by Beth Dranoff
“Fuck off,” said Janey. Guess his rhythm must have faltered. “You had yours. I’m getting mine.”
Derek’s pace got faster, harder. Mashing Janey up against the wall as she arched her ass back to meet him. I was seeing more of both my co-workers than I wanted.
I glanced over at Sam, who shrugged. Yeah, I didn’t have the answers either. So I took a deep breath and did what I could, holding out my hands and plucking at the jewel-toned threads.
Janey’s were jagged emerald-cut greens, blasting siren reds, and underneath it all a magenta pink/purple out of synch with the others. A color-blind toddler elbows-deep in a basket of wool.
Derek’s were different. Gunmetal grey, burning orange, reds that flowed darker and richer than Janey’s. No wonder they hadn’t gotten together before this.
I relaxed my eyelids and with them the muscles around my eyes. Pausing a moment; it had been a long night. No rest for the recently wicked, though. I dug my fingers in again, pulling at strands, breathing in the energy and releasing the driving pulsating force behind it. Focusing my eyes in again to see fluffy cotton candy pinks and blues, coffee cream off-whites and the freshly churned butter yellows. Maybe these two crazy kids had a chance after all.
They were still going at it, despite the lack of any compulsion at this point. So it really was their choice. Not my business, even with their business on full display; glass countertops with mirrors and all.
Which left me with the seething undulations of life forms on the dance floor. How the hell was I going to pull this off?
“How can I help?” Sam had come up beside me as I stood and stared. Trying not to let the sheer mass of carnally driven potential I needed to untangle scare me. Even though it did. I was only one person. Could I do this?
“I’m here,” said Sam. Sliding his hand into mine, interlacing fingers which still held my scent.
“Do you feel that?” The strands of desire in front of us more amorphous than before. Janey and Derek had changed positions so that they faced each other now, with one of Janey’s legs hooked over Derek’s arm. Who knew she had such flexibility? At least with Derek’s back to me he’d stopped staring.
“I didn’t before,” Sam replied, glancing down to where our hands joined then back at the former dance floor. He let me go, looked again. “Whoa.”
“What?”
“I’m looking,” he said. “There’s dancing, there’s fucking, there’s some before and some after.”
“OK...”
“But when I’m holding your hand,” he said, actions matching his words, “I can’t see individuals. It’s this massive tangle of yarn that keeps moving.” He turned to watch my face. “What’s it like for you?”
“Yarn,” I said. So whatever I was doing had nothing to do with my ability to shift. Otherwise Sam would be seeing it too.
I dropped Sam’s hand to look again; the colors continued to writhe, but less vividly. Individuals less distinct. Slipped my hand back into his again and I could see that the blur of ashen smoke was specific and concrete, albeit in constant motion.
I wasn’t sure why physical contact with Sam helped. Or why it didn’t have me clawing at his clothes to get naked skin-on-skin time with him again.
“Try touching my shoulder instead,” I suggested. An experiment. Yes. “That’s good. As good as holding hands.” At Sam’s quizzical look, I clarified: “I need to leave my hands free to do this.” He nodded his understanding, or at least as much as any of it made any sense.
“How about this?” Sam moved behind me, wrapping his arms loose around my waist. Pressing up, and against.
I shivered as I felt hardness, stirring. Opened eyes I’d shut in my temporary distraction. Yes. If I could keep from trying to climb onto Sam again while I did this, it could totally work. “Yeah,” I managed, voice husky.
I closed my eyes, arms loose at my sides, breathing in the jumble of scents around me, winnowing through the murk to find that droplet of fresh, untainted air. Free of whatever had taken control of the Swan.
There.
I focused on that spot and inhaled, borrowing remnants of its purity, visualizing that drop becoming a smear I could expand into a puddle.
It was hard to breathe in air that felt like syrup. Hands slick with sweat, nails pressing so hard that the sulphur tickle of my own blood rushed to the surface, ready to spring free if the opportunity cut through. Shaking. I pressed my arms down to my sides, an attempt at control, but instead my teeth rattled as I banged at my thighs with closed fists.
