Death of an Adept

"I am going to enjoy this," she said. The blood-red carnelian in her Lynx ring matched the blood she stirred with the brush. "I wonder whether you'll be able to guess what symbols I paint on your chest, to make you a fitting offering…."

He turned his head away from her in denial, only to find his face mere inches from the slowly expanding bag of his blood, fed from the scarlet line snaking to the cannula in his wrist. Dismayed, he realized that watching either procedure was likely to unnerve him; but he dared not close his eyes, lest her suggestion conjure the very symbols he knew could weaken what few defenses he might yet possess.

Any semblance of choice quickly became academic, for the clink of the brush being stirred in the bowl was followed by the faint, cold tracery of the sable brush against his skin. He stiffened, determined to resist; but unbridled by the drugs in his system, his imagination began to supply ghastly form to the patterns she began tracing out across each breast, down the midline of his chest and past his navel, up the sides of his throat, the brush strokes making his skin crawl with instinctive revulsion. Though a part of him vaguely recognized that his reaction was precisely what she intended, he could not suppress a growing mental image of hideous carrion insects crawling up and down the length of his body, seeking places to nest and feed.

Nausea rose up in his throat, and a profound shudder of revulsion racked him from head to foot, damped by the restraints at wrists and ankles. His empty stomach threatened to rebel, and he had to swallow hard to keep from retching. Angela laughed to see his shrinking abhorrence.

"I guess it must be true," she observed, "that the righteous can't abide the mark of the Beast any more than the Beast can abide the trappings of holiness. So much the worse for you - and so much the better for our purposes."

He fought down another shudder and looked away again, for he knew full well how open his weakened state had left him. Absurdly he flashed on the image of the patterns tattooed on Taliere's dead body - symbols to brand the dead Druid as the property of the deities he had served. And Angela was branding him with symbols no less potent for being merely painted, preparing him as an offering to unspeakable corruption and depravity.

He tried hard to put that thought from his mind, closing his eyes against the sight of what she was doing, lamely trying to turn his thoughts to an ancient plea for deliverance: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me…. A fifth-century interpreter of the Psalms had recommended the phrases as an impregnable wall for all those struggling against the onslaught of demons, an impenetrable breastplate and the sturdiest of shields….

At some point Mallory returned to seal off the first bag of blood and switch to a second, giving Angela's work an appreciative nod before going out again. By the time the second bag was nearly full, Adam found himself drifting in and out of consciousness again, weaker every time he surfaced - whether from blood loss or the drugs or the effect of Angela's rune-binding, he could not tell. A recurrent if scant source of comfort, if only temporary, was the certainty that Mallory would not bleed him dry, no more than Angela had been prepared to cut his throat prematurely: they needed him for their ritual. And perhaps help still would come - though he held out little real hope.

Perhaps twenty minutes passed while Angela completed her design. As she worked, herself becoming caught up in the spell she wove, she began occasionally to pass a hand more intimately along his body, adding to his dismay. Each instance was like an electric shock, startling him back to full attention, unable to ignore the assaults - though at least they broke his concentration on the symbols and lessened their potency, little though she realized that.

When she had finally finished and set her implements aside, she trailed a teasing hand down his belly to rest on his manhood, catching his gaze with hers when his eyes popped open in startlement, smiling as she slowly bent her lips toward his - and drew back at the sound of the door opening again. Her laughter grated like broken glass as she straightened, the offending hand drawing the quilt back to his waist as she stood.

"You've come in the nick of time, Derek," she said, as Mallory entered and came to close off the second unit of blood. "I do believe I nearly had our very attractive captive convinced that I was going to ravish him on the spot."

"What, and deprive our Patron of his sport?" Mallory retorted, with a heavy-lidded leer. "But you mustn't tease, Angela dear. We wouldn't want to spoil the offering."