His mouth didn’t completely close, and flecks of spittle flew through the bars, landed on my skin. They burned like acid. I scrubbed my arms on my T-shirt.
“What?” How could parts of someone be Fae? Yet that was exactly what it looked like. As if the spear had killed parts of him. Portions of Mallucé’s face were still marble white and handsome in a vampiric way; other parts had been ravaged by a foul leprosy: A blackened vein ran down his right cheek, over his jaw, and halfway down his neck, like rotted marbling in beef; a chunk above his left eye was gray, moist; most of his chin and lower lip had collapsed into a wet, septic decay. It was horrific. I couldn’t stop staring. His long blond hair had fallen out, baring a bloated skull traced by a skein of thin, black veins.
I realized that must be why my hand had sunk into his abdomen—portions of his body were decomposing as well, which explained his altered gait and the change in his voice, not to mention a mouth that wouldn’t close, which had to make diction difficult. Was he rotting from the inside, too? Revolted, I wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Look at me,” he said, his yellow eyes burning lanterns in a misshapen skull. “Study me. Soon you’ll know this face as well as your own. We’re going to be intimate, so very intimate. We’re going to die together.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you know what the worst part is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “At first you think it’s watching parts of yourself rot. Staring in the mirror, poking your finger into melting pockets of your own flesh. Wondering if you should scrape out the rot or leave it alone. Bandage it up. Realizing that your cheek or your ear or part of your stomach is beyond repair. You lose yourself in degrees. You think, I can live with this, but then the next part goes and the next, and you find the worst part isn’t the mornings when you wake up to discover another part of you is no longer alive, but the nights when you lie awake in terror of what you’ll discover at dawn. Will it be my hand next? An eye? Will I go blind before I die? Will it be my tongue? My dick? My balls? It’s not the reality that undoes you; it’s the possibilities. It’s the waiting, the hours you lie awake wondering what will be next. It’s not the pain of the moment, but the anticipation of the next pain. It’s not the dying itself—that will be a relief—but the desperation to live, the stupid fucking need to go on long after you hate what you’ve become, long after you can even stand to look at yourself. You’ll feel that before I’m through with you.” His lips—one sculpted, pink, and firm, one rotted—peeled back from fangs. “Look at me. I lived as Death for years. I played it for them. I delivered Death to my followers, dressed in grand Goth seduction. I gave it to them in velvet and lace and smelling of sex. I took them higher than they’d ever been on any drug. I danced them into death. I ripped out their throats and drank their blood and they came beneath my body as they died. Will no one do the same for me? Will no one dance me into the darkness?”
I couldn’t find any words.
His smile was terrible, his laughter even worse: moist-sounding, wrong. He held out his arms, as if to waltz. “Welcome, dance partner. Welcome to my ball here in Hell’s grotto. Death is not seductive. It does not come silk-clad and sweet-smelling as I did for my chosen. It is lonely and cold and merciless. It takes everything from you, before it finally takes you.” He dropped his arms. “I had it all. I had the world by the balls. I fucked anything I wanted, anytime I wanted. I was worshipped, I was rich, and I was going to be one of the world’s great new powers. I was the Lord Master’s right hand and now I am nothing. Because of you.”
He pulled up his cowl, adjusted it, then turned and walked away. “So think, lovely bitch,” he tossed over his shoulder, “about how lovely you won’t be soon. Think about the morning and what horrors await you there. Try to sleep. Wonder what might wake you. Dream. For they are all you have left now. I own your reality. Welcome to mine.”
I lay on my pallet staring up at the stone ceiling. I’d gone to that sidhe-seer place in my head and discovered something: I was capable of illusion. Not the Fae kind of illusion that affected others, but a kind only I could see. It was enough. With my mind, I’d painted clouds and a blue sky on the stone ceiling of my grotto, and I could breathe again.
Was it really only three months ago that I’d been lying by the pool at my parents’ house, in my favorite pink polka-dotted bikini, sipping iced sweet tea and listening to Louis Armstrong croon about what a wonderful world it was?
The song currently playing on my mental iPod was “Highway to Hell.” I’d been on it and not even known. It was a fast road; made the Autobahn look like snail’s play—three months total from Stateside to Tombside, and a month of that had been squandered in a single afternoon, playing volleyball with a facsimile of my sister in Faery.
“V’lane?” I said with soft urgency. I conjured a light wind to buffet my fluffy clouds on the ceiling. “Are you there? Anywhere? I could really use some help right about now.” For the next little while—I had no concept of time down here—I invoked the death-by-sex Fae fervently. I promised him things I knew I’d regret. I’d regret dying more.
It was no use.
Wherever he was, he wasn’t listening.
What in the world had happened to Mallucé? What had he meant when he’d said parts of him were Fae? How could parts of a person—or vampire in this case—be Fae? My understanding was either you were Fae or you weren’t. Could Fae and human reproduce and would the resulting offspring be half-Fae?
But that wasn’t the read I was getting off Mallucé. Each time I’d encountered him, I’d focused directly on him, trying to get a sense of what he was. It had always been confused, and now it was even more so. However he’d become part Fae, he’d not been born to it. It was something he’d become. But how? Was it like vampirism? Did they bite you? Have sex with you? What?
My clouds were gone. Maintaining illusion was hard work, and between the pain of my wrist and the aftereffects of whatever drugs he’d given me to keep me unconscious while transporting me from Dublin to the Burren, I had little energy left. I was starving. I was cold and I was terrified.
I rolled over on my side and stared out of my cell.
I was imprisoned at one end of a long oval stone cavern lit by torches on the walls. At the other end a single metal door was hinged into the wall.
In the center of the cavern was a low stone slab that resembled a sacrificial altar more than anything else. There were knives, bottles, and chains on it. Three opulent, brocaded, Victorian-style chairs were drawn up around it. Mallucé had brought the tatters of his Goth past with him into the earth.
The walls of the damp cavern were lined with other cells or grottos; some so narrow and small that they were barely more than barred boxes in stone that a person might be stuffed into, others large enough to hold a dozen men. My cell was sandwiched between cells on both sides, with bars separating us, but they were empty. In a few of the cells across the way, occasionally something moved. I called out to other occupants but nothing replied. Had Mallucé created this place, or was I in some ancient dungeon, remnant of a more barbaric time, buried so deep in the earth it had been forgotten?
Clouds. I rolled over and painted them on the ceiling again. I was shaking. Phrases like “deep in the earth” just weren’t working for me. I had a few friends who were spelunkers. I’d always thought they were nuts. Why go to the ground any sooner than we have to?
I added a sun and a dazzlingly white seashore to my illusion, I dressed myself in pink. I painted my sister into the picture.
Eventually I slept.