It's Always Time Act 04 Ch. 03

"Fuck you, T." SB balled her fists. "Fuck you and your fucking rules. How can you just..."

Tomoe's iron grip clamped down on SB's shoulder and spun the rose girl about. There was no trace of Tomoe's casual mischief in her eyes. "SB, darling, please. Listen to what I am saying." She held the first aid kit in her free hand. "There's nothing I can do."

* * * *

Yves drove his overcrowded Jeep down the forlorn road. The surrounding fallow fields of wild grass blurred in undulating waves on either side. He eased back in the seat, trying to avoid tunnel vision and to keep his mental focus set to "Wide Lens." A harsh rapping on his window jolted him and the Jeep fishtailed a few degrees.

"Open up!" Raspberry's upside-down head bobbed outside the window. The wind tossed the petals of her hair into the beautiful chaos of blossoms falling in late Spring. She drubbed her knuckles against the glass again. "Open up, asshole!"

Dee stared, unseeing, out his own window. "We're superheroes."

"Dee, you've said that already." Eurydice grinned in the rearview mirror. "At least a dozen times now."

"You two are the superheroes," Yves said, cranking down the window. "I'm just the guy driving the car." Orchid petals tickled his cheeks and the tang of raspberry perfume overwhelmed all other scents. "What is it, Raz."

"Drive faster, damn it," Raspberry demanded. "I can't cum unless you drive at least sixty. And if you can get this baby up to eighty-eight miles per hour," she winked, "you're gunna see some serious shit."

Yves forced himself not to smile. He enjoyed Raspberry's company so much it pissed him off and he would rather die than let it show. "I'm not going to risk our lives just so you can get off."

Raspberry grumbled, "Ass wipe." Her head swung up out of sight.

For the first time since they drove away from the SRU parking lot, Ursula pulled her nose out of the Sudoku book. "Risk our lives? What's wrong, Yves?"

Yves scrunched his fingers on the steering wheel. "Something just doesn't feel right. Maybe I'm just too wired, gone too long with too little sleep but...something's up." He studied Ursula in the rearview mirror. "I wish you'd keep an eye out. Dee's useless when he's achieving kensho."

Ursula flipped to a page in the back of her book. "Ah ha, here's one she only finished halfway. Alright, Yves, just pass me a pen please." She cocked her head, eyes distant. "You sure? It won't cost you too much? Okay." Yves started to speak but Ursula raised one glossy gloved finger. The fingertip thickened liquidly before stretching up and tapering into a sharp, hooked claw, wet with onyx ink. She brought the claw down over the open book. It made the scritter and scritch noises of a fountain pen.

"Did you just...talk...with Nyx?" Yves asked.

"Hm? Oh! Duh, yeah." Ursula did not look up from her writing.

"She hasn't mindfucked you or anything has she?"

"Duh, no." Ursula tilted her head left and right, pointing with her claw at her ears. Little neat obsidian spheres were tucked into each ear. Capillaries of black ink ran down her neck and coupled the ear buds to the thick rubber collar. "Better than an iPod." She returned to her writing, lips working.

Crammed into the trunk behind Ursula, CeeCee said, "They've been whispering to each other nonstop."

"Subvocalizing," Eurydice agreed. "All the time." She pantomimed a conversation with her hands, her voice tinny and warbling as if she were speaking into a tin can. "Yap - yap - giggle - yap - yap - ooh - m'wah - m'wah ." She mashed her puppeting hands together and made obscene smooching noises. "It's like preteen puppy love but with latex queens."

CeeCee nodded before hulloing to the front of the car. "I call shotgun for the next ride, honey, you hear?"

Yves, his curiosity getting the better of him, kept one eye on the road and the other on the rearview mirror. "Unless you developed a Sudoku fetish, I take it there's more to that book than just magic square puzzles."

"Nope." Ursula flipped to a page in the middle of the book and held it up for Yves to see. "Just magic squares."

Yves could only look at page for a few seconds, at the impossible looping scrawl of words and numbers and symbols in dozens of languages and ciphers and geometries that burst organically from the confines of simple square Sudoku grids to infect the empty spaces in between with illusory dimensions. It filled him with a lurching vertigo and he slapped the rearview mirror vertical. "Sweet Jesus. What was that?"

"Just magic square puzzle answers." The skittering noises of Ursula's fountain pen/claw started up again. She affected Tomoe's mixed-up Asiatic accent and added, "The way they used to answer them. In the old days. The very, very old days." The scratching reached a crescendo and Ursula finished her work with a final chop and flourish. When she spoke again, her voice was edged, echoing and strange. "Oh, God—the stars."

With the driver's side window open and the passenger side door laying in the grass on the side of the road somewhere, the wind whistled through the Jeep's cabin unhindered, whipping up receipts, leaves, and the aromas of lime and caramelizing sugar. Yves drove passed a sign for the highway onramp.

"We're superheroes," Dee said.

Yves pulled the Jeep through a tight curve in the road and the onramp appeared beside the overpass before them. Without knowing why, Yves found his center and entered the detached middle-distance of the martial trance. The next few seconds unspooled before Yves' senses in an orderly, slow-motion succession of events.

Yves consciously registered the bumper and hood of a yellow SUV hidden in the recess beneath the overpass. Yves lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal.

Ursula called out in that same strange voice, "She's here."

The Jeep reached the mouth of the overpass. Yves swung his leg over brake pedal and willed every ounce of his weight into his foot as he began to bring it down. He realized he would not be in time.

Black Cherry, blood-and-shadow batwings spread thrice as wide as she stood tall, leaped from the top of the overpass into the air above the Jeep. She plummeted with the lethal aerodynamic grace of a guided missile, arms thrust ahead of her. Her fists punched through the silver hood of the Jeep, snapped the vehicle's frame and cracked the engine block. Yves' foot felt no resistance when the brake pedal connected with the floor. The brakes failed and all four wheels lost contact with the road.

Black Cherry's feral scream reached Yves' ears.

"Master!"

* * * *

I told you from the start

Just how this would end:

When I take what I want,

I never want it again.

—Hole, Violet

* * * *