Raina stared, watching the tall blonde man uncoil an amp cord patched with electrical tape before plugging it into the familiar beat up axe on the half empty stage. It was, it really was—"Yo." A girl taller than Raina sat down hard on the stool beside while a tall, dark-haired man with an adolescent boy wearing oddly old fashioned suits stood nonchalantly off to one side, eyes fixed on the two women, the bar patrons moving through them.
"Hell, if this's s'posed to be a dream, why not two guys nobody but me sees staring at us?" Raina thought. "Anyway, what's long drink want? If she wants a fight, well, she'll get one!" Raina squinted through the cigarette haze at the newcomer thinking she might be the cat girl, but maybe not.
No cat ears, for starters.
She looked again. Nope, no cat ears, but tall girl did have close-cropped blonde hair and intense blue eyes set in a square face with a slightly pointed cleft chin that vaguely reminded Raina of… Mike's?
Yeah, she looked like Mike if he'd had a…a… little sister? Cousin? ...daughter? The lanky intruder studied Raina with calculatingly narrowed eyes and then gave an abrupt jerk of her head so that her multiple ear piercings glittered and swung against the dark brown leather of her scuffed bomber jacket and makeupless face.
Somebody poked Raina from the other side, interrupting the stare-down when she turned to tell the whoever it was to fuck off, only to lock eyes with the same face on a shorter, curvier body; like Betty Boop's punk granddaughter had Betty Boop ever bothered to reproduce.
Trapped between the mirror of two identical faces, but not exactly in the mood for a dust-up, Raina nonchalantly turned and focused on the stage behind them. The taller of the two clamped a large, long-fingered hand down on Raina's shoulder, pinning her in place whispering in an echoing hiss that cut through every sound in the Bronze, "So you think you can take Uncle away from us, bitch?"
"Uncle? Who the hell's your uncle, little girl?" Raina freed her shoulder and leaning back on the bar on her elbows, took a long pull from the longneck in her hand feigning unconcern. She glanced up at the stage at the other end of the room on the off chance that Mike was still setting up if the dream or whatever this was turned out to be how they'd spent the evening together on stage that night once upon a long, long time ago.
"You know who he is… bitch." The smaller of the two leered up at her, exposing long sharp canines. Her tongue lolled like a dog's… no, a fox's inches, from Raina's face.
Raina put a hand squarely in the thing's chest, and gave a firm push.
Bracing herself against the bar, foxy abruptly snapped her mouth shut, dark lips curling in a sneer, gesturing at the stage at the back of the room, "Bitch, we don't care what you two were on the other side of life. You can't have him back, he's ours now, we made him: he belongs to us!"
"Why would he want something like, like you?" the taller one sniggered nastily, leaning in on Raina once more, "You ho'! You're flatter than I am and I was fourteen when the purple guy and my twin created me with blood and hot irons!"
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust – why wear a bra when you got no bust?" Shorty jeered, adding, "You look more like a boy than a girl. Only a molester would want you!"
Giggling, tall girl chimed in, "Anorexic much? Bulimia? Yo, babe! What's it like to barf up everything you've ever eaten to fit someone else's idea of beauty? Joke's on you baby: only dogs like bones!"
"I'm not… what the hell are you talking about? I never… Mike didn't care that I wasn't a girly girl!" Trying not to show that their little High School locker room jabs had landed a little too close, Raina took another deep pull of beer.
"Little do you know – but we doooooooooooooo." Cooed lil'bit, walking her dark-nailed fingers up Raina's arm, "He likes currrrrrrves… and biiiiiiiig tits!" She snapped her fingers in Raina's face and Raina slapped her hand away. It was cold and hard and her fingers tingled from the impact.
"We should know; we made him!" Talldrink jeered, adding, "You broke him, so he's ours, not yours! He loves us, not you, never you!" Talldrink's slit pupils blossomed into black pools as she crowded in on Raina, snatching the beer bottle out of Raina's hand and smashing it down on the edge of the bar. Broken amber glass and beer sprayed out from the impact in a slow motion peacock's tail, glittering shards and drops wobbling and turning with infinite slowness before Raina's eyes as the man and the boy that came in behind the fox and the cat put their heads together.
The red-eyed man bent to the boy with the single blue black eye and eye patch, a sardonic smile splitting his narrow pale face, murmuring, "Outside of time, you and the cat shall meet. She will ease your heart." He straightened, adjusting his immaculate white gloves. Who the hell wears gloves when it's not a formal dress parade?
One-eye brushed his ragged dark hair away from his face, black coat billowing around him, "And the dark lady who walks like a man?"
(At this Raina frowned, exclaiming, "I do not! (I think. Maybe?)")
"That one?" The taller man said dismissively, silky voice dopplering in and out of Raina's ears. "In the mirror, you will meet her in another body. You will know her by her eyes. Now away, we've pressing matters to attend to." He made a lazy gesture with one spotless gloved hand as the two disappeared in a bird-shaped roar of flame, unnoticed by the people around Raina as they moved through the hot, syrupy air until with a blink everything sped up again and Raina's heartbeat was no longer thunder in her ears, back to reality.
A reality where Raina saw Mike, up on the stage, plugging his old pawn shop bass into an amp when only a few seconds ago there'd been a lame speed metal band with a lead guitarists who should have been garroted with his own E string before he'd ever been allowed to plug into his amp.
"What was that, bitch?" Raina snarled, turning a tin soldier missing a leg that hadn't been there before over and over between her fingers as she tried to look past the cat, the fox, and the milling crowd of bar patrons at the man as he tuned the bass which was now slung over his neck, the fat man with red stubble trudging past him with yet another bag of garbage towards the back door beside the stage.
