Five months later
Blood was everywhere.
Sticky gore was on his face and in his hair, hot little rivulets of it trickling down from the gash behind his ear and the larger wound at the crown of his skull. The salty tang of it stung his mouth. Dean wiped more blood from his eyes with a shaking hand and saw bright red splotches on the dirty hardwood floor of the old farmhouse. He lifted his head and saw yet more blood on the nearest wall, huge crimson smears. It looked as if a crazed housepainter had splashed several cans of dark red paint all over the fucking place. Here, in the foyer, all over the goddamned floor. On the front door. And over there, the staircase bannister, it was covered with a slick film of red.
…blood everywhere…
His blood. Some of it. More blood entered his mouth. Check that. A lot of it. Lisa’s blood. A fuck of a lot of Lisa’s blood. John’s blood. And don’t forget Debbie. Some of the biggest splashes had erupted from the stump of the poor dimwit’s neck when the crazy woman with the axe lopped her head off.
The air was pungent with the combined stenches of spilt blood and recent, violent death, with underlying aromas of piss and shit, the ripest of the latter emanating from the seat of his own soiled britches.
So much blood.
So much motherfucking blood.
Here.
There.
Blood…everywhere.
Then, the absurd capper to it all, the guitar riff from AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It” began to echo in his head. He closed his eyes again and gritted his teeth, trying to will the old song away-but it just kept playing on an endless loop, that maddening, relentless riff and the dead singer’s voice on the chorus.
Over and over and over. Holy hell, how incredibly fucked up was that?
His eyes fluttered open again. Drank in the carnage again.
He heard voices. Muffled. He strained his ears and realized the sound was coming from outside. Then came an abrupt burst of mad laughter. The sound made him shake with fear and anger. How could anyone do the things these people had done and laugh about it?
But the answer was obvious. These weren’t just people.
They were monsters.
And any moment now they’d be back inside, back to finish the night’s grisly work. Because he was the only one still alive. He sniffled, the hard reality hitting him again. His friends were all dead. And they had died horribly. After hours of torture and unspeakable violations.
Suffering beyond quantifying.
The memory of the awful things he’d seen taunted him, a dark promise of the shape of his own near future. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, they’d saved him for last. He had been beaten. Tortured. Mutilated. Two fingers were gone from his left hand, the stumps a charred mass of blackened flesh where they’d cauterized the wounds with an acetylene torch. But they’d spared him the worst of it, measuring the pain and trauma, keeping him alive and forcing him to watch helplessly as his girlfriend was flayed alive.
He sniffled again, wiped more tears from his eyes.
Something glinted in the periphery of his vision. He turned his head slowly to the left, wincing as fresh jolts of agony sizzled through his body. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of the axe propped against a side of a broken down old sofa in the living room. Lantern light flickered in the room. The old house had no electricty. The old Sutton place had been abandoned for decades. Once in a while kids from town would come here to party and fuck, but even that was a rare occurrence these days. The creaky, termite-infested farmhouse was just too creepy and gross a place to take girls. But tonight had been different, of course. What better night to visit the old Sutton place than Halloween, right?
It hadn’t taken much to convince the girls to come out here. The mood of the evening was just right. A clear night sky with a bright moon hanging overhead. A cool fall breeze rolling in. That and a few Corona Lights did the trick. How promising the evening had seemed at the outset. A creepy, fun Halloween with his best friend and their girls. There’d be more beers to drink. Some weed to smoke. Thighs and breasts to grope in the quiet rural darkness. Ghost stories to tell as the evening lengthened toward dawn. Just like last year at the lake.
Only not like last year, as it turned out. Not even a little bit.
He should have known something was wrong upon reaching the end of the old house’s long dirt driveway. For one thing, another car was already there, a gleaming black Bentley parked alongside the long front porch. The old car was no abandoned relic. Its windows were tinted. A silver hood ornament sparkled in the brilliant moonlight, as did the chrome hubcaps. The vehicle was immaculate in every way, and its sleek lines made it look vaguely predatory. The beautiful antique looked as out of place parked outside the old Sutton place as a supermodel in a room full of crack whores.
An argument ensued. They had come so close to turning around and leaving.
My fault, Dean thought, bitterness consuming him as he stared at the blood-smeared blade of the axe. I had to have it my way. Had to show them all what a big man I am. How fearless…
He’d argued more forcefully than anyone, bordering on belligerence. In the end the others gave in. They always did. They did it to shut him up, not because they’d been swayed by the strength of his arguments. If only they’d stood up to him for once. If only…
No.
He couldn’t let himself off that easy. Not now. And never again. They were all dead and it was all his fault.
And soon he’d be dead, too. He held out no hope of divine deliverance, harbored no illusion of the cavalry (police) riding up to his rescue at the last minute. Violent, painful death awaited him, and probably at some point within the next few minutes. It was a strange and horrible thing, the idea of the remainder of your life being down to a handful of torturous minutes. Thinking about it elicited another helpless whimper. He didn’t want to die. Quite the contrary. He wanted to be around for many decades to come, even if that meant living with the guilt of being responsible for the deaths of his friends all that time. Yes, even then.
All he had to do was get to that axe.
Somehow haul his battered body upright.
And then be ready for the bastards when they came for him.
So he drew in a deep breath and began to crawl toward the axe. I can do this, he thought. I have to do this.
His hands trembled as the fingernails of his right hand dug into the rotting hardwood floor. He bit down hard on his lower lip and suppressed another whimper. He willed his hand to be still and pulled himself forward another few inches. Then he extended his left hand and gained another few inches. That was harder. The mangled flesh there throbbed horribly. He bit down harder on his lip to stifle a scream. Teeth penetrated flesh and drew blood. The scream stayed inside him, a fire burning in his chest, aching to explode. He extended his right hand again. Then the ruined left hand. He repeated the process several more times, progressing with great deliberation but seemingly infinite slowness. It was maddening. The sheer frustration almost caused him to give up. Then he heard more muffled laughter and anger engulfed him again.
Ignoring the pain as best he could, Dean began to move faster, wriggling forward on bloodied elbows and slightly upraised knees. He began to make serious progress, passing through the archway separating the foyer from the living room. He focused on the bloody axe with a single-mindedness that allowed no awareness of anything else.
He began to grin as he neared the blade. Just a few feet away, now. And then he was there, an electric burst of triumph sparking within him as his right hand closed around the axe handle. He had it, his coveted weapon.
Now he just had to tap one last reservoir of strength, somehow get to his feet and prepare to make his last stand. And he would do it. By God, he would. He hadn’t come this far to punk out now.
He drew in another deep breath, steeling himself.
His grip tightened around the axe handle.
Then something flashed through his field of vision, a dark blur. He was aware of pressure on his wrist before his eyes could process the image of a woman’s high-heeled black shoe pinning his hand to the floor. Then the image crystalized, searing itself into his mind with blazing intensity. The polished black shoe was as elegant as the woman’s finely turned ankle. Black was her whole motif. Black shoes, black stockings, and black dress-a fitting wardrobe reflecting the darkness dwelling within the one the others referred to alternately as “Mistress” and “Ms. Wickman.”
She applied more pressure to Dean’s wrist, eliciting another sob.
Her laughter was soft and mocking. “Such a naughty boy. I suppose you imagined you might use this on me.” She wrenched the axe from Dean’s grip and tossed it across the room. It struck the far wall and clattered to the floor. “I hope you realize it was intentionally left where you might see it upon regaining consciousness.”
Dean wanted to scream, but he didn’t have the strength for it. His spirits dipped to their lowest ebb yet. There had never really been any chance for revenge. The hope he’d felt moments ago had only been an illusion. This whole exercise nothing but another sadistic mindfuck. A game.
Anger flickered within him again. He wrapped the remaining three fingers of his left hand around her ankle and attempted to twist her foot off his wrist. He burned inside with the need to topple her, get on top of her, rip her flesh with his fingers and tear her leering eyes out. But he failed to budge her even one millimeter, her leg as unyielding as an iron girder.
Her strength was unnatural. She was a slender woman, about forty, average weight and height. Not unattractive. High cheekbones, but a gaunt, almost ghostly pallor. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a bun, lending her features a slightly pinched, severe sexuality. A shade of lipstick so dark red it was almost black painted the thin lines of her lips, which were curled now in a disdainful sneer. So she was spooky looking, yes, but at first glance she had not appeared to be some kind of evil superwoman. Not someone capable of lifting a teenage girl above her head and throwing her clear across a room. But he’d seen it with his own eyes, Debbie flying through the air, then striking the wall and bouncing off it like a rubber ball.
It defied logic. It was crazy. Impossible.
But…
“You’ve underestimated me again, haven’t you, Dean?” She knelt down, pried his fingers from her ankle. “I’m going to hurt you again, child.”
An anguished, keening wail issued from Dean’s pulped lips. “Noooooo. Please…please don’t. I’ll do anything…”
Ms. Wickman snapped his index finger.
Dean screamed. His body convulsed as the pain arced through him, his feet beating a jittery rhythm on the hardwood floor. Through the pain, he was only dimly aware of the front door creaking open. Then there were voices. Those young people. Her followers. They were coming inside, no doubt drawn by the scream.
Ms. Wickman snapped the middle finger of his left hand. The scream this time filled the dust-laden living room like an explosion. He tried to get up. Pure pain instinct was driving him. But Ms. Wickman planted a knee between his shoulder blades and that was that. She was too strong. Stronger than any human woman should be.
“One finger left, one stubby little thumb,” she said, leaning close, her voice an insinuating, malicious purr. “I do enjoy your begging, Dean. Would you like me to spare this one?”
Dean thought about the way this sort of thing usually went in the movies. Your typical cinema hero, facing yet another round of torture, would spit in his tormentor’s face and say, “Fuck you.” Or some witty alternative.
What Dean said was, “Please don’t do it. I’ll do anything. I swear.”
A brief pause.
“Thank you, Dean.”
She snapped his thumb.
Dean’s next scream mingled with the laughter of Ms.
Wickman’s apprentices. Some of the laughter died off as their Mistress gathered his broken fingers in her hand and…squeezed.
Then squeezed harder. And harder still.
Tidal waves of pain slammed through Dean. His body bucked. The long, continuous scream that ripped out of him felt as though it might tear his body apart. Dean blacked out for a moment, only to be reawakened almost instantly by the agony blazing in every nerve ending in his body. At some point, Ms. Wickman relinquished her grip on his broken fingers, stood up, and moved away from him.
He heard her talking to her followers. There were four of them, ranging in age from mid-teens to early twenties. The oldest, a thin but tall boy of about twenty or twenty-one, hauled Dean off the floor and deposited him on the old sofa. The sofa reeked of mildew and rot, and it creaked beneath his weight.
Then Ms. Wickman loomed over him again. A long, thin cigarette was pinched between two fingers of her right hand. She took a draw on the cigarette, then blew a thin stream of smoke at the sagging ceiling.
She met Dean’s gaze and smiled. “Do you smoke, Dean?”
Dean coughed. “No.”
That strange, wicked smile again. Insinuating. Malicious to the core. “Well, you’re about to start.”
Dean felt terror again, sure, but now another feeling rose to the surface, a weariness he felt from the depths of his soul. “I don’t care anymore. Please kill me now. Get it over with.”
The woman’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Oh, Dean, honey, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding between you and me.”
Dean drew in another sharp breath as she sat next to him on the sofa and draped an arm around his shoulders. He trembled beneath her touch, tried to cringe away from her, but of course was unable to move.
She leaned into him, her breath hot on his ear as she spoke. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here, Dean. You see, we’re not going to kill you.”
Dean’s gaze swept over the mad woman’s followers, cataloguing a variety of minor injuries and mutilations. A missing finger here, a livid scar there…and the tall, thin boy was missing an ear.
Dean shook his head as more tears filled his eyes. “No. No, no, no. You can’t make me. I won’t…won’t be like… them.”
A dark-haired girl in a raggedy black dress and black Doc Martens laughed. “Where have I heard that before?”
More deranged laughter.
Ms. Wickman leaned closer still, her lips moving softly against his ear as she said, “You’ll be whatever I want you to be. You belong to me now.”
Then she put out her cigarette on the back of his mangled hand.
Dean screamed yet again.
And watched aghast as smoke rose from the seared pucker of flesh.
Two years later
Dream Weaver was a drink or two shy of being truly drunk. She had every intention of addressing that deficiency within the next few minutes. But first things first. She needed to get her game face on before wading back into the action. So she extracted a tube of lipstick from her Prada knockoff purse, uncapped it, and leaned over the sink as she applied a fresh coat to her full lips. She capped the tube and dropped it in her purse, dabbed away the excess with a square of toilet paper, then teased out her hair a bit with her fingers.
The image looking back at her from the bar bathroom’s tiny, cracked mirror looked less and less like a stranger with each passing day. This was a good thing. She wanted to obliterate every trace of the woman she’d been. Erase her. Replace her with something completely different. Whether or not that “something different” was something others would consider admirable was of no consequence.
Her flowing blonde tresses were gone, replaced by a choppy, dyed-black cut that made her look like a punk Bettie Page. Her formerly perpetual tan was also a thing of the past. The extremely tight and skimpy black top she wore accentuated her womanly assets and displayed a lot of very pale flesh. It looked as though the sun’s rays hadn’t touched her in years, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Ultrashort denim cutoffs hugged her still shapely ass. She turned to admire herself from a side angle, peering over her shoulder to get a glimpse of the new black rose tattoo on her lower back.
She looked good. Hot. She was a beautiful woman. None of the potential cosmetic changes available to her-short of a splash of boiling acid to the face-could change that essential aspect of her existence. But she was cool with that. It was the one thing about herself she had no desire to change. She was a much shallower human being these days, a thing she had no problem admitting to herself. Gone was the ditzy girl who fretted so about the feelings of others and worked to avoid using her looks to unfair advantage. In her place was a cool, cold-hearted bitch who knew damn well she was prettier than just about everyone else-and didn’t hesitate to make full use of the fact.
Someone pounded on the bathroom door, rattling the cheap hook-and-eye lock. “You about done in there? Other people have to piss too, you know.”
“Wait your fucking turn, cunt!” Dream snarled, her face twisting in a sneer.
Dream slipped the strap of her purse over her shoulder and stared at her reflection some more. The only flaw in the otherwise perfect reflected visage was the tell-tale hint of red in her eyes. She dug a Visine bottle out of her purse, squeezed a few drops into each eye, and blinked away excess moisture until she could see clearly again.
The bathroom door rattled in its frame again.
Dream smiled. And waited. The redness was already fading from her eyes.
She waited another beat longer, until the door rattled yet again. Then she went to the door, popped the lock out of the hook, and opened the door. The girl waiting to use the bathroom was a scrawny thing, almost waifish. Flat-chested and curveless. She wore thick glasses and her short hair was dark with streaks of blonde.
Dream smirked. “There she is…Miss America.”
The girl rolled her eyes and tried to push past her into the bathroom. Dream stepped aside, allowing her entry. Then she shut the door and locked it again.
The girl’s face twisted in a scowl. “What are you doing? Are you a dyke or something? I don’t swing that way.”
Dream adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder and stepped forward. “I don’t care.”
She slammed the girl against the wall and punched her hard in the stomach. The girl’s eyes went wide with shock and pain. Her legs gave out, but Dream held her up and punched her again. Then one more time.
She stepped away and the girl dropped to her knees. A sheen of sweat broke out over her face and she lunged toward the toilet, flipping the lid open an instant before her stomach voided its contents. When she was done heaving, she looked at Dream, her lower lip trembling as she said, “Why…why…”
She lifted her glasses and swiped at a sudden flood of tears, unable to comprehend the outburst of violence.
“Because I’m a bad person.” Dream knelt next to the trembling girl, lifted her chin with a finger. “And you don’t fuck with bad people.”
The girl twisted away from Dream and cried some more.
Dream stood up. “Get yourself together. When you’re done here, pay your bill and leave. Don’t say a word about this to anyone, ever.”
Dream watched her a moment longer, then turned and left the bathroom.
The Villager Pub was a tiny place, with a short bar just inside the front entrance. There were two tables opposite the bar, a jukebox (silent now), and an old Galaga tabletop video game. Between the bar and the bathrooms was an open area for dart players. Dream waited for a pause in the in-progress dart games, smiled her thanks to the waiting players, and made her way to the bar. She felt the gazes of the male dart players on her every step of the way. The lust they felt as they drank in her long, long legs and abundant curves was a palpable thing. It made her feel good.
And powerful.
She took a seat at the end of the bar, a good place for watching the dart games. The players were all college-age boys. A look through their wallets would reveal more than one fake ID. Maybe tonight the mark would be one of them. These young guys, bursting with hormones and fueled by too many beers, would be easy. She would lure one of them to a motel room. Dope his drink. Maybe even fuck him before he lost consciousness. Then rob him blind and light out of town before sunrise. It was the way she lived now. Town to town. Mark after mark. Sometimes, when she’d dosed them just right, they were delirious enough to share credit card PIN numbers. There was an art to timing everything just right. She was getting better at it all the time.
One of the players elbowed his buddy-a square-jawed, bushy-haired frat type-and nodded in her direction. Frat Boy saw her looking at him and grinned.
Dream smiled and lit a cigarette.
The barmaid-a thin woman of about forty with long, dishwater hair-approached her and said, “What’ll you have?”
“Shiner Bock.”
The barmaid removed a frosty pint glass from a cooler behind the bar and began to fill it from the tap. Dream licked her lips as she watched the amber liquid fill the frost-rimmed glass. She loved the taste of the stuff, but more than that she craved the fuzziness of mind it would bring, that added buffer between her present life and the painful memories of her past. The barmaid placed a napkin in front of Dream and set the nearly overflowing mug on it. Dream waited for the head to settle before taking a first sip of the deliciously cold, cold brew.
The skinny girl emerged from the bathroom and wobbled through the game area, oblivious to the men with their darts. She bumped into one, eliciting a startled yelp.
Frat Boy sneered. “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”
One of his friends snickered and said, “Yeah, skank.”
The girl didn’t say anything. Dream watched her from the corner of her eye as she continued toward the bar. She experienced a flash of sense-memory, a vivid moment in which she again felt the girl’s soft flesh yield beneath her hard fist.
The girl gave her a wide berth, continuing down to the far end of the bar, where she paused long enough to dig into her purse and extract several rumpled bills. She tossed these on the bar and left in a hurry, the bell over the door jangling behind her. An untouched pint of Bud Light gleamed in the light of the neon Miller sign mounted behind the bar.
The barmaid frowned. “Well, shit, girl didn’t even drink her beer.”
A middle-aged man in a cowboy hat rose from his seat at one of the tables. “Hell, I’ll drink that, darlin’.”
The barmaid shrugged. “What the hell, it’s paid for. Today’s your lucky day.”
Cowboy Hat gripped the mug’s handle with a beefy hand and winked at Dream. Dream kept her expression blank and returned her attention to the young boys playing darts. Frat Boy caught her eye again and grinned. Dream flashed another smile, hoping to encourage the kid to make a move. He’d better get the hint soon, because she had a feeling Cowboy Hat would lumber over any moment and hit on her. But Frat Boy’s attention was again on the dartboard. He was squinting, a dart pinched between thumb and forefinger held at about shoulder level.
It was then she heard the slightly labored breath behind her and knew the time had come to shoot down another dirty old man. The bar stool to her left creaked as a weight settled onto it. Dream set her mug down with a sigh. She looked longingly at Frat Boy a moment longer, but he was still too focused on his damnable game. Vowing to make him pay for that later, she swiveled around on her stool to tell Cowboy Hat off…
But the smackdown went undelivered, the words dying on the tip of her tongue as a paralyzing numbness swept rapidly through her body.
There was someone on the bar stool next to her, but it wasn’t Cowboy Hat.
The apparition smiled hideously through rotting lips. “Hello, Dream.”
A ghost. A fucking ghost. Or a hallucination. That was more likely, she supposed, but how could anyone tell the difference?
It was Alicia Jackson, her one-time best friend in the world. Alicia had been dead for more than three and a half years. She didn’t look like an old-time movie ghost, though. She wasn’t flickering or floating in mid-air. She looked as solid and three-dimensional as the bar stool under Dream’s ass. She was a walking corpse, her flesh bloated and rotting. The back of her head was a pulped, sticky mess-the exit wound from the self-inflicted gunshot wound that had ended her life. She wore a slinky little black dress, which meant a lot of visible putrescent flesh. The tortures she’d endured prior to her suicide were much in evidence, including the uncountable razor-blade cuts the demonic Ms. Wickman had inflicted on her. Each wound weeped blood.
