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As I wrote, a red dusting of chalk spread out across my hand, grinding itself into the lines of my palm. Shrugging off my shirt, I brushed the excess off down my chest, onto my abdomen. Five scarlet fingers, pointing towards my groin.

Up onscreen, an explicit flesh-toned tangle was busily pixilating itself into soft focus through sheer force of back-and-forth action. I turned the mirror to catch it, then zapped the TV quickly off, wrapping my chosen lust-icon up tight in a black silk scarf I keep handy for such occasions. Then I leant the mirror against my forehead and repeated the time-honored formula to myself, aloud:

“Listen! Oh, now you have drawn near to hearkening—your spit, I take it, I eat it; your body, I take it, I eat it; your flesh, I take it, I eat it; your heart, I take it, I eat it. O Ancient Ones, this man’s soul has come to rest at the edge of my body. You are to lay hold to it, and never to let it go, until I indicate otherwise. Bind him with black threads and let him roam restless, never thinking upon any other place or person.”

The spells don’t change. They never change. And that’s because, quite frankly—

“Bring him to me, and me to him. Bring us both together.”

—they never really have to.

Already, I felt myself stirring, sleepily. Jerking awake. Arching to meet those five red fingers halfway.

Purple no-halo raising the hairs on the backs of my forearms, then slipping down to slime my palms with eerie phosphorescence; my wards holding fast, as ever, against the gathering funnel of Power forming outside the circle’s rim. My Art wrapping ‘round me like a cold static cocoon, sparking and twinging. A dull scribble of bio-electricity, followed by a wash of gooseflesh. Nothing natural. All as it should be.

Until: Something, somewhere, snapped.

The mirror cracked across, images emptied. The funnel suddenly slack as a rubber band, then blown away in a single breath-slim stain—dispersed like ectoplasm against a strung thread, or brains on a brick wall. Just gone, baby, gone.

Which was odd, granted—annoying, definitely; left alone and aroused once more, laid open for any port in a hormonal storm. Even sort of intriguing, for all that I wasn’t exactly all that interested in being intrigued right now, this very minute. I mean, damn.

But no, I wasn’t scared. Not even then. Why should I be?

I sat back on my heels, suddenly remembering how I’d once met my former aunt on the street once, just after Pride, arm still in Ed’s, my tongue still rummaging around in the dark of his mouth. How she’d clicked her teeth at me, spat on the sidewalk between us, and called me a banana. How Ed had blanched, then turned red; how I’d just laughed, amazed she even knew the term.

And how I couldn’t understand, later on, why he was still so upset—about the fact that I hadn’t been upset at all.

Because that’s how things go, when you’re shadowless: How trouble slides away from you, finding no purchase on your immaculate incompleteness. How the only thing you can hear, most days and nights, is the bright and seductive call of your own Power—your Art, your Practice. How it lures and pulls you, draws you like a static charge, singing: Follow, follow, follow.

And how I do, inevitably—without fail—even at the cost of anything and everything in my way. Like the lack of a shadow follows a black hole sun.

This is probably worth looking at, sometime, I thought. Got the words wrong, maybe, one of the symbols; have to do a little research, re-consecrate my tools, re-examine my methods. All that.

(Sometime.)

But . . .

. . . not tonight.

* * *

An hour later, I swerved up Church Street, heading straight for the Khyber. Wednesday was Fetish Night, and though nothing I had on was particularly appropriate, I knew a brief flirtation with Vic the bouncer would probably get me in anyway. The street glittered, febrile with windchill, unfolding itself in a series of pointilescent flashes: Bar doorways leaking black light and Abba; a muraled restaurant wall sugared with frost; parks and alleyways choked with unseasonably-dressed chain-smokers, shivering and snide, almost too cold to cruise.

Past the bar and out through the musically segregated dance-floor (the Smiths vs. Traci Lords, standing room only), I finally found my old RTA party partner Gil Wycliffe—now head of creative design for Quadrant Leather—strapped face-down over a vaulting horse in one of the club’s back rooms, getting his bare ass beaten red and raw by some all-purpose Daddy in a Sam Browne belt and a fetching pair of studded vinyl chaps. The paddle being used looked like one of Gil’s own creations; it had a crack like a long-range rifle-shot, and left a diamond-shaped pattern of welts behind that made his buttocks glow as patchily as underdone steaks.

I must admit that I’ve never quite understood the appeal of sadomasochism, for all that “they”—those traditionally unspecified (though probably Caucasian) arbiters of societal lore—would probably like to credit me with some kind of genetic yearning toward pain and suffering for fun and pleasure, just because the whole concept supposedly originated in the Mysterious East: The Delight Of The Razor, the Death Of The Thousand And One Cuts. All that stale old Sax Rohmer/James Bond bullshit.

Then again, I guess there’s no particular reason anyone else really has to “get” it, unless they are a masochist. Or a sadist.

The Daddy paused for a half-second between licks, catching my eye in open invitation; I signed disinterest, leaned back against the wall to wait this little scene out, let my gaze wander.

And there he was.

First a mere lithe flicker between gyrating bodies, then a half-remembered set of lines and angles, gilded with mounting heat: Vague reflections off a high, flat cheekbone, a wryly gentle mouth, a bent and pliant neck. That whole lambent outline—so neat, so trim, so invitingly indefinite. It was my Bloor mystery man himself, swaying out there at the very heart of the crowd. Head back, body loose. Shaking and burning in the strobelights’ glare.

Oh, waaah.

Every inch of me sprang awake at the sight, skin suddenly acrawl with possibilities.