Kallie hadn’t seen the heat of lust in the stranger’s sea-foam-green eyes, just a skin-crawling intensity that reminded her of a gator’s unblinking stare. But that didn’t mean Belladonna was wrong. Maybe the supposedly naïve and nubile young thing the potential perv desired had been a tall mambo-in-training and not herself.
In any case, the man was gone.
“Speaking of pervs,” Kallie said in a low voice, “I think Augustine is playing with Layne’s body.”
“Playing how?”
“Molesting him.”
An expression dreamy enough to rival the one Kallie had seen on Layne-Augustine earlier floated across Belladonna’s face. “Mmm-mmm. I’d pay to see that. Do you think we could convince him to molest himself onstage?”
Even though the image those words conjured pulsed heat through her veins, Kallie shook her head. “Your tank is still full of one hundred percent pure evil, Bell.”
A cat-in-the-cream smile curved Belladonna’s lips, and she shrugged. Whatcha gonna do?
Thinking of all she’d learned about her aunt—whoever that might be—Kallie’s amusement and desire faded. “We need to talk after the contest,” she said.
“That sounds serious, Shug.” Belladonna studied her, her smile vanishing.
“It is, but later, oui? You’re supposed to be having fun.”
“You’re supposed to be having fun too, Kallie.”
“Shit. I don’t even know if I should be doing this.” Kallie dragged both hands through her hair, pushed it behind her shoulders. “With everything that’s happened—”
“You need this,” Belladonna cut in, “because of everything that’s happened. Hellfire, Shug, what if you’d climbed into that bed with Gage instead of running off to the bathroom to puke?”
“I know,” Kallie said from a throat gone tight. “But—”
“‘But’ nothing.” Belladonna grasped Kallie’s hands in her own, her warm fingers squeezing tight. “You need a little fun, Kallie, you deserve a little silliness.”
“I thought that’s what I had you for,” Kallie teased. Belladonna snorted. “Girl, please. I am much more than ‘a little fun.’”
“Fun? No. I was referring to the silliness part. But maybe demented would be more accurate.”
Belladonna’s hazel eyes gleamed with appreciation. “I
see you’re filling up your tank with high-octane one hundred percent evil.”
“More like siphoning from yours,” Kallie said. She wriggled her hands free of Belladonna’s, then wrapped her friend up in a quick hug. “So what do you need me to do?” she asked, releasing Belladonna and stepping back.
“Wet the hunks down once they strip to their boxers.” A wicked smile parted Belladonna’s lips. “Wouldn’t break my heart if you used extra water on Layne.”
Kallie grinned. “Mine either.”
TWENTY-FIVE
COLD AND EMPTY
Dallas strode along the Persian carpet on the sixth floor, uneasiness crawling along his spine. Except for him, the hall was empty. A cart full of linen and cleaning supplies was parked between two rooms, both doors wide open. The high-powered roar of an industrial vacuum rumbled out of one room.
Nothing felt good about this.
He’d tailed the stranger from the carnival and into the hotel, as careful as possible to keep his distance to avoid being spotted. He’d hung back as the man had stepped into an elevator. Then Dallas had watched to see what floor it stopped at—the 6 button lighting up—before jumping into an elevator and slapping the button for the sixth floor.
Belladonna’s room was on the sixth floor—hell, so was his. But Dallas doubted that the stranger had any interest in him given that he’d been chatting up Kallie and Belladonna at the carnival.
Oh, sure, the man could have a room on the sixth floor too. Quite a coincidence if he did. And Dallas would stake his life that it was no coincidence Mr. Could-You-Ladies-Direct-Me now walked the sixth-floor halls.
Question now was—where the hell was he?
How about a process of elimination? See where he isn’t?
Lengthening his stride, Dallas headed for Belladonna’s room. He paused at the hallway junction and listened. Nothing but the pounding of his pulse and the distant roar of the vacuum behind him. He caught a thin whiff of bitter-orange bergamot in the air. Could be a trace of perfume or tea or . . . The hair prickled at the back of his neck.
Bergamot amped up a hoodoo’s personal power and was often used in bend-over potions and oils. Maybe I’m tailing another hoodoo.
