Wild Thing (33 page)

She looked up, gazing past the small body, her unblinking eyes focused on infinity.  Mentally she pictured a small soul winging its way Elsewhere, and offered it a silent acknowledgment.

Wetness on her cheeks brought her back to herself, and she brushed in surprise at the trickles of moisture.

She turned, crossing the lawn to head back to the Institute.  But as she reached the edge of the gravel area, she hesitated, filled with a sudden reluctance – a feeling she should be outside, not in.  Spinning on her heels, she ran into the woods.

-

Harmon's astral form circled the powerful Warding around the Institute's buildings.

He watched her sense her prey, and kill it.  With a single shot.  Saw her aura flare, Unfolding at last – only to watch her
fight it down
.

Furious, he watched her trudge toward the front steps, before turning back and racing out through the barrier, beyond his view.

What foolish game was this?

Long minutes later, the Institute's barrier flared in a Borealis display as she returned through the Ward. 
What…?
  The shimmering curtain closed up behind her almost like wings furling.

The Ward had reacted to Sara as if she were
almost
a threat.

The
“almost”
… it made no sense.  None.

And he saw she had
felt
that interaction, too, as she stumbled at that instant, nearly dropping the dying ember cradled in her hands.  He moved beside her to observe her as she stood, pushing one hand gingerly through the barrier, clearly puzzled.

Spinning around, she brushed past his spirit form.

And
her touch
hurt
.

Impossible.
  Reflexively, he flashed backwards, to the front doors.  On the lawn below, Sara moved now as if in the dark, one arm stretched out, trying to locate the thing she had brushed against. 
Him.
  Somehow she had touched his spirit.  And
hurt
it.

That should not be possible.  Not without both a focused effort of will, and full awareness of what she did.  Not from a clearly accidental contact.

Had
she Unfolded?  If so, into
what?
  He could not categorize the shape of her aura: not as that of a mage, nor as a shaman.

Her aura
had
changed, though.  It looked… calmer.  More self-contained.

Deeper.

Finally she turned, stalking up the stairs to the entry doors where he hovered.  With a thought, he returned to his body.

When his office door opened he looked up, took in the plump little body she carried and her drained expression, and quickly shifted his perception back to the Imaginal.  Her aura had settled into patterns so different from her usual that he barely recognized it.  For one thing, the livid, charged tendrils he attributed to the influence of the beep and scope seemed shrunken.  Somehow quiet.  And the rest of it had altered in subtle ways.  Simpler, clearer.  Stronger, too.  As though he were looking at some familiar bay's shore after a violent storm had reshaped its outlines.

She had approached, standing now before him with the bird held in both hands, the PowerShot poking from the waist of her tight shorts.  Her eyes gazed steadily into his, waiting for him to acknowledge her kill.  She was
not
offering it to him.

He rose and came around the desk, forcing aside distaste as he reached out and touched the bloody neck.  'I see your first hunt was successful, Sara.  I'm very proud of you.'

He saw the unexpected praise warm her – softening her, a little, into vulnerability.  She looked shyly down at the small body for a second, before gazing back up into his eyes.

Harmon felt he could almost
see
the shape of her future stretching ahead, and chose his words with care.  His voice sank, low and solemn as he spoke in more formal tones.

'Up until now, little one, you have been playing children's games.  But this is real, now.  You have made your first kill.'

She nodded her acceptance, eyes not leaving his.  Remembering his script, he dabbed a finger into the creature's blood.  With it, he marked her forehead, then each cheek.  Her eyes shone.

As he anointed her, he spoke.  'With this blood, I mark you and Name you.'

He paused, and in more normal tones, explained.  'Now that you are truly a hunter you have earned a new name: your adult name.  I am sure you will like it,' he Suggested.

Her eyes narrowed.  She frowned, shaking her head, and he saw the spell shatter, broken by her unconscious resistance.

A minor victory for her, but it struck Harmon with all the shock of a slap in the face.  She looked a little confused – hardly aware of this piece of psychic byplay.  Mentally gritting his teeth, he focused his attention – indeed made it all but obvious what he was doing as he recast the spell.  But he felt he needed more.

