I'm tired of my own failures. This life is mine, and I will fulfill my obligations. I stretch a tendril of consciousness along the connection to Ahanu, the job—or, man—I failed to finish, focusing on his name and presence. He's already asleep, though I know he's not conscious of his sleeping self's erection. I feel a little bad for him; he seemed nice enough, and it's been a while since I met someone this pent up. Usually, they at least need a nudge in the right direction. Or maybe he was watching porn before bed, or something. Though I should have felt it through our psychic connection, were that the case.
I ease myself into his dream, and look for a good form to take.
It's a strip club, so the answer is obvious.
I don't think my form through, just push my consciousness into the woman twining around the pole. To be honest, it feels good to be dancing. It's been so long. At the same time, it scares me, reminds me of our last encounter. I avoid any step that feels too much like ballet, and relish the control I have over my body, the fact that it's me moving my limbs. I need to feel wholly myself.
He stands near the stage, eyes on me, riveted. I give him an appraising look, and lick my lips, letting him know I like what I see. From the way his lips twitch, he does too.
I can do this. I have this under control.
Han:
There's something familiar about the girl onstage. Familiar, but not. Green-gold eyes, ruddy skin, and voluminous curls. Her movements are crisp, unconsidered, and possessed with a grace that I've never yet seen in another woman, stripper or no. A grace that couldn't possible exist outside of a dream.
Her features subtly change as I look at her, emerald irises melting away to olive, chin sharpening as she speaks to the men at the rail. Finally, her eyes meet mine, and I hope she senses my attraction, to put me out of my misery.
She doesn't say a word to me, just climbs over the rail, her bare limbs catching the light. She takes my hand and leads me to a seat. She straddles me, ensnares me.
Her skin is as soft as it looked, her hair falling against my face in butterfly kisses, and I wrap my arms around her, kiss those berry-stained lips for all I'm worth. They twitch into a soft smile against me, and I shut my eyes, lose myself in her flesh.
I pull back to catch my breath, drunk on the taste of her lips.
The olive eyes are now blue-green, the hair losing its kinks and curls. For a reason I can't understand, I wonder if it'll turn into snakes. I may have been spending too much time with my nephew and his mythology obsession.
But there's more to it than that. Her arms tighten around me, muscles hard and desperate. She's trembling, and not from lust. Little spasms tear through the soft body in my arms, and the more I try to stroke her hair, her shoulders, to calm her, the less it helps. She swats at herself, clutches at me, her eyes wide and unseeing. I try to take her hands, hold her still.
She shoves me away from her and is gone from the dream. No poof of smoke or light, no melting through the floor, just her lithe body disappearing in midair, her red-painted fingernails the last part to go. The dream dissolves behind her, the club morphing into my bedroom before I wake up, still swearing I smell her perfume and feel her body in my bed.
Aletta:
Flames wreathe my skin, though I can't see them. I feel their touch, a searing burn that makes me want to pat my entire body down to put it out, makes my skin itch and shriek. Wind rifles through my hair, a welcome relief to the flames around my stomach, and I cling to that sensation, letting go of my form as much as I can, to feel it. I open my eyes, but the eyes I'm seeing through are no longer mine. Mine are still locked with Ahanu's, my body pressed against him as he tries to prevent me from clawing my skin off. Then, should-be-me looks up, meets my eyes, and her bone structure shifts, something else trying to manifest itself in my body.
I try to scream, but the ether steals my voice. I try to thrash, but there's no molecules for mine to collide with.
The sensations get stronger. My battered body coexists in two realities I have no control over, and before the pain can get the better of me, I throw myself into Limbo, tugging my body with my mind and excising the foreign force. I pass out in the endless fields, unable to focus long enough to pull myself to Lorelei's. The seedlings grow through me, impale me, welcome me, in seconds, dragging me along on their ongoing quest to reach the sun.
Lorelei finds me anyways; no clue how she manages to do that in our limitless otherworld.
