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  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.

  PART II:

  THE CRIMSON HIGHWAY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One month later

  The strange little girl in the yellow rain slicker was looking at her again. Laughing at her again. The girl made her nervous. She had a weird glint in her eyes. And there was something about the set of her features and the angle at which she was holding her head that made her expression look like a grown-up leer. A hint of lasciviousness one shouldn’t see in the eyes of one so young. Though Dream couldn’t hear the sound of the girl’s laughter over the wind and the rushing water below, she was certain it possessed a mocking tone.

  She wasn’t positive the little girl was really there. Another apparition, maybe. She was glad of the dozen or so yards that separated them. If she moved any closer, Dream would bolt back across the bridge to the parking lot where they’d left Marcy’s van. The girl put a cupped hand to her mouth to cover a giggle.

  Dream shifted her attention back to the natural wonder in the distance. The stiff breeze stirred her hair and the fine mist of rain made her flesh glisten as she leaned over the railing of the Rainbow Bridge and watched the distant churning foam of the water at the bottom of American Falls, the U.S. half of the famed Niagara Falls. The sky was overcast and the temperature had dropped into the thirties, with the stiffening wind adding an extra bite to the chill. It was late afternoon drifting toward evening, and the already bruised sky was growing darker by the moment. The nasty conditions had thinned the usual tourist crowds to nearly nothing. Dream had an eerie sense of standing alone at the very edge of the world as all of existence teetered on the brink of some unfathomable apocalypse.

  Dream shivered as the swirling wind abruptly redirected and gusted across her wet face. She tucked her hands under her arms and wished for better protection against the elements than the light jacket she was wearing. She leaned further over the railing and looked at the rushing stream of water directly beneath the Rainbow Bridge. An image leapt unbidden to her mind then, one that stirred horror within her, but was not without a certain morbid appeal. She imagined herself climbing over the slick railing and leaping spread-eagled into the drink, her arms outstretched as she soared for one glorious moment before plunging into the cold, cold water and the darkness beyond.

  “It’s tempting, isn’t it?”

  Dream flinched at the sound of Marcy’s voice. The fragile—but achingly vivid—illusion of perfect aloneness was wrecked again. On the other hand, there was a measure of comfort to be derived from the proximity of an undeniably flesh-and-blood human being. Dream considered asking Marcy whether she could see the girl in the yellow rain slicker, but decided against it when she realized she wasn’t certain which would unsettle her more, a yes or no answer.

  Marcy took up a position a few feet to her left and leaned over the railing. The wind blew her bottle-blonde hair wildly about her face, but she seemed oblivious to the conditions. She glanced down before looking at Dream again. “I kind of wish I had the guts to do it. Just climb over and…jump.” Her tone turned wistful as her gaze was drawn back to the water. “It would solve a lot of problems.”

  Dream sighed and finally acknowledged her presence. “So do it. I won’t stop you, I promise.”

  Marcy grunted. “If you hate me so much, why don’t you just kill me? Make my brain explode like you did to my friend. Or have your freaky zombie friend rip my head off or something.”

  Anger stirred within Dream as she listened to Marcy rant. The girl had been nearly as silent as her meek little sister during their first days on the road, but in the last week she’d grown increasingly bold with her verbal jabs. Dream knew she was testing her, probing to see just how far she could push. She was treading a very thin line. The pressure building within Dream was immense. It wouldn’t take much to trigger an explosion. And she had a feeling her next explosion might wipe out anyone within range.

  Dream shivered again and looked at Marcy. “That thing isn’t my friend. Not really.”

  Marcy smirked. “That’s not what she says. She says—”

  “I know what she says.” Dream turned away from the railing and leaned close to Marcy. She caught a glimpse of Alicia over Marcy’s shoulder. The black woman was standing at a spot some twenty yards to the left, her gaze trained on the waterfall. “And maybe she even believes it. But she’s not Alicia. She’s not even Alicia’s ghost. There may be some little strand of Alicia’s essence inside her, something some part of my subconscious always carries with me. If anything, she’s some kind of fucked-up clone or copy. There’s a lot of what I remember about Alicia in that…thing, but it’s all distorted.” She frowned. “I don’t know how to put it exactly.”

  Marcy’s brow furrowed. “Like a garbled data transmission, then? Static or interference causing some information to be left out and other bits of it scrambled all to hell.”

  Dream shrugged. “Something like that, I guess.”

