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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: Anima meets animus, anima loses animus, anima regains animus? A woman fleeing an abusive relationship comes face-to-face with a surprising part of herself just when she needs him most.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Skin of the Soul, ed. Lisa Tuttle, 1990
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2002

20 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [31 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [27 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [17 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [73 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [18 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [53 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [88 KB] , hiebook (KML) [70 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [46 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [15 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [19 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [47 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [28 KB]
Words: 5420
Reading time: 15-21 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

She woke from a deep sleep as if from general anesthesia. There was the sudden awareness that time had passed and events had occurred and she had not been present, and the additional realization that things had happened to her. Then there was pain, gradually increasing as she probed downward from her brain to her heart and her gut and her crotch, each of which hurt in its own unique and nonphysical way. The wounds were emotional; but they had been inflicted in her sleep while she lay helpless, and no malpractice suit could be filed against her mind.

She wondered what had been removed this time.

After the dunes had gone, she watched his descent through the still, dark air, a throb of it around him coalescing into a mist. Under his glittering black eyes, his heart-shaped mouth on her throat was a needle-bright sting of white teeth ringed by a sensuous suction. She felt weak and light-headed, and reached for him, but grasped only mist. The damp squeezed through her as desolate tears, and she surfaced crying into the pillow. The dry, unsatisfying dream tears gave no relief to her body's strained ache, but it could have been worse; it had been a different dream this time, with minimal violence. The room was chilly and she reached for the comforter, more awake now, depressed but alert. She turned over against a warm bulk, and froze.

Larger than the cat, it breathed and therefore could be neither a tangled blanket nor her giant teddy bear. It felt like none of her old lovers, and there were no current ones.

And it moved.

"Who are you and what do you want," she asked in a flat voice.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," came the soft reply from just behind her head. It had an odd hint of amusement in it, and desperation, and a brittle timbre like the echo off a picket fence.

He did not touch her, or speak further; almost unobtrusive, he left her afloat in a passive paralysis. Would he strike if she moved? Would he constrict her with that giggling male enjoyment of strength, would he--

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded, the old bitterness welling into rage that thrust her from him into the black air--toward the door, the light switch, her robe--while the skin of her back convulsed with the expectation of a blow.

"If you turn on the light, you will recognize me," he offered pleasantly, but the warning in it stopped her hand halfway to the switch. For a moment her fingers poised in the shadows, and then her palm slammed down fiercely on the jutting plastic.

There was no one in the room.

And then the phone rang.