It hadn't been a car accident, had it? Her foster parents' deaths? No, it'd been something far worse, something terrible and inexplicable. She'd found them. She'd walked out of her room on a rainy Sunday afternoon, bored of reading, seeking interaction of any sort. The silence in the hallway had been strange, even for their quiet home. Vanessa had padded on bare feet through the various rooms until she'd seen Bernie's arm draped over the side of her reading wingback. The girl had gleefully skipped through the furniture, rounded the chair, to fnd that she'd been wrong—her foster mother wasn't sitting there; it'd been only her arm propped on the armrest, torn from the place where it should've met the shoulder.

Blood. It'd been everwhere. All over her, Vanessa had realized suddenly. The small pieces of her foster parents made a trail to the bathroom, where the larger bits had been piled into the tub.

A man had been standing there back-to-the-door, tall, dark-haired, as painted in red as she was, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and when he'd turned around—

Vanessa bolted upright. She was in complete darkness. Had she even opened her eyes? Had her eyes been . . . been removed? She tried to reach for her face but found her arms restrained, her hands pulled taut horizontally. Twisting her fingers, she felt there were straps—leather?—around her wrists, binding her firmly. She quickly realized, though, that her eyes couldn't have been removed; there was no pain, and though she could see nothing, blinking felt normal. Her eyes were surely still there, but her vision?

There was something more. She was sitting on a hard surface in lukewarm liquid, the smell of it pungent and vinegary. It came up to just below her shoulders. Worst of all, Vanessa was fairly certain she was nude in this pool. It was difficult to tell without hands to inspect her body, but the way the liquid moved against her skin was enough confirmation. The woman thrashed, attempting to wrench her hands from the leather bonds, to bring her legs up enough to kick at them. Vanessa had no notion of whether she was alone, but the animal instinct had surfaced, opening a vein of panic she couldn't seal. She wanted only to free herself of whatever this was. Sour liquid entered her mouth; it was vinegar, or at least it surely tasted like it. Her eyes began to burn, but she couldn't reach to rub them. Her hair hung dripping across her face, but she couldn't push it aside. No light enabled her eyes to acclimate to their surroundings, and no sound but her own frantic movements echoed around her. This place, this room—it was small, close. Once she realized she couldn't fight her restraints and slowed herself to conserve energy, Vanessa tried to gain information about her surroundings. The ceiling sounded low, and the humid air, like the moisture of a sauna, suggested a tight, enclosed space. Careful listening gave her to understand that she was likely alone, for she could hear no slight motions, no breathing, no shuffling of feet, nothing to indicate another being was with her in this void.

Moments of immeasurable length crawled past. Vanessa's thoughts raced, attempted to get ahead of what was happening. If frenetic unfocused struggling wouldn't free her, she'd have to be intelligent. She'd been imprisoned, obviously, and though the how and why were murky, the fact that someone had been purposeful in her placement gave her hope they'd return, that she wasn't just left in the dark for dead.

What had happened? Last she recalled, she'd been . . . with Damien? Not exactly. A bookstore. The bathroom of a bookstore! She'd gone in and . . . and the water, it'd been running. Someone had grabbed her! That was it! This time, it wasn't like the shower or the tub at the motel. This time, they'd gotten her.

Oh, God. What could it mean? Had she been drugged and brought here? How would someone have removed her from the bookshop without Damien seeing? Unless . . . unless it'd been Damien. She'd thought it, before. He'd been there, right there, the two other times. It could have been him. But what would he want with her? What would he do here that he couldn't have already done? And why this set-up, with the weird pool, and the ties, and . . . the vulnerability? She felt ill. Her neck ached; her stomach began to swirl. The smell didn't make things any easier, but before she could get too sick, a light sliced the black. A streak of pure white—or at least it looked pure white to Vanessa—split her right down the middle. Had the light been a laser, she'd have been cut in two.

She pulled again at her restraints even as the silhouettes of two figures stepped in front of the bright rectangle that had opened about fifteen yards away, but the straps weren't going anywhere. The light enabled her to take in some of her surroundings, dusted as they were in a powdery white, and Vanessa was gratified to see the room was as small as she'd guessed. There didn't appear to be anything in it, either, save for the slightly raised pool in which she sat. Around her ran a ring of stone whose sill dipped downward into the liquid. Thirty of her could've fit inside of that pool, but Vanessa was alone, right in the center of the circle, her arms stretched out and tied by the straps attached across from one another. Her body divided the pool into a clean semi-circle, and the clear, sour liquid reflected her illuminated face like a pale moon in a black, rippling sky.

