Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Twenty:
Far Above Rubies

T’nu lah mip’ri yadeiha vihal’luha vash’arim ma’aseha
Give her of the fruit of her hands,
and let her own works praise her in the gates.
― Proverbs 31:31

 

“Crap!” Jackie was quickly becoming nostalgic for the madcap exhilaration of the academic world, because the tedium of order-taking and talking to skittish customers was taking its toll on her sanity. She’d just spent the best part of an hour arguing with a yammering wholesaler who insisted that — because he’d pre-sold more than his contractual allocation of what she’d chosen to produce — she was obligated to meet his commitments as if she’d made them. In the end, she’d turned him over to one of her mother’s many law firms, but had been strangely reluctant to close the connection, because she knew that there was already a call on hold, sure to be another idiot on another fool’s errand. She stared at the phone, furious, before she thumbed off the connection and the next call came in. “What?” she snarled.

“Jackie?” Frank seemed surprised.

“Frank! I’m so sorry! I thought it was another of those darned wholesalers complaining about the way the Earth persists in circling about the Sun instead of revolving around him!” Now she was mortified as well as generally pissed off. She wished in vain for a headache, so she could blame something other than her own short temper.

As usual, Frank was calm and reasonable. “Why don’t you hire a secretary, Sweetheart? You don’t have to do everything yourself, do you?”

Jackie gave the phone a baleful look. For a man so very clever, Frank could be irritatingly clueless at times. “I don’t do everything on my own. I’ve got twenty-six women working for me already!”

“Then at least one of them is doing the wrong job, because what you need is someone to keep track of your orders so that you can keep track of your creative art. Instead, you’re doing scutwork because you’re afraid to delegate responsibility.”

“Scutwork!” Her voice rose into the stratosphere, as shrill as an angry hawk. “ How dare you! Keeping track of my delivery chain is vital to the health of my business!”

“Indeed,” he said drily, “and so is taking out the trash, as witness the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which started in overflowing bins of cotton scraps and thread, but that doesn’t mean that you should be doing it.”

Jackie was about to say something really angry and cutting when she stopped herself. She looked up through the skylight fifty feet above her head, trying to drown her anger in cerulean blue, and said, “I’m sorry, Honey. I’m starting to sound a lot like my mother, aren’t I?”

Frank had that reasonable tone in his voice again. “I wasn’t going to point it out, and no offense meant, but the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree. Look, your entire career up to this point has been based on the humanities professorial norm, which is a one-man show — if you’ll pardon the sexist expression — with at most a grad student or two for clerical tasks. In Engineering, we expect to be working with large teams of people every day, with many levels of responsibility and authority. None of us think of ourselves like Paul Bunyan and Babe, his Big Blue Ox, who dug the Grand Canyon by accidentally dragging an axe behind him on a hot day. No one builds a bridge, or a building, alone. Most projects involve hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, so one of the skill sets we train in is how to manage large projects, and that means managing people. You’ve seen how much help your mom has been, but she’s no more a ‘team player’ than you are, really.”

“But you hate my mother!” For some reason, Jackie started crying.

Frank lowered his voice half an octave, a more intimate register which rumbled Jackie’s composure even more than it did the air. “No, I don’t, Sweetheart, not really. We just got off on the wrong foot because she killed my best friend and then changed him into a girl, which was a little weird at first, but you’re still my best friend…. And old Jack would have been totally weirded out if I’d kissed him, so she did us both a favor, really, even if she didn’t necessarily mean to at the time.”

Jackie thought about that with mild surprise. “She did do that, didn’t she? I forget sometimes. Cognitive disequilibrium, one supposes.”

“Say what?” Frank was an engineer. ‘Touchy-feely’ words weren’t a usual part of his vocabulary.

“It’s a psychological term of art for the unsettling feeling you have when you encounter two seemingly irreconcilable ‘facts.’ It’s like when someone you hate asks you for a favor, and for some reason — perhaps simple courtesy — you do it, so you’re conflicted; is the person hateful or not? If the person were truly hateful, should you have helped them? You’re confused. There are two ways to resolve the confusion, both of which involve introducing a new element of belief; either that the person you did the favor for isn’t quite as hateful as he seemed to be at first, or that the fact that he asked you for a favor proves that he’s even more hateful than you’d imagined. We try to justify our actions in retrospect, at least to ourselves. It’s one of the things that makes human societies possible, and keeps us from collapsing into a mush of nothing special. We either blend or separate from each other depending on our beliefs, and our beliefs change according to how we feel about each other.”

Frank wasn’t really sure of what she’d said, but was willing to guess. “Okay, well, that pretty much covers it for me. Jack was more or less miserable most of the time, and so was I, but we’ve both changed. Neither one of us had any luck in our personal lives before we ran into Lilith, and were sort of ‘marking time’ and waiting for our real lives to begin, but now… You….” He paused, and Jackie could hear his emotions in his voice as he tried to control himself, then managed to say, “You’re so often filled with joy and light that sometimes… that sometimes it almost hurts to look at you, because my heart overflows with love, and then I think of how close I’ve come to losing you, first when you died, and then when you tried to run away, and then when it looked like they were going to frame me for DeBauck’s ‘murder,’ even though he was still alive… and… and I thought that I might never see you again….” Frank’s voice was still strained, as if he were trying not to cry, but wasn’t succeeding very well.

Jackie’s heart turned toward his in an instant, her own troubles forgotten, because Frank was at the center and pivot point of her world, and she flashed to his side, taking him in her arms as she saw the tears streaming down his face, and her own heart almost broke with love. “I know, Frank. Almost always, I’m so profoundly grateful for everything she’s done for us both, especially for giving me you, but she can drive me crazy too. She’s like a force of nature, a lightning bolt, or a waterfall, beautiful from a safe distance, which is usually far away, but Heaven help you if you wind up on the wrong side of her power.” She held him close, because he was her treasure in the world. “I’ll never leave you, Frank. I love you with all my heart; you’re everything to me. And just so you know, I’ve already got plans ready to bust you out of prison, so you never have to worry about that again. Nobody’s gonna put my man in jail if they expect to keep him there.”

