Neon Blue

by E J Frost

  I can’t hear anything except that confused voice calling his name. I can’t feel anything except cold. Cold ceramic under my shins. Cold plastic under my hands as I pound against the shower wall. Cold water beating down on my shivering skin. Cold curling around and around inside me because he’s not here and I should want that except that I don’t. I don’t. And still that voice calls his name, louder and louder until it’s a lost child’s cry, a scream of loss that rises and deepens until its no longer childlike, no longer anything that could come from a child, but the cry of a lost, tormented soul. A damned soul.

  I’m coming.

  I batter my hands against the shower wall. Bang my forehead against it until the smack of flesh against plastic sounds loud even over the wailing that’s still filling my ears.

  The white plastic wall flexes, stretches under my fists. A misshapen hand reaches out of it. A monstrous, spined arm. Not his arm. Something else has found its way through the Hellhole and into my shower. I draw back, choking on screams I still can’t stop. I reach. Close my fingers around a cool handle. It doesn’t feel the way it should, and when I pull it out, it’s not my kama that emerges. It’s a black, wavy blade as long as my arm. Blue flames lick gently along the curving edge.

  “Beti, beti, no, that’s a demon blade—” My grandmother’s voice. I ignore the ghost and point the burning sword at the thing emerging from my shower wall.

  The white plastic hand flexes in mid-air. The palm is huge. The fingers uneven. No claws at least. But the spines ridging the back of the arm look deadly enough. The hand stretches, reaches across the tub and grips the far rim.

  I lift the blade over my head.

  You cut off my arm and we’re really gonna throw down, sweet meat. No fucking around.

  The thought pierces my haze of fear and confusion and loss. I hesitate. The muscles of my arms begin to shake, unused to the weight of the blade. I lower it between my knees.

  The white plastic peels back, one finger at a time, revealing blackened stumps. They flex on the bathtub’s rim. Black blood drips down the ceramic to sizzle in the cold water pooling around my knees. I recoil as much as I can, pressing my back against the curve of the tub.

  The plastic peels back further and further. A muscled forearm emerges. No spines. Then a shoulder and the firm lines of neck and side bulge out of the wall. The cold water steams and hisses on golden skin. Jou’s familiar ginger and smoke scent.

  “Beti,” my grandmother’s ghost whispers. “Now. Before he regains our world. Cut off his head.”

  I glance up. There’s a trio of ghosts clustered around my toilet. They’re only partially manifested. My grandmother’s torso. Billigoat’s head. Rupa no more than a faint outline distinguished by her absent arm.

  I look down at the blade cutting into my shower mat.

  I can’t connect anything. The demon hauling himself through my shower wall. The blade in my hands. None of it makes any sense.

  “Beti . . . Tsara, now. Now!”

  I haven’t heard my grandmother use my given name in so long that I look up at her in dumb surprise.

  She’s leaning forward over my toilet, exhorting me to do something. What? What does she want from me?

  I let the sword’s handle slide through my hands, its razor edge cutting a furrow in my bath mat.

  With a roar, the demon shoves his head through my shower wall, shucking white plastic from his horns and dreadlocks like a snake shedding its skin. He grabs the tub rim with his other hand and pulls himself through, landing heavily in the tub. The blade cuts into his calf and he yanks it away from me with another roar. “What the fuck is this?”

  I shake my head wordlessly, staring and clutching at myself.

  He shoves the blade back through the shower wall. “Eat that!”

  “Beng,” my grandmother hisses.

  “Fuck off!” Jou lashes out with his mutilated hand, spattering blood across my knees, the tub and the tile floor. The dark drops tear through the tight cluster of ghosts, dissolving them into a wet splash of ectoplasm.

  “Sweetness?” He wipes his blood off my skin, then puts his arms around me and gathers me into his warmth. “You okay?”

  Jou—

  “Fuck, you’re frozen.”

  Jou—

  “Why are you sitting in this freezing shower?” He reaches behind me and turns off the water. Rubs his hand up and down my legs. “That was a bad transition, but you’re okay.”

