“Be right back.”
He headed down the tiny staircase to the lower level of the train, wandering to the very end. She’d think he was using the bathroom, but really he just needed to collect himself.
The tha-lunk tha-lunk was louder on the lower level, the darkness outside more profound. He sat himself on the luggage shelf full of backpacks and suitcases, all the essentials of those lives up there.
He suddenly didn’t know what anything was, and it terrified him. He was dead, but not. He had a waterfall of grief inside him.
He felt her before he saw her limping down the slim hallway.
When she reached him, she rested her petite hands on his thighs. “I’m sorry, Max.”
The weight of her hands comforted him. She affected him like she’d never know.
“When I wanted you to see her, I didn’t want for you to feel like this,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she said.
“No, it is, Veronica. I want to feel this.” His words sounded growly, even to his own ears. “I need to feel it.”
She furrowed her brow.
He took hold of her shoulders and looked into her eyes, feeling such crazy love for her. She didn’t want things to touch her. That was their difference.
“I want to plunge down and feel everything if that’s what’s there,” he whispered. “Bring it on, that’s what I say. Even if it rips me apart.”
“No, Max.”
He tightened his grip, raw with love and grief. “It’s what I have, Veronica. It’s alls I have left that’s still real. It’s alls I have left that shows I’m alive.”
“You’re wrong, Max—that’s not all.” And she went up on her tiptoes and pressed her soft lips to his. She kissed him slowly and sweetly, but it was electric, too, as if she were shoving life right into him, and suddenly, miraculously, he wasn’t alone. At least in that moment, he wasn’t alone.
Before he knew what he was doing, he was down off his perch, pushing her against the wall, kissing her with everything he had. He felt her fingers wend under his shirt, around his back, pressing into his flesh, clutching at him.
“Veronica.” He kissed down her cheek, trailing kisses down her neck, nuzzling her soft skin, drinking her up like a drought-crazed madman.
“You’re more alive than everyone on the planet combined,” she whispered in the darkness. “What’s between us is real.”
He pulled away, unable to trust it all. “Are you doing a pity number?”
She widened her eyes, a look she reserved for only the biggest of outrages. “Pity? Pity?” She snorted. “FYI, Max—” Then she stopped short.
“FYI what?”
“It’s not exactly an FYI,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“Well, it kind of is, but not on the level of, hey, this is teal, not green.”
“Uh huh,” he said.
“It’s a different level.” She placed her hands on his chest and squeezed his shirt front, gazing into his eyes with a mixture of fear and resolve. He’d seen that look once before—it was back in the bathroom, before she’d consented to let him bathe her, back when she’d let herself be so vulnerable to him.
A shiver came over him.
“FYI,” she began again, then she tilted her head, eyebrows raised. Her expression for when she felt she was delivering the killer point in an argument. “FYI, I love you, so…”
He couldn’t believe it. This crazy happiness washed over him. “So…so there? Is that what you were going to say?” he teased.
Her face went red. “No.”
“FYI, I love you, so there?” He tickled her belly. “FYI? That’s an FYI?”
She laughed. “FYI I love you, so it’s not pity.” She grabbed his hands. “Stop being a freak. Don’t make me take it back.”
He pulled out of her grip and caged her with his arms, pressing her up against the wall with the length of his body. This was real—she was right about that. “You can’t take it back.” He nipped her ear and she gasped. “I won’t let you take it back.” He kissed her hard this time, pressing his tongue beyond the seam of her lips and into her mouth, invading her. He couldn’t get enough of her. He never could.
The train tha-lunked rhythmically, an erotic lull. Tha-lunk, tha-lunk.
He kissed her cheek, then her ear. He whispered, “I have an FYI for you, baby.”
“Is it dirty?” she asked.
He pulled away and cupped her cheeks in his hands. “You are so freaking beautiful. Every inch of you. And I love the stuffing out of you. That’s my FYI for you.”
“Love the stuffing out of me?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Her eyes went serious. “Oh, please do.” She reached down between them and pressed the ridge of his cock right through his pants. “Please.”
He looked up and down the hall.
She whispered into his ear: “Alls they’ll see is luggage, Max.”
His witch, on the spot with the magic.
With shaking hands he pushed her furry coat off her shoulders, then fumbled with the clips holding up her overalls, kissing her all the while. She pushed him away in a huff and undid them herself.
“Not fast enough?”
She watched his eyes as she wriggled out of her overalls there in the dim luggage area, letting them drop off her legs, letting her leg be bare in front of him. Even in the dimness, it was a risk for her because he could see it by the running lights, so much thinner and weaker than the other, especially below the knee.
“You are so goddamn beautiful and you don’t even know.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, but it was her sing-songy voice, making a lie of something thorny. She pulled him close so the leg was out of view.
He pushed off his pants, and then unbuttoned her shirt and pulled down her bra. Slowly he kissed down to her breast. Her skin felt like silk on his lips. She held his head in her fists, managing to grab hold of bits of his hair.
