Nightlife

by Brian Hodge

  Kerebawa took his bundle of ebene and began to carefully load the bamboo tube. Pouring a bit into one end, tapping so as to distribute it along the length. Finally he set the bundle aside and reversed the tube, held it before Justin’s face.

  “I hold it in front of my nose?” From Justin’s vantage point, as the two of them squatted a few feet apart, it looked as if Kerebawa was holding a gun barrel toward his head.

  “Yes. One side, then the other. There will be pain.” Deep breath. Release. His heart had speed-shifted into high gear with fear of the unknown. “I’m ready.”

  “If you have strength left, then you do me.”

  Justin nodded. And shifted the bamboo in line with one nostril.

  Squatting on his haunches, Kerebawa drew a massive breath, held it within his puffed-out chest. Placed his lips to the tube. And with a blast of air that sounded deceptively gentle, propelled his breath through the tube.

  The pain was staggering, an invasion of his skull by both solid and gas. Justin tumbled backward onto his rump, his head feeling clubbed by a hickory stick. He looped his arm around the small waste basket provided for the room and retched into it, then wearily resumed his squat.

  “Bei!” said Kerebawa. Again.

  They did the other nostril, and if the pain was less, it was only marginally so. Justin leaned groaning against the bed while mucus dribbled from his nostrils. When he wiped it away, he marveled at the vivid green tint. Memories swirled, kaleidoscopic. Trent, at Apocalips, his running nose. But while the pain of insufflation may have been similar, he knew instinctively that he was on a completely different journey. And as its cocoon began to draw tighter, there was no fear. Only the dawn of wonder.

  “Are you able?” came Kerebawa’s voice. Justin was dimly cognizant of him reversing the tube.

  He nodded. This ceremony was for his benefit, so that he might better understand his newfound ally; no, more than that, newfound friend. Understand him, the world he had come from, the fates that had bound them together. And perhaps, in the doing, understand himself a little better. Pain and disorientation could be mastered; he would not fail in his half of the exchange.

  Justin squatted again, balancing with knees gone to rubber. Breath came easily, powerfully, and he released it in a sharp blast that Kerebawa signified was well done by a flicker of his eyes.

  “Ai!” said Kerebawa, and Justin complied with more. They set the tube aside and let the ebene work its wonders, and readied to travel to the edge of the universe.

  The change came upon him, upon them both, bringing with it the power, and Tony reveled in it. This time he knew what to expect, and welcomed it with open arms.

  Limbs entwined around Sasha, hers around him, they undulated together and weathered the backfall, that dizzying plunge toward a world of alternatives and possibilities undreamed of. Until each one’s new form began to take shape, substance. Groans of ecstasy and anguish shed humanity, fell toward bestial, hung suspended somewhere between the two. Every nerve burned, every fiber. He bellowed, not caring how much noise they generated. Lupo and a couple others from last night’s fruitless hunt were pulling covert guard duty outside. The penthouse was their own private jungle. Red fog diffused the room, and within the glow, Sasha returned to the blonde-pelted, hybrid she-wolf he had seen two weeks ago. Animal from the shoulders up, forearms down, wispy fur elsewhere. He could smell the primal musk, sense the quickening heart. She writhed atop satin, and he heard it rip under her nails, did not care. Satin could be replaced. Experiences like this were priceless.

  For with them came knowledge. The power flushed all the flotsam and jetsam from your head, left only what was important. He saw his future destiny spread out as clearly as a gameboard. All he had to do was move the right pieces.

  He could see his rise within the Tampa hierarchy, a takeover by blood and powder. Rafael Agualar had had his day in the sun, and was now as fat and lazy as a lizard at midday. It could be simple, so simple.

  Gills flexing, useless in the air, Tony leaned back in rapture as Sasha squirmed across him, canine tongue lolling out to slither wet tracks across his chest, stomach, groin. Where his had gone, he had no idea. Receded far down his throat, maybe, or become something else in his gullet entirely. He could not return the favor to her.

