by Stec, Susan
I need sex.
Gaire
Watching CeCe come out of the status-emblematic tri-level on Lake Harris, I'm enthralled by the feelings that wash over me. Never have I felt the need to protect and take care of another individual. Never have I wanted someone so badly it strikes fear in my heart. And this is the first time I've had the overwhelming feeling I couldn't live without someone.
My kind doesn't mate for life. They copulate only when necessary to build and preserve the herd. And that's only if I'm selected for breeding. I would be corralled in an unknown location with the one I must impregnate, and left there until I did so. It's not a choice my kind is allowed to make for ourselves. But then, being a half-breed, I'm not allowed to mate at all. Tainting the herd is not acceptable. I'm an outcast, and one who requires constant supervision, or annihilation should I chose not to comply.
Adding insanity to the non-compliant choice I'd made, I followed CeCe to this tri-level home after she emerged from the sewer, watched lights go on in a couple of the upstairs rooms, and heard the sound of the shower through an open window on the second floor. Now, as the lights wink out, I wait for her to come out. After seeing CeCe Down Under, there's a good chance she is not entirely human. I have never tried to bed an underworld creature. I've sworn off relationships, but CeCe has given me hope.
The night above Down Under is lit by a full moon and star-filled sky. The air smells of damn grass, roses, honeysuckle, and humanity: oil, exhaust fumes, frying bacon, metal, leather, plastic, asphalt, brick and mortar, trashcans filled with waste, and flesh covered in the scent of manmade fabric and chemicals.
As the front door opens, I hunker down behind the foliage and watch as CeCe gets into a red convertible. Bright lights flash the tree I'm perched in as the car makes an arc before heading down the driveway.
I leap from the tree, phase into the creature I was born to be, and with long muscular legs, make chase.
CeCe
As I sit in the car in front of the diner and stare into the dark building for the umpteenth time since the episode at Purgatory, I wonder why I'm drawn here. The whole time I'd showered, dressed, and mentally entertained pleasures of the flesh, I knew I would end up here instead of the local bar where I'd met Mr. I'm-Doing-You-A-Favor a couple of nights ago.
As I'd applied CeCe's makeup, I wasn't thinking of adequate sex with Blue Eyes. I'd been thinking about Gaire. I'd selected the black dress and strappy three inch pumps, fantasizing how it was going to feel when he removed them. When fluffing my hair and running my fingers through it, I was thinking about how silky Gaire might think it felt. Mr. I'm-Doing-You-A-Favor was never on my mind.
"Damn it!" I said, slapping the steering wheel. "If it's simply sex you want, idiot, this is the last place you should be, and you know it!"
Gaire had made it perfectly clear earlier in the day that sex wasn't an option. Yet, I'd tried to sway him with seductive human behaviors. He hadn't budged when I slipped out of CeCe's shirt. It hadn't fazed him a bit. Not even when I'd tossed it at his feet and slid out of my jeans and stood wearing nothing but CeCe's lace undies. He'd simply picked her clothes up off the cherry wood floor, placed them between our breasts and smiled, eyes twinkling.
I was mortified.
I'd ripped my things from his hands and stomped out of the apartment, swearing to never see him again. All the while I knew I would be right back here before morning. In fact, half-way to the sewer I was tempted to drive back, slither out of the girl's body, and double up on Gaire, just to show him what I was made of. But the way I feel about him, the way my body reacted to him, gave me a smidgen of hope—a small dream of finally finding someone to share more than one intimate moment with—and I kept going. When the succubus at Purgatory had suggested the very same thing—rolling on Gaire—I'd almost spit a laugh at the irony of it.
CeCe's eyes blink me out of my daymares when a light comes on over the diner. Having worked up a slathering lather of annoyance, I exit the car and stomp my strappy pumps all the way around the building to the back stairs leading to Gaire's apartment. I let CeCe fill her lungs and then take the stairs two at a time.
I don't knock, but grab the doorknob in a death grip. "All right, door, we can do this easy, or I can get all hard and aggressive."
