Strange Sisters Read Free

nylon, but the heat did not diffuse itself. It remained localized in the small area of the violated knee, while all the remainder of her was cold and clammy, and her flesh was filthy with crawling things. It occurred to her that the delusions of delirium tremens might be something like this, and that that, too, was an experience she might someday accomplish. Deliberately, functioning under a total exertion of her will, she drained her glass and let it fall and leaned forward into him with her head back and her lids lowered against the awful encroachment of his face.
    She gagged. A thin, bitter fluid rose up into her throat and nostrils, and she couldn't breathe. She was drowning, drowning in a stagnant sea, and she lifted one arm above her head, as a drowning person does, to grasp the receding sky. The hand was held there for a second, hanging downward from the wrist like a claw, and then it descended in an attack of talons. Her long, pointed nails slashed into his cheek below the bone and plowed four parallel furrows to the jaw. With a harsh cry that was mixed pain and fury and surprise, he pushed her away and lashed out violently. The back of his hand caught her across the eyes and knocked her sprawling onto the floor. She lay there, cowering away from him, looking up at him with hate and revulsion. Blood welled slowly from his gashed cheek, making of it a shining, scarlet half-mask, and he began to curse her softly, an inflectionless recital of invective more terrifying than violence. Getting to her feet, she turned and ran through the door behind her into the kitchen.
    It was so small. And it kept getting smaller. The walls closed in on her, compressing the air, threatening to crush her. She stood with her back to the cabinet, her hands spread behind her on the working surface. Her breasts rose and fell and rose again in labored gasps. She watched the door through which she had come, and pretty soon she heard him following, in no hurry, his steps light and measured on the carpet. He was still cursing, quietly and fluently, his voice never rising above a conversational level.
    She looked around frantically for an exit that wasn't there, and it was then she saw the final deadly essential of the bad end. An old-fashioned ice-pick with a rough wooden handle, stuck half the length of its spike between the back of the cabinet and the wall. Reaching over, she pulled it loose with a jerk and held it in her right hand behind her back.
    Angus Brunn appeared in the doorway and stopped. The entire side of his face was now a scarlet sheen, and his eyes glittered with cold, controlled fury. Looking at her down the negligible length of the tiny room, a distance he could almost have spanned by stepping forward and reaching out with one arm, he said with a queer, incongruous dullness, "So that's the kind of little slut you are. A just-so-far girl. A non-producing harlot. Maybe you think I'm a snotty kid to be led by my glands until you're ready to call the turn. That's your mistake, baby. That's your big mistake."
    But it wasn't. It was his. He took two steps and grasped her by the hair, jerking her head back above the strained arch of her throat, and she brought the ice-pick around and up, and the slim spike slipped into him smoothly at an angle just below the apex of the inverted V of his ribs. His breath sucked through his lips with a shrill, ragged sound that was like a reversed whinny, and he wrapped both hands around the protruding handle of the pick and looked down at it in an attitude of stunned, incredulous wonder. Then, without looking at her again, he released his held breath in a long sigh and folded slowly in the middle.
    Lifting her skirt, she stepped over the body and went back into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, almost in the identical position in which she had waited a little while ago for him to return from the kitchen with her Sidecar. Now he was in the kitchen again, and she was waiting again, but