“So what happened then?” he asked, and I realized I’d gone silent, lost in my thoughts.
“Well, we fought, and finally I convinced her that I would kill my devil in exchange for her releasing any of the souls that wanted to leave her.” I was starting to feel sick all over again.
“So you killed the Goad?”
I nodded. “It was a whole lot bigger than I expected, but yeah, I got it. It’s good and dead now.”
“And then what happened?”
I could feel the burn of tears welling up in my eyes. “One little kid wanted to leave, and … he was the only one. The others all wanted to stay.”
My legs went wobbly, and I let myself drop down cross-legged on the soft beach sand. I covered my eyes with my flesh hand, trying to will myself not to start sobbing like an idiot.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right.” Cooper knelt beside me and hugged my shoulders. “C’mon, you saved a kid … that’s supergood! You should be proud of that.”
“Bob … Sara’s husband. Dammit.” My efforts at not weeping were failing miserably. “He wouldn’t come with me. Sara’s crazy, yeah, and she’s done a lot of horrible stuff, but I think she only got really bad after Miko took him away from her. She loved him just as much as I love you. She would have done anything to get him home safe and sound, and … he didn’t care. He just blew her off.”
“Hey.” Cooper tugged gently on my tear-damp fingers. “Look at me.”
I lowered my hand and met Cooper’s serious gaze.
“Bob is … a gigantic flaming douchebag,” he said earnestly, and I let out a short laugh despite myself.
“I’m not Bob, and you’re not Sara,” Cooper continued. “Remember that. We’ve already been through a relationship grinder most mundanes can’t even imagine, and we’re still together, right?”
“Right.” I wiped my face and slowly got to my feet, shaking the sand off my robe. “I’m just being silly, huh?”
Cooper stood and took my flesh hand again. “I didn’t say you’re silly. If you’re worried about something, I want you to talk about it, okay? What I’m saying is, I think you need to focus more on the good you’ve done. You can’t take responsibility for other people’s bad choices. Especially if they’re gigantic flaming douchebags.”
I laughed again and smiled. “Okay, okay.”
We began to walk in the retreating surf, the cool sand squishing pleasantly between my bare toes.
“Speaking of taking responsibility … how’s Blue?” I watched air bubble up from clam holes. “Did you ever get that dumb radio fixed?”
“Yes, that was one of the first things we did,” Cooper replied. “He can get most any station he wants on it now. He took it with him to the Foxes’; I think he’ll be okay there.”
“That’s good,” I replied.
“It was pretty much like you guessed; he thought we’d abandoned him. Or anyhow he was feeling abandoned, and he was having some nasty flashbacks to the hell. He’s probably not over that, but I think we got him to understand that he needs to talk to people and not just go silent and spiral down into the black like he did.”
“He can talk now?” Blue had been able to communicate with me telepathically, but I wasn’t sure he could make that kind of link with anyone else. And I’d never heard him speak—no baby babble, not so much as a hiccup.
Cooper nodded. “A little. It’s hard for him, and it frustrates him, but I think we convinced him it’s something he needs to learn how to do.”
“How are Mother Karen and her foster kids holding up?”
“They’re still pretty rattled by what happened, but they’re all being real troupers about it. It seems like they’re getting their equilibrium back pretty quickly. Faster than the Warlock is, anyhow. I thought working with Blue would take his mind off whatever happened between the two of you, but he slipped right back into his funk after we left the kid at his new home.”
“He … he didn’t say anything to you about what happened?” I asked.
Cooper shook his head. “He might’ve finally said something to your brother. The Warlock was acting all weird around him at first, probably because the two of you look so much alike, so Randall took him aside and they had a long talk. And they’re running around together tonight, so I guess they’re buddies now and it’s all cool.”
We both walked in silence for a moment. I could feel Cooper’s tension building and building until he finally spoke.
