I found Jeff on the karaoke stage, improvising lyrics to Led Zeppelin from Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians—the bit about fornicating. He was going over pretty well. Such a blond.
Nevertheless, no woman came up to him after he stepped off the stage.
He looked ready to cry.
I took his elbow. “Let’s go.”
“Why did Baz leave?” Jeff said. “I thought he was going to sell our bodies.”
“Who to? It’s all couples tonight.” Plus my shirt, or rather, Veek’s shirt, was ripped to shreds. “C’mon.”
We walked down Ravenswood Avenue toward the Lair.
“Did Mella go?”
“Yes.”
Jeff openly wiped his nose. “Why?”
I thought about punching him, but I reflected that his Keek had already worked him over pretty hard. Instead I shared my insight.
“We’re all trapped, Jeff. That love spell trapped them the same way it trapped us. They can’t let go.” I thought of Mella’s face as she tried to free me. Free me! Hah. As if she could undo what love had done. Scorazterax was right. Love was bigger than both of us. I explained this to Jeff.
“Thithomiel said that. He said love’s rules are separate from good and evil. How can that be?” Jeff sounded bewildered.
“Fucked if I know. Let’s consult the fount of all wisdom,” I said, not entirely sarcastically.
We let ourselves into the Lair and plodded upstairs. As we entered the kitchen, I heard Baz speaking. “They’ll never be sex demons, but I have hopes we can get rid of them by the end of the week.”
Jeff and I exchanged a look.
“Really?” I said, as we walked into the kitchen.
Kama was waxing the hair off his toes. Baz was loading the dishwasher.
Baz glanced up. He must have seen the rage in my face.
I straddled a kitchen chair with an angry swagger. Jeff hovered beside me.
“No score?” Baz said, as brazen as you please.
“Why won’t we ever be sex demons?” Jeff said.
Baz lifted his palms. “Look, you’re in love. Sex demons don’t fall in love. You can love ’em. Or you can leave ’em. But you can’t love ’em and leave ’em. Once the sparks of that love spell hit you, you were badly at risk, and once you met those women, you were screwed.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Jeff said.
“I’ve already gathered that,” I snarled. “You could have helped us.”
“I did warn you that if you met them, they’d have you. And then you did, and then they did. And I did help you. You’d still be trying to fuck her up against a wall if it wasn’t for me.”
“You said they would kill us if we didn’t do right,” I accused.
“I said love could kill you.”
“That’s a metaphor,” I said.
“It is?” Jeff said, drooping. “Because I feel like I’m dying.”
Baz folded a page of the newspaper and tossed it across the table at me. “Recognize this guy?”
I looked. The story was about a man found washed up on the shore of the lake. In the photo, his face seemed empty of life and hope. It was a terrible face. Had the picture been taken before or after he died?
Then I looked closer.
“Hanrazaz?” I squinted. “Oh, no. This guy—I was in the helo with him. Guy I worked with for three hundred and eighty years.” I was stunned.
“There’s more pictures online if you want to see them. His Infernal Identification Number is tattooed to the sole of his foot. Only ID they could locate on him.” Baz grinned mirthlessly. “His dental records sure as hell don’t come up.”
“Are you telling me he died of love?”
“Last paragraph.”
I read it. According to the article, the dead man’s girlfriend had died of food poisoning the night before, and “Hank” had told her brother that he was going to drown himself because he couldn’t live without her.
“Well?” Baz said softly. “Could you survive if your ladies left you?”
“Don’t they die, too?” I said, my blood chilling. The Box Rule seemed pretty cruel to me, but at the same time, it comforted me just a little, thinking that Mella might be in just as deep as I was.
Baz shook his head. “Mostly their hearts break. Some of them break their hearts many times. Some of them do kill themselves.” He looked from me to Jeff. “Do you want them to die because you drop out of their lives?”
I pictured this and buried my face in my hands.