  I cough, my throat raw from screaming, choked with mucus and tears. “You weren’t here—”

  “Easy, sweetness.” He coaxes my arms around his neck with one hand. Pushes my wet face into his neck. “What, d’you think I wasn’t comin’? I manifested fully to take care of a little business. Took me a while to get back.”

  “I thought you’d sent me back alone.” I snuffle into his neck.

  “You think I’d let you go after that? The Ass of Hell gave me a hard time comin’ back up without a summons. That’s all.” He brushes hair back from my face with a bloody palm. “Ow, fuck, that hurts. How ‘bout you show me how glad you are t’see me by healin’ this?” He holds his mutilated hand up in front of my eyes.

  “What happened to you?” It comes out in a horrified wail, not sounding like my voice. Still stretched and strained by the touch of magics completely outside the realm of anything I’ve known before.

  “I cut ‘em off.” He wiggles the bloody, blackened stumps of his fingers. “Needed somethin’ to send to Ercie an’ the Hellroarer an’ a couple others. So they can get to the Hill if they need to.”

  He cut off his own fingers. “But-but—”

  “Yeah, I know. I hate handin’ anyone the keys to the Hill, but leavin’ our friends out in the cold is the way to have no friends at all—”

  “Jou, your fingers!”

  “Oh, yeah, well, they’ll grow back. Faster if you’d heal ‘em.”

  I stare at them for a long moment, blinking through the tears still standing in my eyes. Swallow hard. I’m not sure if I can put those terrible, bloody, burned stumps in my mouth. But my mouth healed him last time, and I don’t know if any of my healing potions will work.

  Slowly, I close my hands around his wrist and raise his injured hand to my mouth. I try to think of something else, anything else, other than sticking the mutilated stumps of his fingers in my mouth. But I can’t come up with anything in that moment, still dazed by our trip to Hell and its aftermath.

  I close my eyes, let my head fall forward until the stump of his forefinger brushes my cheek. He doesn’t flinch, just moves his finger so that it skims across the skin of my cheek. He murmurs, “That’s it, sweetness.”

  I stay there for a moment, feel my breath reflect warmly back from his skin. And power rises. Suddenly. Surprisingly. In a hot, tumbling rush. I let my mouth drop open, turn my head slightly, and take that terrible bloody stump between my lips.

  I squeeze my eyes closed, unable to look at the rest of his mangled hand, so close to my face. Concentrate on pushing the power rising in me into him. I can feel it pooling in my mouth, along with a little of his blood that’s seeping along my lips. That rich liquor taste makes me want to lick my lips, and after a moment’s hesitation, I touch my tongue to the stump.

  Power floods through me, through the connection between us. Suddenly my mouth’s full. He flexes his finger against the wet, inner skin of my cheek. Turns his finger in my mouth and draws it out slowly. I open my eyes and meet his. Their neon glow fills the room. Casts deep shadows under his cheeks and chin. Glints off his teeth as he smiles at me. “Can you do the rest?”

  I nod. The first was the hardest. The rest are easy. I take each stump into my mouth, push power into it with my tongue, and swallow the dark treacle of his blood as his finger regrows. When I finish his pinkie, he flexes his healed hand in front of my face, then cups my cheek.

  “Now, how ‘bout I return the favor. Don’t I owe you a thousand orgasms?” His smile turns wicked and his fingertips slid
e down my jaw to caress my throat.

  I grimace. No matter how good he looks naked, sitting across from him on the cold shower mat with my tears and his blood drying on my skin is not a turn-on.

  He chuckles. “C’mon, sweetness. Let’s blow your nose.” He offers me his healed hand and helps me rise. “I don’t do snot. Everything else, I’m happy to lick off.”

  He waits while I wipe my nose, then drags me across the hall and into bed, where, as promised, he licks everything else off me.

  Chapter 32

  I’m pulled awake by movement in and on me. He’s still inside me, still on top of me. He nudges my head to the side and kisses his way up my neck. Slow kisses. Hot but without any fervor. Like he’s already satisfied and this is just bonus time. Maybe it is. He’s not really moving. He’s buried himself in me and there’s this deep, slow pulse between us. It feels good. In a languid, sensuous way. There’s no hurry to it. No frantic build towards orgasm.

