Switchblade Goddess (25 page)

My heart hammering in my chest, I leaned forward and licked the sensitive spot beneath the head, and Miko and I simultaneously drew in our breaths as the spark of pleasure arced through both our minds. Certain I was the filthiest creature on the face of the planet, cursing my lust, I pressed my lips against his head and drew him into my mouth, feeling every stroke of pleasure I gave him as if it were being done to me. Miko tasted like salted caramel.

“Not so fast,” he gasped, but I had grabbed him by his muscular ass with one hand and tugged his balls with the other as I slid his cock as deep into my mouth as I possibly could, ignoring my gag reflex, and then we were both coming, coming in a sweet, hard rush, and I was swallowing down his liquid toffee semen, sucking every last bit of it out of him as if I were starving, and Miko finally had to push me back to get his organ away from me.

“Well, that was intense,” he whispered, staring down at me with a bit of unexpected awe.

Tears were running down my face, and self-hatred ached in my heart. I couldn’t look at Cooper, so I dropped my gaze to Miko’s glistening, half-erect cock. “Fuck me now, please.”

“You know that this is something your man can never do for you, ever. And when he sees you enjoying this, he’s never going to be able to look at you the same way. You understand this, right?”

“Yes. Please fuck me now.”

“Once you have this, sex with him is going to be forever diminished for you. And you’ll never have
this experience again after tonight unless you submit yourself to me as my lieutenant, my ally.”

“Stop talking and fuck me!”

Miko might have worn an expression of triumph, or faint guilt, or lust, but I didn’t look up to see it. I grabbed the backs of his knees and jerked them toward me, sending him tumbling down onto his back, and I was scrambling on top of him, clamping down on his nipple with my teeth as I worked his flesh fully hard with my hand.

We spoke no more words as I impaled myself upon him, feeling the ecstasy doubled, tripled, quadrupled as our pleasures echoed off each other. I felt obscene debasement and soaring divinity in every thrust, every pinch, every lick, every bite, and as I came and came again, I realized that I was not just sharing Miko’s physical sensations but her emotions as well. And beneath the lust, beneath the haughtiness, there was a yearning, wrenching loneliness, just as cold as her Goad-possessed hell, just as black as the trench her mother had condemned her to. And, amid it all, a flickering dream that things didn’t have to be this way. An irrational hope that I, of all the entities in the world, could help her find a different path.

“He can’t want you after this. And you can’t possibly want him,” Miko gasped in my ear. “Swear your allegiance to me, and you can have this whenever you want.”

The words I wanted to say died with my final climax, a spasm that seemed to take over every nerve and muscle in my body. The engorged blood vessels in my overloaded brain burst in an epic high-pressure spurt that laid waste to my white matter like a straw
village under a tidal wave. Just as Miko had promised, she’d fucked me till my brain bled.

I crumpled, insensible, unable to move after such a catastrophic stroke. Miko carefully disconnected us and lifted me from the floor, carried me to the portal, and pushed me back into the living world.

I came to on the uncomfortable cot in Madame Devereaux’s house and wept myself to sleep in the faint light of the crescent moon.

I
dreamed I was a child again. I ran through our old house, calling for my mother, crying; at last I found her in the laundry room. She was washing something in the deep utility sink.

“I did a bad thing,” I sobbed. “I did a bad thing and I don’t know what to do.”

Mom smiled at me and patted my head with her damp hand. “It’s okay, honey. It’s just your brain. It’s
very
dirty. Here, I’ve got a clean one for you. Hold out your hands!”

Mom reached into the sink and pulled out a big white brain. She dropped it into my outstretched palms. I squeezed it, and realized it was made of foam rubber, damp and slick with soapy water. I stared down at it. I couldn’t think with rubber, could I?

“Mommy, I don’t think this will work,” I said.

Suddenly we were standing in the kitchen, right where I’d found her cold body after the Regnum agents executed her. They had made her death look natural. The coroner told us she’d had an aneurysm that burst.

The sponge brain in my hands had turned into a trembling cancer, dark and stringy like the shadow
devil’s remains. I wanted to drop it, but my hands wouldn’t move.

Mom sighed. “I’ll have to go to the children’s hospital. The doctors say they can’t operate on you, but I know a thing or two.”

