Queen Of Blood Part 17

And brutal murder was like anything--it got easier with practice.

Blood spurted over her hands and soaked the front of her jacket. The man tried to twist away from her, but she grabbed the front of his s.h.i.+rt and held him close, yanking the blade from his eye and whipping it around again, punching it through his temple, somehow keeping her aim true as the driver screamed and swerved on the winding back road.

Allyson turned her snarling face toward the driver and said,"Slow down and let the others get around that bend."

She pulled the b.l.o.o.d.y blade out of the dead man's head and brandished it.

"Do it or die."

The man was shaking and crying, robbed utterly of any remaining shred of bravado or machismo. "Y-y-y-yeah...o-kay . . . please..."

And he did it. The van ahead of them disappeared around the bend. The Jeep slowed and Allyson ordered the driver to park at the shoulder. Again, he did as instructed, tears streaming down his face as he mewled like a snot-nosed kid on a playground standing in the shadow of a bully. Allyson pushed the shotgun seat forward, threw the door open, and got out. She hauled the dead man's body out of the Jeep and deposited it in the ditch beyond the shoulder. The whole time the Jeep was in gear and running, its engine chugging, exhaust kicking out steam in the winter's air.

Allyson climbed back inside, a.s.suming the position formerly occupied by the dead, would-be rapist. She pulled the pistol from the driver's holster and jammed the barrel against his side.

"Drive. Now."

The driver looked at the pistol she'd so easily taken from him. Then he looked at her, simple, numb disbelief in his eyes. "I could've killed you. Or left you. Or--"

Allyson jabbed the pistol harder against him. "But you didn't. You f.u.c.ked up. Because you're not as hardcore as you thought. But I am, motherf.u.c.ker. So now you're gonna drive. Catch up to the rest of those a.s.sholes before they know anything's wrong. Make me say it again, I'll shoot your a.s.s and do it my d.a.m.n self."

The Jeep lurched forward.

The engine rattled and ate up highway.

They caught up and kept rolling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

The spoon slipped from her fingers and landed with a small thump on the little card table. It landed upside down, its meager load of mashed potatoes dumped onto the scuffed and scratched black surface. Ellen groped for the spoon's handle again, managed to grasp it at an awkward angle, and raised it again to her mouth. This time the spoon actually entered her mouth. A sound of simple triumph issued from the back of her throat.

Marcy sighed. "That's something, anyway. You didn't get any actual food in your mouth, but h.e.l.l, you're getting there."

She settled back in her chair and stared at the thing that was supposed to be her sister. The creature was the spitting image of Ellen. Marcy was impressed by what Dream had accomplished, this G.o.dlike act of forming life out of seeming thin air. It had been Alicia's idea, to see if Dream could deliberately do what she'd done with her, recreating a dead friend from a synthesis of memories, spiritual essence, and, for lack of a better word, magic. Dream had been wary at first, and then curious, as she became increasingly interested in testing the limits of her abilities. Marcy had been so numb, so grief-stricken, and so willing to gr asp at any straw.

So one night on their way to this place they stopped at a cheap motel on the outskirts of a rural community. Dream and Marcy crawled into bed together. They wrapped their bodies around each other, limbs entwined in the most intimate ways possible. There'd been nothing s.e.xual about this, just an instinctual understanding that they needed to be as close to each other as possible in order to effect this unique process of creation. The darkness and relative silence served to enhance their concentration. Marcy's mind filled with images and thoughts of Ellen and nothing else. She visualized her dead sister so well Ellen seemed to come alive in her mind. She fell asleep in Dream's embrace, and thoughts of Ellen followed her into dreams so vivid, so lucid, they felt as real as anything from her waking life. As she awakened in the dim light of the following morning, she heard a sound like the scared whimpering of a lost puppy. Then she'd opened her eyes and there was her reborn sister, nude and huddled in a corner of the dingy room.

She'd felt such joy in those first moments, a feeling subsequently tempered by the realization the creature they'd created was essentially an empty vessel. But the reborn Ellen did seem to recognize Marcy and the others in a dim way, and it was this little thing that provided the shred of hope necessary to keep going. Dream had pledged to work with her every day until Ellen was fully restored. Marcy had faith in her friend and believed this would eventually happen.

