The Warlock ch 40 pt 2 - a dance

My husband’s eyes have turned gold.

The hazel never came back. The rings around the edges just leached in to fill the irises. “I hope you don’t miss it too much,” he says, when I bring it up to him. “Maybe there’s a way to get it back.”

“I think it’s dope,” Jordan says. “Like a cat-man.”

“You have a proclivity toward anthropomorphic animals,” Ganea says.

“What the hell?” Jordan gesticulates with her beer, which suds over. “Defend me, giant wolf girlfriend.”

“I’m gonna fight you, Ganea,” Bina says.

“My prime form has no arms or legs,” Ganea says.

“They are lovely, Mr. Cartwright. No matter the color.” I kick my other heel off the rest of the way as my legs dangle from his lap. “My only reservation is that people might think we’re related.”

His big tan hand nests under my inky claw. “Always a risk, Mrs. Cartwright.”

“The hair is quite dashing, though.”

He scratches his new silver stripe. “I was thinking maybe dye it.”

“No way, Mr. Cartwright. You look like a sexy skunk.” I lay my forehead against his. “And I want it there to remember the sacrifice. What you did for all of us.”

His lips start to close around mine. I flick his ear.

“Augh.” He pulls back and cups it. “Baby.”

“And I want it there to remember to yell at you,” I say, “for scaring the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry.” He cups my waist and pulls me further into his lap. “But I got a long time to make it up to you.”

“Mmhmm.” I trace his jaw up to his chin with a claw, and tug him back into that interrupted kiss.

“Get a rooooom.” This from Jordan, who’s seated next to us at the bonfire drinking a stout. She’s wearing a shorter, racier version of the maroon dress she had on at Tilliam’s soiree. The dancing flames, and their twins dotting the night, illuminate the banner that the citizens of Little Paradise never bothered to take down from the End of the World party. Someone just painted CANCELED across it.

I flick my wrist and a brick wall shoves up from the ground between us and her.

Jordan gasps. “You got dirt in my beer.”

“It chafes me that Eight is getting so much of the worship,” Salome says. “I’m God, you know.”

“We’re all gods. We’re a pantheon.” I bubble more wine into her glass. “As the religion settles itself, it’ll spread out. We’ll naturally wean her off, I hope. But it looks like she’s going to be the head of the pantheon. Publically, anyway.”

“That is so unfair.” Salome blows a tinkling raspberry.

“Maybe you can be Goddess of Justice or something,” I say.

“You’re joking,” Salome says. “But I’m honestly considering it.”

“I would be honored to be warlock of the Goddess of Justice, mistress.” Adaire has brought a small doggy bag full of charcuterie. She is not touching the hot dogs.

Caspar leans past my wall. I zip it back into the ground for him. “How’s it going on Diamante, Adaire?”

Adaire nibbles some summer sausage. “Everything’s on fire, naturally. As I told you, it would be.”

“Can’t help but notice, though,” he says. “You’re out here acting like the suzerain. Trying to put it out.”

“Don’t read too far into it, Mr. Cartwright,” Adaire says. “I’m still an agent of destruction. But, oh. I don’t know. I suppose you moved me. Enough to see what I can get finished.”

“Everyone has their warlock to have and to hold,” Salome mutters. “And mine is still frolicking around half the time, playing realpolitik. I blame Caspar.”

Caspar takes a sheepish sip of his beer.

“You’re strictly an employer of hers, Salami,” I say.

“Well, yes. Of course. But now you have your little toys around all the time and I’m sitting here doing the crossword.”

“They’re not toys, Sal,” Bina says. “Don’t be gross. Caspar is Irene’s husband.”

“I’m down to be a toy.” Jordan sips her Jungle Bird.

Bina flushes furiously.

“Don’t worry, Mistress.” Adaire tastes another coconut shrimp. “With the reforms I intend to tout, I daresay I’ll only have a few weeks before someone assassinates me. I shall destroy the Key on my way out.”

“Who’ll have power over Heaven, then?” Caspar asks.

“Nobody,” Salome says. “So: everybody.”

