Page 47 of Serpentine Valentine
Earlier that night, before I met up with Bryn, I’d showed up at the party in a short blond wig and blue contact lenses. My unique snake tattoos were covered up by leather pants and a mock turtleneck crop top that still left my belly exposed from the lower swell of my breasts to well below my belly button. The boys had been such easy prey. The moment Ishowed up, they flocked to me like moths to a flame. I wondered if any of them sensed the violence barely contained beneath my skin, flickering at the edges of my forced smile. If a part of them wasn’t drawn to the danger.
Either way, it was easy enough to find the ring leader, Mitchell Paxton, and lure him to his room. Easier still to wrap my fingers around his throat when he bent to kiss me and press just firmly, just long enough for the guy to pass out on his own bed.
The idiot kept the drugs inside the only book on his bedside table, the pages cut out to house three vials of Rohypnol. That it was a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Beautiful and Damnedwas wonderfully ironic.
I left after that, knowing Mitchell would wake up thinking he’d drunk too much and head back to the party. That whatever use the frat had for those drugs would go unfulfilled even if they slipped it into girls’ drinks because I’d taken the vials myself and switched them out for powdered sugar.
On my way out, I’d handed them off to Gracie in the kitchen who was wearing a pink wig that oddly suited her. She stayed inside with Juno as backup to drug the guys when the party wore down so I could go on my date with Bryn.
And now, I was back.
The house was empty when I pushed through the front door. It was only eleven thirty at night, way too early for a university party to be over, but the girls had done good work. I followed the hallway past the archway to the living room and kitchen, both filled with party detritus. Music still played throughout the house, growing louder as I made my way deeper. The door to the basement staircase was cracked open, and my heeled shoes thumped on the wooden treads as I made my way into the bowels of the house.
I wasn’t surprised by what awaited me. My sisters knew what they were doing. Even before we’d become the Man Eaters, we had foughttogether. My foster mother’s second husband had been abusive, so Grace, Effie, and Juno had already been enrolled in self-defense and Muay Thai classes when I started to live with them. As preteens, we had coordinated fights like most kids choreographed dances to top forty music.
So no, I wasn’t surprised when I saw the twelve live-in fraternity brothers tied together elbow to elbow in a circle with their bodies facing outward, duct tape over their mouths, ankles crossed and zip-tied.
“Good work, girls,” I said in my high, flighty voice.
Effie jerked her chin up in acknowledgment, sharpening one of her knives where she sat on the edge of a sofa. Juno stalked around the grouping of men, tapping her barbed wire baseball bat against her hand. Blood stained one end, correlating with the side of a blond guy’s skull. Obviously, he’d put up a bit of a fight.
I recognized him instantly as Mitchell.
“Did you find it?” I asked.
Grace stepped forward, her short skirt swinging over skull-patterned fishnets.
Even tied up, the eyes of two men tracked her progress across the room.
Anger burst inside me like a rotten tomato thrown against the wall of my chest.
“Eyes up here,” I snapped at them, stepping forward to slap one of them across the cheek.
His face snapped to the other side, blood flying from the gashes my talon-tipped gloves cut into his cheek in a wide arch to paint the man beside him like a Jackson Pollock painting. It was lovely.
Sure, we dressed provocatively when we went hunting. There was something poetic in being beautiful in our wrath. Vengeful women throughout history and literature were too often portrayed as ugly, the narrators of their stories inevitably male.
The harpies, the Morrigan, the furies.
Well, the Gorgon sisters were not ugly, and our anger didn’t taint us, it empowered us.
“Here,” Gracie said, handing me a computer. “It was on the floor of his room.”
“Want me to crack it?” Juno asked, affecting the same high, floating tone as the rest of us.
“No, I think Mitchell will open it for us.” I stalked over to the president of Delta Alpha and crouched before him. His eyes widened, ripe with fright, as I traced the edge of his jaw with the end of a talon. “Won’t you, Mitchell?”
He mumbled something behind his taped lips, and I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know it wasn’t very kind.
I clucked my tongue at him. “Have you ever heard of the saying ‘it takes a monster to destroy a monster’? No? Well, let me explain.”
As I spoke, I pressed harder with the metal talon at the tips of my gloves, cutting a precise hole into the top of Mitchell’s smooth cheek and then slowly, carefully drawing a diagonal line down to his mouth. The skin opened up cleanly like drawing a line on paper in red ink that pooled slowly along the crease then wept down the slope of his face.
One. Two. Three.
Cut. Cut. Cut.
“You and your lot are monsters, Mitchell. Maybe you think you’re owed something, maybe you think it’s harmless, that the desire you feel for the women you drug and take without their consent is payment for services you make them render. Honestly, I cannot comprehend the evil path your mind takes you down to convince you what you did to these girls was okay. Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about how you live with yourself.”
