It’s been a cold, wet day all day, especially for August, but Daisy doesn’t mind. The clouds add to the darkness, and it’s convenient for her purposes. It also means there aren’t a lot of people about tonight, so she’s less likely to be observed. She doesn’t need any witnesses for what she’s planning to do.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, she tells herself. It’s exactly what she always does, what she’s been trained to do. She caught wind of a monster. She tracked it, trailed it, sniffed out its current lair, and now she’s lying in wait for it. She’ll spring her trap, take it somewhere safe, and dispose of it. No muss, no fuss, no argument. Certainly no one to complain, no one to miss him—it. It’s what she always does. It’s hunting. Not even trophy hunting, not the kind rightly reviled and despised. This isn’t for sport. Granted, it’s not for food either, but it is vermin control.
Nice and simple. Nothing to be concerned about. Nothing to be nervous about. No reason to worry.
But people are soft. They don’t understand. They want results, they want safety, they want the vermin gone, but they don’t want to acknowledge what it takes to get to that point. So they make noises about brutality and due process and accountability, and they don’t admit that monsters don’t play by the rules, and if you play by the rules trying to catch them, they won’t be the ones getting caught.
So she has to be careful. She can’t be seen. Can’t give anyone the chance to complain. The chances of her getting in trouble with her superiors is pretty slim, they don’t question methods as long as she gets results, but if people make a fuss there might be…complications. For others if not for her. And her superiors don’t like messy.
Besides, this isn’t…technically sanctioned.
She stills suddenly, nostrils flaring. It’s not necessarily that she smells something, she wouldn’t describe it as smelling, but she senses something the way a hunter would, or a wolf on the prowl. A shift in the air, a movement in the metaphorical undergrowth, a looming sense of danger.
Her prey approaches.
Carefully, she shifts her stance from the energy-saving stance she’s been in, the one that enables her to stand, motionless, for as long as she needs to, waiting for the things she hunts, into one that’s poised on a hair trigger, ready to launch at a moment’s notice. She can’t get this one wrong. Something, some instinct, tells her she’s only going to get one shot at this. She has to make it count.
The door of the bar opens, and a figure steps out.
Patrons exiting this place have left in a number of ways—some hurriedly, phones jammed to their ear as they assured someone they hadn’t forgotten and are on their way; some jovially, laughing with friends or shouting cheerful farewells back into its interior; some angrily, stumbling and cursing or being aided by a shove or a boot from another patron or the bouncer. This figure, however, is different. It steps out, not with purpose, not with joviality, not with hesitance, not with defiance. It simply moves as though of course it should be in this space, where else would it be? It does not move as though it is trying to draw attention to itself, or avoid attention being drawn, in any way.
Yet Daisy recognizes the air of menace hanging about it. She senses the danger, the coiled threat of violence. She knows that it is not moving the way it is because it fears anything around it, or wants to make itself known as a threat. It knows it is a threat, and sees no reason to advertise that. It simply exists, and will hurt anything it chooses, for any reason. Not like her. This is no hunter.
Daisy, however, is.
She lunges forward. The timing is exactly right; the door to the bar is closed, the traffic light has just changed and drivers are honking at people in front of them who didn’t immediately floor the gas pedal, and the streetwalker working this stretch of sidewalk is chatting up a potential customer who might otherwise have walked past the alley and seen her. She brings the lead pipe in her right hand up, adds her left hand, and swings it with all her might to land on the figure’s head.
It doesn’t go down.
Instead, it stumbles, then looks up quickly, a familiar red light seeming to shine in his eyes—its eyes. She tells herself this isn’t him anymore, it’s just a monster, it’s—
It’s starting to get up. Daisy curses under her breath and brings the pipe down again—and again—and again, working against the clock, one eye on the traffic and the other on the door, she’s got to get this done before—
Oh, thank fuck, he—it—finally goes down. Daisy tosses the pipe aside and manages to catch him before he hits the ground, then drags him back down the alley to her waiting car. He’s heavy, but not any heavier than the ones she normally does this to, and she’s able to get him in the boot without too much trouble. She backs out of the alley and heads down the road.
