She Wakes Read Free Page A

mattress drew the breast out toward her so that the weight of it rested in her hand. It was warm and slightly damp. The girl hadn’t moved. She looked at the nipple. It was large, a pale brown color, soft now.
        She wondered how long it would get.
        Let’s see.
        She moved her thumb and forefinger together and gently turned. She felt the skin wither and tighten.
        It got long. Very long.
        There was a tiny sound, almost a purring in the girl’s throat and she saw the eyelids move in the side-to-side motion that told her the girl was dreaming. Lelia almost laughed aloud. The Swedish girl was having a little dream. She moved in closer so the girl could smell the scent of her, the fine dusting of expensive perfume.
        Maybe she should lick it. Or bite.
        See how it tasted.
        But no.
        Leave something, she thought, for later.
        

JORDAN THAYER CHASE
        

MYKENE
        
        “Paracalo.”
        He called the waiter and ordered another Metaxa, draining the glass in front of him. “Meh pagukia?" asked the man. With ice?
        “Sketoh," said Chase. Add nothing.
        There was a white elastic strip around the tablecloth holding it down against the evening wind and somebody had penciled in TOO MANY FOREIGNERS IN GREECE along the front of it. That was true enough, thought Chase, though whoever had written it was probably a tourist himself-the English was just too perfect. The sign above him, for instance, read RESTAURANT BAR HOMER. HERE WE HAVE GREEK SERVICE. ALL GRILLDED.
        That was more like it.
        He watched the waiter move off toward the bar.
        He was drinking more than he should, he knew, three empty glasses lined up in front of him and he didn’t know why except that he needed it. The power of a place took a while to roll off you. Sometimes a long while.
        He kept coming back to the candles.
        He presumed they were left by an earlier tour group though he had seen no such tour group. And that only explained the least interesting thing about them.
        How could he have missed fire?
        He’d read somewhere that black holes in space had the capacity to suck in light like a vacuum cleaner but that was space and this was a cave in the countryside of Greece.
        So how could he have missed them?
        By the time they’d guttered out and his eyes finally adjusted to the dark he’d found himself alone in what turned out to be a roughly circular cavern about twenty-five feet deep by twenty feet wide with high pale limestone walls. For a while he’d inhabited the silence like a ghost.
        Like a very humble ghost. There was awesome power in the place.
        It calmed him.
        Then it frightened him.
        He’d felt it before. In Mexico once, and once in England. And worst of all on a foggy New England afternoon, the very last day of his childhood. Times he didn’t like to remember and wouldn’t remember now.
        He felt too much. Too often.
        Murder in the eyes of a man in the streets of Toronto. A hotel fire in San Francisco that killed two children and a fireman. The imminent deaths of his favorite aunt, a teacher in the eighth grade, his father.
         Stop it, he thought.
        It was always the same but always different too in the way that anything elemental was, like water in a stream or like fire. You recognized the familiar power. It was the configurations that surprised you.
        He recognized the feelings too-the tuning-fork intensity, the sense of having access for a moment to some impossible vantage point where you could see worlds turning, growing green or barren, imploding or exploding, mountains formed and seas going dry. It was wonderful and terrifying. And it was meant to be watched with humility if it was meant to be watched at all.
        Even the elation of it, even the joy, was painful. It could drive you crazy if you let