Scarlet Dream Read online

  And then another voice was running through Kane’s skull, a man’s voice, deep and familiar. “Kane? Kane, do you copy?”

  Kane’s eyes seemed to blur, and the room and the women within it lost focus for a moment as the voice drilled through his head.

  “Repeat. Kane, do you copy?”

  It was Grant, speaking to him. Not in his head, but through the Commtact link that ran along his jawbone and into his skull casing, a link that bypassed the normal aural channels.

  “This is Kane,” Kane said, screwing his eyes tight to better concentrate on the communication that seemed so desperately out of place in the love nest. “What’s happening, Grant?”

  INSIDE THE PAINTING, Grant smiled as he heard Kane’s voice reverberating through the Commtact in his skull. At least that still worked right. The broad-shouldered ex-Mag held his free hand to his ear as he strode through the unlit forest away from the sounds of the orgy, his booted feet sinking into the soft earth beneath them.

  “We’re under some kind of hypnosis,” Grant explained. “I’m not sure how, but I think Ellie’s managed to trick us into seeing things that aren’t there. This ringing any bells with you?”

  “A few,” Kane responded over their shared Commtact link.

  Within the lush bedroom of the House Lilandera, Kane opened his eyes just a fraction, seeing the bright red walls and the flickering candles once more, the two beautiful women whose naked bodies were stretched taut in their desire for him.

  “I’m stuck in some kind of freaky painting and I can’t get out on my own,” Grant explained over the Commtact. “You and Brigid have to break this spell right now or we’re all screwed.”

  Kane closed his eyes, shutting out the vision of the room and the desirable women. “When this is over, remind me to tell you about your timing,” Kane returned in response.

  “Count on it,” Grant said before letting the Commtact link go dead.

  The smell of burning incense still in his nostrils, Kane ignored the cooing of the women on the bed, ignored the feel of their warm flesh against his skin. He had felt himself being broken apart earlier, unraveling as the women called to him, losing his integrity in some indefinable yet terrifying way. Grant’s call over the Commtact had brought him back to reality; he just needed to hold on to his sanity long enough to stay there.

  With that, Kane engaged the Commtact link once again, shutting out everything that was going on around him.

  “Baptiste?” Kane began. “It’s Kane. Can you hear me?”

  IN THE MOONLIT GARDEN, the man stepped fully out of the shadows cast by the towering oaks and Brigid gasped, her heart racing as she saw him properly for the first time since the night of their first joining just three evenings before. He was broad of shoulder and long of leg, and he walked in a way that made her know, truly know, that here was a man who commanded all he surveyed. As he was the master of his territory, so, too, was he the master of her, heart and soul.

  Her heart drummed against her breast, so hard it felt as if it would break through the flimsy garment that she wore. Brigid watched as the wolf who was a man came for her, answering her siren song. At the bottom of the trellis, he placed one powerful foot on its lowest bar and, like a deckhand, began to ascend it like a ladder, hurrying so swiftly and with such surety that Brigid wondered if his weight might pull the whole thing loose from her father’s wall, bringing Daddy’s precious roses with it. In silence, the man climbed, the dark, liquid shadow of his body hurrying toward her like an arrow aimed squarely at her beating heart. This was how he had come to her before, she realized, when he had taken her maidenhood as she’d struggled beneath him, scared and confused, her pale body arched in both pleasure and pain.

  “Oh Lord, forgive me,” she whispered, her hands coming together for a moment in front of her heaving breasts. She desired him so surely now that it pulled at her from within, threatened to disable her, to pull her apart at the seams.

  Persephone descended into the underworld for love, Brigid recalled, a silly story from her childhood. But this man—this beast—ascended and thus brought the underworld to her, sowing the taint of that underworld deep inside her, planting the infernal flames deep inside her womanhood.

