She reached down and touched her new belly, pressing her long fingers into the softness of the flesh. It was a sensual feeling. Like she was touching herself . . . but not touching herself-and it felt both thrilling and taboo.
She felt soft fingertips drop onto her bare shoulder, this new flesh molding onto hers, and she turned her head. She had no idea what her borrowed face looked like, but she imagined it as beautiful and feminine with soft full lips and expressive brown eyes. A tall, bare-chested man stood behind her, the length of his body sliding up against her, her ass pressing into the length of his manhood. She tried to find his face, but here things got bizarre. The man's body was human from the neck down, but he wore a ghastly, skeletal stag's-head mask over his head.
She tried to move away from him, disgusted by the animal musk that exuded from the man/death stag's body, but he held her fast. He caught her up in his arms and lifted her into the air, carrying her with him as he strode down the deck. She wanted to fight him, didn't like the aggressive way he held her, but when she opened her mouth to protest, he silenced her with a kiss, his long black stag's tongue laced with a poison that burned her mouth.
Daniela realized that this was some kind of bastardized version of the Horned God ritual. Usually, this magical rite-an induction ceremony, really-occurred when a blood sister first joined her coven and spiritually gave herself to the Horned God as a way of binding herself to the sisterhood. It was a beautiful moment in every blood sister's initiation, and Daniela hated that it was being twisted in this nasty way.
She beat her fists against his chest, the foul scent of animal filling her nostrils, and he bent his antlered head toward her face, slipping the same thick animal tongue back into her mouth again. She gagged, unable to stop him as he bit at her lips, fur and something that was not teeth, but maybe a hard palate, grinding against her mouth.
He finally pulled away from her and when she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a silken bed, soft down pillows fluffed around her nude body. The death stag was poised above her, naked now, his giant throbbing cock angled toward her nether regions. She dragged herself away, not wanting anything to do with the creature or his giant penis. He reached for her middle, and she knew he was going to try to flip her over so he could have his way with her from behind. She did the only thing she could think of to save herself. She grabbed the death stag's skeletal white antlers and yanked on them, pulling his head toward her chest. The antlers-no, the whole death stag's head-came away in her hands, the sharpened tips embedding themselves into her chest.
She gasped as pain flooded her body, rivulets of warm blood spilling down her naked breasts. She reached up and pulled the antlers from her chest, letting them drop onto the bed beside her. She stared down at the gory twin wounds cut into her skin, and then she pressed her palms against them, trying to stanch the flow of her lifeblood out onto the sheets.
When she finally tore her gaze away from all the blood and looked up, she found a grinning human skull staring down at her. She tried to speak, to ask the beast why he'd done this to her, but its empty eye sockets beckoned her to follow it into death. She shook her head, not wanting to go but also not able to fully resist. She couldn't think straight. Had lost too much blood. The whole bed was sticky with the stuff.
She reached up a hand, fingers digging into the skull's mouth, trying to yank away its lower jaw-but it bit her and she began to cry. After a few moments, it released the fleshy digits and she let the hand fall back to her chest, slipping on the slickness there, unable to keep her hands pressed against the wound any longer.
The skull lowered itself toward her face, grinning as it came close and closer . . .
• • •
She woke up after the first real sleep she'd had since they'd left Echo Park for Italy. In her mind, it all seemed like years, decades, centuries ago . . . she felt old and wizened, no longer a young woman. A husk of her former self.
She felt all this and she hadn't even opened her eyes yet.
The weight of the past and the future were already pushing down on her, dragging her back toward things she wished she could forget.
Not wanting to be awake but knowing she had to rejoin the world, she asked her eyes to open, and this time they obeyed her. Light flooded in, blinding her-and the morning sunlight was so bright that tears began to course down her cheeks, not attached to any emotion. She blinked back the wetness, reaching up to discover that one hand was tethered to an IV drip, so she used the other to brush away the salty tears. At first, she thought she was alone, but she quickly realized this was not the case. A woman with uncombed brown hair sat in a plush chair directly across from Daniela's hospital bed. Her eyes were closed, left elbow crooked on the arm of the chair so her chin rested on the back of her hand. She was creamy skinned with a spray of freckles dotting her nose. Her dark lashes splayed fetchingly across the top of her cheeks as she slumbered.