She offered me a glass. “I’m sure he had it coming.”
“I’m serious.”
“And I’m a demon,” she said, leaning back on the sofa and crossing her legs. She regarded me with eyes the color of molten copper. One blink and they were back to their normal green. “Don’t come to me looking for absolution. I won’t give it to you. What’s really got you upset?”
“Yesterday, these people murdered a friend of mine, right in front of me. He was a nice guy, but he had something they wanted, so they tortured him and they killed him. Tonight, this guy Tony…he drowned his daughter. Drowned her and sucked the soul out of her body. She was only eight years old. I asked him why he did it. He said I had it all wrong, that they’re the good guys. They’re trying to save the world, he told me.”
“Everyone,” Caitlin said, cradling her wine glass, “is the hero of his own story. That goes double for fanatics. Some of the greatest horrors in history were perpetrated by people who insisted, all the way to damnation’s door, that they fought on the side of the angels. I hope you didn’t think you could reason with him.”
I sipped the wine. It had a strong, musky scent, peppery and ripe. “At first? Yeah. I kinda did.”
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Badly.”
Caitlin got up and walked over to her stereo, a sleek Bose perched on a glass table. Soft synthesizer strains rose up as she returned to the couch. It sounded like a Duran Duran song.
“There are two answers to evil,” she said. “The first is to justify it. The evil that you do is for a good cause, you’ll be validated in the end, it needed to be done, etcetera, etcetera. Of course, once you start walking that road, it’s all downhill. I’m sure this Tony person didn’t start by drowning children. You have to work your way up to that kind of atrocity.”
“And the second answer?”
“You own it. Be truthful and accept your own nature.”
I leaned back, a line from Shakespeare crossing my mind.
“‘It must not be denied that I am a plain-dealing villain,’” I quoted.
Caitlin beamed. “You know the Bard! ‘If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.’”
“I never would,” I said on an impulse, regretting my words as her smile faded.
“Pretty words I’ve heard before. Always empty in the end. Daniel, why did you call me tonight? Of all the places you could have sought shelter, why here?”
I hadn’t figured that out myself. Only that calling her was the first impulse I had, that her voice was the first I wanted to hear.
“I wanted to see you,” I said.
She rose, cradling her glass as she slowly paced the floor, looking up to the ceiling.
“I told you at the restaurant,” she said, “it doesn’t work. We can’t be…anything. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”
“I don’t see why.”
She whirled to face me, suddenly furious, her eyes blazing copper. “And I don’t see why you don’t run! Why you don’t lay awake in dread of the ruin I could bring upon you and everyone you hold dear! I could use my magic on you. Bind you to me, reduce you to a mindless slave. I could do it right now and you couldn’t stop me. I could do it right now.”
The smell of sulfur and jasmine filled the room. I sat very, very still.
“I’ve done it to other humans,” she said, seething with rage. “For the rest of your days, you wouldn’t have a single thought in your head that I didn’t put there, and you’d love it. You’d thank me for it. You’d be anything I wanted, and you’d never betray me and you’d never, ever leave!”
I heard the pain on the edge of her anger. I knew that song by heart.
I set my glass on the end table and stood up. She watched me, her hands hooked into claws and her fingernails gleaming like razors, shuddering as if she could barely restrain herself from tearing me apart.
I walked up to her, heart thudding against my rib cage, and met her gaze. Then I reached up and brushed my fingertips against her cheek.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whispered.
Caitlin turned her face away. When she looked back, her moist eyes were forest green once more. She started to say something then stopped, her voice hitching. She looked at my arm and touched the bloody rags.
“We need to do something about this,” she said softly. “You’re going to get an infection.”
She led me into her bathroom. Her shower, a glass-walled stall sporting two facing showerheads and a long bench of polished marble, sat opposite a free-standing tub big enough for three people. A wide picture window beside it looked out over the Vegas skyline. Caitlin gestured for me to sit on the broad rim of the bathtub while she rummaged through pristine ivory cabinets, digging out some first aid supplies. She laid everything out next to the faucet. Then she straddled my lap.
I opened my mouth, but Caitlin touched a finger to my lips and unbuttoned my shirt. She paused, folds of fabric gripped in her slender hands, and looked at me.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked, and I knew she didn’t mean fresh bandages.
“Yes.”
She tugged my shirt off, letting it fall to the floor. I winced as the rags peeled away next, the ugly wound stark under the overhead lights.
“I am the prince’s hound,” she mused, giving the cut an experimental poke. “Most of the people I deal with are either terrified of me, plotting to kill me, or both. I don’t have friendships. I don’t have relationships. I’m not very good at them.”
“I’m game if you are,” I said.
She held up a bottle of peroxide and unscrewed the cap, making sure I knew what it was. She curled one arm around my shoulders. With the other, she poised the bottle above my wound.
“This is going to hurt,” she said.
I nodded. “I can take it.”
The peroxide seared the open cut like a branding iron, bubbling in the wound. Caitlin pressed her lips to mine and swallowed my gasp of pain with a desperate, hungry kiss.
33.
