Like the secret-identitied men beneath the masks of all
the great Golden Age superheroes, Linda Herman had two first names. She
felt especially proud that her last name, her second first name, was a
man's first name, just like that of her great childhood heroine, Diana
Duke, A.K.A., Amazing Woman. Like that glorious Amazon princess who left
her island of women warriors to purify the man-corrupted outside world,
Linda Herman had escaped her family in tiny Paradise, New Mexico, to bring
her own brand of justice to the corrupt city of men and machinery, of skyscrapers
and mall-lights that all her young life had glistened on the horizon of
her dry small town landscape like a beckoning dewdrop: Albuquerque. And
though she'd been born Linda Ballwin, a decidedly unempowering name by
her reckoning, her marriage to big city lawyer Steve Herman had been more
than her one way ticket out of Paradise - it had, by chance or by fate,
granted her a secret identity worthy of the epic pantheon she now counted
herself among.
By day she was Linda Herman, mild mannered cashier at
the Mobile Gas & Wash on Highway 25. By night she was Mercuria, shape-shifter
extraordinaire - and this very night, Mercuria would face the greatest
challenge of her career.
"Forget it. I'm out." She tried to squeeze a note of
sympathy into her voice, but her anticipation of the coming showdown blocked
its path like an icy lump behind her tongue. Poor Sid. So worked up over
a game.
"This makes three weeks running." Sid's voice burned
through the telephone. "Keep this up and we'll have to kill off your character.
Just to keep the game going." He sounded more hurt than angry. Such whiners,
her role-playing boys. They were hungry for her presence. She could feel
their need emanating through the line, hear them clattering around in the
background like awkward teenagers, although the youngest among them was
twenty-five. Somebody was passing out beers, clanking the bottles together
noisily. A voice taking pizza orders. "She's not coming," Sid called back
to the room. She heard a great, communal moan, a quiet, "Well, fuck her,
then."
She cradled the receiver against her shoulder and stared
out the gleaming station window as through the transparent wall of a glass
airplane. That's what they all wanted, to fuck her. It was her greatest
power, one that seemed to flow naturally from the masculine last first
name. Men wanted her, and she had learned to use their desire as a dog
trainer used treats and punishment to command obedience. She could disarm
any man with a smile, a lingering gaze. She could lasso him into submission
with the cold turn of a shoulder as effectively as a yanked slip-chain
could bring a dog to heel.
She relaxed and let the power ooze out toward Sid, right
through the phone line. She imagined it washing over him in waves, reclaiming
him as the ocean reclaims a sandcastled beach at high tide. "Sidney, dear,"
she said, wrapping her tongue tenderly around his name, "Tonight I really
have no choice. It's Steve's sister's wedding. I'm a bridesmaid, for Christ's
sake. I'll be with you next week, I promise." She could have said she'd
be at the game next week. I'll be with you offered the treat.
"Does Steve know where you were last week?" His turning
from the bait pissed her off and she yanked the lasso tight. She heard
a soft gasp, his breath quickening.
"You don't know where I was last week, Sid." This time
she split the word with her teeth and heard him moan. She dropped the receiver
onto the counter and stared out again through the window, out across the
overpass to the setting sun's reflection like an angry red eye, watching
her from the towering mirrored spire of All Souls Church, where the wedding,
and the great test of her powers, awaited her. The receiver buzzed beside
her arm as Sid poured out his apologies to the dirty red Formica. When
the buzzing stopped, she raised the phone again to her ear. Sid was still
on the line; she could hear his shallow breathing. She imagined him sitting
there in the cluttered apartment, eyes lowered in submission, awaiting
her command.
"I'll be with you next week," she said again, tossing
the treat this time to ensure Sid's loyalty.
"Next week. Okay, Linda. Thanks."
Why were men so sensitive? It was as if in cheating on
Steve, she was cheating on Sid as well. They weren't even friends, Steve
and Sid. Steve the lawyer husband considered himself above everyone she
knew. He trusted her to spend every Saturday night, all night, with Sid
and the other role-playing boys because he considered them nerds, computer
geeks incapable of offering him any real competition. In a sense, he was
right. Though she led them on constantly, she would never actually sleep
with Sid or any of the other gamers. They were nerds, all of them, still
pimpled in their twenties, pathetically excited by their nine to five jobs
writing code or repairing PCs for Motorola, wasting their fat paychecks
on pizza and beer and endlessly complicated games filled with dragons they
would never see, shapely wenches they would never hold, heroic deeds they
would never, ever perform in real life.
