"Yves, Ursula," Dee said to the odd couple goggling at him in the hallway. "You guys okay?" He scrutinized Ursula's face. Her eyes were hidden behind the fog filming her wide, oval glasses. "Ursula?"
Yves followed Dee's gaze. "Ursula, how're you doing?" Her hand squeezed his until his knuckles ground together. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah," Ursula gulped. "Still gay." She nodded. "I'm impressed but still gay." She surrendered Yves' hand. "Just having a strong flashback, sorry."
"Ursula?" The green girl peeped over her shoulder. "Oh, it's the pharmaceutria from two doors down. Hey."
Ursula started at the term but raised a palm. "Uh. Hey."
The green girl shifted her weight in Dee's arms to leer up at Yves. A sheaf of agate dreadlocks fell over her eyes. "Why hullo there," she drawled. "You're Vigo? A guy like you, staying home playing computer games all night?" She shook her head. "What a crime."
Yves laughed, massaging his hand. "I'm Yves. Upstairs neighbor. Favorite video game: Ms. Pac-Man."
She tipped her head. "Nice to finally meet you two."
Ursula turned away, muttering, "Pharmaceutria."
Dee held the green girl away from his chest to look her in the eye. "I would've introduced you to my friends if you'd ever let me out of the apartment."
"Friends?" The green girl's brow wrinkled. "You have friends?"
"Very funny." Dee rolled his shoulders. The green girl gasped, giggled, and decanted from his arms onto the floor. The cheap carpet wilted and browned under her feet.
Yves marveled at how she moved, sumptuous, feline and somehow familiar. Dee. The green girl sinuated herself under Dee's right arm and nested in the hollow of his shoulder. She moves like Dee does. She purred, her gel flesh smooching against his, a leopard lazing against her favored tree. Or does Dee move like her? He's always moved like that, at least a little or whenever he gets worked up about something, hasn't he?
Dee grinned down at her. "Meet my girlfriend, guys. Honey, these are the guys."
"Just after the nick of time," the green girl sighed, "like always." Dee's right hand disappeared behind her back and she squealed, jumped, and wriggled—No, she's oscillating, Yves realized. Her jelled curves rollicked in the aftershock. It's not a sex kitten act; it's colloid physics. She moves that way even standing still, the poor girl.
Ursula wiped the dew from her glasses on a sleeve. "Galatea, you don't look anything like…" Yves pinched her on the elbow. "…Yves said you would." She glared at him and dodged a second pinch. "You're years younger and a lot shorter than I expected."
The green girl, still undulating against Dee, arched an eyebrow at Yves. "Real subtle."
Yves shrugged. "I'm not worried about subtle. I've got two accomplices. Right, Dee?"
Dee tore his gaze away from the green girl's shimmying chest. "Huh?"
The green girl's face clouded over.
"See?" Yves grinned. "We were just wondering if Galatea was all right, considering everything that happened." His smile fell when he saw the green girl's expression. "Galatea, what is it?"
The green girl fluttered a hand around her throat. "You called me 'Honey,'" she said, staring up at Dee. "You've never called me that before. Have you?"
"I have." Dee cupped her chin. "I'm sorry."
She trembled. "I've lost the first time you called me 'Honey.'"
"We'll get it back," Dee told the green girl. "We'll get all of you back."
"Is it amnesia?" Yves asked.
The green girl shook her head and clung to Dee's side.
"It's a lot more complicated than that," Dee explained. "There are things that happened to Galatea that she's never experienced. And she hasn't just lost Galatea's memories; she's got a bunch of the wrong ones."
"I don't understand," Ursula said. Yves nodded in agreement.
Dee sighed. "It's best if we start over, with proper introductions." He gave the green girl a reassuring squeeze. "Okay?"
"Okay," she said, sniffled and stepped forward.
"Ursula, Yves," Dee said, "I'd like you to meet my beloved, Eurydice."
A myrtle blush flushed Eurydice's bare breasts and flashed up her throat. Yves and Ursula recoiled from a sudden flare of heat, retreating sideways into the dingy dead-end of the long hall. Dee turned but Eurydice squirmed and fled behind him, yipping, "Sorry, sorry!" Yves could only see the daggered points of her hair quivering behind Dee's neck as she spoke. "I'm so sorry. Dammit, Dee!"
Dee flinched under a splattered drubbing against his back. "Ow. What, what?"
"Dee, I can't believe you named me in front of your friends! You know how much that turns me on!" A few rivulets of green syrup spilled over Dee's hunching shoulders and rolled down his sinewy, naked frame. "So few men ever live long enough to name me and the one that gets to name me twice turns out to be an idiot."
"I understand even less now," Ursula said, pressing her palm against her forehead.
"You’re not alone." Yves sidled as close as he could in the baking heat. "Dee, Ursula and I just risked our lives saving you and your girlfriend's asses, and I know it's not over yet—but I have no idea what happened in there." He stood on tiptoe to stare down at Eurydice from over Dee's shoulder, "Are you Galatea or not?"
"Hey," Dee started.
"Shut up," Ursula said, her back still flat against the beige wall. "Let Sherlock do his thing."
Eurydice propped her chin on Dee's brawny back to glare up at Yves. "I am Galatea." Her brow crinkled. "And a few others, too. Dee brought us back." The nervous writhing of her medusa's hair grew more purposeful, the tips of her snaking dreadlocks exploring the cords of Dee's neck. "I mean Dee brought me back from just a few nanomek…"
Ursula said, "What's—" but Yves muttered, "Magic powder, raw material for meliae magic, makes girls out of goo. Move on."
"Oh!" Ursula jumped away from the wall and babbled. "There's a material component for summoning nymphs? Is it the massa confusa? Does it only make female things? Can I have some?"
"Massa what?" Dee said, "Cherry Cupcake called it novilunium."
"Novilunium, really? Why doesn't anyone tell me these things? Can I have some?" Ursula bounced on her feet. "Actually, that connection makes a lot of sense. Seriously, though, can I have some?" She frowned. "Wait, who's Cherry Cupcake?"
"Oh my God," Dee cried, "you mean you don't know?"
Yves and Eurydice chorused, "Shut the fuck up!"
Yves blinked. Eurydice poked her head around Dee's left arm and grinned like a madwoman up at Yves. "They talk way too much, don't they? How do we get rid of them?"
Yves shook his head. "I'd shake your hand if it weren’t three hundred degrees."
"Time to cool off, then." She stepped out from Dee's shadow. "Dee, go hose yourself down and then bring me some ice. I don't need much—I'm very energy efficient—but only if you're not around getting me hot and bothered."
Dee glanced down to give her a wry smile. "Yes, dear."
Eurydice slapped him on his bare rump when he turned about-face and marched back into Bee's smoldering apartment. "Ooh, I shouldna done that," she said, touching the tips of her fingers to her lips. The gelled blades of her hair stuck together and a green sugar glaze ran down her forehead. "I'll need more ice, solid boy!"
Ursula whistled. "Wow, I knew you'd got it bad, but not that bad."
"Have you seen that man's ass?" Yves asked.
"I wasn't looking," Ursula admitted.
Eurydice hooked her thumb at the apartment door. "Go check it out."
Ursula rolled her eyes. "Fine, I get the point." She disappeared into the misty apartment and squeaked, "Holy shit!" Yves and Eurydice exchanged worried looks. "Look at this mess!" Yves gave Eurydice the thumbs-up.
"So," Eurydice sighed, peeling her sticky clumps of hair apart into a forest of shimmering dreadlocks. "How much time we got, do you think?"
Yves watched her shake out her jade mane. She's green. She's made out of Jell-O. She's real. "Just a few minutes, but that's not the real worry." The real worry is you're God-damned made out of God-damned Jell-O. He glanced down the hallway. "The real worry is morning rush hour." No, the real worry is I'm talking to a girl made out of Jell-O as if I meet one every day waiting in line at Starbucks. Well, at least this one isn't fisting my dick and my ass at the same time like the last one did. "There are only two other apartments along this hallway since the rental office is on this floor, and both Kay and this Esteban guy are…gone…but someone's bound to notice all this collateral damage. We're supposed to have security, but somehow they've missed all this. So stop showing off and give it to me straight."
Eurydice cocked her head to one side at a ninety degree angle. "If you stop feeding me a line of bullshit, and tell me what you're really thinking, I'll stop showing off."
"I'm thinking security didn't notice because Cherry Cupcake ate them, like she ate Bee, and possibly Esteban, Kay, and God knows how many other people. Ate them for their collagen; human bones and fibers are loaded with the stuff. That's why she was as strong as Dee, maybe stronger, when they duked it out."
Eurydice's eyes clouded and brimmed. "Did Dee…I mean, was he—"
"Ready? Yes. He was ready. Galatea prepared him well. I saw the video." Yves smiled as kindly as he could. "It was a pornographic version of the Karate Kid training montage, a black belt in goojitsu via four day fuck-a-thon. My turn: How many men sublimated before you found Dee, found the one that could go all the way?"
Her sadness flipped into a visage of shock. "Dee videotaped us?"
Yves snorted. "Dee? Never, and you know it. Bee rigged a webcam from his bedroom into yours. It's hosed now. Melted into slag."
Her mock shock downshifted into real regret. "Aw, damn. I would've loved to see that."
Yves smiled but his eyes were hard. "Answer the question: How many men?"
Eurydice shrugged. "Most of them, I guess."
Yves laughed. "That's not the kind of answer I was looking for."
"That's the only kind you're going to get," Eurydice said, "because I don't know. I don't remember everything, even now. Especially now."
"But you said 'most,' so a few meliae-makers before Dee have gone all the way with you instead of sublimating. Dee isn't the first, after all." That might explain her speaking in tongues.
She smirked. "You really like that pun."
Yves shushed her. I bet I can put it all together now. "You remember at least three. Let me guess:" Greek. "Hercules."
"Now who's showing off?" she said, but nodded. "And it's 'Heracles,' if you please. He had thirteen labors, you know, not twelve. No one ever remembers the first one."
"Very funny." Latin. "Romulus."
"And Remus, too." She winked at him. "My one and only twosome, other than Gilgamesh and Enkido. Tag-teaming's more trouble than it's worth. Dee's already made me cum more than all four of those bozos ever did, and we're just getting started and I've lost half my memories of him."
She's trying to distract me. "And, uh…" It's working "Damn, I don’t know."
"Oh yes you do, Yves." She stressed his name and arched her brow.
"Better not be John Donne," Yves said.
"No," Eurydice laughed. "Gawain." Her grin was wistful. "He was almost as hard and good as Dee. Mm, almost. His friend was kinda cute, too."
"Wait. 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.' The green knight. You?"
"Kinda sorta almost," Eurydice said, rocking to and fro on every word.
"The same way you're kinda sorta almost Galatea?"
Her hips froze in mid swing and her smile vanished. "I am Galatea."
"You mean Galatea is in there with you."
Eurydice stamped her foot, setting off temblors in her many curves. "That's not how it works at all."
Yves crossed his arms. "Then tell me how it does work." Eurydice huffed and heaved. "You can stop the T and A show. Dee and Ursula will be back any minute now, though, and you'll get a captive audience out of the two of them, I promise you."
"Fine, fine." The turbulence in her tits and ass smoothed out. "Nanomek memory is holographic."
"Handwritten?"
Eurydice flicked a hand at him. "Pfft, don't you start. I mean one iota of nanomek contains enough info to reconstruct the whole shebang."
"But when Dee brought you back," Yves said, "something went wrong, the nanomek went down the wrong reconstruction path a few times and brought back fragments of the wrong shebang before it found Galatea. Hey, that's your pun, not mine, so don't blame me for using it. So what went wrong?"
Eurydice turned away. "I don't know."
"Was it Galatea?" Yves guessed. Eurydice shivered but stayed silent and Yves plunged ahead. "Galatea's not sure she wants to come back."
Eurydice spun to face Yves, hair writhing, her glare thunderous. "I wanted to come back. I did come back. I am Galatea."
"But you don't remember how Dee left you." He reached for her shoulders and found them shaking and cool as marble. "What he said, what he did, and what happened after. But there is a part of you—the whole of you, really, because you're the part and she's the whole—there's a Galatea out there that does remember. And Cherry Cupcake has her. And Dee wants her back."
"I hate you," Eurydice sobbed. "I hate you. I could ask Dee to kill you. And he would!" She batted her fists against Yves' stomach as she cried. "Gilgamesh killed Enkido, Romulus killed Remus, Gawain killed Yvain, and Dee will kill you!"
"Is that how this always ends?" Yves demanded. Eurydice wriggled in his grip but Yves would not relent. "A tragic fairy tale? Galatea divided? Friends and brothers dead?" 'Yvain?' Who the Hell was Yvain?
"I don't know. I don't know!" Eurydice threw her arms around Yves and hugged herself to his chest. Her face and breasts were cool but her core still burned. "What if Dee finds Galatea and she wants him but we can't re-assimilate? I couldn't share him, I'd go mad. Or, God, what if we do re-assimilate and I don't want him any more? That would be worse, so much worse."
Yves cradled her head as she wept. "It won't end that way," he told her, "not this time. Dee's different than the others, you said so yourself. And I'm different, too."
Eurydice snuffled and looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"Cherry Cupcake," Yves said, pulling away from her a few inches to escape the furnace below her belly. "She's always involved too, right?"
"That depends," Eurydice said. "Is Cherry Cupcake Dee's psycho bitch ex-girlfriend from Hell?"
Yves nodded. "Yeah, that's her. Like Gawain and Morgan le Fey. Hercules…I mean Heracles and, uh, Medea."
Eurydice laughed once between sniffles. "You've got your myths all mixed up."
"This is Ursula's area, not mine," Yves said. "I took English for Engineers in college. The names don’t matter, but listen: Dee did not screw around with Cherry Cupcake. She came to him disguised but he figured it out and rejected her before anything was fully consummated. That's not why he and Galatea broke up. Hell, they didn't really break up at all. They had a row, a lover's quarrel, that's all."