“No, Mommy, don’t go … don’t do it! They’ll kill you!”

She didn’t seem to hear me, and I tried to run after her as she turned away to fetch her purse and keys, but my legs were stuck to the floor and I screamed for her to stop but she was out the front door, gone, gone forever—

I woke with a start, breathing hard. So much for sleeping. But I was too exhausted to get out of bed. I lay there until midmorning, and when I finally rolled off the mattress I didn’t feel the least bit rested. It hurt to stand, it hurt to think, and the pain of doing basic things like washing my face and brushing my hair made me angry and frustrated. At least tonight the swamp beast would finally be ripe, so I could take my second energy potion. I hoped it was still good.

Madame Devereaux broke the news to Shanique as we all sat down at the yellow kitchen table for a lunch of red beans and rice and collard greens: “Well, you should probably take a nap this afternoon, because I need you to lead Jessie out into the swamp tonight to find Sap Daddy.”

The girl squinted at her grandmother suspiciously. “You told me I ain’t supposed to go out there with nobody but family.”

Madame Devereaux didn’t miss a beat. “You can think of Jessie as my cousin, which means she’s also
your
cousin. And don’t talk back.”

“Yes’m.” The girl shrugged and finished her greens.

After we finished eating, Shanique planted herself in the living room to watch
Iron Chef America
while Madame Devereaux took me to a back workroom that had been outfitted in mismatched kitchen counters and cabinets with open shelving above. The old woman stood upon her tiptoes and pulled down a cardboard box that she set on the Formica work surface.

“This here is what you’ll need for the collectin’.” She opened the box and pulled out a copper-clad glass jug with a black rubber stopper and a galvanized steel funnel. Both looked like they had come from some backwoods moonshine still.

“And this is what you’ll need for the cuttin’.” She pulled out a burlap bundle as long as my shinbone and unwrapped it to reveal what I guessed was an African ceremonial knife. It had an elongated, leaf-shaped ferrous blade with a dark hardwood hilt and matching scabbard. The weapon looked positively ancient, and I could feel a faint magic emanating from it.

“Should I fill the whole jug?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled an old blue nylon gym bag that had to date from the 1970s down from another shelf. “As close to full as you can get, but don’t take more’n that, and don’t waste none. Sap Daddy is a genuine gold-egg goose for us, and we need him healthy. Well, healthy as a thing like him can possibly be, I ’spose.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed.

“All you got to do is get him to settle down and cut one of the little heart-vines.” She peered at the bag’s
white shoulder strap and gave it a couple of yanks; apparently satisfied that it would hold, she began to pack the items from the box into the bag’s round compartment. “But he don’t always come along easy; Shanique is good with spell-song but she’s still just a girl and don’t have her real powers yet. If the beast gets rambunctious, don’t you dare burn him with that hand of yours,” the old witch admonished. “You might just kill him. And don’t you go dropping this here knife over the side of the boat, or I’ll make you go diving to find it again, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am. How do I find him?”

“Well, y’all should use the old pole boat I got in the shed out back—motor noise will scare him off—and take it up the stream that runs behind my property. Shanique’s real good at finding him, so don’t worry none about that. Just hang onto your boots and get the jug full up and bring it back here, lickety-split.”

   I took my last energy potion out in the backyard at sundown, sipping it in mouth-burning swigs instead of chugging it, and this time I didn’t flip out. Feeling properly energized, I dragged the old flat-bottomed skiff to the shallow water just after 11
P.M
. and tied it to the old tree stump that served as a mooring. There was no breeze to speak of, and the piney haze in the air was just enough to slightly dim the stars. Without a moon, the stream bank seemed truly dark. I turned off my flashlight and blinked through to an ocularis view that gave me night vision, the world around me appearing in ghostly shades of green and gray.

“So, once we find this thing, how do we catch it?”
I asked Shanique as we carefully stepped into the boat with our gear.

“I sing to him, and he gets still,” she replied, setting her waterproof, hand-crank LED lantern on the wooden seat beside her.

“For real?” I put the old blue gym bag down in the cargo area, checked my shotgun, and stowed it along the inner hull. Madame Devereaux had warned me that we might encounter some fairly large gators.

