Nicole, responding to Kueur’s encouraging hand, rolled over his body. She lay on top of him, arms at her sides, legs on the outside of his. Her hair fell across Max’s eyes, found its way with Kueur’s tongue into his mouth.
Alioune moved his cock into Nicole, maneuvered the woman’s hips from side to side. A faint moan escaped Nicole.
Kueur pulled away from Max, leaving him gasping for more of her kisses. She drew Nicole’s head up by the hair, scratched Nicole’s cheeks and drew blood. Suddenly, she slammed Nicole’s head into his chest. Max grunted from the impact of her forehead on his collarbone.
The shock and pain of bone hitting bone traveled through Max, and he kicked his legs instinctively.
“Yes,” Alioune whispered, her voice hoarse. She shuddered between his legs, then pushed Nicole’s hips back and forth to a faster rhythm. The warm moistness of her mouth covered him where Nicole’s did not.
Pain evaporated. Max gasped at a sudden shot of pleasure running through him, exploding from between his legs. He forced himself up, saw Alioune had jammed her fingers into Nicole from the rear.
Kueur cried out, laughed.
Max looked to her. She grabbed his hair and banged his head hard to the floor. He heard a crack, and his vision blurred. Pleasure shattered like a crystal vase thrown to the floor. The knock on the back of his head sent a cold wave down to his toes.
Alioune moaned.
“Do not be shy, Tonton,” Kueur teased, nuzzling his neck.
Max shook his head, grabbed hold of Nicole’s shoulders and threw her off, then climbed on top of her, ignoring Alioune’s twisting body between his legs. He thrust himself into Nicole, bounced against her hips, grasping for the pleasure that seemed to be rolling back and forth through his body like a tide, just out of his grasp.
Alioune jammed her hand into him. He arched his back, reaching for sensation. Kueur sighed, caught her breath, then scratched his back, drawing blood. Max cried out, but the pain drained out of him as Alioune began to pant.
“Work harder, Tonton,” Alioune commanded, massaging his butt and back with one hand while the fingers of her other hand still worked like snakes inside of him.
Max complied, his body tingling as the pleasure and pain passing through him was beginning to carry him along on its surging waves.
Kueur drove her finger into a nerve cluster at the base of his jaw, sending a sharp dagger of pain into his brain. Almost immediately, the pain was consumed, absorbed, sucked away by a powerful undertow. He did not have time to cry out; it was Alioune who screamed. He felt the pain blossom in her. It was like watching a nuclear detonation from a distance. Moments later, the aftershock rushed through him, propelled by Alioune’s massaging fingers and eager tongue. He was carried by the wave front of sensation headlong into Kueur’s next torture: biting his earlobe. Back he went, driven by pain, to Alioune. Faster, he jerked between them, between extremes of sensation, the back-and-forth tide rising, trapping him in its tempest waves.
And beneath him, barely conscious, her humanity stripped until she was responding to him on only the most primitive levels, Nicole grunted and moaned, her pain and pleasure a shifting bed over which the storm cycle of sex and sensation raged.
Alioune screamed for Kueur, drinking the pain from him and Nicole.
Kueur cried out for Alioune, downing their pleasure, as well.
Together they shouted his name. Tonton, they called. B`eb`ete.
Max.
And the Beast howled as sensation filled the pit of its appetite. Blood pounding in his ears, the smell and taste of sweat and sex and blood on his tongue, body heat burning his skin, Max surrendered to the Beast, to the storm, to Alioune and Kueur and the dark sorcery of their sex. The thunder of their ecstasy boomed through him. His own pleasure screamed like a hurricane wind, amplified beyond limitations in the twins’ all-encompassing bond. He thrust and grabbed and tore, choked on what he put in his mouth, shut his eyes against the lightning-bright flashes of overwhelmed nerves. He shook and trembled, and finally convulsed, as the twins rose to their climax like two goddesses on pillars of volcanic fire.
He came as if he were in a dream. Hot, pulsing, endless. A throbbing beam of joy cut his body in half and scrambled his mind until he could do no more than moan and mewl and twist his body, stretching for one more pulse of pleasure. And when the beam faded enough for him to think, the first thing that came to his mind was the certainty that what he had experienced was as pale as a distant star compared to the glory of the sun that had burned in the bodies of Alioune and Kueur.
“Sweet Tonton,” Kueur whispered between gasps for breath. She crept away, bloody, hair matted, and braced herself against a wall, legs folded under her.
Alioune said nothing, but crawled on all fours to the bathroom, coughing, her sex swaying casually. She cast razor glances over her shoulder. Her body moved with primal, carnal strength. Like a jaguar with its mouth still painted with the blood of its kill.
