She tilted her head back. “Chance, I want the daughter picked up. She has a strange flavor, so if she won’t tell me what she is, fine. I am going to kill her. But I want the daughter, too.”
I blinked and looked over her shoulder, meeting Chance’s gaze. He looked at me, his own eyes blank. As I stared, some emotion came through the veil. Hurt. He hurt because I did. And yet he stood firm. “You have to do this yourself. I won’t let you blame me. Either face what you are head on, accept it, or you are going to die.” This was grated out of him, his voice husky.
More tears seeped from my eyes.
“Do it for Vickie, if you can’t do it for you. She
will
go after her. I will promise you I won’t help her, but she will go after her.” He looked a little desperate.
No,
I thought through the fog and lethargy that was beginning to overtake me. I could slip away…Vickie would be fine…better really, with out all of the weirdness that was me. Max would never find her with her dad the lawyer. She was safer now.
Without a coward for a mother
…
“Do it for Mia,” he whispered. No, that was wrong, too. Mia was my friend and she would hurt, but she would go on. She, too, was better off with me gone. I could see it now. Now that I was fading, my very soul slipping away like sand through fingertips on a beach.
“Do it for Vance,” he tried.
Nope. Three strikes, pal
. Maybe Vance loved me, but without me he had gone on for centuries. He would make it without me again.
“Oh, Janie, please. Do it for you. Do it for me…” he faded off, miserably. I could see light around the darkness that my vision was fading into. It was pretty.
“I need you,” he whispered, barely audible. I focused on him. He was bent at the waist, clutching his stomach. “I have always needed you. You are the only thing between me and darkness. Please, don’t go again.”
I blinked. I tried to formulate a thought. What could he mean?
And here’s the thing. I am curious by nature. And he had just said a bunch of things that made little to no sense to me, helping me regain some rational thought. Max pulled again, but I could kind of think through the atrophy that seeped through me.
I mean, okay…he needed me. No one needed me. Not even Vickie, not really. And me being between him and darkness…that made no sense! And don’t go
again
. What did that mean? It suggests that I went
before
…when?
She pulled on my soul again, and I tried to hold on this time. Memories ran through my mind as I tried to remember a time that I had left Chance. Running backwards through the movie of my life…and there was no Chance in it. But I remembered my dad. He wasn’t afraid to be a siren.
I parted my lips. My dad…he sang to me. His voice in my head, singing…
The words came up from my very soul, since my soul seemed so close to the surface of my skin. I whispered the beginning of the song, the music playing in my head while I sang.
We were born before the wind
. I looked at Chance, and his gaze met mine.
Also younger than the sun. Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
.
Max stilled. Her eyes searched my face, but I stared at those glass green eyes as Chance came closer, tears unshed in his eyes.
I closed my eyes and pictured my dad, the sorrow heavy in my voice. He held me, my dad, and I had always felt safe. I sang on, remembering my father and how he’d flown into the mystic. Gone from me. And he had taken any shot I had of understanding what I was with him. I hadn’t been safe since.
Max fell to her knees, holding her hands over her ears as if to block out my voice. I opened the internal fist and the fingers spread. Unlike before, I had some control over it. I slammed it into her. I caught her henchmen too, but to her I devoted the largest portion of my power. I slammed it into her and the black tar of her power came back down the line and into me.
Unlike before, I also felt it hit me. The closest thing to how it felt is if you hold your hand above your head for a few minutes, until it goes to sleep. When it does, lower it just a little. So that just a little blood can pump into it. Each pump of your heart makes the blood move further up your arm to the oxygen starved cells in your arm and then, eventually, each finger. That was what this felt like. She had been draining me of my very life force, and then I sang on top of it. I needed oxygen. Here came the tingles as it tried to come back to life with the ebony flow of light that pulsed in Max. Pumping into me with every beat of her heart, every thought she thought. Each was a tiny burst of life to me.
I sang, closing my eyes and thinking I would come home tonight…to Vickie, and to Mia, and Vance. I would survive, and if it meant that Max had to be removed, so be it. No remorse was felt in that moment of choice, her life or mine, and I chose mine. I felt her beginning to fade.
