Marlowe’s hand throbbed as she raised hers, fingers trembling as she pressed in, palm-to-palm. Pike’s hand was warm. The soft pads of her fingers folded over and brushed the backs of Marlowe’s chapped knuckles.
Marlowe tasted blood when she bared her teeth in a smile. “I’ll take that as a deal.”
Pike’s chest vibrated as if she were laughing, and droplets spattered Marlowe’s face like rain. Thin lips pulled back to mimic Marlowe’s smile. Then she twisted away, and Pike’s Lake swallowed her up, leaving Marlowe sinking in the shoreline.
Marlowe crawled to her feet in a daze, heavy rain washing off the muck as she followed the shoreline and limped to her truck. Her legs went weak and she sagged against the rusted side.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus-fucking-Christ.” She tipped her hand, catching flashes of it in the bursts of lightning.
A red circle pulsed and spasmed, bitten into her skin like a layered, knife-edged stamp. Her palm was hot, as if Pike’s webbed hand still pressed against hers. Marlowe’s stomach chilled in the rain.
Whatever had happened was over now. The mark was a bluff, a creature trying to intimidate and protect its territory. Marlowe had escaped. They were done.
She pushed her limp bangs out of the way and winced. Her hand pulsed angrily and the mark constricted her hand into a fist. She needed antibiotics and a drink. Bad. That would be a hell of a conversation to have at the hospital.Yes, sorry I need a rabies shot. What bit me? Hard to say.
Marlowe thinly smiled. For now, she carried a first aid kit in her truck. She shoved heavily off the side of the truck and turned around. Her smile faded.
Ink-streaked paper clogged the space behind her door handle.
Marlowe ripped it away and peeled open the square as torn pieces chased rivulets under her truck. Scrawled in black ink, the message stained her hands and dripped down her wrists.
“If you made it, come to cabin 9. This isn’t ending. I’m sorry.”
She dropped the note underfoot and slammed the truck door shut behind her. Jean shorts chafed her thighs and soaked the bench seat.
Heather had survived Pike’s Lake.
The monster hadn't been out of Marlowe’s sight. Of course Heather had survived. And now, Marlowe realized with a sick twist of her gut, she could never lure Heather here again.
The monster in Pike’s Lake had ruined Marlowe’s chance for a clean, perfect revenge.
Her nails made crescent moons in the leather wheel and she stared at the lake’s edge through sheets of rain.
Golden eyes, round and unblinking, watched her from the shoreline.
Tires flung gravel as Marlowe sped away. The ache in her hand seeped into her drenched cunt in a steady pulse, worsening with each mile she put between herself and that damn lake.
Bleeding For A Taste
If it wasn’t for the stinking pit in the center of Marlowe’s hand, she might have imagined all of it.
She’d been smart. Got antibiotics right after—under the table to avoid any invasive questions—kept it clean, considered checking in for a mandatory hold. Left it open overnight in the sticky heat of her apartment to dry out. She woke up to her hand crusted into a fist.
By the third day, Marlowe’s hand oozed sickly green and her skin peeled away in diseased, flaky layers. Dark tendrils snaked up her arm and twined around her elbow, sluggishly burning through her veins.
The one person who could tell her she wasn’t losing her mind, who had witnessed the beginning with her, Marlowe was going to kill. Desperation hadn’t let her rest, and it rotted Marlowe’s revenge into something crude and reckless.
Acid spilled into her tub, gallon after gallon eating away at the soap-scum sides until a mossy sheen coated the surface under the faucet.
Marlowe peeled off her thick rubber gloves. Another layer of skin sloughed off her palm and slopped wetly on the bathroom floor. She gritted her teeth against the foggy urge to lay her nails into the sore and scratch it to bone, and instead leaned across the tub to crack open the small window.
A strand of her hair hissed and bubbled where it fell. Marlowe’s head cleared in a gust of fresh night air and she lowered herself onto the dingy bathroom tile.
Two years ago, a new maintenance man at the hospital took a different route transporting the chemicals after the weekly delivery. A wobbly cart, slippery floors, and drinking on the job were a near-lethal combination. By the time Marlowe and the other night shifters heard the screams, the puddle of spilled acid had dissolved the carpet and the soles of his boots. His heel bones scraped on the tile when he limped toward them.
After the incident the chemicals had been stuffed in a back room, disturbed only by staff locking themselves away for a cry or a smoke.
Marlowe ground her knuckles into her gritty eyes. She couldn’t have slept more than a handful of hours each night since she left Pike’s Lake. Exhaustion gnawed at her, making her see things,thinkthings.
