Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The night was soft and warm and heavy. Humidity from the rains still hung in the air despite the winds. Thick patches of cloud scudded across the full moon, concealing it, then gliding on and revealing it again. And so the light kept changing, there one moment, gone the next. He couldn’t make his eyes adjust; every time they did, everything changed again and he found himself unable to see. Yet he was becoming more sure by the second that he was not alone in the garden. She’d returned and was waiting for him.

Thunder rumbled through the skies followed by a white streak of lightning, forked and branched, like a map of a stream bed illuminated in the sky.

He walked along the soft dirt path that ringed the outer edge of the garden then spiraled to its center. He spun, alarmed, as he felt something behind him, and then felt the fool, realizing it was only the soft fronds of the cassias blowing against him, tickling his naked buttocks.

He stopped walking as he reached the hibiscus. He could swear Cassie hadn’t planted one. And he certainly hadn’t. Had the tree grown from seed? The clouds slid over the moon again, plunging him into darkness, and when the moon cleared she was standing in front of him. She was dressed exactly as she had been before—in nothing but bracelets and earrings and the sheer skirt made of tiny golden disks.

“Enrico,” she said. Although her upper body remained still, her hips began to sway, the metal disks clicking against each other.in a rhythm that rose and fell with the soughs of the wind.

“I—” He didn’t know what to say to her.

A light rain began to fall. He ignored it, his eyes on her hips, her waist, the round, full breasts. He reached a hand out and touched the side of her neck. He felt the pulse inside her, warm and even.

The clicking of the golden disks stopped. She took his hand from her neck and touched it to one of the hibiscus’s pink flowers, now furled against the night. “Rose of Sharon,” she said. “There were endless rose of Sharon in the Garden—pink, white, yellow, purple, even a blue—and I was so fond of them.” When he didn’t respond she explained, “I thought they would go well in your garden.”

He found his voice at last. “I want you.”

“Of course,” she said. “And I want you—and if you had half the sense of a jackrabbit, that would send you running in the opposite direction.”

“No,” he said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t run from you again.”

“More’s the pity,” she said softly. But she took his hand and led him to a place where the verbena grew thick and green over the brown earth. And she drew him down next to her.

She touched one hand to his collar bone and trailed her fingers to his groin. “‘Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant… our bed is green.’”

The word beloved, uncomfortable close to love, nearly snapped him out of it. “Wait—” he began. “I don’t know you—”

“And you don’t love me,” she finished, amused. “Relax, Enrico. It’s just a line from an old poem.” She bit down gently on his chest and for a split second, lightning turned the night sky white, and it seemed to him that she was not biting his chest at all but sinking her teeth deep into the center of his being. And as she did he thought he heard his grandmother’s voice, calling on the edge of the wind, “El búho, Enrico, ten miedo!”

He forced himself to sit up, to hold her at arm’s length. She rocked back on her knees. “What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head, unable to explain. At last he said, “Would you turn around for a minute?”

She gave him a questioning gaze but did as he asked. He wove his hands through the fall of black hair and sighed with relief as he found them: shoulder blades. Normal, human shoulder blades.

“Okay,” he said.

She turned back to him, her eyes sharp in the moonlight. “What were you searching for?”

“Wings,” he said to his own surprise; he found impossible to lie to her. “I thought maybe you were an angel,” he joked.

“No,” she said. Her tongue circled his nipples. “Angels aren’t to my taste.”

“That’s good.” He pulled her into his arms and tugged on the waist of her skirt. The golden disks fell from her body. “Mine either.”

The rain became heavier, but he didn’t notice. All he knew was her. She smelled of amber and musk. Her body fit against his as if she’d been made for him. Each breast exactly filled one of his hands. He traced the curve from the small of her back to the fullness of her butt, and she made a sound that was almost a purr of pleasure. Her skin was so soft that he actually believed she was vulnerable.

He licked her body. She tasted like the juice of the cactus fruit, tart and sweet. He made her lie still while he drank her, and what streamed inside her tasted like the desert itself, a nectar of sun and wind and all the life that fought so hard to survive there, subtle and strong and infinitely precious.

She suddenly twisted away from him as he drank.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.