Prayers for Rain

[brian_campo]

Truth be told, he wanted to know what it looked like.

In the days since blood fell from the sky – in an event that was scandalously under-reported for the sake of tourism dollars – the tiny town of Searchlight had done its best to clean up and look respectable. The sidewalks and streets had been hosed down, the buildings power washed, the cars scrubbed. It was a monumental task but people pitched in because the blood was drying flies. It also stank to high heaven.

But the outskirts, the dirt lots, and even the cemetery remained rust-red. It was like driving through an alien terrain. Brian made the trip around sunset when there was enough light to illuminate the area but not so much that he sweltered in his car. Air conditioning wasn’t powerful enough to combat that much direct sunlight. The thick, iron-sweet scent came through his air vents. He resisted the urge to cover his nose; it wouldn’t be any better when he got out of the car.

Brian parked in a neglected lot near a motel no longer in use.

He got out and shoved his keys into his pants pocket. Blood had collected and congealed in potholes around his feet, and the scrub grass was stained too. Brian squatted and pinked some of the sand, pink as coral, between his fingers. A warm wind blew his hair into his eyes so he looked up. As the sun slipped behind the hills, it lit up the ridge like liquid fire and then it was gone.

Dark would be quick and complete. There was no such thing as dark in Las Vegas, no real night to speak of. He remembered the desert with its inky sky and stars from his teenage years in his dad’s RV, which he parked wherever was cheap. The desert made Brian feel okay. A lot less frantic.

He left his door ajar and sat on the front seat, feet sticking out while he lit up a smoke.

Comments

[brian_campo]

“Talent, what do you mean? How do you know me?” His small faltered. He frowned.

It was hard not to knock her hand aside, but the minute you touched somebody things got confrontational and he wasn’t that kind of guy, not on a lot of levels. The air carried the charge of an electrical storm, the heaviness of humidity: a sky about to burst and rain hell on the earth, but it was clear overhead for miles.

An introvert at heart, Brian craved distance from people he didn’t know. This – she – was an extreme. When he met her eyes, he felt looked into. Pinned in place. That finger, jabbing near… stirring up a knot of anxiety and love and angst and lust and loneliness and frustration, deep in his ribs where he buried it until it forced its way out in telekinetic release. Brian half-expected her to taste her fingertip.

Force the issue of respect…

Echoing in his ears.

A trickle of sweat ran from his ear to his neck and soaked into his collar.

“Who are you?”

[lady_elfleda]

Only her shadow touched against skin, yet her hand seemed to close around his beating heart, with all the implied sensuality and potential danger that implied. She spelled out neither, yet represented both.

"Elfleda..."

For a moment, her voice seemed as if it was of two realms, again. The serpent to his proverbial Eve; Eden or not.

"And I could bring you many things... Take you many places... Your sense of need be only high enough. Passionate enough. Some souls..." Black eyes cast down to his chest in contemplation, then raised back up to meet his gaze. "For them, passion is a force of chaos. Others? Others can handle it so much better... Use it to help forge themselves anew. I believe you could be such a soul, hmm?"

[brian_campo]

Brian swallowed thickly. His chest hurt, like he’d run a mile at break-neck speed. The car frame was hot on his back, the pavement warm under his boots. But that shadow of her hand, that not-quite-touch, was nice and cool, an icy sensation that should have shocked him the way of bucket of water would, but instead reminded him of his mother’s cold fingers on his feverish skin.

“I’m not good at control.”

But getting better, his inner voice said. A month ago, Brian would’ve broken the glass out of the windows, ripped the antenna off the car and sent it whipping through the air. Now nothing happened except a vibration, subtle as the frame of a house trembling while a freight train rolled by. His hands remained in his pockets.

Looking into her face, Brian remembered being fourteen and pinned in a corner by a girl he had daydreamed about. Kim. Knees knocking, body reacting out of fear and excitement and tongue-thickening dread, while she leaned in smelling of fruit flavored lip gloss.

But Elfleda’s lips were black, and this wasn’t teenage flirtation. It was danger. He didn’t know what kind, but he sensed her power in the air. “What do you want?”

