But first…
He was reaching for the bottle of Beam when he felt a weight settle on the bed behind him. He tensed, expecting to feel the blade of an assassin slide beneath his rib cage at any moment. It should have been impossible, even for the stealthiest of assassins. The windows were boarded up. The front door, flanked by heavily armed guards, was the only way in or out of the little cabin. Logic dictated this was someone who’d been here all along. He could only assume the intruder had employed some magical means of cloaking their presence.
The intruder was closer now. He could feel her breath on the back of his neck. That the intruder was a woman was a thing he sensed on a primitive level. He knew he should leap to his feet and make a break for the door, but his feet felt nailed to the floor. He was as incapable of movement as a statue-and would remain so until the intruder released him from this paralyzed state.
Anger flared inside him. “Stop fucking around and do it.”
Then he felt the cold sting of a large blade laid flat across his throat and closed his eyes. No need to wonder how it would feel. He’d had a would-be assassin’s blade in his body before, back during his time Below. He’d survived that attempt on his life, but he sensed this would be different. And less clumsy. This blade would open his carotid and his blood would splash across the spilled evidence of his formerly exalted place in the world.
The intruder leaned against him. A pair of soft lips pressed against his ear. And a voice, wholly unfamiliar, whispered the following:“Don’t you want to live?”
Jim swallowed hard. “Why are you toying with me?”
The woman turned the blade, pressed the sharp side to his trembling flesh. “Answer my question.” Her free hand slithered like a snake around his midsection and moved to his crotch, where it grasped and squeezed. “Answer…Jim. Or I’ll cut this off and feed it to you.”
“Honest answer…I don’t know.”
The woman slid off the bed to stand before him. Jim’s brow knitted in confusion at the sight of the stranger. She was wearing a black gi. She was slim and small, maybe two or three inches over five feet. Her features were Asian, though her voice had been smooth and inflectionless.
“Who the hell are you?”
She knelt before him and snatched up the picture of Ms. Wickman’s gutted body. “I am of the Order of the Dragon. My name is not important.” She waved the picture at him. “I am here to speak to you about this. And to make a proposition.”
Jim realized the woman had relinquished her psychic grip on him. He grabbed the Jim Beam bottle and chugged from it. Then he sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “Does this proposition involve any sort of threat to my people?”
“It involves the removal of a threat. For my organization, it is a matter of vengeance. This may mean sacrifices. You will have to decide how high a price the removal of this threat is worth.”
An ache began behind Jim’s eyes as a familiar spiritual pain lanced him. For maybe the millionth time, he wished he’d not chosen to assume a position of leadership. He loathed being the man who had to make life and death decisions for a larger body of people. His father had been such a man. Alas, such regrets were useless at this juncture. The die had been cast for him long, long ago.
He looked at her and spoke evenly:“Speak to me. Tell me your proposition. And then we’ll see just how much I feel like living or dying.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Giselle awoke to the sound of birdsong. She opened her eyes and saw a large and multicolored creature perched at the foot of the bed. It was a strange synthesis of parrot and vulture, with brightly colored feathers, a long, black beak, and large and very sharp talons. The creature stared at her through glassy black eyes. She found its scrutiny unnerving and wondered for a moment how the thing had gained entry to her quarters.
Then she recalled the previous evening’s festivities in a series of flashing images. She and Ursula had consumed large quantities of a very expensive wine imported from France. There had been music, a girl playing a guitar. A large number of Apprentices gathered in her quarters at her invitation. Slaves were brought in and put to use in various ways as entertainment. Clothes were discarded and the party devolved to pure orgy. Giselle had partnered with several different men and women through the course of the evening, exploring every possible sexual combination and position with Apprentices and slaves alike.
It had been, she recalled with a tired smile, the most purely debauched evening of her entire life. There had been interludes during which slaves she’d fucked were then tortured and humiliated. Then things would shift back to party mode, with the consumption of still more wine and numerous more carnal indulgences. As evening progressed toward dawn, the wine flowing through her system caught up to her and things became a blur. She vaguely remembered accosting Ursula, violently removing the young Apprentice perched atop the girl and then dragging her out to the balcony. Here her memories became even blurrier. She recalled some frenzied moments of passion. But she’d been rough with the girl, maybe too rough, and there’d been anger. And then…
a sound, the loud crack of her fist across Ursula’s jaw…the girl’s eyes rolling back in her head as her body topples backward, falls against the balcony railing…
Giselle’s head snapped to her right and let out a sigh of relief as she saw Ursula lying beside her. The girl was unconscious, her mouth hanging slack against the silk pillowcase. Her jaw sported a deep brown bruise and her flesh was gouged in other places where Giselle had struck her. But she otherwise seemed okay. Giselle listened to her racing heart and felt her eyes moisten as she realized how close she’d come to killing her lover.
She wiped the tears away at once. They were a sign of emotion. And emotion equaled weakness. She could not afford to be seen as weak. Also, Ursula was not in the restraints Giselle normally put her in at bedtime. The lapse angered Giselle. She’d left herself vulnerable, another thing she couldn’t allow to happen, a thing she’d worked hard to prevent.
Until last night.
She sat up in bed and surveyed the aftermath of the orgy. The physical effort amplified a dull ache in her head. Her mouth felt as dry as parchment. She had a hangover, her first in more years than she could recall. She felt a touch of nausea at the back of her throat, a sensation exacerbated by the pungent scents of piss, semen, and blood. This annoyed her, but not nearly so much as the sight of unconscious bodies lounging everywhere. The crashed-out revelers were all nude or nearly nude, some of them with their limbs still intwined, having passed out after sex. They were on the floor and in chairs. A young male slave was lying atop a table in the library section of her quarters. A male Apprentice, nude, lay next to him, an arm draped across the slave’s waist.
There was a lot of blood. Big splashes on the floor and the furniture. The decapitated head of a female slave sat impaled on the tip of a spear, which was propped against the wall opposite the bed. Giselle couldn’t imagine where anyone had gotten a spear. But that minor bit of mystery was forgotten as she noted the dark entrance to the secret torture chamber. Her heart thudded. She couldn’t remember opening the door. The unnatural cold from the chamber was seeping into the air in her living quarters. There was something insinuating about the chill, a hint of something alive and malignant, and her first instinct was to seal the door at once. But she restrained herself, knowing she would first have to check the chamber for signs of anything amiss.
The missing bits of her memory stirred the self-directed anger again. She had been sloppy. Unforgivably so. The party-cum-orgy had been Ursula’s idea. She had become petulant of late, resentful even, chafing under the new restrictions imposed upon her. She especially disliked being restrained in the evening, rebuffing Giselle’s initial attempts to soften the loss of her total freedom by turning it into a kind of kinky game. Worst of all, from Giselle’s point of view, she’d become more subdued during sex, feigning passion and being quite unsubtle about the fakery.