Bone Orchard (9 page)

Lazarus took Dylan’s cup from his hand. “I’ll get something stronger, shall I?”

Dylan chuckled. “I won’t say no.”

Kitty frowned. “Are you sure, baby? It’s getting a bit late.”

As if on cue, the grandfather clock chimed the hour. Ten o’clock. Both Dylan and Sian bolted upright in shock. Neither Lazarus nor Kitty batted an eye.

“Nonsense, darling. We should extend the utmost hospitality to our guests.”

“Lord, I almost jumped out of me skin,” Sian said with an anxious giggle. There was a tension in the room she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and when she was nervous, Sian drank.

Lazarus lifted the tea tray and Sian lifted her teacup. She downed it in one gulp. Lazarus gaped with horror and his face ashed over gray.

“What?” she asked. “I love Lemon Zinger.”

Kitty burst into peals of laughter. “Your face! It’s priceless!” It was genuine glee, which made it all the more infuriating to Lazarus. He grabbed her by the elbow and escorted her out of the parlor, leaving their guests more confused than ever.

“There’s nothing wrong with the water,” Kitty confessed in the butler’s pantry.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I was just messing with you. The water’s fine.”

Lazarus slumped. He was certain the stun gun had something to do with it, but suddenly his body felt too heavy for his bones to support.

“Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?” The words puffed from his mouth like a wheezing bellows.

“Oh honey, there’s not enough time in the world to answer that one.” She arranged some sugar-dusted cakes on a serving plate. “Besides, we mustn’t keep our guests waiting.”

Lazarus pulled a bottle of Glennfiddich from a cabinet as Kitty headed out the door.

“But I did put ground glass on the cakes.”

He shook his head in disbelief and ran an index finger through a sprinkling of coarse sugar crystals she’d left on the countertop. Tiny pinheads of blood beaded across his fingertip.

“Shit!”

He bolted from the pantry, cursing himself for wasting precious seconds with his skepticism, and now half-expecting to find both Dylan and Sian drooling blood from their glass-filled mouths in the parlor.

Dylan was, in fact, about to sink his teeth into a cake when Lazarus stormed into the room and swatted it from his hand in the nick of time. It sailed off like a shuttlecock, slapping against the wall with a dry poof and a spray of glassy crumbs that was muffled by the thick Persian rug on the floor.

“Hey!” Dylan whined. He rather enjoyed a nice cake.

Lazarus took Kitty by the elbow again, thankfully retaining the presence of mind to snag the plate of remaining cakes with his free hand as they made a hasty stage-left exit.

Back in the kitchen, he slung the whole plate into the rubbish bin.

“Stop this. Just stop.”

“But I’m having so much fun,” Kitty taunted, twirling free of his grip.

“I’ll get rid of them. I’ll go back and toss them out.”

Kitty yanked a knife from the block on the counter and spun at him. For a split second, Lazarus wondered why he hadn’t grabbed it himself. In fact, Kitty had also wondered, but the fleeting thought sailed off like a glass-dusted cake when she saw the delicious look of fear on his smug face.

The tip of the knife sliced through the fabric of his shirt and Lazarus withered in retreat, stumbling into the kitchen table with his back to the doorway.

Kitty held the blade against his stomach. “Shut up and listen. I’m running this.”

Sian could hear a tense volley of gasps and whispers through the wall as she crept through the dining room, sharp but indefinable like fractured steam jets.

“Get away,” Dylan hissed from across the room behind her.

She giggled but ignored him.

“Come
on
, Sian”

“I’m just having a look.” She peered into the kitchen through a crack in the double-swing café door that separated it from the dining room and saw Lazarus and Kitty standing face to face, his face glossed with sweat and muscles taut as his hands gripped the lip of the table behind him.

Wait a minute. Is she…

Lazarus grimaced as Kitty rocked her arm back and forth, flicking the knife point at his abs again and again, leaving a crosshatch of shallow nicks like paper cuts.

Sian, however, saw no knife from her slivered perspective behind the café door. In fact, for all intents and purposes it looked as if Kitty was…

She is! Holy shit, she’s jacking him off!

Sian bit her lip to stifle a snicker. Dylan shuffled impatiently, refusing to venture past the doorway arch. His eyes gravitated to the guitar amp in the fireplace and the Flying-V beside it.

Five thousand quid right there,
he thought with more than a twinge of jealousy.

Kitty slapped Lazarus. His eyes blazed down at her but he remained silent. She slipped the knife lower, still mindlessly flicking with the same mechanical rhythm.

“Don’t ruin my fun,” she growled.

Sian clamped a hand over her mouth to silence the snort of laughter that almost exploded from it.

Kitty leaned into Lazarus and the blade scraped across his belt. He felt the icy heat of adrenaline like bleach in his veins and gripped the table harder.

It’s all fun and games until somebody gets castrated.

Lazarus felt he might be sick.

Sian watched on with voyeuristic glee.

Then Kitty nonchalantly set the knife down on the table and Lazarus slumped against her, exhaling with a shiver of relief.

“Dirty boy,” Sian whispered. She quietly turned and raced back across the room, shooing Dylan through the door into the hallway. “Go on, they’re coming!”

Lazarus slipped away from the table, mentally drained but still in grateful possession of all his parts.

Kitty took a healthy pull off the Glenfiddich bottle and Lazarus remembered the knife. His hand crept toward it on the table but Kitty snatched it from his reach.

“You’ll pay for that later.”

Dylan and Sian hurriedly grabbed their things in the parlor. She couldn’t wait to tell him about the handie, but they had clearly overstayed.

“Oh, no. Leaving so soon?” Kitty barked, startling them nearly as effectively as the grandfather clock had. She glided into the room as if she were Lady Bentwicke herself.

