Fuse

by Angel Payne

  She rewards herself for that with a little bark of a laugh, like a kid comprehending “hot dog” as an expression as well as a food. She tilts her head, suddenly inspecting me like a Pink’s nacho chili special. I pray the woman doesn’t have a thing for nacho chili. If she puts her mouth on me to do this, I’ll lose the contents of my stomach like I’ve binged on those fuckers.

  Luckily, she doesn’t stretch out the torture of her scrutiny for long. Or the wait for her next thorough stroke up my shaft, making it clear she’s not here to “service” me beyond what’s brutally necessary.

  “Shall we get on with things, then?” A ruthless rub of my balls and another pump up my prick. “Because the sooner you give me your liquid gold, the sooner they will be able to put it inside me,” she rasps, once more licking up the column of my neck. “And the sooner I will be the mother of a god.”

  A seething grunt stands in for my roar of protest, but it fades as fast as it erupted. While knowing I’ve figured out what she and the Consortium want the most from me, I’ve held back on theorizing why. Is their purpose for my jizz truly that obvious? Does their army of so-called geniuses clearly not know the truth yet? That I’ll never be a viable father for anyone’s child? If my stuff hasn’t taken hold inside a normal, fertile female like Emmalina, then—

  Emmalina.

  She comes to me now, her light my perfect beacon in this hell. Keeping me sane as Faline starts milking me like a stud horse. Keeps me remembering that, even if this is my life from now on, be it hours or days or months that the Almighty chooses to keep my sorry ass alive, there was a time when my existence meant something. That there was one chance I didn’t throw away. The one massive good I really got right.

  The whisper that won’t stop in my heart.

  Emmalina.

  The presence that seems to fill the room—yes, this room—and yes, even now.

  Emmalina.

  The light of her, so blinding and beautiful, that it makes the air hum and pulse and shiver. Yes, even louder than Faline’s anticipating hiss. Even louder than my thundering blood. The brilliance that shines brighter with every step she seems to stride closer…like there’s a full halo around the top of her hair, and feathers of gold light flaring from her fingertips, and damn beams from the dawn itself shining out of her eyes…

  So bright.

  So damn bright.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  Has it really happened, then? Did Faline really do it? Have I already given her what she wanted and she’s killed me so quickly that I didn’t even feel it? Or maybe getting murdered was a walk in the metaphysical park compared to being tortured Consortium style, and fate decided to give me a bye on all the pain parts.

  But it sure as hell feels like I’m still breathing—hard and heavily. My chest still pumps like the ocean in a tide pool, and my heart hammers like huge waves against those rocks. Is this just the way of things? How one passes from one dimension to the next? If so, it’s a shit ton easier than everyone says it is.

  But if that’s really the case, am I in heaven or hell?

  Because while Emmalina is truly here, so is Faline. Dear fuck, so is Faline. She’s not moaning or sighing anymore. She’s screaming—or at least trying to. I really don’t care. I don’t notice anything beyond Emma’s splendor. Her light is like a living creature come to life inside her, refusing to be contained in the confines of her lush, perfect curves. And holy God, what curves. I’d swear on my balls—still intact, thank fuck—that her breasts have gotten fuller, her hips have gotten lusher, and even her hair has grown longer, fanning from her head with the glowing glory of white-gold wings.

  Wings.

  Yes.

  Jesus God, maybe she really is an angel. But from which side? And do I care, when she’s this magnificent a sight? Will I even notice if I’m floating on clouds or walking through fire, especially if that fire is hers?

  Holy shit. That fire. It’s as if the cosmos peeled off a strip of the sun and then poured it inside her, turning her gaze into a pair of endless skies and her exultant smile into star-bright resplendence. If she walked in here naked, I’m damn sure I’d be blind and burned to a skeleton by now…but I can’t imagine any better experience for my final memories. As it is, I’m positive this view will be embedded in my soul forever. My badass Bunny in head-to-toe leather, undaunted purpose in her steps and unfettered vengeance in her eyes, all but exploding the air itself just by entering the room.