  Marcy nodded. “Yeah. The supernatural gumbo inside you created a shell based on your last memories of Alicia, then downloaded a faulty blueprint of her psyche to her regenerated brain.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s all very late night Z-movie. Not sure I believe it, but I guess it makes at least as much sense as the idea of a genuine walking corpse.”

  Dream didn’t respond to that. She looked over Marcy’s shoulder again at Alicia. The
slinky cocktail dress had been traded in for jeans, a long-sleeved thermal shirt, and a light jacket similar to the one worn by Dream. She looked almost normal now. And it wasn’t just because of the clothes. The wounds and corpse bloat were still there, if you looked close enough, but these things were fading, the open, weeping razor incisions closing and becoming scars. Every day she looked a little better, and Dream suspected she would soon be fully restored. Her improvement was disconcerting, although it wasn’t as unsettling as the realization that other people could see the dead woman now. It reduced the likelihood that she was hallucinating or losing her mind, a scenario that bothered her far less than the idea of having actually conjured Alicia into being through some unconscious use of raw magic. A vision of the girl in the yellow rain slicker formed in her mind then, and Dream was again made to consider the possibility that if she could perform the feat of creation once, then she could surely do it again.

  She thought about that. She assumed the dead woman was feeding off the power lurking within Dream, drawing some of that energy out to make herself more real. That they were tethered together in some way was clear, but Dream had no way of knowing the depth of that connection. But she wondered just how much Alicia still needed her now that she had form and substance in the physical world. She had a feeling the creature would’ve ceased to exist had those idiot kids killed her outright that night instead of abducting her, either blinking out immediately or continuing in a fuzzy state of semi-existence for a brief time before fading away.

  But now…

  Now she was here to stay. Dream could take a swan dive off the Rainbow Bridge and Alicia would remain up here behind the railing. She would watch the water take Dream and sweep her away. Then she would leave this place, taking Marcy and Ellen with her as she resumed her meandering search for Ms. Wickman.

  Which, of course, was crazy. The thing that resembled her dead friend might not actually be Alicia Jackson, but she certainly bore her grudges as tenaciously as the real thing. She meant to see Ms. Wickman dead, preferably at the business end of a straight razor. Dream was not bothered by the idea of being made to participate in the murder of that woman. She deserved death and worse. What did bother her was the obvious impossiblity of making this happen. There was a whole wide world into which Ms. Wickman could have disappeared. They could never hope to find her.

  Except that…

  Well.

  Except that Alicia believed Ms. Wickman had already established a new kingdom similar to the one formerly ruled over by the Master. She also believed Ms. Wickman had scores of operatives scouring the country for Dream even now. She wouldn’t say why she believed this, but the strength of her conviction was clear. Alicia hoped to somehow draw the attention of these agents, induce them to capture them and transport them back to this supposed new kingdom. Which would eliminate the necessity for all this endless, aimless hunting. Dream figured it was the only remotely plausible way Alicia might get what she wanted. And even the remote possibility of again gazing into the awful Ms. Wickman’s cold, dead eyes chilled her to the bone.

  Marcy noted Dream’s continued scrutiny of Alicia and smiled. “Hey, at least the maggots are gone.”

  Dream laughed. “Yeah. There’s that.”

  “So it’s not all bad.”

  “Right. Now it’s only 99.98 percent bad.”

  Dream watched the dark form of a bird swoop through her field of vision before disappearing into the gathering darkness on the horizon. The rain grew harder, falling in silver-white sheets across the sky. The temperature seemed to have fallen another five degrees in just the last twenty minutes. Though it had been her idea to come to this place, she was beginning to regret it. It was one of a number of places she’d always wanted to visit, and when she’d realized they were wandering close to this area, she’d insisted on a slight course change to bring them here. Niagara Falls was as beautiful as she’d always imagined, and the sight of all that rushing water inspired the expected sense of awe. And that overwhelming beauty was enhanced now with the advent of twilight. The spotlights behind the falls had been switched on, adding a lovely soft green tint to the pouring water. The problem was that it was too beautiful a thing to share with her current company. She should be seeing this in the company of a lover, here or on one of the closer observation platforms, holding hands and leaning against each other, enjoying a classic romantic moment.

