Wildest Dreams Part 3

She laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Saunders. But I've never had this much trouble convincing a man to spend time with me."

"It's not you." I nodded at Diabolos Whistler's severed head. "It's him. I'm a little tired of his company."

"I know the feeling," she said.

I started up the circular staircase. A shower would be good. Really long. Really hot. I wanted to be clean.

I wondered what Circe Whistler wanted. I'd struck a nerve when I mentioned her inheritance, but I knew that she was after more than a few extra zeros at the end of her bank balance. One look at the house and I knew that she already had more than enough money.

I could see right through Spider Ripley. Just like he was a window. A first impression was all it took with a guy like that. Spider Ripley was all slot A in tab B, until he fit together like a kid's toy. But Circe Whistler was something else. A puzzle box. The kind the j.a.panese made. The kind you couldn't open unless someone showed you how.

I watched her through spiked wrought iron bars as I walked along the landing above the living room. Watched her black nails rake Diabolos Whistler's long white mane. Watched her fingers curl into a fist. Watched her raise her father's severed head, and watched it sway at her side as she disappeared down a dark corridor of redwood and stone, leaving only the sound of Diabolos Whistler's bristling goatee brushing her naked thigh with every step she took.

4.

"We're alone, just like Hansel and Gretel."

That voice again, like a lonely wind that touches no one.

I jerked awake, but there was no little girl ghost with long blonde hair and a black dress. Only Circe, her raven hair spilling over shoulders inked with scales and blood, demons' leers and children's tears.

"You were dreaming," she said.

She sat on the edge of the bed, and just as I realized that her hand was on top of mine it whispered away over black satin sheets and was gone.

I'd slept away the afternoon. Outside, stars salted the black sky, but there was no moon. In the bedroom, spears of feeble yellow light fought a losing battle with the shadows, abandoning us to the dark.

Somewhere in the house, someone was crying. Very, very softly. Fragile, feminine sobs that were somehow out of place, like a sliver of dream under the skin of reality.

Circe didn't seem to hear the crying at all. Or maybe I had imagined it-another moment and the sound was gone.

I looked into Circe's eyes, twin chips of cold blue ice. Certainly no tears gleamed there. I wondered if she ever cried.

I doubted it. Crying would redden her eyes, and red eyes didn't have anything to do with the image Circe Whistler wanted to project. Red eyes were for demons and monsters. But blue eyes could be many things-cool and intelligent, alluring and hypnotic, enticing as they were mysterious. Maybe that was the secret of Circe's gaze. Not the destructive power of a Medusa, but a vampire's stare that reflected its victim's deepest desires.

What you wanted to see in those eyes, you could. And yet I wondered how it was for Circe, living behind those eyes, staring out from a place deep inside herself.

I didn't know for sure. Not yet. There was no way I could know. But I thought it was as cold as it was dark, and very quiet, that place inside.

Circe rose from the bed and followed a slim shaft of light that spilled through the bedroom doorway.

"Dinner's waiting," she said. "Don't be long."

Dinner was rack of lamb. If Circe wanted to gauge my sense of irony, it was a little much. Still, I restrained myself. I left it to her to joke about the meat coming off an altar in a catacomb of h.e.l.l's own kitchen, conveniently located just below the dining room.

The line was more Elvira than Oscar Wilde, but she played it all right. But if Diabolos Whistler's daughter was trying to sell self-deprecation, I wasn't buying. This woman knew what she wanted and how to get it. One look at her and any idiot could see that.

There was more to it than a pair of alluring blue eyes. Circe wore a dress scooped low in the back that might have been revealing on anyone else. On Circe, the dress was a threat. Snakeskin material clung to her like a second skin, but what the dress didn't cover was more dangerous than any reptile. The tattooed creature on Circe's back was her father's most fearsome demiG.o.d-Korthes'h, all tentacles and teeth, a servant of Satan crowned with a dozen eyes gleaming with soulless fire.

