“Yes, more than once.”
“You kissed me back.”
“A lot,” Sabel said.
“I remember you being…but it doesn’t make sense. We were on a floor somewhere and there was more?”
She thought she saw the glimmer of tears gathering above the lower lids of Sabel’s eyes, but it was hard to tell in the half- dark room. Sabel turned her face away for a moment.
“Yes, more,” Sabel told her in a near whisper.
“When you’re free of that thing and I don’t feel like I got hit by a truck, will you remind me how that was?”
“I’ll remind you of everything,” Sabel said.
On the other side of the bed, Gunnar mumbled and tried to turn over in the chair but fell out of it instead. He hit the floor with an “Ooof” and stood up stiffly.
“She’s awake,” Sabel told him.
“Hey,” Ana said as he grinned down at her.
“You feel okay?” he asked.
“Not too shabby, all things considered. You?”
He picked up a newspaper from the broad windowsill. Unfolding it, he held it where she could see the cover photo of the summoners being led out of the warehouse building with their hands cuffed behind them. Johnson looked furious.
“Your reporter friend brought it,” he said.
“It’s quite the story,” Sabel added. “Somehow Andi tied together the drug shipping and money laundering operation at Roth with Drake Industries and a super creepy group of guys who really thought they could get away with Satanic magic, whatever that is. The press is having a field day. Andi brought that teddy bear and chocolates arrangement too—she’s pretty thrilled with the story. The summoners are all up on charges including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, drug stuff and a bunch of others. Oh, and she said Drake Industries is getting one hell of an audit right now.”
In the half-curtained window beside her bed the sun was warming the sky behind the buildings with a faint orange.
“Do you think they’ll let me go home?” Ana asked.
Back home, Ana savored the simple sensations around her: the nappy weave of the bathroom rug; the cold hardness of the tiles; the motion of air on her skin; Abraxas leaving to talk to Lily and Gunnar who were sitting in the living room; the thousand cotton fingers of the towel on the skin of her back. She could happily stand in the bathroom and just breathe, but someone would probably think she’d gone catatonic.
She’d come home from the hospital in the midmorning after the latest series of tests showed nothing really wrong with her and she promptly fell into a real sleep in her own bed. While she was resting, Ruben invited Lily, Gunnar and Sabel over for dinner. In typical Ruben style, he’d made a salad and picked up the rest of the dinner from a local caterer.
Fresh from the bath, she walked into the bedroom. On the chair next to her dresser was a T-shirt and her black yoga pants. She remembered Sabel borrowing those, remembered being horrified about what she might have seen in the drawer underneath them. She remembered seeing her blood on Sabel’s white jacket and being rescued by her when she ran from the summoners, but then there was a gap before that. She remembered running in a dress, but why was she wearing a dress?
She put on the T-shirt and the black yoga pants and went down the stairs. “Sabel, what was I doing the night the summoners kidnapped me?”
Sabel looked at her outfit and blinked, then flashed her a smile. “You were at Roth’s fifth anniversary party,” she said. “You invited me because you were trying to figure out if I was hitting on you or not. Ruben went with you too and he looked much too fabulous for that group.”
Ruben came in from the kitchen and set a tray of drinks on the coffee table. “Oh and you were in that beautiful Armani suit and there was nothing else to look at in that whole room. Ana, your next job needs to have prettier boys.” He turned from Ana back to Sabel. “
Were
you hitting on her?”
Sabel’s lips quirked up. “I was pre-hitting on her.”
“That’s a thing?”
“You know, when someone’s interesting but you don’t know them well enough yet to know if they’re really interesting so you’re trying to find out—that’s pre-hitting on.”
Ana grinned and sat on the couch next to Lily. “Ruben doesn’t have that phase.”
“I do too, it just lasts about as long as it takes me to cross a room.”
Lily spoke into the lull after the laughter. “If it’s all right to ask, do you know how much memory you lost?”
Standing beside her as a creature made of smoke, Abraxas answered, “Maybe one memory in thirty, but Drake started with some of the more positive ones.”
