PART 2.

Kitty dreams.

She carves out a space here, keeping herself separate, and around her images swim. A quiet room and a smiling boy. A monster in a pentacle. Laughter and books. The times when she was happy reflected in a pair of black eyes.

All the colours around her swirl in celestial harmony. Perhaps she should be afraid - once, forever ago, she was - but the energy around her folds her in this time, taking her thoughts and fears and most private shames and accepts them. Accepts her.

And, for the eternity that was only a bare few seconds, she just lets herself be.

Forbidden

Can beauty tame the demon?

A new play by award-winning playwright Timothy K Richardson

"Will challenge you, entice you... A tour de force of controversial storytelling." - Cashmere Magazine

"You have got to be kidding me." Kitty yanked the poster down in disbelief.

Bartimaeus poked his head over her shoulder. "Ooh, what's that?"

Kitty's nose wrinkled in distaste. "The girl's even fainting. Oh, and the spirit has yellow eyes so you know he's a demon. And are his ears pointed?" she groaned. "They are. It's Swans of Araby all over again."

"Swooning," Bartimaeus pointed out.

Now it was Kitty's turn to look confused. "What?"

"She's swooning, not fainting."

Kitty treated him to one of her patented you're-not-being-funny-you-know frowns.

"I wouldn't expect you to know what a swoon is. You not being the swooning type and all."

She looked at Bartimaeus, wearing his street guise of a breathtakingly handsome young man with dark curls that fell into eyes that sometimes shone gold in the sunlight and had a grin that sometimes made her grit her teeth in frustration and more often made her worries melt away, and then she punched him.

He rubbed his arm in mock resentment. "You're so grumpy before you get your morning coffee. Come on."

.

.

.

He set the steaming mug in front of her and sat opposite.

"It doesn't offend you?" she asked as he slid into his seat. "It's just so... Unrealistic. I've never seen any references to anything like that... Not that I've looked or anything," she added quickly.

Bartimaeus fixed her with a disbelieving stare. "Really Kitty. I thought you had at least some imagination. I've been the slave of magicians – who, I might add, are used to getting their own way – for over five thousand years and you think that not one of them has looked at a shape-changing djinni and considered the possibilities?" He huffed. "You can be adorably naïve."

"That's horrible." Kitty put down her coffee with a clunk. "I mean, I knew the old government was awful, but to, to violate their spirits on that level..."

"Oh, I suppose it happened more often before the Common Era..." Bartimaeus said thoughtfully. "These days it's all demons are wicked and will hurt you when they can. But back then... Well. It was more like lie back and think of Mesopotamia."

Her drink tasted bitter all of a sudden. She stirred more sugar into it. "So you had to? You've... done that before? Gone all Swans of Araby on someone because you were ordered to?"

"Of course." The djinni flashed a toothy grin. "But I've done it without orders too."

"What?" Kitty burst out, then leant forward across the table. "Oh, You are such a liar. You think flesh is disgusting."

If anything, Bartimaeus only showed more teeth at that. "Oh yes. But occasionally appetising. It's like, hmm... You know fried food's bad for you, but sometimes you can't help it. I could tell you some stories..."

"Please," Kitty pleaded, covering her horrified expression with her hands. "Don't."

"There was this vestal virgin back in Rome," Bartimaeus sniggered, "who wasn't a virgin in the least when I was done with her. And Nefertiti! Sometimes I think the only reason I ended up on the wrong side of that revolution was Akhenaten trying to keep me out of her bedchamber. And who do you think 'comforted' poor Gilgamesh after he lost dear Enkidu? Well, half of Uruk actually, the guy got around, but he fit me in somewhere."

Kitty pointed the finger of accusation at him, trying – and failing – to keep a straight face. "You're awful."

Bartimaeus ran slender fingers through his dark curls. "I like to think of myself as a charming rapscallion," he said sniffily. Then he got a truly evil expression and leant forward so they were almost nose to nose. "And if you really want to know? This was the form that we did it in."

"Bartimaeus!"

His laughter rang out, her point of brightness in the dingy cafe.

Kitty forces her heavy eyelids open.