Eurydice gasped and leapt away, her fingers fluttering about her throat. "He didn't…You mean they didn't…?"
"Dee figured out Galatea fed him nanomek. He freaked. They had their first fight, and Dee stormed out to get roaring drunk."
Eurydice's eyes were as wide as saucers. "And he didn't sleep with Cherry Cupcake? With you? Anybody?"
"No, although he had to fight off potential psycho ex-girlfriends with a stick." And now I know why: to fit the fairy tale. "I wasn't one of them, thank you very much."
"Then what the fuck happened?"
"What usually happens when women throw themselves at Dee: absolutely nothing. It just made him mopey and piney…for you."
Relieved laughter bubbled out of her. "I knew he was different! I knew he could be the one!" She jumped up and kissed Yves on the cheek, leaving a warm, gooey green lip-print. "I wish he could have done it some other way than moping and pining. You're not smiling, Yves," she realized. "What are you not telling me?"
"When Dee rejected Cherry Cupcake, she raped me," Yves said, voice flat.
"Oh my God. Oh, Yves, I'm so sorry." She nestled back into his chest and held him close for a long while before muttering, "I'm going to kill the bitch."
Yves hesitated before he ruffled his fingers through her hair, a mop of thick, velvety rope. "No macho bullshit."
Ursula staggered through the doorway to Bee's apartment, shreds of metal scraping across the floor. Green flakes of plaster speckled her hair. "It's Hell on Earth in there."
Eurydice winked up at Yves and turned to face her. "How's Dee?"
"The walls are gone," Ursula said. "Just green gunk, stained cement, and support beams. Like walking inside the ribcage of a giant, rotting corpse."
Eurydice revolved a finger in an unmistakable wrap-it-up gesture. "How's Dee?"
"There's water running everywhere," Ursula said, staring past Eurydice's left ear. "All the porcelain and plastic in the bathroom melted into lumps. Even the toilet."
"Ursula," Yves said, "where's Dee?"
Ursula ran shaky fingers over her braids, knocking out the plaster. "He stood in the water splashing into the hole where the tub should have been. The water was cold." She met Eurydice's gaze for the first time. "I could hear things…cracking…inside him as he cooled off. He said it felt great, like whole-body chiropractics. When he was done, he reached up and pinched the pipe shut." She reached above her head and pinched the air with a thumb and forefinger.
"Sorry," Yves said, "I should have warned you."
"What did you think of his ass?" asked Eurydice.
"I've got ice," Dee declared, waltzing through the doorway with a mostly-melted plastic bowl full of ice cubes. "The freezer shorted out a few minutes ago, so there's a little more if you need it." He stepped around Ursula and passed the bowl of ice to Eurydice. "I've stopped the leaks in the bathroom, but there's like three inches of water in the bedroom."
Eurydice grabbed a modest handful of ice from the bowl and munched on it like popcorn. She tipped her head to regard Ursula. "Well?"
Ursula blinked and glanced downward, pulling her glasses to the very tip of her nose. "Nice ice." She straightened up. An ice cube bounced off her forehead. Eurydice catcalled and threw another cube at her. Ursula ducked and it sailed overhead.
Dee stood still, a naked, human maypole, as the two girls bobbed and weaved around him, ice cubes flying. "What now?" he said over Eurydice's howls and cackles.
"I go get you some clothes," Yves said. He deflected an ice cube with a casual swipe of his open palm.
Eurydice readied her last cube, squinting at Yves. "Shove it, samurai." The icy projectile flew. Yves caught it an inch in front of his eyes and Euyrdice said, "Ooh—ow!" when the returned volley struck her in the nose.
Dee frowned. "Clothes."
"You are buck naked, you know," Ursula pointed out.
Dee's frown deepened. "Yeah."
"Last time you were naked in front of me," Yves said, "you blushed like a school girl."
Eurydice leered at Dee, eyes roving. "He's meant to be naked. Wait." She turned on Yves. "Naked in front of you? You weren't naked, too, right?" Her eyes narrowed and she readied the empty bowl. "Right?"
"You'll need some clothes as well, green girl," Yves told her. "We've got to get out of here before anyone can connect us with Bee's disappearance and all this destruction."
"If you look up in Bee's bedroom," Ursula said, "you see Dee's bedroom ceiling. It's green, too. And arterial red. Security's not going to call the super; they're going to call the fucking cops."
"Worry about it later," Dee insisted. "Yves's right; we've got to go. We've got to go to SRU."
Eurydice leapt between the three of them. "How's this?" She reached behind her neck and pulled. An olive, pullover hoodie stretched over her head and down to her waist. Drab, baggy fatigues unrolled over her legs and tucked themselves into green army boots, dark enough to pass for black. Eurydice reached into a pocket of her fatigues and drew out an oversized pair of tea-green, wraparound, Onasis sunglasses. She pushed them over her face, tucking a few stray tentacles into the olive hood.
Yves swore and stepped back. Ursula just boggled in silence. Eurydice turned to Dee, one hand on her hip, twirling the plastic bowl with the other. "Well?"
"You look like the Unabomber." Dee glanced down. "With a really nice rack."
The bowl clomped upside down onto the carpet before Dee's feet. Eurydice hopped atop her makeshift pedestal and bussed his forehead. "I can be anything you want," she said, her kiss on Dee's mouth lingering until Yves cleared his throat, "as long as it's green."
Dee looked at her with his inscrutable smile. "You don't remember the food coloring."
"Ooh, food coloring?" Eurydice clapped her hands. "Wuzzat?"
Yves cleared his throat louder. "The, uh, Unabomber thing will work great at a distance, but up close the clothes look, well, rubbery. That's not the right word. Fluid?"
Ursula found her voice. "Cartoon. She looks like a living cartoon."
Eurydice turned a sly eye to Dee. "Do I?"
Dee placed a hand on her hip. "Yes."
Eurydice reached down and slid Dee's hand back from her hip to the seat of her pants. "That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"God, yes." Dee pulled her off the pedestal. She squealed into his mouth, her legs kicked up into the air.
"God help us," groaned Yves. "They're worse than teenagers."
Ursula moved over to Yves. "Give them a minute—we've got a minute, right? Well, give it to them. You didn't see Galatea in full cartoon cosplay mode. It sticks in your head." She shifted her weight. "And other places."
"Still," Yves said, "all she needs is one genuine article of clothing and no one other than the cops or campus patrol will look twice. Do you have anything to give her?"
Dee murmured into Eurydice's ear and she sighed and giggled quiet replies. Yves felt the urgent need to brush his teeth.
"Are you kidding?" Ursula clutched the air before her chest, fingers curved inward. "Dee likes her big and busty, and all she's thinking about is him. Besides, I'm a size 2."
"We'll risk it, then," Yves decided. "But no food coloring or we'll have to hose Dee down." He raised his voice. "Guys, I'm going to my apartment to get Dee something to wear. You need to stay here, it's the most isolated place in the building and everyone's heading off to work now. Hopefully. Ursula, unless you need anything from your apartment, you should stay with them."
"I'd really like to change," Ursula said, "and if you want me to find Galatea, I'm going to need a few minutes to prepare the divination."
Eurydice sprang out of Dee's arms. "Wait. What?"
"You can find Galatea?" Dee asked.
Yves dropped a hand on her shoulder but Ursula shrugged it off. "Sure," she said. "Galatea established a sympathetic connection with me when she, ah, used the soap I made you."
"A sympathetic connection," Dee repeated, uncomprehending, while Eurydice said, "You made him soap?"
"At the trace stage of saponification process," Ursula explained, "I add an extra series of distilled oils and herbal essences—not that shampoo bullshit, the real thing, camphor basil, Jupiter's Beard, myrrh oil—anyway, a series of oils and essences that resonate with my nativity." She glanced around. "None of you understood a word I just said, did you?"
"Translation, please," Yves said.
"Let me revel in the moment for a second." Ursula bopped back and forth, humming. "It's wonderful to be on this side of a conversation for once. Okay. I gave Dee some soap. The soap has a magic tracer in it. Galatea ate it. I can use magic to trace her. I'm an apothecary, a pharmaceutria, a 'sorceress'," she said, enunciating each syllable and drawing out each sibilant, as if tasting the word for the first time. She threw her hands in the air. "I'm a witch!"
She stood in silence, arms high.
"Oh," said Dee.
Eurydice shrugged. "Meh."
"I'm going upstairs," Yves said.
"Fuck you," Ursula said, arms dropping. "Fuck you all."
"And then Dee said, 'Ready?'" Eurydice recalled. Yves' Jeep bounced over a deep pothole and it took a few moments for the green girl in the backseat to regain her composure. "And then," she said, sunglasses and mouth settling into their proper places and proportions, "it was like giving birth and being born at the same time. He tore me apart. He tore me open. He tore me free. He burned away all the nanomek that I couldn't control, anything that fought back." She blushed black, the flush spreading through the substance of her sunglasses and hoodie. "I gain nanomek by making Dee cum, but I burn nanomek whenever he makes me cum. Everything I do costs me nanomek, but an orgasm costs the most. I don't remember telling him that, but he must have figured it out, because…because he ripped and shredded and fucked me into pieces. The pain was worse than anything I'd ever experienced but I kept cumming and cumming, harder and faster and, God, stronger than anything I've known, than anything any of us have ever imagined in all our thousands of years. It was awful. It was terrific. It was …"
"Sublime," Yves croaked from the driver's seat. "I was wrong. I thought you were sublimating him. I thought you, Dee," he said, turning to Dee in the passenger seat, "had planned to sublime into Galatea in order to bring her back. But I was wrong, wasn't I?" Dee stared at him but said nothing. "When you kicked me out of the bathroom, you already knew. To get Galatea back, you would have to sublimate her."
Eurydice muffled a gasp with the palm of her hand. "Oh, Dee, is that true? Was that sublimation? Was that what subliming feels like?"
Dee twisted in the passenger seat to treat her to his inscrutable smile. "It's a good description of what I've been through a few times, yeah, but I've never gone as far as you did."
Ursula, her eyes shut tight, her voice drifting in from some other world, said, "Two miles to the north, two to the east, one behind the Sun." She shifted in the back seat next to Eurydice. "But don't worry about that last one."
Eurydice's voice barely rose above the rumbling of the road and the Jeep's engine. "All these years. All those men. I don't really remember, I mean, it wasn't really me, but…" She held her head in her hands. "There are echoes of them all in my head."
"Don't feel guilty," Yves told her. He tapped the touch-screen of his GPS navigation gadget. "It's what they wanted."
Eurydice pulled the sunglasses away from her teary eyes. "What?"
"Make a right at next traffic light onto Campion Street, then proceed two point oh three miles," said the clipped, synthetic voice of the GPS.
"Yves is right," Dee said. "You never forced me to do anything, not really. I bet no lime meliae ever forced sublimation onto anyone, either."
Eurydice shook her head hard enough to sprinkle Ursula and the window with tear drops. "The Demonic Fifteen Point—"
Dee bent backwards to grab her hand. "I loved it."
Eurydice stared at his hand wrapped around hers.
"I never said 'No'," Dee said. "Believe me, I know how to say 'No'. You may not remember, but I've said 'No' to you a few times. And 'Pygmalion,' too."
Eurydice opened her mouth to speak but Ursula shouted, "Stop the car!"
Yves swore, hit the brakes, and wrestled the Jeep to the side of the road. "You're worse than this thing," he said, jabbing the GPS.
Ursula turned her head this way and that, eyes shut and lips parted, as if sampling the air. "Galatea's a few hundred yards to the right of us." She opened her eyes and squinted out the plastic window. "We're on fraternity row?"
Yves called up a map on the GPS screen. "The next right turn doubles back into a cul-de-sac. We've found her."
Eurydice shrank into the back seat. "Galatea?"
"And Cherry Cupcake," Yves said, "If we're still assuming she's got Galatea imprisoned somehow."
Dee nodded. "I'm shooting for the Disney lovey-dovey ending: free the enchanted princess." He saw Yves' expression and smiled. "I'll explain later. Listen, should we leave the car here and sneak up?"
"I wouldn't," Yves said. "In case we need to cut and run."
Dee frowned. "I don't want Cherry Cupcake hurting anyone else. Maybe I should go alone."
Eurydice cried out, "No!"
Yves growled, "No fucking way."
"I slept with Galatea," Ursula said.
Eurydice glanced up, agog, before creasing her brow. "Yeahbuhwha'?"
Ursula's mouth worked wordlessly as Dee leaned further into the back of the Jeep. She gawked back at him, transfixed and aghast.
Yves worked the gearshift, speaking as fast as he could. "I have an idea—let's circle the block once and—say, when was the last time you ate—I'm starved and I think I saw a Waffle Shack around here somewhere—"
"I know," Dee said. He twisted sideways and engaged the emergency brake. His gaze did not leave Ursula's shocked face.
Yves flinched but relaxed when the brake handle did not snap off in Dee's hand. "You know…where the Waffle Shack is?"
Dee ignored him. "I know," he told Ursula again.
Ursula swallowed. "What?"
"How?" Yves asked.
Eurydice sized Ursula up, a petite moppet in a black poncho, distressed jeans, and Doc Martins. Plaited ponytails tied up with white-lace ribbons arced away from her head and into the foot well. "I fucked the loli-goth?"
"I'm twenty-two," Ursula murmured.
"How did you know?" Yves demanded, pushing the gearshift forward into park.
"Still," Eurydice said, eyeing Ursula up and down. "You're really not my type, no offense, but…" Ursula folded up one side of the poncho and held a bare, porcelain-white forearm under Eurydice's nose. "Oh," Eurydice breathed, mouth watering.
Dee turned to Yves. "What color are Ursula's eyes?"
