“Ready to go back?” he asked, brushing his lips over the nape of her neck.
He liked the feel of her arm around his waist, walking back to the hotel, and he hoped Suzanne regarded him as more than just an exotic fuck buddy. She hadn’t been put off by the scale pattern on his forearms, had even claimed they were a turn-on, so why was he so jittery?
“Neddy?” She’d asked him something, but it sailed past him.
“Sorry, baby, I missed that. What did you say?”
Suzanne was looking at him in that direct way of hers. “I just said you seemed spaced out. Are you okay?”
“Nothing a little weed and a back rub wouldn’t fix.” He hugged her slender shoulders. The thought came into his head that she was so slightly built she could be crushed like a dragonfly. He needed to be careful.
“Well, I can’t help with the weed, but I can do the second part,” she said, smiling up at him.
She was so pretty, with her red hair and dark blue eyes. He felt a moment’s pang. She deserved better. Wherever he was headed, it was gonna be a rough ride. But she’d been sent to him, or he’d been pushed toward her, so there it was. Ever since that one awful moment when she’d glimpsed the demon within, he’d kept a tight lid on his psyche.
When they got back to the apartment, the door of the second bedroom was shut, with a Better Living Through Chemistry bumper sticker taped to it.
“Crash is home, I see,” said Ned. No doubt some serious acid test was in progress, so he knew not to disturb.
He gave Suzanne a squeeze. “Why don’t you get some coffee started while I roll up a few jays. Then we’ll have our own private party.”
“Okay, just don’t start without me.”
He watched her heading off to the kitchen, thinking how much he wanted them to be a couple on equal footing and hoping he wouldn’t have to keep his secrets hidden from her too much longer. He pulled a baggie from under the mattress and rolled up a fat joint, using all that was left and eating the few seeds that remained.
Ned put Sketches of Spain, that strangest of Miles Davis albums, on the turntable. It was perfect—jagged and raw, exactly the way he felt inside. He was living in Edge City, man, and this little domestic dance they were performing was only a prelude to some madness he felt but couldn’t see.
Before long, she came in with two steaming mugs. He lit up, and they smoked and drank in silence until the record ended.
“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?” She was staring at him again, trying to look inside. Ned studied the floorboards.
“I don’t even know where to start.” He felt the bones of her hand, thin and birdlike. “I’m very attached to you, Suzanne.”
“Is that a problem? Are you married or something?”
Ned let out a laugh. “No, baby, I’m definitely not married. Never have been.”
She wasn’t smiling. “Then what? Is it my brother? He isn’t thrilled about us, but so what? I’m twenty-three. I do what I want.”
“Your brother is absolutely not my problem. This is.” He showed her the insides of his arms, where the scale design was visible even in the subdued lighting of the bedroom.
She touched his skin, running her fingers over the pattern in a way that made him shiver. The scales were dark enough to appear three-dimensional although the skin was smooth to the touch. He’d rubbed his fingers over those designs too many times himself, trying to understand how and why he’d been marked like that.
She was doing it now, rubbing her fingers against his skin, seeking a texture that wasn’t there. “I did notice that your tattoos had changed color and thought it was kind of strange. I thought maybe you were having an allergic reaction.” She was holding his arm in her lap.
“They aren’t tattoos,” said Ned.
“Then what are they?”
“What would you say if I told you a snake put them on me?”
Suzanne blinked, but didn’t laugh. That was good, because Ned was losing his nerve and had almost decided he’d made a mistake, opening up like that. It was the grass; that stuff was stronger than the last batch Crash sold him.
Suzanne was speaking slowly and carefully, trying, he supposed, to find her way through the cannabis fog to the right words. “I’m willing to believe,” she said, “that there could be some level of existence beyond what we see and touch. Getting stoned gives you a glimpse of what that expanded state might be like. On the other hand, I’ve never had a supernatural experience, so I don’t understand how you could’ve gotten those marks that way. But if you want to tell me how you think it happened, I’m willing to listen.”
