“I don’t understand,” she said, turning toward me.
“Yeah,” I said, “part of you does. You’re afraid to go with that intuitive knowledge yet; you’ll learn that in time too. Your instincts can guide you. It’s the universe whispering in your ear.”
“You were serious about all this magic stuff you been talking,” she said. “You meet guys all over this town that claim to be into occult stuff—usually it’s a pick-up line, or an excuse to wear black and be an asshole.”
“Listen,” I said, “inside. Listen, hear the music between things, between you, in you.”
I saw her open herself to her own inner voice; the knowledge crossed her face for just a second, then she shut it down, hard.
“Are you trying to tell me I’m some kind of psychic or something?” she said. I saw the driver’s hate-filled eyes flick back to us in the rearview mirror. The noise from the radio had diminished.
“Turn it back up,” I said, blowing cigarette smoke out the window, “right now. And if you look back here again, I know several very reputable rakshasa in this town that I will personally invite to feed on your liver. Now drive.”
The cabbie muttered a prayer in Hindi and turned the radio back up.
“Psychic is a word,” I said. “My granny called us Wisdoms. Geri’s kin call us Secret Men or Initiated Men. Wizards, warlocks, witches—lots of w’s there. Magus, Illuminate, hoodoo, Drabarne…”
“Drabarne. My grandmother used that word,” Magdalena said. “You are saying I can do magic? I’m some kind of witch?”
“I’m saying you have the potential to open yourself up to a wider universe, to new perceptions, to power, real power. Yeah, darlin’, I am.”
She looked out the window into the darkness between the islands of city light. She placed her hand on the cool glass, and I could see her shadowed reflection in the window, a face filled with rain. “Why me?” she asked softly. “I’m not anything special, I’m nobody.”
“I don’t know why,” I said. “I don’t think there is a why. You have choices now. Decisions about what you want to do with it.”
“Can I just ignore it?” she said, the ice cracking in her voice. “I don’t want anything to do with it, okay? This is fucking crazy. Magic isn’t even real. This is bullshit.”
“You don’t believe that,” I said. “Not even as the words are falling out of your mouth. You know it, you feel it, and you’ve felt it most of your life. You can run from it, pretend it isn’t real, and ignore it. It won’t ignore you. It’s no coincidence that we found each other. The people who exist in this world—most of us call it the Life—can sense each other. We’re like lodestones. The Life tends to drag us toward one another, and toward trouble, weird trouble.
“The power doesn’t really give a damn what you want. I’m surprised you haven’t run into one of us before. So, yes, you can keep on keeping on. But even if that is your choice, you needed to know about all this, so when the weird shit comes a-knockin’, you can at a least be ready to run, not just piss yourself and lose your mind.”
The words seemed familiar to me, and when I realized their origin was my grandmother, a terrible sadness filled me. I wish I had listened.
We were quiet for a bit. Her hand found mine and I took it. She was tough, I’ll give her that. Most people who just find out that all the paranoid, schizophrenic shit they thought was bad juice in their heads was actually not madness but hyperreality, they tend to lose it. She didn’t. She took my hand and we rode through the endless city.
“I was with someone for a long time,” she began. “I … enjoy submission, I like having someone take control and take me out of my head. I had a lot of bad things happen when I was a kid … that doesn’t really matter. I like it and, at times, I need it. This woman, I met her, and we fell in love, and she gave me that, and I gave her what she needed too, I thought—a sense of being in control of me, of protecting me and caring for me. I thought…”
She was fighting the tears, and so far, she was winning. She turned away from the night and looked me in the eyes.
“She was like you, into all this occult shit. She was powerful, like you, like Didgeri, maybe more powerful. She scared me. She was building a cult around submissives who worshiped her like a goddess. She was buying up land in Mexico, recruiting medical personnel, military types, as her slaves.”
“She have a name?” I asked.
“Yes,” Magdalena said, nodding, “but I don’t want to say it. I can still feel her regard sometimes, like she’s looking for me, and if I think about her too hard, if I say her name, then she will come get me. I know it’s stupid, but she fucking terrifies me.”
