Demon Night Read Free

penis.’”
    Stevens’s mouth didn’t move much, but his eyes—slightly red, slightly watery—turned down into a frown. “You’ve heard this one.”
    â€œWell,” Charlie said, suddenly wary. The two drinks she’d given him over the past hour weren’t usually enough to inebriate a guy his size—but he might have been drinking somewhere else before meeting up with his buddies, and the alcohol was just now kicking in. “Yeah.”
    â€œFuck. You guys, she’s already heard this one. That fucking ruins the whole joke. Forget this shit.” He tipped up his mug, looked down into it. Empty. “I need another one of these, Blondie. Try not to fuck that up.”
    The clench of her teeth could have ground peanuts to butter. Like hell she’d serve him more.
    â€œYo, Stevens. Ease off, man. It isn’t her fault.” Her ally. His tie now hung limply around his neck, but she managed to restrain herself from reaching over and yanking it tight again when he added, “Listen to her. She’s sick or something. Couldn’t get off for the night, Blondie?”
    His tone was sympathetic, but his assumption scraped her already raw nerves, and the rasp in her voice deepened along with her frustration.
    â€œNo.” Charlie pointed to the jagged white line crossing the bottom of her throat. She’d ripped out the sleeves and collar of her Metallica T-shirt, and the resulting boat neckline was low; she couldn’t believe they’d missed the scar. Unless she was wearing a turtleneck, she usually couldn’t get new acquaintances to look at her face. “The Emerald City Slasher.”
    His eyes widened; so did Stevens’s and the others’. “No shit? Thaddeus White, right?”
    She nodded. “Seventeen years ago. I was twelve.” Hopefully they were too loose and warm to recall that the Slasher had fixated on adult women, not kids.
    â€œHow’d you get away?”
    â€œI had to saw through my ankle. Then I crawled to a neighbor’s.”
    â€œHoly shit.” The exclamation made the rounds, and two of the jerks actually tried to lean over the bar for a look at her legs. Did they think she’d pop off a prosthetic foot for them?
    A throat cleared behind her. Her savior had come. Charlie turned; Old Matthew’s determinedly solemn frown wrinkled his raisin-dark face. “You want to take that break now, Charlie?”
    â€œGod, yes,” she muttered and limped past him. Just before she reached the “employees only” door, she heard him telling Stevens and company that, when probed too deeply, the memories of the Slasher were liable to send her into a psychotic rage.
    Good Old Matthew Cole. He’d likely have them gone by the time she returned—or at least moved to a table in the restaurant.
    She grabbed her navy peacoat from the hook inside the break room, slid it on, and dug her knitted cap from the pocket before slipping out through the kitchens. The heavy length of her hair against her back annoyed her, but she didn’t untuck it from beneath her collar. Trapped as it was between the coat and the wool hat, it’d be as flat as a one-dollar beer by the end of her break.
    But flat could be fluffed; drowned rat could not.
    Rain misted over her face and sparkled beneath the halogen security light. Cardboard wilted in the recycler to her left. The lid on the brown Dumpster was up. She grimaced, imagining the sodden garbage, and tipped it closed. The clang shot through the alley, disturbing a yellow-striped cat and echoing in her ears until she reached the gated stairwell to the roof.
    The gate was wrought iron, with a metal screen to prevent anyone reaching through the bars to the interior knob. As a safety measure, only the outside knob locked—if someone dropped the key over the side of the roof, they could still open the gate from the inside.
    Every Cole’s employee had access