So they poured from their upper-floor rooms to see what the commotion was all about.
And learned, too late, that maybe they weren’t so safe after all.
Giselle seized Eddie about the wrist and dragged him out of the room. They were in a hallway clogged with black clad apprentices before he even had a chance to protest.
He couldn’t know, of course, that this was as Giselle had planned it.
She had plied him with the sex magic.
Had provided him the exotic thrills of his darkest fantasies, the ones he never spoke of, that he could never admit aloud, scenarios of bondage and submission.
And it had worked.
Rendered him pliant.
Suggestible.
But she’d thought it wise to leave Eddie in the dark until just moments before the time arrived for him to do what he had to do.
That time was now.
Eddie flinched at the sight of all the apprentices. “Jesus-what’s going on here?”
“Can’t you smell it?” Giselle smiled. “Revolution is in the air.”
Then she was pulling him through the clot of people in the hallway.
Toward The Master’s chambers.
Chad made the second-floor landing faster than he would have thought possible, taking the stairs three at a time. The machete blade glowed with heat, shimmering like a precious ore exposed to a heat beyond fathoming. It seemed to pull him along, taking him where he needed to go through some almost sentient alchemical instinct. He stood panting on the landing and scowled at the wary faces of the apprentices.
Lazarus made the landing a moment later.
He took one look at the faces turned toward him.
Saw the corruption that pulsed behind their shiny eyes like bloated parasites. And opened fire.
Giselle threw open the massive doors to The Master’s chambers and Eddie stumbled in after her. He gaped at the sight that greeted him. Two people kneeling on the floor, two lethal-looking swords pressed to their chests.
A suicide pose.
A hari-kari pose.
But that wasn’t what shocked him. What shocked him was the people poised to do themselves in. The guy, who he deduced right away was The Master, didn’t look the way he had looked the last time Eddie had seen him.
In fact, he looked exactly like Eddie.
Only bigger.
And the other was the woman from his dreams.
“Dream,” he breathed.
Yes. Dream. So he had seen the future! Only, she didn’t appear to be morphing shapeshifter-style. There was, however, some change under way behind those heartbreaking, sky-blue eyes.
Something tragic.
Eddie was so saddened by this beautiful woman’s obviously damaged soul that he at first took little note of The Master’s newly focused attention.
On him.
NO!
Dream wanted to scream when the son of a bitch began to stand up.
So close!
She’d been so close to ending his obscenity of a life.
She glanced in the direction of the disturbance, took little note of the pretty, pale girl standing next to King’s doppelganger. The man was a grungier, less thickly muscled version. There was something else different about the intruder.
The unmistakable humanity evident in his eyes.
She moved on instinct when The Master advanced on the man.
The blade seemed to move of its own accord, swooping in a perfect arc toward the creature’s perfectly exposed throat. The blade’s power filled her with a galvanizing energy. She could feel it coursing through her veins like liquid light. She saw how it would happen in her mind, the blade taking his head off at the shoulders.
So she was shocked when his free hand halted her sword’s path at mid-arc.
She realized how strong he was then.
Stronger than she’d ever imagined.
Stronger than nature.
His head swiveled slowly in her direction, turning farther than a normal human head ought to turn. His face was a twisted mask of loathing and-oddly, incredibly-heartbroken betrayal.
Dream wavered for a moment.
Just a moment.
I could have been his Queen, she thought.
In that moment, just that slightest, almost immeasurable nanosecond, she felt she could have become what the creature wanted.
A sadistic mistress every bit his equal.
Reigning here on earth and, later, in the afterlife.
The moment passed.
She would rather die than live a life that repudiated every good thing she’d ever believed in.
Hell, she would just rather die.
Some things never change.
So she relinquished her hold on the sword, felt the unnatural energy blip out of her with a strange fizz, and stepped back, tore open her blue nightgown, and turned her head to the ceiling to await the final killing blow.
The Master let the sword that had almost decapitated him slide from his hand.
He grasped the other sword, the one with which he’d meant to take his own life, and readied it for another use.
The final destruction of the bitch who’d brought this ruin upon him.
Eddie wanted to help her.
To stop this offense against God and nature.
Dream!
She couldn’t die.
But Giselle’s strong hand at his shoulder restrained him. He tried to wrench free, but she was implacable. She shook something from the sleeve of her dress and pressed it into his hand. His fingers curled around it, and he looked down to see what it was.
A dagger.
It vibrated in his hand, pulsed with a strange energy.
Giselle whispered in his ear, “Sanctified by the gods. His death spirits. He knew you were here, Eddie, but he never knew what was in my heart.”
The hand holding the dagger shook.
Eddie strained at the leash.
“Do what you came here for, Eddie. Go to your destiny”
She released him.
And Eddie leapt forward.
The Master was so intent on the murderous rage consuming him, this need to remove every trace of this lying whore from existence, to obliterate her, that he wasn’t aware of the danger hurtling toward him until it was too late.
The dagger penetrated his throat with an electric jolt.
He tumbled to the floor with the human intruder on top of him. A detached part of his mind reeled at the layers upon layers of deceit heaped upon him tonight. Giselle, his pet, had brought this thing here, had set it upon him. He cried out in agony and frustration-frustration at his inability to have foreseen this.
There’d been no hint of any of it.
Not of Giselle’s betrayal.
Not of Dream’s true intentions.
And, most damnably, not of the momentous changes occurring Below.
He raged into the abyss, that horribly echoing chamber of reality’s darkest plane, cried out against the unfairness of it all. He flung the intruder aside and staggered to his feet, casting about for his fallen sword. He was weakened, had perhaps received a mortal blow, but he remained stronger by far than all these infidels combined.
Dream saw her window of opportunity.
It was small.
Maybe too small.
The asshole was looking for his sword. But he was wounded, badly wounded, and he was so enraged he didn’t see that the thing he wanted was right at his feet. Dream already had the other sword back in her own hands.
She didn’t wait.
Not one moment.
The supernatural energy filled her again, with strength-and with the knowledge that she was stronger than he was now.
That he was fucked.
She drove the blade through his chest and pushed it all the way out through his back. He threw his head back and roared like a wounded dragon, a sound so mighty it blotted out the rest of existence for a moment. Dream stumbled away from him, clamping hands over her ears and willing the sound to stop.