  When he appeared on the balcony, Brigid recoiled, her whole body trembling with fear and anticipation. With the moon behind him, he seemed to be crafted of the inky shadows themselves, only the slightest glint playing where she knew his eyes must be. Brigid stepped back farther, until she met with the cool edge of the door that led into her bedchamber. Familiar with every step of this dance, the man stepped forward, his eyes fixed on her, watching the pulse that throbbed at her pale throat. She felt so small in front of him, her body tiny when placed so close to his.

  He took another step closer, foot crossing foot, peering around the small balcony as if scenting his territory, and Brigid found herself backed into her bedroom. The glass-eyed dolls watched her like artifacts from another’s life. When the man stepped through the balcony doors and over the threshold Brigid let out the tiniest whimper, suddenly fearful of having this creature here, of what he might do. Yet, she wanted to feel him within her, to feel his body pressed against hers.

  “Oh, wicked, wicked heart,” her mind cried out, and there was a voice in her head asking to be heard.

  She took another step back, passing the mirror with the flowers painted across its surface. Where the moonlight seeped into the room from the open doors of the balcony, Brigid saw her reflection in the mirror’s surface, saw her pale lips and long hair, honey-blond curls flowing down her shoulders, her blue eyes catching the light.

  The man reached for her, his hand grasping her wrist and—

  Brigid threw the book aside, found herself sitting in the lounge of the strange mansion house out in the middle of the Louisiana bayou. She was alone in the room now, candles flickering and the vanilla smell of incense assaulting her nostrils as she looked all around her in confusion.

  “What the hell just happened?” Brigid asked, her voice just a whisper.

  “Baptiste?” Kane’s voice drummed through her skull over the Commtact link. “I repeat, it’s Kane. Do you read me?”

  “Kane?” Brigid replied, her voice breathy as if she had been running fast. “I’m…”

  “We all are,” Kane reported. “I’m upstairs. At least, I think I am.”

  “I’ll find you,” Brigid told him.

  Then Kane cut their link, busy with his own dilemma once more.

  Warily, Brigid looked down to the carpet at her feet, saw the leather-bound book lying there, its pages open but pressed facedown into the thick pile of the scarlet weave.

  “That book,” Brigid affirmed, mouthing the words to reassure herself that she was real. Her voice seemed strained, a sound that she had almost forgotten. She had been inside the book, reading it and yet living it. A girl— Mary—no more than sixteen years old, with blond hair and sapphire eyes, had somehow become her, or perhaps Brigid had become Mary; it was hard to tell, since the whole thing was blurred like a waking dream. She had been romanced—was that the word for it?—by some sort of nether creature, a man who was also a wolf.

  Trying to recall it felt strange, like a dream half remembered, piecing together something that had no substance, that had never been real. As she thought of the man-wolf she felt a tremble of desire deep within her, immediately followed by stinging embarrassment flushing at her pallid cheeks.

  Fixed by her gaze, the book seemed to loom on the floor, tempting her to pick it up, to reengage with the world within.

  Brigid looked away, peering around her, her hand reaching for the hip holster that still held her TP-9 semiautomatic. She had been left alone in this room, held in place somehow by the uncanny book. It was only on seeing her reflection—or, more accurately, seeing the reflection of another woman, of Mary, the book’s heroine—that she had realized all was not as it should be. Had Kane’s voice been speaking to her inside the book? Perhaps. And so she had broken the
spell, the same way that one can flinch oneself awake from a nightmare. But, just like waking from a nightmare, Brigid struggled to suppress the feeling that the horror had not gone away.

  Standing, Brigid reached for the metal bar that remained at her side, propped against the couch she had sat upon. Semiautomatic in one hand, metal staff in the other, Brigid warily made her way toward the open doorway and out into the hallway that ran beside the magnificent staircase of the house. She had to find Kane and Grant before they, too, got sucked deeper into some kind of nightmare over which they had no control.

  Chapter 13

  What you see is what you get, or so the saying goes.

  Kane had been born a Magistrate and he would die a Magistrate, if not in name then doubtless in nature. He had been born Kane, named after his father, who, had also been a Magistrate, a defender of the laws of Cobaltville.

