Her Last Whisper (17 page)

Charlie nodded, preoccupied. Her own increasingly urgent emergency was occupying her thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else. Lena was undoubtedly feeling desperate, her sister’s life might be on the line, and rushing to her side was something that Charlie was definitely going to do, but not now. Now what happened to Michael mattered to her more. More, she realized unwillingly, than just about anything in the world. Michael was beside her, and she glanced at him to assess his condition: verdict, not good.

Buzz strode away, heading, presumably, for the elevators. The lobby was enormous, with eighteen-foot ceilings and marble floors and a magnificent chandelier composed of what looked like thousands of brilliantly colored blown glass flowers. It was ten p.m.
Vegas time, although her body clock persisted in thinking it was one a.m., which it would have been in Virginia. She was physically exhausted but at the same time her burgeoning fear for Michael had her absolutely wired. The lobby was busy and noisy, with a pianist in one corner tinkling out show tunes and live birds twittering in a giant gilded cage in another and chattering tourists dressed in everything from jeans to tuxes and sparkling evening dresses flitting about all over the place. Tony, she saw at a glance, was at the reception desk, presumably waiting to check in.

“Cherie!”

Charlie whirled at the familiar voice.

“Tam!” She was immediately engulfed in a warm cloud of bright colors and expensive perfume as Tam greeted her with a hug.

“
This
is the voodoo priestess?” Michael asked as the women separated. It was the first thing he’d said since they’d left the plane, and Charlie was beyond dismayed by how hoarse and croaky his voice sounded. She could tell from his tone that Tam was not what he’d been expecting. At thirty-five, Tam looked years younger. She was eye-catchingly glamorous, with long legs, slim hips, and a tiny waist topped by large, shapely breasts proudly displayed in a clingy, tangerine-colored silk tee with a scoop neckline designed to show maximum cleavage. Her snug-fitting slacks were a stretchy print in which red, yellow, and tangerine vied for dominance. In her chic, kitten-heeled gold sandals she was a little taller than Charlie, and she continued the gold accessories with hoop earrings and an armful of bangles that clinked whenever she moved. She had a slim, attractive face with prominent cheekbones, a full mouth enhanced by her signature scarlet lipstick, an aquiline nose, and artfully made up brown eyes. Her skin was milk white, and her hair hung past her shoulders in deep red waves. Michael finished the inevitable male once-over with, “Hel
lo
, Jessica Rabbit.”

Charlie threw him a reproving look. “She can hear you.
And
see you.”

“Really?” His eyes ran over Tam again. Tam was looking him over, too, critically, and it was obvious from her expression that she
could
see and hear him and equally obvious (Michael at this point being far from his usual handsome self) that she was not impressed.
He tried for a smile which didn’t quite work. Charlie realized that the spreading discoloration was affecting even the structure of his face, and felt a fresh spurt of fear.

“It was a compliment,” he added. The rasp made his voice sound almost sinister.

“Tamsyn Green, meet Michael Garland.” Charlie had to work to stay outwardly calm.

“He’s not in good shape. The
abaissement
is far advanced.” Tam’s words were addressed to Charlie. What Tam was seeing was a gray and twisted version of Michael. A blurred, muted, and, yes, scary version. “Soon it will start affecting his mind, and not long after that he will be gone. Like this.” She snapped her fingers. Her expression was serious as she took Charlie’s hand and, with a hard look and a quick order for Michael—“Stay there, spirit!”—pulled her a little aside. “Cherie, I’ve been thinking about this ever since we spoke, and now that I see him I’m sure of it. It would be best not to interfere, to just let him go.” Her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “He’s from the
Dark Place
. I don’t think you understand what that means.”

“I don’t
care
what that means.” Charlie fixed her with a fierce look. “You
owe
me.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Tam said unhappily, then as Charlie pulled her hand free and glared she added with a sigh, “All right, then. I’ll try my best, but I can’t promise it will work.” Her gaze shifted back to Michael. “I’ve gotten a room, and I have everything prepared. If you’re sure, let’s go up. We need to get started. Cherie, are you
sure
you’re sure?”

