Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times Read Free Book Online Page B

child she saved she purchased in trade. It was her own dark work to
select
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    those who would die in their place, and she had an ever-changing
list of the wicked from whom to choose. High up on it now were a slave trader
in the Aravalli Hills and a captain in Calcutta who had kicked his groom to
death because his horse threw a shoe. Heart attack, drowning, a fall from a
horse, they would meet such ends as that. Estella always dealt sudden deaths,
even to those who most deserved lingering ones.
    This was the office she had performed since she was a young widow
and had found her way down to Hell on her own, like Orpheus of myth. Unlike
Orpheus, though, who had charmed his way past the three-headed dog and
enchanted Persephone with his lyre, Estella had had no music at her fingertips
with which to win Yama's sympathy. He had not given her her young
husband to guide back up to the world. Instead, he had given her this job to
do. It was an ugly job -- earthquakes, floods, pestilence, murder, souls
slipping always through her fingers -- and her resentful demon counterpart took
every opportunity to make it uglier.
    "No, really," he insisted. "Free! Ten
children shall survive and no one shall die in trade for it! All you have to do
is deliver a curse I've been dreaming up. The Political Agent's wife, the
songbird, you know the one? She's had another brat and the christening is
tonight. Were you invited? No? Well, that oughtn't stop you. Here is what I
want you to do ..."
    He told her his idea.
    Estella blanched. "No!" she said at once, appalled.
"No? No 7 . All right then, how about this? I'll give
you all of them. Every child in that village!" "Every ...
?"
    "Every last brat will live! How can you say no to that?"
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    She couldn't say no, as well he knew. She would have nightmares
over this curse for the rest of her life, and Vasudev knew that too, and that
was his favorite thing about it. After a long, miserable silence, Estella
nodded.
    Vasudev chuckled and chortled and went off whistling, leaving
Estella to her work. Still pale, she took a flask from her pocket and drank
down her daily dose of the tonic Vasudev delivered to her, lest she too be
burned passing through the Fire. Then she walked slowly into it. When she
reemerged some time later, she carried the souls of two babies in her arms and
the older children walked behind her in a row like ducklings. Silently, they
followed her out of Hell.
    And far away in the mountains of Kashmir, the rescuers, on the
very verge of giving up, unearthed a pocket of air and pulled twenty-two
children out of the rubble alive.
    It was a miracle.
    75
    TWO The Curse
    A t the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies
of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of. It was generally
agreed that she had been in India too long. It had "gotten to her."
She spoke the native tongue, and not just Hindustani but also Rajasthani and a
touch of Gujarati, and she had even been heard to haggle once in Persian! It
suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India
into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover's fingers. It was
indecent.
    And if that wasn't bad enough, she ate mangoes in the bazaar with
the natives, juice dribbling down her chin, and was said to imbibe a tonic
prepared for her daily by a dreadful little man with a burn scar over half his
face. She touched beggars and had even been seen carrying rag-swaddled infants
home with her in her arms. It was rumored that her handsome factotum had been
one such baby, which in itself bespoke a lifetime in this land -- a lifetime of
rescued beggar babes grown to manhood.
    He was always at her side, lordly as a raja and unsmiling as an
assassin, with a dangerous gleam in his eye and odd bulges about his tailored
suits that hinted at concealed knives. Plenty of whispers went round town about
him -- that he could speak with tigers, that he had a forked tail he wore
tucked down one trouser leg (the