NightWhere (37 page)

Selena nodded. She was still in the outfit Mark had given her before dinner, without undergarments. She lifted the U of I T-shirt to expose her breasts and held it there a moment before turning and letting the block
I
slip back down over her chest. Then she pulled the string on the sweatpants and let them fall to the floor.

“No strings attached,” she said quietly. “Or wires. How much do you think this is worth on the secondhand market?”

The man didn’t even attempt to keep his tongue in his mouth.

“Brick shit…”

“How much for the gun tonight?” Mark interrupted. “Cash and carry.”

The man struggled to bring his eyes back from Selena as she tied her pants back up. He reached into the case and turned the gun over. “Normally it’s $250, and there’s some paperwork and a week or so wait. But I can do this for you. Come back and finish the paperwork tomorrow. You take the gun tonight for $650. You need ammunition? That’s extra.”

Mark nodded. He knew the guy never expected him to come back the next day.

“You know how to load it?”

Mark shook his head.

Ten minutes and $750 later, Mark and Selena emerged from the store with the gun, a knife and a crash course in handling it.

The dashboard read 10:44.

“Okay,” Mark said. “What are we going to do for six hours?” They’d agreed that he wouldn’t try to enter the club until after 4:00 a.m., to make their escape as close to dawn as possible.

Selena put one creamy hand on his arm and drew it towards her stomach. Mark smiled, and she slipped his hand under her T-shirt, leading his fingers up beneath the cotton to cup her left breast. “I can think of something,” she said.

“I thought you were an angel,” he said. “Angels don’t have sex, do they?”

She leaned over the gearshift and kissed him. Her mouth was warm and hungry. When she drew back, a thin line of spit still connecting them for a heartbeat, she whispered.

“I’ve fallen,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Waking Up to the Night

The faces were leering again. As Rae blinked to clear the fog from her eyes she watched them. It felt as if she’d been asleep for days and focusing on the faces helped her struggle to wake up. At first glance, they seemed like just faint, ghostly etchings on the dark ceiling, but when you stared at them a moment or two, you began to see the faint movements as they frowned, blinked, smiled slowly. It was as if they were in slow motion; they didn’t change much, but they
did
change.

She focused on a woman’s face in the center of the crowd, just above her bed. The woman’s face was long, the lines of her face visible even in the dim light. “Who are you?” Rae whispered. “Who were you?”

The woman opened her mouth, as if to speak. But Rae couldn’t hear anything. The woman blinked and then shook her head. It looked as if she was crying. She shook her head again and mouthed one syllable. It looked like…
no
.

Rae brought her arm up to scratch her head and the memory of everything going wrong last night came back to her in a rush. She brought her arm back down and touched her stomach, afraid of what she’d find.

The skin was smooth beneath her fingers. She brought it up to her chest and felt the place where Mark had stabbed her when he’d escaped.

No gaping wound, no blood, no scabs. She still wasn’t used to this sleep-and-heal thing. But thank…er,
not God
…for it. The devil? The Night Mother?

Rae eased herself up on her elbows and pulled the sheets aside. The sheets themselves were covered in dark stains, but they slid off her body to reveal skin that was whole and healed. The scars, however, remained. Her belly now bore the knife-written tattoo of the snake. She remembered the latticework of scars that Amelia’s body had been and wondered how long it would take before she looked the same.

“You’ll never look the same as her,” Kharon said, answering her thoughts again. He stepped into the bedroom from the outer living room. “Amelia tried, but she didn’t have what it takes to cross into The Black. And so she gathered her scars, but never passed on. After tonight…you will be transformed. I will take you to the doorway, and then Yvonna will be your guide.”

“But, what about Mark?” Rae asked. “How can I do it without him?”

“You don’t need him. You’ve never needed him. He was a convenient crutch. But I have someone else in mind for you to use for the
danake
.”

“Who?” she asked.

“In good time,” he answered.

“When I enter The Black, will I see you again? I don’t want to lose you.”

“Yvonna will decide,” he said. “My place is here.”

“Who is Yvonna?” Rae asked. “Why haven’t I seen her here before?”

“She is the Night Mother,” Kharon said. His voice was quieter as he answered. “She lives in the dark and has many places to visit. She only comes when one is ready to enter The Black, as you are.”

“Did she take you to The Black?” Rae asked.

Kharon shook his head. “I was born in The Black. All of the Watchers were.”

Rae looked at Kharon’s corpse-white body, at the way his bones shone through his skin, at the way his face leered, skull-like. He wasn’t human then. But rather, some kind of devil…or fallen angel.

No matter what he was, even though he looked like death in his black robe, something inside her yearned for him. Every time he was close, her blood pressure rose. It wasn’t his appearance, certainly. Some power in him held her. Connected to her. The power of The Black? She hated the thought of losing him, but she also yearned to take the next step. She held out her arms. “Come be with me then,” she asked. “I don’t want to think about not having you again.”

Kharon shook his head. “You must be an empty vessel for the
danake
later.”

He leaned down to kiss her, and Rae felt her sex grow instantly wet as his cool tongue snaked in her mouth.

Kharon took one of her nipples in his fingers and twisted it until she gave an unconscious moan. Then he pulled away and pointed to the ceiling. “They need you now,” he said. “Give them what they need. When you are ready, we’ll be waiting for you at the end of The Red.”

He turned and walked out of the room then, leaving Rae turned on beneath the leering faces.

She felt her face flush with heat from Kharon’s touch, and she mimicked his abuse of her breast.

Presently, she showed the ghostly voyeurs what they wanted to see.

