Walking on Sunshine Read online

  WALKING ON SUNSHINE

  A Slacker Demons Novel

  Jennifer Stevenson

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  August 14, 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-492-5

  Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Stevenson

  For my personal love god, Rich

  YONI

  I’m afraid of heights. There’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s only getting on a plane, I can take drugs, but in my position, when I tour a three-hour show three nights a week, and with the flying number coming close to the end of the show, I have to be alert and in control.

  Not many women like me worry. Amy Winehouse, rest her soul, wouldn’t go to rehab. Janis died of an overdose. I think way too much about all the others who have ruined their careers and given their lives to being messed up—Amy, Janis, Whitney, Marilyn, especially the black ones like me, not to mention the men, Nat Cole, Jimi Hendrix, MJ—I’m not going that route.

  But as they lowered the flying lines down to the deck of the Arie Crown Theater, I felt an overwhelming desire for numbness.

  This must have shown in my face. The stagehand walking up to me had a sympathetic smile on his pale, skull-like face. “Hi. Your regular rep from the flying company has the flu. I’m Baz, the local rep. You ready?”

  “No,” I confessed. “I hate flying.”

  His pale blue eyes looked into mine with understanding. He hefted the harness. “It’s no worse than a trip to the dentist.”

  I swallowed dry nothing. “I have great teeth.”

  “So you won’t feel a thing.” He twinkled at me as if I was merely human.

  “Yoni, get your butt up there! We have one hour before the press conference!” my uncle yelled from the house. Uncle Chester treats me like I’m merely human, too.

  The stagehand’s eyes met mine. “Why do it? You can skip the flying part of the act. It’s your show,” he said softly.

  He had a nerve, getting personal with me at this vulnerable moment. I swallowed.

  “Yoni, goddammit!” Uncle Chester stomped down the aisle and up the steps onto the stage. “Let’s move! They ain’t gone wanna talk to me, that’s for damn sure.”

  At this moment, even a press conference sounded easy compared with letting them strap me into that thing and lift me twenty feet above the deck.

  “Yoni?” Uncle Chester snarled.

  Slowly the stagehand turned toward him and said, “What is your fucking problem, grandpop?”

  Uncle Chester bristled. I almost laughed at his outraged expression. “Outa my face, white boy. You can’t talk to me like that.”

  “Get off my stage,” the stagehand said.

  “Who the—”

  The stagehand narrowed his eyes. “I’m the flyman of this house. It’s my job to see that the little lady gets up on cue and comes down in one piece. You’re a safety hazard. Get the fuck off my stage before I throw you off.”

  He spoke very, very quietly. I think his crazy-white-guy light-blue eyes did it. That and the soft voice.

  Uncle Chester glared and stomped away.

  In spite of the presence of the harness, I relaxed a little.

  The stagehand said, “You sure you want to do this?”

  Something in his face looked familiar. My breath caught. I decided that it would never do to chicken out in front of him.

  “I’m good, Baz. Let’s go.”

  He smiled slowly, and I felt even better. “Okay, then.”

  He showed me the harness. It was the same harness I’d put on for every show on this tour. I’d flown in it six times in the past two weeks. Yet he went over it step by step, showing me every line, every attachment, naming the parts, explaining how strong they were and how they worked and why they could never fail on me. By the time he was done I felt as calm as I sounded.

  “I’m ready.”

  He nodded and held the harness open. I stepped into it. He strapped me up, making the metal parts clink solidly at my back so that I could feel the steel even if I couldn’t see it.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, feeling for my center.

  With my eyes closed, I could hear the crew moving around backstage, checking light cues. I smelled the roses Aunt Maybellyne makes sure are always onstage with me, even in rehearsal. Off in one corner, the dancers were going over their routine for the finale. The thumps of their shoes on the stage came up through the soles of my feet. Inside me was silence and peace.

  When I opened my eyes, the stagehand was waiting, being patient, ready for me whenever.

  I nodded to him.

  He backed up and yelled, “Flying cue, go.”

  And up, up and away I went.

  BAZ

  “Baz, it’s time to give up your self-pity,” said Aphrodite’s golden voice. It filled the darkness that surrounded me. If there were mountains out there, that voice was bouncing off them.

  It was Sunday night and She’d snatched me out of my La-Z-Boy and brought me to the home of the gods, that non-place between the moment of infinite energy and the birth of creation, a timeless instant to which She summons me when She wants to talk.

  She used to come to Earth to see me. But that was more than a thousand years ago.

  She announced, “I have work for you.”

  I tried not to tremble. “That’s a first.” For Her I had given up everything: my kingdoms, my wives and sons, every hope of a normal life. She’d lured me into devoting myself to Her, and then She’d abandoned me. I said bitterly, “When you were sixty thousand years old, you said you wouldn’t marry a mortal man.”

  “And now I’m almost sixty-three thousand years old. Baz,” that golden voice said kindly, humoring me. “If you can’t make it to three thousand, how are you going to live to a hundred thousand? Admit it. You hate immortality.”

  She was right. I just hadn’t faced it. Despair washed over me. I closed my eyes and slumped to my knees on the firmament. “All right. You win. Can I die now?”

