Untitled.FR11 (23 page)

He eased onto the dirt road, the slow crush of gravel tight and grunting beneath his tire wheels. Switching off his headlights, he trusted the moon to light his way.

Katt felt the power as soon as she and Sherry crossed the threshold. The place welled with assurance, rising up through the floorboards. She walked in its embrace, a dim cool calm about her as she built and lit the fire. People would call her crazy— Katt herself would have thought so a few weeks ago—if she spoke of the energies she felt here. Let them. Or rather, let the power’s intensity, at least, be a secret. Even from Sherry.

Anyway, the energy vortex, the influence of the moon, all of it could be seen in two ways: as real, which still struck her as flaky; or as an externaliza-tion of the state of her being in this place, her body, her mind, her spirit focused for some reason as sharp and blazing as the flames in the fireplace. She could relate to it as goddess power or whatever and yet think of it as psychological shorthand for her inner truth. No problem, no contradiction, and no craziness, not really; just a wisdom that defied logic.

About the rising blaze, Katt tepee’d thick branches.

Tonight she didn’t need to be under the skylight. It felt right to move the sheepskin rug before the hearth and lead her lover there where the quick heat of the fire made her clothing cling like hot wool. Sherry’s dark tinsel of red hair caught the fire’s antics, her pupils dancing with the flicker and crackle of it. Katt embraced her. In her ear she whispered, “I love you,” and heard its echo return in low tones, Sherry’s soft lips at her lobe. Their hands roved, unbuttoning, sighing down zippers, pausing to thumb up tight nipples under bras and then nipples without bras.

Must keep my mind on the task at hand, she thought, a temptation just to surrender to the pleasure. But Sherry, all unawares, needed healing; and Katt needed to heal her. Although the vortex made no accusation against her—indeed it asserted the rightness of her actions—she felt as if a measure of atonement would be hers if she healed her lover first thing. It would convey closure. A renewed sense of integrity almost. Then, that done, she could revel in her friend’s flesh, as her friend reveled in Katt’s.

Shuddering with delight, she broke from Sherry’s lips and knelt to unbutton and wiggle down and remove her jeans and her lace briefs, burying a kiss into the smooth pillow of pubic hair, sniffing the glistening nub and lips. “Lie down,” she said, doffing the remainder of her own clothing as Sherry did so—took an instant, tossing backward behind her. Then she knelt to share with her sweet friend a kiss and the heady aroma of her juices. Sherry’s hands rose to caress her. Katt gently removed them. “Lie back for now. Just let me touch you.” And she turned her attention then to Sherry’s mound, her fingers again easing their slow way inside her, deep as they could go, her left hand resdng a moment on her tummy, then moving into her private hair and beginning to scan inward toward the uterus.

Katt’s back, though not uncomfortable, felt less warm than her toasty front. This place spoke of security. The power held her in its warm palm, the rich air buoyant as a soft blanket and replete with what felt, since Lyra’s talk a few weeks before, like the assurance of a goddess. What name had Lyra used? Artemis. Felt right. Felt like just thinking that name summoned out of the firelapped darkness an approval lying almost within hearing. And mingled with that approval was a stern, if muted, reproach about Conner and what she’d nearly done to him; her attack upon her son had been a wrongful act, prompted by the needs of ego, not by spiritual necessity. But in that upbraiding, there lay a sooth of forgiveness.

Sherry moaned, a pattern of brief delighted surprise. It was her learned way to signal approaching orgasm, mouth teased open, eyes closed, back arched, breasts thrust like mounded heaven wantonly upward. The saddle of Katt’s palm rhythmed against her lover’s moist nub. She slowed it, an effort to focus away from sex and toward the troubled area within. She closed her own eyes. She found it, a wayward expansion of cells, and bathed it in twin flows of energy, one from the hand that lay above, one from the tips of her inthrust fingers that nearly touched the place. Her lover squirmed beneath her attentions, and Katt rode the motions like flotsam over rolling ocean. Awareness and trust were all she needed. Her hands held assurance, became conduits for the chthonic power that taught her body as it streamed through to its cure. Love. This, too, the healing she put forth, was love. It and the silent rhythm of palm against moistened pearl were but two facets of the same generosity of spirit.

