I felt for the sense of connection, the subtle spark that allowed me to see where pain bound them to limitations shared by every creature that turned to face the sun.
“Do you remember any of it?” I asked. “The hymn?”
“By heart,” he said. “Why?”
“The way we tell our stories shapes the way we see ourselves. You broke, yes. But that was only one part of your story. Tell me your favorite part of what happened afterwards.”
The lines of his eyebrows drew toward each other in concentration as his eyes fell closed. His words were a smooth, cool breeze, stirring the surface of a sleeping pond.
“Ineffable, hidden, brilliant scion, whose motion is whirring, you scattered the dark mist that lay before your eyes and, flapping your wings, you whirled about, and through this world you brought pure light.”
His eyes opened to find mine shining with unshed tears. “That was beautiful,” I said. “Tell me, is it always that way when you break?”
“What way is that?” he asked.
“Beautiful things come in the wake?”
“It is.” He looked down at the small hands folded in his lap. “But putting myself back together again…” his voice broke off as he stared into the middle distance. “That’s always the hardest part. Others have tried to help.”
“Kings?” I asked, half in jest.
“And horses,” he added.
“I can’t imagine that went over well.”
“Indeed not,” he agreed. “Next time you break a vase, try to enlist the help of something with hooves instead of fingers. You’ll know the truth of it.”
Something about the image struck me as suddenly hilarious. I doubled over my lap, a slave to laughter that had tears streaming down my face.
“What?” Billy asked.
Several moments passed before I could gasp out the words ‘hooves’ and ‘tube of superglue.’
He eyed me through his monocle.
“Sorry,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the teacup’s welcome warmth. “I might be a little punchy.”
Billy reached over to the coffee table and evicted the strainer from his tea. The cup looked overlarge in his hands. “I hope you won’t think me impertinent, Doctor, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with Crixus earlier. It seems I’m not the only one with heavy cares at present.”
The last wisps of levity left me like a dying wind. “You don’t need to worry about that,” I assured him. “I’ll figure something out.”
“I only meant to say that you might also benefit from looking at the best parts of your story. The good parts that have come from places where you might have broken.”
My own teacup halted halfway to my mouth. Images flashed through my head, moments of beauty, clarity, and rare joy I had experienced in the weeks since Crixus and Liam came tearing into my life with the force of a gale. The uninterrupted days before that stretched in a gray, lifeless fog. Whatever I had done with the time, it no longer felt like living.
“You’re one insightful egg,” I observed.
His wink assured me he took it as the compliment I had meant it to be. “I’m not just a pretty shell.”
“Definitely not.” I poured a blob of honey into my tea and stirred. “Everyone knows it’s what’s inside that counts.”
“Flattery won’t work on me, my lady,” he said crisply. “I’ll not be won over easy.”
Tea sprayed from my nose. I snatched a napkin to mop my face and then the coffee table. The clever rejoinder dancing at the edges of my mind disappeared entirely when my front door burst open in a shower of splinters.
*****
“You could have knocked.” The words were out of my mouth before my brain supplied the capacity to process them.
I had just sassed a bear.
“Stop right there, you ruffian,” Billy ordered. “Breaking down a lady’s door at this early hour. It’s not up to dick, I tell you.”
Bob was the first to enter. His movements were slow, predatory. “We don’t want any trouble with you.”
“But we’re not leaving without the doctor,” Tristan added, pushing his way in at his brother’s flank.
Billy set down his tea, apparently unperturbed. “Ah, but you are. All that remains for you to choose is how you leave. On your feet. Or on your knees.”
Carl’s hulking form scraped the doorframe as he wandered in and sniffed the air, his wet black nose quivering. “Is that fireweed honey?”
“It sure is,” I confirmed, hoping to distract at least one of the three. “Would you like some?”
“Boy, would I—”
“Carl,” Bob growled.
