Nightshade

“Matt? Where are you? I need you, Matt.”

He called out to her, but his words were no more than a whisper, and when he tried to call again, his breath caught in his throat, his words dying before they could be formed. He struggled to fill his lungs, but his chest felt bound by steel straps wound so tight his ribs ached and even the slightest movement sent stabs of pain shooting into his body. Then, as he reached out to her again, he felt her.

His fingers touched her flesh, and a new sensation flowed through his body.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes, Matt.”

Though he still couldn’t see her, he could feel all of her now, feel her body pressed against his, feel her fingers exploring him, feel his body responding to her touch.

She was whispering to him again, her lips pressed against his ear, the words nothing more than sounds that penetrated deep inside him. The pain in his chest eased, and his breathing grew stronger, more rhythmic.

He could feel her tongue now, flicking over his skin, tracing the curve of his ear, then creeping over his cheek. Her lips touched his eyes so gently that almost before he was aware it was happening, they had moved on to his lips.

Now he felt her tongue again, slipping through his lips, probing into his mouth. He breathed deeply, sucking the air from her lungs into his own and sending it back, his body writhing against hers as their breath mingled. Then his body felt as if it were burning; her touch traced patterns of fire on his skin, and just as he thought he could stand no more, her mouth left his and her tongue began moving down, flicking over his chest, moving down his stomach.

He moaned, partly from the pleasure of the sensations coursing through his body, but partly from a deep sense of guilt that was welling up within him. “No,” he whispered, his body writhing as her lips and fingers caressed him. “No, Kelly, we shouldn’t — ” His words died as her lips closed and for a moment he wanted to give in, to let the wave of pleasure crash over him and carry him away. But he pulled away, his hands moving Kelly up, and then rolled over until he could feel his body pressing down on hers. Her arms wrapped around him, pulling him even closer. Her legs opened, then they too were wrapped around him. Her body began to twist and writhe beneath him, and again he felt himself sinking into a bottomless morass of pleasure.

Once again he was on the brink of giving in, of hurling himself into the joys of the body beneath him.

And again he veered away.

“No!” he whispered. “Don’t! Don’t do this!”

Her legs only wrapped tighter around him, and Matt felt the terrible straps tighten around his chest once again. But now he knew they weren’t steel at all — they were flesh and bone, muscle and tendon. And they were twisting more and more tightly around him, until he knew that if he didn’t escape in the next instant, he would never be able to free himself at all.

His hands closed around Kelly’s neck, and his fingers began squeezing.

She continued to cling to him, but as his hands tightened around her throat something in her moaning changed. The ecstasy began to fade, and a new note crept in.

A note of fear.

He squeezed harder, and slowly the grip of her arms and legs around his torso loosened.

Now, through Kelly’s moans, he heard another voice, a familiar voice, whispering to, him in the dark.

The familiar, musky scent filled his nostrils.

“That’s right,” his aunt’s voice whispered. “Do it, Matt. Do what you need to do… do what you want to do… ”

Kelly was thrashing against him now, but no longer writhing with passion and pleasure. She was twisting first one way, then another, her legs kicking, her arms lashing, as she struggled to escape his grasp.

He was killing Kelly!

He tried to let go, to release her from his grip, but another force — one far stronger than himself — seemed to have taken control of him.

“Do it, Matt,” he heard his aunt whisper. “Kill her, Matt. Kill her for me… ”

He felt Kelly’s fingernails dig into his back and rake through his flesh as she struggled to escape his grip, but his fingers only squeezed harder, crushing her throat until her terrified moans were cut off.

“Yes!” he heard his aunt cry out. “Yes, Matt! Yes!”

As the heat in Matt’s loins built, his body trembled with the sensations that flowed through it. Then a howl erupted from his throat, the heat in his groin exploded, and for a few seconds — seconds that seemed like hours — he lay gasping and panting, his body shaking, his skin clammy with sweat.

And slowly — very slowly — the dream faded away.

It wasn’t Kelly Conroe he was clutching, but his own pillow, knotted in his hands.

The impenetrable darkness in which he had reached out for Kelly had lifted, and he could see the window of his room.

A dream! It had only been a dream.

He lay still in the darkness, his breathing slowly returning to normal.

The sweat on his body slowly drying.

Yet even as he caught his breath, he knew it hadn’t all been a dream, for there was still an unmistakable odor in the air. The heavy, musky scent of Nightshade, his aunt’s perfume.

He reached out and switched on the light, and for a moment lay blinking in the glare. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he left his bed and went to the door of his closet. Pulling it open, he stared at his reflection in the mirror. His face was flushed, his hair damp.

And when he turned, peering over his shoulder to look at his back, he could see them.

The welts were bright red, and swollen.

Eight of them, four to the left of his spine, four to the right.

He shuddered, recalling the last moments of the dream, when his hands had closed inexorably around Kelly Conroe’s neck, and her fingers — fighting against the death that already held her in its grip — slashed down his back.

So it hadn’t been a dream, not all of it.

Part of it, at least, had really happened.

CHAPTER 22

THE SKY WAS incongruously bright the next morning. there should have been clouds — roiling thunderheads as black and heavy as his mood. Matt felt as if he hadn’t slept at all; his body ached with a fatigue that ten minutes under the hot shower, followed by a minute of ice-cold needle spray, did not alleviate. Nor did the towel he’d heated over the radiator while he stood under the steaming water do anything to thaw the chill in his body, for the cold he was feeling came not so much from the exhaustion in his body as the confusion in his mind. The dream — the terrible dream in which he’d made love to Kelly Conroe, only to kill her a moment later — was still so fresh in his mind that he shuddered as he stood with the towel wrapped around him.

Though he wanted to go back to bed, to hide from whatever the day might bring, he knew it was impossible. To stay at home — to hide in his room — would only make things worse, and whatever reality awaited him, whatever accusations he would have to face at school, couldn’t be worse than the dream that was still etched in his thoughts. Throwing the soggy towel in the hamper, he went back to his room, dressed, and headed toward the stairs. But as he came to the closed door to the guest room, he paused.

The dream came back to him, his aunt’s voice whispering to him, urging him on as he tightened his hands around Kelly Conroe’s throat. But his aunt was dead — he’d never even met her! So how could he know it was her voice he’d heard? He reached out, twisted the knob, and pushed the door open. In an instant, his nostrils filled with the musky odor of her perfume, and strange images began tumbling through his mind.

His father, caught in the crosshairs of the telescopic sight of his rifle.

No! Not his father! It was a deer he’d shot!