“Jackie and Frank, the new Bonnie and Clyde,” Frank quipped, straightening a little and returning her embrace, tears forgotten. “Their daring prison break began a six-state dragnet and prompted pitched gun battles all across Upstate New York and New England. News at Six.” He laughed. “No, thank you, Jackie. I’ll just do my best to stay out of jail and avoid working for psychotic killers, which I fondly hope to do in future by having prospective employers over to dinner, where my very talented wife will scan their helpless brains for any trace of mania or homicide. My biggest mistake in that whole fiasco was not turning to you immediately when I first got creepy vibes off that DeBauck guy. I should have trusted my gut instincts, and then trusted you, but was lured into folly by the extra money DeBauck was paying over grad student scale.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Frank! It was that low-budget Batman and Robin team in cheap suits. Debauck may have pointed them in your direction, but it was those two idiots who put you in the slammer!”

“Jackie,” he said in a soothing tone, petting her hair as he crooned into her ear, his breath tickling the delicate tissue of her ætherial body, “it’s not even the two cop’s fault, really. DeBauck deliberately set out to frame me. He succeeded is all. I don’t even blame those two idiots, as you call them. Most murders are simple, because it’s mostly stupid people who kill people, so the police don’t usually spend a lot of time looking for complicated international conspiracies. You figured it out right away, because you’ve got more brains than an army of Mutt and Jeffs, but I can’t blame Mutt and Jeff for not being geniuses. It’s an engineering maxim: By definition, exactly half of humanity is dumber than the other half, so we shouldn’t be surprised when we run into them. The only real question is exactly how much more stupid they really are.”

“Doesn’t that little bon mot presume that engineers inhabit the upper end of the bell curve exclusively?” Jackie asked suspciously.

“Of course. We can’t help it if it’s true.” He leaned back a little and faked polishing his nails on his shirt, then mimed admiring them, but grinned to let her know that he didn’t take himself all that seriously.

He sounded a little smug, too, which Jackie supposed he had a right to be, even if he was being a little over the top. “And where does that leave me?” she said dangerously.

“Sitting in the catbird seat, Sweetheart. You’re not only smart as a whip, you’ve got feminine intuition, which is even better. There isn’t anything you couldn’t do. It was you, not me, who remembered the key facts about the specific heat of a human body which proved that the fairy-tale the prosecutor attorney and the cops dreamed up about a single tank of acetylene being enough to turn his putative body into ashes was so much hogwash, so I felt much better about the whole thing right away, even though I was still in jail. You, not the cops, were the one who tracked down DeBauck and cornered him in his secret hideaway, a room so cleverly concealed that they needed to demolish the concrete floor to get him out when he had his mental breakdown after tangling with you. You were the one who rescued Sal from his murderous clutches, because no one else knew that he was being held in cruel slavery. You’re the one who knew exactly how to save my aunt’s life, even though it was ‘impossible,’ because she was already dead. As an engineer, I knew that she was dead, that no doctor in the world could have saved her, and even then couldn’t have helped her with her terminal disease, which would have killed her within a few months in any case, but you knew just where you could lay your hands on a miracle. Nancy Drew had nothing on you, Jackie, except maybe the hot little roadster, and we could get you one of those.” He paused for a second. “I see you in a Jag. An XK convertible, I think, in fire-engine red.”

“Frank! We can’t afford a car like that!” She felt faint at the thought, both because such cars were impossibly expensive and because the thought of driving one made her go weak at the knees. She had just the right outfit in mind already….

“Au contraire, mon cherie amour. With what I got from my share of the recovery fee, I could buy you half a dozen, even after having paid cash for our little custom pied-à-terre here in the suburbs, so you can match your outfits to your ride, as we say in the ‘hood.’ As a fashionista extraordinaire, your image demands a little pizazz, enough to turn heads as you zoom by the paparazzi with a negligent wave of your lovely hand.”

“Frank, I’m not a celebrity yet, you know.”

“But you are, dear, and will be even more famous in the months and years to come. You’re not embarking on a career in accounting, hiding in a dreary office somewhere, but one where you’ll be mingling with the inhabitants of People magazine and Paris Match and have cameras following your every move. Soon, the supermarket tabloids will be running phoney stories about rock and roll heartthrobs with your name tattooed above their hearts. You’ll need a black Jag for the inevitable faux tragedies — to show respect for their pain.”

Jackie sputtered, “You …. You ….”

“Dashing young engineer? Island of respectable stability in a precarious world of scandal, sleaze, and unfounded rumors? Dangerously sexy man with a shady past? All of the above?”

Jackie couldn’t help herself; he was maddening at times, but awfully cute, so she smiled and said, “All of the above.”

“Good. Now, are you going to make something wonderful for dinner, or should your secret paramour work his fingers to the bone over a hot microwave and make his own hearty repast?”

“Would you mind, Honey? Or I could flit out and pick something up in a flash. Does anything sound tempting? Pizza? Grinders? Softshell crabs? There’s that nice little Italian roadhouse right off the highway, and they’ll do anything on their menu as takeout for me. The chef there likes me because I speak Italian.” She hadn’t actually known Italian when she first saw the man, but he’d had a vision of his daughter when he’d first seen her, the daughter he’d lost, along with his wife, in childbirth over thirty years ago, and all his hopes and plans for her had come flooding into her brain, along with Neopolitan Italian, in the instant he saw her. They’d been friends ever since, and he had a girlfriend now; the two of them were talking about marriage. ‘It is not good that the man should be alone,’ was Jackie’s motto, and matchmaking came more naturally than breathing to her, so she didn’t actually know many bachelors, or at least very few she’d known for any length of time.

