Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The whiplash of going from suddenly being on her back on her bog-witch-style dining table like that—
To sitting on the ground of Vile’s library, sent Sasha’s head spinning. She was actually glad she was already on her ass on the marble floor, otherwise she would have promptly wound up there from the abruptness of it all.
“What the…” Her heart was racing. She didn’t feel—well—y’know—like she’d been in the middle of—well—yeah—but—she’d just been in the middle of—well—y’know.
Vile was standing ten or so feet away from her, as himself. Dressed in his black, formal suit with the purple pinstripes, his hands were down at his sides, flexing and tightening into fists. His eyes were wide as he stared at her.
Was she supposed to say something?
What just happened?
Did she do something wrong?
“You did something very wrong, Sasha.” Vile took a step back. “Horribly wrong, I’m afraid.”
A step back.
Away from her.
He took a step back away from her.
What the fuck was going on?
Turning on his heel, he stormed away from her into the library.
“I—” Scrambling up to her feet, she went after him. “Vile, what—where’re you going?”
He took a right turn down an aisle of books. She followed after him, not knowing what else to do. Had she offended him? But how?
When she turned the corner, the row of books went on for easily a hundred feet in front of her, but there was no sign of Vile. He was gone. Shoulders slumping, she let out a breath.
He’d just…gone and left her there.
After what they…
Tears pricked her eyes unexpectedly.
No. No. None of that. She would not let herself feel any kind of pity for her own dumb ass. Wiping at her face, she let out a frustrated growl and decided to just walk it off. If Vile was going to abandon her here in the middle of his library, fine. There wasn’t anything she could do about it.
She wondered if Sidney and Virtue were around here somewhere, or if she was stuck in the library alone while they were off in High Fantasy Land enjoying their half of the story. Maybe it was a “romantic fantasy.” That might explain the whole thing.
No, Vile was right. This is all on you, this is all your fault, and you just don’t want to admit it. That was why he ran off. He didn’t want to be embarrassed by her. She’d gone and not only gotten into character, she’d gone and been the equivalent of “sloppy drunk” all over him.
No wonder he’d stopped the story.
It was about maintaining his dignity.
He wasn’t the disgusting one.
She was.
“I’m sorry.” It wouldn’t do any good, but she felt the need to try all the same. “I—I was following your lead, and I thought—” Clearly, she thought wrong. “I know better than to—” Her voice cracked. She couldn’t finish her sentence. Or her thought.
Stopping her progress down the endless row of books, she sniffled, and wiped her hand across her eyes again.
What was the point?
“You know better than to what?” He sounded furious. Like he was going to strike her dead, right then and there.
The voice came from behind her. Whirling around, she expected to find him there, ready to slit her throat. But the row of books was just as empty of him as it was before.
Uselessly, she stammered, unable to form words.
“Speak, Sasha!” He boomed from nowhere. “You know better than to what?”
Cowering, she ducked from his anger. That time, when her eyes started to fill up with tears, she didn’t bother trying to fight them. She was going to lose that fight, too. That was the brutal truth, wasn’t it?
She was going to lose.
Everything.
What was her own dignity worth, in the end?
Nothing.
It’d already been lost, anyway. Shutting her eyes, she let her tears run down her cheeks. “I know better than to think anything between us could ever be—”
“Do not dare play such games with me!”
The hiss of pure, whispered rage came from right next to her ear. Which came right before the floor dropped out from underneath her.
Sasha screamed as the world gave way and she was plunged into the void. Part of her expected the scene to end there, like it always had.
But no.
It seemed Vile wasn’t done with her yet.
This time she landed on something that both crunched and squelched beneath the impact. It was wet and thick, but felt like she had landed on a pile of separate objects. She couldn’t tell what they were—they felt like slippery bags of jelly, or—
A hand grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her up to her feet.
“Behold all that I have wrought, Sasha Lancaster! Lay your eyes upon my work and despair!”
Vile shoved her forward, sending her nearly tripping in the darkness. But as she staggered, the space around her slowly illuminated from fires burning in oil drums around her. It was as though the space around her had always been lit, and she could only now just see the glow.
But she knew the warehouse she could now recognize had only just come into existence.
And now she knew what she had landed on.
Bodies.
