Switchblade Goddess (24 page)

She picked up her switchblade from a nearby stool and checked its sharpness against the glove. “Once you’ve been noticed by the gods—and believe me, Jessie, you’ve been noticed, all right—you have to choose your alliances carefully. There are wars going on right now with stakes and consequences you can’t even imagine. Every human is born to die, but people are good at making new people; humanity will continue no matter how many souls
I
take. So my murdering another little town isn’t what you should be afraid of.”

“What
should
I be afraid of, then?” I spat.

Miko gave me a long stare. Seemed to consider telling me something, then decided against it. “Ask your father. It’s his job to explain the facts of life to you, isn’t it?”

“Why am I so goddamned interesting to you?”

Another appraising stare. “You’re interesting to the older gods, apparently, and that makes you interesting to me.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s what you’re getting.” She shrugged, leaned forward, and cut through the neck of my T-shirt.

“What are you doing?” I tried to pull away but the ropes wouldn’t let me. My shoulders and wrists ached at my futile effort.

“We can talk all night about gods and the fate of the universe, but it won’t change the fact that I have a blood oath to fulfill.” She ripped my shirt wide open,
slit the last bit of tough fabric at the hem, then quickly cut the rest of the tee away from my body and tossed the rags into the corner.

And then she pointed her blade at Cooper, her eyebrows raised in question. “Unless you’d rather he bear your burden?”

My boyfriend stared back at me, his face pale. There was a horror in his eyes that I knew would not be relieved no matter which choice I made. Was it better to be the one suffering physical torment, or to be the lover who was forced to watch it? I didn’t know. At least if it wasn’t happening to Cooper, he could always choose to close his eyes. I’d do my best not to scream.

“No. I don’t want him to bear my burden,” I told her. “Do what you have to, but do it to me. Not him.”

She held the knife just inches from my eye. “You can opt out at any time; I’ll stop if you tell me to. But I’ll start over again on him. Do you understand?”

I nodded, shivering. “I understand.”

“All right.” She cut my sports bra off my body, slitting the straps and the fabric between my breasts. “A technicality: I don’t believe I have to tear
all
your bones from your living meat.”

She ran her gloved hands down my taut, shuddering sides, caressing me with my own dead hide. My skin pimpled with creeped-out goose bumps, but at the same time I could feel a prickling heat building in my loins.

“I think I can indulge in mercy and just pull one or two bones and still satisfy the powers that be,” she whispered.

“How about my pinkie fingers, then?” My voice
was a tight squeak. “I’m good with the pinkies. I’m not a musician; I don’t need ’em. Really.”

She laughed as she pulled off her gloves and tossed them aside. “Severed pinkies are a little too Yakuza, even for me. And your hands have gotten more than enough attention, I think. Besides, I’ve already showed you what a glorious thing pure pain can be; I’d prefer we tried something more … 
interesting
.”

My heart nearly stopped at the thought of what she might be contemplating. But she didn’t leave me alone with my terrified imagination. A beat later, she was carving her blade deep into the tender muscles between the ribs on my right side just below my breast. I let out a loud, surprised wail despite my vow to stay as quiet as I could for Cooper’s sake.

“Jehovah made Eve from a rib he stole from Adam, or so the stories say,” she whispered as she finished her cut. “Imagine what I’m going to do with yours!”

Miko dug her fingers into the cut, her wrist pushing my breast upward. I held my breath, swallowing down on a scream as she worked her fingers through my flesh until she was gripping the curved bone. She began to slowly rock it back and forth, tearing it free a bit at a time from the muscle strands clinging to it. I could hear and feel the cartilage and ligaments binding it to my sternum begin to crack. Bile rose in my throat, but I didn’t make a sound.

Just as the pain was getting so unbearable I thought there was no way I could keep myself from screaming, Miko leaned down and took my nipple in her mouth, and the sudden juxtaposition of intense pleasure over pain made me gasp. Cooper knew just how to lick and nip and suck me, and the Warlock had
claimed to be better … but Miko
was
better. Had she plundered my boyfriend’s memories? Had Roy taught her this? Or had she bedded so many women before she murdered them that this was just the fruit of decades of practice for her?

