Page 17 of The Birthday Girl

Tremaine’s knees buckled, and he stumbled back against the wall.

For a full minute, Tremaine couldn’t make his limbs work.

He was gummed to the wall by terror, the urge to bolt clashing with the shame in his gut for not being there to save Jimmy.

He licked his lips, and the taste of copper was just as real as it was downstairs, only now it burned him from the inside out.

Somewhere behind him, a floorboard sighed. Tremaine's fingers found cold metal at his waist, yanking his weapon free as he pivoted toward the stairs. Three steps. That was all he managed before his boot slipped in Jimmy's blood. He toppled forward, landing with his cheek in a bloody puddle.

The gun skittered across the floor, clattering against a mannequin’s foot.

Tremaine scrambled to reach it, but a weight dropped onto his back, so sudden and heavy it punched the air from his chest. Cold hands seized his wrists, bending them backward, grinding bone against bone, and his arms were forced higher, and higher, until the snap of dislocation made him puke.

Something sharp burrowed behind Tremaine’s ear, the point of it needling until it hit cartilage.

The pain was electric, blinding, instantaneous, and his howl came out as a froth of spit and gore.

The killer’s hand clamped in his hair, mashing his cheek into the tacky warmth on the boards, and Tremaine could taste Jimmy in the backwash pooling along his teeth.

A hiss broke the silence as the killer’s breath filtered through the blank white mask.

There was no warning, only the cold promise of finality as the blade sank into the groove where spine met skull.

It punched through his flesh, the agony so intense his vision went white, then black, then white again.

Tremaine’s legs kicked, sneakers scraping splinters up from the floor, but the killer rode his back like a rodeo champion, grinding him down, down, down.

The knife twisted, severing something deep.

Tremaine’s left arm went cold, the pain dropping away beneath a level of panic so pure it erased his thoughts.

His vision flickered, snapshotting the mannequin faces in the hallway, their sick red grins, and the clown-white skin.

Then. The world spun as the killer used the knife as a lever, splitting bone with a wet, crunching pop.

Tremaine’s body seized. His mouth opened, but nothing came out except a strangled, bubbling gurgle.

The killer pressed his face into the floor so hard that one of his front teeth snapped off at the gum, filling his mouth with a fresh flood of blood and enamel shards.

His body kept trying to crawl, one leg twitching and scraping at the floorboards, the other flopping limply behind, dragging a streak of blood from the wound behind his ear.

Another blade appeared at the edge of his vision, slick and gleaming, and punched into the hollow above his collarbone, sliding through the joint, and popping it loose with a jerk that sent the arm spinning away.

Light exploded behind his eyes, then faded to a slow, creeping darkness.

He felt the killer rooting around for something, hands searching his waistband for his phone and wallet. Then the hands were gone.

His whole body was numb, and time lost meaning. There was a sound, maybe a laugh, or maybe nothing at all. He saw Jimmy, shoes swinging, and tried to say his name one last time, but it was too late. For them both.

The killer rose from Tremaine’s body, chest heaving, breath hot behind the mask. Their gloves were soaked, every crease and fingertip drenched in the men’s blood. They lifted one hand to their face, letting the wetness smear across the smooth, white surface until the mask glistened red.

It was bliss.

The memory of Jimmy’s last convulsions still rippled in their muscles. The sound of Tremaine’s shoulder tearing from its socket still hummed in their ears like a lover’s moan. The air reeked of blood, but to them it was perfume, rich and heavy with the fragrance of surrender.

They stepped back, admiring the tableau they had made. Jimmy hung, still swaying, lips parted in a silent scream, while Tremaine sprawled below in a broken heap, his blood pooling around the mannequins’ legs. It was a gallery of ruin, and they were the artist, the conductor, the lover.

Their pulse raced, their body thrummed. Each kill had been different, but both had brought the same rising heat, the same exquisite unraveling that made their breath come in short, hungry gasps.

They pressed a gloved hand to their stomach, to their chest, to their throat, chasing the echo of release that still quaked through them.

It wasn’t just death. It was the intimacy of undoing a man thread by thread, muscle by muscle, hope by hope, until nothing remained but silence and blood. That silence was sacred. It was better than prayer, better than sex, better than anything this world could offer.

The killer tilted their head, listening to the house settle again. The ropes above creaked. The mannequins grinned their painted grins. And the darkness danced around them in a lover’s embrace.

They shivered, not from fear but from rapture.

Because murder had never tasted so sweet.