Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,103
tried to separate them, but Diana flailed at him, fingernails dragging furrows in his neck. She and her prey were on their sides on the carpet. The stretched funnel of her mouth still adhered to his chest, but now Tim saw the lips crawling caterpillar- like, trying to keep hold of the flesh.
“No. No way,” he said.
Clutching at his bleeding neck, he stomped a bare foot onto that thin, pale flesh. Her mouth came free with a pop and he saw a black tongue, needle-thin and long—so long—slip from the man’s chest before she sucked it back between her lips and spun on Tim.
“What the hell are you?” Tim rasped.
Diana hissed, tore herself from the man, and leaped up at Tim. She attacked with her fingers hooked into claws, and now panic raced like poison through his veins. What the hell had he done? Why had he intervened? He grabbed her by the wrists, but she was strong. She spun him around and slammed him into the wall, and that long mouth thrust at him, long black tongue darting out, and now Tim saw that it had a glistening stinger on the tip. He shoved her backward, clenched his fist, and struck her in the temple. He punched her again and again, drove her against the mirrored closet door, which shattered into hundreds of shards that cut their feet as they grappled.
Tim caught only a glimpse of the room service guy out of the corner of his eye before the guy smashed him in the head with the telephone. He spun backward and crashed into the wall, sliding to the carpet even as blood trickled down into his right eye and pain clutched viselike at his skull. Darkness danced around the edges of his vision, and for several seconds he blacked out.
He opened his eyes again to the room service guy’s voice. Full of desperation, pitiful and withered, half the life already leeched from him, the poor bastard’s cock was still hard.
“Please. Finish,” he pleaded.
The hideously disfigured mouth on the creature Tim knew as Diana twitched, then smiled. She reached out and took the lost soul’s hand and led him back to bed, mounting him again, reattaching her lamprey mouth to his heart and her sex to his.
Amid the tortured music of the headboard and their moans, Tim managed to stagger to his bloodied feet. He nearly tripped over the guy’s uniform as he shoved the room service cart out of the way. Through the wreckage of the closet door he saw a body laid out on the floor inside. The shriveled thing between its legs had once been a penis. The skin was like shrunken leather, split in several places to reveal dry pink meat inside, and the cheeks had torn badly enough to show bone. It looked as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of him, along with all of his youth and vigor, and his life.
Kirk. And now this guy.
Tim had tried. Whatever Diana had done to Kirk, and who knew how many guys before him, she was now doing to the room service guy, and like some kind of junkie, he needed it now, needed her to finish the job. The hook was in deep. The things that made him him had already been taken away.
Kirk’s no longer with me.
I guess I was a little too much for him.
Tim opened the door and staggered out of the room and down the corridor on bloodied feet. He banged the elevator call button and then ran on to the stairwell door and slammed it open. Ever since Jenny’s death, the people who loved him had told him that she would be watching over him. He had never quite believed it—she had gone from this world, a wall thrown up between them—but after this night he was not so sure. It seemed that even those walls could be thin at times.
As he raced down the steps to the lobby, he wondered again if Jenny had ever forgiven him for what he had done. Yet for the first time, it was an idle curiosity. He had loved her as well as he was able and knew she had loved him in return, but she was gone now and would never be able to give him the forgiveness he sought. He would have to claim it for himself. And he would. Tim had done his penance.