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  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 pussy had been sewn partially shut. Giselle had not participated 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 passed out on my bed. A touch too much wine last night, I’m afraid.”

  Something flickered in Gwendolyn’s eyes as she watched the bloody 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 passed through cage bars and touched a spot between her breasts. 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 bloody 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-fuck, 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 damnable smile barely faltered.

  “I don’t think you know anything.” Giselle twisted the spear tip, widening the gash between Gwendolyn’s breasts. 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 ass.”

  Gwendolyn winced again and gritted her teeth as the spear tip continued to twist and delve deeper. “You fucked 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 massive 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.”

  “Fuck 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 bitch. You fucking cunt. 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 fucking thing through her and be done with it.

  But again she hesitated. Fear reasserted itself. She imagined black-clad Order assassins 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 fucking 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 assailed 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 buttock. 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, cunt. Not until it’s too late. But I have one more s
urprise for you. One of them left me a present.”

  She uncurled a fist and revealed a shiny 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 passed 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 circumstances.

  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 fucking 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 fucker 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 bloody convenience store holdup with a string of other brazen crimes, including the murder of a young girl at Niagara Falls and a mass 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 sexy 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 wishing 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 class 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 shirt that was at least a size too small. His bloated belly stretched the fabric of the shirt 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 button. 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 motherfucker 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 muffled whimper issued from beneath the frayed edges of the duct tape. She’d given him a thrashing 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 bluster at first, hurling threats and a barrage of sexist 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 assuage 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 passages. 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 sexual 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 cock to hardness flashed through her. She pictured herself riding the man’s dick 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 sex 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 crashing 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 bloody, pulpy mess by the time she broke off the beating.

  But he was still alive.

  Still breathing.

  A blood-red snot bubble welled from the end of a crushed nostril and popped. Dream stared at the man’s ruined face and felt the same numb disconnect she always experienced in the immediate aftermath of her violent outbursts. The pillow cushioning the man’s head was flecked with blood. More dark red droplets dotted the backs of his flabby arms. His hands had gone limp, the metal handcuff bracelets having slid down to a spot directly behind the crown of his skull. Looking at him triggered the same muted repulsion she sometimes felt when watching an especially gruesome horror flick. Then the numbness was gone, completely, and she owned this again, this twisted reality that was sicker by far than any cheap bit of celluloid exploitation.