A Hand in Hell

"Come, Dexter dear," I said lightly as I swept into the kitchen, clad head to toe in sleek black leather. I must've looked as good as I felt, considering an entire bite of macaroni and cheese fell out of the girl's mouth when she turned to me. I offered her a sweet smile and added, "Lauren dear, I mean."

"Where are we going?" she asked, looking me up and down, and I couldn't help my smirk. "And why are you dressed like that?"

I chuckled. "I have to look good for my new wifey, don't I?" I teased, taking her hand and pulling her from her seat. She didn't resist, and I gave her a joyous little spin away from me. "Do you not like it?" I asked as I pulled her back to me, an arm snaking around her waist to hold her body to mine.

"No," she said, staring up at me in awe. "I'm just jealous that I could never look like that."

"When you can look however you want, it's almost impossible to look bad," I said, beginning to sway in a mock waltz, one hand in hers and the other at the small of her back. "Are you ready to go?"

"Where are we going?" I was surprised that she wasn't fighting me. There was no suspicion to her tone, no resistance in her careful swaying, no desire to escape in her curious eyes. The good humor my sexy outfit inspired was beginning to dissipate. What was she planning? Why was she here? I couldn't let myself get too chummy with her. You could never trust someone after you killed their best friend.

"Well, we're running a little bit behind," I began, my arms sliding away from her as I took a step back, "but we should still be able to catch those silly humans at their silly human meeting." A frown creased her brow, but I went on cheerfully. "You don't have to come, but I wanted to make a quick stop at the bar later, and I didn't want to have to waste time coming back for you."

"Why do you need me at the bar?" she asked, that suspicion I'd grown to love adding a hard edge to her voice.

"Well, you see," I started, making my way around the center island counter to where my tequila still sat across the room, the stiletto heels of my black knee-highs clicking loudly on the tile all the while, "I was planning to kill two birds with one stone." I faced her and uncapped the bottle, smirking. "A quick stop at Furry Boy's fine demon establishment to see just what the hell is taking him so long with that information, then I planned on taking you to the human bar down the street to help me pick out our next victim."

The words were barely out of my mouth when she started shaking her head, gently at first, but then so violently that her hair went whipping from side to side so hard that I could almost hear it. "Uh-uh," she said shortly. "You're not hurting any more innocent people, and I'm sure as hell not helping you with it if you do."

I took a swig of tequila and rolled my eyes. "Lauren, baby," I started in my most pathetic, pleading voice, "you told me when we got together that you would always stand behind me in whatever I chose to do, 100%." Plopping the open bottle on the counter, I stepped away from it, my hands clasped tightly over my chest as I looked at her with tears glistening in my eyes. I could feel them, foreign and burning as they threatened to well over, and all I wanted to do was laugh at how ridiculous I must have looked. "What happened to that?" I went on, begging earnestly. "What happened to the Lauren I fell in love with?"

She plopped back down on her stool and shook her head, unimpressed. "She never thought you'd want to do this," she sighed solemnly, retrieving her fork from where she'd left it, sitting in her bowl. "She didn't know you were a cold-hearted murderer."

"I don't do it because I like it, Lauren!" I cried, rounding the island counter and falling to kneel before her. I pulled her free hand from her lap, gripping it tightly in both of mine, and the bewildered expression she shot me nearly cracked my pitiful mask, but I held on. "I do it for us! I do it because I love you!"

"You don't," she said flatly, eyeing me in confusion, half playing along and half utterly lost as to what the game even was. "You do it because you're selfish. You enjoy it."

"I don't," I whispered, and a tear finally spilled over, rolling down my cheek to leave behind a cool trail. "The only thing I enjoy anymore…" I reached up to brush a strand of nonexistent hair from her face and cupped her cheek gently. "Is you."

Still, she stared at me with total uncertainty. "What do you mean?" she asked in a breath. "What are you sa—" But I leaned forward suddenly, my lips meeting hers in a passionate crash that cut her short. Before she got the chance to close her mouth, my tongue snaked in, quick to take in the taste and warmth of the space. I leaned back before she had the chance to fight me — but she gave no sign that she ever intended to, even if she never intended to return it, either.

