In a small voice she said, “He might not be stuck. He’s done this before. Disappeared on me and then turned up, running around loose in my apartment. Buying stuff on my Amazon account.” Now she sounded worried.
Clay tsked. “You can’t ignore his humanity.”
“I guess you’re right. I’ll call you when I’m done.”
Chapter Four
Jewel had been ready to head home when Clay called, but, at the thought of excavating Randy from bed, she took her shorts off again and plunged into the lake for another ten minutes.
Her shoulder cut through the waves against the slap and heave of the surf. Around her, gulls bobbed, tossed and struggling with motion, but she slid like a sea lion, moving with the water, never against it, thrilled by the incalculable power of the lake and yet comfortable in its arms.
Then she turned onto her back, resting. The water was bracing-cold, the sky pale blue. Far overhead, a white egret oared its way slowly along the lakefront on a five-foot wingspan. What was that like? To fly fearlessly?
She tried to imagine it. Suppose the water was air. Pretend the waves were wind.
She filled her lungs and dove.
No, this was nothing like flying. The waves churned sand off the bottom and scoured her skin. Floating water weed hung down, wobbling with the surf, defying gravity. A pair of pinky-orange gull feet scrabbled below the surface. She eeled forward and popped up beside the bird. It made a gutteral noise of surprise and burst into flight. Jewel laughed.
At length her hands and feet went numb. She gave up and let the water push her ashore.
On the bike ride home, she remembered Clay chiding her. That wasn’t nice. Why did he care? Trying not to feel guilty, she bumped the bike up the steps of the Corncob Building.
She was fed up with having a sex demon for a roommate.
“You try having headbanging sex for three weeks straight with no sleep.”
Said out loud, it sounded ungrateful, as well as mean.
She sighed. In defiance of the Hinky Policy, she picked up her phone and hit speed dial.
“Ask Your Shrink, you’re on the air, caller.”
“Yeah, hi, this is, um, Coral.”
“What’s on your mind, Coral?”
“It’s my boyfriend. He won’t let me sleep. I mean, totally won’t let me sleep. He can do it all night, and I’m starting to see pink elephants, know what I’m saying? I’m afraid I’ll get in an accident.” In the elevator, she punched twenty-three.
“Slip him a sleeping pill,” Ask Your Shrink suggested, and Jewel blinked in shock. “Perhaps he has a sleep disorder.”
“The thing is, I’ve kind of locked him in my apartment. Bedroom. Because then I get to sleep on the couch.”
“Is your boyfriend underage? Debilitated in any way?”
“Heck, no.” He was over two hundred years old and he was friggin’ magical. “He could get out if he wanted,” she lied. Now she felt terrible. Clay was right. She was a jerk.
“When you say he’s locked in your bedroom, Coral, do you mean for the night?”
“Um, no, he’s pretty much locked in. I think.” That sounded worse. She burst out, “I can’t get anybody to see how hard it is.” The more she said, the rottener she felt. Ask Your Shrink probably pictured her chaining this guy down and bringing him bread and water only if he, like, performed. “Oh, never mind.” She hung up and stuffed the phone back in her pocket.
Imagining Randy stuck in bed, all verklempt, worried she’d ever come back for him, she raced her bike to her front door.
Maybe he was in her bathrobe, using her credit card online.
She burst into her apartment and stood in the hall.
No sound.
No Randy in the living room at the computer or the TV. No Randy in the kitchen. No Randy in the bedroom.
She stripped and flopped on the bed. “Randy?”
No tingle. No cuddly come-fuck-me vibe. Sulking.
Staring at the ceiling, she wondered if the woman who had cursed him for being bad in bed all those years ago had known what she would be doing to the lucky girl who won the Randy Raffle. Probably not. When you had magical revenge available, you were probably trigger-happy.
“Randy?” She reached out into darkness in her mind.
Sweet heat exploded in her chest. Her eyes drifted shut with pleasure, and she heard him say in her head, You came back!
