The Hinky Bearskin Rug (37 page)

She said, “What’s
the point of cursing somebody if you have to hang around to make sure it works?
I think your mistress was a genius. Fiendish, but brilliant. She sets it up so
that you have to curse
yourself
,
because, I don’t know, because you
have
to. Because you want something she’s giving you so bad, you’ll torque yourself
into a pretzel to make it work.”

He turned the
thunder-brow toward her. “You agree with her? Have I failed to prove my
feelings for you?”

“No, I mean
yes, you’ve proved them.”
Any second now
he’ll ask how I feel about him.
She was so nervous her ears were sweating. “But
I’m saying it’s not up to me. I think she set up the curse so you would judge
yourself. And if
you
thought you
didn’t measure up, zappo.”

“Have we not
argued this point to death?” he said, now looking steamed. “You accuse me of
vanishing into a bed to inconvenience you.” In the last red rays of the sun, he
looked harsh and desperate.

She took him
by the shoulders. “No! No, I don’t. Don’t you see? This puts more power in your
hands.”

He searched
her eyes. “How?”

“It gives you
control over your fate. If you can face it, and take responsibility for it, you
can have that control.” She took his face in her hands. “The danger is when you
won’t face up to your part. Then you’re giving control back to her.”

He seemed to
think about that. “No. No, I’m giving control to you.”

“What?
I
make you pull a zapper? Oh, for—!” She
turned away, but he caught one hand and held it strongly, pulling her to face
him.

“When I ‘pull
a zapper’ it is because you’re angry with me. I fear to lose you. In that
moment, all I can think is that you will always come to me under one
circumstance.”

“If you’re
stuck in a bed,” she said. He bowed. She added, with irony to fight the word
rising in her throat, “And when I’m in bed with you, you’re in control. So if
you think I’m dumping you, you make me get into bed with you, and that restores
your—”

“My place in
your regard,” he said steadily. “You
want
me when we are in bed.”

Her breath
caught.
I’ll always want you.
She
couldn’t say it.

“I want you to
have a life, Randy. I’ve been a selfish bitch and I’ve used you sexually and I
haven’t regarded your humanity or your dignity. I didn’t treat you like an
equal.” She sucked air through her tight throat.

The “L”
screamed over the bridge, far below.

He bent his
head closer to hers. “Have I not said that you are my equal in demonspace?”

She gave him a
steady look. “You don’t want an equal in bed, Randy. You want to be Lord of the
Nooky. You force intimacy on me in demonspace, when you know I can’t say no.”

He paused,
then bowed his head. “I want to be — very well, you compel me to confront it — I
want to be your lover, not your incubus.” Her heart thumped hard. “I don’t know
if I can be your equal. I was not bred to be anyone’s equal.” He said with half
a smile. “It has been my one defense, for two hundred years, that I am Lord
Nooky in bed. And now I am Lord Pontarsais out of it.”

“This is
America, bub,” she blurted. “I’m not comfortable opening my heart and my life
to a lord.”

There it was.
She swallowed hard.

“To whom will
you open your heart, then?” His eyes were big and bright and quiet. The storm
clouds were gone. “I can try to lower the social superiority that is my shield.
What then is your shield? Can we ever be close?”

Her heart was
hammering. She could barely hear her own voice. “We can try.”

Was it fear
making her pulse pound? Or something else? She remembered what Randy said so
often to her:
Are you afraid because
you’re aroused, or aroused because you’re afraid?

God, he knows me so well.

No point in
struggling. What she wanted wasn’t sex, but something she couldn’t name,
couldn’t see, couldn’t touch. Even now she wanted to run away, when he was
under her skin in a way that made her shiver.

How can he love a wild animal like me?

“I don’t know
what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said helplessly. “I’ve never been in love
like this.”

He smiled. “We
shall have to be inventive.”

A laugh fell
out out her. “We’re good at that.”

“I cannot
promise I will never again be trapped in a bed.”

“I was wrong
to ask if you wouldn’t.”

