Authors: Shana Figueroa
Vengeance (16 page)
He rocked his hips into hers and she matched him, deeper each time, clutching his chest to hers until she thought she might melt into him like a stick of butter left on a hot stove. The furnace of his mouth breathed a cadence into her ear, his stubble branding her cheek, and before she could stop herself, she'd let him take her mouth with his. He kissed her deeply and she kissed him back, long and hard and desperately, as if they were lovers who'd been apart for years and not strangers who'd met only two weeks ago. The wisp of self-control Val had left slipped away, and he dominated all her senses. In the brown of his eyes she watched flecks of glittering amber, like embers from a fire, pop in and out of existence as he moved through her, gazing into the depths of her being as she gazed into his, looking for something that'd been missing in their souls and finding it in each other. He'd finally released the inferno she'd sensed in him, the fire he struggled to keep hidden. It was hers now. And in that moment, she was completely his.
His thrusts became stronger, faster, deeper, until he moaned and his eyes closed. His hips stopped; he was climaxing, and in the midst of a vision. Though her body screamed for him to continue, at the very edge of her own orgasm, she took a few seconds to observe his slack faceâthis was what she must look like when she climaxed, like she'd slipped into a trance. Now she knew.
Val kissed his unresponsive lips, wrapped her arms around his neck, and rolled against him. Still hard and throbbing inside her, his taste still ripe on her tongue, she buried her head in his neck and fell over the edge into orgasmâand saw fire.
I'm in a park. Wet, brown leaves litter the ground. I feel the heat of a vicious fire behind me. People are screaming. I run from the flames, following a paved path that winds around a big white building underneath wide arches. The Space Needle looms straight above me. I round a cornerâright into a clutch of terrified bystanders.
“It's her!” one of them yells. “She set it off!”
Someone else yells, “She's got a gun! Help!”
“Put your hands up!” a man orders me from behind. I turn to face a plump-cheeked police officer, his baby face twisted in fear as he aims a pistol at me. His gun shakes. I raise my arms. The gun goes off. My chest explodes as a bullet rips through my heartâ
Blur.
I'm running away from the fire. I cut to the left, off the paved path and away from the group of people I know are around the corner, one of whom will flag down a police officer who kills me. I skate along the back of the building until I find an unlocked door. I go through it and enter a dimly lit storage area, metal shelves with tagged boxes and knickknacks dividing the room into slender hallways. I cut down the middle at a quick trot, panting from the adrenaline coursing through my veins. Suddenly I stumble and fall to the ground; a searing pain tells me I've been hit in the head from behind. I try to get up but I'm struck from behind again. I collapse flat on my face. Bony hands flip me over, and an older man with a gaunt face, thin smirking lips, and a shiny suit looms over me.
“Miss Shepherd, I presume?” he says.
My head is swimming and my body stays limp despite my desperate pleas for it to move.
He checks his watch. “I've got a few minutes. Let's see if the carpet matches the drapes, shall we?” He pulls down my leggings and starts to unzip his slacks.
“No,” I moan as shear panic grips me. “No!”
He frowns and puts a hand over my mouth. “We can't have that.” He lifts a crowbar above my headâthe same one he likely hit me with from behindâand brings it down with crushing forceâ
Blur.
I hug the wall of the storage room, gun drawn, scanning for the man I know is lying in wait to rape and murder me. I see movement to my right. I spin around just in time to catch him lunging at me with the crowbar. I shoot him three times in the chest. He crumples to the ground, dead. Resisting the urge to spit in his face, I continue through the room until I get to the other side, where a door leads out to a service hallway. I run through the hallway, past stacks of pallets stocked with merchandise for the gift shop. At a fork I make a left, and go through another door into a space exhibit that's been closed off for renovations. I search frantically for the exit, trying to navigate the maze of displays in near total darkness.
As I'm making another lap around the Mars section, I run straight into Norman Barrister. Before I can raise my gun, he clocks me in the face so hard I fly backward and crash into the wall. My gun falls out of my hand and disappears somewhere on the ground. He grabs my sweatshirt in both hands and throws me against the wall again. I pound his chest with my fists and kick him in the shins, but his massive frame absorbs the blows with more irritation than pain. He lifts me in the air and slams me into the ground, knocking the wind out of me. Then he wraps his giant hands around my neck and squeezes. I claw at his hands but they're like metal vises, and his grotesque face, warped in homicidal fury, fades from my vision as blackness closes inâ
Blur.
“You know what you must do, and yet you keep dying.”
I'm in a high-rise penthouse office. Walls of glass surround me. A city of neon glows in the night outside. Not SeattleâShanghai or Tokyo maybe. The city provides the only light for the sparse office composed of a single desk and a couple of chairs. A woman with silky black hair and an all-white skirt suit stands in front of the glass wall, her back to me.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Do I know you?”