  “Fuck. Me.”

  Croaking the words this close to Faline, even in her seething state of distraction, probably isn’t the wisest choice of my limited lung power, but I’m not being given much of a choice. I need the words, from my own lips, as a barometer of reality. If this is still reality. And if it isn’t, then what the hell has just happened? Is still happening?

  “Fuck. Me.” Still sounds real. A good thing, yes? No? “What…the hell…have you done, Emmalina?”

  Though the vibrations of the words are agony in my throat, the pain sparks my brain back to life. Synapses I’d ordered into dormancy zap back online, plugging what I’m seeing—and now sensing and smelling, as her presence jolts my pores and her sea-and-sunshine scent floods my nostrils—into what I know.

  That she’s real.

  That she’s here.

  And that she’s—

  “Holy. Shit!”

  Like a rhino on Ritalin, the comprehension finally, fully, slams me. She’s back. And different.

  Really. Fucking. Different.

  After a visit back to the ridge. Where she’s had access to all that equipment in the lab…

  The power that the guys rigged from the solar panels, to zap me again…

  “Holy fuck, Emmalina Paisley. What the hell did you—”

  “Shut. Up.” Faline underlines it with a punch to my ribs, making speaking impossible—though only sharpening my curiosity. Why is the harpy trying to hide next to me? If I weren’t still fighting for air, thanks to my pummeled ribs, I’d laugh. Faline Garand is taking cover next to the prisoner she’s got in at least twenty locked shackles?

  “Ding dong!”

  The shout, a mix of confidence and radiance, does induce me to laugh. Though I pay the price for it with a stab of pain through my middle, she’s well worth it.

  She sounds like the sun itself.

  “Well, hello there, ma’am. I’m in the neighborhood, collecting charitable donations for hell. They’re especially in need of skank bitches in bad latex. So happy to see I’ve found exactly what those poor souls need.”

  The sun who’s arrived with a hell of a lot more attitude than when she left.

  After a gritted growl, Faline straightens to her full height. With the new angle to my view, I can see every bony cord in her neck, leading up to the combative jut of her jaw. If the woman were wearing anything but her shiny black body condom, I’d mistake her for a cross-dresser about to get the fail-whale medal for attempting to channel Morticia Addams.

  “Well. Congratulations, Miss Crist. You thought to surprise me earlier and failed—but now it seems the depths of your stupidity have truly succeeded at the quest.”

  My heartrate triples as Emma advances by a couple of calm steps. Jesus, if that’s really her…and she’s really facing off against Faline…

  “I don’t give a shit if you’re entertained or not, Faline. Or about your assessment of my IQ, for that matter.” Another two steps, in which her self-sure strut is augmented by a battle-ready flick of her hands. “I don’t care because you don’t matter. Because you can try to hold me back right now—and maybe you can—but that won’t stop me from getting right back up, no matter how hard it is or deeply it hurts, and coming at you with every molecule of air left in my lungs and every drop of strength left in my limbs.”

  In response to Faline’s scoff, Emma merely shakes her head. “Because in the end, I’ll still have what you desire most—yet can never understand enough to have.”

  For the very first time, she fully looks over
to me. Then straight into me.

  “I have true love. Real love. Complete fusion with another, beyond labels and legacies and who-saved-who.” For the first time, her hear-me-roar countenance gives way to another look. A face full of the Emmalina from before. The tender longing of the woman who owns my heart and now captivates my soul all over again. “Not just the love of my life,” she rasps. “The love of my existence.”

  Once more, I give up on even trying to breathe. Or comprehend. Or figure any of this the hell out.

  Even as Faline breaks apart the air with her slow, mocking smacks of applause. “What an adorable little oration,” she spits. “The ‘love of your existence,’ sí?” She shakes out her reddened fingers and jerks them upward, abandoning Morticia for a true witch resonance this time. With palms turned in and fingers slashing upward, she bursts with a gloating shout before charging, “Then you will certainly not have any issue about dying for him, hmmm?”

