Nightwise (11 page)

“You want this?” I said. “You need this?”

“Yes,” Magdalena hissed. “I need to be outside my head. I need to feel out of control, to be under control. I want it.”

I tightened my grip on her throat and sank my teeth into her alabaster shoulder. She gasped and her head flew back. Her body shuddered as pain and pleasure burned through her nerves.

My hand slid from throat to her breast, clawing at the corset. My mouth was at her ear again. I chewed on her lobe for a moment. She gasped again; her hands were clawing at my chest, pulling at my sweater, tearing it. Her hands were running through my hair, tugging on it.

“Mine,” I growled into her ear. “Mine, tonight.”

Her lips found my cheek and then chin as she covered me in sweet wet kisses.

“Yours,” she said, her voice muffled against my neck. “Yours, tonight.”

Magdalena fell back on the bed, her hands sliding under my sweater and T-shirt, teasing, raking my nipples with her nails. Sensation surged through me. Still crouched on the bed over her, I turned my gaze to the harsh light of the open door.

“Propinquus quod obfirmo!”
I said, and stabbed at the door with my finger. The door slammed shut, and the lock turned with a click. I made a sweeping gesture with the same hand all about the suddenly dark room, and said,
“Candela exuro perspicuus!”

All the candles in the room flared to life as one. Magdalena's eyes were huge, full of honeyed darkness in the flickering candlelight.

“Power,” I said as I pulled my shirts over my head and tossed them into the darkness. “Control, will, submission. All of these are the first principles of magic, the currency of the universe. You'll learn that sometimes you control the power and sometimes it controls you.”

Magdalena traced the scars and the tattoos across my skin with her nails. “Which is better, control or submission?”

“Yes,” I said, and we both laughed. We kissed again. She raked my chest with her nails and I caressed her face, tracing my finger along the pulse in her throat.

I pointed at the beat-up old boom box she had sitting next to the vanity, surrounded by towers of loose CDs.

“Lascivio Al Viridis,”
I said.

“Love and Happiness” by Al Green began to play.

“Turn over,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Magdalena murmured. She rolled onto her stomach, like a great sleek cat stretching. I began to unlace the corset, revealing more and more of her porcelain skin and more of her tattoo ink. She was magnificent. I pulled back on her hair, like the mane of a mare. She moaned and reached for the small nightstand next to her bed.

“In the drawer there … I'll get them,” she said, breathless. The last seams of the corset popped loose as she stretched to reach the drawer. I climbed off the bed and quickly removed the rest of my clothes. Magdalena rolled off the bed on the other side with a squeak and a giggle and did the same. Wrapped in shadow and guttering candlelight, she was a dark goddess. It was impossible to tell where the darkness of her hair and her eyes ended and the night began. The smile on her face could make saints fall, gladly. She held up a pair of steel handcuffs, the chain between the bracelets suspended by her single slender finger. She climbed onto the bed and crawled toward me.

“Think you can get these on me?” she said, purring.

I stepped forward and climbed on the bed, grabbing her by the wrist. She gasped. We rolled and struggled, biting, kissing, tumbling, snarling, and moaning. My mouth found its way to her nipple, and I teased it with my tongue as her hands slid to my waist and then lower. Her teeth sank into the biceps of the arm I was holding her wrist with. My teeth scraped the skin of her hard nipple, and we both gasped at the sensations. I rolled and forced her onto her back. The cuffs were in my free hand; I snapped one of the bracelets onto the wrist I had already captured. She grinned, and with her free hand slid her nails down my back; the pain was sharp and warm and it made my loins stir and made me gasp. I captured her other wrist and pulled it forward, looped the handcuff chain between the posts of the headboard, and snapped the other cuff on. She struggled against the cuffs, her arms now stretched above her head. For one horrible second, I saw Berman nailed to his office wall, his arms stretched the same way, but I shoved the profane thought away. No ugliness tonight, just beauty and passion and power. The rest was waiting for me tomorrow.

I ran my hand over her face, traced her lips. The struggling began to diminish. We were both panting, sweating.

“That,” Magdalena said, gasping, as she reached up and kissed me, “was fun.”

