And maybe he really did.
In a really fucked-up, nontraditional kind of way.
The only way he could.
Not that it mattered.
Only his death mattered.
Our deaths, she reminded herself.
The Master slipped into the Trance of meditation.
The state others could access only by ingesting the plant of the same name.
Loth! he intoned.
The answer was immediate.
You have failed us.
The Master’s ethereal laughter resounded in the shimmering realm.
But I have another offering for you!
And now Loth laughed.
Do you?
The Master’s disembodied sigh rolled through the alternate plane like a gust of hot wind across a desert plain.
I do.
And the admission that followed was almost-almost- bittersweet.
The apprentices occupied the top, most exalted rung of the ladder in The Master’s hierarchy of servitude. For many of them, life as an apprentice was good. Very good. Quite a few of them considered their place here preferable to what they’d known in the “normal” world. Here was a place where they could indulge their sickest desires-and never fear for a moment the specter of legal intervention or retribution.
When these people sensed the unusual disturbance occurring in The Master’s home, they never suspected what was coming. The Master was all-powerful. The Master would always protect them. They had nothing to fear.
So they poured from their upper-floor rooms to see what the commotion was all about.
And learned, too late, that maybe they weren’t so safe after all.
Giselle seized Eddie about the wrist and dragged him out of the room. They were in a hallway clogged with black clad apprentices before he even had a chance to protest.
He couldn’t know, of course, that this was as Giselle had planned it.
She had plied him with the sex magic.
Had provided him the exotic thrills of his darkest fantasies, the ones he never spoke of, that he could never admit aloud, scenarios of bondage and submission.
And it had worked.
Rendered him pliant.
Suggestible.
But she’d thought it wise to leave Eddie in the dark until just moments before the time arrived for him to do what he had to do.
That time was now.
Eddie flinched at the sight of all the apprentices. “Jesus-what’s going on here?”
“Can’t you smell it?” Giselle smiled. “Revolution is in the air.”
Then she was pulling him through the clot of people in the hallway.
Toward The Master’s chambers.
Chad made the second-floor landing faster than he would have thought possible, taking the stairs three at a time. The machete blade glowed with heat, shimmering like a precious ore exposed to a heat beyond fathoming. It seemed to pull him along, taking him where he needed to go through some almost sentient alchemical instinct. He stood panting on the landing and scowled at the wary faces of the apprentices.
Lazarus made the landing a moment later.
He took one look at the faces turned toward him.
Saw the corruption that pulsed behind their shiny eyes like bloated parasites. And opened fire.
Giselle threw open the massive doors to The Master’s chambers and Eddie stumbled in after her. He gaped at the sight that greeted him. Two people kneeling on the floor, two lethal-looking swords pressed to their chests.
A suicide pose.
A hari-kari pose.
But that wasn’t what shocked him. What shocked him was the people poised to do themselves in. The guy, who he deduced right away was The Master, didn’t look the way he had looked the last time Eddie had seen him.
In fact, he looked exactly like Eddie.
Only bigger.
And the other was the woman from his dreams.
“Dream,” he breathed.
Yes. Dream. So he had seen the future! Only, she didn’t appear to be morphing shapeshifter-style. There was, however, some change under way behind those heartbreaking, sky-blue eyes.
Something tragic.
Eddie was so saddened by this beautiful woman’s obviously damaged soul that he at first took little note of The Master’s newly focused attention.
On him.
NO!
Dream wanted to scream when the son of a bitch began to stand up.
So close!
She’d been so close to ending his obscenity of a life.
She glanced in the direction of the disturbance, took little note of the pretty, pale girl standing next to King’s doppelganger. The man was a grungier, less thickly muscled version. There was something else different about the intruder.
The unmistakable humanity evident in his eyes.
She moved on instinct when The Master advanced on the man.
The blade seemed to move of its own accord, swooping in a perfect arc toward the creature’s perfectly exposed throat. The blade’s power filled her with a galvanizing energy. She could feel it coursing through her veins like liquid light. She saw how it would happen in her mind, the blade taking his head off at the shoulders.
So she was shocked when his free hand halted her sword’s path at mid-arc.
She realized how strong he was then.
Stronger than she’d ever imagined.
Stronger than nature.
His head swiveled slowly in her direction, turning farther than a normal human head ought to turn. His face was a twisted mask of loathing and-oddly, incredibly-heartbroken betrayal.
Dream wavered for a moment.
Just a moment.
I could have been his Queen, she thought.
In that moment, just that slightest, almost immeasurable nanosecond, she felt she could have become what the creature wanted.
A sadistic mistress every bit his equal.
Reigning here on earth and, later, in the afterlife.
The moment passed.
She would rather die than live a life that repudiated every good thing she’d ever believed in.
Hell, she would just rather die.
Some things never change.
So she relinquished her hold on the sword, felt the unnatural energy blip out of her with a strange fizz, and