His shoulders
sank and the tension seemed to leave him. “You will come for me? You’ll rescue
me?”

Floating on
air, she said, “Always.”

o0o

“Lena Sacker!” Jewel Heiss felt that warm glow a woman gets
when she’s treating a woman she doesn’t like with respect. She shouldered her
cell phone against her ear, put her ancient Tercel in first gear, and coaxed
her bumper closer to the car ahead. “Hey, girl, it’s been a while!”
Not since you made porn with my boyfriend,
she added mentally. “’Sup?”

“Hi, Jewel. I need kind of a professional courtesy.”

“Like what? I give somebody a ticket, you give somebody a
blow job?”

Lena ignored that. “Would it interest you to know that the
pink stuff is appearing somewhere new, where it’ll be easy to study?”

“Hell yes.” Jewel crawled the Tercel south along Lake Shore
Drive with her sex demon partner silent in the passenger seat. A pink veil
shimmered against the blue and steel of late-summer thunderheads above, the
sign of a dangerous commute. Disappearances in the pink stuff were up this
summer. Da mayor had expressed concern. Like she could do anything about it. “Not
in public, I hope. We can’t afford more news coverage.”

This was an understatement. The slower traffic got, the
lower the pink smog sank onto the expressway. To the left, the lake sent
sparkles winking through a pink haze. Half a mile ahead, where Lake Shore bent
to the left at Michigan Avenue, the road — and the bumper-to-bumper traffic — disappeared
completely. Only the flag on top of The Drake Hotel stuck up out of that
uncanny fog. Jewel felt her chest tighten.

“Not public. Laboratory conditions,” Lena said.

“At your company?” Like I’m ever setting foot in that place
again.

Lena Sacker was half owner of the porn company that had
hired Randy to, uh, perform when Jewel had temporarily kicked him out of bed
and out of her apartment, some weeks ago. The porn factory had been lousy with
hinky stuff. All due to the high concentration of sex, Randy had claimed.

Sacker said, “No, at our practice space in Cicero.”

“Cicero. That’s out of my jurisdiction.”

“Perfect. Then there will be no stain on your record if the
pink stuff gets really thick and eats a dozen people in the audience,” Lena
said breezily.

Jewel sucked in a breath. “You win. What’s happening in
Cicero?”

“Roller derby.”

“Roller derby!” Jewel let loose a laugh. “As in mudless mud
wrestling? Knee pads and fishnet stockings? Do people still do that?”

“We do,” Lena said.

Jewel geared down and let the Tercel idle, helpless and
immobilized in the pink stuff. “I guess we can stop by. Unofficially.”

Cars ahead of them were fading as the pink stuff sank lower
and lower, nearer and nearer.

She didn’t want to admit how deeply grateful she felt to be
on the phone with somebody who sounded calm. The pink stuff made Jewel anxious.
In spite of the heat, she rolled up her window and signaled to Randy to do the
same.

“I’m not happy about it either. My girls are being affected.
Tonight’s a practice. It’s happened two nights in a row, so I’m betting it’ll
come again tonight. Six o’clock. I’ll leave your name at the door so you can
get in. If anybody asks, you’re a reporter doing a newspaper article. Park next
door.” Lena gave her the address of the practice space.

“Thanks.” Jewel smelled a set-up. “How do I find you?”

“I’ll be on the track, jamming as sacker tart.”

“You’ll be how much, where, with pastry?” Jewel said,
picturing naked Jello-wrestling, but Lena had hung up. “That was Lena Sacker,
your co-star from Hot Pink Studios,” she said to the sex demon in the passenger
seat. “She’s found hinky stuff at, get this, her roller derby practice.”

“I’ll call Clay,” Randy said, pulling out his own phone.

Randy loved his cell phone. For two hundred years he hadn’t
owned so much as a TV or a pair of pants, and he used his phone as often as he
could. Now that he had a paycheck, too, Jewel didn’t object.

