THE MIDNIGHT ORDER

Christopher Fulbright

First Edition

The Midnight Order © 2015 by Christopher Fulbright

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release

www.darkfuse.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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For Angeline, who makes everything possible.

1

There was blood coming from between her legs. From her vagina.

Nikki’s heart thudded and lodged in her throat.

She caressed her belly—where the baby had been forming inside her for the last three months—with a growing sense of dread.

She reached down and touched the wetness, a moderate flow. In the stark white light of the bathroom, the blood glistened on her palm and fingertips. The tears that filled her eyes fogged the vision of her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

A quick knock at the door.

“Nikki? Babe, are you okay?” Nolan’s voice was muffled, thick with concern.

She couldn’t speak. Her insides twisted into a knot.

“Babe?” Nolan’s voice rose, and he burst in through the bathroom door.

He stopped dead when he saw her standing there, shocked at the sight of blood. He looked at her hand, then between her legs. Scarlet droplets speckled the floor.

Nolan’s eyes went wide and dark and deep. “The baby…” He stepped back into the hall. “I’ll call the doctor.” He disappeared and she could hear his urgent voice in the kitchen. When he came back, he was gentle, cautious. “Okay, they said to take it easy. There could be any number of reasons. We just need to get you over to their office right away and see what’s going on.”

Nikki knew what had happened. She didn’t need the doctor to tell her that she had miscarried.

“Our baby,” she managed to say, and then everything inside her sagged with grief.

He held her as she shuddered against his chest.

She’d always remember that moment in terrible crystal clarity, with sharp angles and brilliant color.

She’d remember that moment in all the years to come, because that was the start of everything that came after.

And everything that came after was much worse.

* * *

Three weeks later she found the note.

Nikki walked in the door wrapped in a light overcoat, ready for a long bath. She’d managed to convince herself that the death of the baby was not the end of everything. There was still a chance for her and Nolan to be happy, to make a family and break away from this life she’d felt trapped in for so many years.

Unfortunately, they needed money, and she knew only one way to do that quickly.

Nikki had just come back from the L.A. Direct studios. Delly Ray was directing a new film and he’d managed to get her in on a shoot for some extra cash. She hadn’t intended to tell Nolan about it, because they were trying to make it without her having to work. Still, things were tight. She felt bad with Nolan out pounding the pavement, looking for a job and having zero luck. Yes, Nolan hated her line of work, but the fact of the matter was they were two weeks behind on rent and on the verge of having the electricity cut off. So she gave Delly a call to see if he had anything. He was doing a film for L.A. Direct called New Fraternity Dreams.

At first Delly Ray protested. It took Nikki off guard. She was too old for the role, and he didn’t beat around the bush about it. But she’d done a lot of work for Delly, and he loved her like a sister, so after she explained the situation, he got her in. The “frat boy” on the shoot had given her a little bit of a workout. Thirty minutes of anal sex, two hours of the standard fare, on her back, legs in the air and over the shoulders. The only thing she’d really begun to loathe was the oral work, since it made her jaw sore; with all the new pills guys just stayed rock-hard forever, so there weren’t many breaks. Still, it had been a couple months since she’d worked, and while it was a lot like getting back on the bicycle—hell, it was all she’d done for the past twenty years—something in the back of her mind squirmed at the thought of it, while another part of her reveled in the sheer nastiness of it. She wasn’t sure which part she loathed the most, but she just shut it off and did what she had to do.

She got paid twenty-five hundred dollars that night and came home with a promise from Delly that he’d keep her in mind for other side work. But that look on Delly’s face as he lit a cigarette and turned around—it haunted her. She knew what it meant. He was done with her. She’d seen it time and time again with other girls but never thought it would be her. She was Nikki Lane, for godsake, star of more than one hundred and fifty of the hottest porn flicks ever set to film. You couldn’t walk into an adult entertainment store without seeing her face on covers, magazines, sex toy endorsements…she even had her own inflatable likeness. (They’d all joked about the thing after it came out because it looked so hideously ridiculous. Delly had once pulled it out and used it for a floatation device in his pool at the release party for a DVD compilation of her hottest scenes, Untamed Lane, one of L.A. Direct’s top all-time sellers of the 1990s.) She smiled wistfully at the memory. She would have laughed, but somehow even that once-fond memory left her feeling ill.

She came home, wishing for the silent peace of a hot bubble bath, that feeling lingering deep in her guts. She had to see Nolan. The prospect of telling him what she’d done was suddenly grim but urgent. Funny how it seemed like the perfectly right thing to do before she left, and now…well, she didn’t want to hide it. He knew all about her job and where she came from. They’d agreed they’d try to make it other ways, but she wasn’t going to starve when she could get work that paid well at the drop of a hat.

She was sorry, but she was also Nikki Lane. Nothing could change that.

So she walked into the kitchen. Turned on the light. The apartment was quiet.

Next to the phone was a note. It wasn’t long. It didn’t need to be.

Nikki,

I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. It’s not the baby. It’s just…everything. I love you, but it hurts too much to go on. I have to go. I think it’s best for both of us. I’ll always cherish our time together. I hope to see and talk to you soon. I’m sorry.

Love, Nolan

Nikki blinked at the note. Anger flashed inside of her.

She threw it down on the counter and went back into the bedroom.

His things were gone.

He was gone.

It took a few moments before it sank in. Then she sat down heavily. She stared at her hands, felt the dull ebb of the aftermath of work in all her sacred places.

A drink would dull the pain. It always did.

* * *

She got some more work from Delly, but it all came to a train-wreck halt when she’d showed up a drunken mess on the set of the latest Linda Lix film.

In the throes of a blackout drunk she didn’t remember much about what happened that day. When she thought back, it was just a vague bad feeling, like something her mind chose to keep mostly hidden, revealing just enough of the awfulness that she knew for sure she didn’t want to remember the rest.

After that, Delly didn’t return her calls.

* * *

One more thing Nikki Lane wouldn’t remember in the days to come:

Lying on the back deck of her home in San Fernando Valley. The rolling sound of an empty bottle of vodka ends with a whispered hush as it falls into a pile of dead leaves.

There’s an autumn bite in the air. The cottonwood and sycamore trees have turned. Their leaves flutter down to her out of the gray, overcast sky. They rattle across the deck toward her, dried and crisp. She manages to reach out and grab one. It’s only by luck she manages to stop the leaf and grasp it in her hand. She’s lying on the back deck like this because she’s too drunk to stand.

She grabs the leaf. Slowly folds her arm with the anesthetic numbness of the alcohol coursing through her blood. It’s almost as if she hasn’t moved the arm herself, but some godly creature has done it for her by divine intervention. She brings the leaf up to her face ... looks at it closely. The veins, the flesh ... withered in the season of dying. This leaf would never live again. It fell from the tree. Now it’s done forever.

Just like her.

Nikki smiles, tries to laugh, but it just comes out as a sound disturbingly a lot like the coo of an abandoned child. A sick child, with a hurt so deep that mere “aloneness” does not adequately describe it.

Autumn. A season for dying.

She feels the crawling sensation then, like snakes, ropy tendrils of flesh wrapping her legs, slithering up her thighs, probing her sacred places. Ghost tentacles massage her, violate her. It feels good, but too soon they dissolve.

Her eyes roll back in her head. With her last bit of effort before letting go, she crumbles the leaf and lets a mild wind carry its remains from her hand.

Her hand falls limp to the deck. She closes her eyes.

“Nikki, oh my God, Nikki!”

Footsteps pounding out across the deck. The smell of a thousand garish perfumes.

“Nikki, Nikki…wake up! Oh my god…”

And Death passes by, despite the season.

Too bad, she thinks. It’s all she has left to give.

2

Three weeks later in the heart of November, her heels snapped smartly against the concrete sidewalk along Ventura Boulevard. After a tearful phone call in which she confessed she had to make some serious changes before her life came crashing down around her, she agreed to meet an old friend, Deana, from the business. Deana, who’d managed to get out of the business. Deana, who’d come back from a coke and sex addiction that almost sank her like the deep end of an iceberg.

Deana promised her salvation. But she hadn’t done so lightly.

I’m where I am now because of the Midnight Order, Deana said. They made it possible for me to get on with it, Nikki. Made it possible for me to have a personal experience with a supernatural being. And it changed…everything. If you’re ready for that, then you’re ready to talk. Do you really want everything to change, Nikki?

Oh, she was ready. She wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t let the world have its way with her for the last time. The alcohol, the sex…it had all been so much bigger than her for so long she didn’t know how to live without it. The only thing that would work for her was a dramatic shift in the paradigm of her existence. But recognizing this and making it happen were two different things. She was willing, but she couldn’t do it alone.

She’d reached out to Deana. A personal experience with a supernatural being sounded like powerful medicine indeed. It also sounded frightening, but fear couldn’t enter the equation. Not where salvation was concerned.

She was ready to live again.

Her dark hair flowed like an exquisite stole over her shoulders. She wore Bolle sunglasses and carried her Hermes Berkin bag over her shoulder. She walked down Ventura Boulevard with a vengeance, stiletto heels snapping out a rapid cadence, and she carried herself like a queen because, damn it, nobody had to know it was over for her in the business. Once upon a time, she’d walked these streets as royalty, but the streets knew what she tried to deny. A few more years with no shoots and she’d just fade away. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be remembered for what she’d done, and that was a sad fucking commentary on her life.

Good-bye yellow brick road, hello to the long sunset.

The sidewalk was a little crowded, enough to make the world seem alive and vibrant with folks enjoying the cusp of Thanksgiving holidays fast approaching. The scent of spiced coffees was in the air.

Nikki didn’t walk to her appointment with Deana—she marched.

Past India West. Past the shoe store, the clothing store, the coffee shop and the CD store. She marched past Vixen Video, and didn’t look twice at the Linda Lix movies prominently displayed in the adult entertainment store’s front window. Nikki was on the door poster of a film from ten years ago, Sinful Affairs, her first five-figure role.

A man who’d been browsing the window art watched her reflection. She strode purposefully, heels snapping, tight blue jeans hugging every nook and curve of her womanly shape, a light sweater and bra doing what they could to contain her bosom.

Nikki Lane marched on by.

Finally, Café DeLuce appeared on the left. Her friend Deana sat at one of the tables there, an umbrella shading her from the sun. Nikki made it the rest of the way to the café feeling the stares of men like heat. It was a mixed feeling; part loathing, part desire, and she did her best to bury it deep.

Deana stood as she saw her old friend coming down the walk.

Nikki smiled and waved.

At the table together they hugged in a tight embrace.

“Oh my god,” Deana said, “Nikki you look amazing. But I expected nothing less.”

When they came apart, Deana looked her up and down, not with disdain, but as if to say, Are you really done? The look brought tears to Nikki’s eyes. Until that moment she didn’t realize just how raw she really felt. Maybe she wouldn’t take off her sunglasses just yet.

“You look fantastic, too, Deana. I mean it.” She looked like a mom, a bona fide member of society. A happy woman with a family.

By god, she marveled to herself, she really left it all behind.

And that gave her hope. This supernatural encounter Deana touted as her salvation must have been powerful. Nikki suddenly wanted it more than ever. Craved it with a deep hunger.

They sat and ordered food and laughed together and talked about old times. But after lunch was almost over, things took a turn. These days, things always took a turn.

“So,” Deana said. “You’re really done?”

“Yes,” Nikki said. The waitress came by and refilled her tea.

“Why?”

“I’m forty years old, Deana. I’ve got the dreaded onset of ‘turkey neck.’ Veins showing through my hands and legs. Dimpling over the backs of my legs and my ass. We’re in the San Pornando Valley…there’s always fresh meat. I’m yesterday’s skin bag.” It wasn’t the whole story, but it didn’t have to be. Deana could read between the lines.

Nikki took a deep drink of her tea and wished it were something stronger.

Deana took too much time using her fork on the last shreds of a spinach salad.

For the first time ever, Nikki felt uncomfortable with her old friend. And that was weird. After all the things they’d done together on film, they shared a bond. Maybe you don’t open up and let your real self out, but you do bond. And now, talking about the business…it seemed like that bond had never been there at all. In that moment, looking closely at Deana, her old friend seemed completely different, almost hollow. A part of Deana was missing. Other than what remained of their friendship, it was like Deana no longer had any connection to their shared past, not even as a place from which she’d come. As if it had all just been…erased.

You’re imaging things, she told herself. She’s just changed. A lot.

“Anyway,” Nikki went on, “Delly Ray saw it too. And he passed me up for his last five projects. Took that little snot-nosed blonde from Iowa to play my part in the last Linda Lix film. I’d say that’s my kiss of death, Deana. I’m done.” And I lost my baby, Deana. And the only man I ever really loved.

Deana looked pained, so perhaps she hadn’t been hollowed out after all. Deana had been there. In some ways, she’d been worse off, with a quarter-ounce-a-day coke habit. It’d been a goddamn miracle she was even able to talk between gnawing on her tongue and snorting bullets. Never mind the business. That’s why it was so surreal to see her here like this, transformed into some kind of soccer mom with a real life.

But it did give her hope.

Real hope.

She expected Deana to examine her. To dig deeper for her motivations, but it wasn’t necessary. They both knew how it was.

Deana smiled kindly. “Nikki…you know you’re stunning. You’ve got a body men lust for on every street corner in the world.”

Nikki gave a pained smile.

“I just want to make sure you’re ready for this,” Deana said. Her tone changed, and something in it told Nikki to tune in. “I mean, really ready. Because what I went through to be free was…serious. It was scary. But worth every minute of the life I’ve lived since then.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me you’re ready for this. The Midnight Order, it’s…serious. You need to really want a change, and be absolutely sure that you are too far gone to elicit a change yourself.”

“I’m ready, Deana. And I think you know that I want it…need it. At this point I…” Tears stung Nikki’s eyes and now she wasn’t afraid to hide them. She took off her sunglasses and looked her friend in the eyes. “I know what I need to do, Deana. And yet, every day, I still crave what destroys me. I talk to myself rationally, understanding the truth, and even as I do I still reach for the bottle, the pills, the phone, hoping for sex. I-I’m sick, Deana. I don’t know what to do. I want to stop it, but I can’t. I don’t know how. I don’t know the first goddamn thing.”

Nikki sank her head in her hands. Deana’s hand found hers and held it tenderly.

“Good,” Deana said softly. “Because you can’t go and do what I’m suggesting and still come back the same person. I guarantee it. You’ll be changed, completely.”

“Sorry. Jesus.” Nikki sniffed and dabbed her eyes with a napkin.

“No need to be sorry, Nik. I’m glad to see it actually. It means you’re really there.”

Nikki laughed bitterly. “In hell?”

“At the turning point, ready for this step.”

“What is this Midnight Order anyway? Why so cryptic?”

“You won’t believe me until you’re there. Until you’ve met them…and seen it.”

Deana leaned forward over the street café table. Her face was serious, expression grave.

“And, believe me, Nikki, you better really want this. Because once it starts, there’s no going back.” Deana’s eyes were strange, and again Nikki was struck by that sense of her being hollowed out, that something about her was not right.

Nikki blinked, tried to process the oppression she was feeling just now.

