When I arrived at Jake’s botánica, the mambo was waiting for me, as well as a police ambulance to take away Jake’s body. I had to sign some papers because I had been present when he died. The officer scolded me for not having called earlier. The mambo explained their practice of washing the dead. The officer didn’t scold her. We learned that they would determine cause of death and, it was hoped, release Jake to be shipped home.
As the ambulance drove away, the French child Sophie arrived. “I have come to help you bury Jake,” she said to the priestess. “I was at the death.” She marched inside the shop.
Drawing in air between my teeth, I shut the door behind her and locked it. We stood in the front parlor of the store.
“Madame Vulcaine,” I said, bowing and keeping as much space between us as I could. The part of me not devoted to watching the mambo was wishing that Sophie wasn’t here, listening to everything with that puppyish fascination, as if she feared nothing on the planet. “This is a private matter, a matter of family.”
The mambo, vodou priestess, was a strong-faced, red-brown woman with a Spanish nose and crinkly hair, a lusty mouth and figure, and large hands. She looked only forty—less than half my age—but much older in power and assurance.
She examined me from shoes to scalp. Then she studied Sophie. “You may stay,” she said finally. “We will have use for you.”
Sophie went to sit in a straight-backed chair on the wall, as silently smug as a cat.
I objected. “What use?”
“She knew Jacob. There are so few who can tell his life in the burial ceremonies we must perform—unless he had other women?” She cocked her head.
“No,” I said hurriedly. “Customers only.” I flushed. Whatever Jake’s relations with our customers might have been, mine were not to be spoken of to this woman. “He had no regular . . . female companion.”
The mambo nodded. “Well, boy,” she said in Kreyol. She settled herself on Jake’s broken-down couch, her brightly-woven Caribbean dress sliding stiffly around her like a comtesse’s brocades. “You were to meet me here yesterday. Do you call this giving your kouzen a proper burial?”
“I’m no hounsi,” I mumbled. I had failed to fulfill my initiation, my kanzo—failed disgracefully—and could not claim hounsi status.
“That is no excuse. Your explanation. Begin with how you left our house without warning in the middle of preparation for your kanzo.”
Here it came. I had evaded telling Sophie, and now I would have to tell her and this awful woman.
“You must have heard something,” I muttered. My Kreyol was rusty. Only Jake had spoken it to me in all these years.
“From others. And now I will hear from you.”
I looked at the tips of my brogues and back at her. “I was fifteen, a boy, a fool. I had led a life—I wanted to be important. All boys do.”
I left out the part about hating Eton, hating Cambridge, being hated by my family, about fleeing university to my mother’s people in this woman’s vodou house.
Instead I confessed to the mistake that had changed my life. “At a ceremony, I ate some of the offering food.”
“Offerings are consecrated to the spirits.” Her eyelids drooped. “Sensible boys don’t eat it.”
Like a boy, I blurted, “That was Jake’s idea!”
She made a kiss-teeth sound. “Didn’t Jake warn you that the food was consecrated? That it could harm you?”
I shook my head.
“How were you found out?” she said. “Speak English now. We have reached a part of Jake’s life that must be told in his family.”
Shit. She wanted Sophie to hear this! I mumbled, “The gede found me out. There at the ceremony.”
“Describe.”
“He—Baron Samedi—took possession of his serviteur, my mother’s uncle. His eyes lit on me and he came striding over with those big steps, like a spider. He said something.” I swallowed. “He said that I had eaten his food, so now he must eat me.” Hairs rose on my body. “It was all pretend.”
“All. What all?”
“When he pretended to eat me.”
Mme Vulcaine’s lips made a kind of smile. “He wasn’t really angry.”
“Oh, I think he was.” I could feel Sophie’s gaze on the tips of my ears. “He wanted to know what the big idea was. Why I had done it.”
“And what did you tell him?”
My throat was tight. “That I wanted to be a god.”
Her finely-arched Spanish eyebrows went up. “Only that?”
I flushed hotter. I cast my gaze downward.
