Crossed (43 page)

Freshly showered ladies have always been a turn-on for me. I stood up, watching as Irene surveyed her options. She placed a proprietary hand on Rachel’s thigh and Rachel winced. “Too sore for seconds?”

“Not if you give me a few minutes,” Rachel said, a little
short of breath. “I can’t—” Her words vanished, cut off by a cry of surprise as Irene went from standing to kneeling, fangs embedding deep in Rachel’s thigh.

“Fuck,” Rachel managed, her eyes squinting against the pain. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and let Irene finish. When Irene pulled away, a line of crimson trailed from her chin across Rachel’s sex.

“I want what I want,” Irene said, eyes locked with Rachel’s. “But I’ll make it up to you.” She lowered her head to the same task I’d been performing, and my mind was blown yet again. It seemed wrong to me, to see two girls like that, but to be married to one of them and have permission to sleep with both of them . . . I won’t say that made it right, but it was new enough that right wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities.

I want what I want.

I heard the words again in my head, and they sounded familiar. I’d heard them before, but in another place. I remembered being angry. Was it in California?
Damn it, Irene,
I recalled shouting,
you can’t act like this. I won’t stand for it.

“Babe?” Irene stared up at me from between Rachel’s spread legs. She waggled her behind at me, reaching back and running her fingernails along the wetness of her sex. “You going to join us or are you having fun watching the show?”

“Both.” I blinked away the memory, momentarily overcome by the scent of cinnamon. I don’t think cinnamon was as popular the last time I was here. Either that or the German occupation had put a crimp on the supply. I succumbed to Irene’s beckoning and she resumed her “apology to Rachel” while I mounted Irene from behind.

Warm from the shower and sustained by the feeding, Irene felt hot and welcoming, like a living woman, lacking only the heartbeat. As I moved to completion, so did Rachel, her grunts echoing mine. Even separated as we were, a connection was
there, deep and primal, as if she were responding to my thrusts more than Irene.

I came in a series of rapid thrusts, gasping for breath, heart roaring to life in my chest, beating faster than I remembered, a runaway pounding of long-dead circulatory muscle. Sagging against Irene, I frowned when she pushed me away.

“And you say that always happens now?” I asked. “The heartbeat?”

“Uh-huh. My turn,” she said, tugging Rachel from the bed and flopping down in the still-warm spot where Rachel had lain.

“I may be done,” I said.

Rachel smiled at me. “Oh, I think you’ve got a little more to give.”

Surprised to find that she was right, I waited for my heartbeat to fade, then took up my same role, but with Rachel in the middle. If Irene had felt good, Rachel felt like coming home after a long day to all your favorite things, scalding my skin with the heat of her flesh and gripping me tight, craving me even though her hands and attention seemed to be elsewhere.

When Irene climaxed, Rachel and I kept going, falling to the floor with me still on top as she turned her head back and I leaned down to kiss her. She tasted like cinnamon, really tasted, and as we came again together, I heard her voice in my head, or maybe it was a whisper.

We don’t need her,
the voice said,
she’s cold and dead and I’m alive and yours.

I bit down on Rachel’s neck, and her body was warm and hot—spicy hot, not just heat. My heart pounded to life again and I clutched at her breasts, pulling her up with me as I stood, taking her against the wall, where I continued to thrust.

I just had time to catch my breath as it faded away. Lowering Rachel to the ground, holding her lest she fall, she responded by spinning around, throwing her arms around me
and kissing me deep and hard, her tongue noticeably warmer than my already cooling one.

“I sooo love belonging to you,” she said. “What do you want me to eat for dinner?”

“We’ll order room service at the next hotel,” Irene said. “Not to be a party pooper, but you”—she indicated me with an outstretched finger—“promised me a different hotel every night.”

“But I like this one,” I complained. In all honesty, I didn’t even remember the name of the hotel, but it smelled like sex with a live woman and I wanted to bask in the scent, in the warmth, in the moment. “And aren’t we already going to have to pay for tonight?”

“I want what I want,” she said. “And . . . you promised.”

“Well . . .” I looked at Rachel for confirmation. “If I promised.”

I showered while the girls packed, and in half an hour we were on our way to a different hotel in some part of Paris I barely noticed. I watched out the window as we drove through the city. The Eiffel Tower looked cool with the lights on it and I wondered when they’d put them up.

“We should have brought Marilyn,” I said as we flew down the street.

“No,” both women said at once. Rachel drove the limo with the divider down this time, eyeing me occasionally as we drove.

“I know it’s the honeymoon and everything,” I said, mainly to Irene, but to Rachel, too, “but it’s not like we’re not having an unconventional one already.”

“Marilyn doesn’t like me,” Irene said.

“Or me,” Rachel chimed in.

“She doesn’t have to like you. I just meant—”

“And someone had to run the bowling alley.”

“What bowling alley?”

“Strip club,” Irene interjected. “Someone had to run the Demon Heart, and you know what a pain in the ass Roger is about the club.”

“I suppose. I miss her, though.”

    43    

TABITHA:

SIGHTSEEING

Appreciating Paris isn’t easy when you’re crosseyed, starving, and running into things. With each monument or cool quirk of history or architecture I passed, my ire grew, and with it, the urge to stop and feast on any of the little heartbeats I passed in the night. The first bad one was Saint-Jacques Tower. I passed it on the left, a big Gothic tower well over a hundred feet tall. So what if I was racing to find Eric? I stopped and stared. Paris had been one of my dream destinations ever since I’d read Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Plus, I’d spent hours researching the city and the history so I could sound smart in front of Eric.

