The Demon Abraxas (26 page)

Plus there was Sabel and if she no longer had Abraxas in her head with her…assuming Sabel was still interested. Sabel was hard to read and the last time they saw each other, one moment she was holding hands and getting close and then she was walking away again so abruptly that Ana couldn’t put a finger on what had changed.

Are you looking forward to this?
she asked Abraxas.

His answer surprised her.
No.

I thought you wanted to get out of me.

He didn’t say anything and Ana wondered what the deal was. Had Lily picked another vessel he didn’t like? Or did it spring from her visit to him in the desert? When he held her, did he feel the same connection with her? Ana didn’t want to think about what it would be like to live without him now, but she would manage. Just a few days ago she couldn’t wait to get rid of him. She tried to call back that feeling now, but it didn’t come.

Lily set out items on the little table: a stone box, a pendant, a cup, a blade, a censer of incense smoking with juniper, a bowl of sand, and a stone. Ana watched her place each one carefully in relationship with the others and wanted to ask what they were all for, but Lily seemed so intent on the creation of the table that she didn’t dare.

Finally Lily motioned her forward and sat down, cross-legged on the carpet. “Face me,” she said.

Ana bent down to sit across from her, trying to ignore the way Lily’s finger-long, scaled toes stuck out from under her knees. Occasionally one foot would flex unconsciously and it took all of Ana’s willpower not to stare.

Oblivious, Lily reached out with her left hand and touched the table, then settled that hand back in her lap.

“What do we do?” Ana asked.

“Just listen to the sound of my voice,” Lily said.

That didn’t seem hard. Lily had a great voice, low and throaty, and now she started a chant at the bass of her register, rising and falling like a boat on water. It sounded so different from the chant Johnson had used to call the demon. His voice had been imploring and demanding, power overlaying anger. Lily’s words were calm and certain, but they held another quality to them, a reverence. She was praying.

Slowly, Lily reached over to the table and picked up the stone box, setting it in front of Ana. Then she lifted the amulet and placed it inside the box, with the lid resting at the side of the box.

“Stand up,” Lily said. “Step back.” Ana did so, facing Lily across six feet of space with the box on the floor between them. Lily continued to chant and Ana could hear Abraxas mentioned regularly.

He began flowing off her like mist over water, accompanied by a undercurrent of grief.
Don’t
, she told herself,
this is best for everyone, don’t bother wishing otherwise
.
Do you really want to be inhabited by a demon?
Days ago the answer seemed obvious. She remembered the first time she met Lily in the bookstore, how the woman had said this was an opportunity, and Ana had begun to understand how that could be true. Now that she had acclimated to the alien sensations, she enjoyed Abraxas’s thoughts in her mind, his running commentary at points in her life, the level of intimacy she never believed could exist outside of an intimate relationship. But what would she lose if she kept that?

Ana watched him form in the middle of the floor. He didn’t look as indistinct as he had even two days ago. Perhaps it was because she had seen him in the desert as the full man carved out of flame. The cloudy mass of him came together into a solid, dense form the color of a thundercloud with ripples of red fire underneath the gray skin. His eyes were defined, dark-lidded, almond-shaped orbs of golden fire. Only his feet remained indistinct, serpents of lightning running into the floor.

“Abraxas,” she said without thinking.

He turned and met her gaze, heat running under her skin from the blaze in those flaming eyes. She cast her vision away from him, to the chair, the window, and then the altar. The strangest fingers touched the middle of her chest over her heart, like being touched by smoke concentrated with the heat of a fire, but without burning, soft as a cloud but completely unyielding. Ana looked up to see Abraxas’s eyes searching her face.

“You can touch me,” she said.

“Apparently.” His voice still wasn’t human, but it lost the whispering quality. Its tones sounded strong and clear, too many different sounds to be a man’s voice, but close.

She reached out a hand for his chest, but her fingertips passed through him. Disappointed, she dropped her hand.

“The box,” she said and shook her head, trying to sort out the words she wanted to use.

“You don’t want me to go?”

