The Demon Abraxas (23 page)

Lily’s fingers wove themselves into Abraxas’s hair, her body small and rounded inside his muscled arms. He felt a little like the body Ana was used to, most of the same basic parts like a head and arms, except that from the knees down she became a million tingling particles running in streamers out into the world, mixing with the fabric of the bed and the very strange outline of Lily’s own feet. It had to be a dream, nowhere else could she imagine the sensation of caressing from all directions legs that ended in clawed feet. The actual contact felt interesting, but the idea of it was disgusting enough that Ana turned her attention upward again.

She had wondered what a man’s body felt like from the inside. Abraxas had broad shoulders but a narrow waist that made his body into a long plank with its square chest and slim hips. But Ana was surprised to find his nipples were almost as sensitive as hers and hardened against the softness of Lily’s breasts.

Again her mind filled with thoughts of Sabel. Her breasts were fuller than Lily’s, though not quite as heavy as Ana’s own. A pang of need went through her at the memory of kissing Sabel—how exquisite it would be to press together like that without clothing in the way as Abraxas and Lily did now.

Abraxas’s long fingers reached up Lily’s ribs to cover her breast and stroke in shrinking circles to caress and tug at the nipple. His other hand rubbed down the small of her back, pressing her against his manhood where it lay along her inner thigh. Lily groaned, her lips against his throat, and rolled her hips so that he was rubbing into the warmth between her thigh and her mound. All attention went there. What a wonder to have that desire fill out a length of him, to throb against Lily.

Lily’s hands trailed down his back to cup his ass and pull him further on top of her while her lips kneaded the front of his throat. His skin wasn’t as solid as human skin and he could feel her lips the moment before she touched him and then experience not only the surface of them, but slightly around the concave sides of them so that he was kissed into as much as kissed upon. He could have been less solid if he wanted, Ana realized, but no more solid than this. He’d done his best in this dream to touch Lily as completely as he could, and for her to have all of him as a physical presence. Lily’s skin felt like the wind underneath him. He explored her neck and ears with his lips and the fiery tip of his tongue and edged down to kiss her breasts, but she held him tightly and wouldn’t let him.

“You’re driving me crazy,” she said.

He didn’t understand the words but he absorbed the sense of them and flushed with relief to not be holding himself back from the one thing he wanted most. With one hand he spread her lips and felt the thick liquid that pooled there, spreading it liberally around the opening. Then he stroked up and down with his fingertips, circling the areas that would give her the most pleasure, until her head rocked back with a groan. Ana found a moment to wonder that a demon would know about a woman’s clitoris, her attention riveted to the tips of his fingers and the slick satin of Lily’s labia.

A spectator who kept fighting with herself to look away while unable to remove her attention in the least, she felt Abraxas’s hand reach for his aching member, rubbing the tip with Lily’s wetness. It really did ache, not like pain but a fullness, a heavy longing. As he guided the tip against Lily, liquid fire ran down the insides of his thighs, up the inside of his belly to his throat. Lily’s lips parted over him and he slid an inch into her. She anchored her hands on his ass and worked herself down over him, the most sensitive part of his body being slowly enfolded in hot wet silk. No wonder men could come so quickly, Ana thought. But Abraxas didn’t, though she could feel the pressure building in his pelvis, he took a deep breath and slid halfway out of Lily and then deeper. Each time he pushed back into her, electric currents of delight shot up through him, settling in his gut in a swelling pool of pleasure and increasing desire.

Lily had her legs all the way open to his hips, her calves curling around the back of his thighs to pull him closer when he thrust in. Her arms came around his sides to clutch at his back and shoulder blades as he rocked against her. She had been moaning as he went into her, but now her voice rose in pitch until she yelled and bucked against him. He brought his hands from around her shoulders to grasp her hips and thrust into her quickly until the electric mass between his hips exploded out into her, his muscles clenching like a fist, jerking inside her, hot and liquid.

