Serpent's Kiss
Page 7

Ingrid hoped her sister would come to her for advice if she were having relationship problems. On second thought, how could she solve Freya's problems when she didn't even know how to solve her own?
Chapter nine
Don't Look Back
Joanna walked outside with a basket and garden shears to gather some fresh bouquets for the house. From early spring through fall, her garden blossomed with different flower varieties, bursting in a multitude of colors along the perimeter, climbing the fence, in the beds, a fragrant onslaught to the senses. This time of year the burnt-orange roses had bloomed, as well as her coral gerberas and rich purple dahlias, pink and white winter daphnes, marigolds from vivid yellow to orange to a deep, rich red. She began cutting the tall-stalked sturdy ones before moving on to the more delicate flowers, placing them on top so they wouldn't get crushed. She wound through foliage and plants in her clogs, snipping here and there.
She stopped at the bed of Japanese anemones, where ferns poked through along the chocked fence - pink, violet, and snowy white flowers, dainty bright yellow pistils resembling little suns at their centers. My son inside each one of them, she thought wistfully. She reached to cut the stem of a set of white ones, when suddenly its leaves withered, petals falling to the ground.
"Huh!" Perhaps there had been a morning frost.
She reached for another, chose a perfectly healthy-looking one, and just as before when her fingers grazed it, it withered instantly, bending and falling to its death. She tried again, and this time a slew of them died, petals spilling like tears into the undergrowth.
No, it wasn't a frost but something entirely different. She finally had to admit that she knew what was happening inside the house - with all the objects being moved and misplaced, especially now with the flowers dying in the garden. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but the last had been such a traumatic ordeal that Joanna had pushed it out of her mind, denying that something similar could recur.
It happened in 1839, when she was visiting England for several months. Events had unfolded in the same way: the belongings in her flat moving around, roses wilting in the garden, and then the mischief had escalated with the frightened horses on the landau she rode around town. The carriage had tipped and been dragged at a gallop along the cobblestone streets of London, killing the coachman. After that, Joanna could not ignore it anymore and had been prompted into action.
The story began with the death of a young English aristocrat from a long illness at the very same time that a farm girl in the countryside of Dorchester plummeted to her death inside a well. Neither had known the other in life due to their geographic distance and entirely different social spheres.
It was in death that they fell in love. When they arrived in the first layer of the glom toward the Kingdom of the Dead, they immediately recognized each other as soul mates. Somehow they learned about the Eurydice clause under the Orpheus Amendment, which stated that if two iterant souls met in the Dead's Kingdom before the first gate and fell in love, they could be granted a second chance at life as long as they remained true to each other. If they did not, then their punishment entailed dying anew, but this time they would never encounter each other again in the glom or beyond.
Philip and Virginia could not imagine ever forsaking each other, and so they campaigned for the chance to live and love each other in mid-world. Joanna's sister, Helda, the Queen of the Dead, was not pleased about their request but, unable to refute the existence of the Eurydice clause, directed the couple to appeal to Joanna instead. "You must make your plea to her, not me. She is the only one charged with the delicate business of resurrection, the only one among us who can bring you back to life. That is not my territory."
The two hapless romantics roamed the glom, striving to contact Joanna however they could, using their abilities to push objects without touching them, or choking the life out of small plants. They became increasingly desperate as Joanna - either deliberately or obtusely - failed to hear them and they eventually resorted to frightening the horses that pulled the landau.
That finally got Joanna's attention. Since Joanna had no desire for others to be harmed by such recalcitrant spirits, such folly, she acceded to their request and brought the lovers out of the spirit world and back to the land of the living. Philip was still on his deathbed, while Virginia's body was just rescued from the well when the "miracle" happened. Upon revival, they found each other and immediately wed.
Philip's family cut him off and disinherited him for marrying a commoner, but for a while they lived happily in the Dorchester countryside. Then the bills came, and the fights. Philip took to gambling, and his losses piled up. He blamed Virginia for his misery, and she in turn blamed him for failing to provide for them. Virginia was pregnant and became ill during the final months of pregnancy. Destitute and penniless, Philip begged his family for money and help with medicine and food. By the time he returned to his beloved's side, she was dead, the child a stillbirth. He shot himself and that was that, a tragic story.
