They came to a halt in the center of the room, next to the couch, standing as close to each other as his erection would permit; she welcomed him back from the Underworld rather more loudly than she'd intended.
"I've returned for you," he replied, as he had been instructed, although with more emphasis on the "you" than was customary. He put his long arms around her and pulled her close against him. She could feel the shaft of his erection throbbing against her heart chakra; she turned her head so her ear was pressed to his heart. It was pounding like hers.
He bent down; she started to tilt her head up for a kiss, but that wasn't what he wanted. Instead he pressed his masked forehead to hers; his eyes sought hers through their masks. "There's only us," he whispered—not a trace of an English accent. "Only us, only you and me. Yes?"
Yes! Again she couldn't trust her voice, but knew he heard her anyway. They kissed, tilting their heads to avoid clashing masks; she let him lower her gently down to the armless chaise. To her left were the green-robed witches, to her right the red-robed men; but when she spread her legs and raised her knees it was for him alone.
CHAPTER 9
« ^ »
When the last couple, Morgana and a Mexican polo player, had finished Selene rushed across the room and grabbed Whistler's hand. It had been torture, being separated from him by the length of the room, watching the other couples make love. Laughing, she tugged him through the arched doorway; they raced up three flights of stairs to the attic without letting go of each other's hands, rushed through the door and froze in awe: the full moon was dead center in the western sky, the entire room aglow with moonlight.
"Have you ever seen anything like it?" Selene whispered, turning her face up to his for their first unmasked kiss.
But the buss was perfunctory on his part. "Have to go freshen up," he said, brushing her lips with his while reaching for his overnight bag. The English accent was back.
"Wait." She put her hand over his on the leather handle. "Whatever's in there, whatever it is you need from there, don't you know you don't have to hide it from me?"
He sat down on the foot of the bed; the room was so small that his knees were practically touching the windowsill. "I'm afraid it's not that simple."
She sat down next to him; she could feel the warmth of his long-boned thigh against hers. The moon, never so large, never so round, filled the dormer window.
"It's not that I don't trust you with my life," he continued, as she wriggled closer; he slipped an arm around her. "What complicates matters is that I'll be asking you to trust me with your life."
"But you know the answer!"
"Yes, but you don't know the question. Please, Selene, let me do this my way."
She looked up at him, and zipped her lips with a pursed thumb and forefinger. It was a gesture she hadn't made since she was a little girl in a pinafore. Her eyes were solemn but sparkling.
"Very well, then. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to tell you a little what-if story. No obligation whatsoever to believe in it on your part. And if you decide it's only a fairy tale, or a lunatic's raving, why then, I was only what-iffing, only joking. No harm done—I'm off to the loo and back in a mo."
"And when I believe you?" Her voice sounded strange in her ears.
"You're a stubborn one, aren't you?"
"Mister, you don't know the half of it."
"All right." He reached down and felt around in his overnight bag. She caught a glimpse of a thermos, but what he removed instead was a folding knife of some sort with a long mother-of-pearl handle. When he opened the blade, she saw that it was an antique scalpel. He presented it to her; she turned it in her hands. When the blade caught the moonlight, she saw from the glint that it had been sharpened to a razor's edge, "if you believe me (you see, m'dear, I'm quite as stubborn as you) then when I'm done all you have to do is hand this back to me—handle first, if you please—and I'll know what to do from there. Now, are you ready?"
She nodded.
He seemed nervous, younger again. "Right-o. Off we go. I told you earlier that I didn't know fuck-all about witches. What I do know about is vampires." Selene forced her body to be still. "Not just cinema vampires, or vampire novels, but the myths and legends behind them. Every culture has vampire folklore, you know—the langsuyar of Malaysia, the lamiai of Greece, the strigoi of the Romanians (they're almost always partnered up with witches, by the way), the dhampir of the Gypsies, the Drinkers of the Caribbean—different names, different manifestations, but what they all have in common is that they drink blood.
"Now, let's play our what-if game? What if there really were some factual basis for all these legends from all the civilizations of the world? What if there were some people upon whom, for whatever reason—some genetic factor, say—blood acts as a drug? Not just a drug, but a drug so powerful that all other drug highs are merely pleasant by comparison? Beyond that, what if when these people drank blood they not only got high—and extremely, extremely, extremely randy—but also gained certain physical powers—strength, speed, vastly improved sensory perception, and immunity to disease?"
He took her hand, the one without the scalpel; she held her breath. "And what if these people didn't need to kill anyone for their blood, what if they only needed a sip here, and a sip there—less than you'd give to the Red Cross."
Selene noticed that he had dropped the interrogatory rise at the end of that last what-if. She waited to see if there were going to be any more of them; when there weren't, she handed him the scalpel. She did not turn her throat up for him, but she would have had she been so instructed. It didn't have much to do with belief, either: this was for love, this was for trusting the Goddess. This was for the moon.
He took her hand as if he were going to kiss it. She started to turn it palm up for him, thinking he wanted her wrist; the ease with which he kept her from turning it gave her a hint of his true strength. He gathered a fold of skin from the back of her hand, pinched it hard so that all she felt was the pinch. She looked out at the moon as he made a drawing motion with the scalpel; when next she looked down he was sucking greedily at the back of her hand.
