“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?”
I couldn’t find any words.
His smile was terrible, his laughter even worse: moist-sounding, wrong. He held out his arms, as if to waltz. “Welcome, dance partner. Welcome to my ball here in Hell’s grotto. Death is not seductive. It does not come silk-clad and sweet-smelling as I did for my chosen. It is lonely and cold and merciless. It takes everything from you, before it finally takes you.” He dropped his arms. “I had it all. I had the world by the balls. I fucked anything I wanted, anytime I wanted. I was worshipped, I was rich, and I was going to be one of the world’s great new powers. I was the Lord Master’s right hand and now I am nothing. Because of you.”
He pulled up his cowl, adjusted it, then turned and walked away. “So think, lovely bitch,” he tossed over his shoulder, “about how lovely you won’t be soon. Think about the morning and what horrors await you there. Try to sleep. Wonder what might wake you. Dream. For they are all you have left now. I own your reality. Welcome to mine.”
I lay on my pallet staring up at the stone ceiling. I’d gone to that sidhe-seer place in my head and discovered something: I was capable of illusion. Not the Fae kind of illusion that affected others, but a kind only I could see. It was enough. With my mind, I’d painted clouds and a blue sky on the stone ceiling of my grotto, and I could breathe again.
Was it really only three months ago that I’d been lying by the pool at my parents’ house, in my favorite pink polka-dotted bikini, sipping iced sweet tea and listening to Louis Armstrong croon about what a wonderful world it was?
The song currently playing on my mental iPod was “Highway to Hell.” I’d been on it and not even known. It was a fast road; made the Autobahn look like snail’s play—three months total from Stateside to Tombside, and a month of that had been squandered in a single afternoon, playing volleyball with a facsimile of my sister in Faery.
“V’lane?” I said with soft urgency. I conjured a light wind to buffet my fluffy clouds on the ceiling. “Are you there? Anywhere? I could really use some help right about now.” For the next little while—I had no concept of time down here—I invoked the death-by-sex Fae fervently. I promised him things I knew I’d regret. I’d regret dying more.
It was no use.
Wherever he was, he wasn’t listening.
What in the world had happened to Mallucé? What had he meant when he’d said parts of him were Fae? How could parts of a person—or vampire in this case—be Fae? My understanding was either you were Fae or you weren’t. Could Fae and human reproduce and would the resulting offspring be half-Fae?