Queen Of Blood Page 15

  Ursula had retrieved a torch from one of the wall sconces and was raising it toward the unconscious form in the cage. The leading edge of the billowing flame licked at Gwendolyn’s body, and Giselle cringed at the memory of the acetylene torch applied to her mutilated flesh in the back of a limo. Gwendolyn awoke with a shriek and jumped away from the searing heat, making the thick metal chain that held the cage suspended above the floor groan as the cage swayed wildly. Ursula laughed and shifted position beneath the cage, raising the flame again. There was a faint sizzle of burning meat as Gwendolyn danced away from the flame and began to plead for mercy. Giselle felt a tiny flicker of sympathy. Not so long ago she’d been in the same position. Desperate, her spirit broken, her dignity gone.

  An intense sense of déjà vu made Giselle want to leave the concealed dungeon at once. Ursula danced beneath the swaying cage, raising the torch again and again as she grinned and giggled at Gwendolyn’s tears and cries of pain. The delight she took in her adversary’s pain made Giselle think about vulnerability again.

  The smart thing to do would be to eliminate the potential threat engendered by her feelings for Ursula. Kill her. Or cast her out to the slave city, which might be even worse for her. But even as she considered these ideas Giselle knew she would not harm her lover. There were other, less lethal precautions she could take. They weren’t as foolproof as death, granted, but they would be better than nothing.

  “Ursula.”

  “Yes, Mistress?”

  Giselle kept her voice even and her face expression less as she said, “There are some things I must attend to. In the meantime, I’ll leave you to play with your toy. I’ll leave the door open in case you need to leave, okay?”

  Ursula nodded.“Okay.” She smiled. “Thank you again. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I…love you.”

  Giselle’s heart raced. “I love you, too.”

  Then she turned away from Urusla and strode out of the dark place. Back in her quarters, she hesitated a moment, considering whether she should simply close the door and seal Ursula inside forever.

  But the girl’s words came floating back to her: I…love you.

  And Giselle again was unsurprised to find she still lacked the will to implement an obvious solution to her dilemma. She would instead summon Schreck and have some simple restraints affixed to the big bed.

  But something else caused her to delay summoning Schreck. It was the other thing that worried her and which she strove not to think about. An inexplicable thing. She approached the full-length oval mirror that stood next to her wardrobe and stared at her reflection for a long moment, her hands clasped tightly just below the sash. The pink bathrobe didn’t look good on her. She was meant for darker shades. But that, of course, wasn’t the thing that was bothering her.

  She sighed. Oh, just do it!

  She untied the sash with fingers that trembled slightly and pulled the front of the robe open. She stared for a moment at her full breasts and flat stomach, then she turned to her side and allowed the robe to slide down her arms to her elbows.

  It was still there.

  A month ago her back had been a smooth expanse of pure white. But now much of that flesh was covered with a large and intricate tattoo of a dragon. The same tattoo she’d seen on Ms. Wickman’s back. She’d seen it the morning after Ms. Wickman’s death, glimpsing it in a mirror after her bath. The sight of it, unexpected as it was, had almost stopped her heart then. And it still scared her. She had no idea what the tattoo’s appearance on her flesh might mean. It didn’t seem to be affecting her in any obvious way, but, as always, it wasn’t the obvious things that worried Giselle.

  She abruptly pulled the robe back over her shoulders and tied the sash. There was nothing to be done about it. It was probably a harmless consequence of having devoured the dead woman’s magic when she ate her heart.

  She turned away from the mirror and summoned Schreck.

  Somewhere on the other side of the world, a slim woman wearing a black shirt and black slacks entered a dimly lit room. Her bare feet whispered across carpet as she approached a man who sat cross-legged on the floor. The man’s eyes were closed. He was meditating. The woman waited in respectful silence until the man’s eyes opened and he acknowledged her presence.