I growl, giving the knob a twist, prepared to break the door from its hinges as I enter. But before I can push to see if it's unlocked, the door is pulled hard and fast. I find myself in Gaire's firm grip, my lips held captive by his.
It's a good thing I don't need to breathe to live, because by the time he takes me to the loft and dumps me on the red satin comforter I would have been dead. My mind takes in a diminutive awareness of his strength and agility to climb the ladder with no hands while carrying me, but promptly tosses the thought on the floor beside the dress Gaire has just ripped off my body. I didn't even notice him take off his clothes and when he covers my body with his, a moan escapes me—not CeCe!
The deep desire to be part of him wipes any sanity of the moment from my mind. Everything in the room fades around me. I revel in the way his skin feels, his mouth breathes into mine, his fingers search. Undergarments are torn away, firm pleasure parting my thighs, filling me and driving deep. Mouth against his, I pant an orgasm deep and strong. Lips devour, teeth puncture flesh, claws slash through delicate skin. With a heady disoriented high, I feel CeCe's skin being ripped from me, and instinctually I begin to shed my host. What was once CeCe sprinkles the bed around us and dissolves.
My fiery red eyes pop open. His lids flutter, and I freeze in silent horror. I disperse and cloak him in smoke, under and over him as I pass up through his morphed body with a shudder of unwarranted fear and an intense struggle for survival.
His long arms frantically reach, claws arcing and then clacking in mid-air with lack of purchase. His teeth bite nothing, and his lungs gulp and expel black smoke to no avail.
I rise to the ceiling like a cloud from damp wood off a camp fire. I whoosh away as though caught by a gust of wind and, palpable, thick, and cloying, I breeze through the many cracks on the closed window frame and dissolve into the night air.
As I twist and twirl in front of the diner, nothing but red orbs flashing, my needle-sharp teeth fold back into my mouth. I continue to stare in horror.
The wendigo from Purgatory stands on the other side of the window above the diner.
Gaire
"What the hell do I make of that?" I ask myself as I pace the apartment over the diner. "I totally blew it. Did I kill her? Or did she run from the apartment?"
I can't remember anything after I tossed CeCe on the bed, except a deep heat—a tightness—as I slid into her body, a hunger so strong it demanded gratification.
"Blood lust! I was enthralled in the lust for blood. Damn it! I devoured her!" I run and leap up into the loft, surveying before I realize and acknowledge there's no blood, bones, nothing to show the brutal event that I thought had taken place.
No! You know it took place. You smelled it, felt it, and you can still taste it on your lips. It happened.
"What the hell are you, CeCe?" I scream at the ceiling. "And damn my mother and father for not educating me about the world Down Under!"
Leading a sheltered life in the human world, I'd passed as a boy living with my grandmother for the first eighteen years of my life. I was told both my parents were killed—a home invasion—when I was a baby. I grew up totally unaware what I really am, and who and what grandmother is . . . until I met Stacy.
Long strawberry hair, freckled button of a nose, green captivating eyes, and soft creamy skin, Stacy was beautiful. We were inseparable senior year, but hid our attraction in public because grandmother had always been adamant about me not making friends. I was told I carried a terrible illness in my blood that could be spread through sharing food, coughing in someone's face, and even touching others. As I got older, the dangers of a sexual relationship were hammered into my head. Grandmother's daily questioning and reminding star
ted during my freshman year and became a horrible drudgery. When I began questioning the illness, insisting she give it a name, she'd push my questions away with a wave of her arthritic hand.
In my senior year, I had myself examined by a doctor at a free clinic by using the fear of having contracted an STD. After a clean bill of health, Stacy and I began to explore the sexual side of a relationship together, in depth, but without imbibing in the actual act of sexual intercourse.
In the summer of my nineteenth year, Stacy was leaving for an out of state university in less than two weeks and I was staying to attend Seminole Community College. The thought of separating intensified our relationship, and we decided to share our bodies totally. That's when I killed her.
Grandmother rushed me Down Under, a place I had no idea existed.
I met my father shortly thereafter and found out he was the most dreaded creature in the otherworld, a wendigo.
