open.
Adrienne was lying on her side, head up on one hand, like an impossible double vision with her slumbering physical form beyond. She winked.
“Now admit it. That was scary. Woof-woof-woofity-woof!”
“You vicious shit! I hate dogs. They scare me, since I was a little girl!”
“Technically that was a hundred-and-forty-pound Canadian timber wolf, not a dog.” Adrienne laughed. “Consider it a literalized metaphor. Didn’t they cover that in your English Lit courses?”
Then she sat up and stretched, looking down at her own body and stroking the slumbering form’s cheek. “I learned how to do this when I was about thirteen-young to be night-walking. Think of the auto-erotic possibilities.”
Ellen forced her breath to slow. Was that the faintest rank dog-scent still in the air?
Could scent molecules come off a body that’s made out of random energies? Oh, shit! “Ah…” she said, collecting herself.
Get into the conversation or she’ll think of something else to make your mind leap and quiver.
“Not real practical for a girl, I’d think.”
Oh, eww! she thought, at images that sprang unbidden. Autonecrophilia? “Oh, there are ways. But, of course, if you can turn into a wolf or a tiger, human beings are easy, provided you’ve got the template. That’s probably how the legend about turning into a vampire or a werewolf if you were bitten by one started, but it’s really the other way ’round. For example…”
Ellen blinked. Then she was looking at a woman taller than Adrienne, blond, full-figured…
That’s me! “In the pseudoflesh,” Adrienne/Ellen said, wiggling closer and giving her a lingering kiss. The lips were fuller and softer, the taste of the mouth subtly different.
“Have you never wanted to make love with yourself? I can assure you that you’re very good in bed. Ah, Monica warned you, I see. Still, there’s some interesting fear and horror there.”
Oh, God, now I’ve got to fuck my own ghost? “It’s more like making it with me wearing a you suit, but let’s give it a try, eh?”
She took one of Ellen’s hands and placed it on a breast; the firm-soft fullness was eerily familiar/not…
Half an hour later Ellen whimpered: “Well, don’t stop…”
Then she opened her eyes and screamed again. Adrian was kneeling between her legs… Adrian to the last detail, except for the wicked slyness of the smile, her/his hands busy again.
“I could be this form when I was thirteen too. Just think of the possibilities. Autonecrophilia indeed!”
“Oh, God!”
“Let’s play a game, ch?rie. You pretend I’m Adrian, and I’ll pretend I’m you pretending I’m Adrian. I warned you this was going to be a carnival of the perverse.”
It’s not going to hurt. I know what’s really happening. Get a grip, Ellen, she thought, repeating it like a mantra. Get a grip. Don’t lose it. Get a grip. Pretend it is Adrian. You’d be going berserk with joy if it was. Get a grip.
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” she/he said, grabbing Ellen’s ankles and levering them back and up.
Weight pushed her down, shoving the sensitive bruised skin of her back and shoulders against the cloth until a flash of fire ran across them. Adrienne looked down at him/herself for an instant, poised above Ellen.
“This is easier because it’s a Shadowspawn body and one so similar to mine except for the XY thing, but there are the most intriguing differences. On the downside, the sensations are all so much more localized; the rest of your body might as well not exist. On the up, there’s this tremendous focus. As if everything in all the world was reduced to the need to… thrust.”
“Uhhn!”
“Like that. Now move with me… and grip…”
Later, a panting whisper in her ear amid the hard mutual effort: “Your mind is opening like an orchid of glittering light… not quite yet… Pleasure and pain and horror… are you listening?”
“O… kay… yeah… mmm… please… bite me after… please… oh, please…”
“Soon. Soon.”
“God… can’t… oh, God…”
“I could turn into Adrian’s wolf, right now. Woof, woof, woofity-”
Ellen felt her control vanish. She began to scream from the bottom of her lungs, over and over again as the scarlet mouth closed on her throat and teeth sliced.
“Right, we’ve got it all ready,” Harvey said.
Adrian took a long breath and looked around. It wasn’t precisely a cave, but the overhang was steep where seepage had eaten the limestone away to leave a pocket of cream-colored rock. A couple of gnarled red pines clung to the surface above; a trickle of water ran out and down the slope, still living with the last of the spring rains. The evening was warm on this south-facing slope covered in dense maquis, but the growing evening shadows hinted at a cool night.
There was an intense smell of sage and spice and pine-sap, of cool rock and cold spring water. He dipped a hand into it and drank to wet his dry mouth, tasting an intense mineral cleanness. He felt empty and light; he’d been fasting for two days with only water to drink, good preparation for prolonged night-walking. A healthy body could go without food for a week or so anyway, and in deep trance for far longer.
“It is time and past time,” Adrian said grimly. “I can feel my base-link with Ellen. She is being hit… very hard. Particularly the last few nights since we met in Paso Robles.”
“Pain?” Harvey said.
“Not so much that. My sister likes to rend and break minds more than bodies, to sculpt the self until it is as she desires, and she is extremely good at it. Ellen is very strong, very resilient… but consciously she is without hope while her memories are blocked. Much longer, and there will be permanent damage.”
“Now’s as good a time as any. Lucky for Ellen, Adrienne’s gonna be distracted with her social obligations.”
He ducked under the camouflage tarpaulin that he and Harvey had rigged. When they fastened it behind them the darkness was intense even to Shadowspawn eyes, and the older man clicked on a dim blue light. Adrian lay down on the air-mattress, and Harvey zipped up the thinfoil sleeping bag. With his body heat, that would keep him from losing too much to the earth. Then he held out his arm, and the other man arranged the saline drip.
The slight sting of the needle as Harvey taped it to the inside of his left elbow awakened him from the seductive voice of the trance. He smiled as his arm was arranged.
“Tucking me into bed again, Harv?”
The Texan chuckled. “Hell, you weren’t that young when I pulled you out of the Br?z? stable. Just into your obnoxious teenaged years as I remember. Remember real well.”
The older man held a small tube of liquid to his lips. “Puree of Wilbur Peterson,” he said. “Probably they got the DNA for replication from strands of hair or the bone marrow, considerin’ how old the body was.”
Adrian drank the neutral-tasting liquid. “Thank you for that thought,” he said, and concentrated.
Within him mechanisms that had evolved long before the age of polished stone assimilated the paired helixes of a man who had decided that immortality was too much to bear.
“Since we’re probably going to die in the next thirty-six hours…” he said, when he was ready.
Harvey grinned like a gargoyle. “Shit, you don’t have to pay me back that twenty bucks you borrowed for beer. Forget it.”
“Then just let me say that if we make it, I’m back in the war full-time. After my honeymoon.”
Harvey froze for an instant, a blue-lit troll. “You are? Any particular reason?”
“For one thing, I don’t think Ellen will stay with me if I don’t, or anyway, I find I can’t stand the thought of her bad opinion of me. For another, I have been infected with the delusion called hope. It is more comfortable than sanity, in the long run.”
“Glad to hear you’re back in.”
“On my own terms.”
A chuckle. “I always sorta liked approaching it that way myself. You ready?”
Adrian sighed. “I am reluctant. It is not the danger, you understand…”
“The danger of possibly eternal torment? Hell, that makes me reluctant, ol’ buddy. I do it anyway, but I’m reluctant as shit.”