He pressed his hands into the flesh of her buttocks, drew her to him as he kissed and sucked her nipple, letting his shaft slide along her seam. She gasped softly, churning against him to the rhythm of the train, tha-lunk, tha-lunk, fists balled at his skull, the short hairs of his crew cut caught tightly between her fingers. It was pain and pleasure and he relished it like crazy.
He pulled away and knelt, and he kissed her bad knee.
“Hey!” She tried to pull him up, but he wouldn’t go. “What are you doing?”
He traced a massive scar over her calf, slid his hands over the mottled skin, feeling its texture. Kissed the roughest area. It seemed to be burned, almost. “You are beautiful everywhere.”
“You stop that.” Again she tried to pull him up. He allowed it this time.
He stood, looked her in the eye. “Or what?”
“I’ll think of something.” She grabbed his cock, trying to distract him from his mission of kissing some more of her bad leg. It worked. He wanted her like crazy. He’d dreamed of this. He picked her up and turned her around, setting her on the luggage shelf.
She wrapped her legs around him, opening to him, guiding him in. “Come here,” she said, even though he was nearly there.
“Wait,” he kissed her, hating to stop. “This could be dangerous.”
“I’m a witch,” she whispered. “Protection…” she bit his ear, slipped her hand down between them. “It’s handled.”
He kissed her some more as she guided his cock into her. He pushed into her with a moan and everything stilled.
Her grip on his hair went even tighter. He might actually lose a chunk of hair, he thought. He hoped he would.
He pulled out and slid in again. Then he pulled out and slid in from a high angle, sliding relentlessly along her clit to the rhythm of the train. Veronica was tight and hot around him. Sweat shone on her face. She moved her hands to his chest, let her head loll back. And then he fucked her at a new angle.
“Just like that, Max.”
So he kept on just like that, needing her, loving her, fucking them both into the land of the living until she cried out and came, convulsing around him, fists tearing at his hair, setting him off in an orgasm that shattered his being.
Chapter Nine
THE TRAIN SPED THROUGH THE night. She’d turned off the spotlight above her seat, put up her armrest, and lay her head on his shoulder, pretending to sleep, but she was really watching him sketch.
He loved her.
It was the best feeling in the world. Unless you counted loving him. Just like that, she’d told him. She’d jumped and he caught her. It was such a good feeling. She didn’t always have to be the one on the outside looking in. She just had to risk everything, that’s all. It might actually get addictive.
He was drawing his little girl, up on the stage.
She straightened up, fished around in her pocket, and pulled out her Village Lip Lickers, sliding the top of the tin open. They had papaya flavor in Chicago. Very rare. “You wouldn’t let me take a photo of her, but you’ll sketch her?” she asked.
He filled in the hair with short, sharp strokes. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “A photo, it’s a way of capturing her. This drawing, it’s a way of loving her.”
Shivers went through her. He was loving his kid. Drawing her. He didn’t need to have her, to conjure her. He was just loving her. It was a selfless love. Veronica felt ashamed to think of her relationship with her niece, Alix, the one member of her sister’s family who didn’t know her, didn’t know to loathe her. The way she’d conjured the little girl for craft days and outings. Like a toy she controlled. Alix would never know about the time they spent together. It was selfish.
She didn’t want her love to be like that with Max. She had to find a way into the code to give him natural life.
Now and then he put down the drawing and walked the train, up and back. He was on edge. She was, too. Salvo’s next attack would be big and brutal, and without knowing what sorts of baddies he’d bring in, there was no way to prepare.
The next morning they developed the photos at the one-hour booth in front of the Piggly Wiggly, and she went right to work down in her lab conjuring the cabinet as he looked on from his seat on the couch.
“It’s done?” he asked when she pulled the electrodes from her head.
“Tomorrow at this time it’ll be on the doorstep.”
He smiled. He was going to use the information to create what he called doomsday letters—letters that would be triggered by her unnatural or even suspicious death. The letters would be instantly sent to a long list of people, and each letter would contain the names of every government official and double agent who’d ever done anything for the Salvos. “They’ll never bother you again once they know you have this. And they certainly won’t send any more supernatural beings after you.” He came up behind her and kissed the top of her head, sliding his hands over her shoulders. “We just have to hold out a while longer.”
She gazed up at him. “Maybe we should go celebrate. We could go to the Malcolmsberg Supper Club for frog legs.”
She didn’t want to tell him the other reason to celebrate—she’d spent the day scouring magic books for ideas on normalizing his term of life, and she’d hit on something—the realization that she’d been approaching it wrong all this time. She needed a new kind of temporal notation altogether, bespelled to fool the computers. She couldn’t be sure it would work, but things were looking good.
His seven days were up in two days. Normally she’d order him 24 hours and 10 seconds before he was due to blink out, so that no matter where he blinked out from, ten seconds later he’d appear at the door.
This new method of expressing time let her reset the term of life he had now. To a year, to 30 years, whatever. Max would simply stay. He’d age like a normal person. A few more tests and she’d implement it.
“I don’t want to go out,” he said, kissing her neck. “I want to stick around here. I can’t get enough of you, Veronica.” He said it as though it baffled him.
