by Bryan Smith
Giselle went eagerly.
She heard the echo of Azaroth’s words in her head.
All will be well.
She willed it to be true.
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Dream was dreaming.
In her dream she felt light as a butterfly, soaring in the air, flitting from place to place with ease and grace. She flew through clouds, over mountains, buzzed a herd of cattle, and passed through an airplane. As she passed through the plane, alien thoughts buzzed in her brain. She seemed to exist as many people at once. She was a gay man named Jim. She was a boy named Alexander. She was a teenage girl named Sophia.
Jim’s parents had disowned him, and he was depressed.
Alexander wasn’t doing well in school.
Sophia was fantasizing about a movie star.
There were others.
The madness of being all these people at the same time brought her out of the dream. The sensation of lightness
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was gone. She felt a jolt. That transitional jolt. She opened her eyes, gasped, and realized it hadn’t been a dream.
Oh my God, she thought.
It was real.
All of it.
The out-of-body experience. King. This house way the hell out here in the middle of nowhere. Shane’s death. Chad’s disappearance.
And the sex.
Let’s not forget about that.
As if she could.
Dream rolled onto her back, closed her eyes against the brilliant light of the sun, and stretched. She groaned, lifted her arms high above her, and stretched her legs to their limit, extending her toes horizontally. Then, when she could stretch no more, she let her muscles go slack and she settled back into the plush feather mattress. She blinked, squinted against the sunlight, and took in her surroundings.
King’s room was, if anything, more impressive by daylight.
The room was just huge, bigger even than she had perceived last night. A small family could live in this room and not worry about invading each other’s personal space. The rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves made her think of libraries at great universities. She thought maybe the books were just for show. How could anyone ever read this many books in a lifetime?
Unless, she reminded herself, one’s lifetime encompassed several centuries.
So, she thought, back to that again.
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Well, there was no avoiding the subject. Her new lover was a supernatural being with powers that both awed and frightened her. Absurd. But undeniable. The exhilaration of her flight through space and time was still fresh in her mind. But so was the memory of what she’d seen in that underground place in England. The slaves. The degradation. Death. And there was another place just like it somewhere beneath this house. While she luxuriated in this incredible bed-easily the most sensually decadent bed she’d ever slept or fucked on-somewhere below her people were suffering.
She shifted ever so slightly on the bed.
She still didn’t want to get up.
Even the reflexive guilt she felt wasn’t sufficient enough to change that. The French doors stood open, allowing her a view of the balcony and green mountainside. The warm sunshine felt good on her nude body. It was like a lover’s lightest touch, fingertips gliding over trembling flesh. She ran a hand along an inner thigh, shuddered at a sense-memory of King’s caress, and touched herself.
She remembered being perched at the edge of the bed.
Her favorite position.
Another shudder rippled through her. She could almost feel him inside her. She was often too shy with new lovers to broach the subject. When she was with someone new, she invariably put up with the standard alternations of boy on top and girl on top for weeks before working up the nerve to tell them what she wanted. They were always enthusiastic, which just made her feel silly for being so bashful. Of course, some of them were confused by her request, thinking she wanted it in the ass.
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Dan thought that.
Of course—
Well, she hadn’t made the connection until now.
It made her giggle.
This is just insane, she thought.
Here she was, surrounded by madness, and she was giggling … and sort of lightly masturbating.
What’s wrong with this picture?
She knew she ought to be getting up, putting her clothes on, making preparations to get out of this place. No sane person, knowing what she knew, would hesitate. Somewhere on the floor was a tangle of clothes. She envisioned getting off the bed, sorting through them, and going out to look for Alicia and Karen. Her friends were somewhere in this house. She had to warn them.
She didn’t move.
The thought came again: What’s wrong with me?
Had she been drugged? She didn’t have any of the familiar symptoms, and she knew them pretty damn well from her time in the hospital and the institution. That spaced-out, numb feeling wasn’t in evidence. Dissociation, they called it. No, this was nothing like that. She had never been more in touch with her senses and her feelings. In fact, she seemed hypersensitive. The hand at her sex felt like a warm, vibrating glove.
Hmm … some weird libido drug?
She jerked her hand away when she heard the sound of a doorknob turning. Dream’s head lolled to the left, and she saw Ms. Wickman enter bearing a tray. She set the tray on a folding stand next to the bed, folded her arms beneath her breasts, and said, “The Master wanted me to tell
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you he’ll be along shortly. He has some business to attend to.” Her gaze traveled the length of Dream’s exposed body before she added, “There’s a robe for you in the closet, should you find yourself feeling … modest.”
She turned and exited the room before Dream could formulate an appropriate reply or inquire after her friends. The door clicked shut, and she was alone again. She perched herself on an elbow and examined the contents of the tray. A porcelain cup brimmed with steaming coffee, and there was a little plate with a cute arrangement of chocolate truffles. Dream’s stomach growled, and she realized how much time had passed since she’d eaten-not so much as a bite had passed through her lips since discovering Dan in flagrante delicto.
