His skin tingled. A chill rushed down his spine. His cock tugged at the skin of his balls.
Her hand was at his elbow supporting him. He hadn’t seen her move.
“Do you think you can kill the dead?”
Max pulled away from her grasp. She held her hands out. He backed off as the Beast fought to both run away and leap at the curve of breasts hidden behind bright red roses. She moved forward in a glide. His thigh hit the altar, sticky with blood.
The bees rose from their calm foraging, gathering into an agitated cloud surrounding her head. The globes of her eyes protruded from their sockets as if she was gathering every inch of him into her vision. Her jaw lowered to a death’s head grin, ready to consume him.
The roses fell to form a bed of blooms.
Her skeletal form lay revealed, encased in translucent flesh scattering sunlight with every motion like a gentle sea on a clear day. The Beast’s resistance to her supernatural nature collapsed, overcome by desire. In the clarity of the Beast’s renewed hunger, Max couldn’t help wondering what that odd flesh might taste like, much less the bones and the few withered ligaments tethered to them. Would his cock be cold inside her, or would he warm her with his life and appetite?
Would she bleed if he cut her often enough? Did her flesh grow back when it was ripped away or did it just melt and splatter on stone until nothing was left to protect the heart of what she was? Could he rip her bones apart and add them to the piles in the ossuary while keeping her head to thrust himself into whenever he wanted?
Was she the one to heal the bonds between Max and the Beast, to return them to the pleasures found only at the portals to death?
The Beast’s hunger gathered, building the confidence to try feeding once again. She was new, like nothing either of them had ever seen. In her presence, they were young again, about to test themselves in fresh waters.
Max did the work of ignoring memory’s faint buzz. She didn’t remind them at all of whatever it was they’d encountered at the ossuary.
Don’t ask questions. Not in the eternal now. Not under the influence of the worm.
Suddenly, the air filled with clicking. La Santisima’s hips swayed and her head bobbed to the rhythm emerging out of the random noise. Her feet touched stone, shuffled back and forth, merging with the pattern set by hips and head.
Her hands reached for him, palms up. She wanted to dance.
He never danced. Could not, as far as he knew. Didn’t care to. But he could kill, and his steps when he stalked were as close to a dance as he could offer her.
The Beast hesitated, feeling mystery’s threat. In a reversal of their roles, it was the Beast that feared consequences and wanted restraint.
But Max didn’t care about mysteries, hallucinations, or whatever other powers and effects might be at work. He’d done his duty. The way back to his masters and the wider world was free and clear. He could go back to the refined possibilities of urban hunting grounds anytime he wanted.
But right now, in this place and moment, he was free of civilization and its restraints. He didn’t feel threatened by the depths of the enigma the Beast feared might devour them. He was Max, and the Beast walked with him. He’d never encountered a danger that could surpass the certain outcome of an ambush backed by overwhelming firepower and numbers. All he’d ever found behind the thickest veils of mystery was hard, harsh reality.
Reality was all that waited for them at the heart of this woman. And the only thing separating them from that heart, the only that mattered, was not mystery, but hunger for the semblance of flesh promising the rapture of pain and suffering.
The Beast rallied. Together they reached the moment’s crest where they could finish what they’d started with Osiel, and attain what they’d been seeking since they’d joined the great and powerful Oz’s Day of the Dead festival.
Max was on her, one hand around her neck, the knife hand coming low to stab her between the ribs and shock her into submission. Whatever was down there was sure to feel the obsidian’s bite.
But she pulled him closer with surprising strength and twisted herself slightly so his stab slipped by her body. In the next instant, she’d trapped both of his arms, the one by her rib with pressure from her elbow as her hand rested gently on his shoulder, the other with a firm grip on his wrist.
Their embrace was nothing like any dancer’s pairing he’d ever seen, but the skeletal face smiled as if satisfied and in the next moment she moved, sweeping him off of his feet and into an orbit around the two structures atop the pyramid.