  Instead, he tilted her atop him, her ivory flesh glowing red. He opened her gently with his newly webbed hands and rubbed the armorlike plating of his blunted snout between her thighs. The smell of her was ravening, and she tipped her head up from him long enough to howl.

  Purpose, individuality — he had retained both. This stuff was absolutely amazing. Retention. His mind had often turned to business during heated sex, and even within this new shell, he was no different. Scratch that. He was different. He was better.

  He charted his meteoric rise, unstoppable because he had something no one else did, had the market cornered on feral and would exploit it of every viable ounce of self-interest it held. He had truly not lived until skullflush had opened his eyes.

  And this woman with him could be a part of it, he could use her, exploit her as easily as the drug. Expansion meant acquisition and investment, and it was not good to leave a trail of receipts leading to your door. He had done it before, could do it again, use a woman as a front for purchases. The penthouse had been bought through the name of a former ladyfriend, as had the Lincoln, and even public utilities.

  Sasha would pull her weight, a leech no longer. So long as he could tempt her with nights like this, where the two of them could let the beasts loose, she would remain forever his.

  His teeth, triangular and sharp as razors, clicked in the air. His breath was a roaring cyclone. Close, he was very close…

  While three words longed to climb up and out of a throat that could no longer give them form.

  Justin followed Kerebawa’s lead and had never felt freer in his life. They rose from the pain of the air blasts, put it behind them, moved on to the infinitely more important business of living.

  It felt as if great weights had lifted from his body. His arms undulated in imitation of Kerebawa’s, and it no longer mattered that they were in a motel room, surrounded by accoutrements of the modern world, for they pranced together in ceremonial dance as old as a civilization.

  They moved with graceful abandon. Justin realized that he loved to dance after all. For it meant something, and anything he had seen or attempted on a nightclub floor was but pale imitation of the origins of dance.

  Spots of light flashed before his eyes, and he heard Kerebawa raise his voice in tuneless song. The words, the meaning, the motivation — they were everything. Justin sang with him, at first attempting to follow, parrot fashion, then finally letting go to allow it to come instinctively. As if something buried for aeons had broken free.

  Together they danced, they sang. They shared. Whatever passed between them was more than the sum of its parts, for while they hailed from two different worlds, Justin knew that some common middle ground had been achieved. And crossed as equals.

  He understood, then, why he and so many contemporaries had so earnestly sniffed and snorted and smoked and injected themselves ever closer to early and sordid graves. This was what they had been seeking: the grail of altered realities. A quest as old as humanity, that spread even beyond humanity.

  He understood why bighorn sheep in the Canadian Rockies climbed dangerous ledges solely to eat a narcotic lichen. Why cows and horses in the West ate the hallucinogenic locoweed. Why Andean natives had chewed coca leaves for millennia. Why species beyond number sought out hallucinogenic mushrooms. Why even children whirled themselves into stupors, or held their breath until their perceptions shifted.

  We are born to it.

  He understood the futility of the ways he’d tried before and now knew he would never try again. Only those living so harmoniously with nature could manage the trick of deriving only benefits. The animals didn’t become addicts. Generations of aboriginals the world over lived long, health
y lives. It was surely the hallmark of advanced civilization to misplace the simplistic beauty of primal philosophies. To bastardize the earth’s gifts and mutate them into poison, while ignoring the fact that spiritual transcendence could just as easily come from art, music, emotional bonding. Achievement.

  Justin soared within, borne on wings of joy that came from knowing such heights were attainable — always had been — without the shackles of dependence, addiction, and ruin.

  Tapestries of music wove through his mind. Primal rhythms, then lofty celestial grandeur, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  He gyrated, looked up, past roof, past sky…

  Looked, and saw the eagle…

  And followed as it led him away.

  Three words. They choked and gargled as Tony’s throat and mouth wrestled with them. At last he surrendered, and the phrase I love you died somewhere between his heart and mind.

  He grunted as Sasha’s lupine tongue finished its task and coaxed him to the edge and past it, as seed mingled with blonde fur. And with it came the death of love, the dropping of the veil, realizing that he had allowed himself to be misled by the confusions of sensuality.