“Damn it,” I meowed. “You won’t find cool stuff like that in Void City.”

“That ole tower?” Courtney asked, seeming genuinely unimpressed. “S’all right I reckon. What language is that yore talkin’ anyhow? Cat or some such?”

“You can understand it?” I rubbed the back of a paw against my eyes.

“If’n a Courtney says it, I ken, I suppose.” He scratched at his stomach. “Guess it took a little while to kick in is all.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

I concentrated and examined the trail to Eric. It was moving again, but not as fast as before. It annoyed me. “Stay still, damn it.”

As we started moving along the trail again, Courtney chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“That reminded me of a joke one them ni—ah . . .” He paused. “Is it colored now or . . .”

“Oh. My. God.” I stopped dead and lost the trail. “Are you trying to say ‘black person’? How long have you been dead?”

Flustered, Courtney looked down at his feet, barely catching his head in time to keep it from rolling over to one side. “Long enough fer all the names ta change, I reckon. I was just tryin’ to say I saw this comedian once, yore husband was watchin’ it, and the man . . . he had surprisingly clean language fer a . . . black. And—”

“Stop.”

“What now?”

“Just stop. It won’t be funny now. Whatever it was, you lost it in the racism.”

“Well, the punch line was—”

I headed on. If I could have made the trip full speed and on human legs, I’d have crossed Paris already, but I was, instead, moving at a brisk walk, forced to remain in cat form so I could see the trail. The slowness ached.

When we passed the Louvre, I lay down in the middle of the road and covered my head. “That’s the Louvre.”

“Why’s it got a big glass pyramid?” asked John Paul.

“La Pyramide Inversée,” I said. “It’s so cool. The visitors’ center is right under there.” I mewled pitifully. “I’m so fucking close to real culture and I don’t even get to go inside!”

“Culture?”

Lit up, the museum all but glowed in the night. “Yes,
culture.” I padded toward the museum. “
Winged Victory
is in there. The
Mona Lisa
. There’s stuff from ancient Egypt in there. And a food court.”

What can I say, all the trip research made me a fan.

“A food court? Is that one o’ them places where you can git all kinds of differn’t food all in one place?”

“Ye-es.”

“I’ve always wanted to see one o’ them.”

We rounded a corner onto a broad avenue. With billions of tiny white lights twinkling in each tree, I could see why they call Paris the City of Light. It made it hard to see the stupid magic line, though. The cat-vision pathway to Eric had stopped moving again and I continued on, ignoring Paris, ignoring everything but the wavering blue line that linked my dead in-law’s magic gun with the bullets he’d slipped into my husband’s pocket.

Or, at least, I tried to—but then I saw the Arc de Triomphe. I recognized it from pictures I’d seen of Paris, and I realized where we were.

“I’m on the Champs-Élysées!” I screeched. “I’m on one of the most high-scale streets in the entire world! Do you hear me? The entire world?! Rent here is over a million dollars per thousand square feet!”

John Paul Courtney soared down the street and came back. “What is Abercrombie and Fitch?”

“There is
not
an Abercrombie and Fitch on the Champs-Élysées.” I scowled, but John Paul scowled back.

“I kin read jest fine, missy. And the sign said—”

“Oh shut up.” I squinted one eye, turned my head, and had the trail again. “Just you shut up!” I couldn’t stand running past all those beautiful shops. When we came to a crazy six-street intersection, I hung a left and cut through the park, past the Théâtre de Marigny and into the next park. Wide, well-lit sidewalks led me past countless park benches as the line to Eric
bent toward my left and I emerged onto a street corner with more bike racks than I’d ever seen in one place before.

I made the mistake of looking to my right, away from the line to Eric, and saw an enormous traffic circle. Though my view was partially blocked by the backsides of two big statues of enthroned women (were those pedestals or entrances to the metro?), I could see that the road made a big oval around an Egyptian obelisk flanked by two spectacular gold-highlighted fountains. Off to the far right, I could see the Eiffel Tower, though from this perspective, it looked shorter than the obelisk. The whole scene was completely Paris, beautifully lit and totally overwhelming, right down to the enormous Ferris wheel. I recognized it. “The Place de la Concorde.” I clawed the concrete. “That means the Tuileries Gardens are just past here someplace . . . and the National Gallery of Modern Art.”

“There’s also a heap of headless ghosts around here. What’d they do, used ta chop ’em off here?”

“As a matter of fact . . .” The blue trail of light had been slanting upward for some time, and the more I looked at it, the more it rose until I realized it was pointing almost straight to my left, toward an upper floor of a large, ornate, white-stone-columned building that looked kind of like a museum, all lit up in golden lights—the Hôtel Crillon, one of France’s oldest luxury hotels.

“Eric!” I ran for the building, unsure of how I was going to get inside. Maybe I wouldn’t have to. If I could get within mental range of him, maybe I could snap him out of whatever spell he was under.

At that very moment, my surroundings wavered and were replaced by a similar scene, except all of the tourists were gone and so was the obelisk.

James, Eric’s war buddy, stood in front of me, a duffel bag over his shoulder. I smelled blood in the bag. “You did great.”

“What?” I meowed furiously, spinning about. Vale of Scrythax. They valed me! “You valed me?!”