When he pulls away, I am seriously turned on—again—and expecting sex, but he really pulls away and stands up. I frown up at him. What’s going on inside his stupid moody head? “Where’s my hat?” he asks, and I pick it up off the ground and hand it to him.
There he is again, naked with his hat on. I want to bone him so hard, I swear to fucking god, but he’s turned around. The view is just as nice from the back, all muscle and round ass, and heavy thighs. I have never considered myself an ass girl, but Ryan has made me re-evaluate everything else about myself—why not that too?
“I hate to ask this,” he says, still turned away from me, “but I need you to find a Door.”
“Are we actually—I mean, this isn’t a vision or something?” I ask uncertainly. Because it could totally be a shared vision, weirder things have happened to me every single day before breakfast.
“Not a vision,” he confirms. “But it is a . . . look, there are Hell dimensions, right? Some of them are big enough to fill a world. And some of them are really, really small.” He gestures around, almost helplessly. “If this was Ashmedai, then he probably just borrowed whatever was closest to our ideal.”
“My ideal is . . . grass?”
“Um?” This is the first time I’ve ever heard him sound uncertain about anything, I think. Jeez.
“So grass and water and sunshine. Got it.” I push my hair behind my ears even though it looks terrible, and I kind of wish that Ištar was around so that I’m not the only naked chick.
“Can you find the Door here? You don’t have to—I mean, you don’t have to talk to it. Don’t ask it for anything. Just find it.” He doesn’t turn around. I know he’s got to be feeling really awkward, but I am feeling a little rejected.
Like, just because I understand his feelings? Does not really make it okay for him to treat me weirdly.
But whatever.
I close my eyes, and I whisper, Where are you?, and then when I open them, next to Ryan is the Door.
Hi, it says, and I swear it sounds cheerful. Come walk through me, Allie.
What do you want? I ask it suspiciously.
I want nothing of you, it tells me.
“It doesn’t want anything from me,” I tell Ryan, and he nods sharply, turns around, and strides through the Door.
I take my time. It’s nice here, and I don’t exactly want to go back to the Christian Hell dimension full of screaming and death. The Door is . . . it’s pretty. It stands about half again as tall as me, and inside it is another Door, and then another, and then another, each one getting slightly smaller. It’s wider on top than it is on the bottom, and it has hieroglyphs carved into it. I bet Ryan or Roxie—or, heck, Narnia—could read them, but to me they’re just decoration.
It glows coppery in the sunlight.
I stroke the outside of it, and it purrs at me. You’re pretty, I tell it, and step through.
16
I’m in my disgusting lamia gear again, and my hair is gross and still in a ponytail, and everything smells like death again, and it’s gross, and there’s screaming—but this time I’m ready for it. It can’t beat me.
I pull my sunglasses down, and the screaming dims a notch. Fuck you, I think defiantly.
I hear all the Doors everywhere laugh at me.
“Ashmedai, huh?” says Roxie, and winks at me. I laugh, and I’m kind of surprised to find out that I can laugh. “You’ll have to tell me all about it.”
“Uh-uh,” I tell her. “It’s all mine.”
“We were pretty worried when you disappeared—”
“We’ve been gone for hours, I’m surprised you’re still here,” I say, and she shakes her head.
“Under five minutes.”
“So time does work differently. Hmm.”
Roxie hands me my bandanna. “Thanks for this,” she says, “but I don’t need it anymore. If we’re close to the Door—”
“About an hour’s walk,” I tell her.
“Let’s go then.” She pats me on the shoulder, and one of her snakes hisses at me. I hiss back, and giggle.
Ryan can freak out all he wants. I think he might actually like me, and that’s why he’s freaking out. He likes me, just a little, and doesn’t want to—or is afraid to. I’m not stupid, I can figure this shit out.
And I had fun. Fuck this hell dimension and all its demons and death. Ashmedai is totally going on my Christmas card list.
