Blood Echo Read online

  A NineStar Press Publication

  Published by NineStar Press

  P.O. Box 91792,

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87199 USA.

  www.ninestarpress.com

  Blood Echo

  Copyright © 2018 by L.E. Royal

  Cover Art by Natasha Snow Copyright © 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at the physical or web addresses above or at [email protected].

  Printed in the USA

  First Edition

  December, 2018

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-949909-53-1

  Print ISBN: 978-1-949909-57-9

  Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content, which may only be suitable for mature readers, and depictions of captivity and torture, bloody violence and death.

  Blood Echo

  L.E. Royal

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  BLOOD. THERE WAS so much blood. It tasted metallic and sticky as it flooded my mouth. My back was uncomfortably warm, wet, and screaming in agony. A high-pitched sound filled the air, piercing, shaking me to the center of myself. My frantic blue eyes searched through spinning space, looking for him. My father was three steps up our staircase and wasted, drunk on his beloved infusion of cheap apple cider and vodka that smelled like drain cleaner on his breath.

  The siren kept on wailing. I searched his eyes, so similar to my own, for any of the fear I felt, anything to signify that he too knew, this time, he really had gone too far. I saw none, and the panic settling over me was ice cold and heavy, crushing down on my chest.

  Warm wetness was all around me. Only when the siren stopped, and I sucked in a deep and frantic breath that sent white-hot pain shooting through my torso, did I realize I had been screaming.

  Lying there, my body strewn across the entryway of the house where I grew up, I considered that I’d never thought much about death. Bleeding at the bottom of the stairs, my ragingly drunk father staggering toward me to either save me or hurt me more, I wished I had.

  At least I might see Mom. That’s what I told myself as the edges of my vision began to bleed, the colors mixing together and fading out. My father’s expressionless face swam into focus as he stared down at me. He almost looked sorry, then he ran the back of his hand across the midnight shadow on his chin and I was drifting away again as he started to shout.

  “Stop looking at me that way, Marion! You left…”

  The words drifted to my ears like I was hearing them from miles away, through a thick-fogged glass of space, time, and pain.

  “You left me! You left us… You left us behind… So don’t you dare…”

  I was dragged back to myself, back to the agonizing sting where the cool air hit the gashes in my skin as, with a wet thwack, a glob of my father’s spit landed on my cheek.

  He’s going to kill me. The thought spun in my head, a carousel doomed to run endlessly. I tried to find the words to tell him I wasn’t my mother; she’d left us both when her long fight with cancer was finally lost.

  This was how I would die, after six years of watching the man who had raised me sink further and further into an abyss of alcohol, emptiness, and violence. The occasional “accidents” had escalated to flat-out beatings, and tonight, I realized it would all come to an end. The minute he had thrown me down the stairs, sending me crashing through the glass door below, it was over.

  “Rayne… Marion…” I heard low mumblings in the familiar voice that had come to foster a sick and unnatural fear in me. I told myself the lie I had lived by since my mother’s funeral—my father had died with her. I would remember him for who he was, not the grief-crazed murderer wearing his pajamas.

  Tears flooded my eyes. I felt everything, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to sleep and to not hurt anymore, not like this.

  Shouting woke me again. I listened to my father’s voice, the click of the front door closing, blowing cold air on the bare skin of my side. My shirt was still wrinkled around my middle from the fall. The words made no sense. The questions floating to me came from a voice I didn’t recognize. His replies were suddenly uncertain. The aggressor was gone, and I opened my eyes just in time to watch him become the victim.

  I don’t know where she came from, how she found me, or how she knew the exact right time to walk into my life.

  A woman stood in our entryway. Slender and petite, softly waved brunette hair hanging loose around her shoulders, and a form-fitting and deep crimson dress riding dangerously high up her thighs. A smooth leather jacket molded to her small form like a second skin.

  I had no time to wonder who she was, but I knew from the minute she appeared like an omen in my darkest moment she was someone.

  Dark eyes looked down at me, and I looked back, though I could not prevent my own closing. I shivered against an invisible cold and the action was exhausting. The warm pool I had been lying in was cooling and everything told me to close my eyes. It was curiosity that kept me alive, it was her, and those haunting dark eyes, searching mine, looking down at me so intensely, yet she was unreadable.

  I was a captive audience, powerless to look away from her, and I saw it all.

  Full lips parted, and I watched in awe and almost complete detachment. The way she moved was animalistic, fingers twisting roughly into my father’s hair—his head yanked right, while hers dipped left. When she turned back to me, letting his body fall to the floor with a heavy thud and pushing it away as if he was a wooden puppet, not a two-hundred-pound man, her lips were marred with blood.

  She was beautiful and she was terrible, this killer, my angel of death. I wondered with the last of my strength if she had come to save me or just to take me away. By now, they were the same thing.

