Why should I give a shit if I wake people up? I can do anything I want—I’m insane. Jesus Christ, I just killed a female demon with a penis and I’m worrying about being polite? It made sense. Each suite he stepped into, however, was untenanted. He peered through closets and bathrooms, hoping to recognize something of Vera’s. And in one of the suites farther down—Eureka! he thought—he spotted her purse, and her name and face on the enclosed driver’s license verified what he needed to know. She’s here, but… where?
The big four-poster bed lay unmade, yet all else appeared in order. Why would she have gotten up this late? Where could she have gone? It was going on four in the morning.
Then he noticed the book.
It lay opened amid rumpled covers.
Holy shit, he thought when he began reading the text.
««—»»
“Yeah. Attitude adjustment. That’s just what little, pretty Vera needs, I’d say.”
Kyle, then, quickly grabbed a shock of her hair and dragged her to the rubber-matted kitchen floor. He’d lowered his jeans, and though flaccid for the moment, his penis hung at his groin like a slack summer sausage. Vera squealed at his fist’s grip on her hair hauled her immediately to the floor. Tears blurred her eyes. He slapped her once so hard in the face, her consciousness reeled.
“You’re such a bad little bitch, “he whispered to her, lowering his jeans further. “I could get in trouble for doing this, but…but…”
His open palm cracked her across the face again—
“—but I think I really do love you. And now I’m going to show you, Vera.” He jerked up her robe and nightgown, baring her raw hips. “If you think Feldspar was good, well…you don’t know what good is till you’ve had a good, hard fucking from me.”
In her terror, though, Vera managed to ponder, Feldspar?
Kyle, now grotesquely erect, pried apart her thighs. The glans looked as large as a billiard ball, throbbing on the end of a veined shaft more stout than a stair prop.
If he sticks that thing in me, Vera thought, I’ll throw up and just die…
“It’s only because I love you,” he whispered some more. “You’ll understand. We’ll keep it a secret, okay?”
Vera’s face felt pinched shut.
Kyle’s open palm cracked her against the other cheek.
“Okay?” he whispered.
She’d never felt so helpless. She felt a thousand times worse than every other woman in history who’d been raped, because she was about to be raped by something far different from a man…
“I’m gonna come in you, Vera. I’m gonna make a baby in you…”
Just let me die…
And if she had the means to kill herself, she knew she would. She’d lay open her throat without hesitance. She’d jump from a one-hundred-story window. She’d gulp down gasoline. Anything—
Anything to prevent this.
Kyle’s impressive pectorals flexed above her. The amethyst pendant swayed. He slapped her once more in the face, this time so hard she blacked out for a moment.
“Baby? Baby? I know you like it, that’s the only reason I do it. I’m gonna make love to you now. I’m gonna make you come—”
At the same moment, though, he…shrieked. High and hard like he’d just been gelded. A stubby hand reached around and snapped off the amethyst pendant. Two stubby fingers sunk into Kyle’s eyes, like fingers sinking into bowling ball holes—and then Kyle’s shriek hitched up to a full, chest-heaving scream. He was lifted off her. One stout hand bent his head back while another hand stuck the end of the big, antique pistol into Kyle’s ear, and—
Ba-BAM!
The pistol-shot’s concussion made Vera’s ears ring. At once she was speckled by dots of black ichor. Kyle’s body collapsed to the matted floor. More black gruel slid out of the ruptured skull.
“The amethyst,” she was told by a high, articulate voice. “It’s a gift from our lord, our safeguard. And it protects the underlings from all physical harm. But without it…”A leather-thonged foot kicked Kyle’s broken pendant across the floor. “They are as mortal as you are.”
Vera feebly tried to wipe Kyle’s strange blood off her face. Her savior, whose own face she still could not see from the harsh backlight of the overhead fluorescents, continued in something of a remorseful tone: “The Kyl-Lemi served well, but he was becoming unreliable. He’s back now, from whence he came.”
A sizzling, like bacon frying in a pan way too hot, crackled in Vera’s ears. What had been Kyle’s corpse only a moment ago was quickly reverting to bubbling black slime before her eyes. Soon it evaporated altogether.
“Questions now? Of course. I will answer them all.”
Vera slid up to her feet against the service line. She could see now, the features of the man who’d saved her from Kyle. The short figure wore not the typical fine, custom-made garments but a mere sackcloth frock. He was completely bald and bereft now of the neatly trimmed goatee she’d always known him to wear. Yet despite all this, his identity was undisputable.
“Feldspar,” Vera whispered.
His words seemed to nod in the air. “Yes. But you may call me by my real name. You may call me Prince Magwyth.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s all relative, Ms. Abbot. It’s all the same in a way, isn’t it? Think about that.”
Flecks of gore began to dry on Vera’s face as she numbly stared back at Feldspar.
“We’re all servants, are we not?” he suggested. “You are, I am, only to different degrees. All of life is experience, as they say. The same applies to infinity.”
In silence, Vera’s eyes darted about for a weapon. Feldspar had set the big revolver beside one of the Jenn-Air ranges, far out of her reach, and just as out of reach now as the cutlery rack. But what could she be thinking of anyway? She’d seen how useless the knife had been on Kyle; certainly it would be even less effective on Feldspar, who was obviously the core of power in this place.
Unless—
His amethyst, she reckoned.
She remembered what she’d read in the book, that amethyst was their protection. And Kyle had been destroyed only after Feldspar had removed the amethyst pendant. And…
Feldspar wears one too. In fact he always had, since the first night she’d seen him.
And that same amethyst sparkled at her now from the ornate pinky ring on Feldspar’s hand…
“Kyle said I was set up,” she told him. She needed to divert him, she needed to keep him talking and distracted. “How?”
“I should think it would be obvious to you by this point,” Feldspar replied. “I needed someone very badly to run the restaurant, and when I found out about you, I knew that you were the one. I also knew you’d be reluctant to leave your fiancé, so I simply made certain arrangements.”
Vera’s eyes thinned. “What kind of…arrangements?”
Feldspar smiled, as if at a naive toddler. “I instructed the Zyramon, via her own sense of creativity, to effect a situation that would induce you to leave your lover.”