“Does it matter what I want? I’m supposed to be aware but not caught up in my stuff and all that, right?”

His thundercloud lips smiled. “Not right now,” he said. “Do you want me to stay within you?”

She knew the answer the moment he asked the question but she made herself stop and consider. This choice could cost her not only her safety but her life as she knew it. And yet, she could work it all out, couldn’t she? Maybe he could go somewhere when Sabel was around—into a dream with Lily even. Maybe she could make him stand outside the bedroom door if it ever got that far.

Did she really want Abraxas enough to go on sharing her body with him? But it wasn’t just Abraxas himself; since he’d come into her life, she had been terrified, in pain, upset, furious, but brilliantly alive. Was life about sitting in a cubicle sending out news releases on new technology? Not Ana’s life.

Her eyes flicked across the room to Lily. Would it be better for her if Ana told Abraxas to go into the box? Certainly that made the relationships clear and easy, but Ana realized she didn’t care about easy. She wasn’t willing to sacrifice her relationship with Abraxas for comfort or safety, any of those qualities. He had asked her if she knew the desires of her soul and—although she couldn’t understand how she did—she knew that she had already chosen him. If she told him she didn’t want him to stay with her, that would be the crowning lie of her life that would reinforce every other lie she had ever told. But if she spoke the truth…

“Yes,” she said. “Stay with me. Teach me. I choose you.”

“It won’t be easy. I’ll need more from you. I will demand and disrupt your life.”

“Do I get the same from you?” she asked.

“Always,” he said. “I cannot give you anything else.”

Ana found herself smiling. “I may not know what I’m getting myself into,” she said. “But neither do you.”

His eyes flickered at her and the black lips pulled back in a smile to show teeth of golden fire. “You’re right.”

“What do I do?”

“Open your mouth,” he said.

She did.

His fingers on her chest, his face, his torso, everything swirled into a funnel cloud that poured itself into her mouth. Fire ran down her throat into her chest, swirling behind her breasts and down into her belly pooling between her hips, and up through her nasal cavities, filling her head and bringing tears to her eyes. The sensations hurt a little, but she let the pain come over her and pass through. It swept her like a shudder and was gone.

All that remained was the living room, the box on the floor and Lily rising to her feet, staring at her, asking angrily, “What did you do?”

Ana swallowed, her throat very dry. “I took him back in,” she said.

“Why? The whole point was to put him in the box and he’s back inside you, why did we even bother…What did he say to you?”

“He asked if I wanted him back. I said yes. You couldn’t hear that?”

At first Ana couldn’t place the look in Lily’s eyes as she picked up the box and amulet and set them back on the altar. It was a cool look, distant, examining her, and then suddenly she realized it was respect. She touched Lily’s shoulder.

“Thank you for setting this up. It’s different now.”

“You chose him,” Lily said, her mouth set like a line in stone.

“You don’t like that? You think it’s a danger?”

“I’m not sure it’s a danger, I just don’t like it.”

“Why?”

Lily shrugged Ana’s hand off her shoulder and walked into the kitchen. Ana followed her.

“Is it bad magic?” She directed her question at Lily’s back.

“No, you’re more powerful than a box,” Lily replied, her words clipped and angry.

Ana thought about Abraxas’s dream with Lily in the tent. If he lived here in a stone box, could they do that all the time? Is that what Lily wanted?

“You care for him?” she asked.

“So do you,” Lily said.

“Not the same way,” Ana said. She didn’t know how to describe it, but she struggled out the words. “First of all, he’s still a guy and I’m so not into that, and then he’s also not really a guy. He’s sort of like having a really talkative conscience. There’s no way it’s ever going to be sexual between us, not like it is for you two.”

Lily turned and sat against the sink, raising her eyebrows at Ana. “How do you know?”

“Aside from the fantastic sex dream? Because I’ve been attracted to you ever since early last week and you’re not really my type.” She grinned. “When Abraxas and I agreed to share my senses, I think I started to see some of how he sees the world. Does that sound weird?”

