such tender things

“You must be thirsty,” she says, and this isn’t Kate, this isn’t Kate Fuller at all, it’s something huge and coiling wearing Kate Fuller like a skin suit – her hair is wrong, tangling in Richie’s face where he can breathe in the rust redness of it and the institutional soap smell, and her eyes are wrong, and her body. Her body is all wrong.

Inside his mouth Richie can feel his gums tightening and furrowing, can feel his teeth turning into ungainly hypodermic points. Her blood still smells like blood.

“You must think I’m stupid or something,” Richie spits past a mouthful of viper fangs.

“I know you kissed me, once.” Me, she says, touching her mouth with two fingers. It wasn’t her. This isn’t fair. “She wanted it to happen. She thought you might be dangerous.”

If he can just dislocate his hand, Richie can pull a Houdini and be done with it all. But he might need that hand not too far in the future, and his escape training has been distinctly lacking.

He throws himself forward hard enough to make the chains rattle when she shoves him back down. Something is making him weak – hunger, maybe, or some spell, except he doesn’t believe in magic barring extremely convincing circumstances and a shitload of galvanized steel links does not pose a compelling argument.

“Enough of the kinky bullshit,” he finds himself snarling, and thinks of Seth. He doesn’t want to be thinking of Seth right now – what this thing would do to him, still all red meat and long marrow bones, full of hot blood.

She leans in close, arms braced against the back of the chair. Richie’s back must be to the wall – and when he strains at the imposition this places on his personal space, he can feel the chains clink against a heavy bolt set into the wall. Another bargain-basement Inca-Maya dime store Aztec deal. Exactly where he does not want to be. The smell is stronger now, the smell of her skin. It smells harder somehow than it had before – hard and pearly.

Her hair falls against his face, and Richard grimaces. He’s better than this. He’s smarter than this. He’s a precision instrument with a specific set of highly lucrative skills and he’s gotten himself out of worse scrapes than this.

Her eyes are not Kate Fuller’s eyes, but they look him in the face just the same. “She died a virgin. Did you know that?”

Richie doesn’t like where this is going, not one bit.

“Good for her.” At least that put to bed some questions about Seth.

Her fingertips trail down the side of Richie’s neck. Her nails are broken down to ragged edges. The rest of her is polished and clean, but not her torn fingernails, underneath the paint. Richie jerks backs from the touch, the soles of his shoes slipping on sand, and her other hand catches the side of his head, grazing his ear with the warmth of her palm.

“Look at me, Richard.”

Jesus, and he’d seen things when the Hand was on her, he’d seen–

Kate Fuller is somewhere underneath, buried, like she’s submerged in deep water.He’d seen scales and coils and claws and eyes, too many teeth and too many eyes. Real Book of Revelation-type shit. But Biblical scholarship has never been the strongest point of Richard Gecko’s education and all he can remember now is the size of it all, the impression of massiveness and power and dark glittering bulk. All of that is crammed inside the freeze-dried corpse of Kate Fuller like a slipcovered wire spring inside a fake can of mixed nuts.

Richie’s eyes flutter open again, and the bonds around him shift almost imperceptibly. His palm is starting to itch.

She is sitting on his lap. Plenty of reasons not to like where this is going.

Kate – was one thing. There by the motel pool, looking like junior Jodie Foster in a tiny bikini, or making a halfassed pass in the backroom of a strip club full of Amazonian man-eaters like the great Richie Gecko would crumble and fold at the first taste of cherry Carmex. It had been sweet, in a way. She had been lost, in a way.

(Honey, you got real ugly.)

He knows its name. He saw its name, and he’s not happy about it.

This thing, Amaru, is exactly where it wants to be, hovering drunkenly in his field of vision like a Magic Eye picture: girl and woman, corpse and witch. Kate’s face is smudged with more black eyeliner than a Kansas City hooker and under the kitschy fortuneteller’s-tent mood lighting it has a sharp cast to it, like a fashion mannequin. Her mouth is the same, her nose is the same, and all things considered she doesn’t look half bad compared to how they left her. But the eyes are like a predator’s eyes, staring out of the eye sockets of a plastic doll. All that – softness is gone.

Richard is trying not to look at her, even as she slinks her hips in closer on his lap, as close as the thick stack of chains belting his arms to his sides will allow her. Sidesaddle.

Her hand slips in between them, where their bodies are pressed together, and Richie makes a small undignified sound. His grimace is making the muscles of his face hurt.

Not because this is doing anything for him, but because it’s not – the various parts of Richie Gecko that could possibly appreciate a nice pair of legs laid across his lap are killed stone dead by the knowledge of who those parts belong to.

“She died a virgin. I thought you vermin liked that.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Don’t you fucking dare.” He jerks his head away, but all it achieves is making his hair fall in his eyes. Not-Kate slips his glasses off his face and squeezes them in one hand until the hinges go crack.

The muscles in his legs are as tensed as they can get, like maybe she’ll take the hint that this little lapdance isn’t a welcome one, or like if he winds himself up enough he’ll bust out of these freakish cold chains like the Incredible Hulk. In the back of his mind the analytical part of Richard – and that’s why he’s so damn good at what he does, stuff like this – is ticking through everything he knows about culebras and vampires alike, about chthonic snakes and the ancient underworld. From Santanico’s memories like bitter chocolate on the back of his tongue all the way to Universal monster movies and late night Elvira. There must be some way out of here before this thing starts in on the whips and thumbscrews.

“Don’t what?” Her voice is like a breath on his face, and her breath is like a hot desert wind, bone-dry. “What service can you do for me, Richard?”

He’s not going to succumb to a come-on from a dead girl while chained up in a basement. She’s close, and the leather jacket on her back still smells like dead animal. It’s unzipped far enough to be officially too far.

His hands twitch into fists. The metal cuffs cut identical bloodless lines.

“Untie me and find out.”

“You want to touch me, Richard.” Her teeth are small sharp points in her red red mouth, and he twists his wrist sharply. Kate hadn’t looked at him like this. This thing wants him under her high heeled boot. “You were made to be my slave.”

“Well, when you put it like that–”

His hands are not fists any more – but a crushed fan of fingers, crumpled and broken like they’ve been broken before by a liquor-store bullet – and not bloodless any more but slippery enough to scrape through the opening of the shackle while only partially skinning the back of his hand. It stings, but it’s about to hurt a lot.

Richie Gecko is an expert at what he does. He is a scientist. He’s an artist. He is very good at what he does, and what he does is inconvenience ancient monsters and terrify young girls. He slaps his bleeding hand against this thing’s bloodless leg, before the eye can even open in his palm, and lets the worst of his mind pour into her like water. He is permitting himself to be seen as well as to see, he is dredging up the neverending mental chatter he’s barely kept down since Santanico came to him and amping it up louder, turning it up to eleven in a screaming feedback loop like a Three Stooges poke in the third eye. He’s got no reservations any more. He’s seen inside Kate Fuller before; he already knows the way. Suck on that.