She didn’t have a Beast inside of her, but she was ruled by a demon as surely as Max, who could barely contain his companion. The erection pressed against his pants crotch and burned, as if the woman had sliced it with a razor blade.
“Heard a lot about you,” she said, her head sinking slightly, shoulders rounding, a patina of sweat beginning to glisten on her forehead. She was also having a reaction to Max.
They were being carried along by the same current, fast, salty and rough, with shark fins breaking over the waves and sharp teeth nipping at the meat between their legs.
“Is Jake coming back?” she asked.
He knew she didn’t care, but he answered, “Yes.”
“So how’s business?” At last she turned, letting her gaze meet his. Her eyes were brown, large, like some nocturnal creature’s designed to gather the faintest trace of light by which to hunt. She pushed her full lips into a slight, smiling pout and shifted thigh, hip and back to draw attention to the curving line of her body.
“Same as yours. Busy.”
The Beast was in his throat, in his cock, burning with rage and the need to devour. When he’d started, Max would have taken her, Star, the shadows watching from the sidelines, the waiters, the cooks in the back and anybody coming in to try to stop him. But life had become more complicated as he’d grown older. He had responsibilities, to himself, and the Beast. Collateral damage was no longer acceptable.
He blamed the constraints on television. Especially cable. News shows were insatiable.
Max took a moment to reign in the Beast, holding his glass in a shaking hand, narrowing his control to the point of taking a long, slow drink of club soda before setting the beverage down with the gentleness of a butterfly landing.
“I have that effect on men,” she said, letting the hint of a smile turn into a nasty suggestion.
Max thought for a moment that he’d slipped into a bad movie, the price for pretending to be something he was not.
But as he let the woman ease her body against his—the warmth of her flesh seeping into his bones and even embracing his calmly beating heart—he understood why someone like him had been sent.
That he was being tested, he had no doubt. There might even have been a joke involved among the responsible members of some inner circle of high office far removed from the consequences of their decisions. He didn’t mind. In the ebb and flow of power and favor, he was often given opportunities to perform his work in those inner circles. Consequences took long and winding paths to their deliverance.
But tests and tricks were not the primary reasons why he’d been chosen.
Every gyration of her body, both subtle and gross, served to draw out his appetite for her. But it was already out. When her eyes flashed, and her silken hair snapped against the nape of his neck, and her husky voice that rose up from below her belly to speak, she made promises. Come to me for unimaginable pleasure. Let me fill your emptiness with my warmth and devotion. My tongue and fingers will heal your wounds.
You’ll forget all your troubles and your pain.
Star looked on with evident envy at her flirtatious exhibition, as did older, suited men long past their prime but accustomed to commanding attention with money and status. The waiters leered. Almost any man who desired women appeared vulnerable to the temptation she embodied.
But he had the Beast. He drew pleasure almost solely from what others could not survive. He felt no emptiness within him, suffered from no wounds. He’d never loved. The war between hunger and survival left him frustrated or confused, sometimes, but also quite firmly informed him of what needed to be done. Rage was a simple engine.
He had never imagined himself with a woman for any purpose other than the gratification of the most savage of appetites.
He did not believe he could be seduced.
The woman had not yet detected this reality.
He wondered how many other agents she’d turned. Apparently, she’d never run into those in responsible positions who tended to deal with the temptation by eliminating it. Or, perhaps she had.
“How many men do you have on a string?” he asked, surprising himself with his playfulness. The Beast pushed for the game’s final move. Max found it surprisingly easy to slip free of its relentless drive. Perhaps he’d finally learned to play a role. To act human.
“As many as I need,” she said, “but right now I’m thinking I only need you.”
She laughed, covering her lips and leaning away for an instant before grinding a shoulder and breast into him, quieting only when Max didn’t join her.
He wasn’t going to laugh. Or kill her. At least, not right away.
