Max looked back. Alioune stood framed, tall, naked, curving lines from an armory of scimitars accented by shadow, in the closing doorway to the pleasure chamber the sisters had constructed in their loft. Suspension harnesses still swung back and forth, and the rubber sheets on the bed below were twisted into a bas-relief map of their strange passions. Devices and equipment lay scattered across the floor. Trophies, offerings, sacrifices, and mementos decorated the walls and hung from the ceiling: skulls and bones from beasts and humans, some broken, others whole, bleached or stained or dipped in gold or studded with jewels; spears and knives constructed of wood and stone and decorated with feathers, hair, bone fragments; shrunken heads, hands, feet, ears, and other parts clustered together and strung up like dried peppers. The scent of sweat and incense blew out on a gust of fan-blown air. But there was no blood. Nothing to clean up.
A sense of relief passed through him as he turned away. Since he had inserted himself into the dark equation in which his adopted nieces found sexual gratification, there had been no need to help them dispose of bodies. Nor had it been necessary to satisfy himself with street prey. Their new relationship, still a shock to him after so many years of serving as their secret guardian, fulfilled them all—and even more astonishing, left them alive. Balanced between pain and pleasure, life and death. Unlike all the fragile innocents he and the twins had sacrificed in the temples of their appetite.
No death. No killing. Max was grateful, because the terrible thing inside that had allowed him to kill so easily was gone. Consumed by the new bond between Max and the twins. He could not go back to the old ways. Without the Beast inside of him, he could barely perform his craft. The simple blood work of carving a body for transport, sterilizing a kill site, burying or cremating the remains, turned his stomach. In the six months since he and the twins had started seeing each other regularly, he had taken only two assignments. Both times, screaming migraines had paralyzed him for days after the jobs. On the last job, he had allowed an old homeless woman to witness the work and had been forced to eliminate her. He had been paralyzed in a pitch-black room for two days afterward. Even their bizarre and relentless lovemaking tested his limits more than he had thought possible.
Max reached into the robe pocket for something to wipe the sweat building on his forehead. His fingers closed on cool, smooth silk, wrapped around a folded sheaf of stiff paper. The note he had found that morning on his pillow, in his apartment, where no one should have been to leave him anything.
A short, breathless walk brought him to the sofa opposite Kueur. The Box's locks and seals sighed into place. Max closed his eyes. Alioune's bare feet slapped against oak floor as she walked to the kitchen. He pulled out the silk-wrapped note and held it loosely in his hand. "The world has become a harsh place," he whispered.
"But it's always been that way," Kueur said.
"What would I do without you?" he asked, overwhelmed for a moment by an image of being naked, crippled, and lost in a maze of narrow, razor-lined walls. "Where would I be, what would I do?"
"What you have always done," Alioune answered from the kitchen. Pots clanged, glasses clinked, cutlery tinkled as she straightened out the kitchen with ferocious energy.
"But perhaps with less care," Kueur added.
The purr of her voice made him open his eyes, meet her gaze.
"What is this thing that flavors you with melancholy today?" she asked.
He took out the note and tossed it across the space between them. The towel draping her body fell away as she snatched the red silk out of the air like a hawk catching a helpless bird.
She read: " 'No one will ever love you the way I will.' "
Kueur looked to Max, who slipped his gaze down to the red silk in her hand. Alioune came over, took the note. Her eyes flicked back and forth over the paper. She turned it over, examined the blank side, then took the piece of silk, rubbed it between her fingertips, smelled it. She handed both back to her twin.
"Certainly not a designer scarf's quality of silk, and that color would never be fashionable," she said. "Some cheap Chinese import."
"It's the color of blood," Max said.
"Fresh blood," Kueur corrected. "The paper's mark—”
“Painfreak," Max said. "I know."
"An invitation," said Alioune. She strutted back to the kitchen, taut legs and long arms swinging with aggressive energy. "A challenge."
Max found himself aroused and looked to Kueur. Her full lips were slightly parted. She brushed back her short-cropped hair, ran the nail of a fingertip from her forehead, down her high cheekbones to the corner of her mouth. "Who is she?"
"I don't know." He told them where he had found it a week ago. "It could have been a bomb, or poison, or there might have been someone in the room waiting to kill me."
"But it wasn't, Tonton. Perhaps it's from some old admirer? Someone you worked with? Someone who ... survived your attentions?"
"I doubt it, but I can't be sure."
Alioune spooned tea from a tin into a kettle. "The Painfreak connection? Is the club in town? Have you visited it lately?"
Max scowled. "Painfreak moved into an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn a week ago. And no, I haven't gone. I don't want to go. That place was a den of dilettantes and amateurs in Saigon thirty years ago." He glanced at the back of his left hand, where the invisible mark of entry and participation was supposed to remain for the rest of his life. "It was a disappointment. I'm amazed it's still in business."
"Twenty-five years ago, in Cairo," Kueur said, holding up her left hand as if the mark would suddenly appear with the memory.
"It was a new world for us," said Alioune, filling the kettle with water and setting it on the stove. "But it quickly became boring."
Max shook his head. "You weren't even born—”
“Tonton, why do you never listen to us when we talk of our past?" Kueur interrupted.
"But you were such little girls when I saw you in the Bois, what, fifteen, twenty years ago?"
Kueur wrapped the note back in the red silk scarf. "We did not have to age, in Africa, in the jungles and cities and desert. And we were afraid to grow old, to take on the risks and responsibilities. We had enough power to protect ourselves. Even in Europe, life was simpler as children. When you found us, revealed your self and appetite and the life that could be ours, we understood that change was not as fearful a thing as we believed. We grew up with the other girls in the school you left us in, learned the ways of modem society and culture. Paid what price we had to pay for change. Adapted. Of course, since we left the school, we simply have not gotten older. We have not had to. We are as we wish to be. Surely, you noticed."
