Scented Lust

by Jacqueline Turner Banks

“Why?”

  “Because the playing field is even more unbalanced than usual for my life. I can’t play this game, Artest. I can’t transport, I can’t move at warp speed, and I damn sure can’t stop time. . .”

  “Not stop time, bend time. The time has be made up somewhere along the way.”

  “Well by all means, excuse me. I can’t bend time!”

  He didn’t say anything, but she got the impression he was rehearsing stuff in his mind. She didn’t know where they were going, but it was clear they weren’t heading to the nearest mall or to her place. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.

  “Back to Tyler’s.”

  “No, take me home. I mean it, Artest. Take me home!”

  “I can’t. Fox told me to take you back to Tyler’s.”

  “Yeah, well now I’m telling you something different.”

  “Jordan, you just listed all those things that you’ve seen Fox do. Well that’s just a fraction of it. What can you do? Convince me that you can hurt us more than Fox and I’ll listen to you.”

  She was through with him. She turned to face the window. He tried to talk, but she ignored him. She’d already decided she wasn’t getting out of the car when it stopped. An image of him pulling her out and carrying her in flashed in her mind. There were some advantages to not being a skinny bitch.

  “Have you ever been out to the Folsom Dam?” he asked.

  She ignored him, but she was really hoping he would continue because his question came out of the blue and she wanted to see where he was taking it.

  “Okay, you’re not talking to me. I understand. I hope you’re willing to listen. Before Fox became someone I would call a friend again, I used to visit natural wonders after dealing with him. I know the dam is human made, but it’s the closest big, scary wonder unless I want to visit the mountains. Fox and I have been cool since I’ve been in Sacramento, but one time he really made me angry. Angry enough to retire my commission. After he left, I drove out to the dam. It was before 9/11, and you could drive across the dam road. I needed to see and be around something more powerful than him.”

  She still didn’t say anything, but she suspected he could tell she was listening.

  “I’m not sure if he is the Pale Fox of our legends, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he is. That would make him older than anything we know. Jordan, in our legend the Pale Fox was an unnatural and socially troubled creature born without a physical female parallel. Based on the stories I’ve heard, Fox has grown a lot since the beginning, but he’s still the only being walking the earth who is one hundred percent male. I’m not saying that that makes him a terrible person, not at all, but it does make him an aggressive person who’s very difficult to understand sometimes. Women are always attracted to him, but they’re unable to communicate well together. He supports us Hunters having lovers, but he’s usually very upset and confused when one of us falls in love. That usually means the Hunter’s retirement, but I don’t think that’s his problem with love. And sometimes he doesn’t express his anger appropriately.”

  Jordan grunted.

  “I’m telling you all this to say, he wouldn’t understand why you want to go home. He wouldn’t understand your fear or my desire to do whatever makes you happy even though I know it’s best that you stay with us a little longer. He’s not cruel by nature, but he is very male. It worries me to think about his reaction if he disagrees.”

  “Is that a fancy way of saying he’ll hurt us?”

  He smiled, probably because he got her to speak, and then he took her hand. He locked his fingers between hers. “That’s me saying I fear for both of us if we don’t go to Tyler’s and it turns out to be something that displeases Fox.”

  “Fine, but I don’t have to like it.”

  “Neither of us do.”

  * * * *

  She’d expected there’d still be a lot of people at Tyler’s, but there weren’t a lot of cars on the street. “Before we go back in there, Artest, will you answer a question about your boss?”

  He parked in the driveway and turned off the motor. “If I can. He’s not the most forthcoming person. He knows much more about us than we know about him.”

  “What did you mean when you said he doesn’t always respond to anger appropriately?”

  She saw him thinking about it.

  “Okay, you heard his whispering voice?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know if this is true or not, but one of the Hunters swears he saw it. Fox was visiting a Hunter, and as often happens when he’s in town, other nearby Hunters came to hang out too. The guys were all playing cards or some other game when Fox sent an Aide out to pick up something. The Aide came back with the wrong thing. That might not have been such a big deal, but Fox was losing the card game too. He screamed at the Aide, and his voice caused the man to drop dead.”

  “Wow.”

  “No, there’s more. Every blood member of this man’s family, wherever they were, dropped dead too.”

  She looked at him closely. “Come on, I was born at night, but not last night.”

  “Jordan, that is the story as I heard it. I don’t know if it’s true, but I do know that there was a two-year period where we couldn’t reach him. I heard he had no human contact during this time; it was his self-imposed penalty. The rumor was that he was in the underworld, suffering as would a lost soul. Since his return, I’ve never heard him speak above a whisper.”

  “When was that?”

  “About the turn of the nineteenth century.”

