Inn on the Edge

by Gail Bridges

  Mr. Abiba, glaring at her, stomped on it, holding his robes up around his knees. His legs were muscular and striking, as beautiful as the rest of him, but as white as the paper Zettia had set on fire. His foot rose and fell, trampling on the flames, a frantic dance of desperation. Bits of ash and smoke rose around him but still the paper burned.

  Zettia laughed at him. “Oh Adi. Have you forgotten that I’m every bit your equal? Did it never occur to you that I might have had a stake in all this? That I might have wished to set myself free? That I couldn’t do it for myself because of your damned contract, so I let your little friends do it for me? Did it ever enter your useless, love-addled mind that I might have been watching all along, waiting for my moment to pounce? No, of course not! Why would it? You’re so full of yourself that you never even thought of me.” She took a single step toward the double doors. “Now say goodbye, Adi Abiba.”

  “No!” he screamed too late. “Zettia—no!”

  But Zettia had seized her chance. She’d already sprung into motion, crossing the floor faster than anything had a right to. Before I’d even registered movement she was at the doors. Mr. Abiba arrived a fraction of a second later, screaming in rage, but Zettia had a firm grasp on the handles…and the doors were mere inches apart. She threw herself against them, snarling. “I’ve had enough, Adi! It’s over! I’m completing the circle! I’m going back. And I’m taking you with me.”

  Mr. Abiba fought her. The doors didn’t close. Instead they quivered with opposing forces, with the push and pull of the two enraged demons. But they didn’t come together. They didn’t complete the circle.

  I fell against Josh, my vision threatening to go black.

  Mr. Abiba screamed and howled. As desperately as I wished to look away, I couldn’t take my eyes from him. He was wild—a savage, horrible beast of a man. He was morphing from something beautiful into something hideous, his dual natures at war with one another. Was this the real Mr. Abiba? Was this what he really looked like? I shuddered so hard that my teeth rattled. This, then, was what I was escaping—a grotesque, unnatural being. A demon! And a gruesome fate that could have been mine.

  No! No! No! Never!

  A fate that could still be mine, if Zettia couldn’t close those dreadful doors.

  I shuddered with revulsion. His finger had been in my vagina!

  And I’d liked it.

  I swallowed bile.

  His bloody face warped by hatred, Mr. Abiba pulled Zettia’s hair, bit her shoulder, wrenched her arm, raked his nails down her neck, wedged his foot between hers, fighting with all his might to keep those doors open.

  To no avail.

  Zettia had got there first. And she was Mr. Abiba’s match—a strong woman, just as he liked. She shoved, pushed, heaved herself against the doors for all she was worth, struggling against Mr. Abiba’s terrible strength, emitting noises that no person should ever make. Slowly, slowly, inch by hard-fought inch, the bride and groom painted on the backs of the doors neared one another. Closer. Closer…

  I held my breath.

  With a triumphant shriek, Zettia made the painted hands touch.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  There was a thunderous crash. Everything went instantly, completely dark.

  I cried out. Josh pulled me to the ground. His strong arms held me, rocked me, protected me. I buried my head in his shoulder.

  This was it. The ringing spell!

  The demons—where were they? Were they gone? Both of them? Had our spell worked, even though it was Zettia who’d completed it?

  Where were they?

  I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see or hear anything. It was noisy, so noisy! And wild, like being in a hurricane. The air was thick, horrible, making me gag and sputter. It was all I could do to keep breathing, to hold my place against the furious storm that surged through the Fine Arts Room. Great roaring gusts of stinging wind blasted over me and around me, trying to separate me from Josh, driving grit into my exposed skin, tearing painfully at my French twist, yanking out all those hair pins Zora had so carefully put in until my hair slapped at my face and blew in every direction at once.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the wind began to die down. It was ending. I lifted my head and squinted. I could see now, a little. I peered into a thick miasma of hazy smoke, wrinkling my nose in distaste, smelling things rotten and decaying. Things not-human. And cinnamon too. I smelled cinnamon.

  Ugh. I knew I would hate the stuff for the rest of my life.

