October 31, 2024. Abandoned Briarwood Manor Estate. Gloamstead, Alabama. Beating a brain-sucker at her own game…

Married three hours ago. Kidnapped two hours ago. Tortured one hour ago for my antique shop.

It’d been one hell of a day.

Consciousness hit me like a fist to the jaw. I jerked awake, tied to a chair, my best blue suit torn and bloody. Gasping air like a drowning man, I fought down panic. After that, I fought with the ropes.

I didn’t actually plan to get kidnapped, or almost murdered, on my wedding day. That was the serial killer’s idea. Having all that take place in an abandoned estate was icing on the death cake. Finally, the knots at my wrists came loose.

“Damn it!”

I hissed in pain, yanking my bloody, scraped hands free. The other bonds were easier to shake off, but I was still careful. Getting stabbed by a jagged, rotten splinter from the chair I sat in was the last thing I needed. I had enough problems.

Honestly, it was a pretty old chair. But while I probably could’ve snapped the wood to get loose, my murder-host, Valeria Moffet, had already worked me over. She’d sliced thin cuts across my chest and one shoulder. They stung like hell.

I eased out of the chair, tossing the ropes aside. Carefully, I rubbed my legs, desperately trying to get some feeling back. Pain pricked at me where the dried blood tugged at the edge of my cuts. I grimaced.

“That hurts like hell.” I shuddered out a sigh. “But I’m still alive.”

A pins-and-needles sensation shot through my legs, making my knees tremble as I glanced around.

“Alive is good. Need to stay alive.”

The air was thick with every festering scent no one wanted to smell. Mold, mildew, and rotten carpet had mixed into a sharp stench that assaulted my nose. I coughed, nearly falling over, then searched my pockets for my phone to call for help. The most I found was damp pocket lint.

“Shit!”

I clenched my jaw, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“No phone. Nothing. She took it all. I’ve got to find help. There has to be a phone… something.”

I eased across the forgotten bedroom, lightheaded from pain. Warped, loose floorboards slowed me down, but terror kept me moving. Once on the other side of the room, I knelt by the bedroom’s only door out, listening for threats. Thunder crashed outside, while rain beat against the cracked and stained windows. Somewhere in the house, wind moaned through exposed rafters that creaked at the abuse. It was a haunted house soundtrack in real time.

But there weren’t any footsteps, screams, or high-pitched giggling—not even heavy breathing outside my own. That bled some tension out of my back. I sighed.

“Weapon. I need a weapon,” I murmured between waves of pain. “Crowbar. Pipe. Something.”

I glanced around the bedroom, clenching my jaw. There wasn’t much.

Valeria had stripped the room down to a chair, battered and stained mattress, and a dilapidated dresser. Nerves pricked goosebumps along my skin like hot needles.

“It’s like some sick stage play for a ritual murder,” I huffed bitterly. “Maybe I could hit her over the head with a drawer? I do not want to die here.”

Slowly, I pushed to my feet, ignoring the hot pain from the bloody gashes under my clothes. Darkness frayed at the edges of my sight, making the world swim. I closed my eyes.

“Cassie.” I breathed my wife’s name like a prayer. “Please be safe—I’m coming.”

I gave up on the drawer idea, since it was rotten anyway, and eased out of the room. The hallway outside was draped in long shadows, spilling across a heavily stained brass-gold carpet that made my eyes spin.

Dark wood-paneled walls with the occasional wallpaper trim didn’t help the lighting—not that there really was much. It was just sporadic bursts of lightning outside, flashing through the second floor windows. There were paintings I didn’t care about, and the occasional thin table that held something decorative, like a mummified flower arrangement.

My memory of the place was a lost cause, so I picked a direction and eased forward. I jerked at motion in the corner of my eye, then relaxed with a shudder. It was me in a yellowed window pane nearby—dark hair bloodied, skin paler than I liked. I looked like a refugee from a mortuary.

A haunting giggle tickled the air before a soul-tearing scream slapped it. My blood froze.

It was her.

Valeria Moffet—elegant and graceful as smooth marble, but as twisted as rusted barbed wire.