He was getting better at standing outside of her body, not that he could go very far, but it was nice to know she could tell him to sit in the other room if she needed to.
There was one memory that now stood out more clearly than ever, but it lacked the painful emotional signature it carried in the past. She’d lived through it so many times that it became almost pure content without meaning, like a word spoken over and over again until it stopped making sense.
She looked across the room at Gunnar, realizing there were obvious words she’d never spoken to him. “Hey,” she said and then didn’t know how to continue. “About that time…the knife…I am so sorry. I know I said that before, but I just wanted to tell you again how much I regretted that.”
“I know,” he said. “I forgave you a long time ago. The whole situation was shit.”
She held up a free hand. “Let me finish, I just have to say this. I was so scared. I knew Mack was after me. I avoided him for a year, but that afternoon I knew if I didn’t get out of that room, he was going to rape me and I wasn’t ever going to let that happen. And you…” She paused as her voice caught. “You were between me and the door. I always loved you and I knew you never wanted what Mack wanted, but I couldn’t see any other way to get out, and I’m so sorry for that day, but also that I haven’t…haven’t said this to you sooner.”
He stood up and walked across the room to her, then dropped to his knees. “I couldn’t protect you,” he said, tears rolling down his face. “God, I couldn’t. I grabbed for the blade, I wanted to get cut for what I’d allowed Mack to do to you. It wasn’t the knife that hurt. When you were a baby, you used to follow me around all the time, like you were my kid. I’ve been so afraid to have a baby and not be able to protect her, like with you.” He put his arms around her waist and wept. “I couldn’t take care of you,” he said, the words muffled into her belly.
She held onto his shoulders, lips against his hair while he cried. When his shoulders grew still again and he pulled back from her, wiping tears roughly off his cheeks, she let herself smile.
“You know,” she said. “For two fucked-up kids, we turned out pretty well.”
He laughed, a light, dry sound. “Sure did.”
“You’re going to make an amazing dad.”
“You think?”
“You make the best toys and anyone who’s willing to randomly follow his sister and offer to help when he hears there are demons involved is definitely going to protect the daylights out of any kid he has.”
“Yeah,” he grinned.
Ana looked around at all of them. Ruben was leaning against the fireplace and blinking hard at the emotion in the room. At the other end of the couch, Lily surreptitiously wiped her eyes. Abraxas hummed in the back of her mind like warm sunlight. And Sabel looked back at her and when their eyes met, Ana saw pride and smoldering desire.
They all had their scars and their demons out in the world, but tonight she wanted nothing more than to sit with these people and enjoy them.
“What do you think we do now?” she asked.
“Ruben and I are going to make popcorn and pick out some movies,” Lily said. “And then we’re going to sit on the couch for about four hours barely moving.”
* * *
By the time the second movie ended, after midnight, Ana looked more at peace than she had since Lily met her.
She’d borrowed Ana’s backyard for her late night meeting with Asilal. The day before she’d written to him to let him know that she needed to update him in person.
He came faster this time, perhaps because they’d talked recently and, of the millions of people on his mind, she was in the forefront now. His mind-bendingly large form separated from the skyscrapers and flowed through the buildings up toward her. In the yard he didn’t have to shrink to man-sized for her to focus on him, so he stayed next to the old tree, just smaller than its upper branches.
“The human woman ousted the shaidan, the Ashmedai?” he asked without preamble.
“She did.”
“Alone? You would have me meet her?”
“Not alone and I do have someone for you to meet,” she waved back at the window, though it wasn’t really necessary because Abraxas had been watching, and he poured himself down onto the porch. He managed a few strides into the yard before he had to stop, at the limit of his distance from Ana’s body.
Asilal bent his enormous head down and sniffed at Abraxas like a giant cat. “You are old and new then,” Asilal said.
“I was the Abraxas once, the former one.”
“What are you now?”
Abraxas shrugged and the gesture reminded Lily of Ana. “An old man in a young body trying to find my place in this new world.”
“You taught the human how to defeat the Ashmedai?”
“I did.”
“Do you plan to tell all the humans these tricks?”
