Sacrificing Virgins (3 page)

She was a black cherry, lush and waiting for him. But why? And waiting for what? She had not been terribly surprised when he'd called, and seemed to recognize him when he stepped into the doorway. Jayce instinctively knew as she slid a hand easily up his back and shoulder that he'd been with her the night before. Here. In this bed. He couldn't remember a minute of it. Which was a shame. As he looked closer at her vanilla-scented skin, he knew that she must have been very good. Perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime partner.

“I don't know who you are,” he said suddenly.

A tiny flicker across her lips.

“I don't know why I was here last night with you.”

She blinked, but did not deny his supposition.

“I don't really know anything anymore.”

She nodded, and this time grinned, exposing a smile that could have lit the room. “That's good,” she said. Her voice was honey mixed with cloves—sweet but edged in dark peat. She pulled him against her and ran cool fingers up his temples.

“Let's keep it that way.”

Jayce could feel his body relax, the frustration of the day fading out of him with every stroke of her fingers. She pressed him back to the mattress and he laid his head against the pillow. She coiled around him like a velvet robe, her thighs slinky and warm against his, the tight cinch of her waist hard against the place where he grew hard, and the swell of her chest a cushion that both called him forward and pressed him down. He breathed her in, and the scent of vanilla suddenly filled the room. Vanilla and gardenias, like this afternoon, when he had… When what?

He wondered, the press of her lips now whispering something to his ear, and then the light flick of her heat warmed his lips as her tongue teased him.

“What about this afternoon?” he asked aloud, and she shushed him, pressing against him with all her body. Her hands ran up and down his ribs and arms, and as she did he felt strange, disoriented. The room seemed to swim in the heady scent of…of…

“No!” Jayce pushed her back and off him, and the woman nearly fell to the floor at his violence.

He shook his head, struggling to clear the cobwebs that had grown across his vision like cotton. “What are you doing to me?” he said, and slapped his own face. In a heartbeat she was there, kissing his reddened cheek, but this time he did not succumb. He backed away and put out a hand to keep her at bay. She crouched on legs creamy as vanilla, her chest flushed cherry red, and heaving now. Her lips were wet, and she licked them nervously. “I need to kiss you,” she begged, and crawled forward again, pushing her way around his hand. He tried to fend her off but she was faster, darting through his fumbling hands to sink a wet, pink tongue quickly between his lips.

Jayce felt the world rush away, and everything tasted…hot. His thighs itched and his eyes refused to stay open. He tasted something warm and smoky, something sweet, something vanilla…

Jayce shoved her away again, disengaging violently from her kiss. She surged back instantly, and he yelled again, “No!”

She took his shoulders between her hands, trying to pin him between the wall and her chest, and he slipped one arm free.

He slapped her, hard, across the face. This time, she did fall back, and off the bed.

Jayce leapt after her, and before she could get up, he cuffed her wrists with his palms and held her to the floor. She twisted and thrashed against him, but he used his weight to hold her down.

“What did you do to me?” His voice grated as he struggled to remain on top. “Why was I here last night? Why can't I remember anything?”

“Let me go,” she hissed back. “I did what you paid me to do.”

“Tell me,” he insisted.

“I'll do better than that,” she said. “Let me go and I'll show you.”

He released her, and pushed back to sit on the floor as she sat up herself, rubbing her wrists. Her face was still dark where he'd slapped her. She was so fair-skinned it would probably bruise. The thought disgusted him. He was no woman beater. Or was he? He couldn't remember enough to know.

“What is this place? Who are you?” he said, calmer now.

“Call me Lethe,” she said, not easing the tension of her body as she faced him. Her voice betrayed a sadness that stretched deeper than any physical pain. “You came to me for help. Let me help you again.” She reached out a hand to him but he batted it away.

“Let me,” she said. “This time, I will help you remember, since that is what you wish.”