She rocked my bloody bone and suckled at my breast, and suddenly my nerves decided it was all pleasure, no longer pain, and I cried out in ecstasy when the front of the rib finally snapped free of my sternum.

“Do you want me to stop?” she asked, her lips teasing the red bud of my nipple.

“God no please no don’t stop no.”

I kept begging her for more like a junkie whore, my vow of silence forgotten, Cooper forgotten even as his eyes never left me, and she worked my flesh, harder and harder, pulling and biting and it was all glorious, and as the rib tore free from its remaining anchor at my spine I came with a gut-wracking cry. The orgasm that took me seemed to last an hour, my vision going white, and when Miko finally released my nipple I hung there from the ropes, as limp and bloody and damp as if she really had stolen all the bones from my body.

B
eing back in the living world was no comfort whatsoever. My nerves seemed deranged now, my body unable to tell the difference between something pleasant and something painful. I tried another round of phone calls to the Warlock’s bar, with no better luck than I’d had the previous day.

I wished I could talk things over with Pal, but he was in such rough shape that he was barely conscious most of the time. It wasn’t fair to burden him with my troubles, so I stayed silent and chatted about whatever he wanted to during his sporadic lucid moments.

Madame Devereaux found me weeping in the sunroom and put me to work on seemingly endless mundane chores: snapping bushels of green beans, husking corn, and—once she realized my hand was on fire—burning weeds out of her yard and garden.

My fever had returned with a vengeance, and my skin and eyeballs were starting to yellow. I felt as though I deserved to suffer in silence, but the old witch finally noticed I was sick after I fainted out in the heat, face-planting right in her bean patch. After she finished fussing at me for crushing her chickpeas, she brought me a cup of a foul brown herbal brew
that brought my temperature down and calmed my roiling stomach.

   That night, I lay down on the cot, simultaneously dreading what would happen if Miko was waiting for me in my hellement and fearing that I’d enter and find everything back to mundane normality. Bed. Posters. Stuffed animals. So boring. I didn’t want comfort. I wanted broken glass, hard ropes, sweating cold walls, bright pain. And that scared the crap out of me.

The room spun, and I found myself lying on the concrete floor. Miko stood above me, an orange cordless power drill in her left hand and something dark red and stringy in her right. Blood dripped from the bit, and I realized that she’d shaved her hair off. There were two rows of raw holes in her bared scalp.

I looked to the wooden Saint Andrew’s cross, and Cooper was shackled there, looking fresher, dressed in clean clothes. There wasn’t any overt sign that she’d molested him recently.

“I think he’ll just be a bystander tonight,” she said, following my gaze. “He needs to see what I’m going to do to you, and I don’t really want to have to do any of this to him. Do you?”

I shook my head, thinking hard. Miko had made her own skull vulnerable; if I rushed her, maybe I could get the drill away from her and—

“Jessie,
really
,” she said. “Has resisting me
ever
helped?”

I’d forgotten she was a mind reader. “Well … not lately, I guess.”

“If you try to fight me, you’ll only be making things unnecessarily unpleasant. For
both
of you.”

My shoulders sagged. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take your clothes off and get down on your knees.”

I did as she ordered, folding my jeans and shirt to use as a cushion to kneel on while I waited, my head bowed. The hellement seemed colder than before. She set the drill and stringy mass aside on a small wooden table and returned with electric clippers. Without a word, she sheared off my auburn hair in a series of quick strokes, buzz-cutting it down to a quarter inch of fuzz.

“I love it when it’s this short.” She ran her hands over my scalp, and goose bumps rose hard on my skin. “It’s just like velvet, especially on a woman.”

“What now?” My voice trembled far more than I would have liked.

“Time for a little trepanation.” She dropped the clippers onto the table and got the power drill. Then she pushed me forward and straddled the back of my neck, gripping the sides of my head with her thighs. I felt as though I were trapped in a flesh vise, and I could smell the sweet musk of her sex.

“Try to hold still,” she said, giving the drill a few revs. “This won’t be nearly as much fun if I damage your brain. Just need to get down to the membrane, but no deeper.”

