia
, he thought.
You are acting afraid
of a box. Man up.

Casting a final look down both sides of the hall,
Jade carefully picked up the box and shut the door
behind him. He set it down on his desk, next to his
computer, his half-finished essay still on the screen.

If it is a bomb, that essay will be the last of your
problems.

Mitch's friend peered over his shoulder as he
opened the box. “Dude, sick.”
For the first time all evening, Jade completely
agreed with him.

Inside the box was a small plastic object Jade
eventually recognized as a chess piece. A bishop, he
thought, since it was too long and detailed to be a
pawn. Its length had been reduced dramatically,
however, due to the fact that it was cleaved in two.

As Jade tilted the box down to better look, the top
half rolled down, leaving trails of paint in its wake.
The entire box was splattered with it, in a color
chosen to approximate blood.

“Somebody hates you, dude,” said Mitch's friend.
Jade barely heard him.

There was a note taped to the lid. He peeled it off
carefully, not wanting to get any of the paint on his
hands. Not while it was still wet. He was too creeped
out
to
be
embarrassed
about
revealing
such
fastidiousness. The paint just looked a little too much
like blood, and there was something fucked-up about
this whole situation. Even the drunkest of frat-boys
wouldn't find this nasty little gag funny.

He flattened out the paper on his desk, hoping it
would offer some sort of clue—some reason—why he,
out of everyone—had been selected as a recipient. It
did. In gleaming ink the same color as the paint in the
box, Jade saw these hastily penned words:

Stay the fuck away from Valerian Kimble.

Chapter Ten
Tiger Lily

Pennyroyal Inn. Sequoia Avenue. 3 o' clock. Room
217.
The words were seared into her visual cortex. She
saw his spidery writing even when she closed her
eyes.
Mary was still being cool to her, though she had
thawed enough that she asked, “Where are you
going?”

Val froze. This was the moment. The moment
when she could redeem herself, when she could turn
it all back. And then she thought of James, and Jade,
and all those young girls, and the words would not
come. “To see a friend,” she said weakly.

Mary did not say,
I didn't know you had any friends
,
but the words hung unspoken between them like an
open secret. “Well have fun, I guess.”

Val was not sure whether she wanted to laugh or
scream. She kept her mouth shut and nodded.

Look at you—you really are his pawn.
Or maybe, his puppet.

She
hopped on the
inter-city
bus, the
onefourteen, the same one she had gotten on by mistake
on her very first day. Rain began to fall, as it often did
in western Washington, and each drop made her
flinch as they pelted against the glass in machine-gun
bursts.

“Sequoia Avenue was what you wanted, right
miss?” The bus driver gave a grotesque smile, or
maybe her imagination made it that way.
(You still
have one, don't you?)
“This is it.”

Yes
, she thought,
this is it—for me.

He gestured towards the street sign, conveniently
stationed outside an old-fashioned building that said
Pennyroyal Inn in flowing script on the cream and
white
awning
flapping
ominously
in
the
rainy
October wind.

Her heart plunged into her stomach like an
anchor.
The
building
itself
was
innocuous
enough.
Coated in white paint with yellow trim that had faded
from years of bipolar weather, it was reminiscent of
an English cottage. Completing the image were
yellow roses, growing on either side of the stone steps
leading up to the boutique-style doors. The frosted
windows were covered with whorled designs that
prevented her from catching a glimpse of the interior,
but she suspected it was no less opulent inside.
Val looked up at the curtained windows on the
second floor, both open and closed, and couldn't help
wondering which one was his.
How strange, to go from doubt to such rigid
certainty. But it certainly looked like the type of place
he would choose. The roses alone could seal the deal.
She remembered Gavin telling her, in what here and
now seemed to have occurred in an entirely different
lifetime, that yellow roses signified infidelity and
dying love.
A ripple of terror melted her spine and turned her
legs to rubber. For a moment it seemed as if she might
throw up on the granite steps, or perhaps her whole
body would putrefy into a quivering mess of terror.
Suddenly, his words, all of his words, took on a
new and sinister context.