“Mmmhmm,” I said, our eyes locking.

I put my hand back to her throat and she closed her eyes, a sigh escaped her lips. My other hand traced a line from her lips to her breasts. I took her nipples between my thumb and forefinger, teasing, pinching them, then moved my hand lower. She moaned and squirmed under me.

Magdalena had numerous colored scarves wrapped and knotted around the bedpost. I released her throat and stopped my teasing of her body to undo a beautiful black-and-blue-patterned one. I raised her head and we kissed for a long time, deep, sweet, and slow.

“Do you trust me?” I asked. I ignored the thoughts stabbing me in the back of the brain, shoved them in the hole with the crucified banker and listened to my reptile brain.

“Yes,” Magdalena said, almost whispered. I slid the scarf around her head and covered her eyes, knotting the blindfold tight in the back. I kissed my way over her body, down her body, exploring, lingering, and learning where she most enjoyed my attentions.

I picked up one of the candles, a red one in a glass jar. I held it a few feet above her body and slowly tipped it until a stream of the hot wax splashed on her shoulder and flowed down to the top of her cleavage. Magdalena gasped and then moaned. I did it again, this time the wax splashing over her hard nipples and running down the sides of her breasts and onto the sheet.

“Oh,” Magdalena said, writhing, as the next stream of hot wax made contact with her pale skin. I picked up a white candle, then a black one, and used each one in turn to paint her skin with wax and pain. The patterns merged, melded, bleeding, flowing like a Monet, like a Rumi poem in flesh.

The hot wax dribbled on her stomach … lower, lower.

“Yes,” she mouthed, her voice a whisper.

The orgasms began, rolling, building, crashing like the thunder that heralded the storm. Magdalena could hardly make a noise, barely convulse, as the pleasure flared in her like dying stars. Again and again and again, until time was a frozen, broken thing.

I could feel her retreating into a secret, private place inside herself, as she became more and more engrossed in the sensation itself, moving past the place where pain and pleasure had definitions and boundaries, past reason, past the waking mind to something far more intimate, far more intuitive.

At the heart of the ecstatic mystic tradition is the understanding that reason blocks the path to understanding, to hearing the pulse of the world, its beautiful voice. Much of the practice, regardless if you talk to a Sufi or a snake handler, is to let go of the prison of the self, of reason. Here, blindfolded and bound, Magdalena had reached that place when the division between goddess and flesh were gone. Freedom. The inebriation of the infinite.

I put the candles away and gently touched her hair. She shuddered, soundless. I found the cuff keys in the open bedside drawer and unlocked her. She moaned at the feel of the cool steel leaving her skin. Magdalena was covered in dried candle wax, as were the sheets. I pulled her close to me and covered her with a quilt. She mumbled and rested her head on my chest.

“Thank you,” she muttered. She wrapped her arms around me and slept.

“No, thank
you,
” I replied, but she could no longer hear me.

In the silver, overcast dawn, the gunmetal sky of a rainy morning, she woke me with her body moving against mine, her mouth to mine. The need between us was hunger, thirst, gasping for air. It couldn't be ignored or denied. Both of us were half asleep, and we moved in perfect symmetry, becoming one, feeling the pulse between us quicken, rise beyond the ability of reason or understanding, expand to encompass everything, all of us, both of us, one.

Magdalena's eyes opened wide as we both came; they had changed from dark and hot, like an August midnight, to brilliant, acetylene blue. Power welled up between us, through us, and in the instant of our communion, every candle in the room erupted with a brilliant blue flame and then snuffed out, dead.

The two of us held one another tight, gasping. I watched as Magdalena's eyes faded back to their normal color.

“That,” I said groggily, “was magic. We did magic, you and I.”

We fell asleep in each other's arms.

 

EIGHT

The light had changed from overcast dawn to overcast day. I was being jabbed harshly. It was insistent, strong, and I couldn't ignore it. I opened my eyes and felt the grainy, steel-wool-in-my-skull ache of too much $200,000 tequila. Grinner was standing over me, poking me in the collarbone.

“Good morning, asshole” he said, jabbing me again. “Your fucking time is up. Get up and get out.”