"Oh. Um." Eurydice's eye's crossed. She brought her mouth within an inch of Ursula's flesh. "Oh."
"Green," Yves said without looking.
"Darkling green," Dee agreed. "Emerald on black velvet."
Ursula blinked, pulling her arm back. Eurydice's lips smacked together over empty air. "But…" Ursula began.
"They're usually hazel," Dee finished. He broke the sun visor off the windshield, flipped its flap open to reveal an oblong mirror, and passed it back. "They were last week, at least."
Ursula snatched the visor out of his hands, scrabbled the eyeglasses off her face, and glared at the mirror, eyes wide. "Holy shit."
Eurydice leveled a suspicious finger at Ursula. "She smells just like you, Dee. Except, you know, girly."
Yves shook his head. "You're paying for that mirror, Dee. How did you notice something like that when I didn't?"
"Give me some credit, Yves." Dee rolled his eyes and settled back into his seat. "It's an easy mistake to make, the two of you have hardly spoken before today, and I've got a thing for girls' eyes."
Eurydice grinned. "He does, you know," she sighed.
"Listen," Ursula said, her glasses slipping in her shaking fingers as she pushed the red frames over her face, "I didn't mean to tell you. I mean, I wanted to tell you, but telling you now would've been insanely stupid."
Yves nodded. "It was."
"Fuck you." Ursula flipped Yves off. "Dee, listen, maybe it was the divination trance. I've been concentrating on my memories of Galatea and they're pretty, uh, specific. Anyway, the words just popped out. I'm sorry."
"You have nanomek in you," Dee said, not turning around, "Galatea's nanomek."
"Dee, I'm really sorry."
"You don't understand. I'm not jealous at all. That's not the point. You have Galatea's nanomek inside you." He turned around again. "Eurydice?"
Eurydice squinted, looking deep into Ursula's eyes. "Yeah," Eurydice agreed, "she's been royally mindfucked, alright. It's amazing she isn't a zombie." Eurydice straightened Ursula's glasses. "You've got some serious firepower between your ears, sister."
Yves sat bolt upright. "Oh, crap, I get it now."
"That's not all she's got between her ears," Dee said, grinning like an idiot.
The Goth and the green girl crinkled their brows in confusion and chorused, "What?"
Yves met Eurydice's gaze in the rearview mirror. "Dee wants you to re-assimilate with Ursula's nanomek, Eurydice."
Eurydice blanched a pale celadon. "You know what I'd have to do to go in and, uh, get it, right?"
Dee's grin puckered into a smirk. "You've done it before, apparently."
"Whoa, whoa!" Ursula waggled her hands, pressing herself up against the window. "I'm not ready for Lesson Six."
Eurydice locked onto Yves' reflection in the rearview mirror. Yves read her silent, abject plea, nodded, and tapped Dee on the shoulder. "You know, Dee, you're acting awfully cruel for someone who says he isn't jealous."
Dee's smile vanished. "What?"
"I'll do it," Eurydice muttered, downcast, "if you want me too."
"You mean you don't want to?" Dee asked, reaching for her.
Ursula scooted forward and took his hand instead. "What do you want, Dee?"
"A show?" Yves suggested.
Dee shook his head. "No."
Ursula shrugged. "Revenge?"
"No, Jesus, what's with you guys?"
Eurydice caressed his arm, bare and cool in Yves' spare muscle shirt. "Then what do you want?"
"Damn it," Dee spat. He lurched back into the front seat. "Isn't it obvious? I want you to re-remember what happened, what happened between you and me." He sighed, quiet and sad. "So I can say I'm sorry. I guess that's pretty selfish."
Yves hauled the Jeep into gear. "No." He toggled the turn signal. "Wanting her to not remember would be selfish. Wanting her to remember your acting like an idiot, just so you can make it up to her is so hopelessly romantic I think I vomited in my mouth a little."
Eurydice slid the sunglasses back on her face in silence.
Dee grumbled, "Thanks."
"Ignore him, Dee," Ursula said as the Jeep pulled away from the curb. "Besides, the nanomek stuff in me wouldn't help."
Eurydice sat up, the oversize sunglasses hiding any emotion. "Really?"
Dee toyed with the GPS touch screen, zooming in on the cul-de-sac Yves had flagged as their destination. "Why not?"
"Well," Ursula said, "Galatea didn't mention anything about a breakup or even a fight to me. She was just pissed off that you were having sex with her, somewhere else. It didn't make much sense to me then." She glanced at Eurydice, who was watching her with the expressionless cool of reflective lenses. "But it does now. Plus, from what Yves' told me, whatever happened between the two of you happened late last night, after Galatea's visit to my apartment. So I all have inside me is Galatea's memories…of me."
Yves made a hard right at the next light. Eurydice rode the Jeep's momentum and sidled over to Ursula, faster than a sidewinder. "Really?" she said again, drawling, one brow arching high above the rims of her sunglasses. Eurydice's breath was warm against Ursula's cheek. "Now that's interesting." Ursula blushed and squirmed away but Eurydice just inched closer and wedged herself against the retreating Goth girl. She finger-walked a jelled hand up Ursula's thigh and wondered, "Did you smell as good then as you do now? Like Dee, but, you know…" Eurydice dipped her head to coo into Ursula's ear, "…girly?"
"Dee? Hey, Dee?" Ursula stammered as Eurydice wriggled and giggled against her. "Your Unabomber's sticking her tongue in my ear."
Dee turned around. Ursula sat sandwiched between one side of the Jeep and Eurydice's supple gel-flesh. Eurydice clasped one arm around Ursula's back, squeezing the Goth girl in a sideways hug. The green girl's hoodie had grown a zipper while the garment shrank two sizes too small. Dee watched Ursula's shoulder sink into Eurydice's corseted cleavage. The gummy fingers walking up Ursula's thigh flicked at the hem of the poncho and crept under and upward.
"Uh, Dee?" Ursula implored while Eurydice tittered, "Ooh, perky."
"The safe word is 'Pygmalion'," Dee said, facing forward again.
"She knows that already," Yves said, keeping one eye on the road ahead and the other on the GPS readout.
"I figured," Dee said, looking back over his shoulder. Ursula's eyeglasses dangled askew on her face. Eurydice nibbled her way down Ursula's jaw line, casting frequent wicked grins in Dee's direction. "You guys okay back there?"
"Yeah," Ursula said. Eurydice's arm rippled fluidly under Ursula's poncho and the Goth girl added, "Oh, yeah. Definitely."
Eurydice pivoted her head and pouted, "Maybe we should pull over and—"
The Jeep rocked to a halt. "We're here. I think," Yves announced.
Eurydice whispered, "Dammit."
Ursula pushed Eurydice's hands away with a quick kiss. "It will be alright," she whispered back. "Where are we?" she asked, louder, leaning between the two front seats to get a good look. "Oh, you have got to be shitting me."
Eurydice peered forward at the imposing, brick building and its columned façade. "What?"
"This thing is working fine," Yves said, tapping the GPS. "What about the one inside your head?"
Ursula shut her eyes for a second, gasped, and unclosed them again. "Galatea's dead ahead. This is it. She's in there, somewhere."
"We're fucked," Dee groused.
"What is it?" Eurydice urged. "Research lab? FBI satellite office? Culinary institute?"
"Worse," Yves said.
Ursula sighed, resigned to doom. "It's the Epsilon Zeta sorority house."
Eurydice glanced around the cul-de-sac. The E-Z house grounds were flanked by far less grand, unaffiliated student housing. A sporty, yellow SUV squatted in the U-shaped driveway in front of the E-Z house door. A gravel road branched from the paved driveway to an overcrowded parking lot on the sorority grounds, housing a few dozen more cars. "I don't get it," Eurydice conceded.
"E-Z's the biggest sorority in town," Yves said. "Over a hundred active members. Very active, well-funded, and well-to-do."
"Very homophobic," Ursula muttered. Eurydice looked quizzical. "The Easies have been drubbing out gay girls for years. Even got a professor fired back in the Sixties. Someone blew the whistle a while back and now, a couple of discrimination suits later…they're just more polite about it."
"Okay," Eurydice shrugged, "a bunch of rich, asshole coeds. So? Dee can just punch his way through the walls and…Oh."
"Exactly." Dee waved a hand at the sorority house. "I can't get in there, and get out again, without innocent people getting hurt, thanks to my public fuckability."
Ursula swallowed a bark of laughter and hiccupped. "Your what?"
Dee sunk into his seat. "Public fuckability."
Eurydice stretched to glower out the window at the sorority house.
"We're using the term 'charism' now, Dee," Yves said, smirking.
Ursula could not suppress her giggle fit. "Public fuckability!"
Dee twisted in the seat, face burning. "Take the wax out of your ears," he growled, "and see if you're still laughing…little girl." Ursula flinched and Yves cursed and thumped a fist against the steering wheel. "Oh, shit," Dee said, paling. "What happened?"
"I don't need to take the wax out," Ursula said, her voice small. "I felt that in my teeth."
Yves reached out an open palm. "Pass me the wax."
"Jesus, you too?" Dee said, head in hands. "It's getting worse!"
"Yes." Yves blinked. "Wait: No. Not like that, anyway. You didn't turn me on. You gave me a migraine." He ran a fingernail down a fault in the driver side window. "And nearly broke the window. I'm pretty sure this crack wasn't here a few minutes ago. Before this is over, we need to get you to SRU and get your charism, kiai, or whatever-it-is, under control."
"Yeah." Dee shook out his hair, exhaling. "Yeah. So, anyway, Eurydice, I can't go in there without innocent people getting hurt." Ursula coughed and Dee added, "Innocent of this matter, I mean, and too many people've gotten hurt already. Cherry Cupcake could not have picked a better spot to take Galatea."
"If Cherry Cupcake's in there," Yves pointed out.
Dee shook his head. "She's definitely in there. I can tell."
"How can you tell?" Yves asked. "Are you sure?"
["…Oh, Master. I'm in you now. I'm in you…"]
"I don't know," Dee lied. "But I'm sure."
Eurydice still glared out the window. "We're being watched."
Yves threw the gearshift into reverse but pushed hard on the footbrake. "We’ve got a choice: leave at the first sign of trouble or at the last possible moment. Staying is not an option; we are not ready for a fight."
"Leave at the last possible moment," Dee said, "and try to learn as much as we can." He turned around. "Is that okay with you two?"
Eurydice nodded. Ursula said, "You can just leave Galatea?"
"No," Dee answered, "but if Yves says we're not ready, I believe him. I don't want anyone else getting hurt because of my mistakes."
"What about Cherry Cupcake hurting Galatea?" Ursula asked.
"She won't do anything to Galatea until after we make our move," Yves said. He sought confirmation in Dee's eyes.
Dee nodded, shivered at the memory. ["…You'll never push me away again…"] "She wants my attention," he said. "She wants me thinking about her all the time. Right now, we've got no plan and little information. Charging in blind would mean I'm not taking her seriously, and that would put Galatea in real danger. Plus, the parking lot is full, so I can't go in there without being buried in Easies. Eurydice, what are you smiling about?"
"I'm thinking of you fucking your way out of a mob of frenzy-sisters." Her teeth were daggered. "It's an interesting mental image. I bet you could do it." Eurydice sat up and pulled the sunglasses off her face. "Orpheus couldn't handle it, they fucked him apart instead, but you'd get through, Dee…Ursula, you okay?"
Ursula groaned, clutching the sides of her head. "My worldview hurts."
"We've got company," Yves said, his hands worrying the steering wheel.
The three passengers followed his gaze. The heavy front door to the sorority house bumped open and a tall coed in ragged jean shorts and a white tee-shirt shuffled through. Her hair was a bird's nest of red tangles.
"That's the worst case of bed-head I've ever seen," Yves said as the newcomer stumbled down the porch steps. A brunette coed in the same outfit tottered out of the building behind her and Yves quipped, "Okay, second worst." A blonde carrying a plastic bucket followed, fumbling the door closed behind her. "Christ, it's a makeover emergency."
The trio bumbled around the yellow SUV. The blonde upended the bucket and a flurry of towels fell onto the driveway. The brunette pulled one end of a garden house from the shrubbery and blasted the SUV with a jet of water. Her aim was unsure and wild. She stood with the hose shooting water straight up into the air as her friends divvied up the towels. Water splashed down over everything.
Ursula kneeled in between the front seats of the Jeep, squinting. "Are they stoned?"
"I know them," Dee said, and as soon as he spoke the trio of coeds turned to face the Jeep, their motions fluid and synchronized. The brunette kept the hose firing into the sky. The trio was sopping wet in moments, their shirts slick and translucent. The redhead pulled a bottle out of her shorts and squirted its contents into the bucket.
"There's no fucking way they heard you from there," Yves hissed.
"They couldn't, all by themselves," Eurydice murmured, "but maybe someone else is helping them."
"I'd vote for the blonde in a wet tee-shirt contest," Ursula said. "Just look at those. Damn, I can see her nipples from here…What?" She poked Dee in the shoulder. "C'mon, back me up on this."
"What the Hell is going on?" Dee asked her. The three coeds triangulated their attention to the front passenger seat of the Jeep.
"Not another word, Dee," Yves said.
The brunette brought the hose down, training its spray at the bucket. The jet of water caught the redhead in the ear as it arced downward. Her hair flew wild. She did not flinch or move an inch.
Ursula swore. Dee opened his mouth but Yves punched him in the arm. "Shut up, Dee," Yves barked. "They're putting on a show, trying to get you to…" Yves' eyes watered. "Ow, Jesus, ow." Yves cradled his right hand in his left, massaging his knuckles gingerly. "It's like punching a brick wall."
"Marble," Ursula corrected. She poked Dee's shoulder again. "His skin gives." Dee turned and made a sour face at her but she ignored him, exploring the hollow of his collarbone instead. Her fingers worked under the narrow strap of the muscle shirt. "His skin gives as you'd expect but the musculature underneath is marble." Dee grumbled and folded his arms. Ursula gasped as his shoulder flexed beneath her palm. "Stone sliding against stone," Ursula stuttered, voice hushed. "Polished granite or greased marble…"
Eurydice cleared her throat in the sudden, icicled silence.
