Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

She lay in bed, his fingers tight around her wrist, thinking Houston, Texas, only one hour by air from home. "Only one hour."

"Yes, they'll never guess," he said. "You might as well have taken us to the South Pole, you couldn't have thought of a more clever hiding place."

Her heart sank. She slept. She was sick. When she woke she was bleeding. Miscarriage again, this time the viscid core was perhaps two inches long, maybe even longer, before it had begun to disintegrate.

In the morning after she had rested, she took a stand. She was going to the institute, to test this thing, and to run what tests she could on him. She screamed and screamed. And finally in terror, and misery, he consented.

"You're frightened to be without me, aren't you?" she asked.

"What if you were the last man on earth?" he asked. "And I were the last woman?"

She didn't know what that meant. But he seemed to know. He took her to the institute. All the normal motions of life were now nothing to him--hailing cabs, tipping, reading, walking, running, going up in an elevator. He had bought himself a cheap little wooden flute in a store, and he played it on the street, very dissatisfied with it, and with his own ability to make melodies with it. He didn't dare buy a radio. It would get its hands around his throat.

Again, at the institute, she managed a white coat, a chart, a pencil, the things she needed, forms from a raft of desktop pockets, yellow, pink, blue slips for various tests, and began to fill out the bogus orders.

She was at one minute his doctor, at another the technician, and whenever questioned, he rattled away like a celebrity in hiding.

In the midst of it all, she managed to fill out a long note on one of the triplicate forms, addressed to the concierge at the hotel, instructing him to arrange for a medical shipment. The address Samuel Larkin, M.D., University Hospital, San Francisco, California. She would make available the material as soon as she could. The concierge was to charge her account for overnight delivery, heat-sensitive medical material.

When they returned to the hotel room, she picked up a lamp and struck him. He reeled and then fell down, blood spattering from his face, into his eyes, but he came back, that wonderfully plastic skin and bones, like an infant surviving a fall from a ridiculously high window. He grabbed her and beat her again, until she lost consciousness.

In the night she woke. Her face was swollen, but the bones were not broken. One of her eyes was almost shut. That would mean days in this room. Days. She did not know if she could endure it.

The next morning he tied her to the bed for the first time. He used bits and pieces of sheet and made powerful knots, and had it half done when she awoke and discovered the gag in her mouth. He was gone for hours. No one came to the room. Surely some warning or instructions had been issued. She kicked, screamed, to no avail. She could not make a sound that was loud enough.

When he returned, he took the phone out of hiding and ordered a feast for her and once again begged her forgiveness. He played his small flute.

As she ate, he watched her every move. His eyes were thoughtful, speculating.

The next day she did not fight when he tied her up, and this time it was with the masking tape he'd brought back the day before, and quite impossible to break. He was going to tape her mouth when she advised him calmly that she might smother. He settled on a less painful and efficient gag. She went mad struggling after he left. It did no good. Nothing did any good. The milk leaked from her breasts. She was sick, and the room spun.

The following afternoon, after they had made love, he lay on top of her, heavy, sweet, his soft black hair between her breasts, his left hand on her right hand, dreaming, humming. She was not tied. He had cut the tape cuffs and let them dangle. He would make new ones when he wanted them.

She looked at the top of his head, at the shining black mane, she breathed in the scent of him, and pressed her body against his weight, and then lapsed back half into sleep for an hour.

Still he had not waked up. He was breathing deeply.

She reached over with her left hand and picked up the phone. Nothing else in her stirred. She managed to hold the earpiece and punch the button for the desk, and she spoke so low they could barely hear her.

It was night in California. Lark listened to what she had to say. Lark had been her boss. Lark was her friend. Lark was the only person who might believe her, the only person who would vow to take these specimens to Keplinger. Whatever happened to her, these specimens had to be taken to Keplinger. Mitch Flanagan was the man there she trusted, though he might not remember her.

Somebody had to know.

Lark tried to ask her all sorts of questions. He could not hear her, he said, speak up. She told him she was in danger. And might be interrupted at any moment. She wanted to blurt out the name of the hotel, but she was divided. If he came to look for her while she was still helpless, possibly she could not get the specimens out of here. Her mind was overwrought. She couldn't reason. She was babbling something to Lark about the miscarriages. Then Lasher looked up, snatched the phone from her hand, ripped the entire apparatus out of the wall and started to hit her.