“Then what happened?”
“He said, the gede said, ‘Bon, but it will cost you everything.’” Eighty years later, I shuddered at the memory of that unearthly voice saying everything. “Then he put his hand on my head and his other hand on my genitals and he—”
I had never described this to anyone, not even Jake, who had been present at the ceremony but drunk.
“He pushed me together somehow. And then he pulled me apart. Like a concertina. When he let go of me, I was . . . different.”
“And?”
“I was chastised and sent to sit in a corner for the remainder of the ceremony.” The next part was painful to tell, also. “I felt odd for many days afterward. Things happened.”
“What things?”
I drew in more air. “Changes in myself.”
I looked at Sophie. She was leaning forward, her hands twined together. Our eyes met. She had my leash. She urged me on with a lift of her chin.
“I was changing, reverend mother,” I admitted.
“Describe.”
“In my sleep, I found myself flying. Often I would dream I was circling Lake Ponchartrain like a gull on the wing, and then I woke slowly to realize that it was really happening. At times, I dissolved into vapor, and then, when I wanted to, I could congeal into a man again. Once I followed a girl from the French Quarter home to her lodgings, and upstairs, and watched while she—”
Absurdly, I could not say it. I’d spent eighty years with Jake, many of them visiting the bedrooms of women at his command, and also the past twenty years rooming with the sex demons in the Lair on Ravenswood Avenue, hearing every kind of coarse speech, learning how to excel at the same trade.
Now in the presence of these two women I was as tongue-tied as a boy itching in his woolen school uniform. I finished, “And other things.”
“Such as?”
I frowned in concentration. Powers that had terrified me during those final weeks in New Orleans had, over the years under Jake’s casual tutelage, become commonplace.
“I could enter someone’s dream and direct it.” That was what I’d done for the clients who visited this shop. “Or, Jake would make bets. I would enter someone’s dreams to learn how to win them.” I skipped over the years of Jake’s lonelyhearts business—my sex demon work.
For a miracle, Sophie didn’t make mention of it either, even though these past two weeks, she had been here when Jake ordered me forth.
Mme Vulcaine sucked her teeth again, but she didn’t look angry. “Go back. What made you run away from our house?”
I swallowed. “I was too restless. These powers that grew in me—they were a misery, like itches I couldn’t scratch, like dog whistles to my ears. In fact my ears grew more sensitive every day. It seemed I was summoned by something without a voice, but I didn’t know what. It wouldn’t—it wouldn’t shut up.”
Even now I could hear that voice. It was to drown it out I had fled, and rioted drunkenly with Jake on the road, and immersed myself in beers and bongs for twenty years with my slacker demon friends.
I swallowed. “I couldn’t bear to stay still. Finally, only three days before my kanzo, I went to Jake and said I wanted to run away. He tried to talk me out of it. Then, the next night, he said he would run away with me.”
I said nothing about how Jake had taught me to use those powers. I’d already said too much about the uses he put me to.
Mme Vulcaine leaned forward. “Now you will hear some things maybe you never heard before. When you walked into our house you handed us a terrible responsibility. My aryè-granmè made a divination. She learned that you were only an embryo, but full of extraordinary potential, destined someday to grow great. You were a kouzen bound to us by blood and then separated from us.” She paused.
I knew that she referred to my mother, who had herself been the mother of her house when she married my father and went away, pregnant, to her death in France. Mme Vulcaine’s lips closed, exactly the way my French grandmother’s lips had closed when she wouldn’t speak of my mother.
The silence having disposed of my mother, Mme Vulcaine resumed. “When you returned, we invested heavily in you—the teaching, the vestments, the ceremonies we all made to prepare you for kanzo. All wasted when you ran away.”
“I know it,” I snapped. I was most guilty of all for that, for the waste of their care for me.
“Through the dreams of several people, Samedi spoke of our obligation to help you complete your destiny.” She looked me up and down again, not satisfied. “We are still under that obligation. Jacob Pierre did not complete it.”
