Thea Harrison - Oracle's Moon

Would they? She was getting tired of being told what to do. She said between her teeth, “I don’t hear you asking me.”

He leaned an elbow on his upraised knee, his crystalline gaze steady, ruthless. “I can always leave.”

Her mouth threatened to wobble. “Why do you want to play?”

“I would have this exchange balanced,” he said tersely.

She was bewildered. She didn’t understand why the concept of a balanced exchange was so important to him. Maybe it had something to do with control? Then she remembered what he had said before, about wishing for information and not wanting to be beholden to her for it. Her expression tightened.

Well, it wasn’t as if she had anything real to lose. She folded her arms and said, “No. We’re done with the truth game. Ask me what you want to ask me, and I’ll answer or not if I like. I’ll ask you anything I want, and you’ll answer or not if you like. No forfeit, no control, no balance. No more favors or deals or measuring shit. We’ll either have a real, messy conversation, or you can get the hell out.”

He grew angry. She could feel it shifting through his energy, slow and sulfurous like slow-moving lava.

She liked it. His anger felt satisfying. It meant he wasn’t indifferent to her. So she pushed him harder. “Go on, go.”

Ever since he had kissed her, Khalil had felt wrapped in invisible chains.

He had attended to his various duties with a surly attitude, snarling at anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way or to look at him strangely. He sat in on a Demonkind legislative committee hearing because it was his responsibility and he must, but he didn’t listen or participate. The committee chair put the subject to a vote, and Khalil looked around at the people with whom he most often shared a common point of view. He raised his hand when they did. Nobody remarked upon it, so he must not have voted for anything too out of character.

He left the legislature and let go of his physical form as soon as he was able to. Then he took to the winds. Releasing his physical form wasn’t as satisfying as he had thought it would be. Nothing he did that day was.

He could not seem to put enough distance between himself and thinking about Grace and the children. He wondered what they were doing that day. Finally, in exasperation, he chose to leave Earth altogether. He materialized into his physical form on the moon.

There was no sound, because the moon had no atmosphere. There was no wind, no air. The sun was a piercing roar of flame. The sun’s reflected light off the moon’s surface was silver white; fragile, unshielded human eyes would have been blinded by the radiance. It did not discomfort Khalil in any way, because his form was a focus. He did not need to breathe. He crossed his arms, staring at the milky green, blue and white ball that was Earth, while he soaked up the blast of inexhaustible energy from the sun.

The moon was as far as the Djinn could travel from Earth without traversing one of the many crossover passages that led to Other lands in other dimensions. Many theories had been put forth about the Other lands, but Khalil thought that the lands were, in the end, either shadows or mirrors, reflections or folds, of the Earth itself.

Around noon, he wondered what Grace and the children were eating for lunch. It would be cheerful, simple and tasty enough to tempt a picky child’s appetite.

Bah. He was back to thinking about them again. With a silent hiss he flicked his fingers angrily in the direction of the blue-white orb. Then he dematerialized and went to the far side of the moon. That side permanently faced away from Earth. It was much more suited to his brooding mood. The surface was battered and densely cratered. The moon was halfway through its lunar cycle, so part of the far side was in darkness.

Here light and dark were knifelike. There were no soft, colorful shadows of dusk, as there had been at Grace’s house last evening. He chose the darkness and rematerialized to lean back against a boulder and stare at the sharp, bright stars. Away from the Earth’s atmosphere, they seemed closer, but they weren’t.

He pushed away from the boulder and strode along the moon’s surface restlessly. The invisible chains were inside of him. It did not matter where he chose to go. His own thoughts were his cage.

Tasty.

Last night, Grace’s mouth had been tasty, succulent with surprise and a kind of honeyed innocence that had nothing to do with virginity and everything to do with the breathless pleasure of new exploration. Her energy had bloomed with arousal.

She was not all sweetness and light. She had thorns, prickly edges and that quick temper he loved to bait into flaring, but the thing that sent him spearing into the night after kissing her was how the darkness of her pain called to his.

While he was not as bigoted as he had once pretended to be with Grace, he had not known many humans very well. He had met those who were just as he had said, conniving and too interested in the search for Power. He had also met some that he enjoyed, and he had taken humans as lovers before.

As lovers they had been toys, a game he had played at, meaningless diversions when he had been bored and looking for a change. He had taken on his physical form for them, because the human lovers Khalil had known couldn’t sense his full, invisible aspect. They didn’t have the presence or the Power to align with his. They couldn’t know what brought him the deepest, truest pleasure, and he always quickly lost interest in them.

Grace had the ability. She was like no other human he had met before. Her Power was, quite literally, unique. She could match him, fit to his presence in the way that Djinn made love to Djinn, share in formless pleasure and arousal. It was bizarre.

It was perfect.

For the first time he seriously wondered what pleasures the actual human senses might have to offer.

His physical form gave him a limited imitation of what humans experienced with all their senses, bound in flesh as they were. But he never really felt the depth of real physical hunger or pain. He never fully tasted, as humans did, the delicacy or nuances of flavor in food, nor did he know to its fullest extent the intensity of physical sexual pleasure. He only played at those appetites, as did most Djinn, sooner or later.

Taking on a physical form took effort and Power. The more real the form that Djinn took on, the more it cost them. To create a fully human form, with the most complicated thing of all, a brain, was an irreversible act. The Djinn called it “falling into flesh.” There were between stages of formation that were reversible, but most Djinn only bothered with forming a facade.

If he created a more complete form, with real skin, he could discover what she felt like when he licked her lips. He could truly know why that sensation shivered through her energy and Power, and heightened her arousal to a fever pitch. The effort would be tiring and cost him more Power, but as long as he did not fall completely into human flesh, he could discard the form whenever he chose.

And then he would know.

He returned to Earth with a more settled frame of mind and went through the rest of his day.

Now as he knelt in front of Grace, he tried to initiate a controlled, rational, balanced exchange, but she denied all of it. She denied him. Worse, she ordered him to leave.

He usually liked when she dictated, but he didn’t like that. He glared at her angry face. Those plush, soft lips of hers were folded into a tight line. She sat bolt upright with her arms wrapped around her middle. She pressed her legs together and turned them to the side. None of that looked promising, controlled or rational. It certainly didn’t look balanced.

He frowned and studied her more closely. She didn’t just look angry. She looked hurt and resentful, but he would be damned if he would leave just because she ordered him to go. He gritted his teeth. “I kissed you last night when I was angry. I shouldn’t have done that.”