Husk (26 page)

“
Woo-ee,” she breathed. “This feels great.”

“
I’ll bet you do,” Adam answered.

The comment earned him a slap on the shoulder from Becky.

Mallory giggled, automatically looking to see Derrick’s reaction. She found him sitting at the patio table, and out of all her friends he seemed to be the only person not eyeballing Elsa’s slim form while she glided through the water. Instead, he stripped off his tank top and reclined in one of the patio chairs.

Mallory gazed at the way his tan skin lay taut over the muscles of his abdomen and chest. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but now that he’d shed the tank top she saw silver barbells pierced through both his nipples.

He smiled at her, and a hot blush rushed into her face. She began to turn away, then stopped short when she spotted the small bags of cellophane his friends had laid out on the table behind him.

“
What’s that?” she asked Troy.

“
Glitter.”

“
What?”

“
Glitter,” Troy repeated.

“
You mean drugs?”

The kid smirked. “I prefer the term, mood-enhancers.”

Mallory glared at him. “No way,” she said. “Not cool. Definitely not cool! If I get caught—”

“
Don’t wet yourself,” the boy laughed. “This stuff is like high-end caffeine tablets. It’s nothing hardcore.”

She turned to Derrick for assistance, arguing that if her dad came home and found them all hyped up on “mood-enhancers” it would be the end of any pool parties for the remainder of her life.

“
You said the kid was gone,” Derrick replied. “And your dad’s at the movies. He won’t be back till after twelve at the earliest.”

Chris nodded. “Yeah, we can blaze out of here by then. He’ll never know.”

Mallory fell silent, not certain how to reply. She didn’t want to disappoint Derrick, who obviously didn’t think the situation was anything serious, but she didn’t want to lose her father’s trust, either. Then, while her mouth fumbled to find a reply to Chris’s last statement, she suddenly had a brainstorm.

“
I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I know the perfect place to hang out, somewhere we won’t be seen or bothered by anyone. There’s an old barn in the back woods, behind the neighborhood. It must have a dirt road or a driveway that connects to it off one of the county roads. We could go there.”

The group glanced to one another for reactions, and all seemed to like the idea of exploring an abandoned farm.

“
Cool, let’s do it,” Adam proclaimed, clearly eager to sample Troy’s goods.

“
Sounds like fun,” Lisa added.

Derrick’s friends looked annoyed by the idea of having to relocate again, but they both obeyed when he told them to pack up their shit and get moving.

They all waited for Elsa to collect her clothes then left the yard together, hurrying back through the house and out the front door. In the foyer again, Mallory started to set the alarm—which Lori had carelessly left off—when she suddenly realized they were one person short.

She glanced back into the house while the others continued out to the cars. “Hey, Tim, come on, we’re going to go check out the old barn.”

When he didn’t reply, she walked to the bathroom but found the room empty.

“
Are you coming or what?” Becky called from the front door.

“
Tim’s gone,” Mallory answered, rejoining her friend. “He must’ve left when we were out at the pool.”

“
So?”

“
He didn’t even say goodbye. I think he’s mad because of Derrick.”

Becky shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, right? Make it up to him later. Let’s go.

“
Yeah, I guess.”

Exiting the house, she closed the door and locked it with her key, wishing that she’d had at least once more chance to thank Tim for inviting her to the fair. She cringed with another stab of guilt, realizing now that she’d just been setting him up for a fall by going.

She tried not to think about it. Instead, she hurried down the front steps and rounded the Mercedes, eventually settling down into the front seat next to Derrick.

* * *

Lori listened to the action upstairs.

The sound of footsteps trailed from one end of the house to the other, accompanied by the muffled noises of half a dozen voices.

She didn’t budge.

Overhead, she caught the clearer sound of a girl calling out to someone named Tim—
Tim Fleming?—
mentioning something about a barn.

Lori remained silent, not daring to speak.

It could be a trick. Maybe the girl was really … that
thing
.

After a moment of calm, the girl’s footsteps trailed to the front of the house and then came the sound of the front door closing.

Lori remained motionless.

Higher up the wall, she caught the subtle sound of insect legs scuttling over the cinderblock wall, a June bug or some other sizable beetle that had entered through the window frame.

Bugs!
her brain wailed.
Oh, God, please no, not bugs!

She stuffed a fist in her mouth, knowing that to scream at the bug or to lash out in hope of squashing it would call attention to her location, the same way calling out to the girl moments ago would have done.

Outside, a car engine came to life. Then another.

Don’t move. He’s out there. He wants you to cry for help.

She listened to car doors closing.

Suddenly, something dropped onto her face, something hard and smooth, about the size of a gumball. Half a dozen prickly legs gripped the skin of her cheek.

Covering the fading whir of the departing car engines, Lori screamed.

CHAPTER 33

Melissa trailed behind Frank when they left the empty ranch house, glad to trade the oppressive silence of its vacant rooms for the noise of crickets singing in the shrubs.

She found the night sky a blank chalkboard, lacking even the slightest hint of the starlight she’d observed earlier. A wind blew across the front yard, blustering her hair. The scent of ionized air carried on its back was the sure forewarning of a storm.

Together, she and Frank had searched the large home from top to bottom, but even their combined efforts failed to locate clues to the identity of her attackers. Against Frank’s recommendation, Melissa planned to use his cell phone to call for backup and request a forensics crew to process the new crime scene. Upon their arrival, she would make sure they scoured every inch of the dwelling for any indications of what had happened.

“
I wish you’d reconsider,” Frank said.

She didn’t reply.