  The train of thought plunged her into a sudden depression. For the first time in a while she thought of Chad and the life she’d left behind. Scenes and aural snippets from their screaming arguments came back to her then. Arguments that nearly always centered around the same thing—her deepening booze and pill dependence. Chad railed endlessly against this “self-medication,” insisting that she needed professional help to deal with her guilt over the deaths of her friends. This was followed by Dream’s usual litany of bitter recriminations, unfairly blaming him for everything that was wrong with her. Even then she’d known how unfair she was being, but she hadn’t cared. She would not be denied her only real solace, the numbing effects of her chosen poisons. Things came to a head the time Dream whizzed an empty bottle past Chad’s head, barely missing him before it exploded on the living room wall. And then she’d hit him. And that’d been the end of it. She moved out the next day and never returned.

  Tears stung Dream’s eyes and she was glad for the obscuring effects of the rain. A flicker of movement to her right drew her out of the painful reverie. She glanced in that direction and saw the girl in the yellow rain slicker again. Only now she was closer than before, the distance between them nearly halved. The rain slicker flapped in the wind and the hood blew back a bit, revealing long wet strands of blonde hair. The girl’s eyes were a brilliant shade of blue that sparkled even in the gloom. She was a pretty young thing, one might even say adorable but for that insidious grin and that strange, mocking laughter Dream realized she could actually hear now.

  Dream cast her gaze about for any sign of the child’s parents, but there was no one nearby who obviously fit the bill. A few other people were present, but they were mostly dark, indistinct forms in the distance. And surely no parent of any worth would allow a child so young to wander from sight on a place like Rainbow Bridge. She didn’t want to believe the girl was another apparition or magical construct, but the sense that she was wouldn’t go away. The idea that the power she possessed was so far beyond her control terrified Dream.

  But there was another thing to consider. From which submerged corner of Dream’s psyche had she emerged? There was nothing instantly familiar about the girl. Except for the blonde hair, she didn’t much resemble Dream as a young girl. Nor did she much look like any of the childhood friends she could recall. Then something occurred to Dream, a flash of insight so stark and compelling she couldn’t help but believe it. Perhaps, on a subconscious level, the girl was Dream’s idea of how her own daughter might look. She was a woman, and perhaps on some primal level lurked a need unfulfilled, a biological imperative that combined with what Marcy called the “supernatural gumbo” inside her to produce this leering manifestation.

  Her eyes still locked on Dream, the girl laughed harder, her little body rocking with the force of her mirth.

  Dream shivered and moved back a step.

  The girl was closer by half again, maybe ten feet away now, and Dream had not seen her move. It was almost as if the physical distance between them was shrinking of its own accord, the fabric of existence retracting or disappearing to draw them closer. Which was an insane, impossible thing, but Dream had seen and experienced enough not to discount a thing merely because it shouldn’t be possible.

  She moved back another step and said, “Stay away.” She bumped against Marcy and her voice rose in pitch as tears flowed freely down her face. “Stay the fuck away! Leave me alone!”

  Marcy shuffled away with a startled grunt and said, “Who are you talking to, Dream?”

  The little girl was five feet away and looking straight at
her now. She raised a hand and pointed a slender forefinger at her. The pale digit looked ghostly in the gloom. Like something only half-formed or incomplete. This impression, combined with Marcy’s question, formed the impetus for what happened next.

  Dream ceased her retreat. The terror was still rising inside her, an inferno that threatened to scorch what precious little remained of her sanity. But there was another emotion now, as well. Anger. Raw, burning hatred. Hatred for a part of herself she couldn’t control. A thing she feared might consume her.

  She loosed a cry of rage and dashed forward. The girl’s hand fell to her side and her evil little grin gave way to a look of shocked surprise. Dream seized her by the shoulders and began to lift her up. A scream of terror ripped from the girl’s lungs, but Dream ignored it, knowing only she could hear the sound. She would not be swayed from doing what had to be done, would not allow this awful thing to feed from her and grow stronger, become a part of the real world. The girl’s body was quaking as Dream lifted her higher and moved toward the railing. She sobbed and pleaded, but Dream blanked it out and focused only on the task at hand, moving the light little body out over the railing.

  Marcy was yelling at her: “Dream, what the hell are you doing? Have you lost your fucking mind!?”

  Other people were yelling, too. Shouts and exhortations, desperate words that failed to penetrate the roaring in her ears. She also failed to hear the sound of several pairs of feet pounding across concrete toward her, but she did feel the grappling hands of the wouldbe rescuers a moment later, felt them pulling at her arms, tugging at her hair and clothes, desperately digging for any hold at all to pull her back from the brink. But Dream was resolute and would not be moved. The dormant core of power within her switched on and filled her entire body with a strength several times greater than that of all the people assailing her combined. Though she didn’t think it consciously, there was an underlying sense that these people were attempting to pull her back from an apparent suicide leap.