“Fair enough.” So then it all came out—how he’d grown up in a Florida swamp with his mother who handled snakes and that he’d helped her until he’d run away from home at age sixteen, then got bitten by a rattler and recovered without hospital treatment, and when he’d finally come to, his skin had changed from freckled and pale to his current olive complexion with the snakeskin designs. He skipped telling her how his forearms had been previously scarred by his mother’s fish-gutting knife. Some day he might get around to explaining that part, but not now. And the exact fate of his mother and what she’d turned into before her death was not going be told to anyone, ever.
Ned got up and retrieved the folder that contained his drawing of Suzanne. “Let me show you this.” He handed her another page, and watched as she held it up.
“What is it?”
“Good question. I have no idea, but I drew it the same day I made that picture of you.”
“It looks like a native shield. Is it African?”
Ned shrugged. “I drew it in that trance I told you about.”
“Drawing the magic,” she said softly. “Can you do it whenever you want? I mean, do the spirits or whatever need to be there when you start to draw?”
Ned let out his breath, relieved she hadn’t bolted for the door.
“No, I can’t, and that’s the worst part. I don’t know why they come when they do. It’s a bad scene. No, it’s worse. The first time it happened, I was only a little kid. It scared me shitless, and I didn’t even know enough to be really scared, because I didn’t have any guidelines for a reality check. Now I do, and I know that something about me is really fucked up.”
Suzanne was squeezing his hand, her attention fixed on his face. “What’s it like, Neddy?” she whispered. “When they come?”
“If I tell you, you might decide Hal’s right, that you shouldn’t get mixed up with me.” Ned tightened his grip. “I’m not a normal person.”
“I knew that when I met you,” she said.
Ned pulled her close, holding her against his chest, her hair in his face. He’d wanted for years to confess his weirdness to somebody, but he’d never dared before now. He’d danced around it with Cecil Rider, but couldn’t give the old man too many details or it would’ve come out that he’d murdered his mother with a shovel to the head because she’d changed into something that talked with her voice but looked like all Hell. He’d gone berserk and didn’t remember the details of how it went down, but in the end he’d stopped the creature and followed his first instinct, which was to burn the house to the ground. It had taken a monumental act of courage to go back there after so many years, but by following that urge he’d been given a vision and what seemed to be a mission. It was that part, figuring out the mission, where Suzanne came in.
“This thing I drew,” he said, “it’s a magical object, some kind of holy grail. In the trance, I saw how it got created for a tribe by one of their gods. Then something happened to it, stolen or something. But really, I’m just guessing. The snake spirit I channeled said I’m supposed to return it. But how can I return something I don’t even have?”
“Why don’t you go into a trance and just ask what it is?”
Ned shook his head. “I’ve tried, and like I said, they don’t answer when I do that, or they’ll give me some damned cryptic vision like I just described to you.” He took a breath. He
remembered asking his mother what was wrong with him, but all she’d said was that it was blood magic, which he now understood was probably why she’d wanted to marry his father.
When Suzanne lifted her face, he was tempted to just kiss her and forget about this shit with visions and snake demons, but he was so close to telling what had been withheld for so long that he didn’t want to stop.
“Anything else?” Her eyes looked afraid, but he could tell she wanted to hear.
“When I got the snakebite that I told you about, just before I blacked out, I hallucinated a snake goddess or something that talked to me. I don’t know if she was real or just in my head, but she told me I had to fix something, find something that was missing. I think she saved me, because I woke up days later still alive instead of dead.” He let that sink in.
“Is that what I saw, that first day when we came here—your snake goddess?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, certain it had been the other she’d seen, because he’d felt its chilling presence along his spine. He felt her stiffen in her arms.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you, Neddy. I want to be with you, just like you are now.”
Ned too wanted that more than anything, but the odds, as he figured them, were about as good as a dragonfly in the path of a semi.