But in a very real sense, Steve was wrong, too. Sid and
the boys had led her to the realization of her true powers and identity.
After marrying Steve and moving to Albuquerque, she'd gone months in a
strange city with nothing but time on her hands. She'd met Sid while combing
the aisles of a used bookstore, one surprisingly heavy on old comics. She
was rifling gleefully through a rack of plastic-wrapped, vintage Amazing
Woman originals when she'd found her arms dropping under the weight of
what she was crazily certain in the moment were heavy, bullet-deflecting
bracelets. There'd been nothing on her wrists that she could see, but she'd
continued to feel their weight. When she'd felt her spine straightening
and her breasts lifting as if confined to a stiff bodice, she'd spun around
to find Sid standing bulkily behind her, close but not touching, his wide
eyes shifting slowly from her face to the Amazing Woman #200 she still
held in her lowered hands, then back again to her face.
"You look just like her," he'd said.
She'd laughed then, struck silly by the honesty in his
voice as his brown boy scout eyes surveyed her tiny body, her thin, blonde
hair, and saw Amazing Woman in all her busty, brunette glory. The laugh
erupted from some deep, hidden place within her, rising up and through
her like a white-capped river of real Amazon power, flooding her whole,
piercing some invisible barrier within - and for the very first time, she'd
heard the sound that would forever change her life: Swisha-bodda-whoosh!,
like water rushing over sharp stones, and there she'd stood, Amazing Woman,
her body tall and muscled, her waves of chocolate brown hair held in check
by a golden tiara, her sweatshirt and jeans replaced by Old Glory recreated
in garish red, white and blue spandex. Then swish-bodda-whoosh!, and she
was back to herself again, just like that. She'd stood there, stunned,
her skin tingling, alive with power, her body glowing with the raw physical
delight of the transformation she'd experienced as a whirlpool inside her
spinning cold water up into hard three-dimensional form, as if Amazing
Woman had been inside her all along and had, for that brief moment, chosen
to leap out, an ice sculpture inverted into hot, living flesh.
Sid had seen it, too. "Holy shit," he'd said, then, "Come
on. Let's get out of here." No one in the shop gave them a second look
as they paid for their comics and headed out to the street. It had, apparently,
been a private revelation, just between them.
She'd followed him back to his rathole apartment, her
mind still swimming in the ecstatic afterglow, and she'd almost made love
to him right there on top of the piled comic books, pizza boxes and stray
computer parts that seemed to cover every horizontal surface in the place.
But just as his thick fingers were prying at the top button of her jeans,
she'd thought of Steve the lawyer husband, who she was already growing
to dislike, but toward whom she had still, then, felt, if not loyalty,
exactly, at least a certain sense of obligation. She'd panicked, grown
desperate to push the hulking Sid away, when Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, she'd
swirled outward again, this time not as Amazing Woman, but as a sleek,
hissing reptile, a curvaceous lizardwoman with taloned claws and dripping
five inch fangs. Sid was at least twice her own weight, but she'd flung
him across the room as easily as a rejected toy, raking furrows into his
soft arms and back that painted crimson stripes down the far wall as he
hit it hard, then slid to the carpet in a crumpled heap.
Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she was herself again, rushing
to his side. The cuts weren't bad, playful scratch-es, really. But Sid
had been in a hurry to get past her, to run to the bathroom to clean himself
up. He was honest enough to admit that he'd come in his pants mid-fling,
overwhelmingly aroused by her arcane transformation into Demonia Rex, a
particularly nasty supervillian she'd never heard of, but who apparently
played a central role in Sid's twisted fantasy life. It had been her first
clear insight into the sexual depths of her newfound powers.
They'd spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the
evening testing her abilities, Sid digging through old comic books, displaying
one character after another, Linda spinning them from her body, becoming
super-heroes and villains, beautiful and terrifying otherworldly creatures,
once even a 5' 3" perfect replica of the control panel from the Integrity
Team of America's space station floating in its 22,300 mile geostationary
orbit over New York City.
As she was preparing to leave, simultaneously exhausted
and exhilarated, Sid had suggested she join him and his friends in a superhero
role-playing game, a long running campaign he would design specifically
to explore the nature and limits of her powers in a variety of situations,
to help her gain insight into and real control over the transformation
process. She'd suspected Sid really just wanted to show her off to his
friends, but she'd agreed, sensing that over the course of the afternoon
she had come to own Sid as one owns a pet, a wholly dependent animal. He'd
been neutered, made safe. It seemed unlikely that Sid's friends would present
any more of a challenge, but the practice really might do her good.