I also found out my grandmother was really my mother, an aswang. They are cannibalistic, eaters of the dead—kind of a vampire-slash-witch. They move among the human race as older women, often caregivers. Mother is a mid-wife and had lived off of dead fetuses my whole life. Since I had absolutely no knowledge of the underground life she'd lived, I found it easy to accept that for centuries, humans were blind to the world Down Under.
Living the life of a Rogaire means constant moving, occasional identity changes, and a hunger I could never allow myself to quench.
Reminiscing about my past gives no comfort for the future as I pause in front of the window and silently curse the death of the berserker, Vicen. It was impulsive, stupid, and now I have no one to ask about the creature I'd just had sex with. It's not like I can trot into Purgatory, sit at the bar, and ask around. I was in a blind rage when I entered the bar and couldn't remember a single face in the room but Vicen's anyway. What I did notice, what was crystal clear, was that the whole frigging place was scared shitless of me. What the hell right do I have to dream of sharing a life with another when I can strike that kind of fear in all creatures?
"Shit! Not like you didn't know this was going to end badly when you started following the berserker. And all because you'd witnessed the confrontation he'd had with CeCe. Not like you didn't know someone was going to die the minute you allowed yourself to take on the body of the beast."
I sighed heavily at my own ridicule. The best I could hope for is that the body CeCe was wearing was glamoured by a witch spell, not real, or borrowed, or possessed. Because although I would kill Vicen again in a human heartbeat if I caught him threatening CeCe, I didn't like the thought I'd killed another innocent girl.
But I saw CeCe in Purgatory...
Should I hit the bar again? Ask around? I can't leave it like this with CeCe. Well, I could, but I sure as hell don't want to.
Whatever I decide to do, I know it's not safe here anymore. I just took a woman to my bed. She somehow disappeared without a trace, and I should move on and forget her.
The beast rumbles inside me.
I pull a trunk out from under a lamp by the couch and begin to load all of the personal items I would take when I left. I'm thinking Michigan would be a good place to gravitate. I believe that's where CeCe is going to attend college in a few weeks. Didn't she mention Michigan State?
One thing Grandmother—I mean, Mother—had taught me was how to get all the money I need to survive in the human world without any suspicion. At least I'll never have to live on the streets.
EIGHT
I am the doppelganger, again.
I spread out like a shadow on pavement under the feet of the unsuspecting woman working her corner in the seven-hundred block of South Orange Blossom Trail. Her name is Jane, and I will be wearing her by morning.
As she drags me along, I watch, listen, learn . . . and I think about Gaire. Although I knew something was different about him, I'd never, for a moment, expected Gaire to be a wendigo. Damn, talk about having a penchant for bad boys. That little proclivity might chalk my 'no killing humans' rule up to multiple charges of aiding and abetting before this insanity ends. And it will end, badly, if I don't get Gaire out of my doppelganger head. I know I should just forget him—I'm sure he's forgotten me—but Gaire is the first and only being who has made me feel real, alive, and, well, human. I'll be damned if I'm giving up on that.
As I stare up at Jane from the pavement, I'm thinking how perfect this chick would be. I could head back to Leesburg, she would stay in Orlando on her street corner, and our paths should never cross. Unless it's in a morgue somewhere—a street-walker's life is a hard one.
In her early twenties, Jane is blonde and tan, wearing a lewdly short skirt and a lacy bra barely covered by a leather vest. Black boots with four-inch heels caress the undersides of her knees as she struts toward a car pulling up to the curb a few yards down from the streetlight on her corner.
I cozy up closer as Jane leans toward the black sedan, filling the window with the contents of her lacy bra.
Both hands now on the window of the car door, Jane is doing her thing, enticing, pimping her carte du jour, negotiating à la cart—palatable little hors d'oeuvres or entrées off the full-service menu—and distracting, while she slowly removes the pistol at her back, reaches down, and slides it into her boot.
I slither upward off the pavement, over the front tire, another moving shadow on a street accustomed to shadows.
Automobiles hedge from traffic light to traffic light, corner to corner. Pedestrians pour in and out of seedy establishments while the streetwise hawk their wares—a night like any other night on the trail.
