Queen Of Blood Part 13

Then she recalled the previous evening's festivities in a series of flas.h.i.+ng images. She and Ursula had consumed large quant.i.ties of a very expensive wine imported from France. There had been music, a girl playing a guitar. A large number of Apprentices gathered in her quarters at her invitation. Slaves were brought in and put to use in various ways as entertainment. Clothes were discarded and the party devolved to pure orgy. Giselle had partnered with several different men and women through the course of the evening, exploring every possible s.e.xual combination and position with Apprentices and slaves alike.

It had been, she recalled with a tired smile, the most purely debauched evening of her entire life. There had been interludes during which slaves she'd f.u.c.ked were then tortured and humiliated. Then things would s.h.i.+ft back to party mode, with the consumption of still more wine and numerous more carnal indulgences. As evening progressed toward dawn, the wine flowing through her system caught up to her and things became a blur. She vaguely remembered accosting Ursula, violently removing the young Apprentice perched atop the girl and then dragging her out to the balcony. Here her memories became even blurrier. She recalled some frenzied moments of pa.s.sion. But she'd been rough with the girl, maybe too rough, and there'd been anger. And then...

a sound, the loud crack of her fist across Ursula's jaw...the girl's eyes rolling back in her head as her body topples backward, falls against the balcony railing...

Giselle's head snapped to her right and let out a sigh of relief as she saw Ursula lying beside her. The girl was unconscious, her mouth hanging slack against the silk pillowcase. Her jaw sported a deep brown bruise and her flesh was gouged in other places where Giselle had struck her. But she otherwise seemed okay. Giselle listened to her racing heart and felt her eyes moisten as she realized how close she'd come to killing her lover.

She wiped the tears away at once. They were a sign of emotion. And emotion equaled weakness. She could not afford to be seen as weak. Also, Ursula was not in the restraints Giselle normally put her in at bedtime. The lapse angered Giselle. She'd left herself vulnerable, another thing she couldn't allow to happen, a thing she'd worked hard to prevent.

Until last night.

She sat up in bed and surveyed the aftermath of the orgy. The physical effort amplified a dull ache in her head. Her mouth felt as dry as parchment. She had a hangover, her first in more years than she could recall. She felt a touch of nausea at the back of her throat, a sensation exacerbated by the pungent scents of p.i.s.s, s.e.m.e.n, and blood. This annoyed her, but not nearly so much as the sight of unconscious bodies lounging everywhere. The crashed-out revelers were all nude or nearly nude, some of them with their limbs still intwined, having pa.s.sed out after s.e.x. They were on the floor and in chairs. A young male slave was lying atop a table in the library section of her quarters. A male Apprentice, nude, lay next to him, an arm draped across the slave's waist.

There was a lot of blood. Big splashes on the floor and the furniture. The decapitated head of a female slave sat impaled on the tip of a spear, which was propped against the wall opposite the bed. Giselle couldn't imagine where anyone had gotten a spear. But that minor bit of mystery was forgotten as she noted the dark entrance to the secret torture chamber. Her heart thudded. She couldn't remember opening the door. The unnatural cold from the chamber was seeping into the air in her living quarters. There was something insinuating about the chill, a hint of something alive and malignant, and her first instinct was to seal the door at once. But she restrained herself, knowing she would first have to check the chamber for signs of anything amiss.

The missing bits of her memory stirred the self-directed anger again. She had been sloppy. Unforgivably so. The party-c.u.m-orgy had been Ursula's idea. She had become petulant of late, resentful even, chafing under the new restrictions imposed upon her. She especially disliked being restrained in the evening, rebuffing Giselle's initial attempts to soften the loss of her total freedom by turning it into a kind of kinky game. Worst of all, from Giselle's point of view, she'd become more subdued during s.e.x, feigning pa.s.sion and being quite unsubtle about the fakery.

At first Giselle told herself she didn't care.

But she did.