“Yeah,” Sian said. “I’m sure you have things to do.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Dylan added.

Lazarus straggled into the room, visibly spent. “Well… thanks for dropping by.”

Both Dylan and Sian just stared at him. Lazarus glanced at the cake stain on the wall.

“No, really.”

“Right,” Dylan said. “Well… see you around.”

Lazarus made for the door.

“No need. We’ll show ourselves out,” Dylan offered.

Sian gave Lazarus a knowing smile and Kitty a once-over with barely concealed disgust before Dylan ushered her from the parlor.

A minute later, Lazarus and Kitty were standing stiffly in the front doorway, the happy host and hostess waving farewell as Dylan’s Fiat rounded the circular drive and disappeared into the absolute dark of a cloud-hooded night in the English countryside.

Neither of them yet had any idea that Arthur McGregor’s second-best shrubbery deliveryman had left his prized Zippo lighter on the couch in the parlor. Of course, with all the excitement, Dylan hadn’t yet even realized it himself.

CHAPTER 11

Had Lazarus not bent a passing glance up at the transom window above the door as Dylan and Sian were making their awkward exit, he would not have noticed it. Something airborne had flitted past, a bat angling for moths perhaps, or maybe the damned kite again. Whatever it was had caught a glint of pale light from one of the few driveway lampposts that remained operational, enough to draw his attention with its fleeting twinkle before winking off into the darkness like a match in a puddle.

It could have been a bloody sprite for all Lazarus knew or cared at that moment. What really piqued his interest wasn’t over the door anyway but beside it. When he pulled his eyes from the transom, there it was, sitting on top of the Queen Anne hall cabinet, hastily stuck behind one of its urn-shaped finials. The black cigarette pack.

The stun gun.

For someone Kitty’s height, it would certainly have seemed hidden well enough, but Lazarus was a good six inches taller then she was.

He had played it very cool. It seemed a long shot that Dylan and Sian would sympathize with an eccentric, cake-slapping recluse that suddenly snatched a concealed electroshock weapon from the shadows and assaulted his petite young houseguest with it. Best to wait until they were gone.

The door latched shut with a solid, brass click and the house became a silent tomb. The two of them stood there like gunslingers waiting for the strike of high noon.

It seemed to Lazarus the perfect moment for the grandfather clock to chime, but it didn’t.

Now.

He spun toward the cabinet and reached for the stun gun. His fingers grazed it but a jolt of pain robbed him of success. Kitty had yanked his head back by the hair and leaped onto his back.

“Don’t you fucking do it!”

Lazarus flung her to the floor with a bony slap that he knew had to hurt, but if it gave her pause it was undetectable. Instead of shriveling, she retaliated, kicking him in the shin with a beefy, Doc Martens crack. Lazarus yelped in agony, clutching his leg and nearly tumbling to the floor himself.

“Okay, baby…” Kitty seethed. “Intermission’s over.” 

She popped up to her feet like a seasoned surfer and dashed away down the hallway. Lazarus limped behind her, pain flaring with each footfall. He didn’t want the little bitch out of his sight. God knew what other toys she might have stashed around the house.

In the parlor, she dumped the contents of her bag onto the floor. The handcuffs skittered over the parquet and slid under the sofa. They weren’t what she was after. She grabbed the truncheon and flicked it open. The thin steel baton wouldn’t bruise a bone it struck. It would break it.

“Game-fucking-on.”

Her anger was a handicap and Lazarus knew it. He pressed his back to the wall outside the parlor doorway and lay in wait. His heart pounded with adrenaline. His leg throbbed. He waited as the heavy boots stomped across the floor. He waited as her shadow preceded her through the arch. He waited until he saw the truncheon in her hand and the expression of utter rage on her face as she walked straight past him. It was raw and beautiful, he thought.

Pretty poison. What a waste.

Sian primped in the dim light cast by the Fiat’s visor-mounted vanity mirror for nearly the entire duration of the ride back to town. Her cover-up was two shades darker than her actual skin tone and years of overzealous eyebrow plucking and shaping had left her looking like Geri Halliwell circa 1997. Sian even looked surprised while she slept.

“Not as cool as I expected,” she said finally, not about the eyebrows, but about the visit to the manor house.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” It was defensive. Almost a snap really, but the simple truth was that Dylan totally agreed.

“Dunno. Just thought he’d be different is all.”

Sian flipped up the visor and squinted. Ahead of them in the road there was a flash of movement to the right. Dylan saw it too, a stocky gray animal had pushed through the tall grass on the shoulder, hugging the ground in stealth mode. The Fiat’s headlamps caught its black-and-white striped face and froze it in its tracks, nocturnal eyes shining back in the harsh beam of light like two glowing mirrors. It was a badger, waiting for its moment to dart across the road and devour whatever poor, slimy creature it presently held clamped in its teeth.

“He’s got a frog,” Dylan chirped with glee.

Sian grimaced.

The badger held steady until Dylan started flipping his high-beams off and on in an attempt to provoke the animal back into motion. It worked.

It shot out into the road, the bent legs of the frog springing crazily. Dylan could easily have braked and allowed it to pass safely to the other side. But he didn’t.

He hit the gas pedal and the Fiat sped up with what little horsepower it had.

“What are you doing?” Sian asked.

Dylan’s grin morphed into a cruel smirk. He kept the wheel straight and let the badger seal its own fate. At the last second it hesitated and considered turning back. Dylan floored it and the badger scrambled in blind panic. The Fiat’s front bumper caught the animal’s head squarely and sent both predator and prey spinning off to the side of the road.

“Haha!” Dylan squealed. At last he hit the brakes, and Sian had to grab the dashboard to steady herself.

“What’s wrong with you?”