“Okay,” she managed.

Deana hovered a moment longer. Then she let the spell break, and it was as if she was just another California soccer mom again, smiling kindly at her friend, no concern beyond what she’d feed the kids for dinner.

“Good,” Deana said, “because I already told them you’re coming.”

3

A week later she’d flown to the bitterly cold Northeast coast and was leaning over the rail of a private ferry on her way to Blackrock Island. The ferry was so small it didn’t take cars, only passengers. On this occasion there was only one passenger other than herself.

A man stood across the boat dressed in a dark pea coat, collar flipped up against the winds. He spent most of the ride admiring the view as they rode across the bay, but he finally made his way over to her.

Nikki leaned with her forearms across the rails, staring off into the aging sunset. He came up beside her. She was aware of his size. Tall, thick shouldered. A powerful presence. Dusk crept toward them across the water, as if drawn to him.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“If you like dark and wet.”

“I like the ocean.”

“It’s not California.”

“Nope, whole other coast up this way. Rocky cliffs, colder and meaner.”

A few silent moments passed between them. The hum of the ferry’s motor vibrated through the soles of her boots.

“Weather, that is.”

“Huh?” she said.

He held out his hand. “Adam Ross,” he said.

She looked at his hand, looked at his face, then shook his hand quickly and didn’t make an invitation out of it. The residual touch of his hand in hers stirred things inside her. She folded her arms on the rail again and stared across the water at the approaching outline of the island. He leaned on the rail next to her.

“Looks like we’re headed to the same place.”

She gave him a pressed smile and looked him over with a raised eyebrow. He had dark hair in a nice style slightly ruffled by the wind, angled features that spoke of power, and intense eyes that sized up the world before him like a general forging ahead into battle. A dim shadow of whiskers shaded the lower half of his face. He wore a small, curious amulet around his neck, a tiger’s-eye stone, part amber, part black. He glanced over at her and those eyes of his made her heart do a rabbit-thump before she looked away.

Don’t even think about it.

But if she had to be stuck on an island with someone, she could have done a hell of a lot worse.

She felt that old familiar stirring in her loins that no amount of sex could make go away. At the same time she felt that old heart-sickness knowing it was part of why she was here. Part of what she came to leave behind.

He gave her a smile in return, but coldness lingered in those intense and troubled eyes. No doubt, he came to leave behind something of his own.

He nodded and pointed with a flick of his wrist.

“We’re here.”

Blackrock Island rose as a jagged horizon line before them, growing larger at their approach. It was a small mountain with enough flatland around it for some forest growth between its base and the shore. Nestled in a ravine surrounded by tall evergreens was a manse that looked like a small castle. The structure looked medieval with parapets and spires at each corner. Set farther back was the main part of the structure—a tower that stood two stories higher than the rest of the manor, Gothic windows with golden inner fires that glowed against the oncoming night.

As they came into the cove of the secluded island, Nikki was surprised to see how modern the dock was. A golf cart drove down a gravel road, headlights coming to meet them as they disembarked.

Night settled around them as the ferry drifted into dock. This close the island seemed small and the castle seemed huge. The structure towered above all, darkly beautiful, sinister.

I hope to God I’m doing the right thing.

Somehow invoking God’s name in this place seemed a betrayal to its dark masters.

4

A brilliant moon shone down as Adam offered to help Nikki with her luggage. She smiled but declined, not making too much eye contact. She was polite but perfunctory, focused on her purpose. She’d managed not to pack any alcohol (something for which she already kicked herself), so she’d managed to defeat that unhealthy addiction for now, but she had no control at all over who came to stay at this place with her, men or otherwise. Otherwise would have been better, but she’d just have to keep to herself. I’m not going to fuck this up was her new mantra. And looking too long at Adam Ross would get both of them into a whole lot of trouble.

Once moored at the pier, the ferry master helped them down the ramp with their luggage. A pleasant gray-haired woman was driving the golf cart. She introduced herself as Eleanor Masterson while a quiet older man took their bags and loaded them on the cart’s iron grate, which served as a luggage carrier. Adam climbed in next to Nikki in a small backseat where she did her damnedest not to heed the lusty fire that raged in her blood at being seated so close to him.

She looked out over the black ocean, the layer of starlit space that floated above it a glittering mantle of night.

They rode up a winding gravel road through the castle gates. The huge driveway encircled a fountain with some cryptic statue that looked like a tentacled creature as its centerpiece. The older man hopped out and promptly grabbed their bags. They climbed out, too. The elderly woman smiled and bid them enter the massive front doors.

“Welcome to Masterson Castle. Please make yourselves at home.”

They walked into a lavish entry. High Gothic arches made it a stunning sight. Tapestries adorned the walls, antique suits of armor and weaponry made the transition back in time complete. A deep red carpet led the way in. There were several doors off the entry hall, and Miss Masterson guided them through one on the left into a large but cozy parlor. Despite the chill night, the parlor was warm. A fire blazed in a massive fireplace, heating the stone walls. Ornately carved wooden divan and chairs with red velvet cushions were arranged in a semicircle. Tall bookcases of thick, dark wood lined one wall. Two statues of medieval figures joined them, holding what looked like real axes.

Nikki was taking in the surroundings with surreal awe, not sure if she’d been transported back in time to some imperial kingdom or a mad scientist’s castle, when Adam said: “Very impressive.”

Eleanor Masterson smiled. “It was my great-grandfather’s life’s work. Despite its appearances, the castle is only about one hundred and fifty years old.”

“Still very regal. Breathtaking.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “His spirit abides.”

Nikki felt a sudden flash of cold sweats come over her. Fatigue, which had been creeping up on her during the ferry ride, now sunk its hooks deep. She felt nauseous. It occurred to her that she needed to eat, but all she wanted to do was lie down.

“Are you okay?” Adam looked at her with concern.

“I…I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well.” She looked at Miss Masterson. “Is there a place to lie down?”

“Yes, dear. No problem at all. You’ll need your rest for later, anyway. You should both know we’ll begin the process right away. You’ll meet the others and convene for everyone’s treatment tonight at midnight.”

Nikki nodded, only hearing half of what the woman said.

“Isaac,” she said to the older man with their bags. “Would you and Madsen please see Miss Lane to her room?”

“Can I help you along—?” Adam started toward her, seeing she was unstable.

“No,” Nikki snapped. Then, softening her voice, “Sorry, just…no. I can make it.”

Isaac nodded and indicated Nikki should follow him. A young man entered the room and grabbed her bags.

Rising above the parlor was a stone staircase that followed the curve of the inner wall. Nikki guessed it led up into the main tower.

Isaac led her upstairs. She dreaded the climb, thought again about taking Adam’s offer to help, but really didn’t want anything to do with anyone right now.

As soon as they reached her bedchamber, Isaac opened the door to the dark room and leaned inside to light a lantern. It was all she could do to mumble thanks to Isaac and the young man who carried her bags. As soon as they left the room, she fell back on the bed.

She closed her eyes. Her head swam. The feelings came and went along with a bout of nausea, and she suddenly felt very heavy.

She wanted a drink.

Every cell in her body craved alcohol. She closed her eyes. The sweats passed, or at least let up a bit in the coolness of the room. She blinked at the surroundings.

There was everything one might expect from a bedchamber in a castle. Canopied bed, a heavy oak dresser, a vanity. No running water or wet bar, but there was a large bowl of water atop a dry sink, next to some fresh towels. She stripped off her coat and went to the water, splashing some on her face.

Nikki breathed deep, wound tight with the anxiety of everything she was here to do. She exhaled and tried to release just a bit of it. She took a cool towel back to the bed and sat down on its edge. She caught a glimpse of herself in a corner of the vanity mirror and looked quickly away, but then she forced herself to look.

Most people saw her as a whore. A good set of curves and great legs that looked even better in the air. But she saw the lines of years, the toll of gravity and age, saw deep inside to the scars life had left on her soul, and she felt very much like a woman who’d given herself over to the things that had used her up. She felt dry…crushed, empty.

Nikki thought back to that last time she was on Delly’s set, when she’d been so drunk she couldn’t even stay balanced on her hands and knees. What she remembered of it came back in foggy details. He called a cab and sent her home in a fury. She’d screamed at him and told him to fuck off, told him she was a goddamn queen in this business, and she’d be working the next day, so keep your fucking cab, I’ll drive myself. And then she proceeded to drive across the valley to her house in Glendale in a solid drunken blackout. The next day she’d almost drank herself to death ... and when Tonya found her on the back porch…

I wanted to die.

It came back to her in semi-corporeal memories flashing by in quick succession. All her train-wreck relationships, all the way back to her pedophile, child-molesting, drunk of a father, her tramp mother, who never did any good for anyone, and things never got much better from there. Nikki liked to think it had. She liked to look back and say fuck them both, because at the height of her popularity in the business, she was on top of the world and they were nobodies. She was a self-made woman, she’d done it on her own merits, so she counted the money and tried not to think about much else for a long time, because she was smarter than that.

For some in the business, achieving what Nikki had achieved would have been their golden moment, but even then Nikki always felt like she had been meant for something greater. Even back when she was just a girl, hiding from her father, clutching her favorite stuffed Ella Dog, closing her eyes to the world and letting the dreams take her away. Everything she’d done to herself, to others, and now…the worst memory of all, of the one man who tried, really tried, to love her. She had been his broken bird, and he had been her shining knight. Nolan was the man who’d seemed to come straight out of those desperate childhood dreams. She’d almost had it all, they’d almost had it all, together, and almost left all of the toughness behind when…

Nikki sobbed. It hit her deep and dug into her like hooks. Sorrow pulled at her aching wounds. She held her face in her hands. She felt like puking, and dying, and goddamn it she wanted a fucking drink!

She tried to pull herself together. Her vision blurred with tears and she wiped them harshly away. She set her jaw, tried to focus on herself in that mirror across the room.

That’s when she heard it.

It was a quiet sound, so quiet she held her breath to listen.

A dragging…or slow shuffling?

It came from the other side of the bed, under the window.

Nikki stood slowly and turned. Her guts were tight. She took a deep breath and tried to fend off the nausea.

The window was open for some reason. The curtain fluttered in the island breeze. She took a step toward it, but once she was past the bed, something stopped her cold. Movement on the floor, near the side of the bed.

She caught her breath and stepped back. A dark shape about the size of a rat dragged itself across the stone floor.

When she saw what it really was, she covered her mouth. She gasped and backed away.

“Oh my god.”

A small bluish fetus crawled toward her. Its arms were twisted, barely strong enough to pull it along. Its head was larger than its body, its limbs malformed…it dragged a torn and leaking umbilical cord like a black vein behind it. Its wet skin scuffed across the floor, dragged onto the rug in the center of the room.

The eyes in the baby’s head were black, shining, but full of emotion. Full of abandon and hurt.

“Momma,” it said, barely enunciating. “Momma…”

“No!” she screamed. “NO!”

She whirled and ran for the door, but in her state of illness she stumbled and fell. The baby (her baby) crawled closer.

Nikki scrambled to get to her feet, but her knees were too weak, legs trembling. Instead, she crab-walked backward, away from the crawling horror.

Still it came onward, slow but relentless. Despite the absolute gut-wrenching awfulness of the baby—the fetus—here before her, in this impossible form, malformed and mottled blue and purple, part of her wanted to reach out for it, to cry for it and wish it were true…that her baby really lived, even in this wretched form.

“Noooo...” The word trailed off into an anguished growl in her throat and tears blurred her vision.

The baby disappeared in a fog.

The door to her room crashed open.

Adam Ross rushed inside. He went to her on the floor and pulled her into his arms.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” Then he held her at arm’s length and studied her. He looked around the room.

Nikki collapsed against him and started bawling. He held her.

“It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead…” she cried.

He patted her on the back, tentatively at first, then more reassuring.

It took her several moments to recover. When she did, she looked around the room.

The baby was gone. The window was closed.

“I-I don’t understand.”

“Let me help you to the bed.”

Adam lifted her to her feet and took her to the edge of the bed. He started to use the damp towel on her forehead but she took it from him and looked around, confused. Then she took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m losing my mind.”

5

“Will you be okay?”

Nikki had calmed down. Adam stayed with her until she’d relaxed. The lantern burned low but gave a comfortable glow, accentuating the sharp angles of his face. She didn’t explain what she had seen, or hallucinated. He didn’t ask her to. Now that she was calm, he stood to leave.

“Yes. I think so.” She smiled up at him, knowing she looked like a wreck. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” Adam opened the door to leave.

Both of them took a quick intake of breath.

Isaac was standing at the door, his hand poised to knock.

“Pardon me, Master Ross,” he said. His voice was thick with age and regret. “Miss Masterson sent me around to all of the visitors of the manor. All need to be present at 11:30 sharp, in the main parlor.”

“Who’s ‘all’?” Adam asked.

“There are three others, five in all, including yourselves.”

“I see.”

Watching Adam interact with Isaac, Nikki wondered again why Adam was here. What did he hope to leave behind?

“There are dark blue robes in each of your closets. The treatment requires that everyone dress in the robes without undergarments. There is a brief preparation, and then the proceedings will commence in a lower chamber of the castle at midnight.”

Isaac bowed and turned away. He made his way down the stone corridor, presumably to the other guests’ chambers.

Adam looked back at Nikki.

“Well. I guess I’ll be getting dressed.”

“Or undressed.”

“A chilly place to be wandering around sans skivvies, I admit. But then”—Adam’s intense gaze met hers and she shivered—“I guess we wouldn’t be here if weren’t committed to the cause.”

Nikki looked at him. Blinked, then glanced at the wardrobe closet.

“See you downstairs,” Adam said.

He turned and left the room.

* * *

At 11:30 that night, Adam and Nikki met a middle-aged woman with wispy blonde hair, an older man with a tobacco-stained gray mustache, and one teenaged girl with a pierced, pale face and a tattoo of a Chinese dragon up her neck. The middle-aged woman was introduced as Marie, the older man was Ben, and the teenager’s name was Raven. They nodded at one another as Adam and Nikki were introduced.

They stood in their dark blue robes in the parlor of the castle. A blazing fire roared in the stone fireplace. Flames shone on the various medieval accoutrements of the room, which was otherwise lit with only a few electric bulbs hanging from brass chandeliers. This seemed to be one of the only rooms in the castle with electricity. Eleanor Masterson smiled during the introductions, bowing to each of them.

“I applaud each of you for coming,” she said. “It is a difficult choice to face your demons, especially to face them this way, coming here with no more than assurances from your referrers.” Her voice echoed to the high reaches of the room. “It was the distinct pleasure of my great-grandfather almost two hundred years ago to discover the magic that dwelled here on Blackrock Island. He discovered it quite by accident, but once he realized what he had found, he honored it by constructing the great tower at the center of this castle atop the site of what he frankly felt—and what we sincerely believe you will agree—was a miracle in the flesh.” She clasped her hands and smiled kindly, like a grandmother ready to offer the neighborhood kids cookies and milk. “Though none of you pay for this service, you do help us to understand more about the power that dwells here in the chambers below as we help you overcome your difficulties and live more fulfilled lives.