  With that, she twists and lifts her hands again, and I almost expect a black cauldron to explode out of the floor to suck Emma down into its glowing morass.

  What does happen is no less jarring.

  The bitch’s electric web is back, only now it sizzles across the air over and around us, an electric force field reinforced with strands of bright-red light. If every inch of those strands weren’t sparking like electrical wires in the rain, I’d call them pretty—but when they start splitting on themselves in order to slither horizontally through the air, it’s past time for poetry. Each of those buzzing snakes hisses and crackles with the obvious potential for killing someone at first touch.

  And three of them are headed toward Emma now.

  Then four.

  Then five.

  “Fuck!” I shout. “No!” And wrestle like a madman against my bonds, shaking the entire table. And finally, finally, have managed enough residual power to notch a tear in the shackle on my right ankle. To ram it hard enough over and over to loosen the damn thing. And then to do the same on the binding around my calf. Then my knee, and my lower thigh, and my upper thigh.

  Not fast enough.

  She’ll be dead before I can…

  But she’s sure as fuck not dead.

  With balletic sweeps of her arms, my avenging angel fries every damn one of those crimson snakes—literally, she’s cooked them off the air like drips of butter in an atmospheric pan. Once that’s handled, she spins and burns half of the spider webs lining the room too—not a development Faline takes with diva dignity. Her shriek is like a Gorgon with bubonic plague, medieval fury mixed with a leaf blower that just sucked up a ground squirrel, as she lunges forward with hands outstretched. The sickening sound worsens as her fingers slam into another strand of Emma’s heat, and the eight tips of her longest digits are burned to nubs like candles stabbed into the sun. Which, when it comes to my girl’s power, is a damn appropriate comparison.

  Christ.

  My girl’s power.

  I seriously just thought that.

  For a second, I can’t even focus on escaping more of my bonds. Confusion and bewilderment mix with awe and elation, centering on one actuality that can’t be ignored any more than the blinding, resounding, resplendent star my woman has become.

  The freak she’s turned herself into…for me.

  And is now fighting as an army of one to save me.

  Not acceptable.

  “Goddamnit,” I snarl.

  Not. Acceptable.

  But I don’t waste the time or the oxygen to vocalize it. Every cell in my blood is ordered to the warfront of my body, blasting back into my limbs and muscles until I burst with a roar, straining and pushing—and popping every shackle on my arms free at once.

  My yell has barely been noticed. Faline, barely taking breaks for air between charges at Emma, has clearly turned up the game on her volume to offset the epic fail on her offensive. Where she’s plunging and squawking like a deluded sailor, Emma is still a poised ballerina of light and lucidity—though swapping the tutu for the tightest, hottest leather. Every move she makes is the epitome of flawless brevity, corresponding to at least four or five from Faline. Not that the bitch stops long enough to notice. Not that Faline is even thinking straight anymore.

  Funny what happens when the queen doesn’t get her way.

  Amazing what happens when a guy gets to watch the train wreck of a follow-up meltdown.

  To feel my eyes pop open as wide as my sockets will allow them—as I vow to commit the sight before me to my fondest memories for life. Perhaps beyond that.

  Because it’s not every day a guy gets a chance to see a sadistic witch taken down and laid out. Then locked that way, flat on a concrete floor, as her skin starts resembling a wince-worthy sunburn-spray ad.

  Courtesy of a thousand ribbons of white-gold sun.

  That are emanating from his fiancée’s palms.

  Nope. A guy usually doesn’t get to watch as the bitch spits and hisses and spews with every filthy word ever conceived. Nor does he usually get to witness the edges of her catsuit start to shrivel beneath those concentrated rays, threatening to burst into tiny flames any second—as he hopes they really do.

  But he especially doesn’t get to behold every shred of his woman’s fiery beauty, her eyes filled with blue flames and her skin shimmering like crushed gold, as she whips toward him and commands in the most wicked-sexy voice the ages ever gave a warrior, “Baby, I can’t do this for much longer. Please, get your ass out into the car!”