And the longer the situation went on the less she enjoyed lovemaking with Ursula. She missed that feeling of unquenchable erotic hunger. The s.e.x had become a rote act in recent days, a matter of going through the motions. She ached to feel that fire again. The need bothered her, though. It was weakness. She could have her pick of lovers. Yet she only wanted Ursula. Wanted her completely again. And so when Ursula begged for permission to throw the ultimate decadent party--along with an unsubtle hint that she would show her grat.i.tude in the way Giselle most desired--she'd acquiesced, had even allowed herself to believe it might be a good idea to get loose and liven things up. She saw clearly now how wrong she had been. She thought of the Master and the relentlessly merciless way he'd exerted authority. He'd managed to survive that way for centuries before he was finally killed. Giselle had loathed the Master, but she decided she could yet learn some valuable lessons from him.

The strange vulture/parrot hybrid opened its beak and trilled another bit of song at her. It peered at her with simple animal curiosity. Giselle smiled and held out an arm. The gentlest of mental nudges caused the creature to flap its wings and move from the foot of the bed to Giselle's extended forearm. She cooed at the creature and gently stroked the back of its head. It tilted its head again and trilled another lovely burst of birdsong.

Giselle wrapped her fingers around its neck. Its eyes bulged a little and it emitted a little chirp as Giselle cooed rea.s.surance. Then it squawked as she tightened her grip and began to twist. Panic set in and it raised talons to slash at her, but another mental nudge stilled the act of self-defense. And Giselle stared into the creature's bulging eyes as she snapped its neck with excruciating slowness.

There, she thought.

Something relaxed inside her and she studied the dead bird's limp body with grim satisfaction, puzzling over why she felt so good about killing so helpless a creature. An impulse caused her to look at Ursula. She imagined taking Ursula's neck in her hands and doing to her what she'd done to the bird. She licked her lips and felt her nipples stiffen. Then the girl stirred in her sleep, groaning and stretching out her body.

Giselle stared at the tender, exposed flesh of the girl's slender neck. So pale. So lovely. She watched the rise and fall of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thought of how they felt in her mouth, in her hands. And she sighed, knowing she still could not kill Ursula. The girl would require a still greater level of discipline, that's all.

She got out of the bed and carried the dead bird out to the balcony. The other world's sun bathed her body in heat, dispelling the cold that had seeped into her bones from the open torture chamber. She peered over the railing at the bustle of activity in the rapidly expanding slave community everyone called Razor City. Here was something of which she could be proud. Her vision for the community far exceeded in scope and daring anything the Master had accomplished with Below. There were many more hovels along the perimeter of the community now, with more being erected every day to accomodate the steady influx of new slaves. The large marketplace was open for business. Numerous other buildings were under construction. It was becoming a real city, albeit a primitive one, like something from a twisted version of the Middle Ages. The community's name derived from the high, razor-tipped fences that defined its borders. Giselle loved the sound of it. Razor City. It sounded like a place where nightmares would go to live. So apt. The endless suffering of its pitiful denizens would exceed the suffering of any oppressed group in human history, honoring the death G.o.ds enough to make her powerful almost beyond reckoning.

She tossed the dead bird over the railing and returned to her quarters. The nude revelers remained unconscious and for a moment Giselle considered killing every one of them, such was her distress at the tainted condition of her quarters. She picked up the spear and pried the dead slave's head from its tip. She tossed the head aside, examined the sharp and blood-coated tip, and imagined plunging it through the hearts of all present. The brutality would afford her a few moments of cold satisfaction, but she decided against it. Several of the sleeping Apprentices were very good at what they did, and capable Apprentices were significantly harder to replace than slaves.

And anyway, she knew she was only delaying the inevitable.