I put my good arm around her waist, holding her close as the burn of the peroxide gave way to the fire in the pit of my stomach. She dropped the bottle, letting it clatter and spill in the basin of the tub, embracing me with mad fervor. We clutched each other like drowning sailors clinging to a life preserver.
Caitlin pulled away to mop at the cut with a pad of gauze. “This really needs stitches,” she said. “I can drive you to the ER, or…”
I looked in her eyes. “Or?”
She seemed almost bashful as she shrugged. “I could do it. I mean, if you wanted me to.”
She wanted to know how far I’d trust her, maybe, or just how much I could take. The answer was easy.
“You do it,” I said.
She smiled with a glimmer of what might have been relief. Still straddling my lap, she opened a small sewing kit and threaded a slender needle, taking her time.
“Relax,” she said, holding the needle up to the light and testing the tip against her finger. “I’m good with needles.”
Caitlin leaned in for another kiss, gently tracing the tip of the needle down my throat, across the curve of my neck.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a local in that kit?” I asked with a nervous laugh. She grinned and touched her forehead to mine, murmuring softly.
“No anesthetic in my home. I don’t believe in it. I think I do have a way to make the procedure easier to bear, though.”
I felt her hand on my belt, slipping it through the loops with a sharp tug. I gasped as her fingers slid over my hardness, her touch teasing, feather-light.
“Now then,” she whispered, hiking up her skirt and taking me in hand. “I’m going to need you to hold very, very still. Are you ready?”
I nodded, breathless. She lowered herself onto me as she lowered the needle toward my cut. We penetrated one another in the same instant, a wash
of sensation that drew a strangled gasp from my throat. She rose up as the surgical thread tugged the ragged flesh closed and then lowered herself again, her body mirroring the needle, matching every sting with a slow wave of pleasure. I barely noticed when she finished the final stitch, reaching over for a tiny pair of scissors to cut the thread.
“I think,” she said, wrapping gauze around my arm and fixing it in place with white surgical tape, “we should adjourn to the bedroom.”
She laughed as I stood up with her still in my lap, her legs clenching tight around my waist. I nearly tripped over my own fallen pants, and she held out a hand to steady us against a wall as she guided me toward her bed. It was awkward and fumbling, and neither of us could stop giggling.
“So much for romance,” I laughed, kissing her.
“You’re just having balance issues, you poor thing. Feeling lightheaded? Did all that blood rush someplace else?” She paused, reaching down as we fell together onto her gray satin comforter. “Oh, it did.”
Her bed felt like silk feathers under my back as she rolled me over, sitting astride me. Her pace was slow, languid. She pressed her palms to my chest and tossed her curly hair as she rode to the beat of some unheard rhythm. My pulse rising, I tried to hasten her only to have her firmly hold my hips in place.
“Do you remember what you said when you freed me?” she said, her eyes gleaming in the dark. “When you thought I was going to kill you?”
“I said I wasn’t going to beg.”
She leaned down, almost nose to nose with me, flashing a wolf-like smile.
“I want to play a game with you, Daniel Faust.”
“What did you have in mind?” I asked, biting back a groan as she moved her body against mine, so slowly I could barely stand it. She whispered her answer, flicking the tip of her tongue against my earlobe.
“You don’t get to come. Not until you beg for it,” she purred. “Let’s see how long you can hold out, hmm? Impress me.”
Then she held me in an unyielding grip as she played my body like a finely tuned instrument, taking me to the very brink of ecstasy and then dragging me away from release again and again. The digital alarm clock by her bedside read 3:43 A.M. by the time I finally broke, the floating scarlet numbers bearing mute witness as I promised Caitlin the moon and the stars if she’d show a heartbeat of mercy. She giggled, listening to my pleas, then gave me everything I begged for and more.
#
I woke in the satin embrace of Caitlin’s bed, warm and tranquil. Morning sunlight filtered in through half-closed venetian blinds. I reached over, wanting to touch her, but my hand fell on an empty swirl of sheets. Sudden panic welled up and my eyes shot open, and then I heard her voice.
“I’m still here.”
I looked over. Caitlin sat in a chair in the corner of the room, draped in a gray silk robe, legs crossed.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, recognizing my fear.
I nodded, leaning back on the pillow.
“Neither am I,” I told her. “What’s wrong, couldn’t sleep?”
“I need very little sleep. It’s more like what you’d call meditation. I got up, read a little, did some digging. Decided to watch you until you woke up. You talk in your sleep, you know.”
“Oh? Did I say anything interesting?”
She smiled. “More like happy little murmurs. But I found something interesting, reading up on our Ms. Carmichael, and you still need to update me on everything you’ve learned.”
“I want to hear all about it,” I said, pushing the covers back and rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “But can I catch a quick shower first?”
Caitlin arched an eyebrow, rising and walking toward the bathroom. “Time is of the essence. Let’s combine the two.”
I soaped her back while I brought her up to speed, walking her through the assassination of Nicky Agnelli’s seer and the bloody attack on Spengler’s house. The twin showerheads filled the glass-walled stall with swirling steam as near-scalding water against my weary skin. Caitlin liked her showers hot.
“The only way to put Nicky’s father on my prince’s throne,” she mused, “is to remove Prince Sitri from power. That cannot happen.”