This time, he let her touch him, and as she ran fingers up his face, and around his neck to draw him close, he felt his pulse quicken. The fuzziness in his mind began to fade back, and his mind seemed to…tighten. Lethe's eyes gazed into his own, and he could see his own reflected back at him, gray eyes wide with fear and a growing pain.

Her tongue slipped into his mouth again, and her fingers began to undress him as his own fumbled with the string of her corset. With every breath he shared with her, with every touch of his skin to hers, his world grew sharper.

He remembered his parents, Lois and Bill, and the cottage that they still kept in Michigan. For no reason, he found himself thinking of skinny-dipping with a blonde girl down at the quarry on one dark amazing night when he had come home for the weekend from college. He'd gone to the quarry alone for a late-night swim, and found himself an hour later exploring the cool skin of a beautiful girl who had come to the lake for the same reason. Escape from the problems of the day. Freedom from everything that had gone before. Instead they had become entangled in each other. A new problem, if a sweet one.

As he thought those words, Lethe suddenly became clearer to him. He had come to her for the same reason. He remembered unzipping the back of her thin black dress and watching in amazement as it fell to the floor.

“The only way out is in,” she had said, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressing her bare chest to his shirt. “I hope you don't mind coming in.”

He'd let her undress him and lead him to the bed, tears forming in his eyes as he thought about why he'd come and felt a rush of guilt for what he was doing. Becky was gone now, but still…he was paying a woman to…

To what…?

Lethe had led him again to the bed, and he kicked off his pants, as she shrugged out of her corset. She slid to the sheets next to him, wearing only black stockings, barely breaking their kiss the whole time they'd undressed each other.

The scent of her hair tickled his nose and he realized it smelled like the perfume of his wife. She wore vanilla. Had worn vanilla, the last time he'd kissed her. But that time Becky had smelled not only of vanilla, but of iron. And her lips tasted strange and cold as he pulled away. His hands had been smeared in her blood, but he couldn't stop from pressing them to his face, to wipe the horrible tears from his cheeks. Across the room, Danny lay dead too. Like his mother, they had carved things in his flesh, something that only Jayce would understand.

The memory stabbed into the deepest pit of his heart like a coil of barbed wire, and he broke from Lethe's kiss to cry out.

“This is why you came to me,” she whispered, pulling him back. “You don't have to remember all of it now. I can take it away again.”

Jayce put a fist to his eyes and shook his head. “I have to know now.” Then he pressed Lethe to the bed, and forced his tongue back into her mouth.

“It wasn't your fault,” Lethe gasped, pushing him back. “You didn't kill them.”

He kissed her again, gripping the fullness of her breasts in desperation, not desire. But she let him use her, and in seconds, as his thrusts built to a point of unbearable need, the worst of it came upon him with the wave of his orgasm.

The laughter froze on his lips. He'd been chuckling at the radio DJ's banter since he'd turned the key off in his ignition, and that laughter stayed with him right up until he saw the bloody handprint slapped against the buttercream wall of the living room. He called out for his wife, and before the echo faded from his voice, he had dropped his empty coffee thermos and a sheaf of papers from work to the carpet as he ran through the kitchen, following a trail of crimson smeared on the carpet, across the tile, and occasionally, with a long, scrabbling fingerprint, down a wall.

Jayce was crying before he found the bodies.

The blood led him on. It stopped sometimes, and then pooled heavily where she'd fallen to rest before forcing herself up and onward, up the formerly white carpeted stairs and down the hall. He knew as soon as he hit the landing where that blood would lead. Her palm and fingerprints scratched and smeared in long digs against the hallway carpet. The tears were already to Jayce's chin when he stepped into the nursery.

Becky lay nude and still at the foot of Danny's crib. The carpet around her had darkened. Her hands clutched at the rails of the baby's bed, but it looked as if she had been unable to make it that final three feet. Her face was wet with tears, but it was the blood that Jayce couldn't stop seeing. Because the blood didn't come from just a stab, or gunshot wound.

It came from two letters and three numbers carved deep into Becky's back. Jayce could see the white of bone shining through the oozing gore around her spine.

