Queen Of Blood

CHAPTER FIVE

Something shifted in the darkness. Dream was dimly aware of a subtle rolling motion. The sensation reminded her of early morning fishing trips with her father when she was a little girl, the way those slowly rippling lake waves would make the boat gently sway in the murky green water. The memory was fleeting, the vivid colors bleaching from the vision before it blew apart like a puff of fog. There was a pang of loss, but then that too was gone, lost in the shifting black tides of unconsciousness.

Shifting…

Dream felt it again, the slow, almost imperceptible roll of her body, only this time the sensation was clearer, more of the real world than the comfortably numb land of sleep. She wasn’t awake yet, but some part of her knew consciousness was approaching and wasn’t happy about it. This dark place was better than what awaited her on the other side of the wall of sleep.

Then she became aware of another sensation, even sweeter, a hand moving slowly over her naked body. Her breath quickened and she moved closer to consciousness. The hand slid up her inner thigh, moved very lightly over her tingling pussy, then roamed over her flat stomach and up between her breasts. When the hand cupped a breast, Dream moaned and arched her back, offering a swollen nipple to her still invisible lover.

She was almost awake now. Her eyes fluttered once before closing again, allowing her a glimpse of a formless shadow. Her lover’s mouth closed over the proffered nipple, making her moan again as the person’s tongue swirled around the stiffened flesh. It felt good. So good. An animalistic grunt came from the region of her breasts as the mouth shifted to her other breast and showed it the same hungry, aching attention.

Dream was awake now, but she kept her eyes closed, reveling in the delicious sensations rippling through her body. The mattress below her rolled again. A waterbed, she finally realized. Which meant she was likely in some cheap hotel. Which further meant the person suckling at her breasts was some sleazy guy she’d picked up somewhere. Not that his identity mattered. In the end he’d be just another faceless mark, the latest in a succession of men she wouldn’t have to care about the next day.

Dream decided to keep her eyes closed while the mytery man did these delightful things to her body. She was enjoying too much the notion that he could be anyone. He could even be…

The image that came to her then arrived with such sudden and shocking vividness that it made her gasp. A part of her mind rebelled. No. The man she was remembering was a monster. He’d done awful, horrific things. And he’d been responsible for the deaths of her friends. But the Dream who’d cared about such things was the part of her psyche she’d worked so hard to suppress. That Dream was dead. The person she’d become accepted darkness, welcomed corruption.

So instead of pushing the vision away, she allowed it to further crystallize in her mind. She imagined the Master on top of her, his naked body gleaming in the flickering candlelight the way it had the one night she’d spent with him. The sex she’d shared with him that evening had been astonishing, better by far than anything she’d experienced before or since. Her body twisted on the bed, delighting at the feel of his rough, masculine hands kneading her soft, yielding flesh. The fingers teasing her sex abruptly pushed inside her, curled and flexed, triggering a first jolt of orgasm and eliciting a shuddering cry of ecstacy. She lifted her ass off the bed and thrust her pelvis at the still-flexing fingers.

She ached to be penetrated by something else and said so. “Take me…” A gasp. Another flex inside her. “Do it. Please …”

Then the mouth came away from her breast and a voice said, “Afraid I can’t do that, baby.”

Dream’s eyes flew open and she gaped at the sight of Alicia Jackson’s smiling face. “I don’t have the necessary equipment, so sorry.” Alicia’s tongue darted out and flicked at Dream’s still engorged nipple. “But this I can do all night long if y ou like…”

Dream’s face twisted in disgust as a maggot tumbled out of Alicia’s mouth onto her breast. “Get away from me!” Her body jerked away from Alicia’s touch, sinking deeper into the yielding mattress. The tiny maggot clung to her skin and Dream instinctively tried to brush it away, but her arms wouldn’t move. They were stretched at sharp angles behind her. She glanced back and saw that she was tied to the bed. She jerked her hands against the restraints, but the lengths of new-looking rope abraded her flesh and refused to yield.

Fully awake now, she began to take in more details of her surroundings. She saw a ceiling fan above her. Tufts of dust along the edges of the unmoving blades. A bookcase filled with haphazardly stacked old paperbacks. An old television with a rabbit ears antenna atop an old dresser. Piles of dirty laundry on the floor. Chintzy cheap curtains drawn across the room’s two windows. A creased and much-folded poster of Robert Smith on the closed bedroom door. And a faint piss smell she associated with cats. Then she felt the sticky wetness beneath her and realized she’d pissed the bed while she was unconscious.