Alicia’s gruesome smile widened, exposing rows of teeth that protruded alarmingly from her blackened, shrunken gums. Maggots trickled from one corner of her mouth. “It’s been a while, girl.” She laughed and more maggots tumbled from her mouth. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking-I’m not real. But you’re wrong. I’m not a ghost. Not exactly. And I’m sure as shit no hallucination.”
Dream opened her mouth to say something, managed a single, incoherent syllable before falling silent again. Her mouth hung open in astonishment. She simply couldn’t speak. What could she say to this…thing? The idea of holding a conversation with it was absurd.
Alicia chuckled. “You’re still not believing it.”
Dream nodded, a very slight downward tilt of her head. She didn’t want anyone in the bar to see her interacting with this thing that looked like her old friend. She knew they’d only see a thirtysomething chick in slut gear conversing with an empty bar stool. An aging barfly with severe mental problems would be the likely perception.
She picked up her beer mug and drank deeply from it again. She looked at the television mounted on the wall behind the bar. The Simpsons was on, and she pretended to pay attention to Homer’s shenanigans.
Alicia scooted closer and slapped a cold, clammy hand down on Dream’s upper left thigh. Dream sucked in a deep breath. The hand on her leg felt rough and leathery. She glanced down, noted the contrast between Alicia’s rot-brown hand and her own pale, unblemished flesh, and began to feel light-headed.
Alicia leaned closer still and Dream felt the dead woman’s bony knee press against her. “There, girl. Do I feel like a motherfucking hallucination?”
Dream trembled. She gripped the handle of her beer mug tighter. Her eyes flicked toward the bar’s front door. She could go. Just slide off the stool and hit the ground running. Bang through the door and leg it across the street to the lot where her old Honda Accord was parked. Then drive. Get the hell out of this stink ing, gray, miserable New England town, find some other place to prowl for a while.
Alicia’s dead hand gave her thigh a squeeze. “Don’t matter where you go, baby. I’ll be there. It’s like I said, I’m not exactly a ghost.”
Dream looked at the bar and kept her voice as low as possible. “Then what are you?”
“I’m something you created.”
Dream frowned. “Bullshit.”
“Oh, it’s true, all right.” Alicia laughed again, and Dream saw a single maggot strike the mahogany bartop and begin to squiggle across the polished wood. “You and I both know you left that fucking house of horrors a changed woman. And I don’t mean just changed in the head. You got yourself some of the same supernatural mojo that Master asshole had. You always had it in you, but he woke it up. You can do things normal people can’t. You’re stronger. Smarter. And you can change the shape and substance of the world around you, just by thinking hard enough about it.”
Dream shook her head. “No.”
“Yes.” Alicia’s fingers began to stroke Dream’s inner thigh. “You know it’s true. And it scares the shit out of you. So you’ve done everything you can to hold that power back, to suppress it. But the pressure’s building up inside you. Some of that psychic energy is spilling out. And me…well, I’m one of the consequences of that. Some of that energy mingled with the bit of my essence you’ve carried with you all these years. And that got all mixed in with your guilt. It was inevitable I would manifest.” Another soft, dry laugh. “And that I would look this fucking awful, I guess. Seriously, I ought to bitchslap you for this Night of the Living Dead Black Bitch look you’ve stuck me with.”
Dream was still shaking her head, but it was just automatic, desperate denial. Another part of her-a part the booze was meant to numb-acknowledged the truth of Alicia’s words. But truth changed nothing. She would work harder to suppress it. Drink more. Drug more. Whatever it took. “I have to get out of here.”
The barmaid looked up from the glass she’d been polishing. “Whatever. Go talk to yourself somewhere else. But you owe me three bucks for that beer.”
Dream fumbled with her purse, digging for bills. “Okay. Sorry.”
Alicia continued to stroke her thigh. “I’ll tell you a secret, Dream, something I never seriously considered telling you when I was alive. I always wanted to get it on with you. You were the only chick I ever felt that way about. I was always too scared to tell you, of course. Didn’t want to risk ruining our friendship.”
Dream’s hands were shaking as she at last managed to extract her wallet from the purse and undo its snap. She withdrew three dollar bills, considered withdrawing a fourth for a tip, but decided against it when she got a look at the barmaid’s face, which was a mask of pity and disdain.
“Remember what I said. You made me. I’m not a ghost.” Alicia’s fingers ceased their stroking motion and squeezed. Hard. “I’m also not exactly the woman you remember. But I’m close, Dream, I’m real fucking close. And I am always with you.” She squeezed even harder, really bearing down. “And I was with you in the bathroom when you put the hurt on that geek. That was some fucked-up shit, baby. Nothing like the sweetheart I remember. Shit, you should change your name to Nightmare, would suit you better these days.” She ran the coarse end of her gray tongue over her bloated lips. “Personally, I think it’s an improvement. You don’t get anywhere in this world without kicking some ass.”
Dream threw the three single bills on the bar and slid off the stool. Some instinct caused her gaze to flick toward the young dart players, and she felt something stab her heart as she saw the way they were looking at her. Frat Boy’s finger made a circle in the air around his ear, the international loony symbol.
She hurried out of the bar and stood outside on the sidewalk, watching the traffic on the two-lane street whiz by. She heard music wafting from another bar on the same side of the street, “People Are Strange,” that old Doors chestnut. Hearing it now, in these circumstances, raised gooseflesh on her arms and the back of her neck. A creeping sense of paranoia threatened to overcome her. She sensed that something important-something on the order of a seismic shift in her life-was on the cusp of occurring. The feeling scared the shit out of her.
She glanced to her right and saw Alicia standing there. The dead woman’s eyes were stained a milky white, but they remained oddly expressive, conveying a hint of amusement.
“Look, Dream, here comes a bus. I think if I were you, I’d consider stepping in front of it.”
Dream looked to her left, where a block away a traffic light was turning yellow. In another few moments, the traffic would slow to a halt and she would be able to cross to the parking lot on the opposite side. She knew she should just focus on getting out of here and ignore Alicia.
But curiosity forced her to ask the question:“Why?”
Alicia smiled. She wiped another trickle of maggots from her lips and flicked them away. “Nasty things. There’s trouble coming, baby. You’re strong. Powerful, even. But this may more trouble than you can handle.”
Dream squeezed her eyes shut. Enough. This was clearly just some especially malevolent corner of her shattered psyche fucking with her. Alicia was a hallucination, and the things she was saying were issuing from somewhere inside her, not from the mouth of some maggot-spewing ghoul. She hoped the realization would make the dead woman’s voice halt in mid-sentence…
…but Alicia kept talking. “You thought it was all over when you left that evil place up in the mountains. But it ain’t, girl, not by a long fucking shot. The evil is still out there. It’s been dormant for a while, but it’s just been restoring itself, getting strong again. That woman, the one who killed me, she’s gonna come looking for you soon.”
Those last words sent a deep, resonant chill through Dream. “No…”
Alicia didn’t respond this time. Dream opened her eyes and looked to her right. The apparition was gone. She breathed a sigh of relief, but the chill invoked by the dead woman’s words remained.
She shivered and began to thread her way through the stalled traffic. She unslung her purse and looked for her keys as she enter ed the parking lot. She cursed, not finding them at first, but then her forefinger snagged the key ring. Before she could get the keys out, though, she heard a vaguely familiar voice say, “That’s her.”
Dream tensed. She’d reached the far end of the lot. It was darker here, removed as it was from the main thoroughfare and the lights of the bars. She heard movement to her right and her head snapped in that direction. She gasped. The girl from the bathroom was standing there, an ugly smirk on her face. Two boys were with her. Dream’s heart pounded. They stood between her and the Accord. Which meant she only had one option available-to turn and make a desperate dash back toward the street. But just as she started to turn, she sensed more movement behind her.
Something hard and metallic struck the base of her skull and she crumpled to the asphalt. Her vision wavered for a moment, went black, and when things came back into focus another girl, this one taller and somewhat prettier, was standing directly over her. There were others, now, a total of five arrayed around her. One held a tire iron that was wet with her blood.
The girl standing over her smiled.
Then she spit in Dream’s face, the gob of saliva hitting her between the eyes.
Dream tried to stand, but a booted foot smashed into her side, causing her to curl into a fetal ball. Then she felt rough hands on her, dragging her upright.
And the girl said, “Get her in the van.”
Dream struggled as they dragged her toward the open back of an old van. She opened her mouth to scream, but someone hit her again.
The world went black.
The smell of cooking meat wafted in from the kitchen. A faint undertone of Indian spices accompanied the aroma. The muffled sound of a television also emanated from that direction, as did the occasional clank of pots and pans being moved around.
Chad Robbins closed out his e-mail and browser screens and flipped the laptop shut. Allyson poked her head around a corner of the hallway arch and smiled broadly at him. “Dinner’s almost ready, baby. Put the silly Internet away and come help me get the table ready.”
Chad looked at her and smiled. Her long blonde hair was in pigtails, but wild strands of it hung over her sparkling eyes and over her ears. She was a pretty girl, with a sweet, almost angelic face. The pigtails and her relative youth-she was twenty-four-endowed her with an almost Lolita-like quality. She could pass for a girl in her late teens. But she was slighter than Dream, smaller and less curvaceous.
And this was a problem, that way he was always comparing the two of them. It wasn’t fair to Allyson. Especially given his still-vivid memories of the emotional abuse he’d suffered during his time with Dream. Allyson was special in so many of her own ways, and her presence in his life had done much to prevent a slide into the kind of despair and guilt that had crippled his ex-wife.
Chad rose from the recliner and followed her into the kitchen. The table was already covered with a crisp white tablecloth. Set upon it were two lit candles in silver holders and a tasteful arrangement of fresh flowers. Chad opened a cupboard above the counter and withdrew two plates, which he set at opposite ends of the table. From a drawer he selected the appropriate silverware and set these next to the plates. Allyson selected glasses from another cupboard while Chad set about opening a bottle of wine.
The cork came out with the usual mild pop, the rich wine aroma immediately mingling with the scent of the spices in a pleasant way. Chad poured a modest measure of the red wine into each of their glasses. He then pulled his seat out and sat down, taking a sip of the wine as he watched Allyson transfer the food from the little island in the middle of the kitchen to the table. He experienced a mildly salacious tingle as he observed her moving through her domestic-goddess-in-training paces. He especially liked it when she would turn and flash him a look at her exquisitely toned calves. The dress she wore had a somewhat prim aspect to it, with no plunging neckline to reveal cleavage. However, the conservative effect was offset by a high hemline that fell just inches shy of miniskirt territory. The big pink apron she wore over the dress inexplicably heightened the erotic charge Chad derived from watching her, so much so that he was almost disappointed when she removed it and hung it from a peg on the pantry door.
She flashed him a dazzling smile as she settled into her own seat at the table. “Let’s eat, shall we?”
Chad needed no further prompting. He dug into the spiced lamb with enthusiasm, letting out a moan of almost sexual satisfaction as the tender meat penetrated his taste buds. Similar moans accompanied each of the next several bites.
He paused long enough to take a deep breath and say, “Allyson, dear, you have outdone yourself.”
Allyson received the compliment in what had become her usual way, by smiling sweetly and saying, “Thank you, sweetie. When we’re done eating, you can thank me again by fucking the daylights out of me.”
The eye contact between them in that moment was electric. Chad sucked in a hissing breath through clenched teeth. Talking dirty at the dinner table was one of Allyson’s kinks. No dinner ever elapsed without some amount of what she called“naughty talk.”
Chad returned her smile and said, “I’d like that.”
Allyson licked her lips after another delicate sip from her wine glass.“Of course you would. But I think I’ll sit on your face for a while first.” She laughed softly as she dipped a spoon in her curry. “After all, you’ll want to show your appreciation for all my hard work, won’t you?”
Dinner continued in that manner for a time. Moments of relative silence during which they enjoyed the food, followed by increasingly ribald verbal exchanges. Chad ’s body was vibrating with need by the time he finished his meal. His fork clattered on the plate and their eyes locked across the table again.
Allyson smiled. “We’re going to the bedroom. Fuck cleaning up. It can wait.”
Chad nodded his enthusiastic agreement. “Yes.”
He hurried around the table and pulled Allyson into his arms, her body slamming against his as she hooked her arms and a leg around him. Their mouths met. Their tongues danced. They gasped and moaned. Chad ’s erection thrust against the fabric of his trousers. Allyson squealed as she felt it and writhed against the hardness, making Chad shudder and reach for the hem of her dress, snatching it up over her ass.
“Hell with the bedroom,” Chad managed between gasps. “I want you now. Right here.”
A sound like a growl emerged from Allyson’s throat and a corner of her mouth curled in a carnal snarl. “Yes. Yes. Do it.”
Chad spun her around, grabbing a handful of her dress and pushing the flimsy bit of fabric up over her ass as she braced herself against the table.
She looked back at him over her shoulder, biting her lip as she said, “Hurry. Hurry.”
Chad was reaching for his zipper when they heard the heavy double knock.
THUMP-THUMP.
Someone was at the front door, pounding the wood with the base of a fist rather than using the brass knocker.
“God-DAMMIT!” Allyson slapped an open palm against the table top and stood up straight. “Who the fuck could that be?” She glanced over her shoulder at Chad again. “Please tell me you’re not expecting anyone. You would’ve told me, right?”
Chad frowned. “Who would I be expecting?”
The question was rhetorical. Allyson was the only person he’d allowed to get close to him since moving to the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead. He had no friends. The friends he’d had in his former life in Tennessee were either dead, estranged, or missing. And he’d made no new friends here. He was a financial analyst for Aerodyne in Atlanta, where he met a lot of people, but he’d intentionally maintained an air of aloofness with his fellow employees. And he met all gestures of potential friendship with a wall of coldness. With Allyson as the one welcome exception, of course.
THUMP-THUMP came the double-knock again.
Chad groaned. “Christ. You know it can’t be anyone I know.”
Allyson sniffed. “Well, I don’t have any friends here either, remember?”
It was true. Allyson had moved to Atlanta only a week prior to Chad ’s relocation there. They had met by chance at a coffeehouse, the chemistry between them instant and undeniable. And since then they’d been too involved with each other to bother meeting new people or getting entangled in the local social strata in any way.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!
“Fuck!” Chad moved past her, anger boiling inside him again as the knocking intensified. “Okay, time to get rid of this asshole.”
“Be careful.” Allyson hurried after him, the slap of her bare feet on the kitchen tile becoming a whisper as tile gave way to living room carpet. “For God’s sake, Chad, don’t just open the door. It could be anyone. Remember that home invasion last week.”
Chad ’s hand paused on the doorknob. She was right. He’d read the newspaper stories. A wife and daughter had been raped. The wife’s husband was tortured until he’d given up the combination to the safe in his office. No one was killed and everyone had said how lucky that was for the victims. Except that Chad knew that was bullshit. Those poor people would carry the mental scars of that night with them the rest of their days.
It had happened in this neighborhood. And the perpetrators had not been caught. They were still out there.
Somewhere.
THUMP-THUMP.
And this stupid fucking door didn’t have a peephole. Fuck. His hand still on the doorknob, Chad looked at Allyson. “Maybe you should get a phone, be ready to speed-dial 911.”
Allyson nodded and hurried out of the room. She came running back a moment later, a slim, silver cell phone clutched in one slightly trembling hand. Chad flashed her a reassuring smile and shifted his attention back to the door as the most insistent knock yet rattled the thick slab of wood in its frame.
Chad cleared his throat and made his voice loud, projecting it the way a stage actor would:“You can stop knocking, asshole! Who are you and what the hell do you want?”
The knocking stopped. Chad held his breath and sensed Allyson doing the same. Then he heard a very dim, muffled sigh. A tired sound. A weary sound.
Chad frowned. There was something faintly familiar about it.
Something- Chad ’s hand closed around the doorknob and yanked the door open. Allyson let out a gasp of surprise, but Chad barely heard it.
He gaped at the figure standing on the darkened front porch for nearly a full minute before managing to say, “Oh…shit…” Then he broke into a broad grin. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” He stepped back and waved a hand toward the interior of the house. “Come on in, man.”
The dark figure stepped forward into the light. The wryest of smiles touched the very edges of his mouth. He looked better than the last time Chad had seen him, years ago. Leaner and less haggard. The bushy mane of gray-flecked brown hair had been shorn to a longish shag. He looked especially great for a man in his early sixties.
Chad shut the door as the man stepped into the house. “Christ, Jim, I can’t believe how good you look. Last time I saw you-”
The man Chad had once known as Lazarus shrugged. “Being an unrepentant sinner is a well-documented course to a healthier life.”
Chad ’s grin remained in place as he turned to introduce his friend to Allyson. “Hey, honey, this is the man I’ve told you about-” His grin faltered as he registered her sullen expression. “Honey-?”
“I don’t care who the fuck this is.” Sullen, nothing. She was fuming. “We were in the middle of a nice, quiet dinner. I can’t believe you’re inviting this person in, regardless of who the fuck he is.”
“Honey, I’m sorry, but-”
“Whatever.” Allyson brushed past him and yanked the door open again. Her face was a tight mask of controlled fury as she turned toward him. “You boys catch up. Jerk each other off. Whatever, I don’t fucking care. I’m going for a walk.”
She stepped outside and slammed the door behind her.
Chad gaped in disbelief at the door for a long moment. He’d never seen Allyson so angry about anything. He understood her frustration about the interruption. He still felt some of that, too, a rippling undercurrent of unspent sexual energy. But storming off like this-well, it seemed a bit out of proportion.
Jim cleared his throat. “Sorry to cause you trouble, friend. But there are things we need to talk about.”
Chad turned and looked at his friend, a ghost of the faded grin returning to his face. “Okay, but I think I need a drink now.”
Chad led the way to the living room and the liquor cabinet.
Allyson waited until she was two blocks from the house before flipping open her cell phone and punching in the number she’d memorized so many months ago. She held it to her ear and listened as it rang and rang.
She cursed as she counted a tenth ring and considered hanging up. But she couldn’t do that. The time had come and she couldn’t afford to turn back now. She made herself wait some more and her patience paid off as the phone was at last answered on the twentieth ring.
A tired male voice said, “Yes?”
Allyson snapped at the man: “What the fuck took so long?”
A pause. Then:“Who is this?”
“This is Allyson fucking Vanover. You recognize that name, don’t you?” Her voice was shrill, rendered almost brittle from the combination of fear and anger coursing through her. There was another strong emotion at work, as well, one she couldn’t afford to think about, not if she meant to see this through. “After all, you’re the reason I’m in fucking Atlanta, remember?”
The man sighed. “Of course. I do remember. I told you-”
“You told me to call this number only if I had news. This is the first time I’ve called, but trust me, the news is big.”
The man’s attitude changed immediately. His voice resonated with eagerness as he said, “Do you mean-”
“Yes.” Allyson paused. She allowed a final pang of regret to pierce her deeply. Then she made herself say, “The man you’ve been looking for, the one you told me to keep an eye out for…he’s here.”
“Excellent. Are you still at the same location?”
Allyson hesitated only a moment, regret stilling her tongue a second longer than necessary. But she knew it was too late for second thoughts. The wheels had been set in motion. Regardless of what she said from this moment forward, there was nothing she could do stop it.
“Yes. It’s the fourth house on the left on Jacobsen Avenue. 505 Jacobsen Avenue.” Her hand was shaking. She forced it still. “There’s a late-model silver Porsche parked on the road in front of the house. Your people won’t be able to miss it.”
“Good. You’ve done very well, Allyson.” Soft laughter issued from the other end, wherever that was. Allyson had Googled the number, but there was no record for it, nor any other indication of its origin. Which was kind of spooky, but it figured. “And as previously agreed, you’ll be handsomely rewarded.”
“I better be.” She forced a toughness into her voice she didn’t feel. “That money better hit my account by the end of business tomorrow.”
More soft laughter. “Oh, it shall. All one hundred thousand. And remind me, that would be your secret account, correct? The one Mr. Robbins doesn’t know about?”
Allyson closed her eyes. “Yes. That one.”
“The money will be there by the appointed deadline, rest assured. You’ll want to be well out of town by then.”
“You can count on that.”
“Good.” A sigh. “We can consider our business closed, then. You will never speak of this to anyone, of course.”
Allyson’s eyes fluttered open. Two kids were playing with a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee two houses down. Somewhere a dog was barking. Through a window of the house to her immediate right she could see the warm glow of a television. She imagined a family gathered around the box, enjoying their evening’s familiar and comforting entertainment. Though part of her was loathe to admit it, she had come to appreciate that a life in the suburbs could be a good, perhaps even blissful one.
She snapped the phone shut without another word and turned back toward home.
