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Silence. If he’d been feeling anywhere near okay, he’d have made some kind of joke about me finally seeing him in the shower. That he didn’t tease me at all was a bad sign.

“Jason, can I come in . . . please?”

“Come in,” he said finally.

I opened the door and the warm air fogged around me. I closed the door behind me. The room was soft and thick with warmth. It was hot, the moisture beading on every surface as if he’d cranked the shower up to as hot as it would go. Hot as it would go was enough to scald the flesh from your bones, if you were human.

The light left his shadow on the white shower curtain. He wasn’t standing. He was sitting on the floor of the shower, huddled.

I moved the towel from the lid of the stool and sat down with it in my lap. “What’s wrong?”

He took a deep sobbing breath, and even over the shower I could hear him weeping. Crying didn’t cover it, weeping.

I wanted to see him while I talked to him, and I didn’t want to see him naked. Choices, choices.

“Talk to me, Jason. What’s wrong?”

“I can’t get it off me. I can’t get clean.”

“You mean metaphorically speaking or literally?” I asked.

“It’s all over me and I can’t get it off.”

I was being a coward and a prude. I reached a hand for the curtain and slowly drew it back until I could see him without splashing the entire bathroom with water.

Jason had his knees drawn up tight to his chest, arms locked around them. The heat from the water was enough to make me draw back. His skin had turned a nice cherry pink but that was it. I’d have had blisters or worse by now.

There were clinging patches of black goo on his back. The back of one arm had a patch on it. He’d scrubbed and boiled himself nearly raw and couldn’t get clean.

He stared straight ahead at the faucets, rocking ever so slightly. “I was okay until I got in the shower and it wouldn’t come off. Then I kept seeing those two vampires in Branson. I thought about Yvette, watching her rot. But it’s the two in Branson. I can still feel their hands on me, Anita. Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the day in a cold sweat, remembering.”

In Branson, Missouri we’d taken on the local Master of the City. She’d had two young women that she was going to torture unless we gave her some of us to torture. They’d suggested that if Jason made love to two of the female vamps they would let one of the girls go. I think he’d enjoyed it, at first, but then they’d started to rot.

Jason had struggled away from them, crawling against the wall. His bare chest was covered in bits of their flesh. A strand of something thick and heavy slid slowly down his neck onto his chest. He batted at it like you would swat at a spider that you found crawling along your skin. He was pressed into the black wall with his pants nearly to his thighs.

The blond rolled off her back and crawled towards him, reaching a hand out that was nothing but bones with bits of dried flesh. She seemed to be decaying in dry ground. The brunette was wet. She lay back on the floor, and some dark fluid rushed out from her to pool beneath her body. She’d undone her own leather shirt, and her breasts were like heavy bags of fluid.

“I’m ready for you,” the brunette said. Her voice was still clear and solid. No human voice should have come out of those rotting lips.

The blond grabbed Jason’s arm and he screamed.

I shook my head trying to clear the memory. It had haunted my dreams for a while just witnessing it. But for Jason it had become his private phobia. One of the Council’s flunkies had been one of the rotting ones. She’d tortured him, too, because she liked how very, very afraid he was of her. Yvette’s little torment had only happened about two months ago. Tonight’s fun and games had been far too close to home.

I took off the wrist sheaths and laid them on the back of the stool. The fact that I was wearing the wrist sheaths when I should have been getting ready for bed said something about my own paranoia. The heat from the water as I reached for the knob was almost frightening. Years of being told,