Seven Kinds of Hell (2 page)

I didn’t need to see whether he had green eyes to know. He was my father’s people.

My family, the people I was never supposed to meet.

The enemy we’d been fleeing all my life.

I turned and ran, even though I saw nothing obviously dangerous. I knew the neighborhoods well enough to avoid tight spaces and dead ends. But my apprehension only increased.

Small and stealthy, I made the most of the shadows when I could, but mostly I relied on speed.

The two other muggings—attacks, let’s be honest and call them what they were—had been too horrible to remember, too terrible to repeat. I’d burst my heart before I let it happen again.

I vaulted a low chain-link fence and ducked between two houses. As I tried to catch my breath, I saw more of them, spread out and running as silently as I was. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, the world begin to swim before me, a familiar thrill of adrenaline.

Oh no. Not now, not when they’re so close…

Maybe I could still outrace it. I tightened my backpack straps, almost to the point of pain. With any luck, I’d keep my meager possessions with me in the flight to come.

Things got worse, more intense, as they do when you’re in a panic. Reality receded. Whoever they were, they hadn’t found me. They had never
lost
me, I now understood, my legs going wobbly. They’d chased me to exactly where they wanted me. Herded me.

My blood boiled, my despair transmuting into something else, more powerful. An anger that was cleaner, nearly irresistible. I knew I was giving up and I knew what would follow as I did.

As my rage grew, it wiped away the last of my resistance. They wanted me so bad, let them see the
real
me.

Let the Beast come.

Footsteps behind me. Ahead of me. Shadows from a street-light showed familiar profiles, features similar to those I saw in the mirror.

I gave in to the Beast.

I felt the shame of unleashing the Beast only until I was washed in a flood of righteousness. The guilt evaporated, sizzled, then vanished like water on a hot skillet as my body shifted. I always expected pain, and the few times this had happened before, I’d been surprised: nothing but goodness, like I’d had an injection that made me somehow better in my Beastliness. My spine arched and stretched, my legs and arms lengthened, my fingers shortened. My jaw grew long and narrow, my ears pointed. My backpack straps were now comfortable, conformed to my new body. As I stepped out of my cheap black China-doll shoes, I felt elegant, sleek, graceful. The wind ruffled my fur.

I could think, I could keep a plan in my head, I knew who I was, but didn’t think I was up to complex math or philosophy. Maybe that was to make room to deal with all the information my heightened senses fed me. I felt like Zoe, but stronger, more elemental, and the Beast guided me.

Go ahead, guys,
I thought.
You’d have to be nuts to stick around, having just seen that. And even if you are nuts, you probably aren’t stupid enough to mess with the Beast.

I growled, low but palpably audible. I ached for them to attack. I’d end this nonsense now. They owed me for haunting my mother and me. They owed me two lives.

A glimmer—but of what? My sharpened senses weren’t easily fooled, but something was happening I couldn’t explain. The air
around me was charged with electricity. Another moment and we’d all spontaneously combust.

It was coming from the men at both ends of the alley. The air was full of Beastliness.

It wasn’t just me. The others were…

I turned and bolted.

I ran as long and as hard as I could until I felt the Beast relax and no longer sensed those around me posed a threat. I trotted, catching my breath, but still kept to the shadows; people in Salem might expect to see a coyote these days, but I didn’t want to draw attention as a wolf in a short cotton dress with a backpack.

I pulled up behind a huge rhododendron, shifted my pack, and…concentrated. Praying I’d be able to turn back, terrified I’d stay in the Beast’s form, trapped in my own brand of insanity. The Beast had come upon me about a dozen times since I turned sixteen, and sometimes it took ages to turn back, and then I despaired of resuming human form. Those were the worst times.

I lucked out, and it happened quickly. Shifting back, I surveyed the situation. The hem of the dress I’d been wearing was shredded by my escape, but it’d do for the moment. I pulled a pair of flip-flops out of my pack and looked no more remarkable than anyone else out on the street that time of night.

As I found my way back to our triple-decker, over fences and cutting through backyards, I wondered about the men who’d just followed me. Ma’d always told me Dad’s family were blood-thirsty killers who considered themselves above the law. She had implied they were “Family,” with a capital
F
for “Felonious.” She said they killed my father and were after her because of what she knew about them. That’s why we moved around so much. I had no reason to disbelieve her. But I knew all along it probably
wasn’t the whole truth. I never dreamed maybe she meant this family shared my problem, one I’d worked hard to hide from her.

Was it possible she knew what I was? Had she been the same?

Impossible. For all her paranoia, if she had known, Ma would have told me, given me some way of coping with the Beast. She had always been straight with me.

Once home, it didn’t take long to pack the rest of my things. I slipped a note under the landlady’s door and then went for the last box of stuff. I’d leave immediately after the funeral tomorrow. I’d wait till I had to decide between going west, on the Pike, or south, on Route 93, then call Ian to ask for that recommendation.

On my way from the car, parked down the street, I stiffened. I felt a tingling in my spine until I saw it was Hunk coming around the corner toward me. He was, as he put it, temporarily between permanent residences. On nice nights, he slept on the Common; I don’t know where he found shelter on the nasty nights. He was far from his usual haunts. I almost sneaked past, but I heard him mumble my name.

There’s always someone worse off than you. No matter how squirrelly our life, I knew there was always someone who could use what little I had to give.

I fished a tattered bill from my pocket. “How’s it going, Hunk?”

He took it, nodding thanks. “Snakes are bad this time of year.”

Not one of his better nights. “Snakes?”

“All over your house. I seen ’em.”

“OK, Hunk. It’s OK. They’re…gone now.”

“Did they find you?”