He allowed her to play with him, as he often let the Beast have its way with his desires and his body. As with the Beast, he found pleasure in his surrender to a force of appetite, though the strength and savagery of what she wanted was a thin trickle compared to the Beast’s or even his own mad, tidal wave of hunger.
She was not the Beast, and yet her words from their playful banter, reduced to mere noise in his head because he could not listen to his responses, worked their way into the warmth she’d managed to spark within him.
The Beast cried out against the intrusion, but again Max found escape from his demon’s rage surprisingly easy, as if the sound of her voice was a drug that killed pain, her touch a surgeon’s armed with a scalpel carving out bones of fear and anger, even the organs of his appetites.
He’d never felt another’s presence so deeply inside of him. No one had ever survived his company long enough to build such a connection.
She broke physical contact with him to order another drink from Star, and flirt with him. Max missed her. Surprised, he wanted to kill Star for stealing her attention. Only the Beast’s confusion over the sudden shift of his attention spared the bartender and saved the evening.
When the woman was ready to tend to him, again, Max tasted her in the air like a new flavor, intoxicating, hallucinogenic. The Beast’s howl echoed through him as if from a distant valley. He wasn’t eager to climb the mountain between them to hear the cry more clearly. He could almost imagine the Beast as a separate entity, removed from him. Leaving him more human, and closer to her than he could ever be with the burden of a demon between them.
He’d never felt as close to anyone or anything, not even the Beast.
He was almost certain he was dreaming. Part of him wanted to withdraw and go through detoxification. The rest wanted more.
They closed the bar down. Max couldn’t imagine what he might have said during all those hours to keep her interested, but the woman seemed amused, even enraptured by his company. She asked to go to his place, claiming she lived too far away in New Jersey. He brought her to a secondary hotel room he kept booked for such operations. He told himself he was still going to kill her. He was just going to take his time.
He could not be seduced.
They fucked, hard and fast, and she yielded to the initial onslaught of his lust without flinching, taking the bruising and cutting, the sprained shoulder and broken finger, without a single cry. She even laughed, as she had at the bar, as if he’d done a clever thing she’d never known could be done.
She was a new breed of prey, needing to be hunted, excited by the certainty of her own slaughter.
When the first wave of his appetite had crashed, she didn’t wait for him to start again, but pushed him on to his back and rode him even while driving her elbows into his ribs, jaw, chest, skull, scratching his flesh, clawing at the muscle beneath scarred skin. She grabbed his testicles, kicked a heel into his windpipe, dug fingers into his eyes. Leered down at him as she sucked in air and rolled her hips in a frantic, driving rhythm, reaching with every gasp for something inside herself, something he, and perhaps only he, could help her find.
The Beast wailed like a tiger mourning a dead cub, shifting restlessly under the threat of trespass in its territory.
He could see why normal men found her irresistible. She was a guide t
o places most could never imagine, would never go to willingly. Under her direction, the companions she chose would discover parts of themselves they’d never known existed. Even men like Star, and others who dropped by the West Side bar after journeying to far-off places to do terrible things.
But she was only leading him into territories he had long ago conquered.
As she abused him, his excitement grew. He saw himself reflected in her abandon and cruelty. The Beast’s cry grew louder, nearer, proving the demon was racing across the distance that had come to separate them to protect its private hunting range.
As she came, he flipped her on to her back. He expected a fight, but she yielded to him. Perhaps a secret part wanted to surrender. He bit her ear off. Smacked her head so hard her eyes dulled. Grabbed her skull by the hair and gave her a mocking imitation of her own laughter.
When her eyes finally focused on him, Max saw the understanding in her gaze: they were no longer playing a game.
The Beast arrived, boiling up from his depths like a school of piranha consuming a stray cow stuck in a river. It was stronger than her hunger, more powerful than Max’s desire. It was cold, and drained all the warmth she’d given Max, all of her body’s heat and lust and hunger.