Ursula withdrew into the back seat. "Look," she told Eurydice, "I'm gay, but I'm not dead. I can see the attraction of that sort of thing but I don't want it." Dee grimaced and rooted around the Jeep's glove compartment. Ursula pointed out the window to the driveway where the coeds, their expressions cockeyed but otherwise blank, were busy soaping up their SUV and each other with sudsy towels. "I'm much more interested in the Night of the Living Coed Carwash going on out there."
"They've been 'mindfucked,' right?" Yves asked. "Cherry Cupcake's gotten into them. How much nanomek does that cost?"
Dee found a pen and waved it around in silent triumph before diving back into the glove compartment.
"It depends on what you want to do," Eurydice explained. "Opening someone to suggestion costs just a little, enthralling someone takes a little bit more plus a really good, hard screw, but remote control zombies? A metric fuckton. What's Dee doing?" Dee scribbled with his pen on the back of an old gas station receipt. "It looks like he's trying to tell us something. What is it, solid boy?"
Dee shoved the receipt in Eurydice's face. She read the back of the piece of paper, and passed it to Ursula in stunned silence.
"'Don't objectify me'," Ursula read as Eurydice burst into giggles.
Eurydice made little, happy snerk! noises. "You left out the three exclamation points."
Ursula peered up at Dee's silent, wounded-puppy expression. Her chin trembled, lips working to hold back laughter. "I'm s-sorry, Dee. But…" She held up the little slip of paper. "But this is just so cute."
Eurydice plopped sideways into Ursula's lap, hooting. Ursula's composure cracked and she laughed right into Dee's face.
"So zombifying three girls would take a shit-load of nanomek," Yves said. He eyed the sorority house.
"Yeah," Eurydice chuckled, her head propped on Ursula's knees.
"How about three dozen?" Yves asked, his voice cool and steady.
Ursula looked up and out. Her mirth died in her throat. Dee turned to sit face forward, moaned in wordless dejection, and hid his head in his hands. Eurydice rolled upright and yelped. "Gah! Where the fuck did they come from?"
The sorority house porch was packed with girls. The crowd spilled down the porch steps and ringed the horseshoe driveway, evenly spaced as if posed for a yearbook photograph, with the original trio, dripping and foamy, serving as a vanguard. The sisters of Epsilon Zeta stood at attention in various clubbing outfits, curve-hugging bellyshirts, and low-rise jeans, all staring at the passenger side of the Jeep with the blank, empty intensity of a camera lens.
"Holy shit," Eurydice said after she took the whole scene in, "that's a lot of skank-bots."
"There are probably several dozen more," Yves said, scanning the building's windows for other signs of life. "Reserves. These are just the ones Cherry Cupcake thinks will make the biggest impression on Dee. I mean, look at them. They could all be featured in a Girls Gone Wild video."
"They're just standing there, waiting," Ursula said, eyes wide. "And everything's so quiet. I feel like we're in a Hitchcock movie."
"There's just one thing I don't get," Yves said, scratching his smooth chin.
"Just one?" Ursula cried.
Yves pondered aloud. "Cherry Cupcake's blown so much nanomek without attacking, without even making an appearance. She's just being cute—well, psycho-bitch cute—playing around. But she knows she's going to need even more nanomek if she and Dee face off again, and that's what she wants most of all: Dee versus Cherry Cupcake, round two."
"Electric boogaloo," Eurydice mumbled.
Dee scrabbled about, gathering more receipts.
"I hate it when he does this," Ursula told Eurydice. "Get to the point, Yves."
"Where's she planning to get it all?" Yves said. "How? Jump the mailman? Send her skank-bots to knock over a fertility clinic?"
Dee wrote with stabbing furious strokes on a receipt. He gave the message to Yves who read it and passed it around.
PARTY
"She had a party," Yves said, dubious.
Dee threw another receipt at Yves.
TONIGHT
"She's going to have a party," Ursula said, uncomprehending.
"Oh, for God's sake," Dee spat, making everyone in the Jeep jump. The mob of girls pitched forward with every word. "I met those Easies yesterday and they said that they were holding a big party Friday night, and that's tonight—"
Eurydice's arm shot forward, stretching across the length of the Jeep's cabin. Her hand clamped down over Dee's mouth. "That's enough, dear. Cherry Cupcake knows that you know that she knows about the party now. Please stop making the zombie horde horny."
The sidewalk fronting the sorority house lawn swarmed with coeds. The vanguard trio and a half-dozen other girls perched on the curb. The redhead ran her tongue over her teeth. A blob of soap suds fell from her chin onto the hood of the Jeep.
"Do you have the air condition vents open, Yves?" Ursula asked. A girl in pink hot pants panted great wet gulps of air by Ursula's window.
Yves checked the dashboard dials. "Yes."
A spreading patch of moisture darkened the crotch of the pink pants outside her window as Ursula said, "Would you set the AC to recirculation, please."
"Yeah," Eurydice piped up, her head bobbing in time with the blonde coed's heaving, tee-shirt plastered chest, "or in about 30 seconds this whole car is going to reek of skank-bot pussy and…" Her brow crinkled in confusion. "…Tollhouse cookies?"
Yves slammed the vent toggle shut and turned the air conditioner on full blast.
"This feels like the last possible moment to me," Ursula said, checking her seat belt.
Dee shook his head and passed around another note.
MONOLOGUE
"What the heck does that mean?" Eurydice asked.
Yves tried to scope out the sorority house through the throng of coeds. "We're waiting for Cherry Cupcake to make her appearance and gloat. Hopefully she'll tell us her grand plan or something."
"That doesn't happen in real life," Ursula insisted.
"No," Yves replied, "but Cherry Cupcake isn't a real person."
Eurydice kicked the back of the driver seat. "Watch it, samurai."
"Not like that," Yves told her via her grumpy reflection in the rear view mirror. "I mean she's detached from reality. She doesn't want real life, she wants the story. What about you, Eurydice?"
Eurydice said nothing and Dee wrote a new note.
WTF?
"Later, Dee," Eurydice whispered. "I promise. At least until after the psycho ex-girlfriend gives her monologue." A winged shadow passed over the Jeep. Eurydice eyed the sky. "And here she comes, flying in right on schedule."
Yves blanched. "Oh, fuck."
"Wha—" Eurydice started, but leapt out of her seat as Dee cried, "Go!"
There was a knocking clamor of a dozen pairs of hands slapping against the Jeep as the mass of coeds surged forward. Dee exchanged a nod with Yves, then punched out the passenger window with an almost effortless backhanded swing.
"What the Hell?" Ursula cried.
A multitude of hands pushed their way into the Jeep, heedless of the broken glass, to tug at Dee's collar, yank on his hair, and feel up his pectorals.
"We're getting out of here," Yves announced.
Dee leaned out through the window. Arms scrambled over his shoulders, urging him farther out. The redhead's lips descended over Dee's mouth with a vacant but bottomless hunger.
Eurydice panicked as the thumping and drumming of arms and bodies against the Jeep grew louder and harder. "Oh my God, ohmygod."
Yves jammed two gobs of beeswax into his ears. "Now."
Dee broke the zombie kiss, turned his head and shouted.
"Get off."
A guttural groan resounded from many throats. The redhead's eyes rolled over white. She fell backward a few paces before she toppled over. All around the Jeep, girls followed suit, zombies attempting to tap-dance and landing on their asses.
Dee craned his neck. "You've got a path. No idea how long it'll last."
Yves took his foot off the brake and the Jeep rolled backward as Dee shouted directions. "Keep it straight, keep it straight. Okay, clear, turn around." The Jeep performed a quick K-turn in the mouth of the cul-de-sac. "Now floor it!"
Eurydice trembled and shook. "What. Why. What."
"Next time you two boys plan an escape," Ursula said as the Jeep sped down the side-road, "you damn well better let us in on it."
Dee buckled himself in. "It's not over. Left, go left. We need to head for the highway, south."
Yves ran a red light.
"What happened to staying for the monologue?" Eurydice demanded.
"There wasn't going to be one," Dee said. He kept watching the skies. "This isn't her style, but I guess she wanted to surprise us, instead."
"But Cherry Cupcake…"
"Weighs in at over three hundred pounds of cherry-chocolate flavored wet cement," Yves interrupted. "There's no way she can fly with those wings. She can only fall with style."
"So it wasn't Cherry Cupcake," Dee said, "but something else." The shadow fell over the Jeep again. "Drive faster, Yves."
My heart had a problem, in the early hours,
So I stopped it dead for a beat or two.
But I cut some cord, and I shouldn't've done that,
And it won't forgive me after all these yearsSo I sent it to a place in the middle of nowhere
With a big black horse and a cherry tree.
Now it won't come back, 'cause it's oh so happy,
And now I've got a hole for the world to see.
—KT Tunstall, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree
The bronze bell above the glass door jangled and tolled. The door remained unmoved.
The rose girl watched the bell jounce about. "Someone's coming."
Tomoe did not look up from the fat Sudoku puzzle book. "Mm." Her pencil skittered across the open page.
The rose girl sighed and hopped off the countertop. As she padded barefoot up to the front door, a copper-colored, one-piece dress sprouted out from her waist to clothe her translucent, cut-crystal flesh. The bell jerked around like a jumping bean. She smoothed out the oblong lump between her legs, swung the door wide, and stood in the threshold. She surveyed the empty parking lot. "They're a long way off. An hour, maybe?" The bell continued to clatter above her head. "This damn thing won't shut up."
"Yeah, yeah." Tomoe flipped the page. She harrumphed at the next grid of math puzzles, chewed on the pencil, then shrugged and started to fill in the empty boxes. "Piece of cake."
"So?" The rose girl turned about face. "Who is it?"
"Whoever it is," Tomoe said, "they're going to have to wait."
"Why?"
Tomoe wagged her hand over the puzzle book. "I'm not finished yet." She made a fist and bonked herself lightly on the head. "Duh!"
The rose girl stepped back into the store. The bell rang louder while the door closed. She tiptoed over to the counter, the bell chattering in the background. "Why do you still keep secrets from me, lovey?" she asked, sifting Tomoe's shining black hair through fingers of polished rose quartz.
Still writing with one hand, Tomoe reached up with the other and pulled the rose girl's palm against her cheek. "SB, do you want to be my partner, my darling, my cheeseburger?" Their eyes met. "Or my familiar, my slave?"
"I felt like a slave last night, cleaning and dragging those stupid dumpsters around."
Tomoe gave the rose girl's hand a friendly but firm squeeze. "Seriously, now: slave or cheeseburger?"
The rose girl's smile was full of diamonds. "I want to be your cheeseburger, T, whatever that means. Unless I can be your slave and still get on top, that'd be kind of hot."
Tomoe returned to her book. "Then let me have my secrets. That way you can get miffed at me, like you are now." She tilted forward, gathered a handful of the silk of the coppery dress, and squeezed it around the lump in the rose girl's crotch in long, unhurried strokes. "And I can make it up to you."
"Take the next exit," Dee said, collecting shards of glass from the window frame into a plastic pouch he had found in the Jeep's glove compartment.
Yves surveyed the empty stretches of overgrown lots on either side of the elevated highway. "We're in the middle of fucking nowhere."
"This is it," Dee insisted, "I'm certain."
"That's not what I'm worried about," Yves said. The Jeep careened through the tight curve of the exit ramp.
Ursula sat on her knees, ass-backward on the backseat, keeping watch out the rear window. "I haven't seen anything for at least twenty minutes now."
"Of course," Eurydice added, contemplating Ursula's jean-wrapped rear-end, "we don't know what we're looking for."
"Right at the end of the ramp," Dee told Yves. "Go under the overpass. Maybe we lost it."
The Jeep emerged from beneath the overpass, roaring down the grayed pavement of the back road. In the side mirror, Yves watched the shadow beneath the arch of the overpass seem to peel away from the cement and swoop into the air. "Unless," he sighed, stomping on the accelerator pedal, "it's smart enough to ambush us when we do something cosmically stupid like getting off the highway in the middle of fucking—"
The rear window flashed black. Ursula shrieked and ducked but the fluttering darkness swooped up and out of sight. The wind whistled through the broken passenger-side window. Ursula spun around, frantic, latching her seatbelt in place. Yves, Dee, and Eurydice looked at one another.
The obsidian girl touched down onto the hood. She made no sound.
She crouched before the windshield, arms splayed, the manifold curvature of her wings flared out wide on either side, blocking any view of the road ahead. She shone in the cloudless, morning sunlight, a living architecture of blackest volcanic glass. Dee and Yves' awestruck expressions were reflected back at them in the featureless, glossy tar oval of her face.
Yves recovered, found his center, and hammered down on the brake. The obsidian girl bled off the excess momentum into her wings, letting them unfold behind her in topologies that confused the eye. The Jeep's tires squealed and burned in the sudden deceleration but the obsidian girl perched unfazed on the hood. She waggled her pointer finger from side to side in a metronomic rhythm.
The speedometer's needle dropped below the fifty miles per hour mark and Dee popped open the passenger door. "Get them out of here," he said, and rolled out of the car. Eurydice screamed his name. The speedometer needle hit the thirty miles per hour mark.
Dee hit the pavement elbow-first. The asphalt cracked and burst and bounced him a foot back up into the air. The obsidian girl punched her knuckles against the hood and swung after him, wings rippling behind her in billows of ebony ink.
Eurydice snarled, "He's mine, you fucking gimp," and sprung out the still-open door, a bounding wildcat. The speedometer needle fell under ten miles per hour.
Ursula rebounded off her seatbelt. A swinging braid knocked her glasses clean off her face. "Um. What the Hell just happened?"