I stayed where I was, crouching before her, our faces inches apart and her taste still playing across my tongue. "You used the Velveeta?" I whispered passionately. "The Kraft was on the top shelf this whole time."

She shoved me away with a noise of disgust, and I straightened and caught myself with a hand on the counter's edge, throwing my head back to let loose a cackle as she began screaming at me. "You're such an asshole, you know that?! I can't believe you just did all of that!"

"I can't believe you let me," I laughed as I made my way back to the counter where my tequila awaited me, and I washed the cheesy taste away with a deep pull from the bottle. "Seriously, though. Kraft, the good shit; top shelf," I added with a gesture at a nearby cabinet, and she scoffed and rolled her eyes.

"I am so done with this relationship," she snapped as she slid from her stool and stormed to the sink beside me, bowl in hand.

The breeze of her passing sent a chill along my cheek, and remembering that single, solitary tear, I began to wipe fervently at my skin with the back of my hand. "You'll never be done with our relationship, you silly thing," I remarked lightly. "You know I'm far too fun to leave."

"Well, considering you tortured me, I'm not so sure." She dropped the bowl into the sink and turned on the faucet, and the smell of Velveeta cheese rushed to my nose.

I cringed. "What? Did you not have fun?"

"You're sick," she said darkly, turning off the tap and throwing a scowl my way.

The playful mood officially soured, I sighed and recapped the bottle of tequila. "Just hurry up and get some shoes on. We're already an hour late. The meeting's probably over by now."

"I sure hope so," she said over her shoulder as she headed into the living room, likely in search of her shoes.

"You won't when you see the alternative," I muttered to myself, and I made my way to the garage alone.

-?-

"You know I'm only going with you to stop you, right?" she asked after we'd been on the road for a few minutes, her gaze carefully focused out the passenger's side window.

"Yes," I said, nodding sagely, "but while there are many things you could do to influence the course of the night, none of them involve doing more than slightly inconveniencing me. There is no 'stopping me,' you know. Try too hard, and you'll wish you'd run when you had the chance."

She huffed. "I can still run, ya know. You can't stop me."

I rolled my eyes and blatantly ran a stop sign. "I'm sure you could, but the Demon Council would catch your ass before I even bothered to start looking, and they've got a lot more in store for you than my petty torture schemes." I watched out of the corner of my eye as she turned to me, a look of slight shock playing across her pretty face. "What? Did you think they actually wanted to keep you alive?" I chortled. "No, my dear. The only reason they've kept me from killing you is to spite me. If you became a threat to their precious species — i.e., if you ran off with a bundle of precious demon secrets bouncing around in your pretty noggin — they would hunt you down, and they would maim and murder you without a second thought." She swallowed, hard, and I smirked to myself. "They're not as different from me as they'd like to believe. They get the same sick joy out of killing helpless little humans as I do. They just don't actively seek it out."

"Would you just…stop?" she said flatly, turning her attention back to the window.

"All right," I said in a sing-song, grinning evilly at the road ahead, dimly lit by the dying streetlights that hung overhead. "Just keep in mind that I'm all that's standing between you and your painful demise. The sooner I take out those demons, the sooner you have the chance to flee uninhibited — unless I decide to chase you, anyway."

"And…would you?" she asked softly, and I turned toward her, our eyes meeting in the reflection on the window. "Chase me, I mean?"

I let my gaze drift back to the street before me, and my smile faltered. "If I was bored, perhaps." Before she could respond, I slammed on the brakes and jerked the car to a stop, squinting through the dark tint of my sunglasses to make out the peeling silver numbers nailed to a support beam of the porch.

687 Church Street. This was it.

"Seems awfully quiet," she said, barely hidden hopefulness adding an odd strain to her voice. "I don't even think anyone's here."

I turned the car off. "The meeting's being held in the garage behind the house," I remarked as I pushed my door open and stepped out into the cool night air. I leaned down to peer into the car, cocking an eyebrow at her in annoyance as she merely watched me from her seat. "Are you coming?"

"No, thank you."

I sighed. "Come on, honeytits. Don't make me haul you out of the car. We've been invited to a dinner party, you know, not a prison scene."

