Chapter Forty-Two
Ashleigh sat in the antique French arm chair in Seth’s room at the Mandrake House. The chair was 19th century, the back and arms carved with images of a woman and gargoyles. It felt like a throne to her. She ate from silver room-service trays: shrimp and grits, sliced heirloom tomatoes, a cheeseburger, a waffle, pecan pie, orange juice and sweet tea. The pregnancy made her crave everything. Besides, she needed to load up on calories to charge up her power, because she’d zapped her latest two victims pretty hard.
Seth and the random girl Ashleigh had picked for him rolled around on the big four-poster bed a few feet away. The girl—what was her name? Alondra?—was already down to her underwear, and she’d stripped off his shirt and started kissing his abdominal muscles.
The girl really was incredibly hot, Ashleigh thought. She was almost as pretty as Ashleigh’s last body had been, and nicely tanned, too. Ashleigh was more than sick of thumping around in Darcy’s pregnant hippo body. Why couldn’t she take this girl’s form instead?
Darcy’s cell phone, with its stupid cartoon-kitten stickers, sang out a chime. New voice mail from Jenny. Though Ashleigh hadn’t answered the calls, she had eagerly listened to each voice mail as they came in. Jenny was even helpful enough to tell how far she was from Charleston in each voice mail, so there had been no reason for Ashleigh to call her back.
“Darcy, Jenny again,” the recording said. “I’m about forty miles from there. I really, really need you to call back and tell me where to meet you, or what hotel you’re at, or something. Please. Thanks.”
Ashleigh decided to let Jenny stew a little longer.
On the bed, the blond girl—Alissa?—was eagerly grappling with Seth’s belt. She pulled it off him and ripped open his jeans. Seth unhooked her bra.
“Slow down, guys,” Ashleigh said. “You don’t want to blow your wad.”
The girl paused long enough to fling her bra aside, and it hooked over a lamp. She whipped Seth’s jeans off and threw them to the carpet.
“I said slow down, damn it!” Ashleigh shouted.
She heaved herself to her feet, got a head rush, struggled with her balance. The baby woke up and kicked in an annoying way against the wall of her womb, three times, then a fourth, then a fifth. “Stop it!” Ashleigh made a fist and punched the baby as hard as she could, and the little bastard quit kicking.
Ashleigh staggered toward the bed. Seth flung the girl onto her back, and she laughed and wrapped her legs around his hips.
“Wait!” Ashleigh put her hands on both of them, taking control of the situation. “Stop. Cool down.”
“But I don’t want to stop,” the girl whined. She clutched Seth tighter between her thighs.
“This is going too fast,” Ashleigh said. “Look. We should play a game. I know the perfect thing.”
“That sounds fun,” Seth said. “Would that make you happy, Allegra?”
“But I want to fuck,” Allegra whined.
“Check this out.” Ashleigh reached under the bed and pulled out a length of rope with a noose at each end. Ashleigh had tied them herself, upstairs in Tommy and Esmeralda’s room on the fifth floor, while Seth was out with his Grayson friends the previous night. Ashleigh Goodling had been a highly decorated Girl Scout in her time, and had brought in a small fortune for her troop pushing those Thin Mints and Tagalongs, even though she overcharged for the cookies and took a cut off the top for herself.
“What are we doing?” Seth asked.
“Just watch,” Ashleigh said. She looped one rope around the base of a headboard poster, and then handed both ends of it to Allegra.
“What do I do?” Allegra asked.
Ashleigh put a hand on the back of Allegra’s neck. “You want to tie him up. It’s always been your fantasy.”
“Yeah, I guess it has. Give me your hands, Seth.”
“I don’t know.” Seth looked a little puzzled. Ashleigh quickly took his arm.
“You love this idea,” Ashleigh said.
“I love this idea.” A giddy smile broke across Seth’s face. “I really, really love this idea.”
“Anything to make you happy, Seth.” Allegra slipped the nooses over Seth’s wrists and pulled them tight.
She’d spent more than an hour on those knots. They were masterpieces, little bunches of knots coiled within knots. Once they pulled tight and small, it would be nearly impossible for Seth to untie them. Seth was no Boy Scout.