Ms. Wickman smiled at the boy on the floor. His name was Terry. His dead sister’s name had been Sherry. Such unimaginative parents. No wonder, then, that the siblings had crumbled so predictably through the course of the evening’s long and bloody festivities. Refugees from the shallow end of the gene pool, these children. Not that it mattered. Ms. Wickman had a slight preference for more intelligent victims, but in the end she was an equal opportunity sadist.
This Terry had a blandly handsome face, though its handsomeness was offset somewhat by a pudginess she found distasteful. He stared up at her with wide, pleading eyes. Snot dribbled from his nostrils. A large red welt on his left cheek further marred his bland good looks. His bleeding lower lip trembled uncontrollably.
“Please d-don’t hurt me…again.” A whimper issued through his sputtering lips. “I d-did it. Did what you t-told me.”
Ms. Wickman’s smile broadened. “Yes, you did.” She clapped her hands in a slow, mocking way. “And congratulations on the murder of your sister.” She leaned over him, her long, brown hair falling over her shoulders. “I did so admire the gusto with which you committed the act. Such savagery. Why, one would think there’d been more to it than the cowardly exchange of your life for hers.”
She looked at the boy kneeling at Terry’s head, a broad, gleaming knife clutched in his three-fingered left hand. “Dean, did it seem to you that Terry enjoyed killing his darling sister?”
Dean looked at her through hollow, sunken eyes. Long strands of greasy hair hung over those eyes. “Yes, m’am.” He laid the edge of the knife against Terry’s trembling throat and drew forth a trickle of blood, making the doomed boy squeal.“Matter of fact…I think he was getting off on it.”
Ms. Wickman nodded. “You know, I believe you may be right. You see, Terry, one of the things that most interests me is exposing the barbarian that exists in all of us. Human beings are taught to live behind a mask of civility, to govern their lives by an arbitrarily imposed set of concepts of right and wrong. You lived all eighteen years of your miserable life with that mask wedged firmly in place, but tonight we stripped it away. Tonight we saw the ugly, craven beast that’s always lurked in the depths of your now thoroughly tainted heart.”
Anger flashed in Terry’s eyes. “Fuck you. Fuck you and fuck all of your evil little helpers. Are you going to lecture me all damn night, or are you going to fucking kill me?”
“Boys, hold Terry very still, please. Dean, make certain he is unable to move his head.”
Terry’s abrupt surge of anger died, terror again twisting his features. “No. I’ll do anything. I’ll kill anyone. Whatever you want.”
“So sorry, dear. I’m afraid I find you too boring to join the ranks of my Apprentices.” Ms. Wickman’s voice conveyed boredom, with an undertone of mock regret, a parody of an interviewer turning down a job applicant. “So now, yes, you die.”
Then she positioned herself so that she was standing directly over Terry’s head. “Now, no peeking up my dress, you naughty boy.”
Terry sniffled. “You’re…crazy.”
“Perhaps. But I’m not the one about to die helpless and broken.”
Two Apprentices worked to keep Terry’s legs pinned to the floor. Two more of the black-clad boys kept his arms still. Dean kept the big blade pressed to his throat, while his other hand was wound in the boy’s sweat-soaked hair.
Ms. Wickman lifted her right foot and placed the sole of the black stiletto against the boy’s forehead. The point of the long, narrow heel hovered just above his dancing eyeball. Normally she wore a more modest heel, but she’d worn the stilettos tonight with this very purpose in mind. She watched the jittery dance of his eyes a moment longer, savoring his terror, enjoying his helplessness.
One of the apprentices snickered and said, “Oh, look, he’s pissing his pants.”
Ms. Wickman directed a last bit of mocking laughter at her victim. “Pathetic. You’re clearly too worthless to continue existing in this world, Terry. Convey my regards when you meet your sister in hell.”
She eased the point of her heel down and it touched his eyeball. Terry squealed and jerked against the grip of his captors. But it was no use. The Apprentices managed to keep the boy still as she continued to press down. She watched in almost breathless fascination as the point of the heel dimpled the surface of the eyeball, causing the tissue to well up around it. Then she increased the pressue still more and there was an audible, liquidy pop as the point of the heel pierced the eyeball. Terry screamed yet again and jerked harder against his captors, almost dislodging the boy pinning down his left arm.
But it was too late to matter now.
Ms. Wickman bit her lower lip and thrust the heel downward, angling it so that it pushed through the eye and into his brain. Blood jetted from the socket and the boy convulsed violently for a moment before going still. The curved back end of her shoe conformed against the curvature of the dead boy’s eye socket in a way she found aesthetically pleasing. She wished someone had a camera to take a picture of it. Ah, well. She admired the darkly delicious juxtaposition of shoe and eye socket a moment longer before extracting her heel, which emerged slick with blood and tissue.
A breath of shuddery, sensual satisfaction issued through her lips. She straightened her dress and brushed back her hair. “Dispose of this trash, children. I’ll be retiring to my quarters for the evening.”
She exited the living room without another word and continued through the gleaming foyer to the ornate staircase that led to the many floors above. She had learned many useful things from the Master, among them the ability to manipulate aspects of the physical world. The necessary magical energy was derived from appeasement of the death gods, entities that derived power from suffering and death, which she happily supplied in generous portions on a daily basis.
This house was outwardly decrepit. When glimpsed from the bottom of the long, dusty driveway, the abandoned farmhouse looked as it always had to generations of locals-like an uninhabited, decaying thing, a rotting collection of ancient timber and drywall that through some miracle managed to remain upright.
But any wanderer unlucky enough to step through the front door would instantly know they had entered a strange place far removed from the natural world. On the other side of that creaking front door was the interior of a huge mansion, a place far too large to be con tained by the ancient farmhouse. And yet, once inside, there was no denying the apparent reality of it.
And once inside, Ms. Wickman reflected with a stiff smile, no could ever hope to escape.
She had learned from the Master’s mistakes. Her new kingdom was formidable in its own right, but it was not so large and out of control that she was unable to maintain a firm ruling hand. The slaves she had were not allowed to talk to each other, lest they have their tongues removed and fed to them. The silence rule drastically reduced the possibility of a revolt.
Everything was so very close to perfect now. The lone remaining large task was the ongoing effort to hunt down the surviving House of Blood revolutionaries. But the hunt was going well and she knew she’d have them all soon, kneeling before her and begging for mercy.
She entered a long corridor lit by candles flickering in wall sconces. Each side of the corridor was lined with doors that opened to bedrooms that doubled as torture chambers. Ms. Wickman glanced through one open doorway and saw a thin blonde girl in skintight black leather.
“Hello, Gwendolyn. Enjoying your work tonight?”
The girl flashed a smile as she flicked a bullwhip at a middle-aged man strapped to a four-poster bed.“Loving it. As always, Mistress.”
Ms. Wickman watched the whip slice away a strip of blubbery flesh and flashed a smile of her own. She then left Gwendolyn to her work and continued to the end of the corridor where a set of double doors marked the entrance to her chambers. The doors opened at her approach, sweeping backward as if triggered by an electronic sensor. They closed again as she moved into the room. The room was huge and well-appointed, a living area fit for a queen. A massive four-poster bed with a velvet canopy was set against one wall at the far end of the room. A library and bar dominated another corner of the room.
She paused at what appeared to merely be a smooth expanse of unadorned wall. Her fingers brushed the wall’s surface and the outline of a doorway formed. A tap of her forefinger caused the door to open. The door, a huge stone slab, made a gritty sound as its bottom end slid over the stone floor of the hidden chamber. Through this door was a deep, sticky darkness, a blackness so impenetrable and compelling that many who glimpsed it feared it would swallow them forever. A fear not far from the truth.
Ms. Wickman stepped without hesitation into that clingy darkness. The stone door slowly closed behind her and the blackness enveloped her. She felt for a moment like a wandering soul suspended in some void between worlds. But the feeling was fleeting, because this was her realm. Her darkness. She commanded the spirits and the elements in this place. She was the only thing to be afraid of here, and knowing that aroused her, caused her nipples to stiffen against the fabric of her elegant dress.
The sound of a muffled whimper penetrated the silence.
Ms. Wickman snapped her fingers and the wicks of several candles sparked and grew thin columns of flame.
Another, louder whimper, just this side of a moan.
Ms. Wickman’s nostrils flared. She ached to touch herself. Instead she placed her hands on her hips and approached the cage that hung suspended from the ceiling by a stout chain. The dark-haired girl whined and scooted to the back of the cage. The motion caused the cage to spin slightly, and the twisting chain links made a grinding sound.
Ms. Wickman stopped a few feet from the cage. She threw her head back and laughed with sudden, shocking heartiness. Just as abruptly, the laughter died. She stepped closer and pressed her face between two cage bars.
“Hello, dear.” Her voice was a breathy whisper, barely audible. “How are you settling into your new home, hmm?”
The girl said nothing.
Ms. Wickman turned the cage. The chain links groaned and the girl attempted to scoot away again, but Ms. Wickman caught one of her slender arms just above the charred stump of her left wrist. A loud moan emerged from the cage. Ms. Wickman gave the girl a savage yank and she crashed against the cage bars. The girl’s other stump flailed uselessly. Her hands were both gone, of course, removed to make the rendering of dark magics next to impossible.
Ms. Wickman pulled the girl closer and said, “I’d tell you struggling is useless, which is true enough, but I do so enjoy reveling in your terror, Giselle.”
The girl abruptly stopped struggling.
She sagged against the cage bars and shuddered as the room grew colder.
Something shifted in the darkness. Dream was dimly aware of a subtle rolling motion. The sensation reminded her of early morning fishing trips with her father when she was a little girl, the way those slowly rippling lake waves would make the boat gently sway in the murky green water. The memory was fleeting, the vivid colors bleaching from the vision before it blew apart like a puff of fog. There was a pang of loss, but then that too was gone, lost in the shifting black tides of unconsciousness.
Shifting…
Dream felt it again, the slow, almost imperceptible roll of her body, only this time the sensation was clearer, more of the real world than the comfortably numb land of sleep. She wasn’t awake yet, but some part of her knew consciousness was approaching and wasn’t happy about it. This dark place was better than what awaited her on the other side of the wall of sleep.
Then she became aware of another sensation, even sweeter, a hand moving slowly over her naked body. Her breath quickened and she moved closer to consciousness. The hand slid up her inner thigh, moved very lightly over her tingling pussy, then roamed over her flat stomach and up between her breasts. When the hand cupped a breast, Dream moaned and arched her back, offering a swollen nipple to her still invisible lover.
She was almost awake now. Her eyes fluttered once before closing again, allowing her a glimpse of a formless shadow. Her lover’s mouth closed over the proffered nipple, making her moan again as the person’s tongue swirled around the stiffened flesh. It felt good. So good. An animalistic grunt came from the region of her breasts as the mouth shifted to her other breast and showed it the same hungry, aching attention.
Dream was awake now, but she kept her eyes closed, reveling in the delicious sensations rippling through her body. The mattress below her rolled again. A waterbed, she finally realized. Which meant she was likely in some cheap hotel. Which further meant the person suckling at her breasts was some sleazy guy she’d picked up somewhere. Not that his identity mattered. In the end he’d be just another faceless mark, the latest in a succession of men she wouldn’t have to care about the next day.
Dream decided to keep her eyes closed while the mytery man did these delightful things to her body. She was enjoying too much the notion that he could be anyone. He could even be…
The image that came to her then arrived with such sudden and shocking vividness that it made her gasp. A part of her mind rebelled. No. The man she was remembering was a monster. He’d done awful, horrific things. And he’d been responsible for the deaths of her friends. But the Dream who’d cared about such things was the part of her psyche she’d worked so hard to suppress. That Dream was dead. The person she’d become accepted darkness, welcomed corruption.
So instead of pushing the vision away, she allowed it to further crystallize in her mind. She imagined the Master on top of her, his naked body gleaming in the flickering candlelight the way it had the one night she’d spent with him. The sex she’d shared with him that evening had been astonishing, better by far than anything she’d experienced before or since. Her body twisted on the bed, delighting at the feel of his rough, masculine hands kneading her soft, yielding flesh. The fingers teasing her sex abruptly pushed inside her, curled and flexed, triggering a first jolt of orgasm and eliciting a shuddering cry of ecstacy. She lifted her ass off the bed and thrust her pelvis at the still-flexing fingers.
She ached to be penetrated by something else and said so. “Take me…” A gasp. Another flex inside her. “Do it. Please…”
Then the mouth came away from her breast and a voice said, “Afraid I can’t do that, baby.”
Dream’s eyes flew open and she gaped at the sight of Alicia Jackson’s smiling face. “I don’t have the necessary equipment, so sorry.” Alicia’s tongue darted out and flicked at Dream’s still engorged nipple. “But this I can do all night long if y ou like…”
Dream’s face twisted in disgust as a maggot tumbled out of Alicia’s mouth onto her breast. “Get away from me!” Her body jerked away from Alicia’s touch, sinking deeper into the yielding mattress. The tiny maggot clung to her skin and Dream instinctively tried to brush it away, but her arms wouldn’t move. They were stretched at sharp angles behind her. She glanced back and saw that she was tied to the bed. She jerked her hands against the restraints, but the lengths of new-looking rope abraded her flesh and refused to yield.
Fully awake now, she began to take in more details of her surroundings. She saw a ceiling fan above her. Tufts of dust along the edges of the unmoving blades. A bookcase filled with haphazardly stacked old paperbacks. An old television with a rabbit ears antenna atop an old dresser. Piles of dirty laundry on the floor. Chintzy cheap curtains drawn across the room’s two windows. A creased and much-folded poster of Robert Smith on the closed bedroom door. And a faint piss smell she associated with cats. Then she felt the sticky wetness beneath her and realized she’d pissed the bed while she was unconscious.
Gross.
“Where am I?”
Alicia’s hand slipped out of Dream’s vagina. The dead woman smiled and licked moisture off her bloated fingers. “Mmm… you’re not in Kansas anymore, baby.”
Dream’s mouth curled in disgust. “You’re not Alicia.”
The dead woman rolled her milky eyes. “How tiresome. We’ve been over this. I-”
“I know you’re real,” Dream cut her off. There was fire in her voice now. “But you’re not my dead friend. She’d never do anything so vile to me.”
“You didn’t think it was so vile a minute ago.”
Dream’s face reddened. “A minute ago I thought you were-” She faltered, her mouth hanging open a moment before she lamely finished, “-someone else.”
“Oh, I know what you thought, baby.” The dead woman shifted position on the bed, stretching a leg across Dream’s midsection. Then she sat up, straddling her. She was still wearing the slinky little black dress; it rode up high on her thighs now, exposing mottled flesh that had once been smooth and toned. “You figured I was some dude you picked up at a bar, but what you were really thinking about was-”
“Shut up!” Dream vainly tugged at her bindings again. “And get off me, you fucking disgusting…thing.”
“I will not.” She cupped Dream’s breasts in her swollen hands and tweaked the nipples with her thumbs. Her nails were abnormally long and yellowed; seeing them graze her flesh made Dream’s stomach twist. “You’re in no position to demand anything. And let me be clear about this one more time. I am Alicia Katherine Jackson. And though you didn’t mean to, you brought me back, restored me to this undead state of existence. And let me tell you, I’m not feeling all that charitable toward my old best gal pal these days. It’s not a lot of fun being a half-decayed walking corpse.”
Dream still couldn’t accept it. Buying into what the grotesque apparition was trying to sell her would mean she was some kind of monster. “No. You’re not her. You’re lying. You’re some thing masquerading as her to cause me misery.”
“Nonsense. You think I’m some random ghoul playing head games with you? What kind of sense does that make? No, I’m what I say I am and you’re just going to have to deal with that.” Alicia picked at a weeping razor wound with a yellowed nail. “These hurt, by the way. Thanks so much for making me corporeal, Dream. Thanks for making me feel things. Everything hurts, Dream. Everything feels like it wants to come apart, but the magic you filled me up with won’t let that happen. So, from the bottom of my dead-but-beating heart, thank you so very fucking much. Cunt.”
Dream’s vision blurred. She sniffled and b linked back the tears. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was small, soft, the sound of a beaten, broken thing. “I never meant to hur t you.”
Alicia’s smile faded. “I wonder how many times you’ve said that in your life. You know, I never thought I’d say it, but I’m beginning to think Chad-boy was right about you all those years ago. You love drama. You wallow in self-pity. And at the end of the day, all you’ve ever really done is hurt people.”
“Stop it.” Dream’s eyes misted over again. “Please…”
There was a sudden sound of voices from the other side of the closed door. Alicia sighed and climbed off the bed, moving to a spot near the bookcase. “The fuckers who nabbed you earlier are back. Guess I’ll just sit back and watch the show. Hopefully they’ll at least leave me some sloppy seconds.”
The door flew open and several young people swarmed into the room. Dream counted seven altogether, including the girl she’d assaulted in the bathroom of the Villager Pub. There were two other girls and four boys. They all appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. One boy was carrying a huge Igloo cooler. He flipped the top open and pulled out a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A few of the others grabbed beers, too. A girl wearing a black gypsy dress had hair bleached a platinum shade of blonde with inch-long black roots. Black fishnets with several rips exposing pale flesh encased her slender legs. She fired up a clove cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Hello, sleeping beauty.”
Dream didn’t say anything. Though the girl was smiling, the expression didn’t reach her eyes, which were hard and flat. A barely contained rage pulsed just beneath that smiling surface. Dream’s eyes again filled with tears. She would probably die in this room. And despite the hell her life had become, she didn’t want that to happen.
The girl blew rancid clove smoke in Dream’s face. “I hear you beat up my sister tonight.” She indicated the girl Dream remembered from the Villager Pub with a nod. “She says you beat the living shit out of her for no good reason at all. Now, you’re not getting out of here no matter what. I guess you know that, so you might as well be straight with me. Is my sister telling the truth?”
Dream met the girl’s merciless gaze and swallowed hard. Though she was still terrified of what was about to happen, a part of her was already resigned to it. So the girl was right, there was no point in telling anything but the truth.
“Yeah. I did it.”
The girl nodded. “Good.” She blew more foul smoke at Dream’s face. “It’s good that you admitted it, I mean. It’ll make this easier for both of us. We’ll know what we’re doing is justified. And you’ll know you’re getting what you deserve.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to kill you.”
The bluntness of the statement elicited a helpless, sudden sob from Dream. For a long moment the only sound in the room was her rising anguish. Then the girl put her cigarette out on Dream’s thigh, making her scream and jerk away from the source of the pain.
The girl waited until Dream’s screams died away to a low, blubbering moan. “We’re going to kill you,” she said again, “and we’re going to take our time doing it. You may wonder why we didn’t gag you. We’re kind of out in the country here, which means you can scream your fucking lungs out and no one will ever hear you.”
One of the boys, a lanky, long-haired kid with acne, had been slouching in a corner, his arms wrapped over his knees, a can of Pabst dangling from one hand. He abruptly came out of the crouch and moved into the center of the room, beer sloshing out of the beer can. “Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of fucked?” There was agitation in his voice, real anger and incredulity, but the words were slightly slurred. A little much liquid courage, Dream figured.
He turned in a slow circle, eyeing each of his friends in turn.“Come on, you assholes. You know this is wrong. You can’t kill a person over something like this.”
No one said anything for a while. Several of the kids shifted uneasily. They studied the floor or briefly glanced at each other before turning their gazes to the ceiling or an inexplicably interesting patch of blank wall.
Then the girl sitting next to Dream said, “Am I going to have to worry about you, Michael?”
Michael was staring at another boy in the room, one to whom he bore a strong resemblance. They were siblings or very close cousins. Michael’s brother or cousin stared hard at the floor. His hands were shaking. Dream did a quick scan of the faces arrayed around her and saw evidence of fear in all of them, including the girl she’d so stupidly vented some of her free-floating rage on in the pub bathroom. The one exception was that girl’s sister, who was eerily calm.
The girl rose from the bed and approached Michael. “I asked you a question. I’d like an answer. Now. Am I going to have to worry about you?”
Michael gave up trying to engage his relative’s attention and faced the girl. “Or what, Marcy?”There was real venom in his voice now, a harshness only slightly blunted by the boozy slur of his words. “Are you afraid I’ll turn narc?” He gulped Pabst. “And what if I do, huh? What then? Are you going to kill me, too?”
Marcy said nothing at first. She pried the Pabst can from Michael’s shaking hand. She drank what was left and tossed the empty can into the open cooler. Then she put a hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “No more beer for you tonight. It’s making you crazy and you need to calm down.”
The kid was trembling all over. Something about Marcy being so close terrified him. He wanted to flinch away from her touch but didn’t quite dare. And he did seem perceptibly less bold without a beer in his hand.
His voice was very soft as he said, “We can’t do this. It’s wrong.”
