22. When All Is Said and Done It Always Ends in Flames #3
The smell was so rancid I instantly gagged, the empty contents of my stomach churning.
The body of what I guessed to be Teresa Guzman was on top, bruised and unnaturally contorted.
Fresh, compared to the tomb’s other occupants.
Beneath her, the white of bone shone through a mound of rotting earth—a strange, uncanny mix of decomposition, with tiny flickers of motion, corpse fauna and predation, those suggestions of life so morbidly tied to death.
The stages of decay here were varied, hair intermingling from the margins of the crypt with the periphery of skeletal remains.
There had to have been several bodies buried there, some more neatly than others.
Some remnants of clothing still remained, but the arrangement of the bodies seemed significant.
Most of them, like Teresa’s, were secondary, arranged around the focal point of the slack-jawed corpse that was the centerpiece of the crypt. The master of the ritual himself.
“Say the line again.” The gun was prodding me forward again, face-first into the crypt. “Say it to Killian.”
“Stop.” Jude’s voice felt distant. I could hardly breathe from the stench, dizzied by revulsion. My consciousness felt ragged, uncertain, but the only thing worse than being conscious among the detritus of the de Witts would be whatever happened to my body if I allowed my mind to shut down.
William grabbed me by my hair, yanking me over the edge of the crypt. “Say the line.”
“I love you,” I choked out. I didn’t actually remember the line, the horrific dialogue. I knew what it meant, the thing that was required of me. “No one else. Only you.”
“Forever.” William used my hair to pull me upright, jabbing my spine with the gun to prompt me forward. “Say it to him, Emmanuelle. You promised your master forever.” He twisted my chin around to speak directly in my ear. “Or was it always a lie?”
“Forever. I promise, only you, forever.” I’d begun to cry at some point, salt leaking onto my tongue.
But something else was happening to me, too.
Something reckless and unrelenting. I knew then that there was no way to win, no defeat that came without some semblance of shame, the covenant of whatever it took to make it out alive, if no longer fully human.
But the game was always very simple: survive. The answer did not have to be dignified. Better alive with the filth of bargaining than buried here, forever interred with the vacancy of a greedy man’s corpse.
“Kiss him.” I didn’t need to feel the gun in the nape of my neck to know what had to happen next. I did vomit then, a little. I spat it out, the wash of acid I could feel staining the backs of my teeth. “Do it—”
I pressed my lips to rot and putrefaction, my face partially buried in the only end that awaited us all.
Even William de Witt, for all the blood he might shed to avoid it.
I hoped then that whatever demons William de Witt had called forth that had poisoned his body—whatever evil might still be opportunistic enough to offer him a bargain in the end—that his price would not only be painful, but pointless.
I could think of nothing more pointless than this, an eternal vow to a man who had already been delivered to decay, who no longer felt or wanted anything.
But the game was very simple. So I kissed the lifeless bones of Killian de Witt and wished nothing but the malice of eternity on his soul.
“Script,” said William.
I’d forgotten I was still holding it. I glanced down at it, my eyes blurred with something too feral now to be shame. There was an action after Emmanuelle’s lines, the ones I hadn’t bothered to say.
EMMANUELLE CLIMBS INTO THE CRYPT AND OFFERS HER LIFE TO KILLIAN IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS PROMISE OF ETERNAL LOVE. KILLIAN SLOWLY FILLETS HER CHEST AND CUTS OUT HER HEART IN AN ACT AS SENSUOUS AS LOVEMAKING.
THIS ACT OF brUTALITY IS ONE OF RAPTURE. EMMANUELLE CLOSES HER EYES IN ECSTASY, UNABLE TO BEAR THE FIRES OF HER PASSION. SHE WANTS TO SERVE HER MASTER, TO BE ONE WITH HIM FOR ALL TIME. AS KILLIAN REMOVES HER HEART, DESIRE CONSUMES HER BODY FROM THE INSIDE.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “This script is terrible.”
“Shut the fuck up.” William pushed the gun harder into the back of my head. “Jude. Get in.”
“No.” Jude’s voice was flat and indifferent. I felt the gun slip as William must have turned to look at him.
“Genesis.” The gun repositioned itself in my hair. “Get me the knife.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Jude. A bored tone of warning, and for a moment, it was the emptiness that did it.
