Chapter Ten
He was right. Victoria realized she was searching for a dead man. He seemed warm when he lay on top of her. His cock was warm. He seemed to draw breath when he spoke to her. His hands were warm when he touched her.
“It is the warmth of Hell, “Jasper reminded her gently, “not the warmth of a heartbeat.”
Victoria wiped at her eye. “Am I dead now, too?”
Jasper shrugged. “Your body is lying on your bed. Anyone seeing it would think you are dead, but when you go back you can get into it again.”
A long scream interrupted them. She turned back to the battle. “When will it be over?”
“It is never really over. But this phase will end soon. We should wait.” Jasper sat down and Victoria did too.
There was no nightfall. This place seemed to have an eternal hazy glow of a cloudy twilight. They waited what seemed like an hour. Finally battle was over. For now. No one had won. The survivors had gone back to their camps. Only a few men wandered among the dead and the moaning. Some looted the corpses; others put the gravely wounded out of their misery. Jasper tugged at her hand. “Let’s go.”
She followed him down the low rise to the stream and picked her way among bloody bodies and pieces of bodies. She swallowed and reminded herself that none of this was real. She pretended she was walking on the set of a horror movie and that the blood was really paint and the intestines and livers and hearts were from a stockyard. It didn’t work. She bent to retch into the glistening gut pile at her feet but nothing came out.
“You can’t puke here,” Jasper whispered. “Because you don’t have a body that eats here.”
“It feels like I do,” she groaned. “And it smells like I can.” The smell of many eviscerated men was indescribable. She bent to retch again. Her stomach twisted.
“You are not going to find him if you spend your time feeling sorry for yourself.”
Victoria could not even take a deep breath to clear her head. Instead she put her hand to her nose and mouth and took careful steps. At least she could keep from slipping on some man’s pancreas. The grass was treacherous and soon she could not even look at the battered faces for Jack’s, or Marcus’ or the nameless scarred Norseman she decided to call ‘Thor’. She stood still and looked up at the red and black sky.
“You said you wanted to find him. You said you would look for him.” Jasper’s voice held a twinge of accusation. Perhaps he felt the silver pumps slipping away from him.
She looked down and his face was blurred from her tears. “This is horrible. This is disgusting and revolting and repulsive…” She would need a thesaurus to continue. She couldn’t even back out and return to the tree. She was in the center of the battlefield. Every direction was a bad direction.
Jasper agreed. “Then find him and quit whining. He is here for a reason.” He gave her a sly look. “As are you.”
She forced herself to look into another ruined face. And another. Jasper handed her a piece of a snapped spear and she used it to turn bodies over and move battered helmets so she could see faces. Glassy open eyes stared unseeing at her. Closed eyes hid their colors from her. Broken teeth and missing jaws gaped at her. She spit bile on the ground and continued, man after man after man. Her spear poked and pushed and lifted torn clothing. Her legs to her knees were covered in blood and bits of flesh and still she kept going, man to man to man with Jasper on her heels.
And then she found him. When she turned this body over, the helmet rolled away and there he was. Marcus. The Roman. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear. If it had healed it would have left a thick white scar. But this wound would never heal. The blood that had poured from this wound colored his chest and the ground at her knees.
She knelt in the gore beside him and turned his face to her.
“Yep. That’s him.” Jasper confirmed.
She stroked the stubble on his jaw. He was warm.
“Warmth of Hell,” Jasper reminded her.
“How do I bring him back to life?” she asked him.
Jasper shrugged. “How is it always done?”
“With a kiss?”
She stared at the dead face and chapped lips. He looked like he had been marching for days. The lines around his closed eyes, though relaxed in death, could be seen clearly. He squinted as he marched, and the sun tanned his face all over but where the wrinkles were. Thin white lines radiated from the corners of his eyes now that his face was slack in death. The sight of this small bit of realism in a land of the surreal tightened her throat. She took his hand. It was calloused and rough. The fingers were thick and the thumb muscle was wide and bulged with strength. This man had carried a sword for years. He worked hard day after day, year after year. His body bore testament to his labors.
