Necroscope 9: The Lost Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

that is to look on the gloomy side, for in the event that she should recover between now and then, which naturally we hope she will…’
    ‘I… am stunned!’Julio choked out the words.
    ‘No need to be,’ said Tony, delicately dabbing at his mouth. Take our card. If your Julietta shows signs of recovery, call us. Otherwise look for our car Saturday night. After that, you may inquire after her at your convenience. But remember: we’re private men. Our telephone number is restricted. And rest assured, Julietta will be attended to in every circumstance.’
    It was done. Hardly believing his stroke of good fortune, the fat man went about the night’s business in a daze; the brothers, apparently unmoved, continued to pick at their food … until Julio was observed busying himself at the tables in the courtyard below. Then: ‘Watch the stairs,’ Francesco said. ‘If he comes up, issue a warning or distract him.’ But as he stood up and moved back a pace from the balcony:
     
    ‘Now who is being indiscreet?’ Tony smiled up at him with eye-teeth
    that were white and needle-sharp in a too-wide mouth.
    Francesco leaned towards his brother - leaned at a peculiar angle -and answered through clenched teeth in a voice that was suddenly as black and bubbling as tar, ‘What, but can’t you smell that bitch back there?’ In another moment he straightened up, coughed to clear his throat, and continued in a more normal tone of voice. ‘Anyway, we need to be certain the fat fool will accept our offer. So drink your wine … and watch the stairs!’
    He turned away. Two paces took him across the balcony and through a curtained archway into a corridor. He passed a gentlemen’s toilet on his left, a ladies’ on the right, and entered a door marked ‘Private’ into Julio’s office.
    Skirting the desk, he passed through a second door into Julietta’s sick-room. And there she lay, with the old biddy Katerin, eighty years old if she was a day, in attendance. The crone was nodding. Startled, she glanced up at Francesco through rheumy eyes. ‘Who? What?’ Then, recognizing him, she smiled, nodded and made to rise.
    ‘No, stay,’ he told her. ‘Best that you’re here, in case that oily little fat man should look in.’ Katerin nodded again and sat still. In the dimness of the room, the grandam’s eyes were yellow as a cat’s watching her master.
    He sat halfway up the wide couch where Julietta lay, and his sudden weight woke her. Or perhaps she’d already been awake … waiting. Her eyes opened big as saucers; her jaw fell open; knowledge and horror painted themselves with rapid strokes upon her lovely, oval, oddly palid face. But in no way odd to Francesco. And before she could cry out, if she would:
    ‘Did you think I would desert you? Ah, no!’ he told her. And his hand crept under her blanket, under her nightgown, to her thigh, so that she could feel his fingers trembling there. ‘No, for having loved you once, I shall love you all the days of your life.’ But he did not say ‘my life.’
    As his hand climbed higher on her thigh, so Julietta’s mouth closed and her fluttering breathing steadied; she began to breathe more deeply - of his breath. His essence was in it, as it was in her. And his eyes were uniformly jet, like moist black marbles in his face and unblinking, or like the eyes of a snake before he strikes. Except he had already struck, on that night six weeks ago. And the poison had taken.
    He smiled with his handsome, devil’s face, and the horror went out of her as she lifted her arms to embrace him. But that could not be. ‘Soon,’ he told her. ‘Soon - at Le Manse Madonie! Can’t you wait? A day or two, my Julietta. Just a day or two, I promise.’ Her sigh, and her breathing suddenly quickening; the long lashes over her dark eyes fluttering, as Francesco’s cool hand discovered the inside of her hot thigh. Then her nod, and a gasp of weird ecstasy as her head flopped to one side in sudden