For the One I Love Read online

  Odiah struggled, his attention divided between the huge, clacking monster hovering over them all and trying to breathe. He moaned and his cheeks flushed as he suffered for lack of oxygen. Somehow, though, he managed to pull Serket back under his control. After another minute of agitated snapping, the gigantic cybeast stuttered and grew still on its platform. A few second later, its enormously powerful pinchers fell still.

  “Mal, please!” Xara said, torn between grabbing Mal by the arm in order to free Odiah and her innate fear of touching Mal. Odiah choked and gagged, and she was almost ready to beg Mal on her knees to let him go when the man suddenly released him.

  Odiah dropped down on shaky legs and fell against the edge of the platform, a hand clutching his bruised throat. His eyes looked unfocused and he was gasping and wheezing as he struggled to pull oxygen into his lungs.

  Xara started forward to help him, but Mal turned and grabbed her by the chin, easily turning her whole body so she was staring directly into his face. He was incredibly powerful; it was like being held by a hydraulic machine. Genetics, genetic engineering, and implants had augmented his already impressive natural strength to almost titan proportions, the intellectual part of her brain decided. “Xara,” he said, just that one word, but Xara understood the implications of it.

  “I’ll control him,” Xara babbled. “Of course I will.” She swallowed against the tears and icy vomit in her throat. “He’s young, Mal. Don’t hurt him. Please.”

  “He can only hurt himself,” Mal said before pushing her away.

  * * *

  Read on for an excerpt from The Dreadful Doctor Faust:

  THEN

  1

  The Church of Saint Bridget sat disemboweled.

  Built in 1873 on the East River waterfront by the well-meaning Irish immigrants of Vinegar Hill, it failed to thrive despite their nurturing. Some said it was the dead brown fish smell of the river that wafted through the open clerestory windows in the summer, or the cobblestoned roads that never saw repair, or the careless rambling look of the cathedral, so at odds with the shapely modern white chapels that had come to dot Brooklyn. There may have been a history of violence, or some mischief, but if so, the story had never come to light.

  In only a hundred years the church had become a shell. By the late 1970’s, the last bits of statuary had been scraped from the structure in a thorough religious abortion, and the grounds de-sanctified. Time and blistering industrial wind did their work. The cathedral leaned, the unwelcomed light of day spiking through massive nesting holes in the ceiling. Mosaic windows, once full of leering Ecclesiastical images, were kicked out by kids so that jagged glass glinted like alien orifices all over the surface of the building. Inside, the crumbling plaster, studs and buckled floor made a deathtrap for the children who dared each other to venture into the structure. There were tarry patches of oil upon which floated crushed beer cans, used condoms, syringes. The floor simmered with dust and rats.

  Urban renewal was discussed, the church boarded over and yellow-taped for demolition, then abandoned when the investor lost his capital, his life savings, and swallowed a bullet from his gun. Slopes of debris from demolished buildings to either side embraced the church. It was soon forgotten again, protected by an urban wasteland of darkness, time, pollution.

  Sometimes garbage floated down from the Long Island Sound and found itself here, tongued to shore by the East River running brown and relentless past the church. And sometimes a few mottled blue-black bodies turned up as well, thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge like unwanted pets, eyes blind eggs in waxen faces so like mannequins. But the corpses didn’t linger long among the debris; they were efficiently dragged off by the clans of scavenging dogs that lived around the church.

  When the body of the girl drifted to shore among the other refuse, there was no one to see, and no dogs. It lay green and heavy, like a marble statue left out in the rain. It did not move, except for the occasional shudder like a little orgasm of pain rippling through the fish-white flesh.

  The man in black found the girl in the moments before daybreak. She was tall, insect-thin, with small, young applelike breasts and long dancer’s legs. Her hair was very long, and full of mildewing leaves like some siren coughed up out of the water in an old myth. She had been chewed, swallowed and digested by the city. Now she was excrement. Like the church, expelled. She might have been pretty, once; he didn’t know. The girl had no face, just a red gaping wound where a pretty face might once have been.

  He lifted her quivering weight into his arms and carried her into the ruined corpse of the church, into that place of the dead.