I went cold. “Did who find me?”

“Your cousins. Said they were looking for you.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about garter snakes now. “I…they weren’t my cousins. They’re bad men. I don’t want them to know you saw me or that I left, OK? You see them, you duck out of sight.”

“Hey, I’m an old guy who sees snakes. Who’s gonna bother me?”

“You don’t want to find out. You take care of yourself.”

But Hunk had already wandered off.

I knew my plan, had been rehearsing it in my head when I couldn’t bear to think about Ma’s pain. Tomorrow I’d drive until I felt safe, then start a new life.

But the apartment was empty, and my footsteps reverberated strangely now that all our stuff was gone.

Now that Ma was gone.

I hadn’t let myself feel her absence before, driving myself with the details of my flight. The place wasn’t really ours anymore, not now that she was gone. The apartment was bereft, the way Ma’s body had been when she passed.

I’d been fending off emotion for weeks. Tonight was just too much. I didn’t even care anymore if my pursuers were hallucinations brought on by stress, sadness, mania, and fear, or if the world was actually full of monsters who were after me. Who were just like me.

I curled up on the stripped bed and let the tears come, my sobs echoing though the empty rooms.

The first time the Beast had come, eight years ago, I was certain I’d lost my mind. It was shortly after I’d turned sixteen. Ma was at work when the landlord came up to badger us for the rent. We’d already told him he’d have it when Ma got paid that night, but he was being a prick, yelling and threatening eviction. When he opened the door—something he should not have done—I felt something come over me, and all I could do was think about ripping out his throat. The images played out in my mind, and I knew exactly how it would go down. Never had I felt rage as simple and clean and demanding as that before. The look on his face as he backed off rocked me. It was all I could do to shut the door and chain it behind me.

That kind of violent response shouldn’t have felt as good as it did. That was my first clue that I was going nuts. The experience was like opening a door to a whole different suite of rooms I never knew existed inside me. I was as terrified as I was exhilarated. If I hadn’t felt the alien, destructive feelings—and if I hadn’t seen the flash of retracting fangs in the mirror as I splashed cold water on my face—I would have spent the whole day trying to get that feeling back. As it was, I was so convinced I was going crazy, I had my bag packed and was ready to leave when my mother came home. All I could tell her was that the landlord was hassling us—hitting on me—and I wanted to move on.

No, I didn’t tell her the whole truth. If you had no family, and friends you only saw once in a blue moon because you’re always moving, would you risk losing the only person you had in the world when you thought you might be mental?

We left. Ma was ready to jam anyway, and I did my best to convince myself it was a flash of hormones, or a bad burrito, or anything besides me going loopy. Until that point, I had never touched drugs and had sneaked a beer only once in a while, so I had no idea the Beast would return.

Until it did.

A year after the landlord visit was the first time the Beast caught me out in public. That time wasn’t the worst, but it changed me forever and sealed the deal for me that Something Was Not Right With Zoe. I wasn’t exercising good judgment that night, and I now wondered if this had been purely coincidence. Yes, it was a full moon, and some nutcases claim they can feel the moon directing them, strengthening them. I felt those urges myself, and rather than try to figure it out, I tried to blot them out. That night, I found myself at a party at a friend of a friend’s. Being young and stupid, and thinking it would be all right
this time,
I drank too much. It didn’t work, not the way I needed. No matter how much I drank, the more I
wanted
to get drunk, the less I could shut off my feelings. I craved a little oblivion, even at the cost of a raggedy, personally embarrassing night. But it wouldn’t happen. No matter how hard I tried to get wrecked, I couldn’t.

Eventually, very late, I said good-bye and took the long way home, hoping the cold air would somehow force the alcohol into my system.

Down the block, the last lights in the darkened cinema clicked off, the late show having let out twenty minutes earlier. A young man set an alarm and locked the door. The manager, maybe, or the last of the late-shift workers.

He looked around, put the keys in his pocket, and set off down the street ahead of me, another lonely soul.

Lonely, maybe, but not alone. Three men stepped out of the shadows in front of him.

“Faggot. We told you we’d be back.”

He kept his head down, kept walking. It was a pretty stupid thing to do; if someone is threatening you, you don’t turn your back on them. I knew from experience you can’t wish away trouble like that. But he quickly lengthened the distance between himself and the others, so maybe he knew what he was doing.

“Hey, faggot! I’m talking to you.” One of them raced up and, before he could move, grabbed his arm.

The kid
did
know what he was doing; he pulled out a can of pepper spray and soaked the guy with it.

The attacker grabbed his eyes and screamed. The kid stepped in and aimed the stream at him. He should have run. His attacker flailed and, with a lucky shot, managed to knock the canister out of his hand.

The kid ran, then. The guy he nailed was screaming curses and crying, rubbing his eyes, which only made things worse. Made it worse for the kid, too, because the other two decided it was time to join in. One rushed him, throwing hard punches at his head. The kid went down.

The other, having checked on his blinded friend, was now screaming himself. He kicked the prone kid several times.

It all happened in less than a minute. It took forever.

I was frozen, unable to scream for help. I stared as the scene unfolded, unable to think. The cheap, prepaid phone in my pocket never even occurred to me.

Everything slowed to glacial pace. Eternities passed between heartbeats, and even as the violence seemed to pause, it was as if a movie was running in my head, several minutes faster than the reality unfolding before me.

I knew exactly what was coming next—

I had no idea. How could I have known?

—They would drag the barely conscious man over to the sidewalk, blood streaming from his face, his hand bent back at an unnatural angle. They would place his head on the curbstone, open his mouth, and stomp his head, splitting his jaw on the anvil of asphalt.