Joanna sighed, thinking of how beautiful those two had been, how rosy and happy when she had visited them in their little Dorchester cottage.
There was always a catch. Philip and Virginia had tried to cheat death, and more recently Joanna had tried to bring back Lionel Horning. Lionel was only in a coma; he hadn't gotten past the seventh circle where his soul would have been forever bound to Helda. Still, on his return, he was, as her girls called it, "zombified." Helda always won her souls in the end.
Joanna shook her head, thinking of her stubborn and proud sister. But at least now she knew what was going on. A spirit, or spirits, sought to contact her. She couldn't ignore the signs anymore.
Joanna closed her eyes in her garden, letting the perfume of the flowers wash over her and feeling the sunshine on her face before moving fearlessly into the glom. She stepped into the twilight world. It was dusky, and above her were tiny, dim pinpricks of light that illuminated the sandy path just well enough for her to make it out.
She heard an owl's call, and she hooted back at it. The scent of something rotten filled the air, something heavy and viscous, the smell of death. Joanna moved off the path, toward the sound of the owl. A spirit who sought contact would be on the first level, the one closest to the seam. She didn't need to continue any farther.
"Is anyone there?" she whispered as her words echoed back toward her. She kept her voice as quiet as she could, not wanting to bump into Helda. Her sister could be vindictive.
She heard the flapping of wings, the owl lifting from a branch. She wished she had her wand, so she could see better, but instead she extended her hands to feel around in the darkness. She ran smack into a tree, the bark dead, dry, papery to the touch. She picked at it with a fingernail, and it began to ooze a shiny, dark liquid.
"Anyone?" she asked again, and again only her voice came back to her: Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?
She did not feel the presence of a soul seeking her here, so she found the path, returned to mid-world, opened her eyes, and was happy to be standing once again in her lush garden.
Chapter ten
Love Shack
Freddie Beauchamp sat at his desk in the Ucky Star, playing hunt-and-peck on his laptop. Now how could a god recently returned from Limbo, new to the modern era, come about such technology?
Girls was the obvious answer. He didn't need any magic to hook up other than his lovely smile. When Freddie Beauchamp smiled, all a girl wanted to do was kiss him. After that, they tended to leave presents, like the Wii console, the video games, and the laptop.
It all started with Gigi McIntyre, a college girl he met by the motel's ice machine, when he first returned. That first night Gigi was there, too, for a friend's weekend-long bachelorette party in early September. She stood with the empty bucket, wearing a midriff-baring T-shirt and the smallest denim shorts. Gigi was a lot of fun, a glorious revelation after the years of dull nothingness in Limbo.
One might imagine a night with the god of the sun would involve cinematic flourish - the immediate tearing off of clothing as soon as the motel door clicked closed, doing it in every imaginable position, on every surface. No.
Freddie understood that each woman possessed her own distinctive set of rules when it came to sex. Every girl had a different key and Freddie's gift was knowing how to find it - its particular shape, and how it might turn in the lock. Freddie had unlocked Gigi - did he ever - had given the college girl her very first full-body, writhing, shaking, screaming orgasm. But it had taken hours of talking, teasing, conversation. At the ice machine, he'd asked her if she knew how to work the television remote and they'd watched some old movie before he even made a move. It had taken almost all night to get her in bed, but then Freddie had all the time in the world.
Gigi had returned the next day to the Ucky Star in a Porsche convertible filled with boxes and clothes. It all belonged to her brother, she'd explained, who had recently left for his freshman year at NYU. "What does he care? We're rich. Consider these a welcome gift, Freddie," she'd said with a toss of her dark mane. "When he gets set up at his apartment in the Village, my mom will just buy him all new stuff. All this is from last year. Nearly vintage." He thanked her, and she had smiled sweetly. She was still grateful to him for that orgasm.