Gross.

“Where am I?”

Alicia’s hand slipped out of Dream’s vagina. The dead woman smiled and licked moisture off her bloated fingers. “Mmm… you’re not in Kansas anymore, baby.”

Dream’s mouth curled in disgust. “You’re not Alicia.”

The dead woman rolled her milky eyes. “How tiresome. We’ve been over this. I—”

“I know you’re real,” Dream cut her off. There was fire in her voice now. “But you’re not my dead friend. She’d never do anything so vile to me.”

“You didn’t think it was so vile a minute ago.”

Dream’s face reddened. “A minute ago I thought you were—” She faltered, her mouth hanging open a moment before she lamely finished, “—someone else.”

“Oh, I know what you thought, baby.” The dead woman shifted position on the bed, stretching a leg across Dream’s midsection. Then she sat up, straddling her. She was still wearing the slinky little black dress; it rode up high on her thighs now, exposing mottled flesh that had once been smooth and toned. “You figured I was some dude you picked up at a bar, but what you were really thinking about was—”

“Shut up!” Dream vainly tugged at her bindings again. “And get off me, you fucking disgusting…thing.”

“I will not.” She cupped Dream’s breasts in her swollen hands and tweaked the nipples with her thumbs. Her nails were abnormally long and yellowed; seeing them graze her flesh made Dream’s stomach twist. “You’re in no position to demand anything. And let me be clear about this one more time. I am Alicia Katherine Jackson. And though you didn’t mean to, you brought me back, restored me to this undead state of existence. And let me tell you, I’m not feeling all that charitable toward my old best gal pal these days. It’s not a lot of fun being a half-decayed walking corpse.”

Dream still couldn’t accept it. Buying into what the grotesque apparition was trying to sell her would mean she was some kind of monster. “No. You’re not her. You’re lying. You’re some thing masquerading as her to cause me misery.”

“Nonsense. You think I’m some random ghoul playing head games with you? What kind of sense does that make? No, I’m what I say I am and you’re just going to have to deal with that.” Alicia picked at a weeping razor wound with a yellowed nail. “These hurt, by the way. Thanks so much for making me corporeal, Dream. Thanks for making me feel things. Everything hurts, Dream. Everything feels like it wants to come apart, but the magic you filled me up with won’t let that happen. So, from the bottom of my dead-but-beating heart, thank you so very fucking much. Cunt.”

Dream’s vision blurred. She sniffled and b linked back the tears. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was small, soft, the sound of a beaten, broken thing. “I never meant to hur t you.”

Alicia’s smile faded. “I wonder how many times you’ve said that in your life. You know, I never thought I’d say it, but I’m beginning to think Chad-boy was right about you all those years ago. You love drama. You wallow in self-pity. And at the end of the day, all you’ve ever really done is hurt people.”

“Stop it.” Dream’s eyes misted over again. “Please…”

There was a sudden sound of voices from the other side of the closed door. Alicia sighed and climbed off the bed, moving to a spot near the bookcase. “The fuckers who nabbed you earlier are back. Guess I’ll just sit back and watch the show. Hopefully they’ll at least leave me some sloppy seconds.”

The door flew open and several young people swarmed into the room. Dream counted seven altogether, including the girl she’d assaulted in the bathroom of the Villager Pub. There were two other girls and four boys. They all appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. One boy was carrying a huge Igloo cooler. He flipped the top open and pulled out a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A few of the others grabbed beers, too. A girl wearing a black gypsy dress had hair bleached a platinum shade of blonde with inch-long black roots. Black fishnets with several rips exposing pale flesh encased her slender legs. She fired up a clove cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Hello, sleeping beauty.”

Dream didn’t say anything. Though the girl was smiling, the expression didn’t reach her eyes, which were hard and flat. A barely contained rage pulsed just beneath that smiling surface. Dream’s eyes again filled with tears. She would probably die in this room. And despite the hell her life had become, she didn’t want that to happen.

The girl blew rancid clove smoke in Dream’s face. “I hear you beat up my sister tonight.” She indicated the girl Dream remembered from the Villager Pub with a nod. “She says you beat the living shit out of her for no good reason at all. Now, you’re not getting out of here no matter what. I guess you know that, so you might as well be straight with me. Is my sister telling the truth?”

Dream met the girl’s merciless gaze and swallowed hard. Though she was still terrified of what was about to happen, a part of her was already resigned to it. So the girl was right, there was no point in telling anything but the truth.

“Yeah. I did it.”

