DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

recognizable now—counter, sink, refrigerator, stove—and that air of threatening unreality which had existed only seconds before was effectively dispelled.

Nothing fought off monsters like light.

She opened the dishwasher, took out a glass, and turned on the faucet.

A figure passed in front of the window above the sink.

She jumped, almost dropped the glass, catching it only at the last second. Her first thought was: ghost. The figure had been pale, a blur of movement undistinguishable as a specific form.

Then she heard the familiar sound of the alarm being deactivated as a password was keyed into the panel outside the door, and in the dim circle of light on the other side of the window she saw Mother Margeaux.

What was she doing out this late? Where had she been?

The door opened, and Penelope stood there, glass in hand, as Mother Margeaux walked into the kitchen. She saw Penelope but said nothing, moving quickly and silently past her as though she wasn’t there.

Penelope said nothing either, simply watched her mother’s pale form fade into the darkness of the hall, her chill returning, wondering why her mother’s blouse was torn.

Wondering why it was stained with blood.

35

Horton stared at the empty wine bottle on the table before him. He’d been staring at it now for nearly twenty minutes, trying to figure out why it was empty.

He could not remember drinking the wine.

He knew he had done so. He was drunk and acutely conscious of the fact.

But he could not for the life of him recall the specifics of the event: how long it had taken to finish off the bottle, where he had gotten the wine in the first place, when he had started drinking.

Blackout.

That’s what scared him. He’d known enough alkies in his time to be familiar with the symptoms, and though he had been hitting the sauce a little heavier than usual, lately, it did not seem to him that he was having any difficulty controlling his drinking.

That was the problem—it never seemed that way to the person involved.

There was something else, though, something beneath the surface fear of alcohol abuse that troubled him as he stared at the bottle, and it had to do with the wine itself.

Daneam.

Lezzie label wine. He’d heard of it, perhaps even seen a bottle here and there, but it had never been available, to his knowledge, to the general public.

And he could’ve sworn that he picked up this bottle at Liquor Shack.

But he couldn’t remember for sure.

He rubbed his eyes, massaging them until they hurt. The effect that the wine seemed to have on him was different than that of any alcohol he’d ever drunk before. Instead of feeling lonely and alone, cut off from everything except himself and his sorrows, he felt… connected. To who or what he didn’t know, but the feeling of communing with others through the wine, through his intoxication, was there, and it was creepy.

He also felt… well, sexually excited. That was not something that usually happened either. To others, maybe, but not to him. He’d always found alcohol to be anything but an aphrodisiac. A de-sexualizer, if anything. Yet he was sitting here now with an erection, aroused after remembering the one time he and Laura had tried something kinky. She’d wanted him to cuff her to the bedposts and rape her, roughly, and he’d been happy to oblige, but when it came down to it, when she was manacled and spread-eagled before him, he’d been too inhibited and hadn’t been able to maintain an erection.

Now, though, thinking back on the incident, he had no problem keeping up his erection. It pressed painfully against his slacks, and he thought that if Laura was here right now, he’d throw her on the fucking floor and shove it up her pussy until she screamed.

He picked up the bottle. It felt comfortable in his hands, familiar, and he supposed that he’d held it as he drank the wine, though he could not remember doing so.

Blackout.

What the hell was happening here?

The phone rang. He sprang to his feet, instantly sober, already striding out of the kitchen toward the telephone in the living room. The phone never rang unless it was someone from the station calling him in, and some cop’s instinct, some perpetually responsible part of his brain automatically kicked into gear, immediately negating the effects of the alcohol.

He caught the phone halfway through the second ring. “Horton.”

“Lieutenant? This is Officer Deets. I’m on-site and patched through the station. We, uh, have what appears to be a double homicide here—”

“Cut the police talk. What happened?”

“Two teenagers. They were torn apart.”

Horton’s mouth was dry. “Where?”

“On South Street.”

“I’m on my way.”

Searchlights, flashlight beams, and the blue-red strobes of patrol cars lit the lonely section of road between the entrance to the Daneam vineyards and the old Mitchell’s ranch. Horton stood inside the roadblock next to the meat truck and lit up. The inhaled smoke felt good in his lungs. Warm. He exhaled, looked toward the Dodge Dart, where McComber and another uniform were dusting for prints. Someone had spotted the car a half hour ago and called in. Both sets of parents had already phoned the station hours earlier, worried about their kids, and when the plates of the abandoned vehicle matched the kids’ plates, Deets and McComber had been sent out.

They’d found the bodies in less than five minutes.

Or what was left of them.

Horton took a deep drag on his cigarette, trying not to think of that assembled pile of flesh and bone they’d bagged and packed in the meat truck. An adult was bad enough, but teenagers, kids… He looked up at the stars, wondering for the zillionth time how, if there was a God.

He could allow shit like this to happen.

He hated this fucking job.

They’d finally gotten a break, though. And, amazingly, old dickhead Deets was the one who’d found it.

A weapon. With prints.

Bloody prints.

He tossed his cigarette onto the asphalt past the roadblock and walked back over to the black-and-white. The