Phantom Prey

13

Fairy was in the kitchen when he called to her; out the window over the sink, the moon was rising behind the bare branches of the winter oaks.

“Hello? Hell- o- o- o?” Loren said. He walked in, wearing another new outfit, this one with a ruffle at his neck, with a green velvet coat that was cut long, as though he’d been traveling in the nineteenth century. He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. His lips were cold and dry. Then he stepped back and, looking down, said, “Those shorts aren’t particularly becoming.”

He was not trying to be offensive: he said it with the detached professional tone of a hairdresser about to suggest a change of style.

“I’ve been moving furniture,” Fairy said. He cut her off: “Just an observation,” he said. He cocked his head and grinned, a practiced gesture that might have been made by a French fop in a romantic novel. But something caught in her throat, and she suspected he knew it. He was still holding her hand, and she could feel the edges of his fingernails in her palm, like claws. “Pale women have a problem with thighs,” he said. “Their paleness, which can be very attractive, also makes them look a little heavy. A soft dress, on the other hand, something in a cool green, or a mint, would be stunning. Black would be good, in the evenings; Ivory would be fine, too-but of course, you know all this."

"Now you’re a fashion maven?” Fairy asked. “I have an interest in costume,” Loren said, not quite dismissively

Before she could say anything else, he turned to the piano and hit a chord.

“You talk about the piano, but you never play,” she said. “You do play?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ve seen your sheet music here, the Moonlight…” With a glance at a wall mirror, to check his look, Loren settled on the piano bench and played a long run from the final movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, missed a few notes, shook his head, tried again, missed again, and banged out a few loud chords. “My problem has always been, I think about it-if you think about it, you can’t do it… At least, I can’t.”

“Stupidity, a piano method by Loren Doyle,” she said, pulling his last name from thin air, not knowing where it came from.

“Doyle,” he said, looking over his shoulder at her, “It means ‘dark stranger.’ How about that?”

“You certainly fit the name,” she said. Loren threw back his head and laughed, his longish hair flipping back to his shoulders. “One thing you’ve got to remember about Beethoven,” he said, picking out the theme of the Moonlight, “is that he’s dead. On the other hand, Bob Seger is still alive.”

Loren launched into “Old Time Rock amp; Roll,” pounding it out, his right hand bouncing up and down the keyboard in a chord- claw, and Fairy began to laugh… and laugh.

And Loren stopped playing, stood up, and gripped the hair at the base of her skull in his left hand, and turned her face to his and said, “I need somebody to laugh for me.” He kissed her on the mouth.

She let go, closed her eyes, opened her lips. His tongue was cold and she shivered, but she let it go.

Up and into the bedroom: sex came first. She hungered for it, needed it, hung on to him. He said, “I’m very cold.”

“Please,” she said. “Please help me here."

"I was thinking… a hot shower?” One cool fingertip traced the line of her throat from chin to collarbone, then down, along the line of her blouse to the first button, popped it, and then another, and slipped inside to her breasts. He didn’t seem intrusive: but it did seem practiced.

“All right,” she said, half turning away, not meeting his eye. “All right.”

He always wanted heat, any way he could get it, from a shower, from her. Heat.

“You have very nice breasts,” he said. The water coursed down her chest and across her stomach to her thighs. He traced it with his knuckles, between her breasts, her stomach, over her navel, then to the side, just inside the line of her hipbone, to her thigh. “The first night that I watched you-that’s the first thing I thought.”

“I should shave my legs,” she said nervously, stretching for something prosaic to right herself. “I’m like barbed wire.”

“Do I feel cold to you?"

"Yes… but not so much as before."

"I don’t think it’s the water."

"No…"

"I think it’s you. You bring me heat,” he said. “Would you like me to shave your legs?"

"No, I’ll… I don’t…” Confused. “Here. Let me.” He stepped out of the shower, opened the medicine cabinet, probed it. “No razor?"