Max stood up on trembling legs. Muscles twitched randomly in his back. He ran a hand over the back of his head, felt the bumps and cuts, checked his wounds. None were serious. Nicole’s, he noted, were fatal.
She looked like any of the twins’ lovers he’d cleaned up after one of their wild nights.
“Your place is just as good as our Box,” said Kueur. Her breathing had slowed to normal. “So private. But of course it would be. You are our Tonton B`eb`ete.”
Max picked up a piece of the blouse he’d ripped off Nicole when he first brought her in, and wiped his face.
“I hope this doesn’t mean I’m falling in love,” he said with a glance at Kueur. “People might talk if they knew I’d turned to incest.” He cocked his head back and laughed, feeling giddy. It was as if he had been transformed, as if he had been crawling like a worm through daily existence, and suddenly discovered one day that he had become a butterfly, beautiful and glorious. A butterfly capable of tasting the sensual depths of any flower he wished to taste.
“Do not worry,” Alioune replied from the bathroom. She turned on the tap and splashed water on her face. “Love is no more a part of your future than guilt was a part of your past. You are beyond the shallowness of emotions, Tonton. More so now than you ever were.” She shook her head, flinging water and blood on the walls. “You are a part of us. Your Beast is tamed, your hunger fulfilled.”
“For now,” Max said.
“Forever,” Alioune replied. She turned and faced him as she slicked back her hair.
Max stood still, let the blood-soaked blouse fall to the floor. The Beast was quiet. Invisible. Consumed.
Max suddenly felt light, almost insubstantial. Like a butterfly fluttering in the air. His future without the Beast flashed in his mind: drifting from flower to flower, aimless.
“But,” he said, his voice thick, “I need my hunger. It gives me strength, it drives me, makes me fight for life.”
“We are your strength, now,” Alioune said. She braced herself with one arm on each wall of the small bathroom. The curving lines of her slim, dark body stood in sharp contrast to the filthy, flat surfaces and straight lines surrounding her. “We are your hunger. We are your reason to fight.”
“You killed the Beast yourself, by sharing,” Kueur said. “We only consumed its corpse.”
Max crouched, stared down, considered the bits of rubble and refuse littering the floor. He felt as if he had been gutted and nothing remained of him except for a dry husk drifting on a breeze.
“Our bond is much deeper than love or hate, Tonton.” Alioune walked to him, put her hand on his shoulder. “We belong to one another. There is only us. You felt what we are like, what we do. How can anything else be important? How can anything else matter?”
Her pubic hair brushed against his cheek. The smell of her filled his lungs. Her hand warmed his shoulder. He searched for some reaction in himself, a glimmer of feeling, but found none. He knew then that only when they were joined together in their singular act of love
would he taste sensation again. Their sensation. As the conductor of their passion, he had no feeling left for himself. The twins could ignite his capacity to feel, but they would also consume it, allowing him to feel only after they had used his body and nerves and mind to fulfill themselves.
They were his Beast and his prey. And he, like the more fragile lovers they had taken on over the years, was the hunting ground on which they played.
“Sex, love, death, they are all the same, Tonton,” Kueur said. “Pain, pleasure, what is the difference? Words. Little labels people put on the things they find to distract themselves from what is important.” She sat up against the wall and spread her legs, opening her sex to him. “We are what is important, Tonton. The rest, they are the feast we consume.”
Kueur’s honey laughter rolled over Max as he looked away from her and met Alioune’s razor-pit gaze. He broke off quickly and, sinking to his knees, hugged Alioune around her hips. Kueur came to them and embraced them both, and the pulse of their life beat in his ears.
In that moment, he was surprised to discover he had surrendered so much, surprised he had possessed so much to give. And he wondered at the hunger he would never feel again, the hunger for the love of Kueur and Alioune that had driven the Beast that was Max to its destruction.
Chapter Two
“Time’s catching up to me,” Max said, slipping into a white terry-cloth robe on his way out of the Box. “I should stop trying to keep up with youngsters like you.” A spasm seized his back muscles and his legs felt weak. He stopped and leaned against the marble counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the loft. Time, and the blur of lives he and the Beast had claimed, left him breathless.
Kueur Ba swept past him, a golden brown blur of lean muscle leaving a wake of laughter. She threw herself down on the black leather sofa facing the picture window looking out on the Hudson River and Jersey. “Tonton B`eb`ete, you know you can’t help yourself. We’re all bound by desire to our fates.” She looked over the top of the couch at him, smile wide and almond eyes bright. A patina of sweat glistened on her skin. With a wink, she drew a large towel around her shoulders and lay back down on the couch. “You are not as old as you believe, nor we as young as you think,” Kueur’s twin sister Alioune added as she shut the door to the soundproof Box.
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 woul
d 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.”
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