Everything hurts. She feels compressed and strange, and every one of the tiny pains that her body throws at her on a daily basis comes back full force and, somewhere above the pain, her higher self wonders if this is what a summoning feels like.

With a deep sigh she relaxes back into the pillows, waiting for it to subside into the dull ache that had been her constant companion ever since she'd landed herself here.

Then, she smiles. Even in her current state of wooziness she recognises that voice.

"Kitty, Kitty Jones. I want to know which room -"

"Sorry kid, visiting hours aren't for another hour or so, we can only let you in if you're family..."

"If you don't take your hands off me you'll get a detonation in the face, I swear to Marduk."

Her laugh is strained and quickly divulges into a cough. Her throat is still sore from the intubation, but the pain just reminds her that she's still here, and she's still alive, and that now... He's here too.

Bartimaeus, wearing the guise of a dark-skinned young man that she thought she'd never see again, swaggers into the room in that way he has, like he's the best thing ever to happen to it. And Kitty smiles because, to her, he is.

"You really know how to scare a djinni, don't you?" His hands are planted on his narrow hips, head cocked to one side.

Kitty does her best to give him a sarcastic shrug. If that's how he wants to play this, she's happy to play along. "I try."

For a split second, his bravado shatters before her and he looks exactly as young as he isn't and as scared as he shouldn't be. Kitty knows she looks awful – pale and thin and washed out in this washed out room – and if he doesn't make some comment making fun of it she's worried any sense of normalcy will be completely out of their reach.

Thankfully, it's gone as quickly as it appeared. Bartimaeus throws himself dramatically into the guest chair, hooking one ankle on the end of her bed. "I guess it's my fault for worrying about you, anyway. I should have known you wouldn't have a bar of that 'death' thing. Not my Kitty Jones." He winks. "Nice move bullying that idiot Kent kid into summoning me, by the way."

"Couldn't leave you relaxing in the Other Place." Kitty resists the urge to reach out to him. "You'd get lazy."

"Lazy? Me?" Bartimaeus lets out an exaggerated yawn. "Never."

A tired smile pulls at the edges of Kitty's lips and, as always, she's just thankful that he's here.

"Rest," he says, returning the sentiment. "I'll be here when you wake up."

The words mount up on her tongue. There's so much she has to tell him. But, for now, her exhaustion gets the better of her.

Halfway up the stairs, Kitty had to stop to catch her breath.

It had never happened before, and that worried her. Her body let her down more and more each day - with its little aches and niggling pains and expanding web of wrinkles, and the stairs had always been hard on her stiff knees… Her hand tightened around the banister, veins and tendons popping out as if trying to escape.

"Kitty?"

She forced herself to stand up straight. "I'm fine," she said, with all the bravado she didn't feel. "Just tired. You're not -" gasp - "exactly easy to yank out of the Other Place, you know."

"Well, I am a fearsome spirit of vast powers and ancient origin."

Kitty barked a laugh when said fearsome spirit carefully wrapped his sinewy tail around her waist to steady her. "Very fearsome."

"Don't you forget it."

The afternoon sun floods the room with golden light, and the Egyptian boy's dark skin glows. So, Kitty realises sleepily, he's back in Ptolemy's form. He always does that when he's worried.

"Good morning," he says without turning around. "Or, should I say, afternoon. But I suppose I can give you a pass considering your condition."

Kitty coughs. "How magnanimous of you."

"Only for you." Bartimaeus stretches, his long, thin fingers curling high above his head. "How long are you meant to stay in this dull little place, anyway? I've only been here an hour, and I'm already bored out of my skull."

Kitty looks away. "It is… Rather constricting, isn't it?"

"Well, it's better than a tiny jar bobbing in the Red Sea, but I get your point."

Kitty laughs. It hurts. And she can't bring herself to tell him the truth.

"And when I get out of here I won't smell terribly of sesame oil." He grins at her over his narrow shoulder.

"No," she agrees. "Just disinfectant. And I actually like the smell of sesame oil."

"Nothing but for the best part of a century really puts you off, believe me."

Kitty takes a deep breath. She's run through this conversation in her head a hundred times since she woke up here, thought up a hundred different ways to breach the subject. But, in the end, she just blurts it out.

"I was in the Other Place."