Divine Fantasy

by Melanie Jackson

  “Well, I can finally catch a Frisbee with my teeth.”

  It was a small attempt at lightness when I knew there was no mood for it, but the pessimist deserved a reward for trying, so I gave him a small smile. “As the old saying goes, what can’t be cured must be endured. Let’s get that chain. We still have a monster to kill.” And I wasn’t talking about zombies. Even with all the personal trauma, I hadn’t lost sight of the fact that Saint Germain was still free and able to go on causing trouble.

  Me, pro. The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive. Each is all three.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  I had thought there could be only two worse writers than Stephen Crane, namely, two Stephen Cranes.

  —Ambrose Bierce on Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage

  Chapter Sixteen

  We were waiting up in the loft. The window that had once been a door for winching up bales of hay was wide open to the night. Ambrose had fed the lengths of chain we found in the garage through the old block and tackle above the door lintel. The air was cold but still, and with Ambrose beside me pouring out heat, I didn’t feel much beyond a slight chill.

  “I used to have trouble believing in the intangibles.” His expressive voice had flatlined and that made me pay special attention to his words. He turned away from the scaffold that now looked entirely too much like a gallows. I hoped that whatever he had planned wouldn’t involve me hanging from the damned thing.

  “Like love?” I asked, trying to distract myself from what was coming. I had been thinking positively that I wasn’t going to let a little thing like lycanthropy ruin this relationship—and end my life—but I was still feeling very nervous about the temporary suicide thing.

  He shrugged. “Not so much anymore. I have learned that love, or at least infatuation, has observable side effects.”

  “Those can be faked,” I pointed out, trying to sidetrack him from whatever subject was making him so grim. Feeling nervy, I began pacing. But not too far because I got cold if I got too distant from Ambrose.

  “No. Not with me. I can hear a speeding pulse, feel the change in temperature of your skin when you think of me in a certain way. That would be hard to feign.” I felt a pang of what I assured myself was simple hormonal lust and not anxiety about what we were about to do. I noticed he didn’t mention reading my mind.

  “Yogis do it,” I said, still playing devil’s advocate.

  “Yogis slow their hearts and breathing. You…” The dark eyes began to gleam, and I don’t mean that in some metaphorical way.

  What? I stopped pacing and really looked at Ambrose. He seemed exceptionally purposeful. Lustful. And he’d been that way since his transformation into a wolf. He had walked away from me when I was in the bathtub, but I wasn’t so sure he would this time. After all, the worst had already happened and I was infected. I wondered if perhaps he was annoyed that I hadn’t said anything about my own feelings when he declared himself. Or maybe he was just looking for the warrior’s reward.

  “I what?” I demanded.

  He wanted me. I had thought I wanted him, but was that just situational pique because at the time I thought I couldn’t have him? Surely I was not that shallow. I tried to drag my mind away from what was about to happen and really consider this question. Did I want him? Why did I want him?

  I’d been talking about trying for a baby, but were we ready for the whole relationship thing that went with that? We had only known each other for a few days. And pick a moment out of any novel or movie, and I promise you that the love scene wouldn’t happen right before the goody-two-shoes heroine was electrocuted by the hero. I was a physical and emotional mess. He was still partly werewolf. Now that I was really looking I saw it. Slightly long ears and fingers, rough voice, weird eyes.

  My own eyes dropped down to the front of his jeans, and I recalled his body from earlier. Not to be crude, but he seemed more proportional to his wolfish form, which was about seven feet tall—long—than he did as a man. Nature had been more than generous. Too generous?

  What should I do? I was used to being Miss Modesty—a vanilla, bring-me-flowers-and-candy, no-kissing-on-the-first-date girl. Nothing had prepared me for this moment.

  “Maybe you should do what you want and not what’s expected,” he said softly as I turned to look outside; not that I was actually seeing the approaching storm. “As you already know, time can be very short.”

  Maybe I should just let go. I thought about it—probably because it was better than the other things I could be thinking about. Like shooting my mother’s walking corpse, or dying by electrocution as soon as Ambrose called up enough lightning to kill me.

  What would hold me back from this step? Parental values? Ha! Even if I had managed to attract my parents’ attention long enough for them to try to teach me anything, my past was now as irretrievable as Ambrose’s was. Time had placed it beyond mortal—or even immortal—reach. I wasn’t the same person anymore. Miss Modesty’s beliefs and mistakes had nothing to do with me as I was that day. I had to make a decision given my present circumstances, which were rather dire.

  Perhaps it was all rationalization, but when the past is beyond fixing or even recalling, it makes looking forward a lot easier. Screw the right moment or being some kind of a good girl. It was time to toss over some of that heavy emotional baggage I’d been hauling around. So, what did I want?

  The answer was obvious, now that I admitted it. Ambrose. I wanted Ambrose.

  I turned back and smiled at him. The expression must have had a fair share of come-hither in it, because before I could do more than blink, he was there in front of me.

  In spite of his earlier words, the look in his eyes had nothing to do with love—not the romantic kind we dream about as adolescents. I didn’t mind that, though. That kind of love would only get in the way of what I needed and wanted. If I was going to die—perhaps permanently—I wanted to go out on a high note.

