It was a baptism of fire, in a way, and a cleansing. Now I knew how bad this could get.
The owners didn’t return during the two days I stayed, surviving on snack bars and water. The seagulls on the narrow beach threw loud, raucous curses at me when I ventured out, which I ignored. Though I did throw them a few crumbs, smiling as they tottered over the sand.
Watching animals do their thing and live life, despite all sorts of misfortunes, helped me to deal with the flashbacks. I would never forget what he’d done but I would handle this. Seagulls were good therapy.
Then I did something that both amazed and dismayed me. I healed, rapidly.
I was becoming more Cucitrice the immortal, and less Zara the human.
Every wound healed over those two days. Soon, only guilt throbbed inside me, guilt, PTSD, and a thousand jarring nightmares that woke me, whimpering and reliving what had happened. Yet every second of this time, while I did nothing but hide and heal, Val was suffering inside his own body.
Or so I told myself.
That he might be gone forever, I kept that thought in a cupboard at the bottom of an imaginary well at the back of my mind.
The rapid healing was a side-effect of being partially possessed by the Cucitrice. That was obvious.
Perhaps that reminder of what was inside me was why I finally succumbed to something that horrified me. I would try to use another of my abilities: I would stitch someone without consent—an old man living in the neighboring house. It was a form of brutalization. It was assault. The Stitched created by the Cucitrice died. They always die.
His house was a white, architecturally designed dwelling, and the elegant richness of the structure told you it was worth millions, even as it tried to pretend to be a simple, laidback beach hut.
Was it less of a sin to stitch a rich bastard? I never, ever thought about sin, but this was wrong even if he was rich.
When I approached, he was in the front garden behind a head-high picket fence, pruning an innocent shrub. After I smiled, he smiled back and came to the side gate where I waited.
A strange force seemed to pull him nearer after he took his last step. Imagined maybe? But his body had jerked, and he looked puzzled.
Then I understood…this was what the Cucitrice felt when a person was a match.
He would be single, unattached.
No family.
Few friends.
No one would care if he wandered off on a killing spree, compelled by me stitching symbols into his skin and inducing a compulsion to destroy nightmare and dream creatures. No one would care when he died or vanished off the face of the planet.
He was perfect.
The knife was tucked into the back of my dress, in a belt tie, and I drew it in a smooth motion, and thrust it through the gaps between art-nouveau-like designs on the gate. Motion blurred the blade into staccato blue. The tip touched his wrist, gentle as an angel’s kiss.
He froze, my chosen one.
I hadn’t been sure how the Cucitrice made people stand still for this, until now.
“Open the gate,” I murmured.
White frosted his temples; wrinkles creased his face. A white designer-wear shirt draped over a pair of disreputable brown shorts. He blinked once then opened the gate, and I stepped through with Neme, my red-and-white wolf, materializing by my side.
“Where were you?” I asked the wolf.
Neme just looked inscrutable, flowing past in a whisper of ethereal hair.
With the C’s spool still AWOL at a police station, Neme had become the carrier of the dream-or-nightmare thread—new little imps and faeries clung to her hair and peeked out with small glistening eyes. Only their teeth warned you they might be less than kind.
Where had Neme found those? How did she coax them on board?
I might never find out, but I needed them to stitch.
I required things I couldn’t get without doing this. A new car the cops wouldn’t track. Weapons. Money. A house to use as a base. Though perhaps this one would do?
When he extended his arm, with his forearm exposed for the dance of my knife, I began to stitch the first imp into his skin. Strength, speed, loyalty to me, hate of those not of this earth…the arcane symbols merged and wove between each other…and then I stopped.
I stopped myself before I inscribed the ones that would make him devote the rest of his existence to finding and killing dream and nightmare creatures.
Because that was a death sentence.
“I don’t need this.” I bit my lip. “I don’t.” But would this work without the whole pattern?
I lowered the knife. “Get me your car keys and bring your wallet, then just…do what you normally do.”
He nodded and turned away.
“Your name?”
“Bernard Hudson.”
“I might come back to stay here, Bernard. Now and then.” My voice wobbled.
Since he said nothing, I wasn’t sure if he would obey me, fully. He might call the cops, later. He might wake and run away screaming, or shoot me in the back, or any number of bad things.
I had tried to lessen the consequences to him, to save my own integrity. It made me feel better, more righteous. I didn’t need him as a warrior in a cause. I frowned…
Or did I? A small army was exactly what might help me kill the King. If I were choosy, and picked those with absolutely terrible lives, if I changed the symbols so it made them stick with me instead of wandering away…would that make me less an abomination?
“Fuck, Val. Should I?”
He wasn’t here, couldn’t tell me, and for once that stock phrase of his, do it, was not much help.
Other problems reared higher, too, now that I had time to think, now that I wasn’t full of holes and cuts and the Nightmare King’s cum. And somehow what had been on my legs and back and inside me had felt different, despite coming from Val’s body. It wasn’t beyond the realms of my imagination for the King to alter his semen and make it reek of evil.
I had scrubbed myself so very clean.
Those problems. Firstly, how was I going to find him? Second. How did I evict him from Val?
Once I moved back to Houston, finding the Nightmare King turned out to be easy.
One night, I prowled close to the nightclubs, feeling an itch that needed answering. The Cucitrice genes and memories, if such they were, made me pay attention to itches like this.
The King snarled a greeting at me from the sidewalk on the other side of the busy road.
Had he remained in Houston to make himself a target? Even though he’d left me sprawled and strangled at the port, maybe he wanted something from me.
A suspicious clot of hard-eyed men stood at his elbow. The eyeglasses would surely confirm them as Possessed if I had time to check. People jostled me, on their way to dates, parties, and late-opening shops.
I was weaponless, barring the Taurus, an ordinary knife, the C’s knife, and a garrote. Not enough.
Fear took my air, chilled my veins, made me voiceless. It choked me, reminding me of what his hands had done that night.
Beneath my jacket, my hand trembled on the cold butt of the pistol.
Before either of us could cross to the other side, sirens screamed. Honestly, I wanted to sprint in the opposite direction. Cop cars swung into the street twenty yards away. Their lights glared and flashed off the glassed shopfronts. People stared while holding their phones out—probably wondering what was going down, and whether they could get a good angle from where they stood for a video.