She seemed to get the message because she crawled away, beckoning him to follow. He pulled off his shoes and socks, and then hauled down his trousers, stepping out of them as he followed. He doubted Katya had noticed what he was up to: she was too deeply engaged in driving her partner to distraction: the girl's sobs of pleasure were the loudest sound in the vicinity.
At ground level, beneath the spread shadow of the ecstatic girl, was a sub-world of shadowy bodies, touches and whispers. There were probably a dozen men and women down here, variously intertwined. Todd felt their hands at his backside, his face, his erection; heard an appreciative coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man's palm there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who'd beckoned to him grazing his lips with hers, saying something he couldn't catch.
He lost sight of her for a little while, then he heard her ahead of him, gasping with delight. Somebody had got his hands on her before him. He felt a spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of sweating bodies, to catch up with her. He'd got it into his head that the nameless girl was his for the having, and he wasn't about to be denied her.
She wasn't hard to find. In fact she found him: catching hold of his hand and drawing him toward her. The shadow of Katya's sobbing victim spilled across much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and Todd saw that this girl who'd gobbled him down so gluttonously looked barely old enough to be out of her parents' charge. She was dark: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodies. She pulled him eagerly toward her and cupped his face with her hands, bringing his mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around and beneath her, but he was too turned on to pay much attention to such details. He kissed the girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Katya had paused in her ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she'd feel just a little pang of jealousy), and the girl returned his kiss, lavishly.
Was there something in her kiss—some subtle tang to the juices of her mouth, some coldness to her lips—which would have given away the fact that she was a spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was hotter than most women he'd been naked with; almost feverish. And despite the fact that his eyes had for so long failed to see the ghosts in the Canyon, she—and all of those around him—now seemed absolutely solid.
His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pursuit; the fact that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off by these spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well, with her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him: what else mattered?
He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to help him. There was undoubtedly somebody else beneath her, but he or she didn't seem to care that he was kneeling on them.
"All the way," she insisted.
He slid into her, as she instructed, all the way to the root, and began to work his hips against her.
Her cunt was as agile as her throat; he felt a counter-rhythm moving beneath his dick, passing through the lower half of her vulva. The sensation was like nothing he'd ever experienced before; after just a few strokes he was brought to the edge. He slowly pulled out of her, to be sure he didn't ejaculate too quickly.
"You like that?" she said, putting her hand down between her legs, and guiding him back in.
"Yes. I like it a lot."
"Good."
"But go slowly. Please."
He let her take him inside again and she threw back her head, expelling a sigh of satisfaction.
"Go on," she said, her eyes fluttering closed. "All the way. Both of you."
Both? he thought, raising his head from her breast.
And as he formed the question he felt an arm, twice, three times as thick as hers, and deeply muscled, reach over and grab his neck.
He lifted his head as best he could, and saw the face of a man over the girl's shoulder. She was apparently lying on him, her back against his chest. He was black, and handsome, even in the shadows.
"She's good," he said, smiling. "Yeah?"
Tentatively Todd reached down into the moist muddle between their legs. He felt himself, hard as ever; and then, further back, buried in the girl's ass, the other man's dick. So that was what he had been feeling as he moved inside her. It wasn't a muscular contraction; it was the black man sliding in and out of her. In any other situation he would have been repulsed; would have pulled out and retreated. But this was the Canyon;
Katya's Eden without the serpent. The part of him that would have been revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him harder thinking about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man; the fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his hand up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the black man's wrist, tightening the three-way knot.
The man laughed.
"You like that?" he said.
"I like that."
"Good," he said, licking the girl's neck, but keeping his eyes fixed hungrily on Todd. "'Cause we like to get real crazy."
Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played her until she started to scream with ecstasy.
Somewhere in the midst of this, the girl Katya was pleasuring began to utter gut-wrenching cries. A little time later Katya must have had mercy on her, and allowed her to be carried off, because when Todd was next getting close to coming (for the fifth or sixth time) he looked away from the blissed-out faces beneath him, and saw Katya sitting among the jasmine and the honeysuckle, with a young man lying naked at her feet, covering them with reverential kisses.
She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a cigarette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then—before she could choose to either return the smile or ignore it—he fell back into the bliss of his ménage-a-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was like, then the living had a lot to learn.
FIVE
Tonight was one of those nights when Marco had decided to get drunk. "An honorable occupation," as his father had always said. He didn't like to drink in company; in truth, he didn't much like company at all. People in this town were full of bullshit (his boss included, half the time) and Marco didn't want to hear it. He'd come out to Los Angeles after his career in professional wrestling had come to a premature conclusion, half-thinking he might have a crack at acting. Then someone had suggested that personal security might be a good job for a man like himself, since he not only looked intimidating, but had the moves to back up his appearance. So Marco had joined an agency, and after working for a succession of spoiled-brat movie stars who treated him as though he were something they'd just found on their shoe, he was ready to head for home. Then, within days of his planned departure, the job with Todd Pickett had come along.
It turned out to be a perfect match. He and Todd hit it off from the start. They had the same taste in girls, cars and whisky, which was more or less the contents of Marco's fantasy world.
Tonight, he wanted a girl, and was tempted to go out, hit the clubs on the Strip, see if he got lucky. If not there was always the credit card: he had no qualms about paying for sex. It certainly beat the five-fingered widow.
But before he went out he always liked to get mellow with a whisky or two: it made him more sociable. Besides, there was something strange about the house tonight, though he didn't know what. Earlier on, he'd been tempted to go out and take a look around, just to be sure they didn't have any intruders, but by now the whisky had got him feeling too lazy to be bothered. Fuck it, they should get another dog. Dempsey had been a great early warning system. As soon as anyone came anywhere near the house he'd go crazy. Tomorrow, Marco thought as he headed down from his bedroom to get a fresh bottle of whisky, he'd talk to Todd again about buying a pup, using the security angle to get past Todd's loyalty to Dempsey.