“Hmmmm. That Gnocchi in Gorgonzola Sauce he makes sounds nice. We had them there once, and they’re not even on the menu, so he’ll particularly like making them for you.”

Frank still surprised her, sometimes, with his occasional insights. “Okay. Let’s do that, then. It’s just a few miles away, and they don’t take long to make, so I’ll probably be back in half an hour, an hour tops.”

“I’ll be waiting, Sweetheart.”

“See you then. Oh, and Frank?”

“What?”

“Take a little shower,” she purred, her voice low and throaty. Sultry, she had down pat. It was a gift, and they were up to twenty-six minutes and thirty seconds. Frank was a very happy guy these days, and was just a bit more than an hour away from being even happier.

The runway shows had been a huge success, and tremendously exciting, but now she’d been plunged into the pit of customer service, even with her mother’s help, and it was no fun at all; she’d been featured as a prime example of young talent on the rising New York fashion scene with an eight-page spread in Vogue, and she’d had smaller appearances in all the major English-language fashion press, WWD, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vanity Fair, W, Look, Schön!, even a mention or two in the French press, including Vogue Paris and Purple, although her target audience was out of the latter’s usual demographic. A few of the articles had focused on the more trendy prêt-à-porter line, but usually mentioned the couture line as well, so she was doing well in both areas, and had quite a few actresses lined up for the Oscars. She’d had great success with Jumbe Mungu as well, since the public had already been exposed to many varieties of Botswanan music through the moderately successful HBO series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which had been very popular among many women, at least, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to encompass an eclectic mixture of the rhythms and sounds of Botswana and Zanzibar with electric guitars and fireworks.

He was looking better already, quite a bit heftier, much more handsome, and had a penthouse apartment and a recording studio in Greenwich Village now, plus a three album deal and a huge fan club. He was busy writing songs for his second album, and already had two singles in the iTunes Top Ten. Lilith had been right; Jackie had made him into a Rock God, and every download was a small act of devotion, every concert a communal worship service.

Her mother…. Lilith was a wonder, amazingly quick with a needle, capable of laying down neat rows of hand-stitching so quickly and so precisely that it looked almost as if it had been done by machine, except machines couldn’t duplicate her work. She had a following of her own, mostly in France, spurred on by much larger articles in Purple and the French fashion and popular presses, since the French were endlessly fascinated by a talented modiste who owned a saloon and was an exotic dancer by night. They especially liked her when it turned out that she spoke fluent Parisian French and had an impeccable French pedigree — all false, of course, since most of the women — and some of the men — on her fictitious ‘family tree’ were various aspects of Lilith herself. She’d come out as her mother as well, which was a benefit for Jackie too, despite her being a American upstart, because her official pedigree was now half French, so even Jackie had been interviewed for a couple of articles, both of which laid heavy stress on how important her French heritage had been for her during her childhood and as a young adult, and of course how having a ‘scandalous’ mother had influenced her childhood. Jackie spoke fluent French now as well, with just a trace of a français québécois de la Vieille-Capitale vocabulary and accent, although she could as easily produce Valois. The more people she interacted with, the more came pouring in, their lives, their hopes, everything that made them happy and human, and their languages were part of that. From the women she worked with had come several dialects of Spanish, Tagalog, Greek, and Turkish, as well as Hebrew and several varieties of Arabic. Sometimes she wondered how her brain could encompass everything, but finally understood how her mother kept track of birthdays and children and lives. They were two halves of the same thing, her mother and she, two peas in a pod, and she’d stopped resisting the idea. She might be only one of a million daughters, but her ancestry was something she was proud of now, daughter to the first woman, the first embodiment of feminine spiritual power, one of the first Goddesses on this Earth, floating along in this little corner of the Universe. Some days, she felt like a Queen. Her mother approved.

Some days, she felt like a perfect bitch. Her mother approved of that as well. “What do you mean, you ‘lost’ my consignment, Mister Mahish. How is it possible to ‘lose’ a shipment for which we have a complete tracking history and a certified receipt?”

His voice sounded tinny over the line, “Well, you have to understand that….”

“No, Mister Khayaal Mahish, I don’t have to understand anything other than your certified check or wire transfer by the end of the coming week. If you like, I’ll transfer you to our esteemed modiste and bookkeeper and you can try explaining your problems to her….”

The man was frightened, to say the least. “No! No, no! I now see that it was an error on our part. The consignment was wrongly entered in the ledger. No need to trouble her at all, now that I understand the problem.”

“I see. We’ll be expecting your transfer of funds by wire then. Tomorrow will be fine.” She thumbed off the phone without further discussion. Frank had been right; delegating these tasks had been an enormous time-saver, even when someone tried to bypass the formal channels, since just the hint of Lilith’s involvement tended to concentrate the minds of her vendors wonderfully, something like the prospect of imminent hanging according to Doctor Samuel Johnson.

To clear her head, she walked out to the shop floor, which was very busy now, the sewing floor just another island of activity among many. As expected, her couture line didn’t make very much money, even after three New York Fashion Weeks, but her prêt-à-porter lines were selling like hotcakes, and had a very good reputation in women’s boutiques and shops all around the developed world.

She had all the fabrics cut under her personal supervision, or that of Lilith, so she wasn’t at the mercy of a jobber tempted to shave the seam allowances to make a penny a garment more. They were shipped overseas for the actual sewing, but she’d created a non-profit organization which helped the women in local communities set up their own small sewing factories, so the women took home more of the price paid per finished garment in wages, rather than having some man take the lion’s share and then dole out pennies to the actual workers.