Max left a trail of blood on the stone tiles. There was no trace of her wake. She kept them moving to the rhythm of her clicking bones. The weathered whiteness of her skull filled his sight so that the sacred geometry of the site around them could only be glimpsed in reflections captured by the liquid night of her infinite pupils.
“We have a bond,” La Santisima said. “Larger than death. You accepted my gift of a skull”
Max pushed his cock against her thigh and found her translucent flesh cool, but satisfyingly resilient. She didn’t push him away. “I thought you were married,” he said.
“What passes between us has nothing to do with my marriage.”
“I wouldn’t care if it did.” He pushed himself past the writhing skirt of snakes and into her. She pulled him closer, keeping his knife hand firmly trapped in place.
He felt warm inside her, thought the sensation might have come from his own body heat. Their dance did nothing for him. It was child’s play. He wanted much more and tried to break free, but couldn’t. The Beast lunged at her throat, and he ripped away a mouthful of whatever protected her skeleton.
It tasted bitter, and evaporated on his tongue with a faint hiss.
La Santisima’s hold on his knife arm loosened and he feinted a drawback of his arm, then lunged forward and around her back. He would have been quicker and stronger if he could have planted his feet, but somehow she managed to keep him moving without letting his feet touch the ground.
He stabbed her in the back, going for the spine. He didn’t want to cut off whatever feeling she had from her legs, since he had plans for whatever passed for nerves down there, so he went for scraping bone and avoiding connective tissue.
But there was no cartilage. No meat. Not even the satisfying scratch of stone knife on bone. His blade sank into the soft, springy coating that invited him to treat it like flesh. But her flesh was not the meat of a living body.
Her eyes popped, as if straining to pierce the mask of his features to catch glimpse of the Beast.
She couldn’t feel. Her bones floated close to each other, all in their proper place, but they remained unconnected. She didn’t have nerves bundled into the vertebrae.
Of course. No nerves in the clear gel of her body. Maybe she’d allowed the few ligaments attached to her skull to remain as a decorative reference to humanity. A symbol of the past, like the temple glyphs. But she was not human.
The truth hit Max. She was something like the Beast, only free. Much more complex. And not anchored to a host.
She’d warned him. You can’t kill the dead. No wonder the Beast had been afraid.
He stabbed her again, refusing to submit, this time targeting joints to break up assembly of her body. The clicking rhythm of their music faltered as the blade interfered with the tapping of La Santisima’s instrument. Her grin subsided, her teeth locked together. The Beast lunged, using his teeth to tear away the matter of her face. It caught an eye, tore it loose, crushed it in Max’s mouth.
Max spat it out. The meat tasted like arsenic. Sand spilled from its core.
Max scrambled to find firm footing so he could get proper leverage and flip La Santisima to the ground. But her bone-tipped fingers squeezed him like teeth. She spun faster, though the rhythm was ruined. No matter how much he fought or stretched, the balls of his feet barely tapped the ground.
She grew as they danced, metamorphosing from a walking skeleton to a fleshed-out wom
an with skin as hard as stone decorated by deeply etched spiraling lines. When she opened her mouth, her teeth had receded along with her lips, and a long, thin tongue flicked out to lick his neck. She looked down at him with huge, lidless eyes, blank and grey like an unfinished temple wall.
Each kiss of her tongue burrowed through his skin to reach bone, where it lingered in the marrow, nesting to bear a screaming brood of mouths eagerly tasting him from within. The ravenous maws delivered a burst of fiery pleasure with each sampling they took from him.
Max cried out, surprised by the sensation. The Beast whirled and snapped at itself.
La Santisima’s serpent skirt writhed against his thighs, curled around his hips, probed his ass, drew him tight against herself.
His cock burned inside her. He moved his hips with desperate energy, searching for release from the heat in his loins even as he rode the flood of delights she delivered to him from every possible source. This was what he’d wanted, what he and the Beast searched for whenever they took their victims. La Santisima de la Muerta was giving them everything they could ever want: pain and pleasure everlasting.
