"Hold on. What do you mean I was snooping around while you were gone? I was just playing with your swords."
"Then why was my closet door open?"
"Oh."
"Yeah, precisely." We were practically dancing, each of us pushing forward with our bodies when we took the offensive, and backing up on the defensive. But we kept getting closer and closer.
"Fine. You caught me. But now explain to me why you have an enormous power source in your closet?"
"Stop making this about me. It's all about you," I said. I noticed I was breathing heavy. Huh, when did that happen? The room was practically crackling with energy. "You're the one who came out here without warning. And you have yet to give me a good reason." I was backing her into a corner. Every time I'd thought about being with her, it was always sweet and gentle with waves and rose-petal-covered beds and lots of sunrises and sunsets and all that mushy stuff. "You've been lying to my girlfriend, clearly, and right in front of me. And you've been making cryptic comments about my mom." Right now I just wanted to shove her up against the wall and fuck her silly. Then I'd rip her clothes off, tear them from her body, bend her over a chair, counter, desk, whatever, and fuck her from behind.
I wanted to make her scream.
And this want—this need—scared me with its intensity.
And also, there was the whole thing of having a girlfriend and just recently screwing her on her front porch.
Michele was backed into a corner, staring at me with fear in her eyes. Fear and... lust. I could feel the power coursing through me. It was practically sparking at my fingertips.
"It's not about me," she whispered. "It's about you." She grasped my biceps in her hands and held me like that for a moment.
I scowled at her. I knew I could turn her arms to cinder without even trying. "No baby, it isn't." I didn't even need magick to flip her around so her face was against the wall and I held her arms pinned against her back. "Now," I whispered malevolently into her ear, "are you going to start talking, or do I have to make you?" I ran my tongue up her neck and nipped lightly at her earlobe.
She groaned and I knew she liked it. She seemed about ready to start humping the wall, in fact.
"'Course, we might both prefer it if you make me make you talk," I said. I moved her wrists so I could hold them both in one hand and use my now-free hand to roughly caress her ass.
The unmistakable rumble of Tom's big penile-enhancing vehicle came through the bedroom window, distracting me from my mission. I reached out with my mind to see what was on his.
Who the fuck does she think she is, dumping me like that? Like she can do better than me. I wouldn't be surprised if that new dyke neighbor of hers is part of this, getting her all high-and-mighty and thinking her shit don't smell. I’ll show her. And if she still don't see we belong together, she'll never be anybody else's neither.
I could practically smell the Jack Daniels on his breath.
I wondered if I should just let Sydney sleep while I dealt with him, but then realized that not only would her being awake be safer, in the almost-impossible case I failed to stop him, but also she could see what he was really like. She would never go back to him.
Even if he lived.
If he didn't, well, she wouldn't mourn him, either.
Chapter 10
"No, no, Ty, don't," Michele was saying, squirming against me even though it was obviously painful. She apparently heard his car, saw the look on my face, and did the math.
"Don't you hear that asshole out there? You know as well as I do some guys don't get it. They need to be taught a lesson."
"Just call the police, please. Let them take care of it."
"Yeah, right. As if they'd do much of anything. He'd keep coming back. You've had a stalker. You know how it is."
"You can't let it take control," Michele said. "That's what your mother wanted me to watch out for—that you stay in charge, and not let the power take over. You're in charge, Ty!"
"Yes. I am." I reached around to none-too-gently stroke the place where her hip and thigh joined, and up and down a few times till she squirmed some more. "You remember that now." Then I tapped her on the shoulder, said, "Sleep," and carried her to her bed.
Next I woke Syd, and with a single hand gesture, raised both the window and screen of my guest room, and jumped to sit on the sill, looking down toward Tom pounding on Syd's front door.
"Goddammit, Syd, let me in!" he bellowed. I saw the lights go on in her house.
Soundlessly I dropped down to my front lawn. I slithered through the darkness thinking I could kill him where he stood without him ever even knowing what was going on—but then he wouldn't learn anything to take with him to his next life, even though he deserved to return as nothing more than a slug, or better yet a fish fly or locust, since neither of those really lived more than a few days. He shouldn't ever come back, actually.
I wondered if even I could arrange such a thing. And I was proof that reincarnation was real, so there were no questions about that.
"Sydney, you bitch! Open this door now. Tell me face-to-face what a fucking whore you are!"
I could reach inside his chest with my mind and squeeze his heart till it popped like a really disgusting zit, but where was the fun in that? Instead I gave Sydney's mind the barest of caresses, so when she got to the door, she invited him in.
This way, there would be no witnesses. Just the few who would testify he came over drunk and started yelling and threatening her. I made my way stealthily over and glanced around to ensure no one saw me entering.
The door closed silently behind me. Sydney and Tom were standing just a few feet into the living room. I stood with my legs spread, my head tilted slightly down. I was looking up at them and smirking. I was so gonna make him pay. I had it all under control.
"It is that fucking dyke," he said, backhanding Sydney. Horrified, I watched as she smashed against the wall.