“We have always known each other,” she says. She has a strong English accent, and speaks slowly with the high-pitched breathiness of a child but the deliberateness of a sage.
I address her blurred reflection in the glass. “I don't want to die.”
“Nor do I. But some things cannot be avoided.”
“I can't. I need toâ¦I was⦔ I try to recall how I got here. What I'm doing here. I can't. “I was with Maxâ”
“Excellent.”
A kernel of memory pops in my brain. “Barrister. Norman Barrister. I need to stop him, expose him. How?”
“By living.”
“But how?”
“Pray at the base of the mountain that touches heaven.”
“I don't understand.”
“Consider what happens if you do not.”
Blur.
I'm standing on the balcony of Max's house, the balcony where he threw his father to his death. The sky is overcast, the water is black. All of the glass is cracked, and trash is strewn everywhere. At my feet I see a weathered newspaper with a headline that reads:
President Barrister Declares War.
Before I can check the date or read the article, the brightest light I've ever seen bursts in the sky and mushrooms upward. I hear and feel a rumbling that grows louder, shattering the glass around me, until a shockwave hits and I'm engulfed in flamesâ
“Val.”
I'm screaming as the fire chars the flesh off my body and roasts my bonesâ
“Val!”
Max's face came into focus, his brow knotted in worry. He grasped her wrist with one hand while the other covered her mouth. With a shudder of relief she realized she was still in the boathouse, naked on his lap, her flesh uncooked. He removed his hand so she could speak.
“You started screaming,” he said.
“I died, over and over, and then I saw the whole world die⦔ She couldn't get out any more before a wave of tears overwhelmed her. She buried her head in his chest and sobbed.
Max hugged her to him and lay down on the bed. Arms wrapped around his chest, she cried into his bare skin while he stroked her shoulder. As his essence infused her senses again and she remembered the ecstasy of being with him right before her horrible vision, her tears began to wane. She focused on the beating of his heart underneath her ear, the warmth of his skin against hers. When she'd calmed down enough to be coherent, she told Max what she'd seen.
“Have you ever had a conversation with someone in a vision?” she asked him.
“No, but all I see is numbers, so I wouldn't know even if I did.”
“She said we've always known each other, but I've never met her before. I wouldn't forget that voice. Then again, if she's from the future, then maybe we'll meet later? I don't know how all this
Back to the Future
shit works.” She sighed. “What do you think âPray at the base of the mountain that touches heaven' means?”
“Mount Everest could be âthe mountain that touches heaven.' Or it could be another tall mountain. Or a metaphor for something else entirely.”
She rolled her eyes. “That's helpful. It'd be nice if she'd just spoken like a normal person, but I guess that would be too easy.”
“Maybe she has to interpret her visions, too, like I do. Ethan told me his were like flipping through the pages of a graphic novelâstatic images with captions and dialogue bubbles. He said sometimes they made no sense.”
“What were your visions like with Ethan?”
“It was an unending string of nondifferentiable numbers. After some research I realized it was two different fractals.”
Val took his hand from her shoulder, turned it over so his forearm faced up, exposing his tattoo. “Are these what you saw?” She ran her fingers across the intricate shape that repeated itself the closer she looked, like thousands of brilliant aquamarine snakes eating their own tails.
“Yeah, that's one of themâit's called the Julia set.” He held up his other arm. “This is the otherâthe Davis-Knuth dragon, also called âtwin dragon.' Ethan said they were important and I shouldn't forget them, but it's been six years and I still don't know what their significance is.”
“What else did you see with him?”
“That was it. Just the one vision.”
She lifted her head and met his gaze. “Are you saying he didn't rock your world?”
Max shrugged. “I wasn't that into him honestly. It was an effort to work myself into just the one vision. And he insisted on being on top, and that I call him âbig brother,' which was fucking weird.”
Val buried her head into the crux of his shoulder and laughed.
“I'm glad you think it's funny.” He ran a finger up her spine; she yelped and arched her back at the tingling sensation. “Just be happy I didn't ask
you
to do anything bizarre.” He let out a long exhale and stared at the ceiling. “Even though I wasn't attracted to him, I still begged him to stay. I was so tired of being alone.”
She lifted her head. His eyes met hers when she touched his cheek. “You're not alone anymore.”
He cupped her hand in his. “And neither are you.”
“What did you see with me?”
He frowned. “The number
pi
until it terminated.”
That didn't sound especially interesting, but Max's sudden haunted look made her think it had some significance in the world of numbers that she missed.
“Will you get that tattooed on your arm, too?”
