“Yeah, sure, we’ve been through weird shit.” Lee pointed the flashlight at Mani’s face. “But she’s been yanking our chain all night. You don’t think she’s still setting us up? You trust her?”
“No, to both.”
“Then are we doing the right thing, trying to ambush her old man? Maybe she’ll tip him off.”
Max leaned into Lee. “Would it matter if she did?”
Lee hesitated, then laughed. “Damn, you really don’t give a shit.”
“At worst, how much of a problem can the opposition be?” Max took the flashlight and swept it like a pointer at the open end of the street.
Lee backed away. “Right. A bunch of half-assed guerillas lost in the big city. Cheap mercs and street guns, at best. No special equipment. Like knocking off neighborhood wanna-be hoods.”
Mani’s manipulations and Lee’s doubts had awakened the Beast’s appetite. Keeping the Beast under control was wearing out his resolve. The unexpected mission changes only heightened his frustration. He did not want to admit to Lee how badly he needed the release of a fight, the familiar routine of killing. The Beast had to be fed again, tonight. And Max required death’s reassurance to calm him in the face of so many lies, so much uncertainty, and the maddening potential of even more changes. If he did not get his ration of blood, he could not guarantee Mani surviving the shelter of his protection. He could not even promise to keep his patience with Lee.
Max turned away from Lee, who went back to the trunk. Mani brightened with Max’s attention.
“Where do you want me?” Mani asked, looking at the garbage bins.
“In front of the trunk.”
She snapped her head around to stare at him. “I thought you were supposed to protect me.”
“Is Rithisak out to kill you?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll be perfectly safe out in the open. Is he the only one protected against your little mind trick?” She nodded.
“Then he’ll come after you himself and use his people to protect him. This is a small space, so you should have line of sight on them. You distract as many as you can while Lee and I close the killing box. If you’re lying, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
She held her stare on him a moment longer, gave him a thin smile, shook her head, and looked at the ground. “This isn’t what was promised to me. What would happen if I made a call to your superiors and told them what you were doing?”
“I’d cut your hand off.” He waited for her reaction. She gave him none. “If you got through, I’d explain the complexity of our situation. I’d mention the fact that you and Rithisak possessed either the technology or ability to penetrate Nowhere House security. Since our safe house might be compromised, I’d point out that I had no choice but to make a preemptive strike against possible pursuers, using those measures you possessed to our advantage. You’d then have to explain and demonstrate your abilities to my employers. There would be tests. Examinations. A delay, I’m sure, in delivering your money and final living arrangements. If they found something that interested them, the delay might be lengthy. In the end, if none of these explanations proved satisfactory, I’d point out that I’m an assassin. I kill people, for pleasure and for money. Whether or not you survive, my employers received the services specified in my original contract with them. I killed for them.
“That is, if I gave a big enough of a fuck to explain myself to anyone.”
Mani’s gaze took in the street, the walls around them, the tractor-trailer rumbling past on the avenue. “I see. And what happens when you start shooting and blowing things up? My abilities don’t work against bullets, or shrapnel.”
“Jump into the trunk, close it.” He led her by the arm to the back of the Lincoln. Lee backed away, dropped a bag with rope, a machete handle, and a gun muzzle sticking out, and trotted out into the street and both curbs, laying out a pattern of a dozen mines, letting their weight pin the loose cardboard and paper trash he used to cover them. Max took a bag of smoke and flash grenades, the .45 and shotgun Lee had left behind, an Uzi, two short tripod- and swivel-mounted guns with radio antennae, a bag of extra clips, and the bag of surveillance equipment. As an after-thought, he took out the tire iron and jammed it into the ammo bag. He locked down the weapon lockers so the trunk appeared normal once more, and showed Mani the trunk light switch, radio beacon, and cell phone compartment, and the inside hood lock.
“What if I want to shoot back?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Max said. “I don’t think you’re used to combat shooting, and the plating this car does have won’t stop armor-piercing rounds.”
