“I did, my lady, and I would never question your abilities. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t require any assistance, that’s all.”
“Thank you for your concern, steward, but all is well. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Ophidia turned on her heel once more and in three preternaturally quick strides had reached the back door of the café. She wrapped her long, aristocratic fingers around the knotty handle of the ancient door and stepped inside.
“Take care of him for me, will you Mordy?” she called to the man behind the counter.
Mordecai gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and she was out the door and halfway down the street before she heard Enoch’s screams.
Ophidia sighed as she strode through the desolate midnight streets of Seattle, putting the Vestiges and the events of the evening behind her as quickly as possible.
It was unfortunate, really, about the new steward, but she’d been forced to reconsider her initial reprieve made in haste after disconcertingly taking leave of her senses. He seemed like a promising servant, and she had been about to leave him alone, but she didn’t like him questioning the state of her health. He’d overstepped his bounds, and even if he was sworn to secrecy she couldn’t take any chances. Not now with Halloween so close.
No one could know, or even guess that something was amiss. She had seen the looks in those demon faces in the club, those frenzied, savage looks. She knew them well. They were the kind of faces that were ready for mayhem. And it was her job to keep them in check. But Beldame had just demonstrated that she knew what her portrait did and had discovered how to control her with it. If she used it to co-opt her powers as Mistress of Ceremonies at the Vestige’s All Hallows’ Eve Convocation, she would essentially have the entire local Verge at her beck and call.
And that was only the beginning. With the colors she had Freya gathering, she could paint more portraits, trapping others like Ophidia in ligature and hijacking the creatures of the Verge in other cities. Ophidia couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t be a servant to some power-hungry mortal any longer. She had to get those colors from Freya before she handed them over to Beldame. The trick was finding Freya before Beldame decided to activate the ligature again and Ophidia became a slave locked within her own body once more.
The trouble was Beldame might be insane, but she was also whip smart. She hadn’t shared the locations of the colors with Ophidia. And her last conversation with Freya had been interrupted before she could ask what places were on the collector’s list.
But it was no matter. She was well connected to the area’s Verge and not much went on in her city without her knowing about it. True, somehow the presence of the pigments had escaped her attention, an embarrassing oversight to be sure, but now that she knew they existed, the colors should be easy enough to track down and, with them, the girl. Once she found her she wouldn’t hesitate to kill Freya if that’s what it took to keep the colors safe.
For perhaps the thousandth time since that fateful day she’d coerced Stuck to paint her portrait, she cursed her shortsightedness and stupidity. She prided herself on her cunning, and in a moment of weakness she’d trapped herself. Now she was at the mercy of some psychotic human. The mere thought of it filled her with disgust. And for what? Some ill-conceived romantic notion? If she’d been in her right mind she would have had Stuck paint Dakryma, taken control of his portrait, and had him in her thrall for eternity. Instead, starry-eyed and lovesick, she dreamed of their portraits hanging side-by-side in some palace or museum, their stories intertwined forever, like a beautiful fairytale. Now she knew why relations between incubi and succubi were condemned.
Her black heart filled with rage at the untenable situation she’d put herself in. She often fantasized of killing Beldame, but she owned Ophidia’s object. It was impossible for the succubus to destroy her master. So she had tried once to marshal the more powerful members of the Seattle Verge, unhindered by ligature, in an organized murder attempt. But she should have known that Beldame’s mansion was protected by powerful black magic. It explained why she rarely left the confines of her home.
Ophidia snarled at these bleak thoughts, wishing she could reverse the chain of events that had brought her to this lowly state. Her great power exploited, her great love rebuffed, her great plans foiled. Ophidia felt the snake writhe within her. There was only one way to calm the beast. A good hunt. It was time to find the paint gatherer.
It hadn’t taken long to kill her. She was already mostly dead from the heroin. Beldame had just helped her along a bit. The old woman closed the newly dead girl’s eyes and tilted her chin up gently with the tips of her fingers, her gaze lingering on the curve of her brows. Yes, she was going to make an excellent model for the latest addition to her burgeoning collection.
When she’d seen her from the window of the town car, wet and miserable in the pouring rain, Beldame knew she was destined to be her Madonna. The collector had spent the better part of a week searching the city for someone to be that femme fatale Edvard Munch had painted over a century ago. Munch had called her Madonna, but she was no ordinary mother of Christ. She was a woman captured in the midst of passion, a seductress that was both the giver of life and the bringer of death.
Beldame loved her for that, the way she embodied the promise and the threat of a woman’s sexuality, and the way that a death at her hands was more an apotheosis than an assassination. In that respect Munch’s Madonna was a kindred spirit.
She had coaxed the girl Cara into the car with promises of sincere hospitality, and Beldame delivered on those assurances, giving her a send-off dinner fit for a queen and enough heroin to persuade even her junkie body into an exquisite high. Then she’d drawn Cara a bath and watched from a crack in the door as her thin body sank into its welcoming warmth.