The girl nodded. “Good.” She blew more foul smoke at Dream’s face. “It’s good that you admitted it, I mean. It’ll make this easier for both of us. We’ll know what we’re doing is justified. And you’ll know you’re getting what you deserve.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to kill you.”

The bluntness of the statement elicited a helpless, sudden sob from Dream. For a long moment the only sound in the room was her rising anguish. Then the girl put her cigarette out on Dream’s thigh, making her scream and jerk away from the source of the pain.

The girl waited until Dream’s screams died away to a low, blubbering moan. “We’re going to kill you,” she said again, “and we’re going to take our time doing it. You may wonder why we didn’t gag you. We’re kind of out in the country here, which means you can scream your fucking lungs out and no one will ever hear you.”

One of the boys, a lanky, long-haired kid with acne, had been slouching in a corner, his arms wrapped over his knees, a can of Pabst dangling from one hand. He abruptly came out of the crouch and moved into the center of the room, beer sloshing out of the beer can. “Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of fucked?” There was agitation in his voice, real anger and incredulity, but the words were slightly slurred. A little much liquid courage, Dream figured.

He turned in a slow circle, eyeing each of his friends in turn.“Come on, you assholes. You know this is wrong. You can’t kill a person over something like this.”

No one said anything for a while. Several of the kids shifted uneasily. They studied the floor or briefly glanced at each other before turning their gazes to the ceiling or an inexplicably interesting patch of blank wall.

Then the girl sitting next to Dream said, “Am I going to have to worry about you, Michael?”

Michael was staring at another boy in the room, one to whom he bore a strong resemblance. They were siblings or very close cousins. Michael’s brother or cousin stared hard at the floor. His hands were shaking. Dream did a quick scan of the faces arrayed around her and saw evidence of fear in all of them, including the girl she’d so stupidly vented some of her free-floating rage on in the pub bathroom. The one exception was that girl’s sister, who was eerily calm.

The girl rose from the bed and approached Michael. “I asked you a question. I’d like an answer. Now. Am I going to have to worry about you?”

Michael gave up trying to engage his relative’s attention and faced the girl. “Or what, Marcy?”There was real venom in his voice now, a harshness only slightly blunted by the boozy slur of his words. “Are you afraid I’ll turn narc?” He gulped Pabst. “And what if I do, huh? What then? Are you going to kill me, too?”

Marcy said nothing at first. She pried the Pabst can from Michael’s shaking hand. She drank what was left and tossed the empty can into the open cooler. Then she put a hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “No more beer for you tonight. It’s making you crazy and you need to calm down.”

The kid was trembling all over. Something about Marcy being so close terrified him. He wanted to flinch away from her touch but didn’t quite dare. And he did seem perceptibly less bold without a beer in his hand.

His voice was very soft as he said, “We can’t do this. It’s wrong.”

Marcy slapped him, the sound shockingly loud in the otherwise silent room.

Alicia barked laughter and said, “Damn.”

No one reacted. The kids couldn’t see or hear the dead woman. Dream glanced at her. Alicia winked and blew a kiss. Dream forced herself not to react and made a mental note not to respond to anything else Alicia might say. She sensed a delicate balance in the room, her fate perhaps hinging on whether this kid had the fortitude to continue making his stand. Her case wouldn’t be helped any should she start talking to invisible people.

Marcy cupped the boy’s chin in her hand and leaned close. “We’re gonna do this. Nobody does what this bitch did and gets away with it, not when it comes to my family, motherfucker.” The boy was shaking more than ever and Dream despaired, sensing the fight was already lost. “And about your question, Michael? Let’s just say you don’t want me thinking for even one second that you might narc.” She released his chin and stepped back. “Can I trust you? And please tell the truth, because I’ll know if you’re lying.”

Michael sighed and nodded. “Yes.”

“And it’s not like she’ll be the first person we’ve killed.” This was Michael’s brother or cousin finally speaking up. “Nobody talks about it, but we all know that bum we jumped in Overton Park last summer didn’t survive.”

Dream’s heart lurched at the revelation. Again, no one said anything for a time. The general anxiety level skyrocketed. There was a lot more nervous shuffling of feet. A lot of fidgeting. Marcy’s sister looked very pale, as if she might throw up at any moment.

A ghost of a smile brushed the edges of Marcy’s mouth before vanishing. “That’s very true,” she said, breaking the silence. “Thank you for reminding us, Kevin. Now back to business.”

She returned to the bed and appraised Dream candidly, her gaze moving slowly over the length of her splayed, nude body. Then she looked Dream in the eye and said, “You really are gorgeous, you know that?”

