• • •
This is wrong. It’s midday. Why is it dark?
Sal floated in the darkness, furiously blinking her eyes to try to acclimate. She saw a spark to her right and tried to maneuver towards it.
Sal.
That was her. Someone was saying her name. She thought it was the spark. She floated toward it with more urgency. It grew, and warmth emanated from it. She wanted nothing more than to touch the spark and feel its heat.
Sal.
She had no real body, she realized with little surprise. She had been distilled to the essence of herself. Was this her soul? Was she dead?
The spark got larger and larger and kept saying her name. She got the hang of her locomotion once she grasped the concept of her lack of body and suddenly she was there beside the spark, which had grown to a pillar of fire.
Sal, it said.
She reached out her hand, or what she thought was her hand, to touch it. Some corner of her head screamed at her to stop, to think, to not merge with an unknown entity because that was how every single problem in her life recently had begun.
The pull was too strong. She reached out again and touched her fingertip to the pillar of flame.
It devoured her.
The warmth was delicious. She felt a release of a breath she didn’t know she held, a satisfaction like the final piece of a puzzle fitting in with the whole. She had a body now, and eyes, which were shut.
She opened them and saw Grace floating with her. Their hands were entwined.
“What happened?” she asked.
Grace craned her head around. “I’m not sure.”
Their eyes met. “I’m not sure I care,” Sal admitted.
“No,” Grace agreed. “This feels right.”
They no longer had any fingers; their hands glowed brightly where they touched, as if they were becoming one pure being.
“I haven’t felt … right in so long,” Grace said.
“You’ve been alone for so long. You don’t let anyone in,” Sal said, not unkindly.
“You got in,” Grace whispered.
Their knees touched, the light growing brighter. “I feel like we should be afraid,” Grace said.
“It doesn’t feel bad. It feels—” Sal searched for the words.
“—Right,” Grace gave her.
It was the only word that worked. “It’s like it’s a gift,” Sal said. “What do you want?”
“You,” Grace said. Her lips hovered an inch from Sal’s.
Something pinged in Sal’s mind, something that was outside of this perfect light she was making with Grace. Something that was her, individually, the things outside of her emotional need for Grace. Her determination. Her fear. Her sense of duty.
Who?
Sal pulled back. “Who?” she asked.
Grace increased her hold on Sal. She closed her eyes and leaned in. “You,” she repeated. “You know. You’ve always known.”
Sal shook her head against the temptation. “No. This is a gift, but from who?”
“Does it matter?”
“Grace, think about what we do for a living. Of course it matters.”
Her dark eyes opened and a bit of the shrewd thinking returned to them. “But it doesn’t feel evil, or wrong,” she said. “Sal, I—”
“I know, Grace, me too. But not like this. Not here. We need to save Liam, remember?”
Grace’s eyes flew open. “Liam. The cyber-succubus. Oh no.”
Sal leaned back from the temptation of Grace’s lips, and pulled. It was physically painful when their connection broke, leaving an ache she feared would never go away. When they released their hands, they landed hard on the floor in Imogen’s bedroom.
• • •
“Is there anything else?” Asanti asked, turning to a fresh page in her notebook. She’d filled several pages with Menchú’s information.
“I don’t think so,” he said slowly. She raised her eyebrows. “I mean it.” He met her eyes, and she slowly nodded.
“All right.”
“And I’m sorry, Asanti. Things haven’t been the same between us in a while, and my actions regarding this didn’t do anything to help. I hope we can rebuild the trust between us.”
She waved her hand, focusing on her notebook. “It’s forgotten, Arturo,” she said.
His insides tightened. It wasn’t forgotten. And it wasn’t all right. He would have felt better if she’d raged at him, or cried, or even quit the Archives. Those would be honest emotions he could trust. This indifferent, almost calculating, response was worrisome.
But you couldn’t fault someone for forgiving you.
Could you?
“Are you angry?” he asked.
Her attention snapped back to him. He could see her considering her answer carefully. “I was. As you said, you and I have a problem with trust, and it’s not getting any better. This is just another incident.” She adjusted her glasses and looked down at her notes again. “But we have so much information here, I think I can look past it and we can get some work done again.”
“Look past it? You’re going to look past the fact that you can’t trust me?” he asked, outraged.
She smiled. “Arturo, do you want me to be angry with you?”
“I want honesty from you. I want to be honest with you. I want to trust that I can speak with you honestly. And I don’t feel like we have any of that.” He threw his hands in the air, giving up. “And it feels damned strange, yelling at you for not being angry enough. But I want an honest reaction, Asanti! Is that too much?”
She put down her notebook and came to him. She gently took his hands and her brown eyes met his. They were full of kindness, the way he remembered them.
“Arturo, we have years of history between us. We’re not going to let a few rocky months end our friendship. You have trusted me with this information now, and I am grateful for that. This can be a first step to rebuilding that trust between us. I was hurt. A little angry. But I forgive you.” She pulled him close and hugged him.
He hugged her back, but couldn’t help but wonder if she was going to be willing to take the next step in rebuilding that trust.
