I lay perfectly still and listened. If someone lurked nearby, they were taking pains not to betray their presence.
I opened my eyes and stared up at stone.
No one said anything ominous like Aha, you’re awake, let the torturing begin, so I risked a glance at my wrist. I was wearing a cast.
“I almost ripped your hand off,” a voice said conversationally, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “You were bleeding to death. It made repairs necessary.”
I sat up slowly, carefully. My head was muzzy, my tongue thick. My wrist was a mass of screaming nerves, burning all the way up to my shoulder.
I looked around. I was in a cell of stone—an ancient grotto—behind iron bars, on a thin pallet on the floor. Beyond those bars my specter stood.
“Where am I?”
Its hood rustled as it spoke. “The Burren. Beneath it, to be precise. Do you know what the Burren is?” Its voice held a smile. Where had I heard that voice before? Sibilant, silky, it was familiar…but different…tone fluid, words loosely formed.
Yes, I knew what the Burren was. I’d seen it on my maps and read about it during the recent learning binge I’d gone on in an attempt to dispel my provinciality. From the Irish Boireann, which meant great rock or rocky place, it was a karst landscape in County Clare, Ireland, a limestone area of roughly three hundred square kilometers, with the famous Cliffs of Moher at the southwest edge. On cracked limestone pavements chiseled by grykes, or fissures in the stone, one could find Neolithic tombs, portal dolmens, high crosses, and as many as five hundred ring forts. Beneath the Burren were active stream caves and miles of labyrinthine passages and caverns, some open to tourists, the majority unexplored, undeveloped, and far too dangerous for the casual potholer.
I was beneath the Burren.
It was a hundred times worse than being in the bomb shelter. I might as well have been entombed alive. I hate confined places as much as I hate the dark. The knowledge that there were tons and tons of rock above my head, dense and impenetrable, separating me from the air, from wide-open spaces and the ability to move freely about made me feel wildly claustrophobic. My face must have betrayed my horror.
“I see you do.”
“Where are my things?” I couldn’t think about where I was or I’d have a meltdown. I had to focus on getting out. Specifically, where was my cuff? Had it been removed here? Or back in the alley? I could hardly ask. I desperately needed to know.
“Why?”
“I’m cold.”
“Cold is the least of your problems.”
Undoubtedly true. Even if I managed to get free, how would I find my way out of this place? Down dark tunnels, through flooded caverns, with no compass, no sense of direction. As desperately as I wanted more information about my clothes, cuff, and spear, I was afraid to press; afraid too much interest might make my captor suspicious, and the last thing I wanted to do was cause the specter to dispose of something it might otherwise have left lying around—a thing that could save my life. How did the cuff work? Would Barrons be able to track it beneath the ground? “Who are you? What do you want?” I demanded.
“My life back,” it said. “In lieu of that, I’ll take yours. The same way you’ve taken mine. One piece at a time.”
“Who are you?” I repeated. What was this thing talking about?
It raised a hand and pushed back its cowl.
I flinched violently. For a moment I was too horrified to do anything but stare. I searched the face for something, anything that I recognized. It took me several long moments to find it in the eyes.
They were dead, citron, inhuman.
Mallucé!
I’d been grossly premature in swiping him off my playing board. I’d been wrong, so wrong! The vampire wasn’t dead.
He was worse than dead.
All those times I’d glimpsed the specter, seen it out a window late at night, or in the alley, or in the graveyard with Barrons, it had been Mallucé, watching me. All those times I’d discounted my Grim Reaper as a figment of my imagination, the vampire had actually been there, somehow. I shuddered. I’d been so close to him so many times, with no awareness of the danger I was in. He’d been in my back alley the night the Shades had gotten in, the night I’d broken into Barrons’ garage. He’d been watching me since shortly after I’d stabbed him. I wondered why he’d waited so long to take action.
I struggled to hold his gaze, if only to keep from absorbing how grotesque the rest of him had become. It was no wonder he kept his hood up. No wonder he hid his face. I looked away. I couldn’t take it.
“Look at me, bitch. See your handiwork. You did this to me,” he snarled.
“No, I didn’t,” I said instantly. I may not know much, but I did know that I’d never do anything like that to anyone, not even my worst enemy.
“Yes, you did. And I’m going to do worse to you before I’m done. You’ll die when I die. It might be weeks, it might be months.”
I looked back at him and tried to speak but couldn’t. His face, once handsome in a pale, Goth Byronic way, was now monstrous. “I didn’t do that,” I insisted. “There’s no way. All I did was stab you in your gut. I don’t know how the rest of you got so…so…” I let the sentence end there, the kinder for both of us. “Are you sure Barrons didn’t do it?” Not very big of me trying to blame Barrons, but at the moment, under the circumstances, I wasn’t feeling big. I was feeling small and terrified. Mallucé was holding me responsible for what he’d become, and what he’d become was worse than anything I’d seen in any movie I’d watched, or any nightmare I’d ever had.
“You stabbed me with a Fae-killing spear, you bitch!”
“But you’re not Fae,” I protested. “You’re a vampire.”
“Parts of me were Fae!” he hissed.
His mouth didn’t completely close, and flecks of spittle flew through the bars, landed on my skin. They burned like acid. I scrubbed my arms on my T-shirt.
“What?” How could parts of someone be Fae? Yet that was exactly what it looked like. As if the spear had killed parts of him. Portions of Mallucé’s face were still marble white and handsome in a vampiric way; other parts had been ravaged by a foul leprosy: A blackened vein ran down his right cheek, over his jaw, and halfway down his neck, like rotted marbling in beef; a chunk above his left eye was gray, moist; most of his chin and lower lip had collapsed into a wet, septic decay. It was horrific. I couldn’t stop staring. His long blond hair had fallen out, baring a bloated skull traced by a skein of thin, black veins.
I realized that must be why my hand had sunk into his abdomen—portions of his body were decomposing as well, which explained his altered gait and the change in his voice, not to mention a mouth that wouldn’t close, which had to make diction difficult. Was he rotting from the inside, too? Revolted, I wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Look at me,” he said, his yellow eyes burning lanterns in a misshapen skull. “Study me. Soon you’ll know this face as well as your own. We’re going to be intimate, so very intimate. We’re going to die together.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you know what the worst part is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “At first you think it’s watching parts of yourself rot. Staring in the mirror, poking your finger into melting pockets of your own flesh. Wondering if you should scrape out the rot or leave it alone. Bandage it up. Realizing that your cheek or your ear or part of your stomach is beyond repair. You lose yourself in degrees. You think, I can live with this, but then the next part goes and the next, and you find the worst part isn’t the mornings when you wake up to discover another part of you is no longer alive, but the nights when you lie awake in terror of what you’ll discover at dawn. Will it be my hand next? An eye? Will I go blind before I die? Will it be my tongue? My dick? My balls? It’s not the reality that undoes you; it’s the possibilities. It’s the waiting, the hours you lie awake wondering what will be next. It’s not the pain of the moment, but the anticipation of the next pain. It’s not the dying itself—that will be a relief—but the desperation to live, the stupid fucking need to go on long after you hate what you’ve become, long after you can even stand to look at yourself. You’ll feel that before I’m through with you.” His lips—one sculpted, pink, and firm, one rotted—peeled back from fangs. “Look at me. I lived as Death for years. I played it for them. I delivered Death to my followers, dressed in grand Goth seduction. I gave it to them in velvet and lace and smelling of sex. I took them higher than they’d ever been on any drug. I danced them into death. I ripped out their throats and drank their blood and they came beneath my body as they died. Will no one do the same for me? Will no one dance me into the darkness?”