It’s only as she hits the edge of the city that she realizes she’s back to thinking of what’s in the boot as him.
She rolls down the window to get some air, cold and damp though it is, even though it’s stopped raining, fucking finally. The wind ruffles her hair, freshly clipped and barely long enough to flutter in the breeze. The road hums under the tires and matches the thrum in her veins, singing a song of danger and chase and the hunt. For most people, this would be a wonderful moment except for the unconscious body in the boot. The mostly unconscious body, she amends as she hears a thump from the back as she goes around a corner. Either he’s, it’s waking up or its feet are just clattering around back there.
Either way, it adds to the experience. Anticipation curls and tightens in her gut, setting her heart thudding with excitement and pleasure. Usually she hates this part, stalls it as long as possible, because at this point it’s usually all but over—her prey captured and incapacitated, her challenge lessened, nothing left to do but end it with a bullet or a knife. She prefers the knife, it’s cleaner and quieter and more intimate. But this…this is different. Every instinct screams at her that the thing she has been hunting is still very much a danger, that the second she opens the back of the car it’s going to spring at her and she’ll still have to outwit it.
She hopes it runs.
She doesn’t think it will.
She drives and drives, the night getting older and the waning gibbous moon stalking her through the underbrush of the clouds, occasionally peering its face down on her battered, nondescript car as it wends its way towards the countryside. At last she turns off at what’s not so much a thruway as a gap in the trees and rattles her way along the dirt road, bumping and jostling, although not as much as she could; the car’s got damned good springs. The thumping in the back has long since stopped, but she doesn’t think it’s because the thing back there is asleep or unconscious or dead. She wouldn’t get that…lucky? No, lucky isn’t the right word; she doesn’t want it to be dead. Not yet. She’s still hoping to stretch the hunt out a little longer. The trouble is that the thing in the back is a kind of predator, too.
It’s not a predator, whispers a voice in the back of her mind, so soft as to almost be inaudible over the sound of the blood in her veins. It’s just a killer.
Daisy grunts. No problem, then. No finesse. She doesn’t have to track something that knows all the same tricks she does.
No, the voice agrees. You just have to kill something that doesn’t do anything else.
Get out of my head, she growls in the confines of her mind.
Her brain, quite inconsiderately, refuses to get out of her head, but it does at least shut up and let her get on with driving.
Finally, she pulls off the road just outside of a small clearing. There are a few people on the force who handle this sort of thing, and each of them have their favorite places; some of them overlap, and she knows where most of them are, but this one is just hers. She’s careful to keep it hidden, and she doesn’t think anyone knows what goes on here except her. Anyone living, anyway.
It’s got three advantages. The first is the cliff just on the other side of the last couple of trees, which is convenient when they try to run, because they never know it’s there and they always try to stop themselves and then she has them. The second is the soil itself; it’s light and sandy, drains well, and is easy to dig, but also packs nicely. The third is the trees themselves. Their roots break up the soil, and…well, Daisy has never forgotten the experiment her professor did in one of the classes she took to get her degree so she could be a cop (passion is all well and good, you can say the right things in any interview and pass all the physical tests, but when you’re a girl, even one that’s six foot even and twelve stone seven, you need something more than that to get past the fucking gatekeepers), the one where he laid a raw steak at the base of a tree and came back the next day to find it had been absorbed by the tree’s roots. Trees need nutrients, too, and there are good nutrients in a body.
These are very well-nourished trees.
Daisy shuts the car off and lets it settle until she can’t hear anything but the susurration of the wind in the beeches (she likes that word, more than murmur or rustle, it’s got a whole different feel that she secretly loves—there was a time she loved words more than the hunt, but it’s so long ago she can barely remember it), and then she gets out of the car and goes around to the back.
