by Sienna Skyy
“What are you doing?” she said, laughing at him.
He admired her body with a smile. “Following the trail of bread crumbs you left me from the door to the shower.”
She giggled. “It’s nice in here.”
“And it’s lonely out here. Your place sounds better.”
And off went his bread crumbs, flying backward to the bedroom beyond. He hopped in alongside her, his chest instantly slick and shining under the spray.
She touched it.
“Mmm, Shannie.”
She smiled. He ran his hands from her shoulders to the crooks of her arms, and she turned her neck toward the pleasure. She couldn’t believe how comfortable she’d become with him.
“Wash my back?”
She rolled around, turning it toward him. He lathered it up and ran his hands down, washing her back and her waist and her hips. Not in the way he might have touched her in the early days, with the eagerness of someone who’d just discovered her body, but with the deliberate, savored motions of someone who cherished it.
He pressed against her and she felt the readiness above his thighs, but he still did not indulge. They washed themselves and each other without discerning which was which.
At last, she faced him and his mouth closed over hers.
“God I love you, Shannie,” he said, pulling back momentarily.
“I love you, Charlie.”
He ran a hand down her side. “Why isn’t it like this every day?”
She tilted her face down, and he did the same so that their foreheads touched.
She sighed. “Separate lives. Your tour. My—whatever it is.”
“We need to change that.” He ran his hand through her wet hair.
“Now that I know how perfect it can be, since this trip. Except for, you know, the whole problem with the megademon trying to enslave the Earth and all.”
She laughed and pressed a wet face to his wet shoulder.
“But really.” He smiled, and he looked at her the way a little boy might look at the latest, coolest video game or skateboard. Or guitar, depending on the boy. “Really, babe. We need to change that. What if we screwed this up? What if all this ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ leads to losing you? That would suck beyond belief. I want to crash your shower every day.”
She reached behind and switched the water off. The stillness enveloped them in the form of steam. Even the shower curtain relented.
“Come on, baby,” she said, stepping out.
He followed her. He had a towel in his hand before she could reach for one, and he caressed her body with it, sliding it over her with reverence. She smiled and tilted her head back, letting him dry her.
She stepped toward the bed, and as he followed he toweled himself off, barely—the eagerness had perhaps crept back. She threw herself back on the bed, her arms stretched over her head, and he tumbled after her with his hands locked in hers.
“I love you, Shannie.”
“So you’ve told me.”
“I can’t say it enough.”
He gripped her hands. “I love you, Shannie.” He said it into her ear. And then he said it into her hair. And then he said it to her collarbone, and her breasts, and her stomach. She let him say it, let the truth of it wash over her, hold her in its embrace.
“I love you, Shannie.”
As his skin met her skin, she felt it in her body. God how she felt it! She felt it curl from her hips in a ball of ecstasy. The absolute trust, the aching, gorgeous release.
She cried out.
He gripped her.
It washed over her in unrelenting pulses. Colored waves that radiated from her center toward the outer reaches of her body. She gasped and reveled, eyes open but not seeing, and then closed but seeing everything.
She told him she loved him, too. Her words were caught, strangled. She said it breathless and shuddering.
“Say it again, baby.”
He was over her. His lips at her ear. “Let me hear it again, Shannie.”
She swerved her hips away, ticklish now.
His hand gripped her and held her still. He pressed himself up against her, held back.
“Say it again, baby. I wanna hear it.”
“God, Charlie. Don’t! You know!”
She was crazy sensitive. But still so hungry. His muscle was right there, scorching, pressed at the center of her and yet not entering. God, it was tantalizing.
“Let me hear it again, Shannie.”
“Charlie, you—”
“Let me hear it again, Shannie.”
“I love you. I love you, Charlie. I love you like I’ve never loved anything before.”
His mouth enveloped hers. His legs gripped her legs and he pressed forward, upward, inward.
