Exposing a Monster

"You're missing a couple of ribs then too!" He screamed with laughter. "And, I think some teeth! I'll tell yah what," the officer hollered mid-laugh, "you are right about something: you did make a better Becca for me...I even thought I could really see myself loving you. Seeming how you did give me the ride of my life this morning, you tell me where Becca is, you un-cuff me, and we'll all go our separate ways."

"Regardless of the rest of my actions today, I'm not that stupid." I managed to chuckle through the pain that should have subsided by now into a constant low mummer that I could have managed my escape through.

"No one is ever going to believe a word of this shit down at the station, and I don't feel like having to hide a body that looks exactly like mine. Or would you change back into something else if you died?"

"You assume—with this genetic condition of yours—that it's not likely that I'm going to be able to drag your girlfriend out of the shithole I put her in, and get her up here into bed with you, and so you're hoping I'll settle for some deal."

"I'll even help carry your lamed ass back downstairs." He mocked me. "If you are missing everything I was missing when I was born...you'll be lucky to walk on your own."

"Carry me back downstairs..." I nodded, remembering my plan B from before, "...where our gun is." I watched him silence his laughter, and stare back at me in horror. "Brilliant plan, Officer. Your accidental asphyxiation by fire as a couple, just became a murder-suicide."

"You couldn't--"

"I have your fingerprints, dumbass. I can make it look like whatever I want." I hobbled closer to his face, using the bed to help support my weight as I moved. "I just need to kill her first, and then kill you. Now, don't get brave on me." I mocked him. I doubted he could actually free himself from the cuffs seeming how he had not done so already, but to prevent myself from making any further mistakes that day, as he opened his mouth to argue, I struck him hard across the temple with a closed fist.

The officer went limp, and after watching him for a bit to make sure he was out cold, I hobbled my naked self from the room. When I reached the staircase, the pain in my knee had grown so exponentially, that I briefly considered throwing myself down the stairs to get the journey over with. I took a deep breath, refocused my attention at the task in front of me, and decided to sit on the top step and ease my way, sitting, down the stairs using mostly my arms to push my weight from each step. The pain in my leg settled from the lack of use, but once I reached the bottom of the stairs and forced myself to stand, all of the pain came flooding back at once.

Needing to move faster to accomplish my goal, I hopped to the first piece of furniture, held on to it briefly to catch my breath, and then continued to the next piece of furniture. I made it back to the dining-room in this fashion, but as I freed the gun from its holster on the table, I heard a large thud followed by an enraged scream resonate through the house from the upstairs bedroom.

"Oh, fuck." I breathed to myself, turning in place towards the kitchen. I had to make it to her first; Becca needed to die before I killed the officer, and they needed to be shot in plausible locations on each of their bodies for my plan to work. I cursed myself while I limped through the kitchen to the back mud-room. The basement had seemed like such the ideal hiding place this morning, but now, it meant I needed to waddle my way down yet another flight of steps.

The staircase in the basement was not as sturdy as the main stairs in the house, and it rocked a bit under my weight. While sliding my way down the open frame, my naked flesh came into contact with dirt, spider webs, and an assortment of filth I hoped was simply more dirt, but doubted so. When I finally reached the bottom of those steps, I wanted to scream with the same intensity as I had heard from the officer upstairs a few minutes prior, but I bit my lower lip, and kept going.

There were faint rays or light streaming into the unfinished basement from the filthy cracked windows sitting in the only parts of the walls that were exposed above ground. I quickly located the pull chain for the lone lightbulb in the middle of the room, and when I pulled on it, Becca materialized on the floor before me.

When she first looked up at me, her eyes were wide in hope, bright against her filthy tear and blood-stained cheeks. I tried to bend down next to her, and instead, collapsed on the floor beside her. "Donovan!" She cried ecstatically when I pulled the gag from her mouth.

"Donovan?" I repeated. "Thanks, not that it really matters, but the asshole upstairs wouldn't tell me."