“Miko didn’t make it any easier on the Warlock after she captured us,” he said. “Or me. But it was worse for him. So … I know what it’s like when she gets inside your head. You end up doing things you’d never dream of doing, but afterward you can’t be sure that you didn’t want to do it all along.”
I considered his words, wondered if I should ask the obvious question since I already knew the answer.
A moment later I asked it anyway: “Did she fuck you?”
He nodded curtly, blushing. “She kept after me till she got what she wanted. I couldn’t control my body around her. I’m sorry.”
Of course she’d fucked him. She’d fuck all of us, sooner or later. If we weren’t toys, we were food. Thinking that Cooper had cheated on me with Miko would be about as sensible as thinking he’d cheated on me with the steering wheel if he ever got castrated in an auto wreck.
“I’m sorry, too.” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to stop her.”
More walking, more silence. I knew that after his admission Cooper surely wanted me to tell him what had happened between me and his brother. But I also knew he wasn’t going to press me any further. And … I had to tell him, sooner or later, and the sooner I did it, the sooner we could all maybe get past it.
“Okay.” I stopped on the sand and took a deep breath, nervously tugging on the cuff of my enchanted glove. “I can tell you what happened, but it’s really hard for me to explain everything, and I’ll probably leave stuff out. Not on purpose, but … it’s just really difficult to talk about. It would be the highlights. The lowlights, I guess. The CliffsNotes version.”
I took another deep breath. Considered the other thing I could do. A shrill little voice in my head was screaming Don’t do it don’t do it bad idea bad idea! but another, darker, stronger voice said Show him; anything less and you’re a liar. Anything less and you’ll never know if he can love the real you.
My father didn’t need to know the bloody details of my indiscretions. That I was absolutely sure of. But what about Cooper? How much truth did I owe the only man I’d ever truly loved? How much truth could he take? Most regular people had to keep their relationships swaddled in cottony white lies; was our love any stronger than that?
I made my decision.
“I don’t have to tell you what happened … I can show you. All of it,” I told him. “I have the magic to give people any memories created in my hellement; I once showed Pal a little of what happened to you and your family. And understand this: it’s not like watching a video or something. You’d be reliving my memory with all your senses. What I have for you is not pretty, and it’s not pleasant, but it’s exactly what I remember. How much do you want to know?”
You can see what I’m capable of and decide if you still want to have anything to do with me, I thought.
Cooper pulled me close and hugged me. “You and the Warlock are the most important people in the world to me. You’re the very core of my family. And if something’s driving my family apart, I need to know as much as possible if I’m going to help.”
He lifted my chin and looked me square in the eyes. “Show me.”
“All of it?” I asked.
He nodded. “All of it.”
“Okay.” I took a step back from him and pulled off my opera glove. “If you change your mind … well, let me know before the spark touches you, all right? Not much I can do to stop it once it’s on you.”
Cooper stood his ground as I stretched my flame fingers in the warm air. I raised my blazing hand and
let myself remember everything that happened between his brother and me after he found me alone in the restraint chair.
“Where’s Spiderboy?” The Warlock’s eyes were glassy, bloodshot. He had the thousand-yard stare of somebody who’d been up far too long but was far too wound up on adrenaline to sleep. His hands were dark with dirt, grease, and speckles of what was probably blood.
I closed my fingers, trying to contain and condense the memories within my grasp.
The Warlock was staring at my breasts. “You know, you look really hot all strapped in like that. Really, really hot.”
My heart beat faster in mixed alarm and—goddammit—arousal. No, no, this was not happening. I met his gaze, and knew that part of his mind was just gone. His superego had fled the building, leaving his id in charge of the party.
“Did you see Miko out there?” I stammered. Obviously, he had, and she’d triggered a lust in him that was at least as bad as mine. Worse, maybe. “Please just unstrap me. This can’t go anywhere good.”
