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  The box contained an assortment of faded pictures and other mementos of the life he’d left behind so long ago. He’d carried it with him everywhere for decades, even Below, where most of the banished people were stripped of their personal belongings. But though the box was important to him, only in his most melancholy moments did he remove its contents to examine and reflect upon. The last time had been more than a year ago, when he’d first heard rumblings of the threat that was out there.

  In the time since then, he’d worked hard to prepare for the coming confrontation, and the heavily fortified Camp Whiskey was the fruit of those labors. The goal had been to establish a haven impenetrable by any enemy. Thanks to the resources and contacts of Jack Paradise, the community enjoyed the protection of a small but world-class army. The camp should undeniably be the safest place for the survivors of Below. And yet there remained intangibles that might yet make them vulnerable, things they couldn’t anticipate.

  Things like the treachery of Wanda Lewis, who had once been a significant player in the plot that ended the Master’s reign of terror. Jim could not imagine how so strong a woman had been swayed to the other side. He had taken her loyalty for granted and bringing her into the fold had been a priority. But she’d been unusually difficult to locate, even given the slippery nature of many House of Blood survivors. She resurfaced a month before her attempt on Allyson Vanover’s life, explaining that she’d been busy eluding a particularly tenacious group of would-be assassins. Which seemed a believable enough cover story. But Jim began to hear reports of some strange behavior on Wanda’s part. She was seen talking to herself, appearing to have animated conversations with people who weren’t there. Once she was spotted engaging in a paganistic prayer ritual in the woods. There was nothing worthy of condemnation in these behaviors, but they were far enough removed from the Wanda Lewis he’d known to be troubling. And so Jack Paradise had passed along instruction to the soldiers to keep a watchful eye on her. Which had turned out to be a good thing for Allyson Vanover.

  He was thankful Allyson was still with them. He had a strong feeling there was more to her story than she was willing to share. The question of why Wanda had attempted to kill her remained unanswered and presented a host of bothersome questions. Allyson’s account of things had been too vague to provide any real answers. But his gut told him Allyson was not a threat. She clearly loved Chad, and Jim sensed she was struggling toward an inner change for the better. He could appreciate that.

  As he sorted through the stack of mementos—mostly age-yellowed photographs—Jim reflected on the uncountable number of mistakes he’d made in his life. At the top of that list, as ever, was the impetuous decision to “kill” his public persona. He’d felt so overwhelmed then, with the press and their lies, with evading an American court system determined to make him serve hard time for a supposed act of public indecency, and with the pressure to record a new album that could never live up to ludicrously high expectations. And, of course, his judgment had been clouded by the drugs, enough so that faking his death and going underground had seemed a perfectly reasonable way out. He’d like to go back to that time and force his younger self not to go down that road. In the first few years after his “death,” he’d occasionally entertained notions of resurfacing. But something always held him back. Then, as the years stretched into decades, he began to realize he would never return to public life. For better or worse, this twilight existence was his lot.

  He came to a picture of Pam, his old love, and his eyes misted. The picture showed her seated outside a cafe in Paris, not long before the end of his old life. She was looking away, not wanting to be photographed. She had just learned of the crazy thing he was planning and was unhappy about it. He wanted so much to talk to her again, tell her she’d been right, that he’d made a horrible mistake. But she was dead and beyond reach now. He touched the photo with the tip of a shaking finger and imagined he could feel the softness of her flesh again. The photo slipped from his fingers and tumbled to the dusty cabin floor. He was reaching to retrieve it when he caught sight of the photograph that had been beneath it.

  His heart lurched.

  And now the entire stack of old photos and mementos slipped from his suddenly numb fingers and fluttered across the floor. The new photo—the one he knew had never been there before—landed upright amidst a sea of white. He felt a tightness in his chest as he looked at it again. The picture showed a nude woman on a plush bed. Her eyes were glassy and her face was twisted in a frozen expression of agony. She had been disemboweled by some means not immediately apparent. Blood was everywhere and a small loop of intestine was visible. Jim forced himself to look beyond the gore for some hint as to why an interloper had seen fit to insert the gruesome photograph in the middle of a stack of older pictures he looked at so rarely. At first no obvious solution presented itself. But then he realized there was something familiar about the dead woman…

  His stomach knotted as the realization hit him: “Ms.Wickman—”

  The wicked witch was dead. The proof was at his feet. This should be cause for celebration. Surely there was no longer anything to fear now that she was gone. Why, then, did he not f eel like celebrating? But he knew why, really. It was the inexplicable appearance of the picture. That and simple instinct. Something very wrong was happening and he didn’t have the first clue what it might be. An unacceptable state of affairs. The thing to do now was summon Jack Paradise and begin an investigation.