• • •
Sal blinked her eyes, dazed and aching all over, physically and emotionally. She was very aware of Grace beside her, burning like a beacon. She felt like she wanted to sob, but she climbed painfully to her feet. She staggered toward the bed, where Imogen was about to undress a barely conscious Liam. She grabbed the woman’s arm and wrenched it, hard, behind her back.
Caught by surprise, Imogen screamed, and Sal yanked her upright and presented her to Grace, who was standing with fists clenched.
They didn’t need to speak. Their eyes met and Grace nodded once. She stepped forward and hit Imogen hard, knocking her out. Sal dropped the woman like a sack of potatoes. They looked around the room; it had been destroyed by the wave of whatever had caught them when Grace tore the computer out of the wall. The bed was charred, the dresser and fainting couch were splinters. Liam was still unconscious, but breathing.
“Are you all right—” Sal asked, and then Grace had her in her arms, pulling her close.
Their foreheads touched, and Grace’s eyes met hers. “Just this. Give me this and I’ll ask for nothing else.” Their lips met, tentative at first, but then with more passion.
Sal’s hands came up and touched the sides of Grace’s face, stroking her soft skin and then tangling in her silky hair.
Sal wasn’t sure how long they stood there, holding on to a scrap of the intimacy they had shared in the throes of the succubus, but Liam groaned on the bed, and she and Grace reluctantly stepped away from each other.
“Are you all right?” Sal said, going to his side. Her voice was ragged.
“I think—” Liam licked his lips, his eyes still closed. “I think I will send email to all the other people I need to make amends to.”
“Good plan,” Sal said, smiling.
• • •
/> They identified the source of demonic power as the video camera, a camera Liam remembered once being the property of the Network. They’d been practicing putting scraps of demons into technology.
“It was my idea to put the succubus in there,” Liam said sadly. “Before, I mean. And I forgot about it. So this time she turned it on and I was lost. She had a focus for her energy right here, and she reached more men than ever. I’m sorry, Imogen.”
They shrouded the camera and stood looking at Imogen, whom Sal had covered with a blanket after she and Liam had lifted her onto the bed.
“I feel like I should be sorry for taking her toy away. It looks like she’s made a good living with it,” he said. “Except for paying her landlord, but she was never responsible with bills.”
Sal looked at him as if he were insane. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I know it’s evil, but come on, it’s like we’re taking away a taxi driver’s car. How will she make a living now?”
“She can buy a webcam for twenty pounds on Amazon! She doesn’t even have to put on pants! Buy it! It comes to her door! Hook it up! Do dirty things! Profit!”
Liam frowned. He knew things were overall better, but poor Imogen had felt attached to the camera, and built her life around it. And it had devoured her while it tasted the men she connected with.
In the car on the way to the airport, Liam bought a high-quality webcam and had it sent to Imogen’s flat. She might get kicked out because of the damage to the apartment, but at least he could replace the tech they had confiscated.
He and Sal sat together on the way home. Grace sat across the aisle, staring at her new novel, The Book Thief.
“What’s up with you two? She’s like an ice queen over there,” Liam said, nodding toward Grace.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Sal said. Grace didn’t raise her head, even though they were both looking at her.
“Sure, yeah,” Liam said. “So I didn’t wake up to see you two lip-locked like one of you was going off to war?”
Sal’s face went crimson. He grinned at her. “Don’t worry, my manhood isn’t threatened.”
“The last thing I ever worry about is your manhood,” she whispered fiercely, but then sobered. “I guess it was the succubus’s mind control. It made us—it made us almost too late to save you.”
Liam shook his head. “That mind control’s a real bitch, isn’t it?” He sighed. The “mind control” defense was too common an excuse for real feelings if anything magic was involved. It was a damn shame that Sal wouldn’t admit to what had happened.
Should he tell them that the succubus energy they’d felt had only amplified existing feelings and desires? Liam had desired Imogen—how could any straight man not desire her?—and he’d been caught. And Sal and Grace clearly had wanted each other.
He thought back over the last little while and finally figured out what was behind their odd silences. Even if they didn’t know it. Or wouldn’t admit to it.
They’d have to figure it out themselves. He wouldn’t tell them. It wasn’t his job to atone for this; he’d done nothing wrong. It wasn’t his job to try to figure out how to make his ex-girlfriend come to terms with her feelings about someone else. There was only so far he would go to help a friend.
He looked out the window and thought of Imogen, and hoped some day she could forgive him.
He checked his email with the plane’s Wi-Fi. Menchú had written to say he and Asanti had met and made some headway in figuring out Hannah’s motivations and goals. That was a good sign. Still, Liam couldn’t believe Father Menchú would have hidden such a secret from them, and let them walk around and work beside such a hellish creature. He might ask for his own meeting with the Father.
He read the email again. At the end, Menchú had said:
I understand if you have questions, and I am here to answer all of them. You’re facing your inner weaknesses and atoning, Liam, and I admire you so much for that. It’s shining a spotlight on my own weaknesses that I must admit to and address. Please drop by when you get in. I would very much like to talk to you.