Gigi zoomed off to New York City, and there were no more college cuties partying at the motel. Things died down. The motel filled with traveling salesmen, couples having illicit affairs, which Freddie found tawdry and sad. He puttered around the boxes Gigi had left, quickly discovering the Wii console and the laptop. The video games were a fun distraction, but the laptop opened a whole new world, one even bigger than the nine worlds of the known universe. He'd missed so much while he was in Limbo, and he caught up on his favorite subjects: sailing ships and oceans. He discovered a deep and instant love for sports cars.
But these were not as cool as the dating sites, where one could choose a girl as easily as picking from a menu. Freddie put up his profile, using the laptop's Photo Booth application to take snapshots of himself. His pictures were nothing like the ubiquitous male profile pictures one saw on these sites: bare-chested guy in the bathroom mirror, the reflection of his cell phone's flash covering most of his face.
No, Freddie used his magic to create more appealing scenarios: Freddie in a tuxedo, laughing it up at a cocktail party; Freddie in a cowboy hat on a bull (he'd morphed Buster for that one); Freddie in a gray suit and slightly loosened gray polka-dot tie, looking serious. The kicker was the casual one: Freddie on the beach in a plain T-shirt, jeans, and black Converse (the caption read "This one's the real me").
The girls arrived in droves, so many of them Freddie did not know what to do, and so there were threesomes and moresomes and somemoresomes. He indulged every whim, courted every girl, made each and every one of them feel special. There were no unsatisfied customers.
His latest obsession was one Hilly Liman. They had been chatting online for a while now, and it was becoming more intense, messaging each other back and forth in the evenings until it was almost morning. For the last few days, the communiques had become so frequent and impassioned that Freddie had been forced to call off the cavalry of coeds. He had no interest in any of them since meeting Hilly.
Something formidable had happened: Freddie had fallen in love. There was no other way to explain it. Hilly was different. She made him wait. Unlike the other girls who appeared at his doorstep after one posting, she had only told him her real name after they'd been e-mailing for a few weeks. She was reserved and cautious, and he didn't think she was playing hard to get. The strangest thing was she didn't even have a picture of herself on her profile, only a shadowy illustration of a silhouette. He didn't even know what she looked like, but he was certain she was gorgeous. He could just feel it. He couldn't explain it, but he was drawn to her from the beginning.
<<so in two weeks, after your exam?>> he typed.
<<yes, can't get away till then. all I can do is think of you, tho. just to be able to touch you. even just a little hug.>>
<<a little hug?>> he wrote.
<<you know what i mean.>> Hilly responded. After a few minutes, she typed again. <<i really like you.>>
Freddie paused, staring at Hilly's words on the screen, putting his hands behind his head as he stretched his back, which was sore from sitting. He exhaled, then typed <<ditto.>>
Three knocks sounded at the door. Freya's signal.
<<brb. my sister's here. i might have to go.>> Freddie wrote.
<<ok. i'll let you go. even tho it's hard.>>
<<u have no idea. <3>> he typed and on-screen, in the chat box, Freddie's heart icon turned red, then swiveled upright, and Hilly typed one out for Freddie on her end, and he watched it do the same thing, smiling to himself. You had to love technology.
Buster nudged his calf as Freya continued to knock.
"Freddie, you there?" she whispered from outside.
"Coming!" He closed the laptop and opened the door a crack.
Freya stood at the doorway, looking wind tossed and holding two shopping bags full of groceries. She stared at him. "Are those ... pajamas? Have you been wearing them all day?" Behind her, the sky was gray, and it was almost evening.
"So?" Freddie asked, annoyed with the sisterly nagging. "It's not like I go anywhere."
"But that's your fault. I've told you so many times to come home." She shook her head. "Well, aren't you going to let me in? I brought you healthy stuff from Mom's garden, some nuts and dried fruit, instead of all that junk food you've been eating."
Freddie took the bags from her, poked his head outside, looked each way, and then fully opened the door. Freya walked in past him. "You seem distracted," she said.