Queen Of Blood

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In the dream, things were as they had once been. She was years younger and her long hair was a vibrant shade of blonde. Her flesh was imbued with that deep, lovely tan all the boys found so sexy. She was in a park on a glorious summer afternoon, the sun a golden ball high in the perfect blue sky. She was stretched out on a blanket, soaking up the rays in a white bikini. Her friends were there, too. Alicia sat next to her on the b lanket, her long legs folded beneath her as she read a John Grisham novel. Karen and Chad tossed a Frisbee back and forth in the distance. The orange disc arced across the sky and Chad hurried into position to catch it. Music emanated from a nearby boom box, a big hit by a new band called Green Day.

It was a lovely dream, but tinged with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy. An aching sense of loss belied the purity of the images. Because this was nothing more than a snapshot of something that was gone and forever out of reach. Karen Hidecki was dead. The Alicia Jackson she’d known in those days was dead, too. The regenerated Alicia would never be anything more than an obscene approximation of the deceased woman.

And as for Chad…

The texture and tone of the dream began to change. The blue sky turned a shade of burnt orange bordering on red. The shape of the Frisbee was almost indistinct against that sky as a gust of wind too cold for summer carried it off course. Karen charged after the disc and for a moment it seemed she would catch up to it. But then her head tumbled off her shoulders and bounced across a patch of dead, yellow grass that moments ago had been a bright shade of green. Dream sat up and screamed, pointing at the headless body, which was still running at high speed toward a nearby line of dead trees. The sight of her pale forearm startled her. What had happened to her beautiful tan?

Then Alicia spoke in the creaking voice of a rotting corpse. “You’re just an old whore now. The girl you were is just as dead as that headless bitch.”

This was the regenerated Alicia now, looking as she had the moment she’d first appeared to Dream in that little shithole bar. Her flesh was bloated and covered with hundreds of weeping razor nicks.

Dream trembled and shook her head helplessly. “No…no…”

Alicia set aside the book she was reading—which had somehow morphed into The Satanic Bible—and began to crawl toward Dream on her hands and knees. The corners of her mouth stretched wide in a lascivious grin. The skin at the edges of her mouth cracked and a pale, dry nub of tongue emerged to lick uselessly at the new wounds. A brittle wheeze of laughter emerged from the back of her throat.

She reached for Dream with a bleeding hand and said, “Come show me some love, baby.”

Dream screamed.

Then her eyes snapped open and she was awake. Above her was the heavy velvet canopy of the four-poster bed. Her head swam and her first impression was she was still asleep, had merely transitioned from one layer of dream existence to another. The old false waking dream, a wicked, but familiar, trick of her fragile psyche. Then she recognized the sensation for what it really was—borderline intoxication. She hadn’t remained unconscious quite long enough to sleep off last night’s binge.

Which was just as well.

She rolled out of bed and swept the nearly empty bottle of tequila off the nightstand. She held the bottle up and shook it. There was enough left for one good swig. She put the bottle to her mouth and upended it. It slid down her throat as smoothly as water. There’d been a time when so much as a single sip of straight tequila had been enough to make her retch. She returned the empty bottle to the nightstand and stretched her limbs, rolling her neck to work out the kinks.

Images from the dream came back to haunt her. Not the predictable bit at the end when it had all turned to rot. Dream had known too much real horror to care about such nightmare images. What really bothered her was the dream’s beginning, which had been so vivid and true, a scene dredged from a store of long-suppressed memories. There really had been days like that. Many of them. Times when she’d been truly happy to be alive and surrounded by her friends. Happy and so young. Thinking about it triggered the old familiar ache in her heart. This was why she normally worked so hard to keep those memories locked down in her subconscious. The usual reflex to push them down failed to kick in this time. So stupid. Next would come the rush of tears…

Only that didn’t happen. Her eyes misted a little, but that was it. And instead of burning straight through to the core of her pain the old ache just fizzled.

Dream sighed. “Nothing stays the same forever.”

She looked around the huge, empty room and wondered to whom she was talking. But the answer was obvious. There was no one else around. She was alone most of the time these days. She’d granted Schreck the freedom to run the estate as he saw fit, with the stipulation that he and his men stay out of the way of Dream and her friends. So far it had worked out well enough. They were comfortable here. The law couldn’t reach them here. There was one downside, but it was a big one. The sense of camaraderie they had shared had diminished by a significant degree. Marcy and Ellen had commandeered a smaller room on a lower level of the mansion, from which they rarely emerged. Alicia, however, was taking an active role in the day-to-day operations of the place. She took such delight in meting out the kinds of tortures that had once been so mercilessly inflicted upon her, which Dream found ironic as well as mildly disturbing.

