"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 03 - The White Ninja" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

he were a malevolent liquid poured from the shadows.
Mariko, still half-stunned that the poster image had come to life, opened her
mouth to scream, but Senjin smashed his fist into it. She collapsed into his
arms.
Senjin dragged her into a corner, and pulled apart the flaps of her robe. There
was now a small blade, warm from his own blood-heat, lying in the palm of his
hand. He used it to economically shred her clothes, denuding her in precise,
co-ordinated quadrants. Then he arranged the strips just the way he wanted.
For an instant, Senjin's baleful eyes took in the full measure of this glorious
creature, as if fixing an image in his mind. Then he knelt and swiftly bound her
wrists above her head with a length of white cloth. He tied the other end around
a standpipe, pulling the cloth tight so that Mariko was stretched taut.
He withdrew an identical length of cloth, wound it around his own throat,
slipped it around the standpipe, calculated distances, knotted it tight. Then he
unzipped his trousers, and fell upon her flesh without either frenzy or passion.
It was not easy to effect penetration, but this kind of grinding pain acted as a
curious spur for him.


Senjin at last began to breathe as hard as the men in the club had done during
Mariko's act. But he felt nothing from either his or Mariko's body in the sense
of a sensual stimulus. Rather, he was, as usual, trapped inside his mind and,
like a rat within a maze, his thoughts spun around and around a hideous central
core.
Flashes of death and life, the dark and the light interwove themselves across
his mind in a flickering, sickening film that he recognized all too well, a
second deadly skin lying, breathing with malevolent life just beneath his
everyday skin made of tissue and blood.
Unable to bear the images and what they symbolized any longer, Senjin dropped
his upper torso and his head. Now with each hard upthrust inside her, the noose
was pulled tighter and tighter around his throat.
As he approached completion, his body was deprived of more and more oxygen and,
at last, sensory pleasure began to flood through him as inexorably as a tide, a
thick sludge of ecstasy turning his lower belly and his thighs as heavy as lead.
Only at the point of death did Senjin feel safe, secure upon this ultimate
sword-edge, this life-death continuum made terrifyingly real. It was the
powerful but tenuous basis on which Kshira, Senjin's training, was built. At the
point of death, he had learned, everything is possible.
Once one has stared death in the face, one comes away both with one's reality
shattered and with it automatically reconstructed along different lines. This
epiphany - as close as an Easterner will ever come to the Western Christian
concept of revelation - occurred early in Senjin's life, and changed him
forever.
Dying, Senjin ejaculated. The world melted around him and, inhaling deeply from
Mariko's open mouth, he gathered to him the susurrus, unique to every human
being. Greedily, like an animal at a trough, he sucked up her breath.


He rose, unwrapped with one hand the cloth from his throat as, with the other,
he mechanically zipped his trousers. His expression was empty, eerily mimicking