She cried out. Her head flung back, pressing the pillow down under her neck. A glisten of sweat beaded her brow, her arms, her stomach. His stomach. She wrapped her ankles around his and yearned him in.
He filled her with shards of heat. She lost herself in that heat. She arched her back and pressed herself forward. His lips grazed her collarbone. Her nipples demanded the feel of his skin and her head swung to the side in yearning. Her body was only a veneer for something timeless, something that sewed them into harmonious, pure rhythms of life.
He strained and she gripped him fast. They stretched toward each other in the span of a coursing moment. It was impossible to get any closer. The muscles in his chest and shoulders flexed. His head thrust back.
She closed her eyes. His hands squeezed hers. She drank in a long breath and he held her so very tight for a lingering, sparkling, blessed moment.
He exhaled.
His back went slack and his head dipped over hers, though his arms remained flexed.
“Relax,” she breathed, touching his thigh.
“Don’t want to crush you,” he mumbled into her hair.
She giggled with a sleepy, stretchy shiver. “You won’t.”
He relented, settling over her. She felt discombobulated, home.
“I meant what I said earlier, Shannie. I need you. I want you in my life every day.”
“I think I would love that, Charlie.”
“Mmm! It’s going to be so nice.”
“I can’t imagine how we’d work it out, though. I’m about to switch gears with my career. I’ve decided I’m going to get serious about the stand-up circuit. That means travel. And you’re always traveling with your—”
“Shh, baby, shh. We’ll work it out. If we both want it, and it’s really important to us, the rest will work out.”
Her eyes closed, and she allowed herself to surrender. She must have dozed off then because when she opened her eyes again he was laying beside her with his arm about her waist and his nose in her ear.
She rolled over to the edge of the bed. His hand grasped her wrist. “Where ya goin’, babe?” he said with a slur.
“Just going to get cleaned up. I’ll be right back.”
She tiptoed into the bathroom, groping her way through the darkness, and switched on the light. First hot water and then cold. She combed her hair, thinking it a fruitless effort because it was liable to get good and wild if she slept on it. Hey, maybe it would scare away the evil spirits.
She left the light on in the bathroom and pulled the door to allow for a sliver of illumination because the hotel room was now pitch black. Was it really nighttime already? It seemed like it shouldn’t be that late.
She went back to the bed and stopped just shy of it.
“Eek! It’s smelly over here! Good God, Charlie, what have you been eating!”
“Hmm?”
He lifted his head, hair standing on end, and cocked an eye at her. She fluttered her fingers in front of her nose.
He laughed. “I didn’t do anything. Here, smell.” He waved a hand over his backside and then reached for her.
She squealed and evaded him. “I’m not getting in there with you. You’re toxic.”
Charles chuckled. “Hon
est, it wasn’t me! It must’ve been you.” Shannon harrumphed.
Charles wrinkled his brow. “That is pretty strong, whatever it is.”
“I’ll open a window.”
She went to the curtain and peeled it back, using the heavy fabric to shield her nude body. But when she lifted the curtain, there was nothing on the other side but solid wall. No window.
“That’s strange. Look.” She drew the curtain all the way open for Charles to see.
The smell grew stronger. And Shannon noticed a faint sort of hissing sound, as if air were moving rapidly. Like gas from a pipe.
Charles sat up with a start. “Where’s the door?”
“What?”
Shannon looked along the length of the wall, confused. She thought the door had been right there, right next to the window—or the curtained wall that was supposed to be a window—but the outer wall spread solid from corner to corner. Then she noticed Charles’s guitar resting up against it.
“Wasn’t your guitar sitting right next to the door?”
Charles got to his feet and switched on the light. “Yeah. The door was right there.”
The odor increased and Shannon’s lungs began to burn. “Charlie?”
She looked from left to right, scanning for a door even along the interior walls. Perhaps she’d just gotten confused? But the only door in the entire hotel room was the one that led to the bathroom.
“Hey!” Charles slapped his palms against the barren stretch of Sheetrock. “Hey! Anyone out there? Hey!”