Except make that another couple of times that I’ve had sex without a condom. I’m starting to feel downright irresponsible. Just because Ryan makes all my thoughts fly out of my head . . . I am going to have to stop at a drugstore when we get out of the Hell dimensions and get myself the morning-after pill. Just in case. I don’t know how much time has passed in our dimension, but I haven’t taken a birth control pill in a couple of Hell dimension–days.
I am almost worried. But it’s hard to be worried about missing a few doses of Ortho Tri-Cyclin. Particularly when faced with, you know, being eviscerated by the legions of the damned.
We trudge through slowly, and hit the Door, and it opens right up, no blood required. You know me, I say as we walk through its pink glow, and it laughs at me.
The Hell we step into is beautiful. I guess they can’t all be disgusting and ugly. It’s full of rivers and lush grass, just like the Ashmedai underworld. At the horizon, a sun is setting. It sets the whole time, never quite leaving. Everything has a beautiful pink glow. Even Christian isn’t clicking anymore.
Roxie strides ahead of us, her coat flapping in a very sexy way. If I were the kind of girl who liked other girls, I would like Roxie for sure.
She walks until she finds a patch of grass in the sunlight. I know I was just in a wonderful, lush, grass-filled Hell dimension, but I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever get tired of. I hand Stan off to Christian and then settle down next to Roxie.
Roxie shrugs out of her coat and pulls off her hat. “I am taking a nap,” she murmurs, and drops right to sleep.
This is the first dimension where Christian is totally okay; I guess arachnids like sunlight and grass? Don’t people turn into arachnids in some Egyptian myth?
I say this to Christian, who’s sitting on the other side of Roxie, stretched out on his back, his baseball cap over his face. He lifts up the baseball cap and gives me a disdainful glare. He’s gotten good at those. “That’s Greece and arachnids hate it,” he says in his clicking.
“Sorry, god.” I roll my eyes. “Whatever, okay?”
“The Greeks thought they invented everything.” Ryan’s voice when he interrupts is almost totally sat’s. “They even stole Ursiris and made him Dionysus.” He/she snorts. The lioness knocks her head under my hand for a scritch, so I decide I won’t bitchsmack sat just yet.
True confession: If these avatars really are the ghosts of Ryan’s past, whoever sat was was really annoying. I am kind of disappointed in Ryan’s taste, which does not speak well for me.
“We don’t make circles here,” says sat through Ryan. “We don’t need to.” sat stretches out too. “This is my domain. You’ve never seen one of my demons.”
The lioness is falling asleep, and so is Ištar.
“Ursiris isn’t Hades, he’s not some vengeful, hideous, deformed creature trying to make everyone as miserable as he is.” She pets the land beside her. “He likes it here.” Now she’s bitter. “Without me.”
The land ripples up. A hand forms, and it stretches up to stroke her throat. Creepy-tastic.
“With me only sometimes,” she amends.
Ryan rubs his chin and grimaces—maybe he has noticed the sandpaper covering his face? “I am tired,” he says quietly in his own voice, “of not knowing what the Hell is going on.” He shakes his head. “I feel like a newbie again. Do you know how long it’s been since I really had no clue what to do?”
I can’t tell if he’s actually talking to me, but I answer anyway. “Five years ago. You wanted to kiss me, you knew I wanted to kiss you, and then when y
ou didn’t, and I didn’t, and you ran out of the room, a semyazza burned my stomach off and you didn’t know how to fix it.”
Ryan doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns to look at me, and his eyes are hooded, dark. “I knew what to do,” he says. “It was just harder to do with you.”
“I do not even know how to interpret that,” I say. He just stares at me. “Is this . . . about your women?” I guess.
“No,” he says. “This is about me and you.”
“Well, that has to be a lie, because everything you do is to keep people from getting close to you,” I snap. Oh, he is pissing me off. “Why did you walk away from me in Ashmedai’s Hell?”