Marcy slapped him, the sound shockingly loud in the otherwise silent room.
Alicia barked laughter and said, “Damn.”
No one reacted. The kids couldn’t see or hear the dead woman. Dream glanced at her. Alicia winked and blew a kiss. Dream forced herself not to react and made a mental note not to respond to anything else Alicia might say. She sensed a delicate balance in the room, her fate perhaps hinging on whether this kid had the fortitude to continue making his stand. Her case wouldn’t be helped any should she start talking to invisible people.
Marcy cupped the boy’s chin in her hand and leaned close. “We’re gonna do this. Nobody does what this bitch did and gets away with it, not when it comes to my family, motherfucker.” The boy was shaking more than ever and Dream despaired, sensing the fight was already lost. “And about your question, Michael? Let’s just say you don’t want me thinking for even one second that you might narc.” She released his chin and stepped back. “Can I trust you? And please tell the truth, because I’ll know if you’re lying.”
Michael sighed and nodded. “Yes.”
“And it’s not like she’ll be the first person we’ve killed.” This was Michael’s brother or cousin finally speaking up. “Nobody talks about it, but we all know that bum we jumped in Overton Park last summer didn’t survive.”
Dream’s heart lurched at the revelation. Again, no one said anything for a time. The general anxiety level skyrocketed. There was a lot more nervous shuffling of feet. A lot of fidgeting. Marcy’s sister looked very pale, as if she might throw up at any moment.
A ghost of a smile brushed the edges of Marcy’s mouth before vanishing. “That’s very true,” she said, breaking the silence. “Thank you for reminding us, Kevin. Now back to business.”
She returned to the bed and appraised Dream candidly, her gaze moving slowly over the length of her splayed, nude body. Then she looked Dream in the eye and said, “You really are gorgeous, you know that?”
Dream didn’t bother responding.
But Alicia moved to the other side of the bed and appraised her in much the same way. “Girl’s a gothed-out skank, but she speaks the fucking truth.” She smiled broadly and blood leaked from cracks at the corners of her mouth. “Hey, maybe if they really kill you, you can come back like me. Wouldn’t that be a kick? Little Miss Hot Stuff all rotting and stinky?” She cackled. “Well, I’d get some satisfaction out of it anyway.”
Again, Dream ignored the dead woman’s commentary.
“Somebody bring me a belt.”
Michael’s cousin reacted instantly to Marcy’s command, crossing the room within the space of a heartbeat and yanking open a closet door. He rummaged around in the closet’s dark interior for a moment, then emerged with the requested item.
Marcy accepted the belt from him, winding one end twice around her right hand while letting the end with the brass buckle dangle. “Seriously, you really are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in person. You could be a model or a movie star.” There was plain, honest admiration in her voice as she said these things, but then her tone darkened. “But beautiful people like you always look down on people like us. That’s if you think of us at all. Or if forced to think of us, you see us as, like, insects, or r odents, something less than human.”
Dream struggled to keep a quaver out of her voice as she said, “Th-that’s not true. I never-”
“SHUT UP!”
Marcy’s arm snapped out like a striking cobra and the belt whipped across Dream’s belly, the buckle gouging her flesh. Dream cried out and the belt snapped across her body again. Then again. A thin trickle of blood ran down her side from where the buckle had nicked her.
Dream’s chest heaved and tears rolled down her face. “Please…please…”
“I told you to shut up.” Marcy’s voice was surprisingly calm again, belying the act of violence. “You should do as I say.”
Dream stifled the whimper that wanted to come, reminding herself that her pleas were less than useless, serving only to further stir the ire of her tormentor.
Marcy resumed her speech as if nothing had happened:“ Beautiful, privileged people think nothing of bullying people like Ellen, my sweet little sister. Poor Ellen’s been pushed around by people like you all her life.” She paused and sat down again at the edge of the bed. “One time a couple of cheerleaders followed her into a bathroom. This was sophomore year of high school, I believe.” She glanced at her sister for confirmation. Ellen wouldn’t meet her gaze, but she nodded. “Do you know what those fucking nose-in-the-air bitches did to her?”
Dream shook her head. “No.”
“I’ll tell you.” Marcy leaned over Dream so that their faces were separated by mere inches. The hate pulsing out of the girl’s hard, dark eyes made Dream shiver. “They pulled her into a stall and pushed her face down into a shit-clogged toilet. They held her there while she struggled and shit and toilet water filled her mouth.”
Dream sniffed. “I’m sorry.”
Marcy grunted. “Yeah, you should be, because it might as well have been you who did that. I hold all your kind responsible. You wonder why I’m so angry? Maybe now you’re beginning to have a clue. When you attacked Ellen tonight, you were making her relive that all over again.”
Dream’s breath hitched in her throat and tears rolled in a steady stream from her eyes. “I’m…so sorry…I wish-”
“Shut up.”
Dream again fell silent.
Marcy unwound the belt from her hand and slipped the thin length of black leather behind Dream’s neck. Dream tensed, her heart pounding as Marcy fed the end of the belt through the brass buckle and pulled it taut around her throat. She wound the end around her hand again and stared into Dream’s suddenly bulging eyes. “I wanted to go after those fucking cheerleaders so bad when I heard what they’d done, but I didn’t have the nerve back then. But not this time. This time someone’s going to pay.”
She stood up and pulled on the end of the belt. Dream sputtered, her face turning a bright shade of red as the loop tightened around her neck. She was dimly aware of someone else in the room saying “Oh God” over and over.
Then Marcy relaxed her grip on the belt and Dream was abruptly able to breathe again. She drew in huge gulps of air and listened to her heart slam against her chest wall.
Marcy was smiling now. “You didn’t think I’d kill you so quickly, did you? That would’ve been almost like mercy. This is just the beginning, cunt. A warm-up. You’ve got a long night of pain ahead of you and I’m going to enjoy every sweet fucking second of it.”
A black rage stole into Dream’s heart then, obliterating the terror completely, sweeping away any lingering trace of guilt she felt over what she’d done to Marcy’s sister. Her mouth curled in a sneer of disgust and fury. Dark, malicious energy swirled inside of her, dormant power awakened and focused by the overwhelming strength of her anger. There was no room in her heart now for anything other than hate and a blind need to inflict pain on everyone around her.
Everyone else felt the change, too.
The other girl in the room, a somewhat plump thing with hair dyed a bright shade of auburn, shivered and said, “Did it just get really fucking cold in here?”
Someone else said, “Yeah. Jesus, what’s going on?”
Marcy looked into Dream’s eyes and flinched. She let go of the belt and began to rise from the bed. Then she froze, suddenly unable to retreat any further.
Dream snarled, hissed like a snake. She flailed at her bindings, rocking the bed violently and causing a lamp to topple off the nightstand. The auburn-haired girl screamed and ran for the closed door. Dream loosed a tremendous cry that filled the room like the concussion from a bomb blast. The auburn-haired girl’s body slammed against the door, then spun around and fell to the floor. When she tried to stand, blood was leaking from every orifice, spilling in trickles from her ears, mouth and nostrils. A bright redness stained the whites of her eyes and she wobbled as she tried to take a blind step toward the bed. Then she collapsed, hitting the floor with a resounding thump that elicited more screams and cries of shock from her friends.
The screaming went on for a while.
The girl on the floor was absolutely still. Dead. Dream knew she’d somehow killed her. She hadn’t done it intentionally, but she’d done it nonetheless, some instinct causing her to strike at the girl with the power she’d tapped.
Her voice emerged as a growl. “No one gets out alive.” And she meant to do it. Kill them all. Make them suffer on an epic level. Wallow in their pain.
She focused on Marcy now, drawing in some of that thrumming energy, preparing to unleash a lethal blast of it straight into the bitch’s pounding heart. She felt a tingle of arousal. She hadn’t felt so deliciously debauched since that long ago night in the Master’s bed. Each of her senses was heightened to an unnatural degree. She could hear each thudding beat of Marcy’s heart. The girl tried to jerk away from her again, but remained held in place by invisible puppet strings.
She whimpered. “Please…”
Dream smiled. “I’m going to kill you.”
Marcy winced at the sound of her own words thrown back at her.
Dream focused energy in a tight, pulsing ball, drawing it in like a ball stretched backward in the elastic band of a slingshot.
Then, as abruptly as it had come over her, the power blinked out. It was just gone, as if someone had thrown a switch. There was a moment of frozen shock, an abrupt and dramatic shift of atmosphere. Dream sagged into the sloshing waterbed mattress, so tired now, her body depleted of energy. She could fall asleep right now, even surrounded by these enemies. Her eyes fluttered, almost closed. And Marcy stumbled backward, tripped over the dead girl, and tumbled to the floor.
She was back on her feet in an instant. Her eyes were wild and darting, moving from the dead body to the stunned faces of her friends, then to Dream. She was breathing hard, like someone who’d just finished a marathon. Then she was screaming and gesturing wildly at her friends.
“EVERYBODY OUT!” She yanked her sister out of the chair and shoved her stumbling toward the door. “GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! NOW, GOD-DAMMIT!”
Michael was the first to snap out of it. He yanked the door open and Ellen staggered through it. The others followed in rapid fashion. Marcy was the last out the door. She turned and paused with the door half-shut.
“I don’t know what just happened here-” She was working hard to project an approximation of the malicious calm she’d evinced before. “-but I’m not fucking through with you. Somehow I’ll make you pay.”
Then she was gone, the door slamming shut behind her.
Dream felt only a mild apprehension at the girl’s threat. Her eyes fluttered again. She mused in a vague way over the awesome power she’d so briefly channeled, wondering where it came from, and whether she could summon it again if needed.
Alicia was standing over her again, but her image was blurred, hazy.
Dream was almost asleep now.
But she remained aware long enough to hear her dead friend speak. “That was pretty impressive, Dream. Those kids are scared shitless, what with you makin’ like Linda Blair in the motherfuckin’ Exorcist. But this ain’t over.” Alicia gave her head an emphatic shake. “Uh-uh, not by a long shot. But listen, you remember what I told you before about trouble comin’, don’t you? I wasn’t talking about these kids, honey.”
Dream’s eyes closed. “Whatever.”
Alicia leaned close. Her rancid corpse breath hot on Dream’s ear. “Trouble’s out there, Dream. Lurking, waiting for you to show yourself. And let me tell you something-if you somehow walk out of here alive, somewhere down the line you’ll wind up wishing these punks had killed you.”
Dream sighed.
She could think about Alicia’s warnings later. Maybe.
Her breathing evened out.
At long last, the world went away again.
The sound of the television emanating from the bedroom abruptly silenced. Allyson looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and listened to the muffled sound of Chad yawning. He was tired. Not surprising, given how long a day it had been, and given how many glasses of whiskey he’d downed over several hours of conversation with the man he called Jim.
Allyson had returned to the house less than fifteen minutes after storming off, making sure to stay out just long enough to allow Chad to believe she’d only been blowing off some steam. She had to stay in character. So she’d come home just soon enough, smiling and apologizing to their uninvited “guest,” but not making too big a deal about it. The men retired to the den while she cleaned up in the kitchen. And while she cleaned, she worked at not thinking about the hard, dangerous men who would soon be here. Whether they were coming to kill or merely apprehend, she did not know. And didn’t want to know.
Or so she told herself, over and over.
It wasn’t supposed to matter. Chad was just a mark, and his friend was just a person some other people wanted to get their hands on. She’d done everything asked of her, working her way into Chad ’s life, earning his trust, making him love her. Being there when the moment her employers said would arrive finally did. She knew she should continue to be cold and emotionless about it, just wait until the opportunity arose to slip away in the middle of the night, but…
The damnedest thing.
She liked Chad. There was no use denying it. The line between playacting and reality had become blurred at some indistinct point. The moments before placing that phone call earlier had been like walking up to the very edge of a high cliff and deciding whether to jump. She had taken that leap after only a minor hesitation, believing her second thoughts would evaporate with the deed done.
But those thoughts were still swirling around in her head, taunting her with images and fantasies of possible futures that could no longer be. They were all the more maddening for the obvious impossibility of taking it all back.
What’s done is done, she thought, silently addressing her reflection. Just leave it be and when you board that flight tomorrow morning start working on forgetting there ever was a Chad Robbins.
Right.
She had a feeling that was going to fall into the category of things easier said than done.
And as if she didn’t have enough to fret about, there was the matter of this mystery man. Chad clearly liked and respected the man a great deal, which added yet another layer of regret to her betrayal. There was something so naggingly familiar about the man. So she’d decided to eavesdrop on their conversation, kicking off her shoes and padding on her bare feet to a spot in the hallway just outside the den.
They had talked of small things at first. But the tone of the conversation abruptly shifted when Jim at last told Chad why he had come to see him after all this time. Allyson’s eyes widened and her heart skipped a beat as he talked of danger on the horizon. Some survivors of the House of Blood had gone missing and another had been found brutally murdered. He urged Chad to “go underground.”
Allyson had been able to bear no more of it, retreating from her eavesdropping position and heading in a hurry to the spare bedroom. There she retrieved from the closet the bag she’d packed months ago. It was a big black canvas bag stuffed full of clothes very unlike the fashionable wardrobe she’d adopted for her big role as Chad’s love interest. Tucked away in a zippered side pouch was the $10,000 cash advance she’d been given for the job. Her getaway money. Another pouch contained an array of flawlessly produced false credentials and ID, including a passport, a Tennessee driver’s license, a birth certificate, and a card identifying her as a consultant for something called Franklin Security Solutions. All bore the name Jennifer Campbell.
Chad likely would invite his friend to spend the night, and she could too easily imagine the man stumbling upon the stuffed traveling bag. A man like that would operate at a base-level of paranoia every day. He would open the bag, see the fake ID and documents, and…so she stashed the bag at the back of her own closet in the bedroom she shared with Chad.
Well. It was taken care of now. No one had any reason to suspect she was working with the bad guys. She turned away from her reflection and returned to the bedroom. She went to the bed, watched Chad ’s sleeping form. He was snoring lightly. She prayed for him to turn over and see her in the expensive Victoria ’s Secret lingerie they’d picked out together from a catalog. It would arouse him. It always did. A good, energetic fucking might be just the thing to get him talking again. She pictured herself in his embrace, their bodies naked and covered with a sheen of sweat in the afterglow of love. The intimacy of the moment leading him to confide in her again, sharing his fears and telling her of the danger Jim claimed they were facing. And it would then be so easy to fuel the fires of that fear, manipulating him with her own show of terror.
They would run.
Rouse Jim, grab a few necessities, and get the hell out of Dodge.
Chad shifted position on the bed, rolling from his side onto his back. Allyson held her breath for a hopeful, tense moment.
He didn’t wake.
Damn.
Allyson pulled on a tiny silk robe and slipped out of the bedroom. As she moved down the hallway toward the living room, she paused at the doorway to the guest bedroom. The door was partly open, but the interior was dark. She could just vaguely make out the sleeping form of Mr. Jim, Lazarus, or whatever his name really was. She heard an intake of breath and thought for a moment that he might be awake. Awake and watching her watch him. Her heart raced at the thought. Without waiting to verify whether the man was awake or asleep, she hurried past the darkened doorway.
She retrieved Chad ’s laptop from his office and carried it into the living room. She settled into the plush sectional sofa and propped the little computer on her lap. She opened it and tapped the power button. The computer came out of hibernation mode to present her with a screen that offered the option of signing on to her desktop or Chad ’s. She moved the cursor to Chad ’s name and clicked on it. The desktop icons quickly loaded and she signed on to Chad ’s AOL account. She opened his mailbox and scrolled through the list of e-mails, looking for anything that might be from someone looking to tip him to Allyson’s true role here. She couldn’t imagine who might be in a position to do that, but paranoia drove her to periodically check his messages on the off-chance anything that needed intercepting did show up.
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she clicked over to his saved mail folder and opened the two-year-old e-mail from Dream Weaver. She read through it again, even though she knew the words by heart. And she felt again the familiar stab of ridiculous jealousy. Ridiculous because the woman seemed to be gone from Chad ’s life forever. And doubly ridiculous given the true nature of her own relationship with Chad.
But the feeling was there nonetheless.
The note read:
Chad,
Yes, I know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me. Yes, I know you’re worried. I can tell because there’s about a gazillion e-mails jamming my inbox. I don’t even need to read them. The subject headers tell me all I need to know.
Sorry if that sounds cold. Sorry if I sound like a bitch. But you need to let go and move on with your life. Stop pining for me, because I’m telling you right now, once and for all, I am never coming back.
I don’t say these things to hurt you. I honestly don’t. It hurts me to say them this way. I’m trying to be forceful and firm-yes, bitchy-because I need you to accept the way things are. What we had isbroken and cannot be fixed. I’m broken. I love you with all my heart, more than I could ever love anyone else, but our lives are on very different paths.
Paths, Chad, that will never cross again.
This is the last time you will ever hear from me.Please don’t reply to this message. I’m cancelling this account and it will just bounce back to you.
Have a nice life, Chad. Please find someone nice and forget about me.
Goodbye,
Dream
Allyson closed the e-mail and clicked out of Chad ’s AOL account.
Dream Weaver. As usual, Allyson’s blood boiled at the thought of that gorgeous woman and her ridiculous name. That fucking cunt. Dream had put Chad through so much drama and strife. He always swore he was over her. But why, then, would he continue to save a two-year-old e-mail?
Cunt. Fucking cunt.
She’d been asked to keep an eye out for her, too. She wished the bitch had been the one to show up tonight. She would’ve called hell down on her without a second thought. But she’d been told from the beginning that Lazarus, as they still called him, was far more likely to one day grace Chad ’s door. And…
Allyson frowned.
Wait a minute…
Chad ’s name for the elusive Lazarus was Jim. It didn’t require a lot of thought to conclude that Jim was far more likely the man’s real name. Allyson clicked over to Google Web search and entered the following:
“Lazarus Jim House of Blood”
She clicked on the first search result, a two-year-old Chattanooga Herald story that recounted everything then known about what had happened at that remote mountain house. One paragraph stood out immediately. It told of the wild Internet speculation about the true identities of the men known as the Master and Lazarus. One theory in particular made Allyson gasp. She’d heard it before, of course, but had forgotten about it or dismissed it as obvious nonsense.
Now, however, she wasn’t so sure.
She clicked back over to the image search tool and with trembling fingers typed in the name of a dead rock star. The images of this man were plentiful. She scrolled through them before clicking on a thumbnail image of the man at his most grizzled-looking. His face was bloated from alcohol overindulgence. His hair was a big brown mane and he had a thick, bushy beard. The hair was shorter now and the beard was gone, but the penetrating eyes and high cheekbones were the same.
“Fuck-”
Jim. Lazarus. That voice…no wonder it’d seemed so naggingly familiar.
Allyson clicked out of the browser window and closed the laptop. She sat there in a state of numb astonishment for several more minutes.
Then a noise from outside the house-a metallic thunk-snapped her out of it. She set the laptop on the coffee table and surged to her feet, her heart thumping in her chest as she moved hurriedly through the living room and into the foyer. Adjacent to the foyer was a small sitting room lined with bookcases. She slipped into this room and moved to a big window that overlooked the front lawn. She moved the curtain back slightly and peered outside.
A big, dark-colored van was parked on the other side of the street. As she watched, two men clad entirely in black moved away from the van and crossed the street. Light from the streetlamps glinted off something shiny in the lead man’s hand. A pistol. Allyson’s breath caught in her throat. She made her shaking hand come away from the curtain. Without thinking about what she was doing, she raced out of the sitting room and headed back through the living room at full speed. Then through the kitchen to the door that led to the garage. She yanked the door open and reached for the light switch. Her hand froze on the switch.
No, she thought. Can’t let them see light.
She hurried down the three steps to the garage floor, making her way around in the darkness by memory and feel. Her bare right foot landed on something sharp and she let out a squeal of pain. But she made herself keep going. The men in black and their guns would have reached the house by now. She didn’t have much time. Her heart felt like it might explode out of her chest at any moment.
Then she reached the back of the garage and her hands moved over the dim shapes of tools hanging from a neatly arranged set of pegs. She dislodged a hammer that landed on the cement floor with a loud clatter. A fresh jolt of terror flashed through her at the sound. But it was nothing she could do anything about. The men in black had heard it or they hadn’t. Her eyes at last discerned the shape of the axe on one of the highest pegs. She seized its handle and y anked it off the peg.
She was back in the kitchen when she heard a soft tinkle of breaking glass. The sound was shockingly close and she realized the men had scaled the fence to make a rear entry. A glint of something shiny at the far end of the kitchen seized her attention. A big hand was reaching through a shattered pane toward the handle of one of the doors that opened to the patio and backyard.
