Divine Evil

raped. At the first thrust, she screamed. And the sound echoed, mocking and hollow, through the trees.
    They sucked at her blood-spattered breasts, making horrible grunting sounds as they lapped and suckled. She gagged and struggled weakly as her mouth was savagely raped. Growling and keening, they pinched and nipped and pumped.
    They were wild, all of them, dancing and capering and groaning as each one took his turn with her. Heartless, heedless, even as her screams turned to sobs and sobs to mindless mewling.
    She went under, to some deep, secret place where she could hide from all the pain and all the fear. Hiding there, she never saw the knife.

Chapter 3
    T HE GALLERY WAS PACKED. An hour after the opening of Clare's show, people streamed through the lofty, three-storied space. Not just people, Clare thought as she sipped champagne, but People. Those capital
P
sorts who would expand Angie's heart to the size of Kansas. Representatives from the business world, the art world, the theater, the literati, the glitterati. From Madonna to the mayor, they came to look, to comment, and apparently to buy.
    Reporters schmoozed their way through, gulping canapès and French bubbly. That old standby,
Entertainment Tonight
, had sent a crew who even now were doing a stand-up in front of Clare's three-foot iron-and-bronze work titled
Return of Power.
Controversial, they called it, because of the blatant sexuality and overt feminism in its image of three women, naked and armed with lance, bow, and pike, circled around a kneeling man.
    For Clare, it was simply a symbol of her own feelings after her divorce, when she had yearned for a weapon to strike back and had found none.
    Representatives from
Museums and Art
were discussing a small copper work, spouting words like “esoteric” and “stratified.”
    As successes went, you couldn't get much higher.
    Then why was she so depressed?
    Oh, she did her part, smiling and chatting until she thought her face would crack like flawed marble. She'd even worn the dress Angie had chosen for her. A sleek and glittery black number that plunged to a deep, wide vee in the back and had a skirt so tight that she had to walk like one of those poor Chinese women when feet binding had been in fashion. She'd worn her hair very straight and added some chunky copper jewelry she had designed herself, on a whim.
    She knew the image was arty and sexy, but at the moment she didn't feel either.
    She felt, Clare realized, small town and dazzled. Dorothy would have felt the same way, she was sure, when her farmhouse dropped down into the middle of Munchkinland. And like Dorothy, she was plagued by a deep and terrible longing to go home. All the way home.
    Clare struggled to shake the feeling off, sipping champagne and reminding herself this was the realization of a lifelong dream. She'd worked hard for it, just as Angie and Jean-Paul had worked hard to create an atmosphere where art would be appreciated-and purchased for great quantities of money.
    The gallery itself was elegant, a perfect backdrop for art and for the beautiful people who came there. It was done in stark whites, with a floating staircase that led to a second floor, then a third. Everything was open and curved and fluid. From the high ceiling above dripped two modernistic crystal chandeliers. Each of her pieces was carefully spotlighted. Around them hovered people in diamonds or designer denim.
    The rooms were choked with expensive scents, each one layered over the others until they merged into one exclusive fragrance. Wealth.
    “Clare, my dear.” Tina Yongers, an art critic Clare knew and loathed, weaved her way over. She was a tiny sprite of a woman with wispy blond hair and sharp green eyes. Though past fifty, surgical nips and tucks kept her hovering deceptively at fortysomething.
    She was wearing a misty floral caftan that reached her ankles. The opulent scent of Poison surrounded her. An appropriate scent, Clare thought, since Tina's reviews were often deadly. She could, with the lifting of one platinum brow, squash an artistic ego like a beetle. It was no secret that she did so, habitually, for the lively sense of power it gave her.
    She brushed a kiss through the air over Clare's cheek, then fervently gripped her forearms.
    “You've outdone yourself, haven't you?”
    Clare smiled and called herself a cynical hypocrite.
    “Have I?”
    “Don't be modest-it's boring. It's obvious to everyone here that you're going to be
the
artist