NightWhere (28 page)

Mark shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think so.”

Richard crossed his arms, letting his hard cock poke straight out at Mark’s face. He shook his hips to make it weave in the air, pointing…

“Drink, or drown,” Kharon said again.

“Here’s the thing,” Richard explained. “Unless you suck the cock that Rae really loved, you’re not getting out of here. And Kharon’s got a hundred other followers who would be happy to come and piss on you for the rest of the night.”

Mark turned and looked back at Kharon. The Watcher’s lips twisted down, in a sneer. He said nothing, but his head nodded, slightly.

All around the pit, the naked guards stood close, not allowing any place for Mark to pull himself up and run away. Not that he knew where he could run to anyway. Behind them, a dozen more white legs walked into position. And behind those, he saw another line begin.

“You don’t have a lot of options, my friend,” Richard laughed. “But you better do a good job. Otherwise…Kharon’s just going to make you do it again. And you know, I’m the judge. So…make it count.”

Mark felt tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. When he’d come to look for Rae, when he’d insisted that he be allowed to see her, he’d never thought that he’d have to endure shit like this. And now…Richard was right. He didn’t have a lot of options. He bent down until his face was eye to eye with Richard’s crotch. Then he closed his eyes and opened his mouth. Something smooth and yet hard entered his lips. And pressed against the top of his mouth. It moved against him.

Something inside Mark died at that moment.

“Rae did it a lot better,” Richard remarked.

Someone in the onlooking crowd began to laugh, and soon the rest joined in.

Mark refused to open his eyes, but tears leaked from their edges. They streamed down his cheeks, cutting through the wetness of his humiliation.

And then he heard his mother’s voice.

“Oh my goodness, Mark, I never knew.”

He opened his eyes. He pulled away from Richard and stared in complete disbelief. His mother stood with the crowd of Watchers, naked as the rest of them. He cringed at the sight of her low-hanging breasts and grey thatch of crotch hair—things he never wanted to see.

But worse, his father stood naked next to her. Dad looked just as he had the last time Mark had seen him, five years before. Just before he’d had a heart attack and died in the bathroom. A year before his mom had ODed on sleeping pills.

They were both dead and couldn’t possibly be here now. Yet…

“I never thought a son of mine would be a cocksucker,” his dad said. The disgust dripped from his words. “Look at you! Look at what you’re doing. Is that what your mother and I taught you? No wonder you can’t keep your wife happy. Poor thing. She deserves better. You really are disgusting. I don’t think I can ever look at you again.”

His father turned away and took Mark’s mom into his arms, slipping his arms around her wide back and waist. Mark had to look away when they began French-kissing, and his mom began to grab his father’s wrinkled, hairy ass with clear intent.

But looking away from his impossible parents only put him back to the hard dick in front of him.

“You either make this cum, or you’re going to get another shower,” Richard reminded. “And if you don’t get busy, you’re going to have to start on me all over again.”

Sure enough, Mark saw that Richard’s steel was turning to taffy.

Mark closed his eyes once again and pushed everything from his mind. The thing in his mouth, the sounds of his parents fucking nearby, the laughter of the surrounding crowd. He forced himself not to throw up and pictured Rae’s broad, welcoming smile.

He had to see it again.

That would make all of this worth it.

He hoped.

Mark opened his mouth.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Last Time

The invitation came just in time.

Gordon had hidden the body in the loose sand of the crawlspace a few days ago, but he couldn’t hide the fact that his wife was no longer at home. He’d told the couple people who asked about her that they had had a fight and that she’d stormed out.

After he’d laid her body in the basement, he had driven her car to a neighboring town and left it in the supermarket parking lot just to add some substance to the lie. So her car was gone. He’d put some personal belongings in the backseat for good measure, along with an overnight bag with deodorant, toothbrush, minipads, condoms and underwear and a T-shirt. So far, apparently, the grocery hadn’t noticed it—nobody had contacted him about finding it.

He’d called up Miriam’s sister, Belle, to see if she could watch Freddy for him the next few days while he was at work since Miriam “had apparently run off”. Belle was usually free, since she hated actually doing anything resembling regular fucking work. She seemed to spend all of her time surfing Facebook and spying on her friends, if she wasn’t texting them. But she did love her nephew, so he locked that problem up with one phone call.

He thought there was a delicious irony in having Miriam’s sister sit on his couch and take care of his baby, while her sister was lying in the sand just a few yards below her feet.

Belle was younger and better looking than Miriam ever had been. But she had the same propensity to flap her gums too much. Tonight, he’d given her two twenties to stay late, in addition to having been there all day. Belle never turned down money. Sometimes he wondered if she’d have done it if he’d offered her a couple of Ben Franklins to suck his dick.

He hoped that he wouldn’t have the time to find out. Though he
was
tempted to try.

Gordon had packed a small overnight bag with his own bathroom essentials and extra clothes and had stowed it in the passenger’s seat of his Toyota pickup.

He hoped that, after tonight, he wouldn’t be coming back.

Belle would be pissed when he didn’t come back, but she’d take care of Freddy. So he wasn’t worried about his son. Kid’d probably be better off without either of his parents in the end.

They’d probably eventually discover the body in the basement, but what would he care? If things worked out, Gordon would be a full-time resident in NightWhere and wouldn’t be seen in the Granville Heights subdivision again.

He didn’t like to think about the possibilities if he did end up coming back home tonight.

But he was really feeling good about the idea that he wasn’t coming back. He knew how to handle a whip and a cane. He knew how to be cruel. Why would they say no after he had proven his loyalty for so long?

He would do anything that they asked.

