Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“I think you’d better leave,” he said quietly. He remembered that he hadn’t heard any kind of vehicle approach. “If you don’t have a ride, I’ll call you a cab.” He stared at her dark nipples. “I’ll even lend you a shirt.”

“Your generosity is overwhelming, Enrico.”

His name wasn’t anywhere on the outside of the house or the mailbox.

She reached a hand toward him and the scent of the datura became stronger. “I want to show you something,” she said.

She took his wrist in strong, cool fingers and despite the heat of the summer night, the coolness went through his body like snowmelt poured through his veins.

He pulled away from her, chilled, unsure of what it was he’d just touched. A gust of wind bent the branches of the jasmine, tumbling tiny white stars toward the ground.

She stepped deeper into the shadows, and the golden spangles clicked together softly. “Here,” she said, pointing to the garden path where it was arched over with cassia branches. “Lie down.”

He was getting hard and he had a horrible feeling that she knew it. “You are one strange lady,” he said.

“Not a lady,” she told him. “Never that. Lie down, Enrico, and let the earth give you her gifts.”

He wasn’t used to taking orders from women, but he was too curious to refuse this one. He knelt then laid himself down, descending into a layer of air woven through with the scents of the garden. He hadn’t known the rich tapestry of smells. Rosemary overlaid with cassia, the musk of sage intertwined with the nectar of honeysuckle.

He looked up at her and swore for a second that behind her back two large dusky wings were rubbing together. No, it was a trick of the shadows.

He held out a hand to her. “Come down here with me.”

“You like to invite women in,” she said. “And then to make them leave again. It’s a rhythm with you, no?”

He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. She’d spoken with Seena’s exact inflections.

“You won’t have to ask me to leave,” she promised. “I never stay.”

Overhead, a screech owl winged through the night, and he remembered something his grandmother had told him. His abuelita, who’d grown up in a tiny mountain village in Mexico, was as superstitious as they came. “The owl brings death, Enrico,” she’d say. “When you see the owl, you must pray to la Virgen de Guadalupe. Then only she can help you.”

The woman was standing by his side now. She moved one hip and her skirts brushed the ground, then his chest. The tiny golden spangles were like thin disks of ice against his bare skin. It was impossible, he told himself. The temperature was in the nineties. Nothing could stay so cold in the summer night.

“You’re chilled,” she observed.

He took it as his way out. “I must be coming down with something,” he said, and got to his feet. “I’d better go in.”

The laughter again. “What about your little cat?” she asked. “Don’t you want to find her?”

Somewhere to the north lightning flickered in the skies, and the scent of creosote began to fill the air. The skies were unusually dark, the desert stars hidden behind a mass of cloud cover. There would be a storm, he knew, quick and hard and loud. The female cat was terrified by thunder. Astrid, another ex, was a therapist who had told him in no uncertain terms that the young cat suffered from an anxiety disorder related to noise.

“The cat will be fine,” he told the woman.

“That she will,” the woman agreed.

He started toward the house, aware that he was leaving a cat to a storm and a half-naked woman in his yard, aware that it was high-summer in southern Arizona and he was colder than he’d been after being stranded for hours in a Montana ice storm. He would not try to puzzle out who she was or how she’d known the things she had, for all of it was impossible.

He went into the room that he’d made into a study and sat down at the computer. The map of the watershed was still on the screen. He studied flood plains, diverted water courses from their natural routes, and “protected” banks, lining them with steel and concrete to prevent erosion. Long ago, he’d realized that it was the land that needed protection from the developers and engineers, and that there was something perverse and futile in all the shoring up and redirecting of streams. Not that he let it stop him. He was good at what he did, he made good money, and he found pleasure in the numerical equations that defined the flow of water, the drainage of soil, and the momentum of a given flood. Now he worked a set of equations, allowing the familiar discipline to calm him. There was great comfort in knowing one’s variables and being able to manipulate them with precision.