“What the hell?” I shouted, as I found myself plummeted back into my body, Blondie looming above me. I’d somehow ended up flat on my back. “I was you!” I accused her. “In a cave! What the fuck just happened?” I demanded, sitting up as she sank down next to me.

“Didn’t I tell you about my tats?” she asked, running a hand up her arm and shivering, her eyes closing to slits for a second.

“Yeah, um, no,” I said, watching her touching her tattoos, feeling my face flush with heat.

“They’re not just ink,” she said. “They’re my memories.”

“What does that mean?”

“I imbued them with my memories. So that I wouldn’t forget things from my past, no matter how long I lived.”

I blinked at her. “Wow… why?”

She snorted a laugh, and then moved so we were sitting side-by-side, her muscular forearm close to mine. I resisted the urge to touch another tattoo.

“You’ve seen what happens to the really ancient. Eventually they stop living and just survive.”

“So, to combat that, you put all your best memories in your tats?”

“Not just my best. Some of my worst, too. And not just anything I enjoyed or hated. I tried to choose memories that made me who I am. The memories that really made me feel.”

I looked up into her clear blue eyes. “That’s amazing. Did it work?”

“You tell me. You’ve seen enough Alfar. Am I like them?”

I couldn’t help but smile, thinking of her energy—her life. “No. You’re not like them.”

“You can touch, if you want,” she said, her voice soft, inviting.

“But they’re your memories. Isn’t that… too much?”

“Not for you. I know you’re coming to our world late. I’ve seen what can happen to people like you who don’t know what they’re in for. I’ve no doubt you’ve noticed things that give you pause, because you’re someone who watches and thinks. But still. Near-immortality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I thought of the cold Alfar and their preternatural calm; the sadism of creatures like Graeme, bored over the millennia into monsters; hell, even the kindly selfishness of Ryu I saw as an extension of his long life. Although short by Alfar standards, he’d lived long enough to become set in his ways, while being entirely unaware that he’d become so.

So I reached my fingers toward Blondie, not knowing where to start. When I paused, she drew herself up to pull her shirt over her head. Then she guided my fingers to her naked abdomen, laying my hand over her muscular stomach. When my palm came into contact with the small skull and crossbones lurking right beside her navel, I was suddenly standing onboard a ship plunging through rough waters, foam and water all about me as a storm formed overhead.

I was shouting commands, my Spanish perfect, as my crew hustled around me, preparing for the storm… but not just for the storm. For we knew the English merchant ship was only a few miles off our starboard bow, and that she’d be floundering in such seas even worse than we…

“You were a pirate?” I gasped, coming to myself as Blondie withdrew my hand.

“Among many other trades,” she replied, smirking. I wanted to ask her more, but soon enough she’d moved my hand to where a woman’s head, her hair bobbed like a flapper, stared out from over Blondie’s left hipbone.

Her stomach pressed against mine as we kissed, our tongues entwined. Her breast moved beneath my questing fingers and she moaned sharply when they found her nipple roughly. My own body grew wetter at the sound of her pleasure. I loved her, even knowing she didn’t feel the same for me. I’d learned it didn’t matter. For, love or no love, they all died and left me alone…

Tears pricked my own eyes as I met Blondie’s blue ones, but she was already moving my hand to her left shoulder. My fingertips grazed over what looked suspiciously like a…

I stood, unable to contain my awe at the marvel before me. Shining wood and gleaming white porcelain combined in such a way that I would have thought it art had I not already had its function explained to me. Unable to believe it really did what my hosts said, I reached out a hand toward the wooden handle hanging from its chain and I pulled… and to my delight the water did, indeed, swirl away…

“You tattooed the invention of toilets?” I asked, only to see Blondie shrug.

“It changed everything. It really did. I’ve got the invention of toothpaste on my right calf,” she said, but instead she moved my hand to her right shoulder and a large, tattered flag.

Her first real battle; her first real war. No longer mere skirmishes between the upstarts calling themselves Alfar and her people. We weren’t different races, the idiots, and yet they were so intent on subjugating everything different from them to their will that they can’t see what’s obvious…

“The Alfar,” I said and gasped. “Not a different species?” And this time my hand moved on its own, seeking across Blondie’s flesh for answers.

I saw the end of the battle of the Black Flag. The Alfar had brought with them something old; something foul. They’d raised it from its sleep, and it had laid waste to everything in its path. It went after those Alfar that had awoken it, first, then had moved on to the rest of the Alfar on the field of battle. But we did not rejoice at the fall of our enemies, for we knew the creature wouldn’t stop there. We also knew if we attacked, we would suffer terrible losses.

And we knew that the Alfar generals—sitting miles away on a distant hilltop—had planned this all along.

My people charged, and when it was over, nearly everyone who’d fought that day was dead, our side, and their’s. But those who fought on my side didn’t keep ourselves back on mountains and let others do our fighting. Indeed, I was one of the only warriors of my kind to leave that place alive; but the Alfar had hundreds held back on that mountain. I knew, then, they would harry us to extinction…

My hand moved down Blondie’s arm, wanting more.

Images of women, children, things… a sea of emotion flooded over me… fighting, loving, quiet moments with friends, the deaths and births of so many loved ones…

Blondie moved my hands to her back, all new sensations and images pouring through me as she lifted my shirt, gently, letting my skin press against hers.

An assault of images, sensations, a jumble being processed slowly—too slowly—by this brain… so much experienced, so much learned… so many terrible fashions endured… Weeping, I called out for those who were gone as, laughing, I relived that first time we drank together, or joked together, only to have that person fade in time and space, my only constants were my loneliness, my mission, and my tattoos…

So hungry for her kisses, the pretty thing, so sad and so alone for so long… but now I’ve got you, don’t I, pretty… hands searching, hers finding, yes, sweet thing, yes, harder, yes, lips so small, yes, her taste, yesyesyesyes…

Only then did I realize that I had my hand on a tattoo of a splay-legged woman, her thighs spread across Blondie’s pubic bone. My mouth was on the Original’s, and I didn’t know whose pleasure I was experiencing—mine or hers, with the woman who inspired the tat. I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to be making out with the woman underneath me.

Anyan’s a dog for one night and you’ve already got your hands down someone else’s pants, my virtue clucked.

My libido took a bow.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Overwhelmed by sensations, I pulled away from Blondie, sitting up. I discovered I was straddling her, my shirt rucked up nearly to my neck from where I’d been pressing myself against her. She had her hands on my ass, and didn’t look too upset about the contact.

“I’m sorry,” I said, throwing my leg over her so that I was sitting on the ground instead of on top of her. “That was intense.”

“I’ve lived a long time,” was her only reply, her lips twitching in a little smirk as she sat up and then reached for her shirt and pulled it back on.

“Still, I shouldn’t have… Did we make out?”

“Well… sort of,” she said, winking at me. “But don’t worry, I won’t tell. Unless you want me to. And it was just because of the tats… People sometimes have strong reactions.”

“They’re…” I began, reaching out my fingers to stroke over a little bit of tattoo tracing out of Blondie’s sleeve. But I stopped myself. “Amazing,” I finished.

“And chicks dig ’em,” she quipped.

“No, seriously,” I insisted, trying to worm past her defenses. I’d been immersed in her, nearly literally, and I knew she wasn’t merely the lovable rogue she pretended to be. All thoughts of mistrusting Blondie fled. “They’re amazing. And you’re amazing. The life you’ve lived… and then to do what you did, with the tattoos. To include those particular memories. So clever.” I wasn’t quite up to full brain power, all my blood and attention having been spread out to other areas.