into the room.

Diana knelt astride an olive-skinned man, rocking herself back and forth on him, riding him hard enough to keep the headboard slamming the wall. The sensual curves of her body in the interplay between moonlight and shadows made Tim catch his breath. But then he noticed the way the man’s body bucked beneath her, the way his hips seemed to come up off the bed with her, not as if he were thrusting into her but as though with each motion she dragged him up with her, as though her sex had clamped onto him and tugged again and again, milking him, attached in some unfathomable way.

So entranced was he by the strangeness of that, and by the swaying of breasts, that at first he did not notice the strange wrongness of the shadows around her face. The man continued to cry out, his eyes rolled back to the whites, his cheeks looking sunken—Jesus, he looked sickly, how old was this guy? Diana had her mouth against his chest and at first Tim thought she must be licking his nipples or his skin, but then Diana shifted in the moonlight, drew her head back a bit, and Tim’s heart seized in his chest.

His mind tried to make sense of what he saw. He stared, breathless, as denial tried to fight back the horror and disgust and fear that filled him. Chills rippled across his body and his stomach churned. Bile roared up the back of his throat, and he had to force himself not to vomit.

Diana’s mouth was distended, stretched into a pale, blue-veined funnel attached to the man’s chest, right above his heart. Her lips trembled with a quiet suction, the skin around them glistening wetly, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from the disgusting proboscis that her face had become.

The man’s cheeks were streaked with tears.

As Tim watched in mounting horror, the other man’s face seemed to become thinner. His entire body had begun to wrinkle, even to wither, and Tim wondered what he had looked like before he had crawled into that bed. Kirk’s no longer with me, Diana had said of her previous night’s lover. So where the hell was Kirk now?

The room service guy’s head tossed to one side, and for just a second, his eyes were on Tim. That was enough.

He swept the screen open and burst into the room. Diana glanced up but did not slow the thrust of her hips, the slam of the headboard, the suction of her hideous mouth.

“Get off him!” Tim shouted.

He grabbed her with both hands, gripped her upper arms from behind, and used his momentum to drag her off the bed, straining with the effort. Too heavy. What the . . .

As Diana flopped to the carpet, Tim watched the room service guy dragged along with her, her pussy and that grotesque, distended mouth suctioned to his flesh. Her hips continued to piston onto him and he kept groaning, but his voice had become weaker now and his skin had begun to turn a hideous coal gray. Smoke rose from his open mouth, as if he were on fire inside.

“Jesus!” Tim cried. He wanted to bolt from the room, to pretend he’d never seen this thing, but he knew he would never erase it from his mind.

He reached down and 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.