The two of them crossed the turnaround driveway in silence, Frank walking beside her without even a glance, preoccupied with his car keys. While he went to retrieve his phone from the Chevy, Melissa stopped at her own vehicle in search of some painkillers.

She dropped into the driver’s seat before she realized the dome light hadn’t come on when she opened the door. Groaning, she dug out her keys and tried the ignition. No response.

“
Perfect!”

“
The electromagnetic pulse probably fried your engine’s circuitry,” Frank remarked, having returned to her side. He handed her his phone. “Just like it toasted your cell phone.”

She looked up at him from the driver seat. “And I suppose the killer ghost is to blame?”

“
In its natural state, the entity is a being of pure energy. At least that’s the theory. If it’s true, then such a creature could conceivably control other electrical forces. That’s how I believe Kane passed through doors sealed with state-of-the-art electronic locks and how he disrupted security cameras to hide his activity; the entity was helping him. But that same energy registers on devices like TriField meters, meaning we can use its own powers against it, as a method of detection; hence the equipment in my truck.”

“
Very sci-fi,” she replied.

Lines of frustration marred Frank’s face.

She got out of the car. “Look, I’m sorry. I owe you my life, so I don’t mean to make light of your beliefs. At the same time, it’s not easy for me to immediately agree with your theory of what’s been happening. I just can’t.”

He fashioning a weak smile. “Five years ago I would’ve said the same thing. But”—he tapped his eye patch—“that was before this monster nearly killed me.”

“
You mean, before
Kane
nearly killed you.”

Frank shook his head, and the added flicker of lightning on the horizon behind him enhanced the already uneasy ambience of her night.

“
Have you ever read anything about human sacrifices?” he asked.

She cringed. “Why would I want to?”

“
Because it has everything to do with your investigation.”

Melissa studied him for a moment, pondering a retort. In the end she simply crossed her arms and leaned against her car. “You’ve got five minutes.”

Frank nodded. “Then I’ll keep it short. What we’re dealing with, Detective, is a creature that can harness the life energy of its victims and use it to manipulate the environment. Humans have done the same in the past. Ancient cultures used sacrifices as a way to tap that power and use it in funerary practices, supposedly to re-animate the dead. Aztecs and Mayans believed the gods they worshiped required human energy as food, nourishment they provided in exchange for a prosperous existence. For those people, blood offerings played a crucial part in their lives.”

Melissa checked her watch. “Does this little anthropology lesson have a point?”

Frank walked to the passenger side of his Blazer. He reached through the open window and picked up a manila folder off the seat.

“
Kane was also sacrificing people, but it wasn’t part of any ancient religious practice or deity worship. I think the entity was teaching him how to manipulate the life energy of their victims, using it as
fuel
for their magic, just like the Mayans and the Egyptians once did. Look at this.”

He held out the folder.

Melissa only stared at him. “Magic?”

Frank nodded. “Don’t underestimate its legitimacy. If this thing has been around for as long as I understand, there’s no telling what sort of knowledge it might possess, or how many ages it’s been since the world has seen this kind of power.”

“
Magic?” she repeated.

Frank flipped open the folder and pulled out a black and white printout of an autopsy photograph, holding it up for her to see. The charred, reassembled remains of a headless woman lay spread across an exam table like a filleted fish on a cutting board.

“
Jesus,” she whispered.

“
I got this from a friend up north. They identified the girl using medical records after she was reported missing by her parents. Her name is Penelope Styles. As you can see, her head and hands are missing and her ribcage is almost obliterated. The investigators are waiting on DNA tests for an official ID confirmation, but the body shows evidence of a healed break on the collar bone, which matches the girl’s medical history. She died in that gas station explosion a few nights ago. According to the chief examiner, however, it wasn’t the fire that killed her.”

He offered her the file again and this time she took it.

“
What was the cause of death?”

Frank’s expression remained stoic. “Someone removed her heart.”

Melissa met his gaze, then flipped to the autopsy report and confirmed his statement.

“
A beating human heart is the most powerful of all sacrifices,” Frank said. “Dozens of cultures have practiced heart removal throughout history, and I’ve come to suspect that’s no coincidence.”

She closed the file and handed it back. “No, it sounds more like a shared trait of humanity’s brutal social evolution.”

“
Is it?” Frank asked. “Or does it prove that these creatures have been plaguing the world for centuries, appearing throughout history and selecting certain people to train in their ways? You wanted to know what Kane’s victims had in common. Well, I’d say it’s a good bet each of them shared unusually strong life forces. That’s why Kane went to such extremes tracking down certain people, why he killed so many of them at once. He wanted all that energy released at the same time, feeding the entity, powering their enchantments.”

Melissa saw where he was going. “The wounds you described that were cut into his body, the writing on that stone …”

“
All part of some spell,” Frank replied.

“
But what spell?” she pressed. “And why would it need Kane?”

“
It wants a body,” he replied. “A living, breathing body. Why it chose Kane, I can’t say. Maybe he fit some supernatural criteria only the entity understands. Whatever the reason, their overall goal was to
bond
together, to merge the entity’s power and consciousness with Kane’s physical form.”

“
How could you know that?”

“
From the writing in Kane’s basement,” he replied. “The FBI’s linguistics experts originally told me it was gibberish, but over the years I’ve shown samples of it to various anthropologists all over the world. Most of the characters show similarities to dozens of ancient languages—Incan, Hopi, Aramaic, Norse, Bahasa; the list goes on and on. It refers to a creature known as the
Vermorca
, a man-god raised from the dead, and the two symbols they found repeated over and over again stood for
unity
and
flesh
.”