She was squeezing my cock so hard I could barely speak. “It doesn’t have to be . . .”
Then her eyes went empty again, as if a switch had been thrown. “You could have been one of my immortals, Snakestaff. You would have been treasured forever. Instead you are just another . . . miserable, fickle, lying man. But you’ll never go to your white-haired whore. You belong to me. I found you, and you’re mine!”
Her knees against my armpits, Vera began to fumble at her long skirts, pulling them upward with a loud rustling of crinoline, exposing the layers of snowy white petticoats. I could feel a heat against my belly from between her legs, but no matter how I squirmed and fought I couldn’t roll her off me. She was lost in some kind of frenzy of anger and misery, something primitive and not very human. She rose into a half crouch and pulled the rest of her petticoats out of the way.
Between her legs, a horror.
Purple and dark blue and angry red, it was a bulging, quivering thing like a jellyfish, its ropy strands of translucent flesh dangling on my belly and thighs. A prickling where they touched me became a stinging, then a scalding fire. I screamed. Vera squatted above me and reached down to put her hands flat on my chest, and just before her fingers touched me I finally saw the translucent, flexible spines, like the bristles on a toothbrush, growing out from beneath Lady Zinc’s fingernails and into my flesh. She had been poisoning me. All that time petting me, stroking my hair, she’d been pumping her toxins into me, some stay-happy fluid to keep me stupid and cheerful. But those toxins had been mild. What she gave me now definitely wasn’t.
The acid burn in my groin suddenly went nova, filling me up like flaming brandy in all my veins. I could feel my flesh swelling everywhere. Blood pounded in my brain, and I could hardly see, but her eyes held me. Vera’s mad eyes.
The thing between her legs made a wet noise, a ghastly squelch like nothing I’d ever heard, and then it opened. Beyond the ragged, mouthlike frill, the edges were lined with tiny needle teeth, hundreds of them, gaping from the slippery, shining purple and pink.
I’m sure I tried to scream again, because she pulled one of her hands away from my chest—the finger-tendrils came loose with a string of sucking pops like ivy being yanked from a wall—then used it to cover my mouth as she lowered herself onto me. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest, but my groin pushed up toward her, offering itself, riding the tide of my own infected, blazing blood.
Then she eased herself down, and I felt those tiny, impossible teeth, and I screamed again from behind her hand, screamed and screamed and screamed without stopping. Her face sagged down toward me, mouth open in a kind of ecstasy, then some kind of membranes slid down from her eyelids, turning her eyes milky-white.
She rode me without stopping, the obscenity between her legs chewing at me, milking me, until I burst and filled her. Lady Zinc collapsed on top of me, and my mind finally escaped into blessed darkness.
twenty-five:
the other white meat
“YOU’RE AN ingrate,” Belle said, and hit me again, a close-fisted shot to the mouth that made my teeth feel like the beads on an abacus. Vera’s servant had very large hands, and she was also pretty damned strong. “She gave you her love. She made you special!”
Boom! Pow! I could almost see the cartoon violence captions appear in the air over my head as she hit me again and again. The big bitch didn’t seem to mind at all that I was tied up and helpless. She didn’t even seem all that mad at me. She was just enjoying thumping the shit out of me.
I didn’t say anything, since I’d discovered there was even less point arguing with the servant than with her mistress. I stayed loose and tried to go with the beating, but there was a part of me that was definitely having a few fantasies about what I’d do if I ever caught this large, nasty piece of work when I was free to fight back.
Several days had passed since the opera and so had the pretense that I was anything but a prisoner. Each night, and sometimes during the day, Vera took me. I’ve never thought rape was anything pleasant, but I had never understood it the way I did now. Helpless, raging, burning with shame, all of these things I now grasped in an extremely intimate way. I even understood the deepest fear now, the feeling that my life was not my own, that whatever happened to me would be beyond my control. There were times when I wept, and not just from the pain of being used, but I always waited until I was alone. That was all I had left.
Belle hit me one last time, a backhand blow that thumped my skull against the headboard of the bed. It had become a rituaclass="underline" she cleaned the room, although nowhere near as carefully as before, she emptied my chamber pot, and then she beat the crap out of me. She was built like a heavyweight boxer, our Belle, like one of the old ones, long arms and big torso. I was guessing that in life she must have gone about two-fifteen, two-twenty, almost linebacker size, but here, with the sharp spikes of bone growing from her joints, I’d guess she was a good twenty or thirty pounds more. Bigger than me, in other words, and with all the strength that a demonic body can give you.
“You should kiss her hand and thank her that she’s kept you,” Belle said from the doorway. “I would have pulled your head off and thrown you on the midden. I know how to treat your type.”
“I’ll bet you do.” My head was still ringing and it would have been smarter to keep my mouth shut, but I didn’t really care. Even being destroyed would be better than this, and it would certainly be less humiliating. “I’ll bet the boys loved you, with that pretty face and figure.”
She smirked. “You think I couldn’t get a man? They came and knocked at my door. They brought me money!” She jutted her heavy jaw. “I had as many as Vera. I just wasn’t so sentimental. No ‘immortals’ for me. No, I would have put you in the fire and watched you sizzle, little fella.”
She really was a charmer. I’d like to say that she was bad cop to her mistress’s good cop, but given a choice between the two I’d rather have just been beaten instead of raped, even if my rapist was crying as often as she was cursing me. Man, was I ever being reminded not to trust anyone in Hell. Vera’s joy-juice had lulled me, but my brain had still worked fairly well, so I couldn’t dodge the blame. I’d grown careless, and now I was paying for it. And paying for it and paying for it.
Most nights, Vera wouldn’t even look at me after she’d finished: when her spasm was over she would crawl off me and rearrange her clothing into respectability. Tonight, as if in parody of one of those old movies where the couples sleep in separate beds, she was dressed in an extremely modest nightdress that she smoothed over her long legs, hiding the alien horror between her thighs. She was Mina Harker as well as Dracula, the Victorian maiden and the beast of darkness rolled into one.
“Vera. Vera, talk to me.” It was hard to speak in a normal voice after the pain I’d just suffered, but I was fighting for my life. “Why does it have to be this way? Because I looked at a woman at the opera? I thought I knew her, that’s all. It was nothing to do with you.”
“Nothing to do with me.” Her voice was heavy, the words bleak. She was always like this after her attacks on me. “That is just the problem. I wanted you only to care about me. I wanted you only to see me.”
I tried to get her to talk, to explain, anything that would keep the lines of communication open. Already she was losing interest in me, I could tell. The worst of her anger, her almost operatic feeling of betrayal, was beginning to cool, but I didn’t fool myself that when she was done with me she’d just let me go.
“Listen, we could try again!”