Time can be a fickle bitch.
It’s been two years. Two years that I’ve watched seasons, people, and families come and go, and a small part of me aches for a normal life.
David passes by my house every day, taking his son Timothy for a walk around the block after work and on the weekends, holding his small hand.
I gaze down at my manicured fingers and picture a child’s hand clutching them, taking a walk of our own. Sometimes it makes me sad and a little jealous, if I’m being honest, that I will never carry or have a child of my own.
I’m not sure I’m deserving enough to be a parent. Who would want me, a killer, with a demon lover as a mom?
Lovers…that’s what we are to each other now after all this time. The day Mastyx called me my Love instead of my Little Sinner, changed things inside me. It gave me a small amount of hope that he cares enough about me that he may not drag me to his fiery lair one day for doing something he perceives as breaking our binding contract.
My red 2005 Audi A4 gleams, a fresh wax job reflecting the sunshine into my eyes. Business has been good. Real good. It’s a used car, but it sure beats the hell out of the shit-box ’88 Nova. Ever since I started harvesting the bones of my victims, my business has skyrocketed. Who knew there were so many twisted fucks like me in the world?
The elderly neighbor nods and offers a subtle smile as he unloads groceries from his trunk. I don’t usually spend much time outside on the porch; it screams, “Come and talk to me,” to everyone, and I don’t care to socialize or make friends, but it’s a pleasant seventy-five degrees with a slight breeze, so I’m soaking up a small amount of unseasonably warm weather for January before Mother Nature decides to send a cold front from Canada down our way.
I take a swig of my coffee, the heat and caffeine, sending a wave of pleasure to my brain and belly. The new grinder coffee maker combo my parents got me for my birthday is a godsend. Until now, I never realized how a freshly ground bean could make a cup of coffee taste so much better. I’ll never go back to pods or a regular drip maker for that matter. It’s funny how, as people mature, we learn to appreciate appliances over other trivial things.
A woman, swinging arms with a little girl on the sidewalk, slows down at the end of my walkway. She bends down, the little girl cupping her hands, whispering in her mother’s ear. The woman glances up at me, smiles, and nods before swiping her palm through her daughter’s long, golden locks.
I set my coffee cup aside and stand as the little girl enters my walkway, skipping toward me, a bundle of pansies in her hand.
She swipes a wayward lock of hair out of her mouth and holds the flowers out to me. “My mommy said I can give these to you.”
A lump crowds my throat. No one has ever given me flowers before. Not my ex from high school, Jayce, not my mom, even though she grows prized rose bushes in her yard, no one.
I wrap my fingers around the flowers and kneel before her. “Thank you.”
My body stiffens as she hugs me without warning. I find myself slowly melting into her the longer she holds me captive in my own yard, her love seeping into me, like a cure. I wrap my arms around her, hugging her back before her mom shuffles down the walkway and reaches her hand out. “It’s time to go, Hazel. Let the poor woman go.”
Hazel’s hands fall away from my neck, and suddenly I feel cold. “Make sure you put them in water.” Her blue eyes twinkle in the sun when she turns away from me and shields them from the rays. “Bye, pretty lady,” she says before skipping back down the walkway.
I stand, grab my coffee cup, and push my front door open, leaning against it once it’s closed. A tear races down my face, and a fresh wave of sadness sucks the life out of me. My back slides down the door until I reach the floor, where I sit with pink and purple pansies resting on my legs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Reflecting
I’m fucking exhausted beyond belief. I don’t know when this depression crept up on me, but here it is, holding me firmly against the couch, covered in a blanket, wanting to do nothing else but lie here.
Halloween is coming soon. It’s one of my favorite days of the year since moving to this place. It’s so easy to find a victim to bring home when no one knows what you really look like. But I find myself struggling. The number of men I’m bringing home grows less and less, the excitement and newness of it all becoming redundant and wearing me down.
I don’t know when my unhappiness started. Perhaps it all started the day the little girl gave me the flowers nearly two years ago to this day.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what I have done with Mastyx, our agreement at least. It’s given me confidence and made me feel like I have a purpose in this world that I don’t deserve.
Men swarm to me now. It’s crazy how easily they fall into my trap. It’s almost like a magnetism hovers around me, and men who get too close get sucked right into my space, my world.
My web.
I barely have to do more than bat my eyelashes to draw them to me. It got to the point when men who were obviously sinfullittle bastards became boring, less of a challenge. The married ones, though, now those are electrifying. The sneaking around, the game of seduction I play on them with the promise that their wives will never find out. The way they battle with their inner demons, the whole time knowing how wrong what they are about to do is, but the temptation of being able to fuck some anonymous woman without their spouse finding out is too good to pass up.
Until it isn’t.
But then the time came when that didn’t even excite me anymore.
Now I’ve moved on to the not giving a shit who I pick phase. I don’t care whether they are good or bad, married or unmarried, single or dating.
Mastyx still comes on the nights of the full moon, and most of the time, I wake up and enjoy his company. But my doctor put me on Ambien, and a few times, I’ve slept right through Mastyx’s visit, not even remembering it happened. If it weren’t for the hand marks on my body the next day, I would have thought he had forgotten to come. Perhaps a part of me wants it this way—to forget.
