BOUND IN FLESH (Marguerite Excerpt)

The short excerpt is when Kathryn, the main character, first meets the villain, Marguerite, as a young hunter-in-training. The backstory to this scene is Kathryn is sick of her mom’s slow teaching and caution and Kathryn secretly goes out to an extermination job on her own. When she gets there, she’s confused because she is greeted by Marguerite and everything seems fine (and she has never encountered a demon that blends in with humans).

Eventually, after going through the house and learning about the family Marguerite supposedly nannies for, Marguerite’s mask slips and gets the drop on Kathryn, throwing her down the basement steps and cracking her head on the concrete floor.

Kathryn comes to, and this is what happens. If you would prefer a PDF version, read this.

EXCERPT

            “Wakey wakey.”

            Kathryn tasted blood. It was the first sensation she had, followed by a shooting pain in her head. She peeled the side of her face off the cold concrete and tried to reach up and touch the top of her skull, but she couldn’t lift her arms from behind her back. They were bound together, but she couldn’t tell by what. She opened her eyes, blinking heavily to try and get them to focus on the world around her, her ears picking up the sound of muffled screaming and the shuffling of feet. A chair scraping against the floor.

            And then slowly the scene came into sharp relief.

            There was a woman tied to a chair who she immediately recognized as the Amy she saw in the photos around the house. She was wild-eyed with terror—probably thought Kathryn was dead the moment she came plummeting down the stairs. Kathryn would’ve thought she was dead to if it weren’t for whatever gifts her Watcher blood had given her to take more punishment than a Mack truck.

            Then the feet standing a few inches from Kathryn’s face came into view.

            Marguerite.

            Kathryn’s daggers clattered down next to her head, nearly cutting her cheeks. She flinched and tried to move, but whatever was holding her down gave her almost no wiggle room. Marguerite had ripped open her bag and was spilling the contents around her.

            “You’re a sweet little liar Kathryn.” She ran her hands up Kathryn’s thighs to her pockets, pulling out the daggers she had tucked away, taking one of them and pushing the tip of the blade barely a centimeter away from her eye. “A bad one.”

            Kathryn thrashed backwards hard enough to get an inch further away from the knife, her arms snapping back into place behind her shoulders hard enough for her to figure out there was a metal chain tied around her wrists, the type you’d use to hold a swing in place on a playground. Very tough to break, but she could if she focused.

            She started flexing her wrists.

            “You are young though. Must be my lucky day that poor Amy got you and not someone a bit more…experienced.” She stroked Kathryn’s head playfully. “I normally don’t like to eat on the run, but your presence has certainly sped things up.”

            “F…fuck you.” Kathryn said, the words still struggling to climb out of her throat.

            Marguerite smiled wide. Too wide. “Let’s get to know each other.”

            She grabbed Kathryn’s head and held her to the floor.

            “X marks the spot.”

            Marguerite’s tongue slithered nearly two feet out of her mouth and crawled around the outside of Kathryn’s ear like a worm looking for a way into an apple.

            It found it.

            A blinding pain—an icepick plunging deep into Kathryn’s brain—and suddenly her mind was a photobook being flipped through rapidly by someone that wasn’t her, someone sifting through her memories the same way a child sifts through a refrigerator to find a snack.

            A game night when she was 10 where her Father cleaned house at monopoly. She got so mad she threw the board and it shattered into pieces against the refrigerator…

            Andy Wilhelm fingering her in her bedroom at 13, both of them horny and desperate to do it before either of Kathryn’s parents got back home to interrupt…

            Kathryn just a few hours ago, taking the call from Arthur in secret, while her parents were out of the house, not waiting for them to come and to go with her mother like she was supposed to…

            Pushing Eddie into the dirt hard enough to crack his shoulder when she was nine, and how he started screaming and her dad had to run over and bring him to the ER…

            Her and her family at Disney World, when they were both still children, her dad asking some stranger to take their photo with an old disposable polaroid while they stood in front of the ball in Epcot and…and…

            Her body jolted and then there was nothing. A blank space where it used to be. No idea what image used to be tucked in that spot, but filled with the horror of knowing that something was there, that something was supposed to be there, but now it was absent. A completely white canvas in the middle of a room inside her head.

