and booked it like felons. Marc was first to reach his target, but invoked a holy hell for the ages as he found the door jammed. He guessed Riona was having the same problem, based on the frantic jingling of the metal handle on her side of the room, punctuated by under-her-breath cussing.
He heard Riona’s fist make contact with the hard laminate of the door. “What the devil?”
“Isn’t it obvious? It’s locked.”
“But who would have locked the door? Dee?”
“Dee wouldn’t do that. Maybe it was you. Maybe a panic thing you did when you found out I was in the room?”
“Reactionary magic? Like, something I wasn’t even conscious of?”
“You walked through the wall of the meat locker without knowing you could do it,” Marc countered over his shoulder, his peripheral vision catching the vague outline of her very precise frame.
“That was a case of life and death. The magic followed the motivation; I can’t walk through walls now if I try to do it on purpose. Why would I lock the doors so you couldn’t leave as a reaction to fear?”
A foreign squirm in his insides made Marc wonder if he might have developed a spontaneous parasitic infection. “Because subconsciously, you know I’d protect you from anything. Maybe you wanted to be stuck in here…” His head turned a bit more, and though Riona’s perfectly-curved assets were well on display, it was her eyes that locked on him now as she, too, tilted her head to meet his gaze. “… with me.”
Was she blushing? Or were her checks still crimson from her time in the hot tub? “Marc?”
Like the last line of a bad joke, the handle of a third door, the one that led into a hall from the lobby of the gym, began to jingle. As the door cracked, two unfamiliar feminine voices poured into the soundscape.
Marc looked to Riona and Riona looked to Marc, before both looked in desperation to the open supply closet at the back of the room. All thoughts of propriety and modesty were pushed aside as they both dove into the darkness of their last refuge. The two blue-haired grannies must not have seen them, as they proceeded into the tub like nothing was afoot.
“Fuck!” Riona’s voice was an airy shout-whisper. “Fuckity-fuck-fuck.”
“You could say that three times,” Marc agreed as he instinctively, mysteriously found himself pushing her in the dim light of the closet behind his body protectively.
“I thought I just did.”
The gym’s building plan hadn’t been drawn up with the closet as a place for anything but a few mops. Riona rolled up on her tiptoes and craned her neck over Marc’s shoulder. Through the crack in the door appeared the senior citizens in the tub, like two white raisins in a pot of boiling water.
“I can go. I don’t have anything they haven’t seen before.” Riona pressed forward, her soft body pushing with disproportionate force against his back.
Marc, however, splayed out his arms, impeding her efforts. “And just what the hell do you expect me to do?”
Riona strained for a better angle. “Unless you keep something else beneath your vestiges not found on other men, I doubt you have anything they haven’t seen before either.”
“Seriously!”
Riona groaned. “Fine. Look, there’s this one charm Ramiel taught last week, but it’s a little tricky…”
The priest saw a glimmer of his faith flash before his eyes. “What does it do?”
“Makes me invisible,” she answered. Marc looked back over his shoulder, careful not to look too far down. She nodded. “Yes, invisible. I’m not supposed to tell anyone, he said. I guess I’m not supposed to know how to do it.”
“Masking the human body from existence is against the rules of conduct the Council established for Pure Souls,” Marc whispered. “He wasn’t kidding; you’re not supposed to know how to do that.”
“But I do.”
“Yeah, damned good for us, too. Can you cast it over me too?”
He felt her dampened hair against his neck as her chin set upon his shoulder. Despite the chill standing dripping wet in a closet should have gave him, he suddenly felt flushed and dizzy.
“Yeah, it’s a bit hard, but I think I can do it. I can get us out into the main hall, and we can get into the locker rooms from the front. Only thing is, you have to hold onto me the whole time.”
His tongue was going to choke him. “Why?”
“The magic is easier to spread when I have physical contact.”
Oh, God, kill me now. “Okay.”
He felt her