Of course, if so, it was also possible that most of the hoodoos and root workers attending the carnival had been assigned to the sixth floor—Kallie being an exception—and that he was being paranoid as all hell.
Maybe.
Dallas swung to the left at the hallway junction, slowing his pace to keep his footfalls as quiet as possible as he approached Belladonna’s room. Sidling against the wall, he crept up to the door. Drawing in a breath and holding it, he ducked down out of the peephole’s line of sight and pressed his ear against the door. Listened.
Silence. No stealthy shuffling or noisy ransacking. Just the distant hum of the vacuum. He listened for several long moments, fighting the creepy feeling that the stranger listened on the other side of the door, his ear also pressed to the cold metal.
More silence. More paranoia.
Exhaling, Dallas straightened, still keeping clear of the peephole, and wrapped his fingers around the door handle. Pulled down. It was locked. His gut told him to ignore the paranoia, that no one lurked unwelcome inside Belladonna’s room.
Hell, maybe the guy was just another red-blooded male horndog looking to pick up some good-looking and curvaceous company.
Ain’t we all? No crime in that.
Hearing the door across the hall swing open, then click shut, Dallas stepped back from Belladonna’s door and turned around. And whirled into someone standing right behind him.
Dallas looked into the stranger’s pale-green eyes, saw amusement glinting in their jade depths. The man locked a steel-muscled arm around Dallas’s shoulders and punched him in the gut three times with the other hand.
“You ain’t worth wasting magic on, boy,” he hissed. The pain of the blows stole Dallas’s breath. Shoving free of the man’s grip, he staggered back against the wall and stared at the blood-smeared knife in the man’s hand. His heart hammered against his ribs, roared like a waterfall in his ears. He pressed his hand against his belly and felt something warm and sticky soaking his shirt. He looked down. Fear poured cold through his veins. His shirt glistened with blood.
Dallas opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. His legs wobbled underneath him, then gave out, but before he hit the carpet, the stranger grabbed him by the shirt collar, hauled him across the hall, and tossed him into the room he’d been waiting in.
Dallas hit the tiled floor hard, shoulder first. His vision grayed. Blood, hot and coppery, flooded his mouth, trickled past his lips. Choking, he spat blood onto the floor. He struggled to get onto his hands and knees, knowing he needed to get up and away before the sonuvabitch planted that knife in his back and finished him, but his blood-slick hands slipped across the tiles.
“You’ve got your teacher Gabrielle to thank for this, Dallas Brûler,” the stranger said. “You’re gonna die because of things she did long before you ever knew her.”
Grabbing the comforter on the freshly made bed, Dallas reeled himself up onto his knees, but a breath-stealing kick to the ribs knocked him back onto the floor. The comforter slithered down beside him. A pair of binoculars thunked onto the tiles. He gasped for air. Pain chewed into his guts with sharp, sharp teeth.
“But you’re the lucky one. You’ll get to keep your soul since you’re not a relative of the backstabbing whore. Kallie and her cousin won’t be so fortunate.”
Keep your soul. Shit, shit, shit. Kallie . . .
Cold sweat slicked Dallas’s body, beaded on his forehead. Darkness suc
ked at his consciousness. Fear coiled through him. Am I dying? Gotta keep awake. Gotta get your ass outta here. Move and keep moving. Talk to him. Buy time.
“What happened?” Dallas panted. “Gabrielle and you? Why hurt others?” He rolled over onto his belly and pulled himself along the floor with shaking hands, expecting to feel the hard punch of the knife into his back as he inched his way toward the phone perched miles above him on the dresser.
Instead, the stranger grabbed Dallas by the shoulders and wrenched him back over onto his back. Held him in place on the floor with one strong hand against his chest. “You’re just going to have to find your answers in the afterlife,” he said, his voice flat.
He lifted the knife. Street light slanted along its blood-glistening length.
Dallas saw nothing in the man’s pale-green eyes that he understood—no hatred, no rage, no satisfaction—just eyes as cold and empty as a flood-ravaged tomb.
“For you, my sweet love,” the stranger whispered.
The blade slashed down and across Dallas’s throat.