I sang, more powerfully and I didn’t fear it. I was what I was and if I was to be damned for it…well, it was too late to worry about that now.
I opened my eyes and looked into Chance’s beer bottle green ones. He was close and working at the knots that held me. I sang right at him,
And I want to rock your gypsy soul, just like way back in the days of old.
And a part of me felt the ages stretching behind us and felt him tremble. I was already rocking his gypsy soul. I pulled harder on Max and my eyes fluttered closed.
Then magnificently we will float into the mystic.
I couldn’t feel Max anymore. She was there and then she was gone. Her flunkies had fallen long ago, and there wasn’t enough there for me to drain. I still needed, still ached, but there was nothing left for me to drain. I sang, aching,
I was silent and untied, but I didn’t move. Chance was there, and I could feel him, but I was in the weird throbbing pain again, somehow worse than when it started rather than better.
Chance mumbled the last line of the song. “It’s too late to stop now.”
I bent over, nauseous, hurting and fell to my knees on the floor. Oh, God, it hadn’t worked. I was still dying. Why? Why was I still dying?
“Come here.” Chance touched my fingertips with his own. “Now we finish this together.”
I tried to curl away from him. That put me face to face with Max. Oh, God, Max was dead.
And I was dying. I fell to my elbows on the floor, powerless to do more.
“You are changing. You need more power.”
I tried to shove off his hands. He removed my shirt. Here I was, freaking dying, and he was trying to get me naked.
Only a man…
I could faintly hear the music from the bar. I think it was
Killing Me Softly
. There was no killing softly. I was having my soul torn from my body in burning waves.
He got my shirt off past my struggles and pulled me onto his lap, facing away from him. When my back touched his front it was like I had hit the very surface of the sun. I opened my mouth to scream and light poured out instead of sound. My pores were open, pulling the light in, but it was too much, so it burned and poured back out of me. I went limp against him, my head falling to his shoulder behind me. He held my hands out from my body, so that every inch of my back pressed against his chest. My arms lay against him, my hands…every inch that touched was a conduit of his power into me. My body realigned itself…shaping to form something that wasn’t me, but at the same time was more me than I had ever been before.
Every curve of my spine, shoulders, and arms fit into him like two puzzle pieces clicking into place. He buried his face in my neck, so I turned my face slightly and our cheeks touched. My hands were still spread, as if welcoming the day, and he was behind me, a shadow of me. My fingers curled around his, clinging. He bent our arms in, one high, toward my heart, the other to rest above my belly button. It was like a hug of power from behind. I breathed in his scent and it smelled of life. He moved his face against mine and my lips parted.
And just then we evened out. That is the only way I could explain it. The power had been flowing from a higher concentration, him, to an area of lesser concentration, me. I had learned about that in science class years ago. It was like if you put a drop of blue dye in a glass of water. The dye would spread until all of the water was equally light blue. Only now the power had found its balance. It thrummed around us, a cocoon of light.
Time itself stopped in awe. The air was still, and everything was waiting…waiting.
He turned me slightly, releasing one of my hands. I moved with him, wrapping myself around him. He held me. We fit perfectly this way, too. I was an extension of him—no that wasn’t quite it.
We are one
. One being, severed in two at the dawn of time. Both waiting, searching, for the part that was missing. And here it was. I was content in a way that I don’t think anyone can or should be in an earthly state. I’d found home.
He moved and I moved, in sync, and our lips met and my soul danced up to mingle with his. It was a play of tongue on tongue…souls merging and joyous. It tasted of life, and strength, and I gulped it down my throat. I was alive. I was…needing. The need built.