She cried out, reaching a place she’d never wanted to see. In her eyes, Max saw the darkness into which she was falling. In the truth of that moment, she didn’t reach out to him for comfort, and he offered her none. As the Beast rose to consume them both, Max and the woman reverted to what they truly were.
Max could no longer control the Beast. He didn’t try. He didn’t want to.
His hands and teeth tore her apart. She became quiet. He gave himself to her death, grateful for the purity and honesty of what the three of them shared in her final moments.
And when there was nothing left but his spent body and a blood-gorged Beast and the scattered remnants of a woman who never seduced him, he discovered gratitude for the Beast. It had saved him from his humanity.
When he called for the room to be cleaned, Lee answered. “What are you doing here?” Max asked.
“Waiting to back you up.”
“There’s nothing left.”
“Damn. And I’d heard so much about her. I was hoping to have my world rocked.”
“Send up the help. I have to go out.”
“Any trouble?”
“No,” he lied.
He didn’t leave everything for the cleaners. He picked out her heart, a few fingers, and an eye—enough for someone who’d loved her to know whose remains they were.
He left them in Jake’s apartment. Jake had not yet found his way home. When Max walked back into the bar, he half-expected to find the man back on a stool, waiting for her to show up.
Star was still working. “My relief never showed up,” he said, wiping the bar down with less energy. “I was supposed to meet my daughter uptown.”
Max glanced at Star, drawn by the sadness in his voice.
Lee came in later. The dinner and theater crowd had left, the tourists were safe in their hotels. Locals and the rough, late night trade had started showing up.
“So here’s to Jake,” Lee said, holding up a glass of Glenmorangie and peering into its color.
“Jake’s not dead.”
Lee put the glass down. “I’m surprised. Should I wait until you come back?”
Max told him what he’d left on Jake’s bed. “This will be worse for him. But he’ll get the message.”
Lee considered the glass. “Yeah, maybe.”
“And I won’t have to kill him.”
“The bosses will appreciate that.”
“I can only do so much.”
“Glad to see you’re learning.”
“Every hunter has his range, his territory. I just need to stay inside of mine. Accept what they give me, take from that what I need to be what I am.”
“Yeah. That’s plenty, all right.”
They sat in silence for a while. A fight broke out on the sidewalk and a few men watched from the windows. Prostitutes cruised through for take-out trade. Star watched them, his eyes ticking away the time he’d let them stay.
“Are you all right?” Lee asked, picking up the glass again.
“It was a tough job,” Max answered.
“Yeah.” Lee drained the glass and closed his eyes. “Now I’m really sorry I never met her.”
Max slid off the stool, the Beast stirring inside him, drawn to the violence on the streets. “Don’t be.”
Lee stared at Max, and Max paused to let him have a good, long look. He wasn’t sure what was true and what as a lie anymore, except for the Beast.
“Yeah,” Lee said, turning away at last. “I guess not.”
Max left, giving himself to the night’s cool embrace and thinking, without regret, that he’d never see Jake again.
At least, not at that bar.
PAINTED FACES
At eleven in the morning, he rang a number he always called when the father in his nightmares made him scream.
“Hello,” he said quietly. “This is Gene. Are you available today?”
She answered, “Twelve-thirty,” and hung up.
He left his house at eleven-thirty to make sure he arrived on time. His daughter Diane (“Dad needs a shave,” she says that morning) and son Art (“Dad’s playing hookey,” he adds with a grin) were at school. Kim (“You’ll finish the breakfast dishes? Some of us have to go to work this morning,” his wife says as she runs out) was at the office. She had already made her morning check-in call. He had the rest of the day free.
Her name was Evelyn, but she preferred Mistress Eve. She opened the door to her house wearing a leather teddy and high heels. Her long blonde hair fell past her shoulders in what he always thought of as a shower of gold. She appeared to be what he paid her so well to be: dangerous, like his nightmare father. Different from the wonderful memories of his father that needed reviving before the nightmares destroyed them.
