VEEK

Her pupils were dilated—oh yes, she wanted more. But in this moment she was thinking of me. I had to smile.

Behind me, like bats skittering in the night of the past, Jake warned, Never jizz inside them—then they have your seed. It gives them power over you. Even longer ago, the games masters at school belabored their health precautions. Use a sheath, you don’t know where she’s been. The French games masters, that is. All the English schoolmasters pretended there was no such thing as sex.

I smiled down at my little anemone. She hadn’t even asked me to put on a condom. There was no need—among the many conveniences of being a sex demon is knowing that one leaves no trace and takes nothing away. But she didn’t know that.

And now I was unprepared.

I couldn’t bring myself to set her a bad example.

As if she knew what I was thinking, she turned her head. “I think condoms are in the nightstand drawer.”

I reached past her. My cock got pressed between us and I nearly lost control. I got the drawer open and groped inside—yes, thank her friend and her friend’s boyfriend, foil packets. I took some, dropped all but one by the pillow, and held up that one.

“I’m sorry, but we must part for a moment.”

She made a face, but she allowed me to draw away and lie beside her. Her eyes followed my every move as I tore open the packet. She said, “I wonder—”

“Yes?” Would she never stop talking?

“What it feels like for you. With or without a condom. All the European boys hate them. The English, eh. Americans seem to go off like touchwood, regardless. Is it really different?”

Chattering again already. How many orgasms would it take to silence her? I looked at the rolled condom in my hand.

She took it from me. Her eyes danced. “Let me.”

She bent over my cock and went to work. I was no longer surprised at her experience, but her skill! First, she capped my cock with the rolled condom. Then she unrolled it over me with lips, teeth, and tongue. She licked up the length of my cock like a child licking a popsicle, circled the rim, and flicked me on the tip, making me gasp.

“Lie back! You are so stiff!”

“I thought that might help,” I murmured.

“You will explain to me exactly what it feels like,” she instructed. “Then later, with the condom. Science!” She smiled brilliantly.

I sighed.

She thrust me back until I couldn’t see her face. She wanted to know what fellatio felt like?

Time for more sex demon magic.

I closed my eyes and let my awareness drift partly out of my body and into hers.

Her little mouth managed my cock as a cowboy manages a green horse, gently, firmly, with little sounds of scolding and encouragement, and her hands helping from time to time.

Let us be one, I thought.

We merged.

I could tell how smooth and hot was my cock on her tongue, how tightly it filled her throat. At the same time I knew my own sensations and shared them with her, the exquisite squeeze of her fingers on my root, the play of her tongue-tip on the head of my cock.

Did she notice that we both felt the same things? She giggled—the giggle echoed in my ears, in her throat, on my cock, in her ears. I think she liked that, too. She giggled again, gagged, and withdrew to wipe spit off her chin.

I let myself merge more deeply under her skin, feeling her nerves as if they were my nerves. Let us be one for now.

“How are you doing that?” we said, and, “What? Did you say that or did I?”

She burst out laughing, and I laughed with her.

Both our bellies trembled with it.

We looked in one another’s faces, our eyes perfect mirrors echoing our startled pleasure back and forth between us.

I had never done that with Jake’s clients—looked in their faces.

It led to vertigo, to deeper merging, a sense of timelessness.

She saw me seeing her through my eyes and felt what I felt, and it shocked her, too. Echoes rolled back and forth between us.

I saw myself through her eyes and realized why she didn’t fear me. She saw a frightened boy, stiff in his school uniform, lost, lonely, and hungry for love.

At the same time I knew she was seeing herself as I saw her, and it shocked me to realize that here in my deepest place I saw a leopardess, fearless, avid for life . . . but kind. Even in her power she was kind.

She liked me.

I quivered like a blancmange, boneless with amazement.

Moreover, she now knew I was smitten with her. I was in her power, seed or no seed.

Was I beguiled by my own love philtre? Subservient to the navel string? Had Yoni’s singing worked this magic on me?

Nonsense, I heard her think. As she shared my mind and heart in this moment, she knew that I knew I had no defenses. Something in her had conquered me—no power greater than ordinary love.