“Yes.” Charlie beckoned to Michael as they began to move toward the elevators. “I’ll reimburse you for the room, by the way. And all your other costs. Just let me know how much.”

Tam waved a dismissive hand. “What are friends for? My problem isn’t with what this is going to cost me, it’s with doing it at all. If he’s being terminated,
he did something terrible
. Are you hearing me, cherie?”

At Tam’s words, Charlie felt a shiver run down her spine. Michael had consistently denied being the serial killer he’d been sentenced
to death as, but he’d also told her that he’d never said he didn’t deserve Spookville. Right there and then, Charlie resolved to get Michael to tell her exactly what he’d done to find himself on the highway to hell—just as soon as she saved him from total oblivion. Having caught up with them, Michael must have heard at least the last part of what Tam had said. It was now impossible to read anything at all in his face, but from the way he was looking at her, Charlie had little doubt that
he
could read
her
face.

Doubt and fear and resolve had to be all mixed up in her expression.

“I don’t care,” she told Tam again, and got the impression that Michael relaxed infinitesimally. “Just save him.”

With Tam looking perturbed and Michael invisible to anyone except the two of them, they reached the elevator bank. As they waited for one to arrive Charlie remembered to text Tony—
I’m going to look around, I’ll pick my key up at the desk when I get back
—and then they were in an elevator shooting skyward toward Tam’s room on the twenty-ninth floor. Other people were in the elevator with them, laughing and chatting away, and an obviously amorous couple got out when they did, so nothing more was said until they were inside Tam’s room.

The light was off, and Tam made no attempt to turn it on. Once the door to the hall was closed, the room was shadowy but not completely dark. The whisper of the air-conditioning was the only sound.

As they walked farther inside the room, Charlie set her purse down on the coffee table and glanced around. She’d never been inside the Conquistador, never been to Las Vegas before, in fact, and she was impressed with how large and nice the rooms were. This one had a king-sized bed, a seating area with an armchair, couch and the coffee table, and the requisite armoire with a TV. The room was decorated in beige and blue, and the large window—the curtains were open—offered a glittering view of the city at night. The only odd note about the room was that the bed had been stripped. Blankets and pillows lay in a heap in the middle of the bare mattress.

Oh, and the smell. Charlie couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but it was faintly putrid in a way that did not say “expensive hotel room.”

“I need your full name,” Tam said to Michael—who, of course, being Michael, asked why.

“Names have power,” Tam replied impatiently. “This is going to take all the power I can muster.”

“Michael Allen Garland,” Michael replied.

“That’s your true full name? No junior? Not an alias?”

“That’s the only name I know.” His answer was short.

“He may have had another birth name. He was adopted,” Charlie put in, and Tam grimaced in a way that said as plainly as words could have that this was a complication. Michael turned his face toward Charlie, but it was now impossible to read his expression. Still, she got the impression that he was not pleased to have such personal information revealed.

Her silent response to that?
Too bad
.

“Go into the bathroom,” Tam told Michael, nodding toward an open door through which Charlie could just see the edge of what looked like a large tub. The bathroom light, which was on, beckoned warmly. Coupled with the glow of the city through the window, it was the reason the room wasn’t pitch black.

“Charlie,” Michael growled. Stopping just outside the rectangle of light that spilled across the bedroom carpet from the open bathroom door, Michael turned to look at her again. The guttural quality of his voice was almost as terrifying as the change in his face and form. But what really moved her was the note in his voice of—was it fear? Quite possibly: he would be a fool if he weren’t afraid. “If I don’t come out of this, lay off the serial killers. Hear?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Charlie replied. She was jittery with fear herself, and trying her best not to let it show.

“I may not have a later. Promise me.”

“Fine. I promise.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about it right now.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Look, can we just concentrate on
this
?”

Tam was looking from one to the other of them with a gathering frown. Charlie realized that the nature of the exchange revealed an intimacy between them that Tam was bound to have noticed, and disapprove of.