“Sheesh. Sorry. But we’re still getting Slurpees after this, right? You promised. I brought my allowance and everything,” Carl said, swiping his paw at the pouch hanging from a leather strap on his neck.
“After we get the doctor.” Bob’s green eyes glowed against his dark fur as he looked me over from slippers to bathrobe. It was clear he wanted to eat me. It wasn’t clear which end he planned to start with.
“Very well.” Billy set his tea on the coffee table and cracked his knuckles. “Collect your comeuppance if you must. Who shall be first, then?”
I sat motionless on the couch, my nightgown barely covering my knees, regretting not taking Liam up on his offer to equip me with a firearm and teach me to shoot. The last thing I wanted was a full-scale apocalyptic brawl between three bears and god-hatching egg to erupt in my living room while I was armed with nothing but my Titan vegetable peeler.
“You really don’t want me.” I adopted a posture as close to professional interest as my unsuitable wardrobe would allow. “I promise I won’t be any help to you whatsoever. Crixus won’t even tell me where Goldilocks is. He wouldn’t give her up for me anyway.”
“Oh, he will.” A smirk tugged at Tristan’s maw. The self-assured expression had me wondering what secrets he might be hiding behind those coffee-colored eyes.
“How can you be so sure?”
“So much you don’t know, Doctor.” Bob stalked close enough for me to feel the warm breath from his nose when he sniffed at my hair. “I might have some fun teaching you.”
“I say, Doctor.” Billy slid a sideways glance at me. “Could you do us a favor?”
“What?” I asked.
“Duck!”
No sooner had the words left Billy’s lips than he shot toward Bob in the same silver-white blur I had first seen in the restaurant yesterday evening. I hit the floor on my hands and knees behind the coffee table and watched as the bears toppled like bowling pins.
The blur bounced off the wall by the door and rebounded, catching Tristan right between the furry thighs as he struggled to his feet.
Tristan’s high-pitched yelp jolted the other two into action. Carl, crawling toward the kitchen, and Bob, backing into a corner to reduce the angles of attack.
Bob’s green eyes tried in vain to track the whirling projectile bouncing around the living room like a sonic rubber ball. The bear flinched every time Billy changed direction, and with good reason.
One second’s delay, and Billy flew right through Bob’s rapid but futile karate chopping paws. The dull thunk of shell meeting skull turned my stomach as Bob went down, knocked out cold from an impact right between the eyes.
Billy paused to give me a thumbs-up, failing to notice the hairline crack carving across his forehead. He turned his attentions to Tristan, who was still balled up on the floor with his paws clapped to his crotch.
The egg paused five feet away from his prone opponent and scraped his little feet on the carpet like a bull preparing to charge.
“No,” Tristan begged. “Please, no.”
Billy hit him in the ribs at full speed and backed up to have a second go.
The crack was spreading. If I didn’t get these bears out of my apartment in short order, I would have an immortal omelet on my hands.
A quick glance around revealed nothing I could use as
a weapon. My eyes stuck and held on the fire alarm overhead.
Water.
My knees burned as I crawled across the carpet toward the kitchen, intent on finding something I could set on fire to trigger the apartment’s overhead sprinklers. Carl’s round rump stuck out of the refrigerator when I peeked around the corner of the kitchen.
“There’s some carrot cake on the second shelf in the back,” I said, scooting by him.
“Thanks,” came the mumbled reply.
I pulled out the kitchen’s resident miscellaneous drawer and grabbed a lighter and some junk mail I had stashed out of sight. One quick flick and I was waving the blazing envelope beneath the sensor above the stove. I felt a rush of satisfaction when the ear-bloodying electronic shriek sounded through the apartment.
The satisfaction ended abruptly when the chilly spray rained down over me, soaking my thin nightgown within seconds.
Carl’s head crashed into the fridge light as he howled in pain. The room was alive with the stomach-turning sounds of flesh and bone rearranging itself.