  The words turn of the nineteenth century seem to hang in the air between them, mocking her. She felt tears somewhere closed to the surface, but she refused to let them fall. She just wanted to return to her apartment, where she could call her friend and tell her about the one who got away. The man who could’ve been the one, had he been human.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Artest knew he hadn’t presented a fair image of the Pale Fox. Everything he’d told her was true—Fox was all male, and Artest had heard the story about his voice repeatedly—but Fox was so much more.

  There were a lot of tales in Mali about the Pale Fox being a trickster god, even evil in some of his actions. But the Fox he’d known almost since birth was a highly evolved individual who cared a great deal about his Hunters. Artest was sure the only beings he loved more were mankind.

  As far as anger goes, he’s more inclined to respond to a situation like a happy-go-lucky college fraternity boy than with the hubris of a god.

  But he couldn’t take any chances with Jordan. Although he hadn’t been around her a long time, he could see that she was as likely as Fox to react to something in an unpredictable way. Being a jaded man, surprised by her reactions, he decided she must be the epitome of the twenty-first-century, educated, foxy lady. He was loving everything about her, but couldn’t those very actions be in conflict with a beginning-of-time all-male god?

  Artest expected Jordan and Fox to find each other attractive, but with the kind of stress they would be facing, he felt he needed to prepare her. Expecting Fox to adjust was foolish. He’d spent a very long time, maybe time itself, becoming who he was. Artest had seen his impatience under stress. He didn’t tell Jordan, but one time he’d seen Fox slap a Hunter in a way that one of the young Aides called a bitch slap.

  The Dogon pantheon was very sexual, not lustful like the Greeks with everybody sleeping with everybody else, but in terms of strongly defined male and female traits. The Hunter Fox slapped was stout and strong, even among a group as physically intimidating as theirs. Fox would never have hit him like that except to remind him who was in charge.

  Artest didn’t believe he could continue to serve if. . . .something like that happened to Jordan. Artest’s reaction would probably cost him his life, and maybe hers as well.

  The house appeared empty when they entered. Since Hunters worked at night and many of them relished visiting the temple after a particularly trying evening, Tyler outfitted
his door with a touchpad lock—that way, Hunters didn’t have to disturb the household when they visited. Jahia still complained about the need to get dressed whenever she left their bedroom, but beyond that, the pad had worked out well.

  Jordan and Artest found the couple sitting out back on their deck. Both of them were stretched out on heavy-duty lounge lawn chairs.

  ‘That was fast,” Tyler said. “Jordan, maybe you can give my wife some pointers about efficient shopping.”

  “We never made it to the mall,.” Artest told them

  Jahia was reading, but she looked up. She pointed to a snack of lawn chairs in the corner. “Go ahead and get comfortable. I’ve got a feeling this is going to be a long story. That’s lemonade in the pitcher, and I’ll go get some glasses.”

  Artest stopped her with a hand signal. “No, don’t bother. I need to spend a few minutes in the temple. Visit with Jordan and I’ll get the glasses before I return.”

  Jahia seemed relieved by his suggestion. He thought again about how fast they were aging. Active Dogon-Hunters appear to be between twenty-five and thirty-five real years. Artest would put Tyler and Jahia’s appearance between forty and forty-five. If they were like others who retired, Artest knew the fast aging would stop soon, and they’d begin to age at what would appear to be a natural pace.

  He sensed that someone was in the temple before he opened the door, but that didn’t concern him. Dogons loved their temple time. It wasn’t that they were freakishly religious, it was more that they craved the temple’s peace and quiet—at least that was Artest’s reasoning.

  The Pale Fox was the visitor. I should have known. Normally Artest could sense the presence of his brethren more keenly than he could sense the presence of the Suckers. In fact, the only beings he couldn’t distinguish were Fox and humans, and humans did have a strong, distinct smell. Plus, no human would know about or be allowed in their temple.

  “If you want to be alone, I’ll come back,” Artest told him.

  He was sitting on the floor in acorner with his legs stretched out in front, as if Artest had disturbed him doing his sit-ups.

  “Nonsense, Artest—pull up some floor.”

  He sat next to Fox.

  “Has Jennie arrived with the new clothing and toiletries yet?” he asked in their native language.

  “I don’t know. We just got here. But I was wondering, how will she know the sizes?”

  “I popped her into Jordan’s apartment, and she looked in her closet.”

  Artest thought about his friend and assistant Jennie. Months could go by without him seeing her, but they talked several times a week. She was a young grandmother at forty-seven who was raising her grandchild. Her father had been Artest’s assistant until his retirement. He’d been dead almost ten years. Jennie took over the job when she was still in her twenties. Artest couldn’t picture the mild-mannered woman he knew popping into anywhere. “Why didn’t you just tell her to get some clothes and a toothbrush while she was there?”