"In the basket behind the cupboard on the left.” He opened the cupboard under the sink counter, took out a wicker basket, rattled the contents, took out a pink- plastic throwaway razor, started to put the basket back and then said, “What’s this?”

A straight razor. He flicked the blade open. “It belonged to my husband,” she said. “Put it back; you can hurt somebody with it, if you don’t know what you’re doing.” He grinned at her and flipped his hair in the practiced way: “Yes, you can; but I do know what I’m doing."

"No…"

"It feels good,” he promised. He pushed her back into the stream of hot water. “I’ve done this before…"

"With who?” she blurted. “Before,” he said. His left hand stayed with her body, trailing gently down her hip all the way to her ankle, as he knelt down. “I, ah, jeez,” she said shakily. “Shut up for a minute,” he said. Looking down, she saw him set the razor aside on the floor with his right hand, which moved to her groin. His fingertips probed lightly in her pubic hair, as though he were combing it. “Open here, just a little,” he said. “Your legs.”

His hands were gently, but insistently, prying. “No, c’mon,” she said, but her legs opened, just a bit, the warm water running down between her breasts, her head thrown back. His hand moved between her legs and she felt him opening her.

“Very warm,” he said. He leaned forward, the water from the shower splashing onto his wet dark hair, and the most exquisite, soft- sexual thrill climbed through her as he stroked her clitoris with his tongue.

“Oh, God…” She put her hand in his hair, on the back of his head, and let the weight of it press his face into her.

After a moment, he picked up the razor. She stepped back, leaned against the cool wall. The steel of the razor touched her at the point of her hip, then moved along the outside of her left thigh all the way to her ankle in a single rasping stroke.

“Feel that?” he asked. “Feels…” she said. Another long stroke, and another; a dozen of them, then small, quick gestures, touching up. “Done here,” he said. He started on the right leg, moving quickly, adept with the edge, cutting, rinsing, patting, cutting. And then, “All done.”

She looked down at him, and his dark eyes were on her face. “Except for this,” he said.

He laid the tip of the razor at the top of her thigh, under his thumb, and traced a sinuous curve down her quadriceps. Her leg tingled, as though a hot nail file had been drawn down it. Loren was kneeling, expectantly, looking at her leg, and then the blood appeared, seeping out of the nearly invisible cut, a crimson curve.

“An L,” she said. “For Loren,” he said, nodding. He bent to her knee and his long tongue came out, and he licked and traced the bloody curve with the tip of it. He did it once, twice, three times, and then the blood had stopped. “Barely broke the skin,” he said, grinning up at her through the spray. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth, pink in the flow of the shower.

She started to bleed again as Loren dried her with a rough terry- cloth towel. He did her legs first, before the blood surfaced again, and she watched it bead along the line of the cut.

“That’s so… I’ve never…” She didn’t know what to say. Loren turned her and did her back and buttocks.

“You’re ready now."

"You’re right,” she said.

Later, in the Prelude, cutting through the night. “Hunting is better than sex,” Loren said. “Don’t you think?”

“They’re almost the same,” Fairy said. “I can’t explain it.” Loren reached across in the dark, stroked the side of her face. His hands had gone cold again, an hour out of the shower, a half hour out of the bed. “I know what you mean. Exactly what you mean.”

They flashed over the LaFayette Bridge into St. Paul, the city brilliant on the bluff above the Mississippi; they took the wraparound exit onto I- 94 and headed west toward Minneapolis. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. She was involved.”

The apartment was dark. They sat in the street, waiting, their breath steaming the windows. They had been here four times; and three of those times, Patricia Shockley came back early, while Price stayed out late. Price was the lover and the dancer and the socializer. Shockley was the intellectual, the loner, who always left early and ostentatiously.

Fairy rubbed a circle in a steamed spot, watching. “Freak me out if she didn’t come.” Loren reached out and touched the radio dial, a golden- oldie station, and Roger Waters jumped out, Pink Floyd, wailing “One of My Turns.”