“Well I’ll say!” Billy shouted. “You’re a right clever bit of frock!”
His shell gleamed as water beaded down its surface.
“Thanks!” I called over the screaming alarms.
I heard the gasp before I registered the figure of Mary Ellen Mayes, my eighty-something-year-old neighbor, standing in my open doorway. Hair in pink rollers and mouth open in naked shock, she clutched the high collar of her floral housecoat like it was battle armor against the den of sin she was clearly facing.
“What in God’s name is going on here?” Disapproval was harder for Mary Ellen to manage without the aid of the sternly-drawn eyebrows that usually dissected her forehead.
My first thought was to look for Billy, who had thankfully made himself scarce. Unfortunately, the three now-naked men writhing on my floor had not.
“Mary Ellen,” I said, shoving my body into the doorway to block her view. “What brings you over at this hour?”
“Is there a fire?” she asked, peeking over my shoulder. “I heard a commotion. And then the alarm started up and I—”
“Nope.” I pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and folded my arms over my sodden nightgown. “No fire here.”
“But the alarm—”
“Toast,” I said. “I like it dark. Lost track of time. You know how that goes.”
The smug set of Mary Ellen’s lips informed me she had never burned a piece of toast in her life.
“I thought I heard voices. Men’s voices,” she said, spitting the word like it might corrode her tongue if she let it stay in her mouth too long.
“Really?” I forced a laugh. “How strange.”
“My balls!” Tristan moaned from behind the door.
Mary Ellen’s hand flapped to her bony chest. “Who was that?”
“Just the T.V.,” I assured her. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“That didn’t sound like any program I’ve ever heard.”
Maybe because they stopped making ‘programs’ about the time Lawrence Welk snuffed it.
“My fucking head,” Bob growled.
“Well, thanks so much for checking on me,” I said brightly. The door rattled on its broken hinges as I tried to inch it shut.
Mary Ellen stuck a slippered foot in the gap. “Dr. Schmidt, I know you have something going on in there, and I intend to report this incident to the housing committee the minute the office opens this morning.”
“Hey grandma,” I heard Tristan’s taunt behind me. “Report this.”
I looked over my shoulder just as he grabbed his package—a sight that would stun even the nearsighted—and gave it a shake. His waggle was cut short when a familiar blur caught him in the solar plexus, knocking him sideways with enough force to take out a couple dining room chairs on his way down.
Renewed screams, grunts, and pleas came from the kitchen, and Carl’s slick, naked bulk dove across the space behind me. Bob leapt after him, his nude, muscled form graceful even in its flight.
“Come back here, you cowards!” Billy raced out of the kitchen on their heels, swinging the feather duster over his head like a battle mace.
The words “this isn’t what it looks like” froze in my throat. No amount of creative reframing on my part could knit this scene into something Mary Ellen Mayes, self-appointed morality monitor of my apartment community, would find acceptable.
“I—egg—three—naked—my dear lord!” Mary Ellen crossed herself, screamed, and scurried back to her doily-choked apartment next door.
Three naked asses of varying firmness bobbed down the apartment breezeway shortly behind her, chased by Billy, who warned me out of the way seconds before they jostled past.
“Come near the doctor again, and you’ll find more of the same!” Billy shouted. He made a show of dusting off his hands as he walked the few steps back to the apartment and met me at the threshold. “Well, that’s sorted out. Should we see about this door?”
We managed prop it into place by the time the fire trucks arrived.
I sat on the coffee table holding an umbrella while the crew—who greeted me by first name after a recent exploding car fiasco—shut off the alarms and sprinklers.
“The systems in these older buildings can be a little unreliable,” one of the crew reported from the top of a stepladder, where he fiddled with the kitchen’s smoke detector.
“Story of my life,” I grumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
*****
“What are you wearing?” Crixus’s voice was clear and unsullied by sleep—a direct contrast to my own, which hovered right at the edge of ‘do not operate heavy machinery.’ He had answered on the second ring, a good sign he wasn’t plowing Goldilocks like a spring field, or so I told myself.
