way through the absolute dark.
She reached Karena first. Karena, silent except for a whispered groan.
Placing her hands around Karena’s head, she intoned the ritual words that asked entrance to this psyche. Terez and Fiore screeched, but the sound of their voices left her as she felt her way through Karena’s interior world.
Hollow silence. Infinitely sterile emptiness, clamoring silently to be filled. To be filled. To be filled.
Karena worked for La Femme, women’s health and beauty products, but her personnel file wasn’t included in her packet, so Jaguar didn’t know how long she’d shown signs of trouble. She was here because she’d walked into a department store and pointed a gun at a cashier. He frantically handed over the money in his drawer, but Karena fired on him anyway, then turned her weapon on the other dozen people there. When the police arrived, she was struggling with a shopping bag, dragging it toward the door. The policeman who took it from her went white when he looked inside, then dropped the bag, spilling dismembered hands and feet and ears and breasts all over the marble floor.
“I was hungry,” Karena told the police.
Jaguar drifted in the vast white emptiness she cradled at her core, and breathed in the necessity of it. She would go no further with her. Tonight was just the first contact with each woman, a brief listening.
She released her hold and groped through the darkness to Terez, her beauty palpable even when vision was denied. Jaguar held her face gently, spoke quietly into the squealing terror of her mind, and found herself slipping into a space as rich and fertile as the rainforest.
There was rapture here, fleshy and sinuous with desire. A pounding and pulsing life-force, wanting to feast not so much out of hunger, but out of a sense of abundance. Yes. It said only yes and yes and yes again.
“Yes,” Jaguar whispered back, “and yes again.”
She let her go and moved to Fiore, who barked and howled and called out all the sounds of wild animals caught in the grip of commune with the night. Jaguar had to struggle to keep a firm grasp on her, her hands caught in her hair as she worried her noises like a dog with a bone.
There was joy in the storm of her voice, which managed somehow to remain profoundly serene within its own rage. A serene and free rage. A wild calm. Some improbable meeting of all that. A complexity, powerful and rich and complete as fire. To Jaguar it felt almost like home. With reluctance, she released her and crawled back over the slippery wet earth to her place.
She took a ladle of water from the bucket and tossed it onto the stones. As the heat hissed and seethed around them she breathed deeply, releasing any toxins she might have absorbed from the contact through the air of her lungs and the water pouring from her skin.
Aaiiyah, the women called out to the night.
Aaiyah they sang into the darkness and into her and into their own souls. When it was time, she held her hand up for silence, and though they couldn’t see it, they were suddenly still. Jaguar spoke through the stillness.
“I myself, spirit in flesh speak,” she said softly, and slid into her own center to meet what swam there.
Saw a woman feral and balanced. Saw a forest of knowledge she crawled through in darkness.
Touched the edge of a wordless whisper. The sigh of movement. That swift blackness which led her with vision thirty times more accurate than human sight.
She breathed in the blessing of that presence, and let it pull her into the spinning darkness, felt herself curling like a leaf within a coil of wind, lifted toward a translucent moon, trying to burst into fullness. She reached for it, all of her pulled to that source.
Grandmother Moon.
She was lifted to a place where light poured down around her, cool and sweet as a child’s hand in hers, bathing her in the same wild calm she felt from Fiore, who must be a daughter of the moon, a huntress. Light poured through her, cool and sweet as dreams.
She rested in it, let it rest in her.
In this light she saw herself facing a man. Someone young and old at the same time. Sad and quiet and full of rage, filled with death. She turned from him and saw another man, one she knew. She felt the warmth of his desire mixing with her own as the great grandmother light of the moon poured cool over them both. He raised a hand to her face, and it was covered in blood.
Aaaiyah. Aaaiyah Nissa nissa.
She saw his hand covered in blood and the moon pouring out a silken scarf of more blood to cover him, drowning them both in blood and more blood.
Blood on the moon, and the scream of pain that followed.
She opened her eyes, gasped, and shook herself out of the vision.
Blood on the moon.
“Open the door,” she said hoarsely to Terez, who sat nearest. Terez flung the canvas covering up and the three women crowded to it, gasping, steam flowing out in front of them like a river bursting through a dam.
Jaguar lay down and let them breathe. They had one more round to go, but they’d get water and a little cool air before they started. She needed to regroup anyway. Needed to climb back in to her own skin so she could conduct the last round.
Blood on the moon.
Phase psychosis. Artemis compounds. Women bleeding, going mad. She was bleeding now, too. Blood on her thigh, and on the thighs of all the women here, and on the moon.
Alex said it was controversial. She knew he put her on this case because controversy wouldn’t keep her from doing her job.
And she knew what to do next. She would start with Terez.
* * * *
The women slept late, and rose to move in their speechless activities of breakfast preparation and cleanup. As they worked, Jaguar noticed that Terez followed her with large eyes, always aware of where she was, what she was doing.
They ate bread and fruit that Jaguar had brought, drank water from canteens. No one spoke, and each face carried in it the glow of last night’s sweat. Jaguar could see a shift in pupil size, in skin tone, indicating that the detox was beginning.
After breakfast was cleared the three women sat leaning into trees, listening as if some answer ran through the sap.
Jaguar turned her green eyes to Terez. “Come with me,” she said.
Terez rose silently and followed her through the thick trees, picking her way carefully over the debris of the forest floor.
Jaguar stopped at a small stream that trickled through the woods. She squatted by the side of it, cupped her hands and lifted water to her face. In the south, the moon was still apparent, white and ghostly in the clarity of morning sky.
The water felt cool and good against her skin. She let her hands linger in it, brought them, slippery and cool, to her neck, sighed with pleasure as liquid slid down her breasts. She leaned over and took another handful of water, spreading it over her ribs and belly, then between her legs, opening her thighs and stroking the insides gently, seeing as she did that she’d stopped bleeding. She’d noticed earlier that the other women
