believed as much, but one can never be certain what will work.”
“Never,” said Isobel. “Never certain.” And she leaned down and forward, reaching towards me with her long white fingers. Her nails reminded me of broken acorn shells.
“No,” I heard myself say, and then, whatever Charlee was doing, he did it some more. The tunnel dissolved around me, swallowed up by the fall, the flash, the sonic fucking boom, and I felt my bladder let go.
I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.
A sack of potatoes that had just pissed itself.
Warm urine trickled down my thighs as this Third Circle of Fuck All swam into focus. My mouth tasted like blood, and I realized I’d bitten my tongue. I was lying on my right side, staring out across a hardwood floor so dusty and gray it might well have been the surface of the moon. The buckled floor of a room in a rotten old house, that floor and walls defaced with chalk pentagrams and seemingly random letters from the Enochian alphabet. Here and there were clusters of white candles burning on the floor. You know, I can ladle on description and adjectives all damn day, all damn night, but it really won’t say jack shit about how evil that place felt. How evil it smelled. Worse even than the tunnels, somehow worse than the summoning of good ol’ Shub-Niggurath. The pitched roof of a garret room rose high above me, impossibly high it seemed, and I wondered if maybe this wasn’t a real place at all. It struck me more as a carnival funhouse abstraction of a spooky old garret room than the real McCoy. Another page ripped from freaking Poe or Lovecraft or Stephen King and splashed across my frontal lobe. A wave of nausea swept over me, but I managed not to puke. Pissing myself was plenty bad enough.
I lay at one end of the garret, and far, far away at the other end, what seemed like fifty miles off, was a sagging canopy bed. The canopy itself had rotted long ago, and nothing was left but cobwebs and tattered strips of fabric hanging from the head and foot posts, from the vaulted crisscross of rusted metal rods suspended above the bed.
The twins were in the bed.
In a corner not far from the footboard, a woman sat in a chair, watching them. Her fingers were steepled, echoing the inverted V of the garret roof, and her chin rested on her fingertips. She wasn’t young or old, beautiful or hideous. She was somehow completely unremarkable and entirely loathsome. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, and her eyes were golden. Amber. Eyes like honey. She wore a tailored pantsuit, black shirt, pants, vest, a stark white shirt with a ruffled collar. Her clothes were immaculate, despite the dustiness of the garret. She was barefoot.
On the bed, the twins were fucking.
“Who is she?” I whispered, and the woman in the chair looked my way, but only for a moment. The scene on the bed was far more important, more urgent, it seemed, than the vampire who’d just appeared on the attic floor ex nihilo.
“Hera Snow,” Charlee answered, from someplace deep inside my brain. “Their mother.”
“No way,” I whispered.
“Yes way,” said Charlee. “But they’re hers by a ghoul father. Once in each generation, a daughter is sent down to the—”
“Selwyn already told me that story,” I interrupted. “I absolutely do not need to hear it again.”
There on that filthy mattress, Isobel was down on her hands and knees, her ass raised in the air, and Isaac was mounting her from behind. They both had ugly vestigial tails sprouting from the base of their spines, bent and hardly as long as my pinky finger. He growled and leaned over her. In response, she spread her thighs farther apart, just before he sank his teeth deep into the meat of her left shoulder. The smell of dust and candle wax took a backseat to the reek of blood and sex. Just before he entered her, I got a glimpse of Isaac Snow’s cock. There were bands of backwards-pointing hooks, like those on a cat’s penis. The sort of shit you see and can’t ever un-see, right? There was not even the faintest hint of love in that lovemaking. It was more like witnessing a consensual rape, which is exactly the sort of nonsensical phrase that comes of trying to apply human sensibilities to the mating of hopelessly inhuman beings. Isobel screamed when he pulled