She looked into Ellen's stupid, vacant eyes again and sighed.

Eventually...

Marcy didn't doubt the sincerity of Dream's intent. They'd formed a strong bond over the course of those long, frequently surreal months on the road. The complicating factor, however, was Dream's near-constant state of inebriation. She'd stayed drunk or high much of the time during their travels, but the camaraderie of the road had obscured the extent of her problem. Now, though, the truth of Dream's dependency was plain to see. She had the perpetually dour aura of the clinically depressed. She was obviously self-medicating. In a way, it was understandable. It wasn't as if she could seek the aid of a psychiatrist or any other type of mental health professional.

But knowing this failed to alleviate Marcy's frustration. Her friend was a G.o.d. Or something very close to a G.o.d. And that was simultaneously very cool and f.u.c.ked-up to the nth degree. Cool because it allowed Dream and her friends a level of freedom few people would ever experience. And f.u.c.ked up because Dream inwardly remained so quintessentially human and frail despite her gift.

Ellen was eating with her fingers again, stuffing mashed potatoes and meatb.a.l.l.s into her mouth with messy abandon. Marcy refrained from slapping her wrist this time. She watched the girl eat and tried to imagine a future in which her sister was functioning at a higher cognitive state, a time when she might exist as a reasonable approximation of the sibling she'd known. She tried to imagine having actual conversations with her, perhaps reminiscing about things from their childhoods.

Ellen's teeth chomped down on her fingers and drew blood. The girl let out a squeal of pain and stared at her mangled fingers in dumb disbelief. A thin trickle of crimson slid over the heel of her hand and down her wrist. It wasn't the first time Ellen 2 had injured herself. Marcy very much doubted it would be the last. And now she'd have to clean the idiot's hand and swab the wounds with disinfectant. Her mind did that forward projection thing again, saw years of tending to this creature, and a black despair seeped into her heart.

Then Ellen held her hand toward Marcy. Her mouth opened and emitted a single syllable:"Hurt."

Marcy's mouth dropped open. The word was the first intelligible thing Ellen 2 had uttered since the morning she was conjured into existence in that dank hotel room. Ellen seemed to misinterpret her sister's astonishment as a rebuke and uttered a second word: "Ssssssorrrrryyyyy..."

Then tears were streaming down her face and her body began to convulse with sobs. Marcy was up in a flash, her chair toppling to the floor as she hurried to embrace her sister. The girl folded herself into Marcy's arms and clutched at her clothes with her clumsy fingers, that second word emerging from her mouth again and again. Marcy stroked Ellen's hair and made cooing sounds in her ear.

"Shush. Everything will be okay. I promise."

Tears filled her own eyes as she prayed for that to be true. She remembered with horrible clarity how she'd felt in the aftermath of Ellen's death, that gnawing, soul-shredding grief. She couldn't imagine anything more awful. It would be better to be dead than have to go on feeling that way. The train of thought made her think of the friends she'd killed after the incident in the bar, all those lives extinguished because she'd snapped or gone temporarily insane. Even now, months later, she had no reasonable explanation for what she'd done, just that sense of fate carrying her toward a dark destiny. A mad whim. She remembered every detail of that day vividly, the twitch of the gun in her hands as she squeezed the trigger again and again, the specific damage each bullet had done to the bodies of her friends, and the way those bodies had fallen. But she hadn't allowed herself to think about how these deaths must have affected the loved ones of her victims. But now she was thinking about it. Oh, yes. And now she imagined the grief she'd felt for Ellen multiplied dozens of times.

The first sob began somewhere deep in her gut and tore out of her throat with wrenching force. It was followed by many more.

The two sisters held each other and cried for a long time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Giselle awoke in darkness, as she had every day for the last two weeks or so. At first she'd tried to keep careful track of the pa.s.sage of time. It seemed important, albeit for no immediately apparent reason. It'd merely been something to do, a simple task to occupy a mind that might otherwise obsess on things more disturbing. At some point she stopped trying to gauge the length of her imprisonment, and so now her best guess was two weeks. Two weeks of numbing existence in the dark and the cold.