And after a while, six or eight or ten more songs, there she was, alone, wobbling along, a little drunk.

“Wait until she’s up; she’s going to have to buzz you in anyway, and we can see if anybody’s coming along behind. If Price is coming,” Loren said.

“My bigger worry is that Price is up there entertaining,” Fairy said, looking up at the dark windows.

Shockley turned into her house, fumbled out a key, pushed through; Loren watching her with lycanthropic eyes. “Ready?”

Fairy bobbed her head. “Talk is done with. Talking time is over.”

Loren said, “Go.”

She pushed the button, and Shockley came back on the intercom: “Who is it?”

“Patricia, this is… this is…” She had to grope for the name; so far down that she could barely recall it. “This is Alyssa Austin. I need to talk to you. I’ve just been talking to Lucas Davenport, and he told me some things… We need to talk.”

“Mrs. Austin… let me buzz you in.” She climbed the stairs, turning the knife in her hand. The talk was done. Strike and get out. Loren touched her on the back, just next to her spine, urging her on.

She knocked on Shockley’s door, heard soft footsteps inside, as though Shockley had taken off her shoes. The door latch turned, and the door opened four inches, a heavy chain across the gap. Shockley peered out, smiled.

“Mrs. Austin. Alyssa,” she said. “Let me get the chain.”SHE WAS still Fairy, and paid no attention to the words coming out of Shockley’s mouth. She simply smiled and when the door opened, walked through, dropped the knife from her jacket sleeve into her hand. The knife had a wooden handle, dry and warm. Shockley was talking, but she wasn’t listening, wasn’t hearing the words, nodding and smiling as Shockley closed the door and fixed the chain, then turned and Fairy stepped toward her and the knife drove up and into Shockley’s belly.

And Shockley flinched away at the last second, her eyes widening, and the point of the knife hit something hard and went sideways instead of in. Shockley said a syllable of some kind, a gahh or an unhh, but Fairy couldn’t hear it; she sensed it but didn’t hear it, and then Shockley swung something, a purse? A small black hand- sized purse? Fairy leaned outside the arc of the swing and went back in with the knife, but Shockley was a big woman with good reflexes and she swung again with one of her ham- hands and hit Fairy on the forehead, staggering her.

Fairy went in again, Shockley tripping backward and going down on her butt and screaming, once, loud, and Fairy tried to grab her hair and Shockley hit at her legs and Fairy went down as Shockley tried to roll over and get up, and the knife finally went in and went in and went in, Fairy riding her back and Shockley making an audible sound now, an ung- ung- ung, and then Fairy stood up and looked down and Shockley opened her mouth and said, “But I loved her. I loved Francie.”

The words threw Fairy out of herself, and Alyssa looked down at the dying woman and the first words through her mind were, Oh, my God, she’s hurt. She looked down at herself: she was wearing a black jacket over a blue wool jersey and black pants, and the jersey was dappled in black that when she brushed at it, came off in her hand as crimson-blood, in fact.

Then Fairy was back, like a blink, and she knelt and said, “You didn’t love her, I loved her,” and she drove the knife in under Shockley’s chin, and there was more blood and Shockley’s blue eyes rolled up and she was gone.

Fairy stood up and looked around and called, “Loren?” But Loren was gone, and Fairy felt herself fading, dropped the knife, picked it up, staggered back away from the dead woman, realized that the blood on her hands was showing, but she didn’t care; she went to the door, took a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and pulled the chain and opened the door and closed it behind her and ran down the steps and out.

Across the street to the car, got in the car: “Loren? Loren, where are you?” And she continued to fade, and this time she went: Alyssa found herself sitting behind the wheel of a strange car, and she shook her head, tried to understand it, fumbled in her pocket for a key, felt the dampness of the fresh blood, could smell it, got the key in the ignition and set off.

Then Fairy surged back, and with it the killing heat, and she hammered the little car down the street and out to I- 94, blood on her hands and face, racing down the highway, looking for sanctuary.