might not wake up again, so I did the only thing left to me to do-I punched her in the head as hard as I could. It bounced her skull off the carpeted floor and for a moment shook loose the astonishing grip of her legs around my neck. I took advantage of the reprieve to gulp in as much air as I could, then grabbed her knife arm and started twisting until at last, as she snarled and spat and grimaced at me with what looked a great deal like insane hatred, I finally got her to open her fingers and drop the blade to the floor. I knocked the big knife as far away as I could, but that moment of changed balance gave her the chance to slide partway out from under me. Then all of a sudden she was somehow on my back instead, pulling my hair in the most painful way imaginable while she used her other hand to hit me over and over again on my already bloody right ear.
I reached up with both hands and caught her behind the neck, then yanked her forward over my head and shoulders so that she cracked her forehead against the floor once more-which, even through the cushioning of the carpet, had to be getting uncomfortable for her. The she-demon didn’t hesitate, though, immediately snaking her legs around me once more, tightening them this time just under my floating ribs, which she then proceeded to do her best to break while I did what I could to get her off of me. Neither of us quite succeeded, but we were both inflicting a great deal of pain on each other. The fight had become something like a wrestling match between two crazy drunks, neither of us really sure who was winning, or why we were fighting, or even very concerned about such trivia-all we could do was keep trying to snap each other in half.
I finally got her under me again, and although she had one leg over my shoulder, the knee of the other in my solar plexus, and was busily punching at my face with her hands, I managed to ignore the pain long enough to get the bar of my forearm down across her windpipe. I held it there, ignoring the hard blows she was giving me except to let my head roll with them, diffusing as much of the force as possible. After half a minute the fists became open hands, then the slaps became a strengthless grabbing and scratching. At last her arms went limp, and she sagged. I didn’t want to kill her-even if she was determined to do me in, she still had information I needed-but I stayed on top of her, and though I eased the pressure on her throat so she could breathe I didn’t remove my arm.
For perhaps twenty seconds she lay beneath me, panting shallowly. Blood was dripping from my ear and face onto her cheek, where it mixed with her own, then ran down her jaw and soaked the carpet beneath her with a spreading red stain. Her eyes flickered open and for a moment she stared at me like an animal stares, without knowledge of anything beyond its own fighting instincts, but then that pale blue stare focused on me, and her mouth opened in a lazy grin. There was blood between her teeth and all over her lips. She pushed her belly up against me, and for a moment I thought she was trying to escape me again, but she stayed there, her pelvis pressing hard and insistent against me.
“If you’re not going to kill me, angel,” she said, “then let’s think of something else to do while I’m still all worked up.”
twenty-two
I’ve never kissed a hellbeast before. I know that sounds like the beginning of an ex-wife joke, but it’s true. I’ve been with waitresses and biker chicks, middle-aged broads with a long tale to tell, and barely-legals just starting to discover their own story. I’ve also had more than a few flings with women of the angelic persuasion, not to mention those odd, sexless but intense, pre-teen-type relationships that you have in Heaven. Did I mention there’s no sex there? Yeah, put it into the “but that’s another story” category. I had even come close to something intimate a few times with members of the Opposition, but only because I didn’t know what they were; I’d always figured it out in time. But until now, I had never had cause to knowingly kiss a demon.
Wow.
I don’t mean to make it sound romantic, because it wasn’t-not really. Not at first. One moment I was lying on top of this crazy thing that was trying to murder me, the next moment we were rolling around on the floor again, but this time without the distraction of bladed weapons. Only as we bumped up against her writing desk did it occur to me I didn’t know where she’d put her gun when we first came in, or whether she had some even nastier weapon than her
I don’t want you to think I had completely forgotten an angelic lifetime of hatred and distrust. Alarms bells were going off in my head that would have deafened me if they’d been real, but at that moment I just didn’t care.
Casimira’s robe was already half off, and we were both slippery with blood and sweat. Her mouth tasted hot as Tabasco but her skin was shockingly cold to the touch. We were pressed together so hard it seemed like we might simply pass through each other; I could feel her nipples against my chest, hard as silver bullets. My mouth was full of the salty tang of blood, but it tasted good. It tasted
“Hold on,” I said, drawing back. We were lying side by side near the bed now, although “lying” is way too passive a word: She had one long, smooth leg wrapped around me, both arms around my neck, and her face so close to mine I couldn’t see much of anything except her blue eyes. At least I thought her eyes were still blue, but in the dim harem light they could have turned red again and I wouldn’t have known. In fact, we could have fallen through the floor and tumbled all the way into Tartarus during the last few minutes and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. “Wait a minute. Just…what are we doing here?”
She leaned forward and licked a smear of blood off my chest, then smiled at me with it still glistening on her tongue. “They don’t teach you much in Heaven, do they?”
“I mean what are we doing, you and me? We’re not…we’re supposed to be…”
She pulled herself up until she could kiss my forehead-a surprisingly gentle kiss, almost ritualistic, lips as chilly as a marble statue’s-then slid back down until her pelvis was lodged against mine again, pressing, rubbing. “I don’t care!” She sounded almost drunk, halfway between tears and laughter. “I don’t care about any of that, Bobby. Not now. This is our time. Whatever happens later…” She didn’t finish, but lifted her face to be kissed-that beautiful, treacherous, untrustworthy face-and suddenly I no longer cared either. Not about my bleeding cuts and cracked ribs, not my friends or my angelic tribe, my place in the great conflict, anything. If the
Although our mouths almost never left each other’s mouths and skin it didn’t take me long to ease her out of the torn nightgown, exposing her small white breasts and the delicate cathedral of her ribcage, to coax the filmy white strip of nothing off her hips and down her legs until she was utterly naked, pale and splendid. She helped me remove my own clothes, pulling and dragging at things without patience until we both laughed at what a muddle we’d made, but even as we laughed we continued to press as much of our skin together as we could, feverish and hurried. We slithered against each other, kissing, licking, biting, tasting salty blood and sweat. Casimira was almost wordless, making little noises of surprise or mock-protest as something was pulled away from her tender attentions, then growling with pleasure as something else was given to her instead. We were both covered with small, stinging wounds, many of which we’d given to each other, but for that time, in that windowless room, even the pain of those injuries seemed only to broaden the range of our pleasure.
Her skin was cold as the belly of a fish, smooth and dry in the few places my own sweaty skin hadn’t rubbed against her, and with just the faintest tang of blood and sea-musk curling through the sweetness of her scent like a snake in a garden. As I pressed my face against the skin of her stomach I had, for a moment-and only a moment- the sudden sensation that Casimira was some kind of animate corpse, that I had been tricked into loving a dead thing. I pulled back in shock, but one look at the frightened need on her face told me what was happening between us was far more complicated than any mere horror, any mere trick or stratagem of the long war. We were different creatures from different worlds, but at that moment we both wanted the same thing, even though we were neither of us certain exactly what that might mean.
She was built like a ballet dancer, no fat anywhere, her breasts small as a very young woman’s, with