  “Baz.”

  “You win. I give up. I’ll never live long enough to be fit to marry a goddess. I’m sick of immortality! Everybody I know dies. I’m lonely and bored. I just want it to be over,” I confessed, feeling exhausted, relieved, and weirdly hopeful that death might be different from the drudgery my life had become.

  “Nonsense. I have too much invested in you to let you die now.”

  I understood. I was gonna be screwed again. Nobody gets the better of a bargain with the gods. I’d been waiting for twenty-seven hundred years because I’d wanted to be Her husband. Now I didn’t want that—and it was too late to get out of the deal.

  “Baz, my love, you’ve been wonderful.”

  Plus, She could read my mind. What kind of idiot falls in love with a woman who can read his mind?

  With Her praise, that terrible, treacherous desire began.

  I wanted Her.

  My heart filled with weakness and longing and fire and confusion. My dick, which had wanted to die moments ago, pointed toward the one I could never have.

  I was already kneeling. I lay down on my face.

  “Please,” I groaned. “Please don’t do this to me again.”

  “There was a time when you wanted nothing more than to suffer love for me, Baz.”

  “I don’t want to feel like this anymore!” I rubbed my face on the ground. I imagined I tasted dirt. I knew that was just my imagination. It could be only the idea of dirt, out here in Her part of the wild blue yonder, where nothing had been created yet.

  “I can help you,” She said kindly. She knew how much the sound of Her voice hurt me, luring me out of numbness and exhaustion, dragging me toward the terrible hot fire of unquenchable love.

&
nbsp; At the thought of feeling that fire again, I twisted like a fish on the hook.

  “No! Let me go!” I took a bite out of the ground, digging my fingers into it, afraid She might pluck me up and hook me through the heart.

  I’d been so happy lately. So numb. But now my heart longed for the hook.

  “Why don’t you let me die?” I screamed, my mouth full of the taste of the idea of dirt.

  I heard Her sigh. The wind of Her sorrow blew through the firmament, out into the world, and birds stopped thinking about how cold it was and started thinking about building nests.

  “Baz,” She said briskly, “you don’t get to die.”

  “I. Take. It. Back. I’m sick of immortality. There. You happy? You broke me. You broke Ashurbanipal, who used to be king of the universe. How low do you want me to go?” I howled.

  “I don’t want you low. I want you working,” She said, sounding businesslike.

  Mercifully, the hook slid out of my heart. The pain eased. I was able to relax my clenched embrace with the ground.

  “Get up.”

  The next stage of my terrible love was coming. In dread, I hauled myself to my feet and glared into the darkness. “Let me go.”

  “Not if you want death,” She said. “Immortality doesn’t work like that. I can give it to you, but I can’t take it away.”

  I barked out a laugh. “Nobody remembers Ashurbanipal.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “Your name is the least part of you. Surely you learned that long ago.”

  “Free me,” I said.

  “When you can love another, you will be free of me.”

  “No, I won’t. You’re Love. If I love anyone, I serve you.”

  “Finally!” She exclaimed. “Good grief, you’re slow.”

  “You want me to love somebody else?”

  “Your love is tribute,” the goddess said, as if to a child. “Surely the king of Assyria, Mesopotamia, Ur, Sumer, and the universe knows this? Fealty without tribute is lip service.”

  “I never wanted to be your vassal,” I said stiffly. My strength returned. I stood straighter. “Never.”

  She said with gentle scorn, “No, you wanted to marry me and pour wine for me and have me shampoo your feet in the mornings.”

  For once my heart didn’t cry out in protest. For once I didn’t feel that blind yearning to possess Her yet clueless how to do it.

  “Ask me for something I can give you,” She said, reading my mind again, “and maybe I will be able to satisfy you at last.”

  “Tell me why you bothered to test me.”

  There was a long silence. Had I stumped Her?

  I waited and hoped.

  She said slowly, “It is no small thing to make a man immortal. I did it for you because you were special and because I loved you. And because your ambition was so great. I worried that your ambition might make you immortal entirely without my assistance. That would have been bad for the world.”

  “What?” She’d never told me any of this before.

  “You might have become a monster if you hadn’t fallen in love with me.”

  “I was slowing down,” I admitted.

  “You were at an age when a man becomes savage and destructive because his penis won’t do what it did at twenty. With your powers, in that place and time, you might have made yourself immortal by avenging yourself on the world.”

  “Over a limp dick?” But I remembered long-ago deeds I wasn’t proud of, even then.

  “Men have done worse.”

  Hope grew in me. “What’s your point?”

  “I’m reminding you, King Ashurbanipal, that we are not like mere mortals. We exist to serve. I in my lonely firmament, and you in that sticky mosh pit you call home.”

  Wow. Would she really let me go? “Okay, all right.” I wanted to be out of Her presence. “What do you want me to do?”

  “One of my avatars is visiting your city. You have met her. She’s at the very beginning of her service. She has stood up well so far to the hammer blows of apotheosis, but she is still mostly human. I need her to survive this phase of her transformation to godhood.”

  “So you can get more work out of her.”