  She bowed her head and presented him with an envelope, which he accepted with finely wrinkled fingers as dry as crepe paper. The man flipped the envelope over and saw that it bore the seal of the Order of the Dragon. He winced slightly at the sight of it. The Order normally preferred to conduct its business in more subtle ways. The arrival of this letter could only be a portent of darker, more dangerous times to come. He didn’t need to read the letter to know this.

  He nonetheless tore the envelope open, unfolded the single crisp sheet of paper it contained, and read the two paragraphs with mounting fury. The intent of the letter was twofold—to serve as a summons and to inform him of the passing of a member of the Order. The old man stood and moved to a table upon which was an ornate sword in a scabbard and a single flickering candle in a silver holder. He fed both letter and envelope to the flame, watched as they turned to black ash and fell to the table’s polished surface. Then he removed the sword from the scabbard and held the blade upright before him. He ran the ball of a thumb along the edge of the blade. The sharp edge nicked his flesh and a thin stream of scarlet ran down the blade.

  The anger coursing through his body invigorated him, made him feel like a much younger man. He turned away from the table and quickly crossed the room. The other man in the room cringed at his approach, but he could not get out of the way of the doom bearing down on him. This other man was tied to the only chair in the room. The rubber ball in his mouth muffled his screams as he watched the long, flashing blade arc toward him. And then he felt nothing as the blade separated his head from his body.

  The old man watched blood erupt from the neck stump and felt nothing. The anger that had possessed him a moment ago had deserted him. Nor did he feel remorse for the life he’d taken, which was only the latest of hundreds. He summoned servants to dispose of the body. The slim woman in black returned and asked if he had any orders for her.

  He did.

  Beginning with the scheduling of his first trip to North America since World War I.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The lighting in the dingy gas station bathroom left something to be desired. The single low-wattage bulb in the exposed ceiling socket flickered and buzzed. Marcy leaned over a sink covered with mildew and studied the dye job Ellen had helped her with in a fleabag motel outside of Newark the night before. The jet-black shade made her vaguely resemble Dream. She didn’t have the supermodel face and figure Dream possessed, but she didn’t look bad. She could almost pass for Dream’s slightly less-blessed younger sister. The important thing was she bore little resemblance to the high school era pictures of herself that had appeared on CNN and the front pages of newspapers across the country.

  Now she touched up her eyeshadow and applied a dark red lipstick. She returned the lipstick and eye-shadow to her purse. Then she moved to the bathroom’s single toilet, dropped her jeans, and squatted on the cold seat. As she relieved herself, a fat cockroach moved across the blue-and-white floor tiles. The place was a pit, but she’d become inured to unsanitary conditions during her month and a half on the run. You couldn’t very well stay at the Hyatt when you were trying to fly under the radar.

  Alicia was waiting outside when she exited the bathroom a moment later, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She glared at Marcy as she barged past her. “What were you doing in there? Counting the fucking tiles?”

  Then she was gone, the gray metal door slamming shut behind her. Marcy sighed and shook her head as she moved across the parking lot toward the old van. Alicia’s progress from freakshow walking corpse to fully functioning living woman still wigged her out. The formerly dead woman hadn’t required drink or food for weeks. Then, as she began to “heal,” normal human appetites re
asserted themselves. At first she’d only nibbled on fries and sipped at fast-food sodas. But now she consumed full, regular meals and guzzled jugs of Red Bull and vodka like a nightclub slut. Very little visible evidence of her original corpselike appearance remained. There was one faint little scar just above her collarbone, but Marcy suspected even that would be gone soon.

  Marcy stepped through the van’s open side door and slid into the seat next to Dream, who sat slumped against the window on her side. She clutched a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in her hands, holding it tightly against her chest. Her eyes were bloodshot and an odor of alcohol clung to her like a second skin. She smiled weakly as she glimpsed Marcy sitting next to her. “Hey, girl.” She offered the bottle. “Have a drink.”

  Marcy accepted the bottle from Dream’s shaking hands and put it to her mouth. She tilted her head back and let the warm wine wash down her throat. Then she passed the bottle back to Dream and wiped her mouth. “Thanks.”