“No, no,” I said. “That’s actually a very good idea. Don’t think about her if you can help it. So things went bad and you left?”
“Yes,” Magdalena said. “She started dominating me all the time, not just when I consented to it. She forced me to take part in her rituals. She … used me in them. Now I think that I was some kind of … battery for her. She used me. I always felt so bad afterward, like I had the flu. I liked her putting me into a submissive mind space, but then she started trying to addict me to it, try to crush my free will. I ran away, took another name, and hid. I got help, helped myself. Started over. So, yeah, I have met someone in the Life before, and she was a psychopath and nearly ate my soul.”
“I know you don’t want this,” I said, “and I understand why, but if you accept this part of yourself, master it, then if this crazy bitch ever does turn up one day, you at least have the tools to protect yourself, to keep running, maybe even to take her down.”
“I don’t want to take anyone down,” Magdalena said. “I just want to focus on beauty, on creating things. This ‘Life’ seems to all be about control and power and using people. I don’t want that.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “Didgeri was doing a working tonight; it was part of what you felt in the club. It was about making people open up, making them feel good, feel connected. The power is a tool; you can make of it whatever you want, whatever you have inside of you.”
“Could you teach me?” she asked. A cold knife slid into my guts.
“I … wouldn’t be a good teacher,” I said. “I suck at that. I’m just telling you what your choices are and letting you know you have options. I’m trying to help you, Magdalena.”
“If this is some bullshit scam to get me to sleep with you,” she said, “it is the worst ever.”
“No,” I said. “Unfortunately, after all of the psychic vulnerabilities we’ve been ripping open tonight, it would be really, really shitty of me to do that. Bad wizard form, I’m afraid. Could get my pointy hat revoked for that. Just a confidante and a friend.”
Magdalena gave me a very strange look and squeezed my hand.
The cab pulled up in front of Grinner’s building. The rain had canceled the usual ongoing block party. We got out, and I reached for my wallet to pay chuckles, the cabbie. The second we were out of his cab, he gunned it and roared away.
“Come on,” I said, putting my arm around Magdalena, “let’s get out of this damn rain.”
The apartment was dark. Grinner and Christine were either asleep or not home. We shed our coats and walked down the hall to our rooms.
“Well, thanks for a very … unique evening,” she said. She held up the thumb drive. “And thanks so much for this! I can really make some things happen in my career with these in my portfolio. You’re a hero, Laytham.”
“Bullshit,” I said, “but I appreciate the sentiment.”
She moved a step closer to me. “Well, you were a Boy Scout,” she said, resting her hand on my chest. I felt my pulse jump at the touch.
“For at least a week,” I said. Awkward silence. No one moved, no one stepped away. The feeling I had when we had first met and talked was back. The unspoken thing that is either there or not, granted or forbade.
I knew what was right; I just really didn’t give a damn.
I ran my hand through her long, thick raven hair, still damp from the rain. Our eyes locked. I clutched a handful of her hair tightly and pulled her head back. She gasped. Excitement, and a touch of fear, flared in her eyes. I felt a cool sense of control settle over me, wrapping itself in my arousal, my desire. Our mouths, hungry, insistent, clumsy in need, opened, fell onto each other, upon each other. She moaned under the crush of my lips, my tongue.
She pushed me against the wall next to my door. Her nails were raking down my back, her legs wrapping around my waist. Her tongue, teasing, flicking my own. It was my turn to moan.
“You going to get in trouble for this?” she said, gasping as our mouths separated for a moment.
“Trouble is my business,” I said, with apoligies to Raymond Chandler, and pulled her by her hair back to my mouth.
We crashed into her room, the only light spilling in from the hallway. There was a vanity with a cracked oval mirror, a dumpster treasure, a dresser from the same back alley store, and a proper bed with tarnished brass head- and footboards. There were dark candles everywhere, on every milk cart pedestal and bookcase, on top of the dresser and the vanity, and there was a brass stand that held a large white candle near the window.
