She sighed dramatically. “I thought you’d never wake up.”
“Then you were wrong.” I smiled. “Some privacy, okay?” She giggled and covered her eyes while I dressed. “All clear,” I said, giving her a wink as I opened the bedroom window. The sea breeze was cool and crisp and clean, and I liked the way it felt on my face.
“Are you surprised to see me?” she asked.
“To tell the truth, I thought I might never see you again. I’m glad I was wrong about that.”
A smile blossomed on her face. “You’re really glad I came?”
“Sure.”
“Good. I thought you might be mad…about yesterday, I mean. I got pretty scared. I don’t like the bottle house, and when that lady showed up-” Her lower lip trembled. “Well, that lady scared me. The way she talked about ghosts. I hid, but I heard what she said to you. I didn’t think she was very nice, and when she said she was taking you to the Whistler Estate…”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Whatever it is, you can tell me about it.”
“She scared me, is all. I was worried about you. I thought maybe I could help if something was wrong.”
“You’re very brave,” I said. “But I’m fine. Everything is okay.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure-”
I bit off the sentence before I could finish it. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure about anything at all. Outside, a troubling sound scratched the silence. The squawk of a police radio.
In a second I was at the window. Before another second ticked off, I saw everything I needed to see. Near the porte-cochere that hooded the main entrance to Circe’s mansion stood two sheriff s deputies wearing shit- brown uniforms. One of them swore under his breath as he turned down the volume control on his handpack radio. The other drew a pistol, his gaze roving from window to window.
I was lucky. The deputy didn’t spot me. He slapped his partner with a dirty look and together they disappeared under the porte-cochere, heading for the front door.
I had to get out of there. I turned and nearly stepped through the little girl. She looked up at me, startled blue eyes in a face that was a handful of nothing.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I lied. “Everything’s okay. But you have to leave, and you have to do it now.”
“But why?”
“Just trust me,” I said. I couldn’t give her another answer. There wasn’t any time.
I wasn’t armed. I glanced around the room. The dusty cat o’ nine tails hanging on the wall wasn’t going to do me much good. My K-bar was in the guest bedroom. I had to get it. Fast.
I started down the hall. The little girl trailed me. She was talking too loud, and I had to remind myself that no one could hear her but me. Still, I needed to concentrate. I had to hear the cops. I had to know what they were doing.
I told her to be quiet. I said it too fast and too hard and too loud. She started to cry. Gooseflesh prickled my skin as her little hand passed through mine, but she couldn’t stop me now. Nothing would stop me now. I had to keep moving. I needed that knife.
Two steps and I’d be in the guest room.
Below, I heard the front door swing open.
The sound of the sea and whispers.
And then another sound stopped me cold.
A held breath burned in my lungs. I stood just inside the bedroom doorway. The sound was everywhere.
The little girl didn’t hear it. Not yet. I turned. I had to stop her before she entered the room. But there was no stopping her. She was a ghost.
She tumbled through my arms, and through me, and into the room. And what she saw there was a raw vision of hell, and what she heard was the tireless buzzing of a hundred flies.
The walls of the guest room were papered with bloody tattoos. Torn ridges of blue scale. Hellish smiles eclipsed by crawling carrion insects. The faces of children and demons I might have recognized had they not been wet with bright red gouts of blood that had dripped like clotted jam until they dried to an enamel gleam.
Circe Whistler lay on the bed in a tangle of black satin sheets, her corpse crawling with flies.
Dead. Gutted. Skinned from head to toe.
Red everywhere, except for her cold blue eyes.
My K-bar knife was planted in her heart.
I saw a flash of movement in the far corner of the room. Something was huddled in the shadows. Something shorn of skin, a tattered mess that opened its cold blue eyes and screamed.
It was Circe’s ghost. It had to be. She rose from the corner, her eyes twin beacons of pain, and I could smell hate on her like a perfume born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave.
The ghost didn’t come for me. She didn’t even look at me. It was as if she knew that I was powerless to stop her. Instead she staggered toward the little girl.
The child was paralyzed with fright. She stared up at that cleaved face, unable to look away from icy blue pools nestled beneath bloody brows. I yelled at the girl, begged her to run, but she couldn’t move at all. She couldn’t even look at me and I tried to snatch her away from the thing but I couldn’t even touch her, there was never a way I could touch her, and soon the mutilated shade closed its ravaged arms around the little girl and they joined in a midnight wail and together they were gone.
Silence filled the room, or it should have.
But it didn’t. I was holding my breath, shutting everything out just as I had the night before in Circe’s bed.
I couldn’t afford to do that now.
There were sounds and I had to hear them. My own ragged breathing. Circling flies cutting buzzsaw melodies. And the deputies were coming. They must have heard me warn the little girl, and now I heard them climbing the twisted wrought iron staircase.
I snatched the K-bar from between the corpse’s ribs.
On the landing, booted footfalls muffled by carpet. I heard every step. They were close. Two men trying to be quiet who didn’t know how to be quiet at all:
“We should be using those damn Dobermans.”
“Uh-uh. Dogs wouldn’t know us from him.”
“Maybe. But this stinks.”
“So let’s get it done.”
More footsteps. I took a deep breath and held it, the stink of death burning in my lungs.
No one was going to smell that stink on me.
I clutched the knife. The room had two doors: one that opened onto the hallway and another that led to a bathroom with no other exit. There was a window on the other side of the bed, but I wasn’t going through it. A twenty-foot drop to a brick driveway didn’t seem like an option, and I wasn’t going to get shot in the back while I jumped, or while running for the security fence that separated the property from the shadow-choked treeline beyond.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway.
I heard the smooth sound of automatic slides as both men chambered shells.
They had guns, and I had a knife.
And there was only one way out.
I gripped the K-bar and stepped into the hallway.
Both pistols were aimed in my face. The deputies stood shoulder to shoulder. The one on the left yelled, “Drop it!”
His partner didn’t waste that much time. He pulled the trigger. The bullet sang past my ear like a steel fly as I moved in on him, slicing the inside of his right forearm to the bone. He dropped his pistol and before it hit the carpet the K-bar had pierced his Kevlar vest and his rib cage, gouging a trench in his heart.