Wild joy fireworked through Ana, exploding in her belly, center, heart, throat, head. She heard her own voice yell and came alive in her own body, sitting up, dizzy, room spinning, sheets under her hands.

She was on her feet in an instant and then she didn’t know where to go. She stared around the room and settled on her jeans and T-shirt thrown over a chair. She put those on and went down two flights of stairs and got into her car. Then she realized that not only was she barefoot, but she could hardly drive over to Sabel’s place and pound on the door and…what?

Hoping that she was far enough from the second floor that the sound wouldn’t wake Lily where she slept in Ruben’s room, she beat the heels of her hands against the steering wheel and yelled in wordless frustration.

* * *

Ana woke up in the early morning light, still in jeans and T-shirt and facedown on her bed where she’d thrown herself after coming back up from yelling in the car. She remembered the dream created by Abraxas and the barely banked coals of desire warmed in her gut. She thought about Sabel and the moments when her tightly wound discipline cracked open. She was always beautiful, but it was her surprised laughter or unguarded emotion that made Ana’s heart clench and want to hold that moment close. What excuse could she come up with to see her again this weekend?

That question opened up a can of worms because as soon as her brain heard “weekend,” it wanted to remind her of everything she meant to get done in these two days. She sighed, rolled over and sat up.

“Abraxas, make it shut up, my mind is really obnoxious,” she whispered.

Says who?

“My mind says it. Oh. Can I ever say anything outside my mind?”

That’s an answer for another day.

“How do I shut it off?”

You don’t. Stop paying attention to it.         

That was like asking her to stop listening to a radio playing in her ear. The dream of the night before returned in its entirety and she blushed even though she was alone in her room. Was it easier for Abraxas to bring Lily into his dream because she stayed in the same house?

“Abraxas, last night…?”

He seemed to shift around and then settle into a mass of silence even though he spoke.
You were in the dream? I didn’t intend that, I apologize.

She thought about telling him not to worry about it; she’d sort of enjoyed the experience. But he was so quiet she thought that saying anything at all about it might worry him more rather than less. She got out of bed, brewed tea, put in a load of laundry and then stood in the living room looking around herself. The peace was nice, but boring.

Ana decided she did have some nagging questions. “Abraxas, can you take me back to the desert?” she asked.

Come here yourself.

Ana closed her eyes and tried to remember what it looked like, the long curving dunes and the hot white light over everything. The picture that formed in her mind was small, a memory, not something she could step into, not the place where Abraxas brought her. Why wouldn’t he help her and just take her there as he’d done before? Was this another one of his teacherly riffs? Ana craved what he knew and resented him for awakening that desire in her when he seemed determined to be so obtuse about fulfilling it.

She let the heat of anger ripple through her, just under her skin like fire, like the heat of the sun. She stopped trying to picture the desert and let that heat rise up in her, rippling over her from the inside out until she felt it beating down on her.

When she opened her eyes, she was standing on the dune. In the distance she saw round tents, tassels off the tops flopping limply in the hint of a breeze.

You’ll learn to walk outside your body yet
, his voice said from beside her.

As usual, he stood just outside her range of vision, a wavering heat at the edge of the seen. But his voice tickled the side of her ear with its warming breath. Everything here was hot today and she wiped the back of her hand across her sweating forehead.

“Why is it so hot?”

You chose midday. The heat is a function of the way you came
.

“You have a really amazing habit of answering my questions in a way that isn’t an answer at all.”

And you have an amazing habit of listening to my answers in a way that ceases to make them answers.

Ana knew she didn’t have to voice her annoyance at that comment for him to perceive it. It still galled her that he was privy to every one of her thoughts. And for someone with access to her innermost thoughts, he didn’t criticize her nearly as much as she expected. She was waiting for a wave of rebuke to crash over her from him, unconsciously holding still for the time he could no longer stand to be in her head another minute and would come exploding out of her with bruisingly accurate recriminations. The longer he stayed in her without that, the more anxious she felt.