Her character for the game would need a name, a colorful
superhero title. The quicksilver nature of the change, shapes and faces
and costumes morphing one into the other like a living liquid metal made
the choice obvious - Mercuria, in fantasy and reality, had been born into
the world.
When she'd pulled into the driveway, Steve had been there
to meet her, had opened the car door and blocked her exit.
"Where the hell have you been? It's after ten o'clock."
She'd slid across the seat and out the passenger door.
"I'm sorry, Daddy," she'd said across the top of the car. "Did I miss my
curfew?" She'd moved around the hood and faced him boldly, shoulders thrown
back, imagining with glee the wild silhouette she must have cut with the
garage light behind her. She'd thrown her arms wide. "Curfew this, asshole!"
Nothing happened. She'd pictured Demonia Rex, Ebony Orchid,
Tiger Queen. She'd called desperately on her Amazon heritage, begged Amazing
Woman to appear. No Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, no startling trans-formation.
The silence had finally broken with Steve's laughter.
"Are you drunk?" He was smiling. "You're drunk," he'd
said, then laughed again. And she'd let him believe it, let him lead her
into the house, put her to bed with a scolding like a rebellious teenager.
"Sleep it off," he'd said as he crawled into the bed
beside her, not touching her. "We'll talk in the morning."
They never did really talk. Over breakfast, he'd suggested
she get a job, find something constructive to fill her free time. She'd
told him about meeting Sid, about the recurring Saturday night game. Steve
had thought it a fine idea. She needed to make new friends.
"Just lay off the booze," he'd said, pausing on his way
out the door. "I can't afford an alcoholic wife. You're part of my reputation.
Don't fuck it up."
She'd watched through the window as his car backed out
of the driveway and disappeared around the corner. Then she'd called Sid.
It had become suddenly and abundantly clear to her that Linda Herman and
Mercuria were two very different creatures who would have to lead two very
separate lives. Her hands were shaking as she punched Sid's number into
the phone. Super powers. A secret life. The liberation and limitless possibility
behind those words played tag up and down her spine like an alternating
current, charging her new identity to a pulsating reality that made the
woman she had been just the morning before a mere phantom, a necessary
lie to be maintained only as a cover for who or what she had become. When
Sid answered, his voice trembling with fear and lust and hunger, she'd
seen the world laid out before her like one vast, sensual smorgasbord,
free for the sampling. Though she had called him, she'd made Sid beg her
to come over, just because she could.
The first time she'd managed the transformation outside
the context of the game, beyond Sid's watchful gaze, had been at church.
The Friday before, she'd been half-asleep behind the gas station counter
when the bells over the door jangled, and the most beautiful man she had
ever seen appeared before her as if stepping from a dream. He was tall,
firmly built, with wavy brown hair and piercing green eyes that seemed
to be observing her a little warily, as if from an intentionally safe distance.
In his tweed jacket and open-collared shirt he'd looked like a young college
professor - not as young as herself, probably in his late thirties, but
young for his profession. English, she'd guessed, maybe philosophy.
"Michael Damron," he'd introduced himself. "Father Mike.
Am I anywhere near All Souls Parish?"
The most beautiful man she had ever seen was a priest.
She'd looked again and noticed a streak of gray amidst the brown waves.
A distinguished gray, she'd decided, adjusting his likely age to early
forties, mid-forties tops. But he was still beautiful; his apparent inaccessibility
made him seem even more so. She'd felt the power rising, straight up from
her groin.
"The church or the whole parish?" She'd hooked his eyes
with her own, sent a little spark across the connection.
"The church will do," he'd said, smiling, sending back
a charge that caressed her spine like dancing raindrops.
She'd had to look away to maintain control. A bead of
sweat snaked coldly down one leg, underneath her jeans. When she'd looked
up again, a matching line had appeared on Father Mike's face, tracing a
curving path around his nose and onto his lip, where he touched it lightly
with his tongue before wiping it away with a clean, white handkerchief.
"It's a hot one," he'd said, now avoiding her gaze.
"Mmhm." She'd let a little of the power slide out along
the hummed syllables, then dammed it up behind an icy wall of teasing indifference.
"Cross the highway," she'd instructed. "Right on the outer road. Three
blocks."
He'd looked to the door, and then back to her. "I'm the
new assistant priest. I hope to see you on Sunday."