Chapter 18
August 6, Saturday—Present Day
Margaret, Lissa, Judy, and Tom walked in a clump along the narrow sidewalk leading back to the dorm. The streaks of a salmon pink sunset lingered against the darker backdrop of approaching night.
“Are you really gonna do it?” Margaret asked, walking beside Tom.
“Like, yeah. Nobody in their right mind would turn down a chance to sneak out after hours with Devin.” Margaret knew Tom would score major points if she pulled that off. Devin was a wicked mix of computer nerdiness and soccer-player hunkiness, plus he was almost sixteen.
Judy looked back at her. “What’re you and Devin gonna do?”
“Something you don’t know how to do yet.” Tom said this in her typical husky monotone. Tom wasn’t smiling, but Margaret could sense the smirk in her undertone. If anything, she was teasing them, making them believe she was more world wise than she might really be. That was just Tom.
Back in the dorm, they congregated in Tom and Margaret’s room with sodas and doughnuts from the dorm vending machines.
“Happy birthday,” Judy said and hugged Margaret hard.
“Yeah, hurry up and open those presents!” Lissa handed her a wrapped gift and watched with a wicked smile as she tore off the paper. It was Seize the Night, volume seven of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s erotic Dark Hunter vampire series, which received appropriate nods and nudges as it got passed around.
“See? It’s signed!” Lissa found the title page and held it up. “My brother got that at a sci-fi convention he went to.”
Margaret stared at the signature, properly in awe. “If Mom sees it’s signed by a famous writer, you think she’ll let me keep it?”
They all cracked up, and Margaret picked up Judy’s package in its red wrapping paper.
“Jude-dude!” She held up the box of chocolates. “Omigod, you are made of WIN!” She took the lid off and passed the box around.
Her mouth full of caramel crème, she opened Tom’s gift last. As the shiny black paper and silver ribbon came off, she could see that it was an anime DVD. Margaret stopped chewing.
“Descendants of Darkness! Tom-tom, this is beyond cool! I can’t believe you got me this!” Tom, whose face was normally a mask of neutral non-expression, was actually smiling.
The others crowded around. “Wow, can we watch it now?”
Margaret was grinning. “We might as well, ‘cause there’s no way I can watch this at home, especially not with Nik. He’d faint!”
The girls whooped with laughter.
“Can’t you just see it,” gasped Lissa. “The Nikster discovers yaoi!” Yaoi, the forbidden love of impossibly beautiful men for each other as expressed in Japanese anime, was only one of the things Tom had introduced them to. That would come to a halt once camp was over and Thomasina Redfern went back to her ultra-cool life in Orlando, Margaret knew. But for now, she was determined to soak up every drop of decadence camp had to offer.
“Be sure to give me your emails before we leave,” Tom said, “so I can send you links to my favorite online manga reader sites. They have all the best stuff—uncensored peens and everything."
Margaret joined in the squeals. She wasn't entirely sure what a "peen" was, but she hoped it was what she thought. Tom was nothing if not educational.
Tom popped disc one of Descendants into her computer, maximized the screen, and they all gathered around as the title segment began to play. They giggled and watched and hit Pause and Replay for over an hour until a knock at the outside hallway door brought a quick silence. Tom minimized the screen, and Margaret got up to let in their quad’s camp counselor.
“Hi, girls. Everybody accounted for?” Melissa checked off their names on her clipboard.
“Have a birthday chocolate.” Margaret held out the box.
Melissa’s hand hovered over the bonbons, dowsing for the right one. “Yum, chocolate-covered cherry. Happy fourteen, Margrits.” She gave her a hug and went to the door. “Good night, all.”
“Goodnight,” they chorused.
As soon as the door was shut, the four of them collapsed onto Tom’s bed, consumed with conspiratorial laughter.
“Okay,” said Tom. “Let’s finish this puppy off. I gotta get ready to go meet Devin.”
They watched the end of Descendants, and Margaret carefully packed it back in its box. As Judy and Lissa left to go watch Scream on Lissa’s portable TV, she gave Tom a quick smile and said, “You rule. Thanks.”