Sam kissed the top of my head and squeezed me, his arms across my chest as the inhale/exhale rhythm of him against me reminded my body of what the tempo should be. I closed my eyes and counted down from sixty. Nothing else in that moment but Sam and me and the deepening of my shallow breaths until finally they synched up with his.
Opened my eyes. Almost shut them once more, resisting the need to run; Sam’s warmth was still against my core and giving me roots where I stood. Alright then. Let’s do this.
I held out my arms in front of me, loose, with palms upturned. Touching the chill of energy. Rotating my hands around each other, wrapping as I made contact with a force made malleable by touch. My touch. Around and around, a soccer ball or maybe a seven-month-old baby still in utero, balancing on the air in front of me. Arm hairs standing straight out, still human; a humming energy as my palms passed over each other without making contact. Intangible yet real.
It took a while. Tedious work. I might have gotten bored, pulling and sorting and releasing, if an or else certainty wasn’t turning acid backwash backflips in my gut. The further into the core I got, the less it was an innocuous ball of yarn and the more it became a seething mass of M&M-colored worms. I dipped my fingers in and ran them through the clammy writhing wriggling bits.
Whatever was going on, the epicenter was the far end of the dance space where I could have sworn Sandor had been not so much earlier. More light would have helped, or maybe the addition of another sense would have been a distraction I couldn’t afford.
Where had Sandor gone? He’d been there before Sam and I got lost in each other for a while. Right? I couldn’t remember anymore. Maybe he’d found a hookup of his own? Now that was an image I really didn’t want in my head. And yet, wanting didn’t make it so and I had to pause what I was doing to clear my mind of the possibility of a green-assed Sandor going at it. Ommm. Sheep. The Cookie Monster. Coffee in bed with Sam on a cool Saturday morning after a night of heating up the room with our bodies. Not the cleanest of mental transitions, but it would have to do.
Emerald-green with jagged spikes of hematite-grey wrapped in ropey Johnny Walker velvet-bag purple and vein-slashed thorny red. This was the core. I could feel whatever it was sucking in the frenzied energy surrounding it, catching threads on its pinpricked points, snagging and swirling the bits I hadn’t yet extricated from the birds’ nest snarl.
It was fighting me now. Not with swords or guns or fists, but with a power that pushed back against my own. I was grateful for Sam’s energy, ballasting and amplifying mine. And still I plucked and sorted, each collection of threads matching a sexual congress of some kind. Releasing the compulsion didn’t have much effect on the floor though, with most of the players too far gone into their own pleasure to stop. There were a few dazed stragglers at the fringes, fumbling with straps and buttons. Nothing I could do to help them but hope they recovered from the experience—and got as far away from here as possible.
The dissolution was working its way inward now with the bubbling irregularity of paper held over a flame to fake that parchment effect. Uneven but persistent.
My muscles were aching, straining their limits without picking up so much as a sugar cube. I pressed again against that knot until it released tension in waves that made me sway, light-headed.
But now I recogniz
ed the source, even though I wished I hadn’t.
Alina.
Chapter Thirty-Two
She sat on what used to be the floor, every bit the cross-legged Buddha in the lotus leaf patch. Her eyes were closed, with elbows bent and palms turned upwards so that her thumb and middle fingers touched. There was a yogic meditation pose name for it, I was sure of it, if only I could remember. Some other time, perhaps, when I was less likely to pee my pants in fear.
“Tell me you see her,” I whispered, hoping Sam could hear me.
“Yes,” he said, quiet in my ear.
If Alina knew we were there, she didn’t care. A first. All around her the floor was dissolving to an inky blue—whether it was water, air, or something else, I had no idea. A demonic guru meditating on a magic carpet that never touched the ground because the ground was gone from underneath where she sat. The more she drew from the sexual energy of the room, the more the blue that was there without being there encroached on space recently solid.
I had to stop her. There was nobody else.
