I sang, closing my eyes and thinking I would come home tonight…to Vickie, and to Mia, and Vance. I would survive, and if it meant that Max had to be removed, so be it. No remorse was felt in that moment of choice, her life or mine, and I chose mine. I felt her beginning to fade.
I sang, more powerfully and I didn’t fear it. I was what I was and if I was to be damned for it…well, it was too late to worry about that now.
I opened my eyes and looked into Chance’s beer bottle green ones. He was close and working at the knots that held me. I sang right at him, And I want to rock your gypsy soul, just like way back in the days of old. And a part of me felt the ages stretching behind us and felt him tremble. I was already rocking his gypsy soul. I pulled harder on Max and my eyes fluttered closed. Then magnificently we will float into the mystic.
I couldn’t feel Max anymore. She was there and then she was gone. Her flunkies had fallen long ago, and there wasn’t enough there for me to drain. I still needed, still ached, but there was nothing left for me to drain. I sang, aching,
I was silent and untied, but I didn’t move. Chance was there, and I could feel him, but I was in the weird throbbing pain again, somehow worse than when it started rather than better.
Chance mumbled the last line of the song. “It’s too late to stop now.”
I bent over, nauseous, hurting and fell to my knees on the floor. Oh, God, it hadn’t worked. I was still dying. Why? Why was I still dying?
“Come here.” Chance touched my fingertips with his own. “Now we finish this together.”
I tried to curl away from him. That put me face to face with Max. Oh, God, Max was dead.
And I was dying. I fell to my elbows on the floor, powerless to do more.
“You are changing. You need more power.”
I tried to shove off his hands. He removed my shirt. Here I was, freaking dying, and he was trying to get me naked. Only a man…
I could faintly hear the music from the bar. I think it was Killing Me Softly. There was no killing softly. I was having my soul torn from my body in burning waves.
He got my shirt off past my struggles and pulled me onto his lap, facing away from him. When my back touched his front it was like I had hit the very surface of the sun. I opened my mouth to scream and light poured out instead of sound. My pores were open, pulling the light in, but it was too much, so it burned and poured back out of me. I went limp against him, my head falling to his shoulder behind me. He held my hands out from my body, so that every inch of my back pressed against his chest. My arms lay against him, my hands…every inch that touched was a conduit of his power into me. My body realigned itself…shaping to form something that wasn’t me, but at the same time was more me than I had ever been before.
Every curve of my spine, shoulders, and arms fit into him like two puzzle pieces clicking into place. He buried his face in my neck, so I turned my face slightly and our cheeks touched. My hands were still spread, as if welcoming the day, and he was behind me, a shadow of me. My fingers curled around his, clinging. He bent our arms in, one high, toward my heart, the other to rest above my belly button. It was like a hug of power from behind. I breathed in his scent and it smelled of life. He moved his face against mine and my lips parted.
And just then we evened out. That is the only way I could explain it. The power had been flowing from a higher concentration, him, to an area of lesser concentration, me. I had learned about that in science class years ago. It was like if you put a drop of blue dye in a glass of water. The dye would spread until all of the water was equally light blue. Only now the power had found its balance. It thrummed around us, a cocoon of light.
Time itself stopped in awe. The air was still, and everything was waiting…waiting.
He turned me slightly, releasing one of my hands. I moved with him, wrapping myself around him. He held me. We fit perfectly this way, too. I was an extension of him—no that wasn’t quite it. We are one. One being, severed in two at the dawn of time. Both waiting, searching, for the part that was missing. And here it was. I was content in a way that I don’t think anyone can or should be in an earthly state. I’d found home.
He moved and I moved, in sync, and our lips met and my soul danced up to mingle with his. It was a play of tongue on tongue…souls merging and joyous. It tasted of life, and strength, and I gulped it down my throat. I was alive. I was…needing. The need built.
