Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

  “The town square is so cute, and I like the old church,” she said, looking north.

  “Great shopping too, and we should check out some of the art galleries. If you like the colors …”

  Her skin started to turn red and from there, to purple, then back to a pale white.

  “What are our rules, again?” I asked, glancing around, glad to see nobody had caught her shifting.

  She laughed. “Well, I remember some of them – bedroom rules and something about shifting in public?” She placed a hand on my chest and moved closer to kiss me.

  Dorian and Veronique reappeared just as Grace finished the kiss.

  “I’m glad you could join us,” I told Veronique, handing her a small bag. “I got you something.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Take a look,” I said, and she reached inside the bag.

  “You didn’t …” Dorian raised a fist.

  Veronique pulled the mother wolf shirt out of the bag, holding it over her body. “Hmmm …”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I like it.”

  Dorian slugged me.

  “Hey! It’s a work of art.” I stepped away from her to avoid another blow. “And if I can’t wear it, someone else should.”

  Chapter Two: Talking Head

  Dorian was on her third margarita and I was barely finishing my second. And she wasn’t drunk either, a phrase that definitely wouldn’t describe my current state of affairs.

  “Another one?” she asked to Grace’s laughter.

  I’d already gotten a few jealous glances from the guys in the restaurant, waitstaff and patrons alike. Man, guys really were a jelly bunch, even if we constantly accused women of being the more jealous gender.

  Right, I drunkenly thought. Like half the wars, many of the regional conflicts, a good number of religious massacres, and a slew of other pressing social matters didn’t stem from male jealousy.

  I’m a feminist, dammit!

  No, you’re drunk.

  I smiled across the table at Grace.

  Maybe I am, I thought back to her.

  I want a margarita.

  Have the rest of mine first, just in case it’s too strong.

  My margarita lifted off the table and floated over to Grace. I glanced from her to the approaching waiter – whew, he hadn’t seen it.

  Sorry. she thought to me, it was just too far away.

  “I’m hungry too,” Veronique said when the waiter set down a steaming platter of enchiladas before me. He placed a chalupa in front of Grace and a meal of fish tacos and slaw went to Dorian.

  “I can have the kitchen make you something,” the waiter told Veronique.

  “No, that’s fine, I’ll eat later,” she replied with a mischievous grin.

  “But I will have a margarita,” Grace said as she finished the ‘rita I’d given her. “Strawberry.”

  The waiter nodded and left. I gave Grace an uneasy look. Dorian could clearly hold her liquor, but I had no idea how Grace would react. Still, if she did something out of the ordinary, Dorian could simply teleport us out of there.

  Talk about a failsafe plan.

  I caught the waiter’s eye just as he was about to reach the bar, and he returned to our table. “Something else, sir?”

  “A CoronaRita for myself.”

  “Me too,” Dorian said, polishing off her margarita.

  “I’ll have a coffee,” Veronique said.

  The waiter nodded again and left again.

  “Bon appétit,” I told them as we dug in, and boy, was it fantastic. Each enchilada was different, and I was prying apart one made from chicken and spinach when the waiter brought our drinks.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said as I went for the CoronaRita.

  Ten minutes later and I was full-on drunk.

  Dorian was still holding strong, but she did look a little messed up, evident in the way she moved her head and relaxed her shoulders. Grace managed two sips before her cheeks turned red; she stopped drinking at that point.

  The three started talking about a new home improvement show they were watching, this one hosted by a snarky British guy who gave everyone hell about their projects but always seemed to come around in the end.

  I more or less tuned them out as I went for my refried beans, moping them up with a freshly baked flour tortilla.

  The alcohol had made me want to write; I was suddenly itching to get back to the house, hoping I could just freestyle some words on the page.

  I paid the bill in cash, and we exited the restaurant, teleporting back to our place. Dorian left us in the living room of our borrowed home and zipped away again, returning just a few moments later with a random guy we’d seen in the alley outside the restaurant.

