by Chloe Garner
Demons started to drift into the open space, picking out rhythms around the two humans and forming random patterns within the music and the space, pulsing in and away as Samantha and Carson moved across the floor, oblivious to who was around them. White suit and black dress spun and tangled and flicked around each other and, if it was possible under the volume of the music, the room grew quieter.
The song transitioned into the next one, and Carson held Samantha in a dip for a moment, her bare feet far out to one side and one hand almost touching the ground, then spun her back onto her feet. She hugged him and pulled him back to the table, laughing.
“He is all fingers and toes,” she said, sitting down. “Where did you learn to dance like that?”
“I didn’t always know for sure that I wanted to be a Ranger. My mom let me take dance classes for a while, because I wanted to try it. That was fun.”
She nodded, taking Jason’s drink and finishing it. Her mood sombered with her next breath, and she opened Sam’s beer and drank it, handing him the bottle.
“Stay here,” she said. She stood back up and stretched, then walked a slow, meandering line through the tables up to the stage where Troy met her at the top of the stairs. She motioned at the room behind her and Troy folded his arms. She motioned again, her temper spiking, and he waved at one of the demons standing behind his throne. The slight woman glitched to his side and inclined her head, then glitched away again. Troy folded his arms again, and Samantha turned, ignoring his demonstration of annoyance to wander through the tables again to where the DJ stood along a wall. She leaned in close to talk to him for a minute, and there was another animated conversation, then the second demon agreed and she went to stand in the middle of the floor, arms down, shoulders down. Sam could feel her just breathing.
The flow of air off of the dance floor lifted and the fog drifted away from the tables. The strobing stopped and dim lights - very dim - lit the floor. Demons howled and danced to the music, where they hadn’t yet noticed Samantha, but slowly awareness of her spread and the dance floor emptied, until she was standing by herself, the music thumping on absently.
“What’s going on?” Carson asked. Sam shook his head. She was so focused it almost hurt his head.
The air cleared and the music dropped as the demon at the DJ booth worked to switch over to whatever it was Samantha had asked for. Conversations - English, hellspeak, and otherwise - stopped and all eyes turned toward Samantha. A tiny current of air moved the very bottom edge of the dress, but otherwise she was still, just breathing. He wished he could help, but he kept his mind to himself.
There was the sound of violins, and she spun slowly over the outsides of her feet, crossing her legs and lowering into a crouch, her fingers just resting on the floor, her shoulders rolling with the melody.
“What is this?” Carson whispered. Sam shook his head again. He knew the music - she played it in the car a few times - but he didn’t know what it was. She had so much random music wandering around on her computer that he’d never heard of.
A drum line came in and she stood, rolling her head back, and then side to side over her shoulders, and putting her hands out, flicking them simultaneously to light black and white flames over her palms. A ripple of reaction went through the crowd as demons at the further tables stood and started to migrate closer.
Samantha spun on the ball of one foot, holding the flames up over her head with her arms crossed at the wrists, then flung her arms down in a sharp motion. One line of black flame and one line of white sprung away from her to either side, as if she’d physically thrown them there, and she stepped forward, hands empty, but lines and curls of flame following her along the floor. The music popped and snapped with synthetic rhythms and she pointed to the floor around her with the syncopation of the music, dropping wells of black and white flame around her as the curls formed shapes around the dots. She spun, holding her hands out, palm down, and the curls crossed, black and white cascading in circles and loops of flame knee-high around her. The lights from overhead were all the way off now, and she was lit solely by the white light burning up from the floor around her. It looked like it was coming up through the floor, like she was dropping away strips of hard wood to reveal cracks of flame from underneath her, but the patterns were growing so thick around her that there wouldn’t have been structure to hold her up, any longer. She stood on her island of wood, surrounded by flame as strings played a smooth, even melody, and then the bass and the drums kicked back in and she stepped through the wall, sending thin runners of flame out along a new section of empty floor.
There were new murmurs, and the edges of the room grew closer, as more demons stood and drew in, trying to see around each other. The edge passed Sam, Jason, and Carson, and Sam stood. He was taller than most of the demons, and even as they crowded closer, he maintained a view of her. Carson edged closer with the demons, standing on a chair at the next table, while Jason sat in his seat, legs crossed, holding his drink and watching the demons rather than Samantha. Sam was glad someone was keeping an eye on things, and he was more grateful that it didn’t have to be him.
Samantha turned and arched her back, sending a set of straight lines of flame out from her, then spun out between two of them, foot over foot, dropping dots of flame like they were wrung from the fabric of her dress. Demons scattered back, abandoning a table too close to her patterns, and Sam took a step forward.
She found him and pulled. Tiny spirals of flame tendrilled out from the dots on the floor around her, alternating black and white flames, branching off into more complex patterns where they touched each other. Sam took another step forward. She spun her hand in a wrapping motion over her head, curling her hand closed at the end of the motion, and a white curtain of flame raced around the oblong shape that the tables formed around the floor, obscuring her from sight for a moment in ten feet of flame. Demons jumped back, crashing into each other to get away from the fire, and Sam took another step, ignoring the demons who bounced off of him in the chain reaction. She drew him on, until he was standing with his toes just inches from the wall of flame that was slowly dropping. It reached his eye level, and he found Samantha looking at him, her hand wide open over her head, her posture unchanged.
