He spat something from his mouth. I caught a glimpse of a red gristly thing before it hit the floor beyond the slab. Was he eating raw meat?
“He is nothing compared to the Fae! It’s a true Fae I need now, a full-blood. Perhaps the queen herself will come for the spear, and give me the elixir of life in exchange for it, make me truly immortal.”
“Why would she do that when she could just kill you and take the spear?”
He whirled and glared at me, citron eyes maddened with fury. Clouds were my illusion. The queen granting him eternal life was his, and I’d just shattered it.
My body retched before my brain processed what I was seeing. Some things don’t have to be filtered through the consciousness; they get you in the gut. A chunk of raw flesh dangled, half in, half out his rotting mouth, and he held another piece of it in his hand. The flesh was pinkish gray, seeping, and glistened with white pustules. I could see beyond his half-turned body to the slab. I knew now what he was eating.
A Rhino-boy was chained to the slab. Alive. What was left of it writhed in agony. Mallucé was eating Unseelie!
My bread metamorphosed instantly to a spoiled lump of yeast that expanded and threatened to disgorge. I refused to give it up. I needed my energy. I swallowed, hard. Who knew when he would bother to feed me again? “You! You’re the one who’s been eating them! But why?” Of course. It was no coincidence the half-eaten bodies had been found where my specter was seen. It had been Mallucé eating the Rhino-boy in the graveyard that night I’d searched it for Barrons. It had been him right outside my bookstore, who’d left the half-eaten nightmare in the Dumpster! So close and I’d never even known!
He shoved the bite into his mouth with his fingers. It quivered, resisting the entire time. I could see his “food” moving behind his cheeks. The flesh he was eating wasn’t just raw; like the Unseelie on the slab, it was still alive. “Do you wonder about me, bitch? I wondered about you. After you stabbed me, I sickened immediately. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I lay in my lair, poisoned, realizing in slow degrees what your spear had done to me. It was then that I projected myself to you, spied on you. I was too weak at first to do more than watch you and plan, but vengeance made me strong. That and eating most of my followers.” He laughed. “While I lay in that room, stinking to high hell, watching myself rot, I had so many conversations, so many intimate little encounters with you while I waited for this moment. In all of them you worshipped me before you died. You want to know me? You’ll know everything soon. You’ll call me Lord Master.” Around another mouthful, he said, “He’s the one who taught me to eat them.”
“Why? For what?” Here, at last, was some information about my enemy!
“So I could see them.”
“Who them? Do you mean the Fae?” I said, incredulous.
He nodded.
“Are you saying that if person eats Unseelie they develop the ability to see the Fae? A perfectly normal person, or do you have to be a vampire?”
He shrugged. “I made two of my bodyguards eat it. It worked on them.”
I wondered what he’d done to the bodyguards. I didn’t ask. I couldn’t see him letting competition in any form live to potentially challenge him. If Mallucé really was a vampire, I highly doubted he’d ever “sired” anyone. “Why did the Lord Master want you to see them?”
“To recruit me to his cause. He wanted my money, my connections. I wanted his power. And I was about to take it—all of it—until you came along. I’d won many of his minions to my side. They serve me still.” He stuffed another bite in his mouth and closed his eyes. For a moment, there was an obscene expression of sensual pleasure on his ruined face. “You can’t imagine what it feels like,” he said, chewing slowly, half smiling. Then his eyes snapped open, febrile with loathing. “Or what it used to feel like, before you damaged me. It was the ultimate high. It gave me power in the black arts, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, and healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted. It made me invincible. Now none of the ecstasy is there. It makes me strong. It keeps me alive, if I eat it constantly, but nothing more. Because of you!”
One more reason to hate me: I’d taken away his drug of choice. On top of that, I’d inflicted an immortal wound on him, one that eating Unseelie obviously couldn’t heal. A wound that was killing him slowly, one Fae part at a time. I didn’t quite understand that aspect of it.
“Does eating Unseelie turn you Fae eventually? Is that what you and the Lord Master were doing? Eating Fae to become Fae?”
“Fuck the Lord Master,” he snarled. “I’m your world now!”
“He abandoned you, didn’t he?” I guessed. “When he saw you like this, he sent you away to die. You didn’t serve his purposes any more.”
Fury hummed in the air. The vampire turned and carved off another slice of flesh. As he moved, his dark robes parted and I caught the flash of something gold and silver, encrusted with onyx and sapphires, hanging around his neck.
Mallucé had the amulet! He was the one who’d beaten us to the Welshman’s estate that night!
But if he had the amulet, why hadn’t he used it to heal himself? The answer came swiftly on the heels of the question: Barrons had told me the Unseelie King had fashioned it for his concubine, who wasn’t Fae, and that humans had to be epic to invoke its power. Mallucé was part Fae now. Which meant either the Fae part of him prevented him from being able to access the power of the amulet, or, despite his machinations to elevate himself to such ranks, John Johnstone, Jr., just wasn’t epic.
Perhaps I was.
I needed to get my hands on that amulet.
A much grimmer thought followed the first: it had been Mallucé who’d so brutally killed all those people. How had Barrons summed it up? Whoever, whatever killed the guards and staff that night did it with either the detached sadism of a pure sociopath, or immense rage.
So, what was I dealing with? Sociopath or hair trigger? Neither boded well for me. I might be able to manipulate a hair trigger. I wasn’t sure anyone could survive a sociopath.
Mallucé stood, turned, withdrew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from the voluminous folds of his robe, and dabbed at his chin. Then he smiled, baring his fangs.
“How does your wrist feel, bitch?”