“Probably,” Adrienne said calmly as she sipped from her own glass. “In fact, she’s probably picking up someone as much like you as she can find to kill that way right now.”
Ellen closed her eyes for an instant, struck with a sudden stab of unbearable pity for someone she’d never see or know. A girl who was just meeting dark gold-flecked eyes and a sharp white smile, whose story would end in a scream before the sun rose.
“I think you gave her an itch she couldn’t scratch,” Adrienne said. “You have the most interesting mind.”
“And I’m frightened of the world now. It isn’t the world I thought I was living in! As if suddenly I’d wandered onto another planet or another dimension or something.”
“Like having the lid of the Abyss whipped out from under your feet?”
Ellen nodded. “Finding out about you was bad enough. But tonight I really realized there’s a whole world of… of Shadowspawn out there. There always was, just a step or a thought or a chance away.”
“You met Adrian on a tennis court. Which led to meeting me, of course.”
She nodded again. “So one of you might have killed me anytime, like something walking out of a nightmare. One of the nightmares where you scream and scream and it doesn’t make any sound, and the thing drags you back to the basement to do stuff to you and everyone ignores you as if you weren’t there… and worst of all is that I know I can’t ever go back to the way things were on Wednesday. Because they weren’t actually that way, I just thought they were.”
Adrienne chuckled. “A Greek philosopher once said that knowledge was the treasure nobody could take away from you. That’s not even literally true. I can make humans forget things. So can vodka or a ball-peen hammer! But it’s stupid even on its face. A wiser one said that no man can step twice into the same river, which translates as: You can’t get a lost illusion back.”
Ellen nodded, finished the sweet wine, and took a deep shuddering breath.
“What do you want?” she made herself say.
“Everything, forever,” Adrienne said. “But you mean right now?”
She gave a sideways glance and rolled a hip into a playful bump against Ellen’s.
“Well, it’s been a long exciting day, but the night is young, and I’m naturally nocturnal. Let’s have some fun, you and I.”
“Do you want to… hurt me… that way?”
“Not tonight.”
Her hand stroked Ellen’s back slowly, from the neck to the base of the spine and back, over and over.
I mustn’t tense up. Remember what Dr. Duggan said.
A flicker of another voice; it slipped out of her mind before she was conscious of it.
I mustn’t. My life depends on it.
Instead she made her back arch and tried to push everything but the mere sensation out of her mind.
There’s nothing wrong with having your back stroked, if you just think about the thing itself.
Adrienne stepped behind her and began massaging her taut neck and shoulders. Strong fingers worked at the long muscles along her spine.
“Mmm,” she said aloud, and thought:
Okay. If I’m not getting hurt, the sex doesn’t gross me out by itself. There were a couple of hookups at NYU, remember, Ellen? That was just sort of… bland and not worth trying again. If this were a fantasy you were having, it might even be hot. Christ, it is sort of hot, in a skanky, degrading, horrible Oh-God-please-no-no-no sort of way. You can do this.
The velvet voice continued in her ear, a murmur: “Sometimes I will give you pain, sometimes pleasure, sometimes utter horror. Sometimes all three. Tonight it’s Option Number Two.”
Another deep breath. “I’ll try, I’ll really try. But… I don’t know if I can.”
“We’ll see.” Adrienne finished the Tokay and smiled, taking her hand and tugging her gently along. “Come, ch? rie, come. Let’s play.”
An hour later she stared up at Adrienne’s face where she leaned on one elbow, their bodies touching from neck to toes. Strands of the other’s black hair stuck to her neck and breasts, tickling sweat-slick skin that felt as if it had thinned to taut foil that might burst. She tried three times to speak, gulped air and said: “Wha-wha-what did you do to me?”
“Well, I would have thought that was obvious!” Adrienne chuckled. “Just now your mind was like… sunlight flickering through beech leaves at noon. Delightful!”
She rested a thigh across Ellen’s; the voice was a lazy purr as she trailed damp fingers across the other’s stomach in an infinite series of tiny tight circles. Ellen felt as much anger as boneless relaxation allowed.
“You’re doing things to my… my brain or something!”
“Not unless you keep your brain here… Oh, you mean that special thing, as Monica puts it? No. Just feedback. I can sense every tickle of sensation, even when you’re not aware of it yourself. Especially when”-she moved-“we’re close. There’s a reason for the demon lover legend too, ma douce.”
A memory flashed through her: a conversation with Giselle about Adrian when she was hashing out her relationship problems with her boss-slash-best-friend.
Best sex I ever had. Like magic. Like every part of his body was reading mine, just right! “Just so,” Adrienne said. “It runs in the family.”
“God, how I hate you.”
“I know. But I’m not bland, eh?”
“No. That was fantastic. But you’re not as good as your brother, either.”
Ellen flinched, but the thought had been in her mind anyway. The caressing hand moved suddenly and clamped on her groin, tight enough to be just short of discomfort.
“Let’s see if you think so when you know what that special thing is like-”
“No! Nnnnnn! ”
For a long instant she thought what she felt was unbearable agony. Then she made a single convulsive movement and locked in a shuddering arch, collapsed, tried to arch up again. Everything vanished except a wash of gold fire that radiated out from the contact at the center of her, out to the very ends of her being and back. She screamed as unbearable tension and its release combined in the same moment, one that stretched on and on in surging waves.
Reality returned like a tide slowly going out. Their lips met; arms and legs intertwined.
“I still hate you,” Ellen whispered into the curve of her neck. “I’ll always hate you.”
“You have odd ways of showing it. You were already rosy pink, but you just went red, with spots!”
A nuzzling at her neck. “A taste, a little sip for the flavor.”
The sting was very slight, and her body relaxed as if she’d been plunged into a warm bath; the panting and quivering died down, which was reassuring.
Since I thought it might be nerve damage.
A tongue lapped up the slow trickle from the little cut, taking the drops as they welled up. Languor spread out from it, calming, a floating drifting feeling. It was less passive this time; all the sensations were distinct, and her hand tangled in the black mane, holding the other’s head to her neck.
Oh, God, but this feels good too. Double the afterglow. It is addictive. Oh, God, if it were Adrian…
“Like… cookies and milk?” she said when it ended.
“No. Coconut-chocolate macaroons and eighty-year-old Tokay.”
“God, why don’t you just do that ‘special thing’ thing to yourself, if you can?”
Adrienne rolled over on top of her and looked down, head cocked to one side. Ellen stroked her back, rubbing hard into the muscle from beneath the shoulder blades to legs and back. The Shadowspawn wriggled and purred against her, breasts and stomach and hips touching, thigh between thighs, utterly unselfconscious in her enjoyment of the moment.
It was disturbingly like petting a cat.
Human-sized… naked… wet… musky… horny cat lying on top of you and licking drops of your blood off her lips. Molested by a man-eating tiger. Oh, Christ! “We can do that to ourselves,” Adrienne said after a moment, her eyes heavy-lidded. “But we generally don’t.”
“Why don’t you?”