“I don’t want any destiny!” I had expected her to mock my fifteen-year-old foolish self, who had wanted to become a god. This was worse.
“What you want doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, her eyelids creasing on a silent laugh. “That’s why I’m here.”
“To force it on me!” I shot a look at Sophie. Would she, too, force me?
“No, you idiot.” The mambo leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “To help you as he did, to delay it as long as necessary, until you are ready. When the lwas call, you must come. But sometimes we can negotiate.”
“Negotiate with gods? Of course,” I sneered. “For a price. That’s how priests live.”
“Have I spoken of a price?” the mambo said mildly.
“You will.” My back was to the wall. I’d put this off for eighty years and here it was again, the way of my mother’s people, both a siren call and a foghorn, pulling me onto the rocks even as it warned me away.
Now she will mention the price.
She glanced at Sophie then. I went cold. The child was tiresome, but I couldn’t toss her into this woman’s jaws. She was mine.
I shook my head, trying to shake that word out of it.
The mambo said, “It is my house that has paid the price. To prepare someone for kanzo, this is no small thing. And then you took Jacob Pierre away from us. That may not be all.”
My eyes flared in alarm, wondering what she meant.
“In the course of a proper burial, you would come home with Jake’s body, to take part with the rest of his family. This will not be possible until we know who and what you have become. I can’t unleash who-knows-what upon my house. I can protect you from the lwas . . . a little. But I must protect my family from you, too.”
My jaw dropped. “I?”
She just looked at me. Then she looked at Sophie. “I see that your loyalties are divided. This one has power over you. She may turn your course. Very well. When you know your duty, I will help you, you ungrateful boy.” She rose lithely. “In a few minutes we must begin the next ceremony.”
She went into the back room.
Sophie bounced out of her corner. “Should you leave her alone back there?” she whispered.
Speechless, my heart pounding, I could only shrug.
“I get that a lot, about my ‘extraordinary potential’ and my ‘destiny.’” Sophie nodded wisely. “My father is all about my destiny and my duty to my family. And everybody else wants my money. So, naturally, they see a huge future for me—in whatever they’re selling.”
I turned my head at her world-weary tone. A rich, pretty girl like her probably did know a vulture when she met one.
“I would gladly give her money,” I said. “She wants more than that.”
There was a knock at the shop door. My nerves leaped under my skin.
Sophie looked at me.
I put my finger to my lips. Then I went to the far corner of the window and peeped through the blind.
Baz lurked outside.
I went to the door. “What?” I said through a crack.
He looked at me with resignation and patience. “What’s up? You’re throwing out ‘save-me’ vibes like a drowning cheerleader.” He lifted his chin, pointing behind me. “Is she here?”
I slipped out, shutting the door in Sophie’s face. The summer air was steamy on my face after the freezing terror inside.
I hissed, “The priestess is here. That stalker you sent me to find, she is here as well.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Fast work.”
I took a few deep, steadying breaths of Clark Street’s late afternoon smog. “The mambo—she has some expectation of me.” I felt the cold breath of destiny on my neck.
Baz frowned. “If those women put their heads together—”
My eyes widened as I pictured this. In one bound, I reached the door, yanked it open, and snatched Sophie by the arm, because of course she was there with her ear to the crack. She came tumbling outside. I shut the door with care. The bell tinkled.
“What is your problem?” Sophie scolded, jerking her arm free. She whacked me with her handbag.
Clark Street was awash with rush hour traffic, yuppies pushing expensive strollers from shop to shop, working people getting off buses, and on every hand someone walking a dog. They ignored us.
I moved to the entryway of the apartment building next door and leaned against the bricks, sweating ice.
Sophie yapped at my elbow. “What language was that you were speaking? What does she want you to do? Will you go back to New Orleans with her? I wonder which of the lwas speaks through her? Did you know that sometimes they make new lwas? Jake told me that, but I never learned any of that language she spoke. Will she cremate Jake? Should we go to the funeral?”