"Sorry, not Catholic." She was pushing him away now,
enlarging the wall of ice until it stood between them like a swelling glass
wave.
"Give it a chance," he'd said as he backed toward the
door. "It's the most fun you'll ever have with your
clothes on."
His very un-priestly parting shot had pissed her off,
so Sunday morning she was in the front row, wearing a low-cut black dress,
four inch spike heels, and earrings made of sparkling faceted mirrors that
reflected the altar lights right onto the pulpit when she turned her head
just so. To introduce the new assistant priest to the congregation, Father
Mike had been assigned the first reading, a passage from the Song of Solomon:
"How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O Prince's daughter,"
he'd intoned, his voice a musical, lush baritone. "Your rounded thighs
are like jewels, the handiwork of an artist. Your navel is a round bowl
that should never lack for mixed wine. Your body is a heap of wheat encircled
with lilies. Your breasts are twin fawns, the young of a gazelle..."
He was staring right down her open dress as he spoke.
She'd crossed and uncrossed her bare legs, shifted in her seat to give
him a better view. A reflected rainbow from hear earrings danced across
his face.
"Your neck is like a tower of ivory. Your eyes are like
the pools in Heshbon..."
The power erupted: Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she was
Solomon's bride, bedecked in splendor, breasts free and heaving as she
felt herself standing, swaying forward, reaching out to touch him...
Father Mike stopped reading, made a strangled cough-ing
noise, begged the congregation's pardon as he shot away from the pulpit
and disappeared into the vestry.
Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she was back in the pew, black
dress tight around her, crossing her legs firmly now against the smell
of sex rising from her soaked panties. A bustle had broken out as the senior
priest ordered the second reader prematurely to the microphone and the
congregation gossiped busily about their strange new hire, but no one had
seemed to notice anything unusual about her. As with Sid in the bookstore,
it had been a private show, just between them.
They'd become lovers the following Saturday night when,
just as she was about to lock up the station and head over to Sid's, Father
Mike pulled in driving a long, green station wagon still loaded with boxes
he had yet to unpack. They'd done it right there, standing in front of
the dark gas pumps, then again in her car, since his was full. They'd lain
curled together for a long time, watching the stars through the curving
backseat window, the pale moon rising hungry over the highway, when she'd
decided to toss him one last treat before sending him home, just to ensure
that she owned him - not like poor neutered Sid, but like a favored toy
she might return to for pleasure again and again. She'd taken him into
her mouth, moved her wet lips up and down, slowly at first, then faster,
harder, but he would not rise to her touch. Finally, he'd pushed her gently
away.
"I think I'm spent," he'd said, shyly. "I'm sorry, but
I really have to go. I have a homily to write."
She'd rolled up onto her knees and smiled down at him.
"Maybe this will help," then Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, the Blessed Virgin Mary
whirled into being, blue robes flowing, a gleaming silver halo floating
in the air above her. She'd dropped her head again to his lap and found
him rock hard, alive in her mouth. He came instantly, then shoved her away,
slamming her into the far door.
"You whore!" He was shaking violently, pulling his scattered
clothes to him, grabbing frantically behind him for the door handle. He'd
rolled out onto the pavement, naked, his wadded pants clutched before him
like a shield. "Whore!" he'd shouted again and again as he scrambled to
his station wagon, fumbled the key into the ignition. "Whore! Whore!" as
he'd skidded onto the highway and vanished into the night.
She'd missed every Saturday game since that night with
Father Mike, perfecting her transformative skills on her own, expanding
her sphere of influence until she owned the Mobile station manager, Sid's
boss at Motorola, the mayor's son, Paul, who let her drive his fully-restored
'68 Mustang as fast as she wanted on the dark back roads, and, most recently,
Steve's sister's fiancé, Reggie, a hopeless romantic for whom she
became a graceful, white swan, a frail southern belle, a fig-leafed Eve
stealing his innocence in the walled garden behind his magnificent three
story house - a house he would soon share with Steve's frigid sister, a
woman she was growing to hate as much as she had gradually come to hate
Steve, the one man in all Albuquerque seemingly immune to her powers.
She liked Reggie, really liked him, and she had come
to realize that she wanted him to really like her back - not just belong
to her the way Sid and the others did, but to like her for her, to like
Linda Herman, and not simply lust after Mercuria. But like the others,
he was under her spell, mesmerized by Mercuria's superhuman allure. Was
that all there would ever be between them? Would he welcome the revelation
of the woman behind the mask? She had, herself, leaped blindly into Mercuria's
exhilar-ating world to escape that woman's gray life. Would things be any
different with Reggie? Could Linda Herman be any more real or special or
important to Reggie than she had been to Steve? To herself?