  Yeah. I really will remember this for a thousand damn years.

  But I’m also going to remember the clenched distress in her voice—and the sudden realization that I can’t do a fucking thing to help her get past it except oblige with her dictate the best way I can.

  So I do.

  Grunting hard as I slide off the table, barely keeping my balance.

  Growling at my legs through clenched teeth as I stumble toward the door—“Move, move, move!”—and then out into the hall, where a half-dozen more henchmen are sprawled across the floor, alive but unconscious. Next to each of them is a melted mangle of black steel. As I take agonizing hops over the assholes, I try not to gawk but quickly accept that impossibility. My fiancée has just turned a bunch of high-powered rifles into oversized licorice twists.

  “Good and Plenty,” I mutter, my careening brain dropping imaginary white and pink coating on top of the decimated weapons. I get two seconds to indulge the vision before being snapped back to the purpose by a pained moan underneath me—to which I respond with a vicious spit when it’s accompanied by a desperate hand around my ankle. “Shit! Asswad!”

  The minion turns a half-burnt grimace up at me. “We…will find you again,” he snarls from between his charred teeth. “She…will find you…again. She…she…is…everywh—”

  A boot on the dick’s neck cuts him off from spewing anything more. Not mine. Number one, I don’t have a cock sock to my name at the moment, let alone boots. Number two, the eerie surety in the guy’s voice has tugged at a visceral part of my being. A part I abhor acknowledging. The part that, for as long as I fucking live, will never completely go away.

  The part permanently haunted by Faline Garand.

  “Time for night-night again, boo-boo bear.”

  The part easily shoved away and out of my psyche as soon as Foley puts an end to the guy’s consciousness with a swift smack of his rifle butt. He’s barely done with the task before snapping his regard back up to me.

  “And now it’s time to get your sorry ass out the damn—eeowww.” He whips the back of his free hand over his eyes. “I didn’t literally mean ass.”

  I fling a glower. “Sorry about your delicate sensibilities, precious. Didn’t have time to muck around for my leathers while Emma and Faline were—” I seize to a stop before we clear the next archway in the hall, doubling over as horror lances me with physical pain. “Holy fuck. Holy Christ. What the hell am I doing?”

  Foley jerks a hand into my armpit, yanking me back u
p with agonizing intensity. His features are a daunting match to the mood, confirming he’s been on this E-ticket ride a bunch of times before. “You’re doing the best thing for the situation right now, gimp-orina. Getting the hell out of the way.”

  “Emma—”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Getting the hell out of her way.”

  As if he’s shot all the syllables at me from a nail gun, I sag. And even look down, expecting to find a couple dozen steel heads turned into sippy straws for my bloodstream. Though I come up empty, I growl at Foley, “This feels disgusting.” Against the demand of every bone in my body. Every calling of my instinct. Every need in my soul. Must fucking protect her. Must fucking save her. Must keep her away from that horrific, heartless bitch…

  “I know, man.” Foley’s low rumble conveys that he really does—though it’s less than a drop of comfort for my spirit. And as I let the guy help me hobble all the way out to the Rover, I pledge a solemn vow to myself. And to Emma.

  This is the first and last time she’ll ever have to do this. To shoulder the burden of conquering our enemies for the sake of saving my sorry, naked ass.

  I’m going to remember.

  All of it.

  All the fear and the pain and the desperation and the helplessness.

  And yeah, I’m even going to remember the dire, consuming relief of this moment too—as she finally joins me in the Rover’s back seat, tumbling into the car headfirst as Foley guns the engine, peeling the tires in the peaceful Palos Verdes night. Every blue-hair in every other estate on this block has likely scribbled the car’s license and reported us to the police by now, but I don’t give a flying fuck. If I’m never welcomed back in this neighborhood again, it’ll be too soon. I only want to get to our ridge again. Everything I need is there.

  Correction.

  Everything I need is finally, finally, back in my arms again.

  My sweet Bunny.

  My perfect Velvet.

  My astounding angel.

  And now, truly, the magnificent more of my world.