"She wasn't talking to you." I heard the officer jeer from the stairs behind me, and I closed my eyes to collect myself and not give in to the anger coursing through my veins. Determined to not be defeated so easily, I forced myself into a huddle on the floor, and then grunting in agony, made myself stand with the gun in hand. "I am seriously impressed." The officer taunted me.

"Kill it, Donovan, fucking kill it!" Becca called from the floor, but the officer seemed to ignore her while he approached me.

"You really want to live..." The officer mused, walking even closer to me. He had pulled his pants back up and fasted them into place, but his uniform shirt was still completely unbuttoned, and I smiled regardless of the situation when I saw the streaks of drying blood down the length of his chest. There were dark bruises surrounding each of his wrists, and deep cuts into his forearms were causing blood to drip down his hands, but the cuffs had been removed. "What are you, some kind of shape-shifter?"

"Something like that." I smirked not knowing any proper term to define what I was.

"What's your name?"

"Are you hoping my birth name will give you some clue as to what I am?" I laughed, and he frowned. I thought about his inquiry, and drew a blank. I had not tried to recall such intimate details about myself for so long. "Clavissa." I answered once the knowledge returned to me.

"So you are a woman." The officer sneered. "That's an odd name; sounds old. How old are you?"

I thought about his question, and shrugged. "I don't remember."

"Where do you come from?" I shrugged again. "How many forms have you taken?"

"Countless." I breathed.

"And the real you?" He asked sheepishly. "The woman that answered the door this morning as Miss Elms...the playful, manipulative, aggressor who could scare the shit out of me and turn me on all at once...was that the real you?" I nodded. "And all of that upstairs; the woman I could feel myself falling hard for...was all of that the real you?" I nodded again. "You were right then, you make a better Becca for me."

"What the fu--?" Becca tried to protest, but we both ignored her.

The officer looked very serious suddenly, and lowered his voice into a whisper. "Could you change back into Becca?"

"What?!" Becca yelled from behind us.

I narrowed my eyes while I stared dumbfounded at my mirror image. "I can't just change forms at will." I shook my head, "there would need to be an exchange of bodily fluids with a lot of genetic material available in the samples."

"So that's why you fuck your victims." The officer laughed. "Does that happen every time you fuck someone?"

I shook my head. "Just when I make myself."

"So," he cleared his throat, "if you fucked her again?"

"What?!" Becca screamed. "Why would you?! I love you!"

"Never loved you." The officer smirked at Becca. "And you cheated on me with another woman. At least when I cheated on you, I thought it was you!" The officer called around my shoulder. "Would you force it?" He asked, turning back to me, and I shook my head. The officer chuckled. "A monster with a conscious? Are there other ways then that it could be done?"

"None that she would survive." I smirked, and he shrugged his shoulders while making a look for me to explain. "There would have to be a lot of blood...from both of us...she would bleed out...between all of the sweat, saliva, and other fluids, sex is just easier... Why are you asking me all of this?"

"It could just be the concussion talking, but I am extremely impressed by you. I like Becca, sure, she's nice to look at, and she makes other people jealous of me, but she's indecisive, meek, and insecure. We are constantly fighting, she doesn't challenge me mentally, and she's just barely satisfying for me sexually, but you?" His smile widened. "If I let you live...as Becca...would you?" Shocked, I stared blankly back while he smiled maliciously. "You know you're not leaving here alive otherwise, but to be honest, I want you to live. Not just to live, but to be the woman you were this morning. Would you continue to be Rebecca Tubbs...continue to be my Miss Elms...my lover?"

Becca was sobbing behind us, but I laughed, enjoying the idea. I had had similar thoughts multiple times throughout the day, but I never imagined my officer would reach the same conclusion for how to settle our current affair once he had accepted the full truth. "You want me to replace your girlfriend for you because I make you cum harder than she does? Who between us is really the monster?"

"I bet you still have me beat," he paused briefly before growling my name: "Clavissa."

"Why should I trust you?"

"Because there is something in my eyes that made you want my body so badly, you literally screwed yourself to have it." He sneered. "Besides...I was being honest...what I said to you when I came...may have just been a stupid slip, but it was an honest one."