And it hadn’t. My whole body shook as I forced myself to remember the worst of it. I whispered an old word for “relic” as I opened my hand, releasing a tiny curl of blue plasma that floated toward Cooper. He stood very still as it settled on his forehead and disappeared.
And then Cooper jerked away, stumbled backward, breathing hard, his eyes staring wide yet unseeing; he was probably experiencing his half brother’s death memory. The Warlock had kissed me against my will, and when his lips touched my cursed flesh I’d relived his being sacrificed by Cooper when they were both children. As far as their father was concerned, the Warlock had been born to be nothing more than a blood offering, a spell ingredient for inhuman magic. Lake hadn’t even bothered to give his youngest son a name, a disability for any Talent; his namelessness would probably follow the Warlock to his grave.
Cooper got dissociative amnesia after he resurrected his infant brother and they escaped. Throughout his adult life, his mind continued to suppress most of what Lake had forced him to do. But now my boyfriend was feeling the knife blade saw through his own throat. I hoped that my memory copy was weak enough to blunt the worst of the pain.
He stumbled backward and fell to his knees on the sand, his features contorted in rage and confusion. His fists clenched and his arms jerked; this was probably the part where I’d beat his brother almost to death. He let out a raw cry and fell backward, his whole body twitching. His cock was hard inside his jeans, and a moment later a dark, shiny stain spread across the denim as he ejaculated. I knew he’d just lived my own orgasm as I simultaneously strangled and fucked his brother with rage in my heart. A moment later, Cooper writhed in the sand, groaning through clenched teeth; I knew that in his mind he was facedown on the bed, feeling the Warlock’s returned fury. Feeling the burn of his flesh stretching around his brother’s hard cock. The stain spread as Cooper came again.
My face was hot; I was certainly blushing straight down to my toes, and I felt sick. The little voice in my head was screaming Oh god, what have you done? This wasn’t just truth—this was torment. My heart ached, but the cold, logical part of my brain told me I’d done the correct thing. I’d given him the choice between a coddled half-true interpretation of the events and my raw memory of it. And he chose. Surely he’d known going in that if his brother was in a close-mouthed trauma over the whole thing, it had to have been seriously twisted.
If everything else went to shit after this, at least nobody could say I’d held back or sugarcoated what I’d done. Nobody could say I’d been a liar.
“Oh Jesus.” Cooper was finally coming out of the memory. His face was ashen, his eyes hollowed, and he was sweating as if he’d just run a marathon. He sat up, looking like he might throw up, but he swallowed and breathed deeply, apparently able to calm the reflex to purge what he’d just experienced.
“Are you okay?” I knelt beside him.
“Oh. My. Fucking. God.” His voice was shaky; he looked absolutely wrecked. He turned a disturbing shade of green, and his stomach gurgled ominously; I was sure that this time he was going to upchuck every meal he’d eaten in the past three days, and probably a couple of future meals for good measure, but his jaw muscles clenched like iron and he kept it down.
“I just found out what it’s like to get reamed by my own brother. Whose power animal is apparently a goddamned Clydesdale,” Cooper said. “Jesus H. Christ. I did not ever, ever need to know what that looked, felt, or smelled like. I wish I could take my brains out and drop ’em in a bucket of bleach. Just scoop ’em out and dump ’em right in there. Swim, brainmeats, swim!”
“Honey, I’m sorry, I —”
“No, no.” He held up his hands. “No apology. I asked for it, right? Hoo boy, I sure got it. That was … wow. You really went to town on him, didn’t you? I think I need a drink. Or six.”
I helped him get to his feet. His vow to be a better boyfriend carried with it the suggestion he’d set aside his hard boozing. But if there had ever been a time for alcoholic oblivion, this was surely it. I wasn’t going to quibble.
We walked back to the beach house in silence.
“I need a shower,” Cooper finally said, grimacing as he pulled at the front of his jeans. “I cannot believe I came in my damn underwear. Jesus.”
“The water’s hot and there are plenty of towels,” I said, feeling stupid and helpless. “And there’s a clothes cleaner by the garment rack.”
