Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 22

In the spa, the hot water churned against Victor’s body, and the bubbles of Dom Pérignon burst across his tongue, and life was good.

The wall phone beside the spa rang. Only select Alphas had the number of this most private line.

The caller-ID window reported UNKNOWN.

Nevertheless, he snared the handset from the cradle. “Yes?”

A woman said, “Hello, darling.”

“Erika?”

“I was afraid you might have forgotten me,” she said.

Recalling how he had found her at dinner in the living room, he chose to remain the stern disciplinarian for a while longer. “You know better than to bother me here, except in an emergency.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you forgot me. It’s been more than a day since you had sex with me. I’m ancient history to you.”

Her tone had a faint but unmistakable sarcastic quality that caused him to sit up straighter in the spa. “What do you think you’re doing, Erika?”

“I was never loved, only used. I’m flattered to be remembered.”

Something was very wrong. “Where are you, Erika? Where are you in the house?”

“I’m not in the house, darling. How could I be?”

He would be in error if he continued to play her conversational game, whatever the point of it might be. He must not encourage what seemed to be rebellious behavior. Victor answered her with silence.

“My dearest master, how could I be in the house after you sent me away?”

He hadn’t sent her away. He had left her, battered and bleeding, in the living room, not a day previously but mere hours earlier.

She said, “How is the new one? Is she as lubricious as I was? When brutalized, does she cry as pitifully as I did?”

Victor began to see the nature of the game, and he was shocked by her effrontery.

“My darling, my maker, after you killed me, you had your people in the sanitation department take me to a landfill northeast of Lake Pontchartrain. You ask where I am in the house, but I am nowhere in the house — though I hope to return.”

Now that she’d carried this demented charade to an unacceptable extreme, silence was not the appropriate response to her.

“You are Erika Five,” he said coldly, “not Erika Four. And all you’ve achieved by this absurd impersonation is to ensure that Erika Six will be in your position soon.”

“From so many nights of passion,” she said, “I remember the hard impact of your fists, the sharpness of your teeth biting into me, and how I bled into your mouth.”

“Come to me immediately,” he said, for he needed to terminate her within the hour.

“Oh, darling, I would be there at once if I could, but it’s a long way to the Garden District from the dump.”