Chloe said fiercely, “Archie, I’m not running. I can’t get away from this transformation. I don’t want to go through it without you.”
I looked at her hand. “What if I promised to see you through it?” Her hand trembled on her knee. “However long it takes?”
“What if,” she whispered, “it never stops? What if my powers just keep growing?” She raised her hand to my cheek and held my chin. “What if you haven’t completed your own transformation, Archie?”
I frowned. “After twenty-three hundred years? I can’t imagine there’s anywhere I haven’t gone yet.”
“I can.” She traced the seam of my lips with her thumb. “Aphrodite said the transformation is sex, then love. You can have love now. You can transform. It can’t be worse to do it together than it is to be alone and without love. Can it?”
She said that as if it was a rhetorical question, as if nothing was worse than suffocating in that crack in the rock, feeling my heart squeeze me until I was ready to do anything, even love Chloe, rather than stay there by myself and hate myself.
It occurred to me, she was right.
I leaned forward and kissed her. “Let’s find out.”
We stood and walked hand in hand up Ravenswood Avenue. On the roof of Cheaters, the last bank of rockets went up, whistling, banging, bursting in the sky into mighty blue and green and gold flowers, punctuated by the red streak and pow of a peony report.
Out of the sky, streaked with soot, fell the members of the Dual Task Force on Finding Out What Archie Has Been Up To.
And running into the street in their pajamas, the lovelorn women of Ravenswood Manor were gathering up dazed, naked men—some with red leathery wings and some with white feathered wings.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank these beta readers for their patience, helpful criticism, and enthusiasm: Melissa Craig, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Patricia Rice, Mindy Fine, Rebecca Grayson Jaxon, John Nikitow, Jenny Marie Stephens, Kate Early, Lori Devoti, Shannon Donnelly. Thanks also to Deborah Ross, for shabbos suggestions; and to Nisi Shawl, Craig Centrie, and Phil Stevens for help with Veek, who needed to be right in this book so that he can be right in his own book. Thanks to Sally Hayes for the gorgeous cover I couldn’t use, and to the grand crew at Musa for their hard work on making this book happen.
About the Author
Twenty-five years or more ago, Jennifer Stevenson was born under a cabbage leaf, dreaming even in the center of those stiffly furled-up leaves of becoming a hack writer for the pulps. She longed to emulate the careers of bygone greats: Rudyard Kipling, PG Wodehouse, Sax Rohmer, Rex Stout. After a flustering detour down the rabbit-hole of literary fiction, she located a trail of breadcrumbs and followed it here, where she finds new uses for old sex demons and celebrates smart-mouth women.
Website: http://jenniferstevenson.com
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http://www.facebook.com/JenniferStevensonAuthor
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