Hart & Boot & Other Stories (17 page)

“You know I love you,” she hissed, and I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me, throwing my words back in my face, or making a confession of her feelings. “But you’d rather grow old and die with Jocelyn than live forever with me.”

“It’s not an easy choice,” I said.

“The only easy choice is suicide,” she said. “At least you aren’t one of those. When I leave, you know... I’ll take it all with me. The balance—my ugly for your beauty, your melody for my cacophony, it all goes away. You’ll be what you were, before. Not so beautiful. You’ll bleed. Your voice will crack. Dandruff. Loss of nerve. Crying fits. Bad cramps. Failure.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of Jocelyn, of her imperfections, and how they made me love her even more; thinking of the way Jocelyn had described my eyes, once, as being like the mirror-side of one-way glass, impossible to see into.

“She might not love you, then,” the harpy said.

“You did. Didn’t you? You told me yourself, you never really changed me. You just sucked the poison out, stripped the ugly things away, shielded me from harm.”

The harpy sighed, and I heard a heavy rustle, like a woman at a fancy-dress ball gathering her voluminous skirts. “I’ll be gone by morning. I wish I could say I wish you well.”

“Harpy. Thank you. Thank you for understanding.”

She laughed. “If I understood, I wouldn’t live alone in a cave. You should leave, shut the door. This place won’t be in your apartment for much longer.”

I hesitated. “The things in the fireplace,” I said. “The things you were burning. Were they some kind of a spell?”

“No,” the harpy said. “They were gifts for you. A vase of flowers, a sheaf of letters. I was going to give them to you. For the fifth anniversary of my moving in. But I was angry with you, and I destroyed them.”

My heart felt like a snail’s shell, crunching under someone’s foot. “I hope you find another place you like,” I said.

“Go away,” the harpy said.

That was the last time we spoke. The door to her room didn’t disappear, but the next time I opened it, there was just a dusty, empty room on the other side.

***

The night after the harpy left, I was slicing carrots to make dinner for Jocelyn, and the knife slipped, cutting my finger. It hurt horribly. It was just a tiny cut, but the pain was unbelievable. A bead of blood welled up, and I put my finger in my mouth and sucked.

I realized I’d forgotten the taste of blood, the taste of pain, and I closed my eyes in horror at what I’d done to myself by sending the harpy away.

Then Jocelyn put her arms around my waist, and cooed soothingly in my ear, and I leaned back against her, and let myself bleed.

***

“You should invite Harp to the wedding,” Jocelyn said a few months later.

“I never hear from her anymore,” I said, and I think I was too quiet, and reserved, all the rest of that night. Jocelyn went to take a bath, probably just to get away from me. I thought about going to sit by the tub so I could talk to her while she soaked, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. In the end, I didn’t say anything at all. But that night, snuggled under the feather comforter, I whispered an apology into her sleeping ear.

Jocelyn and I were married in the summer, in a park, the ceremony presided over by a pagan priestess friend of hers. Jocelyn and I both had flowers woven into our hair, and we both wore white. As we exchanged vows, the sky went dark, a shadow passing across the sun, and all the guests looked up. A cloud of feathers drifted down like a slow, gray snowfall. One feather fell onto Jocelyn’s head, sticking up among the flowers and braids.

“I don’t see any birds,” she said, looking up, looking around. “That’s so weird.”

“It’s a wedding gift,” I said. “From Harp.”

She looked at me, her nose crinkling, her eyebrow quirked as if she knew I was making a joke, but one she didn’t understand.

I plucked the feather from her hair, and let it fall to the ground. I nodded to the priestess to start again. I had promises to make.

Komodo

The trouble began when I met my new lover for the month. I bumped into him at the little Chinese grocery around the corner from my building. He was an attractive young man with some watered-down Asian ancestry in his features, buying ox blood and chicken feet. (I was buying lo mein and pork buns, but I have a high tolerance for people with stranger tastes than mine.) We got to the register at the same time and he gestured that I should go first, the sort of casual chivalry that I appreciate, as long as there’s no hint of condescension. Then he offered to walk me to my car, this being a dangerous neighborhood for a woman out walking by herself. “It’s
my
neighborhood,” I said, “and I don’t own a car, but you can walk me a couple of blocks if you want.” We chatted as we went. His name was Kasan, and he was a personal trainer and lifeguard at a local gym. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was wiry, and I could believe he was a swimmer. He seemed a bit awkward in conversation, as if he didn’t speak to people much, and I wondered if he’d been scrawny and unpopular earlier in life, and gotten into physical stuff to help his self-esteem.

I told him one of my standard half-truths, that I’d made a lot of money day-trading a few years ago and that I was spending most of my time now reading and making art for my own amusement. My true ambitions are rather different, but I could hardly tell a stranger that my goal in life is to rack up a mostly positive karmic balance and eventually make a bid for immortality.

