want to help set the table?" Wellsie prompted.
He nodded. And tried to remember where the knives and forks were.
O's headlights swung across the front of Mr. X's cabin. The Fore-lesser's everyman minivan was parked right next to the door. O stopped his truck behind the Town & Country, blocking it in.
As he got out and the cold air shot into his lungs, he was aware that he was in the zone. In spite of what he was about to do, his emotions lay like smooth feathers over his chest, all arranged, nothing out of place. His body was just as unruffled, moving with its power checked, a gun ready to fire.
The scrolls had taken a long time to wade through, but he'd found what he needed. He knew what had to happen.
He opened the cabin's door without knocking.
Mr. X looked up from the kitchen table. His face was impassive, showing no frown, no sneer, no aggression of any kind. No surprise, either.
So they were both in the zone.
Without a word, the Fore-lesser rose, one hand going around to his back. O knew what was there, and he smiled as he unsheathed his own knife.
"So, Mr. O - "
"I'm ready for a promotion."
"Excuse me?"
O turned his blade on himself, putting the tip to his sternum. With a two-handed jabbing motion, he stabbed his own chest.
The last thing he saw before the great white inferno crisped the shit out of him was the shock on Mr. X's face. Shock that quickly shifted to terror as the man figured out where O was going. And what O was going to do when he got there.
Chapter Fourteen
Lying in bed, Bella listened to the quiet sounds around her: male voices down the hall, low-pitched, rhythmic... the wind outside pushing against the mansion, capricious, uneven... the creak of a floorboard, quick, high-pitched.
She forced herself to close her eyes.
A minute or so later she was up and pacing around, the Oriental on the floor soft under her bare feet. None of her elegant surroundings made sense, and she felt like she had to awkwardly transcribe what she was seeing. The normalcy, the safety she was steeping in seemed like another language, one she had forgotten how to speak or read. Or was this a dream?
In the corner of the room the grandfather clock chimed five A.M. How long had she been free, exactly? How long since the Brothers had come for her and taken her from the earth back into the air? Eight hours now? Maybe, except it felt like minutes. Or maybe it felt like years?
The fuzzy quality of time was like her blurry vision, insulating her, scaring her.
She pulled the silk robe around her more tightly. This was all wrong. She should be rejoicing. After God only knew how many weeks in that pipe in the ground with that lesser standing over her, she should be weeping with sweet relief.
Instead everything around her felt fake and insubstantial, as if she were in a life-size dollhouse filled with papier-m鈉h?fakes.
She paused in front of a window and realized that only one thing felt real. And she wished she were with him.
Zsadist must have been the one who had come to the side of the bed as she'd first woken up. She'd been dreaming of being back in the hole, back with the lesser. When she'd opened her eyes, all she'd seen was a massive black shape standing over her, and for a moment she hadn't been able to separate reality from nightmare.
She was still having trouble with that.
God, she wanted to go to Zsadist now, wanted to return to his room. But in the middle of all the chaos after she'd screamed, he hadn't prevented her from leaving him, had he? Maybe he preferred her elsewhere.
Bella ordered her feet to start moving again and she made herself a little track: around the foot of the gigantic bed, over to the chaise, quick loop by the windows, then a big scenic swing past the highboy and the door to the hall and the old-fashioned writing desk. The home stretch took her by the fireplace and the bookshelves.
More pacing. More pacing. More pacing.
Eventually she went into the bathroom. She didn't stop in front of the mirror; didn't want to know what her face looked like. What she was after was some hot water. She wanted to take a hundred showers, a thousand baths. She wanted to strip off the first layer of her skin and shave off the hair