He drank from her for three or four minutes; she could see a dark red blush creeping up from under the neck of his robe; his face flushed. When he'd finished, he kept his face averted, closing the scalpel with one hand, stanching the wound, which proved to be a hair's-breadth slit about an eighth of an inch long, with a firm pressure of his thumb. Not a drop had he wasted. He closed the scalpel and dropped it into his bag, pulled out a tin of decorator Band-Aids, selected a little round one—blue with yellow stars—and pressed it into place with his thumb.
Only then did he raise his eyes to her. She gasped—the whites were red as blood. "Just a side effect," he assured her. "I can use Visine if you'd like." But his voice was thick with lust, and his erection was nosing its way out through the placket in his robe.
"Never mind," she said, reaching for it wonderingly. He tugged at the hem of her robe; she rose up so that he could lift it over her head. Again, the sight of her nakedness seemed to arouse him beyond mortal lust; for the second time that night—the second time in her life—she made telepathic contact with a penis.
He seemed to understand what had happened. "I believe an introduction is in order," he announced, raising himself up high enough to tug his own robe off. His penis was briefly out of sight; when it appeared again, it was pointing toward the moon. "Selene, I'd like you to meet the Creature." He circled its base with thumb and forefinger—they barely reached around—and made the Creature nod hello. "Creature, Selene."
Selene, laughing through the lump in her throat, nodded back. She climbed onto his lap, facing him, so that the Creature was trapped between them, its circumsized head velvety soft, firm and spongy, throbbing against the hollow of her sternum. "How do you do, Creature?" she said, adopting a clipped British accent of her own, as if she were a heroine in an Austen novel. "I think you and I shall prove to be the greatest of friend
s."
It was Whistler's turn to laugh. He lifted Selene up into the air as if she were light as a doll; she reached down to adjust the angle of the Creature. "Don't let me go," she whispered as he began to lower her—meaning, don't impale me all at once.
"I won't," he said. "I won't ever let you go."
"Oooweee," she replied, trying not to let the implications—among other things—overwhelm her. "You do talk pretty." But she checked to be sure she could still reach the floor with her feet—just in case.
* * *
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Thaw again. We'll be landing in Denver in just a few more minutes…"
The pilot's announcement called Selene back from her reverie; her heart was pounding fiercely. Funny how the thought of Jamey—and the Creature—still had this effect on her, even after all these years.
So what had happened between "I'll never let you go" and now? Wicca had happened. He hadn't let her go, after all; she had let him go. Beltane; May of 1968—it gave her a jolt to realize that it had been a quarter century since High Priestess Morgana had passed through the veil. One unseen weakness in that robust body—a tiny vein deep in her crafty brain had burst while she and a few members of the inner circle were practicing an obscure and dangerous form of black magic divination known as orgomancy.
And Selene and Whistler's plans for the future had died with her. He had proposed to her on Candlemas, back in February; they'd had a hippie wedding planned for Midsummer's Night in one of the great meadows of Golden Gate Park. (Midsummer was an auspicious date on the Wiccan calendar. As for having the ceremony and reception at night, that was for Whistler, whose eyes, like those of all long-term blood drinkers, could no longer tolerate daylight.) And soon after she'd introduced him to Connie and Don, who were having trouble meeting the payments on the property in Bolinas, Whistler had arranged to buy the upper house and lot for a honeymoon cottage—tea for two and me for you and all that.
But Morgana's death in May, and her last will and testament, naming Selene as high priestess, had put an end to the wedding plans. The high priestess could not, by coven rule, be a wedded woman. Selene had chosen Wicca (and the Broadway house, as well as a goodly chunk of Morgana's two fortunes) over marriage.
Now, twenty years down the road, Selene understood full well that if the same decision came up again, she might choose differently. But the point was moot: Jamey Whistler was already a married man. Married and uxorious—and a father. Lourdes Perez, a beautiful young vampiress from the Philippines by way of Modesto, had borne Jamey a daughter within months of their wedding. In fact, just a few weeks before Halloween Selene had sent little Corazon Perez Whistler a darling pink party dress for her first birthday. Lourdes had called Selene from Santa Luz to thank her. Afterward Whistler had come on the line, and he and Selene had chatted briefly. It was their last conversation.
Suddenly, the image of Whistler in the hold of the wooden ship popped into her head, as vivid as if she were still hovering over him. It occurred to her that he had been alone. Whistler, alone. Weeping. Grieving? For a moment, just for a moment, her heart leapt as she understood that something might have happened to Lourdes—something terrible. Possibly even something fatal.
It's an ill wind… were the words that came to mind. Confused, ashamed, she strangled the thought aborning; then, conscience-stricken, Selene forced herself to pray to the Goddess, in whom she no longer believed, for the protection of Lourdes and Cora as well as Whistler. But she felt like a fraud on several different levels, and was glad for the interruption when Captain Thaw came over the horn again to request that the passengers prepare for descent.
I'll try, thought the high priestess of Mann County, returning her tray and seatback to their original upright positions. But I don't know how much lower I can get.