I gritted my teeth as she pressed the cold metal bit against the crown of my head and turned on the motor. There was a sharp pain as it bored through my scalp into the bone, and the vibrations buzzed through my whole skull, rattling my sinuses and molars. My nerves were still addled from the night before and
couldn’t decide if pain was really pleasure, so all my glands opened the floodgates, histamine rising alongside hormones.

“Heh. You feel like a giant vibrator when I do this.” She pulled the bit free from the first hole and started on the next. A thin trickle of blood dripped down my forehead and into my left eyebrow. “But I’m sure this is nothing compared to the flaying, hmm? Probably more like a toothache or a migraine.”

I was getting a strange high as she made more holes, a light-headed sensation as if I’d been breathing nitrous oxide.

“All done.” She pulled the bit out of the sixth hole and released my head. Licked her thumb and wiped the clot out of my eyebrow. “Now, I need to show you something. Look at me.”

I looked up. Miko’s features began to blur strangely.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how I seduced Major Rodriguez?” she asked, her voice dropping lower. I heard the sound of cracking bone, and her legs and spine began to lengthen.

“I … thought he was maybe bi?” What was she doing?

“No.” Her breasts were shrinking, her shoulders and jawline widening, her body piling on corded muscle. “He’s a Kinsey 6; he has at best grudging interest in anyone who doesn’t have a penis. Fortunately, I was able to provide him with a very satisfying one, along with the promise of much, much more where that came from.”

I lowered my gaze, and suddenly realized I was staring at an extremely attractive cock and set of balls. I must’ve started blushing, because Miko laughed at
me. Her new voice was a pure masculine baritone, dark and rich as chocolate.

“It’s just flesh, Jessie. I can make mine do what I want. Yours, too, if you let me, at least in here.” He—it was hard to think of Miko as a “she” anymore—gave his cock a stroke with his left hand to bring it to attention, pulling his foreskin back from the shiny red crown.

There came a muffled noise of protest from the corner. Cooper was staring at Miko, his face a furious red. My boyfriend struggled against his shackles, but succeeded only in rocking the wooden cross a few centimeters.

“Oh, you.” Miko laughed at him. “I didn’t hear this kind of complaint when I was tearing her to pieces, did I? But I’m a
man
now, and it’s all so
very
different to you, isn’t it? Hypocrite.”

Miko turned away from us both and picked up the red, stringy mass from the table, shaking the snaky strands free of each other.

“What’s that?” The sight of the thing made me queasy.

“I took the liberty of going through your memory jars while you weren’t here,” he replied. “And I found our little friend the shadow buried in one of them. I guess you put it there?”

I nodded, feeling sicker.

“I pithed its brain, and was going to destroy it entirely, but I realized I shouldn’t waste good nerve-rich flesh like that. So I’ve made it into a toy for the both of us to share.”

I swallowed. The holes in my skull were itching, and I suddenly felt even more light-headed. “A toy?”

“You’ll see. I think you’ll find this enlightening.” Miko began to push the ends of the dark pseudopods into the holes in his scalp, combing the free ends out like rubbery dreadlocks with his fingers, stretching them as far as he could. “Lift your head a little, please.”

“D-do I have to?” I stammered, staring at the clammy strings dangling from his hand.

Miko sighed. “No. It’s still your choice. But if you decline, my only other option is to drill Mr. Carte Blanche over there, and he’s going to squirm and cry a lot, and I’m really not in the mood for pure sadism this evening. Are you?”

My heart was pounding, causing my scalp to bleed even more. “No. Don’t touch him. Do what you’re going to do to me, and get it over with.”

“I think you’ll want me to take my time with this.” Miko held me by my chin with his right hand as he gently worked the pseudopods into my skull with his left. By the time the third burrowed into the surface of my brain, I realized I could feel Miko’s hand gripping me, feel my ragged exhalations on his erect, pulsing cock. Something strange was happening to my vision, and I was now seeing the hellement in shades of blue.

The task of connecting us complete, Miko held his erection closer to my face. “Suck me, please. I like some teeth, but not too much.”

I stared at the shiny crown for three heartbeats, acutely aware that Cooper was watching everything I did, but lust and curiosity were twin fires inside me. What would it be like to know what a man could
feel? What would it be like to feel it while I was doing it?