He picked up his hat and put it on as she moved to block his way out with her petite pale form. "Stay! Just until sundown! Is there nothing I can do or say to keep you safe down here with me?"
He had to grin as he recalled a mighty similar scene from a swell spooky book he'd read a spell back. He said, "I don't reckon you really mean to offer me a chance at eternal life in odd company, if life is what they call Miss Carmilla's disturbing ways."
"Carmilla?" the pallid brunette demanded with a hurt look. "Are you comparing me to that... creature in that horror Story by that French writer named Le Fanu?"
Longarm shook his head. "Irish, ma'am. I know it's an odd name for an Irishman, but that's what Sheridan Le Fanu is. He's written a heap of swell spooky yarns, and his story about Carmilla, written in '72 or so, is only one of 'em. His story about Uncle Silas is really creepy. You say you've read the one about Miss Carmilla?"
La Bruja suddenly looked even smaller as she sighed. "In a Spanish translation. A vicious woman in one of those endearing attempts to be humorous gave me her copy, asking if it reminded me of anyone we knew. I am called La Bruja by more simple people because I seem to have powers they do not understand. I avoid the sunlight because there is a price on my head and because I suffer a condition that runs in some noble Spanish families. Sunlight hurts my eyes and makes my skin break out in a frightening rash. I assure you I do not enjoy the taste of blood."
She hadn't said she didn't know what it tasted like, and Carmilla had told that young English gal in the book she only wanted to suck out her blood because she really liked her.
He'd read other books, there being little else to do a week or so before payday and the Denver Public Library being so well stocked. So he nodded soberly and said, "I've read about that inherited condition. I reckon it runs in noble families because rich folks don't have to go out and work by broad day whether they can stand it or not. I can see how more fortunate families, nursing their delicate skins indoors all day, and only coming out after dark to attend society doings in maybe a coach with heavy window drapes, might give rise to sillier stories about mysterious society ladies such as Miss Carmilla. But I know you ain't that sort of gal, so..."
"I'm not a lesbian vampire who turns into a black panther at will or sleeps all day in her coffin! I'm not! I'm not! I'm only a poor widow with a delicate skin condition!"
He tried not to laugh. It would have been rude to point out she had a whole gang of Mex border bandits as well. But his eyes must've twinkled, and she must've read his amused, mocking expression wrong. For she was suddenly stepping out of the satin and lace around her trim ankles, in no more than her long black socks and slippers as she grabbed him by both shirtsleeves and stared up wildly demanding, "Do you really take me for some blood-sucking lesbian, El Brazo Largo?"
He hauled her in and kissed her good, as most men would have, before he recalled how someone in that book had been about to do just the same to Miss Carmilla when he noticed the graveyard mold on her breath. La Bruja's soft parted lips smelled more like the almond cakes she'd doubtless had enough of before he'd arrived. It didn't hurt a bit to have her tonguing him so teasingly. So he tongued her back, and cupped a bare buttock in each big palm to hug her tighter to his jeans as she rubbed her small proud cupcakes over the front of his thin shirt. But once they'd come up for air he felt obliged to ask about that chica coming back for the coffee service neither one of them had bothered with.
La Bruja puffed reassuringly that nobody ever pestered her and her guest unless she wanted them to, and asked him to follow her lead from such faint light as there was by her coffee table.
He was able to make out her pale hourglass form, floating ghostly above the frilly lace garters of her black thigh-length socks of jet-black lisle. Then she led the way to what looked more like a bed than that coffin Miss Camilla had favored, and the next thing they knew he was driving something kinder than a wooden stake into her, further down, and she wasn't acting like Miss Carmilla at all.
The spooky lady in that story had spit blood and carried on just awful as she was getting penetrated in her coffin. But La Bruja kissed mighty sweet and moved her hips just right as he got her to come a good dozen hammerings ahead of him.
Once they both came, she agreed it would be even nicer if they both stripped down completely and started over with a black silk pillow under her ghostly but mighty warm little rump. So he didn't get to ask her about those Anglo crooks until he'd made them both come some more.
She still refused to tell him as they shared a cheroot with her disheveled head on his shoulder and free hand on his semierection. As she gently stroked his manly organ-grinder she pleaded, "Please don't try to take advantage of my weak nature, El Brazo Largo. I am already so ashamed of giving in to my own curious nature."
He hugged her bare flesh closer with the smoke gripped in bared teeth as he said, "I'm still curious about them rascals out to kill me. What were you so curious about, senora?"
She giggled and confided, "You, senor. They say La Mariposa still brags insufferably about the many times she made El Brazo Largo come in her, down in Ciudad Mejico when they were hiding from los rurales in a railroad signal tower. Is that story true by the way?"
Longarm chuckled fondly and declared, "Truer than tales of a blood-sucking lesbian who can turn into a black panther on occasion, I reckon. It ain't polite to talk about screwing ladies who ain't here to defend themselves, and I never thought you were a lesbian to begin with."
She demurely asked if he was convinced she didn't like to suck, and when he allowed he was, she proved him wrong by sliding her head down his naked belly, long hair trailing, and proceeding to suck like all get out, although it wasn't his blood she was sucking.
So what with one pleasant surprise and another, Longarm wound up spending the rest of the day in the dark with La Bruja, and while he finally learned her real name and enough to lock her away for years, he never did get her to tell him who those other crooks were, or why they were after him, Lord love her.
CHAPTER 6
Longarm still would have done it his own way, weather permitting. But when he checked in at the steam line again that night, they told him none of their vessels would be coming or going till that heavy weather let up outside.
That sounded reasonable. The warm wet wind was blowing harder by the hour, and the heavy air smelled like spent brass cartridges, or a coming hurricane. So there was nobody laying in wait for him around the deserted wind-swept waterfront when he circled in silently from the lee side of some dark and shuttered warehouses with his gun out and his eyes slitted against the gathering storm.
When he got back to La Bruja's, she naturally wanted him to spend more time with her, and he was tempted. For he could likely come again if she really set her mind and lush lips to it. But he insisted on holding her to that other promise, and so it was along about quarter past midnight, with neither coastal steamers nor paid killers to be seen in the swirling darkness, when Longarm finally left by way of a clamshell-paved wagon trace to the south, driving a team of Spanish mules as he hunkered half sheltered by a flapping canvas wagon cover with old Norma's Saratoga trunk and some trail supplies in the wagon box behind his sprung seat.
He commenced having second thoughts about the grand notion a mile or less outside of town, when the light got even worse and he had to take the word of the mules and the gritty sounds of the steel-rimmed wheels that he was still following that shell path through what seemed like a mighty herd of wind-whipped palmettos flapping fronds on all sides as they strove to uproot their fool selves and take off like stampeding bats.
It got too dark to see even that much as the wind howled ever louder, and then the invisible mules out ahead balked at hauling him and old Norma's Saratoga another step, no matter how a man snapped the ribbons on their wet rumps and shouted curses into the gathering storm. So he set the brake, hitched the ribbons around its shaft, and got down to see what had gotten into the fool mules.