  I coughed and wheezed, trying to get my breath. Was this foul haze the “smoke thereof” that the spell had promised? It must be! Would it “drive him away so that he comes no more”? It had to! The smoke had been at waist level when I’d first opened my eyes, swirls and eddies of the stuff filling every corner of the room. Now it was thinner and sinking, at knee level and falling. Soon it would be gone.

  Something fell on me. A thin wooden crossbar from the bridal arbor.

  Josh pulled it off me, then found my hands and clutched them in his. I felt his breath on my neck. “Angie,” he said, his voice just audible above the still-gusting winds. He squeezed my hands. “We did it, babe!”

  I blinked stinging tears from my eyes. “Zettia did it.”

  He dissolved into a coughing fit. Then he rose into a wary crouch. “You okay? C’mon! Let’s stand up, get above this crap so we can breathe.”

  Using each other for support, we stood up.

  “My paintings,” I whispered. “Look!”

  They were gone. Scoured away. Sent over the edge, as if they’d never existed. All that was left of my grand masterpiece, my Sistine Chapel, was faint smudges on the bare walls, Cadmium Orange, Ultramarine Blue, Raw Umber. A dot here, a streak there. Squinting against the last sandy gusts of wind, I turned in a slow circle. The ringing spell was no more but that wasn’t all. Something else was different. The air of the inn felt softer, gentler. Not even the haze that still hung over everything could hide a new right-ness, a new normal-ness. I stood still, feeling, searching, trying to comprehend. And then I understood. The magic was gone. All of it. The glamours, the apexes, the Tools—all of it.

  I could feel it, or rather the absence of it.

  “Angie!”

  I spun around. “Zenith!”

  “It worked!”

  “He’s gone!” I yelled, feeling free, oh so very free. “We did it!”

  She’d lost a shoe, her hair was sticking out at impossible angles and her dress was twisted and fallen down on one shoulder, but it made her all the more gorgeous. “You did it, honey,” she said, “it was you.”

  “It was all of us. But Zenith—you started the whole thing!” And then I was laughing and crying and hiccupping—a blubbering, slobbering fool—and Josh was patting me on the back and Zenith was hugging me and people were crowded all around, everyone coming together through the dissipating haze. Zenith. And Vane, clutching five ragged Tennenbach brushes, handing them to me, laughing. And Valerian and Zora, clutching each other.

  Or rather Rita and Charlie and Rodney and Anne. It was time to call them by their real names. Mr. Abiba was gone. The old names should be gone too.

  Rodney—I had to admit that he looked much more like a Rodney than a Valerian—was bent almost double, wheezing and coughing. “Damn! This stuff is messing with my eyes.” He peered up at me, frowning. “How did that happen? I thought it was Mr. Abiba who had to close the circle!”

  “Me too,” I said, “that’s what I thought too!”

  Zenith pulled her flamenco dress straight. Took off her remaining shoe. “The book said it was an all-around spell! It was good for a wide variety of demons, remember?”

  “And Zettia was a demon!” shouted Charlie-who-used-to-be-Vane.

  A loud voice came from the other side of the room. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “Geoffrey!” I yelled. “Come over here!”

  “Why were t
hey fighting?” asked Jonathan, holding tight to Geoffrey as they picked their way toward us through the wrecked room, stopping for a moment to pick up Josh’s antique guitar, nestled safely in its case. “We came to watch a flamenco performance and then…and then…” His face was white. “What did Zettia do? Was there an explosion of some sort?”

  “No,” said Anne, “it wasn’t an explosion.”

  Charlie stepped closer to Rita, making room for the newcomers. “We’ll tell you. We’ll explain everything—but you won’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?” demanded Nikki.

  Rita held her hand high in the air. “Let me tell them, Charlie!” But she didn’t speak again until the former audience members—Geoffrey and Jonathan, and Logan and Nikki, and Tim and Rhonda-Lynne—had all joined us and she had everyone’s full attention. Her voice filled the room, clear, triumphant and liberated. “Mr. Abiba was a demon,” she yelled, “a goddamned demon!” She waved her hand around for all to see. “The bastard cut off my finger, hear me? He. Cut. Off. My. Little. Finger!” She made a sound halfway between a sob and a scream. “Bastard!”