  * * *

  Read on for an excerpt from Bride of Doctor Faust:

  BELOW

  Louise bent over the young man in her bed and bit into his cheek like it was a new golden fruit. The boy’s eyes fluttered, but he was otherwise oblivious, his living meat rendered painless by generous amounts of local anesthetic. She watched the wound seep for some moments before lowering her face and kissing the rose-red wound. Then she bit the wound itself.

  “Poppet, please,” said the Doctor. He had already administered more morphine to the boy than was healthy. She knew from assisting the Doctor in a number of procedures that any more might stop his heart. Then he would require the Elixir to survive. And then he would be as they were.

  Impervious.

  Timeless.

  She stopped biting and simply writhed against the bloodstained bedclothes, a familiar heaviness growing in her loins. She held her arms out to him and the Doctor came unto her. He kissed her, licking all the young man’s blood from her lips. Louise sat up, embracing him there on their bed. Deftly she liberated the scalpel from his suit pocket and slid the tip beneath the mask of bandage he wore, the keen edge splitting the cloth with no trouble at all. He grunted at the pressure as the bandages came off in red pieces, the little flesh remaining on his face sticking to them in reptilian patches.

  “Does it hurt very much, Doctor?” she whispered, pressing herself against him, against the hard, changeless body of the man her was her husband. Her godly creator. Her hand moved smoothly down the front of his body and she found him through the thick black armor of clothing he wore. Her touch enlivened his body, though his face remained impassive as always. There was little flesh or musculature there to make it otherwise.

  “It always hurts, Poppet.”

  She wound her arms about his neck and her legs about his waist. “Then I shall have to kiss it to make it better.” And she did. Forgetting the boy bleeding on the bed beside her, she ran her lips and tongue and sometimes teeth along every newly revealed inch of the Doctor’s non-skin, the slick, red-wet bones of his face, the raw patches that tasted of new-minted pennies. The Doctor groaned under her ministrations, his hands tightening about her. She bit his cheek and he hissed fiercely through his teeth, his sudden hardness pressing into her. Their mouths clung in a kiss and she drank the blood off his naked, bleeding lips. Soon enough he was holding her down and thrusting into her harshly, as cutting as his infamous scalpel. She grunted from the violent impacts, her Timeless body unperturbed by the force. She took him and he was cold, so cold inside her.

  A soft knock on the door of their bedchamber interrupted their reverie. Louise loosened her hold on him, and the Doctor edged backward off the bed. He turned his back and reached for a hat on the wall beside his wife’s vanity, there for emergencies such as these.

  Louise sat up, arranging her sodden nightgown around her legs properly. “Yes,” she answered politely.

  The door opened and Rachel peeked in. She was young and slender, no older than Louise, but there was age in her eyes and in the etchings around her mouth. There was a disconnected wisdom in her words. Once a girl of the streets like she, the Doctor had helped deliver her son Matthew. He had saved both their lives. Ever since, Rachel had become as loyal to Louise as a lady-in-waiting to a grand duchess. “Sorry,” Rachel said, glancing down. “There’s someone here to see the Docto
r.”

  Louise glanced aside at the Doctor standing with his back to them both. “A patient?” She moved to the foot of the bed while gathering her blood-soaked skirts about her like a nest of loose skin. She often acted as nurse and assistant to the Doctor when he saw new patients, but she was sure no one was scheduled for tonight.

  Rachel looked distressed. “I don’t believe so. I mean…” She searched for the proper words, practically wringing her hands in the process. “What I mean is…she doesn’t look like she’s in need of medical care.”

  Louise stood up, subconsciously insinuating herself between the Doctor and the door. “She?”

  “A woman, ma’am.”

  “If she doesn’t need care, then what does she want with the Doctor?”

  “She’s requesting an audience. She said the Doctor will see her.” Rachel glanced aside once more at the Doctor, standing prim in his unbreathing silence. “And she says her name is Lizabeth.”

  * * *

  Also Available

  THE DREADFUL DOCTOR FAUST

  BRIDE OF DOCTOR FAUST

  Available at Amazon.com

  Table of Contents

  JOURNAL

  About the Author

  Excerpts

  Also Available