Allyson moved to the wall and edged toward the door, blood from the wound to her foot making a slick trail on the kitchen tiles. As she neared the door, she adjusted her grip on the axe handle and raised it over her head. She held her breath and tried to make herself be calm.
Why are you doing this!? a panicked part of her mind railed at her. You only had to let it happen and collect your fucking money! You’re fucking crazy to be doing this!
Allyson knew that. And she had no answer for the question. All she knew was it was too late to do anything but what she was doing right now.
She was committed.
The man’s hand grasped the handle, found the lock, and turned it.
The door popped open.
One man moved through the opening. He was dressed all in black and his face was smudged with black makeup. A pistol was gripped tight in his hand. Another man attired in exactly the same fashion followed him into the kitchen.
Neither man sensed her presence until it was too late.
Allyson stepped forward and brought the axe down, the finely honed blade chopping through the second man’s wrist with ease. Blood jetted from the stump. Hand and gun struck the floor. The man screamed as the first man into the house whirled around. He gaped in astonishment at his comrade’s mutilated arm. Then he saw Allyson and began to raise his own gun.
But the blade of the axe flashed and cleaved through his neck before he could aim the gun at her. He reflexively squeezed off a shot that blew another pane of glass out of the rear door. Blood pumped out of his severed jugular vein in great gouts and he dropped dead to the floor. The other man reeled about the kitchen, then reached for his severed hand and gun with his good hand.
Allyson brought the blade down yet again, planting it between his shoulder blades and making him cry out again. But it was a weak, dying sound. She yanked the axe out. Blood bubbled from the wound and the man cried out again. He mewled and crawled a few feet away from her, his right arm spewing blood in an arcing fountain as it flopped about uselessly.
Then there were more voices. Shouts and the sound of approaching footsteps.
The kitchen abruptly flooded with light.
Someone gasped.
Allyson blinked at the stark sight of all tha t bright red blood sprayed all over the kitchen. She looked at the dying man. A pale length of ragged bone protruded from his bleeding wrist. The man looked up at her with drowsy, condemning eyes.
Allyson dropped the axe.
Then she stumbled.
Fell.
Landed in someone’s outstretched arms.
Fade to black.
Giselle awoke to the sensation of something crawling up her leg. Something about the feel of it triggered an instant feeling of revulsion. It was fuzzy and many-legged, a large spider probably. She swatted at it and missed, the charred stump at the end of her right wrist brushing uselessly over the still-moving creature. Her mind still fuzzy from sleep, it took her a moment to remember that she no longer had a hand to swat with. But apparently her nerve endings still hadn’t accepted this awful reality and continued to taunt her with this damnable phantom limb sensation.
The fuzzy spider continued its progress up her inner thigh. Its insinuating presence on her bare flesh felt like the light touch of a would-be rapist stroking the sleeping form of an intended victim. The concept of violation galvanized Giselle. There was no telling what the thing on her leg really was. Perhaps it outwardly resembled a spider-though she couldn’t verify that in the absolute blackness of her suspended prison-but it could very well be something else entirely, a deadly magical construct conjured by Ms. Wickman. She thought about the deliberate way it seemed to be moving toward her vagina and imagined it entering her, saw it expanding and transforming itself inside her, becoming something hideous and bloated.
And as she thought these things, the big spider’s body did seem to swell slightly. Giselle’s breath caught in her throat as she realized her suspicions were true. Though conjured by the evil woman’s magic, the creature was all too real. She suspected Ms. Wickman had designed the thing to adjust its shape and appearance according to its victim’s worst imaginings. And the slight swelling while it was still outside of her was a powerful indicator of the scope of its shape-shifting abilities. Once it was inside her and able to directly tap into her mind and feed on her worst fears…
Giselle focused every bit of will still available to her and worked to suppress the phantom limb sensation. The effort seemed to yield results. A dim tingle remained, but now she felt the low throb at the end her scarred stump. She concentrated harder still and jabbed at the creature with the stump. The stump skidded past the creature on the first attempt, just brushing its fuzzy legs. The thing was mere inches from her pubic thatch and was still moving. Panic rose in her throat like an exhalation of poison gas. She sat up straight and jabbed downward. The suspended cage swung slightly on its chain, but she made direct contact this time. Her stump pinned its body against her leg. She felt it trying to escape from the pressure, exerting more strength than so tiny a thing should possess. Giselle gritted her teeth and pushed down with all her strength. Instinct and revulsion made her want to knock the thing off her body, but she knew she had to kill it while she had the chance.
The creature swelled beneath her stump, its legs growing longer and thicker. Giselle leaned forward, applying upper body leverage. Then there was a squeal as the thing’s body burst and a thick, gooey substance exploded against her flesh. Its legs twitched another time and stopped moving. Giselle gagged and flicked the tattered body away. Coated in goo, the thing’s body clung to the cage for a moment, then fell between two of the steel bars and landed with a sickening plop on the stone floor.
Giselle’s chest was heaving. Sudden tears erupted from her eyes and spilled in hot trails down her cheeks. She pawed at the mass of goo coating the center of her body, wiping as much of it away with her stumps as she could. The phantom limb sensation returned and she made a mess of the job, spread the goo over a wider area of her body. She managed to gather a fair amount of the vile stuff on her stumps and flick it away, but without hands it was impossible to clean herself thoroughly.
The room abruptly grew colder and her tears turned to frost on her cheeks. The atmosphere in the room was clearly being artificially manipulated. Yet another spell constructed by Ms. Wickman, likely designed to start working should Giselle somehow manage to thwart the shape-shifter. Knowing the cold was a product of magic did nothing to alleviate the spell’s effects. The temperature plunged several more degrees and Giselle moved into a corner of the cage, drew her legs up to her torso, and wrapped what was left of her arms around them. Her body shivered uncontrollably in the deepening cold, making the cage sway again on its chain.
And though they shamed her and added to her discomfort, her tears continued to flow, etching icy paths down her cheeks. She was so frustrated and afraid, more afraid than she’d been in years. More than that, she felt powerless. She still couldn’t accept that this had happened to her. A few years earlier she’d been at the height of her powers, the Master’s mountain kingdom destroyed through her efforts and years of patient planning.
In the aftermath of that triumph, she used her deep knowledge of magic to build a comfortable place for herself in the world. She returned to the home of her youth, Boston, where she was able to manipulate wealthy, powerful people in her special way, reaching into their minds and convincing them that it was their own idea to hand over large sums of money to the beautiful and tantalizing young girl. Money to buy a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood. She led an easy, comfortable existence in that big house, her every need and desire attended to by a large staff of well-paid and loyal servants.
Giselle’s teeth chattered as she recalled with dim bitterness the betrayal of one of these ostensibly trustworthy employees. It was to have been a lovely evening out at the opera. One of the world’s leading tenors was performing, and she’d managed to procure choice seats and backstage access. Her regular driver, the impeccably mannered and attired Mr. Thorne, pulled up to the mansion that evening in a limo. She recalled how he’d smiled and bowed slightly to her as she came down the mansion’s steps in her expensive evening gown, a fake fur shawl wrapped about her bare, slim shoulders. She’d felt not the slightest twinge of alarm as Mr. Thorne opened one of the limo’s rear doors, allowing her a glimpse of the legs of an elegant woman and two men wearing tuxedos.
These would be her companions for the evening. Her neighbor Angelica Anderson and her husband Henry, and her own date, Robert McDowell, a financier who’d been one of the many contributors to her still-growing fortune. As she approached the open door, she gathered up the hem of her gown and dipped her head in preparation for sliding into the car.
Then she froze, her eyes going wide and her heart stopping for an instant as she saw that the woman inside the limo was not Angelica Anderson. She was Ms. Wickman, flashing a mad grin as she laughed at Giselle’s shocked expression. The men with her were two wild-eyed boys barely into their early twenties. Giselle tried to back away, but then she felt Mr. Thorne’s firm hand at the small of her back.
His voice was fierce and hot against her ear, full of venom and so unlike anything she’d ever heard from the proper British man, “You’re not going anywhere, cunt.”
Then he shoved her inside and the hands of her enemies were upon her. She was too stunned to fight back instantly-as she should have-and by the time it occurred to her to strike at them with her magic it was too late, her powers blunted by the elaborate web of counterspells spun by Ms. Wickman. And when one of the men produced the machete from an inner pocket of his tux, Giselle knew that the battle was lost.
She cringed at the memory of the heavy blade punching through her wrist, the awful grind of steel on bone, then the blade passing into the upholstery beneath. And her hand coming away from her wrist, the explosion of blood across black seat leather. She screamed and thrashed, to no avail. And through it all remained the wild and desperate belief that one or more of her many servants would come running to her rescue.
It didn’t happen.
Her assailants were able to go about their grisly work unimpeded and unhurried.
Ms. Wickman raised the blade again.
And one of the men holding her down thrust his crotch against her ass as steel chopped through flesh again.
She’d been sure she would bleed to death there in the back of the limo, but then Ms. Wickman calmly accepted something passed to her from outside the car by Mr. Thorne. There was a glint of light on some metal object. Then she discerned the cylindrical shape of the object and knew at once they weren’t here to kill her after all. They wanted her to suffer, though. There was a whoosh and the acetylene torch grew a bright blue and red tongue of flame. Another hoarse exhalation of purest terror tore out of her as the flame was lowered to her violated flesh. And yet another, shriller scream as the flame made contact and burned brighter, cooking her flesh as the limo’s interior filled with the aromas of smoke and burning meat.
The flame burned and burned and it seemed like the torture would go on forever. Then there was a click and the whooshing sound stopped. Giselle saw her hands, one on the seat next to Ms. Wickman, the other on the shiny black floormat. A glimpse of protruding bone made her stomach knot. Her blood was everywhere. Splattered across the upholstery and all over the tinted windows. A zigzag pattern of coagulating gore across the front of Ms. Wickman’s black dress. Everywhere.
Instinct caused her to aim a strike of lethal dark energy at the grinning madwoman, but the anticipated blast fizzled and the energy dispersed. Giselle had forgotten about Ms. Wickman’s web of blocking spells. And the removal of her hands had eliminated her most powerful method of focusing and unleashing magical energy.
Ms. Wickman laughed. “Your power is gone and you are mine now, you pathetic whore.”
And Giselle had choked back the tears long enough to say, “Damn you.”
Ms. Wickman’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “Oh, that’s right. The former mute can speak now. Bonus.” Her smile vanished then. She seized a handful of Giselle’s long black hair, twisting it and eliciting a yelp. “Righteous hypocrite. What do you deserve? How many people did you torture and kill while in the Master’s employ, hmm? Including your own brother, as I recall.”
Giselle didn’t reply because the answer to Ms. Wickman’s question was obvious. And because the pain was coming back, overwhelming the temporary numbness of shock. Instead she’d said, “Just kill me. Be done with it.”
Ms. Wickman threw her head back and laughed again, long and heartily, until she was almost crying. “Oh, you of all people should know better than that, Giselle. We’re taking you to a special place, dear. You’ll be there for a very, very long time and your suffering will go on forever.”
And so she was brought to this place, many hundreds of miles from Boston.
Despair overwhelmed her as it became clear Ms. Wickman had truly mastered the most advanced forms of dark magic, working to appease the death gods, drawing immense power from them through daily blood sacrifices. The scent of blood-fresh and flowing-was strong in the air.
Giselle knew she would ultimately be offered as a sacrifice to the death gods. Her sadist’s soul would be particularly prized by them. She would die.
Unless…
Yes. There was one avenue yet left to her. It was a slim hope at best. And any possibility of success would hinge on a price perhaps too heavy to bear, even given the grim reality she was facing already. She hesitated, contemplating what manner of unspeakable atrocity might be asked of her in exchange for the help she needed. Time moved forward. She felt the minutes un-spooling like the ticking of the Doomsday Clock. Death was coming for her soon. She could almost hear the Reaper’s footsteps on the stone floor. She saw him in her mind, raising a gnarled hand to point an icy finger at her.
Then the vision of the Deathbringer dissolved and was replaced by an image of Ms. Wickman’s mad grin as the cleaver separated Giselle’s hands from her body. A low sound like the warning growl of a wounded animal rumbled out of her throat.
She brought her right forearm to her mouth. The taste of her own flesh on her tongue made her pause for a moment, anticipation of pain momentarily freezing her resolve. Then she sank her teeth into her arm, driving them deep, shredding flesh and filling her mouth with salty blood. She drank the blood, drawing it down into her stomach as she continued to slurp more of it from the wound. Then she pitched forward and pressed her face against the cold metal bars of the cage floor. She opened her mouth and expelled blood, allowing it to coat the metal. The pain was bad, but she ignored it and initiated the blood ritual by repeating the phrases she’d memorized years earlier. Rhythmic phrases from an alien tongue. A chant. A summoning spell.
Ms. Wickman had removed her ability to wield magic as a weapon, but she had not deprived Giselle of her knowledge. She had one ally among the death gods. A rogue who had aided her efforts to overthrow the Master. He would help her again. If only she could reach him…
She placed the tip of her tongue against the cold metal and tasted her own blood again. Then she focused what psychic engergy she could and sent a message into the wall of darkness and the ether beyond.
Azaroth, I beseech you.
Another taste of blood, metallic and tart.
I offer you my blood. My pain. Please come to my aid.
I will do anything.
Nothing.
Despair again began to encroach on her thoughts, threatening the necessary focus and spiritual purity of the ritual. She tasted her blood yet again, used the feeble power it contained to focus her wavering will one last time.
And the message went out again: Azaroth, I implore you…
Then she felt it, the death god’s presence manifesting at first as a warmth that allowed her temporary respite from the freezing atmosphere of the torture chamber. She drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, forcing herself to relax. And as she relaxed, a bright, warm light displaced the darkness of her prison, enveloping her in an ethereal radiance that felt like a loving embrace.
Something dark swirled in the midst of all that brightness, a cloud of energy that became luminescent and began to mold itself into a humanoid shape. The entity was forging a human appearance, one that exactly replicated the form Giselle remembered from her prior experience with this being.
When the process was complete, Azaroth smiled at her with his human mask.
Ah, Giselle. I see you have need of my assistance again.
Tears misted Giselle’s vision. The spark of hope became a flame.
I do. My enemies have taken me. They have maimed me. And I fear what they’ve done to me is only the beginning. They will not rest until they have done the same to all those who rose up against the Master.
Azaroth’s expression changed subtly. His eyes continued to glow with that lovely radiance, but the set of his features shifted to something approximating a frown. You speak of the woman who served the Master and her new set of followers.
Giselle gathered her courage. Here was where things might get tricky. Yes. She chopped my hands off to blunt my magic and imprisoned me in a dark place. I’ll do anything you ask of me if you can help me.
Azaroth’s features shifted again, displaying a fluid grace that made the god look like something from an animated motion picture. He was smiling again, but there was a hint of something very dark behind the expression.
What you ask will require a sacrifice.
Giselle nodded. Of course. Anything.
Azaroth was silent a moment, his not-quite-real-looking brows knitting in apparent concentration. Then his expression became solemn. I can restore you, Giselle. Make your body whole again so that you may combat your enemy on equal footing. But to justify this I will need you to do something that will wound your soul very deeply.
Giselle suspected what was coming. She held her breath and nodded tensely.
There is a man who is special to you.
Giselle thought, Oh, Eddie…
Azaroth paused for a beat, hearing her thought. Yes, the very one. I will grant you temporary restoration and temporal transport to his current location. You will be there just long enough to kill him.
And though her heart was pierced to the core by the thought of murdering the one person left in the world for whom she felt genuine affection, Giselle knew there was no other choice. She alone possessed even a slim chance of defeating Ms. Wickman. A part of her hated Azaroth for forcing her to make this difficult choice, but the feeling was muted by the knowledge that this was merely the nature of the death gods, this exchange of blood and breath for aid.
And once this has been done…I will be whole again?
The death god’s expression darkened slightly. As I have said. You know I keep my bargains. Do what is asked of you and you will be more than whole again. The cast of his features shifted again, projecting a shimmering glow as he smiled. You will be stronger than before. More powerful. You will be a fearsome adversary for the one who took you, her equal in every way.
Giselle thought again of Ms. Wickman’s many vile transgressions against her. The memories stoked her anger anew.
I am ready to do what you ask.
The god laughed, a sound that echoed like rolling thunder in this place between worlds. I believe that you are. And now…go from here.
His words seemed to shift the fabric of reality around her, lifting her and moving her at astonishing speed through a place of swirling shadows and strange colors. The journey passed in utter silence, but ended with an audible pop that signaled the end of a temporal displacement.
She blinked against a flash of light. The real, human world reconstructed itself around her in the space of that blink. Then she was standing in the empty kitchen of a woman’s apartment. She based this supposition on the general cleanliness and the array of frilly touches and knick-knacks. The sound of a television tuned to a talk show emanated from another room. Giselle felt a strange tingle and lifted her arms to look at her freshly restored hands. She flexed her fingers, marveling for a moment at the ease of movement and the smooth, unblemished flesh connecting her wrists to her hands.
Azaroth had been true to his word. And now it was left to Giselle to fulfill her end of the bargain. She heard voices from that other room, one male and one female. One achingly familiar and one not.
Giselle opened a likely-looking drawer and found a carving knife with a broad, flat blade. A gleaming and very, very sharp blade.
With a final sigh of regret, she walked out of the kitchen toward the source of the voices-trying all the while to block out the underlying hints of contentment and happiness she sensed there.
The ground in the woods was still wet from the recent rains. The topsoil yielded easily to shovel blades. The going got rougher approximately a foot down, but between the two of them they were able to dig a grave of acceptable size in just over an hour.
Marcy tossed her shovel aside and climbed out of the hole. “That’s enough.”
Michael palmed sweat from his forehead and wiped his hand on his dirty jeans. More swollen droplets of sweat gathered at the ends of his eyebrows. “You won’t get any argument from me.” He threw his own shovel aside and followed Marcy out of the hole. He was breathing heavily, unused to such heavy physical exertion. “That’s, what? Maybe four feet deep?”
“It’s enough.” Marcy screwed the top off a water bottle and drank deeply from it. She’d changed into jeans and a Bella Morte T-shirt for the job and they were soaked from her exertions. But she felt good. It was a strange thing. A woman she intended to kill was tied to her bed back at the house. The dead body of one of her friends was in the same room. Her other friends were freaking out. She should be beside herself with panic. But she wasn’t. She was as calm as a monk in the midst of prayers.
Michael straightened and brushed more sweat from his forehead with the back of an arm. He was shirtless. Sweat glistened on his pale torso, the diffused early morning sunlight making him look like a ghost caught in its slanting rays. Marcy watched him and felt a stir of libido. He was slim and reasonably good-looking, at least compared to the rest of them. And he was smarter than the others. Too smart, maybe. Unlike the rest of them, he didn’t just accept her every pronouncement as gospel. But maybe she could bring him more firmly under her thumb if she fuc ked him.
He looked at her and frowned, seeing the glint in her eyes. He shifted his eyes away from her, studied some vague point in the middle distance. Marcy supposed he’d mistaken her expression for something other than ardor. Which was understandable. He was very afraid of her. They all were at this point.
Marcy moved closer to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Is there something you want to say to me, Michael? Something that worries you…”
Michael jerked at her touch. She could feel the tension thrumming through his body. “I just think this is a rotten idea.”
She squeezed his shoulder and moved another step closer. “You shouldn’t worry. Everything will be okay, I promise.”
He was shaking now. “No. I really don’t understand why we’re doing this. We should’ve called 911 last night. Or maybe just taken Sonia to the ER our selves.”
Marcy didn’t reply to this right away. She was too enthralled by the live-wire trembling of the boy’s body, which seemed to grow more pronounced by the moment. She moved her hand from his shoulder to the small of his back. Michael drew in a sharp, involuntary breath. Marcy leaned against him and slipped her other arm around his back. A small sound that might have been a whimper emerged from his mouth.
Marcy smiled. “Are you a virgin, Michael?”
The sound he produced this time was louder, somewhere between a moan and a whimper. “I’m…that’s…what’s that got to do with anything?”
He abruptly broke out of her embrace and stalked away to a point several feet away from her. He pointed a shaking finger at her. “We can’t do this. It’s wrong. Sonia deserves better than being buried in the fucking woods. We need to let someone know what happened to her. We don’t even have to tell the truth, Marcy. We’ll get rid of that bitch you had us grab first, dump her in this hole, and everyone will figure Sonia had some kind of hemorrhage.”
He lowered the accusing finger, but his eyes remained bright and glowering.