Her lips shifted in a pout, but she obediently undid her seatbelt. "You really like to take this little game seriously, don't you?"

I shrugged, smirking. "Well, why the hell not? Why play a game if you're not going to put any effort into it? Now, hurry up. We're already late. How rude of us!" She finally opened her door, and I leaned back and slammed my own door shut.

"What exactly are you planning to do here?" she asked as she came to my side, and I turned toward the house — 687 Church Street. The windows were conspicuously dark, and I felt my nose twitch almost without my consent as an odd scent wafted to me on the light breeze.

"Mm," I murmured thoughtfully, frowning. "Something's not right here. Not right at all."

"What is it?" she asked, a tendril of panic to her voice. "Is it…demons?"

"No, nothing like that." I glanced down at her and forced a smile. "Just stay close, all right? A dead wifey is a shitty wifey, you know." She nodded, her expression far too serious for my liking, but I started down the sidewalk without another word.

Reaching the end of the front path, I started along the walkway that curved around the side of the house, my heels clicking painfully loudly on the bricks, and finally, the wind brought something useful to me — voices. Murmurs, really, just the barest of whispers — and every single one of them was distinctly female. The whole human coalition had seemed male.

What the hell was this shit?

I walked quicker, Dexter— Lauren's footsteps faltering behind me as she struggled to keep up. The garage came into view, tucked away far at the back of the lawn with a row of tall, thriving bushes to block the pair of windows along the back. I could see a dim light, though, glowing at the edges of the smudged fiberglass windows. The voices grew louder, more frantic.

"Who is it?" the girl whispered, and as the soft melody of voices came to a sudden halt, I could've backhanded her.

I whirled on her, ire pulling my lip up in a snarl. "You'd better hope they don't have weapons and aren't planning to kill us," I hissed, "because they fucking know we're here now." I spun back to the path ahead and stalked forward, heels clicking more loudly beneath my harder steps. A heavy lock glistened in the moonlight, nearly eye-level on the door ahead. What could need to be locked away in a garage like this? "The element of surprise, my dear, is the most important element to have on one's side," I said more loudly, and with that, I jerked the padlock, chain and all, from the door with a scrape and a clatter and pushed the door wide open.

The smell hit my sensitive nostrils like a Mack truck to the face, and I staggered back helplessly, gagging audibly as I rushed to cover my nose with both hands. It was death, decay, mildew, coagulated blood, rotting food, piss, shit — everything I never wanted to smell in a cloud that I wished would just kill me and get it over with.

"Oh my God!" Dex— Lauren gasped, and I barely registered her movements as she brushed past me and into the toxic interior of the building. "Vera, come on! They need help!"

"Who needs help?" I choked out, squinting against the smell and trying to look past the tears in my eyes to see what lurked beyond. My gaze finally locked on a flash of smooth white-blonde in the dim light, and I felt my eyes widen. "Oh, you have got to be shitting me!"

A dozen women sat huddled in the corner of the garage, half-naked bodies entwined across the small space of a dirty blanket that looked to have once been white — pale-skinned women with pronounced cheekbones and stick-straight, platinum blonde hair — my cheekbones, my hair, my snowy skin. Just what in God's name were these sick fucks doing?

"They're hurt!" I heard Lauren cry, though her voice barely reached me through the brick wall of shock that I'd just barreled headlong into. I turned my attention to her as she dropped to her knees at the nearest woman's side, landing in a dark, wet stain of who even knew what. "And they're starved! Vera, help them!"

My gaze drifted across the sea of faces. At a glance, they were definitely Vera lookalikes, but when you looked for more than an instant, it was obvious that they weren't me. Plumper than I, some skinnier, eyes of normal blues and browns and greens, thinner lips, fuller lips, bigger, smaller, thinner noses. This idiotic fucking human coalition…

"That son of a bitch demon gave them everything they needed to track me down and call me out, but they chose to do this instead?" I murmured, my nose wrinkling. "They chose to round up random women with bad dye jobs and lock them in a fucking garage?"

My eyes wandered on, brushing across the trio of buckets only feet away, nearly overflowing with urine and excrement, then finally lighting on the twisted heap in the opposite corner — bodies. Bloody, disfigured, slowly decaying bodies with platinum blonde hair still perfectly intact.