The Beast tumbled in the crosscurrents of its paradise, drifting further from Max than it ever had during all the trials they’d survived together.
Another trap. Mystery revealed itself as another betrayal.
Max held on to the reality of the blade in his hand, still cool and sharp, and dug the obsidian point into her back.
The stone of her skin was another illusion. The knife passed through a gently yielding nothingness until he’d nearly gone through her and into himself. She still would not bleed or cry out in pain. But Max did, if only to relieve the agony that was the price for his cock’s pleasures.
La Santisima de la Muerte spun across the top of the pyramid, oblivious to his resistance and his savage thrusts for pleasure, until they’d reached the altar. There she stopped, pulled him away, held him up between hands that seemed to both engulf him and grip him beneath his armpits. The snakes of her skirt snapped at his dribbling cock. Bees stung him, covering his balls with their bristling bodies and working to build a hive in his scrotum.
She slammed him down into the stone of the sacrificial table.
The crash stunned him. He lost the feeling in his arms and legs, and nearly dropped the knife. But the Beast, bounced out of its heaven, picked up the fight in outrage, holding on to the blade and using it to rip the serpent skirt while biting and raking La Santisima’s hip and belly and breasts with teeth and a clawed hand.
Severed snakes fell away, others took their place. La Santisima looked down on him with a thin smile, while in her mouth the scaled and tangled coils of her tongues shimmered with iridescent anticipation. She shrank to human proportions, though her strength still held Max down.
La Santisima straddled him, settling over his hips. She took his cock firmly in hand and took him deep into her, squeezing, pulling his hips off of the stone table while the snakes of her skirt flailed against his flesh all along his ribs and chest, puncturing his skin with their fangs. Venom sizzled inside and out. Poison boiled his blood and rushed to embrace his heart and lungs with fiery passion.
The Beast bucked, pushed, lashed out, but all its efforts sank into the bottomless depths of La Santisima’s devoted attention. Accustomed to overwhelming its prey, the Beast could not see that it had become the victim of a greater predator, one that prowled a territory so vast it had been stalking them since they’d crossed into Osiel’s country. The Beast would not understand it had been caught by the monster that had been stealing the suffering raised by their kills without a trace of its passing.
It felt only what all who’d suffered under its rage experienced before the instant of their death: complete helplessness.
Through the storm of sensation, Max understood. He saw clearly the trap they’d blundered unto, and tried to reassure his demon. Comfort it by covering its panic with his unbridled hunger as a reminder of their bond and their shared fate.
But he wasn’t strong enough. Panic rose in screams tearing out of his throat, spraying blood in La Santisima’s face. There was no room for comfort in the pain they shared.
La Santisima’s tongues emerged from her mouth to drink the blood he’d gifted to her, and in thanks they descended on his body and joined the snakes of her skirt in feasting on his flesh.
The world beyond the tiny space between himself and La Santisima was walled off by an impenetrable cloud of sensation. Nothing existed beyond the rising tide of pain sweeping away the present, past, future, even the Beast.
Nothing existed beyond the currents of pleasure running fiercely through his agony, transforming the tone and content of his screaming from the jagged remains of broken nerves and connections into the flow of new life, the weave of fresh perceptions.
He screamed, with both pain and pleasure, and heard in his voice the Beast’s accompaniment, a primal expression of ecstasy that was both pleasure and pain. Together they rose to La Santisima and embraced her with their arms and with their voices. Passion carried them into the depths of the creature. They fell, and rose at the same time like hawks on updrafts, soaring and plunging, feeding and being consumed, pushing away from, even as they were being pulled into, the womb that would destroy and create them.
La Santisima joined them, in voice and in flight, and suddenly they were three made into one, and all the deaths they had ever witnessed, all the killings they had committed, returned to them, cascading into a bloody and infinite fall of sacrifice, provoking and appeasing, a prayer in the honor of cycle of life and death.