“To a girl with clawed feet? Hardly.”

Abraxas pushed at Ana’s hands and feet—not so strongly as to actually move them, but she understood what he wanted. Now that she’d accepted him in her body, he wanted her to give him a little time at the controls. She moved to the back of herself and he came forward.

Abraxas closed the distance between Ana and Lily and kissed her. The foremost sensation wasn’t Lily’s lips on hers, but Abraxas himself crowding up to the front of her body to meet Lily. Even a few hours ago she’d have fought him out of reflex, but now there was so much more space inside of her. Everything had changed.

He was happy and her body flooded with a light euphoria. She let him take her hand and tangle it in Lily’s long, thick hair, pushing their mouths together. She couldn’t shut out the sensations, but she tried not to give it her full attention. It was like kissing someone she wasn’t particularly interested in, but at the same time she felt the echo of Abraxas’s desire for Lily. As with the dream, it made her long to kiss Sabel again.

Okay
, she said to him after a minute,
enough
.

He let go of Lily and they stepped back. Lily was staring at Ana, her mouth half-open. Ana had to smile to see the expression of delight, shock and suspicion on her face.

“Awkward?” Ana asked, just to make sure. It was strange for her to see Lily with the just-kissed look and know that her body had done that and yet she hadn’t really.

“Oddly, not as much as I’d expect,” Lily said breathlessly. “I can tell it’s not you, if that makes sense.”

Good thing you didn’t pick some straight girl
, Ana thought silently at Abraxas.

I have discerning taste
, he replied.

I’m not clear on your plan for timesharing the body. Do you think it’s as simple as you getting time with your girl and me getting time with mine?

You plan to kiss the witch again?
He sounded dismayed.

Shut it, bodiless wonder.

Shut what?

Lily watched her, no doubt aware by now that she was having a conversation in her head.

“We’re going to need more practice,” Ana said to Lily. “I get the impression it’s going to take some time to work out the details here. You’re really okay with this?”

Lily sketched a shape in the air with her hands that was bigger than Ana herself. “When he touches me through you, it doesn’t just feel like your body. It’s like your body focuses the sensation, but it’s bigger than you.”

“That is so weird.”

“You two go home before you stir up any more trouble,” Lily said. “I’ll be curious to hear how it turns out.”

Ana nodded and walked out of the kitchen. Before she passed the doorway, she saw Lily turn and put her palms against the rim of the sink, bracing herself up as her head bent down. She looked like a runner trying to catch her breath. Ana kept walking through the living room and out the door. She thought perhaps she should be worried about all of this, but all she could feel was a wild joy in her blood.

When the sales meeting adjourned, Johnson sat by himself in the conference room for a few extra minutes to look over his notes. The symbols in the margin were his shorthand to himself as he thought through how to turn around the few remaining execs who were holding out against the sale of the company. He would have tried to steamroll them except that they had the ear of the CEO, who wasn’t yet persuaded that this sale was in the best interest of Roth. He was right, of course, but that wasn’t the point. What was a small, unknown software company compared to the facility that Johnson could build with the money from the sale?

Could he get Detlefsen to either change his mind or simply admit to being worn down and take an early retirement? The second was more likely. How to do it, though, when he didn’t have the authority to make that offer, that was the question.

Another set of notations was to remind him of the three members of the coven he wanted to talk to about his backup plan. Drake was unpredictable and at some point he would become more of a liability than an asset. As long as the deal was on the table with Drake Industries, Johnson didn’t really need Drake himself. He couldn’t risk letting Drake absorb the power of whatever demon was hiding in Ana—not when he could bind it to himself.

The two men he was sure of, he knew he could buy them with a mixture of money and guilt. They’d seen Helen’s death and they were afraid of what Drake could do. But he needed to find out where the new woman’s loyalties lay. He knew her full name, Sabel Young, even as she didn’t know his—given how common a surname “Johnson” was. That meant he could find leverage over her if he needed it. With any luck, she’d be easy to buy. Once this deal went through, he wouldn’t lack for money.