“I’d like to introduce Dr. Ludwig Falkenstein, a German scientist here to observe and report on the proceedings. He’ll be guiding the procedure, so please welcome him.”

Nikki didn’t know if the old woman expected them to applaud for the guy or what, but she was set a little ill-at-ease by the whole thing. The others must have felt the same, because none of them said anything. Only the older man nodded his head in greeting.

Falkenstein spoke English with a German accent.

“Good evening. I’ll introduce the proceedings by saying that, as long as you follow our directions, everyone should be just fine. Those who’ve emerged from this treatment successfully have gone on—as you all no doubt know—to live fulfilled lives, unburdened by the traumas that brought them here.” The doctor paused to smile and it was unnerving. “The procedure is simple. I only ask that you do exactly as instructed, for the safety of everyone involved.”

Nikki looked over at Adam, who was staring intently at the scientist.

“We will proceed down the stairway to the catacombs in single file. There we will pause at a chamber door and await the signal to enter.” Dr. Falkenstein went on. “Each of you will enter the chamber some time apart, at intervals. We will listen closely outside the door and be there to assist immediately if necessary. After the treatment, you will be escorted to your rooms where you will likely feel weary and perhaps slightly ill for the next day or so. Be assured this is completely normal and everyone who has been treated in this fashion experiences much the same thing. We will closely monitor your progress and keep you here only a couple of days before releasing you to return home.”

The older man with the mustache, Ben, cleared his throat.

“Do you have a question, sir?”

“Nope,” Ben said with a thick Texas accent. “Just ready to get on with it.”

Dr. Falkenstein gave the man a mirthless smile.

“Each of you has been sent here for help by someone you know, someone who had a similar personal trauma conventional means could not cure. I hope that person has prepared you for what this treatment entails. It may be unpleasant for some of you.” The doctor looked at each of them in turn. When the German scientist met Nikki’s eyes, he paused a bit longer. “You are in no way obligated to carry through with this. Should any of you change your minds, now would be the best time, to avoid disrupting the proceedings after we’ve gone below.”

None of them said anything. The fire crackled. Eleanor Masterson smiled like an old Stepford wife. At their continued silence denoting assent to the procedure, Falkenstein produced what appeared to be his first genuine smile of the night.

“Very well,” he said. “Allow me to lead the way.”

Nikki was closest to the doctor, so when he led the way into the Gothic arched corridor and then opened a door to a stone staircase leading down, she was directly behind him. The doctor pointed the way with a flashlight. Far below, they could see flickering light. Nikki had worn flats and nothing else beneath the robes. She could feel the cold of the stairs through the thin soles. The air of the castle depths chilled her naked body beneath as the robes billowed around her. She felt aroused and had to shut off an unbidden thought of Adam and his nakedness as he walked behind her.

The staircase curved down to a rough-hewn landing. From there, a narrow corridor went deeper into the earth, leading into catacombs. They stopped in front of a banded wooden door. Torches burned on each side of it.

“The sensitive nature of what lay beyond this door made using electricity in the walls prohibitive,” Falkenstein explained in answer to their confused looks.

The cloying smell of dank earth and moldy stone overtook Nikki and combined with her still-vague feelings of nausea. Her head spun a bit and the urge to vomit never quite went away. Cold sweat dampened her forehead. She swallowed hard. She wanted to do this, to get it over with and put an end to her suffering. She knew these withdrawal symptoms would get worse before they got better, so if this meant an end to the suffering, she was damn well ready to do it. Yes, her heart hammered like a war drum and her skin crawled at being this deep beneath the earth in what amounted to a dungeon. But she’d come here for one purpose, and she intended to be free of the hell her life had become.

But what lay beyond that door?

At this point, did it matter?

“You may choose amongst yourselves who will go first.” Falkenstein spoke in a hushed tone, as if afraid to disturb some grim balance. The shadows at the end of the far corridor made her uneasy. . She noticed the others glancing that direction as well. It was as if something crouched just beyond the wall of darkness, watching them. The blackness of the catacomb depths pressed heavily against Nikki, closing her in. She couldn’t stand much longer down here without screaming.

“I’ll go first,” she said.

Falkenstein looked her over with a leer, then smiled.

“Excellent,” he said, and reached forward to open the door.

6

Falkenstein lifted the lever and released the latch on the door with a metallic clank. Nikki’s skin crawled as the door opened into the musty shadows. There was light inside, but again, it was the wicked, flickering light of torches too few and far between. The first thing that hit her was the heavy scent of damp leaves, a hint of ocean life and something else, which, if she had to name it, smelled like the rot of old graves. She paused at the threshold to the subterranean room.

Falkenstein spoke in a whisper. Everyone else stood behind them, dark shapes with blurred faces. She could vaguely make out Adam’s features behind her in the torchlight. For one strange moment, his intense eyes caught the light and flashed red like the eyes of a cat. She looked away and focused on the expanse within. The long walkway that stretched before her seemed to open up around a long, curved corner. There was a source of odd light beyond those reaches.

She took a step that direction, thinking, This worked for Deana and she wouldn’t steer me wrong.

She paused.

Falkenstein partially closed the door, waiting for her to advance before letting the next person in behind her. He seemed nervous, fearful of stepping completely inside. When he encouraged her to go forward, it was in an urgent whisper. “Just keep going, no sudden moves. When you reach the corner, turn slowly to your left and stand still.”

Nikki looked back at him and felt a surge of anger, but was too damned sick to make anything of it.

She walked the stone pathway toward the wide-open expanse on the other side of the curve.

She glanced back. She’d gone far enough that she couldn’t see Falkenstein and the others.

She was alone in here.

With something that smelled like fish and graves.

Nikki walked, her heart making a hollow drum of her chest. She crept around the corner and looked at what emitted the strange light.

To her left, as she came into the open expanse, was a stone chamber perhaps thirty feet wide. What covered the floor of the chamber was a series of thick, ropy vines that were gray and fleshy, more like some sea creature’s tentacles than plant-like appendages. Even so, gray and blue-green leaves grew from the vines. The mass of slightly curled and throbbing cords emanated from a central tangle of roots, its tendrils reaching every direction.

Strangest of all was the nature of the plant’s blossoms.

Every two feet or so along the vines were bulbous pods of various sizes—some of them were as large as basketballs, others the size of softballs. All of them pulsed with lives of their own. It was clear that the strange light she’d witnessed from around the corner originated from these lambent pods. Each one ebbed with a unique color—yellow, orange, purple, red or green. Together, the pods emitted an eldritch luminescence that hovered above the tangled growth like a garish neon glow.

No sooner did Nikki begin to understand what she was seeing, than her understanding was immediately challenged. In her presence, the vines began to stir.

A small, snake-like tentacle that looked new and thin compared to the others, shot out from beneath the thick growth.

It came directly for her.

Nikki gasped. She backed away, eyes growing wide.

The wet, meaty vine lashed around her bare ankle. She choked on a scream as its cool flesh slithered around her ankle and she tried to catch her breath, tried to breathe or scream or make sense of what she was seeing now.

More of them came for her.

Two, three, four of the thin vines shot from beneath the growth through the gloom of the stone chamber like eels in ocean depths. They grabbed her, slithered up her ankles, coiled around her calves, gripped her thighs and wrapped snug against the cusp of her pubic mound.

Nikki gasped. Six or seven of the tentacles—she lost count, and as soon as she realized what was really happening, she was overcome with a light-headed, dizzy feeling—wrapped around her lower torso, and one of them even traveled a little farther up, the end of its vine probing her nipples as if to suckle them with squid-like sucker-mouths.

She managed a gurgling scream as she felt them throb, like surging hoses full of warm fluids, secreting stickiness and slithering its profane appendages all over her body. A strange euphoria surged through her. A lightness of being swept her away as she felt herself lifted from the floor. Nikki floated, suspended by the appendages, bathed in that supernatural glow as the vines tightly massaged and caressed her naked body beneath the robes in a slick tangle.

Nikki’s head lolled to the side, her hair falling loose. The feeling in her head now was a lot like a drug, but a clean drug, one that provided a numbness of physical sensation and complete emotional detachment with none of the ill effects. The ropy feeler between her legs pressed against her vulva and pushed inside, palpitating. She gasped.

Vaguely, in her drugged, half-euphoric state, she was aware of a new pod growing on the thickest vine attached to her. The pod started like a small egg-sac, and then its membranous skin stretched from the size of a marble, to that of a baseball, and finally swelled to the size of a basketball over an interminable period of time. As it grew, the sac began to glow with an internal blue light, growing bright like the others that existed across the expanse of the living thing.

The new sac glowed deep blue. Then it pulsed.

As it did so, Nikki felt some internal part of herself come unhinged. Something broke away inside of her. It was the only way she would later be able to describe it. It felt very much like something heavy but intangible broke away from her inner being and flowed out of her through those vines, to ultimately live in the glowing membranous pod before her.

No sooner did she experience this sensation than the tentacles retracted, setting her back down on the floor and releasing her. They slid away, and the blue pod of her making was dragged back into the root-like entanglement where it nested with others of various colors, illuminating the room.

When the last feeler slid from her body, Nikki fell backward. She was reeling but not sick. A little dizzy.

She lost her balance.

There were arms behind her to catch her. She recognized the doctor and Isaac, dragging her from the room.

Her head was spinning. A heavy, unremitting lethargy overtook her. She tried to speak to the others as she went by. Their figures in the torch-lit expanse seemed elongated, like black phantoms hovering above her, swaying, enwrapped in their own experiences with the thing…

“Take her to her chambers,” she heard Falkenstein say.

She was helped up the stairs by Isaac and someone else, a younger man she didn’t recognize. They ascended the curved staircase.

Just as they reached the upper level of Masterson Castle, the last thing she thought she heard before drifting into semi-unconsciousness was the furious roar of an angry tiger echoing up from the chambers they’d left behind.

Nikki turned to her bearers, but she could not voice the question. They lifted her feet and arms up onto the canopied bed. She could only collapse on her mattress. As soon as she was prone, her mind drifted deep into unconsciousness.

The last memory she had before slipping into black sleep was the sound of another roar, distant and full of rage.

7

Nikki stirred and awoke. She had no memory of dreams, just a sense that she had slept like the dead. She came out of the fog with a peculiar lucidity. Certainly nothing she would have expected after such a deep sleep.

What the hell happened to me?

She blinked her eyes. The two lanterns in her room were turned low. For a moment she didn’t remember where she was. The stone walls, ornate wooden furniture, and antique vanity seemed alien, out of place. When she looked down at the long blue robes that adorned her, everything came back to her and gooseflesh rose over her skin in revulsion. There was a tacky residue on her skin where the feelers had groped her. She remembered the things had entered her, and the memory gave birth to a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Sad fact of the matter was, she’d seen a lot of traffic in that particular area, but nothing as revolting as that.

Nikki sat up on the edge of the bed. Her robe caught and pulled up around her legs. The cool air in her chamber caressed her legs. Normally, the mere act of being naked would have aroused her, put her in the mood, but now she felt uneasy. Violated. But also…different. But she couldn’t say exactly how.

As memories of her experience in the chamber beneath the castle came back to her, she swallowed bile to keep from retching. Standing, she padded barefoot across the cold stone of the floor, and then shed her robes. They fell around her feet in a heavy pile. She stood before the dry sink and used the big bowl of water and most of the towels to wipe herself down, removing as much vestigial evidence of the slimy encounter from her skin. She inspected herself. There were neither marks nor signs of its grueling touch. An image of the glowing blue pod that had grown before her came suddenly to mind.

That was when she realized, for the first time since she’d come here, she didn’t want a drink. She wasn’t feeling any more of the physiological symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, and she wasn’t insanely obsessed with thoughts of Adam Ross’s cock deep inside her, which she had to admit she’d been thinking about on some level ever since they’d met on the ferry.

Did it work?

Nikki looked at herself in the mirror. Her visage stared back: the naked form of a woman who’d spent all of her adult life in porn, a sex addict and an alcoholic who never adequately dealt with her father’s repeated rapings when she was a little girl…all that and here she was. The great Nikki Lane. Long and lovely, deep and scarred.

She didn’t know what she felt, other than a little off center. There was certainly a hollow sense inside of her, a lightness she’d never quite felt before. She guessed only time would tell if the…thing had done anything for her.

Adam.

Nikki recalled the roar she’d heard as she’d been brought up to her room. Had that been real? Imagined? Some kind of strange aftereffect of the “treatment”?

“That would be odd,” she muttered to herself. And it was. Because she was pretty sure that sound she’d heard, not once but twice, had been the distinct roar of a tiger or some other kind of large jungle cat.

Her throat was parched. Her clothes needed washing and she longed for a real bath, not just a toweling off at the dry sink. Nikki decided to get dressed and go downstairs. As much to get something to drink and ask after her needs as to ask around about the others…and the roar.

As she emerged into the parlor, everyone stopped talking.

Dr. Falkenstein was standing next to a man near the fire. Nikki hadn’t seen the man before. Or, at least, she didn’t think so. The tall man with whom the doctor spoke was in a long coat, gloves, a scarf and a hat pulled low, completely concealing his features. He turned away as she entered. Isaac sat in a chair across the room from a young man who gripped the armrests of his chair when he saw her come in. He gasped at her appearance and looked at Miss Masterson.

Eleanor Masterson sat on the long divan, hands folded in her lap, her silver hair tied neatly into a bun at the back of her head, a knit shawl over her shoulders. She stood at Nikki’s appearance. Everyone else remained silent. The mysterious man put one foot on the hearth and poked the fire with an iron.

“My dear,” Eleanor said, ever the kind and gentle hostess. “Can I get you something to drink in the dining hall?”

Nikki looked around at the mysterious gathering.

Dr. Falkenstein nodded at her and gave a strained smile.

Isaac and the young man just stared.

“Yes,” Nikki said, giving them all the eye. Bunch of freaks. How the hell did I get talked into this? But she remembered. She remembered all too well. “Thank you. That would be nice.”

Eleanor hurried to her side and hooked her arm into Nikki’s. Nikki didn’t bother to hide her curiosity at the men’s behavior. They stared at her as she left, and she stared right back at them until Eleanor led her into a long dining hall, asked her to wait a moment, and then returned with a pitcher of iced tea.

“Please sit,” Eleanor said. She poured some tea, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass. The dining hall had a massive table with enough room for twenty people, but all the chairs were currently empty. Taking a seat near the end of the table made her feel small. Eleanor sat in the chair next to her and smiled. Nikki caught a whiff of her perfume. It smelled like a hint of flowers in spring. “Are you feeling okay? Is there anything else I can get you?”

“I was hoping for a shower, but I guess a bath would do.”

“We do have shower facilities. I have one in my chamber. If you’d like to use it, I’d be happy to share, dear.”

Nikki breathed easier. The thought of taking a bath in this place set her a little on edge.

Nikki smiled at her. “Thank you.” She took a drink and looked around the dining hall. On one wall was a giant portrait of an old man with intense eyes and a full beard. If the painting could be trusted, he’d been a handsome but fierce-looking man. Nikki set down her glass and nodded at the painting. “Someone important, I take it.”