  Dream sipped from the bottle and leaned her head against the window again. She looked through the window at the gray sky and the cars passing by on the wet street beyond the gas station parking lot. “Where are we now?”

  “Back in New York. Near Rochester.”

  Dream grunted. “We ought to go south.”

  “That’s where you’re from, right?”

  Dream nodded without shifting her gaze from the dreary view. “Yeah. Good ol’ Tennessee. But anywhere in the South would be good. It’s so cold and dark and nasty here all the fucking time.” Her tone was laced with melancholy. It was how she always sounded these days. “I wanna go where I can feel the warm sun on my skin. And smell flowers…”

  Marcy watched Dream’s eyes flutter closed as her voice drifted. She gently pried the wine bottle from Dream’s numb fingers to keep it from falling to the floor. The van’s interior already smelled enough like an accident at a liquor store. She put the bottle to her lips again and drank as she watched Dream drowse. She was even more beautiful in repose. In sleep the demons haunting her weren’t so apparent, and in these moments Marcy fancied she was seeing Dream as she’d been years ago, back before her life had turned into a perpetual horror show. She looked at her closely now and tried to imagine her with the longer blonde hair she remembered from the old newspaper pictures. It was easy to picture and part of her ached for Dream, for what she’d lost. Yes, she was still pretty now, but she was harder inside than she’d been and that showed in the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. The hard living was taking its toll.

  “Has she passed out again?”

  Marcy watched the gentle rise and fall of Dream’s chest. “Yeah.” She held the bottle toward the front seat. “You want a hit of this?”

  Ellen was ensconced behind the wheel of the van. Early on in their quixotic quest she’d assumed the role of driver. It gave her something to do. And Ellen having a defined role in the scheme of things was good. This lit tle bit of structure helped keep her balanced in the midst of the insanity swirling around her. She’d also changed her hair, letting it grow out some and dropping the mix of blonde and black in favor of a dark shade of auburn. The new look brought out her features and made her more attractive, which had also served to boost her confidence. Marcy liked that. Little sister was a mousy doormat no more.

  She’d only relinquished her position as driver once in recent weeks. That being when Alicia had briefly taken over in the aftermath of the Rainbow Bridge incident. Alicia remained behind the wheel as they followed the course of the river, tracking Dream’s downstream progress via some internal means Marcy couldn’t comprehend. Marcy remembered how she’d fretted over the course of that grim hour, worrying that Dream’s confidence in her ability to negotiate the rapids had been unfounded, that she’d drowned out there in those cold depths. But Alicia kept going, staying as close to the water as possible. And then they’d seen her, sopping wet and sitting cross-legged in the grass by the side of the road. Shivering and smiling in a vacant way as she waited for them.

  Ellen turned from the steering wheel and stared through the gap between the front seats. “We should get out of here.”

  Marcy frowned as Ellen took the bottle. “What?”

  Ellen sipped some wine. “You heard me. We should toss Dream out while she’s unconscious and that freaky bitch is away.”

  Marcy shot a nervous glance back toward the gas station. No sign of Alicia. And the bathroom door was still shut. She frowned and looked at Ellen again. “Why would we do that?”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. “Because something bad will happen if we don’t. Duh. We might even get ourselves killed trying to find these people Alicia is after.”

  Marcy’s frown deepened. “So…you want to ditch our friends and step out of the line of fire? That’s kind of a shitty thing to do. Cowardly, even.”

  “They’re not our friends.” Ellen’s tone was thick with exasperation. “You seem to have forgotten that somewhere along the way. We had some real friends, but you fucking killed them all. Remember?”

  Marcy’s expression hardened. “They would have gone to the police. They would have ruined everything.” Her hands curled into tight fists. She didn’t like talking about this, and Ellen fucking well knew it. “And anyway, I’m really only talking about Dream. I don’t care what you think about her. She’s my friend. I won’t abandon her. I sure as shit won’t leave her alone with Alicia.”