“Allie—”
“Everything you do is about walking away from anyone caring about you—your family. Me. Anyone—”
“Allie—”
“Your logic is wrong, it’s not being around you that hurts people, Ryan. It’s your attitude. Because you could have lots of people who care about you, to make this easier—”
“Allie!” he roars. Roxie looks over at us, a weird look on her face. I shake my head a little, my hair swishing, and she looks away again.
“You can’t scare me by yelling,” I say to him.
“You should be scared. People who are near me die, okay? I am not making this up. This isn’t a game. This isn’t—”
“Yeah? Well I’ve been near you for years, and I’m still alive!”
“But you won’t always be.” He’s not yelling now, just looking down at his hands. The lioness shimmers under them; she’s not really there, though.
“Nobody will always be anywhere. If there’s one single thing that I learned from being poor and having everyone abandon me . . .” I take a deep breath. “You just have to take what you can get.” You just have to take what’s there and appreciate it while you have it. I never knew that before, but I know it now, and I know it’s hard. It’s hard to appreciate that I once had a closet full of Manolos and Gucci, and don’t anymore. It’s hard to appreciate that Stan and I once had a pretty good relationship, but that he’s going to die because of me.
“Maybe I want more than that,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s angry or sad when he says it. He rubs his face again, and settles his Stetson on his head. He goes back to sit with Stan without looking at me again.
Well, most of him goes, anyway. Ištar and sat follow after, like the ghosts in a long-exposure photograph. The lioness stays behind, shimmers back into being.
She is staring at me.
“Shut up,” I tell her, and she shakes her head and yawns. She settles on her haunches like an overgrown tea cozy, and I can tell she’s in for the long staring haul.
Fine. Fine. I shove my sunglasses on and try to go to sleep. It’s hard, though, because I keep thinking about Ryan shoving everyone away so that he can die alone, without hurting anyone.
He’s not going to shove me away. I will not allow it.
I wake up when Ryan touches my shoulder.
“Time for walking again?” I ask tiredly, and sit up.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but he’s not looking at me. I don’t think he’s apologizing for waking me up. He looks so sad. I move over to sit next to him and put my hand on his knee.
“Thanks for doing this,” I say softly. “I know it’s not easy. I know I’m a pain in the ass. I know Amanda is totally shirking and Stan is . . . there’s nothing here for Stan.”
“He’s going to die.” Ryan looks at me, and I think he’s sorry.
“Yeah,” I admit, and I hate it.
He notices. “I should’ve done more. I could’ve gone out earlier to get him. But I didn’t, because I was too busy arguing about bringing you to Hell at all,” he says. His eyes have tiny lines crinkling the corners. He lets me close enough that I can see his tiny lines.
“I’m glad you tried,” I say. “I mean, it would be kind of gross if you were the kind of person who could just—Look, you said I didn’t have to come. Remember? You said.”
Behind us, Roxie murmurs in her sleep, and I hear her move, her leather swishing against itself.
“If you’d said yes . . .” Ryan looks rueful. “I would’ve taken you to Long Island to hide from everyone else, would’ve actually gone to Amanda’s house instead of just wandering Battery Park and thinking stupid things. You’d be safe.”
I snort. “And that would clearly be some kind of coffee-making demon pretending to be me. I’d never agree—I didn’t agree. And even if it really was me, and I had agreed, it would all be an elaborate ruse.” I nod decidedly. “I’d just find myself a Door out on Long Island and chase after you.”
He laughs quietly. He stretches his legs out in front of him. They go on forever, encased in black lamia skin. “I think that’s why I like you so much,” he says. “You don’t put up with me trying to be a white knight.”
“Oh, I totally do. Just not the times when your white knight stuff leaves me out of the game.” I pause, and I know my voice sounds different. “You like me?” This is so embarrassing. This is junior high social drama all over again.
Two high spots of color, one on either cheek. Ryan’s blushing again. “Yeah,” he says. “I—yeah.”
Maybe not so embarrassing. I touch his chin and turn him to me. I lean forward and brush my lips against his. “Thank you,” I whisper.
