attended me, always nearby but never landing. My horses awaited my command. I was such a sight, though, I don’t think he ever noticed them.” She took another puff on the pipe. “He only had eyes for me.”
“How’d it go?”
“I brought him to a cottage a lot like this one. I even put out a lavish dinner, with some of this.” She held up the wine bottle. “That turned out to be a mistake.”
“Now how can a goddess make a mistake?” I asked, convinced I’d finally caught her in a contradiction.
She was too tipsy to notice my mocking tone. “Okay, not a mistake, exactly. See, I decided not to allow myself full access to my knowledge of things. I wanted to feel surprise, to understand truly what it must be like to not know. So, because of that, I did something that, had I been at full oneness with everything, I would not have done. I gave wine to a man who should never, ever drink.”
“What happened?”
She snorted. “A drunken sailor, a pretty girl, what do you think happened? He didn’t try to rape me, exactly, but he wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer. I finally had to subdue him, which he later put down to too much wine. After all, no mere girl could overpower him. But I did warn him not to ever again try to compel any living thing on the island to act against its wishes. My little experiment was important to me, I’d grown fond of what I’d created, and wanted to really see what this man was about.”
The gown had slipped further down. I wanted above all to kiss the line of her collarbone over to her neck. I couldn’t believe I was so monumentally, thoroughly horny; I hadn’t felt this much single-minded lust since… ever.
“When he sobered up the next day, I watched him in secret as he wandered around the island,” she continued. “My animals were gifted with a higher awareness than those you know, so when he spoke to them, he could tell they understood. I didn’t let them talk back to him, because I didn’t want to send him screaming for the hills. But I did want him to get an inkling of the gentleness and goodness existing beyond his normal perceptions.”
She paused for another draw on the pipe. “He understood,” she said in a cloud of smoke. “He felt it. Andrew was a decent man, with a kind heart and the ability to feel love. Until he started drinking again. This time he did attempt to force himself on me, and I let him know I was no ordinary woman. I broke his thumbs like that.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate the ease. “I told him that I’d forgive his bad manners once, but only once, and if he did it again, I’d show him just what I could do. Then I healed him. Of course it didn’t occur to him I was a real goddess, he just thought I was some well-studied magician or witch. Again, if I’d let myself know all I could know, I would’ve seen this wasn’t the best approach.”
She tossed the pipe casually into the fireplace, where it fell between two burning logs. She stood and walked to the door. “He stomped off, furious and embarrassed. He found a squirrel, who’d become his special companion over the time he’d spent with me, but he was in no mood for its compassion.”
She paused, looked outside, and when she turned back tears glittered in her eyes. “He grabbed it and tore its head off as easily as I’d hurt him, because in his drunken rage and humiliation, he had to hurt something. He threw its little corpse aside, discarded like some piece of garbage. This squirrel had been his friend, you understand, it had followed him and listened to him and kept him company so he wouldn’t be alone. It brought him nuts and placed them at his feet. And he killed it with no more thought than I just gave to that pipe.”
She took a drink, followed by a deep breath. “Whew. Sorry, it’s just all so fresh to me. That squirrel was part of me, just as you are, just as everything is. When I felt it die, I grew furious, and let my pain lash the island in a storm. I almost killed Andrew with it, in fact, but I was not about to let him off that easily. He fell asleep in the cottage I’d made for him, but he awoke the next morning back on the beach where he’d washed up. I’d wiped the island clean of everything, so that it was only a bare rock in the water.”
She walked back to me as she spoke. “I told him exactly who I was, exactly what I was, and that he was to leave. And do you believe it? He had the audacity to say, ‘And what happens if I don’t?’ ”
“What did you do?”
She smiled coldly, and for the first time since I arrived at the cottage, I felt a little hint of fear. “Oh, Eddie, I showed him just what a pissed-off goddess was capable of. I snapped every bone in his arms and legs, then pushed them up into his torso. I twisted him into human jetsam, Eddie, and cast him back to the sea.” She gestured with the bottle, sloshing wine across the room. “And I cursed him with the worst fate I could imagine; a long, long life.”
