Alex said it was controversial. She knew he put her on this case because controversy wouldn’t keep her from doing her job.
And she knew what to do next. She would start with Terez.
* * * *
The women slept late, and rose to move in their speechless activities of breakfast preparation and cleanup. As they worked, Jaguar noticed that Terez followed her with large eyes, always aware of where she was, what she was doing.
They ate bread and fruit that Jaguar had brought, drank water from canteens. No one spoke, and each face carried in it the glow of last night’s sweat. Jaguar could see a shift in pupil size, in skin tone, indicating that the detox was beginning.
After breakfast was cleared the three women sat leaning into trees, listening as if some answer ran through the sap.
Jaguar turned her green eyes to Terez. “Come with me,” she said.
Terez rose silently and followed her through the thick trees, picking her way carefully over the debris of the forest floor.
Jaguar stopped at a small stream that trickled through the woods. She squatted by the side of it, cupped her hands and lifted water to her face. In the south, the moon was still apparent, white and ghostly in the clarity of morning sky.
The water felt cool and good against her skin. She let her hands linger in it, brought them, slippery and cool, to her neck, sighed with pleasure as liquid slid down her breasts. She leaned over and took another handful of water, spreading it over her ribs and belly, then between her legs, opening her thighs and stroking the insides gently, seeing as she did that she’d stopped bleeding. She’d noticed earlier that the other women had ceased bleeding, too.
As she washed, she could feel Terez staring at her, unspoken longings boring into the back of her neck. Jaguar stood and turned to her, and immediately Terez lowered her eyes. Her face flushed and she took a step back.
“Yes,” Jaguar said, “and yes again.” She reached over and ran a hand through her hair, combing the silken tangle with her fingers. It felt like air pouring over her skin.
“Your hair is like moonlight,” she said. “Weightless and piercing.”
Terez made a small sound, almost a sigh of pleasure, almost a whimper of fear.
“Do you know about the moon?” Jaguar asked, running a finger over her cheek. “Her light is so soft, you’d never guess how much she can do just by being there.”
She grasped a handful of Terez’ hair and twisted it around her hand as she spoke. “The moon moves the entire ocean, and pulls a single body toward desire and knowledge. That’s why men fear her, and fear women who worship her. They know real desire gives you a power they can’t control or steal.”
Terez raised large blue eyes to Jaguar and said nothing.
“You’re afraid,” Jaguar noted, “but not afraid that I’ll hurt you.”
She unwrapped Terez’ hair and dropped her hand to her side. “You’re afraid I can’t hurt you enough. That you’ll never be able to pay for what you did, or who you are. You’d like me to run razor blades in pretty little circles around your face, or whip you. But I’m not going to do that.”
Jaguar took a step forward. Terez took a step back.
“What do you want?” Jaguar asked.
Terez hung her head down onto her chest and peered at her own flesh. She touched it, tentatively, feeling the skin as if it was an animal that might bite. Then she pressed her thumb into her sternum, held it there, released it, stared at the imprint of flesh against flesh.
She lifted her hands and held her own face as if it belonged to someone else, groaned into her palms and drew them across her mouth, licking at them, tasting them. Then she squeezed her eyes shut tight and pushed out one word.
“Dance,” she said.
Jaguar laughed. She stretched her lithe body in a line toward the sky and felt the pleasure of her own muscles rippling in the warming of the sun. She swayed in the dappled green shadows of the forest, flesh ambient with light, her motion the motion of trees in the wind, birds that landed in their branches. She caressed the curves of her own body, caressed the curves of the air that held it. Then she reached over and grasped Terez by the hips, moving them in rhythm with hers.
Terez pulled back at first, then ceased struggling and moved into the cadence of her body’s song as she pressed closer to Jaguar.
For too many years Terez lived somebody else’s life, as if she was just visiting her own skin. But under her compliance Jaguar felt the burden of her desire, the heaviness of longing and the bitterness of fear sizzling within it. It was the burden of the moon as its face moved across the face of the earth. An oceanic shifting of waters and the subtle pulsing of the heart’s rhythm toward its own center. She was always trying to get back to herself, as fast as she tried to run away. Jaguar grasped her by the hair, lifted her face and ran a finger across the thirsty lips.
“This,” she whispered into the weightless light of her hair. “You want this.”
Terez groaned and moved more deeply into the dance, into the body that rocked hers toward knowing.
Then, a slight motion in the shadows of the trees caught Jaguar’s attention. She peered over Terez’s shoulder and saw Fiore standing behind a tree, watching them. Her eyes did not disapprove or approve. They just absorbed. When she saw Jaguar see her, she held her gaze for a brief moment, then turned her attention to Terez. As Terez bent her mouth to Jaguar’s neck and ran a tongue across her skin, Fiore stepped out of darkness and moved closer.
“Yes,” Jaguar whispered, “And yes again.”
She pulled Terez’ hands away from her. Terez grappled to retain her hold, but Jaguar jerked her wrists and pushed her back. She moved her hands toward her own belly and pressed them down into the soft flesh.
“This,” she said. “You want this. The erotic source of power. But you won’t find it in me. What you want is in you.”
