Bloodsong Ch. 03

He'd found what he was looking for. Door number three hid the winner, 'more drugs' took home the championship. Why Jack needed them was a question best left to the discretion of whatever god cared to contemplate the matter. She was satisfied enough with defaulting to 'he's not right in the head' as her answer.

The syringe was a twin to the one she'd used on him and filled with similarly colored liquid. Bar unexpected amplifying interactions between all he had been plying her with, she judged that she'd be out of commission for a similar or shorter amount of time. Fifteen to twenty minutes, if her guess for how long it had taken him to come around was correct.

Jack didn't inject her immediately. He held the syringe between his fingers like a jazz baton, a frown etched on his brow, his expression becoming pinched for a fleeting moment. He laid it aside, but not out of sight. Valerie experienced neither gladness nor relief, because the next second he pulled her half into his lap, making her head rest on one of his forearms. He exhaled contently, while in the faraway foreign land that was Valerie's lower body, sinews shook and shrieked.

"It's been five minutes since you've last insulted me, two since your last attempt at assault and battery." Fingers stroked her face, lips, hair, causing her to question how well Jack knew the effects of what he'd given her, since she would have been hard pressed to tell what he was doing to her should she allow her eyes to fall shut. Was he aware that she couldn't feel him touching her, the only saving grace among it all? Or was it that he knew but found it irrelevant, persisting for the sake of his own gratification? "I think this is the most relaxing time we've had together in decades."

"Nn," she said. Her lips had been replaced with gummy worms. If he were to kiss her there it might be the strangest feeling kiss in a hall that contained no examples that could be called normal.

"Come now, don't ruin it." Gray limbs slid over and between and around her own, weaving them together. There was a book in front of her face, suddenly. The words on the page Jack opened it on appeared blurred, but she recognized the cover. The magic for newbies manual. What in the world . . . "You were enjoying this one, weren't you? Certainly preferred paying attention to it over me."

Valerie pondered the likelihood of Jack being on the verge of gruesomely slaughtering a book, of all things, for the unforgivable crime of her having used it as a vehicle to ignore him.

Given his track record, she found it disturbingly likely.

". . . the complexity of a spell consistent with and equal to that of the object that serves as its binder, circumventing the atrophy brought about by the caster's passing into Death." Catching herself listening mid-sentence, it took Valerie longer to assimilate and figure out that Jack was reading to her.

Well, she thought, numbly and fuzzily. This is happening.

Jack appeared more focused on the cadence of his voice, striving for a gentle lull, than the contents of what he read her, as his delivery didn't change when the text segued into sacrifices living and dead used as spellbinders and the top five best ways to weaponize the talismanic properties of blood ties. He stroked her hair as he read. Valerie wished that she couldn't read his face as well as he read off the book. She wished it weren't written there so plainly, that he was no longer in the jeep with her, sitting among the ruins of all his mistakes.

He'd taken himself elsewhere, to a beach or an orchard or somewhere quiet in a bustling city. Pretended that he existed in a place and time where, were he to lift his eyes from the book, he'd see a girl who looked exactly like her smiling at him, entranced and appreciative.

That idiot is dead, you killed her, I killed her, good riddance either way, she wanted to shout. But she made no sound, two-thirds of the way gone, lost to the sound of Jack's voice, to his song, his heartbeat so much steadier than her own, the warmth of his body wrapped around her as though promising that all would be well. A lie as nice as the ones he fed himself.

Valerie didn't know, in the end, if he injected her on the sly or she wound up fading of her own accord.