She'd felt a deep humiliation upon being returned to the hanging cage, the prison she'd fought so hard to escape. A life had been sacrificed to make that happen. Her own conscience had died in the process. But it had all seemed worth it for a time. She'd had her revenge and for a while had known a kind of contentment. And in time contentment bred arrogance, which led to her downfall. She should have been so much more careful. How stupid she'd been to accept Schreck's loyalty without question. That vile man. He was the reason she was in this awful place again, having suggested it when Dream and her friends had been debating about what to do with her. And he'd surprised her by knowing how to access the chamber. Just one more thing she should've guessed, one more example of how arrogance had blinded her. And now she ached for revenge again, but this time she knew she would never have it.

Her power was gone.

Well, not really gone. Not exactly. It still resided somewhere within her altered DNA, still floated in the microscopic s.p.a.ces between molecules. She could feel the faint thrum of it in her every pore. That was the most maddening thing, that awareness, because the power was beyond her ability to reach. Dream had seen to that, infusing her body with a damping energy, an extraordinarily effective bit of blunt magic that blocked her every attempt to tap her own magical abilities. That Dream was able to direct energy so effortlessly boggled the mind. She was untrained. She'd never read any of the ancient texts Giselle had pored over during her years in service to the Master. She could accept the scope of Dream's abilities as an accident of nature and genetics, a dormant thing stirred to life during her ruttings with the Master. She had a harder time understanding how the woman had come to direct that raw, wild energy with such precision and effectiveness. It was either a case of practice makes perfect, or Dream was some kind of magical idiot savant. Either possibility was equally galling. It meant her years of often tedious study had ultimately been for nothing.

As bad as that was, it was as nothing compared to the desolation she felt in the wake of Azaroth's abandonment. She recalled her last communication with the death G.o.d and felt the same puzzlement she always felt. No words, just that mocking, echoing laughter. So unlike anything in her previous experience with the ancient ent.i.ty.

Perhaps he'd been manipulating her all along, even all those years ago when she'd first invoked his name with a blood sacrifice after reading about him in one of the old texts. The death G.o.ds were old beyond human conception. It was presumptuous to a.s.sume to know why they did the things they did. Maybe Azaroth really had played her from the beginning, building her up with the intent of eventually betraying her. Wheels within wheels within wheels. Suffering begetting suffering down through the ages as the old ones spun out their endless, convuluted machinations. The death G.o.ds fed on suffering, this she knew. And she supposed Azaroth was feasting on her pain even now, enjoying the particular aged flavor of her despair.

An impulse caused her to call out to him. It didn't matter that he probably wouldn't answer, or that at best she would only hear that mocking laughter again. Her every fiber ached to know the truth. She realized it would not grant her peace, that it might even deepen her despair, but the need to know overwhelmed any other considerations.

She focused what she could of her will and called out to the void: AZAROTH! HEAR ME! I BESEECH YOU! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME!

At first there was nothing. Just that darkness. That void. Then she felt a touch of warmth against her flesh, a subtle atmospheric s.h.i.+ft, like the sigh of a lover against her neck. The warmth increased, displacing the cold that normally permeated the room.

Next, a pinpoint of light in the middle distance.

The light grew and pushed the darkness back. Giselle could see again, albeit dimly, the stone walls beyond the cage. The s.h.i.+mmering center of light in the middle of the room flared brighter still and grew to the size of a man. A mist billowed at the edges of the light and Giselle realized she was seeing a portal, a doorway between dimensions. She saw shadows within the light, forms moving, something coming closer. A shape resolved into the dark silhouette of a man.

The man stepped through the light into the dark chamber.

Giselle's screams echoed off the chamber walls.

She screamed and screamed again. Screamed herself hoa.r.s.e.

The man laughed softly and approached the cage. Giselle whimpered and scooted to the far end of the cage, making it rock wildly.

"Nooooo..." She moaned. Her mind rebelled, fought to deny the reality of what she was seeing. But he just kept coming closer, refusing to dissipate like any good hallucination should. "Noooo...nononono..."

The Master laughed again and said, "Yes."

She groaned again. "How?"

He smiled. "I thrived in the afterlife, Giselle. You should have expected that. I destroyed the one you call Azaroth, usurped his position among the death G.o.ds. It's me you've been communicating with during your recent troubles. I'm the one who demanded the blood sacrifice of your friend. You've belonged to me from that moment. You and your dead conscience."