Ashleigh grabbed some of the bed’s excessive supply of pillows. She placed them over and around Seth’s roped hands.
Ashleigh walked to the door of the room and turned back to look, as if she’d just stepped in on them. There was no visible sign that Seth was restrained at all. Perfect.
The girl began to tug Seth’s boxer shorts down.
“Honey, no, wait,” Ashleigh said. She placed a hand on the back of the girl’s neck. “Slow down. Once you get him going, you’ve only got a couple minutes. Go real slow, like I told you.”
The girl sighed. She lay down on top of Seth and kissed him slowly, all over the face.
Ashleigh walked out on the balcony and closed the doors behind her. The last thing she needed was Seth’s voice in the background. Out here, there were the sounds of music and lots of people, exactly what she needed.
She called Jenny back.
“Darcy, thank God,” Jenny said. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m peachy. Why?”
“What about Seth?”
“I guess he’s okay. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“A while?”
“Coupla hours, I guess. He went off with a bunch of his old friends.”
“For a couple of hours?”
“It’s okay,” Ashleigh said. “I’m having a good time anywho, and I get they don’t want some pregnant chick hanging around. And Seth doesn’t want to look uncool in front of his friends, and I know what it’s like when you don’t want to look uncool—”
“Darcy, Seth might be in danger. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?”
“Well, I don’t see him anywhere, but there’s like a bazillion people here,” Ashleigh said. “Did you try calling him?”
“His phone’s not even on.”
Ashleigh smiled. She had pickpocketed Seth’s phone, turned it off, and dropped it in Darcy’s big canvas purse. Though ugly and horribly big, the purse was turning out to be pretty useful.
“Well…I don’t know,” Ashleigh said. “I guess I could go back to the hotel and look for him there.” Through the glass window, she saw the girl sucking Seth’s dick. Ashleigh pounded on the window. When Allegra looked up at her, Ashleigh shook her head and did a cutting motion across her throat. Why wouldn’t that slut slow down? Ashleigh must have overdosed her with love. “How far away are you?”
“I’ll be in Charleston in ten minutes, but I don’t know where to go from there.”
“Meet me at The Mandrake House.” Ashleigh gave her directions, including which parking garage to use and the best way to walk to the hotel. She figured Jenny would use the same route when she later left the hotel, and that was something Ashleigh was interested in controlling. “I’ll just wait in the lobby for you, okay?”
“Yeah. Darcy, everything’s crazy right now. I’m so glad to have you as a friend.”
“I’m glad to have you as a friend, too, Jenny,” Ashleigh said.
“You sure kicked up a big storm,” Schwartzman said. He sat beside Heather, looking out the airplane window into a dark, murky night. “You sure this was a good idea?”
Around them, more CDC investigators were clustered around laptops and talking in low voices, as they caught up on the scarce information.
“There could be a serious event tonight,” Heather said.
“You better hope there is,” Schwartzman said. “The National Guard’s on alert. We have state and local police looking for this girl—”
“That could be dangerous.”
“—with orders to report if they see her, but leave her alone until we can get a biohazard team out there. Homeland Security’s going to be all over that city. This is going to be one hell of a bar tab if you’re wrong, Heather.”
“But you can imagine what she could do in a city, with a big crowd like that.”
“I can imagine things all day,” Schwartzman said. “I can imagine Director Voynich asking why we raised the nation’s threat level an entire color today, if nothing turns up.”
“They still do that color thing?” Heather asked.
“Heather, I’m serious.”
“Me, too. I had no idea they still did that.”
“Heather—”
“What do you want me to say? If there’s a fifty percent—fuck, ten percent, five percent—chance she’s going to repeat what happened in that town, shouldn’t we try to stop it? Shouldn’t we capture her? Quarantine her? Study her?”
Schwartzman tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, a look that meant he was studying you with possible intent to psychoanalyze.
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” he asked. “To study her. You think you’ll discover something.”
“Possibly,” Heather said.
“Something extraordinary.”
“We passed extraordinary a while ago, don’t you think?”
“What is it you want to know?”
“I want to understand how she does it. There’s a lot here that doesn’t make any sense.”
“And you’re going to make sense of it.”
“That’s what I do,” Heather said.