he reaches into his robe. His hand-the host’s hand, he reminds himself-closes around cold metal. A knife. The blade comes into view, and this is no ceremonial instrument. Six inches of dented but very sharp steel. This is a working man’s knife. A killer’s knife.
The host’s hand rears back. Then the blade swoops down in a merciless arc. The man on the altar dies, his throat cut ear to ear with stunning precision.
He steps away from the corpse, holds the dripping end of the knife away from his robe, and Giselle again takes center stage. She lowers the knife, pries the bloody piece of flesh loose, and opens her mouth.
I’m going to faint, the dreamer thinks.
The tongue is drawn into her mouth. She swallows it whole. There is a moment when the dreamer sees a lump in her slender throat, then it is gone, like the body of a mouse passing through a snake’s gullet. Something in the atmosphere of the room changes. It reminds the dreamer of the way it feels outside in the moments just before a storm hits.
Giselle’s nostrils flare and her body abruptly goes ramrod straight. The muscles in her arms and neck convulse like those of a condemned prisoner getting that first jolt of electricity. The throbbing veins look ready to burst. Her eyes glow a brilliant yellow, then morph to red a moment before resuming their normal dark brown hue. A great sigh issues from her mouth and her body returns to a normal posture. The strange power gripping her is gone-at least its visible signs-but her cheeks are imbued with a rosy glow. And that sense of almost erotic excitement remains palpable.
She looks at the dreamer again.
At his host.
She opens her mouth—
Then the scene starts to fall away from him, like the glint of a nickel tumbling down a well, diminishing to a pinpoint before disappearing altogether. There is a moment of total blackness, and in the next instant the dreamer is jolted back into his own body.
His eyes snap open as he jerks awake.
He sits upright in the bed and breathes hard.
My name is Eddie, he thinks.
Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.
And I am not a murderer.
Eddie quickly scanned the room for signs of Giselle, but she was nowhere to be seen. This was the best news he’d had in, oh, ever. He’d rather get whacked repeatedly in the nuts with a Louisville Slugger than ever encounter that scary bitch again. Images from the dream assailed him, disjointed now, but still all too vivid.
The rational side of his mind began its inevitable assault of these things. The dream couldn’t have been real. He certainly couldn’t have been inside the head of another man. Eddie, the voice of reason told him, these are things a crazy person believes.
Eddie told the voice of reason to get fucked, because he wasn’t buying it.
It had all happened.
It was all real.
Whatever it was.
He had no idea what the purpose of the ceremony he’d witnessed had been and had no interest whatsoever in finding out. He knew it was some fucked-up kind of black magic, and he knew he wanted to put as much distance between himself and its purveyors as soon as possible.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, found his jeans on the floor, and pulled them on. This was the same pair of jeans he’d been wearing for the last year, and the filthy fabric felt nasty on his flesh. Nastier than usual, that is. He frowned, ran a hand through his hair, and frowned some more. His hair felt… clean.
He held out his arms and examined the rest of his torso. All the accumulated grime and muck of a year spent living in a cave was gone.
Psycho mama had washed him.
Eddie grunted.
Weird.
It was almost as if she’d been … well… preparing him for something.
His eyes widened as he thought again of the ceremony.
GO! the voice of self-preservation urged. MOVE YOUR ASS!
So Eddie moved his ass.
He went to the bedroom door, gripped the doorknob, and tried to turn it. It didn’t budge. He frowned, gripped it with both hands, focused his strength, and tried again to make it move. Nothing. He sighed and slumped against the door, breathing hard. Okay, this was depressing. The door wasn’t locked, yet it wouldn’t yield to his most concerted efforts. He supposed Giselle could have sealed it with a spell. Yes, she would be able to do that, wouldn’t she?
Damn her black magic-practicing ass.
He would just have to think of something else.
His gaze fastened on the window to the right of the bed. Yes! He ran to it, jammed his palms under the edge, and tried to throw it up its tracks. His muscles protested and a wheeze rattled out of his constricted throat.
“Aw, shit.”
A closer examination revealed the window to be as effectively sealed as the door, but, hey, he could deal with this. Glass would yield, spell or no spell. He went to Giselle’s writing table, picked up one of the chairs, took one step back toward the window…
… and froze.
He heard a muffled sound, but its source was a mystery. Then there was a louder sound. A grinding, shifting sound. Stone moving over stone.
Eddie put the chair down.
He sat in it and cupped his face in his palms. “Fuck me gently with a thresher.”
He rubbed his eyes and opened them again, and he saw what he expected to see. A panel of the wall was sliding slowly open. He glimpsed darkness and the hint of a flickering flame. Giselle emerged through the opening bearing a gas lantern. As soon as she was in the room the wall panel began to slide shut. Then the opening was gone and there was only the wall. The seal was seamless. He shook his head. Well, it made sense. A place like this would have sliding wall panels and secret passages.
Giselle blew out the lantern’s flame, walked over to the writing table, and set it down. Eddie looked up at her and was unsurprised to see her smiling at him. She looked just as she had in the dream. The long black skirt swirled about her ankles. The burgundy top looked flimsy, almost see-through, like something that should be ripped from her body posthaste.
Hmm, what a strange thought…
Giselle reached out and stroked his face with the palm of a hand. Eddie shuddered at her touch. Something passed through her fingertips into him, something sensuous, an electric elixir that made him drunk with desire.
He gulped. “Giselle, I’ve never been so scared of a person in my life, but…”
Giselle smiled.
And she opened her mouth.
And said, “But you want to make love to me.”
Eddie’s eyes widened.
He felt dizzy.
So very, very dizzy.
He slid out of the chair and tumbled to the floor.
The Master relaxed with another drink as he considered his nomadic nature.
Though he tended to remain in one place for decades, he’d traveled the world, beginning new colonies of slaves in the remotest corners of nearly all the major continents. These he wiped out whenever a renewed sense of wanderlust told him the time had come to move on. No trace was ever left. These demolitions were great, masterful symphonies of destruction, carnage on a grand scale, and it all occurred beyond the eyes of the outside world. The gap between the world the humans inhabited and the dark corners he carved out of the fabric of existence could not be breached.
