Bone Dance

It was down to turquoise, watery gold, and indigo. “Going someplace?” said someone behind me.

“Nope.” I glanced over my shoulder. It was Mick Ski

“What?”

“Your new ride. This is going to be a real growth experience for him, right?”

“Jesus,” said Mick, “who put a burr under your sa—”

It took me an instant to remember the end of the expression, as it had him. The sound I made was a substitute for laughter. “Let’s do ’em all and get it over with. Shall I take the bit between my teeth? Or you could look a gift horse in the mouth.”

He looked away.

“I haven’t any horse sense. I kick over the traces. I’m mulish. I’m given to horseplay, nagging, and feeling my oats. Have we locked the barn after the horse got out, or is this a horse of a different color?”

“Stop.”

“Whoa?”

“I’m sorry,” Mick said. “Whatever it was I did. Only I’m betting it wasn’t me.”

I sighed. “Well, the thought of you doesn’t lead me to remember several years of my life with vague embarrassment.”

“What?” he said again. “You’re starting to sound like Frances.”

“That’s almost an insult.” I turned and walked back to where he stood. “Are you part of her invasion plan?”

He lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Why are you still here, then?”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know. Sorry, that wasn’t meant as mockery. Last I heard, you and I were to be protected.”

He looked out toward the sunset, which was gone. “Would you join the invasion?”

Here was the opening to say that I knew Ego, that I knew Albrecht, that I’d be useful. “I can’t imagine why.”

After a moment he said, “Because nobody’s as good at looking out for themselves as Frances thinks she is.”

That was nearly as hard to figure out as the sentence of mine that he’d complained about. “Then maybe she’ll get killed. Ask anybody in this household if they’d weep at the thought.”

“I would.”

“Then go pick up your flamethrower and enlist.”

He smiled, reluctantly. “I don’t think a flamethrower would help.”

“Whatever. What does she have to do to get Worecski?”

Mick scuffed the gravel, drawing patterns in the pale stone with his toe. “It’s all brute strength and speed. At least, it always was. Christ, two Horsemen in a head fight is an ugly thing. You can keep somebody from switching rides, from shifting to a new body, if you move on him fast and hard, as if you’re go

“What do the real owners of the bodies do while all this is going on? Referee?”

“They’re not necessarily there,” he said with an odd expression.

“Where are they?”

“A Horseman seals up the host personality and uses the rest of it: memory, conscious and unconscious motor control, learned skills. But… if you’ve got a horse you want to keep, and you want it to stay where you left it when you ride somebody else… it’s easier if the host isn’t there anymore.”

I felt a chill. “You kill it.” He could have killed me.

“It can happen by accident, if you ride too long. The personality dwindles away, like a candle going out. But you can snuff it right away, too, if you need to. If you want to.” He dropped his gaze to the path.

I wanted to ask him if he’d killed the young man who’d taken such care of that pretty body. I was afraid to know. “So Frances will try to take Worecski over. What happens if she does?”

“Oh, she won’t,” he said. “She just needs to hold him there while she blows his brains out.”

“Chango.” When my voice was entirely mine again, I said, “But if she’s — won’t she blow her own brains out, too? Effectively?”

“Timing’s everything,” he agreed. “If she pulls back too early, he can skip before she kills the body. If she doesn’t pull back in time, it’s blammo, brain for rent.”

Unless that gave the brain back to its original owner. Did Mick believe that Frances had killed her host? “You don’t talk as if this is hypothesis. You… People have done this before.”

“Yes,” he said, mildly surprised. “I told you, it’s called a head fight. Not too many people actually got killed, but that was usually the intention.”

“Frances has done this.”

“Oh, yeah. It must be the way she got the Horsemen she was hunting, too. She was always good. Strong and fast. But Tom was strong and fast and bugfuck crazy. I don’t think Frances can take him. Without help.”

“This doesn’t sound like something you can do by committee.”

“We could distract him,” said Mick. He was hard to see in the dark. “We could do that much.” He sounded as if he were arguing with something I couldn’t remember saying.

It was cool, out near the river after sunset. Mick was wearing his jacket, the one he wouldn’t leave behind in my apartment. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

“Then you can,” I said. “Have fun. If this is a remake of High Noon, she’s not Gary Cooper. She’s not the good guy.”

“Who is?” he asked, as if the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Forget it. I’m square with Frances, and I’m sure as water runs downhill not going to try to get killed just because I can.”

“You still hold it against her, that bit back at your place.”

“No, I told you. We’re square. If I owed her, it would be different, but I don’t owe her anything. Do you?”

With a crunching of gravel, he turned back toward the shrubbery. He came out of the shadow of the garage and moonlight fell on him. I caught up to him where the path bent.

“We all slept with each other,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, at first. “We had a lot of contempt for normal people — or we said we did — and besides, some experiences are so strange and strong that they force you away from anybody who doesn’t share ’em. When we wanted to get laid, as opposed to when we wanted to prove something, we turned to our own kind. So Frances and I have gone to bed with each other a few times.” He pinched a branch end off the nearest shrub and toyed with the leaves, creasing them along the veins. “I think, for Frances, that’s all it was.”

I knew it wasn’t the sort of statement one was expected to answer. I said, “If that was supposed to make me understand, let me remind you that’s not a motivation I have much experience with.”

He looked up sharply. “Haven’t you ever liked someone? Respected them? Been their friend?”

Had I ever… “No,” I said. “So if you tell me it makes you want to get killed for no good reason, I’ll have to take your word for it.”

He dropped the twig. “I was going to tell you di

We had, but there were leftovers. I felt a little like a character mistakenly let loose in Beauty and the Beast, in that house. All one’s needs provided for, and no staff in sight. And a strong suspicion that one ought not to try to leave. Mick took his di

Of all the things that might legitimately trouble me, one seemed to take precedence, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of it. I yanked off my boots and lay down on the bed, staring at the wall that sloped over it, the part under the roofline that was almost but not quite the ceiling. The wallpaper was full of flowers and leaves, like everything else in the house. Who was the gardener? China Black? It seemed out of character from my first sight of her, vampiric in dark blue chiffon and sunglasses, on the first floor of my building.