Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

When he got inside, he ran.

Elena was lying in a hopeless tangle of sheets and blankets on the floor. She was trying to get up, but her face was blue-white with pain.

“What pushed you off the bed?” he said. He was going to kill Shinichi slowly.

“Nothing. I heard a terrible sound just as the door shut. I tried to get to you, but—” Damon stared at her.“I tried to get to you, but—” This broken, hurting, exhausted creature had tried to rescue him? Tried so hard that she’d fallen off her bed?

“I’m sorry,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “I can’t get used to gravity. Are you hurt?”

“Not as much as you are,” he said, purposely keeping his voice rough, his eyes averted. “I did something stupid, leaving the room, and the house…reminded me.”

“What are you talking about?” said the woebegone Elena, dressed only in sheets.

“This key,” Damon held it up for her to see. It was golden and could be worn as a ring, but two wings folded out and made a beautiful key.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The way I used it. This key has the power of the kitsune in it, and it will unlock anything and take you anywhere, but the way it works is that you put it into the lock, say where you want to go, and then turn the key. I forgot to do that in leaving your room.”

Elena looked puzzled. “But what if a key doesn’t have a lock in it? Most bedroom doors don’t have locks.”

“This key goes into any door. You might say it makes its own lock. It’s a kitsune treasure — which I shook out of Shinichi when I was so angry about you being hurt. He’ll be wanting it back soon.” Damon’s eyes narrowed and he smiled faintly. “I wonder which of us will end up keeping it. I noticed another one in the kitchen — a spare, of course.”

“Damon, all this about magical keys is interesting, but if you could let me get off the floor…”

He was contrite at once. Then came the question of whether to put her on the bed or not.

“I’ll take the bath,” Elena said in a small voice. She unsnapped the top of her jeans and tried to scoot out of them.

“Wait a minute! You might faint and drown. Lie down and I promise to get you clean, if you’re willing to try and eat.” He had new reservations about the house.

“Now undress on the bed and pull the sheet over you. I do wicked massages,” he added, turning away.

“Look, you don’t have to not look. It’s something I haven’t understood since I…came back,” Elena said. “Modesty taboos. I don’t see why anyone should be ashamed of their body.” (This came to him in a rather muffled voice.) “I mean for anyone who says God made us, God made us without clothes, even after Adam and Eve. If it’s so important, why didn’t he make us with diapers on?”

“Yes, actually, what you’re saying reminds me of what I once said to the Dowager Queen of France,” Damon said, determined to keep her undressing while he gazed at a crack in one of the wooden panels of the wall. “I said that if God were both omnipotent and omniscient, then He surely knew our destinies beforehand, and why were the righteous doomed to be born as sinfully naked as the damned?”

“And what did she say?”

“Not a word. But she giggled and tapped me three times on the back of my hand with her fan, which I was later told was an invitation for an assignation. Alas, I had other obligations. Are you on the bed still?”

“Yes, and I’m under a sheet,” Elena said wearily. “If she were Dowager Queen, I expect you were glad,” she added in a half-bewildered voice. “Aren’t they the old mothers?”

“No, Anne of Austria, Queen of France, kept her remarkable beauty to the end. She was the only redhead that—” Damon stopped, groping wildly for words as he faced the bed. Elena had done as he had asked. He just hadn’t realized how much she would look like Aphrodite arising from the ocean. The ruffled white of the sheet came up to the warmer milk-white of her skin. She needed cleaning, certainly, but just knowing that under that thin sheet she was magnificently naked was enough to make him lose his breath.

She had rolled her clothes into a ball and thrown them into the farthest corner of the room. He didn’t blame her.

He didn’t think. He didn’t give himself time. He simply held out his hands and said, “Lemon-thyme chicken consommé, hot, in a Mikasa cup — and plum flower oil, very warm, in a vial.”

Once the broth was duly consumed and Elena was lying on her back again, he began to gently massage her with the oil. Plum flower always made for a good start. It numbed the skin and the senses to pain, and it provided a basis for the other, more exotic, oils he planned to use on her.

In a way, it was much better than dumping her in a modern bath or Jacuzzi. He knew where her injuries were; he could heat the oils to the appropriate temperature for any of them. And instead of a barely mobile Jacuzzi head spouting water against a bruise, he could avoid anything too sensitive — in the painful sense.

He started with her hair, adding a very, very light coating of oil that would make the worst tangles easy to brush out. After the oiling, her hair shone like gold against her skin — honey on cream. Then he began with the muscles in her face: tiny strokes with his thumbs over her forehead to smooth it and relax it, forcing her to relax along with his movements. Slow, circular swirls at her temples, with only the lightest of pressure. He could see the thin blue veins traced here, and he knew that deep pressure could put her to sleep.

He then proceeded to upper arms, her forearms, her hands, taking her apart with ancient strokes and the correct ancient essences to go with them, until she was nothing but a loose, boneless thing under the sheet: sleek and soft and yielding. He flashed his incandescent smile for a moment while pulling a toe until it popped — and then the smile turned ironic. He could have what he wanted of her, now. Yes, she was in no mood to refuse anything. But he hadn’t counted on what the damned sheet would do to him. Everyone knew that a scrap of covering, no matter how simple, always drew attention to the taboo area as pure nakedness did not. And massaging Elena by inches this way only focused him on what lay beneath the snowy fabric.

After a while Elena said drowsily, “Aren’t you going to tell the end of the story? About Anne of Austria, who was the only redhead to…”

“…to, ah, remain a natural redhead to the end of her life,” Damon murmured. “Yes. It was said that Cardinal Richelieu was her lover.”

“Isn’t that the wicked Cardinal from the The Three Musketeers?”

“Yes, but perhaps not so wicked as he was portrayed there, and certainly an able politician. And, some say, the real father of Louis…now turn over.”

“It’s a strange name for a king.”

“Hm?”

“Louis Now Turn Over,” Elena said, turning over and showing a flash of creamy thigh while Damon tried to eye various other parts of the room.

“Depends on the naming traditions of the individual’s native country,” Damon said wildly. All he could see were replays of that glimpse of thigh.

“What?”

“What?”

“I was asking you—”

“Are you warm now? All done,” Damon said and, unwisely, patted the highest curve of terrain under the towel.

“Hey!” Elena reared up, and Damon — faced by an entire body of pale rose-gold and perfumed and sleek — and with muscles like steel under the silken skin — precipitately fled.

He came back after an appropriate interval with a calming offering of more soup. Elena, dignified under her sheet, which she had made into a toga, accepted. She didn’t even try to swat him on the bottom when his back was turned.