But try as he might, he could not fully enjoy it. Even blood didn't make him feel any better.
In the morning she felt ... better.
It was an odd sensation, but the bleak pessimism of the! night before had fled, replaced by a cautious optimism. It j was as if the tears of last night had washed away her| doubts and fears.
And had brought new insight.
Penelope sat up. Kevin was still asleep, having crawled| back to his own bed sometime during the night, and she;; crept out of bed an dover to the window, where she liftedj one of the blinds and peeked outside. The morning clear, sunny, a rare occurrence, and that made her fe even better.
Throughout everything, she had tried to forget the fa that she was a maenad, had tried to deny and suppres$| that aspect of herself.
But, she realized now, that was exactly what might save them.
It was the maenads who, each fall, tore Dionysus apart 1 in a frenzy of blood lust.
She stared out at the blue sky.
She knew what she had to do.
Kevin awoke an hour or so later.
Penelope turned away from the window, watched him climb out of bed. "You know," she said, "I never used to like you."
Kevin recoiled, mock offended. "Moi?"
She smiled. "You seemed so ... I don't know. So^ tough."
"Tough?" Kevin laughed. The sound was loud, natural, and seemed depressingly out of place in these circum-J
stances. "What, you thought I was some type of gang banger?"
"Not exactly that. You just seemed ... I don't know."
"You think I'm tough now?"
She shook her head, grinned. "You're a pussy."
He laughed again, pulled on his shirt. "So it's back down to the two of us. What now?"
"We have to kill him."
He stared at her. "I thought you said he was still Dion, that we can't kill him, you wouldn't let us."
"It's the only way." She took a deep breath. "Dion's not coming back."
"But--"
"I think he'd want us to do this."
Kevin thought for a moment. "How could we do it? How could we even get close to him?"
"I think," she said slowly, "that I need to get drunk."
"No!"
"Maybe not drunk," she conceded. "But I think I need to have some wine.
It's the only way I can tap into ... whatever it is."
"You'll be--"
"Just like them?" She shook her head. "I don't think so. I won't drink so much that I'll be out of control. I'll just drink enough to alter my perceptions a little."
"But what will that do?"
"It'll help me be what I'm supposed to be."
"A maenad?"
"A maenad."
"And what then?"
"I'll tear him apart."
The silence hung between them. Kevin cleared his throat, started to speak, then lapsed into silence.
"I didn't ask to be born this way," Penelope said softly. "But it's what I am. I can fight it, I can ignore it. Or I can use it to our advantage." She walked over to the bed, sat down next to him. "I've been thinking long and hard about this, and it's the only way. It's our only chance. It's what's supposed to happen anyway. I'm just ... speeding things up."
He managed a small smile. "You've been thinking 'long and hard,' huh?
I bet you liked that."
She punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Come on -Let's scrounge up some breakfast. We're going to the our energy."
They'd found an unopened bottle of wine in the back o| one of the kitchen cupboards. The renter of the apartment was obviously no drinker, but someone had apparently given him or her a bottle of wine as a housewarming present, and the bottle, still wrapped with a red ribbon was waiting for them behind a sack of flour.
Penelope pulled it out, read the label. "Gallo," she said smiling. "Not Daneam, but I suppose it'll do."
She had not partaken yet, not trusting herself, wanting to wait until the last minute, until she was ready to use it and it was on the car seat between them as Kevin drove.!
Wine.
She kept glancing at the bottle, feeling anxious, expeclj tant, wanting to open it and drink it all in one swallowjjf That worried her.
She hoped she was doing the right thing.
Their clothes were filthy and smelly from the past sev*j eral days, but clothes at all were unusual here, and she'f made Kevin take off his shirt, had used the scissors turn his jeans into cutoffs. She'd felt him through pants as she'd cut, her fingers instinctively curling around the outline of his erection, and there was a moment whe she considered taking it out and putting it in her mouth,| a moment when he had obviously wanted her to do jus that. But then she had finished with the pant leg and stc up.
She'd ripped her own clothes to make them even more raggedy than they already were, but she still wasn't satis-f fied that she looked the part. She considered saying some thing light and humorous, turning it into a joke, buf instead turned to Kevin and said simply, "When we gel there, I'm going to take my top off."
He obviously thought about saying something joking in reply, but he merely nodded, saying nothing.
The street in front of the field was blocked with wreck!
age and debris, garbage and rotting animal corpses, and they parked close to the Avis office where she'd ended up last time. Penelope got out of the car, took a deep breath, then pulled off her shirt. The sun was warm on her skin, but she felt cold and more naked, more exposed than she ever had in her life. She looked down at her breasts, saw that the nipples were erect, and she wanted Kevin to look, wanted him to see her, but he kept his eyes purposely averted, trying not to glance at her at all, looking only at her face when he could not avoid it.
She took the bottle of wine out of the car.
They walked.
The air felt good on her body, the bottle felt good in her hand, and she realized that she was enjoying this. She was having fun. For the first time since Dion had ... changed, she felt happy.
God, she hoped she wasn't going to screw this up.
They reached the edge of the field. It was, if possible, even more crowded than before. In addition to the celebrants, there were satyrs and nymphs, centaurs and griffins, and though such a scene might have looked delightfully pastoral in a painting or a Beethoven-scored segment of Fantasia, the reality was something else. The creatures before them were not only base and dirty, they were threatening, frightening, scary not only for the wildness of their demeanor and the anger of their expressions but for the unnaturalness of their existence.
A centaur stomped on one of the griffins, and with an ear-piercing screech the eagle-headed creature rose into the air and attacked, dive-bombing the centaur, lion's claws tearing into its horse back.
A green-tinted nymph, watching the scene, smiled wickedly, started rubbing herself.
Penelope grabbed Kevin's hand, pulled him forward. "Here goes."
As she'd expected, as she'd hoped, they were not molested. No one hindered their progress, no one got in their way. No one seemed to notice that they were here at all. Dionysus knew, she was sure, but he sent no one after them, made no effort to stop them.
They could have done this days ago, she thought. There was no way the celebrants would have known that they weren't of them.
They were stupid to have run, stupid to have hidden. Dionysus and the maenads were dangerous, but the rest of them were sheep, mindless zombies, existing only for hedonistic pleasures. She and Kevin and Jack and Holbrook had ascribed far too much sense of purpose to Dionysus'
followers. They had given the bacchantes more credit than they deserved.