  He keeps touching me, kissing me, pulsing inside me. Even though it feels good, it’s also getting to be too much. Between our trip to Hell and the frenzied sex after he licked me clean, we’ve been going at it for hours and I’m beginning to ache, not so much inside because what he’s doing there feels too good for any hurt to register. But my hips and back, which are taking most of his weight, are starting to complain.

  “Uh, Jou, this feels . . .”

  “Unbelievable,” he groans. “I can see why the old man does it so often. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt.”

  That’s so not what I was going to say. I reach up and push his dreadlocks back so I can see his face. It’s slack with pleasure. His eyes are nearly closed, but the sliver of pupil that shows under the lid is glowing so bright it’s hard to look at.

  He shifts. “Is this too much for you?”

  “Uh, a little.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  I expect him to withdraw. Instead I feel the hot caress of his nethertongue. “Oh!”

  “Come for me,” he whispers against my throat. One hand slides under me to arc me to him. The other closes on my breast. Kneads hard. His nethertongue licks at me while that deep, hot pulse continues inside me. I gasp at the onslaught of sensation. It should be too much. It is too much. I can’t come again. But he knows me so well, knows exactly what my body needs and when, that he brings me to a writhing, panting orgasm in what feels like seconds.

  Spent and exhausted, I collapse under him, every muscle going limp. He pushes pillows under my spread thighs and I relax completely. It’s all I can manage to keep an arm draped around his neck and watch the golden light run under his skin as he absorbs the sexual energy we’ve generated. My eyes drift closed to that golden glow.

  “That’s it,” he whispers against my temple. “Go to sleep.”

  I do, spiraling down into gentle darkness, rocked by the beat of the pulse deep inside me.

  I wake to bright sunlight. A glance at my bedside clock tells me it’s only ten minutes after seven, so I can legitimately go back to sleep for a half-hour. I snuggle back against the warm body behind me and draw his arm around my waist.

  He grumbles and nuzzles my hair. “Wha’ time’s it?”

  “Seven-ten.”

  A grunt and he draws me closer, tighter into the curve of his body. I expect a prod against my butt, and I wouldn’t mind this morning, because I’ve got time before I have to get up for work, and despite the craziness of the night, I’m feeling really good this morning. In fact, I’m feeling really awake. Like I could get up and move mountains.

  I wiggle my butt against him.

  Another grunt and he rolls onto his back. “C’mere.” He tugs on my shoulders until I roll over. I cuddle up to his side and rub my thigh over his.

  He stops the motion of my leg with a hand on my thigh. “Uh-uh.”

  We did go at it a ridiculous number of times last night. “Sorry.”

  He rolls onto his side and draws me against him. Belly to belly. Chest to chest. Warm and tight. I kiss the firm curve of his shoulder, settle against him, finding the best places for arms and legs. Fitting into him until we’re locked together like a puzzle. He kisses me back gently, without any heat. Just soft, sweet kisses.

  “I’m gonna sleep for a week,” he sighs into my skin.

  “Oh.” I hadn’t realized our trip took so much out of him. “Okay.” I’m enjoying the cuddling, but I’m not staying in bed much longer. Time to get up and move mountains.

  “Stay with me,” he murmurs, tucking my face into his neck. I close my eyes and enjoy the moment. I never thought cuddling with a demon could be so nice.

  My eyes won’t stay closed, though. I feel stunningly energetic this morning. I’m not a morning person on the best of days and we must have been up half the night – although we did start pretty early and I’m not sure whether our trip to Hell took any time at all – but I feel really well rested. Like I’ve slept for a week.

  I begin to wriggle out of his arms. He tightens them around me. “Where’re you goin’?”

  I kiss him a few more times, stroke the furry mass of his dreadlocks. “I’m getting up. I’m not tired at all. You sleep in.”

  He grumbles. “Stay.”

  “No, really, I’m getting restless. I’ll just keep you awake if I lie here any longer.”

  He grumbles a few more times before he finally loosens his grip on me. He cracks open one dark eye as I begin to shift away from him. “Promise me somethin’ before you go.”

  “Mmm?” I slide up onto my elbow and look down at him.