They’d had a favorable article in the Wall Street Journal about that, as well as an outraged editorial bemoaning the incipient death of capitalism, because the scheme bypassed a lot of wealthy middlemen and was creating small-scale capitalists in their thousands, most — but not all — of them women, which the editor evidently thought was some sort of covert socialism.

While she was thinking, she remembered to send a voicemail to their part-time accountant, “Hi, Marianna, Khayaal Mahish is supposed to send payment in full by wire transfer, within a day or two. If he doesn’t come through, please hold his feet to the fire. He’s already tried to spin me a beautiful web of lies, so don’t trust him any farther than you can shoot him.”

It was three o’clock in the morning, and the sewing floor was empty, but Jackie had an idea for a new treatment of the bodice for one of her huipil-style ethnic blouses in her World Collection in prêt-à-porter, melding the classic Central American cut with African fabrics, so she was playing with real fabric for a change. Sometimes the physical texture of the goods suggested an overall context for the finished garment, so manifested fabrics and designs sometimes didn’t turn out exactly as she’d planned when it came time to cut and sew.

Besides, it was fun cutting freehand with the laser cutter; she felt a little like Darth Vader with his light saber, and then sewing the pieces together gave her an excellent feel for how quickly the piece would come together in manufacturing.

Frank had gone to sleep hours ago, and once he was out, it almost took an explosion to wake him up until his habitual wake-up alarm in the morning, seven o’clock sharp, when his eyes would pop open and he’d roll out of bed and run into the bathroom to take care of business and then shower, so she didn’t feel at all guilty about leaving, and she’d wanted to try out different outfits and body types in hopes of some interesting ideas anyway, but putting them together the old-fashioned way had its own charm.

Once she had several variations ready, she took them into her studio. It was set up just off the main door between the atelier and her boutique, so that it was handy both to the workshop and the sales floor.

She kept her digital photography equipment there, as well as the professional lighting set-up, because sometimes she took pictures of her customers wearing her creations, so that they could take them home and think about them. Not everyone was in a position to say, ‘I’ll tke one of each,’ so having what amounted to a personalized catalogue was an excellent selling tool, a sort of high-end ‘wish book’ by means of which the woman could visualize herself in different social situations, or even bring out the photographs to show her friends, asking their advice and simultaneously creating yet another sales opportunity, since at least some of her friends might think to themselves, ‘You know, that dress, or something very like it, would look great on me!’.

She also had an automatic timer set up on one of her large-format digital cameras, so she could quickly cycle through multiple outfits and poses, holding each just long enough for the flash and ‘click’ before changing for the next shot. She could go through a hundred shots in just a few minutes and then bring them up on a portrait-oriented monitor — in actuality a high-def wide-screen television monitor mounted sideways — so she could judge each outfit very quickly, often deleting the image and retaking the shot with subtle variations of either the outfit or her current body. But the huipils were real, so it took more time between shots to physically swap outfits, get set up for the shot, and then set the timer for a few shots in succession.

As she was posing, Jackie felt an odd presentiment of impending trouble that built over several shots. The last time she’d felt the same peculiar curvature of events around her, Sansanvi had showed up and tried to kill her, so she paid close attention to her surroundings as she worked. This time, she saw the disturbance in the air before he appeared, but it wasn’t Sansanvi, although he looked enough like him to have been hatched from the same egg. Putting her lightning wits to work, she figured it must be Sanvi, except this angel was carrying a honking great steel sword that looked just offhand like it was embellished with gold and platinum. It had an otherworldly sheen that told her that it was probably ensorcelled as well as being preternaturally sharp.

The angel carrying it, however, was just the opposite, as stupid and dull as his friend Sansanvi had been. He opened the conversation with an angelic bit of repartee, “Die, Jezebel! Whore of Babylon!” even as he lunged towards her with sword raised awkwardly overhead. Even Jackie could tell that he had about as much skill with the thing as the average monkey.

“Jesus Christ!” she said calmly. “Are you guys all complete idiots? What do you do, pick up your lines from Central Casting along with the wings and halo?” Jackie was being facetious, actually, because he had neither wings nor halo, although the eerie perfection of his skin and body seemed otherwise about as angelic as the stereotypes one saw in paintings and on greeting cards. For some reason, one rarely saw depictions of angels with acne, or ugly noses, although to be perfectly fair they rarely showed faces so twisted and distorted by hate either. “For your information, Queen Jezebel was born in Tyre — part of Phoenicia, what they now call Lebanon — and was married to Ahab, King of Israel at the time. Babylon was roughly five hundred miles away from everything, and —News Flash! — they didn’t have helicopters back then, so there were very few Babylonians dropping by for tea, ‘working girls’ or not. You really need to learn how stick to the point if you ever expect to win any arguments.”

“Sophistry! Vile creature of Satan, you shall die by my hand!” He lunged at her, waving his surrogate dick at her like Errol Flynn as Captain Peter Blood, but not nearly so gallant nor at all swashbuckling.

She danced away, choosing to vacate her studio in favor of the vault she’d had installed next door, right after her mother had discovered a demonic spy in the rafters. While it might not be much of a hindrance to supernatural spies and saboteurs, it had the advantage of steel and concrete framing which put a crimp in Sanvi’s slashing sword technique, and got him out of the room with the valuable cameras and electronic gadgets. He followed her of course, but she noticed that it took him a second or two to handle dematerializing the sword and then re-manifesting it inside the vault. He kept swinging, but now kept running into the reïnforced concrete walls and steel security cabinets, raising showers of sparks and buckets of irritating noise as he flailed back and forth, trying to cut her in half, one way or another. What he lacked in swordsmanship and finesse he made up for in a boyish enthusiasm for mayhem, so he was making a lot of noise and causing a lot of damage as he stumbled around like a drunken Sancho Panza. He didn’t even come close to connecting, of course, but the effort kept him busy while she taunted him. “See what I mean? Non sequiturs and false assumptions go unchallenged by the mush that passes for your brain. A Junior Girl Scout could fox you silly in any serious debate, so I can only deduce that you’ve spent your long and worthless life picking fights with children, or perhaps taking candy from babies.”

