Marilyn Todd - Dark Horse

The demon made its excuses and slipped silently into the night.

My, my. It rubbed its hands. With Volcar safely across the River Styx, Clio another three days in agonizing limbo and an occupant for the box, what a marvellous day this had been.

There was no air left. Only an immense pressure inside her lungs, bursting, heaving, choking, implacable. Darkness turned to red. It tore at her eyeballs. Ripped at her heart. Clawed her liver. Claudia prayed. She prayed to live, to die, no, to live. Please Jupiter, don't let it end like this, I'm not ready. Her throat arched backwards, gurgling frantically to catch the last few drops of air that remained in the coffin.

Not yet. Not yet. Dear Juno, I've hardly lived. Please, not yet.

But the pressure grew stronger, and in a relentless volley of blistering gasps, Claudia's lungs expelled her life force. You don't understand. I'm not ready to meet my mother. I don't want to see her. I don't want to know why she slit her wrists without leaving a note for her only child. I don't want to hear why she could not say goodbye, or that she was sorry. Or that she had never loved me.

The light told Claudia she had no choice in the matter. Give up the fight, said the light. Come with me. And the light was faint, a dull yellow glow, but then it grew brighter and brighter, until- Fresh air blasted her face. Thank you, thank you, you gods on Olympus. Thank you so much. The light was not that of the Ferryman rowing across, but that of a common or garden oil lamp. She was saved. Greedily, Claudia sucked in the clean, wholesome air. And with it the scent of the demon.

Lamp held high, the demon gazed down on its handiwork.

Perfect. The ligatures around the victim's neck, wrists and ankles had chafed the skin raw. Blood oozed in thick red dribbles from the leather straps that bound her and dreamily the demon wondered what it would be like to lick one. To taste her blood on the tip of its tongue. The demon recoiled. Disgusting idea! Ugh! Ghoulish. Vile. Worse than necrophilia!

It watched, fascinated, as its victim's wheezing lungs gasped to fill up with air. It reminded the demon of a salmon thrashing and writhing on the river bank. Drowning in air. At first, the gasps came in short, shallow bursts. Then they juddered and shuddered as they returned to normality, and the salmon's hair was wringing with sweat. Her eyes, unfocused still, were bloodshot. The demon hadn't expected that. An unexpected bonus, if ever there was one. Just like with Clio. Some of the effects there had been particularly stimulating in their unexpectedness and their -

'Thought — no one would — come.' Claudia's strangled voice startled the demon out of its reverie. 'Thought — I'd been — buried alive.'

Buried alive? Good gracious, where was the pleasure in that? Actually, there was quite a lot of pleasure in that — but there was even more pleasure in watching them suffer. Bringing them to the brink again and again and again. And, thanks to the genius touch of the glass panel, this was a show the demon could follow at the closest of quarters.

'Untie me.' Good. Her senses were slowly returning. 'I'm strapped in.'

'The best thing about this piece of equipment,' the demon crooned, 'is its capacity for multiple usage.'

It leaned forward to drink in her terror as understanding finally dawned. Fear, the demon decided, made her even more beautiful.

'I plan to visit in Medea's footsteps,' it confided. Claudia's eyes were bulging with horror. Beautiful eyes, terrified eyes, with long, sweat-soaked lashes. 'Corinth, for example. A wonderful city, full of excitement.' A veritable mine waiting to be tapped. 'Athens, perhaps. Ithaca, definitely. Rome, though, is where I shall settle.'

Home to the homeless, succour to the sick, comfort to the companionless, this was a city where the demon could live out its ancestral fantasies without arousing suspicion. It laughed softly. Everyone trusts a priest!

'Leo trusted me,' Llagos whispered. 'Enough to show me the Scythian war spear. Enough to explain the significance of its feathers and carvings. Enough, even, to let me hold it.'

'Enough to play act with him.'

Llagos was surprised by her perceptiveness. This would be more satisfying than he had imagined. A woman who understands. Days could pass, he mused, maybe weeks, bringing her to the brink and throwing her back. He could toy with her like a ball.

'Yes, indeed,' he said. 'Dear Leo. He was laughing, even as the bronze point buried itself in his flesh. Squelch.'

The demon delighted at the heave of Claudia's stomach. Should he elaborate on Leo's agonizing linger in full consciousness, the pattern the blood made on the threshold, the things he'd told Leo about his whoring ex-wife? There was no hurry. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day he could share his reminiscences over that delicious brutality.

'Bulis trusted me, too, but in a rather different way.'

One more perversion in which to experiment, and that had been some erection the boy had had, Llagos thought enviously, as he'd fastened the chains. He'd learned a lot from Bulis, however. He'd learned that killing wasn't the food that sustained his inner self, it was power and control that kept it alive. A trick he had been employing for some time with Clio.

Clio had trusted him, too, his being a priest. Short, thin and clumsy, with his sticky-out teeth, no one took Llagos seriously. It was an image he'd cultivated over the years, until he had been spinning Clio's trust like wool on a spindle. Reducing her to caressing her own naked body for the sake of a few silver coins had been just the start. Llagos had planned a lengthy process of further physical degradations, until the moment he saw her talking to Marcus. Disaster! Clio was his own special toy, a pet to push and pull at his whim. He could not let her sail away. Not after he had invested so much.

7 created the vampire myth,' he told Claudia. 'It was me, who kept the old traditions alive on this island. Me, who told the islanders not to follow false Roman gods.'

'Because you want them to serve the old ways like you do, you deviant sonofabitch.'

'Claudia, Claudia, calm yourself.' He stroked her cheek with his thumb. 'I told you before. Bindus, Poseidon, Neptune, it doesn 't matter by what name one invokes the God of the Sea, or any of the gods for that matter. It merely suits my purpose to divide the islanders from their overlords.'

Dissent, anarchy and bloodthirsty legends were all weapons in Llagos's armoury. He alone had whipped up suspicions of Clio's lifestyle and voluptuous beauty. Through their priest, the islanders had been drip-fed tales of flesh-eating monsters preying on their community, and he had played his part to perfection the night he ran, scared shitless as they believed, from the screaming banshee.

'But you're married,' Claudia said. 'You have children.'

'Four,' the priest nodded. 'Who will travel with me. Perfect cover, you see.'

'Like your pidgin Latin.'

Better and better, Llagos thought. She was on the same wavelength, this woman. He adjusted his shoulders to their accustomed public droop, let his chin hang a little. 'Iss better if everyones laugh at me,' he said, lapsing into his act. 'Thiss way I can moves around freely, and everyones trust me, you see.'

Thin fingers closed the lid once more over Claudia Seferius.

Outside, the first blackbird of the morning broke into song.

The stiletto hadn't fallen on to the floor as the woman Clio had seen with Leo's cousin on the gangplank had thought. When she'd realized the raw, twitching lump in the stone cottage on the hill had been human, the knife had fallen from her hand, but it landed on the mattress beside Clio.

Then Llagos arrived. Clio fought back the surge of terror, which gripped her now as violently as it had when his silhouette had first blocked out the sun as the woman went to fetch help. Through waves of pain and fear, Clio had been able to see what the woman could not, that Llagos had drugged her and followed her here. Two for the price of one, she'd thought bitterly. To her credit, the woman had wanted to fight. She'd backed up, inch by inch, towards the bed, feeling with her toe for the knife.