Soul Sucker
Loose Ends

Lana Dortmund’s POV

Miller Condo, East Orange, New Jersey

Saturday, April 1, 2023

It wasn’t here.

I’d been searching the Miller condominium for two hours now, and the dagger was nowhere to be found. Lonnie had texted our group fifty minutes ago. “Struck out. Heading out to help Lana.” That meant it wasn’t at John’s Manhattan apartment either.

Would John have taken it to a pool party? That didn’t make sense. It had to be here somewhere. I was on my second run-through of the master bedroom when I heard a knock downstairs. I crept down the stairs and let Lonnie in. “Still no luck?”

“It’s not here, or he did a good job hiding it,” I said. I was more than a little frustrated.

“I brought you help.” He held up a hand-held metal detector. “If it’s in the floor or walls, I’ll replace it.”

“I’m in their bedroom,” I said as I turned around. My twin brother followed me up the stairs. “Have you heard anything from Mom?”

“No, but her part might take longer. She might have to dispose of the body.”

“She could at least say she’s all right.”

“You know she can’t have a phone with her. Nothing traceable is allowed.” He was right, but it didn’t reduce my nervousness. I wouldn’t relax until we were driving away with the dagger. “Anything on the scanner?”

I had a stolen police radio on the dispatch frequency clipped to my belt with an earpiece on my left side. If needed, I could put out a fake call. “Nothing about the Callahan place. The cops are busy with street racers and robberies.”

We checked every inch of their house over the next two hours to no avail. Finally, a little past four in the morning, we sat in the kitchen and took a break. “Where is Mom?”

“I don’t know.” He was nervous too, but he was better at hiding it.

“I’ve got to know.” I handed him the radio. “I’ll drive to the Callahan’s house and see what I can figure out. You stay here and keep looking.”

“Fine,” Lonnie replied. “You know she’ll be fine. She’s been alive for a thousand years, after all.”

“That doesn’t mean I won’t worry.” I walked out of the house and down the street to my car, then drove through the deserted streets to Newark. I went by their darkened home once, then circled the block and parked behind Mom’s rental car. I was across the street and a few homes down.

It was quiet. Using my binoculars, I checked the yard and windows for movement. Not seeing anything, I exited the car and quietly closed the door. Mom had picked a dark spot between streetlamps. Once I pulled the black cap over my hair and put the black mask on, I was practically invisible.

I moved through the yards, using the shrubs and cars to hide, and soon was at the fence. The privacy fence was six feet high with overlapping horizontal wooden slats. I moved into the neighbor’s backyard, slipping under the border shrubs until I found an opening I could see through.

The patio lights were on. Terry Callahan was sweeping the concrete patio with a broom and a bottle of bleach. I could smell the odor from here.

There was only one reason to use straight bleach in the pool area.

He was cleaning up blood evidence.

As I watched, Cathy poked her head out of the garage with an armload of bloody towels and rags. “You almost done?”

“A little more, then I’ll get the pressure washer out. That should take care of it.”

“John should finish the car in an hour or so. The blood got in everywhere.” Cathy entered the house from the garage door, heading for the laundry room. Terry continued scrubbing the bloodstains out of the concrete.

I closed my eyes, nearly getting sick at what this meant. If John was safe, Mom was dead. John somehow killed her by the pool, and they used the car to dump her body. There was no other explanation.

I retraced my steps to the car and drove off, not turning on my headlights until the next block. I was shaking with grief; how would I break the news to Lonnie? What would we do now? I pushed it aside, forcing myself to focus on my driving. The last thing I needed was to get pulled over.

I parked a block away and practically ran to the door. Lonnie opened the door seconds after I knocked, and he read my face before pulling me inside. He brought me into a hug. “It’s going to be all right,” he said as I sobbed into his chest.

“We failed her,” I wailed. “We were supposed to have her back, and she’s gone.”

He pulled me into the kitchen, and I relayed what I’d learned. “John must have taken the dagger with him. It’s the only way to kill her.”

“What do we do now?”