  “Of course. For me, you will shepherd her passage into divinity. You’re the best man on the continent for the job. Don’t let it shatter her. Keep her sane.”

  I folded my arms. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Do this, and you will never have to come here again. And you may have her into the bargain.”

  “Second prize, two nights in Pittsburgh, eh? I get to have her until she dies. Thanks a load.”

  “O proud King Baz. You will not serve and you will not worship. You’ve held out all this time for marrying Love. Well, this is as close to marrying me as you can get.”

  “What, ever?” She was finally admitting it!

  “Who knows? Waiting to get old enough for me isn’t enough.”

  “I call that ‘being faithful.’” You ungrateful bitch.

  “Playing sex demon?” She laughed. “Thank you for bedding all those women, by the way. Each one went on and fell in love with someone else.”

  “That’s all you care about.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  I recognized that line. I’d said it myself plenty, back when I ruled the known universe. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll keep her sane.”

  “Can you love her, Baz? That’s the question.”

  “No, I cannot love her. She’ll die.”

  “Not if you do your job right,” She said. “Now scram, slacker demon. I have work to do.”

  Her fingertip flicked me out of Her presence.

  I tumbled through the formless darkness of the firmament and landed in the world like a red-hot penny sinking edgewise into a marshmallow.

  When I came to myself, I was lying in my La-Z-Boy with vomit in my lap.

  SOPHIE

  “What are you doing in Chicago, Sophie?” my father demanded fiercely. I had run away from boarding school for the fifth time, with nothing but three credit cards and a passport in my jeans. He looked so angry, my heart went weak. Maybe he really had worried about me! “The school notified me that you failed to return from holiday. You have been here two weeks already, according to the concierge.”

  This was how it always went. He scolded, expressing his interest in me in the only way he knew how. I defied him, to remind him that he had a daughter. Sometimes I thought all we shared was the word family. Once, when I was small, a sentimental nurse convinced me to try to elicit fatherly affection by hugging him. That nurse was fired. Thereafter, I stuck with seeking his disapproval.

  I had thought myself exceptionally clever to check into his hotel suite at the Four Seasons Chicago before he even arrived.

  Now, looking at his inflamed face, sensing his insanity, I trembled inside. This was no game. He’d changed greatly in just a few months. Before, he had always been cold. Now he seemed fiery, and so very crazy. Perhaps it was too late for me to stop him.

  I went back to taking my purchases out of their shopping bags. Gray tee shirt. Blue jeans. Small backpack. Two long-handled purses.

  I gave him the explanation that would satisfy him. “Yoni has come to Chicago for two shows. Also to record her new CD. I wanted to establish my base.”

  His eyes changed, not hard or suspicious anymore. “Still stalking the famous singer,” he said with contempt.

  I took the labels off a pair of dark green cargo pants with many pockets and a matching, long-sleeved tee shirt. The lock picks, climbing harness, and gloves with rubber palms I left in the bag, along with the greeting cards where I would write my devotional messages to Yoni. “I feel close to her.”

  He hissed, “You have nothing in common with a working class quadroon who sings for her supper.”

  I slung the shopping bag full of stalking gear under the coffee table. When my work in Chicago was done, I would leave it all behind.

  His voice rose. “You are of excellent fam
ily, noble family,” he said, rolling out the same old rant.

  I baited him. “And it is high time you were named vicomte and head of the family!”

  “I am head of the family. I have been since your grandpapa died.”

  I corrected him. “You have been only heir apparent to the Vicomte Montmorency since grandpère died, because grandpère was only the heir presumptive.” I now knew where the real vicomte was living. I might even have met him. My papa was two weeks behind me.

  “The old Vicomte Clarence is dead. It cannot be otherwise. And soon,” my father said with silky triumph, “I will prove it.”

  So he was still obsessed with the title. “What about all those papers the family sent to les Etats-Unis?”

  “Fakes. Forgeries.” My father swung his arm. “Rest you, I’ll have the title before long.” He calmed down. I wasn’t fooled. His eyes were too bright. His hands twitched. “You remain to witness these concerts?”

  “That was the idea,” I said.

  “You will not disgrace me by getting arrested or provoking this woman to sue me. You may reside here at the Four Seasons, in this suite. When the concerts are over, you will go back to school.”

  This was weird. He should have been livid because I had escaped from school and flown here alone. For years, our only contact had occurred in these disciplinary conversations. It was why I was so good at misbehaving. Now, he seemed grateful to believe that I would be stalking Yoni.

  All he cared for was the title.

  Deep inside, some part of me got colder and smaller and lost. I reminded myself sternly that I was not a child. I had just turned eighteen. I had new powers of adulthood in many countries. I could accomplish something.

  If I couldn’t prevent Papa’s dissolution into madness, I could spare this poor man, whom he pursued so relentlessly. Maybe I could help him hide, or help him win a fat settlement from the family. Becoming vicomte would only make Papa crazier.

  I bowed my head. “Can I use your laptop to check my email?”

  “You heard me, Sophie. Your game has limits. I have set them.”

  I rolled my eyes, the picture of the ineffectual teenage jet-set rebel he thought me. “Can I?”