by Carol Wolf
“No, no, I’m all right, really.”
I got down on the floor with him, and went to his feet and grabbed them, lifting them high. I smiled to myself when he registered how unexpectedly strong I was, how he couldn’t shake my grip on his ankles as I pulled off each of his shoes and then his socks. I stood up, holding on to his pant legs, and pulled off his pants and his briefs while he still lay on the floor. I tossed them behind me and walked into the bedroom, leaving him to follow or not, just as he pleased. I was still smiling.
I pulled off my sweatpants, my sweatshirt, my t-shirt, and lay down on the bed as I heard him come in. I pointed. “Over there.”
“Oh my god!”
I looked up. That hadn’t been Richard's voice.
“What happened to you?” He was staring at my really impressive bruise, only just starting to fade on my hip.
“Oh,” I said. “I got shot.”
“My god!” Then he remembered, and the voice was like Richard's again. “My darling, are you all right?” He came toward me, but hesitated to touch me.
“I’m fine. Richard, over there.”
“What?”
“The oil. In the dresser. You know.”
And the fact was, Richard had bought the massage oil. He’d bought four kinds. He liked the strawberry, as he said there were some things in England he liked to remember. I liked the sandalwood. But that was a memory that belonged to the real Richard, and me. “The almond oil.” After all, if I was going to play this scene to the end, I might as well get some good out of it.
Fake Richard sat down on the bed and opened the bottle. Again I turned to him in surprise. “Feet first, right? Watch out for my ankle. It still hurts.”
Obediently, fake Richard moved down to my feet. “Ow,” he said in sympathy. “What happened here?”
“I got in a fight,” I said. There were constructs by which this statement was true. Besides. There's no point in telling the truth to a liar. He probably wouldn’t even hear it.
“Oh, poor baby!” Richard's voice had never sounded so sappy.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Especially now that you’re back. It doesn’t hurt at all.” I’d never played sappy before, but it sure wasn’t hard.
He began at my feet, and over the next half hour worked all the way up my body, had me turn over, and worked all the way down again, going very gently on my bruises. It was pleasant. It wasn’t Richard, but it wasn’t bad. I have had experiences, before the experience of Richard put them all behind me. Richard had made an art of love hundreds of years before I was born. He brought all that skill and understanding to my bed, in his efforts to bind me to him, to keep himself in my service while he needed my protection. So I’d learned from him that it could be fun. It could be a joy. And now that Richard was gone, I was wondering, will it be anywhere as good with anyone else? So, I thought, why not? By the time he had massaged me up one side and down the other, by the time I was slathered in almond oil, relaxed and at peace, that and his borrowed form might earn him my willing cooperation in what he seemed to have come here to do. So, when he got on the bed, I turned to him, and opened my arms.
He began to kiss me, lightly, following in the path his hands had already gentled and smoothed. I took the oil from him, dripped some on my hands, and worked his shoulders while he continued his way down my body. “Ah!” he said, and “Oh!”
His muscles were not Richard's muscles. I knew Richard's body very well. With my hands on the imposter's, I could feel his larger mass. His scent was not unpleasant. But then, not many smells are.
He pressed me to him, and kissed my ear. I squirmed and moaned a little, to give him encouragement. “Say it,” he breathed. “Say my name! My true name! I want to hear you say it!”
Oh. And “Ah hah.” So that was the idea.
“Mm,” I murmured, “not yet, not ready yet.”
That sent him back to the kissing. He worked his way down again. And it was pleasant. It just wasn’t pleasant enough to make me forget there was a lying bastard in my bed under false pretenses. “Ooh,” I moaned, and likewise, “Ohhh!”
He made encouraging noises. His hands began to roam. I sat up, “Now, darling, now.” He moved up the bed toward me. I frowned and looked surprised. “Aren’t you going to change?”
He was wearing Richard's face, but that discombobulated look was completely original. “Ah—” I looked sad. At least, I tried for sad. “My curse is still upon me. I cannot make love in any other form. You change first. Become my demon wolf!”