Lee returned, slipped on a climbing harness over his jeans and jacket, and put on a communication headset. As Max took out a set from the surveillance bag, Lee adjusted dials until they were able to hear each other over the earpiece. Lee picked up the bag and headed for the fire escape. “Don’t do anything I’d do,” he said with a mocking wave as he left them.
Max pushed down the headset mike away from his mouth, took the two swivel-mounted guns, and motioned for Mani to follow him. “How did you do that trick?”
Mani pointed to her head, then to his, and back to hers. She laughed at his nod. “Why do you want to know? Do you think you can learn it?”
“If you can get inside me, maybe someone else can.” Max set up one of the guns between garbage bins, bracing it against metal walls.
“Rithisak taught me how, but you don’t need to worry about his skill, unless you’re easily seduced by men.”
Her leg was warm against his back as he secured the clip and cleared the antenna on the gun. He stood, rubbing against her thigh, hip, breast. She grinned and leaned into him. The Beast wanted to use the muzzle of the other gun as a cock, and for a moment Max’s hand shook with the desire to add his own cock to the Beast’s cruel punishment. He pushed her away, crossed the street, quickly dropped the gun by a drainpipe, wedging one of the tripod legs between the pipe and the wall.
A car passed. Max started. He was sweating from the exertion of controlling himself. A cold, hard ball of nausea was working its way from stomach to throat. He headed back to the car, where the rest of his gear and Mani waited. He stopped by his equipment, wondered why he didn’t go ahead, end it, fuck her, kill her, fuck her again, throw her in the trunk and drive back to Tuckahoe, with Lee in the trunk if he tried to stop her, and the men on the other end of the encrypted phone line, if they objected.
She waited, leaning back on the lip of the trunk, arms stretched above her head, fingers spread, tips pressed against the inside trunk hood. The arc of her body across the opening was a bowstring waiting for its arrow, a line daring to be crossed, a question without answer, a bottomless void demanding to be filled. The scent of her sweat caught at him, sharp as a hook. The embodiment of appetite, he realized. Like him and the Beast within him, destructive, dancing on the boundary between fulfillment and self-destruction. She was giving in to her need even if it meant a return to Rithisak’s service.
Despite having fought her off, he still felt vulnerable to her, almost like prey. He was sure if Lee could know all that had gone on, he would have considered the feeling kinky, and encouraged him to surrender to his hunter. Shreds of their intimacy clung to his thoughts. Her voice, her need, echoed in his head, reinforcing the Beast’s raving cry for her. And a part of him reared with jealous rage at the idea of Rithisak’s importance for her. He wanted to be the sole object of her appetite, the center of her life.
The most frightening aspect she had awakened, or planted, in him wanted to protect her and the baby she carried. As strong as his drives to protect the twins and kill everybody else, this mewling newborn desire spun images of a human baby that inspired him to care and provide for it, teach it all he knew, and replace Rithisak as its father.
The Beast tore the ghost desires apart and fed on the carcass of kindness and caring.
“You’re not scared of Rithisak,” Mani said.
Max slung the bags over his shoulders.
“You want to know how I can enter you, and men like you? Because I understand the elements which make us.”
The Beast screamed as Max took up the guns. He drew comfort from the cold steel in his hands. Through the fog of his rage, he found the outline of a sewer manhole near the street intersection.
“I’m water,” she whispered, drawing him closer so he could hear. After he took a step in her direction, she said, “Rithisak is like you. Fire.”
“You’re drawn to fire.” He fumbled with the tire iron. The Beast wanted him to swing for her head.
“But I’m not strong enough to put it out.”
“You wouldn’t survive my fire.”
