Chapter 24
She watched Valentine bleed to death.
She found some hand towels and threw them at him. He balled them up and jammed them against his crotch. Pretty soon they were
soaked through, and she didn’t think they were doing much to stanch the bleeding.
“I’m thirsty,” he sobbed.
“Get used to it. I’ve heard people in hell want ice water, but I guess you’ll find out for sure pretty soon.”
The fluorescents went out without warning, and darkness fell upon them. Donna shifted to sit in the bathroom doorway. The
door to her bedroom remained firmly shut. The curtain was pulled back on the picture window, and the hallway beyond was only
dimly illuminated by the emergency strip lighting. No one seemed to be watching, and she judged that if there wasn’t power
for lights, there wasn’t power for security cameras. She bolted back into the room, the Glock clamped under her left arm,
against her side. Fangs of glass bristled from the frame of the television set, curving toward the hole in the center, like
the toothy mouth of a flukeworm. Donna pried one large blade free and scrambled back to the bathroom.
She sat under the sink, let the gun clatter to the tiles beside her hip. She began to poke and saw with the glass spear at
one leather mitten.
“You can’t watch me die,” Valentine whispered.
“Good thing the lights went out,” Donna said. “Now I don’t have to.”
“You’re a monster,” he said.
“Oh, now,” said King Sorrow from somewhere deep in the blackness of the bathroom. “That’s not fair to monsters, is it? I would’ve bit you in two by now, put you out of your misery, if it was up to the likes of me. You want some real cruelty done, you need a human, mate.”
She had thought Valentine was all screamed out, but he let loose the most terrific shriek she had heard yet and kicked and
squirmed toward her, to get away from that voice in the darkness.
“No! It’s not time! Stay away!” Valentine screamed. “I have until midnight! Stay away!”
An eye opened behind the semitransparent shower curtain. It was the size of a headlight and had a cat’s-eye pupil, and the
iris was a shade of dark yellow, stained with threads of blood. It regarded Valentine humorously for a moment, then closed
itself and disappeared.
Valentine’s head bumped her hip. He was shaking. He didn’t look at her.
“It’s not time,” he whispered. “It’s not time.”
She poked and stabbed and slashed. Sometimes she poked her own fingertips, right through the leather, a delicate shock of
pain. She could feel blood on her fingers, trickling into her palm.
“Do you feel sorry?” Valentine croaked. “For any of it?”
“No. The people who have met King Sorrow had it coming. They wrote the invitation themselves. They spent their whole lives
writing it. You too.” She felt the tears close again. She punched the spoke of glass into her right mitten and gouged herself,
a necessary, clarifying pain. “People like you think you can make other people disappear. You can put them in a van and drive
them away and no one will care and it won’t cost you anything. But this is where the van is going. This is where the ride
always ends.”
The dragon’s eye opened behind the shower curtain again. He stared hungrily down at Joe Valentine.
“No! It’s not time. I still have time!” Valentine cried at the dragon’s eye. “You can’t have me!”
“No,” Donna said. “He can’t.” She had sliced her right-hand mitten open across the top and now she pushed it down to her wrist, forcing the hand all the way through a four-inch slash. She transferred the spear of glass to her right hand. “I’ve got dibs.”
She didn’t know how to cut a throat, so she straddled him—straddled his sopping, bloody crotch, in a gory parody of the sexual
act, pinning his arms to his sides with her knees—and began to poke the blade of glass into his neck, while he thrashed and
shouted.
She had reported on murder victims who had been stabbed dozens of times. She had always assumed the attacker must’ve been
in the grip of a homicidal rage, carried away by some frantic need to pierce and pierce again. But it turned out it was really hard to stab someone to death. She put the knife in his neck at least twenty times—it looked like the side of his throat
had been bitten by a wild animal—before the motherfucker shut up and stopped moving. By then her right hand was slick and
red with blood. His. Hers. She wiped her palm on her chest, then shoved her hand under her shirt.
They were all of them waiting on midnight, but the thing about midnight, Donna thought, it was like happy hour. It’s always
happy hour somewhere.
At 8:47 p.m., EST, Donna McBride’s right hand found the tattoo of the coiled serpent on her chest. She could feel it, could feel the snake wound around her ribs, as if it were a cold leather belt, and when she put her fingers to its spade-shaped
head, the belt tightened, driving the air out of her. The snake under her skin seemed to squirm and rearrange itself. She blinked and for a moment there was a film over her eyes, the nictating membrane of a reptile, and
all the world looked as if it was made out of a sooty mist. She blinked again and her vision cleared. Her hands were so cold
she could hardly feel them. She looked at the mirror over the sink and could see the dragon’s eye, watching from behind the
shower curtain.
“Burn this fucking place to the ground,” Donna said.
“Darling,” King Sorrow told her, “I was just waiting for you to say the word.”
The eye of the dragon sealed itself shut and was gone.
It wasn’t long before the gunfire—and the screams—began.