  We kissed. Desire attacked me but I didn’t fight it off the way I normally would. It was a violent meeting that left blood on the lips and my heart hammering. The effect was stunning, or more accurately, shocking. His hands, alight with gold fire, that touched my unprotected skin burned as he pulled my tattered clothes away. I wanted to cry out but my voice was throttled by the current that passed from his lips to my mouth. He stole my breath. I kissed him harder and stole it back. His slightly shocked expression told me he hadn’t expected that to happen.

  It surprised me too. Maybe I was already more of an animal than I thought. Or maybe I was turning into one whose instinct to mate was stronger than fear.

  Surprise didn’t keep him away long. His skin was smooth wherever I touched, eerily perfect, as though he had waxed it. Until I felt the first ridge of scars, the weird erectile tissue that laced his chest as he grew aroused and started pulling the storm’s power out of the air and drew it into himself. He blazed with the power of storm and lust.

  I laid a hand against his groin and felt the pulse there. The bulge was thick and long beneath his jeans.

  “Ambrose,” I whispered as the smell of ozone grew thicker in the air. “But is there time before…?”

  “We’ll make time.” His hand fisted in my hair and he made a small sound that was not quite a word. Not quite human. In the distance, I thought I heard thunder tolling. There might have been lightning as well but I couldn’t see it beyond the radiance that surrounded him, a golden white light that danced over his skin. I knew the name for this light, this spirit light: Saint Elmo’s fire. It made him look like a fallen angel.

  He kissed me again, my back to the wall beside the window, and this time I tasted storm on his lips. I would have fallen but he held me up with his body and I could feel my heart synching with his.

  I pulled my mouth away and moaned into the curve of his neck, burying my face in the radiance, knowing I should be afraid or shocked
or embarrassed about what we were doing, and yet incapable of reaching the logical state where I could pull away or even think to say no, whatever the potential dangers might be.

  I felt his skin roughen and wondered for an instant if he would shift again and let his beast free. He pulled back from me and I saw his eyes. They were no longer black but pure feral gold. His jaw also looked heavier and shadowed and his teeth were longer and sharper. Had I actually been kissing that? And enjoying it?

  “Ambrose?” I whispered again, not exactly afraid but feeling more cautious as I looked at his teeth. I was attracted to this part of him, but I wasn’t stupid. The beast was dangerous.

  He stilled, breathing hard as he struggled with himself. After a moment his lashes lowered over his eyes. He held me against the wall, a hand still fisted tight in my hair, but he did nothing more.

  I didn’t want him to do nothing. The dampness between my legs said that I wanted him to do something and do it right away.

  “It’s all right,” I said softly. “Do what you want. I know it won’t hurt me. Not now.” Not now that I was also part wolf.

  He took me at my word. My remaining clothes were torn free. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see if his hands were again fearsome claws. As though guessing what I feared to see, he spun me around and lowered me to the floor, not sparing me his weight as he came down on top of me and pushed my legs apart.

  Then he was in me. Blood hot. No, far hotter than any blood that my cold, wounded heart had ever pushed through my body. I could feel small shocks inside my loins and reevaluated my stand on kinky sex. I decided to enjoy the electrical molestation and worry about being embarrassed later. Sex, and whatever else we shared on that rough wooden floor, was a sweet narcotic moving through my veins, burning away the person I had been and leaving someone new in her place.

  Afterward as I lay there, too exhausted to move, Ambrose reached over and looped the cold chain around my wrists. He rolled me onto my back but I didn’t open my eyes. I felt something cold and heavy over my heart and then a sharp stab as some kind of prongs were driven into my chest. The wound was shallow but painful. I parted my eyelids once and saw some kind of a medallion pressed into my flesh. Small trickles of blood ran down the valley between my breasts, but it slowed and then stopped even as I watched.

  He put his hands under my butt and pulled me forward. His expression was rapt. He glowed so brightly that I could have read by the sheen. He had become a beacon and I said a quick prayer that his light would be bright enough for me to find. Because I wanted to come back—for my own reasons, of course. But also because I didn’t want Ambrose to be alone again. How cruel it would be to have him love me and then take it all away.

  “It’s coming,” he said. If he had any fears or doubts they didn’t show. “Just close your eyes and concentrate on coming back to me.” With that, he pushed back into my body and began moving again. Stunned, I could do nothing but look into his yellow eyes. Then, seeing the lightning rolling toward us, I did as he asked and lowered my eyelids. I didn’t think there was much chance of my losing track of Ambrose while he was actually in my body.

  The light grew brighter, picking out the pattern of the veins in my closed eyelids. I felt Ambrose changing under my hands. I felt him changing inside of me too. He seemed to be growing hotter and had to fight for every inch he had inside of me as my body tried to adapt to the alteration. My own skin tightened and I could feel the small hairs all over me erect themselves. Electricity was crawling over my skin, in my skin. I climaxed and was so caught up in the radiance that pushed through my eyelids and the feeling of fire inside my body that I didn’t feel the lightning strike.