The fields have claimed me. The seedlings are now trees penetrating me, forcing my flesh apart, centuries of growth manifesting in seconds. The usual cycle of growth, permitting no interference from man or demon alike. I try to let go of my body, let it seep away from their trunks like water through a net. But I can't. As broken as this form is, I'm bound to it. It's mine. How am I supposed to let it go? My toes twitch, and my arms swing ineffectually, suspended along the twisted branches impaling me.
Lorelei finds me anyways; no clue how she manages to do that, given the limitless nature of our world. She eases her hands under me, taking some of my weight off the trunks. She whispers to me, “One, two, three,” and yanks for all her worth.
I scream as her weight pulls me against the trees spearing me. My fragile flesh tears with a sickening noise and even more blinding pain. But as the loose sections fall against the rest, they stick together, reform musculature, leaving nary a scar.
“You're okay, Letty, you're okay.” She wraps me in pieces of herself, holding me together until I can weave my own substance back to normal. “Another bad date?”
I don't want to admit failure. “It was going well, and then I, I don't know. I felt things, felt pain, and then I was out of body. I don't know who or what was in mine.”
“And you weren't dissociating from the force of his feelings? Sometimes it happens.”
I flush, the impotent fury of a man asking his doctor for Viagra. “No, it wasn't like that.” I scour my skin for signs of the burns, something that might convince her that it's not a panicked attempt to let myself retreat from intimacy I'm not fully comfortable with.
But there's nothing.
“Look, don't worry about it. You're young yet; it takes time to get comfortable with people, and let them be comfortable with you. No one expects you to contribute regularly...”
Insult to injury. I know I pull in maybe a tenth of what she does, but I'm also working with a completely different set of parameters. And she's an overachiever anyways, addicted to her own success, more connected to those she fucks than her supposed family.
Her eyebrows knit together slightly as she focuses on taking the both of us to her home. Effortlessly, the landscape unmakes itself around us to get out of the way, and builds her doorway in front of us. The home's part painted lady, part some kind of open-air hut.
That moment I met my own eyes plays out on the back of my eyelids, making me wish I could throw up.
“I can't fucking do this. I can't keep focusing on people touching me without feeling. I can't keep feeling people touch me when no one's there. And I can't keep letting everyone down; I know we only survive by pulling our weight in the same direction. Maybe you would be better off without me. Maybe I'd be better off at peace, without this. I never wanted immortality.”
My fingers wrap on the edge of a book on her shelf, an allusion to the mechanisms for flashing. Our souls are poured out of our bodies and archived in books, unable to be altered, interacted with—only viewed.
The same dour look comes back to her, but she says what she obviously was holding back last time. “You don't remember? You already tried that.”
My mouth opens in shock, and I duck my head.
See, you don't come back from flashing. If I already did that, I shouldn't be able to remember Iniga, or even my own name, Aletta.
But I do.
I must have just fucked that up, too.
Somehow that thought is even worse for my self-esteem.
Chapter Four: IRL
I don't doubt Lor
elei wants me to rest, thinks that throwing myself back in so soon might make me careless or reckless. But she works often enough that she can't actually make sure I stay here.
The weight of my own failures is an itch inside my head, pulling me to do things I know I shouldn't. But it doesn't seem I even have the spiritual cohesion to flash myself, so I have to make this work.
This is my life. I have to figure out a way to live it.
I creep out while she's on assignment and debate my plan of action. Maybe it's just the dreams that are giving me problems. I haven't worked through my specialization yet; I'm no more familiar with mental seduction than I am physical manifestations. Maybe I've been going about this wrong. Maybe the e-inks are right, and the most natural work is done in the physical realm. At least there, the world couldn't unmake itself around me.
I force my mind into a series of electrical connections and binary code; rather than firing neurons, I shove my presence into Ahanu's laptop. I pick through his digital records, just the way I was taught. I know what coffee shop he stops at on the way to work, which porn sites he subscribes to, and what his schedule is.
