Later, when we were very, very clean, we retired to the bedroom. There, we made love as if for the first time. It was magical and romantic, tenderly breathless and wildly new.
Something primal had stirred deep within me. My blood ran fast and hot. I took control from the start. She allowed my dominance and gave herself fully. I covered her body with mine and rode a rhythmic wave as ancient as the tides, throbbing to the ebb and flow of my pulse and the beating of our hearts.
Passion ruled unbridled. She called my name in a whispered shout and raked her nails across my back. I teased her with a break in rhythm and relieved her with timely thrusts. Our bodies tensed. She arched her back and squeezed. We shuddered in unison, our muscles flexing at all the right moments, in all the right ways, in all the right places.
We peaked together, collapsed in exhausted sighs and caught our breaths while gazing at the ceiling, watching the fan slowly plow through flickering shadows of candlelight.
For a while, nothing else mattered. All I ever wanted lay before me, the woman I loved, her head nestled in a pillow, her eyelids heavy with sleep. I watched as she drifted off, the subtle rise and fall of her breasts marking an almost undetectable breath, her lips drawn thin to a Mona Lisa smile.
Later, as moonlight stole in through the window, I brushed her brow and kissed her cheek. She cooed dove-like before turning onto her side and pulling the covers up over her shoulder.
I rolled out of bed and went to my closet, the small one on the right that Lilith had so graciously assigned to me. I stood at the open door and stared at a row of empty hangers. Gone, everything was gone, as if I’d never existed. I went to the bathroom and grabbed my dirty clothes off the floor, dressed and made my way into the kitchen. Then, like a thief in the night, I opened the door and quietly slipped outside.
Jerome was there, sitting on the back porch, his arms folded against the cold, his tail coiled around his bony little frame.
“Bossman!” he said, loud enough so I thought Lilith might hear.
I pressed my finger to my lips to shush him. “Quiet.” I nodded toward the house. “She’s sleeping.”
“Witch sleep?”
“Yes, witch sleep.”
“Bossman no sleep?”
I shook my head, gestured for him to scoot over and took a seat next to him. “No, Bossman no sleep.”
“Why for?”
“I don’t know. It’s too quiet, I guess.” I looked around, up into the trees, out into the woods. Except for the chirping crickets, which was something I hadn’t heard in five years, the sound of silence reigned supreme.
“You know, it’s funny,” I said to him. “I remember when the sounds of treklapods rooting along the forest floor and goliath bark scorpions tearing up the trees used to keep me up for days on end. Now I can’t seem to sleep without them.”
“Ha-ha,” said Jerome.
“Ha-ha, what.”
“You say is funny.”
“No it isn’t. See, Jerome, when I said it’s funny, I didn’t mean….” I stopped and looked into his eyes, realizing it was useless trying to explain. Instead, I nodded and patted him on the head. “Yes, Jerome. It is funny. Isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Funny.”
I stretched my legs out straight, crossed them, folded my arms to my chest and leaned back against the door. Jerome did the same. Then we laid our heads back, rolled our eyes to the night sky and began silently counting the stars. I believe I nearly counted them all before I finally fell asleep.
Jerome woke me with a start at the first sign of light, shaking me by the shoulders as he pointed eastward.
“Bossman! Look! Fire!”
I reached for my ax before even opening my eyes. It wasn’t there. I scrambled to my feet and struggled to take in my surroundings. A light from a fire blinded me. A door behind me blocked my escape.
Then it dawned on me, literally. The dim aurorean glow of sunrise had cast its rays through the trees and bathed us in firelight. I looked down at Jerome. He’d taken shelter behind my leg. Having never seen a sunrise before, he seemed convinced a hellish wall of flames was closing in on us.
I reached down and stroked the back of his lumpy head. “It’s okay, Jerome. That’s not fire.”
“Is no fire?” he asked, peeking around my leg.
“No.”
“Is Decussaday?”
“In a way, yes. That’s a sunrise. You remember the bright ball of fire in the sky yesterday?”
“Yes. Big ball-o-fire.”
“That’s right, big ball-o-fire. Well, that there’s the same big ball. It comes up every morning and goes to sleep every night.”
He seemed to find comfort in that, and soon came out from behind my leg to investigate. I held my arms out to the light to show him it was all right. He understood and did the same. I watched his color morph through shades of orange, yellow, pinks and reds, perhaps searching for a shade that corresponded to the wavelengths of sunlight. He settled on a varied mix akin to a ripened pear, which worked well with his naturally green skin. He looked up after a while and smiled at me, as if granting his acceptance.
“Nice,” is all he said.
I nodded back. “Nice.”
Lilith stole our attention with a rap on the door. I turned around and saw her peering at us through the glass. She looked amazing, her face aglow in the incandescent dawn, her eyes gleaming in refracted sunlight streaming through the glass. She pointed to me and motioned a come-inside gesture with her finger.
“Me?” I said, pointing to myself.
“Yes, you!” she snapped.
I gestured at Jerome. “What about him?”
I could hear the sigh that fogged the glass, and hoped my performance the night before had earned me the political capital I needed to spend in Jerome’s favor.