I fell briefly out of love with him. If any moment called for access to a knife, I thought, then I would simply try to use it.
Even if evil had conspired to keep one man’s malignancy alive, it would be worth the price for even a moment of real discomfort—for half a breath’s humiliation.
If I could give William de Witt a papercut, I would do it, just to call myself the arbiter of even a fraction of his pain.
It was growing in me, rage or whatever this was.
Something was swelling inside me, threatening to break loose.
I could no longer smell anything, I could taste nothing but ash, sourced from some fire burning inside me.
I heard the shuffle of Genesis’s footsteps, the sound of her obedience, and I bit my tongue and tasted murder.
I suddenly understood how very easy bloodshed could be.
“Turn around,” said William de Witt, and from a distance, I heard a voice begin to speak to me. A voice I recognized, that I had always lived with. The quiet presence of something I had never known myself to be without. But it was clearer now, like something in me had finally given it permission.
Listen to this fucking guy, it said. Give an idiot a gun and suddenly he thinks he’s God.
I laughed, unexpectedly. William yanked me by the hair again, dragging me around on the bodies in the crypt until I stumbled, rag-dolling onto my back.
He pinned me down with one arm across my chest, the other hand holding a knife.
His face over mine was so hideous, so unmistakably ugly.
The stains of black that dribbled down his chin.
The line of his hair receding, the marks of age beside his eyes.
The end, the end—no wonder he must have started to panic. It was coming for him, slowly but surely. People’s Sexiest Man Alive would still eventually be nothing. He’d been promised some myth of forever, but alas, mortality was starting to show.
What a fucking idiot, said the voice in my head, like it was casually picking its teeth. Look at this motherfucker. He doesn’t even do his own stunts. What’s he going to do with a knife and a gun? Drop one of them, probably.
I laughed again, hysterically this time.
I could see the flicker of fury in William’s eyes, the ones I could no longer think of as ocean or marine or anything but watery blue, with its rivulets of bloodshot deterioration.
I reached for the hand with the knife, then slid a hand down lower, to his sad and flaccid dick.
“Is this the problem?” I purred, and now the voice in my head was laughing along with me.
William shifted like he wanted to cause me pain, but couldn’t decide how—he was holding too many instruments.
I could hear myself howling with ridicule, and he shifted, shoving the barrel of the gun into my mouth.
“Finally, something with girth,” I said, and in my head, the devil giggled.
I have no idea if William could understand me—it was hard to speak with so much metal between my teeth—but I decided it no longer mattered.
I made a sound, a little whine of falsified hunger, the fake sounds of orgasm from the worst production of pornography, making eyes at William de Witt before letting my eyes roll back in my head.
The easiest, most common form of acting!
Any woman could do it! I was a character again, but this time I was satire.
I was the pleasure he wasn’t capable of invoking.
I was the mastery, sexual and otherwise, he so dangerously lacked.
No wonder he’d made Emmanuelle into a caricature—I was the understudy brought in to say the lines she never would. I wondered if all the others were equally her stand-ins, if all this time, we were designed to suffer for her withheld consent.
Who had killed her, then? Not William. I’d been right, it was Jude all along. I just hadn’t understood that I was never the recipient of his message.
I wasn’t the point. Whether I stayed away or not, it would never have ended.
Hell only emptied when all the devils were dead.
William removed the gun from my mouth to whip me across the face with it, which hurt, but I wasn’t finished, so I slammed my forehead up and into his. He swore and struck again blindly, but this time something caught his hand.
“I told you not to piss her off,” said Jude.
Then he looked at me, grinning. I smiled back. I loved him again, and I was having a nice time. Then I thrust one knee up, jabbing William de Witt as hard as I could in the balls.
He doubled over, the knife held out toward me, not yet anywhere dangerous, but something to be aware of, nonetheless. Genesis slid an arm around my throat from behind, catching me in a headlock with surprising strength.
Oh, here we go, said the voice in my head. Not this bitch!
I tucked my chin and dug my nails into her arm, though she had more presence of mind than William de Witt and ignored my defensive efforts like I was little more than a spider crawling unexpectedly along her arm.
She dragged me backward at the same time Jude struck William, who stabbed the knife blindly, hitting something that left a spray of red.
I didn’t see Jude’s answer—I turned my full focus to Genesis, who despite being strong for a woman still didn’t have what I had, which was a blind, incautious rage.