She motioned for him to enter with a riding crop.
He stripped in the entry hall while she strutted around him ridiculing his flabby body, graying hair, and the whimpering sound he made whenever she prodded him with the crop. When he was naked she removed his glasses and traced the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth with a fingernail. Then she put the spiked leather dog collar around his neck and led him down into the basement by the leash.
They passed the hanging cage and the rack and the suspension harness. The wooden dog house and aluminum food dish held his glance for a moment (“Think about getting a dog?” his wife says as she leaves for work that morning. “I think the kid’ll get over Shamus quicker if we get another one soon”). When he has nine years old his father had brought home a dog, mostly Collie. Gene named him Shamus because he liked detectives. His father always found the name very funny. The dog was gone after a couple of years. Thirty-four years later and Gene still couldn’t hang on to an animal.
In a corner was Mistress Eve’s latest toy: a coffin sitting a foot off of the floor on concrete blocks.
Gene’s heart began to race. Eve glanced over her shoulder at him, flicking golden hair out of her eyes, and smiled. “I see we approve.” She let the leash drop and pulled him by his erect penis to the foot of the coffin.
She ordered him to stand on one of the blocks. After removing the leash, Evelyn took a handle with a roll of plastic shipping wrap and, starting with his ankles, bound him tightly in a cocoon of clear plastic. She asked him to beg for what she was going to give him. In a small, tremulous voice he did until she stuffed plastic in his mouth and sealed off his face, leaving only slits for his eyes and nose.
When she finished he couldn’t move except to sway precariously back and forth on the cinder block. She pulled his stiff penis through a hole she made in the plastic over his crotch. Her laughter punctuated his vulnerability. Sweat made his skin itch. He wondered if this was how all those bodies had felt when they were alive.
He moaned, almos
t lost his balance, then tried to tell her how good it felt to be with her. He tried to tell her about the dreams haunting him. Soft moans and sobs were all that emerged. He did not pay her to hear his confession.
“You’re in my power, now, baby Gene,” she said close to his ear. “Your life, your death, even your life after death are all mine. Yes? Squirm for me if you think I’m right.”
He shook his hips and shoulders gingerly and leaned against her grip. After he steadied himself she stroked his penis for a minute, then climbed atop the block with him and squeezed his erection between her thighs while stroking his buttock cheeks with the riding crop. He could feel the stiff leather through the plastic wrap, and he arched his back to savor and sustain the thrill of goose bumps shooting up along his spine. Her thigh muscles flexed until he was ready to come.
His gaze fixed on the dog house. Its musty, animal smell hit like an electric shock. (“Maybe Shamus’ll come back,” he says to his mother years ago. “With Dad.” “No,” his mother says. “The dog is gone.” “Maybe Shamus’ll come back,” he says to Kim just a few hours ago. “None of the other dogs that have been disappearing around here ever come back,” his wife replies.)
Suddenly Mistress Eve backed away.
“Not yet, mummy Gene.” She poked him in the chest with the crop until he lost his balance. He fell backwards into the cushioned coffin, hitting the back of his head against the pillowed rim. He lay stunned, pain shooting through his legs and along his back.
She climbed in after him and straddled his stomach. He gasped noisily for air as he writhed under her.
“Oh, I know you’re not begging for mercy,” she said, playfully holding his nose for a moment, then letting him breathe. “You know I have none, and I know you don’t want any. I know what you want, don’t I?” She caressed and tousled his hair. Then she reached over the side of the coffin and picked up a makeup kit. She pulled her hair back and then took lipstick, a deep shade of blue followed by shimmering green and the obligatory crimson, and slashed thick lines across her forehead, down her cheeks, nose and chin. With mascara she drew thick circles around her eyes that trailed off in opposing concentric circles across her face. Various hues of shading cream filled in the blank spots. Facial paint from Halloween makeup kits would have been easier and more dramatic, but that was not the way it had been done long ago.
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