And a fire lit in my belly—it was no longer an innocent kiss. He was fire and electricity, and I was water…eternally drawn together, but never allowed to mix. I was the chalice, and he was the sword. We were the eternal symbols of man and woman, meant to be joined. I gasped at the sheer need that filled me. More than water, more than food, I needed his touch. His hands slid up my back and mine dug into his shoulders. Everywhere his skin met mine I burned. Every nerve in my body sang a song sweeter than any siren’s song. I slid against his body, hard and unyielding. I was softness. I could feel him, tugging me closer, closer, but never close enough. We moved until we lay on the floor, a tangle of limbs wrapped in a womb of light. His lips moved over my skin, greedy for more, ever more. My lips moved over him…now his shoulders, his waist, his arms…never enough.
A storm swept me ever higher. If I could take this, if I could touch him and have him, I would never have to fear, to want again. He was all that I would ever need.
A tiny beat in my brain held me back. It whispered no. It said no, it is his need. His desire. His choice. Not you. Not you. Not you. But it was a whisper in a storm of feeling. I tried to ignore it.
His head dropped to lay against mine, forehead to forehead. His heart beat with mine, his breath raced with mine. He was going to take me somewhere I had never gone. I wanted this. I wanted him. We needed one another. Without each other, neither would ever be complete, whole. And he opened those beautiful glass green eyes, so ageless, so empty with out me and—
The spell broke. I blinked. Glass green. He was not mine, and I most certainly was not his. The whisper of thought in my mind gelled into the word No.
I slid off him, terrified.
He breathed out one ragged breath, and the light fell like snowflakes around us. I crouched, staring at him. He was foreign, he was other… he was unlike anything on this planet. Why hadn’t I sensed that before? What was happening? Why would I allow something that alien to touch me?
I looked at him. Chance. He is Chance. I am Janie. Janie Smith. Naming seemed to place me more firmly in the now. I was me, Janie Smith, and Janie Smith did not roll around on the floor of a bar after being double crossed and kidnapped. Okay, Janie Smith did not get kidnapped or double crossed either. Janie Smith was normal. Just a dirty dishwater blond single mom, that’s me. I prefer jeans to skirts. I like the color blue, Foamy the Squirrel and Jenna Marbles. I am me. And me did not need another half to make her whole. I remembered the taste of chocolate and McDonald’s French fries. I am me.
I looked past him, seeing a movement in the mirrored door led into the bar. I hadn’t paid it much mind before. I did now. There were Max and her men’s’ bodies reflected in the mirror. There was Chance’s back, and the chair I had been tied to, all reflected.
But there was a creature there, too. I moved toward it, a very bad feeling in my stomach.
No. All I could think was Nonononononono...
It moved when I did, but with more grace and control than I had ever moved. Sinewy and sleek as a white leopard, its hair hung, straight and white, almost silver. It’s blue eyes glittered at me, but then they shifted and shone green as Chance’s. Another flash and they seemed almost yellow. I blinked and so did it. Golden light flashed behind the eyes and then they sparkled like drenched violets.
I stood, still not able to entirely connect myself with the creature in the glass. With skin so pale as to be nearly translucent, it had my bra on. And my jeans. Bootcut. My favorite pair, knees worn thin as paper.
Okay, so that is me. I stared at my abdomen.
I traced do
wn, where my stretch marks had been. And my pouch. Now it was all smooth and hard as marble. Tears threatened. My stretch marks were gone. I had joked about a spell that would make my body perfect…be careful what you wish for. I hadn’t meant my stretch marks. They were battle scars in the war to create life, erased as easily as crayon from a wall. My stomach was smooth, the skin firm, the musculature perfect. My favorite jeans hung like a sack on hips far smaller than mine had been since I had been a kid.
Janie Smith was not perfect. She was flawed and human. I was flawed and human. I was not this creature reflected back at me. I wouldn’t be.
But my abdomen wasn’t entirely perfect. There, where my hipbone protruded—my hip bone protruded! I hadn’t been slim enough for it to “protrude” since Vickie had been born!—there was a mark. A dark mark. There was one on each hip and one at the base of my throat. Two stars and a moon, the moon being on one hip. I traced the one on my neck with my thumbnail and it was all I could do to stay on my feet. A wave of sheer sexual pleasure hit me in the loins like a fist.