Tom nodded. “There’s plenty more where that came from,” she said, pointing to the box of DVDs beside the computer. “Knock yourself out while I’m gone.”
“Be careful, okay? I don’t want us to get busted.”
“No worries. Devin’s good buddies with his floor warden. It’ll be cool.”
Margaret watched as Tom got dressed in full Goth gear, blew her a kiss from purple-tinted lips, and slipped out. Her exit from the main hallway door was so quiet Margaret didn’t even hear the latch close.
Sitting alone on her bed, she yawned and opened the book Lissa had given her. She’d only read a few pages into the story when a wood tick fell out of her hair onto the page. Momentarily freaked, Margaret dropped the book. Living in the rural south all her life, she’d grown up with the ubiquitous presence of ticks, but that didn’t keep her from being repulsed whenever she found one on her. She must have picked this one up during the field trip to the St. Mark’s lighthouse on the coast that afternoon. The woodland scrub surrounding the lighthouse was notoriously full of ticks and redbugs, chiggers to the locals.
She looked under the book, but couldn’t find the tiny creature. Mentally running through her vocabulary of curses, she scanned every inch of the bedspread where she’d been sitting. The effing thing had gone invisible. There was no way she was sleeping on this bed tonight until it was found, so she ran her fingers all over her pillows and sheets, but still couldn’t find it. Then she spotted the tiny black body crawling up her arm in the slow, methodical way ticks do. She pinched it between thumb and forefinger and forced it onto the surface of the computer desk.
“Die!” she said, and impaled it with the point of a pair of scissors before it could crawl away. Then she brushed it into the trash basket. Unnerved, Margaret put her book away and sat down at the computer. Reaching for the mouse, she felt something brush her hand and thought for a minute she’d glimpsed something fall onto the mouse pad, but when she looked, there was nothing to see.
“Damn tick,” she said, hoping it was the only one. Just the thought made her itchy all over.
She quickly logged onto the Internet and went to her favorite forum. Down in the forum stats, where it listed the birthd
ays for the day, she saw her own handle GOKU, and sure enough, Kinigar had started a “Birthday Wishes” topic for her in the Raves section. She sent him a silent kiss toward the screen. In the Miscellaneous Rants section, she started a new topic called “Ticks—we hates em!” where she described her tick execution and invited anybody else with a tick story to post. She saw that Kinigar was still online, so she pinged him. He responded immediately.
“Happy birfday, Goku! *throws cake at u*” he wrote.
“Heya! Thankees. Remember I told you my roomie here at camp took meh pic with her digital camera? Here it is, shield your eyes.” She attached the picture of herself sitting on her bunk, smiling and waving at the camera. “BTW, I’m Margaret in Florida, in the US. Is Kinigar your real name? What does it mean?” She hit SEND.
Margaret counted the seconds, and by the time she’d reached thirty, Kinigar responded.
“Bloody hell Margaret, U R hot. Got any more? Yesh, Kinigar is meh name. The parent’s big joke coz we got Aboriginals on my dad’s side. Pretty far back I think. My cousin’s great uncle is a senior man, u know what that means?”
Margaret read that last part bouncing in her chair. She wrote back as fast as she could type.
“Bloody hell Kini! I do know. Does he cast spells n stuff?”
“Dunno, mate. I never met him. I just heard my aunt talk about him once or twice. But I know a little about some of the stuff they do. My aunt and Mum told me Dreamtime stories when I was little. Ask if u want to know anything. Kinigar is Dreamtime evil cat-man. He’s got the head, body, and tail of a cat, and arms & legs of a man. In legends he was bloodthirsty and fearless and all the creatures were scared shitless of him. He was killed by the owl and the crow that tricked him with an ambush. A spark of his body went up to the Milky Way. Another spark flew out and made the native cat. Cool huh? Meh other name is Jason but I dun use it. Kini is fine by me.”
Shaman's Blood Page 17
