by Helena Maeve
“North County. The shitty end.” Much as she might have liked to claim otherwise, Eve hadn’t returned to St. Louis to live in Pasadena Hills. Being strapped for cash had gotten in the way of a triumphant return—and besides, there was no one left who might have cared either way.
To his credit, Neil barely even batted an eyelid. “Want a ride?” he suggested. “I’ve got enough gas.” And he had already proven that he was scrappy in a fight.
But Eve shook her head. “The trains are still running. Don’t worry,” she added, when she caught him hesitating. “It’s perfectly safe, for someone like me.” Meaning someone who could take a punch and still come out on top. Neil wasn’t the only one who could handle himself in a tight spot.
“Okay,” Neil said, relenting. “It was…nice seeing you again, Eve. Even if the circumstances were—”
“Don’t get all sentimental on me now. You know how I hate that.” On impulse, she rose up on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his cold cheek. It was early enough that the streets were deserted. There was no one around to see them. “Goodbye, Neil.”
At least this time she had stuck around long enough to say it.
* * * *
The new rule seemed to be that any part of the city that didn’t require human input to function was still very much in use, wheels turning and gears spinning on their axis. As soon as people were required, dwindling manpower made itself felt, crippling schools and hospitals and even churches.
Eve passed a couple of mosques on her way home, both of which seemed deserted, and a strip joint that wasn’t. She stepped around a couple of drunks disgorging last night’s binge on the sidewalk and wrinkled her nose. Her own wine bottle was still half empty. She decided against peeling off its contents and left it on the front stoop of her third-floor walk-up like a modest contribution to widespread public drunkenness.
The welts on the soles of her feet might have healed up, but she felt achy and bruised everywhere else. Adrenaline couldn’t banish the pain forever.
She stripped as soon as she had the front door locked tightly shut behind her, letting her ugly jumpsuit fall where it may. She was down to her underwear by the time she reached the shower and turned the taps on. Miracle of miracles, warm water poured out. It was just what the doctor had ordered—or close enough, because Eve had a powerful aversion to white coats these days and she hadn’t seen a doctor willingly in some four years. The rust-yellow tint of the water was almost unnoticeable.
Water sluiced down her dusky skin in rivulets. Eve bent her head beneath the spray, letting the warm water soak away the dust, sweat and dirt that seemed to permeate every nook and cranny of the city. Now that trash collectors had effectively closed up shop, garbage was piling up on the sidewalks, clustering in mounds of refuse often beset by swarms of black flies. Everything was rank with death, as if the world as a whole had already hedged its bets and decided to take the easy way out.
It was hard not to feel melancholy at the thought. Eve fought to remind herself that she was nearly home free. She’d take a nap then find a cash machine. She would leave as soon as she had the money to secure her way out of St. Louis. It was rumored that anyone who tried to circumvent the free movement laws—so named even though they really did the other thing—was ripe to be shot on sight.
She tried not to dwell on wannabe border patrols getting trigger-happy at the slightest hint of suspicion. She knew the type all too well.
Yet if she didn’t think about escape and she didn’t think about the potential pitfalls, that only left Eve with the thought of Neil. Of all the gin joints, he’d teased and he had been right. That mixture of nostalgia and regret, or relief and frustration made for a heady cocktail. It didn’t help that he had blasted his way back into Eve’s life with danger and excitement. He had convinced her of his mettle without trying very hard.
For all she knew, he had summoned the poltergeist himself and his efforts to dispatch it back into the netherworld had really just been damage control.
Too easy, Eve thought. Too flattering. He hadn’t come looking for her. He couldn’t have. And what did it matter to her, anyway? She had turned the page on that part of her life. She wasn’t the same girl.
The thought lingered as Eve slipped out of the shower and wrapped herself up in a faded, shapeless housecoat. She scrubbed a towel through her curly hair but left it to dry on its own. It was no use trying to comb it into place, anyway. It would only ever do what it wanted.