“We have to erase all evidence of our crimes here before we fly back to Denver,” he said. “Then we finish laying the legal trail to inherit Ingrid’s assets.”

“We don’t have a corpse.” Mom told us what happened when the demon passed into her; the woman aged a hundred years in seconds, ending up as dust.

“Neither does John. Once the physical evidence of the murder is gone, they are in the clear. We aren’t.”

“Why? Can’t we disappear after this?”

He shook his head. “John Miller is an investigator, and he pursued Mom even after Manhattan Life let him go. He won’t give up on the trail because he knows Ingrid wasn’t working alone.”

Shit. “The break-ins at the apartment.”

“Yep. John might even have me on video.”

Double shit. “What do we do?”

“We finish the job. I’ve got a gas can in my trunk. Fire does a wonderful job of destroying evidence. After we torch this place, we’ll wait for John and his family to arrive and take them out. It’s the only way we can be safe.”

I don’t want innocent deaths. Mom killed people to live, but she always picked people who deserved it. If people like the bastards who had enslaved and used us so long ago kept dying, that was acceptable.

As a car pulled into the driveway, I saw headlights flash through the living room. “Shit, they’re home,” I said.

“Crawl over to the window and cover the door for me,” Lonnie said as he pulled a pistol out from under his shirt. We avoided shadows and noises as we prepared for the ambush. I saw the two women get out, but John wasn’t with them.

The door opened, and Mary walked in with Heather. “I’m going to bed,” Heather said as she removed her shoes.

The door closed before they noticed Lonnie. “So nice of you to join us, Mrs. Miller. You too, Heather.”

“Don’t say a word,” I said from the side. “Come in and sit down.”

The two females shivered as they walked up the stairs into the living area. “Take whatever you want,” Mary said.

“The only thing we need from you is the Lord’s Dagger,” I replied. They couldn’t hide the shock. “Did John keep it after he killed Ingrid?”

“I didn’t kill Ingrid,” Heather said defiantly. “Terry took her to the emergency room after I stabbed her.”

I looked at the ten-year-old girl in shock. “You stabbed my mother?”

She nodded. “In the side. The demon got sucked into the blade like a genie in a bottle, and only Frances remained. She got stabbed here, too, but I didn’t do that.” She pointed to a spot on her chest, the same place Frances described in her story. “Your Mom is Frances Dortmund?”

“You know her name,” Lonnie said as he sat back. Heather nodded. “She was married in Scotland in 847 and kept her husband’s name close to her heart all this time. The demon made her immortal to everything but the dagger. Is she still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “Terry did a drive-by so they wouldn’t track her back to his home. John might know, or you might have to go to the hospital.”

Lonnie leveled his pistol at her. “We need to talk about this. Call John and have him come home.” Mary reached into her purse slowly, coming out with her phone. “If you try to warn your husband or send him what I think is a coded message, I’ll put a bullet into your daughter.”

She didn’t, and John promised he’d be there shortly. In the meantime, Mary and Heather told us how my Mom’s demon met her end. “I’m sorry, but she was a spiteful bitch,” Mary said. “Why would she paralyze me, then try to kill my husband while I watched?”

“The demon could take control of her when he wanted to,” I replied. “Mom wasn’t like that deep down. She was a good person in a bad world.” I told them about her rescuing us and a few more stories. It didn’t matter what we told them if they’d die anyway. It felt good to put a human face on the monster that Mom never wanted to be. “The demon used her to do her bidding. As long as Mom kept him fed, she had some freedom. She didn’t want to go after John.”

Mary exploded. “Why not walk away then? Ingrid was on a superyacht, and John was thousands of miles away!”

“You had the dagger and the knowledge to use it. All the demon cared about was someone having the power to end it.”

“And I did!” Heather was proud of her actions, even if it meant my Mom was dead. I was hoping Mom had survived.

John came in a few minutes later; I kept a gun on the girls while Lonnie met him at the door. He wasn’t carrying a pistol, but my brother relieved him of the dagger before escorting him to sit between his girls. “Where is my mother?”