“You’re welcome,” he whispers back, and he hesitates, he stops, and for a second, a split second, I think he’s going to push me away again, even after all this, but instead his hand comes up to my face, and we’re kissing, really kissing, and god, how could I have missed this already?
His mouth is warm and doesn’t taste like anything except him. I breathe in the air he exhales. I feel shaky all over, like I’m going to fly apart at any second.
“We shouldn’t,” he says against my mouth, but doesn’t pull away.
“We shouldn’t,” I agree, “but—I want to.”
“I want to, too.”
“I am still here,” says Roxie in a cold voice, and I giggle.
“Me too,” says Christian.
“Me three,” says Stan, and snickers. “But feel free to keep going.”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry.” I move away from Ryan—a little bit. He drops his hand from my face, and I want to think it’s reluctantly. His mouth is wet, shiny. I wonder what I look like to him. I’m not the beautiful one—Amanda is the beautiful one. I’m passably pretty, pleasingly plump. I have round thighs.
But he said he liked me. And he blushed. And now he’s pushing me down, and his coat is around both of us, and before I go back to sleep I think to myself: Ryan is secretly a romantic.
When we wake up, Christian is gone. We didn’t hear him leave and none of us saw him go. All we can see is the river and nothing else forever and ever, and the Door to the next dimension doesn’t say anything at all.
17
“Be careful here,” warns Ryan when I step through the Door.
“Why?” Something crunches under my foot, and my first thought is that it’s more bugs, but then I look around. We’re just in some woods. Tall trees with leafy canopies that block out most of the light from above, and a forest floor with pine needles and rocks and just a little dampness. I look around. It’s exactly the same in every direction. Flat land and trees. Boring.
The trees look kind of weird, though. I squint. There are big scratch marks ringing a lot of them, all the way up. Cats? Bears?
Except I think I recognize the scratches. This wide, and this deep, and . . .
And I once cautered an entire ingot of silver onto Ryan’s back to heal a set of scratch marks just like those.
“I know this Hell,” Ryan says. He looks at me and Roxie, and then looks pointedly at Stan. “I think we all know this one. Allie, after you’ve got the location for the next Door, take a minute, okay? But keep your eyes open.”
I think I know what Ryan’s saying. And I hate it.
Stan’s standing a few feet away, hands cur
led loosely into fists. He still looks like Stan, but I can’t smell summertime on him anymore.
I drop the blood. The Door obligingly pops up before I can even identify myself. Good for it. I point for Ryan and Roxie’s benefit, but instead of marching forward I walk over to Stan.
“Hey,” I say quietly, and take him by the hand. He’s warm. So warm. “Come on,” I say. “I’ve got some gossip I never told you . . .”
As we walk through the trees, I keep up a good low-level talk about Ryan, and me, and the diner, and the Doors, and how sorry I am. I talk about Amanda, and how I wish she was with us, even though she’d be no help. She’d complain the whole time. She probably would have snuck something forbidden with her through the Door, like a pack of cigarettes and a flask. She would have brought Scotch, because it is what gets her drunk the fastest. Even after years of drinking, she only needs a few sips of Scotch to be pretty wasted.
But she always buys the good stuff to do it, the kind of Scotch that costs at least a hundred dollars for the bottle. And it wouldn’t matter to her if any of it got spilled somehow, because she could just buy another bottle.
I remember being that casual with money. And I remember, right after my mother left, when it was still all just like a dream, like these bad things were happening to someone else, Amanda got me really drunk on a bottle of vodka that cost hundreds of dollars, because it was filtered through crushed diamonds instead of being filtered through charcoal.
Amanda knew all about it, and told me all about it, and all I could think, while she was talking, was that all of my money was gone—gone with my mother to Rio with Rio—and I would never be able to afford to buy anything like that ever again, unless I married well. And who would I marry?
“You could marry Stan!” suggested Amanda brightly, and I almost punched her.
“Why would I want to marry Stan?” I had sneered. “What the hell would I do with him?”
Amanda hadn’t even blinked at my snide tone. She just said, “Spend his money, of course,” and poured me some more vodka.
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