I looked at the mark, afraid to touch it again. “I have a tattoo?” I whispered.
“It is a mark of kills or destructions. You will have one appear per kill. It used to be considered a thing of beauty amongst the sirens. There were women with entire night skies on their skin. Tattoos came later, a copycat thing, almost. They are very sensitive. Sirens would touch each others, especially during sex.”
I looked back at Chance. Appreciation filled his eyes.
“What have you done to me? What am I?” Even my voice was not exactly mine. Melodic, smooth, and even in my terror, a thing of beauty in itself—it terrified me, and I clutched a hand to my lips.
“You are Janie Smith,” he replied lightly. “I helped you become what you have always been.”
“I don’t want to be a siren or an elf,” I insisted.
“You aren’t either. You are the only one of you that there is. You can’t be half and half in the world of nature. Either you are a squirrel or a dolphin. There is no half and half. You aren’t half and half. You are something entirely new.”
I looked at the strange creature in the mirror. I bunched my hand into a fist and punched the glass. My skin parted and I bled, but even my blood wasn’t quite right.
I stared at my fist in horror as it fixed itself. I wiggled my fingers, the jewel bright red of the wet blood the only sign that I had just cut myself. I had healed that darn fast. “What am I?”
He came to me and rested his hands on my shoulders. “I think you are very nearly the same thing as me.”
“Which is?”
“Absolutely and completely new.”
I shook. I didn’t want to be new. I wanted to be me. I wanted to be plain old frumpy Janie Smith. I wanted to be normal.
Now, I looked like a siren. I felt like I could fly. And I hated it.
I shook and fell to my knees and he dropped to try to catch me.
And I did the only thing I could. I hit him. I punched his chest and screamed out my terror and beat at him. I hit him and hit him. I don’t even know what all I called him or why he let me. But I beat on his chest and arms and wept and screamed and he let me.
When I wore down, he pulled me close and rocked me like a child. I could still feel bits of me rearranging, forming, becoming less and less me.
I wept and hiccupped, and he just rocked.
When I had worn down to a quiet whimper, he kissed my head. He brushed my new silver hair back with his fingers. He rubbed off the tears with the pads of his fingers and rained kisses across my cheeks. He did all of this with the quiet patience of a father soothing a child who was hurting then we were both still. Breathing slowed and he still rocked. He murmured little nothings to me. I didn’t hear half of them past the screaming in my brain. I hung on and still he rocked.
Finally, I accepted it. There was no going back. I was what I was. I couldn’t exactly undo it and if I could, would I rather have died?
No, I wasn’t foolish enough to think that anymore. I wanted to survive. I was selfish enough not to care if others would be better off without another monster in the world. I wanted to live. I wanted to go to Vickie’s graduation. I wanted to live, to hurt, to love.
I had a funny feeling that I was a whole lot harder to kill off now.
Pulling away from Chance, I decided the whole Chance thing ended now. He was nothing but trouble and I most certainly did not want some jerk who would manipulate me into becoming one of the monsters by lying about my daughter getting kidnapped. I didn’t want him, I wanted my vampire. I didn’t want his glass green eyes or golden retriever sweetness which hid a cold, self-serving asshole. I didn’t want to be whole and all that crap.
I liked being not whole. I liked being like everyone else. A part of me—the new monster part—wanted him, but I was in charge in my head. I was me. I didn’t give a flying crap about all the metaphysical nonsense. It was like, in that moment, I chose to split in two. Okay, sounds kind of schizophrenic, but if I had to be schizophrenic that was okay by me. They make pills for that. So, I would take them, but I would rather take them and see a nice doctor before I let my decisions be made by a supernatural monster.
I tilted my head. Okay, maybe I was just nuts. Let’s put that back on the table for debate.
I shrugged, got up and brushed off my pant legs and hardened my resolve. I am Janie Smith. It was about time to left this freaking bar and got on with my life.
