Part 13 (1/2)

”Here you go,” he said. ”Bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt cuisine from Chez Syd.” He pa.s.sed her the plate.

”You first. You're the starving one.”

”Nah,” he replied. ”This'll only take a second.”

He grabbed another egg. She spotted the defective one, picked it up.

”That one's bad,” he warned.

”You sure?” Nora turned it in her fingers, sniffed it. ”Smells okay to me.”

Before he could reply, Nora cracked it on the counter's edge, brought it to her lips, and tipped it back down her throat. She gulped it down, then wiped her mouth.

”Yum,” she said. She picked up an orange slice, peeling the pulp away with her teeth. Syd made a persimmon face. ”Jesus,” he grimaced. ”And I actually kissed those lips?”

”What?” Nora said, nonchalant. ”They're good this way.”

”Uh-huh,” Syd said skeptically. ”This is all a cheap ploy to avoid my cooking.” He cracked the egg he was holding, poured it into the bowl, and picked up the fork.

”Oh, s.h.i.+t,” he groaned, stepping back.

”What?” she asked. He gestured queasily. Then she looked in the bowl, and all the color drained from her face. Nora gasped.

Floating in the bowl was a gelatinous, malformed ma.s.s: tiny body soft as a Dali-clock, little stringers of blood curling around it, threading through the clear amniotic fluid. It was a chicken fetus, right down to the beak and bulging eye sockets. A grinning little rictus was frozen on its dead, gooey face.

Syd dropped the fork and stepped back, his head suddenly reeling. He looked around wildly, then turned toward the back door: wrenching it open, pus.h.i.+ng through the screen, and falling out onto the porch.

He was leaning against the rail-coughing and sputtering, a thin rope of spittle trailing from his lips-when Nora appeared in the doorway. ”Syd, are you okay?” she asked, her voice tense and choked. She reached out to touch him.

He pulled away, leaned his head against his arms. Then the sickness took precedence, and he visibly slumped. A high-pitched buzzing trilled in his ears. ”I think-” The buzzing got louder. He shook his head, trying to clear it. ”I think maybe I . . .”

He took a step away from the railing, and his legs folded under him.

”Syd!” Nora cried. She lurched forward, caught him by the waist. ”Syd, what is it?”

”I . . . feel sick,” he mumbled.

”You're okay,” she urged, an undercurrent of panic swelling in her voice. ”You're just having a bad reaction. . . .”

Reaction to what? he thought to ask, but the words wouldn't come out of his mouth. ”Nee'ta laydow . . .” he slurred.

Steadying him, Nora helped Syd off the porch and into the kitchen. The food smells a.s.saulted him again and he doubled over, body spasming.

”Hang on, baby,” she said. ”Hang on.”

Nora steered him back out of the kitchen, heading for the bedroom. By the time they were halfway there he had broken into a full-body sweat, his skin going hot then cold then both at once. His consciousness dislodged and descended, spiraling in his skull.

When Nora next spoke her voice seemed distorted, a million miles away. His brain couldn't quite make out the words she said.

But he could've sworn they were oh G.o.d, here it comes. . . .

18.

Nora and Syd huddled on the bed like a macabre Madonna and child, as the first tremors wracked his flesh.

Nora cradled his head to her breast: fighting down her panic, rocking him like a baby. In the last half hour his body temperature had plummeted to near hypothermia, then rocketed clear into fever-dream territory. She had scoured the apartment, gathering every sheet and blanket and towel, which were now arranged into a heaping semi-circular coc.o.o.n on the bed, forming a makes.h.i.+ft sweat lodge. A bucket was positioned within easy reach. A washrag soaked in ice water sat ready and waiting on the bedside table; the bottle of Comfort was uncapped an arm's length away.

Nora took a slug off the bottle and braced herself, beating back her own fear in the process. The mixing bowl still sat on the kitchen counter, taunting her. She didn't know what to make of the omen, was afraid to even look at it as she broke open the ice trays, raced through the rooms . . .

. . . but when she closed her eyes she could see herself: huge with child but not ready yet, screaming at Vic as they pulled away from the parking lot of the s.h.i.+thole Texas dive where she'd caught him again, his nose already halfway up some beehive-headed bimbo's crack. She could see herself, screaming at Vic as they roared down the highway, his face contorted with anger and resentment and rage.

She could hear herself, the horrible dull-knife agony twisting in her guts as the contractions. .h.i.t, sent her reeling and clutching at the dashboard. She could hear Vic's screams, mingling with her own, as he rocketed off the highway and onto a pitch-black back road.

She remembered the moon, looming over her through the rear window. As full and cold as she felt, as she pushed and pushed and pushed through a blinding veil of pain. She remembered Vic's halting liquor breath as he cradled her head, remembered the smell of her own sour outpouring, a gus.h.i.+ng torrent threaded with red, as she ushered forth the wrongness.

The wrongness that slid from between her legs.

Most of all, she remembered the silence. Like a shroud that descended to engulf them, as Vic lifted the tiny misshapen body to the sky. To the night. To distant mother moon.

A silence broken only by her own wretched sobbing. And the feeding sounds that followed. . . .

Nora stopped: blocking the memories, forbidding any further thought on the subject. That was a long time ago, she told herself. Ancient history, to be forgotten at all costs.

This was now. And she had work to do.

Nora took another swig. She was as ready as she'd ever be. And it wasn't like she hadn't done this before. Initiation was one thing: just about anyone with the spark in them could be jump-started, tapping into the root of the beast through the combination of intoxication and manic s.e.x-magic. And she knew how to pick 'em-weeding out the dweebs and lost causes almost at a glance-so it was rare that she didn't get her pick through the first set of hurdles.

But mastering it . . .

That was the hard part. There were so many ways to fumble, so many things that could go wrong. The kinds of walls they had built-in to s.h.i.+eld them from their nature. The strength and resiliency of their human mind relative to the ferocity of their animal instincts. The sheer force of their imagination . . .

In the end, there were an infinite number of worst-case variations on blowing it. But only one real way of getting it right. First you had to free the beast. Then you had to learn to ride the f.u.c.ker. Primal essence was soul nitro, explosively unstable, and tapping into it always meant working without a safety net.

The price of failure, plain and simple, was death.

Sometimes they got unruly and she did it in self-defense; sometimes they just couldn't get it up, in which case they were meat. Worse yet were the doomed ones who couldn't weather the inner storm that awakening invariably aroused. And while it was a certainty that life without tapping their true nature meant consignment to the hollow strictures of man-meat, freeing the beast without the necessary mental power to harness it was tantamount to turning a starving tiger loose on a sleeping keeper. Unchained after years, sometimes decades of repression, rabid with appet.i.te, the animal side would literally eat its host alive. It was not pretty.

”Uh-nuh . . .” Syd twitched and s.h.i.+vered, a clammy chill seeping across his skin. He could barely speak. ”N-Nora . . .”

”I'm here,” she whispered, feeling his forehead. He was burning up. His breathing was alternately shallow and gasping; his heart jackhammered inside his rib cage.

Nora wrung out the cold rag, sponging his brow. She cursed herself for not having seen this coming. He'd breezed past the first hurdles as if he'd been greased, and tricked her into thinking he could take awakening in stride.

But he was so bound up, and she had so much riding on this, and there wasn't enough time, and . . .

Stop it, she thought. She reminded herself that she'd expected him to crash hard: men inevitably took it harder. Every man she'd ever met was ultimately a child, and any kind of sickness reduced them to infants.