Eleanor looked up at the painting. She smiled. “Ah yes, that would be my great-grandfather Masterson, the man I told you of when you arrived, the one responsible for the construction of this castle. A handsome man, yes?”

Nikki had to agree he was handsome. And she had a handful of questions about the nature of that thing downstairs, but first…

“How is Adam? When I was helped back up to my room, I thought I heard, well, something like an animal. He’d just gone into the room with the…thing.” Nikki took a careful drink and studied Eleanor as she answered.

“Ah. Some folks experience strange aftereffects. I’m not sure what you heard, but I assure you Mr. Ross is doing well. He’s sleeping in his room and will be ready to leave with the rest of you in a few days.” Miss Masterson poured herself a glass of tea and didn’t meet Nikki’s gaze until she was ready to set it down. Her hands shook the slightest bit. “Would you like to take that shower now?”

“That would be great. Thank you.”

They left the dining room and passed through the parlor.

All of the men were gone.

8

Later that night, showered and refreshed, Nikki lay awake in her room. The gray walls darkened with the onset of night. The musty scents of the old castle lay heavy in the room.

She heard shifting.

Part of her was deathly afraid of that sound. The image of her baby, that awful twisted purpled version of her unborn child, came immediately to mind.

She stared up at the gossamer canopy. It stirred, swaying ever so slightly. Her throat was swollen shut.

She heard the sound again.

Nikki sat up slowly. Her chest was tight, skin crawling across the back of her skull at the thought of seeing the child again.

No, she told herself, it was a hallucination, an illusion, a part of withdrawal. The onset of delirium tremens.

None of that kept her from being afraid as she sat up on the canopy bed in the castle chamber and looked around. One of the heavy curtains near the window stirred with a gust of wind beyond the window. She listened, heart thrumming, to make sure that was all she’d heard.

It was. She watched the curtain. It swayed and rustled.

She released her breath, but only the slightest bit.

She couldn’t sleep. No way.

Nikki swung her legs out from under the covers and stood. She knew what Eleanor told her about Adam, but curiosity was eating at her and she didn’t want to be alone.

She opened her chamber door. Looking out into the wide stone hall, the soft glow of lantern light gave enough illumination to see two doors down, where Adam’s room was supposed to be. There was a door across from hers set into the wall, and another not too far from hers next door. Since hers was the first room at the end of the hall this side of the stairs—she recalled him telling her his room was two doors down—she had a decent guess at which one was his.

Nikki looked both ways, paused to listen, and then stepped into the hall. The cold of the stones soaked through her socks as she went to his door and pressed her ear against it.

She couldn’t hear anything.

“Adam?” she said quietly.

From inside, she heard a faint groan. She tried the lever. The latch opened.

She pushed open the door on creaking hinges and stepped inside.

Adam’s room was dark and smelled like an animal’s cage. She could see his bed—the whole chamber’s arrangement was opposite hers—where he lay in an angle of shadow away from the door.

“Adam?” she whispered again. Her pulse quickened at the sight of his face as he turned it toward her—his eye sockets were completely dark, making his face appear like a skull. His pale skin was so white it almost shone with luminescence. As he rolled over in bed, pulling the rustling covers with him, she could see his arms seemed skinny now, his torso likewise white and emaciated. “My god, what happened?”

But as she rushed to his side, she knew what had happened. He’d been through the same thing she had. It appeared to have done him quite a bit worse than it had done her.

Near the bedside, that strange animalistic odor was stronger, a cross between the musky scent of a zoo cage and a men’s locker room. It didn’t faze her. On the bedside table was an oil lamp. She turned the knob to extend the wick and ignited it with a flaring match. The lamp glowed to life, illuminating the visage of Adam Ross.

The man that lay on the bed bore scant resemblance to the man she’d inwardly swooned for but treated so coldly on the ferry yesterday. His facial features were gaunt, only vaguely recognizable as those of the man she’d seen downstairs just hours ago. His eyes were dilated, skin pale and greasy with sweat, eyes swallowed up in purpled sockets. Dark hair fell in wet locks over his forehead. He’d pulled the covers down to expose his torso. His arms were noticeably thinner, like those of an old man, and his torso had lost all definition. She could see his rib cage.

On the dry sink was a large porcelain bowl of water and a pile of clean towels. She brought them all to the bedside, moving the lantern so she could sit on the edge of his bed and reach him.

“Nikki,” he gasped. “What…what are you doing?”

“You look like shit,” she whispered.

He tried to laugh and it came out as a cough. “And I feel worse.”

She wrung cool water out of a towel and placed it on his forehead. His face relaxed, eyes closed for just a moment as he breathed with relief.

Nikki’s robe had slipped open. Her nightgown was short and most of her bare leg was folded up on the edge of the bed near him. She noticed it and recognized immediately the absence of her urge to be touched, to take things further. Had she really been cured by her experience downstairs? Or was the fact that Adam looked like a boiled skeleton not doing anything for her? More evidence the “treatment” may have been a success was her complete absence of a desire to drink. It just wasn’t there. So if it worked for her…

Then what the hell happened to him?

Adam opened his eyes and looked up at her gratefully. He tried to sit up. She helped prop some pillows behind him so he could be in a better position. He caught sight of her leg. Years of promiscuity meant she failed to cover up, and she supposed he might have caught sight of a good bit more than that. She didn’t bother to adjust.

“Hell of a time to be stripped of my masculinity,” Adam said. His voice was weak, but he managed a smile.

“If that’s a pick-up line, it’s the first time I’ve heard that one.”

“I suppose you’ve heard a lot of them.”

“You could say that.”

He tried to sit up farther, pushing himself up on his arms. Adam winced with pain, a small cry of agony coming unbidden from between his lips. He cursed.

“Easy now,” she said.

Adam lay back, at rest. The lantern glowed over his features. He took the cool cloth from her. Their fingers brushed in passing. She folded her hands in her lap and pulled the flap of robe over her leg. There wasn’t any sense tormenting the man. He wasn’t in any shape for anything, even if she had been in the mood.

“What do you mean ‘stripped of masculinity’ anyway? What the hell happened to you down there? Last I remember, I was being carried upstairs, then I heard…something.”

“Yes,” he went on quietly. “That damned old Lakota told me not to come. I guess he was right.” Adam blotted his forehead again. His eyes went to the glowing lamp on his nightstand. Nikki thought she’d never seen a man whose eyes looked truly haunted until now. Dilated as they were, she could almost see the depth inside him, churning with conflict and loss.

“The who?”

“The Oglala Lakota chief, White Elk. Before I came here, I tried everything to rid myself of my family’s bane. My journey led me to the Black Hills of South Dakota as a last-ditch effort. They told me I could not be cured, that some men were given to be beasts.” Adam’s grim smile frightened her. He looked sick now, almost crazed. “I saw it as a curse, but he insisted the Great Spirit bestowed it upon me as a gift, and it was an inseparable part of me.”

“What are you saying? I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“I don’t think you’d have believed me yesterday if I told you. But now that we’ve both seen that thing in the catacombs of the castle, I suppose some things seem less strange by comparison.”

“You don’t have to talk about it. You were kind enough to me yesterday…I was just worried about you,” she said quietly. She reached for his hand in a gesture of support. It was tacky with sweat. He squeezed her hand lightly, perhaps with all the strength he had at the moment, then pulled it away.

“Tell me about you.”

She swallowed, then took a deep breath.

“Nikki Lane. Washed-up adult film star, sex addict, alcoholic, child abuse survivor—although not many people would say what I was doing qualified as surviving.” She didn’t want to talk about her. “Fair enough?”

Adam’s laugh turned into a cough. “Rare. A woman of few words.”

“Your turn.”

“Adam Radoslava by birth, changed my name to Adam Ross as soon as I was legally able. Descendent of Anika Branislava of Serbia. Our family came to the U.S. in the late 1700s, and brought with them a family curse, a medieval Satanic bargain that cursed our ancestors centuries ago…yes, I know it sounds insane. I thought it was bullshit myself, until I hit puberty. And woke up one morning in bed, naked, shredded blankets stained with blood.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am…part animal.” He gave her a smile as awkward as the moment. “And I’m not saying that to try and impress you.” His levity was forced and she sensed that, impossible as it seemed, he was telling the truth. Or at least what he believed to be the truth.

“What kind of animal?”

“Black leopard.” Adam smiled wanly. “Or, I used to be. Until I stepped downstairs and that thing had its way with me.” He gave a harsh bitter laugh. It sounded like the edge of madness. “It certainly took from me my evils, did it not?” Adam held his stick-like arms out like a scarecrow in the bed. “Left a better man?”

“I’m sorry, I still don’t get it,” Nikki said carefully. Actually, she thought she did get it, but she didn’t want to say it aloud because it sounded absolutely ludicrous. As quickly as she’d opened up to the possibility he was telling her the truth, just as quickly she began to think she was right to doubt this man from the beginning. If he believed what he was saying was true, he might be totally crazy. “You mean you were some kind of…?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I am—was—a Were-cat. A therianthrope, a shapeshifter.” He was still smiling and she didn’t like the look of it. Once again, this whole thing had taken a bad turn. Surrounded by the castle, still able to summon the memory of those awful tentacles wrapped around her bare flesh, her skin crawled. But, true to what Adam suggested, it was the memory of the thing downstairs that made her pause to consider what he was saying might be true.

“That’s why I came here,” he said, voice dropping to a whisper. He studied his hands. His fingers were long and spindly in his lap. He dropped the rag she’d given him and stared down at it, desolation in his eyes. “I wanted it to end. To kill the evil inside me.” Looking up suddenly, he met her wide eyes. “But it seems that’s all I was, because now that it’s gone, this”—he gestured at his sallow frame—“is all that’s left of me.”

Nikki’s trepidation melted away at his show of anguish. She’d seen men act all manner of ways and she liked to think she knew a fake when she saw one. Despite what he was saying, he was convinced of it himself. Either way, there was no disputing something had happened to him. Something profound. Something awful.

“The Lakota said it was a part of me. That it was a blessing to have such a gift, to be able to become such a magnificent creature when the moon shone down on the Earth. He said that it represented my masculinity and without it I would be nothing but a shell.” He gave another harsh laugh that sounded on the verge of a scream. “He never woke up with a severed arm in bed next to him, gnawed to the bone. But he was right about one part, it seems.”

Nikki didn’t know what to say. She made no move to get up and leave, but she didn’t move closer to him either. Although she sensed that he needed some kind of comfort, she wasn’t sure she could give it.

“So, what happened to you downstairs? The sounds I heard, the roaring…I thought it was a lion.”

He looked at her bleakly.

“That tentacled creature downstairs extracted the ‘evil’ from me, just like it did you and presumably everyone else. Just like they said it would. But I’m guessing they never had a case like mine. That evil came out of me, all right. It came out whole and it got away. I think it killed one of the others. I can’t be sure.”

His face twisted into a pained, fierce look. Whether the anger was directed at himself, or the situation, or the devil that made him like this, she couldn’t be sure, but it was a pure kind of fury and she could feel its heat. “I would go after it myself, even take it back into me and end it all, if only I weren’t left this…shell of a man.”

Nikki frowned. “You sound like you’re admitting defeat.”

Adam’s tragic eyes met hers and she stared at him straight on.

“So that’s it then,” she said. “The ‘evil’ that left you was all you had left of your balls, and you’re going to roll over and call it a day.”

Adam stared at her. He raised one brow in amusement and then barked a sick laugh that left him coughing again. “You’re quite the piece of work.”

“Usually people say that and don’t mean it as a compliment.”

“I’m not sure I do either.”

Nikki stood. “I almost gave up once. Almost let it all slip away.” She was surprised at the sudden emotion that welled up in her. “But I decided I wasn’t a quitter. I didn’t take you for one either.”

Outside Adam’s room, they heard yelling. Footsteps hurried beyond the door. A man screamed, stark with horror.

Then came a monstrous feline roar.

Nikki stiffened at the sound. Gooseflesh rose over her skin. She stood rigid, the urge to run unheeded only because there was nowhere to go. She looked at Adam Ross.

He reached up and folded back the covers. He was naked and emaciated. He stood, pulling himself up by the bedpost. Nikki caught her breath so she wouldn’t make an audible gasp. Between his legs where she expected to see his penis was a soft-skinned nub instead, little more than a pink nipple, and no visible testicles.

His legs were awful, twisted things. They were bowed and hocked like those of a cat…but not entirely feline, either. A terrible mix between human legs and those of a leopard, the bones folded and jagged, with thin, patchy layers of black hair.

Nikki realized she had clasped her hand over her mouth. She pulled it away now, swallowing the hurt in her throat at the sight of Adam’s mutant lower half. Adam just balanced against the bedpost and looked at the back of the banded wooden door.

“It’s loose,” he said.

9

The screams in the hallway escalated from terror to pain. A man’s voice rose urgently in response to the commotion, then a young woman shrieked. A door slammed.

Nikki’s breathing was shallow and her mouth was dry. Her pulse redlined.

Adam limped across his chamber to the dresser and pulled out clothes. He managed to get them halfway on, over his strange human-cat legs, but struggled to complete the task because they didn’t bend quite right. He fell backward, landing with a grunt on the stone floor. Nikki went to him and helped him pull on his pants, careful not to stare at the nub where his penis should have been. She felt him watching her as she did so. She looked up and met his eyes. Then she stood and held out her hands to help him up. He took them, obviously uncomfortable with this…with everything he’d caused, and what he’d become.

“Thank you,” he said. Going purposefully to the dresser, he removed his tiger’s eye amulet from the top drawer. She remembered seeing it that first night on the ferry, hanging around his neck. Now it dangled from his hand, glinting in the soft lantern light.

“This may help,” he said, breathing heavy from his recent exertion.

“Look,” she said, gripping his arm. “I’m sorry for what I said. You’re in no shape to have any part of this.”

“No, you were right. I have to face this. I set it free on these poor people who intended to help me. I won’t let them die in vain. It must end here.”

He went to his chamber door and pulled. Nikki reached quickly to stop him but it was too late. The door was open.

Raising the tiger’s eye amulet, Adam forged unsteadily into the hall. The amulet twirled in the air, catching glints of light. At just the right angle, the amulet flashed in the corridor and elicited a defiant roar from the black leopard.

Nikki clutched the door of Adam’s room, using it as a shield. She peered around the edge. The sleek creature was crouched in the shadows at the end of the wide stone passageway. One of the fellow “patients” of the castle, the goth girl named Raven, stood with her back pressed against her door, staring down the corridor in disbelief.

In the gathering darkness, all they could see was a silhouette of the creature as it lifted its head from a gory pile of carnage. The savaged body was that of the older man, Ben, with the tobacco-stained mustache. Lying on the floor, touched by the edge of the nearest lantern’s glow, his head was turned at an impossible angle, his eyes wide but flat with death. His white beard and mustache were streaked with blood. One arm lay sprawled, but his torso was a wet pile of torn flesh and entrails.

The black creature reared up from its kill. At first, the parts of the creature that emerged from the blackness looked very much like a huge cat, a savage creature of the wild. But then its head kept rising. Instead of rising to stand on all fours, it moved to stand awkwardly erect.

It lurched into the dim light.