CHAPTER 10
« ^ »
Aldo Striescu had picked up his arsonist's skills (among others) while in the employ of the Romanian Securitate, which had plucked him from the Orfelinat Gheorghiu-Dej, the state orphanage, at the age of fourteen when his remarkable facility with languages had come to light. It was Securitate's Third Branch (counterespionage, which for the most part meant spying on any Romanian who had contact with foreigners) that had conscripted him. Could have been worse: back then most orphans were drafted into the Fifth Branch, which served as Ceausescu's praetorian guard.
The Securitate, however, could not be blamed for either his pyromania or asphyxomania: by the time they got hold of him, Aldo's psychosexual twig was already bent. Flames had been giving him erections since the age of nine; the delights of smothering his partners he'd discovered somewhat later, as a bully of twelve or thirteen trying to keep the younger boys from crying out during the after-hour rapes. By the time he left the orphanage it had become an all but necessary adjunct to Striescuan orgasm.
But skilled as he was in arson, and much as he enjoyed it, not even Aldo was eager to attempt three major torch jobs two hundred miles apart in the span of a single night, so after burning Whistler's El Sobrante farmhouse (a glorious—and fulfilling—clapboard blaze) he slipped a bootleg of La Divina at Covent Garden into the tape deck of the Sable and drove up to Lake Tahoe with the cruise control set at a leisurely sixty miles per hour. He arrived well before daylight, checked into Caesar's, shot craps for a few hours, lost a few hundred dollars of his employer's money, then slept through the day and torched Whistler Manor shortly after sunset on Monday evening.
Unfortunately, he had no time to stick around and watch the mock-Tudor mansion go up—his schedule (as well as professional prudence) mandated that he leave for San Francisco shortly after setting the fire. Then, what with having to stop to pick up a hitchhiker a few miles east of Placerville (Aldo's thermos had been nearly empty), then detouring off the highway a few miles later in order to drop off the body, he almost missed his flight out of SFO. As it was, he had to drop off the Sable at the curb, and boarded the redeye to New York a good deal redder-eyed than any of the other passengers.
But rather than dose his bloodshot eyes with drops, Aldo donned his state-of-the-art wraparound black shades (as he did whenever his schedule required daylight air travel—his eyes hadn't been able to tolerate daylight for twenty years) and explained to the flight attendant that he'd recently had his corneas planed, and had to avoid bright lights in general, and ultraviolet rays in particular. Together they plotted out the point in the flight when the plane on its eastward journey would meet the westering sun. They were over Pennsylvania when the steward alerted him, and helped him secure his black sleep shades under his black-lensed glasses.
A representative of the airline met him at Kennedy and escorted him, thus blindfolded, to the Olympic Airways terminal. He probably could have made it on his own, so acute were his other senses on blood, but his collapsible white cane was packed in his trunk.
Aldo connected with his flight to Athens with an hour to spare, and although it was full dark by the time they arrived at Ellinikon airport, he kept up the charade of blindness, which had never failed to slide him through Customs with only the most cursory of examinations.
But the blind American who checked into the King George in Athens disappeared there. Instead it was a foppish upperclass Englishman who caught the last ferry to Lamiathos the following evening, just after sunset. (The blind American wasn't the only disappearance that evening: a few days later the body of a young prostitute was found floating in Piraeus Harbor, a ligature embedded so deeply into the puffy flesh of her throat that the medical examiner had to clip it free with wire cutters. The left carotid had been partially severed, but in the opinion of the ME, that had been incidental—the girl had died of suffocation first. Only lost a couple liters of blood—about a thermosful.)
Aldo stepped off the ferry, made a few inquiries, and checked in to a tourist resort with separate bungalows just outside of town at off-season rates. After freshening up with a splash of blood from his thermos, Aldo replaced the thermos in the
small refrigerator and walked into town. His nose directed him toward the harbor, where he soon located a taverna that was both congenial and picturesque. He had a nasty microwaved gyro for dinner, but the ouzo was authentic, and after buying a few rounds for the house he used a lightly English-accented Greek to acquire some information about Whistler's villa that might prove interesting to his employer. He also acquired an equally congenial if less picturesque middle-aged whore willing to let him bring her back to his bungalow and asphyxiate her to the point of unconsciousness for an extra two thousand drachmas. About the price of a previously frozen crab cocktail at the Fairmont.
She was no beauty, but then, with the customary pillow over her face she didn't need to be. Aldo's resulting orgasm was greatly enhanced by La Divina's Carmen. (A concert tape—Callas, self-conscious about her fat ankles, never essayed the role in costume.) And although for Aldo release was ordinarily a product of grim effort, his climax, when it arrived during the soaring "Habanera," was all but merry.
The dazed whore regained consciousness a few minutes later, and to Aldo's delight she recognized the glorious voice coming from the tape deck. "Our Maria," she said hoarsely, rubbing her throat. She went on to explain that in the old days, before the skinny American bewitched him, Ari and Maria often visited Lamiathos, and that once ("I was only small child," the whore hastened to assure him), Maria Callas had sung for the village from the prow of Aristotle Onassis's great yacht The Christina.
SHADOWS Page 8