“God, she’s already at it again,” I rasped, voice trembling. “Another body for the stack in her basement.”

I leaned against the wall for support as that scream split the air again, needling a headache into me. This time, sobbing chased after it.

“Please don’t let it be Cassie,” I prayed selfishly.

Cassidy or no, I didn’t want it to be anyone. Still, I hurried down the hall, where I finally found the front stairs to the foyer, and the way out.

“Sheriff. I need the sheriff,” I wheezed. “If I can…”

Another sharp scream and sobbing shattered my thoughts. I twitched and nearly tumbled down the staircase. That shriek felt like it battered everything, from me to the dying art déco wallpaper trim. I sucked in a sharp, putrid breath to clear my head.

“All right, think, Daniel. That can’t be Cassie. The pitch is all wrong. Whoever that is, they’re as human as me.”

But that didn’t make it better—just different. It was still someone Valeria had dragged into this playtime horror show of hers. I glanced down the stairs to the stained foyer, then at the closed front door.

Valeria’s giddy giggle trembled the air, toying with my nerves.

I squeezed my eyes against tears.

“Shit,” I muttered bitterly. “Just… no. I can’t leave whoever that is. Just can’t, even if I’m beat to pieces. There’s no way I’ll get help in time.”

A knot of terror rose in my throat—it was time for a bad idea.

“Cassie?” I prayed quietly. “Please find me. I’m about to be so very stupid.”

A quick, desperate search of the hallway turned up a heavy, antique silver candlestick from atop a nearby wooden hutch. The metal holder was ornate and old, carved with delicate 19th-century filigree.

Valuable? No doubt. But at that moment, it felt better as a metal club than an expensive antique.

“You’ll do,” I growled at the candlestick, then stalked down the hallway. “Cassie said Valeria was a bloodleech. Well, now I’ve got a candlestick. Let’s see who wins.”

It was a great speech—I hoped it wouldn’t be my epitaph.

I eased downstairs, avoiding the worst of the loose boards, and followed the screams. They wailed like warbling ghosts from the manor’s old sitting room, turned personal library, on the first floor. A limp, infected yellow light spilled out of the room’s open double doorway.

Another scream. It sounded like a young man having his soul torn out of his lungs.

This needed to stop one way or the other. I’d curl into a ball and cry later, if I lived. Everything about this plan of mine centered on Valeria being too occupied to hear me over the noise.

But that murder mansion had way too many loose boards. One past the doorway squeaked when I stepped on it. I swung and missed—she didn’t.

The world became an ugly smear. I slammed into a wall at top speed after Valeria threw me like a meat rag. Old wood paneling cracked behind me. I collapsed into a heap, air knocked from my lungs. A moldy avalanche of books poured from an overhead shelf. I dimly realized that somehow I still had my candlestick.

A blonde, college-age, young man lay nearby bound up like a fresh-catch. He was stretched out on his stomach across a battered, bloodstained Victorian sitting sofa. If he wasn’t screaming, he sobbed. Next to him sat an old black grand piano that played host to a lit set of yellow-white candles.

It was yet another of Valeria’s picturesque horror scenes for murder.

The madwoman herself tapped three out-of-tune piano keys while she stopped next to the young man.

Valeria Moffet—elegant as a thin stiletto—stood like she owned the room. Glossy dark hair framed a face too perfect and too pale to be anything but wrong. Her eyes were a washed-out blue, cold and distant as moonlight over ice. The look she gave me was clinical, almost curious, as if she hadn’t decided what part of me she wanted to keep.

Her dead-blue eyes slid over to the young man on the couch when he groaned again.

“Quiet, you,” she sneered icily. “Snacks don’t interrupt.”

The young man replied with a wet, mumbled whisper. Nothing more than mangled pain and sobbing dressed up like words. Valeria scowled.

In a flash, long, sharp, ebony nails snapped out of her fingers before she scraped his scalp. Blood welled up in long lines. He screamed. Her lips curled in a faint smile before she leaned down, planting a soft kiss on the back of his neck.