With a wordless shriek of fury, he laid about him with his vorpal blade, and from the accelerations she observed, and the ringing rebounds when he cut into a wall instead, she saw that it had real weight, so wasn’t just an ætheric construct, which gave her the beginnings of an idea.

She wafted away from the path of the sword again and observed, “There are few things more contemptible than a cowardly thug, you know, but in a million years you simply must have run into someone who more epitomized a candy-ass milquetoast than you; I’m all ears. Come on, you little twerp, you can tell me. Who’s more wimpy than you are?”

He redoubled his efforts, but didn’t seem to be getting tired, so it looked as if he were trying to wear her down, the more fool he.

“Of course, if there’s nobody who’s more of a pathetic pantywaist than you are, just tell me who’s your Daddy? You’ve simply got be somebody’s bitch, don’t you, Sannie?. I can just see those luscious lips of yours wrapped around somebody’s cock. Tell me, Sannie, does he make you swallow? If you sucked him off really good, Sannie, maybe he’d offer to beat up girls for you. Wouldn’t that just make you feel precious?

By now, Sanvi was both livid and incoherent with fury and rage, swinging his sword from side to side like a scythe, which might have done some good if Jackie had been confined to the room, but of course she wasn’t, so Sanvi was taking bigger chunks out of her vault and cabinets, but better these than anything more valuable, and she had insurance, though trying to explain the damage might be difficult. ‘Stupid burglar? Explosion maybe?’ she thought. ‘Maybe.’ Or maybe she’d dun Semangelaf for the tab, since they were part of the same sorry outfit.

“Coward! Stand still and meet your doom!” he cried, still stupid, but not out of breath, unfortunately, so he could still talk.

“Aren’t villains supposed to taunt their helpless victims with something a little stronger than schoolyard bluster? Face it, Sannie — I hope you don’t mind me calling you ‘Sannie,’ but ‘Sanvi’ sounds entirely too grown-up for a wimpy little pansy like you. I have to admit that I called your friend Sansanvi the same thing, but he’s not using the name these days, so I’m pretty sure he won’t mind sharing…. Then again, fuck him if he can’t take a joke, since he’s in no position to complain…. You’d make a lousy Bond villain, you know. They were always able to think of something clever and witty to say, but it’s hard to get good help in this degenerate era, and of course you’d know all about degeneracy. I blame the No Child Left Behind Act, which dumbed down our schools to the point that high school graduates are barely fit to run the pictographic cash registers in the fast food joints, much less hold up their end in sparkling repartee.” She thought for another moment, taking care to look visibly puzzled as he thrashed his sword around the room, as if it could possibly be effective for anything but putting gouges in the walls and slicing steel file cabinets in two. “I’ve got it! You could shout ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ and then plug your ears so you couldn’t hear my scathing reply. That’d fix me good, wouldn’t it? I’m sure you’d feel much more clever if you managed to get the last word in somehow.”

“Cunt! Bitch! Cunt! Bitch!” He was desperate to kill her now, but even less coherent and even more vulgar.

“Okay, that really tears it, I’m sick of trying to talk sense to a puerile pissant and nithing. I’d call you a prick, but you neither deserve the name nor have one, do you, fairy-boy? You’ve got that wonky big sword, doubtless a Freudian over-compensation for your total lack of dick, and all I have is this itty-bitty nail file.” She manifested a faux file and waggled it at him girlishly, just to taunt him a bit more. “Do you think that’s enough of an advantage that you could risk being cut to pieces by a girl? All the other angels will laugh at you if you lose, you know. Would it help if I closed my eyes?”

“Cunt! Bitch!” At least he was talking less, if just as puerile, but he was still slicing jagged holes in her files and concrete walls and floor.

Well, she was bored with this in any case. She kicked him a good one in his gut and then rammed her ætheric nail file up his nose, just to get his attention. Now he was really mad, so she called out, “Run, run run, as fast as you twirl; you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Girl!” and took off in the same direction she’d travelled with Dross, as quick as thought, and for her that was very quick indeed.

He followed, of course, still cursing, still slashing and swinging with his Crusader Rabbit sword, but it took him several seconds to extricate it from the vault, and a stern chase is always a long chase, so she figured he had no real chance of catching her, since she knew where she was going, while he did not.

She burst out into the same space she’d visited with Dross, but there was only one star before her, the orangish giant, a little more distant now, having been given a kick of acceleration by the violent explosion of its small companion, which had also stripped away a good chunk of its atmosphere, now evidently part of the bright billowing clouds left over from the outer layers of the former dwarf star, now coruscating out into the void, and the jets from the first stages of the explosion, which were still streaming in opposite directions at high velocity, pointing back to empty space, the void left behind by the cooling remnant of the original diamond sun which itself was hurtling off on a trajectory which would eventually take it out into the intergalactic void. It was quite pretty, actually, and she wished that she had a little more time to linger, or a camera, but here came Sanvi, still on her trail, still foolishly wiggling his little boy-toy stick back and forth.