  The Magistrates were not recruited; rather they were born, selected before they had even been conceived, chosen to follow in their father’s footsteps for when the old men got too old to pound the streets of Cobaltville or enter the Tartarus Pits where the human detritus lived in squalor. Thus, being a Magistrate was quite literally in Kane’s genetic makeup, a part of his DNA. He was not so much born as crafted, bred like livestock to do the job of a Magistrate.

  Kane had been trained from birth, schooled in the ways of the Magistrates so that he could defend Cobaltville from the insidious forces that might topple its carefully balanced regime. Where other children had grown up in an environment where they learned through play, Kane had grown up in one of stern discipline, and his mind had been schooled to embrace and employ that discipline.

  There had been exercises from the very earliest days of Kane’s life, drills to make his body firm and strong. And there had been other exercises, too, mental tools that made his mind strong, that kept him fiercely focused on his goals, whatever they may be. Part of that had been to teach him to accept the word of Baron Cobalt as immutable fact, a teaching he had had to break in later life, but there had been more to it than that—he had been taught to retain facts, to compartmentalize and to apply logic no matter how dangerous or tense the situation.

  In time, Kane had broken that indoctrination, and he and his partner Grant had found themselves exiled from Cobaltville, defending freedom once they learned that what they believed in was nothing but a sham, a scheme designed to trick humanity and to make them obey.

  Yet still Kane remained a Magistrate, deep down in the core of his being, his mind a disciplined, structured landscape that respected boundaries and could place things in sections and subsections, file experience within boxes.

  And so now he found himself lying atop the mattress in one of the beautiful bedrooms of the whorehouse called Lilandera, with two stunning women pleading for him to take them, to satisfy them that he might satisfy himself, and he reluctantly closed his eyes and ignored all extraneous detail, trusting the disciplined aspect of his mind to take control where his surface thoughts had become distracted.

  To stop looking was easy; that only required the closing of one’s eyes. Kane had done that when Grant had alerted him to something not being right here, had ignited that fear that had preyed at his mind with almost every step he had taken into the House Lilandera. His heart was still racing, adrenaline coursing through his veins with the desire he felt for the two incredibly beautiful women who had thrown themselves at him, who still promised delights beyond imagination. In his mind’s eye, Kane clung to that surge of adrenaline, for he knew he would need it before this moment was passed.

  He slowed his breathing then, consciously taking deeper breaths, slower and more controlled, enforcing a calmness on his body that it yearned to break from. The smell of the incense was still strong in his nostrils, creating mood, enticing the ex-Magistrate to succumb to the needs of the flesh. Smell is that strangest of senses, capable of affecting one’s thoughts, one’s appetite, even one’s mood. With the application of abrupt logic, Kane switched to breathing through his mouth to tune out the incense smell; doing so didn’t matter, he wouldn’t be here long.

  Eyes still shut, Kane next blocked out the murmurings of desire from his ears, wilfully ignoring the crude whisperings of blue-eyed Kirsten and her friend with the prettiest mouth and the greenest eyes. Instead he tuned in to something deeper within him, the rhythm of his body, the pace of his own breathing, of his beating heart. It was an old Magistrate trick, a way to still one’s thoughts as the surrounding world became chaotic; it was the very same trick he used when he went into high alert and employed what he called his point man sense. Thus, the murmurings of desire faded from Kane’s ears, and instead he heard the organic music within him, the beating of his heart, the pumping of his blood.

  With the blocking of the sounds, Kane forced himself to block out the touch of the women’s bodies against his, making them just a minor irritation that he could simply ignore for his resolve was strong. An individual can block out a lot merely by allowing the mind to rest; the way one is not conscious of the feel of a seat once one is comfortable in it. So Kane employed the same sensibilities as the sitter, letting all his concerns float away, and thus stilling his mind.

  He was at peace now, the world around him no longer important.

  And yes, it’s true—what you see is what you get. The thing is, you have to know what it is that you’re looking at.

  Four seconds later, when Kane opened his eyes, he saw the room for the first time. It wasn’t a candlelit bedchamber, with ornate decorations and a window looking out at the reddening ball of the setting sun. No, in fact the description that came to Kane’s mind was “a rat hole.”