“Your… demon wolf?”
“Yes. Now, please, my own, my darling, I can’t wait any longer…” I thought I might be laying it on a bit thick, but he didn’t seem to notice. I added “Rrraaaarr!” like a human imitating the growl of a wolf. Badly.
He tried. And there was a wolf standing on my bed. He looked hesitant and confused. He looked at me as though asking what should happen next. And he didn’t look anything like Richard did, in wolf form. I’d seen him first as a gray streak, leaping into the fray at my side. We’d run up mountains together in the snow. We’d roamed the hills beyond my house night after night. We’d slept curled up together on this bed.
The wolf image was drawn from my mind, somehow, for it was familiar. It had the shoulders and ruff of my brother Carl, but the lop-sided head of Tillman, my oldest stepbrother. In that proximity, with the smell of sweat and arousal in the air—his, and not mine—it's a good thing he didn’t have my stepbrother's eyes, or I would have killed him on the spot.
The wolf form on my bed stepped forward. He nosed me in confusion. I drew in my breath. It had been Richard's wolf form that had seduced me into loving him. I am one of the two-natured kind, so when he followed me into wolf form, it was as though I had met part of myself. But this creature, who didn’t know where the end of his feet were, or which way his legs folded, who wasn’t seeing with different eyes, or taking in the room, or me, with new-lit senses, smelled exactly the same as a wolf as he did as a man. This was not going to work. It was time to put an end to this farce.
I changed, and as I changed I unleashed my passion, my cold fury at what he had attempted, in stepping into the place of one I loved, and pretending to be him, in order to fool me, in order to steal my demon from me. So as I changed, I grew.
The imposter suddenly found himself looking up at a very large wolf indeed, who smelled like a wolf, whose mouth opened in a snarl showing many huge, wet and pointy teeth, and whose eyes were lit with savage golden light. Curiously, he reacted like a wolf. His ears flattened, his eyes rolled back, and he crouched down on the bed, as though I were going to take him by the back of the neck like a puppy. Then his hold on his new form exploded and he lost his grasp on it, and he was a man again, and just himself, naked, sweaty, heavy, dripping with almond oil, and suddenly very much afraid. He yelled, and dove for the floor. I jumped on him and flattened him to the ground.
He tried to throw me off, he tried to reach back and grab some part of me with his hands to twist or rend or otherwise hurt, but I grasped his hand in my teeth and pressed down until he yelled. That panicked him and he twisted under me, and turned on his back to hold me off, and I stared down at him and snarled. Eyes wide, he held mine, and became very still, a stupid grin growing on his meaty face.
Good thing I was already full of yummy pasta. I changed, and sat down on his chest. He tensed to throw me off, and I just sat there, waiting to see if he’d try. After all, I can change as fast as I can blink. Sometimes even faster. He thought the better of it, and lay still. His excitement was high, but his fear had dropped. That's the trouble with being fairly small, and young.
“You’re a shape shifter! A real one!”
“Yes.” I reached over and grabbed my t-shirt and pulled it on.
“I’ve heard about it. I just never saw—” That's when he tried to buck me off. I changed and grew as he moved, planting a forepaw on his chest and bringing my head close to his. His fear spiked again and he subsided, lett
ing his breath out.
I changed back.
“That's just amazing!” he gasped.
I brought my head close to his. “Want me to do it again?” He shook his head.
I smiled. That was better. I looked him over. “You’re not a shape shifter. What are you?”
“You don’t know? Can’t you tell? I’m an illusionist.”
“What the hell is that?”
He’d certainly put on quite an illusion. He was taller than Richard by nearly a foot, with big round shoulders and a torso running to fat, matted with gray-blond hair. He looked like a young guy in an older guy's body, with a round face, snub nose, vivid blue eyes, and pale blotchy skin. His mouth fixed in a smirk, watching me, watching his effect on me.
His voice shifted tone. “Try me and see.” I almost bit him.
“Why don’t you tell me, instead?”
