Dark Duets Part 44

She looked up at him. "Better than well, I should say. Rather perfect, actually."

It struck him then.

"You planned this?"

"Of course. Louisa had guessed what I've been up to. Not that she was threatening to expose me. Quite the contrary. As you heard tonight, she wanted to learn how to do resurrections. Can you believe it? She wanted me to teach her so she could become a compet.i.tor. Not likely."

"But you anointed the maid and still she-"

"I anointed her with this," she said, pulling the carafe from her bag.

"Exactly-"

She unstoppered it and poured the contents onto the floor. "Colored olive oil."

Liath closed his eyes and fought a smile. An utterly devious, utterly ruthless, and ultimately amoral woman. And yet . . . somehow wonderful.

She removed another identical carafe from her bag and anointed Katrina. "She'll be able to walk in a few minutes. I-oh, my." She reached around and removed the doorman's knife from the maid's back. "How inconvenient for sitting."

"But what about me?" Liath said.

She looked up at him again. "Yes . . . what about you? You weren't supposed to be here. I had planned on dealing with only Madame Louisa and her thugs, but you managed to complicate matters by getting yourself captured and strung up like a side of beef. I had to alter my plans."

"I meant, why didn't I go berserk?"

"Because I used the genuine sustaining oil on you."

"Why?"

She frowned. "I'm not sure. You look terribly undignified up there, by the way."

Still holding the knife, she walked over to where the rope was cleated to the wall and placed the blade against the cord.

"Ready?" she said, raising her eyebrows.

"More than ready."

She began sawing through the heavy coils. Soon enough they frayed and then parted. With a thump, Liath dropped to the floor and flopped back onto his derriere.

"Now find some clothes," she said as he struggled to stand. "And do remove those darts from your a.r.s.e. They're . . . unbecoming."

"I'd be delighted to," he said, rattling his manacled wrists behind him. "But there's the small matter of these."

Sighing with annoyance, she said, "Must I do everything?" She waved toward the b.l.o.o.d.y, ruined corpses. "You search their pockets. They're quite messy and I don't want to stain my dress."

Liath did the best he could with his hands behind his back but fortunately Rasheeda found a key chain in Louisa's purse. Once his hands were free, he appropriated the doorman's clean coat and pants.

Rasheeda began leading a docile Katrina toward the discreet entrance. "We'd better leave before someone shows up."

"Do you have a car?"

"Toby is waiting with the hea.r.s.e by the alley."

"Good old Toby. You go ahead. I'll be along."

"What are you up to?"

"Like last time, we'll be needing to make it look like a robbery gone terribly wrong, plus I want to clean up any evidence that might be linking us to this carnage."

A frown. "Evidence? What-?"

"Me dress, for one."

Me dress . . . never in his strangest dreams had he imagined that phrase pa.s.sing his lips.

"And most important, I want to find me diamonds."

"Very well, but be quick about it."

"I'll be but a minute."

As soon as she and the revenant had disappeared around the corner, Liath hurried over to Louisa's eviscerated corpse and grabbed a handful of what Katrina had left of the liver.

G.o.d forgive me, he thought as he shoved it into his mouth, but this is delicious.

Still chewing, he hurried up to the top floor to the front room where he'd seen Louisa. He rummaged through her drawers until he found a lockbox, then fumbled through the key ring till he found one that would open it.

It held some nice bracelets and two diamond necklaces, which he pocketed. Also a stack of shares in something called Standard Oil. He shrugged and pocketed those too. Who knew? Might be worth something someday. But nowhere could he find his diamonds.

. . . out of reach, where no man shall go. . .

A strange thing to say. For all he knew that meant they were somewhere off the premises. Yes, most likely.

Returning to the first-floor abattoir, he found his dress balled in a corner. Before leaving he used it to wrap another piece of Louisa's liver-for later-then hurried out to the waiting hea.r.s.e. Rasheeda sat on the far side, the bloodied Katrina in the middle. Liath slipped in beside the maid.

"That was a long minute," Rasheeda said as Toby got them moving.

"I couldn't find me diamonds. Louisa said they were hidden 'out of reach, where no man shall go,' but where in h.e.l.l that might be I've no idea. Odd thing to be saying, don't you think?"

Rasheeda frowned. "Very. 'Where no man shall go . . .' I can't-" Her eyes lit. "Oh, my!"

She lifted Katrina's short, blood-soaked skirt and spread her thighs.

"Aha!" she said. "Look!"

Liath turned to the window. "Really, Ra-"

"I'm quite serious. Look."

So look he did. He saw the revenant's smooth thighs and frilly knickers. What did she-? Wait . . . was that a leather string protruding from the knickers?

"What . . . ?"

"Pull on it. Go ahead-pull!"

Hesitantly, Liath grabbed hold of the strip and pulled. Out came a small leather pouch. He pulled it open and found his uncut stones safe within. Sighing with relief, he looked from the pouch to Katrina's knickers, to Rasheeda.

" 'Where no man shall go . . .'?"

She dropped Katrina's skirt. "It's complicated."

"Well, thanks for waiting," he said, tucking the pouch away. "I was afraid you'd be leaving without me."

She stared ahead, smiling crookedly. "Oh, I wouldn't do that-not after all the trouble it took to save you."

"Save me? You suggested coating me with tar and setting me ablaze to use as a lantern!"