I scoffed, disgusted. "How long has this been going on?" None of these humans had seen me until mere hours ago, men I'd promptly killed, but if I knew my decomposition rates — and I did — these women had been dead for weeks. How in the hell did they know what I looked like? How had they known for so long?

"Stop standing there and help me!" Lauren shouted, tossing a glare my way as she helped a woman to her feet. I looked the stranger up and down, taking in the too-slender legs and arms, the prominent ribs, the pure emaciation, and I let a sigh slip through my nose.

"Don't bother," I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. "I can guarantee that they know too much to be allowed out of this garage."

"We don't know anything," a girl from the very back of the crowd rasped in a panic, and my eyes flicked to hers. "I don't even know why he brought me here."

"Do you know who he is?" I asked, taking a step forward but quickly moving back again, a hand clamped firmly over my nose. My God, not even I would keep my toys in these conditions. They're no fun when they reek of tetanus.

She shook her head and fell back against the wall, looking winded from just sitting upright. "He's just the man who keeps us locked in this hellhole. Please, let us out." Her voice cracked, and she said again, "Please."

"Sorry," I said with a shrug. "No can do."

"But we need medical attention!" cried another woman in a gravelly voice. "We're going to die."

I rolled my eyes. "Maybe in a few days you would die, but really, it's not that pressing of an issue."

"Vera!" Lauren snapped, her arm still around the waist of her new charge.

"We're torching the garage, then we're torching the house," I said decisively as I started out of the garage. I lowered my hand, and I swore I'd never smelled anything better as the night air washed over me, smelling of grass and distant rain.

"We can't!" the girl yelled, and in the background, the women wailed out their "No!"s and their "Please!"s. "These women need help. They're people — living, breathing, feeling people — and they don't deserve to die just because they might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because they looked a bit like you."

I eased out another long breath and began to knead the bridge of my nose, pinched between my thumb and index finger. First, the humans had to go and complicate things by bringing in a sweaty pile of nobodies, and now, Lauren just had to make things even worse by insisting that I save this heaping helping of poor bastards — poor bastards who probably knew exactly what the fuck was going on here and would rat me out to the police the second they got the chance. And I wasn't allowed to kill any more police officers. I wasn't allowed to kill any more humans at all, period, full stop. So maybe Lauren dear had a point. Maybe the Demon Council would count the infection-ridden nobodies as people, even if I was protecting their Goddamn interests.

And I wouldn't be able to handle them all at once when they descended upon me for breaking our "agreement."

I growled to myself and turned, shutting the girl's opening mouth with a hard scowl. "Well, you have your cell phone, don't you? Call 911, and let's get out of here."

"But they —"

"No more talky-talky," I said as I brought the fingers and thumb of one hand together in the shape of a blessedly closing mouth, then started away from her. "Call the cops, don't call the cops, I don't give a shit. I'm torching the house and leaving, and I don't want to have to come after you. Let's go."

For a moment, there was silence but for the sharp clicks of my heels on the sidewalk, but soon, Lauren's voice filled the air. "Injured women at…at —"

"687 Church Street," I called to her over my shoulder, then approached the house with a sigh. She went on, her words tripping over one another as she hurried to ramble out the information, but I'd all but stopped listening. It was cute how she tried to save everyone. It was cute how bad she was at it, too.

I pulled a lighter from my pocket even as I put my elbow through a single pane of the back door's multi-paned window, and a sharp pain lurched through my arm, ignored just as I ignored Lauren's high voice and the soft tinkling of glass upon the tile floor within. "This should do well enough," I muttered to myself as I stuck my arm through the broken pane, flicked the lighter to life, and set fire to the clean linen curtain that hung above the window. Even if it didn't do more than singe the door, it would get the message across.

I was here. I know who you are.

I stepped back and watched as the fire spread over top of the door, a flaming halo from an angry god. My brow furrowed into a scowl, and the voices of the captive women came to me on the breeze, Lauren's soothing murmurs in hot pursuit.

An angry god.

I'd be watching, and I wasn't happy.