  Ellen scowled. “I can’t believe you. How anyone can go from wanting to kill a person to being their best pal is beyond me.”

  “I’m not asking you to understand it. Just accept it.”

  “Unfuckingbelievable.” Ellen passed the nearly empty wine bottle back to Marcy. “Take this shit. It’s awful.”

  Marcy took the bottle and drank from it again. She wouldn’t admit it out loud, but she knew her sister had a point. They were well out of their league. Yes, the impulsive murders she’d committed at the farmhouse constituted a spectacular lapse of sanity. But anyone could snap and go off like that. It happened several times every year. Regular, everyday people who suddenly lose it and shoot up a schoolroom or workplace, with images of the aftermath beamed into your living room courtesy of CNN and Fox News. But these were tragedies rooted in the real world. They were almost mundane, despite the immense horror and grief suffered by the survivors and loved ones. There was nothing the least mundane about Dream Weaver and Alicia Jackson.

  She looked at Dream and thought about that night on Rainbow Bridge. That was when it had all changed for Marcy. In many ways it had been an awful and tragic evening, but for Marcy it had also possessed a kind of strange and dark beauty. She recalled with a shiver the frisson of that moment just before Dream had taken her dive into the river, a sudden shock of recognition that had passed between them, an awareness that beneath the hate and their differences they were kindred souls. Marcy couldn’t explain it to Ellen in any way that didn’t make it sound like she had some kind of dippy girlcrush on Dream. That wasn’t the case. Rather, she understood Dream and her compulsions. She’d come to feel more closely bonded to Dream than she ever had to her own flesh-and-blood sister. So, no, she would not abandon Dream. If necessary, she would follow her to the ends of the earth. With or without Ellen.

  Dream stirred and lifted her head off the frosty window. She looked at Marcy through bleary eyes and smiled. “Have I told you how good your hair looks like that?”

  Marcy blushed. “Yeah. A few times. But thanks again.”

  Dream took the bottle from her and knocked back a belt. She looked at the bottle and shook it. “We’re gonna need more booze soon.”

  “I saw a liquor store back down that way.” Marcy nodded at the road. “We could stock up before heading out to the highway again.”

  Dream yawned and stretched. “Sounds good.”

  Ellen sighed. “Wonderful.”

  Marcy felt her anger come back in a rush. She leaned forward in her seat and thumped the back of the driver’s seat. “Something you want to say, Elle
n?”

  Ellen met her sister’s gaze in the tilted rearview mirror. “Yes. You’re all drinking too much. It’s not a moral fucking judgment or anything. I’m just worried someone will get sloppy and somehow make a cop look at us a little too hard.”

  Dream drained the rest of the Boone’s Farm and flung the empty bottle through the gap between seats. It exploded on the dash, making Ellen shriek and jump in her seat.

  Then Dream was laughing. “Sloppy like that, you mean?”

  Ellen sat very still for a moment. Marcy’s heart pounded as she waited to see how her sister would react to the sudden violence. Then Ellen undid her seat belt and reached for the door handle. “Fuck this, I’m out of here.”

  The humor drained from Dream’s face at once. “Stay.”

  Ellen’s hand froze on the handle. “Please. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “You can and you will.” Dream’s voice was cold. Devoid of compassion. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ellen. So put your seat belt back on. Please.”

  Marcy let out a relieved breath as Ellen relinquished her hold on the door handle and did as instructed. Though her loyalties had shifted somewhat, she didn’t want to see her sister suffer. And Ellen would damn well suffer if she resisted Dream’s will.

  “That’s better.” Dream pushed up out of her seat and moved into the gap between the front seats. Marcy couldn’t see Ellen now, but she heard the other girl gasp. Then Dream went to her knees between the seats and laid a hand on Ellen’s arm. “Listen up. I know you don’t like me and I guess I can’t blame you for that. But you’re gonna have to work at putting all that shit behind you, because we’re a family now.”