“How’d you—I haven’t even gotten to the dessert menu yet! No fair!” I went back to perusing the menu, fully aware that Mark had changed the subject deliberately and gracefully to let me off the hook, and grateful for the reprieve.
CHAPTER 9
A lot of good food and several hours later, it proved that Phoebe was right. No one seemed to care that I was more of a twitchy, spasmodic marionette than a dancer. Impossibly loud music crashing into my bones made me stop caring, too, and consequently there were a couple of times when the woman in the mirror looked like she might know what she was doing out there on the dance floor.
Mark, on the other hand, really did know what he was doing, enough so that I accused him of being gay, which was wildly un-PC of me. He compounded the lack of political correctness by spending the next twenty minutes swishing around the dance floor, until Phoebe and I were leaning on each other and snorting with undignified laughter. I was actually having a fantastically good time when Barbara Bragg showed up.
For one horrible moment I was afraid she’d have Morrison in tow. There were things my constitution could stand, and things it couldn’t. My boss at a dance club was one of the latter. In fact, my own presence at a club was almost more than it could take, so compounding it with Morrison’s arrival would’ve just laid me out flat, shattered like so much windshield glass. Mark, blissfully unaware of my mental gymnastics, waved his sister down through a series of complicated hand gestures—which is to say, he pointed at us, then himself—suggested he was with Phoebe and me.
Barbara looked us both up and down, then turned to Mark with a grin. I could hear her over the music, which lent me respect for her lung power, if nothing else, as she bellowed, “You don’t get all the cute girls, Mark!”
I figured she had to be talking about someone else. I was too tall to be cute, and while Phoebe had great bone structure, I thought the near-unibrow might preclude cuteness. Regardless, Barbara slid an arm around Phoebe’s waist, fitting next to her like the proverbial peas in a pod, and grinned broadly at me as she pulled her farther away.
Phoebe looked about a thousand times more relaxed dancing with another woman than I could imagine being with anyone. My reflection was still having fun, but I felt a little thrill of envy spark through me. Barbara Bragg was physically adorable, with a pert, turned-up nose and pixiecut hair, her big blue eyes full of laughter. I was pretty sure her hair grew out of her head that particular shade of red, too, which I found totally unfair, and I’d never even wanted to be a redhead. It was the principle of the thing. And maybe the way she filled out the frilly sundress she wore, with curves in all the right places. She also had a butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder, matching Mark’s in size, color and newness. I didn’t know her, but it seemed to suit her: full of life and vibrancy, just like her brother. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out what attracted Morrison to her.
I suddenly felt like a particularly tall and bony stick, and noticed the woman in the mirror didn’t look like she was having so much fun anymore. I gave Mark a meaningless smile and shouted, “Agua,” before elbowing my way off the dance floor. Being tall and broad-shouldered was good for that, anyway.
I ordered a shot of whiskey before remembering I was driving, then swore and gave it to the guy standing next to me while I flagged down the bartender a second time to get water. The guy looked surprised, then gave me a once-over and a smile that made me feel a little better about being a stick on legs.
A Walking stick. Hah. I was so funny. I said “Shit” under my breath and tightened my fingers around the cold glass the bartender slid at me. A peek over my shoulder told me Phoebe looked very butch dancing with Barb, though really, Phoebe looked butch a lot of the time. I didn’t normally think women several inches shorter than me could kick my butt, but I never doubted Phoebe’s ability to do so.
“What’s up?” Mark said from behind my other shoulder. I startled and almost tipped my glass over, and Mark followed my gaze to Phoebe and Barb. “Oops,” he said, the word almost a question. “You and Phoebe?”
The whole world had more faith in my ability to attract romantic partners than I did. I said, “No,” and slammed my water as if it was vodka. An ice cube hit me in the tooth. Ow. Mark touched my arm.
“So what’s the deal?”
I hate your sister seemed a little extreme as far as answers went. I had no reason at all to hate Mark’s sister. Certainly no reason I was willing to listen to myself about, anyway. I swirled ice cubes in the bottom of my glass, put on a deliberate smile and looked over my shoulder at Mark. “Nothing. Nothing,” I said more firmly. “Just needed some water. C’mon.” I caught his arm and pulled him back onto the dance floor, doing my best to let the music pick me up and sweep me away. Mark slid his arms around me from behind and the soft silk of his shirt brushed my spine, sending an unexpectedly enticing shiver over my skin. I nestled in his arms, closed my eyes and, half a moment later, somebody collided into my chest, completely ruining the moment. I opened my eyes, about to yell, but my objection was cut short as Phoebe gave me a ridiculously abject smile of apology. I rolled my eyes and shouted, “Careful, or I’ll take it out on you next time we fence.”
“Oh,” she yelled back, “so you’re planning on coming back to practice?” There was too much noise to carry on a real conversation, so she turned away as she asked, putting her back against me. The top of her head was just above my chin. Barb was in front of her, making a sandwich of the two of us in the middle. I smiled a bit and shook my head, then let my eyes close again. Mark did get all the cute girls, even if one of them was his sister. Ew.
Spotlights swirled through my eyelids, bursting down from above the dance floor in a rainbow of colors. The beat caught me in the small bones of the ear, rather like my drum did, and I detached from my body.
Sound roared incessantly, as powerful as the dance beat, but without its rhythm. Instead it crackled and popped, heat encroaching with every hiss and snap. I opened my eyes, face still tilted upward, and saw a sky of blackness. Not night, not stars, but heavy pressing blackness, the color of sorrow and loneliness. Orange reflected high against that blackness, like city lights glowing against the night, but there was raw intent in this color.
From what I’ve tasted of desire whispered through my mind, and I lowered my eyes to the horizons, knowing what I would see.
I was wrong.
No. I wasn’t wrong. I was just woefully short in my expectations. Fire was all I expected, and it was there, raging on the landscape, but there was more to the world than I thought. Not just empty blackness like the sky, it was built with four mountains that, even scoured by flame, held their colors with resolve. To the east lay a white mountain, gleaming through soot, and to the west a sun-yellow one, defying the orange and red of flame. To the south lay a blue mountain, and to the north black so hard that even fire couldn’t diminish it. There was a semifamiliar flatness to all of it, a hint of the Lower World. It tasted of history and of magic, of mythology built up to create reality. Colors here weren’t real in the sense that I knew them, and the world had edges defined by those colors and by the mountains.
Between those four borders of the world, fire reigned. Everything burned. I stood at the center of it all, animals and insects fleeing toward me, their panic making my skin itch with growing fear. I saw no people, but I found myself leaning into the wind that fire brought, throwing myself against the destructive onslaught. All the power I could bring to bear, cool and silver-blue, as if it was the antithesis of flame, did nothing to quench it. Tears ran down my cheeks from the heat and I strained into it, gulping in rough breaths as I tried to stop what sure as hell looked like the end of the world.