Liam wrote a quick reply, agreeing to see Menchú after they landed. He felt something release inside him, something he hadn’t known was tight. Menchú was his rock, and someone he could never lose faith in. If he didn’t have Menchú, no one else in the world truly believed in him.
Well, there was Sal. He glanced over at her as she tried to doze. He smiled slightly.
“Sal,” he whispered, leaning in.
“Napping,” she said, not opening her eyes.
“Just thought you should know that the succubus energy wasn’t mind control. Neither of you did anything that you hadn’t already considered.”
Her face grew pink, but she didn’t answer. Let her feign sleep if she wanted. He’d gotten his message across. He was glad she and Grace had found each other. So long as they admitted it before one of them got eaten.
He settled back and closed his own eyes, and wondered how he could get himself a girlfriend who wasn’t possessed by a demon and didn’t end up cursed by the Hand or half turned into an octopus.
Bookburners
Season 3, Episode 9
Homecoming
Brian Francis Slattery
1.
Professor Sifuentes had been in the jungle for a week, and the animals were starting to get to him. They weren’t bothering his project; they were either frightened or noncommittal about the work he and his archaeological team were doing. But all night they kept him up, screeching and scrambling in the branches over his head, and small objects kept falling on his tent. In his midnight delirium, he imagined the monkeys were deliberately throwing these objects. He slept no more than three hours at a stretch, woke up feeling almost like he was coming down with a cold, and stretched a shaky hand toward the cup of coffee that Teresa Alarcón, his graduate assistant and the foreperson for the project, always seemed to have ready for him.
Alarcón was cut out for the project in a crucial way that Professor Sifuentes was not. She was up before dawn, planning the day for the work crew, and went to sleep soon after dark. She claimed she slept better in her tent in the rain forest than she ever did in her apartment in Oaxaca. Before Professor Sifuentes had his cup of coffee, Alarcón’s morning enthusiasm made a rage that he struggled to contain boil in him. Once the caffeine kicked in, he was merely grateful. The funding for this dig, here in the rain forest on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, was not limitless. They had only the summers to assemble the crew before Professor Sifuentes had to return to teaching during the school year. Every day mattered, and Alarcón was helping him make the most of it.
Central American archaeologists had known about the site—nicknamed La Lágrima, the Teardrop, due to the shape it made in the jungle in aerial photographs—for decades, but its small size and remote location had made it less than desirable for excavation. Even now, Sifuentes was a little unsure what drew his attention to La Lágrima in the first place. It was a couple of local stories, a hunch, a gut feeling. It had taken him days to get to the site; he questioned his own actions. But he and Alarcón, who’d been a first-year graduate student at the time, were rewarded. In the unexcavated walls, they had found sets of etched glyphs that seemed unique to La Lágrima, figures in stone that appeared nowhere else. It justified further research even from a linguistic perspective. And now, three years later, their early explorations were yielding so much more. Including an anomaly Sifuentes could not explain.
Sifuentes was poring over a new set of glyphs on the eastern side of La Lágrima’s small temple building when Alarcón tapped him on the shoulder.
“You need to see something,” she said.
“What is it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You need to see it.”
The room was in the back of a small apartment that, they guessed, once constituted a priest’s quarters. Stone walls, stone ceiling, stone floor, all covered in glyphs. A slit in one wall all
owed a beam of light, a breath of air, into the place.
“Wow,” Sifuentes said.
Alarcón nodded.
“How is this possible?” Sifuentes said.
Because after a thousand years of abandonment, as the jungle turned the temple into a hill, the ball court into a grove, and all the other rooms in the house into caves for bats, warrens and dens for mammals and reptiles, nests for birds, sanctuaries for a thousand varieties of plants … this room was bare.
“It’s like the Maya just left,” Alarcón said.
“But why did nothing take their place?” Sifuentes asked. “What kept the jungle out? What was it so afraid of?”
“You make it sound so sinister,” Alarcón said. He could hear in the tone of her voice that she was teasing him.
“You’re right,” he said. “There’s no need for drama.” But something passed through him, a sense of dread. Something was wrong.
• • •
The Orb was dark, quiet, like the rest of the Archives. Menchú looked upward at the vaulted ceilings, then lowered his gaze to the stacks. Now he let his eyes move from one member of his team to the next. Sal. Grace. Liam. Asanti. The Vatican had drawn lines between them lately, sometimes forced them to draw lines amongst themselves. Yet they still kept coming back together, Menchú thought, this little family of his. By age and experience, he should be its father, he and Asanti its leaders. He could never quite let them know just how much he was making it all up as he went along, how much he relied on them. Though maybe, he thought, that’s what all fathers did.
“So what brings us here today?” Liam said.
“I’ve been thinking about Hannah and her experiment, doing some research,” Asanti said. “Trying to get ahead of her.”
By instinct, Menchú searched the faces of the people around him—his team, the assistants in the Archives within earshot. He was looking for those eyes, the sign that Hannah was with them. He didn’t see them, and felt his nerves ease.
Bookburners Page 30