“What the hell is your problem, man?” I said, trying to sit up. I was covered in bits of candle wax.

“My problem, Ballard, is I can always count on you to make a fucking mess on your way out the door. What the hell happened to not messing with Megan?”

I rolled over to look. Magdalena was on her side, facing away from me. She too was still covered in little globs of wax. She was breathing deeply, obviously asleep.

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah,” Grinner said as he walked to the bedroom door, “shit. Get the fuck up, get dressed, and meet me in the living room. We are going to conclude our business.” He exited and then poked his head back inside the door. “Asshole,” he said, and left again.

I staggered nude down the hall to the bathroom. Showered, brushed my teeth. My head was full of grease-soaked cotton, and my stomach was a rock tumbler full of gravel and bile. I wanted to puke so badly, but I couldn't.

I wiped the condensation from the shower off the bathroom mirror above the sink and looked at my reflection. I looked old, too old to still be making the same stupid mistakes.

“Asshole,” I said to my mirror self. He nodded in agreement.

*   *   *

My bags were packed and on the floor next to me on the couch. I was dressed—jeans, boots, and a black T-shirt. My hair, still wet from the shower, was pulled back into a ponytail. Grinner sat on the couch next to me and sipped his coffee from a square mug fashioned to look like the head of a creeper from Minecraft. I drank my coffee out of a mug with the seal of Grinner's old naval unit on it. I was trying not to hurl all over his rug.

“He's dead,” Grinner said. “He has to be. No other answer.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Not a damn thing. Not a ripple in the whole damn Net. Dusan Slorzack is gone. Gone, daddy, gone. The stuff I gave you before is stale, useless to track him. After 2002, he simply doesn't exist, no footprints, no smudge to indicate his passing. He simply falls off the earth. And anyone even tangentially related to him ends up gone too. Forever.”

“Well, if he's dead, shouldn't there be some kind of trace or trail?”

“You ever hear of Jimmy-fucking-Hoffa, motherfucker?” Grinner said. He was red, flushed, excited, and this just wasn't about me getting with Magdalena. He was scared.

“You told me you knew where Hoffa was,” I said.

“Yeah,” Grinner said. “He's an animated corpse serving drinks to a bunch of old toothless Sicilian necromancers at a spelleasy in Cleveland. That's not the fucking point, motherfucker! The point is some folks you simply do not want to find, and your boy is one of them, man. He is protected by angels from on high, or demons from the fucking pit. He is gone, Ballard, you hear me? Gone. And now, so are you,
capisce
?”

“You cover your tracks well enough, Grinner,” I said. “You know I don't want this showing up on your doorstep.”

“Fuck, Ballard, you're like dogshit on your shoe, track it all over, stink the whole place up. I am about ninety percent. Me, Christine, and the baby are golden. We're taking the money you are about to pay me and getting the hell out of the city for a while.”

I handed him an envelope I took out of my bag. It was close to the last of my money from the Egypt caper, after helping Magdalena. Back to broke again. Grinner counted the money and nodded.

“Okay, thanks,” he said, starting to calm down a little. Fifty thousand dollars had a way of helping with that. “I'm sorry I couldn't get you more, man. But this guy is a ghost.

“I do have another avenue you could try, but it's a long shot. I know a guy in Virginia, he owns a farm there. He was with IBM a long time ago, back in the gray flannel suit days. CIA too, part of Project Stargate—that psychic stuff they screwed around with. He was a big part of Project Midnight Climax too, those LSD experiments. The old dude's totally BAMF!”

“You think he can find Slorzack?” I said, taking the slip of paper Grinner offered me with a name and address scribbled on it.

“I've exhausted all the technological means at my disposal,” Grinner said, “which is to say, everything technological. I think you may need to try other avenues of information retrieval. Magic is kind of the ultimate in social engineering, you know?

“‘Bruce Haberscomb,'” I said, reading the name on the paper. “Never heard of him. He's in the Life?”

“Dude's an Acidmancer,” Grinner said. “An Akashic hacker. If it's information contained within the human experience, he can find it and even alter it.”

“Acidmancer, huh?” I said.