“Well, until recently, I've only come when you needed me, and I didn't think—You're right, I didn't want to know. Not really. I wanted to believe you might have had some innocence to you at some time."
"Alioune and I were never innocent. And neither were you. Being born was a corruption of our souls." Kueur wrapped the towel more tightly around herself. "It is only one of the things that bind you to us, Tonton."
"Why are you afraid to go to her?" Alioune asked. "I don't even know if it is a her. . . ."
"There was a time when nothing would have stopped you from finding out what this message means," said Alioune, turning back to the kettle.
"I'm not as hungry as I used to be. Your fault," he said, almost smiling.
Alioune bowed her head. "Neither are we, and we are grateful. But someone," she continued, waving the red-wrapped message, "wants you, and it is dangerous to ignore such a summons. These things build power over time. We know."
"But why me?"
"Are you afraid?"
A chill passed through Max. "I don't know. I don't think so." He laughed, shrugged his shoulders, stroked his wide palm with cold fingers. "I've never been afraid before. I think what I feel is something else. Like something is waiting for me, and I don't know what it is, what it wants, how I will deal with it. My world, inside and out, has changed. I feel . . . uncertain?"
"Dread," Alioune said, pouring boiling water into cups. She stared intently at the stream of steaming liquid.
Kueur came to Max, put the letter back in his robe pocket, settled herself in his lap. Her arms snaked over his shoulders, around his neck. A leg twined around his. She was hot, even through the towel and robe. Her breath smelled of sex. When her tongue probed his mouth, he tasted his own cum.
"You must face this haunting," she whispered in his ear. "Stalking, surely."
"In times of change, the past sometimes comes to haunt," Alioune said, appearing suddenly beside them offering a tray of cups.
"
Merci
, Alioune," Kueur said, taking one. To Max, she said, "You must, or the cost will be terrible. And we do not want to lose you, Tonton B`eb`ete. Especially now that we have truly discovered what we can be to each other."
Max took a cup, sipped the tea. Alioune's mixture went down like a caress and sent soothing fingers of warmth through his body, into his muscles, along his nerves. A feeling of calm settled over him. He exhaled a long breath that released all the tension his body had been hoarding. Alioune pressed against him as she sat, cup in hand. She sipped, then rested her head against his shoulder. "You must pay the price for change," she said gently.
"I thought I already had," Max answered, thinking of his Beast.
"That was only the beginning," said Kueur.
They finished the tea and sat huddled together as the afternoon passed in silence, like a hunter circling its prey.
~*~
On his way back to his apartment, walking on Leonard Street with the river, sunset, and brisk fall breeze at his back, Max struggled to remember how time had passed before and after meeting the twins in Paris's Bois de Boulogne. The moment he saw them with the young Brazilian boy masquerading as a woman remained vivid in his mind, like an explosion of light and emotion. Like Creation's Big Bang. Seeing them carve into the prostitute while at the same time pleasuring him, one feeding on pain, the other on ecstasy, had awakened feelings he never knew existed. In the twins, he caught a glimpse of a part of himself in the moment, and in the future. The reflection tantalized him with its differences, seduced him with possibilities. Raised hope, which remained even after the consummation of their relationship, so that he wondered what he was hoping for in staying with them. Fired a need to protect, as if the twins had emerged fully grown from his own loins. Cast a cold shadow over him at the thought of losing them.
In that moment, Max remembered making the first clear, conscious decision of his life. He would not interrupt their play, or kill them, or run away from something he did not understand. He would not become their victim, or allow them to control his life. Max vowed to help them instead.
He would watch what they became. Be their friend, their guardian. But at a distance, so neither his appetite nor theirs would interfere with their relationship. And so the Beast that had been Max would not corrupt their development, and their blossoming would not distract him from his work.
That moment was so different from the random paths of death he had followed before and after that it hardly seemed to belong to him. And since that moment in the Bois, his life had been shaped by his visits with the twins. The years spent killing, for himself and others, was a fog of vague memories. The days shared with Kueur and Alioune were light-filled islands of life. He was old in time without the twins, and young in time with them.
Max laughed to himself, wondering if there was a way to borrow from the young to make the old feel better.
"Why laugh alone?" a woman's voice asked.
Max froze, focused on his surroundings.
He was alone on the tiny island of Finn Square, waiting for the light to change. The streetlamps had just turned on, and the crisp autumn air was tainted by exhaust from cars accelerating to beat the red signal. The open space gave him a view down West Broadway, up Varick, and up and down Leonard. A few pedestrians walked in the distance. Neon restaurant names glowed between closed storefronts. Darkened office building windows reflected the closing darkness while spilling the emptiness they had contained through the day onto the streets.
The breeze gusted. Something cool and smooth settled over his ear and cheek. Max jerked a hand up, startled, and brushed away the sensation. A red scarf fluttered away.
Max checked the windows again, peered through a hole between boards protecting subway construction work abandoned for the weekend, then patted himself for a planted transmission receiver. He found nothing. But the voice was real. Someone had spoken to him, from nearly right next to him.
He waited. Shadows stretched, twisted, scurried before cars and trucks, blossomed under streetlamps. At the next corner on Varick, one shadow hesitated before vanishing up the street. Max followed.
Buildings loomed over him, doorways yawned. Homeless men and women looked out from cardboard shacks and dens fashioned out of accidental juxtapositions between steel and concrete. Max examined them as he passed, searching for the elusive maker of the shadow he pursued. Startled cries and moans of fear greeted him. He moved on, stalking sudden movements on the periphery of his vision. The streets shortened as he broke into a run. The echo of his footsteps chased him as he hunted his unknown prey, turning corners, threading his way through traffic.