The ghosts of women past, or the flesh of the ghost incarnate.
He chose Alma.
She was raven-haired and tall and her pose was stiff, her arms and legs resting in the parallel lines of a corpse on the autopsy table. Her skin was not gray - that had been a trick of the light. She was white. Startlingly so from lack of sun and loss of life and blood. Her back bowed proudly and her breasts were large and round, with wide rose tips. Her nipples were stiff and, though she made no attempt to cover herself, she was shivering. Her sex was full and black, the color of her love. With his eyes he traced the curve of her hips, the familiar lines of the woman she had been.
He knew this body well, this body she had taken. What was once illusion was now a cold and cruel reality. The skin and hair and the rest of her shell was Jo, but the spirit, everything that was the soul inside and staring back at him, was Alma. In this house she had lived for a century and he only a summer, but to each it remained the only home they'd ever known.
Husband and wife, until death do us part.
Outside these walls, the car doors began to slam and the voices became a chorus of shouts and orders barked. Their footsteps pounded over the porch boards, shaking the front of the house.
Conrad ignored them as his clothes fell to the floor in a whisper. When he lay down beside her his heart beat stronger, and he was not surprised to feel his arousal quickening toward the familiar. He thought of murder and revenge and blood gushing between his fingers as they sank into her neck to end the thing that had taken Jo and Nadia and the other mother with the red hair of fire and her child, but Alma stalled all such dreams when she rolled to one side and pressed her cold shape against him. He saw stars under clenched eyelids until she pried his fingers loose from the bedding, and her touch was a welcome balm.
When he looked into her eyes and saw himself reflected in the black liquid pools, his fear began to ebb. She had saved him when he no longer deserved saving, when all others had abandoned him. She was offering him forgiveness.
He pulled her tightly against him, wishing to make her warm. To know that she was alive too. He wanted to stay with her forever. As if to prove her vitality and further allay his fears, her limbs stirred and claimed him, rolling him onto his back to sit astride his hips. Her lips were firm and he saw the fissure scar above as he kissed her there upon her healing. He tasted her cool tongue warming, warming even now, pushing into his mouth at the same moment that he pushed past her slick opening and deeper, to the end.
She pulled away before he could taste her breath, or know that she was breathing at all. But her chest expanded as she began to rock, wetting his lap, and their hearts began to beat in unison. He felt one last spike of the blackness, the fear and lust and hunger for violent revenge, certain that none of this would last and that he would die here, alone.
His thoughts swung between two choices, as they had for all men.
Love and death.
Life and murder.
An end and a beginning.
The front door burst open with a thunderous crash and the men were shouting his name, ordering him to come out, to reveal his sin. The voices fanned out through the house and the dogs sang as they set upon the interlopers.
She took his hands, folding them in prayer. She held him until her warmth spread through his fingers but he clung to the darkness, the grief, the anger.
His fingers crawled over her breasts and along her throat and she moaned, reading his intention as if reading his mind.
Without slowing she opened his palms and slid them down, lower, lower, placing them flat against her belly, showing him his work, holding his new world inside her body until he could feel what was to come, what he had never felt before, that which he had been searching for since it had been stolen from him years and years ago, when he was seventeen.
The men with guns beat a heavy drum up the stairs.
Any second now, in a sliver of time, a span within which life might blossom or be smothered, the law would fall on them and its weight and judgment would be mighty. Knowing this, he entertained visions of cold courtrooms and colder prison cells, of foster parents for the dogs and endless grief for the parents, of earth tilled for burial and graves wreathed with flowers, all of them strands of a future flowing from this human contest to go on.
But those were only visions, realities yet to be born. Until they cast him inexorably toward such a fate, he refused to allow them shelter. For at last his home was full, its hearth so very warm.
Inside her womb he felt the affirmation of his power to create, the other side of the darkness, his only purpose in this world, his final beginning.
The stirring within, its tiny beating heart.
Soon she would be a mother, and he a father.