The Chosen

here. We spike all our booze with it. It makes people a little more willing to—you know—do things.”

That shit I was snorting, he remembered, the strange brownish-white powder that made him crazy. The stuff she’d no doubt also put in his beer.

“You’re gonna drink this, Paulie,” she told him. “It’ll make you lighten up. Then you’ll give me a good blow job before I fuck you in the ass.”

This was not good news. Paul moaned as she approached the bed and uncorked the bottle. Her erection bobbed along with her breasts. Then she leaned over and prepared to dump the wine into his mouth.

Paul lurched forward, more unconsciously than anything else. He didn’t even know what he was going to do, but one thing he knew he wasn’t going to do was give this woman any more head.

He collided into her abdomen, surprising her enough to actually jar the bottle from her hand, which hit the earthen floor and broke. Paul’s face bulled into her belly, his mouth opened, and he bit down hard on whatever was there—

The woman screamed.

When she fell away, Paul discovered that he’d bitten out the oval of soft flesh around her navel. And with it…the amethyst.

Paul spat the stone, and the little ring of flesh, out onto the floor.

Then the woman did the strangest thing.

Instead of coming for Paul, she dove howling for the amethyst. This Paul didn’t know what to make of. She’d already easily demonstrated her superior strength, yet without the amethyst in her navel, she seemed desperate with fear. She began to crawl across the floor, toward the lightless corner where he’d spit the stone. And as she did so…

What the fuck is happening now? he thought in dismay.

She began to change…

As she crawled forward, her sleek body darkened, shuddering. Her joints seemed to expand, and so did her head and hands and feet. Hip bones and shoulder blades protruded, the skin between her ribs turned gray and sucked in. Her terrified howls turned inhuman, and Paul could see why.

Because she wasn’t human, not anymore.

Taloned, long-fingered hands padded at the dark corner, searching hungrily for the amethyst that Paul’s teeth had divorced her from. By now her skull looked warped, with a long fissured forehead. And horns.

Strike when the iron’s hot, he reasoned.

Beside the bed lay a tray of sadomasochistic instruments: knives, thumbscrews and nipple-clamps, and long, long needles. Paul stuck one of the needles into the thing’s back, about where the kidneys might be. She screamed like a machine, faltering. Then he inserted several more needles in a random pattern about her back. She convulsed, wailing like an animal on fire, and collapsed onto her belly.

Hmmm, Paul thought. This looks like it has some possibilities.

Then he picked up the heavy stone tray on which the torture instruments had been lain. He hefted it in his hand, raised it up—

“Here’s some head for ya,” he remarked.

—and brought it down on top of her head. The head burst, splattering a plume of black brain mush across the earthen floor.

“There. Blow yourself.”