Cheat the Grave (15 page)

He shot me a look of ill-concealed disdain, gripped one side of the branch in each hand, palms down, and pointed it in front of him. Head bobbing beneath his conical hat, he
began muttering as he circled me. I frowned, then straightened. “Wait—are you dousing?”

I tried to recall what I knew about divining rods and dowsers. They were used to find water. Only seconds after this great mental leap, the rod took a dive of its own, seemingly flying from Shen's hands to bury itself, single point down, right between my feet. It found a soft, or softer, spot, and sunk straight down, though the sand around it, and beneath me, remained unmoved. Relieved, I glanced back at Shen.

He lifted his head, the giant hat sliding away to reveal a mocking grin. Then he flipped me off.

A whirring sound started up underneath me, growing louder as the grains began to drain between my feet. The rod's handles became propellers, blowing sand outward in a whipping blast to sting my bare skin. The ground altered elevation, and I backpedaled as if balancing on a rolling ball. I did a fair job of remaining upright—my dream, remember?—until a pair of rough hands found my lower back and gave me a good hard push.

“You little—”

Flailing, I slid in a roller coaster arch down the waterfall of sand, the light of the red sun disappearing like it'd been swallowed in one bite. Or maybe it was me. I thought of Carlos's worms, burrowing through the years, existing underground, ingesting the old and birthing the new in the gritty darkness. Was Shen right? Had I called all of this to me? I waited for the drugs to wear off, and—as I continued to fall—prayed for a soft landing.

 

Sliding to a surprisingly easy stop, as if flowing off a large silk veil, I spit grit from my mouth, wiped it from my eyes, and tried to regain my bearings.

“Here.” An unsurprised voice—one that didn't echo—sounded next to me, before a cool, damp cloth was pressed against my cheek. I wiped the sand from my face, noting the sound of running water as my dirtied rag was replaced.
As I wrung water into my eyes, another voice, farther away, piped, “If you hadn't fought it you would have arrived as you were meant to, clean and on your feet.”

I sighed, because I knew that voice. It was both chipped and singsong, with a light tone and dark smoky texture. I'd left its owner, Diana, in Midheaven too. “Ah, but this makes such an impression,” I muttered, then squinted, gazing about. “Where am I?”

The metallic taste was worse down here, weighed down and compressed like a silver bar in my mouth.

“The water room, of course.” Her voice didn't echo either.

So it
was
one of the elemental rooms. Squinting, I looked about. At least more of one than the dust bowl upstairs. It had glass sides and a sandy rooftop, yet it tinkled and flowed, its perimeter completely awash in clear water that fell over the walls in a steady rush. Slate shelves caught the musical liquid, spilling it to the ground in beautiful, almost balletic, designs.

The room's center was dotted with basins: black marble, clear crystal, hammered copper, and rose glass. Each bubbled in competing heights, and where there wasn't water, there were mirrors, including underfoot. Straw-thin streams backlit with firefly lights filled in the blank spaces, and behind all the watery reflection was the constant movement of white sand shifting against crystal walls. It added to the eerie movement of the room, so that I felt caught in the middle of an hourglass.

There was no music, but the various pools sang as though charmed. The thought kept me alert as I turned my attention to the room's occupants, three in total. The one with a waist comprised of dangerous S-curves still loomed above me, but two others lounged in webbed hammocks winking with gold fringe. None looked particularly surprised to see me, and the voluptuous one even offered me a hand up.

“It's a water vein,” she said, pulling me to my feet. “Both
the water and the electromagnetic current from our bodies allow the dowsers to measure our depth and location.”

“And time,” Diana added, swinging in her hammock like a bright, overgrown black widow. She wore voluminous skirts in layers of taffeta, and black fishnets studded with crystals that flashed when she kicked her heels. The venomous spider analogy, I thought as she smiled, was something to keep in mind. “They can also douse for a specific place in time.”

And time didn't pass the same way in Midheaven as it did in the real world. Here it bent and twisted upon itself, eating large chunks of a lifetime even in a blink. I hoped that wasn't also true when visiting in your dreams.