We stopped at the front steps of my building, a weathered old townhouse that had been divided into flats. I glanced skyward, though I knew full well what the moon had to say. It was dark of the moon tonight, a good time for new beginnings, as any enterprise undertaken tonight would only grow in the following weeks as the moon waxed. I hadn’t cultivated a new lover in many months—the last one had fulfilled all my wishes and, as he’d requested, was now living happily at the bottom of a local river, slowly decaying into the bottom-mud and learning the languages of fish and pollution. In another hundred years or so, if the river didn’t dry up entirely, he might become a minor river god. Kasan had appeared just in time. I had certain things to accomplish over the course of the next month, and the energy that came with a new lover could serve well to fuel those endeavors.

“Want to come upstairs for a while, Kasan?” I asked. I’m beautiful. I’m desirable. I know how to sense when a potential partner is interested. I can say these things with no particular pride, because such powers require relatively small magics to achieve. People seldom say no to me. I never compel anyone to make love to me—such mental domination is possible, but it’s also essentially rape, and cannot be condoned. I entice my lovers with beauty, and bring them back again and again by giving them the best sex they’ve ever had. There’s no magic to that, just years of experience and sensitivity to the needs of my lovers. I am good at what I do. Sex is my vocation and my devotion.

Kasan wanted me, and agreed to come in. I led him upstairs, to the apartment on the top floor, where I’ve made my lair for these past half-dozen years. “It’s a nice apartment,” he said, and it is, wine-red couch, tapestries in muted blues, and lots of bookshelves crammed with everything from a complete run of Burton’s translation of
The Arabian Nights
to paperbacks with their covers ripped off that I’d bought from street vendors.

“It is nice,” I said. “You should see the bedroom. It’s even nicer. But there’s a dress code in there. You’re not allowed to be dressed.”

Kasan stripped so fast his clothes might have been on fire, and his body was lean, young, and excited.

I took his hand, feeling excited myself. Sex is my life and livelihood, but I haven’t grown tired of it yet, and a new partner always thrilled me. I took him into my bedroom.

Some time into the second round of lovemaking, he stopped moving long enough to touch my shoulder and get me to turn my head and look back at him. “I’m embarrassed,” he said. “I never asked your name.”

“Delanie,” I said. That’s what it had been for the past few decades, anyway.

“Rhymes with felony,” he said, grinning. He had a toothy, bright smile, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

“We’re not committing any of those, unless you’re under eighteen and you didn’t tell me.”

“Nope. I’m legal. Just turned twenty last week.”

“That explains the twice-in-an-hour thing we’re doing here. So, birthday boy—ever had anal sex ?”

He seemed surprised, but he agreed readily enough. Most men do. For my part, I like anal well enough, if I’m in the right mood, but the main reason I wanted to do it was magical. There’s a different flavor of power to sex when it’s explicitly, incontrovertibly non-procreational, and all that potential power of creation can be turned to other uses. (Oral sex works just as well, but I have to take the seed into my body for maximum effect, and I’ve never liked the taste.) Plus, in this culture at least, there’s a whiff of the transgressive about the act which further fuels its potency. We’d have a lot of anal sex in the next month, if things went my way—I needed the power. I had to renew my life force soon, and restore the wards on my building, and there were certain other rituals to be performed, steps on the long road to true immortality and the bottom rung of godhood.

“You can lose the condom,” I said, handing him a bottle of lube. “I’ve got a recent clean AIDS test, if you want to see it.”

“Aren’t you worried about catching something from me?” he said.

“Should I be?”

“Well, no.”

“Then I’m not worried,” I said. He could have every disease known to humankind, and it wouldn’t hurt me; that’s one of the benefits of magical life-extension. I don’t have to worry much about purely physical threats.

I lay face-down, and with only a little awkward fumbling and guidance from me, he slid in. When he orgasmed, not long after, he bit down on my shoulder, his teeth breaking the skin. He apologized for the bite afterward, embarrassed, looking away. “I’ve never done that before. I just lost control.”

“I’ve had worse,” I said, dabbing at my shoulder with a damp cloth. It wasn’t a very deep bite. “I’m flattered I had such an effect on you. Give me your number, and in a couple of days we’ll see if I can make you lose control again.” He scribbled down his home phone, cell number, pager, fax, and e-mail address. He was so eager, I wanted him all over again. In four weeks or so I’d reveal my powers to him and offer to invoke a vision to find his path to greatest happiness, and help him toward it, as I did for all my lovers. It was a small reward in exchange for how much I drew from them during our month-long liaisons, and it kept me in favor with certain forces that were far above personal mortal concerns, but nevertheless retained an interest in human affairs.

“I, uh, have to get up early tomorrow,” he said, gathering his clothes, not looking at me.

“No worries,” I said. I wouldn’t have let him stay the night anyway; I had work to do. Most of the men I picked up wanted to sleep over, though. His desire to leave was probably just due to the shyness I’d sensed earlier. I doubted he was very experienced with women. We kissed goodbye at the door, though it was a bit hurried and awkward, and I wondered if I was his first one-night stand. I found his nervousness rather endearing.