  “Don’t do anything you know’ll piss me off.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I poke him in the chest. “You can’t expect me to stay in bed. First of all, I’m not tired. Second, I have to go to work—”

  He sighs and runs his hand down my back. “Yeah, yeah, fine. Just say it before you go.”

  “What? That I won’t do anything to piss you off? Okay, I won’t do any—”

  “No, that you’ll be my seggurach. Fuck, Tsara, what d’you think last night was all about?”

  “Oh.” My mind goes blank. “Oh, um, I, uh.”

  “Fuck.” He rolls away, disentangling himself.

  “Wait, wait. Jou, wait.” I scoot after him. Plant myself over him. Catch his head in my hands and kiss him deeply. He kisses me back. I wind myself around him and we lie there entangled for a long time, kissing. Not speaking. His kisses become slower, less purposeful, until finally he’s just breathing into my mouth, his lips slack against mine.

  I hold him until I’m sure he’s really asleep, then slip out of the bed, dress as silently as I can, and trot off to the T station.

  It’s standing room only on the train. I cling to a pole and watch the dark tunnel flash by beyond the train’s windows. Think about what I didn’t say. What he wants me to say, to feel, to be.

  I’m still not sure I can.

  I stand, and think, and hum The Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain” to myself.

  Customer service has its own special magic, and whatever it is, I don’t have it. Fortunately, Evonne does, and when I ask her to reschedule my afternoon appointments so I can keep my date with Timmi, she does so without complaint, in her effortlessly cheerful way that makes the clients feel like we’re doing them a favor. She pops her head into my office after my one o’clock to tell me she’s cleared my afternoon. I thank her and put a sticky note on my phone to remind myself to buy her another bag of Bruegger’s Gingerbread, then turn off my computer and make my way out into the light drizzle.

  Timmi’s offered to send the Museum’s car for me, but being chauffeured to the private museum for my personal tour is way too O.T.T. for me. I take the train.

  Timmi’s waiting for me in the front door of an attractive brick building that looks exactly so many other attractive brick buildings in and around the Harvard campus. The door’s framed by two of the eponymous columns, which support a semi-circular porch under which Timmi stands, out of the rain. When I r
un up the three short steps, she takes my arm and leans in for an air-kiss.

  “I’m delighted to see you, my dear,” she says.

  “Hi, Timmi.” I return the air-kiss. I’m happy to see her, too. Maybe it’s stupid – to feel so flattered by the interest of someone I barely know. Who just wants to share her knowledge. But it’s less stupid than being flattered by the interest of the demon who wants me to be his freaking seggurach.

  Whatever. It’s nice to be wanted.

  “What would you like to see first?” Timmi asks as she guides me through the massive oak front doors and into the museum.

  I stop in the lobby and goggle.

  It soars up three floors, to a huge domed skylight that lets in the gray afternoon light. In the corners of the room, four terra-cotta-colored pillars support the glass dome. At ground level, the natural light is warmed by wall sconces that flicker with amber witchlight. The atrium is filled with the soft susurrus of water, which slides down three of the marble walls in a glassine veil. The water disappears into a groove at the base of each wall without a splash. A breath of highly oxygenated air teases my hair back from my face, rising off the nearest water-wall in an exhalation that should be woodsy but is metallic instead.

  I don’t know what I expected. Brick and dark wood and low ceilings, maybe. Like the Witch Museum in Salem, which only has an aura of very human sadness, but no magic. Not this. This looks like the entrance of one of the big downtown hotels. Or a bank. A power lobby – designed to impress. Not at all what I expected from a museum dedicated to witchcraft.

  “Timmi,” I choke. “This is very . . .”

  “Ostentatious.” She laughs. “Our first curator was a Quincy. They built on a grand scale.”

  “It’s . . . wow.”

  “Oh, my dear, this isn’t even the good part. Come, let me show you my favorite bits.”

  She leads me through the galleries. In no order I can discern. In one gallery she breezes past magnificent sarcophagi glittering with gold, whose onyx eyes follow us as we pass, to a tiny case full of dull blue rings. Each ring is inscribed with a tiny scarab. When she leans in to press her ear to the case, I follow suit. Even through the thick glass, I can hear their high chittering.