She braced herself with an intake of breath and stepped through the open entrance to the darkened torture chamber. The cold seeped into her bones again. She muttered a spell and the ranks of candles grew flames. Her gaze was drawn immediately to the limp figure splayed across the bottom of the dangling cage. No one else was in the room and there was nothing obviously amiss. She still couldn't recall opening the chamber, but she guessed Ursula had coerced her into doing it somehow.

Giselle moved deeper into the chamber and the figure at the bottom of the cage stirred and turned toward the sound of her approach. Gwendolyn lifted her head and several tangled golden locks fell across her face. She smiled weakly through lips puffy and coated with dried blood.

"Why, it's the great usurper. What a privilege it is to be in your presence, Mistress." She laughed, a ragged sound followed by a deep, hacking cough. "Come to finish me off, have you? Where's your kept girl, then? I'd think she'd want to be here for this."

Gwendolyn's flesh was covered with bruises and livid scars, many of which pulsed with active infections. Patches of abraded skin leaked blood and pus. She was missing an ear, a nipple, and several toes and fingers. There were multiple burn marks on her abdomen and thighs. And her p.u.s.s.y had been sewn partially shut. Giselle had not partic.i.p.ated in any of these tortures, but she had been present for most of them, observing in a detached manner as Ursula enjoyed herself. But her lover's endless abuse of the prisoner had become tiresome, having dragged on for weeks beyond the point at which the former Apprentice should've been put out of her misery.

Giselle smiled and moved closer to the cage, adjusting her grip on the spear as she worked to decide on the best possible angle for a kill thrust. "Your tormentor is pa.s.sed out on my bed. A touch too much wine last night, I'm afraid."

Something flickered in Gwendolyn's eyes as she watched the b.l.o.o.d.y spear tip move closer. The instinctive fear of one who senses impending death, perhaps. But that impression was belied by the small smile that dimpled the corners of her puffy lips. And she didn't retreat as the spear tip pa.s.sed through cage bars and touched a spot between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Giselle's body tensed as her hands tightened on the spear shaft. The girl was making it easy for her, almost offering herself up for sacrifice. Which should not have been surprising. She had suffered immensely. Almost anyone in her position would welcome the release of death.

And yet...

That smile.

Giselle frowned. "Something is wrong."

Gwendolyn's smile broadened, displaying b.l.o.o.d.y gums and cracked and chipped teeth. "You don't know the half of it, Mistress." Another ragged laugh, followed by another whooping cough. She spat blood. Then she spoke in a singsong tone: "I know something you don't."

Instinct told her to ignore the doomed girl's vague insinuations. This was likely nothing more than one last mind-f.u.c.k, an empty game designed to delay the impending end of her life a few minutes more. She pressed the tip of the spear forward a millimeter or two, piercing pale flesh and drawing forth a trickle of blood that spilled along the girl's protruding rib cage before dripping through cage bars to splash the stone floor below. Gwendolyn winced as the spear tip entered her flesh, but that d.a.m.nable smile barely faltered.

"I don't think you know anything." Giselle twisted the spear tip, widening the gash between Gwendolyn's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A thicker stream of blood flowed over the tip, fresh gore commingling with dried red flakes. "This is just a last-ditch shot at saving your a.s.s."

Gwendolyn winced again and gritted her teeth as the spear tip continued to twist and delve deeper. "You f.u.c.ked up when you killed Ms. Wickman."

Giselle arched an eyebrow. "Oh? How so?"

"The tattoo on your back is lovely. It's funny. Usually the only tattoos you can't remember getting involve ma.s.sive amounts of tequila and a road trip to Tijuana." Gwendolyn smiled again as the spear tip stopped twisting. "Got your attention, did I?"

Giselle's heart pounded. "What do you know about the tattoo?"

"Oh, a lot. I wonder if Ursula told you I was Ms. Wickman's favorite, hmm?" Gwendolyn pushed the spear away and sat up, making the stout chain groan as the cage swayed slightly. She pressed her face between cage bars and leered at Giselle. "She told me things. Secrets. Tell me, Giselle, what do you know of the Order of the Dragon?"