Closed my eyes and leaned back against Sam’s bulk, the beat of his heart a pattern I could focus on. A constant. Warming the chill of fear in my chest, reminding me of why I had to survive this fight.
I opened my eyes and went back to work, pulling and plucking, working now to the pounding resonance of Sam behind me. Faster. Two hands now, shredding the lettuce leaves of Alina’s exercise in sex-fueled love nesting. I wish I knew what else I could do but I had no idea what I was doing already, relying on instinct in lieu of training or knowledge.
Alina opened her eyes then, fathomless kaleidoscope swirls of color, and fixed them on me. My heart almost stopped and I tasted copper sulphur where I bit my cheek without wanting to do it.
“Stop that,” she said.
I gulped down the bile that wanted to respond. Instead:
“No,” I replied.
She flicked one set of fingers and I heard Sam gasp, his arms tightening around me.
“Don’t...stop...” His whisper harsh, forced through the airways Alina was constricting for kicks.
I inhaled the energy of the room and did some finger flicking of my own, mimicking her motions. Each jerk releasing some of the power she was drawing on to open the sky at her feet and the air from Sam’s lungs. Could I take it from her fast enough? She glared at me as I stared back. No more laughter. A flick from me and a gulp from her; a flick from her and a shudder from Sam. Hurting me by hurting him.
Yeah, she’d gotten that part right.
Even more reason for me to work, and go faster. Pushing the limits of a power I thought maybe I should explore further—assuming I survived this part.
The scary hole was shrinking, with more and more patrons shaking themselves free of their one-track mind and body fervor in its contracting wake. Could they see Alina? I thought maybe not since nobody was screaming. None of them stepped over the edge into the Great Beyond either though. Instinct?
No time to be sure, as Alina let out a nails-against-aluminum-siding shriek. Sam sagged, holding on to me to keep himself upright where before our needs had been reversed. But I wasn’t complaining. Sam could breathe on his own again, and Alina was literally losing ground against me.
Suddenly I spotted the tusked green of Sandor’s head as he pushed himself up from whatever he’d been up to in the midst of this carnal carnivale. I didn’t know where his shirt had gone but I hoped he found it again soon. Those barbell-studded pieced nipples—all five of them—couldn’t be unseen.
The pressure in the room dropped and I yawned to pop my ears. I wasn’t the only one, as more and more bacchanalia participants were able to extricate themselves from Alina’s lure.
“You good?” I had to speak louder than before; the decibel level of squawks and growls and other, less identifiable sounds, had risen.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I am now.”
I nodded and went back to my save-the-room-from-Alina activities, tracking Sandor making his way towards me while keeping his distance from the epicenter. Poking my fingers into the balled energy Alina was sapping as fast as I was draining it. Texture and smell different now. Manure? Fuck.
I almost dropped the mass I was working with; flicked my eyes over to Alina and saw her assessing her handiwork with narrowed eyes. No. It was an illusion. Not real. Muttering under my breath to reinforce the reality that must exist. It took almost sixty seconds for her to drop it, snarling. The gaping hole shrunk a few more feet in diameter.
“Here, let me help,” said Sandor, grabbing one of my hands. I so didn’t want to know where that had been a few minutes ago.
“Aw, Sandor, I didn’t know you cared.” Flashed him a grin I was trying to feel. The adrenaline of the moment was still there; I could keep going. Had to. Then realized that was Dana from two minutes ago. This new skin-on-skin contact with Sandor was a jolt like swapping out an almost drained battery for one with a full charge and then some. I blinked surprise. “Whoa,” I managed.
“Yeah,” said Sandor. “Kick her ass for me. For all of us,” he amended, looking around the room.
I nodded. Except I needed both hands free, including that one Sandor was holding. We could be flexible, right? At my request, Sandor swapped positions so that his warted hand was under my shirt and lying palm-down flat on my stomach.
Sam growled then; neither one of us wanted me getting felt up by my boss. Even though I trusted Sandor. Mostly.
