Inn on the Edge (31 page)

No! No! No!
Never!

A fate that could
still
be mine, if Zettia couldn’t close
those dreadful doors.

I shuddered with revulsion. His finger had been in my vagina!

And I’d liked it.

I swallowed bile.

His bloody face warped by hatred, Mr. Abiba pulled Zettia’s
hair, bit her shoulder, wrenched her arm, raked his nails down her neck, wedged
his foot between hers, fighting with all his might to keep those doors open.

To no avail.

Zettia had got there first. And she was Mr. Abiba’s match—a
strong woman, just as he liked. She shoved, pushed,
heaved
herself against
the doors for all she was worth, struggling against Mr. Abiba’s terrible
strength, emitting noises that no person should ever make. Slowly, slowly, inch
by hard-fought inch, the bride and groom painted on the backs of the doors
neared one another. Closer. Closer…

I held my breath.

With a triumphant shriek, Zettia made the painted hands
touch.

And then all hell broke loose.

There was a thunderous crash. Everything went instantly,
completely dark.

I cried out. Josh pulled me to the ground. His strong arms
held me, rocked me, protected me. I buried my head in his shoulder.

This was it. The ringing spell!

The demons—where were they? Were they gone? Both of them?
Had our spell worked, even though it was Zettia who’d completed it?

Where were they?

I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see or
hear
anything
. It was noisy, so noisy! And wild, like being in a
hurricane. The air was thick, horrible, making me gag and sputter. It was all I
could do to keep breathing, to hold my place against the furious storm that
surged through the Fine Arts Room. Great roaring gusts of stinging wind blasted
over me and around me, trying to separate me from Josh, driving grit into my
exposed skin, tearing painfully at my French twist, yanking out all those hair
pins Zora had so carefully put in until my hair slapped at my face and blew in
every direction at once.

After what seemed like an eternity, the wind began to die
down. It was ending. I lifted my head and squinted. I could see now, a little.
I peered into a thick miasma of hazy smoke, wrinkling my nose in distaste,
smelling things rotten and decaying. Things not-human. And cinnamon too. I
smelled cinnamon.

Ugh. I knew I would hate the stuff for the rest of my life.

I coughed and wheezed, trying to get my breath. Was this
foul haze the “smoke thereof” that the spell had promised? It must be! Would it
“drive him away so that he comes no more”? It had to! The smoke had been at
waist level when I’d first opened my eyes, swirls and eddies of the stuff
filling every corner of the room. Now it was thinner and sinking, at knee level
and falling. Soon it would be gone.

Something fell on me. A thin wooden crossbar from the bridal
arbor.

Josh pulled it off me, then found my hands and clutched them
in his. I felt his breath on my neck. “Angie,” he said, his voice just audible
above the still-gusting winds. He squeezed my hands. “We
did
it, babe!”

I blinked stinging tears from my eyes. “Zettia did it.”

He dissolved into a coughing fit. Then he rose into a wary
crouch. “You okay? C’mon! Let’s stand up, get above this crap so we can
breathe.”

Using each other for support, we stood up.

“My paintings,” I whispered. “Look!”

They were gone. Scoured away. Sent over the edge, as if
they’d never existed. All that was left of my grand masterpiece, my Sistine
Chapel, was faint smudges on the bare walls, Cadmium Orange, Ultramarine Blue,
Raw Umber. A dot here, a streak there. Squinting against the last sandy gusts
of wind, I turned in a slow circle. The ringing spell was no more but that
wasn’t all. Something else was different. The air of the inn felt softer,
gentler. Not even the haze that still hung over everything could hide a new
right-ness
,
a new
normal-ness
. I stood still, feeling, searching, trying to comprehend.
And then I understood. The magic was gone. All of it. The glamours, the apexes,
the Tools—all of it.

I could feel it, or rather the absence of it.

“Angie!”

I spun around. “Zenith!”

“It worked!”

“He’s gone!” I yelled, feeling free, oh so very
free
.
“We did it!”

She’d lost a shoe, her hair was sticking out at impossible
angles and her dress was twisted and fallen down on one shoulder, but it made
her all the more gorgeous. “
You
did it, honey,” she said, “it was you.”

“It was
all
of us. But Zenith—you started the whole
thing!” And then I was laughing and crying and hiccupping—a blubbering,
slobbering fool—and Josh was patting me on the back and Zenith was hugging me
and people were crowded all around, everyone coming together through the
dissipating haze. Zenith. And Vane, clutching five ragged Tennenbach brushes,
handing them to me, laughing. And Valerian and Zora, clutching each other.