AS032.

That was all that her back said. But the numbers were fatal.

Jayce moved closer, forcing his eyes away from his wife to look into the bed where she almost, but couldn't quite, reach.

“Jesus,” he cried aloud, when he saw the still form of his little boy. The crib bars were coated with blood, and the sheep and cows on the bedsheets appeared slaughtered in the sea of red. How could one baby have held so much life?

“Oh God, Danny,” Jayce had cried, barely seeing, but not stopping until he held the still form of his sticky, lifeless boy against his chest. After a moment, he crumbled to the floor with the tiny corpse to sob beside the body of his wife.

His fingers traced the wound that was already almost dry on his son's back. From the amount of blood smeared on the baby's hands and across the bars of the crib, he knew that Danny had been carved alive, just as Becky had been. The fuckers had left him their living note, and coldly walked away. Jayce had not killed his wife or son, Lethe was right in the literal sense. But they were condemned by his actions.

AS032.

Danny's back bled the code just as Becky's did.

AS032 was the last sequence in the passcode to the account that Jayce had been siphoning from for the past six months. And someone had, apparently, gotten wise. Someone who could never go to the police to complain.

“You lived in fear for months,” Lethe whispered to him, kissing his earlobe gently. “You were paralyzed with it. Nothing worked. There was only one way.”

Jayce nodded. The memories all came back. The agony of his unconfessed guilt. The fear that at any moment, from any corner,
they
would finally step out of the darkness to end his life. The insomnia. The jumping at every creak and crack. The horrible, racking tears that came without warning at work, in the car, as he made breakfast…

In a flash he saw the flyer again that he'd found at the back of the free weekly paper.
In Memoryum
, read the headline.
Let us remove those troublesome memories inside your brain with a kiss. What we give you here, you'll want to remember…but we'll make you forget. Ask for Mistress Lethe to receive a $20 discount.

The address was in the city's red light district, but Jayce had called anyway, and quizzed the woman who answered about whether they could really make a person forget. In the end, he set up the appointment.

“You're a hooker,” he whispered.

Lethe raised one eyebrow, shrugged. “And you're a thief. You hired me to take away your memories. I did.”

“But you…” He pointed at her stockings, her discarded corset.

“The only way out is back in.” She smiled. “My gift is forgetfulness. But you must be close to receive it.”

Jayce slumped on the bed, pulling his arms around his knees in a fetal hug. The images of his wife and baby, carved with the code of his trespass, was now overlaid on everything he looked at. He closed his eyes, and the blood still was there. He remembered now, why he'd lost his friends, and his job after the murders. The picture wouldn't leave. AS032. Carved in his family's flesh. In his mind's eye forever.

“Why did you take the money?” Lethe asked.

“For them,” he said. “For Becky, Danny. I didn't think a little bit here and there over time, would be missed. I wanted to give Becky a new house, a place where Danny could run…” His voice trailed off.

“And now?” she asked.

The tears came again, hot and fast, raining down his cheeks to drip across his thighs. Jayce rocked on the bed, crying without restraint, his voice gasping in tortured hitches as he begged the air for forgiveness. “I'm sorry,” he moaned. “So, so sorry.”

“You didn't mean it,” Lethe said.

“I miss them so bad,” he cried. “I don't want to forget them. But all I can see is their blood.”

“Sometimes, you have to be reborn to go on,” Lethe said. She stretched her arms out to him, and lay back on the bed, slowly spreading her legs for him to move between.

“The only way out is in,” she said once more.

Jayce rubbed the tears from his cheeks, and looked through the bloody memory of AS032 to see the beautiful woman who offered herself before him.

“I have to forget,” he said, gritting his teeth against the sobs. “I need to forget.”

He took Lethe in his arms, and pressed himself desperately against her, inhaling her scent and drowning his guilt in the warmth of her touch. She kissed his tears, and then his lips. Through the window, the dull red glow of the neon sign that blazed
In Memoryum
to anyone on Clandestine Road, lit his way to her.