  “Where …?” he began to ask, but Veronique had already started draining him before he could finish his question.

  His eyes glazed over as his skin purpled and shriveled. Yikes.

  “Easy,” I told her, trying to keep my wits.

  “I won’t kill him,” Veronique said. She licked her lips.

  Grace, who was also a little drunk, leaned against me, pushing me off balance. I fell, and she fell on top of me, her form morphing as she hit me. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  I helped her up. “It’s fine.”

  I watched Veronique drain more of the unsuspecting guy’s lifeforce. She was hunched over him, vampire-like, her hands glowing red as his body continued to shrivel and turn purple.

  She stopped suddenly and looked back at me, offering a slightly sinister grin, as well as a pretty good shot of her rear; Veronique was wearing a pair of impossibly high-cut jean shorts she’d recently picked up. She gave a playful shrug. “All done.”

  Dorian laughed, placing her hand on the guy’s shoulder and disappeared, then just as quickly reappeared, alone this time.

  Rather than remind them we weren’t killers, I headed for the guest bedroom of the home, which I’d already designated as my writing room.

  I’m going to sleep, Grace’s voice rang out in my head. Have fun tonight.

  Have fun tonight? I fired back the mental question but didn’t get a response. I knew what it meant. It was funny she was so open about it, yet I was still very reluctant to give power to it or acknowledge it.

  Damn my Puritan ways!

  I burped, tasted the acidity from the margarita, and opened my laptop.

  Once the doc was up, I cracked my knuckles and began. I found a NieR:Automata and Persona 7 playlist to set the mood. It was one I’d made when I was writing How Heavy This Axe, and it was especially good for writing stats.

  Problem was, my laptop speakers were shit, and I didn’t have headphones. Which was how I heard the rumbling from the closet.

  I turned to the closet door, wondering what the sound could have been.

  For a moment there was nothing, but sure enough, the noise came again.

  Maybe a raccoon is in there? was my first thought, followed by, Are there even raccoons in New Mexico?

  Before I could GoogleFace that query, I heard some more rustling and decided to see what the hell was going on. But just in case it was a snake – or, hell, I don’t know, a raccoon-sized cockroach – I shouted for Veronique.

  “Coming,” she called back, and I heard the light patter of her feet as she walked down the hallway and entered the room.

  She came into my arms, and my hand went around her waist. After a long kiss – it wasn’t a great kiss, but she meant well, and why would I ever tell someone who could kill me that she’s a bad kisser? – I told Veronique I heard something in the closet.

  She laughed. “You called me in here for that?”

  “Well, yeah. You’re like my bodyguard, right?” I said, still a little tipsy. Scratch that, definitely a little tipsy.

  “What am I supposed to do if it’s something scary?”

  “I don’t know, what are you scared of?” I asked.

  “Spiders.”

  “Ick, I hate spiders.
” We both turned to find a drunken Dorian standing behind us.

  Damn teleporters. She’d done this a couple times over the last few days – just appeared out of nowhere.

  It always took me off guard, especially when she’d teleported into the bathroom while I was taking a dump. She took it way better than I did; I couldn’t look her in the face for a good four hours after that.

  “It’s not going to be a spider unless it’s a tarantula,” I told them. “Shit, let’s hope it’s not a tarantula.”

  I moved to the closet door, took one more glance over my shoulder at Veronique and Dorian, and opened it. The backpack toppled out, and as it plopped to the floor, we heard a low groaning sound.

  Veronique placed the backpack on the bed, and used her power to unzip it without touching it.

  Angel’s head fell out of the bag, his neck attached to a very small body.

  “Holy shit!” I jumped back, nearly colliding with Dorian.

  Angel groaned again, and Veronique went over to him and started draining his energy.

  “Wait,” I told her after she’d already started. “Let me talk to him for a second and see just how cognizant he is.”