Dozens of mangled corpses lay around her in piles. Legs and arms and torsos and heads of every size, shape, and color surrounded her. Blood ran from them and pooled in the shallows of the concrete floor before forming rivers that flowed downhill.
The smell hit her all at once like a physical blow. Rot. Burning flesh. Piss. Shit. And all the viscera that came with a decaying body. Throwing her hand over her mouth, she turned and fought to keep her stomach where it belonged.
And froze like a frightened deer.
A thing was standing in the path, not twenty paces away from her. Its hulking form consisted mostly of stitched-together rolls of flesh packed poorly into stitched-together, blood-stained denim overalls. A mask was embedded into his skull. She knew it was concealing the fact that he had no face.
In his hand was a butcher’s knife that made her wail in terror before she could even really process what she was seeing. She did the only thing she could do.
She ran away.
She ran away as fast as she could.
“This is how it would always be.”
The voice resonated in her head.
“This is what I am.”
Turning the corner, she slipped in a puddle of blackish-brown blood and other substances that she would rather not think about. She collided into a pile of the corpses, knocking several of them down on top of her.
Her scream was a choked, broken sounding thing.
“This is what brings me joy.”
Pushing the bodies off herself in desperation, she scrambled out of the mud and barely managed to escape the maniac with the butcher’s knife.
A door! There was a door just there at the end of the room. Redoubling her efforts, she ran as hard as she could. If she made it, maybe—
But this horror movie wasn’t starring her. She wasn’t the chesty blonde who would be the only one to make it out alive.
Suddenly, her right leg wouldn’t move forward, and her inertia sent her crashing to the ground. Weirdly, she couldn’t process what had happened at first. It didn’t hurt for the first strange, almost detached second. Looking down to see what had happened to her leg, she blinked.
There was a meat hook sticking all the way through it. And it was attached to a chain.
A chain that was now reeling her backwards.
Back toward the thing with the butcher’s knife.
“N—no!” She screamed and tried to grab onto anything that she could to drag herself the other way. But it was no use. “Vile—stop! Please!”
“That is the kind of begging I prefer…”
“I’m sorry, I—I don’t know what I did wrong—please!”
“Music to my ears.”
“If you do this, we’ll—we’ll lose, and—Vile, please!”
“I have told you, I do not care.”
She was only a foot away from the butcher, now. He reached down and grabbed her ankle, and began dragging her behind him.
It was over. Tears blurred her vision as he dragged her through the rivers of blood.
“This is what I love.”
Shutting her eyes, she did the only thing she could.
“I forgive you.”
For the second time, in rapid succession, Sasha was sitting on the floor of Vile’s library.
She was no less confused about it the second time than she was the first.
And no less shaken up, if for extremely different reasons.
“How dare you!” Vile roared. He dragged her up to her feet by the shoulders and shoved her into the long table that ran down the length of the room.
It seemed he did so only so that he could point into her face while he shouted at her, his face a twisted mask of rage.
“How dare you forgive me for what I have done? I have done worse and will do so much more before all is said and done, Sasha! I am the worst of your kind’s imagination, don’t you—”
She’d shut him up.
She’d shut him up by doing the thing she knew which would work. Which was to act on instinct. Without any forethought. Just go.
She’d shut him up by kissing him.
Grabbing him by the lapels of his suit coat, she’d dragged him into her and kissed him as hard as she could. She could taste the salt of the tears still on her lips.
This was wrong. She knew it was.
But she wasn’t sure it was worth caring about what was right or wrong anymore. What did it matter anymore, when she was going to die soon? What did it matter, when she might not even be real?
What did it matter, when she was starting to think she might be fa—
Her train of thought ended abruptly as he yanked her head back away from him by her hair.
“Depraved thing you turn out to be,” he growled through gritted teeth.
The glow of his purple eyes was uncanny, and the darkness that gathered in the shadows of the room seemed to grow darker.
“Perhaps I did not pick the wrong twin after all…”
“Vile—“
Roughly, he turned her around and threw her forward. Her hips impacted with the table and doubled her over the wood surface. When she went to push up onto her hands, she watched as black tendrils—as dark as spilled ink—wrapped around her wrists and yanked them up over her head.
Lifting her head up was a mistake.
Because then she saw what the tendrils holding her wrists hostage were connected to.