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  “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 passage 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 spaces 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 god 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 entity.

  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 gods were old beyond human conception. It was presumptuous to assume 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 gods 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 shift, 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 shimmering 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 hoarse.

  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 gods. 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 shifted 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 gratitude.”

  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 sexy. 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 grass 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 whore now. The girl you were is just as dead as that headless bitch.”

  This was the regenerated Alicia now, looking as she had the moment she’d first appeared to Dream in that little shithole 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 massive, containing hundreds of rooms. And in each of those rooms resided a sadist-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 institutionalized 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.

  Fuck.

  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 fucking 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 fucking 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 classic titles she recognized. Many others were unfamiliar. Some titles 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 hea
rd 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?”

  He smiled. “Does it matter?”

  And now she smiled. “No. It doesn’t matter at all.”

  She set the book on the table next to the vodka bottle and stood up. She stepped into his outstretched arms and laid her head on his shoulder. She felt his calm strength and reveled in the warmth of his bare flesh.

  Her voice was a whisper:“I’m sorry.”

  “Shush.” He stroked her hair with one hand while the other slipped to the small of her back. “Things were different then.”

  She lifted her head and looked into his eyes again. “Yes. And I think I’ve become the woman you needed me to be back then. I think I could be your Queen now.”

  His hand slipped beneath the thin fabric of her halter top and roamed over her trembling flesh. She felt herself grow wet and moaned as his mouth met hers. The kiss made her knees shake and she gripped his shoulders hard to remain upright. It went on for several moments, his warmth suffusing her as their bodies began to writhe in tandem. Then he broke off the kiss and smiled again.

  And he said, “You are already my Queen. I knew one day you would be ready.”