Anything.

Gordon ran his thumb along the edge of the razor-sharp knife he kept sleeved at his waist. He smiled and licked away the small drop of blood that gathered on the head of his thumb. He looked forward to whatever twisted shit the freaky Watchers at NightWhere could come up with.

Anything.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Woke Up With a Monster

Everything hurt.

Her brain throbbed. Pain pulsed like the rhythm of a train. She didn’t want to open her eyes. For a moment, she didn’t. She simply thought back to what had happened sometime this morning. Sometime after she’d emerged, bloodstained and naked from the gothic doorway that guarded The Red.

She had had to tell Sin-D about what had happened to Peter and Amelia. The bartendress had smiled at Rae’s composure (or lack thereof) and poured her a vodka with a splash of cherry juice. “Virgin blood,” she’d laughed, pushing it forward. “Drink it up, you need it.”

“Have you ever done anything like that?” Rae asked at dawn, round about her third drink of “virgin blood”.

Sin-D laughed and then slipped the thin straps of her shirt down from her shoulders, exposing the globes of her breasts. But that wasn’t what she wanted Rae to see. Sin-D turned her back to Rae and said, “Touch it.”

Rae reached out and put her fingertips on the bronze skin of the bartendress’s shoulder blades. They were covered in a network of thin pink lines, culminating in two rippled puckers on either side of her spine. Rae could feel the gnarled flesh of the scar tissue there; it was different to feel it, rather than to simply
witness
that Sin-D had scars.

“I’ve done worse things than that,” Sin-D said. She turned and for a moment, Rae was confronted by the wide, pink silver dollars of the woman’s prominent nipples before Sin-D pulled up her shirt.

“You can do anything in NightWhere,” Sin-D said. “Killing is easy. Surviving to do it again…that’s the hard part.”

An hour later, the club closed for the coming of morning, and Kharon turned up at Rae’s unsteady elbow to escort her back to her room.

An hour can allow a lot of alcohol to enter the bloodstream.

Rae struggled now to open her eyes, as she thought about Kharon and what he had taken from her. What he had given to her.

In the windowless dark of her new bedroom, he had shown himself to be more than simply the man who ran this strange sex club. He was the
god
who ran it.

When she had taken his robe from him and let him stand strictly naked before her, Rae nearly pulled away.

She had seen it before, on the first night she’d stayed. But at a glance, Kharon was hideous.

His face was gaunt, his chest bony and small. His belly was white and sickly looking, and his entire frame seemed a bit crooked, as if he’d been broken and sewn back together again and again. She knew he had saved her life, and yet, some part of her knew too that he was sucking her life dry for his own purposes. She had no illusions—Kharon was not benevolent. But what did he really want from her—that’s what she didn’t know. He was demanding, but also kind, as if she was some kind of sexual pet. She liked being a pet.

She had watched him kill the “rabbits” and had done his bidding when he demanded that she kill Peter and Amelia. He had no qualms about taking life.

When would it be her turn?

All those things ran through her brain, but when he put his hands on either side of her head and guided her mouth to his hips, she didn’t resist. Just the opposite, really. Part of her reveled in the danger of being this man’s pet. If he was a man at all… She’d realized over the past few days that there was more to NightWhere than sex and pain.

There was a darker, deeper element. And she had begun to wonder if Kharon and the other Watchers were even still human.

Certainly their needs were familiar, she thought as he guided her head up and down in his lap.

Her head was pounding with a burgeoning hangover when she felt something gush behind her lips and down her throat. The taste was acrid and bitter, and when she looked up, Kharon’s eyes seemed to glow with a fiery light.

As his orgasm dripped from the corner of her mouth, she looked into those eyes and asked him, “Where are we really? This isn’t some abandoned warehouse that we’ve taken over just for the night.”

He grinned faintly and shook his head.

“Are we in hell?”

Kharon laughed. “Hell is for the dead,” he said. “We are in NightWhere.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lesson Two

Despite appearances, humans are hardy creatures. On the surface they seem weak and easy to take down—they have no external skeleton, spines or protective armor, lack the advantage of long deadly claws or sharp teeth and can be fatally wounded with just one blow. They appear soft, fleshy, easily broken.

But…strangely…despite their apparent outer frailty, humans are resilient beasts. They thrive on hardship—witness the generations of men and women in India who live on the brink of starvation their entire lives. Humans survive and triumph over the bitter cold of Antarctica and the sandstorms and brutal heat of the Sahara. And never mind the elements. There are dozens of stories about individuals, abducted and locked in depravity, who have weathered daily physical abuse, only to emerge unbeaten years or even decades after first being locked in someone’s dungeon.

Humans are survivors.

They outlive. Outlast.

When everything looks impossible, the human brain somehow trumps the physical impossibility and pushes the frail flesh farther.

All that said and considered, Mark wasn’t sure that he could survive the second challenge put before him by Kharon.

After the humiliation episode was over, they had taken him to a small bedroom where he had spent part of the night leaning over the toilet in the adjoining bathroom and throwing up. Then he’d spent an hour in the shower trying to cleanse himself from the degradation.

But he had finally fallen asleep. And when he’d awoken…Damia was standing next to his bed. He/she was nude, yet with the decoration of the tattoos and metal studs covering her body, the nudity barely registered with Mark at first.

But Damia didn’t let it rest. She swiveled her hips at his eye level, letting the bluish-pink head of her cock slide back and forth on Mark’s sheets. Taunting him.

“You licked the dick last night pretty good,” she teased. “So how about giving me a little of that lip now?”

Mark shoved her away from his bed and sat up.