The tattoo was just the kind of thing that could ruin a man's appet.i.te, but I didn't have to look at it while I ate. We faced each other across a long dining table. Spiked wrought-iron candlesticks stood under a chandelier that looked like a torture device looted from Torquemada's dungeon.

The lamb was good, and so was the wine. We finished a bottle of Merlot, and Circe opened a Cabernet Sauvignon. The sound of wine splashing crystal was pleasant, almost as pleasant as Circe's voice. She was trying so hard to be something she wasn't, and it was real work for her. I could tell she wasn't used to it.

"Do you like the wine?" she asked solicitously.

I tried it. "It's a little sharp, but I like it. Especially since you're paying for it."

"What you really like is money. Am I right?"

"Not the money so much. I like what it can do for me."

"These days it goes pretty fast, doesn't it? There never seems to be enough."

"I do all right," I said. "Of course, I'm not running the world's largest satanic church. I've got it a little easier than you do. I've got my own tools, and my business is low overhead."

"Mine isn't. The more you have, the more you need. Unexpected problems come up. It's hard to find motivated people to deal with them."

"I had the impression you weren't hurting in that department."

"Oh?"

"Spider Ripley. The way he puts it on, he's the man when it comes to bad business hereabouts."

Circe laughed. "Spider's all right. I found him through my sister, Lethe. She met Spider at a club in San Francisco. One of those places where people take to the dance floor armed with broken bottles and razor blades. Spider saved her a.s.s, and she hired him on the spot. First he was her bodyguard, and now he's mine."

She paused, as if I needed time to read between the lines. I only shrugged. "I must have missed the Enquirer that week," I said. "But I think I follow you."

"Beyond matters of sibling rivalry, Spider is very good at what he does. In fact, he rarely has to do much at all. Physical size tends to intimidate most people."

"So do scars. The guy looks like fifty miles of bad road. I especially like that ankh branded on his chest."

"Before we met him, Spider belonged to an Egyptian revival cult. So it really wasn't much of a stretch to get him to convert to the gospel according to Diabolos Whistler-my father hijacked a good bit of his theology from the Egyptians."

"Well, I know the old man had a thing for mummies. He kind of looked like one, too. Your big bad bodyguard certainly could have handled him easily. You'd have saved some money, if nothing else."

Circe sipped Cabernet Sauvignon. "Looks can be deceiving. I considered Spider for the Mexico job. The idea flitted through my head for a full five seconds. And then I realized that he wouldn't have the stones for it."

"Why not?"

"Like I said-Spider is a true believer. Alive, my father frightened him. Dead, he terrifies the poor boy."

I had to laugh at that.

"That's why I hired you, Mr. Saunders. You're not afraid."

"Not of anything I can't see."

"Neither am I. And I see things pretty clearly. Take the future. Mine is an organization on the move. With my father out of the way and me at the helm, we'll be more than just another cult. We'll be an accepted religion."

"That's the buzz, all right. You're definitely in the news. You looked good on the cover of Newsweek, by the way. Not as good as you look tonight, but more professional. Corporate goth girl, all the way."

"They wanted leather. Crushed velvet was a compromise. More feminine. I didn't want to scare off my target audience.

"The New Hedonism." I chuckled. "That should nail the sofa set right between the eyes. And that sidebar on Anton Lavey and Jayne Mansfield. Wow."

"It's a start.

"And I'm sure you'll go far with it. L. Ron Hubbard meets Vampira. It's gotta sell."

Circe blinked a couple times and tried for a smile, but her lips trembled and she lost it.

I swallowed my laughter.

She said, "You can be very cruel, you know."

She was right about that. I could be cruel. But I was a lot rougher with a K-bar than I was with my mouth.

I had my reasons, sure. Everyone has reasons for the things they do. But in my opinion I was an amateur in the cruelty department compared to the people who hired me. Not that I gave myself a pa.s.s for the things I did. Not that it mattered to me. To tell the truth, I didn't think about it much. Morality, that was just one of life's little intangibles as far as I was concerned. Everyone had a different view of it, a result of the traps life had thrown their way.