She scooted to the edge of the bed, picked up a truffle, and nibbled. Crumbs tumbled from her mouth to the mattress. She brushed the crumbs off, got out of bed-finally!-and went to the closet. The large space was filled with expensive, tailored suits, things a modern bigwig would wear with pride, but there was a curious assortment of clothes from other eras. She saw vests, shirts with ruffles, Edwardian jackets, and tweed coats with arm patches. There was a shelf for hats. There were fedoras, bowlers, top hats, and a leather cowboy hat with a braided band around it. Some of it looked like stuff that belonged in the Smithsonian or some other museum. She wondered how long it had been since he’d worn some of these things. Why would he keep such old clothes?
Could a thing like King feel sentiment?
Dream pulled a terry-cloth robe from a hanger and slipped it on, shuddering at the way it felt on her skin. Her
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conviction that something was enhancing her senses grew a little stronger. She drew the sash tight across her waist, cinched it, and returned to the room. She picked up the tray and carefully carried it out onto the balcony. She set the tray on a table and moved to the edge of the balcony, where she gripped the railing with both hands.
Her voice was a breathy whisper. “Oh … my. …”
The view was spectacular. She had a greater appreciation now for the distance she and her friends had traveled the night before. And she must have been too tired to have a real sense of the size of King’s house, which appeared to be perched atop some high point, perhaps at the very peak of a tall mountain. It hadn’t seemed that way on their approach last night, but she was beyond questioning these inversions of reality. The rear of the house stretched for what seemed like a mile in either direction. Dozens of gabled windows overlooked the same b
reathtaking panorama of mountains and greenery. She saw a lowlying cloud roll lethargically through the slash of land below.
It was gorgeous.
Heartbreakingly so.
She felt weak in the knees, so she made herself go to the table and sit down. She settled into the wicker chair, picked up the still-warm cup of coffee, and sipped from it. Delicious, as she’d somehow known it would be. She set the cup down, reclined in the chair, and stared in rapt awe at the scenery.
What would it be like to wake up to this every morning for the rest of her life?
She sensed that King wanted that.
She smiled at the memory of his fairy-tale analogies.
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Me, she thought. A queen.
Imagine that.
She sensed other things about King, as well. Things gleaned from the unique bonding of the out-of-body experience. Insights few humans could ever perceive. The most readily apparent thing was the change under way inside him. He maintained a convincing facade of menace, but she had a notion his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He’d reveled in his nature for centuries, glorying in sadism and cruelty, but wasn’t it possible even truly evil beings could grow bored with their existence?
It wasn’t as if she’d read his mind. But these things had been easy enough to intuit. In the altered state of incorporeal consciousness, feelings and thoughts possessed something close to form and substance. Subtle permutations of light and color, hot and cold. She’d detected the strongest indications of his changing mood during their tour of the long-vanished underground society in England. This she’d discerned as a darkening of her perceptions, like a lens with a filter over it, and a chill that penetrated to the core of her disembodied essence.
A strangely appealing possibility resonated in the wounded regions of Dream’s battered psyche. She recognized deep depression when she encountered it, and the concept of a depressed demon or spirit was intriguing.
Well.
More than intriguing.
She sighed.
She also found it romantic. Romantic, that is, in the manner of gothic dramas and Shakespearean tragedies. She had always had a weakness for the doomed figures in
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plays and fiction. They spoke to her in ways the characters in modern trifles could not. The writers of old seemed more keenly attuned to true suffering, and they’d evoked that quality in timeless, compelling ways. Her favorite had always been Hamlet, with its incomparably dark climax of blood, poison, and treachery.
She had to remind herself that King was not Hamlet. It was tempting to fall prey to such an analogy. A leap like that would make reconciling her knowledge of King’s brutal deeds with her desire for him too easy. But King possessed none of the prince’s haunted nobility. Oh, he was handsome and suave, and his home dazzled you with its beauty, but the pretty picture was rife with imperfections.
He was a killer.
More than that, he was a sadist who killed for pleasure.
And he did it on a grand scale.
So, then, how would it feel to wake up to this sweeping vista of pastoral beauty every morning?
But she knew the answer to that question, didn’t she?
It would be akin to waking up one morning to find you’d suddenly become the devil’s concubine. A favored whore allowed to wallow in all of the world’s most sensual pleasures while all around you time’s doomed souls cried out in the eternal torment of molten hellfire.
Unacceptable.
No part of her could fathom being a willing part of an existence like that. It went against her pacifist instincts, which were deeply ingrained. She’d even felt a twinge of regret at the sight of Dan’s vandalized Beetle. She’d long ago stopped caring much about her own well-being, but she would not give tacit approval to acts of subjugation
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and brutality by consenting to be King’s mistress. Her self-esteem had taken a lot of hits in recent years, some quite crippling, but most of her more admirable traits had remained intact.