It seems creepy, learning so much about someone without their awareness. But it's a means to an end. I need an organic way to meet him. I'm tied to him anyways, in the waking world. I just need an in to make him aware of me.
When he goes in after work and places his order, I pull a burst of energy and use it to build a form for myself in line behind him. He yawns as his energy leaves him to sustain me.
We wait for our drinks together, and he steals glances at me out of the corner of his eye. I stand on tiptoe, place my foot against my ankle in ballet coupe, and balance. It's an odd neuroses, but a lifetime spent refining your balance makes you aware, makes you test it, just to be sure you know how the right alignment feels. It's an old habit, but one I've never managed to shake when I'm wearing a humanoid shape.
As the barista passes me my chai latte, Ahanu looks at me. “Excuse me, miss. You look familiar. Do you work at PGE?”
It's a big company. You never know, I guess. 11,294 employee accounts, including his.
I shake my head. “No, sorry. Just one of those faces, maybe?” I shrug and turn away, gambling that he'll follow. I sit in a chair in the corner.
“Did you study at Princeton?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Are you going to tell me your life story by trying to guess whether we've ever passed each other on the street?”
“If you'll let me. May I?” He gestures at the seat next to me. He has an effervescent confidence that makes me wonder how often he actually flirts. I wouldn't have expected him to be this outgoing from our time in dreams.
I pause as though thinking it through. “If you want. I'm pretty sure we haven't met, though, so you might not want to waste our time focusing on that conversation.”
He smiles as he sits. “Ahanu—call me Han.” Ah, nicknames. One of the more difficult things to learn ahead of time, but sometimes the key to putting someone at their ease.
I shake his hand. “Aletta.” Shit; I'm supposed to lie, to keep an emotional barrier between us.
“Aletta. That's pretty.”
I twitch a little smile. “It works well enough. Weird names aren't much fun when you have to spend all your time trying to teach them to people.”
Han chuckles. “Tell me about it.”
I smile, with a little faked surprise. “Yeah, I guess you'd know.” For where I'm from, neither of our names is that weird, but I've seen enough to know how comparatively homogeneous the names around him are.
“Are you a student, or—”
Maybe this was a bad idea. I'm not an especially good actress, and it's painful trying to stumble into some kind of role I can play. At least in dreams, your errors can be played off as surreal. You don't have to be a complete person. You barely have to talk. “Kind of. I'm on a bit of a hiatus, I guess.”
He nods. “I know how that goes. I took about two years off while I was doing my degree to try to save money. But no one tells you that the loan companies punish you for that, and it's much harder to go back. I'd probably still be in that hole if my step-dad hadn't loaned me the money to pay them off.”
I'm embarrassed to admit how little I know about the world he lives in. Apparently I've slacked in following the news.
He takes my irritation at myself and my awkwardness as a dismissal. “I can leave if I'm bothering you.”
I shake my head. “No, I'm just—I'm not good with people.” I try to remember all of my lessons about brain chemistry, to remember what to tweak to defuse things. It's supposed to be fairly intuitive, and easy to tell because you can feel how it affects your bond, but maybe I've just never been good at immersing myself in a connection like that.
“You're sure?” He takes my hand, squeezes my fingers, and releases it. “I don't want you to be like 'so I met this creepy guy today,' when we part ways.”
I heave a silent laugh, tainted by guilt. I hate deceiving him. “You're fine. Seriously.”
“So, what were you studying?”
How to charm people into bed? Shit, bad answer.
“Ballet.”
“Fun. I guess. I mean, not really my thing. I think it's kind of boring.”
I snort. “How can it be? It's communicating without speech. It's absolute trust, played out night after night. It's the pinnacle of human cooperation.”
He shrugs. “To each their own. I'd rather attend a plain concert than a ballet performance to the same music.”
I shrug. “Maybe you just haven't seen the right dancers.” I realize how flirtatious that sounds, and flush, before I realize it's the perfect response for my purposes.