“Let me up.”
“I don’t feel like it. I want to know how you did it. I want to know why. And I want to know now.” I could feel my anger rising. His fear spiked when my eyes changed. I reached for my sweat pants and got off him to put them on. When he started to sit up, I raised my lip at him, and he subsided most of the way. I sat down in the doorway. “Now,” I suggested.
“I just—I’ve always been able to do it. When I look at people— some people can see auras. I see patterns, colors, reflecting from inside their minds.” He lay there more relaxed now, looking a little past me. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself. “The darker they are, the more tangled, those are the ones that are the most important. And I, well, I become the mirror.” He looked at me then, and my mother looked up at me, with her little sideways smile.
I roared. “Don’t do that!”
The illusion vanished, and the guy tried to lift his hands as he grinned up at me. “Okay, okay, you said explain. It's much easier just to show you. I look for the tangled dark spots in your mind, and I just—”
“Don’t—”
“Some people like it.”
“Then you’ve done this before.”
“It's my power,” he said modestly. “I can do other people too, once I’ve seen them. Check it out…” His form shifted under me, seeming to become a little smaller, his face smooth, hair light brown and slightly curled. His new form produced a winning smile and bright eyes. It was a movie star. I’d seen the face before, but couldn’t think of the name. To go with the new look, a tang of sexual arousal rose. I wrinkled my nose. The movie star sighed, the illusion dissipated, the scent faded and the big guy was revealed again. He didn’t really change. He coalesced into another form, which broke up like smoke when the illusion passed.
“How many times have you done this?” I wondered.
He shrugged, smirked again.
“And what usually happens when you’re caught?”
“I don’t usually get caught,” he told me. “This is actually a first.”
“So, I’ll set the precedent.”
He said nothing to that, not wanting to tempt his fate, I suppose.
“Did you pull Richard right out of my head?”
He shrugged. “I’d seen him, which helps. And love, longing, missing someone, creates certain shades of color. They’re easy to spot.”
“Where did you see Richard?”
“Can I get up?”
“No.”
He sighed. “I saw him at Madam Tamara's store, after the bears defeated the Eater of Souls.”
“The bears… ?” Well, if you’d heard the bears tell the story, that was the way it had happened. I curled my lip. “It is true, the bears were of some help in that action.”
“Oh? Were you there?”
I thought of thirty different answers. I was the one who’d gone in, all on my own. I was the one who had found Richard, and obtained his release. I was the one Yvette had come to help. Yvette had brought the bears. There had been a fair amount of blood on the floor before the bears came in. “Yes,” I said. “I was there.”
He started to get up. I raised up my wolf head above my human head, and we both looked down on him, both aspects at once. “Stay where you are,” I said, low in my throat.
His cheeks sagged, and his eyes opened wide. He lay still.
“Why do you want my demon's name?”
“Are you kidding me? Don’t you know the World Snake is coming? We have to save this town! You may not care, but some of us live here. If you’re not going to do it, somebody has to. A demon can do it, if it's treated right, if it's ordered correctly. There are thousands of things a demon can do, in the right hands…” His face grew cunning, as he imagined all those things a demon could do. I could see he’d thought about it. A lot.
“And yours are the right hands.”
“Well, you’re not doing anything with it!”
“With him.” I stood up. It wasn’t fun anymore. “Don’t get up,” I told him, as he sat up, so he stayed there, leaning on his hands. “We have one more thing to talk about.”
“Oh, yeah?” His attempt at defiance was undermined by his winning smile, so I let it pass, offering my best attempt at a winning smile myself. It was probably just as fake, because he winced.
“You invited me to a party,” I reminded him.
“Oh?”
“Yes. And I went to the party, and you weren’t there.”
“Oh.”
I leaned over him. “And that's where they shot me.”
“Uh. Look, I don’t know anything about that.”
“But you did ask me to the party.”
“So? What's the harm in that?”
“You pretended to be my friend. You baited the trap. Who told you to do that?”