That mocking laughter again, filling the chamber, rattling her bones and triggering an ache behind her eyes.

Another whimper. "Kill me. Finish it."

His expression s.h.i.+fted again, something that was almost sadness touching his handsome features. "No. Your final judgment is in the hands of others." He stroked her cheek with the back of a strong hand. "I'm showing myself to you one final time to thank you. Your sacrifices have facilitated my return. For that, you have my eternal grat.i.tude."

Giselle wept. She was no longer capable of articulating her despair any other way. The light dimmed as the portal between dimensions began to close. The Master remained in the chamber with her a while longer, stroking her hair and delighting in the sound of her anguish as the darkness and cold enveloped them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

In the dream, things were as they had once been. She was years younger and her long hair was a vibrant shade of blonde. Her flesh was imbued with that deep, lovely tan all the boys found so s.e.xy. She was in a park on a glorious summer afternoon, the sun a golden ball high in the perfect blue sky. She was stretched out on a blanket, soaking up the rays in a white bikini. Her friends were there, too. Alicia sat next to her on the b lanket, her long legs folded beneath her as she read a John Grisham novel. Karen and Chad tossed a Frisbee back and forth in the distance. The orange disc arced across the sky and Chad hurried into position to catch it. Music emanated from a nearby boom box, a big hit by a new band called Green Day.

It was a lovely dream, but tinged with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy. An aching sense of loss belied the purity of the images. Because this was nothing more than a snapshot of something that was gone and forever out of reach. Karen Hidecki was dead. The Alicia Jackson she'd known in those days was dead, too. The regenerated Alicia would never be anything more than an obscene approximation of the deceased woman.

And as for Chad...

The texture and tone of the dream began to change. The blue sky turned a shade of burnt orange bordering on red. The shape of the Frisbee was almost indistinct against that sky as a gust of wind too cold for summer carried it off course. Karen charged after the disc and for a moment it seemed she would catch up to it. But then her head tumbled off her shoulders and bounced across a patch of dead, yellow gra.s.s that moments ago had been a bright shade of green. Dream sat up and screamed, pointing at the headless body, which was still running at high speed toward a nearby line of dead trees. The sight of her pale forearm startled her. What had happened to her beautiful tan?

Then Alicia spoke in the creaking voice of a rotting corpse. "You're just an old wh.o.r.e now. The girl you were is just as dead as that headless b.i.t.c.h."

This was the regenerated Alicia now, looking as she had the moment she'd first appeared to Dream in that little s.h.i.+thole bar. Her flesh was bloated and covered with hundreds of weeping razor nicks.

Dream trembled and shook her head helplessly. "No...no..."

Alicia set aside the book she was reading--which had somehow morphed into The Satanic Bible--and began to crawl toward Dream on her hands and knees. The corners of her mouth stretched wide in a lascivious grin. The skin at the edges of her mouth cracked and a pale, dry nub of tongue emerged to lick uselessly at the new wounds. A brittle wheeze of laughter emerged from the back of her throat.

She reached for Dream with a bleeding hand and said, "Come show me some love, baby."

Dream screamed.

Then her eyes snapped open and she was awake. Above her was the heavy velvet canopy of the four-poster bed. Her head swam and her first impression was she was still asleep, had merely transitioned from one layer of dream existence to another. The old false waking dream, a wicked, but familiar, trick of her fragile psyche. Then she recognized the sensation for what it really was--borderline intoxication. She hadn't remained unconscious quite long enough to sleep off last night's binge.

Which was just as well.

She rolled out of bed and swept the nearly empty bottle of tequila off the nightstand. She held the bottle up and shook it. There was enough left for one good swig. She put the bottle to her mouth and upended it. It slid down her throat as smoothly as water. There'd been a time when so much as a single sip of straight tequila had been enough to make her retch. She returned the empty bottle to the nightstand and stretched her limbs, rolling her neck to work out the kinks.

Images from the dream came back to haunt her. Not the predictable bit at the end when it had all turned to rot. Dream had known too much real horror to care about such nightmare images. What really bothered her was the dream's beginning, which had been so vivid and true, a scene dredged from a store of long-suppressed memories. There really had been days like that. Many of them. Times when she'd been truly happy to be alive and surrounded by her friends. Happy and so young. Thinking about it triggered the old familiar ache in her heart. This was why she normally worked so hard to keep those memories locked down in her subconscious. The usual reflex to push them down failed to kick in this time. So stupid. Next would come the rush of tears...

