in sudden panic, clutching her father’s bed linens to steady herself as she looked around the room wildly. “Who is here?”
Fear tightened her throat and her heart began to pound. It made her overtaxed body work harder than it should, making her weak again as vertigo struck with a vengeance.
The air became thick around her suddenly and her nostrils flared as she tried to suck in a breath. She smelled something tart and tangy, like nutmeg. Nutmeg and a rich, dank, musty odor like a room long overdue for an airing. Her skin prickled and the hairs on the back of her arms and neck rose as a tingling sensation of stinging heat crept over her.
“Kathryn.”
The voice was upon her now. Behind her. Coming into her ear with warmth and nearness as if the speaker was just at her back.
She spun around, terror clutching at her.
There was no one.
But she could feel heat! The heat and warmth of a person. The electric aura of a powerful, unexplained presence.
“Oh my God, I’m going out of my mind!” Kathryn tried her damnedest to get a grip on herself, telling herself it was just exhaustion toying with her mind, fearing she was finally succumbing to the same illness as her family.
Then heat and a suffocating thickness washed over her. Her vision went black, with spots of green floating before her. Then the spots went a luminescent yellow, like cat’s eyes did when caught between shadows and candlelight.
A scream caught in her mouth, barricaded at her lips by something that felt like a chilled, smothering hand.
“Kathryn, my beauty.”
There were disembodied fingers at her throat, soft and warm—
No! Cold now! So cold!
The ghostly caress stroked her. She trembled helplessly as that chill touch drifted over her everywhere, her neck and throat, her breast, belly, and hip, touching against her flesh as though she did not wear any clothes at all. Kathryn tried again and again to scream, to struggle, but she was paralyzed everywhere but her mind. Who was doing this to her? Why could she not see? Had she somehow fallen asleep without realizing it and now suffered another cruel nightmare?
No! It was all too real. Too sickeningly real.
“Perfect.” The cloying, hoarse vocalization rang with undertones of demented pleasure. Then those fingers were at her throat again, gently palpating the wildly rushing pulse they discovered there.
“Sleep,” the voice commanded, as rough as sand, then as smooth as glass, “sleep!”
Kathryn crumpled lifelessly into the waiting demon’s embrace.
“Light. Now.”
Cronos nearly jumped out of his clammy skin when the command came out of the darkness.
He had not even heard the Master return.
The torch flared brightly, revealing the bulk of the Master, the fact that he was once again cloaked, and that he held a great object within the cloak’s folds.
Cronos had to stay the urge to run forward and get a better look at the Master’s new treasure.
“What is it, Master?” Cronos crowed, his gleeful face turned respectfully to the floor in hopes that his properly respectful subservience would win a response. “Is it a pretty treasure?”
“It is my prettiest treasure yet, Cronos,” the Master said, his voice rolling around the room in such a way that the shadows seemed to shift eagerly to absorb it. The Master rarely deigned to speak to him, never mind use so many words in this place.
In this way, Cronos knew the Master was pleased with that night’s plunder.
“To the treasure tower, my lord?” Cronos asked eagerly. He dared not move without permission and there was no telling if the routine would be the usual one if this was so special a spoil.
“Lead.”
Cronos almost fell on his face as he scurried to obey. He felt the Master’s dark presence behind him, overwhelming and just shy of treading over him.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Cronos’s toothpick legs had to coordinate their steps three times faster to stay ahead of the Master’s ground-devouring stride. One misstep on Cronos’s part and he would be a loud crunch beneath his employer’s heavy foot.
But he did not mind. There would still be new treasure to see! Joy! What joy it was to see the Master’s new treasures. Sometimes Cronos was more ecstatic than even the Master was about his acquisitions.
They traveled swiftly up out of the depths of the dungeons, Cronos lighting the way as they took spiraling stairs up and up and up.
Cronos’s pallor was nearly blue-gray from lack of oxygen by the time they reached the treasure tower’s main floor.
He doused the torch. Here there were large sconces embedded in the smooth marble walls, and nearly a hundred candles in stands between the mid-chamber’s massive marble columns.
Now no longer dependent on Cronos to light the way, the Master strode past him, his cloak whipping the little toady hard in his wake.
Cronos caught the flailing fabric hard in the side of his head and his valiant efforts to remain upright failed. He received a face full of marble floor, loosening several already damaged teeth.
The Master was oblivious.
He took to another flight of stairs, his steps a ringing clang against the ornate black iron.
When he reached the uppermost level, he traversed the long hall to a set of colossal double doors. So huge were they that it seemed it might take five strong men on either side to push them open.
But all it took was a momentary glitter of intent from malachite eyes. The doors swung soundlessly, easily open and the Master was not even forced to break his stride as he entered. The room beyond the intricately carved doors gleamed gaudily back at him, the bright resplendence of it making him narrow his eyes.
There was ornate paneling upon the massive, curving walls, constructed of the purest gold and crafted by a brilliant artist who had incorporated into the design his adoration for the four seasons of the years. Golden suns and filigreed autumn leaves in multicolored gold glistened all around him.
The entire circular floor, enormous in diameter, was carpeted with a single hand-woven rug. It was a tapestry of silken threads that had taken a madwoman all 101 years of her life to design and create. Every god and goddess known to any man, woman, or child in her world had been depicted within its weavings. Every beast of superstition and legend, every imaginary creature from all manner of folklore. The Master even saw several representations of himself crafted amusingly into the loom.
Then there was the ceiling. It was streamed in multihued satin bunting. The dye master who had colored each magnificent bolt had been a genius out of his time. He had managed to create a palate of colors that might never again be rediscovered or even named.
The