Marcy put a hand to her face, rubbed at her tired eyes with thumb and forefinger. A dull ache had flared behind her forehead. Her own rage was building, rising up within her like a black storm cloud. She fought to keep a grip on her emotions. Nothing good could come of a fight with Michael. Things were too precarious as they stood. On an objective level, she knew the course of action she’d chosen wasn’t a smart or rational one, but instinct had driven her down this path. This was the way she wanted things to be. The way she needed them to be. It felt like the first step down the road to her ultimate destiny (though she had no clue what that might be).
So fuck it.
Michael would not ruin this for her. No one would.
She lowered her hand and saw Michael still glaring at her. Her own expression hardened, the corners of her mouth curling slightly in a humorless smile. Michael’s brow furrowed. His eyes reflected fear.
Good.
She darted toward him, closing the distance between them before he could even consider retreat. She drove a fist into the softest part of his stomach, making him splutter and double over. She crashed the same fist against the side of his head and he pitched backward onto his ass, landing at the side of the open, empty grave. He instinctively sought to brace himself, but one of his grasping hands reached into the hole and offset his balance. He tumbled into the hole and landed with a thump at the bottom. Marcy picked up one of the shovels and moved to the edge of the hole. She turned the shovel around, holding it like a baseball bat while she waited for the boy to climb back out. She heard him sit up and groan. She tightened her grip on the handle.
Michael exhaled heavily and groaned again. “Jesus, Marcy…that was pretty fucking uncalled for. I’m only trying to make you see some goddamned sense.”
Marcy made her voice soft and placating. “I know. And I’m sorry. I got carried away. Now come up here so we can talk things out. Maybe you’re right about everything. Maybe I’m being overemotional and crazy about things.”
Michael grunted. “Ya think. Jesus, but I’m glad to hear you talking sense for a change. Okay, I’m coming up now.”
She heard him shifting position; then he got to his feet with a groan of effort. He blinked and frowned at the sight of Marcy holding the shovel. He remained perplexed as she lifted her arms and brought the shovel blade around. It was as if he simply couldn’t fathom the idea of Marcy doing this to him. Only at the last possible instant did it occur to him to lunge away from the arc of the blade. He almost made it, but the tip of the shovel blade clipped the side of his face and sent him spinning back down into the hole.
Marcy jumped in after him, planting a foot at either side of his prone form. Michael groaned and looked up at her through a mist of tears. He still couldn’t believe what was happening to him. The dumb bastard. Marcy adjusted her grip on the shovel handle, taking it by the base and holding it in front of her like a jackhammer. Michael squealed and tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. The back of his head connected with moist earth and he stopped moving. His mouth opened to issue a last plea for mercy.
Then Marcy squatted and drove the shovel blade into his throat. A fountain of blood erupted around the dirty blade, and Marcy watched the gory cascade with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. Michael bucked beneath her and flailed at the shovel handle. He had to know he was doomed by now, but he was fighting her with everything he had. She leaned forward and used upper body leverage to drive the blade deeper into his throat. The grind of steel on bone made her stomach lurch, but she kept bearing down and finally Michael died.
She swallowed hard and let go of the shovel handle. Her heart was racing and her breathing was shallow. She stared at Michael’s very still face and tried to make herself feel something other than numbness. The strange positive buzz of before seemed to have at least temporarily deserted her. She stared into the boy’s unseeing eyes and tried to discern some hint of the human being he’d been, but whatever he’d possessed that had made him uniquely Michael was gone forever.
And she’d caused that. She was a killer. She thought about the bum in Overton Park the previous summer, recalling vividly the way he’d dropped and not moved after the second blow to his head with the heavy wine bottle. They’d taken his booze and pitiful handful of pocket change. Marcy remembered the way the dark blood had oozed from the gash at the back of his head to stain the grass beneath him. She was almost positive he hadn’t been breathing when they’d left him. There’d never been any verification of the homeless man’s death. But Marcy’s gut told her she’d become a murderer for the first time that summer evening.
This was different in so many meaningful ways. The old wino had been little more than a walking casualty anyway, a ruined shell of a man no one could possibly care about, as evidenced by the silence of the local media on the matter. It was as if he’d never existed at all. But she’d known Michael since childhood. Had watched him grow up and struggle to fit in before gravitating to her little clique of outcasts. She knew his likes and dislikes. His favorite bands and books. She knew each member of his family by name. In a way killing Michael was sort of like killing family.
She touched his face, stroked his cooling cheek. “I’m sorry this happened, Michael. If only you’d been quiet and fallen in line like the rest of them…” As she said the words, the vague sense of purpose-of destiny-she’d felt earlier reasserted itself. “I did what I had to do, damn you. Wherever you are now, I hope you know that. But I’m sorry anyway, okay?”
The dead boy said nothing.
Marcy got to her feet and hauled herself out of the hole.
Then she noticed for the first time that the front of her clothes was splattered with sticky, coagulating blood. There was more gore on her hands and arms. Shit, it was everywhere. She’d have a hell of a time explaining all that blood to everyone back at the house. Then there was the matter of Michael’s absence. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to put two and two together.
Dammit!
Marcy flicked blood from her hands and shook her head in disgust. This was what she got for acting rashly and not thinking things through. But the burst of self-directed anger soon dissipated. She’d done this thing and there was no way she could take it back. She could only move forward and maybe devise a way out of this mess on the fly.
She spied the pile of freshly turned earth next to the grave and had an idea. She grabbed a shovel and dug into the pile, working feverishly to return the earth to the hole. She stopped when she reached the concealed layer of topsoil at the bottom, the damp earth that was nearly like mud. She knelt next to the diminished pile and scooped up handfuls of the dark soil. And she smeared the damp dirt across the front of her shirt. The mud blended nicely with the blood, effectively obscuring the gore without cleansing it, which would have to be good enough for now. She smeared more handfuls of mud over the front of her jeans. Using the remaining water from her bottle, she was able to remove most of the dried blood that clung to her forearms.
She would look more of a mess than she should, she supposed. As for Michael, she would tell the others he’d gone for a walk. The fiction should buy her some time, maybe enough to clean up and concoct a better story.
Satisfied that she’d done all she could do to cover up what had happened, she turned away from the half-filled grave and began the short trek out of the woods. She soon emerged through a line of trees and entered the large field behind her house. The field was overgrown with weeds and was dotted here and there with ancient, discarded farm equipment. Marcy trudged through the weeds toward the house, which sat on a hill a quarter mile away.
She and her sister had inherited the property a year ago, after their parents were killed when their Subaru stalled on some train tracks. They were drunk and messed up on some other stuff. As usual. With the radio blasting, maybe. And so they probably never heard the blaring horn of the locomotive that eventually plowed into them, crushing them like bugs in a can. Marcy initially had a vague notion about reviving the property as a farming enterprise. But she’d soon recognized the idea as foolhardy. She wasn’t up to all the work it would require anyway.
Most people would love to have a place of their own that was paid for, but Marcy mostly found it to be a pain in the ass. She was bad at remembering to pay things on time. And there was so much to remember. Property taxes, water bills, power bills, and miscellaneous upkeep expenses out the goddamned wazoo. She’d already squandered much of the money her parents had left behind, of which there’d not been very much, and there was no new money coming in. The prospect of having to get a job filled her with dread and made her want to bolt. She wondered if the crazy things that had happened since the summer-the murder of the bum, the abduction of the woman, and Michael’s slaying-were symptoms of some kind of self-destructive downward spiral. Then she thought about that some more and laughed. The laughter was manic, verging on hysterical.
She reached the rear door of the house and-as silently as possible-let herself into the empty kitchen.
She heard muffled but obviously agitated voices. The sound seemed to be coming from the living room. Moving as stealthily as possible, she crossed the kitchen and entered the hallway that led to her bedroom. She paused at the archway that led to the living room. The voices suddenly stilled. Not that it mattered. She’d heard enough to know they were talking about her. And not in a positive way.
She glanced in and smiled weakly at their apprehensive faces. “We’re about done. Michael’s gone for a walk, but he should be back shortly. I’m gonna get cleaned up and then we can talk everything out, okay?”
Ellen was sitting away from the others. She was on the floor in a corner of the room, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her eyes were full of tears when she looked at her sister. Then she frowned, noticing the mud on Marcy’s clothes. “Are you… okay?”
Marcy made her smile go brighter and nodded. “Yes. Absolutely. Cheer up, little girl. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
The smile fell off her face as she turned away from them and continued down the hallway. Her room was at the very end of the hallway. The door was still closed. No one-not even Marcy-had managed to work up the nerve to venture into the room again. And no wonder. The woman bound to her bed possessed some level of telekinetic or supernatural ability. Marcy experienced a chill as she recalled the way the woman had reached into her mind and temporarily shut down her motor control. She wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of being in the strange woman’s presence again. But there was just no way around it-she needed something in the room.
As she neared the door, she detected a stench emanating from the other side. The source, of course, was Sonia’s corpse, which remained exactly where it had fallen several hours earlier. Marcy paused at the door, her hand hovering shakily over the doorknob. She put her ear against the thin wood and listened for any indication that the woman was awake. She heard nothing at first, but then detected the low sound of very shallow breathing. Not giving herself a chance to think about it any further, Marcy gripped the doorknob and turned it, rushed into the room and closed the door behind her.
Her gaze went immediately to the woman tied to her bed. She was lying very still. Her head was turned to one side, a sheaf of jet-black hair falling across her face like a veil. Her chest rose and fell very slightly, and the softest of snores confirmed that she was asleep.
Marcy hurried to the dresser to the left of the bed. She knelt and opened the bottom drawer, brushing aside some puttering-around-the-house raggedy clothes to find the L-shaped lunk of metal concealed at the bottom. The 9mm Glock felt good in her hands, the molded plastic grip seeming to adhere to her flesh like a living thing. She stood up and looked at the sleeping woman. It would be so easy to kill her now and remove one big fucking problem once and for all.
But the others would hear the shot and freak. Maybe run.
She swallowed hard.
Just do it.
“Right.”
She went to the door and opened it smoothly, stepping back into the hallway with as much stealth as she could muster. She was midway to the living room archway when Michael’s cousin stepped into the hallway, saw her holding the gun, and opened his mouth wide.
Marcy raised the gun and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet hit his chest dead center. Redness like a rose petal stained the front of his shirt as his body was propelled backward. Marcy blanked all thought from her mind then. She hurried into the living room and saw that the other boys were on their feet. Two of them were standing near the sofa and screaming at her. The other one, an Asian kid named Kim, was edging toward the front door. Marcy swung the Glock in Kim’s direction and squeezed off two shots. One whizzed by him and punched through drywall. The second drilled a hole through the back of his head. Then she swung the gun back toward the remaining two boys, who were backing away from her now, their faces shiny with tears as they begged for their lives. Marcy squeezed the Glock’s trigger two more times and both boys fell dead to the floor.
Marcy’s ears rang from the boom of the gunshots. The air in the room was thick with the pungent stench of cordite. A long moment later she realized someone was screaming. Her eyes found Ellen, still huddled in the corner, her eyes wide and frightened. Next Marcy heard her hammering heart and a moment later the hard reality of what she’d just done crashed in on her. She’d killed all her friends. Oh, God. What little remained of her sanity was hanging by a thread. This thing she’d done made no sense on any obvious level. And yet there remained that sense of selfish righteousness, that she was doing only what destiny required, no matter how crazy it seemed.
She lowered the gun and went to her sister, knelt next to her and smoothed back her hair with a trembling hand. “I meant what I said, baby sister. Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll see. This…it had to be done. This was a…a cleansing. And maybe the beginning of something new for you and me.”
Ellen sniffled. “You…you’re not going to…kill me?”
Marcy felt something give inside her. She dropped the gun and drew Ellen into her arms as her own eyes filled with tears. “No, no, no, Ellen, don’t you ever think that. I could never hurt you. You’re my baby girl, my only family, and I love you more than anything.”
Ellen sagged against her sister and wailed like a baby for a time. Marcy held her and patted her back, allowing her as long as she needed. Her own tears dried up faster than she expected as her mind turned back to practicalities. They had no close neighbors, so she wasn’t worried about anyone reporting gunfire. Regardless, they were going to have to leave this place. At some point relatives of the dead would report their loved ones missing and sooner or later the law would come sniffing around. And there was no conceivable way to cover up this much carnage or explain away a bunch of missing friends known to spend most of their free time in her company.
Marcy gently eased out of her sister’s embrace and picked up the Glock. “We’re going to be leaving, Ellen. Going on the road.” Seeing that her sister wanted to protest, Marcy put some steel in her voice as she said, “We’re going and that’s that. It’s too late for regrets or second thoughts. We have to go on the run, get some place far away from here. Maybe Florida, way down in the Keys. Wouldn’t that be nice? If we get out of here within the next couple of hours, we might have as much as a day’s head start before the cops start looking for us.”
Ellen chewed on her lower lip and frowned. “But…I didn’t do any of this. Can’t I just stay?”
Marcy’s expression went slack. She stared coldly at her sister for a long moment. Then she put the Glock against Ellen’s temple and said, “You’re going with me. I love you, Ellen, but I can’t leave anyone behind. Do you understand that?”
Ellen was shaking again. “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Look around you, Ellen,” Marcy snapped. She eased her finger off the trigger, but kept the Glock’s barrel pressed to Ellen’s head. “I really don’t want to hurt you. I do love you. But I’m not feeling very stable right now and you don’t want to upset me. Do you understand that?”
Ellen nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’ll go with you.”
“Just remember, sister, you put all this in motion when you came running to me with your sob story about the bitch attacking you in the bar.”
Ellen started crying again, her thin shoulders heaving beneath her black blouse.
Marcy lowered the Glock and stood up. “I’m sorry, Ellen, but that’s just the way it is. I need you to see that we’re in this together from the beginning to the very end. Do you see that?”
Ellen continued crying, but she managed a weak nod. “I do.”
“Good.” Marcy didn’t doubt Ellen’s sincerity. She was too scared to lie. “I’m going to take care of some loose ends and clean up. You’ll hear one more shot. You know what that will be.”
Ellen nodded again. “Yeah.”
“And while I’m busy, you’ll need to pack a bag for the road. Make sure to bring as many clothes changes as you can. And any hair care products you have. We’ll be wanting to cut and dye our hair wherever we stop tonight.”
“Okay.”
Marcy held out her free hand and Ellen slipped her own hand into it, allowing her older sister to haul her to her feet. “Come on.”
They walked hand-in-hand out of the living room and into the hallway. Marcy saw Ellen flinch at the sight of the first boy she’d shot. He apparently hadn’t died instantly. There was a trail of blood along the hallway carpet to the place where he’d ultimately expired, just a few feet shy of the kitchen archway. Marcy turned her sister away from the sight and led her in the opposite direction. She relinquished Ellen’s hand when they arrived at her bedroom. Ellen slipped into the room and began rummaging through her closet. Marcy watched her a moment longer. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t have shot Ellen. As sure as she could be given the way this insane day had developed. She did, however, feel a tremendous relief as she watched the younger girl make preparations for departure. An acquiescent Ellen would make the whole process so much smoother.
She turned away from Ellen’s door and continued down to her own bedroom. The door was standing open, as she’d left it. The black-haired woman was still asleep. Marcy drew in a steadying breath and entered the room. She was going to get this over with now. Put the gun to the cunt’s head and pull the trigger. But as she strode into the room she was immediately aware of something not right. The door swung shut behind her and Marcy spun about, raising the gun and applying pressure to the trigger. But her finger froze before squeezing off a shot.
Her mind reeled at the sight of the intruder, a shapely black woman in a slinky black dress. The woman was alive and smiling, but she looked like a walking corpse. Maggots wriggled from the corners of that hideous smile, falling onto the black dress and the bare tops of her bloated breasts.
Marcy took a step backward. “Holyjumpingjesusfuckingshit!”
The black woman laughed and more maggots tumbled out. “Yeah. About sums it up, I guess.”
Marcy’s hands were shaking. “Stay away from me!”
The black woman chuckled and took a step toward her. “I’m not afraid of you, Marcy.”
Marcy squeezed the Glock’s trigger. The gun boomed and the bullet punched a hole in the door behind the woman. The black woman didn’t flinch. She never stopped smiling. “I’m not afraid of you, Marcy,” she repeated. “And the reason for that, in case you haven’t already figured it out, is that I’m already dead.”
Marcy was shaking her head and moving backward again. The backs of her legs met the foot of the bed and she stopped. “No. That’s not possible.”
“Oh, it’s possible, all right, thanks to that bitch tied to your bed.”
Marcy frowned. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
The black woman pried the gun from Marcy’s suddenly numb hands and tossed it on the bed. “I was her best friend back when I was alive. But then I died. Which should’ve been the end for me, but she conjured me back to…undeath, I guess you’d call it.”
Marcy was shaking. She turned her head away from the dead woman’s rancid breath. “This is insane. It can’t be happening.”
The black woman slapped her. “But it is. It’s real as a motherfuck. Hell, I’m getting more real by the goddamn minute. You didn’t see me last night, but I was here all the time.”
Marcy couldn’t deal with this. It felt like the very fabric of the world was unraveling. Soon she would go spiraling away into some unfathomable void. Which would kind of be okay at this point.
The black woman grinned again. “And speaking of insane, that was some wild display of batshit crazy you just put on, girl.”
Marcy felt bile rise in her throat. “I shouldn’t have done it. Any of it. Something’s really wrong with me.”
“Don’t you second-guess yourself, baby.” The black woman wrapped her arms around Marcy and pushed her rotting flesh against her. “You did what you had to do, and you know it. Hell, it’s the main reason I’ve decided not to kill you.”
Marcy shivered in the dead woman’s sickeningly intimate embrace. “What do you mean?”
The black woman laughed softly. “We’re all going on a very long trip together. Just us girls on the road. Won’t that be fun?”
“Where are we going?”
“To a bad place, Marcy. A very bad place.” She smiled in a way that might have been intended to reassure, but the effect was offset by the sight of more wriggling maggots. “But along the way we’re going to have big fun and see many wondrous things. You have my word on that.”
Marcy frowned. So much for an escape to a tropical paradise. She felt a vague instinct to fight against this, but she recognized the idea as futile and it quickly withered. And anyway, maybe this was the true unescapable destiny she’d sensed was waiting for her beyond this place. “So when are we leaving?”
The black woman’s smile widened. “Oh, soon. Now give me a kiss.”
Marcy sucked in a breath. Then the dead woman was kissing her.
Maggots fell into her mouth and slid down her throat.
Marcy closed her eyes and prayed for an end to the nightmare.
The old Ford pickup slowed as it passed a green highway sign announcing the last rest station for fifty miles. When its turn signal began blinking, Chad flicked on the Lexus’s blinker and glanced at Allyson. She looked disheveled and tired. They’d talked very little during their three hours on the road, with Allyson sitting very still the entire time and staring straight ahead at the unfurling highway.
He supposed he couldn’t blame her for not wanting to talk. She was a young woman from the suburbs used to a life of relative peace and quiet. Chad, however, had some experience with sudden, shocking violence, mostly from his time in the place called Below, the cavernous underground prison beneath the House of Blood. Even now, three years later, nightmares of that time still occasionally jolted him out of sleep.
And now Allyson, who had swept into his life like some divine angel of mercy, had likely been condemned to years-and perhaps a lifetime-of similar nightly tortures. The thought of it made him grip the steering wheel harder as his anger began to build again.
He hadn’t known the dead men in his kitchen; Jim seemed sure they were emissaries of the long-missing Ms. Wickman. And Chad had believed him. Which was why they were on the road now, bound for some vague destination Jim had assured them would be a safe haven. Citing “security concerns,” he refused to specify the precise location of the place, asking that they instead follow him to wherever it was they were going. It wasn’t that Jim didn’t trust Chad and Allyson with the information. Rather, he refused to allow even the remote possibility of the location being extracted from them via torture should more of Ms. Wickman’s agents intercept them en route to the place. Which was paranoid as hell, but Chad didn’t blame the man.
The old Ford slowed some more and eased off the highway onto the curved white lane that led to the rest station. The parking lot was about half full. People were milling about around the vending machines and talking to each other on the long sidewalk. Other people were having lunches at the nearby picnic tables. A dog ran across the sloping lawn to the left of the rest station, chasing a yellow Frisbee that arced across the sky. Chad felt the knot of tension in his gut ease a bit. After the long, silent hours on the road, it felt good to be among people again. Normal people doing normal things.
He followed Jim’s brown-and-tan truck to the end of the lot. Then he shut off the Lexus and twisted in his seat to look at Allyson. She still had that stunned animal look, her eyes dull and staring at nothing at all.
He put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Honey? Let’s get out and stretch for a bit, okay?”