She nodded to indicate the end of her story, took another drink and fell heavily into the rocker. “He’s still alive, too. He wants to die, because the pain never dims for him, but I’m not ready to let him. Not yet.” She finished the bottle and flung it vaguely toward the kitchen, where it shattered against the wall. “But as you can probably understand, he’s still pretty mad at me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if she’d just noticed the effect she’d had on me. “Uh-oh,” she said, her voice slurred, “I got so wrapped up in my story I forgot about yours.” She jumped up, nearly fell backward and, giggling, extended her hand to me. “Come on, Eddie. Time for your reward.”
She pulled me to my feet and over to her bed. I put up no resistance. When she pulled the sheer gown over her head, I noticed for the first time that she was deathly pale and emaciated; as ill, in fact, as Nicole had said. Not that anything, at that point, was a turn-off. She was still the most sexually arousing woman I’d ever met.
I gently lifted one of her arms. Great scabbed welts ran along the inside, almost from her wrist to her elbow. Some were red and oozy from infection. “Damn, Eppie, what happened?”
“Hm? Oh. This.” She pulled her arm free, held it up and dug her fingernails into the soft flesh. She ripped down to the inside of her elbow, and gasped at the sensation. I grabbed her before she could repeat it on the other arm. She struggled weakly in my grasp.
“Don’t stop me, Eddie, I crave this. Ripping myself open reminds me, in any weird, twisted, perverted way you want to call it, that there is life and a world to embrace.”
The blood ran in thin trickles down her arm. There should’ve been more; her illness was serious. But she sighed with almost sexual satisfaction as the pain faded. “I have visions of poking a stiletto through my cheek,” she said breathlessly. “Imagine the tear. It’s tough, the cheek. But it can be broken.”
“You need help,” I said.
She shook her head. “I need to be fucked. I need to feel it the way you do, while I can. I’ve indulged every human impulse. I’ve opened this body to everything, to every one. And it’s killing me. I don’t have long, Eddie. Neither do you.”
I should’ve pursued that comment. It was right there, the bit of information I needed to understand the imminent danger. But when she blatantly grabbed me between my legs, my baser instincts took over, and I no longer cared about anything else.
She pulled me onto the bed. I disrobed as quickly as I could, and she spread herself for me without delay. She wrapped her legs around me and pulled me close, her hands in my hair. Her body was hot with fever, yet amazingly strong. I looked down at her face, drawn tight with something more like pain than desire, and felt emotions I could barely remember gush through me like a river. “Please, Epona,” I asked seriously. “Tell me how you know about Janet.”
She kissed me with a tenderness that, to this day, can bring tears to my eyes. It was a kiss of such compassion, such unconditional love, that it melted every wall I’d built around my heart and opened me to her. She held me while I cried and said, “I know about Janet, Eddie, because I welcomed her when she crossed through the veil. I felt her pain, the horror at what happened, her utter terror at both dying and leaving you.”
I rose and looked into her face again. I saw every woman I’d ever loved, in any sense, in those dark eyes. My mom, my grandmother, Phil’s mom, Janet of course, and even Cathy. “I really tried,” I sobbed. “I would’ve died, too. I wanted to. But I didn’t. And they made me watch… ”
She caressed my cheek. “Shhh, Eddie. Janet’s safe in the Summerlands now. She’ll wait there for you. But she also knows you have more time in this world, and wants you to be happy here.”
“With Cathy,” I said as I wiped my eyes.
Epona shook her head. Her voice grew harder, sadder. “It’s too late for Cathy. And it never would’ve worked, anyway. She’s close to what you need, closer than you can imagine. But she’s not the right one.” She kissed me lightly. “It’s not too late to learn from it, though. Don’t be a jackass next time, LaCrosse.” She arched her back. “And for now, don’t be anywhere but with me.”