“Okay, buddy,” Baz said, ignoring her. He stood before me with his hands in his pockets. “Breathe.”
Sophie perched beside me. “She was mean! I don’t think you should leave her alone with all Jake’s things. Can I have the goat’s head in the waiting room if you don’t want it?”
“Mon Dieu, child,” I groaned, “rest you a moment, if you please?”
“Who’s the—” Baz gave her a look, then another quick look. Did he recognize her as the singer’s stalker? “Wait, is this—”
I nodded. I pulled myself together. “Baz, this is Sophie de Turbin.”
Sophie interrupted. “Wow. You’re Ashurbanipal.”
Baz did a second double-take. For the first time in twenty years, I saw him at a loss.
“Oh, wow! Wow!” Sophie’s eyes were big and bright. Her mouth made a pretty O of amazement.
“Do I know you?” Baz said weakly. These days, he pretended that his brief, meteoric rock’n’roll career had never happened.
I said, “If you have ever been famous, Sophie knows you.”
“Oui, I am a bit of a starfucker.” Sophie smiled broadly. “That’s the American idiom, yes?”
I frowned. “It’s not a ladylike expression.”
“Oh, I hope not,” Baz breathed. He seemed to have recovered his poise. He bent a fascinated stare on Sophie. “So you’re a fan?”
“But of course! ‘That’s My Dirt!’” She leaped up and played furious air guitar, making noises that were part jet engine, part angry cat. Then she did an absurd dance, shouting out the words to Baz’s hit song, squatting, sticking her arms out, stalking stiffly with her head turned to one side, leaping into the air and spinning wholly around to come down facing the same way, flapping her elbows, and making a rude finger, all with a gleeful grin.
Baz had covered his face with his hand. Now he raised one eyebrow at me.
I remembered now that he had offered to seduce her, to get my navel string away from her.
If he had met her a day earlier, he might have had her and welcome.
After last night—
It was only a little love philtre—
Like a fool, I shook my head, mute.
Baz raised both eyebrows as if to say, Are you sure?
“No, I’m not sure,” I said crossly. I wanted to drag her away from him and teach her not to talk to strange men, be they never-so-famous former rock stars.
Baz turned and chucked Sophie under the chin. “Don’t forget me, sweetheart. Your watchdog won’t always be around.”
Sophie languished at his touch.
My teeth ground.
Baz sauntered away.
o0o
“I’ve thought of something,” Sophie announced, turning her full attention on me as Baz left.
It was like a fire hose, that attention, and me, I had been fire-hosed in jail with Jake more than once. “Yes?”
“I can tell my father that Jake’s body has gone to New Orleans. Maybe we can get Mme Vulcaine to tell him so. He’ll believe her. Then he will have to follow, and be delayed, and perhaps he will ask for a delay on the court case as well. Oh! And I have remembered something urgent! He has a DNA sample of the real vicomte! That may be a challenge.”
“He what?” I went cold. How could her father have such a thing? “Don’t tell that woman.”
“Oh, she will not help him,” Sophie said. “I think I like her. She’s direct.”
“So is a rifle.”
“I wonder why she is afraid of you, when you are afraid of her?”
I rolled my eyes. “She is not afraid of me.”
“Do pay attention, Veek! About the DNA sample, I am thinking we come back to the shop when she is not there, and we find something of Jake’s, some hair or a fingernail clipping, and you find a way to copy it.”
I squinted at her. “Copy?”
“Silly, with your vodou demon powers. We know that you can pretend to be old—I have seen it. So, now you pretend that your DNA is like Jake’s.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. But maybe I could lie and say I could. Then if I had to give a DNA sample to the court—but what on earth could her father possess that was of mine? I had taken the umbilical cord away with me when I went to Eton, almost ninety years ago. And why would her father have it? Back then, sentimental families sometimes made jewelry of a child’s hair, but I had always been shaved bald, from childhood. No French nurse would have woven my shamefully nappy cuttings into a ring or a locket.