When she went slack from the heat of the water and the drugs, Beldame had slowly approached the girl from behind, her practiced paces nearly soundless on the tile floor. Her fingers found the grooves and hollows of Cara’s neck, the ones that she knew so well, that seemed made for her smooth, strong fingers. And then she eased her down under the water, the girl barely protesting. The lack of a struggle meant Beldame could appreciate the form of Cara’s body in the process, the way the water softened the angles the street had carved into her, and the old woman felt that welcome shot of adrenaline. Her muscles quivered in anticipation, the color rose in her cheeks.
Finally, when the last soft shudders of life subsided, Beldame let the water out of the tub and, looping her arms underneath Cara’s wet shoulders, dragged the girl out with a singular strength derived from a transcendent sense of purpose.
She laid her on a towel, then grasped the edges and pulled, sliding the corpse down the hall and into the large room she used for a studio. In the center of the dark wood floor was an island of grey, cream, and orange gauze arranged artfully in loops and whorls. She rolled the body from the sheet so that it came to rest in the center of the diaphanous cloud of fabric, and then carefully twisted one arm up, the other down, creating a graceful undulation that hinted at the venerated contours of maidens and mothers.
Taking her time, she arranged each tendril of hair in an exacting replica of Munch’s masterpiece. She tilted the girl’s head at the precise angle of the original and, with covetous hands, carefully shifted hips and ribcage so that the body reflected just the right kind of light.
Then, with an intimacy ordinarily reserved for lovers, she carefully positioned a kind of headband bearing a semi-circular disk on the girl’s head so that it seemed as though she was crowned by a halo—a halo, blood-orange in color, that pulsed with an energy that was, at once, vital and virulent.
Beldame stepped back and admired her work. It was one of her best to date. She climbed to the top of a ladder she had oriented above the body and took shot after shot with her camera, occasionally descending to tweak some small detail until she was certain she’d captured Munch’s travesty of a Madonna perfectly.
She was pleased. No, more than pleased—she was, she realized, elated. The latest addition to her collection was among her finest work, and she was poised to expand her collecting power from the confines of her home, palatial though it might be, to the city beyond, and more, perhaps. She just needed those colors, those beautiful, magical colors described in her most arcane alchemical texts, the ones she had obtained through means that made even her death-hardened eyes close against the memory.
Then she would paint. She would paint them all, all the nightmares of her wildest imaginings, and in ligature they would be hers. Beholden to her just like that bitch, Ophidia.
Feeling inspired, she crossed the hall to her library and pushed the rolling ladder to the farthest corner of the room, climbing up until she could reach the highest shelf. She stood on her tiptoes, stretching for her battered notebook that rested next to the ancient volumes from which she had pieced together the mystery of Ophidia’s portrait, where she had learned of ligature and how to hold phantasms and demons in its thrall.
She flipped through the creased pages, running her fingers over her frantic scribbling, recalling the first time she had summoned Ophidia to her, smiling at the demon’s anger and fear upon meeting her new mistress. She’d had it easy as part of the Frye’s collection, but now that she belonged to Beldame, the collector had more important plans for her.
The other night when she’d taken control of her at the Vestiges Club had only been a test, one that Beldame felt she had passed with flying colors, although it had come at a great cost to her physically. But she would command the All Hallows’ Eve Convocation even if it nearly killed her and use her newfound demon multitudes to expand her reach. And imagine if she could convince the Bulgarians to part with their precious Lucifer. She’d find a way. Everyone had a price, and the portrait was already in Seattle. It was almost too easy, and with both of them tied to her commands the possibilities were endless.
The colors would just be icing on the proverbial cake. With them in her arsenal she could use Ophidia, and someday Dakryma, to help her harness demons in other cities through ligature. And using a nobody like Freya to collect them had been the perfect option. Ophidia was a powerful demon, but sadly not invincible. She didn’t want to risk losing the most important player in her scheme, even if the chances were relatively minute. Certainly she couldn’t navigate the dangers of acquiring the colors from the Verge herself. A girl plucked from obscurity and made to do her bidding was just what she had needed. Freya had the soul of a collector and the right looks for one of her portrait models. Mostly though it was just a hunch Beldame had, a feeling in her gut, that Freya was the one for the job. And she always went with her gut.
The best part was that for Beldame, sending Freya on the color hunt was a win-win. She hadn’t even demanded that Freya show her the colors before the opening night of the exhibition. She wanted the first time she saw the pigments to be a spectacle, a ceremony. And if the girl dared to show up, that was confirmation enough that she’d succeeded. If Freya was missing Halloween night, she was either dead or Beldame would end up with a lovely new addition to her art collection. And really, making her part of the collection would be happening whether she was successful or not. There was no way she would be letting the girl go even if she survived the ordeal. But, perhaps, if Freya did get the colors, she’d consider making her death quick and painless.
When she had first begun her treasured photography collection she wasn’t well practiced in the art of murder. It had taken some time to perfect the process. Now, it was almost like putting the girls to sleep, but it hadn’t always been that way. There used to be more struggle, more blood. A couple of times the girls had even managed to fight back, to beg for their lives, to ask her for a reason when they saw their cause was futile. Why? they wanted to know. Why them? And Beldame never knew quite what to say. Would it make it any less painful for them to know there was a justification for her actions? Would it give them any more peace as they fought for their last breath?