She wondered idly if Neil missed seeing her with her hair all straight and relaxed, soft like a white girl’s. She wasn’t making a statement with the new look—she just didn’t have the cash to spend on making herself look good. For the past nine months, ever since the asteroid had registered and it had become clear that Earth was under threat, she had been saving up as much of her paycheck as she could to buy her freedom.
Then the prison gates had shut the urban population inside the cities and the government had declared a state of emergency to avoid a mass exodus. They needed the roads clear so they could intervene in rescue operations. The same didn’t apply to the skies, although airline tickets had quickly become prohibitively pricey.
In the midst of this perfect storm of natural disasters and human perfidy, somehow Eve found herself thinking of Neil.
It wasn’t all that absurd, in the end. She was alone and he was alone, and both of them were standing on the edge of a precipice, gazing down at the distance they had to fall. Was it so wrong to want to cling to someone, even if only for a descent?
Eve crossed into her embarrassingly small kitchenette and pried a carving knife out of the drawer. Ten years on, she still remembered how to do a summoning. All it took was a little blood, a piece of paper, a flame. The embers fluttered free in the stale air of the kitchen, dancing and climbing ever higher until they faded out of sight.
The last time she had attempted the ritual, she had done it in secret, at the Briars. The proof of her conjurer’s tricks was in the silence that had followed. Then, as now, she sat and waited, hoping that something would give.
Hoping that Neil would listen.
The sun was high outside her kitchen window, bathing the swath of sticky Formica counter in yellow light. Her shadow lengthened across the tile floor like a specter. She counted minutes, at first, then hours. The wall-mounted clock above the fridge was a flea market find. Eve gave up staring at it, having realized that it didn’t necessarily make the hands move faster.
Just because she remembered the routine didn’t mean she could imbue the rite with power. She wasn’t like Neil. She didn’t have the blood of a hundred generations in her veins, giving her strength.
Go to bed, Karvan. She was wasting time.
A knock on the front door echoed dully through the living room. Eve froze.
Chapter Three
St. Louis, fourteen days before
The knock came again. She hadn’t dreamt it up. That was slightly reassuring because for a while there at the Briars she hadn’t been entirely sure that she could trust her senses. The mind refuses to acknowledge horrors to protect itself. Eve had read that somewhere. It didn’t matter now.
“Who is it?” she called out, pitching her voice high.
The answer came through muffled, but still loud enough to be intelligible. “Neil.”
Oh. It wasn’t a surprise, not really. It’s probably a coincidence, she told herself. Eve scraped the bottom of the barrel for the very last sediments of courage and unlatched the door.
“I wasn’t stalking you,” Neil said the moment they came face to face, as though to pre-empt an accusation. “I don’t even know how I found your apartment. I was just— I was on my way home and I got this feeling…”
Perhaps he would’ve continued trying to make sense of the impossible if not for Eve hooking a hand in his hoodie and pulling him into a rough kiss. His lips were rough against hers and his mouth tasted of wine and metal. She didn’t mind. It was better than the nothing she’d had for the pa
st four years.
Out of her peripheral vision, Eve saw Neil push the apartment door shut and trip the lock. He didn’t break away from the kiss, however awkward it was to maneuver around it. It took him a moment to get his hands on her waist, but once they were there, she never wanted him to let go.
She felt his cold fingers dip under the loose folds of the housecoat, prying the silk open to touch bare skin. He didn’t hesitate to graze his thumb against the soft swell of her breast. He even seemed to like it when Eve shivered from head to toe, canting forward to press him bodily into the door. Control was something they traded back and forth like a hot potato.
The first time they had done this, Neil’s touch had been clumsy and overeager. He had spent himself against her belly with a flood of apologies. Luckily, he’d been young enough that one missed opportunity didn’t mean they couldn’t try again just as quickly. And they had. They’d done it all—awkward sex, clumsy sex, angry sex—but this was the first time it felt as though if they didn’t do it, their hearts would stop beating. Eve didn’t stop to quantify the sentiment. She knew herself well enough to suspect that it was her libido talking. She just didn’t care.