She was silent for many blessed seconds, apparently thinking this over. “Oh, well. We’ll have to find a way around it. Maybe we can steal whatever it is, his relique, and then we can find a way to make it false. Substitute something else. Or make something of yours match it, the way I said.”
“Too elaborate.”
“Or I can get into his laptop tonight and make an error in his next filing. Something that would invalidate it in court.”
That was a clever thought. “Don’t anger that man,” I said, realizing I was wasting my breath.
Sophie flapped her hand. “If I didn’t, he would think I was ill.” She tipped her face up to mine.
I could see she was still open to me. I took her arms in my hands as roughly as I dared.
She collapsed against me, body to body. Her eyes glowed.
Instantly I was inflamed.
Seduce her.
I pulled her to me for a fast, plundering kiss. Her tongue played hot and quick on mine. She thrust her thigh between my knees.
I was lost and found, falling and flying, and my cock swelled like to mess in my pants. That fire hose was pounding away all my wits, leaving me battered but somehow . . . clean.
With an effort I thrust her away. “Find out when your father is not in his suite. We’ll need to get into his laptop, for case numbers and the like. I want to go online and inspect the document filings for this court case.” I also wanted to find that navel string.
She didn’t look at all disconcerted by that kiss. “Bon. And now we go back to Jake’s funeral.”
“Am I the wind talking to you?” I demanded.
“You have a ceremony now. I get to watch.”
I groaned.
So much for seduction. I might have a chance when she was unconscious.
o0o
For the next two hours, I sat and watched with her. Mme Vulcaine did her part in Kreyol and in the old language, sometimes singing. She made a fragrant smoke with herbs. She lent me a white robe to wear, very beautiful and thickly embroidered. I felt clumsy and ashamed and annoyed, but I hoped Jake slept better to this music. After a while I understood how much he had left behind when he ran away to play vagabond with me. There should be fifty family members here to bid him farewell. But there were only myself, Mme Vulcaine, and this bubble-headed Eurotrash child.
I, too, had once taken comfort in prayer.
Sophie sat like a mouse against the wall.
Mme Vulcaine nodded to me. NowI was supposed to tell a story about Jake.
I cleared my throat. “Me kouzen and I mek party bon joli gro an.”
“Speak English,” the mambo said again, nodding at Sophie. “We do this so that he is not forgotten.”
I thought of Baz, his ancient name now merely the name of a rock band.
It occurred to me now that if I told a story here, these two women would remember not only Jake but me. Jake’s history was also my own. As much as I could tell them in nine days, that much of my youth would not vanish into the grave with Jake.
Baz was right. At the funeral of my oldest friend, I was windmilling on the precipice of eternity.
I began:
“We were really drunk, and we sneaked up on top of a big cattle truck one night. I fell off the truck on the highway and had to dematerialize and fly after it as fast as I could. By the time I caught up with it, the truck was parked by the road for the night, and the driver asleep in the cab. I found Jake had been letting some of the cows out. He was so pleased with himself for doing it so silently. What a mess! I thought we would be arrested for cattle stealing. I wondered if Samedi was in him that night, but it was probably just Jake.” I smiled weakly. “What a mischief-maker my kouzen was!”
I hoped that would suffice. But Mme Vulcaine turned to Sophie next. “What is your story about Jake today?”
Sophie’s eyes were narrowed on me. Don’t tell her how I vanished in the bar last night, I thought.
Sophie’s chin lifted at me, and she turned to Mme Vulcaine. “This happened about two weeks ago, when I had just come. A customer came here. I sat in the back of the shop. Jake went out and spoke to her—I looked around the curtain and listened—an old—a woman about your age, with good rings and a Louis Vuitton handbag and matching shoes. She complained about her husband. Jake asked, did she want him to be a better soldier at night, and she shook her head. She said she had heard that he, that Jake could sell her something to give her a good dream. A dream of a lover. Jake said he could do that and named a price.”