It didn’t matter really because Beldame couldn’t give them that comfort. The truth was that when she saw someone who appealed to her, she made them her own. It was just a simple desire to possess what caught her eye. There was nothing more than that. And when her acquiring gaze fell upon Freya as she chanced to pass by her one day, she had felt that tug in her insides and known she was the right one for the color hunt. She’d sent Ophidia out that very afternoon to trail her, to find out more about her, and she had been pleased when Freya had so easily acquiesced to Beldame’s plan.
Turning to the last page in her notebook, she descended the ladder and retrieved a pen from the large table in the center of the room. She ran her finger down the last few entries.
Janice because she glanced my way.
Emory because she wore green.
Maya because of the wisp of hair across her face.
She took up her pen and scratched out two more lines.
Cara because of the arch of her brow.
Freya because she reminds me of myself.
She gently closed the book and returned it to its spot on the highest shelf, then retraced her steps to the studio where Cara’s body still lay. Beldame sat down on the floor and grabbed the girl’s cold fingers. She held them tight and thought about Freya. She hoped that she would survive her encounters with the Verge. Then, after she delivered the colors, Beldame could have the pleasure of watching her die.
Rusty felt uncomfortable in the front seat of the old Cadillac. It had been years since he’d last left the lodge and he still wasn’t sure that it was the right decision. But the place had felt wrong as he lay there on the floor after his and Freya’s narrow escape. The living heart of it, dark and rotten as it was, had died when the Verge swallowed the goblins. The grand interior had felt more like a wooden tomb than a place freed of a tyrannical otherworldly force. Without the magic of the kobold, the lodge took its place firmly within reality, and in reality it was just an overgrown cabin in the woods, a desolate bachelor pad for an ugly, uncouth man.
In truth he was afraid of what might happen to him if he stayed there. Certainly there was no love lost between him and the kobold. In fact, it had given him a strange kind of sadistic pleasure to see those arrogant bastards go, but they had given him a purpose, even if they had treated him like some kind of imbecilic underling. Without them he was fairly sure the depression and anxiety that had flitted around the edges of his consciousness since the disaster with his face would consume him. Isolation felt more dangerous than taking his chances in the city, even if it meant he’d be the object of pity or scorn.
Besides, he felt strangely responsible for Freya now. He’d almost gotten her killed by leading her into that enchanted world unprepared, and then she’d saved him. He’d nearly been ready to let that suffocating darkness consume him, but then through the growing obscurity he’d felt her hand in his and it felt good. He remembered how it was to be a human, what his life had been like years before, and he wasn’t ready to give that up. He knew that the road ahead of her would be full of strange obstacles, as dangerous, if not more so, than the one they had just so narrowly survived. He might not have a lot of experience with humanity, but he knew about the Verge, knew he could help her, repay her for her kindness.
They hadn’t said much after the escape. For a while they had just lain on the floor, hearts pounding as they tried to catch their breath. Finally, when they’d both gotten to their feet, Freya had reached out her hand and touched him gingerly on the shoulder.
“Come with me,” she’d said. “You can’t stay here. There’s nothing left.”
She seemed to sense it too, the weight of the place, the bond they’d formed in that short encounter with the magical world. He’d only nodded his acquiescence, not wanting to say the wrong thing and make her change her mind. He’d never been very good at social niceties and, after years here alone, he was surprised he could even still communicate with another human, let alone an attractive woman.
The long walk back to her car had been cold and dark. He flinched when she started up the roaring engine. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a car. Freya had glanced over at him nervously and then thrown the Caddy into drive, executing a perfect y-turn and rolling slowly down the rest of the rocky drive. When she turned back onto the relatively smooth tarmac of the highway, she gunned the engine, and they’d shot down the mountain road, headlights cutting two glowing swaths of light through the impenetrable alpine midnight. Neither one of them looked back.
It was nearly dawn when Freya pulled the huge car into the narrow alley of the Briar Rose.
“We’re here,” she said, turning off the engine and opening the heavy driver’s-side door.
Rusty followed her around to the front of the building and up the stairs to her apartment. When they reached her door, he was suddenly overcome with a rush of nerves. His mind started to race. What was he doing here? He didn’t know how to survive in the real world. He didn’t know how to treat a woman like Freya. The only things he’d known for years were the woods, the mountains, and the goblins.
“Are you okay?”
Freya had paused in the search for her keys to study Rusty’s face.
“You don’t look well.”
Rusty sighed and tried to pull himself together.
“How can you tell?” he growled at her.
It sounded a lot angrier than he’d meant it to.
“Oh, well, I just mean,” Freya fumbled for the words. “I just mean you seem kind of nervous.”
Her cheeks were bright red. Rusty looked at her for a long moment and then slid his eyes to the floor.
On the Verge Page 13
