It's Always Time

by Oblimo

  Dee slammed the front door behind him, cracking the frame and ruining the lock.

  "You're just becoming more you," Galatea whispered.

  Eurydice tore free of Galatea's embrace. The eidolon of memory and light winked out. Eurydice quaked, disheveled dreadlocks falling everywhere, fists squeezed against her sides.

  "I'm sorry." Galatea's smile was kind but sad. "But you had to know. He's not the one."

  Eurydice said nothing.

  "Another will come." Galatea's smile turned wry. "They always do."

  "You're wrong," Eurydice said.

  "What?"

  "You were wrong." Eurydice flipped her hair back, a gesture both childish and defiantly strong. "Dee was changing." She stepped forward. Silver foxfire bloomed below her skin. "Dee has changed. Wait. You weren't wrong." Her eyes narrowed. "You're lying."

  Galatea fell back between the two upright sunlamps. "No, I'm not."

  "Of course you are. You lie all the time. You're lying right now." Eurydice's laughter rang like fey bells. "To me!"

  "Dee can't change," Galatea insisted, but her eyes pled otherwise.

  "I know something you don't know," Eurydice sang, glowing. She opened her arms wide. "C'mere, you big dummy."

  Galatea rushed into her embrace and the world went white.

  Yves and Dee were arguing in the copse of ruined trees at the edge of the wide flowerbed. Eurydice followed the fleeing Raspberry with her eyes, burned nanomek to smooth her ears into perfect parabolas, and homed onto Dee's dark vibrato.

  "The decision has already been made, hasn’t it, Yves?" he said.

  Yves' grin was mirthless. "I know that tone, Dee. You're starting a rehearsed hissy fit." Dee tried to protest but Yves cut him off. "'Bitch-bitch-bitch, walk out the door.' That means you're leaving."

  Icy panic seized Eurydice. She shut down, terrified to move, ready to shatter.

  A warm hand enfolded her shoulder, soft and soothing, creamy satin. "Keep listening, honey," CeeCee urged. "If they wanted to be out of earshot, they would have driven two counties away."

  Eurydice drew a ragged breath, nodded, and swiveled her ears like a cat.

  "…So it has to be me," Yves was saying.

  "Agreed," Dee said, nodding gravely. "Black Cherry wants to live in a story? Fine. We're going to give her one."

  Yves rubbed his chin. "What do you mean?"

  "Black Cherry's holding all the cards," Dee said, "but she's not playing with a full deck."

  "A little less hissy fit, a lot more exposition, please," Yves insisted, "time's a wasting."

  "All right," Dee smirked, then ticked off each point with his fingers. "I head off, alone, to Easy House. I distract Cherry, make sure she can't use Unyx's hair. You guys catch up—still have my keys? Good. So I distract Cherry. The Easies go on automatic pilot." He dropped his hand. "Out of fingers. Anyway, Easies go on automatic pilot, Unyx cures the Frenzy."

  "How?" Yves' cheek twitched. "This is another answer I don't want to know, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Dee replied, "it really is. So Unyx cures the Frenzy. Raspberry finds Unyx's hair and the nanomek. CeeCee eats anybody trying to get away. You do…what you've got to do."

  "And you rescue Galatea," Yves said, brow furrowed.

  "No," Dee said, "that's Eurydice's job." He turned to the flowerbed. Eurydice contemplated her feet. "If she wants it. Eurydice deserves the chance to make up her own mind about Galatea," Dee finished. He turned away and Eurydice popped her head up, eyes wide.

  "Two problems with that plan," Yves countered. "One, Eurydice doesn't know if she wants Galatea back."

  "And two," Dee sighed, "Galatea probably doesn't want to come back. CeeCee said Cherry was lying about her. Cherry's setting me up with some sort of cruel irony gag. What else could it be? She thinks she's the villain in a fairy tale or vaudeville routine."

  Dee shrugged. "But the Frenzy has got to be stopped, and Black Cherry will go berserk as soon as Unyx shows up. So I've got to keep Black Cherry busy, no matter what it takes. Oh." Dee raised his voice. "And I don't know how Unyx's precognition really works, but Cherry can hear through Unyx's ears, so I sure hope she hasn't been listening to any of this."

  Eurydice, almost frozen with anticipation, managed, "Unyx, don't start listening five minutes ago."

  "'Kay," said Unyx, Raspberry's head resting on her shoulder.

