Incubi

gesture. It was nearly violent.

Yet his voice remained serene. “Love iss transposition,” he whispered. “You are not yet ready to transpose.”

Veronica’s fascination played with her rage.

“Before you can love another person in truth, and be loved by another, you must first learn to love yourself.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Do it,” he said. “Don’t think about it, or vunder. Do it.”

“Do what!” she exclaimed.

He pushed her legs further apart and looked at her sex.

Oh, my Lord, she thought. Somehow he had seen her on the balcony. He’d probably been watching from the door. Strangely, though, she felt no embarrassment. Just frustration colliding with her lust.

She brought her fingers to herself and began to masturbate. Marzen remained knelt in attendance between her legs. His erect penis pulsed almost directly above her moving hand. She glided her other hand up and down over her body. This combination of sensations felt even better than Marzen’s oral ministrations.

Her sex felt burning now; it was thumping against the careful succor of her fingers. She looked up at Marzen, at his shining muscles, at his erection, thinking that seeing him would give the experience more spark. But it didn’t. Transposition, she thought. I am not yet ready to transpose. She didn’t even know what that meant, yet it clearly worked within the structure of this bizarre, self-investigating liturgy. So she closed her eyes and thought about nothing. She fought to banish the image of other men from her mind. Her moisture continued to well. Instead, she thought about herself. She pictured herself touching herself, loving herself, and then she began to come.

She moaned beneath the shadow. Marzen’s silence gave evidence to a poignant supervision, and this, for some reason, made it feel better. Frantically her fingers teased repeated orgasms out of her sex, her buttocks flexing. Her fluids seemed to throb out of her sex, a tapped cask of flesh and pleasure. She’d never come this hard and this many times in her life.

Soon she could go no further; the jolts left her sex so sensitive another touch would make her scream. As her fingers came away, she felt the sudden hot spurts land across her stomach and breasts. She knew what he was doing, and it even pleased her; it sated her, being dampened by the fluids of his own orgasm. The last of his ejaculation dripped warmly onto her belly.

She lay panting for a time. Her body turned to rubber. She opened her eyes and saw his penis limpening in the dark.

“Now zat we have loved ourselves, next time we can love each other, ja?”

Next time? “Just give me a minute,” she pleaded. “I’ll be ready again in a minute.”

Her disappointment gaped. Marzen got up and left the room. Before he closed the door, he said very quietly, “Pleasant dreams.”

Veronica sighed. She had no energy left to reply, or even move. Then the door clicked shut: finality.

The long lines of his semen began to cool. She ran her hands over them, thinking of body lotion, and covered herself as much as she could. It dried quickly to starchiness — more finality. She wasn’t wearing his semen as much as she was wearing him, and that idea consoled her. Even though Marzen was gone, she still had him all over her.

She fell asleep on the carpet, curled up as a warm ball. The scent of him mixed with her musk, and the joyous exhaustion, rocked her consciousness away.

She dreamed all night.

She was standing naked in the deepest grotto. A figure ascended — a figure composed entirely of flame. The figure was caressing her. Beneath its fiery skin, eloquent shapes moved, the suggestion of flesh. Hands of fire kneaded her body. A mouth of fire kissed her lips. The fiery shaft of the figure’s penis entered her sex and ejaculated endless spurts of flame.

She knew that the fire was love.

It didn’t burn her. It didn’t hurt.

All she felt, as the fire devoured her, was ecstasy.

Chapter 10

“It’s not metal,” Jan Beck said the instant Jack Cordesman walked into her lab, which occupied half the basement of the county’s HQ. Myriad junk filled the workup section, shelves of glassware and chemicals, rows of fuming cabinets, comparison microscopes, and squat machines. Jan Beck looked tiny amid all this, for she was tiny herself. She looked desperately thin in her lab coat. Her hair was flat ashen brown and frizzy, and she wore huge spectacles. In her hand she tapped a fat camel’s-hair brush.

“You want a Coke, sir?”

“Sure. And what’s not metal?”

She opened a refrigerator and got two sodas. Jack had time to glimpse a clear-plastic evidence bag containing one human foot. Then the fridge door sucked shut. “I worked up the n/a/a-scrape,” she said, handing him a bottle. “The weapon that opened Shanna Barrington is not composed of metal.”

“An airplane knife or something? One of these polycarb jobs?”

Jan Beck shook her frizzled head. “Plastic composites would be easier to ID. It’s some kind of stone, I think. Our spec-indexes don’t provide reference for stone-cutting objects, so it’ll take me a while to ID.”

He guessed she was about forty. She’d worked for the state police for years, and had come to the county for more money and because “county gets better homicides,” she’d told him once. Jack often wondered exactly what constituted a “better” homicide.

“Stone,” he said after her.

“Something brittle. It shredded well against the ribs and sternum. Some of the particulate residue I could actually gander fucking bare-eyed.”

Jack loved this woman’s sense of terminology.

“—but it’s also something that takes a mean edge. Flint, maybe, or obsidian. Some of the initial incisions could’ve passed for scalpelwork.”

A stone knife, Jack contemplated. He’d have to inform Faye Rowland as soon as possible. The instruments of the ritual could lead to the ritual itself.

“And your killer’s blood is B neg,” Jan Beck said.

This was a bombshell. “How the hell…? Her fingernails were clean. And you said this semen didn’t type.”

“They were, and it didn’t. Salined random bloodstains and malachited them. Shanna Barrington’s type was A pos. One of the malachite samples gave a different hue, so I factored it. All that shit the killer left on the walls, the triangle and the symbols, was done in the victim’s blood. All except one.”

“Aorista?” Jack speculated.

“Good guess, sir. That word was written in B neg. What’s it mean, by the way?”

“A process that doesn’t end,” Jack muttered

“That’s a kick from your end.” Jan Beck’s cynical grin looked vulpine. It was her way of saying, You’ve got a real winner here, sir. A killer whose buzzword indicated an unending process was the same as saying I will not stop. But Jack was thinking about the blood. The fucker cut himself, he thought. Why?

“We’ve got a hair problem too,” Jan Beck went on. She led Jack to a labtop piled high with red hardcover field texts. Morphological Differentiation of Human Hair, one title read. And another: Microchemical Cortex Analysis. Several large CRP slide frames hung from a glowing lightboard. Jack saw that they contained long kinky hairs.