“Have you ever done anything like that?” Rae asked at dawn, round about her third drink of “virgin blood”.
Sin-D laughed and then slipped the thin straps of her shirt down from her shoulders, exposing the globes of her breasts. But that wasn’t what she wanted Rae to see. Sin-D turned her back to Rae and said, “Touch it.”
Rae reached out and put her fingertips on the bronze skin of the bartendress’s shoulder blades. They were covered in a network of thin pink lines, culminating in two rippled puckers on either side of her spine. Rae could feel the gnarled flesh of the scar tissue there; it was different to feel it, rather than to simply
“I’ve done worse things than that,” Sin-D said. She turned and for a moment, Rae was confronted by the wide, pink silver dollars of the woman’s prominent nipples before Sin-D pulled up her shirt.
“You can do anything in NightWhere,” Sin-D said. “Killing is easy. Surviving to do it again…that’s the hard part.”
An hour later, the club closed for the coming of morning, and Kharon turned up at Rae’s unsteady elbow to escort her back to her room.
An hour can allow a lot of alcohol to enter the bloodstream.
Rae struggled now to open her eyes, as she thought about Kharon and what he had taken from her. What he had given to her.
In the windowless dark of her new bedroom, he had shown himself to be more than simply the man who ran this strange sex club. He was the
When she had taken his robe from him and let him stand strictly naked before her, Rae nearly pulled away.
She had seen it before, on the first night she’d stayed. But at a glance, Kharon was hideous.
His face was gaunt, his chest bony and small. His belly was white and sickly looking, and his entire frame seemed a bit crooked, as if he’d been broken and sewn back together again and again. She knew he had saved her life, and yet, some part of her knew too that he was sucking her life dry for his own purposes. She had no illusions- Kharon was not benevolent. But what did he really want from her-that’s what she didn’t know. He was demanding, but also kind, as if she was some kind of sexual pet. She liked being a pet.
She had watched him kill the “rabbits” and had done his bidding when he demanded that she kill Peter and Amelia. He had no qualms about taking life.
When would it be her turn?
All those things ran through her brain, but when he put his hands on either side of her head and guided her mouth to his hips, she didn’t resist. Just the opposite, really. Part of her reveled in the danger of being this man’s pet. If he was a man at all… She’d realized over the past few days that there was more to NightWhere than sex and pain.
There was a darker, deeper element. And she had begun to wonder if Kharon and the other Watchers were even still human.
Certainly their needs were familiar, she thought as he guided her head up and down in his lap.
Her head was pounding with a burgeoning hangover when she felt something gush behind her lips and down her throat. The taste was acrid and bitter, and when she looked up, Kharon’s eyes seemed to glow with a fiery light.
As his orgasm dripped from the corner of her mouth, she looked into those eyes and asked him, “Where are we really? This isn’t some abandoned warehouse that we’ve taken over just for the night.”
He grinned faintly and shook his head.
“Are we in hell?”
Kharon laughed. “Hell is for the dead,” he said. “We are in NightWhere.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Despite appearances, humans are hardy creatures. On the surface they seem weak and easy to take down- they have no external skeleton, spines or protective armor, lack the advantage of long deadly claws or sharp teeth and can be fatally wounded with just one blow. They appear soft, fleshy, easily broken.
But…strangely…despite their apparent outer frailty, humans are resilient beasts. They thrive on hardship- witness the generations of men and women in India who live on the brink of starvation their entire lives. Humans survive and triumph over the bitter cold of Antarctica and the sandstorms and brutal heat of the Sahara. And never mind the elements. There are dozens of stories about individuals, abducted and locked in depravity, who have weathered daily physical abuse, only to emerge unbeaten years or even decades after first being locked in someone’s dungeon.
Humans are survivors.
They outlive. Outlast.
When everything looks impossible, the human brain somehow trumps the physical impossibility and pushes the frail flesh farther.
All that said and considered, Mark wasn’t sure that he could survive the second challenge put before him by Kharon.
After the humiliation episode was over, they had taken him to a small bedroom where he had spent part of the night leaning over the toilet in the adjoining bathroom and throwing up. Then he’d spent an hour in the shower trying to cleanse himself from the degradation.
But he had finally fallen asleep. And when he’d awoken…Damia was standing next to his bed. He/she was nude, yet with the decoration of the tattoos and metal studs covering her body, the nudity barely registered with Mark at first.
But Damia didn’t let it rest. She swiveled her hips at his eye level, letting the bluish-pink head of her cock slide back and forth on Mark’s sheets. Taunting him.
“You licked the dick last night pretty good,” she teased. “So how about giving me a little of that lip now?”
Mark shoved her away from his bed and sat up.
“Tease,” Damia complained.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“We’ve got a few minutes,” she said, moving back to the bed and climbing up on the mattress to kneel in front of him. “Let’s fuck off together.”
Mark rolled out of bed and looked for his jeans, hiding his crotch from her view.
“You’re not going to find those here,” the voice from the bed warned. “Kharon won’t allow you to hide yourself from us. We get to see you all the time. All of you. No secrets. Have to say, the view’s not too bad.”
Mark thought about how enjoyable it would be to put both of his hands around that thin neck and strangle the life from Damia until her fruity musical voice was silent for good.
“You’d have a much harder time strangling me than you think,” Damia said. Her voice was dangerously low.
Mark looked back at her and saw that her face held none of the sarcastic, playful humor she normally teased him with. She looked very ready to see him try to do her harm. And he sensed that if he did…despite her willowy form and half-female softness…he’d take the harder fall.
Mark didn’t risk it. He slipped off the bed and used the bathroom. When he came out, he joined the waiting Damia at the door.
“What’s the evil of the day?” he asked, half joking.
“Pain,” she replied, not joking at all.
Once again, Mark followed the leering skull tattoos of Damia’s backside down a long hallway. When their walk began, he’d thought they were in the dark, but soon he realized that there was always a darker place than the place he’d been before. The red haze that had glowed along the floor at the start of their walk soon deteriorated into pitch. Every few yards, a candle sconce lit the walls, which all looked strangely shiny and wet. But in between, the