  "No games, Dee," Yves dismissed. "Do you want Galatea back?"

  "I want her to be happy," Dee said, "I want Eurydice to be happy." Dee relented. "Yes. God, Yves, I want them both to be happy." His Adam's Apple bobbing, he whispered, "I want them to be happy with me." Dee stood in teary silence.

  Yves softened. "Dee?"

  Every iota of nanomek in Eurydice's body latched onto her sensory web. Billions of green girls listened to Dee's breathing deepen and slow. Dee nodded, then spoke with such sudden conviction Eurydice nearly cried out. "This is how it has to happen. I won't second guess her or Galatea anymore. Whatever Eurydice and Galatea choose will be the right thing." Dee dried his face with his palm. "No looking back."

  "You sure?" Yves asked, but he was already adjusting his scabbard, tightening the knot in his belt.

  "Yes," Dee answered, and as if it were the easiest thing in the world, he added, "I trust her both."

  The washing machine tore off its wall hookup. Water squirted up the basement wall. Black Cherry hissed and drank. Her gel-flesh seethed around Dee's cock. Candy-red froth poured off her back and flailing wings, sluicing over Dee's belly and thighs. "Had enough?" Dee growled, brutalizing her ass from behind. "You…sick…fucking…bitch?"

  "Never!" Black Cherry smashed her ass against Dee's crotch, jabbing his cock into her very core. She howled in orgasm or agony or both. "Master! Cum in me now. Name me now." Her insane enthusiasm was infectious, the constant surf of her flesh impossible to deny, and Dee felt pressure rise within him. "Become me," Black Cherry moaned. "Now!"

  "Dee?"

  Dee whipped around. His dick gashed Black Cherry wide open. She twittered and gabbled, cumming so hard her wings fountained off.

  A green face peeked at him from around the washroom door. Thin dreadlocks cascaded about the face in sheaves, hiding everything but a sensuous smirk. "This is what happens," the green girl said, tipping her head, revealing a sparkling emerald eye, "when you leave the house."

  Dee's heart raced. "Eurydice?"

  "Yes," said the green girl, and filled the doorway. She flipped her hair back, ducking to avoid the top of the doorframe.

  Time stood still. "Galatea."

  "Yes," said the green girl. "I am Eurydice." She swayed into the room. Dee was staggered by the grace and sumptuous promise in that single step. "I am Galatea. I am Venus." Her gel-flesh flowed, her curves tapered into a classical figure with hair falling down to her knees. "I am Lilith." The beauty grew fangs, her form fiendish and fleshy. She stepped closer, body diminishing as dragonfly wings sprouted. "I am Fée. I am all of them and more. But more than anything…"

  She moved close enough for Dee to hear the metallic sigh as she morphed into the ravishing beauty that had greeted him at the washroom door, in the flowerbed by the overpass, in Bee's bathtub, and in Dee's apartment, rising up from the kitchen table, mischief and fantasy made flesh. Well, no, not exactly flesh.

  The green girl's fingers crossed her left breast, cleaving an angled X, its curved lines suggesting a dancer in mid-leap.

  "I am yours, Deiter Detwiler," she said, and kissed him. "Always."

  Black Cherry backslid off the washing machine, splashed down into a ruddy lake. Her hips pumped in reflexive jerks on the floor. Little waves rippled through the soupy mess. "Master, master, master."

  "You know," the green girl said, glancing sidelong at Dee's crotch. He was ramrod stiff and slicked with cherry syrup and sugary foam from his bellybutton to his knees. "This'd be so much more romantic if you hadn't just butt-fucked my sister."

  Dee felt drunk with delight. "Or if you'd stop screwing e
very woman I introduce you to," he countered, grinning like an idiot. "What's going to happen when I take you to meet my mom?"

  She poked him in the chest. "You're the one who slept with Yves!"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Yeah," the green girl pouted. "Still, I can dream, can't I?" She reached for a torn clothes line and mopped the gunk off Dee's gut with a silk camisole. Black Cherry flopped onto her back, gulping like a suffocating fish. The green girl swirled the camisole around Dee's balls, stepping close. "So." Her breasts pushed against his neck as she leaned into him, slowly stroking the silk material over his prick. Dee swam in a perfume of citrus-and-sex. She whispered into his ear, "Tell me: your mother." She pulled back. "She hot?"

  Dee kissed the wicked grin off the green girl's face.