She blew a kiss to the station manager, who had come
in himself to make sure she got the evening off, stuffed the awful teal
dress onto the passenger seat, then laughed, a little sadly, from that
deep, hidden place as she turned the key and gunned the car out into traffic.
Love and super powers had never been very success-fully
mixed, at least in the two-dimensional realm of the comics. The obvious
hubris of believing such things should work differently for her, just because
she was her, grated quietly at the hidden pillars of her self-confidence,
but she brushed the feelings aside and forced her eyes to take in the road
ahead. She'd have to sort out the personal stuff later. Right now, Mercuria
had a wedding to stop.
The narrow entranceway was jammed as tuxedoed groomsmen
fought their way through a hoop-skirted, teal obstacle course to line up
for the processional. Someone knocked over a little table of programs that
scattered like snow under their shoes. Steve, Reggie's Best Man, slid past
her without a glance to man his post beside the teary-eyed Maid of Honor.
Reggie was already at the front beside Father Mike, awaiting their entrance.
Handel's Coro began in the distance.
Steve hooked the Maid of Honor's arm and started down
the aisle. When her turn came, Linda followed, arm in arm with Reggie's
brother or cousin or friend, a plain body in a tuxedo whose name she hadn't
bothered to ask, even sitting next to him at the rehearsal dinner. She
didn't look at him now. She kept her eyes straight ahead, fixed on Reggie.
Reggie was watching her, too, his eyes filled with a
dreamy hunger she new Steve's sister could never feed. As she baby-stepped
forward in slow time to the music, she felt Reggie's eyes on her, eyes
finding her from every corner of the room, male eyes, and then the power
swirling up from her groin, electrifying her skin. The moment had arrived.
Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she was an elegant, woman-sized
swan, all curving neck and ivory wings, exuding sweet perfume as she glided
toward Reggie's opening arms.
But the arms weren't opening to receive her. They were
reaching for Steve, turning him around, cupping an ear. Steve's gaze hit
her like a shotgun blast. Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and the graceful bird exploded
in a spray of bloody feathers. The teal dress was back, suddenly dingy,
threads loose at the seams, a full shade paler than the dresses around
her, like a wash and wear hand-me-down washed one too many times.
What? Steve was mouthing silently. Reggie shrugged, raised
an empty hand. The hunger in his eyes was mixed now with pale confusion,
jittery fear, but his gaze stayed fixed loyally on her. The moment Steve's
attention waver-ed, she felt the power returning.
Father Mike stared down into the black cover of his Bible
as she turned after the first row of pews and followed the other bridesmaids
into line. She was standing less than four feet away. He would have to
acknowledge her eventually, but she had nothing special in store for him
today, or ever again, as far as she was concerned. He was no longer beautiful.
He seemed to have aged decades since she'd last seen him. Scowling in his
pastoral robes, he looked like any bitter celibate performing a ceremony
whose fruits he would never personally taste - to his parishioners knowledge,
anyway.
There was a break in the music, then the first chords
of Mendelssohn's Wedding March sent the stained glass windows humming in
their panes. The congregation stood as one and turned to face the wide
rear doors.
And like water swirling down a rusted metal tub, Mercuria
sunk through her feet into the floor, leaving her groin an empty hollow,
her skin numb and lifeless beneath the off-teal dress. The power was gone.
She suddenly couldn't imagine what she had hoped to accomplish with the
swan, with showing up for the wedding at all. To make Reggie love her?
To drive him to call off the wedding? To bring him running down the aisle
to her side on his own wedding day, in front of God and Steve and two families
who would never forgive him? Thanks to Steve, whatever naïve expectations
she'd had coming in were blown. And she hadn't made a Plan B. Steve glanced
over, and she smiled back wanly, feeling bland and stupid and alone.
The bride was already front and center. Her gray, tuxedoed
father placed her hand into Reggie's, then slipped into a seat.
"Dearly beloved," Father Mike began, his voice thin,
harsher than she recalled, "We are gathered here today in the sight of
God to witness the joining of Reggie Andrews and Christina Herman in the
Sacrament of Holy Matrimony."
Linda Andrews, she thought. If it had been her up there,
she would still have had two first names. She looked at Reggie looking
at his bride with eyes she'd never seen and knew she was losing him. Mercuria
or no Mercuria, she had to do something.