Was he the right one? Only his eyes would tell. She remembered his eyes as both the expressive brown ones and the searing yellow ones. In death he was just a man like many lying here on the battlefield.
“He’s the one. No one else has a slit throat like that. None of the others were killed that way. You are making excuses.” Jasper shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He wanted his shoes. “Kiss him.”
She bent over the bloodied lips. As she pressed hers against his, she realized that in all her demon encounters, not once had he ever kissed her. Kissing is for lovers, she thought. She pressed harder, and she there was no response from the corpse, she smoothed his short hair from his brow and cupped his cheek tenderly. Even if he was a demon now, this man deserved a bit of tenderness. In the touch of his lips she felt his years of loneliness. The endless marching, the rough weather, the constant orders and incessant movement of the legion. She felt his love for his comrades and saw flashes of their games, the dice, the wrestling and the stories of adventures in far lands told across a campfire between mugs of ale and wine and beer and mead.
She also saw him killing, and raping and burning. She saw the terror in the eyes of young women as he threw them to the ground ripped at their clothing, He saw the hatred in the eyes of the warriors he killed and the hopelessness in the eyes of the old men and women he roped together to sell as slaves.
She saw all this as she kissed his lips.
She sat up in bed and looked at the clock. Eight in the morning. The sun shone through the window. The tree outside was cheerful with the sounds of morning birds waiting their turn at the feeder. She could see her closet where the harpy had messed up her line of shoes, and she could see that the silver pumps were gone. The chalk circle on her wood floor was smeared into streaks and the alarm on her clock was going off with a pounding rhythm. She leaned over, picked it up and threw it across the room.
Sharon arrived later with the two boys and the first wave of unloading and unpacking began. Victoria moved through the chores without enthusiasm. She smiled at the boys and sent them outside with peanut butter sandwiches to play in the yard. She helped Sharon assemble bed frames and carry dressers and suitcases over her threshold. By the end of the day she lay on her back on her bed, sweaty and dirty, staring at the ceiling, too tired to get in the shower. She did anyway. Water ran down her face and over her breasts and down the drain. It started out brown and grey and soapy, but ran clear after a while and long after she was clean. Victoria sighed. All week she had tried to forget him. Each of him. She dismissed the blacksmith, erased the Norseman, and tried to crumple the Roman like a piece of paper and toss him in the wastebasket.
Her body was warm and moist from the shower, and the memory of each of her men moistened her inside. She grumbled a little that she missed the sex. But why not? It’s not like I am getting any in real life. None of her so-called relationships had lasted more than a few months. None had been satisfying. As soon as she had a man, she wanted to get rid of him. Each had been flawed in a way that she could not overcome. One was obsessed with video games, another with sports. One could not leave his work at the office when he came to her and was always on his phone talking to clients instead of to her. In the middle of sex he would answer his phone talking into the little glowing device in short puffs as he f*cked her. That pissed her off. The one thing they all had in common was how self-centered and shallow they were. My books are better company.
She moved to her bed and threw the coverlets aside so only the bare sheets lay spread out before her. She opened the drawer in the lamp table and took out her dildo. And my dildo is a better lover. She tested the battery. Good. The low hum reminded her cleft what was to come and another wave of moisture slicked her. She lay back on her pillows and bent one knee. One arm was behind her head in her wet hair. She touched the humming tip of the dildo to her * and wriggled her buttocks into the mattress. Not too much too soon.
She imagined the Roman first. Marcus. She imagined him in his battle gear, then little by little she took off each bit of leather. As she removed his breastplate she touched herself, then each leather strap of his sandals, another touch. She squirmed. She slid the leather skirt thing over his thighs and a word popped into her head. Pteruges. She stopped. How did I know that? Her * called out to her so she made a note to follow up with some research. Right now she had to attend to something. She touched the tip of the dildo to the inner lips of her vagina and waited for the familiar tingling welcome. In her mind her Roman was naked now. She raised his cock in her imagination like the legion’s standard until it was thick and ready. She imagined him kneeling and leaning over her, then imagined the hard cock touching the outside of her cleft exactly where she positioned the dildo. She brought her other hand down from the pillow and stroked the edge of her breast as her demon sometimes did, as Jack stroked Maggie’s. Her hips twitched and she pushed the dildo in a little further then used her thumb to flip the switch to a higher vibration. The hum of the dildo grew louder, which was annoying but it couldn’t be helped. If a man’s penis hummed, it would be easier to fantasize, but the only thing that hummed with a real cock inside her was her spine.