“I’m still calling myself a God.” Bina takes a bite of Jordan’s hot dog. “I wanna be Goddess of the Hunt.”

“Babe.” Jordan scoots another chicken wing into her muzzle. “Have you ever been hunting?”

“Uh-uh.” Bina bites down; her canines crack the wing’s bone. She swallows. “But I like meat and day-drinking and hanging out. That’s like seventy-five percent there.”

Bina has been all over Milly since she came back. But she’s also all over Jordan as usual, and the magnetic urge to never not be touching both of them has led to multiple overexcited Bina manifestations inadvertently knocking things over with their tails. Bina number 2 is shepherding Milinoe to the bonfire, Peat Moss and Saoirse at their heels. “And then Saoirse came out of the stoner guy,” she’s saying. “And oh it was just crazy.”

“It was nice to get out and stretch my legs,” Saoirse says. “Lovely little constitutional. Irene can testify. We really ought to get down there more often.”

“And that’s how I was born,” Peat Moss says. “And now Caspar’s gonna teach me to whittle.”

Caspar chuckles. “I am?”

“Jordy says that the thing to do when you have hands is whittle, not shoot a gun. And I said can you teach me to whittle and she said no but Caspar can because he’s a hayseed.”

Caspar gives his sister a look.

“You don’t need to keep summarizing, Beany.” Milinoe laughs behind her hand. “Adrienne and I watched the whole thing.”

Bina blinks. “Adrienne?”

“Like—Eight. Eightrienne.” Milinoe points out into the sky. “That’s what she’d like to be called now. She knows it’s a little ridiculous. And she can’t show her face, just yet. She’s rather ashamed. And disemboweled. But once she can. Adrienne.”

“Adrienne.” I take Milly’s hand. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s a beautiful name.”

“She wanted her sisters.” Milly folds her delicate claws around mine. “She didn’t think there was another way back, after what she’d done.”

“We’re family.” I rub her bony palm. “There is always a way back.”

Her limpid eyes blink back a tear. “Can you forgive her?”

“How about she spits the rest of you out,” Salome interrupts my fond affirmation. “And then we’ll talk about forgiveness.”

“I’m digging myself out, bit by bit.” Milinoe rubs my arm. “It’s going to take time. But we have all the time in the world.” She looks around the circle. “Where’s Alexandra? Her prime form’s hovering around, I know.”

I point out into the darkened forest. “In the trees, still. She’s embarrassed, I think. I told her the door’s still open, but I guess she needs time.”

Salome raises a chrome brow. “If Adrienne can make an an appearance through Milly, she certainly can.”

Ganea stands from the bonfire and paces into the night.

“Where are you going, Gan?” I call.

“I am going to rip her manifestation in half,” Ganea says over her shoulder. “For the feathers.”

I get to my feet and give Caspar a kiss on the forehead. “I should deal with that.”

He squeezes my upper arm, which is chilly from the late evening. “Go on. I’ll be right here.”

The party filters inevitably toward the dance hall, coaxed in by the new jukebox’s tuneful strains. Caspar doesn’t move with the rest of them, just looks out into the night.

Jordan walks over and stands by him.

“You reckon when they write the history book, they’re gonna put your name in it?” she asks. “And everyone who comes in is gonna want to meet you? I bet they’re gonna want to meet Rebecca.”

“Lord, I hope not.” Caspar’s knuckle rubs the rim of his beer. “I’m not a big spotlight fella.”

“You are a hayseed, man.” She chuckles. “I bet you do know how to whittle.”

He grins. “So what if I do.”

“Hey.” She nudges his arm. “Brother. You fucking did it.”

“We did,” he says. “You were more of a warrior than I ever was. Just got my ass handed to me and tagged my wife in. I cede my page in the book to you.”

“We gotta work on how humble you are, man. It’s unbecoming of a world-savior. If I was you—”

A fluffy tentacle wraps around Jordan’s waist and pulls, like a crook yanking a hack comic. She spills into her girlfriend’s arms; Bina turns it into a rakish dip. “Let’s dance, boo.”