It’s still silent. She is aware that’s not a good thing.
For a moment, she stands, running through her options. The gun would probably be the smartest option—quick, clean, no chance for it to get away—but there’s a part of her that wants it to have that chance, that wants to chase it. Besides, this one…this one is more dangerous than most, and she’s afraid—no, not afraid, concerned, fear is for prey, not predator—that if she doesn’t kill it in one go, it will try to wrest the weapon away and turn it on her. A knife wound, or even a bludgeoning wound, she can probably explain away at the A&E. A bullet wound will result in an awkward conversation.
Something heavy and solid? She left the pipe back in the alley, but her tire iron is in the backseat (she’s not stupid, she doesn’t keep anything in the trunk that could be used as a weapon against her), so she can use that if she wants to beat it to death. After how long it took her to get it subdued, though, she doesn’t think that’s likely to work. And it’s awake—she can sense it, with a hunter’s instinct, even if it’s lying still and playing dead—which isn’t normal. Real life isn’t like in books and films; head injuries are nothing to mess around with, and if it’s not brain dead after the clubbing she gave it, let alone still unconscious, that’s definitely something to be concerned about.
So it has to be the knife. She has a few, including a really nice set of throwing knives she definitely didn’t take off of one of the bodies buried here, but usually she uses her trusty hunting knife. This time, however, she hesitates, then ducks back into the car and unlocks the hidden compartment in the center console. Inside is a genuine antique, a knife her grandfather brought back from the war. He said he took it off a dead soldier, but he was always real closed-mouth about the details, no matter how often young Daisy asked. It’s the one thing she claimed as her inheritance—there wasn’t much left after the fire anyway, but the knife was all she took in the end. She’s always been equal parts fascinated and repulsed by it, especially by the fact that, no matter how well she cleans it, it always seems to carry the faint coppery scent of old, old blood.
The voice in her head buzzes with a warning, but she ignores it and pulls the knife out. It feels cold and heavy in her hand. Gripping it tightly, ready to strike, she moves around to the back of the car, pops the lock, and throws the lid open.
She jumps back immediately as the thing in the boot launches itself at her. It hits the ground, rolls, and gets to its feet, standing in the same casual, insouciant, of course I belong here attitude as it came out of the bar with.
“Well, well, well,” it leers. “What do we have here?”
The voice is nothing like the one Daisy remembers…which isn’t that much of a surprise, actually. Not that the thing that’s taken over the body in front of her has altered it in any way, but the last time she saw the body in front of her, it wasn’t entirely done with puberty yet, either.
“Benchley,” she says coldly.
There’s no recognition in the amber eyes looking back at her. She’s not terribly surprised at that; puberty had its way with her as well, so even her closest friend she hadn’t spoken to since school wouldn’t have known her, and she doesn’t really expect this thing to know her either. But, and this is the part she hasn’t been prepared for, there’s not the vacant expression she remembers staring down at her from the stairs, either. There’s a person in there, just not a very nice one. Calvin Benchley hasn’t been taken over by a monster. He’s still human.
For just a minute, her resolve falters. Then Calvin’s eyes lock on the knife in her hand, with a gleam in them she really, really doesn’t like, and she knows two things.
One, Calvin Benchley cannot get his hand on this knife.
Two, Calvin Benchley cannot leave this clearing alive.
He lunges for her, hands outstretched like he wants to wrap them around her throat or shove her to the ground. She dodges to one side and slashes out at him. She misses, but only just; it catches the edge of his jacket and tears it. He hisses as if it’s burned him and pounces again. This time he’s aiming for the knife.
Daisy twists, stabs out, and this time she catches him in the shoulder. Blood wells on the tip of the knife, but he doesn’t cry out. The smell of the blood seems to excite him. He turns to her with a grin, and that expression is familiar. It’s the grin that still haunts her nightmares, the one she saw from the top of the stairs. The grin that promises that he not only wants to kill her, he wants it to hurt.