“I always come back.” Her body, freshened by a good night’s sleep, yelled a big yahoo.
And fell backward, cartwheeling into that cloudy night sky in demonspace.
She fell and fell. It was not like swimming at all.
She screamed.
He caught her from behind as they flew, or fell. The clouds rushed up to meet her face. You want it.
Yes, I want sex! But I don’t want — She turned in his arms, struggling with his strength. And because she was in demonspace with him, she could be as strong as he. I thought you could count my breaths!
So I can.
She felt them lift up into the air, always in the air, he knows how scared I am of heights.
They grappled, body to body.
They were so high, there was nothing to see, above or below, but the turbulent curling bellies of thunderclouds, purple, blue, black, and every shade of gray. There was no ground in sight at all. Fear clutched her chest.
In the peculiar half-light of demonspace, his eyes burned down on hers, big and black, so intense that she froze, helpless.
Fear and exhaustion met the core of her strength.
This time she wouldn’t cave. She refused to swoon and let him scare her into holding still while he did his magic deed.
With that thought, she felt her shoulders bunch up. Extra muscles sprouted to pull her a few inches out of his grasp. Without surprise she realized she had grown a pair of big leathery snow-white batwings.
She pulled her knees up to her chest, set her feet against his belly, and kicked.
He spun away, falling. In seconds, he was a speck, far below.
Randy! she screamed. She squinted down through the clouds.
He fell and fell and fell.
She beat the air with her wings, making great flaps of wind, drawing a bead on his shrinking body. Then she aimed her head down, put her arms at her sides, folded her wings until they touched her ankles, and plummeted after him.
Randy!
He didn’t seem to get any closer. Frantic, she opened her wings and beat down hard, accelerating her plunge. Now he was a starfish spinning below her, now child-sized, now a naked man falling slack with his eyes closed. She shot past him and tumbled over herself on air as hard as asphalt, trying to brake and keep him in view past her own ankles.
In another moment she was pacing him. She seized him in her arms and, with one powerful wingstroke, carried him up through the clouds, cradling him. He was dead weight in her arms.
Randy?
He opened his eyes.
You saved me.
A little sneaky something in his tone, in the lines around his eyes, made her pause in midair.
She gasped. You — you big faker!
She opened her arms and let him fall.
He slid down her body, clutched her ankle, and stopped with a yank that set her rolling again.
Let go of me!
Very well, since you will have it so.
In another instant he had his own pair of batwings, oxblood red, making a mighty wind as he hovered before her. Even his flesh reddened. Every muscle on his big naked body swelled. Including the sonic red boinkwurst at his groin.
She backpedaled in the air. Wait. I want to negotiate a—
He bounded into the sky over her and spread his dark red wings, his face dark with lust and testosterone-flavored greed. For once he looked demonic in a not-good way.
Jewel had had enough.
She was not going to be intimidated anymore.
She too leaped up, letting her wings out with a flump like a parachute
opening. His equal, was she? Thinking of comic books, she flexed and stirred her fists at him, bulking her muscles up until she had big bulgy thews.
Come and get it, fool, she said, beckoning him with a hamlike hand. Ew, the hands seemed a little too hulky. She smoothed them out and added long white fingernails.
He looked startled. I don’t want to fight with you.
Shoulda thought of that when you were scaring the shit out of me in the air! Come on, demon. Put ’em up.
Her demon reared back on his wings.
Sissy! she yelled. Sunday driver! Big fat lord on the outside, melted marshmallow on the inside!
His face darkened. You take advantage of my need.
You take advantage of me every single night! she screamed, and a jet of flame shot out of her mouth with the words.
Whoa. She shut up, startled.
You want it! You want me! he screamed back. Fire billowed out of him and played over her bare skin, leaving sootmarks and a sizzling thrill wherever it touched her.
Just like a man. Throw dirt on her and then blame her. She flung out her wings, letting them expand even bigger, letting them glitter like huge white diamonds, burning away the soot, sending blazing white light into his angry eyes.