With that realization she had to look at him, to see the creature who could be so frustrating to her, so intimate, so upsetting. She couldn’t stand that he would know her so well and she had never even looked in his face. She didn’t care what he looked like, horned or barbed, made of animal parts or decayed flesh. It would be better if he was awful, then she’d have something to hold over him.

Ana whirled on her heel. He moved back a step under the force of her glare. His body rose up from the ground like a pillar of flame, but the tongues of fire licked around the outlines of shoulders and long arms with the rise of lean muscle, a broad flat chest, and a face: a face in the flame that looked at her with thick lips open in surprise.

“You’re not awful,” she said.

Did you want me to be?

“Sort of. You get to see everything about me and now you’re actually good-looking. I thought I’d have something on you.”

He looked down and so did she to see that he had no feet. Instead he had something like a cloud of electricity, snakes of fire and light that cut the air between the ground and place mid-calf where he began to be constituted of fire.

“Those aren’t so bad,” she said, still trying to figure out what they were made out of.

I’m glad you think so
, he said.

“You’re not really what I expected from a demon,” she told him. “You’re kind of a good guy, unless you’re the prince of lies or something.”

He folded his arms across his chest in a gesture that actually made him look a little like a genie from a bottle. On impulse, Ana stepped forward and touched his arm. It was hot, like liquid satin. Her fingers sank a little way into the flame and then struck a solid surface. His fire on her skin didn’t feel any hotter than the air around them and she ran her fingers across the top of his forearm and arm to his shoulder. The longer she looked at him the clearer his face became. A narrow, square jaw, aquiline nose, slightly almond eyes and thick lips all painted in ruddy flame that danced less and consolidated itself into a mass very much like skin only marbled with fire colors.

“You’re beautiful,” she said.

He smiled. “It takes your eyes to see me this way. Some people would be terrified, some see me as a consuming fire, or a storm, to others I look darker, like an angel of death.”

“What do you mean? Can you tell me and actually make sense?”

He tipped his head back, laughing, a throaty sound that reverberated with the moods she’d felt from him inside her mind. “I’ll talk, you make sense,” he said. “You’re seeing me with your beauty, and I see you with mine.”

“Wow, I must look great.”

“You do. You have been so afraid that I will criticize you, that I will have seen the truth about you and will bring horrors into the light. You think that you are dangerous, harmful, uncivilized, brutal, disgusting, but that is your own warped vision of yourself. You think that because you once took a knife to your brother in anger that you are that child forever. You have been frozen inside yourself as the girl who hurt her brother, the girl who was beaten, the girl who is afraid she deserved it by being monstrous. You have been blind to your own majesty. Let me show you what I see.”

Stunned, Ana nodded. His fingers lifted her chin and he lay his lips along hers; unlike any human kiss, when his lips covered hers a wind pressed her on all sides and she fell out of herself, landing in the sand. She looked up at herself.

A whirlwind of colors and patterns shot through with gold ribbons trailed out into the air like a dye dropped in water. A bit of radiance and rage had shaped a life of pain and struggle, then formed all that into this person who would stand against killers. An indomitable spirit in which every petty anger and judgment shone like a jewel, not because she operated in spite of these limitations, not in condemnation of them, but because of them, because each little piece made her who she was: cheating on a math test in fifth grade, stealing from her parents, lying to men and women she slept with, driving a knife through her brother’s hand: every large and small moment, every drop of hatred, anger and fear was deeply loved.

She couldn’t understand it. She could hardly watch it. All those years she’d hated herself for things she had done and now Abraxas could look on all of them and love her. Abraxas who had lived thousands of years and had traveled in the realm of the dead, who trafficked with angels and devils and wise men of the ages—he loved this mess of a woman because of the mess. That mess had been created by the same source that created the sunrise, the oceans, music and mathematics and all culture, and it was no less beautiful to him. To his eyes, it wasn’t even a mess, it was a pattern with purpose and intention. Everything she thought was a mistake was a beautiful swirl in the pattern, a new creation.