Fuck that. Daisy is not going to be the one that dies out here. And she won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her in pain.
“Come and get me, then,” she taunts, and backs away a few steps.
Calvin’s grin gets wider, crueler, darker. He twitches his ears in a way that almost hurts in its familiarity—she remembers him at nine years old, giving her that goofy, gap-toothed grin and wiggling his ears at her to make her laugh—does she even remember how to laugh like that anymore? Not important—but it seems to be because he’s…listening for something. Like he can hear something she can’t.
Except he can’t. Daisy’s hearing is keen to begin with, and at times like this—when she’s doing this dance with her prey—every sense is at its sharpest. She knows exactly what he’s hearing: the wind whistling along the edge of the cliff and the water surging against the rocks far below. He thinks he’s going to throw her over when she’s not expecting it, or chase her over it. He thinks she doesn’t know it’s there. He thinks he has the advantage.
She can use that.
Maybe.
He springs towards her again. She drops to the ground and somersaults away, then pops to her feet between a pair of trees. He doesn’t hesitate, merely bulls low and tries to rush her. She knows she won’t be able to pull that trick again, so instead she leaps into the air and stabs downward with the knife. Either he’s lower than she thinks or she jumps higher than she expects, because she misses, again, barely grazing the back of his head, which is…no longer bleeding.
That’s going to be a fucking problem.
You think? The voice in her head whispers.
“Shut the fuck up,” Daisy mutters out loud. Calvin has managed to stumble to a halt before he slams headfirst into the tree, and he’s drawing himself up to his full height. He’s somehow still got a few inches on her, in both directions, and for just a second she wonders if she’s outclassed.
Then she shakes off the moment and tosses the knife into the air as Calvin rushes towards her. It rotates twice, then heads point-down towards Calvin. He slams into her, nearly taking the wind out of her entirely, but she manages to catch the knife by the hilt and drive it into Calvin’s back.
Contrary to what some people might think, she doesn’t actually enjoy killing. She doesn’t hate it, but she doesn’t get any kind of thrill out of it either. It’s just a chore, like brushing her teeth or doing her laundry or making her bed—the natural conclusion, some might say consequence, of an activity she does enjoy—eating, working out, sleeping. Hunts end in a kill. She’s not a fucking photographer. It’s just what happens.
But this—driving a trench knife through Calvin Benchley’s back, in the exact same spot where she bears the scar he gave her twenty years ago—this she enjoys.
He gurgles, and then goes still. His weight bears heavily against her legs and drives her to the ground, but she knows with a hunter’s instinct that he’s not getting up again. Ever. Calvin Benchley, or whatever he’s become, is dead.
For a few moments, Daisy remains on the ground with Calvin’s weight on her legs. Then she takes a deep breath, gets up, and extracts the knife from his back with a wet sucking noise. Methodically, she cleans the blade, getting every single drop of visible blood off, then slides it back into the sheath and locks it in her center console again.
Ignoring the voice in her head, which is murmuring that she should have left the blade where she found it—seriously, what is with her brain today—she extracts the shovel from under the backseat. Choosing the biggest, most aggressive looking tree, she starts digging, slowly and methodically, angling her shovel so it goes between the roots to give her better access. The rain’s made the soil a little heavier than usual, but nothing she can’t handle. Once she’s dug deep enough, shoved the body into it, and tamped the earth back into place, she goes back for the knife and makes a small, but deep, nick in the trunk, so she’ll remember which tree ate him.
She backs away from the tree, gets into the car, locks the knife away again, and reverses slowly out of the clearing, all without taking her eyes off the tree. Only when she gets to a place where she can no longer see it does she do a three-point turn, slam the car into gear, and peel out of there as fast as she can.
She’s never turning her back on that tree again. Never. Superstition or not, she doesn’t want to begin to imagine what it might do to her if she does.
Not with what it clutches beneath it.