Sophie cast her eyes at me sidelong. “It was twenty-five dollars. She said she had heard it cost much more. He said, it does, more every time you come back. She said, the first one is the cheapest, eh? They both laughed. She gave him money. Jake said, you know I need something more. She pulled one hair out of her head and put it in his hand. Then she went away. Then Jake made a phone call and soon this one came.” Sophie’s head jerked in my direction. “In the guise of a young man as you see him now. Jake gave him such-and-such an address, saying, it is for tonight, blah-blah. I did not see her again in all the last two weeks.”
I was sending Sophie death looks, but she ignored me.
“I think he liked that woman very much, Jake did. Sometimes women came and asked, but he sold them nothing, told them nothing.”
I looked to Mme Vulcaine. She gave a little snort. “That’s Jacob as we heard of him.”
How had she heard of Jake? Had his hellion reputation survived all these decades since we ran away?
I resolved to get Mlle Sophie under control at the earliest possible moment.
o0o
Night fell in Chicago. I went home to the Lair.
It was time to put Sophie’s stolen hairs to work.
I closed the door to my room, lay down, and dematerialized with her fragrant hairs in my hand. I breathed in their scent of expensive shampoo and girl. I sought her in her dreams.
There is a place at the back of the family estate at Montmorency where I used to go to be alone, when I was a small boy. A long-ago vicomte built it for his daughter after they saw what a long-ago Louis had built for Mme Pompadour: a belvedere, a tower, a pretend farm with kittens. While modest, it is lovelier to me than Versailles, because of the marais that surrounds it, many kilometers of wetlands in all directions, lush and fertile, teeming with herons and geese and frogs and the mosquitoes for which the Vendée is famous.
My mother’s people also came from wetlands. When I lived with Jake at the vodou house, we visited the Louisiana bayou often. The day I saw my first alligator, I was completed. When I was a child I would have been delighted to find alligators in our canals. At fifteen, in the bayou, I knew I had come to a better home even than home: peopled with saints, demons, gods, and dinosaurs, marvelous and terrible. I was enchanted.
That was before I ate the food of those gods and paid the price.
My ancestor had built for his lady a grotto, also like the one Louis had built for La Pompadour. He brought in stone by barge, and constructed a great crude maze, not complex, but walled with lichened rocks in fanciful natural shapes. Generations of small aristocratic boys found ways to dig under the walls, creating caves and petits grottos for hiding lunch and slingshots.
Using the hairs I had taken from Sophie’s hairbrush, I sought and found her in the land of Nod.
Conceive of my surprise when I entered her dreams and found myself in that familiar maze on a summer’s day. The grass was ankle-high and starred with buttercups and orchids. While the sun beat down, I wafted along the twisty paths, following my nose to a great perfumed tuft of salsapareille, whose vines concealed the entrance to an old, old, sacred space.
Evidently Sophie had found the secret caves of my youth.
She was inside the cave, asleep even in her dream. She lay naked on her side.
Sunlight shot down through a crack in the rocks. Where a sliver of sunlight fell on her thigh, her skin glowed.
Her knees were drawn up, her arms curled in front of her, her hands clasped at her mouth as if she were kissing them, or breathing through them. Her dark ringlets tumbled over her naked back.
I wanted to eat her. I wanted to protect her.
I impersonated the scent of her shampoo, faded into the smell of salsapareille, and slid into her body through her little sharp-cut patrician nostrils.
Her body was as lovely inside as out. She was soft like a baby, without extreme muscle tone, but fresh and new and unscarred. It would be a pleasure to give her pleasure.
I gathered tiny greenish-white flowers from the vines and crumbled them over her, sprinkling her with fragrant petals.
She inhaled and expanded, rolling onto her back. Her limbs opened. I hovered, stirring the salsapareille blossoms as if with the wing beats of a butterfly. I touched my softest skin to her softest skin.
Her knees parted. What temptation! I resisted the desire to plunge in. Instead I hovered, invisible, tickling her with flower petals, and gently pressed my member to her vulva.
She opened.