You make me what I am, he grated. I offer you nothing you have not imagined or wanted deep in your heart.
She had never bought that and she never would. Quit trying to scare me!
He recoiled from her. His face and body swelled inhumanly. His wings caught fire. His legs joined into a block-long oxblood-red tail that whipped out behind him with a crack like thunder. He pulled his neck back like a fighting cock about to strike. His neck elongated. He opened a mouth full of foot-long fangs, flared the crimson ruff around his neck to its fullest, and screamed a long, angry blast of fire at her.
But Jewel reacted as if he were a dark red mirror. Her own ruff flared, white as mink, sparkling as the sun on water. Her own long sinewy body uncoiled.
His flame licked her like jalapeño bath oil.
Oh, lord. That felt good.
Against her will she felt that old heat, that zing, that shimmy-shimmy-coco-pop undercarriage goodness.
He’d done it to her again.
As he sent another gout of flame at her, she darted straight through it and bodyslammed him, wrapping him with her tail, boa-constrictor style. He wrapped her in turn, sending pulses of raw desire through her straining muscles.
I know what I want, she panted. God, this was exciting. Like riding a green horse. Like mountain-biking down a switchback. Like wrestling. She exulted in the feel of body on body.
Their tails tangled, knotted, tightened on one another, and their scaled bodies lengthened, twisting this way and that, striking sparks as they slid against one another.
She wanted him so much she was dizzy with it.
Furious with lust, she opened her jaws as far as they could go, then farther, calling up the fire in her belly. His throat came in view. With a roar of white-hot flame, she chomped down, shutting her eyes and pulling him to her with her claws, grappling with his thrashing, glowing body, tasting him, feeling his muscles move in her jaws.
When she opened her eyes she saw the impossible.
He clung to her face-to-face, his dragon’s eyes dark as old lava.
He opened his mouth wide. Wider. His fangs were the height of tall buildings. Wider still.
The impossible happened every night, in demonspace.
His dragon-dick found her opening and slid home, and she squeezed around him a if she would never let go. I love this.
Down inside his throat, she saw the heart of his volcano.
All right. Let’s do it, she thought, and she dove into the fire. Her wings expanded. Her tail thrashed, knocking against his gullet. He swallowed her down, down into the spiralling sparks, even as she swallowed him into her burning center.
They reached the magma core at the same moment.
The fireball blew them into a million tiny pieces.
o0o
Jewel found herself lying in bed, tangled with two hundred pounds of sex demon. Her body sang like a comet tail, all sparks inside, sooty, sweaty, stinky, satisfied. Randy’s naked body was curled around hers. She sighed.
With one hand she ruffled his hair. “You’re a pain in the ass, but you are so good at that.”
“I know,” he said, his breath cool on her shoulder. “And yet it angers you. I don’t, er, ‘get it.’”
“I know, buddy, I know.”
Now she saw soot on the ceiling, walls, closet door, venetian blinds, rug. “Time to get up. Gotta go to work.”
Randy looked at the soot all over the room. “My powers increase while I am with you.”
“Yeah. My cleaning bill increases. Unless you care to spend the day washing and repainting this place. You understand what I was saying in there — out there — wherever we were? I don’t want you scaring me for the hell of it. It’s rude.”
He smiled, sooty and naked, looking unfairly adorable. “Sex is rude.”
“It can be. But can we please try something else?”
He blinked. “Very well. But I don’t see—”
In the living room, her cell phone rang. She crawled out of bed and went to answer it. “Heiss.”
“I’m in,” Clay’s voice said. “Be here this afternoon sometime. I’m a well-known criminal, insinuating myself into an innocent antique collector’s home so I can burgle the joint or something. Think you can remember that?”
“What do you mean, you’re in?” This was what came of Ed hiring a former con artist for her partner. “I told you to wait!”
