Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

While this admittedly drastic therapy was quite messy, Melinda thought it fast and effective. Debra’s shoulder pain had been thoroughly and completely resolved.

As she stood watching Katie work on her grisly meal – it was lunchtime, after all – she pondered what to do next. She’d killed Dennis – torn the business manager’s throat out with her teeth – before coming out to the reception area to help Katie deal with Debra, and there was no one else currently in the clinic. The other PTs were at lunch, and no clients had been scheduled for this time. People would soon be coming, though. Her employees would return from lunch, and the afternoon clients would begin to arrive. She supposed she and Katie could attack them as they entered, and while that would be fun, she couldn’t escape a nagging feeling that there was something else she should do. Something important.

It had been a strange day so far. She and Katie were always the first to arrive, and while Melinda usually beat her to the office, today had been one of those rare occasions when Katie got there before her. She had been seated at the reception counter when Melinda entered the clinic. Melinda wasn’t much for empty pleasantries at the best of times, and today she especially wasn’t interested in chatting with Katie. She and Carlo had had a fight last night, a real knock-down-drag-out that had come close to ending their relationship. Things had been better between them this morning, if still strained, and while she was hopeful they would return to normal soon, she was worried the fight had been a symptom of deeper relationship issues that needed to be addressed.

The fight had started because Carlo had said he was too tired when she’d wanted to make love last night. He’d been putting her off sexually for a while now, but when she’d confronted him about it, he’d said she was making something out of nothing. He still loved her, still wanted her. He was simply tired. He ran his own construction company, and he put in long hours, often doing physically demanding work alongside his employees. Of course he’d be too tired for sex sometimes. Melinda knew that. But every time she wanted to fuck? She was starting to worry that he was having an affair.

So when Katie greeted her as she entered the clinic, she hadn’t bothered smiling, only nodded and hoped Katie would get the message and leave her alone. But Katie hadn’t taken the hint.

“I’ve got something cool to show you,” she’d said. “Really cool.”

Melinda had intended to ignore Katie and keep on walking until she reached her office, which was located across the hall from Dennis’s. She’d enter, close the door behind her, and try to get it together before her first client of the day arrived. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she walked over to the reception counter to see what Katie wanted to show her. Why she’d done this, she wasn’t certain. Maybe, despite her determination not to interact with anyone this morning, she needed some positive human contact. Or maybe she’d decided that just because she felt shitty was no reason to treat Katie poorly. Whatever the reason, she was at the counter, and she waited for Katie to reveal whatever it was she wanted to show her. It damn well better be cool, she’d thought.

Katie had something inside a plastic shopping bag sitting on her desk area behind the counter. She stuck her right hand inside the bag, but instead of pulling out whatever object it contained, she quickly withdrew her hand, reached out, and rubbed her fingers rapidly back and forth over Melinda’s lips.

“What the fuck?” She stepped back in alarm, raised a hand to her lips, touched them, looked at her fingers, saw they were smeared with thick, sticky red.

“It’s cat blood,” Katie said. “Awesome, right?”

Melinda was beyond horrified. She had two cats herself – Puddin’ and Lightfoot – and the idea that Katie would smear ketchup on her and claim it was cat blood for some sick fucking joke was….

She heard the plastic bag rustle, then watched as Katie lifted a dead cat – half a dead cat – up for her to see.

It’s out of the bag, Melinda had thought. The cat. Is out. Of the bag.

The blood (definitely not ketchup) felt warm and tingly on her lips, and she had the sensation that her skin was absorbing it somehow, pulling it into her. Or maybe the blood was forcing its way in, invading her. Either way, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it felt good. Felt fucking great, in fact.

She’d started laughing then, and Katie joined in. They both looked at the cat’s head – open staring eyes, small blood-flecked tongue sticking out of its mouth – as if they expected it to say something. It remained silent, of course, but the look on its dead face was so ridiculous that the women’s laughter intensified, becoming shrieks of hilarity.

That had been hours ago, and while Melinda still felt fantastic, as if she was flying high on the greatest drug ever created, she felt unsettled as well. Restless. There was something she needed to do, she and Katie both, but she couldn’t—

And then the dark infection that had entered her body via tainted cat blood began whispering to her. She listened intently for several seconds, and when the voice fell silent, she smiled. She knew what they had to do.

“Lunch is over, Katie. Time for you and I to get back to work.”

Katie spat out the length of intestine she’d been chewing on and stood, giving Debra’s ravaged body a last regretful look, as if she felt guilty about wasting so much food. Then she turned to face Melinda, her stomach bloated, full to bursting with cat and human meat. Melinda noticed the woman’s face had changed. Her eyes were now amber and larger than before, and tufts of downy hair covered