The upper body of the thing was indeed a panther, or sleek black leopard, but its lower half was mostly that of a man. The black fur of the body’s upper half thinned at the pelvis. The long, thick penis of a man hung between twisted human legs. The bare feet on which it balanced were large and soaked with blood as it stepped through the grisly remnants.

The bizarre creature approached. Its upper arms pawed the air, shredded flesh dangling from blood-soaked claws. The feline eyes glinted, catching an inner red glow that immediately reminded Nikki of when she’d seen that same look in Adam’s eyes last night.

The man-leopard continued to come closer, moving unsteadily through the hall. A purring growl vibrated with menace in its chest.

Across the corridor, Raven pressed even harder against the door, obviously wishing she could somehow melt into it and become invisible. Her eyes were ivory white and wide with terror. Raven looked across at Nikki, who still held tightly to the edge of Adam’s chamber door, watching him as he went to meet the creature, unstable on his own mutated legs.

“Look!” he yelled harshly, brandishing the amulet. “The symbol of our ancestors. You are me…I am you! Come now, beast, and let us be one again! End this pointless killing. We will hunt again with purpose, live as we once did.”

The black leopard paused and cocked its massive feline head. It halted in its slow gait. When they were only ten yards away from each other, the aberrant creature roared. The sound filled the corridor with harsh vibrations. The sound lowered into a growl, settling into that menacing purr, then rose again into a lionic roar. They could see its glistening fangs, long and sharp.

Beneath her fear, Nikki reasoned that the strange mix of sounds coming from the beast sounded almost as if it were trying to communicate verbally, but had no vocal cords capable of human speech.

“Come,” Adam said to it. He stepped carefully toward his counter-half.

As he neared the savage creature, Nikki took a quick intake of breath and hissed quietly, “Adam, stop!”

Adam furiously shushed her warning.

“That’s it,” he continued. “Come now, let us be joined again.”

Behind the leopard creature, someone hurried up the spiral staircase and surged into the distant end of the corridor. The new figure paused at the pile of carnage. Then, silhouetted by the light that glowed from downstairs, the figure raised a rifle to its shoulder and aimed at the shambling man-leopard.

They understood what was happening too late.

Adam focused on communicating with his lost half, but Nikki and Raven saw it all too well.

It was Isaac who’d come up the stairs and saw Ben’s mutilated body.

Isaac aimed at the creature and fired.

“No!” Nikki yelled, as much afraid of him disrupting the communication that was taking place as she was of Isaac missing the creature and gunning down Adam with a rain of lead.

The rifle blast was like cannon fire in the stone corridor.

The barrel flashed. The bullet ripped through its shoulder, rocking the upright leopard creature back on its haunches. It roared as its body folded and went down on all fours. It turned toward Isaac and loped like a primate with its unaccustomed back legs. Isaac had just enough time to jump from its path before it barreled past him and ran down the staircase to the castle’s main floor.

Isaac pressed against the wall, trying to breathe.

Adam was enraged.

“You fool! Couldn’t you see what I was doing? Did you see—?”

“He…i-it…killed Madsen!” There were tears in Isaac’s eyes, glistening in the gloom. The edge in his voice said he was sodden with grief, and instantly Adam’s anger abated. Madsen must have been the young man who helped Isaac around the castle, Nikki thought. The one who’d helped them get settled and carried her bags.

Adam leaned against the wall. Nikki went to him, touching his shoulders. Adam stiffened against her touch. She sensed his exhaustion.

Behind them, Raven didn’t move from her place in the doorway until now. She stepped out, tentatively joining the group at the top of the stairs.

They looked down on all that remained of Ben-with-the-tobacco-stained-mustache’s body. There wasn’t much. His throat was ripped in wide gashes. His abdomen had been torn open, his guts strewn in a widening pool of blood.

They heard the creature’s anguished yowl from somewhere deep in the castle keep.

Adam closed his eyes, as if in pain.

10

Later that night they gathered in the grand library of Masterson Castle. It was a high-walled affair lined with mahogany shelves packed with books, some new, most very old. A couple of bay-window alcoves with tall panes looked out on the sea, long purple velvet drapes hanging on each side. An oval table was in the middle of the room. A stack of old books that had gathered dust sat on one end of the table. In two corners of the room were smaller study tables, lamps on them, plush chairs set to each side. In two of these chairs sat a bleak Eleanor Masterson and a grim but determined-looking Dr. Falkenstein. Isaac paced across the room, never straying far from his shotgun. Adam and Nikki sat in chairs near the giant oval table. The girl Raven leaned against the edge of the table nearby. Nikki noticed the faintest traces of needle tracks up and down her arms.

“So what the hell are we waiting for?” Raven snapped.

The huge, banded-oak doors to the library were suddenly pushed open from the other side.

“Them,” Dr. Falkenstein said, in delayed answer to Raven’s question.

Five men of various heights came into the room. At least, Nikki guessed they were men based on their general build and statures; she could not see their features. Each of the mystery men wore cloaks with deep cowls pulled over their faces. There was a distinct leader, who came in first. She couldn’t be sure, but she believed he was the same man she’d seen earlier talking to Dr. Falkenstein, hiding his face with a high collar and low, wide-brimmed hat instead of a hooded cowl, as he did now.

The leader of the cabal drifted like a wraith to an aisle of books near Dr. Falkenstein.

The doctor hung his head—beads of sweat shone on his bald pate. He dabbed it with a handkerchief. His hand trembled as he did so.

Three of the four remaining hooded figures stood near the door. The last one of them sat heavily in a nearby chair, cowl still hiding his features. He had a peculiar scent about him.

Nikki looked across the table at Adam. They exchanged looks that said plenty. The arrival of the faceless figures didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

“Dr. Falkenstein,” the lead figure said. The voice was deep, elderly, but strangely layered, almost as if two people were talking at once. “What has happened here?”

Falkenstein dabbed his head with the handkerchief again and gave a nervous grin.

“Well, it appears the experiment with Mr. Ross, the therianthrope”—he nodded across the room at Adam Ross—“didn’t go as planned. We have a problem, I’m afraid.” Falkenstein’s grin faltered.

The faceless figure turned and acknowledged the others in the room for the first time. He looked at each of them closely, his unseen eyes lingering on Adam Ross a little longer than the others.

“When the siphon engaged Mr. Ross, it began to draw out his ailments. Unfortunately, the spiritual ailments could not be entirely separated from the essence. Apparently it was too closely knit with the physical form to separate as energy—”

“Please omit the speculation.”

“Sorry, of course…well, when the siphon attached its appendages to Mr. Ross, the pod formed, but I’ve never seen anything like…” The cowled man shifted. Nikki heard a menacing grunt of impatience from the imposing figure. “Anyway, instead of simply gathering the ‘bad’ energy as they usually do, the pod somehow formed into the extracted beast, which then tore wildly from the vine and escaped. Mr. Ross collapsed and we rushed in to retrieve him. That was when the creature attacked Marie and slipped out into the hall…” Falkenstein’s voice hitched, choked with emotion. Nikki had to wonder if Marie had been a close acquaintance of his.

As the doctor was overcome with grief, the massive figure turned to everyone in the room. He walked toward Adam, stood before him, staring down. Nikki closely watched the darkness in the cowl. She thought she could make out some facial features but couldn’t be sure. In addition to that layered voice, something else seemed strange. The features too dark to make out in detail, and yet something struck her as entirely wrong about them. The big man turned toward her and practically snarled. It was the first time any man other than her father had ever scared her with such a simple gesture. He loomed over her, and the eight-year-old child in her cowered in fear.

The figure turned back to Adam.

Adam stared up at him without any discernable emotion.

The big man finally spoke again.

“We’ll have to capture the beast. Then you and the beast both must return to the siphon vines. It’s your only chance for survival. You”—he looked at Nikki and Raven—“all of you—and the beast are now tied to the thing below. We’ve called it ‘the siphon’ for many years, for lack of a more fitting term. Of course you all know now it’s much more than that.”

Raven, the young goth, was sassy. Or foolish. In either case, the encounter with the beast upstairs emboldened her where the robed men were concerned. Even Nikki was surprised by the way Raven spoke to the strange man that had addressed them.

“So, the siphon,” she said, an edge in her voice at the term, “a.k.a. that tentacled thing in the basement, drank our bad energy.”

The tall man changed his focus to her and remained impassive, unresponsive.

“It takes out all our bad stuff—our addictions and our hate and everything else that’s eating us and every other sorry fucker who’s wandered through here since the beginning of time—and it stores it or feeds on it or something? Transfers it to those pods?”

“More or less,” Doctor Falkenstein said quietly from across the room. He was still distracted by his misery, staring bleakly at the floor and dabbing himself with the handkerchief.

“So, if the plant keeps the bad stuff, wouldn’t killing the plant also kill this…thing that came from Adam here?”

The men in cloaks visibly bristled at the suggestion of killing the tentacled plant creature. The tall man spoke from the darkness of his hood. “If you kill the siphon, you all could become seriously ill, or even die.”

Raven’s jaw dropped just the slightest bit. “What the fuck for?”

Nikki raised her eyebrow at the kid. She had spunk, that’s for sure, but not one iota of tact. Still, Raven was at least managing to extract some information from the cloud of mysteries. She silently cheered her on.

“You don’t think”—the voice of the cowled man was thick with irritation—“that you just have your energies extracted and go on unburdened by your sins, do you? There is a price, young woman. There is always a price.” The tall man paused and now Nikki thought she sensed a grin. Over the musty smells of moldy books and wet stone, Nikki caught a whiff of something foul and thought it might be his breath. “There is a life force inside each of you comprised of your darker passions. That life force dwells in your souls and has to exist in some form on this plane for you to continue to exist on Earth. Energy never disappears, it only changes form. And this particular kind of energy—the energy that all of you came here to leave behind—is an intrinsic part of your being. Yes, you leave here with it drained from your corporeal bodies, unburdened by it in your day-to-day lives, but it continues to exist, continues to be tied to your spiritual energies. It is only contained by the siphon, so that none of you may continue to suffer from it in your physical forms.”

Raven’s black eyebrows brunched in concern. Her jaw dropped slightly at an obvious loss for understanding. “So, just cut off his vine,” Raven insisted. “The one that birthed that thing.”

“You cannot kill one part without killing the whole.”

Nikki thought she was grasping the concept, and the realization was sinking its teeth into her in a grim and awful way.

“So,” Nikki said, “what you’re saying is, if the plant is destroyed, then parts of us—the parts of us that it drank—are destroyed as well. And even though the siphon absorbed these ‘darker passions,’ all this stuff that made us broken people, they remain critical parts of our life force that ultimately make us tick. Is that about right?”

The leader’s nod of assent was barely perceptible. He looked at Nikki, his perceived stare lingering longer than she would have liked.

“Destroying the siphon is not an option,” he said. “Destroy the siphon, and you, and everyone else who’s ever been helped by it, run the risk of dying as well.”

Nikki stared into the darkness of the man’s cowl. She swallowed her fear, held the trembling eight-year-old deep inside her in-check, and gave the man her hardest, most determined gaze. She knew from experience it was a damned sexy look that won her fans in every city in the nation, but this man, if a man he was, remained unmoved.

What are you hiding under there? she thought. And if you can’t even show your face, how much can you be trusted?

The tall man turned away.

“We must capture the therianthrope’s manifestation,” the leader said to the other robed men. They nodded their assent. The man who’d been seated now stood. Bones cracked in his joints as he moved. The leader turned back to Adam one last time. “If we can capture the beast, you both must go back down with the siphon. Naturally, there is no guarantee of your survival, but going back down, to attempt to be rejoined, is your best chance.”

Adam nodded as if deferring to royalty.

“I understand.”

The robed man nodded to the others. All five of them headed toward the door of the library, headed out in search of the beast.

“Grandfather,” Eleanor Masterson suddenly said. “Can we help?”

Grandfather? Nikki thought. Looking across the library at the old woman, Nikki did some quick math. If Eleanor was over seventy—and surely she was—that would make her grandfather about one hundred and twenty years old or more. And looking pretty damned stalwart for that.

“Yes,” the tall man with the strange voice said. “You can keep everyone in their rooms, safe behind closed doors.”

Eleanor nodded as the group of men left the room. After they were gone, bleak silence settled over the library.

Raven said what Nikki was thinking.

“‘Grandfather’? How is that even possible?”

“Actually,” the kindhearted Eleanor said, “He’s my great-grandfather, the man who discovered the siphon and built this castle to protect it. He’s the reason you’re all here. The reason so many have been helped over the years.” She smiled, proud of the legacy, but devastated at the recent turn of events. Disappointment rimmed her eyes with tears she refused to shed. “He’s a good man,” she told them. “He is the driving force behind the Midnight Order.” She looked at each of them earnestly. “They handpicked each of you to be here, though I don’t expect you to understand how or why.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. He was hunched over, cold in his sickly frame. Nikki watched Isaac pause in his pacing, going to the windows to look out at the rushing tide, white caps of waves glowing with moonlight.

“They’re good men,” she said, standing with obvious difficulty, with obvious pain, both physical and emotional. “Isaac.”

Isaac came to her and took her arm, providing support.

“Your rooms are probably safest for now.”

Nikki thought Adam couldn’t be anything more than full of dread, no matter how it went, either way.

The old woman left in the wake of the five mysterious men.

Dr. Falkenstein stayed behind in the library, staring grimly at the floor.

11

Isaac left the castle, headed out into the night, presumably to help the men set traps and hunt for the creature that had escaped the siphon. Nikki passed him on his way out as she helped Adam into the parlor and up the long, curved flight of stairs to his room.

Before they made it all the way up the stairs, Raven ran to catch up with them. She grabbed Nikki by the elbow, looked around nervously, and said quietly, “Listen, they’re not telling us the whole truth here—that leopard thing didn’t kill Marie.”

Nikki looked at Adam.

“What?”

“Shh,” she said. “That leopard beast didn’t kill Marie, but that tentacled fucking nightmare in the catacombs sure did. After the commotion, one of those vines licked right out, ripped into her throat, drank her blood, and left her a drained husk. Right there. Dropped her to the stone floor.”

Nikki was stunned silent. Adam looked into the young woman’s eyes with dark intensity.

“They carried her body out quick,” Raven said. “They thought I was too out of it to notice anything, but I saw them later, carrying her dead body around the edge of the castle keep. They threw her on a pile of other corpses in some kind of makeshift graveyard out back, on the mountain side of the island.”

“Behind the castle?” Nikki whispered.

Raven nodded, serious as the grave. “Take a look. You can probably see it from your window on that side of the tower,” she whispered.

They had stopped on the stairs that curved around the high wall of the open parlor. They suddenly looked down. Eleanor was standing below in the middle of the parlor, staring up at them.

Raven let go of Nikki’s elbow, quickly changed her demeanor, and then waved down at Eleanor, claiming she was starving as she hurried down the stairs.

“Can I get you something to eat, dear?” they heard Eleanor say.

“That would be awesome,” Raven said. She took a last glance up at them before following Eleanor into the kitchen.

They went the rest of the way upstairs. In his room, Adam reclined on the pillows of his bed, staring at the wall.

Nikki sat on the bed next to him.