  Yves sat in the idling Volkswagen, fingering the scabbard. Yves remembered mocking Dee when he had refused to hurt the mindfucked Easies under the highway overpass. He could sympathize now.

  "C'mon," a coed whined. "Lemme in." She bounced on the balls of her feet, rattling the driver's side door handle, breasts spilling out from under her tank top and smearing the window with sweat. "I'll suck your dick."

  He looked up into her rabid eyes. "Sorry," he said, turning away, "I just can't hit that."

  The front door of the sorority house banged open. Raspberry jigged in the threshold. "Woo! I rock!" She brandished two long, braided ropes of black hair. "I got 'em!"

  Yves swore. Nothing to do but to do it, he thought, and popped open the car's electric door lock. The coed bent down, fumbled the car door open. Yves swung the door out hard, wincing as the coed whacked her head against the window. He stepped onto the pavement, grabbed the reeling girl in a fireman's carry, and dragged her up the porch steps and into the sorority.

  The foyer was crowded with idle coeds. Some looked miserable, others abashed, but all where exhausted and lost. "Need some help here," he said, hefting the girl to her feet.

  A girl with a FedEx cap rammed down over unruly strawberry blond curls trotted up. "She okay?"

  "She's still frenzied," Yves said. "Where's Unyx?"

  "Upstairs," the strawberry blonde said, "there're still six or so sisters unaccounted for." She took the woozy coed from him. "This…oof…makes it five. I'll take her upstairs." She blushed. "I'm so sorry for all this."

  "Where is she?" Yves felt hollowed out, coreless. "Where is Cherry?"

  "Last I heard from her," the strawberry blonde answered, "She was in the basement, down that hallway. First door to your left." She wobbled but made her way toward the stairwell in the center hall. Her blush deepened. "Thank you, Mr. Valiancourt."

  At the sound of his name, all the girls turned to him. No one told them my name. They just know, from Cherry. The Frenzy is gone but the cherry lives on. Yves swept from the foyer and down the hallway.

  "Rage," SB had whispered to him on the boiled shore of the reservoir. "Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles."

  "What would you have me do?" Yves had asked.

  "Someone needs to die today, Yves."

  "It's me," Yves had said. He had not intend it to be a question.

  SB had said, "Yes, Yves. It's supposed to be you."

  The door at the end of the hall led to a large kitchen. A clutch of coeds tended to a naked boy in his late teens sitting on the marble top of a utility cart. Yves watched a girl in torn pink hot pants hand him a satchel. "Here's your newspapers. What's left of them, anyway. And, uh, your two dollars." She dropped a fifty dollar bill into the satchel. "Keep the change."

  "Thanks," the paperboy muttered, plopping the satchel in his lap.

  "We're so, so sorry," said one of the other girls.

  The paperboy shrugged. "S'okay."

  "We mean it," the girl in the pink hot pants cupped his shoulder, then withdrew her hand. "Look, uh, I know this doesn't make any difference, but you were pretty good." The paperboy laughed dryly.

  "Seriously," another girl insisted. "All those other guys are out cold. And Eddie ran away, I bet. You're the last man standing. I think that cable guy's going to need an ambulance." She blanched. "We're really sorry."

  The paperboy sat up straight, laughing. "You know what I'm sorry about? I was a virgin. Hell, the only date I've ever had was to the prom. And we only necked. And this…" He waved his hand around at the surrounding gang of half-naked college girls, "This is what happens my first time. You won't believe it, I can't believe it, but do you want to know what I'm thinking? It's all downhill from here. What I'm sorry about? Nothing like this will ever happen again."

  The girls glanced at each other.

  "Yeah," the paperboy mumbled, "pretty stupid, I know. Thanks for listening to me, though." The girl in the pink hot pants coughed politely. The paperboy looked up at her.

  "What's your phone number?" she asked.

  Yves shook his head and trudged down the basement steps.

  "Supposed to be," Yves had repeated to SB. "That's not the same thing as 'has to be,' is it?"

  "No," SB had said, "it isn't. Dee's a rule breaker. His story is off course. You don't have to play by the rules, either. You can choose who dies this time around, Yves. It doesn't have to be you. But you have to pick." She had walked back to the water's edge. "So who's it going to be? You? Dee?"

  She had turned to face him. "Me?"

  "Wait," Black Cherry burbled. She sat up but her momentum and the weight of her formless wings drove her back down again. "Wait."