Shannon pounded on the interior wall, the one adjacent to the next room. “Hey! Help!”
She grabbed the phone. She’d call the desk or, better yet, call Bruce or Jamie. But the phone was dead.
That horrible hissing! That horrible smell! It smelled . . . malignant. Shannon’s fists bounced harmlessly off the wall and she started to feel light-headed.
“Hey!” She picked up one of Charles’s shoes and banged on the wall. “Hey! Help!”
Her breathing grew very labored and her lungs burned. She knew she should try to remain calm, but that was going to be a very serious challenge.
“Hey!” One more bang.
“Shannie!”
She had somehow slumped to her knees without noticing. And then she was on her butt on the carpet. Charles was beside her and the room was starting to spin.
He wrapped his arms around her waist. “Shannie! Baby, hang on,” he said, putting a T-shirt over her face. “Breathe slowly, baby.”
But she could see that his eyes were starting to lose focus, too. She looked back at the place where the door should have been, where the guitar stood. Only the guitar was gone.
“Look!” She pointed to the place where the guitar had been. Charles’s “axe” had been replaced by a real axe.
Charles leaned her against the bed and lunged for the axe.
Shannon struggled to keep her eyes on him, though her vision zigged away and then zagged askew. He swung the axe and embedded its blade in the wall, heaved to release it, and swung again. Shannon smiled, a distant observer, thinking he looked like a lumberjack in a porno film. Still naked, that axe wasn’t the only thing swinging. And he seemed very far off. Disappearing at the end of a dark tunnel, her little pornojack. Her head lolled backward. She fought to lift it up.
A patch of daylight burst into the room, tiny but true. Enough to pry her eyes open. Charles kept after it. Shannon felt her head swing toward the mattress. She shifted, changing her position in a way that forced her posture to keep her head aloft and her eyes open. But they failed her. She heard a sound like a giant filbert breaking open under the crush of some massive nutcracker.
“Shannie!”
His arms were around her again. Shannon felt herself being lifted, and felt searing light that shone red beyond her eyelids.
And then a fresh cool breeze.
“Breathe, baby!” Charles’s voice was labored under gasping breaths.
Shannon did. Had been doing that, hadn’t she? It wasn’t like she’d stopped breathing or anything. Her lids swam open. She was head-tohead with Charles, both of them gasping like guppies at the dinner plate-sized opening in the wall. Her lids, arms, and legs grew lighter, and the fog in her head dissipated, leaving behind a crackling headache.
“I . . . I can breathe.” she said, nodding. “I’m much better.”
Charles squeezed the back of her neck. “Okay, baby. Take a deep breath and then hold, and stand back.”
She did and he went to work again on the wall. She held that juicy oxygen in her lungs as long as she could, and when her lungs began to contract, she let it out slowly.
When she filled her lungs again, the air was tainted, but not so much as it had been earlier. Even standing away from the door, she could feel a luscious breeze that filtered through the hotel room.
Charles alternated hacking with the sharp end of the axe and picking with the hooked end until he’d carved a sizeable hole in the Sheetrock and studs.
“Come on, Shannie!”
He dropped the axe on the bed and took her hand, guiding her to the gap. She slid sideways through the opening and glorious afternoon sunlight blistered her vision to near-blindness. Better yet, pine-scented fresh air filled her lungs. Charles stepped through behind her and joined her on the concrete breezeway.
There was no one about. That was good, as they now seemed safe enough—and were standing there naked as ballpark franks.
Charles’s hands rested at her elbows.
“Look,” he said, tugging at her arm.
She looked back over her shoulder at the hotel room. There was no hole in the wall. Looking through the window that wasn’t there a minute ago, she saw there was no axe on the bed. Instead, Charles’s guitar now lay diagonally across the rumpled bedspread. The hotel room door creaked innocently where the hole had been.
Charles caught it just before it swung shut and locked them out.