Neil rolled his hips against hers in a tantalizingly slow scrape of jeans on skin and she felt the swell of his cock along her pelvis. With Neil’s help, she stripped out of her housecoat and nearly tore his hoodie in her haste to remove it.
It wasn’t smooth and graceful, and they were long past seduction. His pants undone, Neil only allowed her a second to catch her breath, to tease him through his underwear before he reversed them against the door. The frame shook, impact rattling through Eve as her skull made contact. No matter. She wasn’t stopping for hell or high water. A little pain was par for the course.
Neil bent over her, his body long and lean like a spider devouring its prey, and latched onto her nipple with sharp teeth. That hurt, too, but it was a good kind of hurt—it served to ground Eve when she felt like she might spin out of her own skin and vanish into the ether, a soul without a body to cling to.
“Lower,” Eve gritted out and nudged Neil to his knees. She had always been a demanding lover and she got off so rarely with a partner these days that she couldn’t remember how to let go.
It was pure luck that Neil seemed more receptive to her suggestions now than he had ten years ago, when the slightest brush to his ego had been enough to send them into whirlwind recriminations.
He kissed her belly, dipped his tongue into her navel. It was enough to make her insides flutter embarrassingly, but not quite the satisfaction she craved. “Lower,” Eve insisted, fisting a hand in his wavy hair. He was due for a trim, soon, assuming he trusted anyone with a pair of scissors near his ears. She didn’t. Not since scissors were scalpels and it wasn’t so much about what they could cut but what they might put in.
Don’t think about that now, Eve told herself. Enjoy this while it lasts.
Neil kissed the gentle divot of her mound, nuzzling at her with his nose as Eve hoisted up her leg and pinned her foot on the doorknob. She dragged him to her by the scruff, her chest heaving as she fought for patience, for self-control. Self-denial had gone to the dogs already. All she had was the stubborn refusal to plead with Neil for release. She would sooner order and snarl than beg for his touch.
He seemed to know it, too, because he didn’t linger long. He parted her with his lips, pressing his tongue where she needed him most. He had been a fan of oral sex since the first time they slept together. He hadn’t always known what he was doing, but this was just about the one area of their—doomed, long-buried—relationship where he hadn’t resented her input.
And if I kiss you here, he’d murmur, before doing just that. He’d pull back with a Cheshire Cat grin when he felt her hovering on the edge. “You like that?”
It took Eve a moment to see past the vivid memory surging behind her eyes and realize that Neil had spoken aloud, in the here and now of her matchbox apartment. His mouth was wet with her juices, lips crimson-pink. He looked thoroughly debauched.
Rather than answer, Eve dropped to the floor and pried his cock out of his boxers. Protection would’ve made sense in a world where she could still get sick—where she could still get pregnant—but she was safe from both those things now. Neil didn’t protest as she slid into his lap, straddled his hips and joined them with a steady hand. He fit her just as perfectly as she remembered. Maybe it was a little tighter, a little more in the way of a sharp stretch than it used to be, but self-imposed celibacy was to blame for that.
Neil buried his face against the crook of her neck, shaking as Eve drove them to the carpet, her legs on either side of his thighs. He scrambled to find purchase on her flanks, on her hips, only to end up circling her back with his arms and holding on tight. Eve didn’t blame his haphazard efforts. It was overwhelming.
Her knees dug into the carpet as she moved, rocking back and forth over his stiff length. Her body ached for his, long silent flames fanned to bonfire proportions. Every gasp made them surge higher. Every moan told her that Neil was getting closer and closer to the brink. She wanted to urge him on, to tell him to chase his climax without waiting for her, but the words stuck to the roof of her mouth like honey. She couldn’t spit them out.
As long as they didn’t acknowledge it, perhaps they could pretend this hadn’t happened, right?
Wrong. It was wrong to do this at all, but she didn’t give a shit. She sat up, pinning her weight with both hands on Neil’s chest, then touched herself under the heat of his smoldering gaze. Shame wasn’t in her repertoire. Let him see the scars. What did it matter if he found her attractive after all this time? He could look away.