  Rhonda-Lynne gasped. “No! He never!”

  Rita glared at her. “He did! He did!”

  Charlie took Rita’s hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed her once-injured finger. Then he looked at the six horrified guests who hadn’t seen. Who didn’t know. “Mr. Abiba lied to us,” he said solemnly, “about everything. About who he was. About what was going on here at the inn. About keeping us captive. About the sex, even. You saw that contract Zettia burned? Well he held contracts just like it for all of us!”

  There were scattered gasps.

  “It’s true. He had one for everyone in this room, even for the Guides. Signed in blood, remember?” Charlie took a ragged breath. His voice rose. “Mr. Abiba was stealing our sexual energy, and we had no idea. Lies. All lies!”

  “But he was so nice,” sputtered Rhonda-Lynne. “He was!”

  Anne turned to her. “He could be very nice sometimes. When it suited him.”

  Rhonda-Lynn shook her head in dismay. “He taught us things—you know what things! Stuff we couldn’t get anywhere else! And I liked him!”

  Anne patted her on the back. “Don’t worry, honey. We all did once.”

  The room was silent for a moment. The wind had stopped. The haze was gone. The smell too. The only sounds were the shuffling of our feet and the creaking of a broken bridal arbor well on its way to collapsing. Rhonda-Lynne was right. We had learned things there, things we’d never have learned on our own. Mr. Abiba had been a thief and a liar, true. A bastard, definitely. But I believed what Zenith had once told me, about how underneath everything else, all he ever wanted was bountiful sex for all, erotic love given freely and generously.

  Our stay at the inn hadn’t been all bad. Not by a long shot.

  Tim spoke. “I tried to get out…I remember now. He wouldn’t let me!”

  “Me too,” said Geoffrey, “the first day.”

  “You all did,” said Charlie, “every last one of you. You too, Rhonda-Lynne, even if you don’t remember. But Mr. Abiba was ready for it, you know? It was all part of the game for him.” Charlie traced the pale white line that ran around Rita’s pinkie. “Look. You can see where he hurt her. Right here. He did some mumbo-jumbo in the middle of the night over her hand and put her finger back together. He fixed it. Kind of.”

  “It hurt like hell,” whispered Rita, looking at me.

  “I know. I heard,” I said.

  Logan sucked in his breath. He visibly shuddered. “I heard the screams. I didn’t know what it meant.”

  “Well now you do,” said Charlie.

  We fell silent again.

  “He was a…demon, you say?” said Geoffrey, changing the subject, placing an overturned chair back on its feet. “Shit. That’s unreal.”

  I stared at Geoffrey, my eyes narrowed, wondering how I could possibly have lusted so hard for him. I was aghast at myself. Why—just that very morning I’d practically thrown myself at Josh just from hearing Geoffrey’s voice! Geoffrey was funny and sweet and big and cuddly and yes, he had that nice wide hairy chest…but really? The laughter of a near stranger, practically bringing me to orgasm? Absurd! Ridiculous! I shook my head, marveling at my own behavior. How much of it had been Zettia’s glamours? How much had been the inn’s magical influence? How much of it had been me?

  Geoffrey saw my look. He grinned. He knew exactly what I was thinking.

  Shrugging, I grinned back. I liked him. That hadn’t changed.

  Suddenly I was aware of others having similar moments with their paramours. There must have been an entire river’s worth of astonished undercurrents flowing through that room because it wasn’t just between me and Geoffrey. Oh no. Not at all. I caught a wink and a nod between Josh and Nikki. And a tentative smile between Tim and Jonathan. And muffled words between Rhonda-Lynne and Logan. I felt better.

  And I let it go.

  Rodney was talking, clearing his throat, getting us back on track. “They were both demons. Mr. Abiba and Zettia both! But we got rid of them—sent them back to the hellhole they came from.”

  I looked toward the double doors where I’d last seen Mr. Abiba. They were now wide open, giving a partial view of the hallway and, beyond, the staircase. Empty. No more Mr. Abiba. No more magic. No more fearing for our lives.