Dream didn’t bother responding.

But Alicia moved to the other side of the bed and appraised her in much the same way. “Girl’s a gothed-out skank, but she speaks the fucking truth.” She smiled broadly and blood leaked from cracks at the corners of her mouth. “Hey, maybe if they really kill you, you can come back like me. Wouldn’t that be a kick? Little Miss Hot Stuff all rotting and stinky?” She cackled. “Well, I’d get some satisfaction out of it anyway.”

Again, Dream ignored the dead woman’s commentary.

“Somebody bring me a belt.”

Michael’s cousin reacted instantly to Marcy’s command, crossing the room within the space of a heartbeat and yanking open a closet door. He rummaged around in the closet’s dark interior for a moment, then emerged with the requested item.

Marcy accepted the belt from him, winding one end twice around her right hand while letting the end with the brass buckle dangle. “Seriously, you really are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in person. You could be a model or a movie star.” There was plain, honest admiration in her voice as she said these things, but then her tone darkened. “But beautiful people like you always look down on people like us. That’s if you think of us at all. Or if forced to think of us, you see us as, like, insects, or r odents, something less than human.”

Dream struggled to keep a quaver out of her voice as she said, “Th-that’s not true. I never—”

“SHUT UP!”

Marcy’s arm snapped out like a striking cobra and the belt whipped across Dream’s belly, the buckle gouging her flesh. Dream cried out and the belt snapped across her body again. Then again. A thin trickle of blood ran down her side from where the buckle had nicked her.

Dream’s chest heaved and tears rolled down her face. “Please…please…”

“I told you to shut up.” Marcy’s voice was surprisingly calm again, belying the act of violence. “You should do as I say.”

Dream stifled the whimper that wanted to come, reminding herself that her pleas were less than useless, serving only to further stir the ire of her tormentor.

Marcy resumed her speech as if nothing had happened:“ Beautiful, privileged people think nothing of bullying people like Ellen, my sweet little sister. Poor Ellen’s been pushed around by people like you all her life.” She paused and sat down again at the edge of the bed. “One time a couple of cheerleaders followed her into a bathroom. This was sophomore year of high school, I believe.” She glanced at her sister for confirmation. Ellen wouldn’t meet her gaze, but she nodded. “Do you know what those fucking nose-in-the-air bitches did to her?”

Dream shook her head. “No.”

“I’ll tell you.” Marcy leaned over Dream so that their faces were separated by mere inches. The hate pulsing out of the girl’s hard, dark eyes made Dream shiver. “They pulled her into a stall and pushed her face down into a shit-clogged toilet. They held her there while she struggled and shit and toilet water filled her mouth.”

Dream sniffed. “I’m sorry.”

Marcy grunted. “Yeah, you should be, because it might as well have been you who did that. I hold all your kind responsible. You wonder why I’m so angry? Maybe now you’re beginning to have a clue. When you attacked Ellen tonight, you were making her relive that all over again.”

Dream’s breath hitched in her throat and tears rolled in a steady stream from her eyes. “I’m…so sorry…I wish—”

“Shut up.”

Dream again fell silent.

Marcy unwound the belt from her hand and slipped the thin length of black leather behind Dream’s neck. Dream tensed, her heart pounding as Marcy fed the end of the belt through the brass buckle and pulled it taut around her throat. She wound the end around her hand again and stared into Dream’s suddenly bulging eyes. “I wanted to go after those fucking cheerleaders so bad when I heard what they’d done, but I didn’t have the nerve back then. But not this time. This time someone’s going to pay.”

She stood up and pulled on the end of the belt. Dream sputtered, her face turning a bright shade of red as the loop tightened around her neck. She was dimly aware of someone else in the room saying “Oh God” over and over.

Then Marcy relaxed her grip on the belt and Dream was abruptly able to breathe again. She drew in huge gulps of air and listened to her heart slam against her chest wall.

Marcy was smiling now. “You didn’t think I’d kill you so quickly, did you? That would’ve been almost like mercy. This is just the beginning, cunt. A warm-up. You’ve got a long night of pain ahead of you and I’m going to enjoy every sweet fucking second of it.”

A black rage stole into Dream’s heart then, obliterating the terror completely, sweeping away any lingering trace of guilt she felt over what she’d done to Marcy’s sister. Her mouth curled in a sneer of disgust and fury. Dark, malicious energy swirled inside of her, dormant power awakened and focused by the overwhelming strength of her anger. There was no room in her heart now for anything other than hate and a blind need to inflict pain on everyone around her.