TV and movies show normal people getting hit like that and much worse but still being able to get up and walk away without a scratch. I knew it was all a lie—I had the bruises to prove it. Sydney was badly stunned, if not unconscious. "That was one of the last mistakes you'll ever make," I said. I'd been fighting him for centuries, but he didn't know that. This time, I would end it for good.
He swung at me. I caught his arm and threw him against a wall. He was fairly resilient. He leapt to his feet and charged me again. "Why you little—"
I raised an arm so it cut across his windpipe and he landed on his back. I kicked him in the ribs until I heard a couple crack.
"Don't feel so hot being on the receiving end, now does it, Big Boy}" He was stunned, thinking it was just little ol' me doing all of this. He didn't have a clue about my super-charged engine and how I could do all this with just my mind.
"Oh, god, Ty, please stop!" Sydney was behind me, trying to wrap her arms around me, trying to pull me from her downed ex.
"Why do people keep saying that to me?" I said, kicking him once more. "He hurt you. Don't you understand? He came here to hurt you and he was going to hurt you some more. He'll kill you if I let him."
"But don't you understand? If you kill him, you'll be no better than him."
"But I'll be right."
A look of fear passed over her face and she stepped back with her hand over her mouth. "Oh, god, Ty—"
And then everything went black.
I wasn't out for long, but when I came to, I wasn't just pissed off—I was wicked pissed off and had a helluva fucking headache as well.
"You Goddammed, fucking, bitch," Tom was yelling. He was holding Sydney by the shoulders and smashing her into a wall. Her barely moving feet couldn't even touch the floor and I could see blood on the wall. "She hurt me!" he yelled.
Even as I summoned the power to make him stop, he threw her against the fireplace. When she landed, her neck was at an odd angle to the rest of her body.
"NO!" I yelled,
using my mind to pull him through the air to me. I shook him by his shoulders, so his feet didn't touch the ground. 'WOW" Goddammit, he'd won again! I threw him to the ground so hard the floor shook, and then I kicked him so violently his body arched up and he flew halfway up the stairs. He tried to stand, to move, but his broken body wouldn't let him.
I stood, looking at him, my fists clenched, and I growled.
I slapped my hands together, hard, building my power, focusing it, and finally giving in fully to centuries of rage, anger and hatred. I felt it pulse through me, and I did not care that every light bulb in the house—in the neighborhood—popped from the explosion of energy that surged up within me.
I raised my arms and held my palms toward Tom, channeling it all at him—tearing his skin off, ripping it from his body, even as he screamed and I—
Holy fucking shit! I dropped to my knees, feeling as if someone had run me through with a sword. I looked down to see that someone had run me through with a bloody, rutting sword. I fell forward onto my hands, but then a strong arm twisted me around so I ended up on my back and the sword plunged farther into me.
I could feel the blood gurgling in my throat.
She straddled me, kneeling on my hands so I could not use them to defend myself magickally or physically. She ripped my shirt open and placed her hand upon my heart.
"Oh, god," Sydney moaned as her hand started to glow. "You are so juiced this time—you've got more power than ever before! It was all worth it, waiting in nowheresville for you to break down all those protective spells. Six months I'd been trying to get past the closet. I finally set up the first set of challenges to make sure you'd find your power, and go back into it as soon as possible."
"Sy..." I couldn't breathe. She was sucking my power from me.
"Oh, baby," she said, slapping my cheek lightly with her free hand, "you shouldn't bother wasting any life force trying to figure out how you can make this end up better for you next time. The power you're giving me will be mine forever—that's how much you've got for me this time! All I needed was to get you here, and that was easy once your parents went kerplop from a great height. For paranoid people with a zillion protection spells, you'd have thought they'd have seen me coming."
She blurred in my vision, then steadied again. The picture she made still wasn't pretty. I wanted to scream, to rage at her for taking my parents from me, but the world was getting fainter by the moment.
"I almost worried when Michele showed up—that she might get you to see how well I was playing you. But she's still as insipid and powerless as ever. Did you really think she could block your little mental probings? Or, better yet, that you could actually read my mind? You only heard what I wanted you to—oh, baby, let me play with myself for you. Such a typical butch!"
I tried to fight her, but things were getting darker and the sounds were fading but I thought I heard a crashing... and then the weight, the pressure on my chest was gone. I rolled to my side, relieving the weight from the sword. The room got a little brighter, but still I was gasping for air and in terrible, terrible pain.
Sydney hit Michele and Michele went tumbling back against a wall, dropping her sword. I saw that the new light was coming from the tongues of flames dancing all around us. Fires had started when the light bulbs popped.
Sydney flung Michele across the room. I knew I had only moments. It had taken me a bit to learn to use my power, so Sydney ought to have a learning curve as well, but once she got up and running with my power, we were in trouble. I dropped face down onto the carpet so the sword was pushed back out of me. It hurt and I was dying, but the least I could do was try my damnedest to save Michele from my stupidity.
Michele leapt off the couch she had landed on, and started grabbing anything she could to hurl at Sydney.
"I don't care what magick Ty's mother taught you, little girl," Sydney said, pelting the items back at Michele almost as quickly as Michele launched them, "you have no chance of standing up against me. Why do you even try?"