Reaching out to
her
, he laid his right hand gently on her arm.  The physical contact, so rarely made, seemed to put her suddenly off-balance.  Her eyes widened slightly as she looked up into his.  He tried again.

'Yes, I am
sure
you will like your new name.'

He held the Imaginal pattern of the spell inside himself, letting it swell as he channeled extra force into it before releasing it and directing it over her.  It seemed to tear at him this time as it passed from him to her, and he panted with the effort of controlling the flow.  This time, though, he felt the spell take root.

She nodded, fractionally.

'I name you
Leeth
!'

Her eyes closed as she accepted her new name.

He could almost read her thought – so
right
.  She smiled.

With his hand still holding her arm, the silence lengthened.  Suddenly, he was acutely conscious of the touch.  Her body language told him she also was all too aware of the contact.  He watched her aura, strands now pulsing and swelling.  Sexual tension vibrated in the air between them.  He mentally retreated once more to the safety of the script he had prepared all those days ago.

'Now we shall feast you.'

She opened her eyes and grinned. 
Leeth
grinned.  Satisfaction and pride suddenly bubbled over into delight.  In very much her old way, she whispered intensely, 'Oh, yes, Keepie, yes!  Let's feast!'

Together, they plucked it.  He let
her
dress it, with a small but wickedly sharp knife, her eyes shining at the implied trust.  Together, they prepared it.  Cooked it, together.  And together celebrated the Feast of Becoming.

Engrossed in their shared work, she didn't notice as he cast and slipped the mindmeld spell over her with exquisite delicacy.

Parts of the meal verged on the indigestible due to the cooks' lack of knowledge; but parts were wonderful – though he had to smile at her discovery that real flesh tended to stick between one's teeth, not at all like soyburger.

But as the meal progressed, the tension that had discharged earlier crept back and began to build.  Her fever grew.  He retreated further down the link as her senses began flooding her so strongly they started to overwhelm her.  He had even allowed her a glass of red wine.  He was quite pleased at her doubtful reaction.  He sensed her appreciation of the full flavors, smooth and tart at the same time.  He held his breath as she noted the unpleasantly bitter aftertaste.  Relaxed as she thought nothing more of it.

She even drank it all, to please him.

He had dimmed the light earlier.  As the small meal progressed, Sara's eyes – no,
Leeth's
eyes – seemed to grow larger and larger, until they were brimming dark pools.  Desire seemed to move like some submarine behemoth beneath their surface.  He shook himself mentally at the foolishness of the simile.  Yet in a very real way, she made him nervous.  The current he tapped, he suspected, ran very deep indeed.

After drinking all her wine, from the tall, slender glass he'd set out, she seemed unable to leave its stem alone, her fingers sliding up and down it.  Harmon noted the flush of her cheeks.  Her movements had slowed, smoothed.  No longer bird-quick and jumpy.  A feline sensuality instead surfaced, as she twirled the glass stem between thumb and finger.  With her other hand, she ran a finger around the rim; stroked down the side; cupped the gently curved shape in the palm of her hand.  She seemed to find the contact strangely intimate, strongly pleasurable.  He continued his retreat, finally dropping the link lest her senses swamp him.  Nor did he wish to risk reawakening her stubborn resistance at this critical juncture.

He watched as she shifted in her seat, crossing one subtly muscled, copper-bronzed leg over the other.  Then slid it forward and back, purely for the pleasure of feeling one silkily curved calf whisper against the other, he knew.

Her eyes had half closed, he noted, the upper lids drooping down as she fell headlong into the enticement of her own senses.  He watched, enraptured, as the drug took hold.

His intimate knowledge of her gestures and habits made him hypersensitive to her every action; made perfectly clear the meaning of each departure from her normal body language.  So when the fingers of her right hand trailed casually up the smooth length of her forearm, he imagined it was his own hand generating the sensuous pleasure that triggered and then prolonged her self-caress.  When she idly placed one hand on the underside of her breast, and then oh so slowly, let her fingers trail up over that curve and then down into the valley and up the other side, and her mouth opened in a small “O”, he knew she relished delicious sensations that flowed beneath her outwardly calm exterior.