Everyone else felt the change, too.

The other girl in the room, a somewhat plump thing with hair dyed a bright shade of auburn, shivered and said, “Did it just get really fucking cold in here?”

Someone else said, “Yeah. Jesus, what’s going on?”

Marcy looked into Dream’s eyes and flinched. She let go of the belt and began to rise from the bed. Then she froze, suddenly unable to retreat any further.

Dream snarled, hissed like a snake. She flailed at her bindings, rocking the bed violently and causing a lamp to topple off the nightstand. The auburn-haired girl screamed and ran for the closed door. Dream loosed a tremendous cry that filled the room like the concussion from a bomb blast. The auburn-haired girl’s body slammed against the door, then spun around and fell to the floor. When she tried to stand, blood was leaking from every orifice, spilling in trickles from her ears, mouth and nostrils. A bright redness stained the whites of her eyes and she wobbled as she tried to take a blind step toward the bed. Then she collapsed, hitting the floor with a resounding thump that elicited more screams and cries of shock from her friends.

The screaming went on for a while.

The girl on the floor was absolutely still. Dead. Dream knew she’d somehow killed her. She hadn’t done it intentionally, but she’d done it nonetheless, some instinct causing her to strike at the girl with the power she’d tapped.

Her voice emerged as a growl. “No one gets out alive.” And she meant to do it. Kill them all. Make them suffer on an epic level. Wallow in their pain.

She focused on Marcy now, drawing in some of that thrumming energy, preparing to unleash a lethal blast of it straight into the bitch’s pounding heart. She felt a tingle of arousal. She hadn’t felt so deliciously debauched since that long ago night in the Master’s bed. Each of her senses was heightened to an unnatural degree. She could hear each thudding beat of Marcy’s heart. The girl tried to jerk away from her again, but remained held in place by invisible puppet strings.

She whimpered. “Please…”

Dream smiled. “I’m going to kill you.”

Marcy winced at the sound of her own words thrown back at her.

Dream focused energy in a tight, pulsing ball, drawing it in like a ball stretched backward in the elastic band of a slingshot.

Then, as abruptly as it had come over her, the power blinked out. It was just gone, as if someone had thrown a switch. There was a moment of frozen shock, an abrupt and dramatic shift of atmosphere. Dream sagged into the sloshing waterbed mattress, so tired now, her body depleted of energy. She could fall asleep right now, even surrounded by these enemies. Her eyes fluttered, almost closed. And Marcy stumbled backward, tripped over the dead girl, and tumbled to the floor.

She was back on her feet in an instant. Her eyes were wild and darting, moving from the dead body to the stunned faces of her friends, then to Dream. She was breathing hard, like someone who’d just finished a marathon. Then she was screaming and gesturing wildly at her friends.

“EVERYBODY OUT!” She yanked her sister out of the chair and shoved her stumbling toward the door. “GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! NOW, GOD-DAMMIT!”

Michael was the first to snap out of it. He yanked the door open and Ellen staggered through it. The others followed in rapid fashion. Marcy was the last out the door. She turned and paused with the door half-shut.

“I don’t know what just happened here—” She was working hard to project an approximation of the malicious calm she’d evinced before. “—but I’m not fucking through with you. Somehow I’ll make you pay.”

Then she was gone, the door slamming shut behind her.

Dream felt only a mild apprehension at the girl’s threat. Her eyes fluttered again. She mused in a vague way over the awesome power she’d so briefly channeled, wondering where it came from, and whether she could summon it again if needed.

Alicia was standing over her again, but her image was blurred, hazy.

Dream was almost asleep now.

But she remained aware long enough to hear her dead friend speak. “That was pretty impressive, Dream. Those kids are scared shitless, what with you makin’ like Linda Blair in the motherfuckin’ Exorcist. But this ain’t over.” Alicia gave her head an emphatic shake. “Uh-uh, not by a long shot. But listen, you remember what I told you before about trouble comin’, don’t you? I wasn’t talking about these kids, honey.”

Dream’s eyes closed. “Whatever.”

Alicia leaned close. Her rancid corpse breath hot on Dream’s ear. “Trouble’s out there, Dream. Lurking, waiting for you to show yourself. And let me tell you something—if you somehow walk out of here alive, somewhere down the line you’ll wind up wishing these punks had killed you.”

Dream sighed.

She could think about Alicia’s warnings later. Maybe.

Her breathing evened out.

At long last, the world went away again.