  Animal instincts, however, were less easily fooled.

  His heart was betraying him; he had let Sasha get too close to his soul. A man in his position could ill afford that. First comes love, then comes downfall.

  He spun her around toward the headboard once more, her sides heaving with excitement and her muzzle panting hot musky breath, and he held her by the shoulders. Seeking points of contact that went far beyond physical, buried somewhere within spirit.

  Somehow, the drug acted as the bridge.

  Her essence, his will. They interlocked like the fingers of lovers’ hands. Only love was illusory, he had forgotten that most important of lessons.

  He caressed his own inner core — muscular, sleek, predatory. Touched hers. Skittish, whimpering in the dark. No comparison.

  No contest.

  And so he pressed.

  Will to will…

  Soul to soul…

  Core to core…

  And like the good little she-wolf that she was, Sasha let primal instincts surface, willingly rolled belly-up and stretched back her head. Baring her throat, submitting to his dominance. A lupine mechanism of surrender that would defuse the other animal’s aggression as soon as its muzzle touched the exposed throat.

  Except Tony cared nothing for the ways of the wolf.

  And he let his own instincts rise…

  …while Justin hurtled through forests seen best when glimpsed from the corner of the mind’s eye. Primeval awe and wonder — flying, he was flying. The air was murky, as if never kissed by sunlight, and from the branches and canopies of foliage hung suspended not-quite-human figures that dissolved the more closely he looked at them. Ravenous beings, hungry to eat the souls of enemies, meat-hungry for it.

  Onward he soared, until he saw a red glow emanating from the dark emerald depths of a distant tree. Closer, drawn half by his own will and half by another’s, unknowingly, because the road had already been paved that night he’d half-slept on Erik’s couch.

  Closer.

  He looked, and this time the images held form—

  —and Tony opened wide his jaws, while Justin saw wolf and piranha on a bed of red light. Tony. The face was unrecognizable, but this could be no other. Obviously experienced in the ways of hekura-teri. Why had he felt only the she-wolf’s previous foray and not Tony’s? Perhaps with hers, as now, his twentieth-century guard had been down, the doors of perception opened during half-sleep and leftover powder in his system.

  And as Justin hurtled in with the speed of a comet and the helplessness of a dying breeze, he watched Tony lunge…

  …and bite through the center of her throat, encountering no more resistance than if chomping into a piece of ripe fruit. Even before teeth pierced hide, he knew there was no turning back, not even if he wanted to, for he could smell the pulse of blood beneath the surface.

  Sasha managed a strangled yelp, exhaling a glittering mist that washed over him and fanned the flames of hunger even as he gulped the slab from her throat down whole. Her core screamed within his own, locked in futile subjugation.

  Forepaws slashed out in a frenzy, and he dodged, and her nails ripped open the mattress. Arcs of water splashed them, shimmering rainbows tinted red. Followed by arcs of blood, so dark and rich in the haze they looked black, like liquid velvet.

  She thrashed, and Tony drove into the cratered ruin of her throat with hunger and thirst that knew no abatement. She flailed and rocked from side to side, shredding the top of the mattress. Satin drenched through as bright, moist fans spattered the wall and ran together into runelike tracings.

  The waterbed’s frame contained the outflow, and the mattress parted to receive them both. Tony bore down on her from above, her legs splayed to his either side as she kicked with steadily waning efforts. Sinking, sinking … her head, then her shoulders, slipped beneath the water, his own following immediately after. Gusts of air bubbled from her mouth, her throat, and the water the blood the foam the churning melded into an orgiastic stew. This was what he was meant for.

  He feasted. He gorged. With no need to come up for air.

  When she no longer kicked, and his snout was buried in her midsection, he paused. Senses aflame, the smell of rich life flickering madly within her. A mingling of scents. Hers, of course. And another, even more familiar: his own. Coalesced into one tiny mass, growing. Souvenir of their first night of intimacy two weeks ago.