[lady_elfleda]

And then it happened. Like a magnet, she was suddenly there, pressing up against him. Had gone from standing, to a form of black swishing vapour, then perfectly physical, once again.

He should be feeling free, save for her. But the very air, itself, seemed to be pressing in around him from every conceivable angle, like a bubble of air sticking to one's skin in a lake of oil.

"I want..."

Head tilted, but there for all the erstwhile seductiveness about their entwined position, it was like being looked at under a microscope. Studied.

And there was a very literal purr. Not like some friendly kitten's. More like a dragon's. A very hungry dragon, indeed.

"I want you to unleash... I want you to become."

[brian_campo]

The air felt thin and also toxic. Brian found himself taking shallow breaths. He had gone from intrigued to alarmed to outright fucking panicked in under a minute. If he struck her, would his hands go right through her? If he pushed at Elfleda with his mind, would she budge? Somehow his hands had come out of his pockets and he lifted them to her shoulders.

He saw it in his head: one, two, three, and he’d shove with the force of his power, an accompanying, “Get off me!” that shattered the relative calm of the parking lot and bounced off the battened doors of that cheap motel. Elfleda would skid away from him. She’d shriek, hiss maybe, and then disappear in a puff of swirling, black smoke, leaving him breathless and sweat-drenched but okay. He’d have to squat down or a second to get his bearings, and then he’d grab his keys, stick them in the ignition, and get the hell out of Searchlight. He’d spend the length of the trip glancing in his rearview and checking his back seat.

But he did none of it.

When his hands clenched, they sunk into flesh as pliable as putty. She wasn’t solid, not like his physical world. Brian turned his face to avoid her mouth and eyes. She was a viper in a pretty disguise and all the muscles in him had knotted up in reaction to her.

Yet something in his mind and heart was shifting. Yielding. The more he tapped into that hidden well of telekinetic strength and prepared himself to use it, the harder it seemed to be to filter her out. As if the two were connected, her power and his power, and he still didn’t know what her power was. Brian gritted his teeth and screamed a noise of frustration.

A peculiar voice in his head whispered that he could try her on, wrap himself in that ephemeral haze like a cloak.

[lady_elfleda]

"Shhhh..."

Such an aggressive act, yet caressed in gentle affection. Perhaps her very appearance, of whites and blacks, echoed the contradictions she seemed to represent.

Yet, the force of will he exerted seemed just enough to wash her away, like shadows not quite able to survive against an onslaught of light. Nevertheless, the figure remained. Anchored to his form.

"You could bring such thunder," she cooed with a trail of icy finger to mortal jaw. "Even now, in your resistance, you become something beautiful, Mister Campo... Something wanted. Something which deserves better."

Expression hardened.

"Do not be content to squirm in this bucket of rotting fish you find yourself... You settle for less when you could have more."

It was like being in an oven of somehow freezing heat. A viscous cloud of toxicity which sought to imprint itself, contaminate and pollute. Yet... Yet, its own held purpose. She didn't want just another victim. She was after something else.

"Promise me..." She spoke into ear with a voice of burning honey. "Promise me a vengeance of my choosing... Promise this and I will grant you freedom. What say you?"

Would he accept? Or would he attempt to unleash against her?

[brian_campo]

Willpower was never Brian’s strong suit. He had fed his emotions with a steady diet of pills, blunts, and bottles for year, so willpower showed little promise of surfacing now. Not while the poison seeped into him and the promise of freedom loomed large. He was so angry. So incredibly, hellishly pissed.

He gave way.

“Fine! Just.. get the fuck off me,” he growled. This time, he did push with hands and mind.

[lady_elfleda]

All of a sudden, it ended. Her presence, her physical contact - everything. Where there had been the distinct impression of being stuck in a kiln's furnace, like clay, it was now like a flood of cold water had doused his surroundings. One could almost expect a gentle hiss of cooling metal, for all the relief conveyed.

"William Basterson," spoke the devil-woman in his midst. A gentle, if sudden, pressing of finger to his forehead in a communication of the man's face. Flashes of an act he had engaged in: An elderly citizen beaten to near-concussion for the sake of meagre funds to supply a drug habit. A habit now starting to turn into pushing those same narcotics onto others.

"His end nears... You have the power to decide if it should drag others down with him or not."