She smiled up at him. “All bodies are electric. All emotions are electric.”
“Stop with the science shit.” He pulled her up.
“It’s true,” she breathed as he lifted her clear off her chair. He carried her upstairs to the living room where he’d made a fire.
She pressed a hand to his chest, enjoying his solid strength. He would be his own person.
Roughly he grabbed her hand and kissed her palm, then the inside of her wrist. He undressed her and made love to her by firelight, sweetly. Max had so many moods. He’d died twice, but he was more alive than anyone she’d known.
Afterwards they lay side by side, naked on the couch under a blanket.
“Do you want to order a pizza?” she asked. He always wanted to eat.
“Too dangerous,” he said. “This is not the time to be loosening your wards for delivery boys. Anyway, I want to draw you.”
Her heart leapt. “You want to draw me?”
“You.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
He stood and flipped on a light. “Stay there. I’ll get my stuff.”
She grabbed her shirt.
“No,” he said, “just like that, just as you are.”
“Naked?”
“Yes.”
She stiffened. “Max, you can’t.” It was one thing to let him see her leg in dimness or firelight. It was another to be laid out for him to stare at and sketch.
“Why not?”
“It’s too much for me…”
He touched her hair. “Let me,” he whispered.
“Don’t ask it. I can’t.”
“You can do anything, Veronica. You’re the baddest of the bad, baby.”
“The baddest of the bad doesn’t want to be drawn in the nude. Let’s just hang out.”
“Okay.” He slid a finger over her shoulder. “Okay.”
She looked away. She felt so pathetic. Why not? She thought about the time in the bathtub, the train, the strange and delicious luxury of letting herself be vulnerable to this man whom she trusted beyond anything. It had always worked out. But drawing the leg, it was too much.
Do something that scares you, he’d said to her. Well, she was about to give him a natural life and release him from her control. She’d told him she loved him. Wasn’t that enough?
They watched the fire together. Why couldn’t she have said yes? It was special that he wanted to draw her. Hell, he’d seen the leg. Still, for him to stare openly at it and sketch it, catalogue it in all its ugliness…
“It’s okay,” he whispered, as though reading her mind.
But it wasn’t. She sunk into him, let him hold her, trying to remember what it was like to give herself over. Was she not the Bitch Queen of the Witch World? Could she not do this? She sat up. “Get the stuff.”
“You’ll let me draw you?”
“Do it before I change my mind,” she said.
He slid out from beside her and headed to the stairs, broad back gleaming in the flames, ass radiant. He disappeared to get his drawing stuff.
She flipped off the covers and looked at her leg with its mottled skin and frail, wrongly formed bones. Just a leg, she thought to herself. But it wasn’t just a leg. Her shame over it and the ridicule she’d suffered from it had driven so many of her choices. It was why she’d studied to become a witch, seeking out the most extreme mentors, traveling to the most remote places for the rarest charms, accumulating more and more power, having to beat everybody. It wasn’t why the other witches had rejected her—they’d laughed at her ideas, not her leg. But somehow, when they laughed, she was still that kid in gym shorts, limping around, vowing to crush them all.
She closed her eyes as he came back down. He flicked on the lamp.
“Every single light?” She opened her eyes.
He smiled his crooked smile. “Shut up and get comfortable.” He took the ottoman in front of the couch.
She stretch
ed out sideways, with her good leg in front of her bad.
“No, no, no.” He came to her, grabbed her good ankle, and set it in back.
“So pushy,” she joked, just to cover the gravity of this.
“That’s me, baby,” he said.
She closed her eyes, feeling painfully exposed. The leather crinkled as he sat back down.
Lying there, naked, she couldn’t help but think of the girl the younger Salvo had left naked and dead on display.
She banished the thought and focused instead on Max’s pencil, which made a rustling sound. Her leg tingled at times—she felt sure it tingled from his sketching it, as though his eyes were too much for it. She fought the urge to cover it. This was Max. He’d said he loved her.
Still, it seemed like the sketch was taking forever.
“You okay like that?”
“Yeah, Max,” she said.
A few minutes later he tore the paper from the pad.
“Are you done?”
“No. Got it wrong.”
She groaned. “You’re starting over?”
“Yeah. It was the wrong color.” He crumpled up the paper and knocked through the pencils in his box. “I’m doing you in blue.”
She laughed, overcome with the ridiculousness of it all. She was letting him sketch her naked, complete with her maimed leg. Not only that, but he’d already done one sketch, discarded it, and was starting over.
“I’m not a bowl of fruit,”
“Oh, I know,” he said.
She snorted. “That had better be a good drawing or you will be illin’ my friend.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
He sketched away, pausing only when Jophius scratched at the door. She felt a blast of cold as he let the little beast in, then he went back to work. She didn’t know how much time had passed. It felt like an hour, but it probably hadn’t been more than 20 minutes.
“Done.” He smiled. “Was that so bad?”
“Depends.” She pulled the woolly blanket around herself and sat up.
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