Queen Of Blood (16 page)

“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 surprise 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.

Now you finish it
, she thought.
This guy’s an asshole,
but he’s a human being. End his suffering.

The strip of duct tape had loosened during the beating. She pressed it down and pinched the man’s nostrils shut again. It
didn’t take long. He regained consciousness for a brief moment. His hands jerked once against the brass headboard slats. Then
he went still. His eyes glazed over and he was gone.

Dream’s shoulders slumped and her chin dipped toward her chest. And here was the next necessary stage she’d come to expect.
This abrupt agony of remorse. The tears came, hot and plentiful, spilling in rivulets down her cheeks to moisten the collar
of her T-shirt. No one said anything. They were used to this by now. Her friends. She’d started out hating them all. Not anymore.
She belonged with them. They understood her. Accepted her. She’d told Ellen she thought of them as family. And it was true
enough. Sort of an all-girl version of the Manson family, yes, but family nonetheless.

She sighed and the tears abruptly stopped. The remorse was gone. And now the dead man beneath her was just a slab of meat.
A thing to be dealt with, no more significant than a bag of garbage.

She swiped moisture from her nose. “Let’s get this bag of shit out of here.”

Alicia leaned across the bed and unlocked the cuffs. She removed them from the dead man’s limp wrists and tossed them onto
the table. Dream climbed off the bed, slid her arms beneath the big body, and lifted him as easily as she’d lift a small child.
There was a distant ache in her knuckles as she turned and carried him toward the bathroom. The slight pain was nothing. A
normal person’s knuckles would be broken and useless.

Ellen raced ahead of her and threw the bathroom door open. Dream turned sideways and moved through the opening. Ellen followed
her in and opened the shower’s sliding glass door. Dream dumped the body inside. It landed awkwardly on the gleaming white
tile, one leg tucked beneath a fat buttock, the other splayed across the edge of the tub. The strip of duct tape had come
off again and his plump lower lip looked like a rancid sausage. Dream closed the glass door and turned away from the ugliness.

Ellen continued to stare at the dead man. “Look at him. Pathetic. He deserved that.”

Dream shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really give a shit.”

Ellen followed her back out to the main room, skipping across the beige carpet like a child on a playground. Dream shot her
a look of mild rebuke, but the girl didn’t notice. She was bouncing off the walls. That damn cocaine. And now Marcy was chopping
fresh lines on the back of the Gideon Bible. The sisters took turns kneeling over the table, inhaling white lines through
a clipped fast-food straw. Ellen did the last line and tossed her head back, loosing a manic shriek of exultation.

Dream frowned. “Too loud.”

“You need to loosen up, Dream.” Marcy shook the last bit of white powder from the Baggie and went to work with the razor blade
again. “Little Miss Gloomy all the time.” She grinned. “Haven’t you had enough of feeling on the verge of doom every waking
moment? I know I have.”

“Yeah!” Ellen leaped into the air and clapped her hands. Then she dashed over to the nightstand next to the bed and started
fiddling with the little alarm clock radio. “Let’s have a fucking party!”

The radio’s tinny speaker emitted a long buzz of static as the red dial indicator moved all the way to the left before at
last hitting a surprisingly strong signal that turned out to be a college radio station. A student DJ spoke in a monotone
before introducing a Violent Femmes song. Ellen shrieked again as the first herky-jerky notes of “Blister In The Sun” rattled
the little speaker. Then she leapt up on the bed and began a manic dance that made her look like a person having an extraordinarily
violent seizure. Marcy hopped up on the bed and mimic ked her sister’s spastic moves. The mattress springs squeaked in loud
protest and the headboard slammed against the wall over and over.

Dream shook her head. “You guys weren’t even born when that song came out.”

The sisters didn’t hear her. They sang along loudly, the combined volume of their voices overwhelming the meager capability
of the radio-clock speaker. Dream experienced a reflexive bit of annoyance, but it felt halfhearted. The beginnings of a smile
tugged at the edges of her mouth. How strange. Circumstances dictated the exercising of caution at every turn. Otherwise they
could wind up cornered by half the cops in Ohio, the last moments of their wild spree playing out on television screens across
the country, providing vicarious entertainment for millions of disapproving good citizens in safe suburban homes.

But as Dream watched the sisters some of their enthusiasm began to infect her. “Blister In The Sun” ended and a more modern
tune she didn’t recognize began. The girls evidently recognized it, as they let out identical shrieks and continued to torture
the mattress springs.

She moved to the table and sat down. She pulled the Bible close and stared at the little mound of powder.

Alicia chuckled. “Go ahead. Have a toot.”

Dream picked up the clipped straw. “I’ve never done this before.”

Alicia braced her elbows on the edge of the table and leaned toward her. “Dream, you just killed a man. That’s five motherfuckers
you’ve knocked off since we hit the road. Every John Law in the whole goddamned country is looking for your ass. Most people
would be shitting themselves just about now, maybe be ready to swallow a bullet rather than face the music. But not you. Uh-uh.”
She made a clucking sound and shook her head, grinning broadly. “Because you’ve got these super freaky powers. On some level
you feel invincible. Am I right?”

A corner of Dream’s mouth turned up. “Could be.”

“Damn straight.” Alicia slapped the table and laughed. “Ain’t nobody takin’ you down and you know it. You’re the baddest bitch
ever lived, bar none. And you’re telling me you’re afraid of a little powder.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her
arms beneath her ample breasts, shaking her head. “Well, shit.”

Dream sighed. “Okay. Stop giving me static.”

She picked up the razor blade—another thing pilfered from the dead man’s belongings—and scraped the powder into a thin white
line. Then she wedged the straw into her right nostril, pressed the other nostril shut with a finger, and bent toward the
cocaine. She inhaled hard. The stuff hit her nasal passage and she almost sneezed. She didn’t care for the physical sensation
at all. But she inhaled again and finished off the line.

She dropped the straw and rubbed at her nose. “God
damn
.”

Alicia cackled. “Kinda grabs you by the short and curlies, don’t it?”

Ellen shrieked and pointed at Dream. “Ohmigod! Ohmigod!” She grabbed a still-bouncing Marcy by the shoulder and made her look
at Dream. “Dream’s gone crazy! She’s got white-line fever!”