After his footsteps receded down the stairs, I went to my bedroom and opened the walk-in closet to my shrine, the stone altar, the crystals and figurines, the beads and candles, all the physical bric-a-brac that helps me focus and externalize the power that grows inside me each time I make love. I renewed the daily protections on my building—I had many old and formidable enemies—then went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of shiraz. I stayed up for a while, reading a bit, and went to bed when the moon set at 3:30 a.m., still warmly pulsing from the power of the night’s sex.

***

I spent the following morning rearranging all the fictives in the building, because it’s dangerous to leave them in one position for too long. I owned the whole building, and every apartment but mine was filled with cheap furniture and those incredibly expensive, creepily realistic life-sized sex toys known as “Real Dolls.” The dolls are made down in San Marcos for about $6,000 each, and they appear convincingly human at first glance. I didn’t have any interest in the dolls as masturbation aids, but since they have articulated skeletons and realistic (if silicone) flesh, they’re human enough to fool all sorts of nasty spirits who have a tendency to think all people look alike anyway. In the old days I made do with scarecrows and, later, mannequins to create my fictives, but their effectiveness was questionable at best. The dolls were the next best thing to hiring real people living in the other apartments, which was a bad idea for many reasons. Every day or two I moved the dolls around, posing them at various stations of life—at the sink, in the shower, sitting around in the living room. They all carry little tokens of my body, bits of my hair woven in with their own, mostly, or fingernail clippings tucked in their mouths, under their soft rubber tongues. There are creatures looking for me, tracking me by half-remembered scents, and having bits of myself secreted away in so many lifelike figures scrambles their ability to detect me, and where they
should
see me they see a blur of too many bodies, and move on in confusion. The fictives have other uses, too—anyone attempting to harm me magically is likely to affect one of the dolls instead.

In apartment 2-B, I found one of the dolls melted into a lumpy puddle of rubber, stuck to the carpet. The dolls are rated to survive temperatures in excess of 400 degrees Fahrenheit, so this wasn’t a simple case of my leaving her by the sunny window for too long. Bits of her steel joints poked up gruesomely through the skin-toned silicone, and her eyes stared up from widely separated points in the mess. I shivered—someone had aimed a devastating attack at me some time in the past couple of days, and I hadn’t gotten any warning of it at all. The protective spells that surround the building are supposed to erupt in divers alarums if anyone attacks me magically, but in this case, nothing had happened except the melting of my silicone proxy.

I needed to clean up the doll, but I wasn’t sure where to begin—she’d fused solid to the carpet. I’d have to buy some industrial solvents or something. In the meantime, I needed to investigate, and find out who’d attacked me, and why.

***

Before I could start a ritual meant to uncover the psychic spoor of whatever malevolent entity had targeted me, someone buzzed at my front door. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and went down the creaky stairs to the foyer, where I opened the pebbled-glass door.

A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie stood on my steps, holding a clipboard bulging with papers. “You own this building?” he said, looking down at his clipboard.

“I do.”

“I’m the building inspector. I just checked out the exterior, and just to let you know, there are going to be a lot of fines. You’ve got structural problems, the fire escapes are deathtraps, I can tell right off that the windows in the back are too small for emergency fire exits... well, it goes on. You’ll get a copy of my report. I’ll need to come in to the building and inspect a couple of the apartments, too.”

“Why, exactly, are you doing an inspection?” I asked. He still wasn’t looking at me. This would be much easier if he’d just look at me.

“Routine,” he said, which was no answer at all, though it wasn’t the first time a building inspector had come by—I’d used magical persuasion to sidestep such an inspection when I took over the building, and there was apparently an unresolved file about this property at City Hall. I’d have to deal with it eventually, but I had too many other things to worry about now. At least
this
problem was easily remedied. I was still filled with power from my time with Kasan the night before, and I could twist this man’s will in a moment.

I touched the inspector’s chin with the tip of my finger, and he looked up at me, surprised. Once he looked into my eyes I said, “I’m sure you’ll find everything in order.” It wasn’t a question, or a request; it was a command, and I put the force of my powers of compulsion behind it. Something twinged inside my head, a sudden flash of migraine-intense pain, there and gone in an instant. I kept myself from wincing, though the pain worried me. “I’m sure those other things you noticed are fine, too. You should probably check again and reconsider your report.”

He frowned and looked back down. “No ma’am, I don’t think so. I’m fairly thorough. I’ll come back to do the interior inspection later this week. My office will call you to set up a time.” He walked away.

I stood in the open doorway for a moment, then shut the door and leaned my forehead against the glass.

My powers had failed me. That building inspector was no adept-in-disguise, I could tell, and I hadn’t felt any sort of protective spell wreathing him. My power simply hadn’t
worked
, and that hadn’t happened to me in more decades than I could count. I’d long since moved past the awkward early years of hit-or-miss magic, into a realm of greater mastery. I might fail at more ambitious magic, if I tried to expand my skills or did my work sloppily, but a simple compulsion laid on an unsuspecting human? It should have worked. It should have been as easy as breathing.

I went upstairs again. Whoever had attacked me had done more than just melt one of my fictives. They’d somehow interfered with the flow of my power, and I could not allow that. I’d do my ritual, which should at least point me in the right direction, and I’d find out which old or new enemy had decided to come for me.