And a fire lit in my belly—it was no longer an innocent kiss. He was fire and electricity, and I was water…eternally drawn together, but never allowed to mix. I was the chalice, and he was the sword. We were the eternal symbols of man and woman, meant to be joined. I gasped at the sheer need that filled me. More than water, more than food, I needed his touch. His hands slid up my back and mine dug into his shoulders. Everywhere his skin met mine I burned. Every nerve in my body sang a song sweeter than any siren’s song. I slid against his body, hard and unyielding. I was softness. I could feel him, tugging me closer, closer, but never close enough. We moved until we lay on the floor, a tangle of limbs wrapped in a womb of light. His lips moved over my skin, greedy for more, ever more. My lips moved over him…now his shoulders, his waist, his arms…never enough.
A storm swept me ever higher. If I could take this, if I could touch him and have him, I would never have to fear, to want again. He was all that I would ever need.
A tiny beat in my brain held me back. It whispered
no
. It said no, it is his need. His desire. His choice. Not you. Not you. Not you. But it was a whisper in a storm of feeling. I tried to ignore it.
His head dropped to lay against mine, forehead to forehead. His heart beat with mine, his breath raced with mine. He was going to take me somewhere I had never gone. I wanted this. I wanted him. We needed one another. Without each other, neither would ever be complete, whole. And he opened those beautiful glass green eyes, so ageless, so empty with out me and—
The spell broke. I blinked.
Glass green.
He was not mine, and I most certainly was not his. The whisper of thought in my mind gelled into the word
No
.
I slid off him, terrified.
He breathed out one ragged breath, and the light fell like snowflakes around us. I crouched, staring at him. He was foreign, he was other… he was unlike anything on this planet. Why hadn’t I sensed that before? What was happening? Why would I allow something that alien to touch me?
I looked at him.
Chance. He is Chance. I am Janie. Janie Smith
. Naming seemed to place me more firmly in the now. I was me, Janie Smith, and Janie Smith did not roll around on the floor of a bar after being double crossed and kidnapped. Okay, Janie Smith did not get kidnapped or double crossed either. Janie Smith was normal. Just a dirty dishwater blond single mom, that’s me. I prefer jeans to skirts. I like the color blue, Foamy the Squirrel and Jenna Marbles. I am
me
. And
me
did not need another half to make her whole. I remembered the taste of chocolate and McDonald’s French fries. I am
me
.
I looked past him, seeing a movement in the mirrored door led into the bar. I hadn’t paid it much mind before. I did now. There were Max and her men’s’ bodies reflected in the mirror. There was Chance’s back, and the chair I had been tied to, all reflected.
But there was a creature there, too. I moved toward it, a very bad feeling in my stomach.
No.
All I could think was
Nonononononono...
It moved when I did, but with more grace and control than I had ever moved. Sinewy and sleek as a white leopard, its hair hung, straight and white, almost silver. It’s blue eyes glittered at me, but then they shifted and shone green as Chance’s. Another flash and they seemed almost yellow. I blinked and so did it. Golden light flashed behind the eyes and then they sparkled like drenched violets.
I stood, still not able to entirely connect myself with the creature in the glass. With skin so pale as to be nearly translucent, it had my bra on. And my jeans. Bootcut. My favorite pair, knees worn thin as paper.
Okay, so that is me.
I stared at my abdomen.
I traced down, where my stretch marks had been. And my pouch. Now it was all smooth and hard as marble. Tears threatened. My stretch marks were gone. I had joked about a spell that would make my body perfect…
be careful what you wish for
. I hadn’t meant my stretch marks. They were battle scars in the war to create life, erased as easily as crayon from a wall. My stomach was smooth, the skin firm, the musculature perfect. My favorite jeans hung like a sack on hips far smaller than mine had been since I had been a kid.
Janie Smith was not perfect. She was flawed and human. I was flawed and human. I was not this creature reflected back at me. I wouldn’t be.
But my abdomen wasn’t entirely perfect. There, where my hipbone protruded—my hip bone protruded! I hadn’t been slim enough for it to “protrude” since Vickie had been born!—there was a mark. A dark mark. There was one on each hip and one at the base of my throat. Two stars and a moon, the moon being on one hip. I traced the one on my neck with my thumbnail and it was all I could do to stay on my feet. A wave of sheer sexual pleasure hit me in the loins like a fist.