The passenger-side door fell off.
"I'm getting you out of here," Yves said. The rear tire kicked against the fallen door as the Jeep pulled away.
"No, you're not." Ursula fumbled her glasses back onto her face. "But, uh, we're getting out of this car. Right now."
Yves glanced into the rearview mirror. Ursula nodded her head toward the rear side window. A little gush of viscid, lavender fluid ran down from the roof like spilt shampoo. "Yeah, I guess we'd better." Yves pulled the Jeep over to the curb, wincing at how false his nonchalance sounded to his own ears.
A fount of creamy champagne poured over the lip of the Jeep's canvas top through the gaping hole left by the lost door. A confusion of golden hues—marigold, saffron, school-bus yellow—filled the passenger-side front seat. The air inside the car grew heady with the dizzying bouquet of caramel and melted creamsicle. The storm of melted sherbet made little sound, just a satiny susurrus, as more and more of the lush stuff piled into the bucket seat, drew itself up, and filled itself out and then further out.
"You can't leave yet, honey" purred the plump amber woman, "I haven't even started to sing."
Eurydice bounded onto the pavement with arms outstretched and her back arched high. She brought her legs down with her knees bent the wrong way. Only wrong if you plan on being a biped, she thought, running with a sinewy, feline gate. Ahead of her, Dee skimmed the road as he tumbled, the asphalt rumpling beneath him like the surface of a lake under a skipping stone. Solid boy's giving the road a case of road-rash.
Despite Eurydice's cheetah speed, the obsidian girl's powerhouse wings won the race. For a few seconds Dee and the obsidian girl danced in a horizontal, martial ballet, Dee feinting even as he fell. The obsidian girl played the game just as well, counter-feinting with scissor kicks and dancing pseudopodia, and Dee disappeared down a funnel of enfolding wings. A host of clashing emotions welled up in Eurydice's jumbled mind-web: panic, fear, fear for Dee, fury--jealousy. This is jealousy, she realized, watching the obsidian girl cocoon Dee until the two of them rolled over the road like a giant, licorice jelly bean. Why am I jealous? She's trying to kill him! The black ovoid rocked as it slowed. Isn't she?
Eurydice slid to halt on all fours as the ovoid cracked open. Layers of liquid black wing peeled away and Dee struggled to his feet. He bucked and flexed, trying every goojitsu trick Eurydice knew, and then a few she did not know, to shake his opponent loose. The obsidian girl clung to him, head buried in his chest, her arms hooked under his in a desperate but chaste hug.
Dee flushed and floundered in the obsidian girl's embrace. "Gerroff me!"
A wicked, single-edge blade appeared in Yves' hand in the time it took Ursula to blink. She had learned enough about her upstairs neighbor these past few hours to know he had his own brand of macho bullshit—Yves will never back down when he's afraid—and now she watched it kick into gear as he raised the weapon high. In her peripheral vision, a second trickle of translucent purplish goo seeped down the side window.
The amber woman raised her pudgy, open hands close to her head at a "raise-the-roof!" angle. She had a stout neck and a roll of double chin that wobbled as she chuckled, "Whoa, cowboy." Ursula could not place the drawn-out twang in the amber woman's accent. Boston? Virginia? New York? "Does this look like a combat chassis to you?"
The amber woman primped her coiffure, a lick of golden pudding plastered atop her head. Her hip spilled over the bucket seat and smothered the emergency brake and gear shift. "Besides," she said, "you'd get a lot further with an ice-cream scoop than that knife." The surface of her substance was mellow yellow and satiny, like whipped frosting, with no elastic tension to hold her together. She churned perpetually, inside and out, in a constant, slow boil of luscious mush. "I'm not a stick of butter, I'm buttercream."
Yves lowered the blade but kept it ready at his side. "I don’t think I can take much more of this kind of thing."
A purple glaze shellacked the window to Ursula's side. "We've got another guest on the roof, Yves," Ursula said.
A muffled but acid voice razzed down from above the Jeep's canvas top. "Put a cork in your cakehole, you cunt, or you'll ruin my entrance."
"You've done that all by yourself, honey," the amber woman sighed. "The things that come out of your mouth are positively criminal."
"Got that right, fatso," said the voice. The purple glop gumming the window slurped up and out of sight. "Things should be coming in my mouth."
The amber woman treated Ursula to a conspiratorial wink of a canary diamond eye. "I spoon feed her straight lines out of charity." Her face was wide but regal and carved from lemon meringue. "Poor girl wouldn't notice a double entendre if it came with cherry on top."
An elfin, lavender face popped into view, upside down, in Yves' window. "I don't get it." Her hair tumbled around her head, an unruly mass of pale orchid petals. She shouted at Yves through the glass. "Hi! Wanna fuck?"
Yves reddened and spluttered. Before he could recover, the amber girl came to his rescue. "No, honey," she said, sizing Yves up like a piece of meat. "This tall drink of water is a man's man."
"Well, fuck me gently with a chain saw," the lavender girl said. "No wonder that Black Cherry twat is out of her gourd. 'Master' is gay." She spat the word "master" as if it were the crudest, most vile thing she could ever think to say.
"I'm not Dee," Yves said.
The lavender girl crooked her upside-down head to eye the back seat, captivating Ursula with her inhuman, ethereal beauty until she opened her mouth. "Who's the dinky-dyke?"
"I came with the car," Ursula grouched.
"Hey, me too," the lavender girl said, slopping down onto the pavement in a spray of indigo. "But only when your nancy chauffeur drove above sixty." She stood, tall and haughty and nude, the lips of her pouty sex peeking out from a frill of orchid petals in her cleft just as the tapered tips of her ears poked from her dryad's mane.
Ursula thought the lavender girl looked the part of the honey nymph more than Eurydice or even Galatea. I could fall in love with something like that, Ursula realized, tracing the lines of the lavender girl's classical figure, if she'd only stay quiet. The lavender girl looked around and did a quick double take. No, no. Her mouth gaped open. Not yet. Her vulgar purple nipples hardened into cherry-pits. Hush, now, and let me drink you in. Dew dampened the insides of her thighs. Let me memorize….
"Oh, sweet merciful mother of fuck," the lavender girl marveled as Dee approached. "I'm creaming in my jeans."
Damn.
The amber woman shifted in the front seat as Dee drew near. "Oh my, now that is emotion in motion."
Ursula strained to see. Dee steamrolled toward the Jeep, falling into his unstoppable, predatory march. Ursula felt a flutter deep within her. It was a visceral but not a truly sexual thrill, like riding the crest of a rollercoaster. She remembered feeling it once before, when Dee emerged with Eurydice in his arms, and a small spark of it even earlier, when he had set up her computer.
"Can you get her to let go of me?" Dee asked the lavender girl. "I'm fine, really."
The obsidian girl, her geodesic wings compactly folded against her shoulders, stood on Dee's feet with her hands latched onto his back. I used to dance with my father just like that, Ursula remembered, and the recollection somehow shocked her.
The amber woman slipped sideways out of the car, legs oozing down and taking shape as she rolled. She moved by relaxing and letting her bulk fill the space of her destination. Like an amoeba, she simply grew in the direction she wanted to go, lending her an alien but smooth and mesmerizing grace. "Ask her yourself, honey," the amber woman told Dee. "Or better yet, say you're sorry. You were the one who took one look at her and jumped from a moving car."
"He thought he was protecting his friends from her," Eurydice said, padding on all fours around Dee from behind, a jade sphinx with Medusa's hairdo. "From you."
Eurydice's appearance woke the lavender girl out of her horny reverie. "Jesus Christ, it's a lime, get in the car!" The lavender girl vaulted over the Jeep's hood, one cheek of her perfect ass squeaking on the silver metal, planting herself between Eurydice and the amber woman, arms upraised like a traffic cop's. "Get the fuck back into the fucking car, CeeCee," she hissed to the amber girl before turning to Eurydice. "Look, limey, we didn't come here looking for a catfight."
Ursula pushed the passenger seat forward. She nodded to Yves and clambered out of the Jeep. Yves hopped out the driver's side door, putting the car in park but leaving the engine running.
"We figured you weren't gunning for a fight when little Miss Midnight here tried to save my life," Dee said, patting the obsidian girl on her featureless pate. She snuggled in even closer. "Now how do I get her off?" Eurydice flashed him a leonine glare and he mutterred, "Um, wow, that didn't come out right…"
"Quiet, you," Eurydice huffed. She pawed a hole Dee left in the pavement and turned back to the lavender girl. "So, whose side are you on, then?"
"Ours," said the amber woman, CeeCee.
"Not hers," the lavender girl added sourly.
The obsidian girl snuggled.
"I'm confused," Ursula said, maneuvering around the amber woman with the curves of pin-up girl from the Forties but the girth of a professional football linebacker. The obsidian girl prised her head away from Dee's chest and pivoted her shoulders in Ursula's direction. Ursula looked into the obsidian girl's blank face and saw only her own convex reflection gazing back at her, as if the obsidian girl had put on an Ursula mask. "I'm confused," she repeated, unsettled. "'Her' who? I'm having pronoun trouble."
Yves answered her. "Cherry Cupcake." He worked his knife into a pouch below the armpit of his undershirt. "She made you?"
"Black Cherry made her," CeeCee said, gesturing to the obsidian girl.
The lavender girl reached back to wrap a protective arm around CeeCee. It sank into the rich batter of CeeCee's shoulders. "The psycho-twat made Eddie make us. Oops, shit, I'm stuck in you again."
"What can I say, honey," CeeCee cooed as the currents of velvet-soft flesh dragged the lavender girl closer and deeper into CeeCee's side, "we go together well."
The obsidian girl stepped down and away from Dee. She still wore Ursula's face but did not say a word. Not counting the wings, Ursula thought, she's no taller than I am. Why is she staring at me? Wait, that's just my reflection, which means I'm the one staring at her. Oh, great, now I can see myself blushing.
Yves sidled in front of the Jeep, never turning his back to the group of goo girls. "I don't understand. Who’s Eddie?"
The lavender girl's arm sucked into CeeCee's side until the two goo girls stood shoulder to shoulder. "Your tits are even softer on the inside," the lavender girl told CeeCee. "What does this feel like?" The lavender girl rolled her shoulder, tongue peeking out between her teeth. She gave a little yelp and squished into CeeCee, head-to-toe.
The obsidian girl skipped forward. Ursula backpedaled, keeping a few paces away. The obsidian girl flourished a wing, and Ursula could not help but follow its tip with her eyes as it traced over trim, inky black flesh, the long line of a willowy neck to narrow shoulders to budding breasts to a flat tummy to—Snap! Snap! The obsidian girl's fingers snapped together, loud as pistol shots. Ursula dragged her eyes back up into the obsidian girl's face, the Ursula-mask face.
Licks of sunny yellow crawled over lavender hips. "It feels so good," CeeCee said, "you'd better pull out or you're coming in."
"All the way?" the lavender girl asked, watching a creamy tendril swirl between her breasts.
"Mm-hm."
"Again?"
"Mm-hm."
"Hm," the lavender girl hummed. She glanced at their audience. Yves, Dee, and Eurydice seemed struck dumb by the display of the golden web spinning across her body, coiling around her nipples and vanishing into the cleft of her sex. "What about—Ooh!—saving the world?"
The obsidian girl inched forward. Ursula's blush deepened but she stood her ground. A gentle wave rippled up from the obsidian girl's neck and her face dusked into a matte black. The Ursula-mask vanished. Yes, Ursula thought as the obsidian girl's wings excited the air, I'm still staring. The obsidian girl held a hand out for her. I'm staring at you, not the me-in-you. Ursula tentatively reached for those smooth, conical fingers. I want to touch you, not the me-in-you.
"That was short, dark, and creepy's idea," CeeCee said. "But it looks like she's found something else to think about now."
"Wait." Ursula spun around. "What? Saving the world?" In her peripheral vision, Ursula saw the obsidian girl smack herself in the forehead and stalk away. "The world needs saving?"
"Break it up," Eurydice snarled, "and make with the exposition."
CeeCee and the lavender girl pulled apart, purple-red-gold filaments and filigree unraveling and snapping. Yves looked ready to retch but would not look away as they rewove themselves. "Start from the beginning," he gulped, "and don't do that again."
When the lavender girl's surface tension sealed over her nectarous insides she intoned, "In the beginning." She looked into the Sun. "In the beginning there was this…" She opened her arms to the sky "…There was this biiiig refrigerator."
"What the Hell is this," Yves demanded, "goo girl religion?"
"No," Dee said. "She's being literal. Going back to her first memory. Hey, Yves, you look like crap. You okay?"
"Yeah," Yves puffed, "I will be, yeah. This is just a lot of goo for me, right now. Sorry," he told the lavender girl. "So you were in a refrigerator."
"I was in a bowl in the refrigerator. An aluminum bowl." When Yves did not react to this revelation she soured. "Look, you fucking faggot, you wanted the whole story and I'm giving it to you. You ever bit on a piece of tinfoil? Well, that's what it was like, but my whole body was in that fucking bowl, and my whole body is one big mouth. And it was cold." She shivered at the memory. "So cold."
"Honey," CeeCee stage-whispered, "you can't call a man a faggot and then expect any sympathy."
The lavender girl waved her off. "Okay, okay. So there I was, in the dark, in the cold, tasting nothing but that fucking aluminum, for like for-fucking-ever. And then there was light." She glared at Yves. "There was light and air and—Whoosh!—these big red hands grab me out by the bowl and flip me upside down and drop me—Splat!—right onto this kid's cock. And then, I mean, what would you do? The bowl was so cold and tasted so bad but here was this cock and it was so warm and tasted so good. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven."
"Whose cock?" Yves asked.
"Dee left me there," Eurydice mumbled.
CeeCee paled. "He left you in the bowl? Oh, you poor thing."