Jeff said, “How can her heart break? She’s like a sex demon herself. She’s done that thing with so many men, surely—”
“Maybe, you sanctimonious fuck, she was never in love with any of them,” Baz said. “But she loves you. Congratulations. You’ve stripped away her defenses. Now she’s as vulnerable as you are.”
“I see,” Jeff said, sounding unsure.
I saw. I’d disarmed my prickly Mella and left her unprotected. I tried to explain this to Jeff, who seemed dazed. “I think Baz is saying that if you leave her, your Keek won’t be able to be promiscuous any more.”
“That’s good,” Jeff said cautiously.
“Your work is done, eh?” Baz said.
“She won’t kill herself,” I said. “But she might try to fight the battle of the sexes again, the way she used to. And she’ll get hurt, because you broke her heart and left her wide open.”
I was speaking of Keek, but I was thinking of Mella, who had such a low opinion of herself, she thought she didn’t deserve me. Me!
Jeff looked at me with reproach. “I thought you’d understand.”
I said scornfully, “I understand that you left a comrade on the field of battle because you think you’re better than she is. I may have been a piss-poor soldier in Hell, but even we don’t do that.”
“You know, the metaphor these days is about football,” Kama said, looking up from trimming his toenails.
“Yeah, you’re a big help,” I said savagely.
“If you love her, you go back and work it out,” Kama said. “If you’re a sex demon, you shrug and move on.”
“Like you did?” Baz said.
“Shut up,” Kama said.
“I don’t know what I am,” Jeff said miserably.
“I don’t know what you are either,” Kama said. “But I know what you’re feeling. You’re breaking your own heart. And hers.”
Baz looked at me. “You too, soldier boy. I used to make war myself, back in the day. I could still be a soldier if I wanted to. War never seems to go out of style. You want to run away from what’s-her-name and enlist?”
I looked at Baz as if he was crazy.
“But,” Jeff said, sounding really upset now. “What about right and wrong? You can’t run the field on the rules of love. The Home Office—”
“Nobody ‘runs’ the field. It runs itself,” Baz interrupted him. “The Home Office, like the Regional Office, invests a ridiculous amount of capital in publicity, promoting their brand. They’re so busy telling everyone how different their toothpaste is from the other guy’s brand, they’ve totally lost touch with their customer base in the field.”
“I’m sure you’re wrong,” Jeff said, frowning.
“So you’re cutting us loose,” I said, to pin Baz down.
Baz looked at me. “It’s not us you want to be loose from.”
Chapter Five
I FELT TERRIBLE. Mutt and Baz kept arguing. I couldn’t. My head didn’t feel right. My jaw and my stomach hurt where Keek had punched me, and I felt hollow, the way I’d felt after those green sparks hit me and sent me tumbling over the cemetery wall.
I gave Mutt the other half of my beer and wandered outside.
Someone was walking past the door as I left the Lair.
She was short and round, wearing knee-high lace-up army boots, fishnet stockings, tight, shiny running shorts, and a sleeveless shirt that showed round yet muscular arms. The streetlights made her hair look electric-raspberry-colored.
The hollow feeling went away. I started walking after her.
“Keek,” I said, when I was close behind her.
She spun around to face me. “What do you want?”
“You were waiting outside the Lair,” I said.
“Was not!” She didn’t seem mad, either.
I took a couple of deep breaths. If she’d been hanging around the Lair, then she wasn’t cutting me loose.
“Mutt says I wronged you. So does Kama.”
“Kama’s that Indian lust god?”
I nodded. “Mutt says I abandoned a comrade in battle. And Baz says I’m overpromoting the Home Office brand of toothpaste, and I’m out of touch with the field.”
She raised her eyebrows. “This makes sense to you?”
“Not entirely,” I confessed. I looked down and took her hand in mine. “Can—can we go somewhere where it’s quiet?”
She held my hand. I felt her hand warm up. Pretty soon she was smiling as if she didn’t want to be.
“Can you carry me when you’re flying?” she said.
“Probably.”
