“Have you talked with the others?” she asked.
He nodded and began to shuffle closer to the wheelchair, the rats at his feet shrieking with protest as he stepped on their tails.
“Robert and Eugene, yes. I tried to find Angus, but have had little success. You were quite difficult, too, but then you found me.”
He was standing behind her now. He took a deep breath, then placed his hands on her shoulders, gently massaging the soft, pliant flesh beneath the cotton dress. It felt disgusting, but it was necessary.
Daphene had stopped feeding.
“How long was it after you spoke to Eugene and Robert that they…they…?” She had problems with the next word.
“That they died?” Stearns asked, kneading the flesh of her shoulders, barely able to feel the tender muscle beneath the layers of fat. “Let’s not mince words, my dear. They were murdered.”
The rats suddenly became more agitated, snapping, hissing and biting any other that was close by.
“All right.” She swallowed noisily. “How long was it after you spoke to them that they were murdered?”
“Actually, I spoke to them just before they died.” Stearns knew that he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. He leaned close to his former lover’s ear and whispered, “Right before I killed them.”
The rats were going wild now, and Stearns actually felt a hint of tension through the flab. Daphene tried to turn her bulk in the chair, but he held her tightly, feeling the tiny mouths that had formed on the palms of his hands less than a year after being hooked up to Konrad Deacon’s machine eagerly opening and closing.
“What are you doing?” Daphene screamed.
“What I need to do.” He gripped her flesh all the tighter, allowing the mouths to take hold. “Nothing else was enough. It was like Chinese food; I’d always be hungry again in a matter of days.”
“Algernon, please,” Daphene begged. She was struggling to wheel herself away. The rats that continued to climb upon her body were biting at each other as well as at her.
Stearns held her fast, feasting on the unique life force of another cabal member.
“And then I started to think about all my good friends and what we’d been through together, and I became soooooooooooo hungry.”
Daphene thrashed but could not escape his grip as Stearns continued to feed, making his pain go away. Satisfying the hunger.
“Something deep inside told me that my friends were the answer, that they would be the ones to save me… to feed me… And it was right.”
He could feel the flesh beneath his hands starting to wither.
The rats were in a panic as Daphene lost her grip on their tiny minds. They darted this way and that, frantic to flee the basement.
His former lover no longer fought him. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her eyes now a milky white, looking up at him, begging him to stop before it was too late for her. But he would not. He had to take it all and leave nothing behind.
The mouths on his hands eagerly sucked at the remaining life stuff, hungrily taking in energy. She would be dead soon; he could feel its approach.
The cherry atop the sundae.
As her life ended, he saw her memories, staccato flashes of a life of privilege, magick, and decadence. A life leading to this one spectacular moment when it would all be given up.
For him.
And then it was over. That last bit of delicious life clinging to the shriveled carcass in his hands broke free of its mooring and flowed into the mouths of his hands and into his newly enlivened form.
Stearns shuddered with obscene pleasure, tossing his head back as he experienced the sensations of his revitalized body. It was like that morning in the Catskills all over again, when hundreds of thousands of people died to give him life.
To make him strong.
He released Daphene’s decaying remains, wisps of lingering life force, like smoke, trailing from her body to the sucking mouths still visible on his hands. The corpse pitched forward, tumbling from the chair to land upon the multitude of dead rats she had drained for sustenance.
His entire body hummed with life-with power. He looked at his hands, watching as the writhing mouths receded back into his flesh. Then he moved swiftly through the shadows and out of the building.
There was only one member of the cabal remaining, but Stearns had already set plans in motion for the future. Plans that, if carried out precisely, would sustain him long after the final cabalist had withered beneath his hands.
It was a changing world, and Algernon Stearns was starving to be part of it.
Remy returned to his room at the farthest end of the motor lodge with the clay skull beneath his arm, wrapped in his jacket.
He was just about to slip the key attached to a green plastic pine tree into the lock when he sensed it.
Danger.
He hesitated a moment. He was still weak from his encounter at the farm. But, then, even though every preternatural sense screamed in warning, he unlocked and pushed open the door.
A serious sense of menace rolled from the room like a thick fog as he stood in the doorway. The shades were drawn, but his eyes quickly scanned the dimness, searching for the cause of his overwhelming unease. His gaze fell on a shadowy shape sitting in the chair wedged into the corner of the room beside a floor lamp, and watched as the figure reached up to switch on the light, expelling the unknown.
“What took you?” Francis asked. “I almost dozed off.”
Remy forced himself to calm down, even though his senses continued to warn him of danger. He found that odd, for he and the former Guardian angel had been friends for quite a long time. He wondered if it had something to do with the fallen angel’s stay in the Hell dimension known as Tartarus. Something had happened to Francis there. Something he had not yet shared with Remy.
“You got here fast,” Remy said, closing the door behind him. “I appreciate it.” He set his jacket-wrapped bundle on the end of the bed and sat down across from his friend.
“What’s the story?” Francis asked, casually crossing his legs.
The former Guardian angel and part-time assassin was dressed in his usual attire: two-piece suit, dark socks, dress shoes. He looked more like a certified public accountant than a fallen angel of Heaven serving out his sentence on Earth. Francis knew he had made the wrong decision when he chose the Morningstar over God, and had begged for forgiveness from the Almighty. For penance, he wound up as a guard at one of the passages between the hellish Tartarus and Earth.
A job that had come to an end with the return of Lucifer Morningstar.
“Somebody’s taken Ashley,” Remy blurted out, the words stirring the destructive power of Heaven that churned inside him, still waiting for its opportunity.
Francis said nothing, which surprised Remy, but he continued anyway.
“I wasn’t sure at first if it had anything to do with me, but-”
“But it does,” Francis interrupted without emotion. He reached into his suit-coat pocket and removed a pack of cigarettes, tapped it against the side of his hand, and slid one from the package.
“Yeah, it does,” Remy admitted, the very words painful.
“Any idea who’s responsible?” Francis put the pack away and lit the smoke with a metal lighter that he took from another pocket of his suit coat.
“I’ve talked to the guy. He called me with Ashley’s cell phone, but I haven’t a clue as to who he is. Seems to have a hard-on with the notion that I’m an angel.”
Francis puffed on his smoke.
“And how does he know that?”
Remy shrugged. “Maybe from Ashley.”
“But she doesn’t know, unless…”
“No, I haven’t told her,” Remy said quickly, starting to think.
“Never can tell,” Francis said. “Every now and then, you seem to get the urge to unburden yourself.”