Her head swiveled toward the sound of his voice. The corners of her mouth dimpled, a smile so soft and weary that it made Chad ’s heart ache for her. “Sure.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and reached for the door handle, stepping out of the car before Chad could reply. She threw the door shut and moved rapidly to the sidewalk, where she paused to stretch her arms and neck. Chad remained behind the wheel a moment longer and watched her, enjoying the simple, supple grace of her lithe body. She caught him looking at her and smiled. Chad smiled back as she reached into her handbag, retrieved a pair of black sunglasses, and slid them on. She waved at Chad and headed for the rest station’s main building.
Chad watched her go, the slight sway of her hips beneath the thin fabric of her dress making his heart race just a little faster. She slipped into a small throng of people standing beneath the building’s pavilion and disappeared from sight.
Then he got out of the car and threw the door shut. Jim was leaning against the side of the old Ford, one booted foot raised and braced against a rust-flecked door. He was wearing dark sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. He turned his head slightly and blew a stream of smoke up at the clear sky. “Nice day.” He tapped the cigarette and ash fluttered to the faded asphalt.“When I was young, days like this would inspire me to write poetry.” He smiled. “Or chase girls.”
Chad raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
Jim chuckled. “Oh, yeah. That or get drunk. Or all three at once.”
Chad grinned and shook his head. “Sounds a little tricky. You know, there are still times when I can’t get over the fact that I know you. Did you ever see that movie made about you, the one where that pretty-boy actor played you?”
Jim smiled. “Yeah. Wasn’t bad…for such a load of shit.”
“Yeah, well, I was a kid when that came out. I saw it a bunch of times. There was a scene in there-”
“You should believe only ten percent of any given scene in that film. There’s some truth, sometimes just a grain of it, but much of it embellished and manipulated for dramatic effect.” Jim flicked away the cigarette butt and reached again for his Winstons. “I don’t mind, of course. It’s what filmmakers do with works based on the lives of real people. The same thing happens in real life. People tell stories intended to convey a particular image or idea about themselves. From what we might call white lies, basically harmless fictions, to wholesale, malicious untruths meant to dupe the victims of con artists and other criminals.”
A frown stole across Chad ’s face as he listened to Jim’s seemingly incongruous oratory about truth and lies. “Um…what’s this got to do with the movie?”
Jim took a drag on his fresh cigarette and said, “Can I ask you a question?”
Chad hesitated. He had a feeling he knew what was coming, but he didn’t want to hear it. It was something insane, a thing he’d attempted to relegate to the darkest, remotest recesses of his mind. But it had remained just beneath the surface, a niggling nag of a notion that kept trying to capture his attention. He wanted more than anything to keep pretending it wasn’t there, and he certainly did not want the idea verbalized. But an image that made the ground beneath him feel slippery intruded on his thoughts-Allyson shoving an overstuffed black travel bag he’d never previously seen to the back of the Lexus’s trunk, then quickly covering it with two more hastily packed bags.
He sighed. “Ask me.”
Jim removed his sunglasses and nailed Chad with his piercing dark eyes. “How well do you really know Allyson?”
Chad felt dizzy. He put a hand to his head and said, “I have to sit down.”
Jim nodded in the direction of the picnic tables. “Over there. We’ll get out of the sun and talk this out.”
He flicked away the cigarette and set off toward the tables.
Chad numbly followed.
Allyson brushed past a pair of doddering elderly ladies and banged open the restroom door. It was a long room with a line of gleaming silver stalls against one wall. Nearly all the stall doors stood open, indicating disuse. Two of the nearest were closed. A woman in her thirties leaned over the basin, checking her makeup in the long mirror. Allyson kept her head down and strode quickly to the very last stall, stepped inside, and shut the door behind her. She sat on the toilet seat, fished her cell phone from the depths of her pocketbook and thumbed the red power button.
She’d turned it off at some point after killing the intruders, fearing a call she wouldn’t be able to explain to Chad and the annoyingly suspicious old rock star. A displayed message informing her she had received seventeen missed calls and had three voice mail messages. She was not surprised to find each call was from the same number. Allyson’s heart pounded as she pressed the button to dial her mailbox. She drew in a calming breath and raised the phone to her ear. The first message was a brief burst of shrill panic. “What the fuck is going on out there? Call me back.”
The caller’s voice was more relaxed during the second message. But the content of his message sent a bone-scraping chill winding through her:“Ms. Vanover, we know you have betrayed us. This is not a very smart thing you have done. Those who betray us are always made to pay the highest price. Rest assured, I mean to hunt you down and exact vengeance personally. I have a lovely picture of you right here, by the way. It appears to be a still from a pornographic movie. Your hair was different then, but the image is unmistakably that of Allyson Vanover. Or as you were known then, Sinthia Fox.”
Allyson felt the earth shift beneath her. She closed her eyes and gripped the phone tighter as the man’s calm voice continued. “I’m going to show this picture and others like it to your boyfriend just before I go to work on your delectable body with a knife. I wonder what he’ll be thinking as he watches you suffer and die. Will he be crying out for blood and revenge when I shove the knife up your cunt? Or will he still be too stunned by the images of double penetration and girl-on-girl pussy-licking to care?”
The message ended and Allyson sat there shaking for a time before working up the nerve to hear the last message. She didn’t want to hear the man’s insinuating tone again, but she knew she had to hear what he had to say. So she pressed a button and heard the following:“I imagine you are very frightened now. Afraid not only of what’s coming for you, but hoping against hope that Chad doesn’t begin to piece some things together. But he will, Allyson, and you know it. He’s a smart man. Even now he is thinking hard about many puzzling things, and in time he will ferret out the truth about you. And when that happens, you will be tossed out like the trash you are.”
There was a silence then, the recording continuing as he paused long enough to allow her time to think about what he was saying, the obvious truth of it. She worked hard to imagine an alternative possibility, but every time she tried to see a happy future with Chad the forced images glimmered with a plastic sitcom phoniness for a fragile moment before dissolving.
Then the man drew in an audible breath and slowly exhaled. “Not a pretty picture. But you know what, Allyson? I’m feeling generous today. I’m going to offer you a way out of this mess.”
Allyson tensed and closed her eyes again.
“Call this number when you arrive at your destination. Tell us where you are, then slip away when no one’s watching. If you do this, your death sentence will be rescinded. You will not be getting the hundred thousand dollars originally promised you, but you’ve probably already figured that out. You’ll get to keep the ten grand we fronted you…if there’s any left, that is. Which I doubt, if you’ve still got that nasty porn star coke habit. So that’s the deal, bitch. Take it or die. Remember…before sundown.”
The message ended and Allyson pressed a button to delete it. She did not dismiss out of hand the offer she’d been given. It was a simple way out of a very complicated situation. One phone call. She could do that and haul ass out of Jim’s “safe haven,” whatever or wherever the hell that was. She still had every penny of the ten-thousand-dollar advance. She’d shed her coke habit prior to coming to Georgia and had successfully resisted every temptation to dip into the fund. Ten thousand dollars wasn’t as comfortable a stake as the one hundred thousand dollars upon which she’d based her original plans, but it would be more than enough to start a new life somewhere else.
Allyson flipped the cell phone open and punched in a number. She held the phone to her ear and listened as it rang. The man answered on the second ring. “Hello, Allyson. Have you accepted my offer?”
Allyson allowed a moment to pass before responding. She was still thinking. Still unsure. She didn’t know what she would say until the words came out of her mouth. “You’ll never find us, you son of a bitch,” she said, voice emerging without even a slight quaver. “And there’s not a threat in the world you can make that scares me. I’ve told Chad everything and he’s forgiven me. And even if you do figure out where we’re going, I’ll kill anyone you send after us, just like I killed those men last night.”
There was a long pause from the other end. Then the man grunted and said, “Next time you won’t have the advantage of knowing my men are coming. One night when you’re sleeping they’ll slip into your room and take you. And then they’ll bring you to me. And then-”
A soft laugh.
And then the line went dead.
The phone slipped out of Allyson’s hand and landed with a clatter on the floor. She stared at her shaking hand, willing it to be still again. The man’s final, implied threat had rattled her more than she would’ve expected given everything else she’d been through. The voice of cowardice rose within her again, imploring her to pick up the phone and call the man back to tell him she’d reconsidered.
Allyson did pick up the phone. Then she stood up and smashed the delicate device against the concrete wall. The casing cracked, but that wasn’t good enough for Allyson. She wanted to destroy the thing completely, to vent her fear, frustration, and rage on this symbolic link between herself and the bad people she’d so foolishly aligned herself with all those months ago. So much had changed since those early days in Georgia. She no longer felt dead inside. The world was wide open and alive with possibilities she’d never imagined for herself. And she’d be damned if she’d allow that snide cocksucker and his threats to taint that. So she flipped the phone open. The hinge connecting the two halves of the device let go with a snap as she smashed it against the wall two more times. Then she separated the two halves with a savage twist and stood there breathing heavily for a moment.
Then she stepped out of the stall and strode to the end of the bathroom, where she dropped the pieces of the ruined cell phone in a waste bin. She moved to the basin and examined her reflection in the mirror. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, but otherwise she looked okay. Definitely nothing like a woman who’d just been forced to make a potential life-and-death decision. She slipped the strap of her purse over her shoulder, slid her sunglasses back on, and exited the bathroom.
Remembering what she’d said about getting a soda, she paused at one of the vending machines and fed change through a coin slot. A can of Coke thunked into the slot. As she bent to retrieve the frosty cold can, she glanced in the direction of Chad ’s car and dimly perceived a shape behind the wheel. Jim was leaning against his pickup and smoking a cigarette.
The old man made her nervous. She was certain he suspected her of something. It was in the way he looked at her and the subtly doubting tone of his voice when he questioned her. In the aftermath of her confrontation with the intruders, he’d asked her a series of questions that made her uncomfortable. He wanted to know why she’d been up at that late hour. Wanted to know every tiny detail of how things went down. She explained everything in minute detail. It helped that much of it wasn’t made up. She’d been restless and had come into the kitchen for a late night snack, she’d told them, and that was fiction. The rest was stone cold truth.
More or less.
So it was aggravating that Jim clearly wasn’t buying it. This despite understanding why he was suspicious of her. She was an unknown quantity as far as he was concerned. He was a hard guy to figure out, not much at all like the wild rock-and-roll madman portrayed in movies and books. He was calmer, quiet, and coldly analytical. He’d hauled the dead men away in the bed of his pickup and disposed of them somewhere. It was chilling how unfazed he’d been by that.
Once the cleanup chores had been completed, Jim made the offer of sanctuary at his “place in the mountains.” He made the offer explicitly to Chad, pointedly leaving her out. But Chad would only go if Allyson accompanied him. Jim acquiesced without argument, but his demeanor told the real story-he’d didn’t trust her.
Allyson straightened and took a large gulp from the can. The cold soda felt good going down. Slightly invigorated, she set off toward Chad ’s Lexus. She smiled at Jim as she passed him and he nodded, his eyes unreadable behind his dark sunglasses. Then she opened the Lexus’s passenger door and slipped inside.
“Thanks for stopping. I feel so much better after getting-”
Then she saw the thing propped on the dash and her voice died in her throat. It was an ID card with her picture on it. At the top in cobalt blue block letters were the words FRANKLIN SECURITY CONSULTANTS. Beneath her picture in small black type was the name Jennifer Campbell, and beneath that the title Senior Solutions Specialist.
The back door on her side opened and someone slid into the seat behind her. The door thunked shut and Allyson detected a faint scent of tobacco. Jim. No one said anything at first. Allyson’s face reddened as sweat appeared on her forehead. The air in the car felt close and hot. The slick Coke can began to slide from her fingers. She set it in the cup holder with a shaking hand and tried to think of something-anything-to say.
Chad cleared his throat and said, “Is there anything you want to tell us, Allyson? Or should I call you Jennifer?”
His tone thrummed with equal measures of anger and hurt. Hearing that hurt snapped her out of the state of speechless panic. The partial admission that followed came before she could take even a moment to consider it. “I’m an ex-porn star and drug addict. Allyson Vanover is my real name. I’m from Los Angeles originally, but I ran away from my life there because it was out of control. I did twenty-four pornos in just under two years, and the ten thousand dollars is what I had left from that when I met you. I used to do so much coke my nose bled all the time and I wouldn’t sleep for days. I had to get away from that or I was going to die. Jennifer Campbell is the alias I came up with in case I needed a new identity to really start over.”
The words had come out in a rush, tripping over the tip of her tongue like pebbles tumbling wildly down a waterfall. As with her previous explanations in the aftermath of last night’s carnage, her story now was comprised of interweaving strands of truth and fiction. And, again, much of it was truth. But she had no faith at all they would buy the whole package this time. She suspected the combination of Jim’s paranoia and Chad ’s hurt feelings would conspire to put her out on the street. The thought filled her with a black despair. She’d done many bad things, but she was doing her damnedest to make up for them. The unfairness of it burned, coming so soon after taking her stand against the bad guys.
Chad blinked slowly, his face registering shock. “Um…porno?”
Allyson’s nod was emphatic. Her eyes were shining, imploring him to believe her. “I swear to God.” She glanced at the rearview mirror, met Jim’s stoic gaze, and looked again at Chad. “I don’t know what you guys are thinking or what you suspect, but I swear it’s fucking wrong.” A quaver entered her voice and tears began to roll from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not a bad person. I love you, Chad, and I didn’t tell you the truth about my past because I knew you wouldn’t want anything to do with someone so…trashy.”
The tears gave way to sobs, a display of genuine emotion devoid of even the smallest hint of fakery. She had known all along the real Allyson Vanover was not the kind of person who could ever hope to move in the same circles as a Chad Robbins, much less ever hope to marry a man of his quality. And now that this part of the charade was over, she felt like crawling into a hole and never coming out.
Jim shifted in the backseat and spoke up: “I don’t suppose you have proof to offer of the veracity of this tale?”
Allyson’s eyes went wide and she said, “ Chad! Your laptop, please get it.”
Chad ’s brow furrowed and he stared at her in a searching way for a moment. Allyson expected to see judgment in his eyes, but it didn’t seem to be there. Or maybe he was merely holding everything in for a big explosion to come. But then he sighed and got out of the car. He popped the trunk with the electronic key fob, and Allyson glanced again at Jim as she listened to the rustling sound of baggage being moved around. His sunglasses were off now and he was staring hard at her.
She made herself hold his as gaze as she said, “I’m telling the truth.”
Jim’s nod was barely perceptible. “I’m sure you are.” Then he smiled, an expression untouched by humor. “But I don’t think you’re telling all of the truth.”
Allyson looked away from those cold eyes. “I’m not lying. You’ll see.”
Jim didn’t reply.
Chad returned to the car, sliding back behind the wheel and moving his seat back before flipping open the laptop. The computer came out of hibernation mode, its screen a bright glare in the sunlight. Chad tapped some keys and said, “Lucky us, there’s a wireless network in range. We’re connected.” He glanced at Allyson. “What are we looking for?”
Allyson swallowed hard before replying. She didn’t want Chad to see the things she was about to show him. But she knew she’d been left with no choice. “Do a Google image search on Sinthia Fox. That’s S-i-n-t-h-i-a Fox.”
Her fingernails etched grooves in her palms as Chad tapped the keys. The search immediately produced pages of results. And though the glare of the sun obscured the shameful images somewhat, she was able to see enough to know she’d delivered her promised proof. Her hair had been a darker shade of blonde then, the sandy shade that was her natural color, and the makeup she’d worn for the movies and photo shoots had been starkly whorish and slutty. But it was her. Chad stared at the thumbnail pictures without saying anything for long moments before clicking on one that showed her fellating a dildo. He winced at the enlarged image and flipped the laptop shut. Then he looked up and stared straight ahead, eyes focusing on nothing at all.
“I’m sorry, Chad.” Allyson’s voice sounded small, defeated. “I understand if you kick me out now.”
Chad finally looked at her again. She saw pain in his expression. The withering aspect of judgment she expected was still missing. “I’m not kicking you out.” His voice was softer now, entirely devoid of the rage and implied accusations of before. “I wish you’d told me the truth before. It would’ve saved us all some grief. But I understand why you didn’t. It’ll take me a while to come to terms with this, but I want you to know that I care about you, too.” He indicated the closed laptop with a nod. “I know how hard it must have been for you to show me those…things.”
He reached out to her, stroked her cheek with the back of a hand, and Allyson melted inside. She grabbed his hand and held on for dear life. “I’m so sorry. Chad, I’m so sorry.”
Jim said, “I take it you’re satisfied, Chad?”
Allyson blinked her tears away and watched Chad as he hesitated for only a moment before nodding. “Yeah, Jim. I’m satisfied.”
“Fair enough.”
Jim opened the rear door and swung his legs out. He paused before getting the rest of the way out. “I trust you, friend, and if you choose to place your trust in this woman, I’ll abide by that. But we’re going to a place I can’t afford to compromise. We’ll stop ahead of arriving there and blindfold young Allyson. She’ll ride the rest of the way in with me. That condition is non-negotiable. Understood?”
Allyson answered before Chad had a chance to open his mouth. “Understood. I’ll do whatever you say.”
Jim nodded. “Good.”
He departed without another word, throwing the door shut and returning to his pickup. Allyson settled back into her seat and felt her eyes flutter shut. There was so much else she wanted to say to Chad about her old life in California, so much she needed to explain, but she didn’t have the energy now.
Darkness took her as the Lexus followed the old Ford back to the highway.
Giselle Burkhardt opened her eyes in darkness. She was back. She felt the cold steel of the cage beneath her bottom. Giselle sat upright and grasped the bars of her prison. Then she pulled them apart as easily as a child deconstructing a clumsily assembled Lego building, the steel yielding with stunning ease to her strength. She climbed out of the cage and dropped to the floor. Instinct guided her to the room’s only point of egress, a place where the texture of reality was thinner and more susceptible to the manipulation of magic. She splayed her hands on the cool stone wall and focused her will.
It was easy.
A door formed in the wall. It swung open before her and she stepped into a large room that was a precise replica of the Master’s old chambers. The door closed behind her, its outline vanishing instantly. An odd sense of peace settled within her as she surveyed the uncannily familiar surroundings. Giselle had emerged from her dank and freezing prison a changed woman. It was as if she’d shed an old skin with her passage back through Azaroth’s portal. The missing parts of her body had been restored, obviously, but there was an inner change as well.
The murder of Eddie and his woman seemed to have erased the last traces of her conscience. She was no longer a redeemed sinner. There was fresh blood on her hands. Innocent blood. She’d taken it willingly, even eagerly. So she was no longer afraid to shrink from the core truth about herself. She was a murderer. A sadist. And by killing Eddie she’d unleashed the tamed beast she’d kept hidden in the darkest part of her soul f or so long.
She thought of Eddie and tried to feel some trace of her former feelings for him, but those feelings now seemed as dead as he was.
She had done it fast, sprinting across the apartment’s living room floor toward the oblivious couple seated on the sofa. They were watching a movie and laughing. Their arms were around each other, the woman’s head on Eddie’s shoulder. Giselle gripped a handful of Eddie’s hair and yanked his head back. Eddie gagged as his eyes rolled up to look at her. His woman screamed. There was a moment of recognition in Eddie’s terrified expression. His eyes may have expressed pain over the betrayal. The knife slashed across his throat, blood leaping from the gash as Eddie’s woman disengaged herself from the dying man and tumbled to the floor. She got to her feet and ran for the door. Giselle hurried after her, moving with the speed and grace of a wolf. Unnatural, unhuman speed. She gripped the screaming woman by the shoulder, spun her around, and slammed her against the door. Then she drove the knife through yielding flesh, plunging it in just below the sternum. The woman screamed and thrashed some more, but Giselle held her in place with a strong hand to the throat. She held the knife in place a moment, coldly holding her agonized gaze, then yanked it out and thrust it in again to the hilt. The woman died and Giselle returned to Eddie and drank blood from his still-bubbling wound, knowing the obscenity would further honor Azaroth and the other death gods.
Killing the woman hadn’t been strictly necessary. But it had seemed the right thing to do. So she had killed the woman, a primal, reptilian part of her enjoying the act of senseless murder. She had a feeling Azaroth and the other death gods would appreciate the additional blood offering. And even in the midst of those savage moments she’d known that something within her had changed forever.
Now, standing here in Ms. Wickman’s lovingly recreated version of the Master’s chambers, Giselle understood that other things had also changed, including her immediate plans for the future. The things she wanted now were no longer the things she’d coveted prior to summoning Azaroth.
A full-length oval mirror on a swivel-stand caught her attention. She walked over to it and a ppraised her reflection. She was as flawless as ever, her flesh porcelain-white, body slender and shapely. Her face was delicately beautiful, almost angelic, with exquisitely fine lines and angles that belied her capacity for savagery. Her long hair was jet-black and straight, a shimmering raven mane that starkly contrasted her pale flesh.
