The Chosen

shaking like you’re standing on a live wire. You’ve got blood leaking out of your fucking nose, for God’s sake.” Tate paused to rein some of his disgust. “I’m leaving now, Kirby, and I’m gonna try real hard to pretend that I never knew you. In fact, I’m ashamed that I ever published you in my paper. It makes me want to puke knowing that the money I’ve paid you for your stories was used to buy drugs. It makes me sick to my fucking stomach that I used to think you were a good writer. You’re not a writer, Kirby. You’re just another shuck and jive, don’t-give-a-shit, cocaine-snorting loser…”

Tate walked out of the apartment and slammed the door. Paul felt riddled in shock. He wiped his upper lip, and his hand came away red. And he was shaking, he was sweating. But there was one thing he knew without doubt. He was not a drug user. The entire confrontation was too impossible to even contemplate.

But his memory still hung before him like a black hole. He couldn’t remember the last four days. I better call Vera, he realized. Find out what the hell’s going on.

His joints ached when he went to the phone. He couldn’t even remember The Emerald Room’s number; he had to look it up.

“Vera Abbot, please,” he said when the hostess picked up.

A long pause, “I’m sorry, sir, but she’s…gone.”

Paul frowned. “What do you mean gone?”

“She quit a few days ago, for some job in north county.”

Quit her job? “That’s impossible,” Paul countered. “I—”

“Apparently,” the hostess persisted in the rumor, “she caught her fiance cheating on her, so she took another job the next day and left town. And she took three of our best people with her…”

Listening further would’ve been useless. Paul’s senses blanked out. Something in his psyche snapped, like a bone cracking, and his eyes blurred. He dropped the phone.

Strange—and awful—visions showed him things. He stared ahead, at nothing. The small glass panes of the dining room cabinet reflected back his pallid, unshaven, and bloody-lipped face—

And in that face he saw the nightmare. Its whorls seemed to congeal above him.

“Oh my God,” the reflection whispered.

Then the memory crashed down.

««—»»

Lemi’s blade gleamed like molten silver. He used it with a calm and lavish finesse. Organs slid wetly from the cadaver’s sliced abdominal cavity; they landed on the floor in a sloppy, sort of crinkly sound. The corpse’s blood had long since gone dark.

The Factotum liked to watch Lemi work. He saw resolve in the young man’s eyes, determination and an almost reverent placidity. Faith, the Factotum thought. It was faith, he knew—a doubtless, unvacillating, and even radiant faith in the promise behind their tasks. Zyra was the same way: incorruptible in her loyalty to the Factotum and their calling.

Zyra, her beautiful eyes set in placid determination, undraped the female, who lay prone in the stark light. Bound and gagged, her face looked similarly stark-drained of its color by dread. She was plump, ebon-haired, and her light blue eyes would have been alluring were it not for the pink circles of shock about them, and the muddy smudges of mascara. Her entire body faintly trembled.

“Don’t be afraid,” the Factotum consoled her, not that she could reply. “Wondrous things await you. But you must have faith!” And he thought of sacrifices, of warm hearts plucked from opened bosoms and held high to the eyes of gods. He thought of the flesh consumed, and the blood drunk fresh from newly