  Then I heard myself scream, and my back arched off the floor. It sounded partly like pleasure but mostly like pain. The noise was also closer to a wolf’s howl than any sound a human would make.

  Thunder and lightning were loosed on the inside of my body and mind. And it seemed that all the light in the world—even the cold moon hiding in the icy clouds above us—screamed aloud and then stabbed through my skin. It entered every fiber of my physical being and perhaps my soul too, spreading pitiless fire. It was the blaze of a laser. But it didn’t burn; rather it melted my heart, drawing away everything that wasn’t essential to survival. It filled the head with merciless white noise, a clamor not understood by the ears themselves, but rather a vibration that distorted tissues, distressed the molecules of the body and drove them into violent rearrangement. I could feel myself being remade, reordered into something stronger, something that perhaps wasn’t entirely human. I think that the newborn werewolf inside of me wanted out.

  Then a flock of blackbirds, a murder of crows, swooped in and buffeted my brain, tearing at my thoughts with talons, confusing and distracting me until I could no longer tell what was happening to my body. I fought to keep my soul in place. There was no proof but I believed that the reaper was closing in quickly. I snarled a warning and this sound was purely animal.

  But then it was over; the tearing claws were gone. Lightning danced over my eyelids and died out slowly, a last climax of eerie, incandescent light that was as soft as a kiss. My body spasmed once more and then the world went black. I was blind and breathless. Dead, I realized, but not gone from my body. Something had tethered my soul.

  I thought I felt Ambrose pull the medallion away from my chest and then something long and cold stabbed me in the heart.

  Pain returned along with breath! Terrible pain as the adrenaline hit me! But my heart did what he demanded and began to beat again almost immediately. I started to shudder with cold. The propellers of normal thought started back up in my head, their sharp blades revolving through my brain as it pulled me back to wakefulness, slicing up the lingering veil that cloaked my feelings. Lucidity returned. I regained control of my body.

  “It’s over. You’re alive.” I knew the voice was Ambrose’s but suspected it belonged more to his wolf-self than the human man. I didn’t care. His wolf would never frighten me again. It had fought for me, had saved me.

  Trembling, he picked up my shuddering body and staggered down the stairs. A moment later I felt him laying me on the floor in front of the fireplace. I was sandwiched between the twin heats of the fire and Ambrose’s body.

  “Open your eyes,” he said. “Joyous, look at me. I need to see your eyes. I need to know if it worked.”

  Feeling reluctant, I nevertheless complied. As I suspected, Ambrose was still partially in wolf form. His ears were slightly pointed, his eyes burning gold. He was also naked.

  This should have been unnerving, but I’ve never seen any sight I loved more.

  Then I looked lower and was nonplused. Damn, if he still didn’t have an erection. Instead of interrupting the mood, the vicious lightning had acted like some kind of electrical Viagra.

  I shook my head, amused. “You have a one-track mind,” I muttered.

  “At the moment, that seems to be true.” He shook his head and sounded chagrined. As I watched, his features again began to draw inward and become human.

  “Then I guess I’m a very lucky girl,” I murmured. My voice was rough. It sounded passionate, but I suspect it was half the effects of the lightning constricting the muscles of my throat when I screamed and howled.

  And then—Heaven only knows why—I started to giggle and blush. Maybe Miss Modesty was back in the driver’s seat and she just wasn’t ready to deal with an aroused he-wolf. Again.

  Academe, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

  Academy, n. (from academe). A modern school where football is taught.

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  Dear Lora,

  I go away tomorrow for a long time, so this is only to say good-bye. I think there is nothing else worth saying; therefore you will naturally expect a long letter. What an intolerable world this would be if we said nothing but what is worth saying! And did nothing foolish—like going into Mexico and South America.

&
nbsp; I’m hoping you will go to the mine soon. You must hunger and thirst for the mountains—Carlt likewise. So do I. Civilization be dinged!—It is the mountains and desert for me.

  Good-bye. If you hear of me being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. To be Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!

  With love to Carlt, affectionately yours,

  Ambrose

  —Letter from Ambrose Bierce to his niece

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Ambrose?” I asked after a while. “When you said that the Dark Man had a ritual for changing his…patients? Well…” I trailed off and kept my face buried in his chest. I wasn’t sure how to frame my next question. There didn’t seem to a polite way to ask if the ritual always involved sex.

  “Yes?”

  I could feel the painful heat of an embarrassed blush burning through my cheeks, but my verbal filters were definitely not working at full efficiency because I went ahead and asked.

  “You didn’t mean that he had sex with the bodies while he electrocuted them, did you?” Translation: You didn’t have sex with him, did you? While I was okay about what had happened with us in the minutes before I died, the image of Ambrose and the Dark Man together was…well, eww.

  Ambrose started laughing. His chest shook hard enough to dislodge me. I was relieved to hear it.

  “No. I just thought it might be more pleasant to have the lightning pass through me first so you wouldn’t suffer from the kinds of burns that I had. They heal quickly, but they’re disconcerting and painful that first time. And though I know you’re stronger now and could take more damage…” He stopped. “I just wanted it to be as pleasant as possible and thought maybe a distraction would help both of us.”