  The mattress he lay on was soiled and torn, and it sat low to the floor not through some convention of the bed but because there was no bed. The walls of the room showed expanses of green mould and dark patches of damp assaulted the deteriorated plasterboard across two of them. The polished walnut door was no longer polished nor walnut—Kane saw it now as a broken thing with panels missing, an eczema of peeling paint marring its surface. Additionally, there were black streaks across the door frame where it had been damaged by smoke; presumably the door itself had been replaced after that.

  In the corner where the incense sticks had once appeared to be burning, Kane saw now just a hole in the bare floorboards. As he watched, a mouse scurried from the hole, scrambling across the room on its tiny pink feet until it disappeared in a hole in the skirting board, peering back out at him with its twitching nose.

  All of this, Kane took in in a matter of just a few seconds, his eyes wandering over the room as he stilled his tremulous heart.

  However, the biggest revelation hit Kane like a punch to the gut. The two women, with their radiant skin and long blond hair, had been replaced. They were no longer the divinely beautiful creatures that Kane had been almost unable to keep his eyes—or hands—off. In their place, clambering on the soiled mattress, Kane saw two hairless, emaciated things, their flesh incomplete, their faces malformed. They reminded him of fetuses, with their large eyes in dark pink sockets and the whole thing not fully formed, as if they had somehow grown to adulthood without altering from their early fetal state. The darkness around their eyes, the way their skin seemed tight in places yet sagged in others, reminded Kane of newborn birds, just waking in the nest for the first time.

  With a kick of his feet, Kane shoved himself back on the bed, pulling away from the fetuslike women as they watched him, smiling with their lipless mouths. The one to the left had blue eyes the color of cornflowers while the one on the right had eyes as green as the ocean. Stripped naked, sharing a bed with these things, Kane felt sick.

  As his stomach turned, Kane felt his self-control slip, and for just a single flashbulb instant he saw the women as beautiful once more, the cozy warmth of the red room vying for attention in his muddled senses. He took another breath through clenched teeth, tried to stay in the moment, to see things as they truly were. A man with less discipline woul
d find such a thing impossible, the illusion was so pervasive, but Kane knew it was an illusion now, and so he knew he must hang on to whatever tentative grip he had on the reality or he would lose himself to this perverse dream that sucked at him like quicksand.

  The unformed things that had once seemed beautiful made their way toward Kane, the one with blue eyes reaching for him with a fleshy hand of pink so dark it looked as if the skin had been scalded. She reached for Kane, walking her short pudgy fingers up his leg toward his groin, a coquettish twinkle in her eye. Kane batted her hand away, rolling himself from the bed and out of the creature’s reach.

  “Keep away from me,” he warned, backing to the mould-dappled wall.

  “Come back to bed,” the one with green eyes pleaded. Her voice was soft, husky, laced with desire. If Kane didn’t look at her, hadn’t seen her for what she really was, he could still believe she was that beautiful woman who had enticed him here. Instead he had no idea what she—what either of them—were. They weren’t human, not really. They were more like something that had been aborted before it could achieve true life. Succubi perhaps, those mythological prostitutes who drained the life from their lovers, left them as nothing but empty shells. Even as the thought occurred to him, Kane was struck by the similarity of the classical succubus to Lilitu, the Annunaki goddess who had been reborn as Ezili Coeur Noir. Were these things somehow a part of her, related to her in some way? It was like seeing pieces of a puzzle with only the scantest idea of what they formed.

  Swiftly, Kane moved across the room, reaching for the pile of his clothing. Curiously, he still wore his Sin Eater in its wrist holster—all thoughts of it had evaporated while he had been under the spell of the house and these malformed creatures had obviously considered it no threat to them while he was under the spell. The things that had once appeared as women watched him, cooing to him and pleading he stay in bed with them, satisfy them, abuse them. For a lightning-flash moment he saw them again as he had seen them before, beautiful and alluring, and the room was painted red and lined with candles once more.