"No," Eurydice said, "worse." She paced on all fours and started to babble. "He took me out of the fridge and he saved me from the bowl and then he took out his dick and it was huge and I could feel the heat pouring off it. And then he held me so close to his cock, so close I could taste, I could almost taste…and then he dropped me on the table and left me there until I melted."
CeeCee and the lavender girl were silent and saucer-eyed. The obsidian girl's wings trembled violently.
Yves breathed, "Jesus Christ."
"I'm sorry," Dee begged.
Ursula stomped over and kicked him in the shin. "You asshole!" It felt like kicking a boulder, but her clunky Doc Martins absorbed most of the resistance.
"I'm sorry." He fell to one knee if front of Eurydice, "Honey, I didn't…"
"It was amazing!" Eurydice crooned.
Dee blinked. "Huh?"
"You teased a lime," CeeCee said, awed.
"Hours and hours," Eurydice gabbled, "and all I could remember was your cock. All I could think about was your cock…"
"You cunt-teased a fucking lime," the lavender girl said.
"…What you would taste like," Eurydice was saying, "How you would feel, how warm you would be…and how much I would make you cum, over and over and over. Nothing but you, your cock, your cum, for hours."
Dee looked lost. "Was that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Eurydice sighed. "It was a good bad thing, Dee." She hid her head in her forepaws. "A very, very, very good-bad thing."
Ursula and Yves exchanged looks. "Maybe it's a hetero thing," Ursula hazarded.
Yves shrugged and cleared his throat. "Whose cock? This 'Eddie' guy?"
"Yeah, Eddie; a guy from a grocery store," CeeCee said. "He must've been with her when she mindfucked all those Easies. Then she tricked him into cooking up Raz and me. After that, she trussed him up in the kitchen with us. For us, I mean. We kept getting his rocks off until he cried. We thought we were just giving him what he wanted, poor dear. He eventually started to scream, and we finally figured things out and left him alone. We thought Eddie was you, you see," she said to Dee.
"No," Dee said, "I really don't. So Eddie made you, not Black Cherry?"
"Yeah, sorta," the lavender girl said. "We found Black Cherry and confronted her about it afterward. She'd convinced Eddie to pick a couple of flavors—Cheesecake, here, and Raspberry, that's me…"
"No shit," Yves said, eyes wide in mock surprise.
"Shove it, spooge mouth." Raspberry flipped him the middle finger. "You fuck cows in retrospect. Where was I? Oh, yeah, she said some bullshit about a curse, how the person who uses the novilunium never gets what they want, so she got him to make us instead."
"Did that work?" Dee asked.
"I told her to eat shit and die," Raspberry crowed. "I'm nobody's minion and I'll never call anyone master."
"We demurred," CeeCee said, "and she scooped us up and threw us in the store room. She's so powerful, Mast—er, Mister Detwiler, we were too scared to run away. But we heard about the party tonight, and we had to do something, so we snuck onto the roof when you made your surprise inspection."
The obsidian girl rushed over and poked CeeCee in her ample belly. Her finger came away batter free. "Well, we did have to do something," CeeCee insisted. "We, Raz and me, had to skedaddle. Then darkwing showed up and offered to bust us out in exchange for helping her find you. Find Dee, that is. We didn't expect a...band, or league, or whatever it is you've put together. And we certainly didn't expect another lime. Black Cherry was convinced she had the only one."
"She does." Eurydice stood and morphed into her busty Unabomber disguise again. "I am Galatea, and Galatea is me."
"You can divide? Sweet," Raspberry whistled. "That is so hot. I tried dividing and all I got was me and a puddle of jam that was dumber than a sack of wet shit. I can hawk a mean loogie, though."
"Where is she keeping Galatea?" Dee asked in a voice so calm and mild it frightened Ursula to the core.
"We don't know," CeeCee said. "We'd only been alive for a few hours before you showed up, and it's a big house. We didn't see her. Can we ask a question, now? Just one, other than these two?"
After a long pause, and in that same mild voice, Dee said, "All right."
"Where the fuck are we going?" asked Raspberry.
"SRU," Yves said as Dee nodded, "the place where everything started. How many men are supposed to show up to the Easies' party tonight, do you know?"
"About fifty eligible bachelors," CeeCee said. "I think Black Cherry plans to drain, kill, and consume them all."
Raspberry thought this over. "And probably not in that order." She grinned.
"You see what I meant about spoon feeding her straight lines," CeeCee told Ursula.
"We're on a timetable, then." Yves hustled back into the Jeep driver's seat. "Let's get moving."
Ursula groaned at the prospect of another ascent into the Jeep. The two-door vehicle's high wheels and narrow access to the rear cabin were not designed with petite women in mind. She awkwardly swung up and hauled her butt high and vulnerable into the empty space that the Jeep's fallen passenger door once shielded—and a stinging tingle shot through one ass cheek and grounded itself in her clit. She stumble-hopped away from the car, chirping a staccato of swearwords: "What-shit-fuck-crap!" She almost tripped over her own clunky boots before she regained her balance, braids flopping. "Dammit, who pinched me?" And who knew exactly where to pinch me?
She whirled to face the assembled mob. Dee wore his inscrutable smile. Eurydice frowned at Raspberry as the lavender girl, unabashed, undressed Dee with her eyes. CeeCee was contemplating the sky but pointing an oozing finger at the obsidian girl. "You," Ursula said. The obsidian girl steepled her fingers against her neck. "Don't give me that 'C’est moi?' look," Ursula seethed, advancing.
"How do you know her 'C'est moi' look?" CeeCee asked as Ursula stormed past.
"How can she have a look when she doesn't have a face?" Raspberry wondered as Ursula drew nose-to-oval with the obsidian girl.
Ursula narrowed her eyes at the Ursula-mask reflected in the midnight gloss of the obsidian girl's head. "Well?"
The obsidian girl danced back, stood still a moment, and then gave a helpless shrug. She wriggled her fingers, hands level with her hips, in febrile, grabby flexions.
"Of course you think I have a great ass," Ursula sneered. "Everyone thinks I have a great ass. In fact, the next…" Ursula faltered. "The next person...the, the next…" She flushed, remembering.
["…the next person who mentions my ass is going to wear it for a hat, I swear…"]
Ursula chewed on a braid. "Uh, never mind. Just…wait." The gloss drained from the obsidian girl's face and the Ursula-mask vanished. "What are you doing?" The obsidian girl's skin clouded. Her wings unfolded into drooping, paper-thin tatters. "What's wrong?" Obsidian skin grayed and the faceless girl collapsed to the ground, swaying on her knees. Ursula pulled back, hands clapped over her mouth. "Oh, God, I'm sorry."
A heavy, uneven weight rolled over Ursula's shoulder. CeeCee was stroking it with her thick fingers. "It's not your fault," she said. "This is her choice. There's something we didn't tell you."
Raspberry knelt beside the fading obsidian girl, hesitating to touch her. "It's fucking amazing she lasted this long, after what she's been through. She's different from us, somehow."
Dee uttered his favorite refrain, "What the Hell is going on?" but Eurydice tapped him on the arm, muttered, "This isn't about you. C'mon," and tugged him away, whispering into his ear.
"She didn't just bust us loose," CeeCee explained. "She fought Black Cherry while we got away. Those two had been at each other's throats ever since she refused to touch Eddie."
"When Black Cherry concentrates on the Easies," Raspberry said, "she can make them do pretty much anything. If our little batgirl hadn't kept Black Cherry busy by opening up a can of whup-ass all over that psycho-twat, this Jeep and everyone in it would still be suffocating under a ton of zombie pussy right now." The obsidian girl's legs spread out into uneven puddles of ink and Raspberry added, "Oh, Christ, here she goes. I can't watch."
Ursula's stomach flipped. "I don't understand."
CeeCee shook her head, "She's used up most of her novilunium and she's taken nothing to balance the scales. She's losing cohesion.
"She's dying."
Ursula took another shaky step backward. "Are you saying she used the last of her magic—nanomek, novilunium, whatever you want to call it—to grope my ass?"
CeeCee gave Ursula's shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I suspect the prospect of touching your derriere was the one thing that kept her going." CeeCee clucked. "And, honey, that thing is fine."
The obsidian girl lolled her head and shrugged, but Ursula shushed her. "No. Don't move. Every time you move, it costs you more magic. Wait." She knelt on the ground next to Raspberry. The obsidian girl's legs had deliquesced up to her knees. She appeared to be standing thigh-deep in a pool of glistening black ink. "If you can still move, that means you still have some magic left. How much?"
The obsidian girl held her finger and her thumb in a shape of L on her forehead, waited for Ursula to crack a nervous smile, and then closed the gap between the two digits until they were about an eighth of an inch apart. Ursula's stomach settled. "Okay, we just need to get you a bucket, or something, and you'll be fine until I get you some…Oh, Jesus."
"Never heard it called that before," CeeCee said. Her arm withdrew but left a residue of buttery yellow cream on Ursula's poncho. "Oops, sorry honey. That's cashmere, isn't it?"
"Doesn't matter," Ursula muttered.
"Whoa." Yves leaned over and poked his head out of the Jeep. "Ursula, you're in deep."
"Fuck you and find me a bucket!" she cried.
"Don't," Raspberry said. "It wouldn't work, not for long."
"Why the fuck not?"
Eurydice tiptoed into the orbit of the conversation. Ursula was surrounded by goo girls, enclosed on all sides by living walls of shimmering, slobbery, sticky glop. The air infused with a miasma of citric and cloying scents. Ursula did not give a damn. "Why the fuck not?" she demanded again.
Eurydice spoke softly. "Brownian motion. The energy has to come from somewhere."
"Oh come on," Yves said, "You are making that up." Three pairs of gemmed eyes—canary diamond, purple amethyst, darkling emerald—blazed at him and he fled into the relative safety of the Jeep. "Fine, Brownian motion burns magic, so no bucket."
Didn't Galatea say something about 'burning magic'? Ursula gasped, "I know what to do."
Yves poked his head back out. "What?"
["…When you were wearing me, and I held still while you moved, I didn't burn any magic…"]
She rocked back onto her ass and pulled her knees up. "I know exactly what to do." She pulled at the laces and buckles of her boots.
Eurydice, Raspberry, and CeeCee exhaled at once and tension bled out of the air.
"What?" Yves groused again, but Dee had circled around to the driver's side of the Jeep and made a furtive, Zip it, will ya? gesture.
Ursula hitched up her poncho. The obsidian girl bobbed in her tarry pool as the ascending cashmere garment revealed a milky-white abdomen and a lacy black bra. Ursula glanced down at her own curves and then looked around. Raspberry's a viola, Eurydice's a cello, and CeeCee's a full-blown double bass, so I guess that makes me a violin. You're a violin, too, Ms. Whatever-Your-Name-Is. She surveyed the obsidian girl's svelte figure and sighed. No wonder I gave up the cello in high school. I should have known. Ursula pulled her right foot free of its boot before locking eyes with the reflected Ursula-mask. I'm a violinist.
"Wear me," Ursula said, rolling her sock down and tossing it away. Her bare foot hovered over the slowly expanding perimeter of the obsidian girl's liquefying lower body. The inky pool caught the delicate heel's reflection, a moon trapped at the bottom of a well. The revelatory image hit Ursula with an epiphany, and she could only whisper in benediction.
"Wear me, Nyx."
Nyx shuddered and clawed at the blacktop, disappearing up to her waist into the pool.
Eurydice tugged off her sunglasses. "You named her." She turned. "Dee! Ursula named her."
"It's okay, Nyx," Ursula soothed, "I know this will work." She scooted backward over the pavement to avoid soaking her butt in the advancing, iridescent stain. "But let's start with my toes, alright?" Nyx's eyeless face fixed on Ursula's bare foot. Ursula wiggled her toes at her. "Lesson one: Ursula's toes." Thank you, Galatea, Ursula thought, for talking me through this first, for making sure I was ready. "Ursula's ass will be in lesson two, I promise." Her cheek still stung where Nyx had pinched her. She concentrated on the sensation and her sex ached. And, God, am I ready.
"This is so fucking hot," Raspberry gawked. The orchid petals of her hair dewed and stuck together in unkempt clumps. "I don't know what to say."
CeeCee swaggered back a few steps, giving Ursula a little more personal space. "Keep doing what you're doing, honey," CeeCee told her. "Anything that shuts Raz's trap is fine by me."
Yves moved out of the way and Dee called to Eurydice through the Jeep. "So?"
"I thought only you could do that," Eurydice said.
Ursula dipped her foot down. "Here we go." The tip of her big toe kissed the surface of the ebon pool. "There. You feel cool and…and dry." She squished the stuff between her toes. "Fluid yet dry." She swallowed. "Slick but not sticky at all." She smiled, hoping she looked demure and in control despite the meltdown in her pants. "I like it." Like it? I love it. I want to jump in and God-damn wallow in it. The surface of the pool shook from Nyx's trembling, and Ursula knew she had to take it slow. "I like it a lot. Now…" And take charge. "…little girl: cover my foot." Black ink lapped over Ursula's toes and crept up her ankle in a slipper softer and smoother than silk. "Tighter." The slipper drew snug. "Tighter."
"So…hot," Raspberry droned.
"Shut…up," CeeCee drawled.
Dee shrugged. "What name?"
Green, glassy beads dripped from Eurydice's chin and rolled off the blades of hair poking out from the hoodie. "Huh?" The droplets sizzled when they hit the pavement. "Oh. Um. Nyx."
The black slipper grew to swallow Ursula's calf. "Tighter, little girl, tighter." The slipper clamped down just below the knee. Ursula felt it grip hard, even between her toes, to become a sleek, flawless, second skin. Ursula rolled up her pant leg and caressed the glassy surface of the stocking connecting her leg to the ebon pool. "Perfect." Oh, God, I'm actually purring. "Hold it right there for a minute." Ursula squirmed and tugged at her remaining boot. My underwear is sopping. Dee is oblivious, I bet Yves is suspicious, but the meliae are bloodhounds for sex. They must know exactly how I feel. Including Nyx. "Let me take my other boot off and then we can start lesson two." Ursula giggled and leered. "Getting into Ursula's pants."