He spasmed.

She inhaled.

I stared wide-eyed and trembling.

The young man collapsed, unearthly still. Once Valeria straightened, she wiped a clear fluid from her pale, black-veined lips. Her chilly smile was all sharp edges. A cold humor that didn’t quite reach those watery, solid black eyes.

“Now, Daniel, where were we? Oh, you were giving me your antique shop,” she said as smooth as poisoned oil.

I rolled to my right, ignoring the pain that danced along my cuts. Using the wall as support, I got to my feet, brandishing my now-warped candlestick like an all-too-short baseball bat.

“Get bent. Where’s Cassidy?” I rasped while my knees trembled.

Valeria drifted away from the sofa with an inhuman grace that defied the laws of physics. Every primal instinct I had screamed to run, find a deep cave, and hide.

“Your little bat is hiding,” she said coolly. A smile tugged at her mouth. “Which is clever of her, even if she was stupid enough to follow you here.”

A shudder punched through me. I didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, I glared.

Valeria tilted her head a little, considering me like a venomous snake debating a tasty meal.

“Still, she’ll be a lovely keepsake. So will you.” Her smile sharpened. “Isn’t that what you do at Moonlight Curiosities? Offer lovely ‘keepsakes’? You should’ve given me what I wanted, Daniel.”

She rushed at me before I could spit back some half-baked remark of desperate bravado. Quickly, I swung the candlestick. She ducked, and I missed. Again. Sadly, she didn’t, knocking me backwards.

Wood paneling snapped once more when she bashed me against the wall. I slid down, leaving behind a me-shaped crater as my body kissed the floor with an ugly thump. Pain told me to stay down. Instead, I lurched to my feet with a roar, candlestick at the ready.

I swung wildly as Valeria stepped back, wide-eyed. Candlestick met jaw at top speed—a wet crack of bone followed. The fiend lurched to one side, then reset her jaw with an ugly pop. She giggled as if it were the best joke in the world.

“Oh, I was hoping you’d fight. It’s so boring when my guests just let me drink them down.” She ran a tongue over her lips. “This way there’s struggle. A delicious, awful panic.”

“Get a therapist,” I wheezed.

She darted forward, a snarl cutting the air.

This time her skin shriveled like overheated paint bubbling off polished wood. Reddish-purple veins weaved erratically through her withered skin. Her almost too-perfect marble elegance, like an ideal image of a person, melted away like rancid candle wax.

Valeria’s eyes rolled fully back into her head, replaced with void-black orbs as her fingers stretched long and skeletal. Ebony-dark claws snapped out of her fingers again, aimed for my chest.

I darted aside, but her claws found my shirt. She jerked, and the room flipped sideways around me. Mold and plaster dust filled the air when I hit the wall… again.

“So delicious.”

The words slithered out of her warped, sucker-like mouth, ringed with needle-like teeth.

“I can’t wait for you to watch while I suck your precious Cassidy dry. All before I eat you.”

She hauled me off the floor, one hand on my shirt, the other at my throat.

I should’ve been terrified. But Valeria underestimated my rapidly diminishing sense of self-preservation. With a manic zeal, I slammed the candlestick against the bloodleech until the metal—and her jaw—bent out of shape.

“Let. Me. Go!” I rasped with each hit, turning purple while I slowly lost air.

Valeria savagely snapped her jaw back into place with a free hand, as a shadow stretched across both of us.

I managed a limp grin.

“Oh, you’re gonna get it now,” I croaked.

It was my wife.

Cassidy stood in the doorway, clutching a small canvas bag—jeans and shirt as torn as my suit. Red hair, wild and unkempt, framed a face with livid emerald green eyes. She was a five foot eight bundle of delightful, righteous fury.

“Drop him right now!”

Her command sliced the air like a scalpel. Heat flashed in her eyes like torches from a thousand angry villagers.

“Oh. The bat,” Valeria hissed with a bored, sucking sneer.

The bloodleech dropped me like yesterday’s garbage. But she barely had time to turn around before Cassidy was already in motion.