Worse, she knew it. I supposed because she was a woman. They always know.

I felt myself dissolving.

Panic caught up with me.

I dissolved in fact, letting her sink to the sheets as my body evaporated under her.

I floated backward, watching her as a rabbit watches a cat.

She turned over. Her eyes were full of loss and bewilderment.

“No!” she wailed, sitting up, clutching the sheets.

I had thought I was strong enough to disappoint her.

She sobbed, “Vee-ee-eek!”

“Sh, sh, I’m here,” I said, materializing beside the bed. I reached for her hand. “Soyez tranquille.” My insides groaned with longing. I wanted to climb inside her and shut out the world.

She yanked me onto the bed and into her arms.

I pulled a blanket off the floor to cover us. She burrowed under it, clinging to me with all four limbs. “Don’t do that,” she said into my armpit. “Don’t disappear.”

“Sh, no, I won’t.” I only wanted to comfort her.

“You did before! In my dream, in the maze, on the Marais Poitevin,” she accused. “I woke up alone.”

“Wait. When did you dream of me?” I demanded.

She made an impatient sound. “I already told you! It was two nights ago. I was in my secret place back home, inside the maze at our Petit Trianon, and you visited me. You had many skills in my dream,” she said demurely.

I was dumbfounded. “Did you see me?”

“But yes. You were covered in salsapareille flowers and you had this tattoo.” She pushed me away and sat up energetically, bending around me, tracing between my thighs with her fingers. “Here, a serpent. Does it go all the way down?” She burrowed busily in my lap.

I hadn’t time to be shocked. Her fingers tickled.

“Stop, monkey!” I got hold of her hands and held them. “How could you see me? I was invisible.”

She shrugged. “To whom?” Before I could answer this unanswerable question, she was off again. “The tattoo I like best is the kingfisher perched on a massette, how you say, a cattail reed. It reminds me of home. Here!” She tried to roll me over and I wriggled out of her way, catching at her hands. “Now tell me, how did you come to be with me?” she commanded. “That night?”

“In your hotel room?” I was still hard like a stone. My thoughts came slowly.

“In my dream,” she said, slapping the bed impatiently. “You knew how to get through the maze. You found my cave. How did you do that?”

Well, there I was, caught. I had to answer a direct question. “I stole some of your hair from your hairbrush.”

She looked blankly at me. “When?”

“In the bar that night. After those men attacked you.”

“How did that help you find me?”

“I can follow your smell, your taste. A picture is also useful. But if I touch something that was once part of you, I can never get lost.”

“Is that what Jake meant by your leash? What is it?”

I lay there breathless, panicking, nailed down by her questions. Now I had to tell her.

She put a soothing hand on my arm. “You can trust me. I’m on your side, remember?”

That was right, she was. It might be for foolish reasons. But she wanted me to succeed against her father, though she thought it would be fraud.

“Well? What is the leash?”

I confessed, “It’s the cord that joined me and my mother.”

Her mouth made an O. “What’s it look like?”

I spread forefinger and thumb. “About so. A twist of dried-up old brownish-red stuff, like a strip of leather.”

“What can it do?”

I looked her in the eye. “Do you mean, what can you do to me while you have it?”

“No!” she protested. “I thought it was, oh, magic.”

I leaned toward her and put my hand over her heart. Had I made her love me? Too late to know. I said, looking into her eyes, “With it, you could kill me.” I held my breath.

She frowned. “My father must never learn of this.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I said sincerely.

There was silence. I imagined I could hear thoughts ticking inside her brain like ping-pong balls.

At length she nodded. “I will help you find it. If Jake gave it to me, it’s in my clothes or my stuff I had with me while I was visiting his shop. All those things are at my father’s hotel suite. We’ll go now, and we’ll look for it, and we’ll find it!” she said with determination.

“We?” I eyed her.

“Of course I will help. I want to raid his computer again and see what progress he is making at trying to find Jake.”

“He’s trying to find Jake?”