Or rather Rita and Charlie and Rodney and Anne
.
It
was time to call them by their real names. Mr. Abiba was gone. The old names
should be gone too.

Rodney—I had to admit that he looked much more like a Rodney
than a Valerian—was bent almost double, wheezing and coughing. “Damn! This
stuff is messing with my eyes.” He peered up at me, frowning. “How did that
happen? I thought it was Mr. Abiba who had to close the circle!”

“Me too,” I said, “that’s what I thought too!”

Zenith pulled her flamenco dress straight. Took off her
remaining shoe. “The book said it was an all-around spell! It was good for a
wide variety of demons, remember?”

“And Zettia was a demon!” shouted
Charlie-who-used-to-be-Vane.

A loud voice came from the other side of the room. “What the
fuck
just happened?”

“Geoffrey!” I yelled. “Come over here!”

“Why were they fighting?” asked Jonathan, holding tight to
Geoffrey as they picked their way toward us through the wrecked room, stopping
for a moment to pick up Josh’s antique guitar, nestled safely in its case. “We
came to watch a flamenco performance and then…and then…” His face was white.
“What did Zettia do? Was there an explosion of some sort?”

“No,” said Anne, “it wasn’t an explosion.”

Charlie stepped closer to Rita, making room for the
newcomers. “We’ll tell you. We’ll explain everything—but you won’t believe it.”

“Believe what?” demanded Nikki.

Rita held her hand high in the air. “Let me tell them,
Charlie!” But she didn’t speak again until the former audience members—Geoffrey
and Jonathan, and Logan and Nikki, and Tim and Rhonda-Lynne—had all joined us
and she had everyone’s full attention. Her voice filled the room, clear,
triumphant and liberated. “Mr. Abiba was a demon,” she yelled, “a goddamned
demon!” She waved her hand around for all to see. “The bastard cut off my
finger, hear me? He. Cut. Off. My. Little. Finger!” She made a sound halfway
between a sob and a scream. “Bastard!”

Rhonda-Lynne gasped. “No! He never!”

Rita glared at her. “He did! He
did
!”

Charlie took Rita’s hand and brought it to his lips. He
kissed her once-injured finger. Then he looked at the six horrified guests who hadn’t
seen. Who didn’t
know
. “Mr. Abiba lied to us,” he said solemnly, “about
everything. About who he was. About what was going on here at the inn. About
keeping us captive. About the sex, even. You saw that contract Zettia burned?
Well he held contracts just like it for all of us!”

There were scattered gasps.

“It’s true. He had one for everyone in this room, even for
the Guides. Signed in blood, remember?” Charlie took a ragged breath. His voice
rose. “Mr. Abiba was stealing our sexual energy, and we had no idea. Lies. All
lies!”

“But he was so nice,” sputtered Rhonda-Lynne. “He was!”

Anne turned to her. “He could be very nice sometimes. When
it suited him.”

Rhonda-Lynn shook her head in dismay. “He taught us things—you
know what things! Stuff we couldn’t get anywhere else! And I
liked
him!”

Anne patted her on the back. “Don’t worry, honey. We all did
once.”

The room was silent for a moment. The wind had stopped. The
haze was gone. The smell too. The only sounds were the shuffling of our feet
and the creaking of a broken bridal arbor well on its way to collapsing.
Rhonda-Lynne was right. We had learned things there, things we’d never have
learned on our own. Mr. Abiba had been a thief and a liar, true. A bastard, definitely.
But I believed what Zenith had once told me, about how underneath everything
else, all he ever wanted was bountiful sex for all, erotic love given freely
and generously.

Our stay at the inn hadn’t been all bad. Not by a long shot.

Tim spoke. “I tried to get out…I remember now. He wouldn’t
let me!”

“Me too,” said Geoffrey, “the first day.”

“You
all
did,” said Charlie, “every last one of you.
You too, Rhonda-Lynne, even if you don’t remember. But Mr. Abiba was ready for
it, you know? It was all part of the game for him.” Charlie traced the pale
white line that ran around Rita’s pinkie. “Look. You can see where he hurt her.
Right here. He did some mumbo-jumbo in the middle of the night over her hand
and put her finger back together. He fixed it. Kind of.”

“It hurt like hell,” whispered Rita, looking at me.

“I know. I heard,” I said.

Logan sucked in his breath. He visibly shuddered. “I heard
the screams. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Well now you do,” said Charlie.

We fell silent again.

“He was a…demon, you say?” said Geoffrey, changing the
subject, placing an overturned chair back on its feet. “Shit. That’s unreal.”