32
NEW YORK
HE HELD HER IN HIS ARMS, smelled her hair, felt the lithe fluidity of her movements. Gloria was his. He could tell that she had already changed in her heart.
Enervata danced with Gloria in the glittering lounge. Onlookers watched them, trancelike, unaware of what they were witnessing on a conscious level, though he knew they were instinctively mesmerized within their primal selves. Enervata was accustomed to these reactions from mortals. The staff, the patrons, the spies, everyone. They were alert to the sheer power, not only of Enervata himself, but of what he represented in dancing with Gloria.
Her hand was in his hand. Her arm draped over his shoulder. She had willingness in her eyes; hunger even.
He was surprised to find that he wanted to draw this out longer. He chose to maintain this slow, sustained pace. A sure pace. He wanted to savor these moments that brought all of humanity to their collective knees before him.
“Aaron,” she said.
“Yes, my dear.”
“I wonder if you know what’s happened to Sileny. I used to see her all the time. But now, it’s been a while.”
He frowned. He wanted her attention, all of it. Sileny had been useful in getting Gloria accustomed to her new life, but he was loath to allow the two to spend too much time together. He wanted to keep Gloria yearning for his company.
“I believe Sileny has been otherwise occupied.”
“It’s a shame. It was nice to have another woman around.”
He watched her face, unsure what to make of it. Then Gloria’s gaze lifted to meet his. And in that moment, he saw that she did have motives. She seemed beautifully corrupt. Perhaps she had become spoiled by the luxury of her surroundings, the beautiful clothes she wore. Being waited on by a handmaid.
Her eyes drew him in to her, like the heated chimney of an open hearth might beckon a banshee on a clear cold night. He relished the thought of turning that hearth to ice. Already, the crystals had begun to form.
He lowered his lips to hers and kissed her. Long, sumptuous. Sh
e did not resist him.
WEST VIRGINIA
Forte and Shannon looked like hell. When they’d come pounding on the door in the Arkansas hotel room with stories about deadly gas and Forte’s guitar-cum-axe, Bruce had wanted all six of the questers to pile into one room to keep an eye out for one another. Things were just getting too dangerous. But Forte and Shannon refused, deciding instead to sleep in the van. They were too spooked to be able to relax inside a hotel room, though Bruce couldn’t imagine that things were actually safe anywhere. And the van’s seats couldn’t have been a hospitable substitute for a bed; they didn’t exactly emerge all bright-eyed and bushytailed.
Meanwhile, he, Jamie, Bea, and Em did all pile into one room with two king-sized beds. Bruce was not about to take any more chances and he didn’t want the group to split up. As it was, he barely slept; he kept checking outside to make sure Forte and Shannon were okay.
Now as the road arced between the mountains of West Virginia, he felt as though his eyes had turned to sand.
“Keep going on this road until we get to Charleston,” Emily was saying from the backseat. “And then we turn onto I-77 going north.”
Her chatter was a welcome diversion and he wondered if she was making a deliberate effort to keep him company and keep him awake. Everyone else was asleep. Jamie’d passed out in the front seat next to him, and in the back next to Emily, Bea was also out of it, her cardigan wadded up and tucked between her neck and shoulder in a makeshift pillow. In the very back, Forte was sawing logs with Shannon’s head draped over his shoulder.
Bruce cut his eyes to the rearview mirror, where he could see Emily sitting bent over the road atlas. She leaned forward as far as the seat belt would allow and spread it out for Bruce.
“And then I-77 brings us to guess where—right back to Ohio.”
“Does it look like there’s a town or a rest stop anywhere soon?” Bruce had to pee so bad he was beginning to sweat.
“Yup. There’s an exit coming up close and it looks like it goes to a town.”
Bruce glanced down at the atlas. In the top right-hand corner, he saw a black thing that looked like a dragon squatting in the blue stretch of New York Harbor. It looked suspiciously like a creation of Emily’s felt-tip markers.
