On the Verge (17 page)

As he navigated the dance floor a few denizens of the club, mostly vampires from the looks of them, approached the injured steward. He snarled at them, but they seemed drawn to him regardless of club protocol. Enoch’s heart began to race. The wild-eyed one nearest to him was poised to strike when he heard a low growl behind him. It was Ophidia. They knew her, of course, and quickly understood they were out-matched and backed off, much to Enoch’s relief.

Ophidia gave Enoch a nod and he followed warily behind her, unsure of where the greater danger lay, with the Morrigan or her unruly hordes on the dance floor. They mounted the grand stair, Ophidia outpacing him as he struggled through the pain radiating from his injured ribs.

He’d been so intent on putting one foot in front of the other he hadn’t noticed when Ophidia paused on the wide landing. As the heavy bass thumped through the hot air, Enoch paused and followed Ophidia’s gaze across the seething dance floor below. The rapacious stares of the demon revelers stopped him in his tracks. They were all looking right at Ophidia.

She nodded, the slow, deliberate acknowledgement of someone recognizing the respect of her brethren; then she simply turned on her impossibly sharp heels and headed down the dim hallway Enoch and Travis had traversed not an hour before. Enoch waited a few moments more and watched as the revelers returned to their debauchery. By the time he finally tore his eyes away, Ophidia was already stepping out through the ironwork gate into the moonlit decrepitude of the brick courtyard. Enoch walked quickly after her. He felt light-headed and a couple of times his knees threatened to give way, but he managed to catch up halfway across the crumbling space.

“Thanks for the back-up out there,” Enoch panted when he got within earshot of Ophidia. “Those vampires looked like they didn’t really give a damn about club rules.”

“It’s getting close to All Hallows’ Eve,” Ophidia said as she traversed the cracked bricks back towards the café. “You know how it is this time of year. It gets harder to reign them in. Plus I owed you one for the beating.”

“Yes,” Enoch said, “that was…a bit unexpected.”

“Consider saving you from that horde of bloodsuckers my sincerest apology,” Ophidia said.

“Yes, of course, Mistress,” Enoch said. “Is—is everything alright?”

Ophidia stopped short and turned suddenly to face Enoch head on. She was statuesque and in her towering heels she was a good head taller than the steward. He cowered a bit despite himself. She was achingly beautiful, but he knew the beast within. He tried to meet her eye, but the intensity of her gaze frightened him and he focused instead on the half circles of light reflected in the sequins of her dress.

“Are you questioning my fortitude, servant?” she spat.

“No, no, I would never—”

“That’s good,” Ophidia snarled. “I know you haven’t been around that long, but even a neophyte should know that I am at my most powerful this time of year. Did you not see all those demon eyes on me, their queen, their Morrigan, their Mistress of Ceremonies?”

“I did, my lady, and I would never question your abilities. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t require any assistance, that’s all.”

“Thank you for your concern, steward, but all is well. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

Ophidia turned on her heel once more and in three preternaturally quick strides had reached the back door of the café. She wrapped her long, aristocratic fingers around the knotty handle of the ancient door and stepped inside.

“Take care of him for me, will you Mordy?” she called to the man behind the counter.

Mordecai gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and she was out the door and halfway down the street before she heard Enoch’s screams.

Ophidia sighed as she strode through the desolate midnight streets of Seattle, putting the Vestiges and the events of the evening behind her as quickly as possible.

It was unfortunate, really, about the new steward, but she’d been forced to reconsider her initial reprieve made in haste after disconcertingly taking leave of her senses. He seemed like a promising servant, and she had been about to leave him alone, but she didn’t like him questioning the state of her health. He’d overstepped his bounds, and even if he was sworn to secrecy she couldn’t take any chances. Not now with Halloween so close.

No one could know, or even guess that something was amiss. She had seen the looks in those demon faces in the club, those frenzied, savage looks. She knew them well. They were the kind of faces that were ready for mayhem. And it was her job to keep them in check. But Beldame had just demonstrated that she knew what her portrait did and had discovered how to control her with it. If she used it to co-opt her powers as Mistress of Ceremonies at the Vestige’s All Hallows’ Eve Convocation, she would essentially have the entire local Verge at her beck and call.

And that was only the beginning. With the colors she had Freya gathering, she could paint more portraits, trapping others like Ophidia in ligature and hijacking the creatures of the Verge in other cities. Ophidia couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t be a servant to some power-hungry mortal any longer. She had to get those colors from Freya before she handed them over to Beldame. The trick was finding Freya before Beldame decided to activate the ligature again and Ophidia became a slave locked within her own body once more.

The trouble was Beldame might be insane, but she was also whip smart. She hadn’t shared the locations of the colors with Ophidia. And her last conversation with Freya had been interrupted before she could ask what places were on the collector’s list.

But it was no matter. She was well connected to the area’s Verge and not much went on in her city without her knowing about it. True, somehow the presence of the pigments had escaped her attention, an embarrassing oversight to be sure, but now that she knew they existed, the colors should be easy enough to track down and, with them, the girl. Once she found her she wouldn’t hesitate to kill Freya if that’s what it took to keep the colors safe.