Life had set a trap or two for me. As a result, I had a view that was different than most.

Remember, I see things differently.

I see ghosts.

I, of all people, knew exactly what I was doing with my knife. Shorn of a pulse, most of my victims didn't seem that much different. They didn't sprout wings, and they didn't grow horns. They simply endured.

But I'll tell you this-without the money, I wouldn't have killed anyone. I wouldn't have had a reason.

Circe Whistler had hired me to cut off the head of an old man who happened to be her father. But unlike so many others, she didn't dismiss me when the job was done. She invited me into her home. Sat down to dinner with me. Poured me a gla.s.s of wine.

She stared into my eyes, and she didn't blink first. One thing I was sure about-trembling smiles weren't her style. Not this corporate goth girl. I didn't buy it for a second.

I said, "You don't believe any of it, do you?"

"What?"

"The things your old man preached. All that stuff about a new satanic age coming on the heels of his death. And the ruin of Whistler's corpse shall be Satan's cradle, and Satan will be reborn in flesh and blood to walk the earth once more-"

"You've been doing your homework, Mr. Saunders."

"Hanging around airports, you have plenty of time to read. Not just Newsweek. You run into all sorts of interesting folks who are eager to share all sorts of interesting pamphlets."

"More true believers." Circe sighed. "Look, this is a job to me. Some people put on suits and ties and run corporations. They tell their stockholders what the morons want to hear. I put on black leather and run a religion."

"Crushed velvet," I corrected. "Remember your target audience."

"Have your little joke."

"Like they say: the devil is in the details."

"No-the devil is in the bottom line." She leaned forward, her voice strong and sure. "My father lost sight of that. He p.i.s.sed away a fortune on archaeological expeditions and medieval ma.n.u.scripts, looking to verify his prophecies. And my sister was no better. San Francisco was Lethe's vampire. Forget razor blades and broken gla.s.s on the dance floor-from the Haight to the Mission, every human leech in that town had her marked for blood. Our operation was poised on the brink of a sinkhole called debt, and my father and my sister were determined to shove us over the edge."

"Well, I guess you're down to one problem, then."

"No. The way I see it, I've turned a negative into a positive. Now my father will be my ace in the hole." She laughed, shaking her head. "My father created his own f.u.c.king mythos. Now he'll be part of it. Imagine the questions-is he really dead, is he really alive, has he been reborn as Satan? I can play to that. Don't think I won't. People love a good mystery. Like Jim Morrison-"

"No mystery there. Morrison died choking on his own vomit in a bathtub in Paris. And your old man died with seven inches of steel jammed through his neck. It's all pretty simple, as far as I'm concerned. Dead is dead."

Fire shone in Circe's icy blue eyes. Blood pumped under that cool marble skin, lighting up her tattoos. Her breaths came short and fast. I knew she was fighting it, because she wanted to maintain control.

But all the signs were there.

She was getting angry...and so was I.

She said, "You're the kind of man who likes to be right, aren't you?"

"Sure."

"I like to be right, too. And I'm right about my father. He may be dead, but he's coming back. Not by supernatural means, and not as a result of the prayers that spilled over his lips or the lips of his followers. None of that will bring him back."

"Then what will?"

"Me," Circe said. "I'll bring him back. I can do that. Not with magic, but with words and lies that don't mean a thing." She sipped her wine, pausing for effect. "You see, we're not that different, Mr. Saunders. We can't be fooled with pretty words. We require proof. To us, dead is dead, until someone shows us otherwise. We both know that the only real power my father had was the power people gave him through their misguided faith."

"And now those same people will give that power to you."

"Yes. Those people, and many more just like them."

"And you'll give them what they want."

"Yes."

"The same way your father did." I shook my head. "Maybe the old man wasn't quite as stupid as you think."

It jerked her around good, but she wasn't about to crumble. Not as a result of a few harsh words, no matter how well placed they were. She said, "You really aren't afraid of anything, are you, Mr. Saunders?"