She instantly turned toward the enormous spiral disk she’d noticed before and plunged into its gravity well, noticing too that the angel/demon had trouble making the turn at the speed they were traveling. She smiled and plunged like a comet into the vast and swirling cloud circling around a central core which glowed with a strange blue light. When she judged the time was right, she suddenly shifted to the side and started back the way she’d come, but Sanvi flashed by her, struggling to keep control of his magic sword as he tried to turn and follow her back through the gap between the infalling spiral of bright gas and the eerie light of the inner structure. Cherenkov radiation, she thought they called it, although she wasn't completely sure. She'd have to ask Frank about it sometime, preferably sometime in the distant future when they could laugh about it.

“I’ll kill you, you evil bitch!” he screamed as he flashed past her, struggling to force the sword back the way he’d come, but the pitch of his ætheric voice was already dropping.

Jackie watched as he dropped below her, slower and slower, his face turning bluish and his mouth working as he hurled slow curses toward her to no avail. At last he slowed to some limiting value where time dilation and the speed of light appeared to balance what she knew was a continuous plunge toward the event horizon and singularity beneath him, apparently stopped, his face frozen in a rictus of purple hate, the sword in his hand still pointing straight down even as he looked up, and Jackie flashed back the way she’d come, reappearing in her ruined vault just seconds after she’d left.

Unfortunately, the vault wasn’t empty.

The room was full of angels, but not in a good way. Luckily, they were all armed with swords — much like the one she’d just seen being flushed down a galactic toilet — so the general mêlée that followed her sudden reappearance was notable mostly for how many ways seven murderous angels could get in each other’s way, every one of them grabbing and slashing at her, but with so little coördination that she was saved seven times in a row through the interpolations of other angel’s swords, or grasping hands, or fool heads, in the separate paths of seven nearly simultaneous killing blows.

And that was just the start; things quickly became much more confused, accompanied by a confused cacophony of angelic curses, imprecations, and vulgarities, all very similar to the first two angels who'd attacked her. It might as well have been a script.

Not having a sword in hand herself, and unsure what she would have done with it if she had, never having had the foresight to join the Society for Creative Anachronism and take up Medieval fencing styles as a hobby, she did the first thing that came to mind, which was to bug out, since it had worked well enough before.

Of course, before was one angel at a time, and now she had seven pursuers to juggle. She knew better than to try zig-zagging, because she was afraid that one of them might see the problem of inertia and figure out some form of coöperative solution to increase their cohesion and effectiveness as a unit, perhaps by sending out flanking outliers to limit her range of movement, creating a larger net in which to scoop her up. Of course, she might be able to even the odds a little if she managed to scoop up even a few of them in the net that had so neatly snared Sanvi, so she began a much wider curving turn toward the singularity, slowing slightly to make it easier for them to follow while still wagging their swords around, which of course excited them as they seemed to be catching up with her.

This time around, she sought out a few nebulæ along the way, to give the impression that she was trying to hide among the clouds of gas and dust, thereby making her final dash down toward the event horizon through the thickest of the clouds of in-falling matter seem more familiar and innocuous. Sometimes she astonished even herself with her ability to keep on thinking in extremis. ‘They say,’ she mused, ‘that even if the heart stops beating, the brain lives on for another six minutes or more, so at least one has a little time to gather one’s thoughts.’ This seemed comforting, for some reason.

And then…. And then she was plunging through the whirling clouds of gas, gauging her distance from the point of no return by the velocity of it whipping by in its spiral of decay. ‘Wait for it….’ She slowed slightly, so that they sped up, desperate to lay their hands upon her, and then she went partially corporeal, swept up in the jet stream of gases, then broke free again by disincorporating and heading back out toward open space, a heavy job more difficult this time because she’d cut her margin of error so closely, but evidently enough, because she was quickly out into open space and there were only three angels nipping at her heels now, and only one of them had managed to keep his sword — the last in the lure of angry angels she’d been trolling behind her — the rest presumably having gone down into the dark unknown, along with at least a few of their erstwhile wielders.

She wheeled around to face them, determined to kill them all, or die trying. She was getting sick and tired of running, and couldn’t return to Earth in any case with angels on her trail, lest they harm Frank, or any that she loved.

Their three faces shone bright with bloodlust and fury as they flew toward her, with what they thought of as victory now in sight, two with hands stretched out to throttle her, one with sword held high in parody of real angels, perfectly posed and poised to cleave her limb from limb.

As grim as Death, Jackie prepared herself for the fight of her life, but growing more confident the closer they came, now settled in her mind on victory, no matter what the cost.

“Jackie?”

A voice rumbled softly from behind her, as deep and rich as melted chocolate. It was Dross! “Run, Dross! Run! Save yourself!” she screamed, and flung herself at the nearest angel, the one with the sword, now even more desperate to overcome this unexpected complication, a helpful Troll to defend against the onslaught of three angels bent upon spurious vengeance. Except the one with a sword suddenly didn’t have a sword anymore, because it had instantly exploded into a million sparkling droplets of molten steel and then she closed with him, grappling for control as she surrounded him with her real power, no longer afraid of it, nor of herself, dipping deep into the Well of Cosmic Fire for power, choking out his life until he quailed away from her, or tried to, and then she took hold of him in her sharp claws, digging in, drawing up his spiritual essence like harsh wine through ten straws plunged into the arteries of his being, feeding on his strength, adding it to her own, sucking him dry until the empty ætheric shell of him turned to virtual dust and drifted off into space. Then she took another one in hand as well, the nearest, and dispatched him with brisk efficiency, growing stronger by the second until his dust joined the first, and then turned to the last, who was locked in combat with Dross, but Dross was holding his own at least, although wounded by the brutal savagery of the angel’s murderous rage, even without the sword. Once Jackie took hold of him though, the life force quickly left him and the twisted angel sparkled first into a twinkling shape of ætherial soulstuff, which then puffed out into space like the seeds of a dandelion, as promptly dissipated as the vapor of a warm breath on a frosty day. Jackie looked around to be sure that none of the other angels had made it back from the singularity, and she felt better than fine, her ætheric body newly forged in the heat of combat, her soul perfected by mortal struggle. She turned back to her friend Dross, reaching out to help or comfort him.