“Fine,” she said, after a timely deliberation. “But hurry before I change my mind.”
I opened the door and walked in ahead of Jerome, but not before warning him to behave. The problem was, for Jerome, behaving was a relative term. What did he know about behaving? I should have simply told him to fold his hands behind his back and not touch anything. Maybe then he’d have earned a little political capital for himself.
“Hungry?” Lilith asked, pointing to the kitchen table with unspoken instructions for us to sit.
“Eats!” said Jerome.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Kermit.”
“I’m not hungry,” I answered.
“Sit anyway.”
Jerome and I obeyed. She turned her back and began preparing some coffee for me. I tapped on the tabletop and ran my fingers along the hardwood finish. “I see we have a new table.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Living room furniture is new, too, I noticed.”
“Yup.”
“What happened to the old stuff?”
“I burned it.”
“Why?”
She returned with a cup of coffee to the table and set it in front of me. “Long story.”
“I see.”
“So, what do you want to eat?”
“Nothing. I told you, I’m not hungry.”
“Come on.” She cupped her hands to my cheeks and brushed my whiskers against the grain. “Don’t you need to rebuild your strength after last night?”
“No, I’m not much of a morning eater.”
“Tony, you look like you lost thirty pounds. You have to eat something.”
“All right then, how about a little cereal with milk?”
“That’s better.” She ratcheted her thumb up over her shoulder. “What about him?”
“He’s lactose intolerant.”
“I’m not cooking squirrel.”
“Squirrel!” said Jerome.
“Tony!”
“Lilith, he knows. No squirrel.” I snapped my fingers to get Jerome’s attention. “What did I tell you, mister?”
He flopped back
in his chair and frowned. “No squirrel.”
Lilith said, “Listen, if all you want is cereal, then you boys are on your own. You know where to find it. Give Kermit whatever he wants, just so long as it isn’t still breathing when he eats it. I’m going to get dressed.”
“Oh wait, that reminds me.” I thumbed the collar of my soiled shirt and tugged it away from my neck. “I went to get dressed earlier and found my closet emptied out. What happened to all my clothes?”
“That, yeah. I burned them along with the furniture.”
“Couldn’t wait to get rid of me, eh?”
“Cute,” she said, snatching my coffee off the table and taking it with her down the hall. “You still have some clean clothes in the dresser.”
I tried getting more out of her, but she had already disappeared into the bedroom. I looked at Jerome. He seemed clueless. “She burned my clothes,” I said. “Nice, huh?”
He smiled and nodded back, “Nice.”
I shook my head. What else could I do? The driget simply doesn’t understand sarcasm when he hears it. I got up and grabbed a bowl and cereal from the cupboard and milk from the fridge. Returning them to the table, I said, “You want some cereal without the milk?”
He stuck his hand inside the box and pulled out a fistful of flakes, spilling more on the floor than what he managed to keep in his hand.
“Ooh, look!” He held up a small cellophane packet and let the rest of the corn flakes flutter to the floor. “Prize!”
“Yeah, look at that,” I said. “Good job. You got a whistle.”
“I get one for Bossman.” He squeezed the sides of the box, causing it to flare and forming an opening wide enough, he could have plunged his head into it. Which he did.
“No, Jerome.” I pulled him out. “There’s only one prize in a box and you got it.”
He seemed especially proud of that.
I pointed at the whistle. “Go on, give it a blow.”
He put the packet to his lips and blew.
“No, not like that. I took the plastic toy from his hand and freed it from its wrapper. “Like this,” I said, and blew into it.
As whistles go, this was a good one. It had a little ball inside like a coach’s whistle and screamed like a banshee. The look on Jerome’s face when he heard it was worth the price on the box of cereal.
At first, the thing scared him; then it thrilled him. His eyes grew wide and animated. His ridiculously large mouth got ridiculously larger. He clapped his hands and thumped his tail on the floor excitedly.
“Me do! Me do!” he cried, grabbing for the whistle while still in my mouth.
He put it to his lips and blew on it hard until he was so out of breath he nearly fainted. But that didn’t stop him. He puckered again and made it scream as though the entire neighborhood should hear it. They probably did. I know Lilith heard it. She flew around the corner as if riding a broom. Her pants were half unbuttoned, her shirt half tucked in and her temper half-cocked.
“What the hell is going on here!”
Jerome, acutely startled, inhaled and swallowed the whistle in a single breath. I tried to come around him, thinking I could administer the Heimlich maneuver, but the little fucker dove under the table, wheezing and whistling in a hyper-frightened state that had him changing colors like a kaleidoscope.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lilith yelled.
“He swallowed a whistle.”
“What the hell? He’ll eat anything, won’t he?”
“He didn’t mean to eat it. You scared him.”
“Then why can’t he just scream when he’s scared like everyone else?”
I ducked my head under the table and reached for his hand. “Jerome? Are you all right?”
He had stopped flipping through colors and appeared to have caught his breath enough to where he only whistled when he spoke the letter “S”.
“I okay, Bosssssssman.”