Michael said, “I want to make sure you’re going to be all right if I wind up not being around to save your ass.”

“I don’t need you to save my ass.” An instant’s reflection amended that to, “Usually. Would you let me worry about me and just
go into the bathroom
?”

Tam said in a warning tone, “Time is short.”

Michael turned and went into the bathroom. Charlie followed, with Tam bringing up the rear and closing the door behind them.

The first thing Charlie noticed was that there were a number of tall, fat black candles waiting unlit beside an open gym bag in the middle of the floor. Looking past them, she saw that the bathroom was large, at least ten by twelve feet, all tiled in earth-toned marble, with the big soaking tub Charlie had glimpsed through the open doorway, a roomy glass-walled shower, a toilet, and a long marble counter with twin sinks. It was the type of setup that came complete with a huge mirror covering the entire wall above the sinks. Charlie knew the mirror was there even though she couldn’t see it.

And the reason she couldn’t see it was that the missing sheets had been duct-taped over the mirror so that not so much as a sliver of glass showed.

Charlie looked a question at Tam.

“Mirrors can be used as a portal,” Tam said. “What I am going to try to do here could attract the wrong sort of attention. I don’t want to give any
esprit malin
the chance to come through.”

Charlie immediately thought of the hunter, and shivered.

“You’ve done this before, right?” Michael sounded distinctly uneasy as he looked around.

Tam shook her head. “The spell is my mother’s. Ordinarily I never go near the dark side.
Maman
tells me I’m too sensitive, but I prefer it that way.”

“Fantastic.”

Tam’s brows snapped together. “You say that like you have an alternative.”

“You can trust Tam,” Charlie intervened, watching as her friend bent over the gym bag. “She’s the real thing.”

“Get into the bathtub,” Tam told Michael as she withdrew a package wrapped in layers of clear plastic from the gym bag and set it on the shelflike rim of the tub. It was, Charlie realized as she looked at it with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, the source of the putrid smell. It was also dripping blood. Dark red drops ran down the tub’s tan marble side.

“What the hell?” Staring at the package, Michael asked the question before Charlie could.

“A chicken heart and entrails. From a creature killed fresh today. I picked them up at a butcher shop I know as I left L.A. Probably I should have put them in a cooler, but I didn’t have time.” Tam pulled out a couple of small containers and set them on the edge of the tub, too. Charlie couldn’t tell what was in them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “My mother would have actually sacrificed a chicken as she did the spell, so you should feel fortunate that I’m choosing to use a substitute.”

Thank goodness
was Charlie’s heartfelt response to that as she was assaulted by an instant, horrified mental picture of Tam slicing open a live chicken in front of them, but she didn’t say it aloud.

“Jesus,” Michael said.

Tam looked at him with a glint in her eyes. “Would you get into the bathtub?”

“Why the tub?” Michael asked warily.

“Because it makes the cleanup easier.” Tam sounded on the verge of losing her patience.

“This is some voodoo shit you’re throwing down, right? If it goes wrong, am I going to be turned into a zombie or something?” Michael’s deteriorating voice grated on Charlie’s ears like sandpaper. The suspicion in it was unmistakable.

“If it goes wrong, you will not
be
at all.” Tam frowned at him as she popped the lid off the Tupperware-like containers. “Do you want me to try or not?”

“He does,” Charlie answered before Michael could say anything else. She glared at Michael. “For somebody who’s a
ghost
, for
God’s sake, the amount of skepticism you still harbor about everything to do with the supernatural is ridiculous.”

“Yeah, well, if you’d started telling me about all this shit two months ago I would have said you were nuts. I’m still adjusting.”

“So adjust already,” she snapped.

“Would you get into the bathtub?”
Tam said to Michael, not patiently at all now, and with a long look at Charlie, who pointed an admonishing finger at him, Michael did as he was asked.

“Oh, and strip,” Tam added on a milder note.

“What?”
From the middle of the large tub, Michael turned to stare at her.

“Your clothes are a barrier. For the
abaissement
to be stopped, the spell must be able to hit the target.”