He almost smiled.  The drugs would make this so easy.

Mentally, he drew back, musing.  Analyzing.  A perceptive stranger would, at best, have thought she was flirting.  A less observant stranger would have noticed nothing at all.  Sara – no
Leeth
, dammit – Leeth herself was unaware of how clearly she was signaling to him. 
She
assumed the slight movements caused by shifting her legs would pass unnoticed.  Did not realize he drank it in and correctly interpreted it – knowing she relished the surreptitious nudging of thigh against thigh… and all the other, more subtle pressures and touches.

He smiled, amused.  She thought she was arousing and pleasuring herself secretly.  Right in front of him.  For him, however, knowing her to be ignorant of his awareness, he had not only the thrill of watching her arouse herself, and the anticipation of what would come, but also the illicit thrill of the voyeur watching from the shadows, safe in his own secrecy.

And now for the next step.

He gestured at the music console across the room.  Softly, the notes of his first selection seeped into the background of the room.  He decided to skip the various interludes.  Another gesture jumped it straight to the heart of the sequence – a shallow modern piece, but one with a pounding bass undercurrent and a primitive, even savage, rhythm.

Leeth's eyes slitted in pleasure, acknowledging it with the merest nod and a widening of her already wicked smile.  On a whim, he shifted his senses to the Imaginal plane.  What he saw was enough to reawaken his clinical interest: the thickly twining ribbons were noticeably tumescing, in driving pulses that matched the beat of the music.  They twisted and throbbed suggestively, penetrating and threading the other parts of her aura.  He found the movements engrossing: they
compelled
attention.  He watched as the patterns and colors associated with the higher mental processes dimmed and diffused, while the simpler and more fundamental patterns became steadily more urgent and dominant.

At that moment, a contraction seemed to pass through the branches of her Imaginal form.  Simultaneously, their intensity deepened.  And now, the rest of the pattern seemed to be opening up.  He watched, fascinated, struggling to formulate the concepts that would explain what he was seeing.  It was as though parts of her aura were, were…
reaching out
.

With a start, he realized her aura was flowering, opening out toward him.  He snapped out of his rapt daze.  Leeth stretched, cat-like, and prepared to get up.

With the speed of desperation, he gestured at the console of the Yamaha CyberSound, jumping ahead right to the climax of the final piece he'd chosen.  The music faded into stillness.  In the charged pause before the new selection started, Leeth uncoiled from her seat and stood, staring at him hungrily.  There was even a predatory gleam to her eyes, he fancied.  A shock ran through him, as her movement triggered a proto-memory of a disturbing dream he'd once had.

And then, as one leg stretched sensuously out and she began stalking toward him, the music rose and wrapped around her.  He had found a more modern group, from her own playlist, who had a tribute to the almost one hundred year old song that had so inspired her, whose surging, driving bass would surely stir her blood.

It seemed to snare her, and she slowly turned, looking back at him over her shoulder.  A look; a promise:
soon
.

Then the sudden, heavy beat caught her, crashing through her body like a breaking wave, and she turned and plunged wildly into the music.

Wild Thing
You make the light spring
You make the world sing

Wild Thing
You make my eyes dim
You make my soul dream
...

Her eyes flashed as she accepted the song as homage; took it into herself, and then expressed it in dance.

A primal, driving dance: her every movement a scribing of passion in the air.  Each gesture declared her savagery, her desire.  There was no restraint: she poured all her considerable strength, all her athlete's skills, and all her grace into the song.

She spun around him, whirling through the room.  Twisting, weaving, tumbling through the air: stalking, grasping and killing, in mime.  And every movement, every frozen pause, matched perfectly to the rhythm.  It was a consummate exhibition.  So much so, that lost in his appreciation of its sheer artistry, he did not at first see where it was headed; ignored the message being sent.  Until, as her circling movements meshed and focused, drawing tight the net she wove around him with her body, his heart suddenly thudded as he realized: she came for
him
.