“Come. Let me help you out of there.”
I eased him out and helped him to a chair at the table. Lilith was still buttoning her shirt and tucking it in when she turned to leave. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“Where do you think? We’re going out to look for the portal.”
“We?”
“Yes. You, me…” she pointed to Jerome, “your little squeaky toy over there.”
“No. I can’t. Carlos arranged for me to meet with the captain this morning. I have to explain to him where I’ve been for the last five years.”
“You mean weeks.”
“Weeks, years, whatever.”
“Yeah, well good luck with that.”
“Why don’t you come with me? You’re good at making stuff up.”
“You mean lying?”
“I mean explaining the unexplainable. Come on. You do it better than anyone.”
She trucked back up to me, squinting into my eyes, probably checking to see if there was anything there. “Tony, are you positively dense? Don’t you get it? We have to find that portal and shut it down as soon as possible.”
“What about him?” I pointed across the room to Jerome, who had wandered over to the fridge and helped himself to a stick of butter.
“Seriously? You have to ask?”
“Lilith, I—”
“He can’t stay here.”
“What if we—”
The front door opened without warning. “Hello! Anyone home?”
It was Carlos, and behind him, Dominic and Ursula. Jerome poked his head out from behind the refrigerator door and dropped the stick of butter to the floor. “Amigo?”
From where I stood, I could see the two of them, their faces mirrored in mutual surprise.
“J-man?”
“Amigo?”
“J-man!”
Jerome slammed the fridge door and tore around the corner in a blur, his big flat feet playing slip-and-slide on the greased-up vinyl floor. Carlos dropped to his knees and threw his arms out to receive him. Jerome slammed into him so hard, they both ended up on the floor.
Spinelli, reacting to instincts, drew his weapon and staggered back.
“Dominic! No!” I shouted. I ran over and pushed the muzzle of his gun away. “He’s friendly.”
“What is that thing?”
“That’s Jerome. Come on, give me a hand.”
“Jerome?” He holstered his weapon and helped me lift Carlos off the floor. “Jeez, from listening to you two, I thought Jerome was this cute little Chihuahua.”
“No,” I said. “He’s no Chihuahua.”
“He’s kind of ugly, ain’t he?”
“Hey!” said Carlos. “That’s my little buddy you’re talking about.”
Jerome came back, “I no ugly. You ugly.”
“Tony.”
“All right, guys.” I palmed Dominic’s chest and eased him back a little. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot.” I made a presentational gesture toward Jerome. “Dominic, despite what you’ve heard, this is Jerome. Jerome, meet Dominic.”
Jerome offered up his hand. “Domic.”
“No,” he said. “It’s Dominic.” The two shook anyway. “Dom-i-nic.”
“Let it go,” I said, waving my hand to dismiss his critique. “He’s a talking lizard. You’re lucky he got it that close.”
“Guys?” Lilith came into the room, holding a wad of paper towels smeared in butter. “What are you all doing here?”
Carlos answered, “We’re here to take Tony to work… that is, Dominic’s taking him. I have to meet a man about a job.”
“You?” I said. “What kind of job?”
“It’s a moonlighting gig that Powell told me about.”
“What sort of gig?”
“Night security for a jewelry store downtown.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. They’re gearing up for a big clearance sale next week. I guess they have a huge inventory of gems in house and they need a good security man to watch the place at night.”
“So why
are they interested in you?”
“Funny.”
Lilith said, “Carlos, why are you even interested in a second job? You don’t need the money.”
“I know. It’s not about the money. It’s about the thrill of guarding millions of dollars worth of diamonds from international jewel thieves.”
“Really, so you’re not worried about getting killed, eh?”
Carlos’s expression grew suddenly blank. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“Come on, Carlos, think about it. If a team of international jewel thieves come to town to hit the place, do you think they’ll give up and turn around just because a single rent-a-cop is standing guard?”
“What, they won’t?”
She shrugged, uncaring. “They might, or they might just as soon kill you.”
“Tony?” He looked to me for a reasonable rebuttal. “They wouldn’t kill me, would they?”
I hesitated, not wanting to burst his bubble, but Lilith had a point. “I don’t know, Carlos,” I told him. “I think you have to ask yourself why Powell, of all people, would tell you about this job instead of taking it himself.”
I could see him turning it over in his head, his eyes shifting from me to Lilith and back again, expecting one of us to give up the gag. It wasn’t happening. As he faded back quietly to consider the implications, Lilith said, “So, Ursula, what are you doing here? Are you going downtown with the boys?”
“Nay,” she answered, shaking her head lightly. “I have come to see thee. Hath thou forgotten? Are we not to do interviews today?”
“Interviews?” I said.
Lilith returned a look of mild inconvenience. “No, Urs, that’s not until this afternoon. Remember?”
“Lilith.” I slipped my body between the two. “What is she talking about?”
“All right, fine,” she said. “I suppose you’re going to hear about it eventually from one of these two chatter boxes.” She gestured to Carlos and Dominic. “Later today, Ursula and I are conducting interviews to find new guardians for the prime essentials.”
BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series) Page 3