"The Sacrament of Marriage is a solemn and lifelong commitment,
not to be entered into lightly. If there is anyone among you who has reason
to protest this union, let him speak now or forever hold his peace."
Now. She had to act now. She cleared her throat in the
solemn silence and opened herself to the power, begged Mercuria to rise
up and through her, to return and take her whole. "I object," she said,
her voice as dry and fragile as a moth's powdery wings.
Every eye in the church turned on her, and the power
exploded like a geyser from her skin. Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and massive
silver chains spun out of her own arms and legs, binding her, dragging
her down and forward under their terrible weight. Steve's hateful stare
painted the shining links teal, but too many eyes were on her, pulling
her in a hundred directions. She crashed into the altar, scattering wafers
like shaved ice. Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she became a Japanese Geisha,
a slave bound in stocks, a beaten, bleeding witch strapped to a smoldering
stake. Men's eyes had always made her beautiful, exotic, clothed her in
the glorious variety of their desires; now they shaped and reshaped her
in a cruel series of variations on a single theme: Be quiet, woman...
"Reggie..." But Father Mike had turned to acknowledge
her at last, his eyes burning through her like angry, red suns. Swisha-bodda-whoosh!,
and her mouth was gone. She became a great, pale breast, swelling and swelling,
spilling over the altar and into the aisle, toppling bridesmaids like bowling
pins in her wake.
She's drunk! The bitch is drunk! Steve's voice drifted
to her as if from far away. Drunk? What the hell was he seeing? Plain Linda
Herman bouncing over the wedding party like some teal taffeta beach ball?
Were any two people seeing her the same, as they took turns humiliat-ing
her according to their own sadistic lusts?
Of course Steve would see her as her. He had no lust
for her, never saw her as anything more than Linda the dowdy housewife,
a possession like his car, his briefcase, his blessed reputation. She rolled
to him, flattened him in the aisle, covering him whole with her pink, eye-like
aureole, then rotated, sucking him up on top of her, his body a shield
against the congregation's groping eyes. Look hard, you bastard! she commanded
mouthlessly, See me!
Swisha-bodda-whoosh!, and she was back to herself, drab
and breathless under Steve's weight, but whole again. She cropped him hard
in the testicles, rabbit-kicked his writhing form under a pew, then sprinted
for the side exit and out into the sightless, black safety of the night.
If Paul, the Mayor's son, hadn't meant for her to take
the '68 mustang, he should never have given her keys. It was small compensation,
really, for all the entertainment she'd afforded him and the others, never
considering that it might have been at her own expense. She thought of
Steve carousing at the reception, drinking with his friends, framing her
story by conniving story into a careful picture-box of insanity, painting
himself the sympathetic victim, solidifying his precious reputation in
the looking-glass world now shrinking away behind her in the rear view
mirror. She raised her middle finger to the night and rammed the gas pedal
into the floorboard.
The creatures of Sid's comic book fantasy world, Father
Mike's Virgin, Reggie's sweet swans and belles and endless permutations
of innocence offered up and taken... She'd wanted power, and she'd gotten
it. But had she ever really been in control? Had she, herself, been so
mesmerized by Mercuria's power that she had written off Linda Herman from
the start, never even considering her own will or desires, what the singular
appearance of Mercuria within Linda Herman might mean to herself - for
herself? She had allowed herself to be used, had used herself as callously
as had the men she'd lusted to hold power over.
In the silence of the car, she felt Mercuria resting
deep within her, a placid lake waiting for a breeze, a pool of liquid fire
satisfied to bubble quietly until some focused will called her to erupt.
As her thoughts touched Mercuria, she felt the power stir just a little,
then settle again as a single tear spilled over onto her cheek.
Could it really be that simple? Had she simply never
tried? Steve was right; she had been drunk, stupid drunk on an adolescent
power trip, with all the clichéd self-doubt that entailed. But she
was sobering now with every mile the deserted highway carried her beyond
the mistakes of Mercuria's first weeks of life toward the discovery of
her own will and the shaping of her own solid future - a future in which
the only eyes that measured Linda Herman's worth and strength and beauty
would be her own.
She laughed from a deep, no longer so well-hidden place
as she passed the Albuquerque city limits sign and rocketed into suburbia.
A few more miles and the road would break onto clear, white sands, sparkling
like a million stars under the silver moon, then Paradise, and beyond that
the winding mountain road that would take her up, up and away from the
Land of Enchantment.