Any other time, this last would’ve come out as a sucker-punch, or even accompanying one. Instead, Chess leaned back against the bar with his arms crossed — trying for insouciance, yet almost hugging himself. His purple-clad shoulders rose high and he bent his head first right, then left, his tense neck cracking audibly.
“Been a while since he’s had him one, I guess,” he said, as if to himself. “That’s all — somethin’ familiar. Though . . . it is true how he ain’t queer down to the bone, like me. Not really. And me . . .” Chess paused. “. . . me, I ain’t no hex, Goddamnit.”
Morrow had to bite his tongue. “Well — ”
“Well what?”
“You never know, right? Do ya. I mean . . . I could be a hex, I just got hurt bad enough. That’s the rumour, anyhow.”
“Sure it is. Want me to gut-shoot you right now, so we can find out?”
That did succeed in drawing a laugh, after all — from both of them at once, equally sharp, yet genuine. Morrow felt an instant’s strange stab of kinship with the little monster standing next to him, ’specially since there were two others within easy reaching distance who really did have him beat for scariness.
But here came one of them sidling up, a raw flicker of dark on dark, to lean past Morrow and loom over Chess with a small smile curving her lips, as she murmured: “Ah, but no . . . there is no power waiting dormant in your bed-warmer, little warrior. He is a man, nothing more or less — as good as any other, I suppose, for doing those things that men do.” The smile deepened, letting out a sliver of teeth. “Though you may feel free to enlighten me, if I misjudge.”
Morrow, unable to figure out what best to say in return, just stood there, a wax-hall dummy.
But Chess blushed deep, eyes fair throwing out sparks, and snarled back, “Ain’t too sure how they do things where you come from, ‘Lady’ — but for my money, Ed and I were havin’ ourselves a private palaver, and I don’t recall you bein’ invited.”
Ixchel’s own laugh rippled out, an ascending glissando of music — light and cold, yet weirdly innocent. “Aaaaah,” she said, her teeth fully out now. “You are such an angry little man, Mister Pargeter. For so little cause, and with such small result.”
“There’s a host of dead men would disagree with you on that one — ”
“But then,” she continued on, without even seeming to hear, “he did warn me of this when we discussed you, earlier. . . .”
“Who did — Ash?” Chess blushed further. “Ash wouldn’t — ”
“And why would he not? Being, as he is, my very own. . . .”
Not the guns, then, but Hosteen’s knife. Chess had it out and brandished before Morrow could blink, so close its shine lit Lady Ixchel’s dolorous eyes from the outside-in. Saying: “Keep on callin’ him ‘husband,’ you gimcrack bitch, and I’m gonna stick this right in your — ”
“Oh, shhhh.”
No pause in the surrounding rollickry, but as of that exact split-second Chess was stuck — eyes locked with hers, strung tight and humming. Unable even to close his own lips as she leaned near enough to steal the breath from them, crooning: “Here, child. Here. Yes. This is better.” She gave him a protracted huff, sniffing him deep. “Aaaah, yes. It is as the Reverend implied. So strong, so singular . . . and so untouched, even now. So . . . inviolate.”
Morrow looked for Rook, and found him closer than he’d thought — a step or so behind Lady Ixchel, near enough to look down over her shoulder — yet hardly close enough for comfort.
Chess’s lids were fluttering now, ever-so-slightly, and . . . damn, if Morrow hadn’t seen that look before, back at the Two Sisters, watching the air between Rook and Chess grow slimy-liquid and run like blown glass, while Rook sucked a portion of Chess’s very life from him in the service of a Little Death.
And yet Chess managed to bite out, while the lover he’d thus far trusted to protect him simply stood there and watched — “You . . . don’t . . . know me worth shit on a shingle, ’f that’s what you think . . . ‘Lady.’”
A spasm ran through him, heel to head, as he struggled to free himself — and almost succeeded, before Lady Ixchel laughed again, and made a casual motion with her left hand’s little finger, insultingly tiny. Which tied him up tight once more, jaws locked and straining. She leaned farther forward, to sleek her lips up the cords of his tense throat, spilling out a rope of foreign words whose syllables crackled and crawled, sluggish, bruising the eardrum.
On Chess, their effect was both immediate and horrid: it brought him up against her in a single hapless heave, pressing himself to her curves, inhaling her smell — wrapping himself in her torrential hair, which almost seemed to rise and embrace him, in its turn. Set his pupils skittering, frantic for escape, even as it hooked him deep between the legs, pushing his trouser-fronts tight.
Oh God, what? What the ever-friggin’ hell —
The day Chess Pargeter looks t’ engage himself with any woman’s situation’ll be a cold one in the Hot Place for sure, Hosteen had told Morrow, once — and though Morrow found he couldn’t remember why, the remark had stuck with him ever since. Which was just one of many reasons why this, right here, was unnatural . . . awful.
Like he’d said last night, Chess wasn’t made that way — and the Lady damn well seemed to know it. To revel in it.
Morrow looked back to Rook again, heart slamming, but registered no appreciable difference in attitude. In fact, the Rev seemed similarly statue-bound, one hand held mid-rise, on its way toward Ixchel’s shoulder. The long span of it twitched, as though galvanized — or like he, too, were deriving a sick spiritual nourishment from Chess’s plight. Were somehow piggybacking on the Lady’s extraction, siphoning away its topmost layer for his own enjoymen
t while Chess hung in agony between them, made a meal of . . . predator turned prey, at the mercy of two hungry hexes.
Goddamn vampires, the pair of them, Morrow thought, as the Manifold spun and kicked with vile activity. Yet not a soul around seems to see it, savin’ me, Hosteen, Chess. Chess, who can’t do nothin’ to save himself. And us — who won’t.
Lady Ixchel stroked Chess Pargeter’s cheek with one hand, deftly plucking his knife away with the other — turned it so the blade was toward him and briefly menaced one green eye with it, as though to see if he’d give out any betraying blink. But when he refused to, she only grinned the wider, reversed it once more and slid it straight down the front of her bodice. A single perfect brown breast sprang forth, grazed along its inner orbit, deep enough that one small blood-drop ran quick and sure to gild the sharp, red nipple.