Greatly amused by his taunts, I laughed. Centuries of doubling had finally caught up to me, and truth be told, I was so tired of constantly hiding. To live with someone who knew what I was and accepted me for it, would be such a welcomed change in my life, that it sounded too good to be true. If it was, then I was in far too much pain to continue to fight for this meaningless existence any longer. "Did your Miss Elms ever have a first name?"

He shook his head, and I lifted my arm to hold out our gun for him to grab. He stared at it, and then looked to Becca on the floor behind me. Now was time for the moment of truth, to test how sincere he really was, or to discover his true intent. Were it not for Becca crying on the floor behind us, the growing tension in the air would have made all other sounds silent while he debated his options.

"I think Miss Elms should have a first name," I glared at my officer, daring him to choose, "name her."

Shaking, and with bloody, swollen discolored hands, my officer reached for our gun, watching my eyes the whole time that he moved. I heard the shot, felt myself fall to the floor, and felt all of my senses leave me for the second time that day. The only thing I was aware of, was the return of excruciating pain erupting over my entire body, so devastating, that I blacked out.

"Clavissa?" I heard my officer whisper sweetly for me while I fought to open my eyes.

When I finally succeeded in opening them, I was surprised to be in a bedroom I had never seen before. I tried to sit up, but my officer gently reached for my shoulders, and pushed me back into the bed I was laying in. He was no longer wearing a uniform, and the tight t-shirt he was wearing allowed me to see the clean bandages wrapped around his hands and forearms from where the cuffs had sliced his skin.

"No, no, relax. It's okay, baby, I got you."

Confused, I looked down and noticed my slender arm held tightly to my petite body in a sling. Knowing he must have shot me, I felt my pulse race while my body panicked, and screamed at me to flee. Seeing my unease, my officer reached for a hand held mirror from the nightstand next to the bed. He held it for me so that I could see Becca's worried face look back at me, and he solemnly lowered the mirror to the nightstand once more. Unable to relax, the idea that he had meant to kill me, missed, and went with his own plan B as a last resort, entered my mind.

"I packed a bag full of her clothes for you, all of my favorites of course, and brought them with us...along with a few other things that you'll need. After..." he swallowed hard "...after it was over...I buried her where no one will look for her, and then using your idea with the silk scarf...I set a fire." His tone, though sarcastic, seemed to joke with me while he continued. "It was a good thing, Becca that you left me so many texts Halloween night that I went over to your house the next morning after my shift, to save you, and pull you from the electrical fire that had already started before I arrived."

My officer smiled warmly for me, bent down over me, and kissed me, but as he raised himself once more, I found that the look in his gorgeous hazel eyes became suddenly possessive. "As the responding officer, I was able to convince one of my paramedic buddies who owed me a favor, to stitch you up and drop you off here at my house before anyone was able to ask too many questions. I doubted you would want to go to a hospital...I wasn't sure if they'd do any blood work, or what the doctors would find if they did. But here, with me, no one will find out about your secret."

"How long has it been?" I choked, readjusting to Becca's vocal chords once more.

"Three days."

"You've taken care of me for three days?" I asked in surprise, and he nodded.

"Of course I have. I need to take care of my little badge bunny...don't I?" His gorgeous eyes went wild, and he seems manic for a moment; scaring me.

"Does anyone else know I'm here?"

"Everyone knows that Becca is here...protected by her distraught, loving boyfriend who won't let anyone near her. That's how much you mean to me now...I'll make damn sure no one else will ever get close enough to you to find out. I will always make sure you're cared for, and will always keep you safe and sound. I have to."

Safe and Sound? With Officer Donovan Martin? Fellow murderer.

This life is hell, it is full of monsters and demons who delight in torturing our very souls, but life is what we make of it, and now my life was indebted to the whim of a traitorous, deviant man in a position of authority. My ultimate hell. Desperate to please my officer until I could formulate a new escape plan, I forced a small smile for him, and he beamed, relieved.

"Welcome home, baby." He whispered lovingly to me; his eyes growing darker. "Welcome home."