The two silhouettes strode toward her. The darkness, though lit enough for Vanessa to make out the room, was still too deep for her to discern the features of the figures, especially as they appeared to be clad in dark colors. One stayed back, but another drew near the pool. Its head was wrapped in a balaclava.

Vanessa sat still, calculating, contemplating her options. She'd been trained for this sort of thing, crisis situations, kidnapping scenarios. She knew that to remain in control of her mental faculties was imperative, and while her nakedness and impotence unnerved her, Vanessa at first managed to subdue the urge to scream and swear at her captors, who surely had been told not to respond to anything she might stay. Still, when the approaching stranger actually stepped down into the pool, waded toward Vanessa, she couldn't help but breathe heavier, tighten her muscles against the leather restraints, begin to twist her wrists again. The person reached her, stood over her in the gloom, looking down like some dystopian prison warden all masked and silent, before lifting their legs one at a time over her left arm and moving to her back. Vanessa knew that this being, whoever it was, could do anything at all to her without her consent, and that knowledge brought out the mania she'd been so desperate to conceal.

"Who are you? What do you want?" she shouted, fully aware she'd get no answers yet compelled to ask. "Let me go! Untie me and let me go, you fucking sadists!" she demanded, knowing her commands would go unheeded.

There was something in saying the words, expelling her breath and curses, that gave her the illusion of control, and so as irrational as it was, she snarled and bit at the stranger as it put its legs squarely on either side of her, restricting her movement. One thick-fingered hand grabbed the back of Vanessa's head and shoved it down. She tried to wrench free but had no power over what was happening. In the dimness, tied into a pool of vinegar, some man now fingering her neck and her spine, Vanessa began to choke on her own saliva. Something stung painfully, as if the man were making small incisions down her back . . . and now he was pulling her head back so she looked up into his masked face, saw only the sheer rectangle of light beyond, the glint against the corneas of his eyes as he went about his task—

"What is this?" Vanessa grunted, as difficult as it was to speak with her head drawn so far back, too far, now, to see anything but the black-clothed crotch of the person working at her throat. "What are you—"

But she could manage no more, for the burn of a quick blade from one shoulder across her collarbone to the other shoulder, the punch of a sharp tool into that softness beneath her chin, the unzipping of her flesh as that sharp thing drew down, down across her breastbone toward her navel . . . and then she was left alone, limp in her bonds, her own blood gurgling in the back of her mouth. The monsters left her, taking their light with them, and Vanessa was enclosed in the darkness to, she assumed, die, though why this elaborate procedure, she couldn't fathom.

Thoughts moved just beneath the surface of her consciousness. The pain wasn't so bad, not really, not so terrible as she'd have thought, and it surprised her. Yet just as she reflected on the dull, pulsing ache of her dissection, a very different sensation began to boil within her core. Not quite pain but awkward, difficult discomfort, a churning, a building pressure, as if her insides themselves were alive in some way separate from herself. This writhing from within was so utterly disorienting, so wholly consuming, that Vanessa's awareness began to flicker and fade. In the absolute black, naked and panting and gagging in that warm sour pool, the woman no longer held her form; she felt, in fact, formless, hovering in some liminal, starless void, for how long she didn't know. But then the movement in her gut took a sharp and vicious turn toward unbearable agony, and all her blood-saturated shrieks were stifled by the pulling and tearing of a body ripping itself in two.

When Vanessa woke, the first thing she saw was the urine-colored liquid undulating silently an inch beneath her eyes. She watched it move in its slow rhythm, realized each puff of her breath put an indentation in the clearness, though it quickly leveled again. Funny, the distorted image of her breasts and stomach below the surface, her yellowish knees against the green stone of the pool—

Light. She could see, now. Vanessa laboriously lifted her chin, raised her head. Her neck was terribly stiff. Her arms, still tied though hanging slack at her sides, didn't even feel like a part of her body. Everything tingled in a subtle, subcutaneous manner, threatening itchiness. Thoughts of molting crabs, molting spiders traversed the theater of her mind. Why? Because . . . because her flesh, the electricity of it, that nearly imperceptible pins and needles . . . it was as if she were in some new skin, as if she'd sloughed an old shell. Exposure to the elements irritated her. Ropes of black hair hung before her eyes, but Vanessa had no ability to move them, no power to shake her heavy, dripping head, but her obstructed vision didn't keep her from seeing, when she at last managed to sit up straight, that she was not alone.