Her benevolence, for instance.
And her compassion.
Her basic goodness.
She would die before allowing King to destroy whatever good was left in her.
Hell, if things had gone as she’d originally planned, she wouldn’t be alive right now. Her brains would be splattered all over the walls of some hotel room. Dream shifted in the wicker chair, recrossed her legs, and shuddered. The image lingered in her mind, alluring, Technicolor vivid. She saw herself with the Glock jammed like a big black cock in her wide-open mouth, the back of her head a ragged, bloody mess. The vision filled her not with horror but a sense of long-sought peace finally attained. The ruined body she imagined was an empty vessel, no longer home to the tortured soul that had inhabited it for nearly thirty years.
It astonished her that something so grisly could be so beautiful.
But, to her, it was.
She was still deep in contemplation of the image when she heard footsteps behind her. King stepped out onto the balcony. He flashed her a small, knowing smile. A lover’s smile. She couldn’t help returning it. And seeing those dark, soulful eyes did something to her, triggered a spreading warmth that made her tingle in all the sensitive places he’d so deftly pleasured the night before.
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Right here.
Right now.
Amazing. She could know all the things she knew about him, even the dimly sensed plans for her friends, unspeakably vile things, and still she desired him.
He went to the railing, grasped it the way Dream had moments earlier, arched his head to the sky, and inhaled deeply of the clean mountain air. Dream’s gaze, saturated with bald erotic need, studied the impressive figure his body cut against the gorgeous scenery. He wore khaki trousers with the cuffs rolled up over bare ankles and feet and a white button-up shirt open over his muscled torso. His sleep-tousled hair stirred in the gentle breeze, and he ran a hand through it, brushing it back from his brow.
Dream’s hand went to the sash around her robe.
The need was almost more than she could bear.
He turned around and leaned against the railing. He didn’t so much as glance at the hand slowly tugging at the sash. Well, a man-or thing-like King would never be anything less than impeccably smooth and unflappable.
He smiled again. “Did you sleep well?”
Dream willed her hand away from the sash. She picked up the cup of coffee instead, brought it to her mouth, and took a casual sip. “With the exception of one troubling dream, yes.” She smiled. “That bed is amazing. I’ve never felt so comfortable.”
He frowned. “Tell me about the dream.”
She set the coffee cup down and folded her hands primly in her lap. “Well, I’m not sure if it really was a dream. I think I might have been … traveling … again.”
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King nodded. “It’s possible.” He unfolded his arms and gripped the railing behind him. “It’s also rare. Humans usually aren’t capable of spontaneous sleep forays so soon after their first experience. In fact, only a small percentage of your race is capable of what you did last night at all. The ones who manage it possess a common trait, an unusual sensitivity to the nuances of the world around them, the little holes in the subtly interwoven planes of the physical world and the spiritual realms. You are one of those people. I sensed that upon first setting eyes on you.”
A flicker of something like sheepishness briefly creased his handsome features. “Actually, I’m being disingenuous. I sensed your presence before you even arrived. I am capable of many things, but that degree of acute psychic awareness isn’t something that happens often. I knew well before you arrived I would be encountering a woman of rare gifts.”
Dream arched an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
King shrugged. “It is. You are that rarity of rarities, Dream, a human with an untapped well of amazing powers. You are capable of so much, and you never knew it. You need only to get in touch with those abilities,
to develop and hone them. If you can do that, there is no limit to what you can do.”
She tried not to smirk. “And you’re the teacher I’ve always needed, right?”
His eyes glittered with confidence. “Yes, Dream. I am.”
She felt something like defiance come to life within her. The feeling was welcome. Invigorating. A reminder of her essential humanity. “Well, Ed, allow me to introduce you to a radical concept-maybe I prefer to leave those powers
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untapped. Maybe, and here’s the real kicker, maybe I prefer being a normal chick.”
His expression darkened. “You have never been normal, Dream. That’s a ridiculous statement.” He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “I can sense the truth of your soul, and the truth is you have always felt apart from others of your race. You have many friends, close ones, but there’s a missing connection, a vital component they lack. You’ve never known what it is, but I’ll supply the answer. It’s that sensitivity, Dream, that ability you have to see beneath the surface of things. To see truth. Learn what I have to teach you, and you can know bigger truths. The eternal ones. The secrets of the gods, Dream. Surrendering your humanity is worth that, I think.”
Dream snickered. “Yeah, I’m real good at divining hidden truths, Ed. Hell, I’m so good at it I didn’t know my boyfriend likes men.” She tapped a temple with a forefinger. “My powers of insight are astounding, are they not?”
King didn’t say anything.
His gaze settled on some vague middle distance.
He’s mad at me, Dream thought.
The notion was at once thrilling and frightening. She was in what she had to assume was the rare position of being courted by this creature. The thing wanted her to join him here, to become a willing part of his insane world, which likely was the only reason something dreadful hadn’t happened to her yet.
