The Dirty Streets of Heaven

amaranth-colored buds on the tips as firm and cold as ice cream still hard from the freezer. A delicate shimmer of fine pale hair descended in an almost invisible line from her navel and across her flat lower stomach to the delicate swelling of her pubis, where it joined the tiny puff of near-whiteness that hid the cleft. As I held her legs apart to look at her there, the muscles of her thighs quivered and she made a noise as if she fought back tears. She pulled herself upright in what seemed more than ever like desperation, put her hands flat against my chest to shove me backward, then took my cock in her mouth and did things to me with her startlingly cool tongue that I still cannot quite explain or even remember clearly, but the sensation was enough to make me fall back on the floor and lay there for long moments, unable to do anything except let it happen and hope it would never stop. Her hands kept moving the whole time, stroking, cradling, her chilly, tender fingers everywhere, distracting and delightful.

Soon enough, though, she lifted herself up on one elbow, holding me in her hand and squeezing gently, her eyes glinting with mischief. “More? Or do you need a rest?”

I answered the only way I was capable of at that moment: I rolled over and wrestled her to the floor again, then began to lick and kiss and nibble my way from her face to her toes and back up again, stopping somewhere in the middle of the second traverse to nose my head between her thighs. She yanked down one of the filmy curtains surrounding the bed and let it settle over us, then took an end of it and looped it slowly and lovingly around my neck, using it as a bridle to speed me up or slow me down as I indulged myself in her astonishing, wonderful wetness. I heard her cry out my name until even that last word disappeared into less articulate sounds. But as much as I loved the taste of her, the cold skin and the warm, salty damp, I couldn’t wait long-in fact, I couldn’t wait any longer. As she lay catching her breath, I sat up between her thighs and began to position myself over her, but she was not going to let me do it, not yet. She rolled me onto my back, putting a finger over my mouth to silence my questions, and then squatted on her heels above me, teasing my hardness with her own silky softness, rubbing back and forth without allowing me to penetrate, until I was almost as desperate as in the most frightening moments of our struggle, with her knife pressed against me. Then, as if we still struggled, I suddenly summoned my remaining strength and wrestled her onto her back. This time I was the one who stabbed at her, and she was the one who gasped out a cry that sounded like agony. Cold, cold, her skin was so cold…but inside she was hot as a furnace. I cried out then, too, shocked and amazed and overwhelmed that it could be like this-that anything could be like this.

“He’s never been here,” she said as we lay on her bed later, naked and sweaty. “He doesn’t know about this place.”

“I guessed, actually. Wouldn’t be a very good hiding place if he knew it, and he’s the one you’re hiding from, right?”

She nodded. I couldn’t help staring at her flawless features, her schoolgirl face and ancient eyes, and wondering again what she really looked like, but somehow it didn’t matter as much to me as it had before. “Not just hiding from. Running away from.”

“What do you mean? And if he’s never been here, why do you have clothes for him here?”

“Because I had the same contractors build it who did all the rest of our…hideaways. And to keep them from being suspicious I did everything the same, including stocking the closets with his clothes. I handled all the bills, and he doesn’t care how much things cost, anyway. He’s a duke of Hell-money is like water to him, he turns on his faucets and it pours out. So I had them build this one just for me. I decorated it myself. I know you think it’s ghastly.”

“No,” I said, “not at all. Just…surprising. Not what I would have expected.”

“It was something I dreamed of when I was a girl. Don’t worry, we also had the boring Aspen cabin with the fabulous view and the boring Manhattan penthouse on Central Park West, and even a boring little chalet in Gstaad. But this one is mine. So if you spoil the secret and make me give it up I swear I’ll kill you, Bobby Dollar.”

For a moment the tone of her voice made me raise up on my elbow to see if she was kidding. She didn’t look like she was. “Did you really…fall for him? Like you said?”

She shrugged and rolled onto her side to root in a bedside drawer. She took out a slim golden case and removed a cigarette, then offered the case to me.

“No, thanks. Had to give it up years ago.”

She lit up anyway, then settled back on her pillow and watched the smoke lift lazily toward the surprisingly high ceiling. “I don’t know, maybe you were right. Maybe I didn’t fall for him so much as I fell for what he had, what he could do-what someone like him could mean to someone like me.” She frowned. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Then you don’t have to, Casimira.”

“Caz. Nobody’s called me Casimira much for a couple of hundred years.”

I looked at her. My surprise must have shown.

“Yes, I’m old,” she said. “I’ve been around a while. How about you?”

“We never know, and they sure don’t tell us. I don’t remember any farther back than the 1990s, which is when I first got to Earth.”

She dragged on her cigarette, let a plume of smoke geyser upward. “Lucky.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” She put the cigarette out in an ashtray on her bedside table, grinding it dead with surprising force. “I didn’t mean to get you into this, but I’m sorry anyway.”

Even now, after all that had happened between us, I still found myself reflexively mistrustful. Who ever heard of a demon apologizing? Was she laying it on too thick? Had I just fallen for the oldest con job since the apple? “From what you’ve said it wasn’t your fault,” I offered. “It was Grasswax’s.”

“Yes, but if I hadn’t tried to leave Eligor-if I hadn’t stolen from him so I’d have some protection against him-”

“Slow down, Caz. You stole from him because you left him? Not the other way around?”

For just a moment I saw the return of that sharp flare of anger, but then it passed and something infinitely sadder crept into her eyes. “He wouldn’t have let me go any other way, Bobby. Once something belongs to him, it’s his forever. He’s that way even with his living possessions-no, even more with the ones that are alive. Someone like me, who’s likely to live as long as he does and would be a permanent reproach to him…well, he’d much rather destroy me than let me go, whether he still wanted me or not.”

“So you stole this…feather. To blackmail him into leaving you alone?” I was mostly guessing since I still had no idea what the feather actually was but didn’t want to reveal the depths of my ignorance. I was relieved when she nodded.

“I guess you could say that. But I don’t want to think about him any more-about any of it. You’re here. I’m here. We may never have this moment again.” She shook her head. “What am I saying? We won’t have this moment ever again.” She smiled a hard little smile. “Obviously we were never meant to be.”

I was badly torn between wanting to tell her I’d never leave her, which was truly how I felt at that moment, and wondering still if this was just some elaborate scam-if I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a cynical ploy from a self-serving demoness. I certainly knew which side the oddsmakers would have chosen, but looking at those wide, almost tearful eyes it was hard to let my more critical self do its job. “Whatever we are or whatever we’re meant to be, you’re right-we have right now,” I said, and pulled her toward me so I could kiss her neck. She rolled closer, then fastened herself against me so that I could feel the wetness we had made together pressed warmly against my leg.

“Oooh,” she said, reaching down and giving me a squeeze. “It appears your chariot is no longer swinging low, Mr. Dollar.” Her voice dropped down to a husky rasp. “What do you say, Wings? Would you like to…carry me home again?”

Caz was asleep, her hair spread in a white-gold fan across the crimson pillowcase, her back nearly as slender as a child’s. I could count every knob of her vertebrae and watch the muscles move beneath the skin every time she changed position.

I crawled out of bed to take a shower. As I dried off I tried to call Sam and the others but couldn’t get a signal. Perhaps the walls of Caz’s hideaway had been constructed to block transmissions. After seeing her secret agent garage, I could believe it. Whatever the case, I was going to have to get in touch with somebody on my side