Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
It’s getting warmer. Too warm. Hot.
I’m burning. Boiling. My skin is literally bubbling.
I blink again. Three times always seems to do the trick.
Back in the bed. Rouge is on her hands and knees. I’m fucking her in her ass.
Fuck. So tight. So good. So... So…
I’m stuck.
I’m in a desert. Surrounded by white sand.
Excepts it’s not white sand… I bend over and slide my fingers through.
Tiny diamonds.
I take a handful. I’ll pocket them. Sell them when I get home.
But I don’t have pockets. I’m naked.
And I’m slowly sinking into the diamonds.
They’re digging into my skin, burrowing into me like tiny little gremlins. Their tiny teeth gnaw at me, consume me from the inside out.
And… And…
“Maddox? You look thirsty.”
I’m back in the four-poster bed. Rouge is lying next to me, stroking her fingers up and down my nude body. Her eyes keep changing sizes, and I can swear her pussy is winking at me.
I breathe in, but I can’t speak.
“Your throat is dry. Here.” Rouge gets up, goes to a small sixties-style refrigerator. Red, of course, and next to a large safe in the same color. She returns with a goblet of red liquid. “Drink.”
I behold the glass. Swallow several times, enough to lubricate my throat to rasp out the words “Bloody Mary?”
She sits next to me. “Bloody Mary. The first true queen of England. Do you know why she was called that?”
I shake my head.
“Her father was Henry the eighth—you’ve undoubtedly heard of his six wives. He was the one who started the Church of England, mostly to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother. When Mary took power, she restored Catholicism as the state religion and executed anyone she could find who remained clinging to Protestantism.” Her eyes light up with crimson fire. “Burned them at the stake.”
I try swallowing again. I don’t really want a drink right now, not with whatever the fuck is going through my system.
“Elizabeth the first took over upon Mary’s death and reversed the decision.” Rouge grins. Her teeth are made of the same diamonds that were burrowing into my flesh. “Of course, she couldn’t unburn the ashes of the dead Protestants that lay at Mary’s feet.”
I close my eyes and rub at my forehead. Why is Rouge talking about this?
“You’re not speaking, Maddox. Drink what I gave you. You’ll feel better.”
I hold up the glass of red liquid. Smell it.
It doesn’t smell like a Bloody Mary. It smells like…something familiar.
“Drink, Maddox.” She pushes the glass to my lips. “Drink.”
I look at Rouge. Her eyebrows are raised. I think I can hear them giggling at me.
“Drink, Maddox. Drink, in remembrance of me.”
I obey. My throat is dry. Probably a side effect from the shrooms.
The liquid is thick. Viscous.
This isn’t tomato juice.
It has a metallic taste… Like…
Like blood.
I stare at the glass, and it slips from my grip. Falls to the floor. Breaks into a million pieces. Creates a giant red puddle.
Wild laughter bounces off the walls of the room, penetrates my body, blurs my vision…
And I’m on a canoe, paddling upstream through it. Through a river of thickest blood. I look behind me. I’m about to go down a waterfall.
A bloodfall.
But no matter how hard I paddle, I can’t stop the boat.
I finally relent, fall down the scarlet cascade.
The static returns. Tiny little gnats buzzing in my ear. Entering my skull. Flying in and out of my eyes, my nose, my mouth.
It isn’t real. None of this is real.
Or is it?
To this day, I don’t know the answer.
What happened with Rouge that night… I don’t know what was real and what was fabricated by the mind-altering mushrooms.
I mean… The swarm of gnats, the desert of diamonds, the blinding snowstorm. Those weren’t real.
I know we fucked. That part was pretty damned good.
But the goblet of blood that Rouge commanded me to drink…
That I was never sure of.
For years I dismissed it as part of the trip brought on by the shrooms.
All I know is that I kept Rouge at arm’s length after that night.
What if it actually happened? It felt real in the moment, but then I started hallucinating again right after. The waterfall of blood.
Hell, I was hallucinating while it was going on. I saw her eyes light on fire, her eyebrows laugh, her pussy wink at me.
Now that I know what Rouge is capable of doing, that particular vision doesn’t seem that farfetched.
I kept going back to the club because I thought it wasn’t real. I enjoyed going to the club, and I just avoided Rouge when I could.
Even now, I don’t know with a hundred percent certainty that what I experienced was real.
But if it was… If Rouge truly handed me a cup of blood and told me to drink it…
If she’s the one behind May’s decapitated head in the park by the airport…