“Depends on what’s in the Box,” I said, “or what these people think is in the Box, anyway. Maybe they want to make him step down of his own free will? Could it be a blackmail thing?”
She laughed, high and merry. “Blackmail my prince? I think if anyone actually managed that, he’d reward them for their cleverness. Then destroy them. No, it must be an attack of some kind. Troubling, though. It sounds like this is just another side effect of Lauren Carmichael’s plan, not her real goal. A bone they’re tossing Nicky in order to secure his cooperation.”
“What could dethrone a demon prince as a side effect?” I said. “It would have to be something…”
Caitlin turned, pressing herself against me, our bodies glistening in the pulsating spray. “Apocalyptic,” she murmured, kissing me. “I may have a lead. You’ve mentioned that India keeps coming up, in regards to Carmichael’s past.”
“A couple of times, yeah.”
She turned me around and traced the curve of my shoulders with a bar of soap.
“My nocturnal ramblings led me to some old news stories about her alma mater, Stanford. Many years ago a young Lauren, undertaking her freshman studies of archeology, talked her way onto a field expedition to southern Nepal, near Chitwan. The team intended to explore and document a recently-excavated temple complex dating back to the Maurya Empire.”
I closed my eyes, savoring her touch. “And how did that go?”
“Badly. Two weeks into the expedition, their camp was attacked by murderous bandits. By some miracle, Lauren survived.”
“Miracle, huh?” I shook my head. “She’s not the kind of person who depends on miracles. Did anybody else make it out?”
“One man. Her professor and mentor, Dr. Eugene Planck. Upon his return he was immediately hospitalized with a nervous breakdown, which quickly progressed into full-blown psychosis. He tried to kill himself by drinking muriatic acid. He wanted, according to witnesses, to ‘burn the parasite.’ His family had him committed.”
Burn the parasite. I thought about Lauren’s death-curse, the snake creature she’d forced into my stomach, and shuddered. Was that where she had learned the trick?
“Did he die?” I asked.
“No, and as far as I can tell he’s still languishing in a padded room at Napa State Hospital.”
“He knows what happened on that expedition. Dr. Planck is probably the only person who can tell us what Lauren’s become and what she really wants. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m thinking San Francisco is an hour and a half away by plane, and from there it’s a short drive to Napa,” Caitlin said. “We can be there and back in time for a late dinner. Speaking of, how do you feel about scrambled eggs and sausage?”
My stomach gave an involuntary grumble. With all the chaos, I couldn’t remember the last time I sat down for a decent meal.
“Sounds great,” I said.
“Fantastic.” She turned off the shower and reached for a towel. “You’ll find my kitchen is well stocked. You cook while I go online and buy our tickets. Oh, don’t use any of the meat in the red Tupperware.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t like it. It’s…not for you.”
She hummed a happy tune as she wrapped a towel around her hair and strolled off. Alone for a moment, I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“So,” I said to myself, “now you’re dating a creature from hell. That’s new.”
I was okay with that.
No, better than okay. Being with Caitlin felt…natural, in a way I couldn’t find words for. Like her hand was made to fit in mine. I dreaded the inevitable conversation with Bentley and Corman about it, but for now I was happy just to see where this road would take us. In a week marred by death and pain, I’d found
a single red rose growing in the ruins.
I’d take the thorns as they came.
34.
Two hours later we leaned back in stiff chairs as our plane roared down the runway, lifting off for California skies. Caitlin had bought us tickets for business class, and we were sitting toward the back on a half-empty flight.
“Normally I prefer first class,” she told me, “but I felt a low profile would be wise. We don’t know how many eyes Lauren has, and I imagine she wouldn’t want us talking to her dear old professor.”
“I’m wondering why she let him live,” I said. “And on the note of paying for things, I’m reimbursing you for the tickets.”
“No you aren’t,” Caitlin said. “It’s a business expense. I am investigating a potential threat to my prince’s safety. I just have to fill out an expense report when we get back.”
The plane leveled out. Wisps of cloud slithered past my window. I tilted my head, looking at her.
“Expense report? It just seems a little modern for, well, who you work for.”
She fished in her handbag, a slender black Louis Vuitton, and handed me her business card.
“Southern Tropics Import/Export Company
Caitlin Brody, Regional Manager”
“We believe in keeping up with the times,” she said. “It’s not all backward Latin and slaughtered goats.”
The drink cart trundled down the aisle. Caitlin promptly ordered a pair of ginger ales for us. I stared at her.
“Are you going to keep doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Ordering for me.”
“Oh,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth in mock surprise. “Do you mean you weren’t just feeling slightly airsick, and a bottle of ginger ale wouldn’t help your stomach feel better?”
“I suppose,” I said, unscrewing the cap, “you may kinda sorta have a point.”
“Besides, you get the most adorably consternated look on your face.”
I had to smile at that. She was right about the ginger ale, anyway. I waited until the stewardess pushing the drink cart was farther up the aisle, leaving us alone in our little pocket of empty seats. I wasn’t looking forward to this, but it was time we laid all our cards on the table.
The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels Page 242