“University Hospital,” John replied. “She was barely alive when Terry dropped her off.”

“Who knows about her?”

“Only my family and friends,” John replied. “You should know I’ve left information about Ingrid and my investigation in button-down mode. If I die or disappear, it goes to the cops.”

Shit.

We let Heather sack out on the couch while the adults struck a deal. It was pretty simple; we’d take Mom home, and John would leave us alone. He’d keep the dagger, as that couldn’t hurt us now. Mom’s demon lord was gone forever.

Whatever we did with the money was our business. Frances wasn’t Ingrid or Jordyn, and John couldn’t prove anything.

We didn’t leave their home until nine. Lonnie wanted to give them money as compensation for pushing the DA into charging him, but John refused. He was a good man with a beautiful family, and I was pleased we could walk away from each other.

I stayed in the area until Jane Doe recovered from her injuries. She’d lost a lot of blood that night, and the trauma took away her memories. She couldn’t give the police her name, who beat her up, or how she got stabbed twice hours apart.

I picked her up after her release and drove her back to Colorado. Frances was shocked to be alive and to have her mortality back. It was great to have Mom back, even if she looked like my daughter now. We traded stories and talked about her new life during the three days we took going home.

Lonnie went back home, working his magic with identities and forgeries. It took a few months for us to arrange Ingrid’s ‘death’ by overdose with the associated toxicology and coroner reports. She didn’t have any life insurance, but she did have a large estate that passed to her second husband, Lonnie Dortmund.

Yes, my brother was a motherfucker. He’d always loved her, but her immortality made her keep him at a distance. With that gone, the two were inseparable.

It was weird, but I didn’t mind because I loved them both. We aren’t blood-related, plus we were young teens when we met.

They were free now to act on their love, with significant legal and tax advantages. The young redhead and the tall middle-aged blonde added four children to their family in their first five years together. They lived on the yacht full-time, with Frances homeschooling their children as they cruised wherever they wanted. They live without regrets, and I love them both so much.

John’s legal troubles didn’t end for another two years when the wrongful death suit settled out of court for a half-million dollars. New York was dead to him after all the publicity. Manhattan Life refused to bring him back, no other company would employ him, and Mary’s job couldn’t support them both.

They reached out to me in June. I’d kept in touch since we made the deal, and our families had become close as we bonded over shared experiences. After all, we couldn’t talk to anyone else about what happened! Lonnie and I hired the pair to manage the offshore properties our investments were operating through shell companies. They moved to Denver in July and got to work. With Mary’s experience in real estate and John’s organizational skills, it was the perfect match. The pair worked with us to recover and invest the accounts we’d inherited from Landon Street’s illegal activities, and we all got rich because of it.

The Miller family grew with the birth of James, then Margaret a year later. Margaret was born in Miami after John and Mary fled the cold and snow of the mountains. They bought a big waterfront home and a fishing boat. Heather and Mary learned to love deepwater fishing and scuba diving.

When the company expanded, John hired Terry to help him out. Their best friends moved in a few blocks away.

Heather grew up, got her MBA from the Wharton School, and started working in the family business. She’s taken over most of John’s duties so her parents can travel. James is in pre-law at the University of Miami, while Margaret plans to be a doctor.

John still had the gift of demonic sight and the dagger, while Heather had a sixth sense for when evil was about. The Catholic church in the Caribbean is more open about demonic possession than the mainland, and the pair got called in when prayer and exorcisms didn’t work. The dagger didn’t have to kill the person, only break the skin. When John retired, James took over his religious duties.

That is another story, though.

What about me? A year after Mom’s freedom, I met Don, a cattle rancher, at a charity function in Denver. It was love at first sight, and we married six months later. He was a widower with twin daughters in college and a son working to take over the ranch. He knocked me up on my honeymoon, and I stayed home raising Chance and working for Mom remotely. We retired when Chance went to college and bought a place in the Virgin Islands.

It turned out that Don was sick of the snow too.

The End