She rolled her eyes. “Do catch up, Veek!”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’m not catching up too quickly.”

She flapped both hands. “Oh, never mind.” She flopped back beside me and pulled the blanket up to her chin, smiling up at me. “I wish you could come to see our Petit Trianon for real. It’s beautiful at this time of year. The summer flowers are almost over, but there’s fruit in the orchard, and the canals smell good whenever it rains, and they’re full of fish and crevettes and turtles. We can get a picnic basket from the cook and go into the maze in daylight. I’ll show you all the secret places!”

I could see it and smell it in memory. The cows would be moved from pasture to pasture on barges, chewing cud as calmly as if it were natural for cows to ride in boats. Thousands of lavender and pink and white marsh orchids would spear up among the reeds. I closed my eyes. The scent of wild iris filled my memory, and my bones melted with nostalgia.

She murmured, “The frogs make this noise, burr-roop, wip-wip-wip. If you hold still and listen hard enough, you can become weightless and fly up into the clouds!”

All this talk of Montmorency lit the candle of memory and threatened to burn me to ashes.

Would I ever see it again?

“And we’ll play tennis, and you will teach me to box!”

I blinked. “How do you know I can box?”

“But you were school champion at Eton!” Then she fell about laughing. “Oh, right. The real Clarence was school champion at Eton.” Her hands flapped again as she whooped. “You’re amazing. I believe you will do it! We’ll get the leash and we’ll outflank my father and you’ll win!” She beamed at me.

My gloomy thoughts couldn’t survive, awash in all this puppyish optimism. Sophie could conquer the world, if all it took was confidence and youth and sparkle.

Madcap and idiotic as her plans might be, she was giving me back the future.

Smiling, I touched her chin with one finger. “Every man needs someone to believe in him.” She smiled back at me with a sophisticated, womanly confidence. I said, “Nothing flusters you, does it?”

I leaned forward again. I knew a sex-demon kiss that would send sparks flying off the tips of her ears.

Our lips met.

A bang came from downstairs.

“Goddammit, what the fuck?”

Sophie froze. She sat up with a gasp, snatching at the blanket. The whites of her eyes showed.

More banging came from downstairs, and a man’s drunken, angry voice. “Somebody up there?”

She leaped out of bed and began pulling on her clothes.

In that moment, I realized this was not her friend’s house.

There was no friend.

She had broken into a total stranger’s house so that we could fuck in comfort on a bed. Typical Sophie.

I got up and pushed open the bedroom window. There was a roof outside, big enough to stand on.

I whispered to Sophie, “Dress. Get out the window. Wait. I’ll deal with him.” I gripped her arms and gave her a little shake. “You can.”

Angry footsteps were already thumping up the stairs, no louder than my heart.

I faded into vapor and whisked out the bedroom door.

The drunken householder was halfway up the stairs. He wore nurse’s scrubs and a thunderous scowl, but I could see in his aura that he was as scared as we were. He had an umbrella in his hand.

As he turned the corner at the landing I flattened against the wall, stuck out a foot, and tripped him.

He tumbled to the landing. I was right behind him. As he tried to get up I picked up the umbrella and thrust it between his legs.

Down the stairs he rolled.

I didn’t wait to see if he had hurt himself. I whisked up the stairs, into the bedroom, and threw on my own clothes. Sophie was gone. The window stood open. Bon, she had got out. There was no doing anything about the smell of sex or the mussed sheets, but I pocketed the condom Sophie had put on me, and its torn foil wrapper. I swept the unopened condoms off the bed, threw them into the open nightstand drawer, and slid it shut.

Was that the last of our traces?

Curses and thumps came from below. Well, he hadn’t broken his neck. I didn’t mind having sent him down the stairs, but I was sorry for any man trapped in one of Sophie’s adventures.

I tiptoed to the window, clambered through it, and slid it closed. I found myself standing on the front porch roof.

Of Sophie, I saw no sign.

I rolled my eyes.

Inside, footsteps were coming up the stairs again, slower and with more curses. One hoped that the householder thought he had tripped himself on his umbrella.

Time to vanish.