“It would harm the Sangkesh none.”
Asilal groaned like a tree and Lily heard his laughter in the sound. Abraxas bowed his head and with his eyes on the ground continues, “Protector, I ask permission to reside in your city, in this woman. What is in my purview, I will protect.”
“Granted,” Asilal said.
“I ask also you close the city to the Ashmedai and any who ally with him so they may not enter and harm anyone within.”
“It is done. I cannot reach him outside my city, but any inside this city are safe from him. When he has power again. Do you have anything else to request?”
“That is all.”
“Then I do,” Asilal’s voice dropped to a curious purr. “This woman that you have made interesting, we would like to meet her.”
“We?” Lily asked.
“The protectors of the city. We would like to know all of you better. You are helpful.”
“Now?” the question squeaked out of her.
He straightened up with another tree-like groan. “We will call for you,” he said. He inclined his head once briefly to them and then rolled away down the hill like a landslide.
Abraxas sat down on the edge of the porch, his legs hanging over the side and the lightning of his feet crackling down into the grass. “Simple enough,” he said.
“I’ve never met anyone but him from the city,” Lily said.
“You do good work for them, you should have.”
“I was overseas for a long time, I’ve only been here ten years.” She walked up the steps and sat next to him. He put his hand over hers. It didn’t feel like a hand, more a warm layer of steam on her skin, but the gesture mattered.
“I know more crossbreeds than full demons by far,” Lily said.
“How do we demons measure up?”
She grinned at him, “Oh I’m still taking my measure of you.”
He laughed. “Then I shall not stop trying to impress you.”
The night was cool and dry. A night bird crying from the tree and the sound of cars on a distant street barely filtered through to them. She was tempted to go inside to Ana, just to tell her that she was really safe now that Ashmedai could not come back in the city, but it could wait a little while. She looked at the lit windows and then back to Abraxas’s burning eyes.
* * *
As late as it was, Ana only felt a bit tired, probably because she’d slept most of the day. Gunnar had left for home after the first movie and Ruben was upstairs rustling around in the bathroom as he got ready for bed. Lily and Abraxas were in the backyard. Ana still felt Abraxas in her, but it was lighter, as if he could shift his weight a short distance away from her and rest less heavily in her body.
At the far end of the couch, Sabel had her feet tucked under her, which made her look small and delicate, like a little cat. She had the remote and was clicking through the list of other movies they could watch. During the movies, Ruben had settled himself between them with his arms around both. It wasn’t nearly enough connection, but it didn’t trigger that energy thing the witches hadn’t taken off Sabel yet. The image of Sabel dropping instantly when Drake reached her was still fresh in Ana’s mind.
“Abraxas is in the backyard,” Ana said. “Could I touch you?”
Sabel put down the remote and crawled down the couch to her. Ana touched the side of her face. This close, she smelled like wildflower honey and the scent gave Ana a half memory of pushing her face through that curtain of dark hair to kiss behind her ear.
“You said you would remind me,” Ana told her.
“Do you remember anything?”
“I remember you taking us someplace where we were talking and then it all starts to fall apart and I just have bits and pieces.”
Ana trailed her fingers down the side of Sabel’s graceful neck and stopped above her collarbone. Sabel shivered and leaned into her so that she was sitting more against Ana than the back of the couch.
“I have one clear memory of kissing you here,” she said. “And something funny about a pair of date panties?”
Sabel stretched her legs the length of the couch and turned enough that she could undo the button of her jeans and slide the zipper down. Ana glimpsed a delicate triangle of white lace against Sabel’s smooth skin and the cobalt blue denim of her jeans.
“These are the date panties,” Sabel said. “Well, one pair.”
“How many do you have?”
“That’s something you have to discover by experience?” She zipped and buttoned her jeans again.
Ana coughed lightly and tried to get her mouth to form words. “What did we do?” she asked.
“You told me where to kiss you,” Sabel said. “I was in a million places in my mind and you focused me here and here and here,” she touched Ana’s collarbone and then drew a line slowly down the front of Ana’s body.