She turned, and we walked hand in hand up Ravenswood Avenue. “I know where we can be alone. But you’d have to fly us there.”
I could feel my wings trying to slide out of my shoulders. “Um—sure—but—” I had on a sparkly sleeveless shirt Baz had called a rocker beater which we had borrowed from his former roommate’s wardrobe. I could feel the straps getting tangled with my wings.
Keek laughed at me. “Here. Hold still.”
After some wrestling we got the beater over my head, and then one arm got free, and then one wing, and then the other wing, then the other arm. I felt sweaty and foolish when I finally threw it to the sidewalk.
Keek was still smiling at me. She raised her arms. I hoisted her up, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, and I leaped into the air with her, feeling like an eagle that’s got away with a whole sheep.
With Keek in my arms, I remembered how easy it was to touch her. When we were this close, I knew what she wanted. It was easy to be with her. As I flew, she laid her cheek against my chest. I imagined that my heartbeat was telling her the things I didn’t know how to say.
“Where are we going?” I said to her hair.
“Cemetery. There’s a place I want to show you.”
We flew over the cemetery wall. Keek twisted her head to look down and directed me along the asphalt cemetery roads in the dark to a pond, and a grassy mound, and a set of grass steps bordered by cement going down to a doorway in the mound, barred by a gate.
“What is this?” I said as I set her feet on the grass.
She grabbed my hand. We looked down the steps. At the bottom, beyond the gate, was darkness.
“I’ve always wanted to see what’s in that mound,” she said. “But in the daytime there’s always people around, and at night I’d be chicken.”
“Plus you couldn’t get into the cemetery at night. Not without wings,” I said, feeling proud of my usefulness.
“That’s right.”
“Are you chicken?” I said.
“Not if I’m with you,” she said, and my heart swelled up, all hot.
I squeezed her hand.
The night wind blew through the trees, smelling of bus exhaust and a hint of rain.
We walked down the grass steps. The iron gate was shut by a chain and a padlock that hung inside, away from view. I reached through the bars and pulled it around where we could see it.
“It’s a combo,” Keek said. “Give me a minute.” Kneeling, she put her ear to the lock and turned the dial. Behind her, I could hear tumblers move. In a moment she had it open. She pulled the chain through the bars, clank-clank-clank.
Keek swung the iron gate open and went in. I followed.
Slowly my eyes adjusted until the dim light from the doorway showed me a little stone room. There was nothing inside but one big flat stone lying on a pedestal. A few dried leaves lay against the walls. There was a smell of old animal musk.
“Kinda dark in here,” she whispered.
I cupped my hands and made a light. Up at the crown of the ceiling was a light fixture, but there was no light bulb in it. I got up on the flat stone and reached up…yes…my glowing yellow ball fit neatly into the socket.
Her eyes got big. “That’s cool.”
She was beautiful in the soft yellow light. She’d left off the harlowe paint, but her earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings, and lip stud gleamed. I wanted to take them out. It looked as if she’d been trying to hurt herself. I hated to think of Keek trying to hurt herself.
I clambered down off the stone slab, keeping it between us.
She walked slowly around it toward me. “Jeff,” she said, sounding breathless.
“Yes?” I felt breathless, myself.
“I brought you here to talk to you.”
“Okay.” I tried not to sound disappointed.
She moved closer to me. “Only I don’t remember what I had to say.”
I moved closer to her. Her body temperature rose sharply. I extended my hands, palm out, and felt her heat pulsing toward me along with her heartbeat. She leaned in my direction.
“Um, was it about me selling my body?”
That stopped her. She pulled away. I held my breath—maybe I shouldn’t talk, as Baz suggested. Everything I thought came out wrong. I should stick to doing.
“Mella says you’ve sold yourself cheap to me.”
“I’m not selling anything,” I said, frowning. “Keek, I don’t understand how all this fits with what I know. Maybe it doesn’t. I’m terribly ignorant.”
I paused to give her a chance to be angry. If she would stop me from talking, I might not make her hate me!