Mani laughed, brought a leg up, and hugged her knee to her stomach. Her body broke the spell it had woven. The Beast did not care and brought Max a step closer, and another, until his crotch was jammed against her raised foot. His cock was as hard and unyielding as her heel. Her left shoulder dipped, and then her right, as she swayed from side to side between the car and Max. Her hips rolled. Pressure increased, decreased, on his cock. He smelled the stale, sweat-ripe air from the long plane ride from Asia in her hair, the incense mingled with jungle blossoms lingering on her skin, and the musty leavings of a man’s sex rising from between her legs. Rithisak’s scent. The Beast leapt to attack a rival’s presence, and Max let his inner rage chase the lost trail of an old territorial marking. He was not supposed to kill her. He did not want to kill her.
She closed her eyes and put her head back, but the gesture was the closing of a door, not surrender. After drawing him in, she was shutting him out.
He put his free hand over her knee, passed the tire iron through her hair. Fueled by her denial and his hunger, the Beast lost Rithisak’s trail and screamed itself into a storm sweeping back on a bloody path to Mani. But like the faint wail of a horn in the fog warning him away from dangerous shores, a woman’s voice rose out of the storm to tell him there were other things Mani had to give him, other appetites she could fulfill. The Beast rejected the offer with a shriek that made Max’s metal-filled hand shake. Her voice grew louder, clearer, becoming a siren song luring the Beast from its death focus on Mani. The voice tuned itself first to Max’s thoughts, and then, settling into a deeper resonance with truth, to the Beast’s roar.
A promise of flesh and blood took shape in Max’s mind. Just out of reach, the shape teased the senses, becoming a salt-sharp taste not quite on his tongue, a smell lost between jungle-rot stench and the perfume of riotous growth, a touch warmer than spurting blood and colder than dead flesh. A yearning took hold of him, as if the promise had already been fulfilled, leaving his body and spirit aching with the vague memory of an appetite’s satiation. It was as if he had consumed dream food that, when he awakened, could only leave him hungrier than when he had gone to sleep. It was an appetite he had never experienced before, like an addiction to a substance tailored to provoke but never quite satisfy his needs.
The Beast’s hunger slid its focus from Mani to something less defined: the memory of a feast that never happened. Mani’s voice and the false memories counterbalanced the Beast’s insatiable drive, keeping Max in a state of hunger and not-hunger. What he seemed to want did not appear available. Appetite chased itself in an endless loop. Mani had given him the tool to help her survive his company, a light to keep his own darkness at bay.
The tool was an illusion. Max had no more wish to embrace the light than he had to hold the life he discovered Mani carried. Succumbing to distraction was an unknown thing for him, counter to the darkness and destructive nature he found more comforting. Change was not the kind of dangerous territory he was driven to explore.
For the first time he could remember, he had a choice of whether or not to rape and kill—if in fact his hesitation was his choice, and not another of Mani’s mind tricks. The sensation was not pleasant. In control of himself, he missed the headlong rush of the Beast’s tumultuous currents, the raw sensation of meat and blood and orgasm.
He did not choose, but he did not throw away the choices. Meager though it was, he held on to the power. It was convenient, for the moment, in keeping the Beast in check and fulfilling the mission.
Mani’s touch had broadened his existence in a way he had experienced before only with Kueur and Alioune. Max fought against the realization’s deadening stun. He did not want the twins to have to share their unique place in his life.
Moving to a rhythm he did not hear, Mani pushed her foot into his groin as her arms arced through the air in wider circles. His hand dropped from her knee. He took the pain shooting up from between his legs, let it tickle the Beast to see if it could be provoked. Mani’s influence strained but did not break. He stepped back, letting the tire-iron hand fall to his side.
She danced away from the car, taking small, silent, delicate steps, spinning slowly in a half-crouch. She leaned forward, then arched back, hands carving shapes in the air, fingers plucking invisible strings. Her head turned in slight degrees, against the flow of her body, as if she followed a ghost’s flight with her heart as her body took her on a living path. A faint luminescence emanated from her skin. Max turned to check the avenue, wondering if a new targeting technology was being applied. When he looked back, her dance had taken her a quarter of the way around the car. She glowed like a cloud-shrouded moon, the outline of her body blurred by both the dead-end street’s darkness and the soft, hazy, pale white light emanating from her body. Her eyelids fluttered as if she looked out at him through a trance. The glow and the sheen of sweat on her ace made her look like smooth, living stone.