Terez peered down at her own belly, saw her own hand pressed on top of it, Jaguar’s hand holding her fingers against the flesh.
“See who you are,” Jaguar said. “Be what you see.”
Terez began to tremble lightly, ripples of energy moving through her skin.
“Dance,” Jaguar whispered.
Terez swayed and moaned and held herself close. Jaguar moved back toward the trees as Fiore moved to Terez and put a hand on her shoulder. Terez opened her eyes wide and stopped swaying. Fiore spread her hands and ran them down Terez’ smooth white back, cupped her small hips and danced. Jaguar nodded, and silently faded back into the trees.
Day swallowed the white eye of the moon that led them here, and they continued in their dance.
* * * *
When afternoon transformed into dusty evening, Jaguar returned to the clearing by the stream. She found Fiore and Terez laying on their backs, looking up toward the tops of the trees and to a sky that was quickly emptying itself of light.
“We’d better get back,” she said. Fiore stood and brushed herself off, then walked off into the trees, but Terez remained still.
Jaguar reached over and tapped her shoulder. “Terez,” she said, “look at me.”
When Terez’ wide sky eyes met Jaguar’s, they were clear and focused. Jaguar touched her forehead and felt the return of words, slowly, as if she was a child just learning to use language as a tool.
Good. That was good. That meant her plan was working, and she was on the right track.
Jaguar ran a hand down Terez’ face. “Are you still afraid?” she asked.
Terez frowned. It seemed to take her some time to remember how to respond to a question. After a while she shook her head slowly back and forth, as if the gesture was new to her.
Jaguar nodded. “That’s the gift the moon had for you. An authentic self. And now, you own it.”
Chapter 4
Alex’s workday often finished at odd hours, depending on the assignments under his supervision and his involvement with them. For the next few weeks, he knew, that involvement would be deep, and the hours
would be long. He didn’t want this one to get too far out of his sight when it exploded. After reading Rachel’s research, he knew it was a matter of when, not if.
Brendan Farley’s history deepened Alex’s suspicions about his exposure to Artemis. He was an eco-terrorist with a long history of petty vandalism in service of his cause. He focused primarily on pesticides, and had done his share of lawn shredding, independently of any environmental group. Whenever he was charged he claimed self-defense. Pesticides poisoned him and his mother, he said. He had every right to defend himself.
Newspapers picked up on his story as he went from town to town, and he actually managed to get some local ordinances changed, but the prevailing mood on the home planet about such cases was one of peevishness. People didn’t want some crackpot getting between them and their quest for the perfect lawn.
Then, a month ago, he leapt from his irritating but fairly benign protests to setting off a pesticide loaded bomb in a mall, killing about a hundred people and making the place into a toxic waste site. He used the same kinds of pesticides he was protesting, the ones everyone said were safe. Alex supposed in that sense, he’d proved his point.
He told the Planetoid testers that the world was clearly going to hell in a hand-basket, and he just wanted to help complete the process. Get it over with, he said. Put humanity and the earth out of their mutual misery. Because of this, testers said his core fear was death, which had transformed into Thanatos syndrome – a complex similar to Stockholm syndrome, where death was the captor.
Thanatos driven prisoners saw themselves as kidnapped by death, and overcame their relentless terror by becoming friend, partner, lover, to their captor. It was a common syndrome of the Killing Times, and they still saw it pretty frequently on the Planetoids. It made sense as Farley’s core fear.
All this was the kind of reaction Alex would expect to see in a man exposed to Artemis, but it could also be intergenerational trauma or even some genetic defect created by exposure to biobombs. His crimes didn’t necessarily connect him to Artemis, but his work history might.
He had a degree in mineralogy and geochemistry and started his career with Galactic Net Communications, doing bench-work with transmission lodestones. He moved on to Assured Insurance, where he tested post-disaster materials for toxic elements. After two years there he quit, and in what seemed to Alex a most unusual career move, he went to work for La Femme, women’s beauty and health products, doing lab work in vitamins and makeup.
He left them less than a year ago, and from what Alex could tell, went on to be a free-lance madman. And Rachel’s research had turned up one small piece of information that, for Alex, connected the dots into a cohesive whole.
All the companies Farley worked for were different divisions of one large parent company called Global Concerns, Inc. That company had invested enormously in the initial moon mining concerns, and had gone on to throw all its weight at the Hague to prevent a ban against it. Now they controlled the biggest lobbying efforts for a moratorium repeal. In a small side jaunt in her research, Rachel also learned they already had an ad campaign ready for the many uses of Artemis compounds.
When Alex read that, every fiber of his precognitive capacities started to hum in recognition. He figured if this case wasn’t filthy with Artemis, he’d just have to hang up his title of Adept.
What he read next, from Rachel’s research on Board governor’s memos, made him also figure he and Jaguar were about to dive head first into a political and corporate quagmire. That was why, though it was well past midnight, he sat in his rocking chair facing the window that looked out over the replica of Lake Ontario, reading over the files one more time.
They told him no more than they had the first three times he read them, so he tried another source. He closed the file, let his hand rest palm up and open on top of it, breathed himself into the empathic space he knew best.
