Heat Stroke

She continued to stare at him, and I didn’t like the light in her eyes. Not good. Definitely not good.

“Yes.” She flipped him the perfume vial. He nearly fumbled it, and I felt the Dji

He held on to it. Damn.

Yvette nodded toward me. “Take her with you.”

“Yeah, okay. You. Come with me.”

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay here, guarding that blue bottle that held all that remained of David, but I couldn’t disobey a direct order. Kevin walked out of the living room, and I had to follow him.

The last sight I had was her sitting down on the sofa again, picking up the blue stoppered bottle and holding it between her hands.

The expression on her face—avid, delighted, anticipatory—made me go arctic cold inside.

Kevin walked through a door that read Kevin’s room do not enter or else! It was decorated with skull-and-crossbones decals, pentagrams, line drawings of naked girls grabbing their ankles.

Ah. Home rancid home. He shut the door behind me, stared at me for a couple of seconds, and put the perfume vial down in a nasty-looking ashtray filled with candy wrappers and what strongly resembled the butt ends of a few joints. I looked around. Kevin’s room wasn’t any more attractive on second viewing than on first There was no place to sit, other than the dingy rumpled bed, and I was not going there.

Kevin flung himself down full length, staring up at the pinup on the ceiling. Hands behind his head. “Did you really almost kill those people?”

“Did you want me to?” I countered, and crossed my arms. He shrugged, as much of a shrug as he could manage lying down.

“Probably would have been kind of a mercy, living in a podunk town like that and all.”

“Why Seacasket?” I asked. He continued to stare up at the centerfold, who pouted and simpered in a frozen second of humiliation. “Something special about that town?”

“Something about it being important to him. You know. Dauid.” He gave the name a contemptuous twist of his lips. “She’s had a hard-on for him for years. Tried to get him before, but Bad Bob wouldn’t let her have him for more than a couple of hours. Said she might break him.”

Too much information… I tried not to think about what it meant. “What now?” I asked.

Another horizontally muted shrug. “Don’t know. Not like she tells me shit.” Definitely more than a little resentment there. This kid was turning out to be interesting. Maybe there was a way to use him…

I stopped the thought train with a squeal of brakes when he suddenly shifted his gaze to stare directly at me. “I like the other outfit better.”

Crap. I tried not to let him see how much that alarmed me. “Which one?”

“The one you had on before. With the, you know—” He mimed breasts. “And the stockings. The one with the apron.”

He still hadn’t told me to put it on. “Wouldn’t you like something a little classier?” Dumb question. I was surrounded by glossy photos of women wearing stupid smiles and strips of cloth no bigger than Band-Aids. Classy didn’t enter into it.

His dark eyes went hard. “I don’t give a shit if you like it or not. Just put it on.”

Well, that was direct. I had no room to maneuver. The peachskin pantsuit vanished, replaced with the Frederick’s of Hollywood French Maid Nightmare. Truthfully, I kind of liked the shoes, in a trashy, over-the-top kind of way, and I might not have minded putting the thing on to see the look in David’s eyes, but to see it in this kid’s… worthy of a shudder. Or two.

The corset top definitely lifted and didn’t separate.

I looked down at my bulging décolletage and saw I’d been given something new. A classy-looking upside-down pentagram tattoo, just over my left breast Unsettlingly close to where there’d once been the black stain of a Demon Mark.

I looked up. Kevin was sitting up in bed, watching me. He licked his lips and said, “Turn around.”

I did. All the way, back to face him.

“I thought you said I only had three wishes?”

I kept quiet. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d lied.

“You got any idea what my mom’s doing out there to your friend? He is your friend, right?” Kevin studied me with too-intelligent eyes, looking for sore spots. “More than a friend? You fucking him?”

“You’re way too young to ask that question,” I said primly. The Julie Andrews tone didn’t go with the blow-up doll outfit.

“You’ll tell me. You have to.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked. Which threw him, a bit. “And anyway, how do you know how many wishes you get? Maybe it’s ten. Maybe it’s twenty. Maybe the next one is your last, and then I get to rip you into little screaming shreds. Care to try your luck?”

I smiled when I said it. Friendly. Warm. Inviting.

He pressed himself back against the headboard, where Miss July of 2003 was squashing her bare breasts together for his inspection.

“What’s the use of having you if I can’t do anything with you?” he asked. Petulant little jerk. “I mean, maybe I’ll just do it anyway. Wish for what I want most.”

“And what’s that?”

He hadn’t really thought about it. I hoped he wasn’t going to pop off with something stupid, like world peace, but I needn’t have worried; Kevin would never think about anyone or anything larger than the confines of his little self-centered universe. He finally came out with, “I want never to have to work for a living.”

I blinked slowly, thinking that over. Teenage thought processes were so different from adults… An adult would have asked for truckloads of cash, under the assumption that truckloads of money meant no more work. Which wasn’t unreasonable, as assumptions go. But Kevin had asked for something completely different.

“So, hypothetically, if you asked for that, you wouldn’t be disappointed if I made you a quadriplegic breathing through a tube?” His turn to blink. His mouth opened, produced silence, and closed again. “I mean, you wouldn’t ever have to work for a living, would you? Or I could just kill you. You’d never have to work for a living that way, either. Or, let’s see, I could kill everyone else in the world. Never have to work for a living that way, either. Or I could turn you into a big slobbering dog that your mom can feed every day—”

“Stop it!” He looked appalled. “You’re making it all—”

“—complicated?” I finished. “It is. You want a Dji

I had him. I so had him. It was all I could do not to gloat. He looked about to vomit with fright.

And then he calmed down, swallowed, and said, “I know what I want. It’s what you want, too. I want you to kill my mother.”

Not that I couldn’t understand it, but I felt like it was one of those cartoon moments, the one where you have to smack the side of your head to make sure there’s nothing stuck in your ear. I stood there in my ridiculously sexy French Maid outfit and said, “Excuse me?”

“Yvette,” he clarified hastily. “My real mom’s already dead. My dad, too. I guess what I mean is that I want you to kill my stepmom. Yvette Prentiss.”