Her focus dropped just for a moment, acknowledging him and how glad she was to see him, then her personality was gone from him again and she drew another deep breath, pulling him forward again.
He stepped through the white flame, and there was a chorus of gasps behind him. He felt the fire lick at his skin, like a hot electricity that rolled over his arms and legs, but it only touched his skin, like a thrill, and then he was through. His breath caught.
What had looked like solid lines of flame were much more nuanced. Some of them had rough edges and gaps, while others were the smooth shape of a calligrapher’s pen. They spun away from him in endless complexity, and Samantha pulled him again.
He didn’t want to walk over the shapes.
Stepping on them felt wrong, like he was disrupting something in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. Samantha answered him with a distant laugh, and the curls and coils moved, twining into each other and forming a path. It wasn’t so simple as a long empty space for him to follow, but he could see how to move through them without treading on what Samantha had built.
The music rose again, and the flames went higher, spreading and growing, and Sam started through them. Samantha scolded him playfully. Not like that. She took hold of him, moving him through the flames and the patterns with the flow of the music, twisting and turning like one of them until he reached her. Once more there were violins, and the flames died lower and lower until he could only just see the silhouette of her face in front of him, feeling her breath against his skin. He put his arms around her and closed his eyes and felt the explosion of power as the next turn of the music hit. His eyelids went red in front of the wall of white flame that he found close around them, and she looked up at him, the faintest glimmer of a smile on h
er lips, then flung herself out of the ring, dancing with the music and calling him forward. He was just another instrument.
The flames, the drums, the strings, and his own body, all of them moved in the patterns her force of will directed. He danced with her, close, feeling the beat of his own heart under the intense roll of the music, his hands on satin that felt like skin.
The music turned once more, and she shaped the two of them through a slow waltz sequence as the flames went lower and lower, and then, with a final note, it was over. She leaned against him, her skin hot, and the room was quiet. She was out of breath, and Sam realized he was, as well, but he wanted more. As she came back into herself, he felt her realize how close he was. He wanted to kiss her. She reached into his pocket, finding the hair pin there, and leaned back in his arms to tangle her hair on top of her head.
“And that, my friend psychic, is all you get to see,” she said. “Troy takes it personally when people use his club for ambushes. I wouldn’t. Friendly warning.”
She put the pin through her hair and clasped it, and it felt like a wall Sam had been leaning against gave way. He was on his own again. On the other hand, he still held her against him, and the smell of her skin made him want to bury his face into her neck. She took his hand and spun out of his arms, dragging him across the floor as the demons slowly went back to their normal behavior. They found Carson and Jason at the table.
“Don’t drink those,” she said, pointing to the drinks on the table. “Order new ones. You’ve got him?” she asked Jason. Jason shrugged.
“Sure.”
Sam’s eyes met Jason’s, and Jason winked.
“We’ll come looking for you when we’re ready to go.”
Samantha went on.
<><><>
She dragged Sam down into the maze of mostly-unused rooms below the theater, finding an old prop room where a few of the relics of old plays lived and closing the door behind them. The room was too dark to see.
Her heart rate was still up from dancing, and she was running on endorphins and instinct, not taking time to think or plan or consider. She just felt good and wanted to be up against him. His mouth found hers as he lifted her weight up off her feet, so that she was just stumbling backwards on tiptoe, his legs on either side of hers as they tumbled across the room. Her back found a wall and he crushed against her, kissing her deep.
They smelled like sweat and his hair was tangled. Her fingers caught in it and he bit her lip.
“Ouch,” he said. She grinned.
“Sorry.”
He kissed his way down her neck, and she tipped her head back against the wall, eyes open to the darkness. He pushed his forehead against her chin.
“You’re not armed,” he said.
“Of course I am,” she said. Most people had a hard time - impossible, really - finding Lahn. They missed the fact that Samantha was wearing a harness for the thick leather sheath that she carried Lahn in, as a result, but Sam never did. His hands were on her back, and he had realized that it was actually her back he was touching. She found his ear with her nose, tracing the outside edge up to the peak, then finding the ear lobe with her mouth. He shuddered away.
“No. You’re not,” he said. She got a shot of adrenaline as she didn’t fend off the next impulse.
“Inside of my thigh,” she said. Sam’s hands froze, then one slowly made its way down the slick fabric, palm heavy on her hip, to find the leather belts that held the sheath in place on her thigh. There was another moment of suspended motion as they stood, breathing, and his fingers played over the edge between skin and leather, then he kissed her again, curling his hand behind her thigh and picking her up.
She locked her arms around his neck, holding her weight off the floor as he leaned against her harder. She waited with a sense of inevitability for something to snap, but in the dark, it was just the two of them curled around each other.