“I don't have enough room for that unfortunately.
Pi
is a lot of ink.”
She rested her head on his chest and traced the outline of his abs with her finger. “Well, this is great. I saw myself die horribly a bunch of times and met a woman who talked in riddles, and you saw the number
pi
. Real useful, all around.”
Val adjusted herself against him. When her thigh rubbed against his manhood, she felt him harden. He must have the same accelerated libido she did, always craving something that remained eternally out of reach. She pushed herself up so she was face-to-face with him, his warm hazel eyes with their starbursts of green in the center studying her in that way that melted her from the inside.
“Doâ¦you want to try again?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“You're not feeling sick or tired or anything?” She pushed a lock of hair from his brow and searched his bruised face for hidden signs of distress.
Max bear-hugged her, and with a whoosh, he'd rolled on top of her. “I feel great actually.”
There was no way he felt great after everything that'd happened that day, but his full smile and the joy in his eyes convinced her, at that moment anyway, it was true.
“What about you?” he asked. “You sure you want to risk seeing something horrible again?”
“We need to keep trying until we have a plan. And as long as you're on the other side, I think I'll be all right.”
His lips seized hers, and Val didn't consider stopping him this time. She hugged him close and relished his weight on top of her, her rock in the storm that raged around them. With her legs wrapped around his waist, he slipped into her and flowed in and out, slow and deliberate, prolonging the act. They both knew the journey to climax was the best part, the buildup, the falling into each other until she didn't know where he ended and she began. Her fingers traced a lazy path over every soft hill of his vertebrae, up to his thick hair and the fine coat of sweat that misted his scalp.
Like before, Val tried to think about the accountant or how to save Delilah without dying, and like before, she could think of nothing but Max. She breathed in his breath, tasted his tongue, smelled his sweat, felt his mass atop and inside her. When his thumb caressed her lips, she seized it with her mouth, clasping it with her teeth, running her tongue along the folds and grooves until he filled her completely. He moaned into her ear, and she couldn't hold out any longer. Every muscle in her body tensed and her chest arched into his. She dug her fingers into his flesh as a wave of ecstasy rolled over her. A desperate cry escaped her chest to stay with him and not slip awayâ
A Frisbee flies overhead, caught by a teenage girl, who throws it back to her partner. I'm surrounded by families in a public park, the Seattle skyline glinting in a clear, azure sky. A warm breeze tickles my skin. The grass around me is so green I think someone's littered the ground with emeralds. A little boy runs up to me with blond hair and gorgeous brown eyes with bursts of green at their centers.
“For you, Mommy,” he says, and hands me a dandelion.
I reach for him as he runs away from me to gather more flowers. I feel kisses on the back of my neck, hands resting on my shoulders.
“Let him go,” Max whispers into my ear. “He'll be back.”
Blur.
A Frisbee flies overhead, caught by a teenage girl, who throws it back to her partner. I'm surrounded by families in a public park, the Seattle skyline glinting in a clear, azure sky. A warm breeze tickles my skin. The grass around me is so green I think someone's littered the ground with emeralds. A little girl runs up to me with silky black hair and gray eyes.
“For you, Mommy,” she says, and hands me a buttercup.
I reach for her as she runs away from me to gather more flowers. I feel kisses on the back of my neck, hands resting on my shoulders.
“Let her go,” Max whispers into my ear. “She'll be back.”
Blur.
Max grabs fistfuls of clothes from a dresser drawer and shoves them into a duffle bag.
“Fine, just run away,” I say, my voice shaking. I tremble with rage, and there are tears on my cheeks. I don't know why. “Run away like you always do.”
“I can't do this anymore.” His face is haggard and his eyes are red like he's been crying, too, though his anger has overwhelmed his sadness. “We're never going to find her. They will always be one step ahead, and I can'tâ¦I can't.” His voice chokes up. “I'm sure that, wherever she is, they're treating her well.” He zips up his bag.
“You fucking coward. Get out and don't come back!”
He brushes past me, wiping tears from his eyes.
“When I find her, I'll tell her that Daddy gave up!”
Blur.
I run along a path through a tropical forest. Max runs in front of me, barefoot, wearing only board shorts. I'm barefoot, too, in a bikini. I hear a roar through the trees. We burst from the forest, into a clearing at the edge of a cliff. Water cascades down the side into a crystal blue pool fifty feet below us. My stomach lurches as I consider the drop.
“You can't chicken out now,” he says, panting from our run. He takes my hand, and I see he wears a wedding ring; I have one, too. “Come on. On three: one, two, THREE!”
We sprint off the side of the cliff, screaming as we fall, hand-in-hand, until the cool water envelops us.