They came as one in an orgasm of death, a climactic ending beyond which existence could not be perceived, which rolled on and on in a series of black bursts pulsing from every sensory nerve in Max’s body like an undying star at the center of the universe.
But the star slipped from Max’s reach, the bursts faded, as the limits of his human body and even the demonic Beast were reached and broken. He tried to hold on, and the Beast tore at its bonds to Max for the chance at remaining in La Santisima’s possession.
They were both thrown from Max’s body, suddenly, spinning like broken bodies from a crashing car. Max didn’t land on hard dirt or a roadbed, but instead found himself floating in the smoke boiling off from a savage, crackling blaze above the temple altar where he also lay between La Santisima’s thighs eagerly devoting himself to her deathly body. He sank deeper into her, into the fire, scratching to hold on to the physical world while reaching for the power of his flight.
The Beast managed to break away and Max was alone, disembodied, welcoming the storm whipping through his ghostly self, echoing from his distant body. He caught lightning strikes from both the Beast and La Santisima until he couldn’t tell where he ended and they began, until they were all one contained in a flash that propelled them beyond sensation, into a black and infinite realm of silence filled with the answers to every question that could ever be asked, rich with the meaning beyond all those questions and answers.
An eternity far beyond the worlds he knew.
He thought he’d saved himself. He’d never have to hunt or kill again, because he’d become the hunt and the kill, complete and perfect.
And then the blackness crumbled, and the storm collapsed, and he fell back into his body and felt La Santisima’s weight across his hips and the Beast trembling in his heart, the bonds between them raw and ragged, and the stone altar against his back, and he knew he was alive even as pleasure and pain reverberated through him in a pale reminder of everything he’d just experienced.
He thought he might never be hungry for the pain and suffering of others again. He feared the Beast would be numb to its rage, become docile and quiet within him.
But these thoughts and fears were lies, like Osiel, La Santisima, and everything else he’d experienced since he’d landed in this forsaken part of the world.
What wasn’t a lie was his hunger, and the Beast’s. That raving need was gone. At least
for now.
The truth was in their hunger’s appeasement. Whatever had just happened, Max and the Beast had finally been satisfied. Everything else was offal and sacs of bile and fluids too foul to be consumed, left behind with the scraps of bone and tough sinew for scavengers to fight and pick over.
The dance was done. La Santisima de La Muerte slipped off of Max and the altar, changing and shrinking in a trick of light and shadow, where there could be no shade, until she stood to the side, between the two small houses atop the pyramid, a skeletal form clothed in translucent flesh and roses.
Her skull grinned at him. Her eyes sank until they were nearly invisible in the darkness of their sockets.
Max tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Every muscle in his body seemed to protest, refusing to obey his will. The Beast was of no help.
Blood stained his body, still trickling from the thousands of pin prick bites covering every inch of his skin. He closed his eyes. The sun burned through his eyelids, bore down into the meat of his skull and hammered at his temples.
“Doesn’t the blood excite you, anymore?” La Santisima asked. “Or are you afraid of the love?”
Max grunted at the word, as if he’d been kicked in the ribs. What could have happened between that mirage of bones and a man possessed by the Beast? Nothing physical. Certainly not love. His only passion was his appetite’s fulfillment.
“Love,” he said, the word dead in his mouth.
“Yes, that’s what you fear. Love. The kind that would make you offer yourself up for sacrifice, surrender yourself to your conqueror, your god, your king. It’s a terror of the love that you’d need to accept such sacrifice, and appreciate the value of the gift, that drives your madness.”
“I don’t have a god or a king. And I’ve never been conquered. I don’t surrender.” Max made another effort to sit up. His cock, flaccid, shrunken looked like it had been chewed by a pack of dogs.
“You don’t know love, yet. But it comes with the blood, sooner or later.”
He called on the Beast for help, but it was sated and curled up on itself, disinterested in talk or in effort to cope with the world.
A Blood of Killers Page 48