As one clumsy, thrashing organism, we stumbled to the bed and fell onto it laughing and moaning. Clothes were flying everywhere. I sat up and put my hand to her pale, perfect throat. She gasped, then relaxed against my hand. I kissed her bare shoulder and then kissed my way up to the tender junction where shoulder met neck. I moved her head backward slightly with pressure to her throat.
“You want this?” I said. “You need this?”
“Yes,” Magdalena hissed. “I need to be outside my head. I need to feel out of control, to be under control. I want it.”
I tightened my grip on her throat and sank my teeth into her alabaster shoulder. She gasped and her head flew back. Her body shuddered as pain and pleasure burned through her nerves.
My hand slid from throat to her breast, clawing at the corset. My mouth was at her ear again. I chewed on her lobe for a moment. She gasped again; her hands were clawing at my chest, pulling at my sweater, tearing it. Her hands were running through my hair, tugging on it.
“Mine,” I growled into her ear. “Mine, tonight.”
Her lips found my cheek and then chin as she covered me in sweet wet kisses.
“Yours,” she said, her voice muffled against my neck. “Yours, tonight.”
Magdalena fell back on the bed, her hands sliding under my sweater and T-shirt, teasing, raking my nipples with her nails. Sensation surged through me. Still crouched on the bed over her, I turned my gaze to the harsh light of the open door.
“Propinquus quod obfirmo!” I said, and stabbed at the door with my finger. The door slammed shut, and the lock turned with a click. I made a sweeping gesture with the same hand all about the suddenly dark room, and said, “Candela exuro perspicuus!”
All the candles in the room flared to life as one. Magdalena’s eyes were huge, full of honeyed darkness in the flickering candlelight.
“Power,” I said as I pulled my shirts over my head and tossed them into the darkness. “Control, will, submission. All of these are the first principles of magic, the currency of the universe. You’ll learn that sometimes you control the power and sometimes it controls you.”
Magdalena traced the scars and the tattoos across my skin with her nails. “Which is better, control or submission?”
“Yes,” I said, and we both laughed. We kissed again. She raked my chest with her nails and I caressed her face, tracing my finger along the pulse in her throat.
I pointed at the beat-up old boom box she had sitting next to the vanity, surrounded by towers of loose CDs.
“Lascivio Al Viridis,” I said.
“Love and Happiness” by Al Green began to play.
“Turn over,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Magdalena murmured. She rolled onto her stomach, like a great sleek cat stretching. I began to unlace the corset, revealing more and more of her porcelain skin and more of her tattoo ink. She was magnificent. I pulled back on her hair, like the mane of a mare. She moaned and reached for the small nightstand next to her bed.
“In the drawer there … I’ll get them,” she said, breathless. The last seams of the corset popped loose as she stretched to reach the drawer. I climbed off the bed and quickly removed the rest of my clothes. Magdalena rolled off the bed on the other side with a squeak and a giggle and did the same. Wrapped in shadow and guttering candlelight, she was a dark goddess. It was impossible to tell where the darkness of her hair and her eyes ended and the night began. The smile on her face could make saints fall, gladly. She held up a pair of steel handcuffs, the chain between the bracelets suspended by her single slender finger. She climbed onto the bed and crawled toward me.
“Think you can get these on me?” she said, purring.
I stepped forward and climbed on the bed, grabbing her by the wrist. She gasped. We rolled and struggled, biting, kissing, tumbling, snarling, and moaning. My mouth found its way to her nipple, and I teased it with my tongue as her hands slid to my waist and then lower. Her teeth sank into the biceps of the arm I was holding her wrist with. My teeth scraped the skin of her hard nipple, and we both gasped at the sensations. I rolled and forced her onto her back. The cuffs were in my free hand; I snapped one of the bracelets onto the wrist I had already captured. She grinned, and with her free hand slid her nails down my back; the pain was sharp and warm and it made my loins stir and made me gasp. I captured her other wrist and pulled it forward, looped the handcuff chain between the posts of the headboard, and snapped the other cuff on. She struggled against the cuffs, her arms now stretched above her head. For one horrible second, I saw Berman nailed to his office wall, his arms stretched the same way, but I shoved the profane thought away. No ugliness tonight, just beauty and passion and power. The rest was waiting for me tomorrow.