She said, “Provided we survive this pink shit, we can exit
at Michigan, swing east, and pick him up on the office front steps.”

Jewel was senior investigator of the Hinky Division of
Chicago’s Department of Consumer Services, protecting citizens as best she
could from magical mishaps without ever, ever mentioning the word “magic.” Clay
and Randy both worked under her. Which was a total joke. Clay worked when he
felt like it, and Randy was under her — and all over her — and inside her, day
and night.

She guessed she had to call him her boyfriend now.

Randy murmured into his phone.

The pink smog seemed to press against her windshield and the
window beside her. She switched her engine off.

For something to do besides panic, Jewel watched Randy. His
black hair was longer now, pulled back in a ponytail that softened the
aristocratic planes of his face. He always wore a crisp, white, tailored shirt
with his favorite black Armani suit or, as now, with blue jeans. He looked hot
and poised and relaxed and powerful. She loved listening to his fancy English
accent, even when he was annoying her with his English lord ego.

Earlier that summer, while undercover busting a fake sex
therapist, she had released him from the “treatment bed” and acquired a hinky
roommate... a roommate who would stop at nothing to give her an orgasm... a
roommate who was ruthless about getting his own way.

He made her crazy. She was quite aware that she was
hopelessly addicted to his mojo.

His black eyes, sometimes soft, sometimes sharp as jet,
narrowed as he spoke to his former rival.

Be nice to Clay,
she prayed. She hadn’t slept with Clay in a while, not since Randy had made it
clear in his maddening way that he cared. Clay was their teammate in the
department. They all had to work together. Randy was still jealous of him.

Randy frowned, listening to the phone, and his lips
tightened. Then he glanced over at her. Her heart lurched. As if he knew how
she felt, he reached out and touched her hand, and she suffered a ripple of
ecstasy that shouldn’t happen unless a person was actually getting laid by
someone with godlike pleasuring powers.

As he glanced over at her, their eyes locked, and suddenly
she was falling, falling into him, thinking,
I want you, I want to be with you, I want to vanish into you.
The
world swam around her. Scary, but good. Good and scary. Like he always said to
her,
Are you aroused because you’re
afraid, or afraid because you’re aroused?

Behind them, a car honked. The pink stuff was fading.

Jewel blinked, and put the car in gear.

Randy smiled a little, then went back to tightening his lips
at the phone, where Clay was no doubt being annoying.

There had been something so patronizing in that smile.
I know how you feel. And it’s okay.

It was not okay. It shook her. Her heart thumped and her
tummy felt unsettled.

At last Randy tucked his phone away. “Clay prefers to stay
at the office. Things to do.”

“What things?” Those two always irritated each other. She
should have called Clay herself.

“He declined to inform me.”

Jewel resolved to discuss this with Clay at length, when
Randy wasn’t around. Clay used to be a con artist — most recently, a fake sex
therapist — but that was over. At least, she hoped it was over. The thought of
what he might get up to away from her supervision didn’t help her anxiety
level.

“Turn on the radio,” she said. “It’s almost time for ‘Ask
Your Shrink.’”

“—Understand you’re
uncomfortable in traffic. Are you remembering to breathe?”
came the voice
of Your Shrink, calm and faintly Teutonic, like a cross between Sigmund Freud
and your mom.

“I’m afraid to breathe! What if that stuff gets into my
lungs?”

“Breathe, breathe. You are strong and you are safe. There is
no danger.”

Jewel listened as Your Shrink talked the motorist, who was
probably stopped in traffic somewhere within a hundred yards of them right now,
off his window ledge. Your Shrink talked a good Hinky Policy line. “Don’t ask,
don’t tell, cope.” Her voice was soothing, even if she was full of bullshit.

There couldn’t be a soul left in Chicago who didn’t know the
city was under siege by weird magical phenomena, like a lot of cities around
the world. But da mayor’s Hinky Policy actually seemed to be working.
Chicagoans coped. Creatively, resentfully, or simply trying to turn a dollar on
the hinky stuff, they coped.