“How would you prefer to die?” The woman next to me tilted her head prettily. “Fire or ice?”

“You giving me an option?” I said, returning the dirty cloth to her. My echoing voice made the question sound more forceful than I intended, but she took the cloth without moving to harm me. I remained wary. The women in Midheaven, powerful to the last, were never exactly what they seemed.

This one seemed to be a forgotten flower child, with dried blooms woven through her hair and light brown curls streaked with gold and red. Round cheeks dimpled beneath a cheerful spotting of freckles, but the sweet visage changed drastically below the neck. Cleavage bloomed over a black bone corset, covering the sinuous slide of those hips to end in a skintight pencil skirt. The outfit, and the body it encased, was totally out of place beneath a face of such abject innocence.

She took the cloth, smiling, and folded it in the crevasse between her milky breasts. “It's only a question.”

But in case it was a trick one…“Old age. In bed.”

She shifted, causing gold flecks to spark from her limbs. Musk, like a tobacco rose, wafted to strike me in the gut. I hadn't scented anything so heady and delicious since
losing all my amplified senses. Though fully clothed, the sight and scent and sound of her were a promise of pure sex. The men in the Rest House, like Shen, and Tripp when he'd still been here, probably fell to their knees in front of her, begging for a taste of all that softness.

“In seven and a half billion years,” she said, breathy voice filled with wonder, “the earth will be dragged from its orbit by the sun, and spiral to a vaporous death.”

I blinked.

“Fucking cheery, Trish.” Diana rolled her eyes at me, then turned to address her companion on the hammocks. “Does she know how to bring down a party or what?”

That woman said nothing, her silence a rebuke after Trish's bubbling friendliness. She could have been either white or Asian, porcelain skin almost translucent atop chiseled cheekbones and piano-black lips. I thought about checking my reflection in them. Her hair was a severe bowl cut in the same glossy ebony as her mouth, but the thick bangs cutting straight across her face obscured her eyes, rendering her expressionless.

Covered from neck to ankle in form fitting black, she reminded me of a severe Audrey Hepburn without any other adornment beyond long dark nails. Yet every bit of her skinny body was revealed in a way even Trish hadn't dared. Her ribs could be counted, her elbows jutted sharply, her nipples looked set in concrete.

She reminded me a bit of Mackie, I thought, shifting uncomfortably. Alert even without the use of her eyes. I glanced at Diana, who was lazily swinging a leg just above the ground, and when I looked back, the woman's long, elegant fingers were tucked beneath her chin. A mannequin striking a different enticing pose, not moving into the position, but simply there, rigid and aloof. I frowned.

“I'm stating fact, right, Nicola?” Trish said, breaking me of my study as she whirled to join Diana, curls flying to emit another whiff of sweet muskiness. “Just because you
don't talk about it doesn't mean we're not all going to incinerate as the globe is engulfed by fire. Though we won't even make it that long,” she turned, saying to me, “the sun will be ten percent brighter in just a billion years, causing all the oceans to boil away. No water, no life. Want a drink?”

“No.” Taking a drink was how I'd gotten into this mess.

Or was it? Shen claimed I'd called him to me, and these women were acting as if I'd stepped in from another room, rather than another world. I blinked again. “I am dreaming, right?”

“Of course,” Nicola said. Amazing, because her chrome mouth never moved. “But that doesn't mean you aren't really here. You're a part of this world now, or didn't you know?”

Maybe giving up two-thirds of the
essence de vie
gave me free admittance for the rest of my natural lifetime. If only Disney had the same policy, I thought wryly. “So I need a drug to induce some sort of deeper level of sleep—”

“The theta level,” Trish said helpfully.

“And then I call the world to me just as I go under.”

“So telling someone to go to hell at that moment isn't probably the wisest course of action.” This from Diana, hers a more mocking helpfulness. I scowled, and she smiled prettily. “Hope you have someone to pull you back out, though.”

“What?”

The smile widened. “You know. In case
she
finds out you're here.”