He didn’t. The intense focus of his blue-gray stare forced a groan from her throat, a sound that became a whimpering moan, and before she knew it, she was coming, screwing down onto Neil with no thought for the neighbors and what they might hear. She felt Neil arch to meet her in a series of small, abortive movements that cut off abruptly as he gripped her thighs and thrust in deep.
Heat flooded her from within and slicked down her thighs. For a few breathless moments, her body was pulled taut with the stretched-out remnants of pleasure. As soon as it had passed, she collapsed onto Neil’s chest, gentling her fall as best she could with one hand in his hair and the other scraping aimlessly along the floor. It was ungainly and awkward, especially since she couldn’t seem to stop shaking. It was what it was—a mistake of the best kind.
“That was…” Neil started.
“Yeah,” said Eve, not sure what she was agreeing with, only that she couldn’t seem to make her mind process more than one-syllable answers.
It was maybe a minute before she pulled away, gripping Neil’s softening length by the base as she lifted up and off him. Her knees, she discovered, were as pink as her cunt.
“My back’s a little sore, too,” Neil said, sitting up. His sweat-slicked hair stuck out over his ears, giving him a vaguely comical expression.
Eve didn’t laugh. She was too wrung out and her joints creaked as she stood. Neil took the hand she offered him. Had they not trodden this path before, perhaps they would’ve been more awkward about the aftermath. As it stood, they both seemed to know not to make more out of it than what it was.
If Eve didn’t let herself face her own reflection in the mirror, it had everything and nothing to do with the fact that she knew what shame looked like when it took on a human guise.
“There’s hot water,” Eve said, wetting a washcloth in the sink.
“Oh. Excellent.” Neil fiddled with the shower taps and made a small, pleased noise when warm water gushed out in a steady stream. “Do you want to join me?”
It was a tempting offer and, precisely because it was so temping, Eve shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied. She wasn’t fine. She was a long way from fine and the only thing keeping her together was the knowledge that she had done something stupid of her own volition.
She wasn’t a slave to the changes in
her body, the festering adjustments that had turned her from a born shifter into something else.
“Okay.” Neil didn’t push his luck, though his reflection in the grimy mirror above the sink spelled confusion. That, too, was new. Normally he would’ve insisted. He liked to needle her and he did it well. He had been the only one to know her weak spots, a long, long time ago. Now he had to share that dubious honor with faceless scientists operating on the wrong side of the law.
Eve swiped the sodden washcloth down her thighs and belly, washing away the worst of the congealing mess on her skin. She was still waiting to hear the bite of guilt from Neil when the shower cut off. He pulled aside the curtain with water dripping from his hair into his eyes and trickling in translucent rivulets down his rosy skin.
“Can I use this?” he asked, forcing Eve from her reverie.
She nodded. She had summoned Neil to her—the least she could do was allow him to use her towels to dry off.
“I should get dressed,” she said but didn’t move a muscle. Something was keeping her there, rooted to the spot. Stuck might have been a more appropriate term for it. The world was ending and she couldn’t make room for her ex-boyfriend to step out of the shower properly.
“You know, this doesn’t have to be awkward,” Neil murmured. He blushed as their eyes met. “Not that I’m saying it is, but—”
“It is,” Eve acquiesced. “Look, there’s something you should probably know about me.” She folded her arms across her breasts, untroubled by her own nudity. It was hard to give a damn when she had spent her formative years running with a pack. Clothes didn’t usually stay on one’s back when you shifted.
Neil smiled. “That sounds ominous. Do I need to sit down for this?”
There was a whole apartment they could’ve done this in and yet Eve had chosen to broach the subject in her narrow bathroom, when she could still smell herself on Neil’s skin.
“Part of the work being done at the Briars was meant to give us better control of our second form,” Eve said, ignoring his quip. “The result had some unforeseen effects.”