He looked confused all at once. He even blushed a little. I thought he didn’t know how. “That was just a favor…for a friend.”
“Who?”
I was betting on the evil vet again, but he named Elaine's sister.
“Holly. Look, if you’ve ever met Holly—”
“Not that I know of.”
“—then you’d know. She's hard to say no to.”
“You’ve seen Yvette, then.”
He shrugged. “Everyone knows Yvette.”
“Have you ever tried to pull something like this on her?”
“What? And piss off the bears? No way.”
I kicked his clothes over to him, and walked away while he put them on. Not that I hadn’t already seen everything he had, but I wasn’t interested. I picked up my sweatshirt and pulled it on, and came back to find him doing himself up in my living room.
He smelled of sweat, saliva, tension, hair gel, and almond oil, and still his unlikely form exuded sensuality. “What's your name?” I asked him. “Your real name.”
His fear had faded. His confidence and excitement were rearing back up. He smiled, broader than his smirk, but just as ucky. “Jack Collier. Call me Jack. I do insurance claims, up in Van Nuys.” He got out his wallet and handed me a card. I didn’t take it. After a second, he put it away, saying heartily, “So tell me, when did you figure it out?”
I shook my head. “You don’t smell anything like Richard.”
“Oh.” His smiled wavered, and then returned at full wattage. “Well, we did have a good time, didn’t we?”
I changed and launched myself completely without thought, my switch thrown and ready to kill just on that last smirk. I hit his body with my forepaws and bore him back, my jaws reaching for his throat. He choked a scream, and in that final second I turned my head, took his shoulder in my teeth and bit down. Hard. He shrieked again, and the blood streamed out everywhere.
I stood up on two feet and backed up as he fell. I stood looking down at him, gasping, bleeding, clutching his shoulder, staring at me in disbelief, horror and fear, trying to hold in the blood with his opposite hand, gulping in shock and sudden nausea, and all the time crawling backwards, backwards toward my door, all his illusions gone.
I threw him a dish towel to staunch his wound. It was stained, and had c
ome with the place, so it was no loss. “Get out,” I said. “Don’t let me see you, in any form, ever again.”
I wiped up the blood after he had gone. I had known it wasn’t Richard. What had happened here had been with my full knowledge and understanding. But he had come to steal from me, under false pretenses. And in his past, I knew, there were others who had surrendered to him because with his form he had lied to them. For myself, I may have been a bit harsh. But all in all, I figured I’d gotten someone's own back again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I showered and soaped off the almond oil, but that wasn’t enough. I opened all my windows, knowing I would be smelling traces of the illusionist, his blood and his sweat, for a long time. I needed to get out of there for awhile. Tamara had given me firm commands about staying off my ankle for a week, but I really was better now. I thought I would walk up to the hills. The sun was just setting, it would be light for another hour. If I took it slowly, by the time I got there the park would have emptied out, and I could change and go for a run. A short run, just see how my foreleg was doing. As I grabbed up my keys to go, there was a knock on my door.
Imposter guy was back for more? He’d forgotten something important he’d left here? Not likely. More probably my landlady was here for the rent, which I hadn’t paid on the first of the month, for the first time since I moved in. When I got closer to the door, I could tell who it was. Yvette was on my doorstep.
“You know your phone number isn’t listed? You have to let me have it.” Yvette wore her happiness with the same force with which she expressed her displeasure. “Come down to the music store and help us,” she said. “Ariadne wants to open this coming weekend, and she's got too much to do. I told her I’d get some help.”
Well, I did have days of training now, in working in a music shop, so I pocketed my keys and went with her back down toward Greenleaf. Yvette explained about Ariadne being more into classical, Western-traditional music than Madam Tamara—as if I hadn’t gathered that already—but that she was open to holding drum classes together with her current plans to teach violin, cello, viola, piano, and other music classes out of her store. Yvette talked so ardently and threw off such excitement I was certain she hadn’t noticed the two guys who fell in behind us as we came down the hill, but when we reached the alley next to the Chinese place, she turned on them.