  “I’m fucking cognizant, you little piece of shit,” Angel said, his voice higher than before.

  It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen.

  Angel’s neck and head were their normal size, but a small body had started to grow beneath the bottom of his neck – arms, a torso, itty-bitty legs, and feet; it was almost like the body of a starfish.

  The new growth was hyper-pink, fresh new flesh, and as Angel glowered at me, he actually wiggled his little legs like the fucking gingerbread man.

  “When Mother finds out about this …”

  “You know, Angel, for a talking head with a fucked up little doll body, you’re really in no position to make threats,” I said, emboldened by the alcohol.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my mini USB to mini USB cable as well as my smartphone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to plug in,” I told him.

  He laughed. “Good luck with that.”

  It looked awkward as fuck, but somehow, Angel was able to use his little starfish body to move his neck to the side and show me that he didn’t have a port. A deep gash was in the place where his port should have been, a gash covered by a purple scar.

  “What happened to yours?” I asked, stuffing my cable back into my pocket.

  “Gideon, come here real quick,” Veronique said. She touched my elbow and I felt her power swell. She meant business.

  I stepped outside the room with her, leaving Dorian to watch the angry head.

  “What’s up?”

  “Remember the first time we really had a conversation, and I told you Angel was one of the ones who escaped that we brought back?”

  I recalled her conversation with me back in the hotel room in Stamford. We’d never talked about that again, and she didn’t have to say the next words for me to put the pieces together.

  “One of the things Angel did was pry the plug out of his neck,” she said, demonstrating how she thought he did it.

  “Whoa. And they never replaced it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, it looks like we’re not plugging in, but we can at least ask him some questions.”

  We went back into the room only to catch a sourpuss look from Angel.

  “Hey, are you thirsty or something? You look parched.”

  “Fuck you, Gideon.” He laughed bitterly. “You’re so dead.”

  “You already told us that,” I said.

  Sure, I felt like a tough guy with my two powerful security guards on either side of me, but also … he was a fucking head. If he really wanted to start some shit, I’d punt him out of the room.

  “How do you know she isn’t tracking you right now?” he asked.

  “Because she would have come here by now, considering we have her son/baby daddy/lover in a backpack. It’s you who should be asking why she hasn’t come. Maybe Mother has another flying, muscular guy with long hair waiting in the rafters; a future stepdad.”

  Dorian snickered.

  “See, she gets my jokes,” I told the bodiless man.

  “You laugh now, Gideon, but there are others like me, and they’re all coming for you now. You, Veronique, Dorian, and wherever the hell Sabine is. You four are dead. You may kill me, or you may keep me as a fucking head, but I will laugh at the end of all this when you’ve all been killed. Even if I’m laughing from heaven.”

  “Did you just say heaven?”

  “That’s … Yeah.” He licked his lips, which were chapped and scabbed over.

  I almost felt bad for him, not because of the fact that he believed he was going to heaven (he clearly wasn’t because he was an asshole), but mostly because he looked like a rutabaga covered in soiled taint hair. “You never struck me as a religious man, Angel.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I know you tried to escape once and that you took the port out of your neck. I know you’ve let me live twice now when you could have killed me. Twice? Has it been twice? You know what I mean. And part of me wants to know – or, should I say, part of me thinks you may have ulterior motives here.”

  “You know nothing about me!”

  “I know you’re a head that’s going into a bag later because he’s misbehaving, and I know you have a relationship with your mother. See? I do know some things about you, and I’d like to know more. Tell me about the time you escaped. Tell me more about that.”

  “I already told you, you don’t know anything about me.”

  I sat down on the bed, far enough away that he couldn’t roll over and bite me. I was acting as casual as possible; in actuality, I was a bit on edge because even though he was a head, he was Angel. There was a good chance he could bite me hard enough to rip off my leg or some shit. I had no idea what he was capable of in his current form, but I did know he was already starting to grow a body again, which was disturbing.