“For real.” She dipped her paddle into the water.

I untied the boat and pushed off the bank with the long white fiberglass pole. “Show tunes, or lullabies, or what?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “It likes old Spanish Christmas songs like ‘Venid Pastores.’ I guess they used to sing that stuff to him back in the old days.”

“So, no Ricky Martin?”

Shanique gave me a sidelong squint that would’ve made Clint Eastwood proud. “Uh,
no
.”

“That’s good. ‘La Vida Loca’ isn’t really in my range.”

“You’re weird,” she said.

“You have
no
idea,” I replied.

The girl fell silent, and I kept pushing us along. The only sound was the faint swish of the water and the frogs calling to each other in the cattails. A few fireflies flitted to and fro, blinking come-hithers that seemed impossibly bright through my stone eye.

Someone laughed, right behind me it sounded like, and I nearly dropped the pole in surprise. The boat rocked as I whirled around. The frogs went silent, startled by the sudden slap and splash of the hull. Nobody was there.

“What’s the matter?” Shanique frowned at me.

“Did you hear that?” I held my breath, trying to listen, blinking through other ocularis views as I scanned the weeds and dark water. Still nothing.

“Hear what?” she asked.

“That laugh.”

“Uh, no …” The girl was staring at me as if she wasn’t sure if I was messing with her or not.

“Seriously, you didn’t hear that?”

“No, ma’am.”

I swore under my breath and pushed the boat off again. “Never mind. Just my nerves, I guess.”

Problem was, I didn’t think I’d been all that nervous. Not enough to start hearing things, anyway. Pal’s life depended on the success of our mission, and that was no small amount of pressure, sure … but this was something a nine-year-old could do. Had done several times, apparently. So how bad could it be?

“Oh, there’s plenty that could go bad tonight,” said a voice behind me. Miko’s voice.

I swore and turned again, holding the pole like a spear. My heart was thudding. “Where the fuck are you?”

Her head broke the surface a few yards behind the boat, just beyond my pole’s reach. She smiled at me. “I’m right here. Or am I?”

“What do you mean?” My voice shook.

“Maybe I’m not here at all.” Miko smoothly breast-stroked forward, graceful as a naiad, still keeping her distance. Her long black hair fanned out in the water behind her. “Maybe I’m just a hallucination. Maybe the viruses have finally started eating away at your brain, and you’re going crazy.”

“Uh, ma’am, who are you talking to?” Shanique sounded worried.

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.

“Or maybe I’m here, and your songbird just can’t see me,” Miko continued. “And she won’t see me even when I cut her skinny little throat.”

“Leave her alone.” I gripped the pole with my left hand and bent down to pick up my Mossberg with my right. I trained the shotgun on Miko, who just laughed at me.

“What’s going on?” Shanique sounded genuinely scared. “Is—is someone out there?”

I looked back at the girl. Her brown eyes were huge, and her cheeks were wet with frightened tears.

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to sound calm and confident. “There’s a problem, but it’s
my
problem, okay? Just get us to Sap Daddy.”

She nodded and wiped her face. “Okay.”

“I might say some stuff to my friend in the water,” I continued. “Just … just ignore it, all right?”

The request sounded stupid the moment I made it, but Shanique simply nodded again, all her eye-rolling sassiness gone. One good thing about kids who’ve been raised around magic is that although they might be annoyingly cavalier about everyday spells, they know to take things seriously when real monsters come calling. Or at least they’ll go with real monsters as plausible, and not immediately assume that the responsible adult in the boat with you has just transformed into a hallucinating, gun-waving lunatic.

“A lunatic without a moon to howl at.” Miko laughed again. “How ironic. How sad.”

I set my shotgun down and began to quickly pole us
away from her, my shoulders straining with my effort, but the death goddess easily kept pace with the boat.

“Fuck off, Miko,” I said. “I’m really not in the mood for this tonight.”

“I know.” Her voice was husky with fake sympathy. “You’re just heartbroken over your familiar, aren’t you? Here you are, trying so hard to save him, and every minute that ticks off the clock is a minute he’s closer to death. He’s suffering so much, Jessie, so much more than you know. And you’ve put his future in the hands of a little girl and an old witch. Do you really think they can save him?”