NightWhere

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Woke Up With a Monster

Everything hurt.

Her brain throbbed. Pain pulsed like the rhythm of a train. She didn’t want to open her eyes. For a moment, she didn’t. She simply thought back to what had happened sometime this morning. Sometime after she’d emerged, bloodstained and naked from the gothic doorway that guarded The Red.

She had had to tell Sin-D about what had happened to Peter and Amelia. The bartendress had smiled at Rae’s composure (or lack thereof) and poured her a vodka with a splash of cherry juice. “Virgin blood,” she’d laughed, pushing it forward. “Drink it up, you need it.”

“Have you ever done anything like that?” Rae asked at dawn, round about her third drink of “virgin blood”.

Sin-D laughed and then slipped the thin straps of her shirt down from her shoulders, exposing the globes of her breasts. But that wasn’t what she wanted Rae to see. Sin-D turned her back to Rae and said, “Touch it.”

Rae reached out and put her fingertips on the bronze skin of the bartendress’s shoulder blades. They were covered in a network of thin pink lines, culminating in two rippled puckers on either side of her spine. Rae could feel the gnarled flesh of the scar tissue there; it was different to feel it, rather than to simply witness that Sin-D had scars.

“I’ve done worse things than that,” Sin-D said. She turned and for a moment, Rae was confronted by the wide, pink silver dollars of the woman’s prominent nipples before Sin-D pulled up her shirt.

“You can do anything in NightWhere,” Sin-D said. “Killing is easy. Surviving to do it again…that’s the hard part.”

An hour later, the club closed for the coming of morning, and Kharon turned up at Rae’s unsteady elbow to escort her back to her room.

An hour can allow a lot of alcohol to enter the bloodstream.

Rae struggled now to open her eyes, as she thought about Kharon and what he had taken from her. What he had given to her.

In the windowless dark of her new bedroom, he had shown himself to be more than simply the man who ran this strange sex club. He was the god who ran it.

When she had taken his robe from him and let him stand strictly naked before her, Rae nearly pulled away.

She had seen it before, on the first night she’d stayed. But at a glance, Kharon was hideous.

His face was gaunt, his chest bony and small. His belly was white and sickly looking, and his entire frame seemed a bit crooked, as if he’d been broken and sewn back together again and again. She knew he had saved her life, and yet, some part of her knew too that he was sucking her life dry for his own purposes. She had no illusions-Kharon was not benevolent. But what did he really want from her-that’s what she didn’t know. He was demanding, but also kind, as if she was some kind of sexual pet. She liked being a pet.

She had watched him kill the “rabbits” and had done his bidding when he demanded that she kill Peter and Amelia. He had no qualms about taking life.

When would it be her turn?

All those things ran through her brain, but when he put his hands on either side of her head and guided her mouth to his hips, she didn’t resist. Just the opposite, really. Part of her reveled in the danger of being this man’s pet. If he was a man at all… She’d realized over the past few days that there was more to NightWhere than sex and pain.

There was a darker, deeper element. And she had begun to wonder if Kharon and the other Watchers were even still human.

Certainly their needs were familiar, she thought as he guided her head up and down in his lap.

Her head was pounding with a burgeoning hangover when she felt something gush behind her lips and down her throat. The taste was acrid and bitter, and when she looked up, Kharon’s eyes seemed to glow with a fiery light.

As his orgasm dripped from the corner of her mouth, she looked into those eyes and asked him, “Where are we really? This isn’t some abandoned warehouse that we’ve taken over just for the night.”

He grinned faintly and shook his head.

“Are we in hell?”

Kharon laughed. “Hell is for the dead,” he said. “We are in NightWhere.”