Giselle swallowed a lump in her throat. She'd heard of the organization. Vague whispers of an ancient and powerful order founded on principles of extreme self-discipline. But that was the extent of her knowledge. The Order, to her mind, was like the Masons or the Illuminati. Formless phantoms lurking in shadowy, unknowable segments of society. They served as fodder for popular fiction and gave conspiracy theory crackpots something to obsess over.

"Are you implying Ms. Wickman was a member of the Order?"

Gwendolyn licked her puffy lips. "I'm not implying it. I'm flat-out saying it. And that tattoo on your back makes you a marked woman." She laughed. "Every Order tattoo is unique in some way. The Order is coming for you, Giselle. One look at your back and they'll know I was telling the truth."

Giselle tightened her grip on the spear shaft again. She was genuinely rattled now, but she didn't want Gwendolyn to see that. "They'll never get to me. They can't. I'm too well-protected."

Gwendolyn smirked. "Do you really believe that, Giselle?"

"Stop addressing me by my first name!" Giselle pressed the spear tip against Gwendolyn's stomach. "I'll not tolerate insolence."

"f.u.c.k you. The true Mistress of this house is gone. You're just a pretender." She flexed her torso, made the spear tip cut into her flesh again. "And I'll call you whatever I want, Giselle. You b.i.t.c.h. You f.u.c.king c.u.n.t. You'll pay for what you've done."

Giselle's shoulder muscles tensed again. Anger overwhelmed fear. "Time to die, Gwendolyn."

Gwendolyn smiled. "Yes. But one more thing."

Giselle knew she shouldn't listen.

Kill her, she thought.

Poke this f.u.c.king thing through her and be done with it.

But again she hesitated. Fear rea.s.serted itself. She imagined black-clad Order a.s.sa.s.sins coming to her in the middle of the night, could almost feel the killing blade at her throat, and her helpless to prevent it despite all her power. She was possessed by a sudden conviction that only a greater depth of knowledge would keep her alive.

She lowered the spear again. "Tell me."

"You're afraid. Good. I hope you spend the few nights left to you consumed by your fear. And while you're lying awake at night waiting for them to come for you, please think of me. I sent them the photo of Ms. Wickman's body. I tipped them off, Giselle. I'm the reason all your grand schemes are about to collapse." Gwendolyn's smile faded and her voice was laced with a more sober tone. "But I didn't do it alone."

"I don't believe you." Giselle swallowed with difficulty. "What are you saying?"

"There are traitors in your midst, Giselle. Other people burned by your f.u.c.king coup d'etat. Here's a question you'll no doubt ponder over those long, sleepless nights--who took the picture I sent to the Order?"

Giselle jabbed at her with the spear. The tip of it plunged into a spot beneath her sternum. Gwendolyn gasped and fell backward, rattling the cage. The heavy chain groaned and twisted. But then the girl was laughing again, a maddening display of mirth that a.s.sailed Giselle's ears like a swarm of buzzing locusts.

"Tell me who the traitors are!" Giselle jabbed with the spear again, opening a long gash along the back of a thigh. More blood spattered the stone floor beneath the cage. Another savage jab pierced a b.u.t.tock. Still more blood sprayed the floor.

Gwendolyn sat up, lurched toward the side of the cage again, and sneered at Giselle. "You'll never know, c.u.n.t. Not until it's too late. But I have one more surprise for you. One of them left me a present."

She uncurled a fist and revealed a s.h.i.+ny razor blade.

Giselle's eyes widened. "No."

Gwendolyn laughed one last time and drew the blade across her throat in a flash. Her flesh opened like a zipper and blood fountained from the wound. Then she fell backward and the razor slipped from the remaining fingers of her right hand. Her body jerked once and went still. Giselle stared at the unmoving form in open-mouthed shock for several moments. The turn of events seemed unreal. In a few brief moments, her deepest fears had been revealed as truth. People in her employ were actively working against her. For a moment she found it difficult to breathe. The cloying darkness lurking just beyond the candles seemed to reach for her...