  Her eyes as she crouched beside me were unforgettable, one brown, one green, though the irises seemed to be alive. The colors swirled, rich and bright, moving like flames, spinning into their own constellations. Suddenly, I was glad this beautiful killer would be the last thing I’d see.

  Those strange eyes peered down at me, perfectly shaped eyebrows arched, and I stared back up at her. The only sound breaking the silence was my own rasping, rattling breaths.

  This was it. It had all been for nothing, my father, my mother, me… This was the end of the Kennedy family, but somehow, I couldn’t feel sadness. Looking into those swirling eyes, light-headed, I couldn’t feel anything.

  I sucked a gurgling breath through my bloodstained lips as I watched my father’s blood drip down her chin. Somehow, I forced out my last words.

  “Thank you.”

  I WOKE UP alone, disoriented and confused, lying on the old threadbare sofa. The only other piece of furniture in the living room was the large flat-screen TV I knew my father had so
ld the last of my mom’s jewelry to buy.

  The nightmare felt so real, I still felt the large shard of glass sticking out of my thigh at an odd angle. I remembered the smell of my father’s breath on my face when he grabbed me at the top of the staircase, every bump on the way down, and the killer with the galaxy eyes.

  The thought of her stayed with me, haunting me, following me around the empty house as I walked from room to room, lost. My father, or at least his body, was gone. I found the glass shards that had littered the floor in the trashcan beside our back door, the only proof all this was real. Everything was the same, but everything had changed.

  My feet took me back to the sofa where I had woken up, my fingers played with the comforter that had been taken from my bed and draped around my body. It seemed as if I was looking down at myself, watching from a distance, unable to feel or to process the situation as I should.

  My father was dead. I reached out for the remote. He’d been murdered by a strange and merciful killer with eyes that moved like something from one of the science fiction books lining my bookcase. I flicked through the channels until I found a news station, noting the time and date in the corner of the screen with disinterest. Two days were gone, yet the panic I knew should follow this realization remained absent.

  Something clouded my emotions—relief, fear, maybe even shock? I didn’t have the answer, and I didn’t look for it. Deciding instead to fall into my usual routine, I went up the stairs to dress, then leave on the hour-long walk to school. I might still make it for my afternoon classes, during which I’d forge another note to explain my absence. At least this time I wouldn’t have to try to explain the bruises.

  The realization hit me hard and fast, knocking all the air out of my chest, leaving me empty, my blood running cold. I looked down at my arms, my legs that ran long below my blood-stained pajama shorts. Nothing hurt. There were no bruises, no scars, just my skin, as pale as ever, unblemished.

  The impact of every stair came back to me, and I flinched. The agony of the glass tearing into my skin, lodging into my thigh, my back, my arms crashed over me, a tsunami that stole my breath and finally instilled some of the panic I knew I should be feeling into me.

  I was alive. Inexplicably unharmed after what seemed like certain death. My father was dead, gone, and though it meant the beatings would stop, staring at my rain-streaked windowpane, I realized I had a new problem. Without his disability allowance, without him, how would I pay the already grossly overdue bills? How would I keep the house and finish school and escape to college?

  I had no answers to my own questions, so I pulled on my worn blue jeans and old sweater and wrapped my long hair into a braid with shaking fingers. I set off, unable to escape the thick fog of shock still shrouding me. Leaving the house behind, I tried to ready myself to do what I always did—to carry on. For years, I had learned to leave home problems at home and disappear into the crowd. Nobody noticed me or cared much for me at school, or anywhere, really—facts I wore like a cape of invisibility.

  Chapter Two

  THE WORLD MOVED around me.

  My father was dead. My mother was dead, though that was nothing new. I existed, living between the cracks my death—my almost death—had left in my version of reality.

  They were knocking at the door again. It was another Tuesday night spent sitting in the bathtub, my chin on my too-bony knees, waiting for them to leave. The faucet dripped pitifully on my sneakers and I almost wanted to cry.

  I traced shapes in the thin sheen last night’s bath bubbles had left on the discolored porcelain beneath me. My father was a man I had come not to know, someone who I lived with, and lived in fear of, yet knew so little about—the men banging on the front door of the house proved that.

  The first time they came by, I had answered their insistent knocking, a mistake I wouldn’t make twice. The one who had spoken to me was full of quiet anger I could sense brewing behind that polite façade, and it scared me. I didn’t have the money they mentioned in the message for my father, and sooner or later, they were going to realize he wasn’t really in the hospital after falling down the stairs either.

  I closed my eyes, leaning back against the cold, hard side of the tub. Once again, I was amazed and dumbfounded by myself in equal parts. I should be terrified, falling, breaking into a million pieces. Since the accident, my usual easily panicked demeanor seemed to have faded out. It felt muffled now, not quite absent.