“Great.” He sounded numb.
We got back to the house; Cooper passed right by the liquor and went straight to the cleaner box. I sat down at the café table while Cooper undressed, his back to me. Normally I would have been helping him with that, running my hands down the hard lines of his delicious body as I pulled the clothes off his smooth skin. But if I’d just been through what he’d been through, I wouldn’t want anyone touching me. He didn’t ask me to join him in the shower, and I didn’t offer. I just sat there silently, feeling more and more like the Princess of Fail as I listened to the shower run and Pal snore.
A few minutes later, Cooper emerged from the bathroom, dressed in his clean black boxer briefs, shrugging into his Jimmy Buffet T-shirt. His expression was closed, unreadable.
I cleared my throat. “Do you want to talk more about what happened?”
My boyfriend shook his head; he looked exhausted. “I … don’t have my head around it all yet. Can we sleep on it, and talk in the morning?”
“Sure. Do you … want me with you while you sleep?”
“Of course.” He looked from the bed to Pal’s futon, then picked my mirror off the mattress and set it on the bedside table. “It’s not like there’s really any other place for either of us to get decent rest, is there?”
I felt deflated. “Well, I could grab a blanket and sleep on the sand. Magic it into a tent, maybe.”
“There’s no need. Stay here with me.” He sat down on the bed and patted the mattress.
I found a ribbon-tied package of clean white cotton pajamas on the garment rack’s hanging shelves, and I went into the bathroom to change and brush my teeth. After I turned off the lights and joined Cooper in bed, he spooned me, the sensation of his body against mine simultaneously reassuring and frustrating, both familiar and strange.
“Do I still make you happy?” he asked. “Do I still … satisfy you?”
“Of course you do,” I replied.
He paused. “The Warlock’s a lot bigger than I am.”
“He’s not that much bigger,” I said, then immediately realized it had probably been the wrong thing. So I added: “There’s such a thing as too big.”
“He sure didn’t seem too big in your memory.” Cooper’s grip on me tightened. “You came like … well, I never feel that way when I come. That was really intense.”
“It was also extremely fucked up,” I countered, feeling embarrassed. And irritated that of the dozens of life-or-death matters that could be foremost on his mind, cock size was it. “I’m not that much into pain in real l
ife, and you should know that.”
And then I reconsidered. If I were in his position … well, yeah, I’d have concerns. He probably had other questions crowding in his brain that were far more difficult to talk about, so he’d voiced the first one he could peel off his tongue. Perhaps reliving my memory had left him doubting his sexuality. And maybe he was still supremely creeped out by what had probably felt a whole lot like incest by proxy. My sympathy wasn’t quite strong enough to dispel my aggravation, but I took a deep breath and tried for a rare moment of tact.
“I am perfectly happy with your body and everything attached to it, honey,” I said. “Honest.”
Cooper fell silent, his grip relaxing, but I could still feel the tension in his body. We lay there in the fading afternoon light, watching the sky turn purple and pink through the windows. We gradually drifted off, holding each other over the chasm of unasked and unanswered questions between us.
We slept until Pal began to scream in the darkness.
chapter
twenty-three
Catastrophe
“What the—?” Cooper threw off the sheet as Pal emitted a second head-splitting shriek.
I was out of bed right after my boyfriend, hastily turning on the light. It sounded like something was killing my familiar.
Pal had fallen off the futon and was on the floor, his eight legs clenched and trembling. Fur was sloughing off him in alarming clumps, piling around him like hay. The sores on his legs were an angry red and seemed considerably bigger.
“Are you okay?” I ran over to him and knelt beside him. The sores on his legs were moving, expanding, like cancer tumors on speed. I heard a cracking noise that might have been the sound of deranged flesh invading bone.
“This hurts!” Pal’s voice was a strained gasp inside my head.
Switchblade Goddess Page 15
