Crossover.”
Rae looked at the man at her feet and then back at Kharon. “Shouldn’t we take the trap off his foot first?”
“If you wish,” he said. Kharon bent down and with both hands, pried the trap open and let Perry’s bloodied foot slip free. The floor was instantly covered in a rush of new blood from the wound.
“Cross over,” Kharon said. It was a command.
Rae helped Perry up, so he stood on one foot. As she did, the red snake slipped onto his arm. It coiled around and around until it held Perry in a vise grip.
“The snake will be your strength,” Kharon said and pointed across the bridge.
Perry put his arm around Rae’s shoulders and his other hand on the bridge rail. Slowly, she walked him up the wooden planks to the rise in the middle. Kharon called from behind. “Rae, stop. This is not your time. The Crossing is only for him.”
She stopped, and Perry pushed himself down the other side of the bridge by going hand over hand on the rail.
When he reached the other side, he cried out once.
Just once.
“What’s the matter?” Rae called, but Kharon was at her side instantly. “He can’t hear you,” he cautioned.
“I just saw him,” she said. “I’d think he could still hear me.”
“He’s crossed over,” Kharon explained. “He may never talk to you again.”
He turned to Gordon and shook his head. “Your rabbit lost,” he said. “You’ll have to feel what that’s like. Put your hands on the bridge.”
“Flog him,” he commanded Rae.
She lifted the whip that Kharon had given her not long before. She raised it and tested how it felt as it came down, at first gently on the man’s back. Then she raised it and brought it down harder. And then she really gave her arm a flick and smiled at the sound the leather made on Gordon’s back. She could feel the place between her legs growing wet as she beat him, and at times she let her eyes roll back in her head as she released the leather. She had almost always been the recipient of the pain, but this energy…she liked it. It was power in its most brutal form. She’d wielded power over plenty of men in her life-using her body and promises of the taboos that she could fulfill. But that was all subtle teasing. An art and a form of power. But this…this made her belly tighten. Her lips swelled and her entire body warmed.
Whipping Gordon was like sex without the penetration.
Rae felt hands touch her ankles and calves. And then something wet licked her flank, and a tongue traced the curve of her ass. More hands touched her, but Rae kept whipping Gordon; she was getting off on the way his back welted visibly with each slap. She looked down briefly and saw that the entire Living Path had gathered in a mob around her. Some of them were touching her, but many were working on each other, fingers and tongues plying each other’s sex with increasing urgency. The air grew thick with the smells and sounds of copulation, and when the hands reached around from behind her to pinch her nipples, she almost dropped the whip as her nerves released a pent-up electric jolt all the way to her clit. A tongue traced her inner thigh, and she looked down to see a woman kneeling in front of her. Still Rae whipped, and Gordon shivered in his place on the bridge. His legs trembled with every blow. The ground between his legs was wet. Rae laughed at his weakness, but did not stop, even when he sank to his knees.
Something prodded Rae from behind, and she felt someone’s cock easing between her legs. She widened her stance slightly, barely thinking about it, but giving the stranger permission to slip inside her. She raised her arm back once more, but this time when the whip cracked against Gordon’s ragged back, he fell to the ground.
Rae surrendered as well. The feeling of having a thick man inside her was overpowering in her current state, and she bent over, gripping the rail of the bridge as she gave up control, and Gordon crawled away. She shook her ass slightly, wiggling the cock to draw it as deep as possible inside her. The woman who had been licking between her legs adjusted and crawled now in front of her, fastening her mouth on Rae’s breasts, sucking each in turn. Rae offered them uncontrolled access to her body. She closed her eyes and focused on the sparks of sensation that electrified her groin and chest with every kiss and thrust.
Hands pulled at Rae’s hair, and someone slapped her. The violent nature of the crowd began to surface-they weren’t in The Red because they enjoyed simple doggy-style scenes. She cried out, but then her mouth was full of leather…someone had put the whip between her teeth…and now with the rhythm of the man fucking her, she was slapped and punched by various members of the Living Path who had all gathered close. Fingernails gouged at her back, and the woman who had been sucking gently now bit hard on her nipples, so hard Rae tried to scream. But she couldn’t…her mouth was choked with leather.
Instead of fighting back, Rae worked to spread her legs farther apart, urging the stranger to own her as he (or someone) yanked on her hair like a bridle. She welcomed the abuse with the pleasure…had dreamed of it in her secret fantasies all of her life. This moment, right here, with its mix of sex and blood and sudden exchanges of power and pain, may have been the fulfillment of almost every dark desire she’d hidden deep inside her heart for most of her life. Rae abandoned herself to the degradation of the moment. Where The Red took her…she would go.
To the side of her a big woman climbed over Gordon and sat on his face, forcing him to eat her sex or smother. Maybe both. Another man sat on Gordon’s chest and French-kissed the big woman as, beneath them, Gordon shook and moaned, trying to escape. Trying to breathe.
Rae felt her orgasm build like a storm. Her legs began to tremor and her arms shook. Something in her head almost seemed to pop, and then she was falling forward, landing on the chests of two people who pulled her down with them, and the man behind her followed as well, crushing her into this mound of licking, sucking, scratching flesh as she screamed her climax into the leather of the whip. Someone put their hands around her neck and throttled her as she came. She choked and gasped for air, the room growing hazy in her eyes, freckled with pinpricks of red light.
Her body felt like a fireworks display, full of crazy light and heat and tingling and explosions, one after another, until she couldn’t see straight. She gasped hard trying to draw air through her strangled throat, knowing that she couldn’t go much longer without it, and at the same time moaned for more abuse, begging for immolation in the moment of mingled fear and ecstasy.
She didn‘t know when the hands left her neck or the whip fell away or her invisible partner finished, or when the others around her left. The next thing she really knew, Rae was nude and damp and alone on the cold floor.
Kharon stood over her, holding her slinky red dress. He dropped it on her chest and frowned. “The dawn is almost here,” he said. “NightWhere is done. Until the next…”
He turned and walked away, into the shadows.
Rae pulled the dress over her head and found her bra and panties on the other side of the room. When she walked through the Blue Room there was almost nobody left. Someone was taking the last cords away from the stage, and Sin-D was clinking glasses behind the bar.
Tailor still guarded the door, though morning approached. He nodded as Rae slipped past him and out into the crisp air of dawn.
She felt more alive and more afraid than she ever had before in her entire life.
She never wanted to leave NightWhere.
But she knew that in the end…it might kill her.
Chapter Eighteen
Mark heard Rae come home, but instead of leaping up to interrogate her, he rolled over and listened with his eyes closed as she stripped, threw her clothes in the hamper and got in the shower.
When she finally did come to bed, it was almost 6:00 a.m. She cuddled up behind him, slipping her arms around