"Like I didn't know you'd poisoned the wine, amateur." Michele looked at me, a fatal giveaway.
Sydney, with little more than a flick of the wrist, tossed me across the room. The sword clattered onto the ground. Now I didn't even have that to fight with or staunch the flow of blood. But I had landed right where Michele'd dropped the other one.
"Go!" I yelled at Michele as I picked up the sword in both my hands, using almost all of my remaining strength.
Sydney turned toward me, but I was already running full tilt at her. We collided and went flying into the flames right behind her.
I felt my skin sear as she screamed, but I stood as she tried to pull herself from the fire. I was on fire and it hurt like hell, but I was used to it. I could ignore it to get the job done. After all, I was By-the-Book Black, and I'd been burned at the stake before.
Using all the strength I had left I swung the sword, and watched Sydney's head hit the floor with a satisfying thump.
"Ty!" Michele screamed.
I lurched toward her. "Go," I said. Someone had to live to tell the tale.
She pushed me to the floor and dropped a blanket on me, smothering the flames. "We've got to get out of here, now!" she yelled, trying to get me to my feet.
"You." '
"This is nothing, Black! Your mother'd roll over in her grave if she saw you giving up this easily!"
I pushed myself to my feet, wrapped my arms around her, and guided us up the sofa by the window, then through the window. I turned in the air to ensure I'd land on the bottom.
And then it all went finally and completely black.
Epilogue
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust..." I tuned it all out. I couldn't believe everything that had happened. I had to be here, had to see this, because it was all utterly impossible.
Syd's house was ashes now. When the wreckage was cleared and the body parts collected and identified, Tom's injuries appeared consistent with those caused by a fire and a fall from an upper floor, so it was easy to assume there was no foul play with regard to his untimely demise.
The discovery that Syd's head had been neatly severed from her body raised both alarm and questions. However, when the neighbors testified that Tom had shown up at Sydney's, belligerent and drunk, it was far easier to put it down to a domestic dispute gone horribly wrong than to try to implicate someone as famous as Michele Anne Browning.
After all, the firefighters responding to the call saw us both exiting the residence at the same time, and if I was involved, her high-profile celebrity ass was as well.
The police and D.A. decided it was just easiest all around to take the simplest solution.
I took Michele's hand in mine. "Okay," I said. I just needed to see Sydney put into the ground, to know she was really and truly dead and gone.
"Let's go," Michele said to the attendant who turned my wheelchair and pushed me out of the cemetery toward the waiting ambulance. The doctor hadn't been too happy with my insistence on attending the funeral, and Michele wasn't too happy with my insistence that she go ahead with her hiatus project—but it did make her feel a lot better that I was moving back home—to California—as soon as I could and was even coming back to the show.
Who knew where things would go from there? I knew where I wanted them heading, and I was pretty sure Michele had about the same idea.
Fortunately for me, Mom had helped Michele develop the very little power she did have—and that's how she was able to overcome my sleep spell. Mom was hoping that keeping me from my power would keep me from evil, and from Sydney, so she hadn't told me I had a multi-lifetime stalker after me. But just in case, she had appointed Michele my guardian angel.
Ironic, really. I kept her from harm at work, and she was supposed to keep me from harm in life. I wondered if we could trust each other with our hearts?
Before I headed back to California, I had to pack up what was left of my stuff. The fire had spread to my
house as well, and at this point, with all its secrets looted, I was thinking about having it demolished.
What I knew for sure was that I'd destroy the book and everything in that room. It was all bad. I still wasn't sure what had happened, kept happening, or would happen, in the pasts and present, but I did know Syd had played me.
All the drama had been playing out over centuries. Lifetimes after lifetimes. Sydney wasn't the woman of my dreams; she had been the one screwing with my dreams, creating the fiction she wanted. I always lost, until this time around. I held Michele's hand on the journey back to the hospital. I had won this time because of her and I would happily spend the next fifty lifetimes repaying that debt.
"I hate leaving you like this," Michele said, sitting on the edge of my hospital bed. She brushed the hair off my face as I sunk into the pillows. "You really overdid it, going to the funeral."
"Don't worry, I'll be up and fighting again soon. You go do your movie and I'll be back on the show when break ends."
"Don't rush it. Don't strain yourself. And let me know if you need any help packing up here or anything, okay?"
I was feeling particularly brave, so I took her hand in mine and kissed it. "I'll be fine."
"Remember, if you need a place to stay in California, mi casa, su casa. In fact, I already put my key on your ring. In case you need a place before I get back."
"Thank you. For that, and for pulling me back from the brink."
"C'mon, I know you've had days when you've felt invincible. I'm sure your mom did, too. You keep me real, Ty. And I'll always be there to keep you real, too."
There's all these platitudes about absolute power corrupting absolutely, people not being islands unto themselves and that one cannot decide what's best for the masses. Well, yeah, it's all true. I'd had all that power and thought I knew best. I felt bad about the guy in the Hummer because I was nearly certain he'd rolled because I'd thought of it. There was nothing I could do about it now, though.
I'd thought about making everyone in the world all happy and peace-loving.
Bell, Book and Dyke - New Exploits of Magical Lesbians Page 16