  Very disturbing.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time, and I’d like an answer or we’re going to have to put you back in the bag. How’s that sound?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to go fuck yourself, Gideon? You and I have nothing to talk about. Now kill me, or shut up, and leave me the hell alone.”

  “Go get me a knife and a cloth from the kitchen,” Veronique said suddenly.

  Dorian shrugged, disappearing in a flash. Her body reformed seconds later, a large kitchen knife in one hand, a small towel in the other.

  “You may want to leave the room for this,” Veronique said, lifting her lips to bare her teeth. “We don’t need Angel having a body.”

  “Don’t kill him.” I went to the door, not at all interested in watching Veronique cut off the limbs Angel had grown.

  I made my way through the living room, toward the back door, and stepped outside.

  Man, it was a gorgeous night in Santa Fe. I could see some of the city lights and barely heard the highway in the distance. Just a low hum, the way I liked it.

  The alcohol was still making me feel loopy. I got the urge to turn back to the house and go upstairs, cuddle up next to Grace. That would be nice. Then again, it was really nice out tonight, and I wasn’t tired.

  My phone buzzed, and I saw Luke had sent me a message.

  Luke: Bruh, are you sitting down?

  I took a seat on one of the back patio chairs, a plastic one with a covered cushion. I kicked my legs up and propped them on a plant holder. Comfy.

  Me: I am now.

  Luke: Someone is trying to steal your mojo.

  Me: Damn, that’s dirty. LOL! And Broner Hughes? What kind of name is that?

  Luke: I know, right?

  Me: I knew I should have trademarked Creative Nonfiction Gamer Sci-Fi! Or is it Non-fiction?

  Luke: I believe both are acceptab
le. Shit, if you start now, you can call yourself the Father of Creative Nonfiction Gamer Sci-Fi, because you sort of are.

  Me: Not a bad idea, but I don’t want to be a father. Shit. I’d be a terrible father. I’d drop the baby on the first day.

  Luke: The Godfather?

  Me: No … something cooler.

  Luke: God Emperor?

  Me: Damn, that one’s pretty cool. But something more referential to what I am and what I’ve become.

  Luke: The Harem King?

  Me: No, that’s somebody else.

  Luke: The Tiger Guy?

  Me: Also somebody else.

  Luke: The Necromancer Attorney?

  Me: No, but only because I am above the law. Also, why do I feel like that’s somebody else too?

  Luke: The Big Chalupa? The Bacon Guy? The Bacon Guy with a Beard?

  Me: Who the hell are these people?

  Luke: The Slime Guy?

  Me: I’m not opposed to slime.

  Luke: The Canuck? Nope, that’s me.

  Me: Do authors really need nicknames? And if so, can I choose my own?

  Luke: Well, that kind of eliminates the point of a nickname.

  Me: But I have a pretty good one.

  Luke: Oh?

  Me: How about Dude Who is in Way Over His Head and Has a Talking Superhero Head in a Backpack?

  Luke: You’re kidding, right?

  Me: About which part?

  Luke: All of it?

  Me: Yep, a talking head, WTF. Thank god I’m a little drunk. So, our Main Character hasn’t updated his writer friend recently.

  Luke: Go on.

  Me: After coming to Santa Fe, our amazing, stoic MC – who is constantly surrounded by beautiful women that could kill him – ended up becoming a superhero for a limited amount of time. He used his powers for good, of course, and to kill private military men and women – which is debatable if that’s good or bad, but we won’t go there. And eventually he got to another superpowered guy, who goes by the name of Precious Angel.

  Luke: His superhero name is Precious Angel? LMAO!

  Me: Yep, and the Magneto lady decapitated him. His head was supposed to be a trophy, or better, some collateral. If that means anything.

  Luke: It doesn’t, LOL.

  Me: Well, that was the plan anyway. Then it started talking. And luckily, our MC was drunk, or he would have shit his pants.