“What are we doing here?” Vigil whispered. There were about a dozen shadows occupying seats in the theater. I carefully counted down four rows from the back and then counted over eight seats over from the far right wall.
“Ritual,” I said. “I learned about it from a pornomancer who owed me five ounces of cocaine, blessed by the Antimatter Buddha. Fucker turned out to be full of shit, but he taught me this in trade.”
“Why would you even need blessed…” Vigil dismissed the troubling thought with a wave of his hand. “What does this ritual do?”
“I’m consulting a local expert on our missing princess.” I spotted the seat I needed and moved down the aisle toward it. The seat was occupied by a man who looked like a guilty suburban husband. I sat down in the row behind him and Vigil sat a few seats down from me. “Hi,” I whispered to the man. He practically jumped straight in the air. “I really need your seat. It’s kind of got sentimental value for me. It’s where Dad proposed to Mom after she got out of prison.” I dangled a hundred-dollar bill beside his face. The man snapped the hundred out of my hand, got up, and left the theater without a word. I moved to the now-vacant seat, and Vigil sat down next to me.
“Okay,” he said, “you got the seat you had to have, now what?”
“Now,” I said, “I masturbate.”
“I’ll see you in the lobby,” Vigil said, standing back up. “Someone tries to kill you, you got my number if you can’t bludgeon them to death.” I couldn’t help but laugh softly.
“Hey, you’re the one who insisted on coming along,” I said. He gave another dismissive wave.
“Who the fuck you trying to contact?” the Elf muttered as he exited the theatre. “Pee-wee Herman?”
The room settled down after Vigil departed, and I felt the raw Svadhisthana force permeate the room, and I was physically at its center. I opened my senses, viewing it like a swirling orange fog, billowing out of every patron in the room. I opened my sacral lens wide and felt the lust, the wordless need, strum my nerves like a harp. I began my tantric breathing, my focus, as the power flowed through me, an invisible river of silent aching, so sweet and so demanding, all at once. Desire makes crack look like Skittles.
I felt myself become aroused. I stoked that fire inside me, almost oblivious to the shabby, counterfeit lust playing out a dingy fantasy on the movie screen. While the intent of many of the patrons may have been unsavory, wrapped in chains of guilt, violence, and repression, their energy was as pure as sunlight. I was acutely aware of myself, of my body and the root power churning around me. My hands clutched the arms of my seat, but slowly my fingers loosened and my hands came free to clasp each other, palm in palm, facing skyward, thumbs in opposition, acknowledging the dominance of the water element at work in this place. I began to shape and carve the energy around me, in me, of me, using very precise hand movements, mudras, as my sculpting tools. To a casual observer, I was moving my hands quickly in my lap in a dark porn theater, nothing to see here.
I felt the sweet pressure build in my loins, and I denied myself the release, raising the desire to even greater levels, build and deny again and again like climbing a mountain built of ache. In a timeless place, my body and mind were aware only of the subtext of my reality, not the trappings. Because of the nature of what I am, my building energy began to flicker at the edges of the other patrons’ auras. I felt several of the men in the room ejaculate, pushed past the threshold of self-control, or casting that control away willingly. To my perceptions, each release was an explosion, a bloom of salamander fire. I almost came too from the flood of sexual energy but my training won out, and I rode the swell of power, greedily hoarding my own sexual energy, using it and theirs to send my call out through the jagged walkways to the other places, the other spheres, lands where energy and intent replaced words and coin. This Svadhisthana power, harvested this way, it was her language, and I used it to barter with her. I felt her near, always near to her city, to her unknowing worshipers and sacrifices, to her sacred places. She was outside, waiting for me.
The movie, the men fucking on the screen, the patrons, many of their faces still locked in a grimace of ecstasy, all slowed to exist in the silence between two heartbeats. The shuddering stream of light from the projection booth was now a solid beam. An orange fog rolled all around me, and the shadows seemed to congeal. I stood, adjusted my jeans to accommodate my tumescence, and headed up the aisle. Best not to keep a goddess waiting.
Vigil was in the lobby, sitting in an old chair with duct tape covering rips in the faux leather upholstery. The chair was next to a sun-faded plastic fern in a pot. He had his cell phone to his ear, engaged in a conversation. The orange fog swirled everywhere, making him move very slowly as it cheated time. His Fae physiology was resisting the spell I had just cast, but the power behind the spell was powerful enough to slow even him down until I got my answers. I walked past Vigil, the recognition and surprise just beginning to spread across his face in slow motion, and waved as I pushed open the lobby doors and stepped out onto the street.
The streetlights and the now-muted glare of the marquee were all pale hues of tangerine. Everything seemed grainy, slightly scratched and jumpy, like an old celluloid film from