  Fox gave him a strange look. Artest thought he might have been upset about him second guessing him, but then Fox started laughing. He doubled over in laughter, which had to be hard to do from where he’d started.

  “That thought never occurred to me,” he finally said.

  Artest wondered if his thought had come from his female side, a sensitivity Fox didn’t possess.

  “Not you too?” Fox said.

  “Me too what?”

  “Whenever I’m in the States, my Hunters are always thinking about male and female sides when I make a mistake or overlook something. What is that? Is it something that’s always on the television?” His expression was playful. He was still tickled by his oversight.

  Artest knew his question was rhetorical. He’d never known Fox not to know something.

  “I apologize,” he said. “It was rude to focus on a mistake and unacceptable to consider it in your presence.”

  Fox stood. “No apology is necessary.”

  He walked to the door. They always walked in and out of the temple. It was considered disrespectful to transport in and out.

  “I won’t take long.”

  “Take your time. It’ll give me an opportunity to get to know Ms. Greene.”

  Artest waited until he left before he allowed himself to have the next thought. I’ve got to get back out there. He didn’t know if he was more afraid of Fox charming or hurting her.

  Artest couldn’t insult Fox by returning immediately. He sat for about ten minutes, said a few prayers and returned to the back door. It was then that he remembered he was supposed to get some glasses. He returned to the kitchen. He got a glass for the Pale Fox too, but he’d never seen him eat or drink anything drink except cognac.

  When Artest returned to the group, they were all seated and laughing. With the others leaning toward Fox to hear better, Artest knew Fox had the floor; no doubt he was telling one of his many stories. He wouldn’t talk about his own life, but he loved to tell embarrassing stories about the Hunters. Those funny stories came from that frat boy side of him they all loved. When he was in that mood, Fox was the life of a party.

  “Aw, here he is now,” Fox said. They all laughed.

  “Do I dare ask?”

  “Fox was telling us about the little crush Marabella had on you.”

  All eyes were on him, but the only ones that concerned Artest were Jordans. She too was smiling at him, but there was a kindness there that told him she was going along with the silliness and she meant no harm.

  Artest opened his right hand, upturned his palm, and swept it up and down the air in front of his body. “How could she resist?” he asked.

  “Indeed,” Jordan agreed, and all eyes left him and focused on her.

  “Sounds like an endorsement to me,” Tyler said.

  “My brother!” Fox said as he held up his palm to Artest for a high five.

  Jordan laughed aloud. Artest figured such childish behavior from one reputed to be a god shocked her, but it should have let her see what he meant by Fox’s very male behavior too.

  “Marabella certainly saw something she couldn’t resist—she chased him all over Europe and most of the Eastern seaboard.”

  Jahia got so tickled she yelped. “No she didn’t. Ogo, you’re lying on Artest?”

  It did Artest’s heart good to see her so happy, if even at his expense.

  “It’s true—she kept popping up with a different face and hair color and a body tighter than the one before it,” Fox continued.

  “How did you know it was her?” Jahia asked Artest.

  He placed the chair he had secured next to Jordan and sat. “I had to be somewhat suspicious, I’m not accustomed to beautiful women throwing themselves at me. The third time it happened in so many weeks, I trained myself to recognize her essence.”

  “That was around the time she resorted to her magic, was it not?”

  “Yes, Fox, that was when she bewitched me and I ended up kissing her.”

  “Ew,” the husband and wife said in unison.

  “Marabella has been a good friend to all of us. I’m not comfortable with this conversation,” Artest said, an obvious attempt to guilt trip them onto another topic.

  “That is so true, Artest. But darling, that doesn’t negate the eww factor,” Jahia teased.

  He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. They could tease all they wanted, but he was no longer participating.

  “There is something else we should be discussing,” Tyler said.

  He’s such a good friend.

  “You’re right. Ian is coming in the front door now. You will be working with him to protect your charge, Artest.”

  He sat up immediately, as did Jahia.

  “Why, Fox? I work alone.”

  “None of the Hunters work alone. We are a body.”

  “What about Tyler?” Jahia asked. “Is he still going out?”

  Fox looked at Jahia as if he was surprised to find her there. He sighed wearily before
answering with words he probably suspected would cause a fight. “Tyler has made the decision to go out. I’ve made the decision for him to work with Roberta.”

  Jahia slammed her book down on the glass end table next to her. Artest didn’t know why it didn’t break. She gave Fox a look that only a friend could get away with; then she stormed into the house.

  “Why, Fox?” Artest asked. He tried to contain his hurt. Fox could be compassionate, but he had no sympathy for a weak male. Artest wouldn’t be surprised to find him kicking a sniveling man while he was down.

  The curl of Fox’s lips told Artest he was getting annoyed. “He is a fool whose sheep runs away twice.”