  “He was a type of Incubus,” Rodney went on, “something called an Amorous Demon.”

  “Right!” yelled Josh. “An Amorous Demon who got all amorous with the wrong person!” He put his arms over my shoulder, pulled me close, and kissed me straight on the mouth. A kiss so joyous, so full of life, so happy that it made my heart skip a beat.

  Josh. My beloved.

  I was alive—he was alive. We were going to come out of this in one piece. Together.

  I whispered his name, and again. And again. Then I kissed him back. I might have had sex with just about everyone in the room during the past few days, been infatuated with a gay man, been introduced to the joys of lesbian love and been courted by a demon whose merest touch could set me on fire—but it was Josh my heart wanted.

  Josh. My husband.

  “I love you,” I whispered.

  “Hey,” he said, smoothing the wild, sandy hair from my face. “Angie…” He brought my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles, his voice lowered so that only I could hear. “Angie. I was so scared. I thought…I thought I might lose you.”

  “Me too,” I whispered.

  “I thought he might…”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “I love you so much,” he said.

  We looked into each other’s eyes. We smiled.

  And all was well with us. Different, but well.

  We held each other as if we were the only people in the room. As if we’d never separate again for the rest of our lives. As if we’d never let anything come between us, ever again. But we did. Of course we did. And we welcomed her with open arms. Freely and generously.

  Rita.

  “Look, Angie!” she said. “Look what I have!”

  “The Storybuilder! You have the Storybuilder?” I put my hand to my neck, feeling for a hammered golden chain, but there was nothing there but the lacy top of my wedding dress.

  “Hey, I have mine too,” said Josh.

  “And me,” said Charlie, smiling, his hand on Rita’s shoulder.

  Anne held out her hand. “I have three of them. Yours and mine, Angie. And Rodney’s.”

  “We should give them to Angie,” said Rita.

  I tried to protest but she would hear none of it. “They’re yours, remember? He gave them to you. In public. Besides, you deserve them. You’re the one who offered yourself up to save us. You’re the one who took all the risk. They should be yours.”

  “But you’re the one who had her finger cut off!”

  “And you almost became his bride. Demon bride beats chopped-off finger, don’t you think?”

  I wa
sn’t so sure.

  “Just be quiet and take them!” Rita put her pendant in my hand. The other pendants joined hers on my palm, in a tangle of cords and hammered golden links.

  “Thank you,” I said, staring down at them, frowning. Did I really want these reminders of my time at the inn?

  “Angie,” Rita said, “they’re to remind you of us. We’re your friends. We love you.”

  “Take them,” said Charlie.

  “Yes,” I whispered, closing my fingers over them, “you’re my friends.”

  Then the impossible happened…a sparkle…and then another…and another, showing through my fingers. I opened my hand, gasping. The pendants! They were flashing! Filling with multitudes of brilliant color, turning on, recognizing each other, preparing to do their job. Just like when we’d used them to go to the ghost town and to the dragon cave! The Storybuilder Tool was coming alive. I stared in disbelief. I didn’t know how it could be possible. Unless…unless…

  No. I shook my head. No. He was gone.

  But there they were, those Storybuilder pendants, merrily casting off showers of colored light, little bits of magic in a magic-less place. Rita and I stared at each other over the flashing arcs. “Honey,” she whispered, her face dappled in Cadmium Red and Lemon Yellow and Cobalt Blue, “this isn’t the end.”

  She smiled at me, and at Josh, my beloved. And it was beautiful.

  I smiled too.

  For some reason I couldn’t stop smiling.

  About Gail Bridges

  Gail Bridges is happiest when she’s working on a new story, typing away with a purring cat on her lap. She’s even been known to forget to eat when she’s writing a great scene—which never, ever happens in real life.

  When she’s not writing, Gail can be found in her metalworking studio, creating jewelry she sells at Fine Art Fairs. If she’s not making earrings or necklaces, she’s probably playing her classical guitar. Gail lives with her husband and six very demanding cats.

  Gail welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email addresses on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.