“My raincoat and galoshes. But I’m taking them off as we speak.” My cell phone, thankfully, like the bed I settled onto cross-legged—had remained mostly dry.
“Anything under the raincoat?”
“Save it,” I said. “I need your magic.”
“Now you’re talking.” The smile in his voice was as radiant as the sun reaching gilded fingers into the gray dawn.
“Not that kind of magic. So far tonight, my apartment has been home to three bears, eight firemen, and one immortal egg. I’m in no mood.” Twice now, I had depended upon Crixus to undo the damage wrought upon my apartment and office by his retinue of squirrely supernatural guests. It was the one power the demigod possessed I wouldn’t mind stealing for myself.
That, and the spontaneous orgasms.
“And you didn’t invite me?”
“Since when did you need an invitation?” Crixus’s propensity to pop into my life at his leisure had been a contention of mine since we first met. My office, my car, even my bedroom, he invaded with the carefree indifference of a child hopping rides at the amusement park. And still, he managed to be frequently unavailable when I needed him.
“If I could be there, I would.” His voice lacked its usual cocktail of arrogance and caprice. He almost sounded earnest.
“Hey baby,” a syrupy female voice sang in the background. “You coming back to bed?”
My stomach tightened on a mixture of acid irritation and exhaustion. “Goldilocks, I presume?”
“Yes, but—”
“So sorry to bother you. I didn’t realize you were busy.”
“Matilda, it’s not like that. I—”
“Just forget about it, okay? I’ll take care of the mess myself.”
“I’ll send someone,” he promised. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Your least doesn’t interest me,” I said, and hung up. Five times, Crixus called back. Five times, I rejected it.
I stared at the clean, snowy expanse of my comforter. It had been in this very spot, on this very bed when I first heard his voice through my phone.
He spoke, and my world had changed completely and forever. I wanted to grab
some giant lever and crank the wheels of time backward. Force them to wind the past months back onto fate’s spool while I had the chance to decide if I wanted the knowledge they would bring.
A small, white dome appeared at the end of the bed. “Everything all right?” Billy asked.
“No, Billy,” I sighed, having neither the energy nor the desire to feign cheer for someone else’s benefit. “Things are decidedly not all right.”
“Might there be something I could do to help?”
I looked at him over my knees and saw the crack in his forehead had already knitted itself together. Three shapeshifting bears vanquished, and not so much as a scratch on him.
My mouth curved into a smile as the idea took shape in my head. “Maybe there is.”
*****
“Tell me you didn’t just kidnap the blackmailer.”
Liam’s voice was little more than mosquito buzz in my ear as I rode the surge of adrenaline up the Adirondack Northway toward Point Au Roche State Park. Between the hum of my tires as the orange needle approached the 90 mph mark, and the muffled shouts from the car’s rear, it was all I could do to hear NPR’s Weekend Edition—the Saturday ritual I was unwilling to give up even under these circumstances.
“Okay,” I said. “I didn’t just kidnap the blackmailer.”
“You’re lying.” It was a flat pronouncement of fact.
“And how would you know?”
“My guy’s been watching him. Just called to tell me he’d been snatched from the Dino’s Pizza parking lot.”
“He’s a blackmailer, Liam. I’m sure there’s any number of people with reason to apprehend him.”
“Any number of people aren’t a hot brunette with glasses accompanied by a walking egg in a do-rag.”
Shit. And we had been so careful. Setting up a deserted meeting location in a dark alleyway. Wearing all black…Well, I was wearing all black. Billy had to settle for a black bandana tied around his pointy shell like a pirate's cap, as he had flatly refused to be dyed with food coloring.
I replayed with pleasure the memory of the blackmailer crumpling at the knees when Billy launched himself into his crotch. To be fair, I had given him ample chances to tell me where my mother was.
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