Wildest Dreams Read Online Free

backpack over my shoulder, and the freak grabbed a fistful of my right hand, his big hand swallowing mine like an albino spider.
    He shook my hand like he wanted to break it. I let him have his fun. “Spider Ripley,” he said.
    “Clay Saunders.”
    Ripley eyed me hard. But when he released my hand, he didn’t have anything. I still had the backpack, and Circe’s robe.
    The robe was silk. I liked touching it. It hardly weighed a thing. I turned my back on Spider Ripley, and Circe turned her back on me when I came near. Another horror movie scare—scales and tentacles and more eyes tattooed on the sleek, muscled plain of her back.
    Circe held out her arms and I blinded the monsters, covering her in black silk. She looked better in silk. Her pool time had bought her strong swimmer’s shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist. The hem of the robe fell just under her ass, and the long legs that carried her were white and pure, as surprising as an unmarked canvas hanging in a museum. She wore no tattoos from heel to thigh, but her legs held my attention just the same.
    Circe knotted the sash around her waist. “Did everything go all right?”
    “I finished the job,” I said.
    “Wonderful,” she said.
    It wasn’t like we were talking about murder at all.
     
    * * *
     
    We entered the house. Spider Ripley went to dress. Circe didn’t. She seemed perfectly comfortable in her silk robe, and I was perfectly comfortable with her in it.
    She led me to a large living room. A peaked wall of windows faced west. The view was beyond spectacular, only slightly marred by the barred security fence that surrounded the entire property.
    Beyond the fence, the Pacific gleamed like a mirror under the setting sun. Jagged cliffs carved by wind and rain dropped to a beach hidden from view by the twisted skeletons of stunted cypress trees, but I had no feeling for the wind that had maimed them. All was still within the house.
    There was no wind here at all. Still, the room was as tortured as the trees outside, the difference being that the room had been twisted by man. A circular staircase rose in one corner, writhing with barbed wrought iron railings. Lights grew on spiked steel stems. The walls and furniture were fashioned from carved redwood that was as dead as coffin wood, its live, earthy smell now no more than a faded rumor.
    But there was life here, if you were willing to look for it. A bonsai tree sat on a low glass table, its limbs tortured by cunning twists of wire, harnessed just as brutally as the dead things.
    The house exuded male pheromones, and I was willing to bet that they didn’t belong to Spider Ripley. Circe Whistler was the owner here, but her father had put his mark on this place and it was as indelible as the mark of the beast. Diabolos Whistler’s daughter could not erase it or cover it over with her own mark, try as she might. Circe’s father had claimed to be Satan’s successor, had built a cult with temples spread as far as Paris and Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro, and even in death his presence was as unavoidable as the ripe black stench of decay.
    I could feel it.
    And I could smell it.
    I opened the backpack and placed Diabolos Whistler’s severed head on the glass table, next to the bonsai tree. The cult leader’s face wore a twisted expression frozen somewhere between a sneer and a smile, but no length of cunning wire had trained it.
    I had trained Whistler’s death grin.
    I had done the job with a seven-inch U.S. Army K-bar knife.
    “Fucking hell.” Circe’s nose wrinkled. “Couldn’t you have kept it on ice or something?”
    It was the wrong thing to say. I took a deep breath, and the stink of death burned in my lungs. Circe smiled as if she’d made a joke, but I wasn’t laughing. Not after what I d gone through. I wasn’t laughing at all.
    I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have held that stinking breath in my lungs and not said a word. But I couldn’t do that.
    “I didn’t much