I move, unnoticed, over the shiny bumper and onto the hood of the automobile, and there I lie, red eyes glimmering, watching, and learning.
The man inside the car wears a dark suit and tie with a white shirt. His hair is neatly trimmed, parted to the side, not a lock out of place. His randy smile displays straight white teeth, a cleanly shaved jaw-line under intense gray eyes. As he reaches over to open the door for Jane, a gentlemanly gesture during an ungentlemanly proposal, the light from the streetlamp on Jane's corner dances off gold cufflinks. It draws my attention to his well-manicured fingernails.
Boy, is this guy going to be so totally unaware when I, doppelganger, walk out of the hotel room wearing a post-coital grin, and Jane. The surprise will come later when he tries to take a shower and finds Jane—not the carbon copy, the real thing—lying in the tub. One thing is for sure: he's about to have mind-blowing sex and a night he'll never forget.
As I slide into the front seat with Jane and pool into the shadows under the dashboard on the car floor. I amuse myself with a notion my mother is gonna hate my new outfit.
"So, what's your name?" the guy in the suit says. "Or are we not supposed to ask that?" He chuckles tensely, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road as he coasts down Orange Blossom Trail.
"Oh, you can ask, sweetie, long as you got two big ones, you can ask anything you want. Name's Jane . . . you?"
Without hesitation, he answers, "How about you call me Dick?"
I almost laugh, not like they can hear me if I do, but still.
Jane laughs and I revel in it. "Cute. So, Dick, where ya takin' me?
"As far as you'll let me." Again with the edgy laugh.
Jane reaches down and pats the Smith & Wesson 9mm stuffed in her black boot and resting nicely against her right calf. "If you got the money, sweet cheeks, I got all night."
Jane's words, the ones that had attracted me to her earlier tonight, play over in my mind. "The only way to a man's heart is through his chest cavity" she'd told another hooker before they'd split and headed toward their respective corners on the trail.
"You kill me, Jane," the other hooker had said over her shoulder as she laughed and walked away.
Oh, cold and retched life of a doppie be damned, what if I'm choosing a serial killer, or worse, a man hater!
I feel the car hook a right and take a small bump before it makes a hard left and then come
s to a stop. Purple and green light blinks on Jane's face as she says with disgust, "Haven't been to the Ambassador in a while. You paying by the hour or night, hon?"
When Dick gives Jane nothing but a smile, she adds, "Full night's cheaper if you wanna spend some time, is all I'm sayin'."
Her nose wrinkles and her mouth tightens. She turns away, opening the car door. Together we step out, Jane dragging me along, a dark shadow under her feet. We head toward a bottom-of-the-barrel hotel on the nastiest block of West Colonial Drive in Orlando, but hey, it's less than a mile from Jane's corner and most importantly, her car.
Dick has a key, looks like he knows where he's going as he gets out of the car and takes the lead.
We walk through a lobby—I glide—and past a murky aquarium with no fish, water lines descending with evaporation. But the fish tank is larger than the television balancing on a microwave table beside it.
Dick nods at a questionable character behind the desk. I can smell him from the heels of Jane's boots, sickly sweet cocaine-sweat, bad personal hygiene, and day old sex.
The furniture in the lobby is Salvation Army Naugahyde and the walls are dark green. Everything else screams "rooms by the hour." West Colonial Drive at its finest . . . drugs, sex, filth, and destitution. Ashtrays overflow onto faux wood tables, yellowed newspaper scatters the floors, and duct tape partially seals holes in the walls. I would think the tape is a bigger expense than plaster, but hey, given the frayed edges, I would say it gives roaches and rats easy access to the soul of the place where they can wander in and out of the rest of the hotel.
As we head into the elevator, I spy a sign that reads "free breakfast"—most likely stale coffee, but this clientele probably doesn't even notice. Shady-looking men, the kind that are interested in really bad things, linger around the sign. Before the elevator doors close, one guy tells another he had invited the little girl in 219 to his room to see his horsey, and I make a mental note to return here through the sewer system with a few of my friends from Down Under.