“Too late. My cover is set up now. You and Randy don’t have to pretend to be anybody. You’re you, a six-foot DCS fraud cop with the razor blue eyes, and Randy’s your partner. I don’t know you guys are coming.”
“Randy is not coming!”
“We need Randy.”
This was the man who swore up and down, three weeks ago when she busted him for selling fake sex therapy, that he never used an accomplice. “What do we need him for?”
“Lots of things. He knows about magic. He has presence. He’ll impress the marks.”
“He’ll screw up and do something suspicious.”
“Thus drawing attention away from you. He’s foreign. That’ll get him slack, and at the same time distract people from any little undercover slips you might make,” Clay said, putting his finger on Jewel’s insecurity. “We’re still training you there. Randy’s a pretty good liar. You suck, girlfriend.”
“Thanks,” she said. He had a point.
“Plus he’s a hunk and we may need one,” Clay said with unprecedented modesty.
“Jewel?” The hunk came out of the bedroom. “Do you want to shower first?”
Jewel put the phone on her knee, swearing hard but silently. She looked at Randy. He might clean up okay. She bit her lip. “Go shower and put on some nice clothes. No tee shirts or jeans.”
Randy disappeared into the bathroom.
She said to the phone, “I’m going to have to kill you.”
“That’s part of your cover.”
“I’ll enjoy it.” She spread the yellow afghan over the couch and put her sooty behind on it. “Don’t hang up yet! Brief me. Who’s in the house besides you?”
“Besides the old guy, there’s his sister and the golddigger, plus a bunch of servants, butler, cook, maid, chauffeur. You can ID them when you get here. I’m kind of hampered.”
“You? Mr. Omniscient? I’ll write that in my diary. Did you bring those background files with you?”
“Uh-oh, someone’s coming. Gotta go.” He hung up.
Jewel counted to twenty. Then she showered and picked out some navy polyester.
Clay was insubordinate and sneaky, but they’d worked well together at the gas stations. He might be trainable. The big question was, what could she do with Randy? Randy was in her head, in her every-other-personal-thing. He was a miracle in bed, but ou
t of it he was impossible. She couldn’t stand having him around.
Yet she couldn’t dump him. The terms of his curse were explicit. The hundredth woman he satisfied was the only one who could rescue him. He’d been out of bed for weeks now, yet things like today kept happening. Apparently, he still needed Jewel.
The curse, recorded on parchment by his pissed-off mistress two centuries ago, also specified that, to be free, he had to “love” his rescuer, whatever that meant.
No way did Jewel want to go there. Randy seemed equally reluctant to discuss it. The “relationship conversation.” God, she hated that.
“Did you make coffee?” Randy said, reappearing, rubbing his head with a towel.
She sent him a look.
He said hastily, “Very well, I shall make it.”
She headed for the shower. His coffee sucked, but at least he had volunteered. For the next twenty minutes she was allowed to hope they might be getting somewhere.
Their shoes left soot-prints from their front door to the elevator.
Then that cute stockbroker from down the hall stepped into the elevator with them and Jewel smiled at him and Randy stiffened like a pillar of ice until the poor guy went to stand in the extreme far corner of the elevator.
Another reason to establish cooperation.
“Guys are gonna smile at me,” she told her possessive sex demon when they were in the parking ramp. “Get used to it.”
“They mean you harm.”
She rolled her eyes. “This is not 1811, dude. I am not ‘ruined’ just because I’ve slept with a guy—”
“Or several hundred ‘guys.’”
She couldn’t stick her tongue out at him and drive down the spiralling exit of the parking ramp at the same time. “So how many women have you had? Not counting your other ninety-nine satisfied customers.”
He ignored that. “It is said, Vulpus est index anima. Yet men’s souls do not always reveal themselves in their faces.”
“I thought you flunked out of lord school.” She pulled out of the Corncob Building onto Dearborn and aimed the Tercel north.
He was silent until they got to a stoplight. Then he put his hand over hers on the gearshift. “Jewel.”
“What?”
The Hinky Velvet Chair Page 3