Maybe half an hour later, Sam hadn’t pushed her any further. The intensity fell off, and they just enjoyed each other. Whatever traps she had out there, waiting to spring shut, they had managed to avoid them, and she was calm.
She was laying underneath him on the floor, and he had dropped his head to rest his face on the exposed skin under her throat. She pulled her fingers through his hair, breaking tangles.
“My feet are going to be black,” she said. “I don’t think I want to put my shoes on again.”
“I don’t want to think about what we’re lying in,” Sam said. She laughed.
“Couldn’t possibly be worse than demon ash,” she said.
“Wanna bet?” he asked. “At least with demon ash, you know where it’s been.”
“Inside a demon,” she said. His face curled in a smile.
“Touché.”
She sighed.
“We should go back upstairs. I need to make another appearance.”
“Are you done dancing?” he asked. She nodded, and he smiled again.
“What?”
“You aren’t going to dance with Troy tonight.”
“It’s so funny that he, of all people, bothers you.”
“He’s just using you,” Sam said.
“And I’m using him,” Samantha answered. “And Jason uses every girl he meets.”
“What has that got to do with anything?” Sam asked, sitting up. She moved to lean against his chest as he scooted against the wall.
“Either it’s okay or it isn’t,” she said. “Using people.”
“I don’t like it when people use you like that.”
“It doesn’t count with a demon,” Samantha said. “It goes both ways. It doesn’t count for a demon, either. You can’t expect him to care about me.”
Sam sighed.
“I just don’t like it.”
She looked up at the darkness where the ceiling would be.
“Then I won’t,” she said.
“Won’t what?”
“Dance with him,” she said.
“You already said you weren’t going to.”
She shook her head.
“Not at all. I can’t not do stuff just because it bothers you, but I can not do that.” She smiled to herself. “Makes a good power play, anyway.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Sure.”
There was a silence.
“Thank you.”
The words popped into her head and she held them up for an instant, making sure, then went on.
“I love you.”
He wrapped her up, and she pulled her knees across his.
“I love you, too.”
She smiled, curling her head against his chest, then sighed.
“I really should go back upstairs now.”
“Sure,” he said. “I get it.”
She laughed when he didn’t move.
“No. Really.”
“Yeah. I get it. Really.”
She laughed again, wriggling against his locked fingers.
“Oh, you mean you need me to move?”
He laughed and stood, pulling her to her feet. They bumbled their way to the door of the room and opened it, letting in a flood of light. Samantha put her hand up against it, and Sam found his glasses and put them on. She laughed.
“They aren’t really sunglasses,” she said.
“Shhh,” he answered. “I’m scouting.”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I should be worried about Jason and Carson. Though I would imagine we’d have heard something if someone picked a fight with them.”
“They’re fine,” Sam said. He dipped his head. “I checked on them a couple of times, anyway.”
Samantha felt her mouth drop. She’d had no idea. She closed her mouth and opened it again.
“I’m speechless.”
He laughed.
“Sorry.”
“No, I’m glad you did. Just… shocked I didn’t think of it.”
There was a slow smile that spread across his face as he searched for another moment, then pull
ed off his glasses.
“I think you forgetting to worry about someone may be the most flattering thing you’ve ever done,” he said. She made a mock-angry face at him and he laughed, wrapping his arm behind her and starting to walk. “Let’s get this over with.”
“It’s that way,” Samantha said, pointing over her shoulder.
“Seriously?”
“Yup.”
He paused, looking.
“Dang.”
She laughed as he spun her to face the other direction before setting off. She nodded.
“Let’s get this over with.”
<><><>
“Carson’s fading,” Jason said as they sat back down at the table. He took a long look at his brother, but Sam didn’t give anything away. Samantha put her hand to Carson’s forehead.
“Are you in pain?” she asked. Carson laughed.
“No, I’m just ready to go.”
She sat.
“Oh.”
She took a moment, looking around the room. The fog was back on and the demons were packed on the dance floor again. You had to know what you were looking for to recognize the difference: the world was bending around her, now. She nodded and stood, handing her shoes to Sam.
“I’ll meet you outside. Keep your guard up.”
Sam nodded and stood. Jason and Carson followed his lead. Out through the foyer, down into the musty basement, turn, turn, turn, and out a door into a parking area. The demon who had driven them there was leaning against the wall by the door.
“So she’s actually going to do it, huh?” he asked, flipping the keys. None of them answered, and he laughed. “Not a secret any more, boys. She just put up a billboard.”
Jason glanced at Sam, who shook his head, a quick little silencing motion. The demon laughed again.
“I’ll go get the car.”
Jason saw Sam’s eyes go vacant, then he pulled his sunglasses off his shirt and put them on. Carson snickered.
“You think they make you look cool?”
Sam took a breath and pulled them off, handing them to Carson. He was back. Jason watched for a clue and Sam gave him another head shake. Nothing to see. Jason nodded. That was the worst thing that could happen right now. Getting into a fight with Carson there. He wondered - again - why Samantha had agreed to bring him.