            Marguerite’s tongue retracted back into her mouth like a measuring tape. She looked full. Satiated.

            “That was…delicious.”

            Kathryn thrashed, beating herself against the ground enough to move her chained body across the floor feebly.

            “I’ll fucking kill you!”

            Marguerite laughed at her. Kathryn stared, keeping a murderous glare while flexing her wrists, hoping to feel one of the metal links start to bend and twist the way she needed it to get her arms free.

            Marguerite turned back toward Amy and walked over, placing her hands on her shoulders. She flinched and cried and tried to recoil from her touch.

            “Back off her!” Kathryn shouted.

            Marguerite sighed. “And to think, you thought you were going to help?”

            Her tongue slid out and impaled the side of Amy’s head, right through her ear, the way a mosquito’s proboscis starts drinking. Amy convulsed and jittered and twitched and Kathryn couldn’t even look, could only focus on flexing her wrists and moving her arms, slowly working away at a weaker link in the chain, wearing it down, trying to snap it while Marguerite was busy feeding.

            Goddamnit—goddamnit just break!

            And then her tongue retracted, and Amy stared, an empty vessel, a bottle with nothing left inside of it. She looked around the room blankly, as if everything her eyes saw was completely foreign to her.

            A small bit of drool ran out of her mouth. Marguerite wiped it away and looked at her.

            “What a marvelous life you had. Such little sorrow.”

            She took a finger and pushed Amy’s head to the side. It lolled back and she pushed it again, like a cat batting a mouse that was long dead.

            Kathryn’s blood boiled and she stretched her arms with all her might. She could feel something starting to give, starting to snap.

            And then she heard the front door of the house open.

            Kathryn looked up to the ceiling as dust fell down, footsteps pattering across the main hallway.

            “Mom,” a voice called out. “Is this food for me? It’s cold.”

            Marguerite looked over at Kathryn. “Well, would you look at that? The bus is early today.”

            Kathryn flexed with all her might. 

            Snap!

            In the blink of an eye Kathryn grabbed the dagger closest to her and threw it right at Marguerite’s shoulder, sinking to the hilt and causing her to stagger back and scream one of those godawful low rumble screams so many demons had.

            She jumped to her feet and ran straight at her to push the blade in more, but Marguerite’s tongue came out like a spike and grazed the side of her head, sending a shock of pain through Kathryn’s body and her memories flooding like a film projector sped up beyond its ability, pictures and moments in time assaulting her— a cluster of birds fluttering their wings around her head.

            She stumbled and hit the ground as Marguerite ran past her, bolting up the stairs in a ferocious bound. Kathryn smacked her head, the world straightening, and shot to her feet.

            Upstairs, she heard a scream.

            Kathryn made it up the steps in three leaps and ran through the kitchen and into the hallway, whipping around the corner ready to rip her head off—

            Marguerite was already out the front door and down the driveway, running like a wounded animal on the fight of its life. And in that moment, Kathryn realized she’d forgotten to do the sealant spell when she got to the house.

            How…how could you forget to do that?!

            And then the screaming hit her—the little girl in the hallway, holding her ear, blood dripping down the side, screaming bloody murder about what she just saw.

            Kathryn’s thoughts swirled, a dam of them bursting forth, uncontained and roiling, and suddenly the floor was spinning out under her again. She dropped against the wall to steady herself, to try and breathe her way through it, to figure out what she had to do, but the girl was still screaming and her head was still pulsing and everything was so wrong and—

            “It’ll be okay,” she said to the girl, with such a stillness in her voice that it caused the screaming to stop. “It’ll be okay.”

           She walked over to the phone and made a call.