  But first…

  He was reaching for the bottle of Beam when he felt a weight settle on the bed behind him. He tensed, expecting to feel the blade of an assassin slide beneath his rib cage at any moment. It should have been impossible, even for the stealthiest of assassins. The windows were boarded up. The front door, flanked by heavily armed guards, was the only way in or out of the little cabin. Logic dictated this was someone who’d been here all along. He could only assume the intruder had employed some magical means of cloaking their presence.

  The intruder was closer now. He could feel her breath on the back of his neck. That the intruder was a woman was a thing he sensed on a primitive level. He knew he should leap to his feet and make a break for the door, but his feet felt nailed to the floor. He was as incapable of movement as a statue—and would remain so until the intruder released him from this paralyzed state.

  Anger flared inside him. “Stop fucking around and do it.”

  Then he felt the cold sting of a large blade laid flat across his throat and closed his eyes. No need to wonder how it would feel. He’d had a would-be assassin’s blade in his body before, back during his time Below. He’d survived that attempt on his life, but he sensed this would be different. And less clumsy. This blade would open his carotid and his blood would splash across the spilled evidence of his formerly exalted place in the world.

  The intruder leaned against him. A pair of soft lips pressed against his ear. And a voice, wholly unfamiliar, whispered the following:“Don’t you want to live?”

  Jim swallowed hard. “Why are you toying with me?”

  The woman turned the blade, pressed the sharp side to his trembling flesh. “Answer my question.” Her free hand slithered like a snake around his midsection and moved to his crotch, where it grasped and squeezed. “Answer…Jim. Or I’ll cut this off and feed it to you.”

  “Honest answer…I don’t know.”

  The woman slid off the bed to stand before him. Jim’s brow knitted in confusion at the sight of the stranger. She was wearing a black gi. She was slim and small, maybe two or three inches over five feet. Her features were Asian, though her voice had been smooth and inflectionless.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  She knelt before him and snatched up the picture of Ms. Wickman’s gutted body. “I am of the Order of the Dragon. My name is not important.” She waved the picture at him. “I am here to speak to you about this. And to make a proposition.”

  Jim realized the woman had relinquished her psychic grip on hi
m. He grabbed the Jim Beam bottle and chugged from it. Then he sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “Does this proposition involve any sort of threat to my people?”

  “It involves the removal of a threat. For my organization, it is a matter of vengeance. This may mean sacrifices. You will have to decide how high a price the removal of this threat is worth.”

  An ache began behind Jim’s eyes as a familiar spiritual pain lanced him. For maybe the millionth time, he wished he’d not chosen to assume a position of leadership. He loathed being the man who had to make life and death decisions for a larger body of people. His father had been such a man. Alas, such regrets were useless at this juncture. The die had been cast for him long, long ago.

  He looked at her and spoke evenly:“Speak to me. Tell me your proposition. And then we’ll see just how much I feel like living or dying.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Giselle awoke to the sound of birdsong. She opened her eyes and saw a large and multicolored creature perched at the foot of the bed. It was a strange synthesis of parrot and vulture, with brightly colored feathers, a long, black beak, and large and very sharp talons. The creature stared at her through glassy black eyes. She found its scrutiny unnerving and wondered for a moment how the thing had gained entry to her quarters.

  Then she recalled the previous evening’s festivities in a series of flashing images. She and Ursula had consumed large quantities 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 sexual 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 fucked were then tortured and humiliated. Then things would shift 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 passion. 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 piss, semen, 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 passed out after sex. 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-cum-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 sex, feigning passion 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 sex 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 gratitude 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 reassurance. 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 breasts 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 carr
ied 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 gods 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.