I stared at Geoffrey, my eyes narrowed, wondering how I
could possibly have lusted so hard for him. I was aghast at myself. Why—just
that very morning I’d practically thrown myself at Josh just from hearing
Geoffrey’s voice! Geoffrey was funny and sweet and big and cuddly and yes, he
had that nice wide hairy chest…but
really
? The laughter of a near stranger,
practically bringing me to orgasm? Absurd! Ridiculous! I shook my head,
marveling at my own behavior. How much of it had been Zettia’s glamours? How
much had been the inn’s magical influence? How much of it had been me?

Geoffrey saw my look. He grinned. He knew exactly what I was
thinking.

Shrugging, I grinned back. I liked him. That hadn’t changed.

Suddenly I was aware of others having similar moments with
their paramours. There must have been an entire river’s worth of astonished
undercurrents flowing through that room because it wasn’t just between me and
Geoffrey. Oh no. Not at all. I caught a wink and a nod between Josh and Nikki.
And a tentative smile between Tim and Jonathan. And muffled words between
Rhonda-Lynne and Logan. I felt better.

And I let it go.

Rodney was talking, clearing his throat, getting us back on
track. “They were
both
demons. Mr. Abiba and Zettia both! But we got rid
of them—sent them back to the hellhole they came from.”

I looked toward the double doors where I’d last seen Mr.
Abiba. They were now wide open, giving a partial view of the hallway and,
beyond, the staircase. Empty. No more Mr. Abiba. No more magic. No more fearing
for our lives.

“He was a type of Incubus,” Rodney went on, “something called
an Amorous Demon.”

“Right!” yelled Josh. “An Amorous Demon who got all amorous
with the wrong person!” He put his arms over my shoulder, pulled me close, and
kissed me straight on the mouth. A kiss so joyous, so full of life, so
happy
that it made my heart skip a beat.

Josh. My beloved.

I was alive—
he
was alive. We were going to come out
of this in one piece. Together.

I whispered his name, and again. And again. Then I kissed
him back. I might have had sex with just about everyone in the room during the
past few days, been infatuated with a gay man, been introduced to the joys of
lesbian love and been courted by a demon whose merest touch could set me on
fire—but it was
Josh
my heart wanted.

Josh. My husband.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“Hey,” he said, smoothing the wild, sandy hair from my face.
“Angie…” He brought my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles, his voice lowered
so that only I could hear. “Angie. I was so
scared
. I thought…I thought
I might lose you.”

“Me too,” I whispered.

“I thought he might…”

“But he
didn’t.
”

“I love you so much,” he said.

We looked into each other’s eyes. We smiled.

And all was well with us. Different, but well.

We held each other as if we were the only people in the
room. As if we’d never separate again for the rest of our lives. As if we’d
never let anything come between us, ever again. But we did. Of course we did.
And we welcomed her with open arms. Freely and generously.

Rita.

“Look, Angie!” she said. “Look what I have!”

“The Storybuilder! You have the Storybuilder?” I put my hand
to my neck, feeling for a hammered golden chain, but there was nothing there
but the lacy top of my wedding dress.

“Hey, I have mine too,” said Josh.

“And me,” said Charlie, smiling, his hand on Rita’s
shoulder.

Anne held out her hand. “I have three of them. Yours and
mine, Angie. And Rodney’s.”

“We should give them to Angie,” said Rita.

I tried to protest but she would hear none of it. “They’re yours,
remember? He gave them to you. In public. Besides, you deserve them. You’re the
one who offered yourself up to save us. You’re the one who took all the risk.
They should be yours.”

“But you’re the one who had her finger cut off!”

“And
you
almost became his bride. Demon bride beats chopped-off
finger, don’t you think?”

I wasn’t so sure.

“Just be quiet and
take
them!” Rita put her pendant
in my hand. The other pendants joined hers on my palm, in a tangle of cords and
hammered golden links.

“Thank you,” I said, staring down at them, frowning. Did I
really want these reminders of my time at the inn?

“Angie,” Rita said, “they’re to remind you of
us
.
We’re your friends. We love you.”

“Take them,” said Charlie.

“Yes,” I whispered, closing my fingers over them, “you’re my
friends.”

Then the impossible happened…a sparkle…and then another…and
another, showing through my fingers. I opened my hand, gasping. The pendants!
They were flashing! Filling with multitudes of brilliant color, turning on,
recognizing each other, preparing to do their job. Just like when we’d used
them to go to the ghost town and to the dragon cave! The Storybuilder Tool was
coming alive. I stared in disbelief. I didn’t know how it could be possible. Unless…unless…