A man, middle-aged, sat in front of her though outside the pool. He was not like the others who'd come in earlier (earlier? how long ago? a moment? hours? she couldn't tell, had no sense of time). He wore no mask, no all-black clothing. He had on a white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and jeans. His feet were bare, and he leaned forward in his seat, propped his upper half on his knees, and watched her. Around them, the circular room was a cave swimming in ghostly shadows. The strange light came not from an open door but from a bright LED lantern the man had placed a few feet away from himself. Beyond him, against the walls, was a shelving unit Vanessa had been unable to make out in the chaos and black of before; on it were buckets and tools, mostly what looked like sharp objects, saws and knives and chisels, an axe, perhaps. Other than that shelf, though, there appeared no adornments or furnishings. The walls curved into a low sloping ceiling, and the pool in which Vanessa was tied appeared to be the focal point of the space.

She could only stare at the man across from her, his dark curls, his beetling eyes, his ugly unshaven jaw. This wasn't the first time they'd been here, like this. She knew it as well as she knew her name.

Her name! He knew her name . . . her real name—

"How many times are we going to have to do it this way?" he spoke suddenly, his words scattering like bedbugs through the folds of gloom.

Vanessa shook her head, hardly knowing why. She didn't know what to say, though she was sure this had happened before. Damien had mentioned that feeling, hadn't he? That sort of déjà vu?

"If you'd learn to be more submissive, we wouldn't have to tie you up like this. I'd like it to be a pleasant experience for you, or at least a meaningful one. It's meaningful for me, always." His deepset eyes narrowed in their sockets as he scrutinized her.

Vanessa felt no shame in her nudity; she was far too confused and frustrated to let something like humiliation cloud her thoughts. Her fingers twisted and gripped the straps holding her fast to the walls of the pool.

The man clasped his hands in front of him. "Two for one, today," he said enigmatically. "A little bit dangerous, but we can't have these people upsetting The Messenger's plans, now, can we? There's much work to be done, darlin'."

Vanessa's breathing had become suddenly noticeable to her own ears. Her jaw trembled as a combination of chills and anger overtook her, and she had difficulty stopping the chattering once it'd started.

"Oh, now don't go on getting upset about things. You won't remember this, either. You know it. And after everything we've been through together, you'd think I'd get a little more thanks for all I've done for you. Risked my life many a time, haven't I? And all this back and forth—it ain't nothing easy. If you could just tell me how you do it, share the secret to it all—" He sat back and threw up his hands. "God almighty knows it would save so many of these useless lives. So many of them, my dear. I won't say I'm sad to see them go time and again, but the optics? Well, they aren't good, now, are they? And the help . . . you know how that is. They start to doubt, if things take too long. Start to wonder whether I am what I say. So you've got to help me, my dear. All my hopes are . . . on . . . you."

Heart beating within her skull, Vanessa caught a glint of something in the man's eyes, a bit of the madness within them, and she was brought, in her mind, back to the height of a little girl, standing in a tiled bathroom covered in blood, the figure of a similarly dirtied man in front of a gore-filled tub, his back to her. But that man was turning now, turning . . .

Splashing pulled Vanessa from her memories. The man had stepped into the pool, was sloshing toward her. Her chest tightened; her fingers gripped the straps so tightly her wrists began to sting where the leather dug into her soft skin. He seemed not to care at all that he was geting wet up to his waist, and when he reached her, he stood above, staring down. Hunger throbbed in the curves of his lips, the flare of his nostrils, but it wasn't a hunger for her, at least, not in any sexual way.

"It's beautiful," he breathed, tracing with his thumb beneath her tipped chin, down her neck, to her collar bone. He stopped when his hand reached the liquid. "Not a mark, not a scratch." He paused, hovered with his hand against her neck, then shoved her head hard to the side. Vanessa grunted in pain. "Fuck if I know how to do it!" the man snarled, his voice rising. "You've got to tell me, to show me! I haven't got much more time! You hear me? You hear what I say?"

Vanessa spit red into the vinegar, found herself laughing. As she lifted her pained head and shook side to side to fling the hair from her face, she looked up fully at the man before her. She saw him, in her memory, turning from the tub, claiming they had to go, that he'd finally come back for her, that he was going to keep her safe, that he would never tell anyone about her, about his—his raksasa.

With one more bitter, hoarse laugh, Vanessa met the devil in the man's face, speaking to him, remembering, hating: "I hear you, Daddy."