He stopped because she reminded him that the marks would show. They had to go to America. They should leave tomorrow. And when he tied her up she wanted him to make everything looser. If he kept tying her up so tight she would lose the use of her limbs. There was an art to keeping a prisoner.

He wept in a dry quiet way. "I love you," he said. "If only I could trust you. If only you could be my helpmate, if you give me your love and trust. But I made you what you are, a calculating witch. You look at me and you try to kill me."

"You're right," she said. "But we should go to America now, unless you want them to find us."

She thought if she did not get out of this room she would go completely mad and be useless. She tried to make a plan. Cross the sea, get closer to home. Get closer. Houston is closer.

A dull hopelessness covered everything. She knew now what she had to do. She had to die before she conceived by this being again. She could not give birth to another, could not. But he was breeding with her; he had impregnated her twice already. Her mind went blank with fear. For the first time in her life, she understood why some human beings cannot act when they are frightened, why some freeze and stare in a meek fashion.

What had become of her notes?

In the morning, they packed the suitcases together. Everything medical was in one bag, and in this she placed the copies of all the various tags and slips she had used to order various information at the clinics. She placed on top the written instructions for the concierge which included Lark's address. He did not seem to notice.

She had taken considerable amounts of packing from the lab, but now she shoved towels in around the material. She shoved in her old bloodstained clothes.

"Why don't you throw that away?" he demanded, "that horrid smell."

"I don't smell anything," she said coldly. "And I need the packing, I told you. But I can't find my notebooks. I had all these notebooks."

"Yes, I read them," he said quietly. "I threw them away."

She stared at him.

No record now but these specimens. No communication to anyone that this thing lived and breathed and wanted to breed.

At the doors of the hotel, as he arranged for the car to take them to the airport, she gave the bag of medical specimens to the doorman, with a bundle of Swiss francs, and said in German hurriedly that the bag must go at once to Dr. Samuel Larkin. Turning her back on the man immediately, she walked towards the waiting car as Lasher turned and smiled at her and put out his hand.

"My wife, how tired she looks," he said softly with a little smile. "How sick she has been."

"Yes, very," she said, wondering what the bellhop saw when he looked at her, her bruised and thin face.

"Let me hold you, darling dear." He put his arms around her in the backseat. He kissed her as they drove away. She did not bother to look to see if the doorman had gon

e inside with the medical bag. She did not dare. The concierge would find the address inside. He had to.

When they reached New York, he realized the medical bag and all the test results were gone. He threatened to kill her.

She lay on the bed, refusing to speak. He tied her up gently, carefully, giving her room to move her limbs but not to get free, the twined tape making the strongest rope in the world. He covered her carefully so she wouldn't be cold. He turned on the fan vent in the bathroom and then the television at a high but not unreasonable volume, and went out.

It was a full twenty-four hours before he returned. She had been unable to hold the urine. She hated him. She wished for his death. She wished she knew charms with which to kill him.

He sat by her as she made all the arrangements in Houston--yes, two floors in a fifty-story building where they would have complete privacy. It was small in Houston terms, such a complex as this, and right downtown, and Houston had quite a few empty ones. This had been the headquarters of a cancer research program until it had gone broke. There were presently no other tenants.

All kinds of equipment was still on these three floors. It had all been repossessed by the owners of the property. But they could warrant nothing about it. Fine with her. She leased the entire space, complete with living quarters, offices, reception rooms, examining rooms, and laboratories. She arranged for utilities, rental cars, everything they would need to begin their serious study.

His eyes were very cold as he watched her. He watched her fingers when she pressed the buttons. He listened to every syllable that passed her lips.

"This city is very near to New Orleans," she said, "you realize that." She did not want him to discover it later and rail at her. Her wrists ached from his dragging her about. She was hungry.

"Oh yes, the Mayfairs," he said, gesturing to the printed history, which lay in its folder. Not a day passed that he did not study this or his notes or his tapes. "But they would never think to look for you only one hour away by air, would they?"

"No," she said. "If you hurt Michael Curry, I will take my own life. I will not be of further use to you."

"I'm not sure you're of use to me now," he said. "The world is filled with more amiable and agreeable people than you, people who sing better."

"So why don't you kill me?" she said. As he reflected, she did her level best with every invisible power at her command to kill him. It was useless.