Giselle hurried out of the chamber and sealed it. She was shaking as she turned to survey the damage to her quarters one more time. Most of the hungover revelers were still unconscious, but a young male slumped in a recliner yawned and began to rise.

Giselle slammed the spear through his chest. His eyes went wide and he had a fraction of a second to realize what was happening to him. Then the spear tip pa.s.sed through his back and impaled him briefly on the recliner. A bottomless rage sizzled through her as she yanked the spear out of the dead boy and moved to a sleeping couple entwined on the floor. The spear penetrated their bodies with equal ease, magic fueling her body with strength even as it sent bursts of wild energy darting through the room. More of the sleeping people began to wake up, only to find their bodies on the business end of a spear already coated with blood and lumps of viscera. Some tried to flee, but froze in their tracks, their bodies and minds paralyzed by a single small flex of Giselle's raging magic.

And the slaughter continued until they were all dead.

All of them, that is, with a single exception.

Ursula was sitting up in the bed, a sheet pulled up over her bosom. The pointless modesty might have made Giselle laugh under other circ.u.mstances.

She pointed the spear at her lover. "Don't ever betray me." The tip of the spear touched the hollow of Ursula's throat. "Ever. Not f.u.c.king ever."

Ursula swallowed carefully and gave a slight nod. "I wouldn't." Tears trickled from the corners of her eyes. "I...love you."

And I love you, Giselle thought. Which probably makes me an idiot.

She tossed the spear aside and climbed up on the bed. She yanked the sheet out of Ursula's hands and forced the girl onto her back.

"Prove how much you love me."

Ursula just stared at her for a long moment, her eyes still bright with residual fear. Then, at last, that gleam faded and she reached for Giselle.

And here it was, that thing she'd been missing for so long.

The hunger.

The need.

It was glorious.

And, for a time, it allowed her to forget the things that troubled her.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

"Are we gonna kill this f.u.c.ker or not?"

Dream didn't reply to Marcy's question right away.

She had two fingers wedged between slats of a window blind and was peering through the small opening at the motel parking lot. The place was a moldy dump on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. They'd been holed up here for two days, lying low after a robbery gone bad in Cleveland. A cop was dead and surveillance video of the crime had made the national news. Some genius with the FBI had connected the dots, linking the b.l.o.o.d.y convenience store holdup with a string of other brazen crimes, including the murder of a young girl at Niagara Falls and a ma.s.s murder at a New England farmhouse. The common denominator being a group of young women traveling together, three whites and one black.

The female gang angle made the story a s.e.xy one and thus a natural for the chattering talking heads on the twenty-four-hour news networks. But the whole thing really blew up when Dream was identified from her appearance in the surveillance tape. Now the reportage was virtually non-stop, and Dream found herself wis.h.i.+ng for a major ter rorist strike or something, anything to divert the media's attention in another direction.

The parking lot was somewhere just shy of half-full. Most of the cars she could see were old and in shabby condition. A nearby Caddy sported a leopard-print steering-wheel cover. A pair of fuzzy dice dangled from the tilted rearview mirror of a Plymouth Duster. The Starlite Inn did not attract an upwardly mobile cla.s.s of clientele. But that didn't bother Dream. Among other things, it meant their old Dodge van didn't look out of place.

She turned away from the window and looked at the balding, middle-aged man cuffed to the headboard of the queen-sized bed. Blood leaked from his nose and trickled over the strip of duct tape covering his mouth. He wore rumpled black slacks and a blue polo s.h.i.+rt that was at least a size too small. His bloated belly stretched the fabric of the s.h.i.+rt and made him look pregnant. Marcy was pointing her Glock at his head. Two nights ago a bullet fired from the same gun had ended the life of a Cleveland officer on routine patrol. It was an ugly weapon. A brutal, merciless thing. And the sight of it pointed at another likely victim made Dream's stomach churn.