"Nyx's a good name," Dee told to Eurydice. "I don't see the problem. What's going on?"
A balled-up sock sailed over Eurydice's shoulder. "Uh. Y'know. Stuff."
Ursula plunked her bare foot into the ebon pool. Nyx needed no further encouragement. Lurid fluid raced over Ursula's ankle and disappeared under the pants cuff. Ursula relaxed recumbent. The creamy flesh peeping from rips in Ursula's distressed jeans vanished into shining black. A cool bath crawled over her knees. She sighed and scissored her legs. The Nyx-stocking clinched and flexed. Ursula mewed. "Sooo…slinky." The delicious sensation stole higher across Ursula's thighs and Nyx's body sank into the pool of pitch up to her chest. Ursula thought Nyx looked more like an imperiled heroine sinking into a jungle tar pit than a dissolving meliae. Then the velvet tide poured into her panties, engulfing her ass and sex in a single, siphoning, suckling kiss, and Ursula did not think or see anything at all.
Eurydice's sunglasses melted in her clenched fist. She spun and shuffled around the front of the Jeep, her gummy army boots sticking to the pavement and leaving a trail of smoking green footprints. "Dee." She spoke in hoarse monotone. "Dee let's go."
Dee turned to face his advancing girlfriend. "Huh?"
Jellied dreadlocks tumbled out of Eurydice's hoodie and fell over her eyes in a chaotic, steamy mass. "Let's go fuck."
"What?"
Ursula's soft mewling drifted over from the other side of the Jeep. Eurydice grabbed Dee by the elbow and urged him into a copse of scrub trees clustered close to the road. "Let's go fuck now."
"O-okay."
Yves shouted after them, "We've got a time table, remember? Cannibal skank-bots? World in jeopardy? Hello?" He tried another tactic. "Jesus, Dee, I can see your dick…No, that doesn't help, Eurydice, I can see through your ass."
A swash of black gushed out from beneath Ursula's belt to fill the narrow hollow of her belly. She pushed against the road, hips pumping the air, and coils of black lashed over the small of her back. She drifted down from the height of ambush orgasm into a muzzy mind and a world in soft focus. I came so hard it knocked my glasses off. The black bodysuit stretched to taste and tickle her ribs even as more swirled up from the pool, coursing under her knees to swirl between her thighs and the globes of her ass—but something was missing. What was it? Oh, yes. "Tighter."
Raspberry groaned, sat up on her knees, and drove gluey fingers into her pussy. She threw her head back—and did a double take at CeeCee, who was just standing there. "How can you not be whacking off right now?" Raspberry demanded. "Can't you fucking smell it?"
"Don't mistake composure for ease, honey," CeeCee said, "I'm hot enough to sit on a fireplug."
The silken bodysuit slurped up Ursula's chest, swallowing one rib, sucking against the skin to fill every pore, and then moving onto the next. Ursula sighed and reached between her breasts to unhook her bra. "Won't be needing this for a while." The bra unsnapped and fell away.
Raspberry pulverized her sex with her fingers but still had the presence of mind to grit her teeth and quip, "You didn't need it in the first place."
Nyx's molecule-thin pseudopodia slithered over Ursula's breasts. Ursula cried out when the bodysuit vacuumed against the tender flesh. Her nipples hardened under the second skin, each crinkle made to stand out in sharp relief by the glistening coating. A familiar, burning wire stretched down from Ursula's chest and stabbed deep beneath her bellybutton.
Nyx descended into her contracting pool until only her shoulders breached the surface, covering Ursula in a thickening shell of liquid night. Wanting to look Nyx in the face before that face disappeared, Ursula swiveled her hips in an effort to sit up. The whole bodysuit sloshed and the goth girl was lost in a raging surf of overstimulation from toes to clit to tummy to tits to neck to chin to lips-teeth-ear…
thank – you – named – me – you – saved – me – named – and – saved – me – thank – you – thank – you…
The voice was so quiet, small and quick that Ursula could barely distinguish it from the oceanic thrum of her heart in her stoppered ears. Ursula tried to speak, "Ny—" but the black fluid filled Ursula's mouth with the taste of licorice, anise and absinthe.
yes – me – Nyx – yes – name – life – thank – you – let – me – thank – you…
Panic fluttered in Ursula's stomach as the bodysuit surged thick and fast over her face, sealing her lips and eyes.
no – never – hurt – you – never – would – never – oh – let – me – thank – you – let – me – fuck – you…
Licorice ambrosia poured down her throat. Nyx's gel-flesh nuzzled Ursula's clit and vulva. The goth girl spread her legs in mute assent but could not hope to match the cavernous pit of need her sex had become. The swath of bodysuit covering Ursula's cleft concaved, throbbed deep into her core, and set her to flight.
Ursula's inner eye buoyed into the sky. Her body sprawled on the road below. The last vestige of Nyx, a dome of jet black on otherwise faded asphalt, liquefied and flooded up Ursula's kicking legs. The lustrous coating gave Ursula's skin and angular profile the perfection of a masterwork sculpture of polished black granite. "I wish I had taken off those stupid blue jeans," Ursula sighed. "I bet our legs look fantastic."
"Ursula…" The voice was mellow and warm. "Ursula…" It was fatherly and familiar. "Ursula! You will go to the Dagobah System." It was Alec Guinness.
Ursula's adrenal gland was stuck in the body flopping on the pavement far below her mind's eye, but she still felt an insurgent urge to jump out of her skin. "Wah!" Ursula's point of view spun, taking in the road, the roof of the jeep, Eurydice on all fours and impaling herself onto Dee's cock, and the blazing, mid-morning sun. She was alone in the air. "Wait. Dagobah System?"
"Ha! Kidding, kidding," said Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice. "It's me, Galatea. I left a little bit of nanomek in your head—" Ursula spluttered and swore but the voice continued without interruption "—to give you a message in case the shit hit the fan. If you're hearing this, it means you've gone astral and I'm in trouble, so you need to—"
hello – hello – where – did – you – go – ah – there – you – are – hello – hey – um – getting – crowded – got – company?
The disembodied voice of Alec Guinness paused. "What the fuck was that?"
"You said you were just a recorded message," Ursula accused.
"I am," said the voice, growing edgy and strangely modulated, "but…"
jesus – ha – it's – a – lime – ha – ha – get – in – the – cranium – ha – ha – ha!
"That's really freaking me out!" Galatea cried out her bewilderment in her usual fiery alto. "What's going on?"
Ursula wrapped herself in blanket of smug silence before speaking. "You're the uninvited guest, Galatea, not her, so you explain yourself first."
"Oh, all right," Galatea grumped. "But we've talked about this already, remember?"
"I wasn't expecting any of this." Ursula's point of view righted. "I can handle the astral-body stuff better now, thanks to your coaching, but how the Hell are you out here with me?"
"Damn," said Galatea's voice. "I thought I'd explained this bit. You said it would be okay. And this message is running out of nanomek fast. Playing around in here costs a bundle."
yes – Ursula – yes – so – strong – your – mind – is – so – strong – your – body – so – sweet – come – back – and – feel – me – fuck – you – please – sweet – strong – please!
"I gotta be honest, Ursula," Galatea confessed, "your new girlfriend's creeping me out. Anyway, I asked you to give me, a newbie me, a power-boost from me, the old me, in case something bad happened to me, the whole-me. That boost was me, a kinda mini-me. See?"
"Uh, yeah," Ursula said, her point of view bobbing in a cameraman's nod, "that's the part I didn't understand the first time, either. Sorry."
"When I mindfucked you," Galatea explained, exasperated, "I left a little message-web and a big wad of energy, a backup magic battery and a message in a bottle explaining how to use it. This message-web's almost gone, now, you know. Just a few thoughts left."
Ursula mused, "A backup magic battery? A big wad in a bottle? But you said you recharge your magic by fucking Dee's brains out...Oh my God, you put Dee's sperm in my brain!"
ew – ew – ew – um – no – wait – hold – on – magic – battery?
"Don't be silly." It was Galatea's turn to be smug. "You don't put sperm in your brain, you put it in your—"
found – it – found – it – lime – thank – you – found – it – just – enough – keep – me – going – keep – me – fucking…
"Hey." Galatea grew faint. "That's not yours."
"Nyx, no," Ursula insisted. "The, uh, power level of that battery must be so small."
Galatea's furious screech echoed as if from miles away. "It's over nine thousand!"
"Okay." Ursula astral-shrugged. "Maybe more than a little. Still, Nyx, don't waste it fucking yourself to death."
worth – it – worth – it – worth – it – to – thank – you – to – love – you…
Ursula aspired into the air, stunned. "Nyx…"
"It's easy to for people like us to die for love, little sister." Galatea's wistful, distant voice crackled with static. "Ursula wants you to take the harder path."
don't – understand – don't – want – to – stop – want – to – thank – want – to – fuck – want – to – love…
Ursula focused on the source of the whispery non-speech. While Galatea's astral message emanated from the surrounding air, Nyx's words flittered from somewhere deep within, from between the eyes and beside the heart. "Live for me, Nyx."
will – try – will – live – will – love – live – love – oh – love…
Galatea's voice strained even as it broke apart. "It…yours…lit…sister. Ursula…tell…love him. Tell Dee…no matt…happens. I love…always." And Galatea was gone.
so – sad – so – strange – Dee – cute – kind – caring – but – too – solid – almost – stolid – yuck.
Ursula scudded down toward the Jeep, laughing. "I thought all goo girls were into solid boys."
Dee – too – hard – CeeCee – too – soft – Ursula – just – right!
She drew close to her body, marveling at the mummifying corset of Nyx's embrace. It smoothed out every uneven line or asymmetrical curve, molding her flesh into its ideal shape—not a generic twiggy, Hollywood starlet ideal, but an ideal Ursula shape. Her ebony-glued braids were giant, bendy licorice sticks. Her legs twitched, her gummed lips curling in a rictus of carnal bliss. "Nyx, how am I breathing?"
no – need – you – opened – yourself – to – me – and – let – me – flood – within – you – now – you – breathe – the – blood – music.
"You mean you're oxygenating my blood?"
bah – science – babble – no – mystery – no – romance – come – back – come – sing – the – blood – music – with – me! or – just – cum – that's – fine – too.
Ursula wafted close enough to see the stretchy black membrane covering her tongue and teeth. "I need to breathe to get back in, to inspirit my body."
ah – yes – inspiration – yes – mystery – yes.
The liquid shadow drained from Ursula's face in fingers of running fluid. Her mouth swallowed its contents down in a sensuous gulp. Ursula heard her own post-orgasmic laughter for the first time—a deep, slow, mind-blown chortling. "Damn," she said, watching her body luxuriate on the ground and feel itself up. "I never imagined myself like this."
how?
"So…sexy. Hold on, that reminds me of something I can't believe I forgot."
["…That was 'going at it'? But I was just walking…No, you're right, it was more than that. It really did feel like sex. Constant, nonstop sex…"]
The bodysuit peeled away from her head completely, forming a thick band below Ursula's chin, more choker necklace than turtleneck. "Oh, Nyx," Ursula sang, ethereal voice dripping with mischief. "In order for you to wear me, to use my body's motion to conserve your magic, you’re going to have to hold still, to not burn nanomek, and let me move you."
understood – that – sounds – strange – but – fun – so?
"So, I did it with Galatea once, and she said it was a little…intense."
["…When you were wearing me, and I held still while you moved, I didn't burn any magic…But I could still feel you—taste you, touch you, smell you—and you pulled me and pushed me and stretched me and…and fucked me. There's no better word for it. You were touching every part of me. I had no core, no reserve, no backup, no body, just you, you, you, everywhere. I could feel your tits bounce and you pussy drip and your ass rock and your legs swing, and when you put me into your mouth…"]
A spiky shiver shot through the obsidian substance of the bodysuit. wait – what? constant – um – nonstop – sex? pull –and – pussy – and – tits – and – push – and – legs – and – stretch – and – fuck – every – part?
Ursula bobbed back up a bit. "You can read my flashbacks? I mean, hear my memories?"
when – they – make – your – heart – beat – this – fast – and – your – sex – get – this – wet? yes – but – but – constant – nonstop – sex?
Ursula could not wait to get back into her body so she could leer properly. She hovered, poised above her pouting mouth. "Oh, yeah."
but – but – for – how – um – long?
Ursula dipped down. "If I have any say in the matter…" Her body's lips parted. "…I am going to make it last…" She pushed her astral-presence close and an electric thrill shocked through her as she tasted her own lips "…for the rest of our lives."
oh – God – oh – God – oh – my – God…
Ursula threw her head back, gasped, and became inspired.
Take me down where the love honey flows,
Kiss you nice–nibble your toes.
Take me down where the good stuff grows,
Love you nice–tickle your nose!
—B-52s, Good Stuff
"Shit," Dee said over dry crackling, "I broke another tree. Sorry." He let go of Eurydice's waist, slipped out of her nectarous sex, and stepped back.
Eurydice threw him a lazy, cross-eyed smile over her bare shoulder. "S'okay," she panted, clinging to the listing tree for dear life. "I'm goo—oop!" The tree groaned and gave way, dragging her down with it. She lay there, bent over the fractured tree stump, her rump high in the air. "Man, am I good." Her giggles sent shock waves through her heart-stopping apple of an ass.
Dee ogled her rear-end. Green syrup wept down the insides of her squeezing thighs. The translucent flesh of her ass, her pussy, and her tenebrous inner gel, churned a milky, pale jade as his cum suffused her substance. He ran three fingers up the inner curve of a thigh and the liquid of her sex ran down the back of his hand as hot mint jelly. Eurydice cooed and rocked back, squashing his fingers between her legs. Dee grinned, angled his fingers up, and eased them further in. Eurydice whimpered and thumped the ground with her fist, stirring a little flurry of twigs, leaves and earth into the air. "No fair," she whined as he slid his hand about, "don't tease me."