And that was another thing. The interior of this house was massive, containing hundreds of rooms. And in each of those rooms resided a sadist-in-training, an Apprentice, each of them committing acts of atrocity so vile the mere contemplation of which would once have made Dream want to vomit. But the part of her that might have cared had withered and died somewhere along the way. She couldn’t even feign offense at the institutionalized brutality that surrounded her. It was simply the way things were and would always be in this place—and the way they needed to be in order to sustain the dark magic that kept the place thriving.

So she supposed she liked it her e well enough.

But it would be nice not to feel so alone.

Fuck.

It was insane that she could still feel such depression. She was so powerful. There was nothing she couldn’t do. She could will life into existence just by thinking about it hard enough. She could change the temperature in a room with a small flex of her will. She could send a hail of fucking bullets off course by doing the same thing. She suspected she was even capable of altering her own body chemistry, of rolling back the years to erase age lines and reverse any age-related infirmities. Disease could take root inside her and it wouldn’t matter because she would be able to burn it away just by thinking about it. For all practical purposes, she was now immortal.

So why was she still so unhappy? She didn’t know. What she did know was she was fucking tired of thinking about it. So she strode across the room, crossing the large expanse of open floor to the area at the opposite end that functioned as both a library and den. The walls here were lined with tall bookcases. There was a fireplace and plenty of expensive-looking furniture. And there was a well-stocked bar tucked away in the corner. She stepped behind it and scanned the rows of gleaming bottles. After a few moments of debate, she selected a bottle of Stolichnaya. She opened it and knocked back several big gulps of vodka.

A slight semblance of well-being returned immediately. It felt good just to have a full bottle in her hands again. She moved away from the bar and examined the shelves of books. Many of them were classic titles she recognized. Many others were unfamiliar. Some titles weren’t in English.

She saw one that called to her, the words THE SATANIC BIBLE etched in gold print along its spine. She recalled her dream and pulled the book off the shelf. Then she settled down in a plush recliner, set the bottle on the little table next to it, and flipped the book open. Her fingers moved over the pages and her lips moved slightly as she read the words. She frowned. This book was not the famous Anton LaVey tome with which she’d been fleetingly familiar in her youth. It appeared to be an actual bible for Satanists, a genuine dark equivalent to the Christian Bible, but that was…

“It is what you think it is, Dream.”

Dream’s fingers stopped moving. The intrusion of the familiar voice had surprised her, but she felt no fear and that was strange. She had helped to kill him, after all. He was standing so close, but she hadn’t heard or sensed his arrival. She could hear the soft, unlabored sound of his breathing. He was alive again. Somehow. Or was he? Maybe he was like Alicia and Ellen, a manifestation manufactured by her subconscious, this time a conjuration of shameful desires she’d worked to ignore through the years. She had been thinking about him a lot of late, especially at night as she lay alone in the dark in that big bed.

Then he moved into view and she knew it wasn’t true.

It was really him. The Master.

She closed the book and looked up at him. “How?”

He smiled. “Does it matter?”

And now she smiled. “No. It doesn’t matter at all.”

She set the book on the table next to the vodka bottle and stood up. She stepped into his outstretched arms and laid her head on his shoulder. She felt his calm strength and reveled in the warmth of his bare flesh.

Her voice was a whisper:“I’m sorry.”

“Shush.” He stroked her hair with one hand while the other slipped to the small of her back. “Things were different then.”

She lifted her head and looked into his eyes again. “Yes. And I think I’ve become the woman you needed me to be back then. I think I could be your Queen now.”

His hand slipped beneath the thin fabric of her halter top and roamed over her trembling flesh. She felt herself grow wet and moaned as his mouth met hers. The kiss made her knees shake and she gripped his shoulders hard to remain upright. It went on for several moments, his warmth suffusing her as their bodies began to writhe in tandem. Then he broke off the kiss and smiled again.

And he said, “You are already my Queen. I knew one day you would be ready.”

Dream thought, You have no idea how ready I am.

And perhaps he knew her thoughts, because in the next moment he swept her into his arms and carried her across the room to the big bed. And within the next few moments Dream again experienced the thing she’d secretly longed for all through her years of private torment.

Her screams filled the room.

And after the screams, tears of joy.