Dross didn’t look so good. In fact, he seemed to be wilting slightly even as Jackie looked over his damaged body. “Hang on, Dross! I’m going to find you some help!” she yelled, hoping to reassure him, but Dross was already unconscious and bleeding, as she swept him up in her arms, thick drops of whatever sable ichor made up his blood beading up into droplets and gobbets of coal-black liquid that followed them as Jackie instantly fled back toward Earth.

Jackie manifested wings to catch the ionic wind of plasma that spilled out from the massive singularity at the center of the galaxy she found herself in, speeding back through the dimensions toward Earth with Dross held loosely in her arms, or as much of him as would fit within the span of her grasp as she simultaneously willed him back to strength and life. Jackie was surprised to notice that his inky blood was still following closely behind them as they twisted through the echoing corridors of the Multiverse, as closely as if magnetized, but didn’t stop to wonder about it; she was on a mission.

After what seemed like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, she was lying with Dross on the floor of her own living room, in front of the blazing fire in the hearth, and calling, “Sal! Sal! Quickly! I need your help! My friend Dross was very badly hurt in trying to help me, and he’s a very good man. Please help him!”

Sal looked out of the fire and began to move forward. “Ooooold! Droozzz! Zzzooh ooold!”

“That’s right, Sal, he’s an old, old friend, and he’s very dear to me. Can you help him?”

“Yazzz! Droozz ooold vuuhn,” Sal crooned, and wrapped himself around Dross as if he were Sal’s old, old friend as well. The conflagration this time was almost instantaneous, rocketing through the blazing rainbow until the brilliant colors grew too strange to comprehend, somehow burning themselves directly into the brain without any need for eyes to see what was happening, until the shadow of Dross within the flames burst into even brighter fire, brighter than a thousand suns, as bright as the very fires of Creation.

And then… Dross laughed, the flames somehow burning brighter still as a tongue of laughing fire leapt from his mouth and he sat up, still burning comfortably, now petting Sal as if he were a big pussycat, and Sal was purring.

Jackie was astonished. “Dross? Are you all right?”

“Dross fine, Jackie. Better than all right. Dross perfect now.” Slowly, the fiery outline of Dross within the flames cooled, and he started going through the spectrum of heat in reverse, ultraviolet, blue-white, then white, then rapidly down through yellow, orange, and red, quickly running down through orangish grey to black again, but Dross was changed. As his outline became clearer, still surrounded by Salamandric fire, it became obvious that he was petting Sal with a hand he hadn’t had before, that whatever Sal had done had cured him of his deformity, and that Dross was whole.

As the glare diminished, though, the outline of Dross within the flames took on a decided difference from what he was before, and Jackie started to worry about the amount of fabric she had on hand, because Dross was going to need a new outfit, and it was absolutely certain that Jackie didn’t have anything that the new Dross could squeeze into.

But then again, the new Dross didn’t seem to care one way or another, so that was the way Frank found them when he wandered out from his bedroom in his undershorts, blinking once in mild surprise at the sight of the three of them — Jackie still winged and clawed in her primal form as a Succubus, a fifteen-foot-tall naked Goddess with angelic wings of her own in the living room, and Sal still burning brightly on the broad stone hearth — before he said, “Oh, hi, Jackie, Ma’am, Sal. Would anyone like coffee? Perhaps tea?”

Jackie felt like laughing… or something. Frank was, in her opinion, the ideal man, as steady and unperturbable as Jupiter circling the Sun, as regular and studied in his habits and courtesy as a masculine Miss Manners. She shifted back to her more familiar form. “I don’t know, Frank, although I don’t feel the need for anything.” She turned to Dross, or whoever he was right now. “Dross, would you like something to drink, anything to eat? Are you feeling up to breakfast?”

“I’m fine, Jackie, thank you very much. I’m back to my original form and identity now, as Tiamat, Goddess of the primordial Chaos, the Ummu-Hubur

who formed the Universe before anything that is now existed, Creatrix of the Big Bang, or more precisely the vasty Fertile Continuum from whence myriad Big Bangs form like bubbles in champagne. I’m necessarily self-sufficient, although I have to admit that I’m a little surprised to find myself recreated back to my own Beginning, and so filled with power. It’s been long ages since I was worshipped, so I find it difficult to account for my present state, although of course your friend the Salamander, and your own love, helped to heal me.”

Frank smiled. “She has a profound effect on people, doesn’t she? I take it you weren’t always so… imposing?”

“As a matter of fact, no. I seem to have been healed of both physical infirmity and loss of memory.”

“Don’t forget that you helped to save me as well, dear friend,” Jackie said. “I have no idea how you managed to show up where and when you did, but I know that it must have been you that destroyed the one sword. I don’t know how I could have handled that, since the only way I knew then to combat angels involves very close combat. Any sort of magical edged weapon makes that tactic problematic.”

“Oh, that was simple enough. I remember telling you that I can sense energy patterns, and I felt the disappearance from the perceivable Universe of several bits of my metallic asteroids in quick succession, a long way from where and when I’d seen them last, so I was drawn by simple curiosity to investigate. As I drew closer, I recognized your energy-signature as well, so my curiosity became more urgent. When I saw that you were in trouble, I had to intervene, so my natural instinct was to take control of the iron in that sword, one of the few powers that remained to me.” She smiled and shrugged. “You know the rest of the story, of course, and I’m very glad of your own part in my rescue from my own imperfect attempt to rescue you.”

“Hey, what goes around, comes around,” Jackie said modestly. “We’re all doing what we can.”

