The Liminal People (16 page)

“Do you plan on judging me?” She can play it off as mellow as she wants, but, her beautitul head resting on her beautiful hand, I know she's angry.

“No. I don't pity you, either. I want to apologize for my impatience. I didn't realize the process was so intimate.” She raises herself to my face. Somehow, her breasts don't seem so small pressed against me.

“You are the only one of his followers that ever deigned to apologize to a whore.” I take her face, gently but quickly, and hold her eyes to mine.

“You are no whore.” Her mouth is impossibly hot. I'm flushed. She kisses me. I swear she kisses me first.

There is a vast expanse of black openness before me. I do not feel my body. My body is my lodestone. Without it I am powerless. I don't want to panic, but I do. Luckily it's a purely mental panic. No hormones to go awry, no nerves to seize and spasm with a cascading lack of coordination. Just the realization that less than a minute ago I was losing control inside of a woman so beautiful her looks alone could kill me . . . and now I'm incorporeal.

“In the time it took you to meet this vessel, I could have flown to London.” It's a young stranger, walking with a cane across an old African savannah in a deep red tribal wrap and headband. The expanse is gone, giving way to harsh, untended grains that scrape at my legs, tiny swarming bugs that move in haphazard patterns, and a setting sun that matches the tone of the stranger walking toward me.

I know the voice and the eyes. Yellow eyes, and the same spittle-infected tone. Nordeen. This is an ancient landscape he strides across, in a time before language. What I am experiencing both has happened and is happening right now.

“Only the faults are mine,” I say as I bow my head. I look down and find myself dressed in the clothes I wore in high school. A T-shirt and faded jeans. This is not my body. This is an image of my adolescent body from when Mac was the center of my world. Nordeen once told me one that, in the spirit realm, it is our self-image that we present—the image of what we think we are. But this is not me. I can't feel my body.

“The whore's talent takes some getting used to, there's no denying it,” he says and I remember Samantha's insinuation that he is our inappropriate uncle. “But she has her uses. Don't trust a word she says, though.” I keep my head low. Part of me wants to ask him why. But that's not why I'm here. Part of me wants to believe him fully, but I also know I was being flooded with pheromones right before I got—

“Where are we?”

“An off-ramp between the Akashic records and the astral plane,” he says, taking my arm and continuing to walk a circular path. “It doesn't matter. Speak quickly, little healer. We will be able to communicate like this only so long as your postcoital slumber lasts, and I know how that thing inside of you resists rest.”

“I need to know if one of us has backing from greater powers.”

“Some of us do. The bitch whose body rests next to yours serves a deviant plant god with plans so surreptitious even I don't know its true orientation.”

“A specific one of us.” I take note of the strength of the hand that won't let me go. Nordeen's lightly bronzed skin oppresses the veins and muscles in his spirit hand. Is this how he used to look?

“Ah, no doubt you ask about the illusionist.” He says with that smile. He puts his young yellow eyes upon me. It's not hard to show deference to this new body. In his prime, I would've been no match for him. But he's in his principal physical shape. How come I'm not?

“She is a pretender to a nonexistent throne,” he scoffs viciously. “She thinks there is a pantheon of our kind. She believes she deserves a seat at this imaginary table.”

“You know her. Alia?”

“Not her name, before this, but her actions, yes. She sent supplications to me once. I ignored them. I figured a lesser player would take out someone as ostentatious as she before her actions would become worthy of my attention. What did she do to evoke such ire in you, healer?”

“She killed a friend of mine. Another one like us,” I say slowly. I'm not ready to lie to him. Even though my powers don't work here, his, whatever they may be, might. But even without my powers I can tell he's about to speak when a crowd appears in the horizon. They are dressed like him, coming out of the sun. But they run as though chased. Some have spears made of iron. Others just wood. All of them men. I wish for my powers and feel nothing. Still, out of instinct I extend my hand against them.

“No need. These are only memories of a long-gone time. Tell me more about your plans for this Alia.”

I try and ignore the pleas of the dreams who speak in words so close to clicks and grunts that I'm barely able to distinguish them as language. They throw themselves before us, begging Nordeen for help with some endeavor. He steps over them as though they were rocks or fallen trees. There is no way to understand them, but I imagine them calling to him as a god, as a benefactor. They beg him for aid. Somehow, they can see us. The very memory of their language is no doubt long dead; still, they see us.

“She's way too brazen with her skills, as you say. My friend was connected to someone powerful in the normal world. This girl is responsible for taking them both out. I've got a plan to deal with her, but I wanted to make sure it wouldn't interfere with anything else you had going.”

“The girl's illusions are realistic enough. But I doubt she'd expose herself with an open killing. She does brazen, not stupid. On the phone you alluded to there being others,” young god Nordeen says.

I need to go careful with this one. But it's hard to pay attention. Another vision from the horizon comes as we walk in a winding down circle. A man, or at least a part man with a lion head, walks toward us. He growls, and I feel it in my body, in my sleeping body. Even Nordeen mumbles something about forgetting how loud the lion man is. He is naked. The supplicants raise their pitiful weapons against him, and already I know they are dead.

“She works with two others. A boy, responsible for the killing. He makes things explode with his mind. And a girl who controls animals.”

“Really?” The possessive smile of a kid in a toyshop, one who's finally found his favorite item, takes over the man's face. “And you've seen this animal girl?”

“Yes,” I say, thankful I've given him something of interest other than Tamara. “She's Alia's bitch from what I understand. There's no spine in her.”

Before I can go on, Nordeen stops our walk to watch the lion man take apart the poor plainsmen who appealed to him for help. One man is bitten and shaken to death by the lion man; the paw-like hands of the creature maul three others. When it's done, the creature growls again in full fury. It's then that Nordeen's spirit body shakes. “This will only take a second,” he tells me.