  Rather than being consumed by the mounting bills and the men who came knocking at the house at all hours, I was consumed by her. An unremarkable week had passed, and she monopolized my every available moment. I dreamed of her, of those liquid irises, the blood dripping down her chin. My thoughts drifted back to her when making the long walk to and from school, sitting at the back of geography class, walking through the lunch hall to my usual seat, alone. I felt as if she could just disappear, nothing more than a dream, an imagined savior to slip through my grasping fingers, and so, my mind clung to her. I relived every piece of her, and pulled together more, from that frantic, blood-stained memory at every opportunity.

  I studied my sneakers, still filthy from the time spent looking for my father’s body, in the backyard, the small shed he kept, in the trunk of his beat-up old van. I had looked for answers yet found none. Although she was the thing that held my focus, I never tried to find answers about her. Part of me was afraid if I did, my greed for knowledge would somehow cause her to disappear forever. Another part of me thought that was stupid, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to look.

  Of course, I had drawn my own conclusions. The neck biting led me immediately to believe she was a vampire—if such a thing existed. Yet she had broken through the door before the sun was fully dead behind the woody skyline of our quiet little New Hampshire town. When she looked down at me, I didn’t see fangs. I just couldn’t rectify something so beautiful, the thing that had saved me, with something so…dark, any more than I could understand my own rose-tinted view of this murderer.

  My breath left me in a sigh. The shouting and knocking had subsided, I didn’t know exactly when. The faucet dripped on and I was content to study the dirty tiles.

  She was palpable in my mind. Sometimes, I thought I sensed her, three steps behind me. It was ridiculous, but those eyes haunted me. I’d watched her kill my father, but she fascinated me, grossly so. If not for her, my father would have been the murderer that night, and the victim… I couldn’t finish the thought.

  Everything inside me pulled and strained, and I ached to be close to her again, to look into those oddly colored magical eyes, and know her. Somehow, I felt like I already did, or had. Morbid curiosity was killing me, but she was gone, and so I clung to her in my thoughts, my dreams, blocking out the knowledge that I was fixated, probably unhealthily so, because it was the easier alternative.

  I drifted closer to sleep, lulled by the steady dripping of the faucet. As my eyes closed, I felt her presence again, as if she was close to me, watching over me, thinking of me. It made no sense, but sense wasn’t what I searched for.

  The intensity with which she had looked down at me that night, the way she had saved me without a moment of hesitation, her nearness… I fell into a vivid and dream-riddled sleep, where once again I had all these things I knew I had begun to covet.

  MY NECK STILL ached. One of my favorite books was open on the table in front of my lunch tray, and although my eyes lingered on its worn pages, I wasn’t reading. I loved Romeo and Juliet, and I hated it. A love like that seemed to belong exactly there, in a storybook, yet the way it was all lost, all twisted and broken and tragic in the end—that seemed more like real life.

  I jumped as the chair across from me was drawn back. The cafeteria was loud, but I wasn’t expecting the sound. Nobody ever sat with me, and that was the way I had come to like it. My lunchtimes were the smell of fried food, the clamor of footsteps and voices, fading in and out of my awareness as I disappeared into a book, or lately, into her. The
y were never shared.

  My eyes automatically shot up, then up some more, and I imagine the color drained out of my face. She was tall and pretty—beautiful, actually. Softly tanned skin and thick dark hair, plump lips and expensive clothes left me wondering how she had stumbled into my humble presence.

  I offered her a weak smile, though I was sure she had either come to mock me, or to ask to copy my English homework.

  “Would it be okay if I sat with you?”

  The way she spoke was strange, I couldn’t place her accent to either coast, but the request seemed genuine enough. I nodded, blushing furiously before I looked back to my book. She must be new, that’s what I told myself. She was new, and her presence would be a short-term inconvenience and novelty in equal parts, until she realized I was not the go-to lunch crowd if you wanted to be anybody at Jaffrey Public High.

  I could feel her watching me. Discomfort crawled down my spine.

  “My name’s Jade Pearce…”

  I was forced to look up again.

  “Rayne… Rayne Kennedy.”

  I paused, waiting for her to speak, but she just looked at me with brown eyes that seemed too dull for the rest of her dazzling self. I cleared my throat.

  “Are you new?”

  She nodded, twirling her fork with slender fingers, pushing the salad on her plate into a neat little mound with a finesse that seemed misplaced on such a menial task. I had no idea what else to say, so I went back to pretending to read.

  “Romeo and Juliet?”

  I just wanted her to leave so I could go back to thinking about her, about the angel of death—that’s what I called her in my mind now. Ever polite, I looked up and gave her half a smile and a nod.

  “Do you like tragedy, Rayne?”

  It was an odd question. She watched me with an intensity that made me want to shrink, and I considered my answer carefully.

  “I think it’s realistic.” I leaned back in my seat, resigned to having this conversation. “Life is tragic, love is never straightforward… Or least not from what I’ve seen,” I added quickly, not wanting to say too much on a subject I had experienced so little of. “There’s light and dark in everything, the story doesn’t fall into the light for the sake of a happy ending. Things end badly, imperfectly… Like I said… Realistic.”