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Lia was giggling so hard she forgot to drive on when the light changed. A car honked behind her and she waved an apology and sped off into the night. The kylix had worked its strange powers on her again, and she felt high as a kite. Higher. She’d smoked pot once with some friends and it had done little more than make her sleepy and paranoid. This, however, was heaven. This was bliss. This was a thousand elves dancing jigs around a thousand trees and all of them—elves and trees and jigs—all lived inside her dancing head.
Nothing could hurt her. Nothing could touch her.
Throw her off the top of London Bridge and watch her fly...
The rational part of Lia’s brain warned her this was nothing but the side effect of the Rose Kylix. She wasn’t really bulletproof. She couldn’t really fly.
But maybe...maybe she was untouchable. She certainly felt strong enough to take on the world. Her toes tingled and her heart leaped and she danced in her seat, though she hadn’t turned on her Mini’s ancient radio.
She wanted to test her joy, to find out if it was as ironclad as it felt.
At the next stoplight she dug her phone out of her bag and Googled an address. A short detour and worth it if it worked for her.
She made it to the Attic Gallery without incident and parked her car in a nearby alley. She couldn’t simply drive by and take a peek. She had to get up close and personal. Usually Lia avoided walking in unfamiliar London neighborhoods at night, even posh ones. But that night she walked with her head high, her spine solid steel as she strode down the sidewalk, her boot heels banging the pavement with every confident step. Let a mugger try anything with her. She’d just been fucked by Achilles—and Patroclus, too—and lived to tell the tale. Who else could say that?
Lia braced herself as she came to the front windows of the gallery. Just as she’d suspected, they were already advertising David’s new show calledRare Bones: Exploring the Interior—The Work of David Bell. Rare bones? Instead of bare bones? Lia rolled her eyes. A pun? David couldn’t do better than a pun for his art show?
Disgraceful.
The Attic was going all out for David’s show. Posters, four feet high, filled each window. Three of the four posters were just images of his art cropped in artful ways: a mural of surrealistic skeleton horses running through the streets of New York—pure wank; a reverse Hamlet with a skeleton holding a human head—must be a theme; and a massive pink rose, blooming erotically out of the pelvic bone of a woman—August had been right about the rose/vagina connection.
In the fourth and final poster, David’s face—so solemn and serious and handsome—stared right at her through the glass.
The gallery knew what it was doing by advertising David along with his art. He wasn’t just handsome, he was striking, a work of art himself, the poster seemed to imply. Lia met the eyes of the photographic David. She stared at him and he stared at her. Her lover. Her enemy. The man who held her fate in his paint-spattered hands.
She flashed him the V-sign and walked away. Friday night after she paid David off, she’d do exactly that.
Still flying with the hardest case of afterglow she’d ever been hit with, Lia drove home to Wingthorn and arrived by midnight. She parked and went in through the kitchen entrance. The light was on, and she found her mother in her dressing gown and her father wearing half of a suit—trousers and shirt but no jacket, tie or shoes—fighting over a bottle of wine.
“You broke the cork,” her mother said. “How have you managed to father three children when you can’t even work a corkscrew?”
“I don’t follow your logic, spouse, unless you rate all forms of penetration on the same scale. Just push the broken cork into the bottle.”
“Then we’ll have cork bits in our wine,” Lia’s mother said. “Unacceptable.”
Lia shook her head, sighed and stepped out of the shadows and into the kitchen.
“Lia,” her father said. “Where have you been all evening?”
“I was kidnapped and forced to have a threesome with Greek soldiers.”
“Hope you had a nice time,” her mother said.
Lia picked up the wine bottle and slapped the base of it twice and hard. The cork popped out.
“How did you do that?” Her father’s eyes went wide.
Lia walked out of the kitchen. “That was my spanking hand.”
The last thing she heard as she stepped into the hall was her mother saying, “Has she been acting strange lately? Or is it just me?”
Lia did not wait around to hear her father’s answer.
She skipped up the stairs, desperately in need of a long bath. Tomorrow when her mind was back to normal and not doing cartwheels off the ceiling, Lia would call August and ask him about what had happened tonight. For the moment, however, she was going to do nothing but enjoy the high-flying feeling as long as she could. She wasn’t going to work or weave or talk to anyone. Instead she would simply lie in bed and remember the seawater scent of Achilles’s skin and the feel of Patroclus inside her, and the intensity of the orgasms that had probably done permanent damage to some vitally important area of her cerebellum.
Lia opened the door to her suite—and found August sitting by the fireplace, playing tug-of-war with Gogo.
“August?” Lia said, shocked silly.