From out of his form, a duplicate pulls itself. I hold on to the man I was walking with as he shakes. When the duplicate fully emerges from the old vessel, I find myself supporting the body of the Nordeen I know, the older man of gray features and tremendous ambiguous power. Yet he still stands erect and angry. The younger body walks in front of the lion man and whispers in the same language as his deceased petitioners. The lion man raises his paw only to be held in check by some unseen power. The younger Nordeen's whispering becomes louder, more inconstant, less like speech and more like idiot-savant scatting. In under a minute the lion man is reduced to a small shell of a lion cub, whimpering and crying as though it hadn't eaten in months. With a quick thrust of the heel, the younger Nordeen smashes the cub's head. He doesn't look back, just keeps on walking. But halfway to the horizon he growls, and his growl has the same sound as the lion man's, only with the spit-infected rattle of Nordeen.

“What the fuck was that?” I'm asking as I stare into the prideful face of the old man.

“A rewriting of history or at least memory” is the closest he'll give me to an answer. I don't push it. “This animal girl. I want her. Deal with the illusionist and her exploding boy as you see fit, but I have uses for a totem controller.”

“I can't guarantee—”

“Do you forget your oath?” I look down, and the razor around my neck is hot. Shit, even in my imagination body, I carry it.

“I was only going to say I can't guarantee to deliver her unharmed.” It's a lie. A bald-faced lie. And he doesn't catch it.

“Harmed is fine, so long as she still has access to her powers. . . .” He pauses and looks down. Drops of blood paint the ground. I look around quickly, thinking the lion man or the spearmen might have attacked us. But no. The blood is coming from my hands.

“Healer, why is there blood on your hands?”

I'm awake.

The bed is empty when I rise. I dress quickly, afraid that my six-hour time limit is up. I rush down unfamiliar stairs to the scent of chocolate tea. Samantha sits comfortably on a chair, sipping tea and reading a foreign-scripted book. In a brass ashtray lies a joint of something that smells too sweet to be marijuana or hash. She's set a place for me. The same style of ambient music plays as when I first entered the house, but while then it was active and frenetic, it's soothing and passive now.

“You've only been asleep for half an hour. I'd appreciate the chance to speak with you, if your schedule will allow.” She doesn't look at me until I speak.

“What is it with you and tea?” I say, taking a seat in the wooden hand chair across from her. I think it's wood, but it feels more like calloused flesh.

“I find it soothes my nerves. Did you get what you need from your employer?”

“You couldn't tell? For some reason I felt like we were inside you, in a bizarre way.”

“If I wanted to, yes, I could've listened in. But I have no taste for any business that involves that man.” She rinses her mouth with her tea then takes a long drag from her joint. She doesn't offer me any.

“Did you ever?” I venture. “Have a taste for what I do?”

“And what is it that you do, Taggert?” She says it with more pity than I feel comfortable hearing in anyone's voice regarding me. “What does Nordeen use you for?”

“The same thing he used you for, I suspect. To keep those he doesn't know in line, and to keep those he knows afraid of him.”

“And you are comfortable with that role?” She pats my hand. Despite the pheromones, I pull back.

“Like you, I made my deal with him when I was too young to know better. And now it's too late. I do the best I can with what I've got. That's all I can do.”

“I can offer you more.” For some reason I believe her. “I broke his hold over me, and I can tell I'm not as strong as you.”

“I was there when you ‘broke' from him. You just exchanged one master for another.”

“My new lord is as far from Nordeen as we are from the average man and woman on the street.” The smoke dances across her eyes, but she doesn't blink. She just takes it in and lets the milky film of tears well up in her deep brown orbs of grace. “Soon my lord will have a vassal strong enough to challenge the Nordeens of the world; the fence-sitters and the opportunists. The vassal will make way for the new growth. You could be part of it.”

“You've been with this new lord since you left Nordeen?” She nods vigorously as I take her hand in mine. “If Nordeen sent me here, don't you think he'd know you'd try to convert me?”

“It doesn't matter.” She smiles so wide I'm afraid she'll tear her cheeks. “Once you join, you will have the power of us all behind you. Nordeen will not risk open warfare with my lord.”

“You'd be surprised what the old man will risk. Besides, I don't want to trade one master for another. Even one as great as you claim yours is.” But that doesn't stop her smile. She puts her joint down and clasps my hands with her free hand.

“You don't understand, Taggert. Listen. What are you?”

“I'm a healer.” I say on reflex.

“Exactly. Your trek across the Motherland was legendary. Gods took notice. That was who you were supposed to be. Did you know that it was Nordeen who pushed you towards the Dogon? He used them to make you feel inferior, to make you confused. Then, when you were at your weakest, that's when he picked you up. But even then you were not warped enough to be suitable for his handling. When did Nordeen find use for you?” My mind goes back to the year I didn't use my power until the bar fight, and my first realization of the pain I could inflict with my powers. As though she sees my thoughts, Samantha nods in time. “He can only use that which he has twisted from its original form.” She pauses, choosing her words delicately.

“Where you just met him . . . most have to lose the most intimate of control to access that place. Nordeen gets there by sacrificing an innocent. This is who you work for, Taggert. Nordeen is a killer. You are no killer, Taggert. At least not by nature. And your nature is important.”

I pull my hands away and stand. “I have to go.” I walk to the door. I don't hear her footsteps, I don't see her pass me, but somehow she bars my way before I can grab the knob.

“I mean no offense,” she says genuinely.

“I know. I can't do this. Someone is relying on me.”

“Humanity is relying on you.”