But then the arching sound was back, bursting through the room like a low-flying phoenix. Ducking, I studied the cascading water walls, but the sound was already gone, lost in the rush. I held still, eyes darting, waiting for it again.

“So
that's
why you're here.” A slow smirk finally curled at the corners of Nicola's black lacquered mouth. “Should have figured.”

“Solange was right,” Trish singsonged.

The name alone sent shivers along my limbs, and apparently Diana felt the same way because she shushed Trish with a harsh glare. Maybe she'd done something to anger the woman too. Too bad for her…for us both. Solange's was the sort of anger that blotted out entire planets. Basically, the difference between her and God was that God didn't require the breath from your body, the bone from your marrow, the white from your eyes. Solange did.

Fuck the sound, I thought, and began looking for a way out instead. The other women chuckled, but didn't look like they blamed me. “She sent Mackie after me,” I told them.

Trish shrugged, smiling sweetly. “He probably just wants to talk.”

Yeah, and porn stars just wanted to cuddle.

“Carlos?” I called the name tentatively, looking toward the ceiling. It echoed in that mix master's scratch. Water continued to pour down the glass walls. I sighed.

“She sent him because you're a danger to us all,” Nicola said, still stiff and autoerotic, like everyone else was incidental to her existence.

Diana flicked her fingers at me. “Joanna's no danger to me.”

“She is if Solange catches you with her.”

“Stop saying her name!” This time Diana curled her delicate hands into fists, squeezing tight before forcibly relaxing them. “Besides, she doesn't rule me.”

“She rules everyone whose soul has been melded into her sky!” Nicola said bitterly.
Her
sky, I thought, shuddering, remembering the planetarium.

“So you've all had parts of yourself put in her sky?”

Diana snorted. “It's the first thing she does when someone new arrives. But you protected yourself from it somehow, and she hasn't forgotten it. She thinks you're after her power.”

“I don't know why she wasn't able to touch me.” I'd come awake while she'd been fashioning my gem, some
how deforming it and keeping her from using it. “Besides, not everyone is after power.”

Nicola and Diana scoffed, but Trish lifted her chin. “Maybe Joanna just wanted to watch, like us.” She turned to me, wide-eyed. “Is that why you chose the water room?”

“I've no idea why I'm here.”

Yet even as I said it, the bottom dweller sound echoed again. Arching my head, I followed its path as it vaulted overhead, then fell like invisible rain into the basin sitting between Diana and Nicola and their four hammocks. I strained toward it like I had gills. What
was
that?

No, not a basin, I thought, frowning as I took a step to follow. A well.

Trish motioned me forward. “Come. Look.”

“No!” Nicola hissed.

Ignoring her, Trish slipped into a third hammock, and pointed to a fourth. I inched forward to peer in the thick crystal basin.

My anti-Olivia self was reflected in the water—dark eyes and choppy, blunt cut. Strong, lithe limbs, and a severe expression to match my mood. But I stared past my reflection, wondering where sound could go. Unlike the rest of the room, it was ice still. I waved my hand above the small pool.

“Not there.” Nicola was back in slideshow mode, bowl-cut fringe still perfectly arranged over the bridge of her nose. Her face was upturned, the shifting sands of the mirrored skies sending light to dance over her profile. She looked like a Roman bust, hard edges cut and sliced into soft curves.

“The water is merely a conduit for sound. You have to relax into the hammock, and once you've caught the rhythm of the room, look up.”

So I did, leaning back carefully, gaze on the blurred ceiling as I began to rock.

“You have to wait for it, since you are attracted to it, and not the other way around.”

Whatever “it” was, I thought sullenly.

“It's not fair,” Trish sighed as we waited, airy voice rising, flowing upstream. “When are we going to get a turn?”

Diana hummed her agreement. “She gets to do whatever she wants.”

“Shh,” Nicola chided harshly. “She'll hear you.”

But then I heard
it
, coming at me like it was shot from a pistol, but also from another room, another world.

“Ready?” Nicola turned her sharp chin my way, and this time her fringe parted enough for me to momentarily glimpse a startling blue eye before the hair fell back into place like a curtain. “Say hello to your mysterious sound.”