Amelia had been sidestepped. Kharon had come to her in her house and had given her the strength to survive to see The Crossing. But he had witnessed her weakness then too. And so the baton had passed. Kharon had chosen another to fawn on.
Very few ever survived the torture of The Red long enough to pass through into The Black. In Rae, Amelia saw her own chances dwindle. Those who ran the rabbits were being tested. It was an important moment for the Watchers. Who had enough desire, mixed with enough cruelty, to bring an innocent to NightWhere to endure the ultimate degradation?
Could it be that the Watchers were wrong, and Rae didn’t really have it? Perhaps she was still too stupid and naïve about what NightWhere really was? Amelia prayed that was the case. Rae had only been here a few times, after all. She did not have the history of pain and understanding etched on her skin, like a road map to every conceivable destination of pain, as Amelia did.
With Gordon the loser in the rabbit race, his own star had fallen some too, leaving a newbie as the star in the Watchers’ eyes.
Amelia knelt in the bathtub as dawn slipped in the window of her small apartment. Drops of blood dribbled down her thighs, and she rinsed it with warm water and soap before lubing up a finger with antibiotic cream. Then she slid it inside her to coat the ripped flesh where Kharon had seen fit to pin a snake.
The cruel bastard had told her it was the only place that he could find without a scar.
Well, she was going to have one there now. A big one. And it gave her an idea. Something that would bring the princess down and remind the Watchers who could really take-and dole out-the pain. Who could enjoy cruelty the most.
Nobody should ascend to The Black ahead of her. Certainly not a pretty little clueless girl.
Amelia put on a pad to staunch the flow and dressed. Then she went to her dresser drawer and pulled out a flesh-colored dildo. One of her favorites. She fingered the fake veins and the bulbous head, and considered how she might have it modified before the next invitation from NightWhere. She knew a guy who did all sorts of steel and plastic model making, and he was also a pretty dark soul. She’d seen him at plenty of fetish nights over the years. She thought he might be willing to help her make some alterations to the way this particular sex toy functioned. Something that might really give the princess a “pop” when she tried to use it.
“I’ll show you what it means to get nailed,” Amelia grinned. “We’ll see who can take the pain.”
Chapter Nineteen
Gone
“Rae?”
Mark called her name absently as he walked into the house. It had been a sucko day, and he would rather have gone straight to the bar. He really wanted to pound a couple beers and try to forget the afternoon. Part of him hoped Rae had cooked something good for dinner so he could lose himself in a food high. But part of him hoped she hadn’t…so he could drag her out of the house and really pig out. Speaking of pig…maybe barbecue. If he could sell her on it…
“Rae?”
He dropped his laptop case in the corner and walked through the kitchen, flipping on the light even though he continued right on, into the next room. He smiled at that. She always complained that he wasted electricity.
The living room was silent, and the front room the same. He knew without going up the stairs that Rae wasn’t home. But then…where?
He changed clothes and then came back to the kitchen. A crumpled fragment of red paper lay on the floor and he bent to pick it up.
And then unfolded it.
He knew the paper. Knew the envelope. Another invitation from NightWhere.
Mark’s heart sank. What the fuck? She had gone again without him? They had agreed that she wouldn’t go back there without him. That they were a team and had to be on the same page with this. Over the past three weeks, it had seemed like things were getting better. At first she hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but then slowly she had divulged the story of what went on in The Red. Of how they played a surreal game of sex and violence…and of how much that appealed to her.
He knew he couldn’t tell her not to do it, and he couldn’t offer to fulfill that desire for her in any real way…it just wasn’t in him. But he was afraid that she was going to get hurt in these perverted games. Rae didn’t really know these strangers-what if someone took the whip too far? Or the piercing and cutting? He had tried to plead sense to her about putting herself in real danger, but in the end, he’d simply made her promise that she wouldn’t do this without him nearby, at least. To pick up the pieces, if need be.
He crumpled the envelope back up and tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’d just gone into town to get a special outfit for tonight or something once she’d received the invite. He waited a half hour and then found some leftover chicken in the fridge to reheat. But it was hard to eat. Rae hadn’t just gone to the store.
She’d gone to NightWhere without him.
And this time, he couldn’t follow her.
He forced another few bites down and then got up to look outside. Then he sat and ate a couple more mouthfuls. And then he got up to look outside. No matter how many times he looked, Rae wasn’t to be seen.
Finally sometime after midnight, Mark walked to the front door and switched off the outside light before locking the door.
Part of him cried inside, knowing that somehow, inexplicably, this was the end. His wife hadn’t left him for another man, she’d left him for other men. More than that really. She’d left him for a lifestyle.
She’d left him for pain.
Mark went to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, he played back all of the times he’d told Rae that she could do whatever she needed. He just wanted to keep loving her. He just wanted to be the one she came home to in the end.
At 3:25 a.m., she still had not come home.
At 6:00 a.m. he got up and showered, and then sat for an hour at the kitchen table in his robe, sipping his coffee alone. Finally, Mark pulled on a polo shirt and went to work.
Mark had called home every hour during the day, and the answering machine just kept picking up, with Rae’s cheerful voice asking him to leave a message.
When he got home from work that night, Rae still had not come home. Nor had she called or e-mailed. Mark walked every room of the house, as if she might really just be hiding in a closet somewhere, and all he had to do was find her. Hide-and-seek.
Mark didn’t know what to do.
Over the course of their admittedly nontraditional relationship, Rae had stayed out until the next morning once or twice with other men. But in the past, it had always been with his permission, and she’d never stayed out the whole next day.
He couldn’t go anywhere to look for her, and he didn’t really want to call the police to report her as a missing person either. What was he going to say? “My wife went to a sex club-I have the envelope from the invitation right here. She went to a place that has no address and she hasn’t come home since.”
What would they say to that? Aside from politely gagging back laughter, there wasn’t much to be said. “Sorry, dude, you left your wife up for grabs. Obviously she decided to shack up once and for all with someone else.”
Mark didn’t know where to turn for help. But somehow, he had to find her.
First though, he had to find NightWhere.
Chapter Twenty
Crawling Through the Wreckage
Where did you start to look for a place that only appeared once a month? And never in the same spot.
Mark had never returned to any of the other sites where NightWhere had been held, but he decided to drive back to the first one, down on Riverside Avenue in the South Loop. He knew he could get back there easily-it wasn’t too far off the expressway. Maybe there’d be some kind of clue there. What kind of clue that might be, he didn’t know.