  Huh. She’d said she was on the Pill.

  The pause gifted him with other thoughts, other senses. The fibrous hold on her core, now like cold mist, became a window of sensations. Another presence, voyeuristic, receding, its link to host extinguished.

  He knew who it would be, and if Tony could have, he would have grinned. Give the peeper one last parting view. Tony slammed into her with renewed hunger, crunching the tiny cellular spark of life before it could wink out on its own.

  After all…

  Fish often eat their young.

  Chapter 25

  THE MISSING LINKS

  Under a sky beginning to tint in the east with muddy shades of rose, the Lincoln ate up the miles. Lupo held it steady, as firmly on track as a slot car. None of this meandering around within his own lane — he couldn’t stand drivers who did that. You had to keep the focus tight.

  “Traffic’ll be picking up before long,” said the guy in the passenger seat. One of the hired help from the past couple of nights, one of two brothers named Barrington. This one was Bruce; everybody called him BB. Neither particularly big nor menacing in appearance, but looks were deceiving. BB had been into the martial arts ever since he was seven. Got hooked on Bruce Lee movies at an early age, partly because of the draw of having the same name.

  “Don’t worry about traffic.” Behind the wheel, Lupo was steady as Scylla, the beast of rock from Homer’s The Odyssey. “We’ll be on the bridge before long.”

  BB looked down in faint distaste at the garbage-bag bundle at his feet. It looked weighty but shapeless. Lupo knew he would just as soon be rid of it.

  “What happened to the rest of the body, man? That’s the lightest corpse I ever lugged around.”

  “It’s been disposed of,” Lupo said. Voice very cool, very even.

  But his nonchalance was a mask, if an effective one, covering the sliver of doubts and disturbances pulsing beneath. He thought he’d seen it all, death in all forms that mattered. Torture. Murder. Brutal interrogation. Had a crinkly white scar across his own gut guaranteeing that he had endured some heavy-duty abuse of his own. Thought he’d seen it all, no more surprises left.

  And then Tony had to go throw a new one in on him.

  A couple hours earlier, he had walked into the condo — alone, with the Barringtons staying outside — and was almost immediately slapped in the face by the rich, coppery odor of a recent kill. A messy one. He had rapp
ed on Tony’s door. Waited. Rapped again.

  “Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Come in.” Tony’s voice was ragged. What Lupo found inside had given even his own battle-tested gorge a run for its money.

  Tony, sitting in his waterbed. Not on it, in it. As if it had been converted into an aquarium to replace the one he’d lost. Tony had been leaning back against the headboard. An absolute mess, blood caking his mouth, face. Streaking the wall behind him. And in the water, floated, well…

  Things.

  Things that had once been joined, parts of a whole. And were now apart. The most recognizable of which had been a foot and lower leg, rising from the water to drape over the bed frame.

  Tony had sighed heavily. Finally met Lupo’s astonished gaze.

  “Don’t we do a lot of bizarre things out of love?” he had said.

  Lupo’s mind had spun frantically to grasp it all. Not entirely sad to see their association with Sasha come to an end. Not entirely relieved to see it come about this way. It was the last thing he’d expected, because for the past few days Tony had actually seemed to be falling for the girl. Falling, and fighting it, maybe.

  Tony had likely snapped back to his right mind. But was it possible to snap back too far in the right direction? To go beyond?

  Then he saw the mirror on the floor. The straws. Recalled finding Tony last week after his earlier experiment with skullflush. He wasn’t sure he wanted to learn anything more of what had gone on in this room than absolutely necessary.

  “Need to get rid of this mess.” Tony held up a second foot and let it go to splash back into the water. Too far apart from the other one, the angle all wrong. “And then we’ve got a lot of things to plan out.”

  Sometimes, over the past couple of hours, Lupo had wondered why he was going along with this, as if it were par for the course. This was careless, sloppy, needlessly risky. Tony had been taking more risks, calculated and otherwise, the past two-plus weeks than he had in the past two years. Why stick with that, given the consequences?