genuinely sorry for the woman who had brought her here. Yes, Mia had lied and betrayed; yes,
she had tried her best to get Eddie and Roland killed. But what choice had she ever had?
Susannah realized, with dawning bitterness, that she could now give the perfect definition of a ka-mai: one who has been given hope but no choices.
Like giving a motorcycle to a blindman, she thought.
Richard Sayre — slim, middle-aged, handsome in a full-lipped, broad-browed way — began
to applaud. The rings on his fingers flashed. His yellow blazer blared in the dim light. “Hile, Mia!” he cried.
” Hile, Mia!” the others responded.
“Hile, Mother!”
” Hile, Mother! ” the vampires and low men and low women cried, and they, too began to applaud. The sound was certainly enthusiastic enough, but the acoustics of the room dulled it and turned it into the rustle of batwings. A hungry sound, one that made Susannah feel sick to her
stomach. At the same time a fresh contraction gripped her and turned her legs to water. She
reeled forward, yet almost welcomed the pain, which partially muffled her trepidation. Sayre
stepped forward and seized her by the upper arms, steadying her before she could fall. She had
thought his touch would be cold, but his fingers were as hot as those of a cholera victim.
Farther back, she saw a tall figure come out of the shadows, something that was neither low
man nor vampire. It wore jeans and a plain white shirt, but emerging from the shirt’s collar was the head of a bird. It was covered with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes were black. It
patted its hands together in polite applause, and she saw — with ever-growing dismay — that
those hands were equipped with talons rather than fingers.
Half a dozen bugs scampered from beneath one of the tables and looked at her with eyes that
hung on stalks. Horribly intelligent eyes. Their mandibles clicked in a sound that was like
laughter.
Hile, Mia! she heard in her head. An insectile buzzing. Hile, Mother! And then they were gone, back into the shadows.
Mia turned to the door and saw the pair of low men who blocked it. And yes, those were
masks; this close to the door-guards it was impossible not to see how their sleek black hair had been painted on. Mia turned back to Sayre with a sinking heart.
Too late now.
Too late to do anything but go through with it.
SEVENTEEN
Sayre’s grip had slipped when she turned. Now he re-established it by taking her left hand. At the same moment her right hand was seized. She turned that way and saw the fat woman in the silver
lame dress. Her huge bust overflowed the top of her gown, which struggled gamely to hold it
back. The flesh of her upper arms quivered loosely, giving off a suffocating scent of talcum
powder. On her forehead was a red wound that swam but never overflowed.
It’s how they breathe, Mia thought. That’s how they breathe when they’re wearing their —
In her growing dismay, she had largely forgotten about Susannah Dean and completely about
Detta. So when Detta Walker came forward — hell, when she leaped forward — there was no way Mia could stop her. She watched her arms shoot out seemingly of their own accord and saw
her fingers sink into the plump cheek of the woman in the silver lame gown. The woman
shrieked, but oddly, the others, Sayre included, laughed uproariously, as if this were the funniest thing they’d ever seen in their lives.
The mask of humanity pulled away from the low woman’s startled eye, then tore. Susannah
thought of her final moments on the castle allure, when everything had frozen and the sky had
torn open like paper.
Detta ripped the mask almost entirely away. Tatters of what looked like latex hung from the
tips of her fingers. Beneath where the mask had been was the head of a huge red rat, a mutie with yellow teeth growing up the outside of its cheeks in a crust and what looked like white worms
dangling from its nose.
“Naughty girl,” said the rat, shaking a roguish finger at Susannah-Mio. Its other hand was still holding hers. The thing’s mate — the low man in the garish tuxedo — was laughing so hard he
had doubled over, and when he did, Mia saw something poking out through the seat of his pants.
It was too bony to be a tail, but she supposed it was, all the same.
“Come, Mia,” Sayre said, drawing her forward. And then he leaned toward her, peering
earnestly into her eyes like a lover. “Or is it you, Odetta? It is, isn’t it? It’s you, you pestering, overeducated, troublesome Negress.”
“No, it be me, you ratface honky mahfah!” Detta crowed, and then spat into Sayre’s face.
Sayre’s mouth opened in a gape of astonishment. Then it snapped shut and twisted into a bitter
scowl. The room had gone silent again. He wiped the spit from his face — from the mask he
wore over his face — and looked at it unbelievingly.
“Mia?” he asked. “Mia, you let her do this to me? Me, who would stand as your baby’s godfather?”
“You ain’t jack shit!” Detta cried. “You suck yo’ ka-daddy’s cock while you diddle yo’
fuckfinger up his poop-chute and thass all you good fo’! You — ”
” Get RID of her! ” Sayre thundered.
And before the watching audience of vampires and low men in the Dixie Pig’s front dining
room, Mia did just that. The result was extraordinary. Detta’s voice began to dwindle, as if she were being escorted out of the restaurant (by the bouncer, and by the scruff of the neck). She quit trying to speak and only laughed raucously, but soon enough that, too, was gone.
Sayre stood with his hands clasped before him, looking solemnly at Mia. The others were also
staring. Somewhere behind the tapestry of the knights and their ladies at feast, the low laughter and conversation of some other group continued.
“She’s gone,” Mia said at last. “The bad one is gone.” Even in the room’s quiet she was hard to hear, for she spoke in little more than a whisper. Her eyes were timidly cast down, and her
cheeks had gone deathly white. “Please, Mr. Sayre . . . sai Sayre . . . now that I’ve done as you ask, please say you’ve told me the truth, and I may have the raising of my chap. Please say so! If you do, you’ll never hear from the other one again, I swear it on my father’s face and my mother’s name, so I do.”
“You had neither,” Sayre said. He spoke in a tone of distant contempt. The compassion and mercy for which she begged owned no space in his eyes. And above them, the red hole in the
center of his forehead filled and filled but never spilled.
Another pain, this one the greatest so far, sank its teeth into her. Mia staggered, and this time Sayre didn’t bother steadying her. She went to her knees before him, put her hands on the rough, gleaming surface of his ostrich-skin boots, and looked up into his pale face. It looked back at her from above the violent yellow scream of his sports jacket.
“Please,” she said. “Please, I beg you: keep your promise to me. ”
“I may,” he said, “or I may not. Do you know, I have never had my boots licked. Can you imagine? To have lived as long as I have and never to have had a single good old-fashioned boot-licking.”
Somewhere a woman tittered.
Mia bent forward.
No, Mia, thee mustn’t, Susannah moaned, but Mia made no reply. Nor did the paralyzing pain deep in her vitals stop her. She stuck her tongue out between her lips and began licking the rough surface of Richard Sayre’s boots. Susannah could taste them, at a great distance. It was a husky, dusty, leathery taste, full of rue and humiliation.
Sayre let her go on so for a bit, then said: “Stop it. Enough.”
He pulled her roughly to her feet and stood with his unsmiling face not three inches from her
own. Now that she’d seen them, it was impossible to unsee the masks he and the rest of them
wore. The taut cheeks were almost transparent, and whorls of dark scarlet hair were faintly
visible beneath.
Or perhaps you called it fur when it covered the whole face.
“Your beggary does you no credit,” he said, “although I must admit the sensation was extraordinary.”
“You promised!” she cried, attempting to pull back and out of his grip. Then another
contraction struck and she doubled over, trying only not to shriek. When it eased a little, she pressed on. ‘You said five years . . . or maybe seven . . . yes, seven . . . the best of everything for my chap, you said — “