TWENTY-SIX
TIME OF RECKONING
Should he wear his best boxers, or the pair most likely to become translucent when wet? Which would be sexier—expensive silk, or cheap and clinging? And could he keep his excitement from showing when luscious Hoodoo Kallie tossed water on him? Would she be in a bikini in case of backsplash?
Oh, blessed and horny Pan, please-oh-please, let her be in a bikini.
A sudden thought froze Ray Wippler, binocular-spying Wiccan extraordinaire, in front of his room. Not cold water, surely? As he slipped his keycard into the slot on the door handle, he realized that not even cold water could diminish the molten heat of his lust for the lovely hoodoo—lust she would finally see and admire.
For once he wouldn’t need his binoculars to keep a close eye on her. This time she would be up close and oh-so-personal.
Jiggling ta-tas barely covered by her low-cut bikini top, the nipples hard little pearls beneath the thin material, Kallie’s purple-hyacinth eyes widen as Ray’s soaking-wet boxers reveal his burgeoning manhood.
“The contest is over,” she whispers from red, glistening lips. “I declare I’ve never seen a bigger . . . man. Ravish me, Ray, ravish me like I’ve never been ravished before. Right here. Right now.”
But Ray’s ravishment fantasy popped and vanished like a finger-poked soap bubble when he realized he heard noise on the other side of the door.
Inside his room.
Gurgling. Choking. And underneath it all, a conversational voice, the words too low for him to make out.
Ray glanced down the hall. Maybe the maid . . . ? But a maid would’ve left the door open if she was busy cleaning his room. A maid also wouldn’t be choking, gurgling, or chatting while doing so either. Unless . . .
The TV.
Relief flooded through Ray. He must’ve left the TV on when he’d left the room. He had been watching the National Geographic channel when he’d split for dinner. The ravishment fantasy returned full force.
Kallie swoons against his thick-muscled chest and throbbing member. “So much man,” she whimpers. “Take me now.”
Ray unlocked the door, pushed it open, and stepped inside. A rush of air thick with a raw, metallic scent washed over him and he froze again, skin crawling. The low murmurs stopped, but the choking and gurgling continued—albeit weaker.
A man in jeans and a purple button-down shirt was sprawled on the floor beside Ray’s bed, blood-wet hands grasping his throat while his cowboy boots scuffed weakly against the tiles. Blood spilled in dark rivulets from between his fingers and from underneath his palms, a deep red tide spreading across the gray-and-umber tiles and lapping against the tan, tasseled loafers of a man standing beside him.
Ray’s heart pogoed up into his throat and stuck there. He caught a glimpse of khaki trousers above the tasseled loafers, of a blood-smeared knife held in long, brown fingers against the trousers. Panic blurred Ray’s vision, and he refused to look any higher. Refused to look into the face of a knife-wielding bogeyman.
The bleeding man choked out a liquid plea. “Run . . .”
Just as Ray whirled to flee, the guy with the knife slammed into him, bulldogging him face-first into the wall. The coppery taste of blood seeped into his mouth. Expecting to be stabbed at any moment by the intruder, Ray dropped to the floor, curled into a tight, muscle- quivering ball, and, following the advice learned in a geeks’ self-defense class—Drop! Curl up like a dead bug! Scream!—shrieked with everything he had.
A second later he heard the quiet click of the door closing. Ray felt faint. Had the throat-slasher actually left, or was it a ploy to lure him out of his fetal position? Sweat trickled into Ray’s eyes.
The choking sounds faded. Stopped.
C’mon, man, lure you outta your fetal ball? When he could just stab you at leisure? Someone’s dying behind you.
Unfolding, Ray sat up and glanced around the room. Empty except for him and the poor sonuvabitch bleeding to death. Pushing himself onto his feet, he hurried over to the bogeyman’s victim. The guy’s hands lay lax against his sliced throat, his eyes now closed, his face whiter than a vampire’s.
Ray yanked the sheet from the bed, tore a strip free, and dropped to his knees beside the red-haired man. Blood soaked warm through the knees of his jeans. His gut clenched. Swallowing back the bitter taste of bile, he shoved the guy’s hands away from the wound. A gash had been sliced clear across his throat. Ray knotted the cloth around the guy’s throat.