She didn’t speak.
I said, “I may seem stuck up, but it’s just my ignorance. The Home Office brand is all I know.” I retracted my wings so it wouldn’t seem like I was acting stuck up.
A smell began to come off her like the leftover musky smell of the animals that used to sleep in this room, only her smell was fresh and…happy. It was so quiet in the room, I could hear her breathing change.
“The thing is, Keek,” I said, feeling myself begin to sweat, “I don’t want to give up my brand.”
She held very still. I could hear the changes thundering through her body. I could smell them. She opened her lips a couple of times and I cringed. Now I saw what Baz meant when he said love can kill you.
If she hated me, I had no reason to live.
“Jeff,” she whispered finally.
I tightened my stomach. “What?”
“I really, really should let you talk. I haven’t been fair. You have a right to your opinions.”
No, I thought, stop me! Don’t let me mess this up!
“But I have to be honest with you right now.”
Dread slowed my heart to a wrecking-ball pace. “Yes?”
She looked anxious. “The state I’m in, I can’t listen. I can’t be fair. If you don’t make love to me soon I may start screaming.”
I let out a huge breath. “Come here.”
The roof of our two-flat was divided in half by a piece of chain-link fence with plastic slats threaded through it. The landlord had bought big, heavy yard chairs and chaise lounges and chained them down. Keek used our half of the roof more than I did. I’d never found mildewed plastic chaise cushions all that romantic.
I went up there when I couldn’t stand my life any more. I’d kneel at the parapet wall and look across the street at the railway embankment and the heads of giant cottonwood trees that peek over the embankment and the cemetery wall beyond that. Sometimes huge flocks of crows came and roosted in those trees. If I was really unhappy, I’d squawk at them. Sometimes I thought they were squawking back.
Tonight, I got up on the edge of the parapet wall in my bare feet and my big granny nightie. The limestone towers of the cemetery gateway were silhouetted against the starless, gray city sky.
If
I could turn back the clock, would I run out into the street just a moment earlier? Maybe Mutt would have fallen straight into my arms, if he could have seen me. Maybe he wouldn’t have tried to escape his fate. Maybe the spell would have been stronger if I’d got my hands on him twelve hours earlier. Then he would never have known the difference between freedom and…whatever we were.
Even I knew better than that.
Why would he want to trade serfdom behind a desk in hell for slavery in my bed?
Yet Mutt would come if I called him.
Which was exactly why I couldn’t call him.
A warm night wind started up somewhere to the south, bringing scents of lindens blooming in the cemetery and fresh-cut grass. I teetered on the parapet wall of the roof, feeling the summer wind fluff out my nightgown and lift my hair off my back. I stretched my arms out.
I could just say his name. Three times, bang, no waiting.
And then he’d be trapped in this box of his, where master and slave did whatever. I felt weak all over, thinking of his big, hard body trembling under mine and the frightened animal under his sarcastic badass demon facade.
“Mutt, why? Why did you let yourself be trapped by the Regional Office? Why would you submit to being trapped with me?”
I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until I noticed the big, blazing number one, like a stoplight in my mind.
I’d said his name once.
Stop right there, Mella. Don’t summon him “by accident.” That would be tacky.
It would never have worked. He didn’t know anything about my world, about the real world, which he called “the field” as if he were some kind of salesman who could never earn his full commission because he was stuck behind a desk. I wondered if they would let him back into the Regional Office if he got hold of my soul. Maybe then they’d forgive him for getting hit by enchanted green sparks and blowing the mission and falling in love against his will.
Would that make him happy? Would he be content to get his old life back?
Or would they punish him anyway?
Would he hate going back?
Would love ever let go of him?
The parapet wall chilled the soles of my bare feet. I covered my face with my hands.
In that moment I knew love wouldn’t let go of me. Somehow I’d let my guard down with a guy who knew nothing about sex, who thought fucking for money was a job, who grew horns and talons whenever he freaked out, which was apparently twice a week. So far. The week was only two days old.
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