“Do you like my dance?” she asked. “Rithisak did. Though not my stories. Not even my favorite. My father always told it before guiding me into the vision depths of some true part of the world. And my mother repeated it often after teaching me a step in one of the great dances she knew. Before she died. Her version was true to my father’s, but longer and richer in detail, just like her dances elaborated on my father’s visions.”
Max heard the crackle of fire in her voice, and the crashing of waves. He shook his head to clear the noise and focus on her words. Time slowed, beating to the rhythm of her telling. The world contracted to the circle of Mani’s performance, which moved with the hallucinogenic deliberateness of a bas-relief carving making its way across the stone face of its realm. He could not look away from her eyes.
“This is what my parents told me: Once gods clothed in water and fire danced over the world. Wherever their feet touched the ground, life bloomed. Every creature and plant we see, each spirit haunting the spaces between life and death, was born from a moment’s kiss between the divine and the earthly. The imprint of their steps formed valleys and mountains, which wept with the beauty of the gods’ sacred dance. From the earth’s tears rivers great and small were born, and from the earth’s sighs grew clouds and winds and song that are earth’s memory of the gods’ touch. In the wake of the gods’ most perfect gestures, stars glittered. From the brightness of gods’ eyes as they followed the vision of their dance, the sun was born. And in their hearts, where dwelled the sadness of what was to come, the moon was created and nurtured like a flawless pearl.
“The gods danced with the grace of flowing water, the passion of burning flames. What they made illuminated the world so that no shadow could hold secrets, no truth could be hidden. But in time, when every land was marked by their passage and the world was done, the gods grew weary and had to rest, to dream new visions and prepare themselves for the next dance of creation. They surrendered themselves to sleep, and where they slept became secret places, shrouded in the mysteries of birth and death, becoming and ending.
“As the gods knew in their sad hearts, what they made could not rest. What they made grew strong in the wilderness of their absence. What grew in their wake dreamed its own dreams, danced its own steps, sang its own songs. And as the gods slept, the life that was their legacy wondered over the
ir own creation, worshiped the mysteries that veiled the gods, explored, experimented, envied. They forged machines and built empires, harnessed elemental powers and let loose appetite. Daring to follow in the dance of the gods, prying into the secret places where gods slept, they sought to leave their mark on the world as the gods once did. The dreams of gods were stolen. Shadows grew. Truths were lost. Nightmares erupted.
“Those whom the gods created tried to shape the world as the gods had, but all that filled their vision was their own image. Now, we poor children who still follow in the footsteps of the gods are lost in a land echoing with power we can never hold. We dance in mist and moonlight instead of with water and fire. We seek to bring life and beauty to the world, but sow only death and chaos.”
Mani came to a stop in front of the open trunk. She straightened out of her final broken-body posture, rising from a wide-based crouch and backward camber, lowering arms held out akimbo, aligning twisted joints, adjusting the sharp curve of her neck. Her glow faded with the reverberating music of her voice. The spell of her dance dissipated, bringing the wider world back into focus. Concrete and brick loomed on either side of Max. The city’s pulse sounded from steel and machinery, the bone and flesh of the city: a nearby subway tunnel and the elevated highway not far off, from cables and pipes under the street, and barges slipping quietly past on the East River. Electricity hummed. The weapons Max carried grew hot through the bags, as if struck by a fever to discharge.
The Beast growled, sensing Max’s wandering focus. Max shook his head to clear away the confusion of returning to the real world after Mani’s tale.
Mani resumed her position sitting on the Lincoln’s rear. “Do you like my story? Your people have made a world you think you can control, made yourselves gods. But like the gods, you can’t control the thing you made any more than you can control the things that made you.”
“I thought you knew I don’t make anything,” Max said. “I kill.” He turned to go to his station, then looked over his shoulder at her. “I agree with Rithisak. Your stories are flicked.”
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