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 ass, 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 pass 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 glass 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 pissed away a fortune on archaeological expeditions and medieval manuscripts, looking to verify his prophecies. And my sister was no better. San Francisco was Lethe’s vampire. Forget razor blades and broken glass 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 fucking 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.