The badness dwindled, increasingly banished as Sherry gave in to her rising abandon. Katt midwifed the birth of inner harmony, the coming into correct focus of previously troubled flesh and the unstoppable release of deep orgasm. They melded, the two healings. And they held there, clung tight together, the air filled with joy and the sweet high terror of Sherry’s voice pushing beyond the power of lungs to express. Katt wept with happiness. For one insane and certain moment, she knew she would tell her. Here in this cabin, here where the goddess enfolded them, what Katt had done to Marcus—even what she’d nearly done to their son—would make perfect sense. Sherry would understand. She’d commiserate and forgive. They would share the pain, share the grief, their common womanhood speaking below the level of everyday law and logic, conspiring over deeper truths.

Katt withdrew her fingers and Sherry fumbling brought them to her lips, kissing the moistness. Then, still weak from lost breath, she gasped, “Come here,” drawing Katt to her, downward, torso to torso, the hot sweat, the touch of mouth to mouth, Katt’s arms resting upon fleece (hot here, cool there), the grapple at comfort, animation below where skin glowed, new arousal eager for its twin.

Gunshot! She let out an unformed sound. Scatters of impression. The thoughts wouldn’t cohere, not fast enough for her fear. Not a gunshot. Even as she turned her head and saw the door jittering from the crash, the shape moved like a wraith through the room, the night coolness touched her calves, upraised arm on the thing hurtling toward her, silver gleam, a held silver bone that arced down like dull pewter sweeping through burnished air.

Sherry deafened her right ear with a scream.

A No! almost made it to Katt’s lips.

Then the world thundered out.

Well-behaved earth. No twigs snapped underfoot, moon giving sufficient outline to things, the three steps up to the door by the canted flagpole nice and firm, no telltale creak to betray his coming. So when he took a deep breath and burst in, charging at the flames and trusting that his victims would be there, surprise was on his side. Seconds of surprise would be crucial. Two combatants were one too many. He had a clear shot across the carpet, lumpy shapes he processed as clothing only later, chairs and couches at the periphery—and, good fortune, resolving like photos in a tray, their clasped unclothed bodies, helpless, stunned, ready for capture.

His rush was seamless. Get one! was his only thought and all else was acUon. He clonked the top one, a brutal stroke to the skull. She went out, falling on the redhead where notions of rising had be-pm, falling so heavily that he heard a quiver in the redhead’s scream. She flailed at the body above her, t tying to escape. Inert buttocky mass blocked his way loo. He shoved at it with his wrench hand and grabbed a fist of red hair, wanting too many things at once, opening himself up. In the next instant, as the old one rolled off, he was tensed to yank the other’s skull to the floor, hard and fast enough to stun her at least, then follow through with the wrench. But her knee she abruptly wedged in his belly, air gone. She was water. He toppled beside the liquid squirm that was the redhead getting away and grabbed her ankle, his remaining strength concentrated in his grab, so that she fell forward. Breath returned in sufficient quantity to leap at her, cover her kicking legs with his body, his wrench hand at her right thigh as if to measure a new silver thighbone. Cold metal on flesh. She struggled to rise, her bare back a curved porcelain ripple below a fury of red hair.

Absurd word above, like odd tan lines: MINE.

He grabbed upward at her left shoulder, felt tension, felt her try to shake him off. But he had her pinned, and he was stronger, and his breath was back in full. Sped-up turde-tug forward. He’d gained a foot upward, leg flails now from chest to thigh. The first blow of his wrench had little power. The second one fell solid and her struggles abruptly ceased.

Out.

His face was burning up. Chest heaving at the exertion but soon okay. He had the urge to pulp her head with blow after blow, silken red hair flying up amid the bloodspray, matted then in stickiness. But there were drillings to be attended to, a pump-priming on the body of this temptress, followed by a weave of screams that would get through loud and clear to their accursed sex across the globe.

He whipped two lengths of rope from his jeans pocket, binding the plain one’s hands behind her with one of them. Enough. Weren’t going anywhere, that one. She’d probably be lying here on the rug, still out, when he came back.

The other rope he used on the sexy one, flopped hands at the small of her back above her sleek butt, that absurd word MINE moving her shoulderblades. He hefted her hot bag of bones and sand, a fireman’s carry, neck canted left to make room for her warm curve of thigh. Behind him, the fire crackled, and the room he passed through reminded him of his den growing up. But he was already thinking of the huge oak where he’d left his things, beside a recently dug and filled-in hole, spade handle poking up from the earth. He hoped the found hole was deep enough to bury them both. If not, he’d have time—their hoarse torment still ringing in his ears—to dig deeper.