A slow smile touches his lips, and I bite my lower lip lightly. “Well, one of these days, you'll have to persuade me.”
“One of these days? Someone's a little presumptuous.”
His eyes flick to my lips and my neck, and I conceal my smile. “No, just hopeful.”
I let a little bit of that smile peek through, to encourage him to be a bit braver.
“Give me a sec—” He pulls his phone out of his pocket, tearing his eyes away from me.
I take another gulp, savoring the spices in my throat. I may not need to eat anymore, and I'll probably be queasy as sin until my body rejects it, but I've missed this. I've missed having my own sensory feedback, not trickledown from a partner.
I can't see being dead as that different from being a succubus. At least no one screws corpses.
Er, hardly anyone screws corpses. And people put a stop to that shit pretty quickly.
I shut my eyes and focus on the degradation of flavor as the aftertaste fades.
“Looks like the ballet isn't really in season right now, but the symphony is doing Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.” He's engrossed in his phone. I don't need to peer over his shoulder to see the site he's looking at. It's already in his head.
I raise my eyebrows. “A little spendy for a first date, eh?” I want him to think I'm flattered, but a bit insecure, and that if he pushes, he can probably use that momentum to good effect, maybe eve get lucky before the show.
Still, some traitorous part of me hopes he doesn't press that advantage. I want to sit next to him and hear the kind of beauty that has been missing from my life for more than a century. I know how much is lost in translation when the only music I can hear is codes and vibrations in the digital fabric. Or neuronal sparks.
I want to feel some kind of normalcy. Maybe then I'll be able to keep my focus well enough to do my job.
Han:
Aletta's smile is shaky, and I'm not quite sure why. But, sometimes people react weirdly to things. I want to reassure her, though, and not just because she's the most beautiful woman who has given me the time of day in months, terse and cool though she is.
“Spendy, but worth it. Concerts are always better with worthwhile company, and my nephew isn't old enough to appreciate them yet. I'm looking forward to it already.�
�� I touch a few prompts on the phone, and tell her, “There. Tickets for two. Tomorrow okay? Performance starts at 7?”
She nods. “Tomorrow's fine.”
I hit the last button to confirm the date and payment information, sneaking glances at her. Her eyes are distant, sad, and I can't think of anything to do but squeeze her hand. The thought that maybe she's in some kind of trouble occurs to me, before I scrub the thought from my head. That's what I get for falling asleep to Chinatown.
I can't say what it is about her that draws me to her. She seems like she lives half in her own world, and I don't think she'll welcome me to it. That should warn me away; I've had my heartbreaks from women who didn't ultimately want a full companion. But maybe that's it. Maybe I want the unattainable. Maybe I don't want my own partner, so I look for women who'll sabotage that.
Not exactly good first-date thoughts. Her tongue darts out to moisten her lips, remove a spot of chai, and I try not to stare. I can't tell if she's wearing a stitch of makeup, or if her lips are naturally that pink and plump.
“You want to get dinner before the show?” I distract myself.
“No, I can't. Thank you, though.”
“Another time, then. Can I pick you up?”
She thinks her answer through, her eyes defensive. “I'll meet you there. I work in the area.”
A few things click into place. I've seen the behavior before in people who had dealt with stalkers or violent partners. She's giving me a chance, but I have to earn every bit of trust she'll give me. And her address is too raw, too risky a thing to chance.
I don't call attention to my new knowledge. “Sounds great.”
She smiles, and her leg brushes mine under the table.
My pants crinkle, remind me that I hadn't actually planned to kill so much time here. “I've gotta take off, then. What's your number?”
She hesitates, so I take some of the impetus off her. “Tell you what. Here's mine.”
Our fingers touch over the business card, and the temptation to kiss her goodbye blossoms. But as skittish as she is, there'd be consequences for it. I want to, and the longer we linger together, the more likely I'll give in. But if I'm right, if she does need things to go slow... I don't want to risk it.
Beyond The Veil: A Paranormal & Magical Romance Boxed Set Page 55