Despite everything, it was still hard to deal with all this killing.

But it was getting easier. Some. And that was maybe the worst thing of all.

She sighed. "You can't shoot him. Too much noise."

Alicia cackled. "Ooh, this should be good." She sat at a little table at the far side of the room. She aimed a remote control at the television and hit the mute b.u.t.ton. She turned in her seat to get a better view of the bed. "So what's it gonna be, Dream? Gonna reach inside his brain, make the motherf.u.c.ker hemorrhage?"

A toilet flushed and Ellen returned from the bathroom. "No, that's boring. Make his head explode, like that dude in Scanners."

Marcy laughed. "That would rock."

Ellen's eyes were wide and she was blinking rapidly. She kept licking her lips and wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. Snot dripped from her nose and Dream could see little white specks above her upper lip. Marcy was just as twitchy. The two had spent much of the evening snorting the cuffed man's cocaine off the back of a Gideon Bible. The stuff had turned up during a search of his belongings, several white Baggies hidden in the lining of a scuffed and dented old suitcase. Turned out the guy was some low-level middleman in the drug trade, information he'd coughed up after a pistol-whipping from Marcy.

Dream sat at the edge of the bed and looked the man in the eye. A m.u.f.fled whimper issued from beneath the frayed edges of the duct tape. She'd given him a thras.h.i.+ng earlier in the evening, back in those first moments following their invasion of his room. He'd opened his door to step out for some reason. And the moment the door was open Dream and her companions swarmed out of the van and bludgeoned their way into the room. He'd been full of bl.u.s.ter at first, hurling threats and a barrage of s.e.xist epithets. So Dream had been rough with him, surprising him with her strength. She remembered the feel of his nose breaking beneath the force of her fist. She'd pulled the punch. Otherwise the man's head would've come right off his shoulders. She was that strong now. And getting stronger all the time, the power inside her growing by leaps and bounds every day. And full of a fury that had nothing to do with the man's apparent misogyny. It was only an extension of the darkness that had taken root in her soul, a sickness of the spirit she could only a.s.suage with violence.

Dream pinched the man's nostrils shut and watched his eyes go wide. He thrashed and managed to dislodge her fingers, sucking in air through the narrow pa.s.sages. Dream climbed up on the bed and straddled him. Marcy let out a whoop that made her sound like a drunken sorority girl at a kegger.

Ellen dropped to her knees at the side of the bed."Do it." Her hands were clasped in a way that was almost prayerful. "Suffocate the pig."

Dream ignored it all as the man continued to buck beneath her. Her body rolled with the motion of his struggles. She thought of the time she'd ridden a mechanical bull in a bar in Florida. That had been fun. So was this, in a deeply twisted way. There was something distinctly s.e.xual about it, in fact. She hadn't been with a man in months. A mad impulse to rip the fat man's pants off and suck his c.o.c.k to hardness flashed through her. She pictured herself riding the man's d.i.c.k and felt a dampness between her legs. She could kill him while he was still inside her, rip his throat out with her bare hands.

Then Ellen's breathy whisper: "Hey...this is kind of...hot."

The words broke the spell. Dream would not sate her needs with this man. He wasn't worthy. And she wasn't quite debased enough to relish the notion of playing the starring role in a live s.e.x act for her friends. Not yet. So she exerted her strength and pinned the man firmly to the bed. He still thrashed with all his might. Useless. Dream felt that darkness rise inside her again, that sickness aching to feed. She raised her fists and brought them cras.h.i.+ng down on his face. She felt bones and cartilage splinter and yield beneath her hands. His head whipped side to side, the motion a blur, like a punching bag in a gym. His face was a b.l.o.o.d.y, pulpy mess by the time she broke off the beating.