She arched her back and pretended that Marcus was pushing that thick cock inside. She pushed the dildo and tilted it so the hum would reach her *. It did and she gasped. Her vagina gripped the dildo with waves of contractions and the electric tingle in her * ran up and down her spine, down her legs until even her scalp tingled with the orgasm. She did not want to stop, but the intensity became painful. Honest orgasms with real fleshy cocks did not feel that way. Only the electric orgasms sometimes hurt with too much pleasure. The Roman faded. She flipped the switch on her dildo and the hum faded. Her glittering orgasm faded. The light outside the window faded, and she felt like her whole life was fading away.
She tossed the dildo and it bounced once on her blankets and lay there looking silly like a cock without a man attached. She sighed. She wanted the man. Not the cock. It wasn’t just the sex.
This thought wasn’t any more comforting. She realized she wanted a dead man. Impossible. She knew a few widows. Like Michael Brand’s wife. She remembered her from the office parties. And her mother’s friend Martha who lost her husband to cancer. Those men were not coming home to their wives.
But the wives weren’t going to the Netherworld to see them either. Victoria sat up. I found him once. I can do it again. I have to figure out how to stay there. She didn’t know why she left the Roman at the moment she was supposed to be reviving him. She glanced at the clock. “Albert Magnus” she said loudly and looked at her phone.
Sure enough, it buzzed and vibrated on the little table top.
“Mr. Magnus!” she said. “Don’t hang up until I have asked you everything!”
She heard a soft laugh from her phone. “Is that possible? To be asked everything?”
“Yes. Everything for now, anyway.” She told him about the harpy and about Jasper. She told him about the battle and about Marcus. “How can I make sure I don’t get whisked back to my bed before I am ready?” There was silence on the other end. “Mr. Magnus?”
“I am here. I am thinking of how to answer you. Did you say that Jasper told you to kiss him?”
“Yes.”
“And you did.”
“Yes, but then I was back in my bed.”
“Don’t kiss him next time.”
Victoria grimaced. “Well.”
“Listen, it was not the kiss per se. He didn’t want you to be there. He is the one who sent you back.”
That had not occurred to her. It had never occurred to her that he didn’t want her anymore. Not once did that thought cross her mind. After all, he was the one who started this whole thing. Tears dripped down her nose. Even a dead man didn’t want her. She broke into sobs; the phone fell to her lap. She coughed and choked and cried and made terrible noises in her throat. She played all the old boyfriends in her mind and all the failed relationships. She flogged herself with every pound she gained and every bad hair day at the office. She made up reasons why she did not have a man and replayed all the times her mother had asked when there would be a husband and children and grandchildren. She had been replacing men with books and a humming dildo.
Vaguely she could hear Mr. Magnus’s tinny voice coming from her phone’s speaker. “Victoria? Victoria?”
She sniffed and picked up the phone. “Never mind,” she croaked and pushed the end button. A dead lover was breaking up with her by sending her back to Earth from Hell. She started to laugh hysterically but it wasn’t funny.
Her phone rang. She sniffed again and picked it up.
“Victoria?”
“Yes, I am fine,” she lied. “I am just so confused.”
Mr. Magnus sounded concerned. “I am in Nebraska or I would meet you for coffee. Listen to me, Victoria. You can go back. You must go back. But you can’t let him push you around. You have to find your courage, Victoria.”
She sniffed.
“Once you can stand on your own, he can’t control you anymore. He loves you. He needs you. You have to help him.”
Victoria wadded up her tissue and frowned. “How do you know he loves me?”
“Jasper told me.” Then the light blinked and his call was gone.