Giselle smiled. She looked good.
Better than ever, in fact.
She turned from the mirror and moved past the large four-poster bed to the French doors at the end of the room. One of the doors was standing open. Giselle moved through it and stood on a long balcony. She moved to the edge of the balcony, braced her hands on the metal rail and looked down. The vista that unfurled below took her breath away. The balcony was high in the air, maybe as much as a half mile above the ground. The landscape beneath was a pockmarked, blasted place. The red terrain made her think of pictures she’d seen of the surface of Mars. She spied a big bonfire in the distance and a thick haze of black smoke rising toward the horizon. Teams of men in black hoods worked together to haul huge stones of varying chiseled shapes in the direction of the bonfire. Other men with machine guns and whips prodded them onward.
These activities were likely connected to Ms. Wickman’s own efforts to appease-and draw power from-the death gods. The thought made Giselle smile. Ms. Wickman was powerful and ruthless, but she did not have Azaroth on her side.
Giselle turned away from the tableau of horrors and returned to the bedroom. This time she went directly to the bed and spread herself across the plush and luxuriant feather mattress. She let out a low groan of satisfaction and rolled across the mattress a time or two, reveling in the decadent cradle of comfort. Then she repositioned herself, propping her head on the plump pillows and staring up at the heavy velvet canopy.
She heard a cough and turned her head to see a bare-chested man with a studded leather collar around his throat. The man was lean and sinewy, the exposed flesh of his torso a map of scars and abrasions. He stared at Giselle with eyes that were wide with fear and confusion.
Giselle eyed him coldly. “Stop your gawking, boy, and go fetch your Mistress.”
The man flinched as if slapped, then turned and hurried across the room. He tripped and tumbled to the floor, smacking his head against a marble pedestal. A sculpted bust of someone Giselle failed to recognize rolled off the pedestal and split in half as it struck the floor. The man scrambled to his feet and resumed his flight from the room.
Giselle closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift. It was amazing how at peace she felt now. Life was so much easier minus the tiresome complications of moral concerns. The apparent obliteration of her conscience did not alarm her. One risked these things when making deals with gods, especially of the darker variety. She fell into a sleep state, entering a dream in which she sat on a high throne made of gold. An audience of slaves knelt in rows below her, chanting, their arms extended in praise of their queen.
Then the creak of a door opening roused her from the dream state, and her eyes fluttered open. She turned her head and saw Ms. Wickman and a coterie of followers enter the room. Ms. Wickman, as always, was elegantly attired, wearing a simple black dress with a hemline just above her knees. She wore black stockings and black heels. A single strand of glittering white pearls encircled her throat. The last time Giselle had seen Ms. Wickman she’d worn her long brown hair down, but now her hair was gathered in a bun at the back of her head, the way she’d always worn it during her time as the Master’s top servant and de facto second-in-command.
Two of Ms. Wickman’s entourage were muscular men clad in black, militaristic uniforms, complete with gleaming black jackboots and crisp black caps. These men flanked her. Both were armed, one with a machine gun, the other bearing a sidearm in a holster. Giselle felt a faint flicker of amusement. In so many ways Ms. Wickman had exactly resurrected aspects of the Master’s former regime. Behind the guards was an assortment of Apprentices and servants, among them the bare-chested slave Giselle had sent to fetch Ms. Wickman.
Giselle stifled a giggle as Ms. Wickman paused next to the pedestal and stared at the shattered bust. There was a subtle atmospheric change in the room, a gathering of energy sensed by all present. No one said a word, but some of the Apprentices were smirking, sensing what was coming. Even Giselle felt a surge of excitement as she felt Ms. Wickman’s always considerable anger build and build.
Ms. Wickman at last lifted her gaze from the shattered bust and looked in Giselle’s direction. She smiled. “I’ll deal with you in a moment, dear, but I need to address a housekeeping issue first.”
She turned and brushed past the armed guards, her head down like a bull’s as she strode purposefully toward the cowering, bare-chested slave. He shook his head, whimpered, and held his hands out in a beseeching way. He backed away, but Ms. Wickman moved fast. In a moment she had the man’s head locked in her strong hands. Then there was a sickening snap and the slave fell dead to the floor.
One of the Apprentices, a young girl with pale skin and golden blonde hair, applauded. “Bravo.”
Ms. Wickman smoothed her dress and smiled at the girl. “Thank you, Gwendolyn. Could you get rid of this…mess for me?”
Gwendolyn smiled. “Of course.” She unfurled a whip and snapped it at two nearby slaves, barking strident instructions at them as the whip peeled away strips of their flesh. The slaves worked together to hurriedly haul the dead slave from Ms. Wickman’s quarters. Gwendolyn and two other Apprentices followed them out.
Ms. Wickman made eye contact with Giselle now, holding it as she circled the bed and came to a stop on the side nearest the French doors. Giselle shifted position slightly, rolling to her left a bit to better observe her adversary.
“I’m impressed by what you’ve accomplished, Giselle.” Ms. Wickman’s tone was even and devoid of any hint of emotion. Amazing. The woman’s self-control was remarkable. “Clearly you possess magical capabilities far beyond what I suspected. In retrospect, I should’ve had you killed immediately.”
The guard with the sidearm moved toward the bed.
“Should I execute this woman, Mistress?”
Then Ms. Wickman smiled again and said, “No, Captain. This…girl…presents no threat. Stand back, please.”
The guard nodded and retreated to his former position.
Ms. Wickman said, “You puzzle me, Giselle.”
Giselle arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Oh, yes. I suppose I should have you killed now, as the Captain suggests, but my curiosity has been aroused.” She licked her lips and allowed her gaze to slowly travel the length of Giselle’s naked body before again settling on her face. “I would like to know some things. For instance, with your level of ability, you could easily have escaped this place already. Instead you summoned me. Why?”
Giselle smiled. “Because I do not wish to escape.”
Now it was Ms. Wickman’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Oh? That’s surprising, given the nasty things that have been done to you here.”
Giselle raised one of her restored hands, bending it at the wrist for better display. “Nothing that was permanent, as you can see.” She lowered her hand and smiled again. “You’ll want to know about that, of course. A god assisted me. Do you have any direct experience with the death gods, Ms. Wickman?”
Ms. Wickman’s gaze hardened. “I do not.” Her terse manner indicated this was an admission she was furious to have to make in front of her followers. “But I know a death god would not assist you without a suitable offering…”
“A sacrifice, you mean.” Giselle moved a hand over the empty patch of bedsheet next to her, enjoying the feel of the smooth silk beneath her restored flesh. “Yes, a death god granted me temporal transport to a location far from here. There I made the required sacrifice by killing one of the men instrumental in the Master’s demise.”
Ms. Wickman grunted. “How very fitting.”
“The Master should never have died,” Giselle said, the sincerity in her voice surprising even her. “I’ve changed. And I’ve seen the error of my ways. I want to serve here with you, Mistress, to honor and exalt you. I want to kill for you. Torture for you. Anything you desire…”
Ms. Wickman continued to regard her coolly for several long moments, her expression giving away nothing as she mulled over Giselle’s words. Then she said, “Is there anything else you want, Giselle?”
Giselle patted the smoothed-down silk sheet and said, “I would like for you to lie here with me for a while.”
Something subtle sparked in Ms. Wickman’s dark eyes. Giselle felt a deep satisfaction at having prompted it. Without moving her eyes from Giselle’s face, Ms. Wickman barked out a single command:“Leave us!”
The others in the room reacted as if slapped. They scurried almost as one out of the room, even the guards, responding to the undeniable imperative in their Mistress’s tone. The big door slammed shut, the sound echoing in the large room for a moment.
They were alone. At last.
Ms. Wickman held Giselle’s gaze a short moment longer. Then she turned her back on Giselle, dipped her head, and said, “Unzip me.”
Giselle got to her knees and moved to the edge of the bed. She took the tiny zipper tab at the collar of Ms. Wickman’s dress and began to slowly draw it down, unveiling a wedge of flesh nearly as pale as Giselle’s own. Then a surprise, a hint of color as she pulled the zipper further down. Then further still, Giselle’s breath catching in her throat as she slid the zipper all the way down to Ms. Wickman’s waist.
“Oh, my…that’s…beautiful.”
She gripped the flaps of the dress and pulled them farther apart to better admire the illustration. Ms. Wickman had a large and intricate tattoo of a dragon etched into the flesh of her back. Its scales, nostrils, teeth, talons, and glaring eyes were all stunningly rendered. Giselle touched a forefinger to the back of Ms. Wickman’s neck. Her flesh was cool and marblelike, but warmed nicely to her touch. She drew the tip of her finger down the length of her spine, moving through the dragon’s mouth before stopping at the small of her back. Then she splayed her fingers and moved her hand slowly over the bared flesh. Ms. Wickman made a soft sound and reached behind her to undo the bun at the back of her head. She shook her hair loose and turned around.
Giselle’s excitement level rose yet again. They were no more than a foot apart. Ms. Wickman placed a hand between her breasts and shoved her backward. Giselle fell into the plush mattress and watched as Ms. Wickman pulled the dress off and tossed it to the floor. Then she stepped out of her heels and climbed onto the bed, moving toward Giselle on her hands and knees, stalking her like an alley cat about to pounce on its prey. Giselle squirmed backward, toward the headboard, then stopped as her head met the pillows. Ms. Wickman reached Giselle and climbed atop her, one leg to either side of her waist, hands braced on the pillows above Giselle’s shoulders. She lowered herself slightly and her erect nipples brushed Giselle’s soft breasts. Giselle placed her hands on Ms. Wickman’s waist and urged her even closer. Their faces were only inches apart now. An electric sensuality tingled within her as she looked into Ms. Wickman’s wide, hungry eyes.
Ms. Wickman let out a heavy breath that was almost a moan. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this. You have always been such a resourceful little whore.”
Giselle caressed Ms. Wickman’s back before allowing her hands to settle on the woman’s upraised ass. “And you have always been a consummately evil cunt. We were made for each other.”
Ms. Wickman’s eyes flared again, and this time the carnal need was unmistakable. She abruptly lowered her mouth and kissed Giselle with a hunger Giselle met with equal enthusiasm. They squirmed against each other, hands grasping and probing, wet tongues thrusting between cries of pleasure. After several minutes of this, Ms. Wickman moved lower, her mouth drawing in each of Giselle’s engorged nipples in turn. Giselle moaned and squirmed, running her hands through Ms. Wickman’s long, unfettered hair. Then Ms. Wickman moved lower still, Giselle spreading her legs as the other woman’s tongue found her clit and began flicking at it energetically. Giselle thrashed on the bed as waves of intense pleasure crashed through her. She grabbed the iron bars of the headboard behind her, arched her back, and let out a piercing scream. And after Giselle had been made to scream and pant several more times, Ms. Wickman eased away from her throbbing pussy and laid down next to her.
Giselle let out a feral grunt and rolled on top of the woman. “Your turn.”
Ms. Wickman made a growling sound and scooted toward the headboard, better positioning herself for Giselle’s attentions. Giselle kissed Ms. Wickman lightly on the mouth before sliding down and taking a nipple into her mouth. And now it was Ms. Wickman’s turn to moan, writhe, and pant. After a little of this, Giselle moved south, her tongue tracing a wet trail down Ms. Wickman’s flat belly. She laid a hand flat on Ms. Wickman’s stomach.
“I made you want me, you know.”
Ms. Wickman moaned again and said, “Mmm?” Her eyes were closed and her mouth open, her lips curled back to bare her teeth. She writhed slowly and clutched at the bedsheet with both hands. She arched her back and lifted her pelvis, her thighs and stomach muscles quivering with the force of her need. For Giselle, that need was a lovely thing to behold. It was gratifying to see the cold and merciless Ms. Wickman reduced to this helpless animal level. She was a prisoner of overpowering desire-just as Giselle had planned.
Giselle moved her hand in a slow, circular motion over Ms. Wickman’s stomach, drifting to a stop at a spot just below her prisoner’s sternum. She brought her fingers together, forming a wedge of flesh that pushed against Ms. Wickman’s soft abdomen. “You’ve forgotten some things about me, cunt, beginning with how adept I was at sex magic when I served under the Master. Haven’t you wondered why you were so quick to dismiss all your lackeys and leap into bed with me?”
Ms. Wickman’s eyes fluttered open and her gaze floated lazily toward Giselle’s intent face. She wasn’t quite alarmed yet-the erotic charge sizzling through her body was still too powerful-but Giselle’s words stirred a part of her mind that had been sleeping. “What is this?” She grunted and lifted her pelvis again. “Please…”
Giselle sneered. “Pathetic. You want me to penetrate you? Okay.”
She leaned forward and thrust her hand forward with all her considerable strength, the wedge of fingers splitting Ms. Wickman’s flesh as easily as if she’d shoved them into jelly. Ms. Wickman’s eyes opened wide and her mouth stretched to issue a scream, but Giselle slapped a hand over the opening and muffled the sound. Her other hand delved further into Ms. Wickman’s body, pushing aside organs and digging through layers of muscle to reach for her heart. Ms. Wickman thrashed in agony. She scratched and flailed at Giselle’s face. But Giselle held on with ease. She was stronger than Ms. Wickman now. She pressed her face against Ms. Wickman’s, staring into her bugged-out eyes as her questing fingers found the throbbing mass of muscle. She held that gaze a moment longer, savoring the mass murderer’s agony and terror. Then her hand closed around the heart, gave it a savage twist, and yanked it from her body, her dripping red hand emerging from the hole beneath the woman’s sternum with a moist plop.
Ms. Wickman went still at once. She was dead.
Ding-dong, Giselle thought, and giggled.
And without her heart, this particular wicked witch would never rise again. Again, Giselle felt satisfaction, but there was no righteousness attached to the feeling. She had not done this thing to avenge the thousands of deaths Ms. Wickman had been responsible for over the decades. Her role now was that of usurper. The dead woman’s kingdom would belong to her now.
She brought Ms. Wickman’s dripping heart to her mouth and tore a chunk out of it. She chewed it slowly, enjoying the tough, raw taste of meat and muscle. A groan of satisfaction escaped her lips as the morsel slid down her gullet. Then she tore another chunk out and devoured it more quickly. Followed by another chunk, and then another, until it was gone, until she’d symbolically eaten the woman’s essence and her magic. This Giselle did to preserve the work Ms. Wickman had done with this place. Otherwise this magically constructed edifice and the fiery realm beyond would turn hazy and wink out of existence. Giselle licked her lips and sighed with the satisfaction one derives from a fine meal.
Now that the deed was done, she allowed herself to marvel over how easily it had been accomplished. If anything, Azaroth had understated how amplified her abilities would become with the sacrifice of Eddie King. The power coursing through her was such that she felt like something so much more than a mere sorceress. In the past, even the simplest magic had required some rudimentary form of spellcasting. Now, however, she was able to wield magic merely by focusing her will, thinking about what she wanted to happen, and directing the core of magical energy within her to make it happen. That Ms. Wickman had succumbed to sex magic spoke volumes about the staggering intensity of that energy. Giselle had long been able to manipulate normal people by amplifying the automatic sexual response to certain scents given off by her body, but other practitioners such as the Master and Ms. Wickman had been immune to this brand of magic. No longer. She felt capable of absolutely anything-and of everything all at once.
What she felt like, actually, was a goddess.
She decided to experiment. She flexed her will and heard the large doors at the far end of the quarters creak open. She thought of the people who had accompanied Ms. Wickman into the room earlier and focused on one of them. A few moments later, one of the black-clad guards came staggering into the room, his legs propelling him forward jerkily as if he were a puppet on a string. He pawed at his holstered sidearm, but his hand twisted painfully away from the weapon with a sound of grinding bones. His eyes popped and jittered with the helpless terror of one not in control of his own body. Then he saw the limp form of his dead Mistress and let out a squeal of fear.
The man Ms. Wickman had referred to as “Captain” came to a swaying halt at the foot of the bed as Giselle relinquished much of her physical control over him (though she kept his hand twisted away from the pistol).
Giselle licked blood from her fingers and smiled at the terrifed man. “Tell me your name.”
In a trembling voice the man said, “I-I am…C-Captain Girard of the B-Black Brigade. The military wing of the M-Mistress’s…organization.”
“I see.” Giselle tongued the last of Ms. Wickman’s blood from her fingers, then wiped them clean on the bedsheet. She climbed off the bed and approached the trembling captain. “As you can see, you no longer serve Ms. Wickman. I am Mistress of this place now, and you will answer only to me from now on. Is this clear?”
Captain Girard appeared to be too stunned by the inexplicable coup d’etat to immediately supply the only acceptable answer. He kept glancing at Ms. Wickman’s body, perhaps expecting her to rise from the dead and reassert her authority. Which, given the condition of her body, was just stupid. Impatient, Giselle snatched the 9mm pistol from his holster and shot him in the face. By the time his corpse struck the floor more black-clad armed men had stormed into the room. Giselle usurped control of their minds in a millisecond. They stood there, terror shining in their eyes, mouths hanging open in shock, their fingers frozen over the trigger guards of their useless weapons.
Giselle stepped over the fallen Captain and advanced to within six feet of the nearest trembling man. “Ms. Wickman is dead. I rule this place now. Captain Girard is dead because he could not accept that. He was a stupid man.” She eyed each of the men in turn before saying, “Are the rest of you as stupid?”
A chorus of muttered denials brought a very slight smile to her face.
“Good. Then know this. I do not wish to kill any more of you. Nor do I wish to upset the essential order of things around here.” She clasped her hands be hind her back and strode slowly back and forth in front of them like a marine drill sergeant addressing a rank of fresh boot camp inductees. “This is a change of command, nothing more. Your Black Brigade will remain intact. If anything, you will have more power than before.”
Giselle allowed a moment for that to sink in. A new, hungry gleam stole into the eyes of several of the men. Giselle supposed the message was getting through. These men had been something of an elite force before, but now they would be backed by power far greater than that wielded by their deceased Mistress.
Giselle said, “I need to speak with your top officer privately. The rest of you go about your business at once.”
All but one of the men hurried out of the room. The big door slammed shut yet again. The Black Brigade officer who remained with her was a tall, thin man with cold blue eyes and close-cropped steel-gray hair. He glanced briefly at the bodies of Ms. Wickman and Captain Girard. Giselle watched him closely, but his eyes registered nothing at all. He was over any shock he’d felt at this turn of events.
Giselle moved closer to him, almost to within touching distance. “And what is your name?”
The man’s face remained expressionless as he said, “Lieutenant Schreck, Mistress.”
Giselle suppressed the smile that wanted to come.
Mistress.
“The Black Brigade is yours to command now, Schreck. Anyone above you will be demoted or eliminated.” Giselle smiled. “Whichever you deem necessary.”
A corner of his mouth twitched, the first indication of any emotion lurking behind the man’s mask of cool indifference. “I understand.”
Giselle moved away from him and sat at the foot of the bed. She crossed her legs and set the pistol next to one of Ms. Wickman’s unmoving feet. “Please bring me up to speed, Schreck. Brief me on the things I most need to know about this place.”
Lieutenant Schreck cleared his throat and began a concise recitation of a number of basic facts. Some of what she learned then increased her contempt for Ms. Wickman. Her handling of the slaves, for instance, bespoke a pathetic lack of confidence in her ability to forestall an uprising like the one that had brought down the Master. This would not continue under the new regime. More pleasing was what she learned about the ongoing efforts to rein in the survivors of the Master’s former domain. She wanted to see those people again.
The briefing finished, Giselle allowed herself a silent moment of contemplation. She looked at Ms. Wickman’s corpse and felt a tingle, a ghost of the powerful erotic charge that had flowed through her own body during their brief but electric coupling. That tingle intensified and Giselle became keenly aware of an awakened taste that had not yet been sated.
“Tell me, Lieutenant. You are no doubt familiar with all the Apprentices in service here. Of the females, whom would you say is the most beautiful?”
Schreck’s answer was immediate. “That would be Ursula, Mistress.”
“Have someone fetch her for me. But first…” Giselle turned her head to look at the open French door and the red sky beyond. “Have this cunt’s body taken to that barren place and burned. I would like to watch this happen from my balcony.”
“As you wish, Mistress.”
She dismissed him then and he departed the room at once. Giselle again arose from the bed and ventured back out to the balcony. She observed the diminutive forms of the hooded, toiling slaves and thought of what Schreck had told her about the edifice they were constructing.
An actual pyramid, she thought, wonderment again filling her as she imagined it.
She smiled again.
She couldn’t imagine a more appropriate place for the sacrifices to come.