“Connects with her chi,” Sandor said. “Sorry for the lack of decorum. It’s only temporary. I hope,” he added.
“It tickles,” I said. My boss and my—what was Sam exactly now? Could I call him boyfriend? That was weird. OK, well, whatever Sam was to me, both he and my troll-shaped boss were making skin-on-skin contact with me.
Nope. Not awkward at all.
But I couldn’t deny the jolt of power singing through my veins and buzzing in my ears. Thank you, Sandor.
I straightened my spine and pushed back my shoulders, freeing the energy to move through me once more. Breathing it in as I drew on Sam’s and Sandor’s proffered strength. Sam’s was similar to mine, fur and whiskers and heat. Also desire, but whether that was a strength or a weakness remained to be seen.
Sandor’s was different. There was an icy core of cut crystals that glowed a paler shade of the ivy-dappled green skin he chose to share. Spiky and sparkling with ungrounded electricity. Not sure how Sandor managed usually, but there had to be some kind of physiological compensation involved.
This time, as I embraced the energy, I threw my arms open wide and pulled in as much as I could physically hold. Cradling a mass that I could only just get my arms around, wriggling jelly bean snakes that hissed and flicked their forked tongues at me before darting out to sink fang into my arms. So many pointed attacks, a staccato puncture beat of pain. Knowing it was another one of Alina’s illusions didn’t make it hurt any less.
I spared a moment to glance at what I was holding, what Alina wanted me to see: faceted jewel tones and primary colors with eyes that tracked me from thumbprint-flattened heads and rattled at me with intermittent shimmies from arrowhead-pointed tails. If I relied only on what I saw then self-doubt would tell me this couldn’t be done. That there was no way to hold a passel of snakes in your arms when you don’t even have the passel.
And yet, when I closed my eyes and looked with my other senses, I was holding a giant ball of yarn, the kind that wasn’t a single solid color but rather one that faded in and out from one spectrum extreme to another. There were gnarls; I worried them free with fingers I could no longer see. Somewhere there was an angry demon who was fighting me. But she hadn’t killed me yet so small mercies. Maybe someone somewhere still needed me alive. Lucky me.
“Almost there,” said Sam, soft in my ear.
First there was a buzzing,
the kind of sound that made me think of cicadas in August. Then a pressure popping against my ears. Painful; I yawned once more to release it. A reflex. Pushing all exterior distractions to that place in my head relegated to I’ll deal with it later. Getting closer to the center, that glowing spark nudging at the gateway; a doorstop preventing me from shutting off the path altogether.
And then it started: a familiar pain. Being gouged with a thousand head-of-pin faery swords in my back.
I wanted this to be yet another Alina hallucination, but I knew it wasn’t. No—the dots tattooed on my back were calling out to the gaping maw between this dimension and the next.
“What the...?” Sam loosened his grip on me as my spots burned through what was left of my shirt to jump across from me and onto his chest. Fuck. Sam let go of me then to beat at the fire licking his shirt; my energy pulse dropped by a third.
Alina cackled, enjoying the show now. Maybe I was getting in her way. But I was inflicting pain on someone I cared about too, and that was popcorn with all the fixings for Alina.
“Sam, you OK?”
He didn’t answer right away, saving his focus for tamping the embers on his chest. Yeah, I didn’t want him on fire either.
“I’m good,” he said finally after one of the longest minutes of my life. “It’s out.” A brief pause. “Still need both hands free?”
“Yes.”
Sam came around behind me again, careful not to touch my back this time. Slid his palms along the sides of my waist, away from the ink, as his fingers formed a loose vee in front. Any other time I’d be willing those fingers lower. Hell, I’d go for it right now—except for the part where I needed to seal a portal, get rid of a demon way more powerful than me, and oh yeah, my boss’s scrabbly hand was just there above Sam’s. A threesome not quite as enticing as you might think.
Plus there was that back-stabby thing where cleats were doing figure eights around my spine.
Pushed the pain to that I’m ignoring you now place, or as much as I could because holy crap. Tried to think.