She laughed. "Oh, that. I knew they'd never survive long enough."

"Really . . . why did you come back?"

"For Katrina, of course."

"Of course. As you said before, why let a perfectly good revenant go to waste?"

"Exactly."

He leaned across the docile maid. "Are you sure that's all?"

"Well, if you want to know the real truth . . ."

He leaned closer. "Yes?"

She pushed him away . . . gently. "I've decided it might prove useful to have a revenant with a penny-dreadful sense of honor indebted to me."

Was that the reason-the real reason? With this woman, yes, it could be that and nothing more. But he sensed it might be only half the story.

Liath leaned back and crossed his arms.

Maybe he'd put off his final dying a wee bit. Just long enough to find out. No worry about running out of time. As long as she kept anointing him with that sustaining oil, he had all the time in the world.

BLIND LOVE.

Kasey Lansdale and Joe R. Lansdale.

I don't believe in love at first sight. l.u.s.t at first sight, maybe, but love? Not so much. It strikes me as a crock, and because of that, I can't believe I let my friend Erin convince me to go to an eye-gazing party with her, a kind of modern-day hippie's answer to speed dating.

What you do is you go into a room with all these other sad, dateless men and women, a timer is set, and you sit down at a table and gaze into each other's eyes for two minutes without speaking. When you've done that with everyone in the room, you're supposed to choose the person you felt a burning eye connection with, go sit with them for a second round, and this time you can talk, having hopefully made a soulful bond by previous eyeball connection.

I feared the first two minutes might only involve observing distracting mucus and a bulbous, red sty.

Not Erin. She was all in, high as a kite about the whole thing. It reminded me of the phase she went through when she was into ma.s.sage therapy applied through psychic power. You're not touched. The ma.s.seur or ma.s.seuse waves their hands over your body and channels some kind of energy from beyond the veil, or pulls it up from Mother Earth, or some such thing, and sticks it in your back through the enchanted power of healing hands.

I had injured my back once during a s.e.x act with a gymnast. He proved agile but had all the personality of a pommel horse. It was a onetime experience in which I was a.s.sured certain positions would bring me unique pleasure, but instead they brought me a bad back and three sleepless nights due to embarra.s.sment and pain. Erin a.s.sured me her ma.s.seur could pull out the ache, if not the embarra.s.sment. What he pulled out of me was forty-five dollars and an hour of my life. I went home with the pain I came in with.

Bottom line is she's the kind who reads her horoscope for real, believes there are special numbers in her life, and thinks that constipation is a sign of energy clog instead of pizza, tacos, and an abundance of cheese. We even did nude skydiving once-well, there was the parachute. It was supposed to free our inner selves. She swore to me. We ended up with several seconds of fear, skinned knees, sc.r.a.ped a.s.ses, and coming down not in the field where we'd planned to, but in a grocery store parking lot in the middle of a busy Sat.u.r.day afternoon, an episode that led to newspaper prominence, a fine, and overnight jail time.

The problem is she's my best friend and I feel obligated to support her in her quest for the perfect mate, this time via an eye-gazing party.

We were coming off a light, me driving, when Erin said, "I think it sounds romantic."

"With a room full of people doing the same thing? I don't find that romantic so much as creepy. Which celebrity started this trend?"

"I'm just trying to find happiness, Jana."

"I don't think you're all that unhappy. You just think you're supposed to have a man to make you happy. What's that old saying? A woman needs a man like a fish needs a motorcycle."

"Bicycle," Erin said.

"Well, if a fish doesn't need a bicycle, I'm going to bet it doesn't need a motorcycle either. Thing is, you'll find someone, and if you don't, well, we can play cards at your house all day when we're old. You got to stop obsessing about having a relations.h.i.+p. I mean, you got all the tools. You're smart and pretty, have a good job and all your own teeth, so eventually someone who has all their parts working and isn't too scary to look at is going to end up with you."

"Gee, thanks."

"Hey, I'm in the same boat here. My last date spent the whole night talking about his Lego collection. Let me say this without meaning to hurt your feelings, Erin. You're too desperate, and guys can smell desperation the way animals smell fear. Either they feed on it until there's nothing left of you, or it makes them nervous and they run."

"You may have a point," she said as I hit the main highway and honked at a truck that tried to switch into my lane. "Yet, I feel like I'm running out of options. Jordon, girl I work with, she went to one of these events once, met a guy there she's been with ever since. They've even started to dress alike."

Obviously Erin's idea of what's adorable in a relations.h.i.+p is quite different from mine.

"We turn around now, chicken out," she said, "and I end up with a house full of cats and a pa.s.sion for macrame, you will be to blame."

"I'm more than willing to carry that burden."

"Well, it's too late, because we're here."

We certainly were. It was a long rambling piece of property right in the middle of town. There were hedges around it high enough that you'd have to have a ladder to see over the top, and there was only a gap between them to serve as an opening to a driveway. I wheeled through the gap and along the driveway that wound through a number of tall and well-groomed trees, then parked behind a car in a row with a lot of other cars, all of them so expensive and cool they made my ride look like a hay wagon.

All along the walk were little signs with orange hearts painted on them. Above each heart was a pair of sleepy blue eyes, and at the corner of each sign was a black arrow pointing up the walk.

"This is either the place," I said, "or an elaborate scam to murder us and sell us for body parts."

"You're always negative," Erin said.

"Experience has been a harsh teacher."