Sometimes he would sit like this for an hour, and emerge with nothing more specific than an intuitive sense of the next action he should take. Tonight, he was lifted and tossed roughly into an image that sizzled its way across his mind, and just as quickly disappeared.
The moon as a woman curled in on herself, bleeding from a gaping wound in her breast. A man whose face he knew flying to her, pouring something from a vial into the wound. Medicine? Something to heal?
No. Poison.
Searing pain and fire that he felt in his own body like a knife. He jerked back from the shock of it, gasped for air. Then, darkness.
Alex opened his eyes, stared down at his hand which was now a fist. That was it, he supposed. And it was enough to give him food for further contemplation.
He was deeply absorbed in considering it when he felt warmth at his back.
He didn’t shift. Didn’t lift his head or twitch. He just sat and felt it. Warmth. Like breath applied by a mouth held close to the back of his neck. It glowed and spread through him, and he let it, without moving. Warmth explored him, and he let it.
Jaguar.
He hadn’t heard anyone enter his apartment, but he never heard her when she chose to be silent, and he never missed her when she chose to be heard. He caught the scent of sage and smoke in her hair, and her warmth was balanced as the earth, holding fire at its core.
“When you make love,” she asked, “do you keep your eyes open, or closed?”
He let the question settle in someplace where it wouldn’t cause too much trouble. Then he smiled.
“That depends, Jaguar,” he answered, without lifting his head.
“On what?”
“The woman. The context of the lovemaking. With certain women I won’t name, I can’t imagine ever turning my eyes away again. Would you like specific examples and illustrations?”
He felt her shift behind him. He had disturbed her. That was a good thing.
“Your point,” she noted. “We’d better move on. And by the way, the women all have Phase Psychosis, induced by exposure to Artemis.”
He twisted in his chair and faced her. She resonated fire and moonlight, held calmly in her skin and her eyes, beautiful and distracting. He didn’t have to ask if she was sure. He knew from what he’d seen, and he read it in her flesh.
She walked around to stand in front of him. “My guess,” she continued, “is that it’s heavy and direct exposure, over a fairly long time.”
He held her gaze steady. “What makes you think so?” he asked.
“I can smell it,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I smell it. In their sweat. Direct contact. Not airborne.” She stared at him hard, daring him to tell her she was wrong. He didn’t.
Instead, he kept his dark gaze steadily on her sea eyes while he reached up and took her hand. His thoughts moved into hers easily. They’d done this so many times, in so many ways, there was very little to block contact unless one of them chose to actively push the other away. She didn’t choose that tonight.
Show me, he requested.
Easy as a sigh, she opened. She drew him in to her experience, what she saw and felt from the women in the sweat lodge. He felt the swirling of energy that told her what was happening within them. Wordlessly, she took him through the entire sweat, through their experience and her own, including her vision in the sweat lodge.
Both the content and the feel of it almost jolted Alex out of contact with her. Blood on the moon, and a man with blood on his hands. And the first man she saw – he startled at the brief glimpse of a face, so soon covered in blood. His surprise was so sharp that Jaguar halted in her sharing.
Alex?
Okay, Jaguar. Just – give me a second here.
She let him linger in the vision, and at his signal moved on though the night and into the morning, where he observed her at her work with Terez.
The sun on her bare back as she leaned over the stream and dipped her hand into the water. The curve of her hips as she swayed with Terez, dancing her flesh into desire. He felt it directly, as if it was injec
ted into his veins. Fear and desire and power. The most potent and potentially combustible combination he knew, and Jaguar danced with it as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Every motion of her hand seemed both effortless and inevitable. What she did with her body was only what the laws of the universe had insisted on from the beginning of time. Yet, he also felt her concentration, her focus on the task. She danced lightly, but she understood the forces she partnered with.
Fear and desire, saturated with the power of the moon. The intensity of it, and her willingness to give herself so completely to it in this dance were more than he could bear right now.
He withdrew, pulled his hand back from hers. She leaned back against the windowsill, tilted her head at him.
“Problem?” she asked.
“I’ve seen enough to - to understand. Unless there’s more I need to know?”
She shook her head. “I’m good.”
He resisted all possible responses he could make to this. Instead, he stood and pressed his hands against his lower back. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I want some coffee, and we have to talk.”
She padded behind him, talking as they went. “Terez is coming along already,” she said. “The others should clear just as quickly if I keep sweating them.”
“We still need proof,” he said, then hushed her impending protests. “I mean, proof for the Hague.”
“What kind of proof?”
He sighed. “Not the kind you just showed me.”
He led her into his kitchen, and made coffee in the warm darkness, the aroma creating a comforting intimacy. She perched herself on his counter while he worked, watching him silently from this post, swinging her legs back and forth. He felt her gaze on him, still full of the moon, as he moved from stove to cupboard, making coffee, being normal, trying not to let his hand slip and find itself suddenly on her thigh.
When the brew was finished, he poured her a cup, set it down at his small kitchen table and took a seat. She sat across from him, letting the steam rise to her face and breathing it in deeply.
A Lunatic Fear Page 4