Dee bowed over her. She groaned, propped herself up, and crushed her back into his chest. "I thought you liked it," he scolded into her ear.
"I do. I like it too much." She plopped back down to the ground in a viridian puddle.
"And we're running out of trees," Dee admitted.
Eurydice glanced around, frowning. The four toppled trees gave her a clear view of the road and the Jeep. "I finally get to fuck you in public, and nobody's watching, dammit. Yves is just sitting there reading a roadmap."
"Yves is not a voyeur," Dee said. "'Unless there're two dicks involved, and one of them's mine, I'm not interested,' he says. It's part of his 'existential monogamy' nonsense." He tapped her on the ass. "C'mon, hon. He's waiting."
"It's not just that," Eurydice said, watching Yves comparing notes between the hardcopy map and talky GPS. "He's wound so tight." She turned to Dee, eyes glistening. "You know why, right?" Dee nodded and she faced forward again. "And now he's surrounded by goo girls. It isn't his wet dream, it's a nightmare. What are we going to do?"
Dee cleaned himself off with the muscle shirt. "The only thing we can do." He plucked his briefs and borrowed sweatpants off a broken branch. "Be his friends and help him save the world. Oh, and ruin another one of his shirts. I grabbed a bunch of his old clothes from his closet and stuck them in the trunk."
Eurydice smirked. "I like your priorities. Let's go." She pulled herself upright, her chest stamped with the zigzag of tree bark. Gel pulsed down her legs in a fluidic reflex, splashing into the puddle of piping hot apple jam at her feet. Teeny whitecaps formed on the puddle's surface and soon Eurydice stood in the center of a minute maelstrom. She huffed and closed her eyes in concentration. The whitecaps peaked and spun, higher and faster. Eurydice clenched her fists at her sides. "C'mon, dammit, c'mon, keep it together."
Dee could see the anxiety painted across her face. He tried to ask if everything was all right, but she spat, "I can do this, dammit." She hefted her fists up, arms trembling with the effort, as if struggling to raise heavy, invisible dumbbells. The whitecaps stabbed into the air, rising and wriggling like fingers—"Got it!"—Eurydice snapped her fists up to her shoulders and the whirligig of goo funneled up her legs, feeding her core. "Got it, God damn it."
Dee pressed a gentle hand against her back. He felt currents racing below the surface tension of her gel-flesh. "Are you in control?"
"Aye. I mean, yeah." This time, the smile she gave Dee over her shoulder was crooked but nervy. "But if you ask which me is in control, I'm going to kick you in the crotch."
Dee nodded. "It's a fair cop; that's exactly what I was thinking." He hitched up his briefs. "But is there anything I can do?"
Eurydice winked. "Lower your sperm count?"
Dee snapped the elastic band of his briefs. "I'm already wearing really tight undies."
"I can see that," Eurydice breathed, eyes shining as she glanced down. She sighed and shook her head. "Better put Mine away, Dee, unless you brought Hazmat suits for your friends along with those extra clothes. I lose a little control with each nanogasm."
"You kind of always have," Dee said, pulling on the pair of baggy Hammer pants.
"But not like this. Too many nanogasms at once and I, um…" She groped for the right word. "I fragment, I guess."
Dee perked up. "Like a hard drive."
"You are such a dork." Eurydice mugged and morphed into her Unabomber disguise. She took care to smooth out tufts of unruly, violent green cilia that erupted from random crevices, sprouting from the tops of her boots and struggling out from between her tits.
"I'm in love with a Great Old One," Dee mused as the last writhing mass vanished into her disguise. "What would Lovecraft say?"
"Howard? Dunno," Eurydice shrugged, "he kept passing out. Had to take notes from Clark and Rob."
Dee's eyes bugged out of his head. "You're shitting me."
Eurydice crooked an eyebrow at him and popped her sunglasses on. "I don't kiss and tell." She sauntered out of the devastated copse and onto the road.
Dee hopped after her. "Aw, come on, you've got to be kidding. Right? Right?"
Eurydice swung her hips, crying out a preposterous, overacted fake orgasm. "Ia! Ia!" Ursula swaggered into view around the Jeep and Eurydice froze mid-swing. "Ia—whoa."
Dee's jaw dropped. Ursula scissored down the road, a proverbial walking streak of sex. She had abandoned her clunky Doc Martins for a pair of gleaming, black vinyl go-go boots that hugged her ankles and disappeared up the bellbottomed legs of her jeans. Thick, six-inch heels whacked-whacked-whacked! on the pavement as Ursula brought one foot down right in front of the other. Without the poncho, the waist of her jeans smiled wide under her flat stomach, riding low enough to expose the mouth of the valley of her crotch. Dee saw no flash of flesh, just more of that same glossy black PVC-like material. It rose up out of her pants in a seamless one-piece, sealing off her entire body below the neck in a hard candy shell that yielded and flexed with her every movement and breath but never stretched or creased. An Emma Peel cat-suit with muscle memory. "How do we look?"
"You have to ask?" Dee managed.
Ursula ground to a halt. Her fingers, gloved skintight, toyed with a long, plaited ponytail as she muttered. "Yves wouldn't look up from the map. CeeCee wouldn't stop wisecracking. Raz couldn't stop frigging but that's okay because she says the most awful things anyway."
Dee interrupted but soon found himself at lost for words. "Ursula, you've got nothing to worry about. You look, well, I don't quite know how to say this, but you look…"
"Damn, girl," wowed Eurydice.
"Yeah," Dee agreed. "What she said."
Ursula blushed, beamed, and flounced back to the jeep. Dee watched her braids pendulum across her ass. "I wonder how that feels for Nyx," he said.
"Mm, I can’t even imagine," Eurydice sighed. When Ursula disappeared around the Jeep, Eurydice asked him, "Should I be jealous?"
"Excuse me?" Dee crooked his thumb. "You were the one who fucked her, apparently."
"No," Eurydice said, swaying close and running her hands over Dee's ribs. "I mean, have we ever tried that? Have you ever, y'know…" She left a curlicue finger-trail of green frosting over his abs. "…worn me?"
"Not like that," Dee admitted. "Not exactly."
Eurydice pouted. "Then I am jealous."
Dee waggled his eyebrows. "You don’t remember the Nanocream Bubble Spa Technique."
Eurydice pulled off her sunglasses to wonder at him wide-eyed. "Whuzzat?"
Dee scooped the frosting off his skin and popped it into his mouth, lips smacking at the tangy taste. "I don't kiss and tell, either." Eurydice mocked shock and Dee added, "You'll remember. You'll remember everything, I promise."
Dee smiled as confidently as he could and made his way past her toward the Jeep, pretending not to hear the anxious way her voice fell as she mustered, "Yeah, I know I will."
"This is an utter indignity," CeeCee protested from the trunk of the Jeep, a cramped gap between the backseat and the vehicle's rear hatch. "I like restraint if it doesn't go too far, but a woman of my stature should not be so confined."
"Get your boobs out of my head," Eurydice huffed.
Dee, intrigued by the peculiar phrasing, twisted in the front seat to get a good look. Eurydice mashed her elbows against the avalanche of confection-flesh billowing over the lip of the trunk. The speeding Jeep jolted. CeeCee's butter yellow tits bulged around Eurydice's arms and flumped against both sides of her head, orange areola smothering the green girl's ears through the hoody. "Great," Eurydice said as stiff nipples slipped through the surface tension of her own citrus gel, "now all I can think about is tight, scratchy sweaters, baby binkies, and—for some reason—Graham cracker crumbs."
"Unless your man's hankering for a slice of Key Lime pie," CeeCee told her, "we'd better get to this 'SRU' place in a hurry."
"Would you rather be stuck on the roof with Raspberry?" Eurydice threatened.
"I'm fucking the wind!" Raspberry hollered from above. Lavender Ghostbuster slime spattered the windows. Yves flicked on the windshield wipers, launching a spray of wiper fluid. "Oh, bugger off, you butt-pirate." Yves snarled and pumped the brake. Raspberry cried out with each lurch. "Oh, yeah! Harder! Give it! Aw, was that the best you got?"
"I think I'm beginning to hate her," Yves said, pinching the bridge of his nose. Eurydice shot Dee a worried look. Dee put a hand on Yves' arm. "I'll be okay," Yves muttered. "That caffeine headache must be kicking in early. Are you sure you know where we're going? The GPS thinks were in middle of the county reservoir." Dee gave Yves a reassuring shoulder squeeze and Yves sagged in the driver's seat. "Look, I'm know I'm not 'great' or even close to 'fine,' but I will be okay, so let's just get this thing done. I swear I'll let you know if I get in trouble. Hell, you'll probably know before I do. All right?" Dee nodded and Yves glanced into the rearview mirror and spoke to Eurydice. "You too, all right?" Eurydice nodded and fought back another landslide of cheesecake. Yves rolled his eyes, frowned, and angled the rearview mirror. "Ursula, what's up? Carsick?"
Ursula sat in the backseat next to Eurydice, flushed and agape, her face prickled with sweat, her oval eyeglasses askew at the tip of her nose. "N-no, not really, I'm fine. Really. Just..." She shifted in her poncho. The rubbery collar around her neck looked dappled and slick. "Just don't bounce and jerk the car around like that again, okay? All that cum, um, commotion caught us by surprise, that's all."
Yves shrugged, scanning the road ahead. Eurydice, arms spread wide to hold back the marshmallow tide, grinned at Dee but said nothing. Ursula turned to look out the window, cupping her chin with a gloved hand. She ran two black-lacquered fingertips over her lips. A single, impish giggle escaped her and she sucked her fingers into her mouth. The inky material of the glove wrinkled and wriggled in frantic motion, but Ursula just worked her fingers in and out, her slurping laughter deep and muffled.
"Do I want to know?" Yves asked as Dee spun to face forward.
"No," Dee said, blushing scarlet, "you really don't."
"Good," said Yves, pulling the Jeep into a wide, empty parking lot with a white brick building squatting in the middle of it, "because we're here."
"No Mini Coop," Dee observed, "but the sign says 'Open,' so SB is probably inside. Don't park too close. We don't want to interrupt anything."
"Mm, listen," Ursula said, pulling her wet fingers out of her mouth. "They've got a bathroom in there, right? Because I really gotta pee—Eeep!" She sat up, stiff as a board and thunderstruck. She blinked, blushed, and relaxed. "Uh, never mind."
Eurydice edged away from Ursula as Yves picked a parking space halfway into the lot. The Jeep's engine cut off and Dee heard a discordant ringing at the edge of hearing. The car ticked as it cooled. "Well," Yves said, waving a hand at the cluttered storefront window. "Now what?"
The ugly claxon grew loud as the door with SRU MEDICAL stenciled in fading blue ink opened inward. A lean, muscular girl with skin the color of Ruby Red grapefruit juice and cornrows of cotton candy stepped out onto the sidewalk. Her coppery, sleeveless dress rippled in the wind, tracing the sleek physique beneath.
"Dee, I thought you said Strawberry Banana was hung like a horse," Yves said. The rose girl stepped down onto the pavement. Dee nodded. "Some dick-girl," Yves scoffed, eyes narrowed. "Where's her dick?"
The rose girl raised her right arm parallel with her shoulder. She furled her fingers and a forest of fractals sprouted from her palm. The pale, rainbowed lines and wedges zigzagged through the air, reminding Dee of the sudden, geometric spread of ice crystals captured with time-elapsed photography. The cloud of chaos whirling away from her fingers grew random and fractured and unrecognizable, but at some hidden instant collapsed into solidity and certain, deadly shape.
The rose girl held her scimitar aloft. Its wide, curving blade of pale pink crystal dazzled with sunlight. She wrapped her left hand around its huge pommel and brought it down before her chest in the imposing two-handed grip of a harem guard from the decadent flights of Arabian fantasy. Her diamond eyes were cold and expressionless. The sickle tip of the sword towered above her head. For a long while, Dee heard no sound other than that horrid bell, blessedly muffled behind the closing door. Then came the crunch of dust and lose pavement as the rose girl advanced on the Jeep.
Yves stared ahead. He clucked his tongue.
"Do something, Dee," Eurydice whispered, huddled into CeeCee's pliant flesh.
"What should I do?" Dee asked as the rose girl drew closer." SB could probably kick my ass six ways to Sunday. Maybe I could talk to her?" He shook his head to clear it. "Wait, what are we worried about? She's made out of Jell-O. That sword is made out of Jell-O. It’s useless."
The rose girl swept the sword out and down in an underhand grip. Its tip connected with the pavement. Sparks flew. She stepped over the charred, smoking scar the sword left in the blacktop. The swing followed through and the sword slapped back into both hands again, unmarked.
"I just shat my pants," Raspberry announced from the roof. The rose girl had crossed half the distance between the store and the Jeep. "I had to grow pants just to pinch a loaf in them. Somebody better appreciate the effort I went through before we all die by shish kabob."
"I think," Yves said calmly—and Dee knew that Yves at his calmest was also Yves at his most dangerous—"I've had enough of this sort of thing for today." Yves clicked open his seatbelt, eased out the driver's side door, and ambled into the rose girl's path. He walked with an unhurried gate, shoulders squared, his knees and arms kept bent at a relaxed angle.
"Yves' in trouble," Dee said.
"Don't let her hurt him, Dee," Eurydice pled.
Dee hunkered in the Jeep's busted doorframe, ready to leap out at the two figures closing ranks in front of him. "I won't." Damn it,, he thought, none of this makes any sense. SB wound her scimitar back, a batter ready to swing for the bleachers. Dee coiled to jump. I can't think of any reason for SB to act this way…
"I've sparred with a Swiss Flamb