  Dee broke his kiss. The green girl giggled and hummed, eyes closed. "If you're going to meet my mother," he said to her, "I'll need to know your name."

  "Mm, a third name. That's your job." The green girl beeped him on the nose. "But don't name me here. It makes me orgasm so hard and I want some real romance for once."

  "Shouldn't you name yourself?"

  The green girl gazed at him. Behind them, Black Cherry thrashed, the crimson lake shrinking into a puddle as her wings took shape. "No, Master."

  "That's so cornball," the green girl snickered, "I love it." She kissed him, slurring into his mouth, "But I cum rilly, rilly hard when you do it. You're the one."

  "No." Black Cherry swayed on all fours, head bowed, the wings above her ears little more than red, wet noodles. "Master, no."

  "You said that before," Dee told the green girl. "Back at the highway, you said, 'You're supposed to be the one.' But what does that mean? There some prophecy I don’t know about or something?"

  The green girl laughed, "No, silly. It just means you're the one." She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so hard his toes curled.

  Black Cherry sat up on her haunches and shrieked like a wounded animal. "No!"

  "The one for me," the green girl told Dee, and kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him.

  "Cut the crap," Yves had told SB. "I don't believe in fate or destiny, and especially not some bullshit story."

  "Black Cherry believes," SB had said.

  "Exactly!" Yves had paced, hands balling into fists. "Fate didn't rape me. Black Cherry did. Fate isn't going to kill anybody. Black Cherry will." He had jabbed his finger at SB. "You're not talking about fate, you're talking about Black Cherry. Her actions, her choices. She's not going to stop until somebody dies. Because that's what she wants."

  SB had reached for him but he had pulled away. "What do you want, Yves?"

  "Stop ignoring me!" Black Cherry's voice was shrill enough to break glass. "Stop it. I'll kill you all!"

  "Let's get out of here," Dee told the green girl, hooking an arm over her shoulder. "Your baby sister's being a real brat."

  Dee and the green girl turned their backs on Black Cherry and made for the door. The scarlet girl flew at them, all her strength and fury funneling into her wing claws as she hurtled forward.

  Yves stalked through the door, drawing his sword. He stepped around his friends and raised his blade. Its ghostly edge sliced through Black Cherry's wings like a razor through water. "Victory is not being cut," he said, angling his
blade as Black Cherry stumbled into it.

  He cut Black Cherry in half. "You lost."

  Her belly unzipped. Yves' cut was clean and Black Cherry cracked open, torso canting backward like the lid of a cigarette lighter. Her face contorted. Her jet-engine scream switched off into total silence. Yves was convinced he had been struck deaf. Black Cherry's torso bent almost parallel to the ceiling and her entire body dissolved into a downpour. Sound returned to the world as the deliquesced scarlet girl sloshed onto the floor like an upturned barrel of claret wine.

  "Yves," Dee called from the door. Yves nodded but did not look back. The rollicking red waves described a perfect circle on the floor before him. He took the time to find his center and relax into the Water Kamae ready stance.

  "She needs a name, Yves," Dee said. Yves nodded again and heard the door shut behind him.

  Black Cherry spindled up out of the waves, body hardening within a creamy red shell, beautiful and terrible. "Playmate's come to play." Her lips parted as she gave Yves's pale sword a sultry look. "Where did you get such a wonderful toy?"

  "Your banter's lousy," Yves replied. "Derivative, too." He angled the tip of his sword to point at the bridge of Black Cherry's nose. "This is the endgame, Cherry. Bad time to get sloppy."

  Black Cherry feinted with a right hook. Yves sidestepped, leaving his chest exposed. Black Cherry swung a roundhouse punch at Yves' breast powerful enough to pulverize his heart. His thumb prickled and Yves spun about, sword rising high. The scarlet girl's punch flew wild as Yves severed her right wing at the shoulder, then flicked his blade through her neck on the downswing.

  "Stupid girl," Yves said over the deluge as Black Cherry rained down all around him. "I told you I never make the same mistake twice. I know you have claws."

  Black Cherry scrabbled over the floor like a half-drowned swimmer dragging herself from the ocean. "How…H—how…"

  "Nice triple-feint, though," Yves said. "Too bad you can't divide like your sister, or I'd really be in trouble." Black Cherry pushed herself up. She was nothing more than a head and torso above a choppy puddle of crimson melt. Yves brought his sword down.