“Indeed. Perhaps I could show you how to disrupt metallic and covalent bonds, and so disintegrate any metallic weapon, which is all I really did. Do you think that would help you in any future confrontation?”

Jackie nodded eagerly. “I’m sure it would. Is it difficult?”

“Not particularly.” The information was inside Jackie’s brain even as she spoke, by way of demonstration. “No more in any case than the subtle manipulation of ætheric energies which allowed you to destroy them, although perhaps less obvious to your perception.”

Frank was looking alarmed. “Destroy? Weapon? Were you attacked, Jackie? By who, and why?”

Jackie was a bit chagrinned to have this revealed so precipitously, but saw no particular remedy for it but honesty. “Well, I had to fight off several aggressive angels, including both Sansanvi and Sanvi, who’d taken it into their heads to commence hostilities against all of Lilith’s children for some reason, including me.” After she’d said it, she had to amend her speech. “Perhaps especially me, now that I think about it. As it turned out, it didn’t really amount to much of a threat, although they did manage to kill one of my youngest and most inexperienced sisters, Jane, of whom I think I’ve spoken.”

“Did they explain themselves? Why on Earth were they hostile to you?” Frank was getting excited, not that Jackie could blame him, really, but it was disconcerting, not the way she normally thought of him at all. Frank was… Frank.

“I’m not exactly sure, Frank, and please believe me when I say that’d I’d be glad to tell you if I did know. I’ve asked Semangelaf, and he has no explanation either, although he agrees that my response was both necessary and appropriate.”

“What do you mean by ‘necessary and appropriate’?” he asked suspiciously.

“Well, I seem to have destroyed them, or close to it. The trouble with immortal enemies is that they really never quit until they’re effectively stopped.”

“So you killed them? You killed an angel? Two angels?”

“Ummm…. In the first place, I didn’t exactly kill them, exactly, but I put them into situations from which they’re very unlikely to extricate themselves in the foreseeable future, sort of like jail, but as near forever as I could manage.”

“So, what’s the second place?” he said with a fierce look on his face that would have done credit to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“There were nine of them,” she said rather quietly.

“So you put a fucking baseball team of angels into jail?” By now, her imperturbable rock seemed to be getting seriously angry.

“Well, yes, more or less…”

“But why?” Now, he was shouting, and in front of a guest!

“I told you,” she shouted back at him, “that they were hostile; is that so hard to understand? Who knows why guys are murderously angry toward women? I don’t understand it, that’s for sure, except that they may be cowards who’re simply afraid to pick fights with other guys. The first one, Sansanvi, tried to strangle me. The next eight used swords, evidently having taken a lesson in overkill from the fate of the first.”

“Swords! For Christ’s sakes, Jackie! When were you planning on telling me all this?”

“Wait just a damned minute, Frank! My last little encounter happened just a few minutes ago, and I had to help my friend here before I trotted off to make my report to you like a ‘good little girl.’ She was wounded very badly, perhaps mortally, in helping me to fight off my assailants, so I had to ask Sal to help me to heal her before farting around with thank you notes and the precise etiquette of handling assault with deadly weapons by multiple assailants, so I’m just ever so terribly sorry that you didn’t get your engraved notification in plenty of time to RSVP.” She scowled at him in real anger. “I don’t recall you asking for my permission before you managed to get attacked by a crazy Satyr and then framed for murder, or did I miss that part? Sometimes, things just happen! Sometimes, I just have to deal with it!”

Frank looked shocked. “But….”

Dross, or Tiamat, whatever she was calling herself now, said, “Children!” in a voice like thunder.

Jackie was taken slightly aback, although she could see how she’d developed a reputation as a hard-assed Goddess back in the day. Frank was shaken too, with the added chagrin of having staged a ‘scene’ in front of a guest in their home.

“Frank,” the ancient Goddess said quietly, “Jackie is not now and never will be a shrinking violet. She’s a powerful being with powerful enemies, and is quite strong enough to take care of herself, mostly. From time to time she may need a little help, but you have to realize that she can’t be a stay-at-home housewife. It’s not her natural rôle in life.” Then she turned to Jackie and said, “Jackie, you’ll have to cut Frank a little slack as well, because thus far he’s been an ordinary mortal suddenly plunged into daily contact with the realms of the supernatural, and doing fairly well with it so far.” She smiled to include them both. “Now, one of the advantages of being a Goddess again, especially the primal Creatrix of the Infinite Multiverse, is that I can fix things up for both of you.” She waved her right hand casually toward Frank and lightning sprang from it, enveloping his body and Frank suddenly swelled, growing taller and more muscular, even his bone structure thickening slightly, until he looked like a hero from the fantasies of Robert Ervin Howard, the pulp fiction writer from the Thirties who gave the world (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) the character of Conan the Barbarian, big, but not musclebound at all, sleek instead with an almost feline grace and power like that of a panther, exactly the sort of man almost any woman would like to have by her side in a dark alley, or in a dark corner for that matter.

Jackie gasped, suddenly aware of his masculinity in a way she’d never felt before. “Oh, Frank! You’re…. beautiful!”

Tiamat smiled benignly. “He’s also immortal now, and pretty much a match in power for you, Jackie. That’s important for a man, and his new appearance marks him as an übermensch of sorts, an alpha male to whom other men will unconsciously defer.” Then she grinned laciviously. “You may have to watch out for predatory women as well, Jackie, but in any case he’ll rise quickly to the top of his profession, or any profession he takes up in the future, since he’ll have ample time to experiment with different careers. Ayn Rand would be panting for him, but luckily she’s dead.” Then she clicked her heels three times and disappeared.

Neither Frank nor Jackie noticed, their attentions being otherwise fully — and more intimately — engaged.

 

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011 by Levanah