“Wouldn’t you prefer your own room to the company of a condemned man?” Adam asked. She looked at him, a little offended that he’d be so gloomy, and then realized he had a sideways grin on his face.

“You’ve got a strange sense of humor, Adam Ross.”

“And you’ve got a hell of a knack for choosing friends, Nikki Lane.”

“Not a huge selection around here, so you’ll have to do, sweetheart.”

“I’m not sure I take that as a compliment.”

“I’m not sure I meant it as one.” Even with the oppression of the night’s events, they gave each other a smile. She was relieved to see him lighten up a bit, if only for a moment.

She stood and walked around the end of his bed, going to the window of his chamber. The cove of the small island lay below, waves crashing against its rocky shores. Trees loomed in black silhouettes against the purple night. Stars spattered the skies. She looked down on the terrain below the castle, wondering if the beast was out there or still in here with them. Then she looked toward the mountain side of the island. There, in a rocky alcove cleared of trees, she saw fifteen or sixteen piles of rock that looked like cairns.

“Do you see it?” he said.

“I think so. It looks like rock-piled graves.” Nikki looked closer. Was that a fresh body at the edge of moonlight, awaiting burial? “My god, I think she’s right.”

“The news gets better and better around here.”

Nikki looked away from the gathering of graves, out to sea.

“You never did tell me much about yourself,” Adam said.

“I told you enough. More than I should have.” Nikki stayed at the window.

“I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing one talks about in a situation like this. Hell of a place to get to know one another.” He emitted a hissing laugh and broke into a coughing fit. She turned to help, but he held up a hand to quell her ministrations. She sat again at the end of his bed, a strange mixture of fascination and revulsion astir within her. She couldn’t say if her revulsion was for the emasculated Adam Ross, or from the deeply ominous realization that all of them had willingly lined up to let some organism drink critical life force from their souls. No doubt a combination of both.

She did know that the fascination she had was for Adam Ross, the man, or whatever he’d been, when he arrived here with her. How did one live such a life? And, if she could believe the amazing story of how he became what he claimed to have been (and she did—how could she not, given what they had seen?), then there were no longer any barriers to her speculating even further. Nothing was normal on this island.

When Adam recovered, he looked at her and said, “I assume you have some thoughts about tonight’s revelations.”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course, but I’d be interested to hear your side of it. Better that you talk than me…I’m feeling a bit weak.” He pressed his lips together and blinked his sunken eyes at her, reclining on a stack of pillows.

“I’ll go all the way out on a limb here,” Nikki said, “and say that I think the old men of the Midnight Order are lying. They definitely don’t want us to destroy that thing downstairs, but not for the reasons they gave us. I think they need it.”

“Need it?”

“I think they’re living off it.”

Adam raised one eyebrow, intrigued, but he didn’t voice his thoughts.

“I think—and this sounds crazy, but I swear it’s all just clicked together in my head like this.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think they’re living off the siphon. I think its powers go both ways. It must, otherwise they wouldn’t have suggested that you go back downstairs with the siphon and your beast-half. They clearly think it can make you whole again, using what it originally took from you and replacing it.”

Adam cleared his throat. She pretended not to notice the smear of blood on the handkerchief he used to wipe his mouth. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “They appear to believe there’s a chance of reuniting me with my better half.” A bitter smile. “Or, they just hope to get us both in one place, lock us in, kill us both, and say it was all a failure.”

“Maybe.” Nikki stood again, starting to pace. “But I don’t think so, Adam. I think that thing, that siphon, gives and takes. You heard Eleanor say that we were all handpicked to come to the island. I thought I was referred by a friend, but maybe they used her to get me here. Maybe they use their network of people they’ve ‘helped’ to find other, more successful, and strong-willed people, to bring to the island. Then they let that siphon downstairs suck their energies into pods and…”

Adam waited. Nikki was on the verge of protesting her own thought, but damn it, she knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was on the right track because it made sense. It was the only thing that made sense here, crazy through it seemed.

“Adam, I think those men of the solemn Midnight Order are using us. That they’ve used everyone who ever came here. Luring strong-willed people with problems here with the idea of helping them get over their shortcomings by simply withdrawing these ‘darker passions’ as he said, from their person. But really”—she paced back and forth at the end of the bed—“it’s like a transfusion.” She stopped near the window, illuminated by the moon. She looked at Adam for a sanity check, to see if maybe she’d really just gone around the bend and kept on going.

No. He was with her. He’d even sat up in the bed, a new glimmer in his eye as her excitement over a possible explanation for everything ignited his own passion for her idea.

“Of course,” he said, in an incredulous whisper. “If it’s really true, the irony of it makes it more fascinating…that it is the broken parts of us, the monsters within us, from which they draw their strength. For surely, without those parts of us inside, flawed though they were, we never would have become as successful as we were. A concept Sigmund Freud would have appreciated to no end. As if those parts of us that were killing us were unconscious forces equally responsible for carrying us to higher levels of success. Using that ‘siphon’ creature below, they’re drawing out our id, where our most powerful instinctual drives live, our sexual desires, our primal aggressions. The demons, if you’ll excuse the expression, by which we’re driven.”

Nikki looked at him, heart pounding. He’d taken her thought and infused it with reason. Given it air to breathe and really come alive. She didn’t remember any psychology from high school, but what he was saying made sense. A twisted, dark kind of sense. If the siphon could really transfuse the very life forces between humans...

“My god, Adam. Those men. Those old men, all this time, they’ve been living off us, and people like us.”

And now the deep hoods and cowls to hide their faces made sense, too. She felt her vague emptiness inside like a vacuum, that missing part of her yawning like a chasm. Perhaps it was just a sensation brought on by the thought of her very essence having been captured by others for some nefarious purpose, but she sensed a palpable emptiness within, nevertheless. Nikki shuddered.

The stone walls of the room seemed grimmer now, no longer the quaint surroundings of a step back in time, but the walls of a dungeon. The high ceiling of the room was deep with shadow, and she looked up, almost expecting to see something lurking there above, perched on the wooden beam, listening.

Adam pushed himself to a sitting position. Then he used both hands to stand. He swayed. She stepped quickly to his side but he caught himself on the corner bedpost and waved her back.

“Enough,” he snapped at her, then softened. “Thank you, but I have to do this on my own.”

“What?”

“Destroy it.”

“Not alone, you won’t. You can’t.”

“Because I’m not strong enough?” He gave her that painful smile. She noticed blood on his lips. When he coughed, more blood came up. “We can’t allow these men, these…id-drinking energy vampires, or whatever they are, to continue this way. I wouldn’t say, for all I was led to believe about this arrangement, that I’m much better off than when I arrived. Would you?”

Nikki contemplated that vacant feeling inside her. She had to agree.

“No,” he said. “And I’m guessing all those people down in that grove of shallow graves would concur.”

She clasped his arm gently, just firm enough to hold him in place, ready to catch him if he fell. “Aren’t you afraid that we might die, after all? There’s a chance old Great-Grandpa Masterson was telling the truth and we’re all connected to the thing. That if it dies, we all die.”

“Do you believe that?” he asked her.

Nikki looked at him, searched his eyes.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you hit the nail on the head and they were lying to protect their fountain of youth.” Adam pulled his arm from her grip, but held her hand for just a moment. She felt his cold fingers, his bones in loose skin. He gripped her ever so slightly. “I wish I’d known you before this.”

Nikki’s eyes filled with tears.

“No, you don’t.”

He smiled. “I have to do this. If for no other reason than to prove to myself that the only part of me that ever drove me to do anything worthwhile is not the same part of me that’s killed these people tonight and now roams the halls of the castle a murderous beast. I am still a man worth living…and I must tame my own beast.”

“Oh, for Christsake, don’t get all poetic. Screw fighting that creature. Let’s take some of those kerosene lanterns down to the lower chamber, douse that fucking tentacled thing, burn it to smoking embers, and be done with it.”

Adam Ross blinked at her. For a just minute, she thought he’d begun wheezing to death but it turned out he was laughing.

“Yeah, it’s a laugh a minute around here,” Nikki muttered, going to the nightstand and grabbing the oil lamp. There was also a lit kerosene lantern on the dresser. She thought for a moment about gathering more kerosene into the water basin on the dry sink and carrying that, but she wasn’t sure how much time they’d have.

As it turned out, they didn’t have long at all.

Adam took the other flat-wick kerosene lantern from atop the dresser and went to the door. They moved out into the dark hallway, thick with the scents of musty rooms and damp rock. They made their way to the end of the corridor, moving as swiftly as they could with Adam’s weak and twisted legs. Nikki was careful not to leave him behind as he limped along, the lamp swaying by his side. Nikki’s eyes went to Raven’s chamber door. She wondered if the girl was in there, not sure she could leave her behind to fend for herself with a clear conscience if the place was going to come down; she was unsure how much, if any, impact starting a fire in the catacombs would have on the rest of the structure.

Nikki and Adam followed the stairs down along the contour of the inner tower wall. She let him take the lead, at his insistence, though it made her nervous. One side of the staircase was open, without rails. The massive height was intimidating. As they descended, they reached a point at which they could see down into the arched entry hall of the castle.

Adam gasped. Nikki stopped short behind him.

One of the huge front doors of the castle stood open. The night loomed beyond. They could hear the roar of the surf, could smell the salty, crisp scent of the cold ocean air.

Upon the red rug that lined the entryway lay the twisted body of Isaac. Blood gleamed in the wan light of the faux torches on the wall. The old man had one leg torn off. His throat was ripped out and his face was eaten away.

As they came down the last few steps, they could also see into the library. The body of Dr. Falkenstein was sprawled over a broken chair amongst a pile of spilled books. His entrails were strewn across that section of the room, glistening in the dying firelight from the hearth.

Nikki heard a terrible, animalistic groan. At first her heart clenched because she thought the beast had found them, but she realized the sound was coming from Adam.

A deep, resounding purr vibrated the air, echoing up to the rafters in the great hall.

The beast came out of the library. It roared, giant fangs glistening in the light.

12

Nikki kept her eyes on the creature and backed into the parlor, across the hall from the library. She hissed at Adam to follow her, but he was bent on facing down the beast.

She would have to get around the man-leopard somehow. If she was going to carry out their plan, she had to wait until it came closer, and then run around it to the stairs that led down to the catacombs. For now, this was the only safe place for retreat.

Her heel stubbed against something heavy but resilient.

She looked down quickly.

The whites of Raven’s eyes struck her first. Then jet-black hair. Then the stark contrast of the scarlet splashes of her blood across the powder-white skin of her face.

Like Isaac, Raven’s throat had also been torn out. Both arms gnawed to the bone. Her thigh and crotch had been eaten down to the bone and pubis.

Nikki felt her gorge rise. It came violently. As the lurching thing approached from the castle’s main hall, she felt herself wither in the face of this new grotesquery. Making matters worse, she could see that the kitchen door stood partially open. A limp elderly hand was propped against the jamb.

Oh God, she thought, not Eleanor Masterson, please not her.

She knew if everyone else was dead, there was a damn good chance Eleanor was, too. She felt a surprising amount of grief at the prospect of the elderly woman’s death, but instead of bringing her to her knees, it strengthened her resolve and gave her the will to continue on, focused on their goal.

Adam stayed between her and the beast. His other half.

The leopard-thing came into the parlor, quietly padding the stone with twisted feet wet with blood. Those mostly human back legs made for awkward balance. Its penis swayed between its legs, long feline tail swishing in the air. It lowered its head, ears back, neck muscles rippling beneath the sheen of black fur. It roared at them, wicked fangs gleaming.

“Adam…” She reached forward and grasped his shoulder.

He pulled away, balancing precariously on his own feeble, malformed legs. His eyes were focused on the beast.

“Go downstairs and burn the siphon.”

“Not without you—”

“Go!”

The leopard-beast lunged forward. It raised a huge paw, extending blood-crusted claws. Adam reached up to catch the descending limb before it flayed him. The impact of the swipe knocked him to his crippled knees. The leopard-beast came forward again, menacing, opening its jaws to gnash at its alter ego’s bared neck.

Nikki froze, a scream caught in her throat.

Adam dropped the kerosene lantern he’d been carrying. The glass shattered on the floor. Some of the pieces scattered over the carpet, others tinkled across the nearby stone. The powerful smell of the kerosene rose into the air as the beast knocked him flat on the floor. Adam reached down for one of the larger shards of glass, then swung it up toward the neck of the beast. He drove the shard in deep and gouged the beast’s flesh, but it was far stronger than he and pushed him back again onto the broken glass.

Adam grunted. The creature growled.

I’m wasting time.

Recognizing there wasn’t much she could do but get hurt in the battle and squander her only chance to get downstairs, Nikki ran around them. She ducked into the arched hallway, then ran down the echoing corridor to the recessed doorway leading to the catacombs. The lock bar that had been in place the last time they’d come this way now stood in an upright position, the stays for the bar just empty hooks.

The door was unlocked.

Nikki looked down. In one hand she still held the burning oil lamp from upstairs. She needed one more. She rushed back to the library, stepping over Falkenstein’s eviscerated corpse, holding her breath against the stench of offal. She found an ornate, glass, flat-wick kerosene lantern on one of the study tables. The sounds of Adam’s struggle with the leopard beast across the hall sounded dire, but she had to make a run for this, and wouldn’t be able to help him otherwise. This is what they’d agreed to do, and she damn well intended to do it.

Holding both lamps in one hand while she opened the great door, she peered into the grim darkness of the stairwell that led down into the catacombs. She raised the oil lamp even as it occurred to her it might be better to extinguish it. She could see the flicker of torchlight far below, and tried not to guess who or what might be down there to greet her.

It didn’t matter. She was going down.

Nikki transferred the heavy kerosene lantern to her right hand, and held the burning oil lamp in her left, lifting it up in front of her to light the way. The fear of descending the staircase in darkness was greater than her fear of someone seeing the lantern from below.

The stairway’s shadows rolled back against the lamp’s glow. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, tension hummed through her like electrical current, making her light-headed. Her muscles felt tight. She gripped the handles of the lanterns, white knuckled.

The long hallway that led into the catacombs stretched before her, stone walls soaking up the shadows. She went to the door she remembered from last night (had it only been last night?) and saw that it, too, was unlocked. She pressed her ear against it and listened. The door was thick, and though she thought she perceived whispering beyond, the only thing she could really hear and identify for sure was the surge of her pulse and the pounding of her heart.

I can do this, she thought.

Nikki reached forward and pulled open the door.

The smell—that earthy dankness mixed with the scents of grave rot and aquatic life—washed over her as she stepped inside, knowing if she hesitated even a minute, she’d run back up those stairs and away from this place forever.

She forced her steps. Her legs seemed to carry her of their own volition, trembling so much she felt like she was bouncing with each step. Everything inside of her clenched in revolt as she rounded the corner into the giant room where the siphon dwelled. She froze as she came into full view of the room.

Torches burned in the walls, flickering with hellish light. The siphon-plant filled the room, a tangle of root-like appendages, its long tentacles reaching into every corner of the room. Pan-sized leaves that grew from the tangles shuddered as if in some cosmic wind and turned toward her like elephant ears. The knotted heart of the great plant heaved. Across the length of the thing, along all of its vines, those ghastly glowing pods trembled. The eerie lights—blue, yellow, red, orange, green—lined the thing at different intervals, each pod ebbing with some phantom energy of its own.