“Bean, c’mon. Throwing me around and shit.”

“You like it.” Bina’s big pink tongue licks the side of Jordan’s face. “You coming, Caspar?”

“Eventually.” He puts his beer in the grass and his hands in his pockets. “Reckon I’ll stay out here a while longer. Look for fireflies.”

“All right, man.” Jordan extricates herself from her handsy Old One long enough for a quick hug. “You okay?” she murmurs into his ear. “After the close call? And the spill into Heaven?”

He nods. “I’m here, now. I’m good.”

“All right.” She squeezes him. “Make sure you party, yeah? We’re gonna have to go back to work soon fixing the damn place. Bina’s been telling me about some of the relicts we’ll be hunting.”

He chuckles. “What, you’re trying to be a warlock up here, too?”

“Yeah, motherfucker. And you are, too. I know you are. Dutiful ass.” She punches his shoulder. “You better be. Need my brother.”

She lets a giddy Bina drag her away.

Degmar and Alys dance laughing, drunk and dissolute. Sam and Kai dance uncertainly. Neither of them know the steps they’re trying with one another. Florin is doing a significantly more chaste dance with his chortling mother, who picked just the perfect time to die, as far as party-planning is concerned.

Peat Moss is dancing with Jordan, at Bina’s grumpy agreement. She laughs as his little hooves click and slide on the hardwood. “This sucks,” he says.

“It don’t suck. You’re just not good at it yet. You suck.”

Paul Tilliam shuffles across the floor toward his wife, who’s having an animated conversation with Saoirse. My sister's advanced state of fungal dessication seems not to bother her whatsoever.

“They are just so finicky,” she says. “I feel as though I have one for days and it starts rotting.”

“The trick, darling, is not to give them a drop of water until the soil’s dry,” Saoirse says. “Otherwise they rot.”

“Well these are just lovely.” Rebecca messes with the string-of-pearls vines that make up the manifestation’s hair. “I’m going to be relying on you, I think. Gardening was always the thing I thought, yes, and tried, and just fell on my face.”

Paul takes an adventurous step forward.

A hand taps Rebecca’s shoulder. Edgar has his hat in his hand. “I don’t want to cut anything short,” he says. “But perhaps you might like to dance with me, Miss Wallace?”

Rebecca gives him an inquisitive smile. “You know what?” She deposits her cup of punch onto the appetizer table. “Why not?”

She catches Paul’s eye as the schoolteacher takes her hand and leads her to the dance floor. She gives him a little smile and a nod.

He returns it, and pours himself some punch.

The prologue is over. It’s chapter one.

Caspar sits in the grass. His beer’s finished. He lets its glass roll down the hill. The fireflies have come out, after all. He watches them loop and corkscrew.

Three lights appear among the light show at the edge of the forest, and steadily grow.

I walk barefoot across the grass and sit next to my husband.

I rest my head on his shoulder. He puts his hand in my lap.

“That’s that,” he says. “That was my life, I suppose. Shorter than I thought it would be, somehow. Despite the wars and the hedge magic and all the troubles.”

I lay one of his hands on my manifestation’s heart. He’s never paid close attention to my pulse; now he feels its strange, slow, two-part beat. I draw him down into the waving grass and curl into the crook his body forms between chin and knee. My thigh rests on his. “Do you feel dead?” I whisper.

I kiss his collarbone. My tendrils stray along his neck, cup his jaw, boop his nose. He chuckles and smooths them against my dusky head. “No,” he says. “I feel…”

He isn’t a poet, my husband. The love and the peace and the benediction flow across his mind on their way to his heart, and his efforts to catch and hold them in a spoken word are like cupping a waterfall in his hands. The greater part escapes, undiminished, to a bottomless and fundamental joy.

“I feel good,” he says.

My smile is so big my face hurts. “I feel good too.”

He caresses my spine. I arch it, trying to get closer.

“Let me see that mark.” I rest my hand on his pectoral. “I can get rid of this.”

He grasps my fingers and lowers them. “No,” he says. “You’re holding on to yours?”