A litany of who-why-how kept snaking through Ray’s mind. Who was this poor bastard, and why had he been knifed in Ray’s room? And how the hell had they gotten in?
Ray pressed both shaking hands against the cloth. Blood oozed, warm and sticky, through the material. He nearly gagged when he sucked down a breath of blood-reeking air.
Focus, or this poor bastard’s dead.
Ray closed his eyes, concentrated all of his Wicca-trained energy into his hands, and visualized stitching blue light like thread through the gash. Visualized a red aura full of vitality flickering around the guy’s body and radiating out from around the hands he held over the stranger’s throat.
Heat pooled in Ray’s palms, and sweat popped up on his forehead, and trickled down his back. Energy vibrated from the crown of his head and down along his chakras, sparking electricity down his spine, into his arms, and his hands. Opening his eyes, Ray saw deep-blue and scarlet flames dance against the torn strip of sheet before dimming, then vanishing.
And that will have to be good enough for now.
“Don’t die, okay?” Ray begged. “Hang in there, man. Help’s on the way.” Jumping to his feet, he dashed to the bureau, snagged up the phone, and punched O for the front desk.
Hooves thud against the ground, crunch across fallen leaves.
Dallas opens his eyes. Above him, he sees pale phantom aspens crowned with blood-red leaves against a frost-etched autumn night. A black-veiled woman in a scarlet dress rides a wild-maned white horse out of the moonlit forest and into the room. The horse’s nostrils flaring, eyes glowing red embers, its hooves clatter and slip in the thickening and cooling blood pool.
A wind Dallas doesn’t feel flattens the veil against the woman’s face, revealing the shape of her nose and lips, and flutters her dress against her body, outlining lush and bountiful curves. He notices that her feet and well-rounded calves are bare, her skin the color of sun-warmed caramel.
But the pendant hanging around her throat and glimmering like pale moonlight against her brown skin truly captures his gaze; a vévé-of a heart pierced with a knife.
Symbol for Erzulie Dantor, the loa of love, passion, and sex.
And one helluva fierce defender of women—every last one of them—especially those betrayed by a lover.
Looks like reckoning time, podna. All those broken hearts, all those games, all the empty searching . . .
A blur of movement from one of Erzulie’s long-fingered
hands, and a knife thunks into the floor beside his head, point sinking deep into the slate. “You be mine, Dallas Brûler,” the loa says. “And mine alone.”
Her words surprise Dallas, considering she lost her tongue long ago in an act of violence and has relied on interpreters ever since. He parts his lips to speak, but no sound emerges. Everything within him has spilled out onto the floor. Darkness edges his vision. Numbing cold frosts his veins, ices his heart.
The night sky lowers over him, veiling him in starless black.
Veil, hell, podna. A shroud.
Any regrets? Yeah, one. Dying.
Erzulie’s magnolia and dying leaves scent perfumes away the stench of his own blood, and Dallas draws in an easy breath. Shivering, cold to the bone and down to the soul, he wraps himself in the night-woven shroud for warmth and shuts his eyes.
TWENTY-SEVEN
BUCKETS OF WARM WATER
Kallie watched from the wings as Contestant Number One awkwardly stripped down to his boxers to the hip-shimmying rhythm of Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie,” revealing a weight lifter’s thick-muscled build on a medium frame. He danced with stiff, muscle-flexing movements as though he were posing for a bodybuilders’ competition, pausing between moves as though waiting for applause.
The largely female audience shrieked with delirious and rum-soaked—Kallie would bet it was daiquiris—enthusiasm, clapping and shouting encouragement.
“That’s right, baby! Take it off! Shake that ass! Make Mama happy!”
Recognizing the voice, Kallie looked across the stage to the four judges seated in the front row—Belladonna, two other women, and a guy in a rainbow tee—and saw Belladonna standing, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Make Mama real happy!”
A totally impartial and professional judge.
Oh, for a cell phone camera and an Internet link.
Smiling, Kallie gave her attention back to the stage. Number One dance-posed for a few more moments, then shuffled backward to the crossed-spotlight-beam backdrop.