Now I was beginning to feel what she felt, a wash of pleasure like small waves lapping sand, as her softness swelled with her heartbeat, beat, beat, beat.
I was nothing, a zephyr, a scented patch of air, the notion of a caress—except for my warm member sliding against her vulva like the warm water of the Mediterranean pressing against a weakness in a seawall. She made a squeak like a stretching kitten. In her own voice I whispered in her head, That feels nice.
I moved an inch further inside her.
With a puff I set the flowers dancing on her right nipple. A spike of pleasure ran from her nipple down, deep into her belly, and hit the spot where we joined.
She squeezed me with her opening. I nearly made a sound. Without meaning to, I slid another two inches into her. She was slick and aromatic and ready.
Moaning, she rolled fully onto her back. There was barely room in this little cave for her to do so. Lazily, she propped one foot up on the rock wall.
Her hand slid over her belly toward her vulva.
Let me, I crooned in her head. I hadn’t meant to speak this time, not in my own voice, but seduction takes its own pace for every woman. Feather-light, I took her wrist in my fingertips and slid my finger down into her palm, tickling it, warming it, pushing her exploring hand away, until she let it rest on the packed-earth cave floor. I slid my palm over hers. I didn’t have to press. She was perfectly willing to let me do this.
Her other hand slipped to the cave floor and opened. I was thus invited.
I smiled.
I put my other palm over hers. Her hand turned hot under mine.
Now, I was nothing but a cloud of flower petals, a breath on her neck, two hands keeping hers still, and my cock, now throbbing on its own, nestled four inches deep inside her hot, slippery sheath.
I didn’t dare go deeper. My self-control was great, but it had limits.
Her breath came fast now. Her heart rate accelerated. Her back arched as if begging, and both her crimson nipples crinkled and pointed outward, showing me the way into her body. Little blossoms clung to her sweaty neck. She would be ready soon.
I began to withdraw my cock.
She sucked in a long breath. “No!” she moaned aloud. If she didn’t come, she would wake.
I pulled back until the mushroom tip of my member caught against the smooth hard muscle of her sheath. She smelled heavenly. I pulled back—popped out of her vulva—and immediately pressed in an inch or so, until I popped back in past those convulsively tightening muscles. Pull—pop—push—pop. My own desire moved me exquisitely, but I controlled myself, keeping my touch on her palms feather-soft as I tortured us both with that in-and-out tease at her opening.
Desire rose in her, too. I tried to flow with it, to abandon my own lust-crazed body and become her, to feel this act in her body and not in my own. Our breath shuddered, our heart raced, our back arched and our nipples begged, and sweat ran into the hollow of our throat. The ocean waves beat harder and faster on the sand. We gripped the phantom cock tighter with every pop.
This was the hardest part of my job.
I had to be ready to flee.
When our moment had almost arrived, I stretched my jaws wide and bit down hard on the back of her neck, below the hairline.
We screamed.
I whirled backwards into vapor, into nothing, while she flopped like a fish crying, “Ah! Ah! Ahhhhh!”
The reflected sun-glow in the grotto dimmed. I found myself hovering invisibly over her bed . . . in a hotel room? I saw a dull-colored, ugly, framed print of a sailboat on the wall over her head. Yes, and a smoke detector on the ceiling beside me. Hotel.
Bodiless, I still hungered for the orgasm we had shared. If I slipped back down into her body I could share the aftermath.
But she was waking now.
And someone turned the handle of her bedroom door from the outside.
In a flash I whisked behind the filmy window curtains.
Her father put his head inside, looked at Sophie on the bed for a moment, and withdrew, closing the door silently.
I passed invisibly through the glass, slid down the outside of the hotel, slipped inside through a ventilator, and materialized in a storeroom near the hotel’s lobby. There I paused to concentrate on my own room back at in the Lair, forty blocks north.
Dematerialize. Find my room. Rematerialize.
Back in my room in the Lair, it wasn’t until I had finished off my own desire, wanking until my wrist was tired, that I remembered that I had forgotten to search her room for my navel string.