I slide the fabric of my dress up, until the golden initials peek from the hem. “For all time.”

“Then I’m keeping mine.”

I stand from the grass and wipe its stray blades from my sundress. “Hey.” I give him a gentle tug. “C’mere.”

He gets to his feet. I shuffle into his arms and hug him around the waist, leaning forward into his chest. He inhales my scent, fills his head with rain and sweet stone fruit.

“Mine, now,” I whisper.

“Yours, now.” He runs his knuckles up and down my back. “Forever.”

Mine forever.

A warm breeze rustles my skirt and whirls the flame-colored leaves around us. I let it carry my steps, loosing myself from Caspar’s arms until only our fingers connect us, interlaced, the metal of our engagement bands kissing.

“Dance with me, Caspar,” I say.

“I’m not exactly—”

“My husband is home from the war,” I say. “And we won. And now I want to dance with him.”

He gives me a hangdog smile. “As my mistress commands, I guess.”

We dance, slowly and uncertainly at first. Caspar kicks his shoes off. “I’m nervous I’ll step on your toe.”

“When we first met,” I say, “you bit my finger hard enough to hit bone.”

“That was your idea.”

Music rises from the field around us. I grow bolder, throwing in some of the sly and weaving steps Rebecca taught me. Caspar’s dusty laugh fizzes in my chest as he meets me, matches me.

Caspar doesn’t talk about this, much. And he hasn’t had cause to use it in a long time. But he is an excellent dancer.

We two-step and spin across the night, framed by the fireflies. I twirl into his sure grasp and let him dip me low. I come up in another spin and this time, I stick to him, staying where I am, my arms crossed over my body and my hands in his.

Slowly I move again to the music, but closer this time. Close enough to feel his breath on my neck, and his heartbeat on my back, and his growing desire nestle against the curve of my butt (His COCK, reader. I’m talking about his cock).

I reach my hand out, and suddenly we’re in the woods, the lights of the dance hall a gleaming distance from us. I plant my palms on a tree in front of us, and bend the graceful arch of my back low.

I give him a playful swivel of my hips. “You wanna fuck in the woods, Mr. Cartwright?”

“Mrs. Cartwright.” His thumb hooks into the band of my thong. “I wanna fuck everywhere.”

And as my husband opens me, and loves me, and pulls and kisses and makes me sing his name, I see into the infinity that awaits us. I see spontaneous, passionate lovemaking on the kitchen counter. I see furtive, giddy fingerfucking in the car. I see slow, sleepy mornings in our bed, our skin kissed by the light of our repaired afterlife. I see the eternity I asked for, and Caspar brought to me.

We’re on the ground before it’s done, breathless and giggling, the dirt and leaves in his hair and stuck to my shining skin, and when he comes in me I come with him, and the world breathes with us. And this is forever.

But I do still want to try the barn door again sometime.

My back undulates as the lithe muscles inside me squeeze and slide and coax, and it’s only moments before he’s hard again.

“The hell?” he murmurs.

I flex greedily. “Welcome to my idea of Heaven, Cartwright. Refractory periods are for mortals.”

“Let’s agree that you only get to mutate me once a century,” he says.

“That was the last one.” I roll on top of him. “I swear to Me.”

My mighty warrior. My eternal plaything. My master; my servant; my husband; my warlock.

I am so small in his arms, and I am so vast all around him. The night time drifts away. The ground fades. A darkness deeper than any night any mortal has ever known envelops us, lit only by my eyes, three blazing stars bathing him in gold, tracing the faintest contour of my body, and it’s as if he’s being held by the abyss itself. By the infinite blackness.

Caspar submerges. Into a darkness so complete it would terrify any mortal who beheld it, but he’s not mortal any longer. Into unfathomable eternity. Into his new death and his new life. Into the void.

And the void holds him close, wraps him in a warm, shivering embrace, and as it draws another gasp from him, it whispers his name, and in this moment, and every moment thereafter, for the rest of time, it says: I love you, I love you, I love you.

I love you.