Lover Enshrined

“Here, now, suh, let’s get you in the car.”

Lash allowed the little guy to take him around to the passenger side and settle him in the seat.

“Whatchu got in your hand there, suh-”

Lash shoved the lesser to the side, bent over, and dry-heaved a couple of times over the ground. Something black and oily came out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He wiped it off and looked at it.

Not blood. At least, not the kind… “I killed them,” he said hoarsely.

The lesser knelt down in front of him. “ ’Course you did, and you made your daddy proud. Them bastards ain’t your future. We are.”

Lash tried to stop the scenes from replaying in his head. “My mother screamed the loudest. When she saw me kill my father.”

“Not your father. Not your mother. Animals. Those things were animals in there. Like taking down a deer… or, yeah, like a rat, you know? A vermin.” The slayer shook his head. “They wasn’t you. You just thought they was.”

Lash looked down at his hands. The knife was in one. A chain in the other. “So much blood.”

“Yeah, they done bleed a ton, those vampires.”

There was a long silence. Like, one that lasted for a year.

“Say, there, suh, you got like a pool thing ’round this place?” When Lash nodded, the lesser said, “ ’Round back?” Lash nodded again. “Okay, we gonna take you there and let you wash up. We got you some fresh clothes in the back of this here car and you gonna put ’em on.”

Before Lash knew it, he was in the estate’s pool house under a shower, washing the remnants of his parents away from his skin and watching the red funnel down the drain at his feet. He rinsed off the knife and the chain as well, and when he stepped out to towel off, he put the stainless-steel link around his neck first.

There were two dog tags hanging off the thing. One was his rottweiler’s last license, and the other the record of King’s final rabies shot.

Lash’s change of clothes went on quick enough, and he transferred his father’s wallet from the soiled pants he’d had on to the clean ones Mr. D had gotten for him. He was going to have to keep using the boots, but the stains were browning up, looking less red, which made it more bearable.

He came out of the pool house and found the little slayer sitting on one of the glass-topped tables by the lawn chairs.

The lesser hopped down off it. “You want me to call for the backup now?”

Lash looked at the Tudor. Driving over here, he’d intended to ransack the place. Take anything that was worth a dime. Use a fleet of what the Omega had told him were his troops to strip the place down to its wallpaper and floorboards.

It seemed like the Conan thing to do. The perfect declaration of his new status. You don’t just crush your enemies, you take their horses and burn their huts and hear the lamentations of their women…

Trouble was, he knew what was inside that house. With the bodies of his parents and the doggen in it, he was staring at a mausoleum, and the idea of desecrating the place, of sending in a swarm of lessers to defile it, was too wrong.

“I want to get out of here.”

“We’ll come back then?”

“Just get me the fuck out of here.”

“Whatever you like.”

“Right answer.”

Moving like an old man, Lash walked back around to the front of the house and kept his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the windows he passed.

When he’d slaughtered the doggen in the kitchen, there had been a roasting chicken in the oven, the kind that had one of those little popup thingies that let you know when it was done. After he’d bled out the last of the servants, he’d stopped by the Viking stove and turned the light on. The chicken’s popper had gone off.

He’d opened the slim drawer to the left of the stove and taken out two white-and-red-striped oven mitts that had Williams-Sonoma tags on them. Turning the oven off, he’d slid the roasting pan from the heat and put it on the gas burners. Golden brown with corn-bread stuffing. Giblets were in the bottom, on their way to spicing up the gravy.

He’d turned off the potatoes that were boiling in water, too.

“Get me out of here,” he said as he slid into the car. He had to move his legs inside using his hands.

A moment later, the Focus’s sewing-machine engine turned over, and they started down the driveway. In the dense silence of the shit box, Lash took his father’s wallet out of his fresh cargo pants, flipped the thing open, and checked through the cards. ATM, Visa, Black AmEx…

“Where you want to go?” Mr. D asked as they came to Route 22.

“I don’t know.”

Mr. D glanced over. “I kilt my cousin. When I was sixteen. He was a bastard, and I liked it while it was happening and it was the right thing to do. But afterward, I felt bad. So you got nothing to apologize for if you done feel like you wronged ’em.”

The idea that someone knew even a little about what he was going through made the whole thing seem less like a nightmare. “I feel… dead.”

“It’ll pass.”

“No… I’m never not going to feel like- Oh, fuck it, just shut up and drive, okay?”

Lash slipped the last card free as they took a right on Route 22. It was his father’s fake driver’s license. As his eyes hit the picture, his stomach rolled. “Pull over!”

The Focus shot onto the shoulder. As a massive SUV passed them, Lash opened the door and heaved some more black shit onto the ground.

He was lost. Utterly lost.

What the hell had he just done? Who was he?

“I know where to take you,” Mr. D said. “If y’all just shut the door, I can get you to where you’ll feel better.”

Whatever, Lash thought. At this point, he would take suggestions from a bowl of Rice Krispies. “Anywhere… but here.”

The Focus pulled a U-ie and headed toward downtown. They’d gone a couple of miles when Lash glanced over at the little lesser. “Where we headed?”

“Place where you can catch your breath. Trust me.”

Lash looked out of the window and felt like a total pussy. Clearing his throat, he said, “Tell a squadron to go back there. And take everything that isn’t nailed down.”

“Yes, suh.”

As Z pulled the Escalade up to the Tudor mansion Lash and his parents lived in, Phury frowned and sprang his seat belt free. What the hell?

The front door was wide-open to the summer night, the light from the chandelier in the front foyer casting a golden yellow glow over the stoop and the pair of topiaries standing at attention on either side of the entrance.

Okay, this was just wrong. You expected colonials with porch pots and gnomes in their flower beds to have their doors languishing open like that. Or maybe ranch houses with bikes in front of the garage and chalk drawings on the sidewalks. Or, hell, even trailers with busted windows and decrepit plastic chairs dotting their weed lawn.

But Tudor mansions on manicured grounds didn’t look right with their grand front doors wide open to the night. It was like a debutante flashing her bra thanks to a wardrobe malfunction.

Phury got out of the SUV and cursed. The smell of fresh blood and lessers was all too familiar.

Zsadist palmed one of his guns as he shut his door. “Shit.”

As they walked forward, it was pretty damn evident they were not going to be talking to Lash’s parents about