I ran my hand over her face, traced her lips. The struggling began to diminish. We were both panting, sweating.
“That,” Magdalena said, gasping, as she reached up and kissed me, “was fun.”
“Mmmhmm,” I said, our eyes locking.
I put my hand back to her throat and she closed her eyes, a sigh escaped her lips. My other hand traced a line from her lips to her breasts. I took her nipples between my thumb and forefinger, teasing, pinching them, then moved my hand lower. She moaned and squirmed under me.
Magdalena had numerous colored scarves wrapped and knotted around the bedpost. I released her throat and stopped my teasing of her body to undo a beautiful black-and-blue-patterned one. I raised her head and we kissed for a long time, deep, sweet, and slow.
“Do you trust me?” I asked. I ignored the thoughts stabbing me in the back of the brain, shoved them in the hole with the crucified banker and listened to my reptile brain.
“Yes,” Magdalena said, almost whispered. I slid the scarf around her head and covered her eyes, knotting the blindfold tight in the back. I kissed my way over her body, down her body, exploring, lingering, and learning where she most enjoyed my attentions.
I picked up one of the candles, a red one in a glass jar. I held it a few feet above her body and slowly tipped it until a stream of the hot wax splashed on her shoulder and flowed down to the top of her cleavage. Magdalena gasped and then moaned. I did it again, this time the wax splashing over her hard nipples and running down the sides of her breasts and onto the sheet.
“Oh,” Magdalena said, writhing, as the next stream of hot wax made contact with her pale skin. I picked up a white candle, then a black one, and used each one in turn to paint her skin with wax and pain. The patterns merged, melded, bleeding, flowing like a Monet, like a Rumi poem in flesh.
The hot wax dribbled on her stomach … lower, lower.
“Yes,” she mouthed, her voice a whisper.
The orgasms began, rolling, building, crashing like the thunder that heralded the storm. Magdalena could h
ardly make a noise, barely convulse, as the pleasure flared in her like dying stars. Again and again and again, until time was a frozen, broken thing.
I could feel her retreating into a secret, private place inside herself, as she became more and more engrossed in the sensation itself, moving past the place where pain and pleasure had definitions and boundaries, past reason, past the waking mind to something far more intimate, far more intuitive.
At the heart of the ecstatic mystic tradition is the understanding that reason blocks the path to understanding, to hearing the pulse of the world, its beautiful voice. Much of the practice, regardless if you talk to a Sufi or a snake handler, is to let go of the prison of the self, of reason. Here, blindfolded and bound, Magdalena had reached that place when the division between goddess and flesh were gone. Freedom. The inebriation of the infinite.
I put the candles away and gently touched her hair. She shuddered, soundless. I found the cuff keys in the open bedside drawer and unlocked her. She moaned at the feel of the cool steel leaving her skin. Magdalena was covered in dried candle wax, as were the sheets. I pulled her close to me and covered her with a quilt. She mumbled and rested her head on my chest.
“Thank you,” she muttered. She wrapped her arms around me and slept.
“No, thank you,” I replied, but she could no longer hear me.
In the silver, overcast dawn, the gunmetal sky of a rainy morning, she woke me with her body moving against mine, her mouth to mine. The need between us was hunger, thirst, gasping for air. It couldn’t be ignored or denied. Both of us were half asleep, and we moved in perfect symmetry, becoming one, feeling the pulse between us quicken, rise beyond the ability of reason or understanding, expand to encompass everything, all of us, both of us, one.
Magdalena’s eyes opened wide as we both came; they had changed from dark and hot, like an August midnight, to brilliant, acetylene blue. Power welled up between us, through us, and in the instant of our communion, every candle in the room erupted with a brilliant blue flame and then snuffed out, dead.
The two of us held one another tight, gasping. I watched as Magdalena’s eyes faded back to their normal color.
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