He unlatched the door and slipped out, careful not to bump Miss Pretty’s head on the jamb.

Skull shiv. Coarse twists of hair tickling her lips. Sheepskin. Wisped fleece. Then it rushed to her knowing. Katt forced her eyes open, expecting them to be there, the man from Alfalfa’s, Sherry bound and gagged.

No one.

The fire crackled behind her. When she tried to push up, she discovered the numb tingle of restraint, wrists in proximity, maybe an inch of give between them. Face down. She brought a knee up, shifted, winced at the agony in her head. Continued. Got her knees under her and aching rose to them, scrape of one elbow against the cold stone of the hearth. She yanked at the rope, arms still feeble and not much strength there. Except for one dangled end, bristles like unshaved stubble, it eluded her grasp. Yanked again. Again. The cabin was oddly calm. She felt like she ought to feel panic, urgency, but she didn’t. Anything might’ve happened to Sherry. They’d been attacked. Now her friend was gone, surely overcome by the maniac who had rushed in. He could be raping her, killing her, far off in the woods. But the stillness of the cabin spoke otherwise. Lethargy, inevitability, kept her quiescent. She felt like a docile farm animal, roped, drugged, stunned. The snap of burning logs throbbed inside her skull where he’d hit her.

Then a muffled scream shattered the sdllness.

It knifed into her. In an instant, lethargy was gone and her attendon was riveted on the door. Katt yanked at the rope, over and over. More power behind her movements. Nothing gained. The bastard was hurting Sherry. Hurting her deeply. Katt’s skin felt like it would burst outward, so great was her need to break free and stop him.

She struggled to her feet. Sea of fleece below. She was naked, her hands useless. The thing was absurd. Even if she succeeded in opening the door, there was nothing to be done. Had to get this rope off. Sherry’s scream died. Then a whimper rose into hearing and ratcheted sharply up, a new unbearable scream that topped the first and rode its spiral of agony to new heights.

Katt looked around wildly for something sharp. Thigh backs burned with the nearness of the fire. She could see nothing that wouldn’t take an eternity to do the job—move into position, secure the jag somehow, then rub against it as Sherry endured unspeakable torment outside.

Knives! Katt glanced over at the kitchen and saw the knife handles angling up from a block of cedar shoved back on the counter. Her heart sank. With her hands tied, she had no chance of reaching them, and time was running out.

Then it came to her.

Bum the sucker off. The rope was thin. Felt old as well, from the dangle hanging down. Get it going and snap it free. She’d burn herself too, but that was curable and fast. So swift was the thought, so certain the plan, that Katt fancied the goddess herself was speaking it. She sat on the hearth, sauna stone, and clasped her hands together behind her, willing a protective envelope of healing there as she thrust them backward into the fire.

Curved roar of heat. Image of her hands as torch, an orange wrap of flame about them. She yanked them out, not half a second in there. It was okay, she assured herself. Okay. No pain, no singe, her mind sustaining a protecdve field around them, the twin clasp of hand to wrist drawing healing power from inside and seemingly from the air about her. Trust in it. Sherry’s voice skirled in torment. An instant later, no thought of hesitation, she again plunged her hands deep into the flame. Wrist hair crisped like an army of ants moving with steady purpose, but her skin bore up as though it were covered in water. She felt as if she wore oven mitts, smoldering, browning, threatening to give in to the tremendous heat surrounding them.

Felt right. She drew them out, unclasped, kept alive the protecdon as she yanked. The rope was burning, licks of flame at her wrists. Yanked again. The sucker snapped and her hands' swung around wildly forward, almost throwing her off balance. Arcs of fire. Had to douse them. Hands out before her, still resisung burns, she ran to the sink and twisted a faucet and soaked the frayed ends. And then she let lapse the envelope of protection, her skin glowing hot as if she’d just evaded a burn and it hadn’t yet quite decided to blister.

Katt considered the knives. Took one. But knife use called for close-in work. She wouldn’t get near enough to be effective and she was a terrible throw. No, she needed something larger, more like a bludgeon.