The siphon stirred at her presence.

This sight, though terrifying enough alone, was what she expected to find. What she did not expect to find were the four figures that stood at random places around the room, knee-deep in the siphon’s foliage, drinking from the pods.

Perhaps drinking was the wrong word, she thought, for this was no conventional means of consumption.

Small, glass-like straws seemed to have grown out from the bases of the few pods next to which they stood and attached themselves in multitude, like branched icy webs, to the humanoid figures’ mouths.

The four figures were hunched over, attached, face-to-pod, drinking fluids through those glass-straw webs.

It only took a moment for them to see her.

Each one turned, one after the other, to face her.

13

The faces of the four figures were abhorrent. Perhaps once human, it was as if their features had been flattened or burned and swirled with some kind of dreadful gray wax. Their heads were hairless, ears flat without lobes, their eyes different colors and sizes. One of the faces had three eyes.

Their bodies were naked, the bodies of very old men, but somehow still thick with muscles, despite the sagging and generally mottled condition of their skin. As they turned toward her, the glassy strands detached from their mouths and retreated down into the pods from which they’d been drinking…feeding.

Nikki willed herself to move.

One of the humanoid men came toward her, quickly. A grotesque appendage jutted from between his legs, probing the air like a divining rod. The other three followed more slowly, as if drugged.

She had to move!

Shuddering, her body paralyzed with fear, gasping with shallow breath, she willed herself to move but she could not.

“Sisssslllleeeetttt-ahgahhhhhhh…” The humanoid closest to her made a slurring mess of whatever it tried to say. It reached out for her with sharp-tipped fingers. When it brushed her hand, she came out of her spell of stasis.

The other three beings came for her.

Nikki threw the kerosene lantern. It lobbed through the air and then came down in a flaming explosion of splattering fuel and broken glass. The splashes of kerosene carried fire everywhere as they fell. She gave a loud grunt and heaved the oil lamp on top of the blaze, too. It soared through the air, but didn’t travel as far as she’d hoped.

It sank into the tangles of vines and hit the floor beneath with a clang. It had cracked open not far from where the kerosene lantern started its own small blaze. The oil slowly spread.

The humanoid grabbed her arm. She turned and screamed in its face—in defiance, in terror. Up close, it gawped at her, its mouth a ruined maw of few teeth and a bluish tongue that lolled toward her. Its breath smelled like a thousand corpses. It held her with one hand, and struggled at the front of her pants with the other, trying to tear them off. Its jutting member, swollen and engorged with purple juices, swayed between them, as large as anything she’d ever seen in the business, but infinitely more grotesque.

The lamp oil finally caught fire.

The whole plant, huge as it was, filling the thirty-yard room, shuddered with fire and heaved, curling its tentacles toward the flames. She heard a forlorn moaning, as of some deep-space creature howling through comic reaches, a sound that echoed in ways that seemed impossible for the size and nature of the room. The very air around them rippled. Nikki felt a sway of dizziness, the push of heat.

The other three humanoids had reached her as well, but now that the plant was ablaze, they seemed less intent on raping her and more intent on pulling her deeper into the room. Each of the beings emitted a hissing sound from their flat, slotted noses. They clutched her, those sharp fingers digging painfully into her flesh.

She fell beneath their onslaught, but in the panic of the moment, her adrenaline surged and wouldn’t let her stay down. She kicked upward and crushed the genitals of one being, then two more. One clutched his groin and fell backward, the second reeled and toppled into the fire with a screech of anguish. Nikki reached up and grabbed her first assailant by his engorged cock-thing and yanked down, twice, three times, then twisted and yanked again. The meaty shaft ripped free and a brackish fluid oozed from the hole where it had been, followed by slender white things that curled from the new hole like worms…or pale roots. The being fell to its knees, its terrible eyes full of fury, its twisted features contorted in pain. She planted a kick in his chest, thrusting him back into her final assailant.

Nikki scrambled to her feet as the flames grew higher. The siphon caught; the blaze grew. Heat filled the room like a chamber of hell, and it smelled just as foul as she escaped it.

Nikki ran out into the catacombs. She turned and swung the heavy door closed behind her, locking it. Then she ran up the stairs, slipping once, then regained her footing and hurried the rest of the way up.

At the top of the stairwell, she slammed that door closed too. When it fell heavily into the frame, she nudged the bar down so it fell into the lock notches, barring entry from below.

Blood surging, cheeks burning, skin crawling with the vestigial touch of the humanoids, Nikki fell back against the wall, breathing hard.

It took a moment for her to really wrap her head around what had happened. Then emotion began to push toward the surface, forced up from inside her, threatening to cripple her spirit.

Not yet, she thought.

Adam.

Nikki ran toward the parlor where she’d last seen Adam. She slowed before barging in, remembering the leopard-beast. She caught herself saying a prayer, something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She prayed that he was okay. Though it seemed unlikely, it felt okay for her to hope, so she let the hope in.

Nikki peered around the doorway into the parlor.

Both the leopard-beast and Adam lay on the carpet amid a scattered pile of broken furniture. Her heart caught in her throat.

Adam stirred.

Gasping with relief, Nikki rushed into the room. She knelt beside him. He lay on his side, bleeding from lacerations in his arms and across his ribs, his shirt torn away. His hands were bloody, covered with deep cuts. He opened his eyes and groaned as she gently turned him. She laughed, in spite of herself.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

“Yes,” he groaned, “you probably will.”

She laughed again, feeling on the verge of hysterics. They came in the form of uncontrollable giggles that she started to let loose as she held him. He was whispering in her ear. She stopped to listen.

“Watch it…” he said.

Instantly Nikki half stood, turning toward the leopard-beast.

It lay on its side in a position almost exactly opposite that of Adam Ross. The giant cat was definitely the worse for wear. It was panting, but not at all concerned with her. One eye was open. There were several shards of glass rammed into its throat, the black fur around those wounds wet with blood that seeped onto the carpet beneath. A splintered chair leg was rammed into the creature’s other eye, the one that lay against the ground. It had gone deep.

The creature panted, then suddenly stopped.

It lay still.

She realized something about the creature had changed. It was no longer half a man, with semi-human legs. It had somehow transformed into the pure shape of a black leopard. It was a huge and regal creature, and despite everything, something about its death made her feel a little sad. Only after she reminded herself that the creature had somehow once been a part of Adam, a part that had cursed his family for centuries, did she begin to loathe it again in remembrance of the lives it had taken. Revulsion for it overcame her, as if it were some form of vanquished evil.

When she looked back at Adam, it took her a moment to process the changes that had taken place in his body. He was still beaten and bloodied from the fight, but he looked heartier in color, some weight seemed to have magically grown on his frame, and his legs were thicker in his jeans, fuller.

“My God, Adam,” she said, returning to his side. “Your legs!”

His legs, and presumably the rest of him, had been restored. Just as the black beast was fully leopard—through some inexplicable transformation—Adam had also become fully human once again.

14

“Help me to my feet,” he said.

Nikki supported him as he stood. The palms of his hands were shredded from handling the glass shards. He ripped two strips off his tattered shirt and wrapped his palms tightly.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked him.

“I’ll be fine, as soon as we get the hell out of here.” Adam nodded toward the door of the kitchen, which stood partially open at the back of the room. The sight of Eleanor Masterson’s curled hand propping it open filled Nikki with another surge of sadness. Jesus, girl, pull yourself together. We’ve got out get out of this. You can’t start coming apart now.

Why she felt that having emotions about all of this was a bad thing, she couldn’t say. In fact, this was the first time in a long time that she really did feel something deep enough to move her. For so many years now, she’d just moved back and forth between being an aching bag of hurt, or alcoholically numb. Even when she and Nolan had been together, when she’d been pregnant, the proverbial sun had only just barely peeked through the clouds of her twenty-year charade of happiness as a porn queen. And she guessed that was why she’d taken it so hard when she lost the baby and it all came to an end with Nolan. Up until he’d come along, she’d felt nothing but numbness, hurt and self-loathing for so long she didn’t remember what it had been like to feel anything else. Now that the emotions were flooding back into her, she didn’t know how to react. It wasn’t the simple power of the emotions that disturbed her, only that they seemed to cloud her judgment at a time when she desperately needed clarity and focus. She wanted very much for her and Adam to get out of this alive. To get on a boat, to leave this godforsaken island and castle behind, and…

And what?

She knew the answer to that question. Knew right off the bat what she was thinking about: a potential life with this man, this mysterious Adam Ross. And she knew as soon as she admitted it to herself what a crazy, lunatic idea that was.

First things first. We have to get out of here.

Adam led the way across the parlor and pulled open the kitchen door. Nikki stepped inside behind him. They both hovered over Eleanor Masterson. There was no blood. Nikki looked around the kitchen. It was a giant room, with two long stainless steel tables, pots hanging from racks, and a wall of three ovens, plus a fireplace and smoker in a rounded corner. Long sinks and lots of dish racks lined the nearest wall. The place rang with an open quiet that was at once unsettling. Nikki couldn’t shake the feeling that something, or someone, might come in and find them at any minute.

There were only four of them downstairs, so that means Great-Grandpa Masterson is up here somewhere. And he’s not going to be happy.

Adam knelt next to Eleanor and felt for her pulse. Then he listened at her mouth.

“She’s alive,” he whispered.

Nikki felt a leap of joy in her chest at the news, but they had limited time.

“Can we revive her?”

Adam gingerly turned Eleanor’s head so she faced them. He lightly slapped her cheeks with his bandaged hands.

“Miss Masterson,” he said. “Eleanor, can you hear me?”

The elderly woman stirred. Her eyes moved beneath closed lids.

Adam turned to Nikki. “Cool water. Quick.”

Nikki went to the sink, her scuffling footsteps echoing from the stone floor. She turned on the faucet. The water stream roared into the bottom of the steel basin as she dampened a clean dishrag that was folded nearby. The water was ice-cold out of the tap. She hurried back to Eleanor Masterson’s side, touching the damp cloth to her forehead.

The elderly woman’s eyes fluttered open like startled butterflies. She looked up at them both, recognition slowly dawning.

“Oh my heavens,” she gasped. She gripped Adam’s forearm. “The beast—”

“Is dead,” Adam assured her.

“And Isaac…Dr. Falkenstein?”

Adam pressed his lips together. Nikki glanced at Adam, then met Eleanor’s eyes. She understood. Tears rimmed her painful gaze.

“Eleanor,” Adam said. “We have to know if there’s a fast way off this island.”

She blinked and struggled to sit up. Nikki and Adam helped her to a sitting position. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of one hand. Her throat worked, and her bottom jaw quivered. Then she looked at both of them. “There’s a boathouse not far from the dock where the ferry drops off. There’s a motorboat in there. It isn’t used often, but Isaac keeps it in good repair. There’s enough gas to get to the mainland. We always kept it…in case of emergencies.” The old woman’s eyes filled with more tears and Nikki shared her pain. This was an emergency all right. Everything she’d known, all that she had respected about her heritage and all they’d done here had come down around her in shambles. Like the rest of them, she’d lost everything. Nikki tried not to think too much about the hand she’d had in that destruction. She pulled the woman into a quick hug, then met her eyes and smiled with determination.

“We’re going to get out of here.”

Eleanor looked like she wasn’t sure she wanted that at all. Just for a moment, Nikki could see the internal struggle. Finally, Eleanor nodded.

“Let’s get you up,” Adam said. They lifted her to her feet, allowing her to drape her arms over their shoulders, giving her support to walk.

They left the kitchen and crossed the parlor. Eleanor gasped at the sight of the black leopard beast, slain and bloodied on the floor where Adam had killed it. The room was a disaster, and Nikki could see Eleanor’s eyes quietly counting the sentimental cost of everything in here that had been destroyed.

They passed through the doorway of the foyer into the Gothic-arched main hall. The alcove that led back to the catacombs was filled with smoke. They could smell the fire downstairs in the castle’s bowels, a smoky pungent scent drifting slowly into the upstairs. They passed the slightly open door of the library, through which Eleanor could see the eviscerated corpse of Dr. Falkenstein. Unfortunately, there was no avoiding the final horror—Isaac’s dead body lay on the red carpet just inside the massive front doors of the castle. One door stood open and a frigid wind blasted inside, carrying with it the crisp scent of winter.

The night was waiting.

Adam breathed heavily. Nikki could see he was feeling the exertion of everything he’d been through. Nikki was feeling it, too, but pure adrenaline got her through. Eleanor was limping, still making it, only requiring a small bit of effort as they traveled those last several yards to the front doors, bound for the front gates of the castle beyond.

Before they got there, the tall door that had remained closed was pulled open. Sharp, long and smooth fingers—grayish digits without fingernails—wrapped around its edge and pulled it wide. What felt like an arctic chill filled the corridor.

Adam cursed under his breath. Nikki and Eleanor froze in their tracks.

The towering figure of Great-Grandfather Masterson lumbered into the entry hall. Almost seven feet tall, he loomed over the broken corpse of Isaac. He was breathing deep, anger rising from him like waves of heat.

He lifted huge hands to pull back the hooded cowl and reveal his face.

15

It could barely be called a face. Something that once was a face certainly, but to categorize what it had become was something else entirely.

Great-Grandfather Masterson loomed in the doorway of the castle keep. They stepped away from his menacing figure.

His head was bald, and like the other humanoids below, the skin over his skull had a waxen sheen, as if layer upon layer of mottled faux flesh had been melted over the top of it. Both ears were simply clumps of flesh on each side of the awful skull. The forehead was low, the brows like fat, pulsing blisters, and one eye looked as if it had slipped down the side of the face to stare balefully out from a sunken pit where a cheekbone might once have been. His nose was two uneven, slotted holes. His mouth had no lips, and around it were spiked protrusions like the fleshy whisker-like barbels of a catfish. Nikki recalled the glassine tubes the beings downstairs had used to feed off the pods and realized the growths must have formed those grotesque, thin phalanges.

Next to her, Eleanor began to weep. “Oh Grandfather,” she said quietly.

The huge man took slow steps toward them.

They backed away.

Eleanor lost her footing. She fell against Adam, throwing him off balance. Eleanor’s arm slipped from around Nikki’s neck and suddenly Nikki was the only one left standing in the cavernous hall.

Masterson grabbed Nikki by the throat. The odd texture of his touch made her squirm. His fingers tightened on her neck, pinching off her air supply as he lifted her from the ground. She immediately began to get light-headed. Her vision swam. She felt the bones of her neck stretch. A cracking sound came from her spine. She felt it deep within.

Masterson stared at her with that single, baleful eye. She saw cold murder in his black pupil.

I’m going to die.

The elder Masterson pulled her closer to him, the phalanges around his lipless mouth probed the air between them, groping for her face. Nikki’s vision spun. The oxygen to her brain cut off, she started to black out…

She sensed a struggle beyond the wall of thickening fog in her mind. She felt fingers scrabbling at the ancient Masterson’s grip to no avail and realized they were her own. She managed to peel away one finger, then another…and blood and oxygen began to flow again, just enough…leaving her in a dizzy kind of limbo.