Only that didn't happen. Her eyes misted a little, but that was it. And instead of burning straight through to the core of her pain the old ache just fizzled.

Dream sighed. "Nothing stays the same forever."

She looked around the huge, empty room and wondered to whom she was talking. But the answer was obvious. There was no one else around. She was alone most of the time these days. She'd granted Schreck the freedom to run the estate as he saw fit, with the stipulation that he and his men stay out of the way of Dream and her friends. So far it had worked out well enough. They were comfortable here. The law couldn't reach them here. There was one downside, but it was a big one. The sense of camaraderie they had shared had diminished by a significant degree. Marcy and Ellen had commandeered a smaller room on a lower level of the mansion, from which they rarely emerged. Alicia, however, was taking an active role in the day-to-day operations of the place. She took such delight in meting out the kinds of tortures that had once been so mercilessly inflicted upon her, which Dream found ironic as well as mildly disturbing.

And that was another thing. The interior of this house was ma.s.sive, containing hundreds of rooms. And in each of those rooms resided a s.a.d.i.s.t-in-training, an Apprentice, each of them committing acts of atrocity so vile the mere contemplation of which would once have made Dream want to vomit. But the part of her that might have cared had withered and died somewhere along the way. She couldn't even feign offense at the inst.i.tutionalized brutality that surrounded her. It was simply the way things were and would always be in this place--and the way they needed to be in order to sustain the dark magic that kept the place thriving.

So she supposed she liked it her e well enough.

But it would be nice not to feel so alone.

f.u.c.k.

It was insane that she could still feel such depression. She was so powerful. There was nothing she couldn't do. She could will life into existence just by thinking about it hard enough. She could change the temperature in a room with a small flex of her will. She could send a hail of f.u.c.king bullets off course by doing the same thing. She suspected she was even capable of altering her own body chemistry, of rolling back the years to erase age lines and reverse any age-related infirmities. Disease could take root inside her and it wouldn't matter because she would be able to burn it away just by thinking about it. For all practical purposes, she was now immortal.

So why was she still so unhappy? She didn't know. What she did know was she was f.u.c.king tired of thinking about it. So she strode across the room, crossing the large expanse of open floor to the area at the opposite end that functioned as both a library and den. The walls here were lined with tall bookcases. There was a fireplace and plenty of expensive-looking furniture. And there was a well-stocked bar tucked away in the corner. She stepped behind it and scanned the rows of gleaming bottles. After a few moments of debate, she selected a bottle of Stolichnaya. She opened it and knocked back several big gulps of vodka.

A slight semblance of well-being returned immediately. It felt good just to have a full bottle in her hands again. She moved away from the bar and examined the shelves of books. Many of them were cla.s.sic t.i.tles she recognized. Many others were unfamiliar. Some t.i.tles weren't in English.

She saw one that called to her, the words THE SATANIC BIBLE etched in gold print along its spine. She recalled her dream and pulled the book off the shelf. Then she settled down in a plush recliner, set the bottle on the little table next to it, and flipped the book open. Her fingers moved over the pages and her lips moved slightly as she read the words. She frowned. This book was not the famous Anton LaVey tome with which she'd been fleetingly familiar in her youth. It appeared to be an actual bible for Satanists, a genuine dark equivalent to the Christian Bible, but that was...

"It is what you think it is, Dream."

Dream's fingers stopped moving. The intrusion of the familiar voice had surprised her, but she felt no fear and that was strange. She had helped to kill him, after all. He was standing so close, but she hadn't heard or sensed his arrival. She could hear the soft, unlabored sound of his breathing. He was alive again. Somehow. Or was he? Maybe he was like Alicia and Ellen, a manifestation manufactured by her subconscious, this time a conjuration of shameful desires she'd worked to ignore through the years. She had been thinking about him a lot of late, especially at night as she lay alone in the dark in that big bed.

Then he moved into view and she knew it wasn't true.

It was really him. The Master.

She closed the book and looked up at him. "How?"