Chapter Forty-Nine

NightWhere

“Turn here,” Selena said softly. She pointed at an old farmhouse surrounded by a stand of maples and pines. They’d been driving for almost forty-five minutes to get clear of the suburbs. The highway had gone from four lanes to two after they’d passed Wheaton, and traffic went from scarce to nonexistent when they’d pulled down a potholed farm lane. The landscape now consisted of long rolling hills bordered by scrub trees and fences to keep the livestock in.

Mark pulled the Sonata into a gravel driveway. At least three dozen cars and SUVs were parked in the grass near an old barn behind the house. “Just follow the crowd,” Selena said.

Mark pulled around a row of vehicles and parked near the driveway. Easy exit, he thought.

When he turned off the key, Selena grabbed his arm. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’m begging you not to go. I can give you what you need.” One bloodred tear trailed down her cheek.

Mark took a deep breath and, with his finger, wiped the trail away. “I have to do this,” he said. “You know I do.”

“I can’t help you anymore once you go inside.”

“I know,” he said. “Stay here? And stay out of sight.”

He kissed her once again, tasting the despair on her lips. Earlier, after they’d left the pawnshop and found a secluded forest preserve to park in, she’d tasted urgent, wanting, demanding. Now her lips tasted bitter, defeated.

The door on the front of the barn opened, letting light escape briefly into the night. A half-dozen people came walking out together, and the door shut behind them. But Mark could see the shadows bobbing across the gravel. They were headed towards Mark’s car.

Jesus, could they be onto him already?

Mark’s stomach froze. He slipped lower in his seat, and he motioned for Selena to do the same.

And then just as quickly, he relaxed. The group dispersed as soon as they reached the rows of cars.

“The night is winding down,” Selena said. “They’ll all begin filing away soon. First the newbies, then the regulars. And then the inner circle will finish their rituals and the last of the visitors will leave for the night. Just as we should.”

Mark nodded. “I need to hurry.”

He eased the car door open and stepped out. The early morning air was cool and moist—heavy with fog and dew—pregnant with the coming day. He drew it into his lungs in a long, deep breath as he patted the knife in his back pocket and the pistol in his front.

It might be the last time he tasted the predawn air.

Selena sat like a statue in the front seat of the car. She would not look at him as he closed the door. Mark shrugged and turned towards the barn. He got it. Selena thought she’d had him “hooked” and here he was risking his life for another woman. A woman Selena probably thought of as a worthless, evil slut.

But Mark had allowed Rae to be caught up in the allure of NightWhere. It seemed like a cult to him, in the end. And the only way to save someone from the brainwashing of a cult was to sever all connection to it. You had to force them away from the people who were playing with their heads.

If Kharon and the Watchers were all demons…then Mark had to believe they were using some kind of spell over Rae. The woman he loved and had lived with for years would never have considered using him as a sacrifice before.

He bent low and crept softly through the rows of cars. He didn’t want to be noticed by any hidden sentries before he was at the door. He’d have to move really fast then; he didn’t need them to be tipped off any sooner.

Mark stepped past the impromptu parking lot and began to follow the barn wall to the main door the crowd had just exited.

A cool hand grabbed him by the wrist.

“Mark, wait.” Selena whispered. She pulled on his arm until he backtracked around the corner of the barn. “I know a better way,” she said. “You can’t just walk in the front door waving a gun around. They’ll take you down before you ever leave the Blue Room.”

“I’ve never seen another entrance,” he whispered.

“There is. There’s a door to the Field of Flesh,” she said. “If you walk through there, you’ll come out in the hallway that leads down through the center of The Red. Once you pass the whipping rooms and the rooms of mutilation, atrocity and desecration, you’ll arrive at the final room before The Black. You can’t go anywhere but through, or back. That room is where you were last night, and it’s where Rae will be tonight. It’s used for the rite-of-passage room to The Black.”

Mark nodded. “Sounds much better than forcing through the front door.”

“Just remember,” she warned. “Do not listen to anything you hear in the field. Like everything in NightWhere, it’s a poisonous place. It will play on all of your fears. It will twist whatever love you have into hate and try to turn what you hate into love.”

“Ears closed,” he said.

She led him to a small side door in the barn. “I can’t go inside,” she said. “They’d be on me in a heartbeat.”

Mark nodded. “Thanks for getting me this far.”

She leaned in to kiss him. “Please don’t let them catch you,” she said. “I gave up too much for you to die now.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

He eased the door open, but still it squealed in the quiet of night. Just as he slipped inside, Selena said one more thing.

“Mark, I love you. I always have.”

Chapter Fifty

Gordon

Kharon had promised him a new chance. Gordon had been furious when his rabbit had lost the race. He knew that there was some kind of status won there, and certainly Rae’s star had risen quickly in NightWhere after that night. Meanwhile, the Watchers’ interest in Gordon and Amelia, who had vied for the position of top degrader/degradee, seemed to have waned.

Amelia had since disappeared altogether. But Gordon had asked Kharon for another chance to prove himself. He’d been assigned the role of guard to Mark, ushering the man through the room of fire.

Kharon had seemed pleased and afterwards had shown Gordon to a private bedroom. “You may stay here for as long as you are able,” the lead Watcher had said.

Gordon had nodded and tossed his overnight bag on the bed. He had hoped for this. It was the first time he’d been invited to stay over in NightWhere, but he’d come tonight with the hope (and preparation) that he would finally join the inner circle. He knew it was either join or die trying, because the body in his basement wasn’t going to stay secret forever. Even if he transported it out of there, he was no dummy. Every genius murderer in the world hid the body someplace smart, and they always seemed to rise to the surface and get themselves found, fingering the killer with some kind of evidence in the process.