Bone Dance

“Hell, no. I thought this way I’d get Frances’s head and the cheval body. I always did like one-of-a-kind shit. But Fra

“Lost her… sense of humor.”

He was too dangerous not to watch. My breath stumbling loudly through my open mouth, I lifted my head from my knee and my gaze from the floor. Tom’s face was bright with sweat in the lightning flicker. “Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

I tried to send a look of appeal to Mick, but he couldn’t see it for the backlighting, or he didn’t care. It was time to say something brave and witty, and do something creative. Nothing occurred to me. It seemed I hadn’t seen enough movies after all. But Frances had. The door banged open under her kick, showering splinters from the frame. She’d gotten a handgun from somewhere, and was taking aim while the door was still swinging. Tom dropped to the floor like a felled tree and fired three shots, all of which hit Frances somewhere between the shoulders and the knees. She sagged back and slid down the door frame. I could hear the drag of air into her lungs.

“Stupid bitch,” Tom muttered. He scrabbled across the floor and kicked her pistol out of her reach, farther into the room. “Did you think I’d believe this shit? I knew you had to show up.”

It was more than I had known. I wanted to say so, but my tongue was frozen.

“So go for it, Fra

“You said you’d let her go,” Mick spoke from the couch. He sounded as if he’d been shot, too, as if he had only one lung working. “You said you’d showed her, and now you wouldn’t have to kill her.”

“And I wouldn’t have had to, you little prick, except here she is. She needed showing again. What was I supposed to do? Let her kill me instead?”

“You promised me — if she got away from you, you’d let her go. You promised.” Mick rose, shakily. What had happened to him in the last weeks? What had Tom done to him? Whatever it was, why hadn’t it given him a sensible distrust of promises from Tom Worecski?

Frances hadn’t moved, but I saw her eyes open and squint in the blaze of lightning. Rain was projected on her face, the image of it ru

Tom faced Mick, his whole face alive with anger. Then it fell. “You’re right. I broke my promise.” Tom dropped to his knees on the carpet and held the pistol out to Mick. “Kill me. Kill me, goddammit. If you can bring yourself to do it, then I must deserve to die.”

Mick took the pistol. The big window rattled with the thunder. “Oh, I can do it,” Mick said in a trembling voice.

I thought, No.

Then Tom sagged to the floor and Mick smiled. “Jesus, what a sucker,” he drawled, and put the barrel in his mouth.

“No!” Frances screamed, but it was drowned by the double crack of thunder, inside and out.

Tom stood up and shook himself. “Shit,” he said. “Shouldn’t’ve done that. There was still plenty of fun in him.”

He’d been weak, that was all. Mick had cared for Frances; he’d even cared, I realized, for me. But he’d been too weak to stand against a thing like Worecski. And I’d been too weak to save him.

Frances’s head dropped back against the door frame, and I heard a little despairing noise from her. Her eyes were tight shut. Mick had slid in a heap to the carpet, smearing the white couch on the way. The pistol lay on the floor between his body and his arm.

“One down,” said Tom. “Come on, girl. Jump for it.”

Slowly, Frances shook her head.

The bead of glass at my throat was cool and hard. My head was swimming with heat and loss of blood, and my legs were shaking under me. But neither gun was in Tom’s reach. So I took a last shuddering breath and flung myself untidily at him.

His arm came up across the side of my face like a log. There was no reason why someone who could do what he did should be so strong. He hoisted me up in two handfuls of shirtfront and shook me. I hit him as hard as I could in the stomach with my right fist, but the angle was bad, I was weak, and it wasn’t hard enough. He grunted and bared his clenched teeth, and pushed me backward into the wall. I sobbed when my left shoulder hit.

He wasn’t going to fight with his head. If he didn’t, I hadn’t a chance against him. But the alternative to this pointless battering was to sit quietly and wait for him to kill me. That seemed wasteful.

I staggered upright and went for his throat with both hands. Tom grabbed my wrists and forced me back to the wall again, pi

“Jesus Christ, Frances, what’s holding you back? I thought for sure — But if you were ridin’ this, it would fight better. What does it take, Fra

I wondered if she’d heard that. If he was right, she and I would both be better off if she’d ditch her principles and ride.

I could see the pores in his face in the lightning flashes; I could smell the sharp reek of his sweat and feel the moist heat of him. I twisted, felt torn things in my shoulder pull farther apart, and bit off a cry.

“Now I remember,” he said, his voice mild and cheerful. “You don’t like to be touched.” And he leaned forward and forced his mouth down hard on mine.

My teeth were already clenched; it was too late to clamp my lips between them. The hierarchy, from weakest muscles to strongest, is: lips, tongue, jaws. At least he couldn’t get past my teeth. He pulled his head back and laughed softly; his breath fa

Somewhere in my brain, I probably had the equivalent of jaw muscles, that I could have closed and kept closed. I didn’t know where they were. Tom Worecski had ridden me once before; but the circumstances had been such that I didn’t remember what it had been like. I expected something like the blinding shock of Frances’s assault, a forced mental entry like a mortar shell. I didn’t expect Mick’s easy falling in and out, like blinking, like a switch toggled. All my expectations were worthless.

Tom was a gelid, poisonous presence inserting itself through the soft places in my personality, trickling in like dirty water through a crack. He was a flavor of decay in the back of my throat, a rotting-vegetable slickness under my fingers, the rustling sound of beetles scurrying. And it was all done slowly, slowly, so that I had time to understand what was happening to me. So I knew exactly what sort of tenant would occupy the rooms of my body once I was forced out.

I struggled. I did it physically, flat against the wall, unable to so much as get a knee up between us; and mentally with even less effect.

Suddenly I was alone again. Tom still pi

He let go of my left wrist. I went for his face with my freed hand, but before I reached him he slammed his right shoulder into my damaged one. The sensation was, for several seconds, literally blinding. My knees buckled, but Tom’s grip kept me from falling.

The chain must have showed a little inside my shirt collar. He hooked a finger in it and flipped it to the outside. The glass bead glittered between us in the crazy light, and he caught it. As soon as he did he knew it was important, by the way I behaved.

It was like Beano all over again: slapping me against the wall, twining fingers through the cord — no, chain — around my neck. But this couldn’t be Beano’s. No miasma of incense. Gunpowder stink, and the smell of blood, which at Beano’s had come later. Oh, santos, Sparrow, keep your mind on it, don’t pass out now. I blinked, trying to clear the smudginess from everything.