Hmmm, problem. Max. There was a dead Master Magician in the bar next to the jail. Here was a problem that was going to be fun to fix and far better to think about that immediate concern than traipse around in the mess of my mind. “I never thought I would actually ask this question, but what are we going to do with the body?”
“She’s not dead. Not entirely.”
I looked closer at Max. “No, man, I think she is all the way dead. Do you have one of those fire blowing things?”
He looked at me, curious. “Bellows?”
“Yeah, those.” I smiled.
“What are you going to do with bellows?”
I looked at him, exasperated. “Haven’t you seen Princess Bride? You stuff it in her mouth and then push down on her chest if she is mostly dead and she will talk…”
“What?” He had one brow quirked and his head tilted.
“Nothing. Seriously, you old guys have a hard time with pop culture. If she’s only partly dead, what are we supposed to do? I mean, do we call 911, or what?”
“Yes, we should contact the authorities. I don’t think there is anyway that they can associate you with her state.”
“Yeah, I had something similar happen once before. I drove two guys over the edge with my voice without draining them. They said it was gas or something.”
“Fine, so—”
“Oh! There is an FBI agent tied up in the other room.”
“I’ll get her for you,” he offered generously, and left.
A few moments later, the nice FBI lady came out and dropped to her knees. “What happened?”
I looked at her and back at the door. “Where’s Chance?”
“He said something about going. I don’t think he’s fond of police of any kind.”
“Huh.” I scratched at my scalp. “I forgot your name. Sorry.”
“Shawna Pierson. Sorry, I didn’t get yours either…” She looked at me, her dark eyes searching.
“Janie, Janie Smith.”
“Is there a phone around? We sould call for help.” Shawna peered around.
“Sure, out front.” I decided being helpful was beneficial
“Great.” She stood. “What happened to her, anyway?”
Okay, here’s the thing. I don’t want to stay and be questioned by the police either, probably why Chance left. It occurred to him things were about to get sticky, so he bailed. I should probably follow his lead, just this once.
I smiled, “I don’t know?” I tried. “I was just an innocent person she happened t
o kidnap?” I hadn’t really meant those to come out questions rather than statements.
The cop’s eyes narrowed on me. “Uh, huh.”
“You can call and I’ll stay here.” I made the offer with no plans to stay.
“Uh, huh.” Shawna did not believe me. “How about this…I’ll give you my card. I have a feeling there’s a lot going on in this area I may not know about. I have an equally strong feeling you could explain some of it to me. I’ll make you a deal—you disappear today and I forget I saw you. If something of this nature comes across my desk in the future…things that don’t make a lot of sense to me, give me your number and I’ll call you and see if you can help out. Deal?”
Work for the po-po? Me, a secret government agent? Heehee.
That could be cool. Especially now that I had super powers and all. Maybe I read too many comic books, but as Spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility and all that shit.
Okay, I edited that. Again, my head, not yours.
So, I help out the FBI on cases of a supernatural nature. “Deal.” I shook her hand.
She lowered her gaze, and I thought I caught a flash of gold light behind her eyes before she closed them. Nah. Impossible. And I was on the run, right? She headed for the bar proper after I dutifully provided my number.
Assuming there was an exit the way Chance had disappeared, I decided to go that way. It never once occurred to me that Shawna had not asked me what was up with my new freak look.
Well, not that day, anyway.
I found a door that went out the back, ran to the alley to the front of the building, and continued running all the way to my car.
I jumped in and turned the key in the—
The keys. The keys were in my purse. In the bar.
I slammed my head into the steering wheel. A silver car pulled up behind mine with the whir of a racing engine. A look in my rear view mirror revealed Chance behind the wheel.
One might think I’d be smart enough to stay away from him, as nothing good has come from associating with him up to that point.
In this case, the other option was stay and try to explain the whole sordid mess to the nice officers who would do one of two things—lock me up for suspicion or lock me up for being more loony tunes than Bugs Bunny.
Odd Stuff Page 25