Читать книгу Dead Men Don't Lie - Jackson Cain - Страница 15

Chapter 5

Lady Dolorosa and her new capitán watched the four novitiates drag the Lady’s ex-lover up the temple’s stepped slope. She was giving him a shy, demure wave.

“Yes, I shall almost miss you, whatever your name was. We did have some fine times. We must have. I kept you around for over a month.” She looked at her new prospect. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much about any of my lovers. When I try to recall their faces and features, it’s as if their memories seem to vanish without a trace. In my head they all blur into a single, generic, composite male.”

She turned to her “prospect.” “But every day is a new beginning, and now I have you. Any questions?” she asked, giving him her most endearing smile.

“I was curious why we’re here,” he said nervously.

“Think of this as motivation. That’s what I try to instill in all my eager young boys: the passion to serve and excel.”

“To serve and excel in the service of Madre Méjico?” he asked, confused.

Lady Dolorosa broke into a series of mocking, mean-spirited giggles.

“No, silly. I’m talking about fealty to my bed and body, of course! I thought you knew. I can’t sleep nights and one of the few things that distracts me in those dreadful nocturnal hours is really good . . . sex. You able to excel in that department? You better be.”

“Of course, My Lady. You’re the most beautiful, irresistible woman I’ve ever seen, and you’re my ruler.”

“Funny, that’s just what who’s-it up there on the pyramid used to say. Flattering words, however, are no substitute for action and endurance. Stamina—that’s what I require from my willing young men—juggernaut stamina. I do hope you’re up to the task—unlike what’s-his-face.”

An almost preternaturally shrill and piercing scream ripped through their conversation like a thunderbolt.

“Ah, the pièce de résistance!” Lady Dolorosa shouted to her new capitán above the crowd’s ear-cracking cheers.

Her former lover—up on the altar—was still alive, and the Señorita’s head priest was covered with the man’s gore as he stabbed and hacked his way into his chest cavity. Reaching deep into it, the priest slashed the aortas and yanked out his victim’s still-throbbing heart. After shoving it straight into the man’s hysterically screaming face, he lifted it high overhead for the crazed congregation to see. He then tossed it into a huge ceramic crock filled with the hearts of those previously immolated.

His assistants hung her ex-lover by the heels over a nearby edge, along which a gutter ran all the way down into a ground trough. As thoroughly as any slaughtered steer, the man was finally exsanguinated, his blood filling a huge ceramic crock below.

When she looked back up at the summit, the head priest was hacking at the man’s neck with a black, razor-sharp obsidian blade. When he cut through, the man’s head slipped off the altar and hit the stone summit with a sickening crack! The priest picked up the head by the hair and flung it down the terraced slope. It hit every one of the hundreds upon hundreds of steps on the way down.

“Good-bye, Pancho,” she muttered half aloud, “or whatever the hell your name was.”

“Do you wish to go anyplace else?” the capitán said, looking a little queasy.

“No, this has been amusement enough. I have to get back to the palace before my colossal joke of a stepson burns the place down. You can do whatever you have to do. My bodyguards here will take me back, but I must see you tonight at ten p.m. sharp. Don’t be late.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Until then?”

“Until then . . . El Dopo.”

She pinched his cheek so long and hard that his squinting eyes teared, and the bruise quickly turned garishly, sickeningly livid. Studying her handiwork, she could not resist pinching it again. And again. And again.

Turning abruptly, she headed toward her team of bodyguards, which had remained a discreet twenty or so feet behind them. When she reached them, she paused for just a second to look back at her new lover.

“Just one more thing, Capitán.”

“Yes, My Lady?”

“Do not ever disappoint me. I am the last woman in the world you want to disappoint.”