For perhaps the thousandth time since that fateful day she’d coerced Stuck to paint her portrait, she cursed her shortsightedness and stupidity. She prided herself on her cunning, and in a moment of weakness she’d trapped herself. Now she was at the mercy of some psychotic human. The mere thought of it filled her with disgust. And for what? Some ill-conceived romantic notion? If she’d been in her right mind she would have had Stuck paint Dakryma, taken control of his portrait, and had him in her thrall for eternity. Instead, starry-eyed and lovesick, she dreamed of their portraits hanging side-by-side in some palace or museum, their stories intertwined forever, like a beautiful fairytale. Now she knew why relations between incubi and succubi were condemned.

Her black heart filled with rage at the untenable situation she’d put herself in. She often fantasized of killing Beldame, but she owned Ophidia’s object. It was impossible for the succubus to destroy her master. So she had tried once to marshal the more powerful members of the Seattle Verge, unhindered by ligature, in an organized murder attempt. But she should have known that Beldame’s mansion was protected by powerful black magic. It explained why she rarely left the confines of her home.

Ophidia snarled at these bleak thoughts, wishing she could reverse the chain of events that had brought her to this lowly state. Her great power exploited, her great love rebuffed, her great plans foiled. Ophidia felt the snake writhe within her. There was only one way to calm the beast. A good hunt. It was time to find the paint gatherer.

I
t hadn’t taken long to kill her. She was already mostly dead from the heroin. Beldame had just helped her along a bit. The old woman closed the newly dead girl’s eyes and tilted her chin up gently with the tips of her fingers, her gaze lingering on the curve of her brows. Yes, she was going to make an excellent model for the latest addition to her burgeoning collection.

When she’d seen her from the window of the town car, wet and miserable in the pouring rain, Beldame knew she was destined to be her Madonna. The collector had spent the better part of a week searching the city for someone to be that femme fatale Edvard Munch had painted over a century ago. Munch had called her
Madonna
, but she was no ordinary mother of Christ. She was a woman captured in the midst of passion, a seductress that was both the giver of life and the bringer of death.

Beldame loved her for that, the way she embodied the promise and the threat of a woman’s sexuality, and the way that a death at her hands was more an apotheosis than an assassination. In that respect Munch’s
Madonna
was a kindred spirit.

She had coaxed the girl Cara into the car with promises of sincere hospitality, and Beldame delivered on those assurances, giving her a send-off dinner fit for a queen and enough heroin to persuade even her junkie body into an exquisite high. Then she’d drawn Cara a bath and watched from a crack in the door as her thin body sank into its welcoming warmth.

When she went slack from the heat of the water and the drugs, Beldame had slowly approached the girl from behind, her practiced paces nearly soundless on the tile floor. Her fingers found the grooves and hollows of Cara’s neck, the ones that she knew so well, that seemed made for her smooth, strong fingers. And then she eased her down under the water, the girl barely protesting. The lack of a struggle meant Beldame could appreciate the form of Cara’s body in the process, the way the water softened the angles the street had carved into her, and the old woman felt that welcome shot of adrenaline. Her muscles quivered in anticipation, the color rose in her cheeks.

Finally, when the last soft shudders of life subsided, Beldame let the water out of the tub and, looping her arms underneath Cara’s wet shoulders, dragged the girl out with a singular strength derived from a transcendent sense of purpose.

She laid her on a towel, then grasped the edges and pulled, sliding the corpse down the hall and into the large room she used for a studio. In the center of the dark wood floor was an island of grey, cream, and orange gauze arranged artfully in loops and whorls. She rolled the body from the sheet so that it came to rest in the center of the diaphanous cloud of fabric, and then carefully twisted one arm up, the other down, creating a graceful undulation that hinted at the venerated contours of maidens and mothers.

Taking her time, she arranged each tendril of hair in an exacting replica of Munch’s masterpiece. She tilted the girl’s head at the precise angle of the original and, with covetous hands, carefully shifted hips and ribcage so that the body reflected just the right kind of light.

Then, with an intimacy ordinarily reserved for lovers, she carefully positioned a kind of headband bearing a semi-circular disk on the girl’s head so that it seemed as though she was crowned by a halo—a halo, blood-orange in color, that pulsed with an energy that was, at once, vital and virulent.

Beldame stepped back and admired her work. It was one of her best to date. She climbed to the top of a ladder she had oriented above the body and took shot after shot with her camera, occasionally descending to tweak some small detail until she was certain she’d captured Munch’s travesty of a Madonna perfectly.

She was pleased. No, more than pleased—she was, she realized, elated. The latest addition to her collection was among her finest work, and she was poised to expand her collecting power from the confines of her home, palatial though it might be, to the city beyond, and more, perhaps. She just needed those colors, those beautiful, magical colors described in her most arcane alchemical texts, the ones she had obtained through means that made even her death-hardened eyes close against the memory.

Then she would paint. She would paint them all, all the nightmares of her wildest imaginings, and in ligature they would be hers. Beholden to her just like that bitch, Ophidia.

Feeling inspired, she crossed the hall to her library and pushed the rolling ladder to the farthest corner of the room, climbing up until she could reach the highest shelf. She stood on her tiptoes, stretching for her battered notebook that rested next to the ancient volumes from which she had pieced together the mystery of Ophidia’s portrait, where she had learned of ligature and how to hold phantasms and demons in its thrall.