Nikki fell hard to the stone floor. She grunted, then shook her head to clear it.

It took a few moments for her vision to return. She realized Masterson’s hand still clamped her throat. Jarred and disoriented, she pulled the smooth, elongated fingers from her throat. Masterson’s severed hand fell to the ground next to her. She blinked at it. Its stump oozed with dark, oily fluid, fingers twitching.

Great-Grandfather Masterson emitted a throaty howl of rage.

Nikki looked up. Adam stood next to the giant, a sword in his hand. He’d drawn it from one of the medieval weapon displays on the wall. The blade shone wickedly in the corridor’s dim light. Masterson’s arm, severed just above the wrist, dripped brackish gruel onto the red carpet.

Eleanor crawled up next to Nikki. She was able to focus on the old woman’s face. She looked overwrought, in physical and emotional pain.

“Come on,” the old woman whispered to her. “He’s lost his mind. We have to escape. He’ll…he’ll kill us all.”

Eleanor tugged on Nikki’s arm, urging her to stand. As she did so, she turned to watch the altercation between Adam and Masterson. She dared to hope that Adam could take him. One more well-aimed blow with the sword and—

Three thin white tentacles slithered out of the ancient man’s severed arm and lashed around the sword, yanking it free of Adam’s grip.

Quickly, things turned uglier. Adam delivered blows to Masterson’s midsection. The only effect they really had was to throw the large humanoid off balance for a moment. Ultimately, his size was too great, and when Masterson bore down on Adam, he did so with a punishing blow to the side of Adam’s head.

Adam stumbled, dazed.

Masterson gripped Adam’s face with his tentacle lashes, then wrapped the entire palm and waxy, pointed fingers of his other hand over Adam’s face and head.

“No!” Nikki yelled. She was tempted to run for him, but fear kept her in check. She was still light-headed and hurting from her own encounter. Eleanor gripped her arm as tightly as the old woman could, given her own state of health.

Nikki saw Adam’s eye flick down between the creature’s fingers that held him. It was wide, but as full of determination as it was of pain.

“Go…go!” he yelled.

Eleanor drew up next to Nikki’s ear. “Come…don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

“No, I won’t leave you behind again!” Nikki said, tears blurring her vision. And just as she took a step toward the giant that held Adam captive, he screamed.

The slender tentacles wrapped Adam’s neck as Masterson’s pointed fingers plunged into Adam’s eyes. The white orbs popped and slid out as wet shells, oozing fluid. As Adam’s screams intensified, the fingers sank deeper into his skull. Pinkish gray brain matter pushed out around the deadly grip, lined with the sticky mix of blood and fluids.

Masterson pulled Adam’s head toward him. The mouth phalanges went eagerly to the gored eye sockets, small, wormy mouths opening at their ends to drink the foul emissions of mutilated eyes and brain matter.

Smoke from the fire in the catacombs had begun to choke the air and roll down the entry hall toward them when Nikki gripped Eleanor’s hand. Both of them, even the old woman, ran like they had wings, fast and fleet out the front doors of the castle, across the courtyard, past the fountain, and into the bitter night air, fresh with the scent of salty sea.

They ran through the castle gates and down the hill toward the forest and shore beyond. It was dark but for the glow of moonlight, and Nikki, blinking away tears, faltered only to look around, to find a path. Finally the tears got the better of her and anguish swelled until she felt she would explode. She reeled in the night air, in the wash of the bitter cold wind from the roiling ocean. She wanted to drop to her knees and scream at the heavens.

The grip of madness brought her to a staggering halt. She covered her face with her hands. Tears flowing freely, she rubbed her palms down her cheeks and stared at the starry skies. Everything inside of Nikki wanted to scream, but all she could do was moan.

From the castle at the top of the slope behind them, they heard the enraged yells of Masterson. It was the sound of pure fury. And she knew he was coming for her.

16

The old woman drew up close beside her.

“This way,” gasped Eleanor. She reached down and touched Nikki’s shoulder. She looked up at the old woman, grief plain on her face, and Nikki instantly felt guilty. She had to pull herself together and keep moving.

Eleanor led them down a path worn through a copse of trees. It came out on a rocky shoreline.

At the edge of the water stood a small boathouse, black in the night. Next to it was a small dock, the water from the ocean slapping the beams of the pier. The wooden door of the boathouse was unlocked. Eleanor pulled it open and led the way inside.

They went into deep shadow, black as pitch, surrounded by the scents of wet wood, oil and gasoline.

“Is there a light?” Nikki said quietly.

“A flashlight,” Eleanor said. Nikki heard her rooting around near the door. A click was followed by a yellow beam of light that lanced the darkness, illuminating the interior of the place. One side of the boathouse was a workbench with an organized rack of tools, two large cans of gasoline, several cans of oil, and assorted engine parts. A spare outboard engine was attached to the top of a thick board propped against the wall.

The other side of the boathouse was open to the water. In the dock was a nicely maintained, fairly modern motorboat. They climbed in, helping steady each other as they got over the side and untied the mooring ropes from the cleats. The boat began to drift.

They heard another subhuman roar of fury from the hill above.

Masterson, she thought. He’s coming.

Eleanor stood next to Nikki near the driver’s controls. They scanned the cockpit with the flashlight, looking down at it all blankly. They looked up at each other.

“Unfortunately,” Eleanor said, “I don’t know how to drive it.”

Nikki’s heart jumped into her throat but she didn’t give up. She took a closer look. A steering wheel, a stick shifter like an automatic transmission, a keyhole…

“Where’s the key?”

Eleanor looked panicked for just a moment, and then shone the flashlight at the workbench across the boathouse.

A small silver flash reflected from the pegboard where all the tools hung.

The key.

“I’ll get it.” Nikki jumped out of the boat. It swayed under her feet and pushed slightly away from the dock, drifting. She went across the boathouse to the workbench and reached for the key.

Outside the boathouse, she heard the huffing sounds of labored breathing. Grunts of exertion.

The door, which had fallen closed again after they’d come inside, crashed open.

Masterson stood framed in the doorway.

Nikki plucked the key from the pegboard and gripped it in her hand.

The ancient man lurched toward her, lumbering with heavy steps. She could see the shadows of the waggling phalanges around his mouth as he growled and came for her.

Nikki grabbed a hammer from the workbench. Without hesitation she swung it at the oncoming creature. Eleanor screamed. Nikki’s swing went wide, throwing her off balance.

Masterson grabbed her by the ankle, lashing her with tentacles that had sprouted from his gory wrist-stump, pulling her to the ground. Nikki fell face-first to the boathouse floor. Air whooshed from her lungs. The key bounced out of her hand.

The abominable figure of Masterson growled deep in his chest as he dragged her closer.

Nikki could smell his odious breath and see the shimmer of moonlight glancing off the water over his hideous features. His lipless mouth opened and the feelers fluttered toward her.

She swung the hammer one last time.

It smashed into the top of his head. The sound was like an axe driving deep into wood.

Masterson dropped instantly, facedown onto the wooden floor. The whole boathouse shook with the weight of his fall. She felt the fleshy lashes around her ankle loosen.

Nikki scrambled for the key, snatched it up, and then made a jump for the drifting boat.

She made it. The boat rocked crazily under her as she staggered forward into the cockpit, jammed the key into the ignition, and turned it.

The engine fired up on the second try. Nikki thanked God, dropped into the captain’s seat, and made quick work of deciphering the controls. One lever put the engine in gear, a second lever served as an accelerator. She put the boat in reverse to back out of the dock and gave it gas. As soon as they were clear, she shifted into gear and accelerated, steering them clear of the pier and out into the open waves of the ocean.

The wind was brisk, the night bitter, and the waves choppy. As they reached full speed, they hopped the waves, but the feeling of the wind, while achingly cold, was a blast of freedom and Nikki found herself giggling uncontrollably as they left Blackrock Island and Masterson Castle behind.

Once again, she managed to gather her wits about her enough to calm down. Frigid, she focused on the lights of the inland shore and steered toward them. She didn’t realize she was crying until Eleanor came up beside her with a blanket and wrapped it over her shoulders, sitting on the co-pilot’s seat nearby.

They both stared at the distant lights, lost in their own thoughts. Nikki knew that Eleanor must be devastated, and how no matter how much Nikki struggled with everything that happened, her own inner conflict would never match the grief Eleanor had to cope with in days to come. How much had been hidden from her? How much had she really known?

Without a doubt, Nikki felt that she had left a big part of herself behind on that island. Even now, heading toward freedom, she felt like a new woman, but only because a part of her that had been filled with so much desolation for so long was now filled with nothing at all. She felt the emptiness in her like a void, a feeling almost like a vacuum, waiting to pull anything into it to fill her again. And she thought after all of this…after Adam Ross, and her experiences here, that she had better be damn careful about what she chose to fill it with.

None of this was in vain.

She said it to affirm to herself that what everyone had given tonight was worth it, but the grief that welled up in her was hard to turn. It was up to her now. To make sure that none of it had been in vain, it was up to her to make the right decisions, to play the right keys.

She’d been given a new chance, the proverbial new lease on life. She intended to make the best of it, even if she didn’t know where to start.

Time enough to figure that out.

Yup. All the time in the world.

The boat hummed beneath them, vibrating with power as it surged through the waves. Nikki looked over at Eleanor, and the elderly woman looked back at Blackrock Island with a wistful sadness, then met Nikki’s gaze. She gave Nikki a smile heavy with woe.

I feel it, too.

Before they reached shore, it began to snow.

Epilogue

Two years later.

Nikki spent the day with Audrey. She bought the teenaged girl lunch, gave her some encouragement, and told her if she needed a place to stay, don’t hesitate to call. Audrey was hardheaded, but she knew the road she was on and was smart enough to know where it ended, too, so she was open to hear what Nikki was saying.

Nikki touched the girl’s heart and spoke the truth. Audrey knew it, and she respected that above all the other people who’d ever tried to get through to her. She looked to Nikki like a big sister. She’d been there.

Oh Lord, have I.

She was haunted by thoughts of what Audrey did the rest of the day.

That night, Nikki tried to let loose and have a little fun. She went to dinner with a guy she knew from Pierce College. Nikki was still making decent royalties from some of her films, and since college had always been a dream for her, she got a part-time job to supplement her income and finally went for it.

They had a Saturday P.E. class together. It was hard for her to work out in front all those younger adults. Some of them still looked like kids. One guy in class was about her age, so they hit it off pretty quickly. The guy was a handsome Hispanic named Royce, divorced, with one daughter. They had some normal conversations in class and around campus. He didn’t seem like a lecher, but she knew he was interested and it took him a while to get up the nerve to ask her out. She hadn’t been on a date in over a year, and while she wasn’t wildly attracted to him, he was interesting and a pleasure to talk to. That counted for a lot.

Now, walking into her apartment after dark, she dropped her keys on her table and thought back on the date. It had been nice, if a little awkward, being together for the first time outside the school environment. She guessed all dates with folks her age were going to be a little weird when you had an interest and knew so little about each other’s past. Every conversation was a minefield, and you just hoped one thing you said didn’t blow the whole thing up. Fortunately, he did a lot of the talking, and all Nikki really talked about were her plans to go into counseling and do something worthwhile with her life.

Not that she hadn’t already started.

Despite how well the date went, ending with a shy but nice kiss on the doorstep of her apartment, Nikki’s thoughts went back to Audrey. She only hoped the teenager hadn’t gone back to her old boyfriend’s house tonight. He’d lead her into disaster and she knew it. They were already into amateur porn and professional drugs and making pretty big money from both endeavors combined. Audrey hadn’t said it, but Nikki was pretty sure he was abusing her, too.

Nikki took off her coat but didn’t turn on the lights in her apartment. They’d had a heavy meal after a pretty full day. Exhaustion overcame her.

Nikki walked through the night-shadowed apartment by memory. She closed the blinds in the living room, then went into the bedroom. She shed clothes on the way, finished her night with a toothbrush and mouthwash in the bathroom, removed her makeup, then slipped on a satin nightgown and crawled beneath the fresh sheets of her bed. Not long and she was fully asleep.

The room was remained quiet and still around her for almost two hours, save for the sound of her measured breathing.

The phone rang once. Twice.

Nikki awoke, groggy, blinking at the dresser across the room. The clock said 12:02. Midnight.

The face of her phone glowed from the nightstand. She picked it up, wholly expecting the caller to be identified as AUDREY.

It wasn’t Audrey.

It was an area code she didn’t recognize. She almost let it go to voice mail, but now she was awake and her heart was slamming in her rib cage like something was wrong.

She answered.

“Hello?”

The line hissed for a moment, as if there were a bad connection.

“Nikki Lane?”

The voice was that of an elderly woman, vaguely familiar. Then it came to her, and when it did, it left her shocked and full of questions.

“Eleanor? Eleanor Masterson?”

“Yes, dear. It’s good to hear your voice…” And despite the thrill Nikki felt, the deadpan tone of Eleanor’s voice made her ill at ease.

“Eleanor, I can’t believe it—it’s been so long. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. And I have good news for you…all was not lost. There were spores in the catacombs. The siphon had grown into the other chambers below the castle—it wasn’t fully destroyed! Great-Grandfather has forgiven you, and all is well once again. Everything has returned to its rightful order.”

“Eleanor, you…you don’t sound okay. You mean to tell me you went back to Blackrock Island? Back to the castle?” The memories that rushed back to Nikki filled her with horror as fresh as her last moments on the island, a pulse pounding fear that pulled at deep roots, misting her eyes, aching in her heart.

Great-Grandfather?

No, he was dead. She had seen the hammer in his skull with her own eyes. The man had died by her hand. But now she was questioning what she had seen. Had it really been over two years ago?

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“We’re fine, dear.” She thought she could hear a smile in the old woman’s voice. “He’s a good man, you know. The people we’ve helped ... well, you surely know. Things were hard when you were here. I misunderstood what he had become, and I took it all the wrong way. He’s explained it to me fully. And just look how well you’re doing now!”

Nikki’s expression froze on her face. She tingled from the inside out. Had they been watching her?

“Don’t be afraid. We’re only calling because the time has come for your cycle to complete.”

Nikki stared at the dark shapes of furniture in her bedroom. The moon glowed blue against ghostly curtains. She sat straight up in bed, listening in disbelief.

“My cycle?”

“Your young friend Audrey has been chosen, dear.” At the mention of Audrey’s name the implication of it all finally sunk in. Nikki pulled the phone slowly away from her ear, but she could hear the tinny sound of Eleanor’s voice. “Please send her our way.”

About the Author

Christopher Fulbright’s fiction has been published by Elder Signs Press, Bad Moon Books, Dark Regions Press, Delirium Books, PS Publishing, DarkFuse and others. He’s a former journalist turned technical writer, but his real job is raising kids with his wife and sometimes collaborator Angeline Hawkes. They live in North Texas with their four children, one fickle feline, and a house full of lurid pulps. For news and information, please visit www.christopherfulbright.com.

About the Publisher

DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

Table of Contents

THE MIDNIGHT ORDER

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Epilogue

About the Author

About the Publisher