He fluttered along at my side as we left the bar like some fey thing, his feet in their black and silver stiletto heels just barely touching the ground; tiny phantasmal flowers sprang up from those brief instances of connection. He was properly the kouris again now, almost like his young self but with that long hair in a slightly more modern style, but I could see a hint of his wings tonight, iridescent butterfly-like with a roughly monarch pattern but rainbow and evershifting.

"You look divine tonight, love," I said to him in the next layer of existence up as I headed alone down the drizzly hill.

He smiled. "Thank you, darling—" For an instant I caught a feeling from him, a wistful pining, and I focused harder on the scene as I waited at the light, fully clothing and accessorizing him. He was fiddling awkwardly with a designer umbrella--he wanted to shelter me from the rain but didn't want to look like a tourist— "No, I just can't get the catch open," he corrected me. "Ah! There it is," he said, and the thing flew up around us, huge and sheltering and magically shielding, a giant maneki neko painted upon it, eversmiling, ever-waving her golden paw for our fortune. "Now your glasses and my coat are both safe."

His long black fur coat looked almost but not quite like one he'd worn in a brilliant and iconic television appearance from '74. It was a little less bulky and distinctly more magical, though; it seemed to draw light into it like a black hole, splitting each beam into its component colors in the last instant. Distant rainbows flickered and disappeared and flickered again in its depths. "What is your coat made of?" I asked.

"Some magical beast or another," he said with a shrug. "The kind that doesn't stay dead for long and is terribly difficult to kill in the first place. --Oh don't worry, the fur doesn't regenerate. The thing, the word you want is respawns, isn't it?"

I realized I was watching him a little too eagerly, tracing the lines of his body beneath the fur. "Yeah," I said. "That's the word. It's some kind of big cat, isn't it?"

"Oh, possibly," he said. "Maybe a fox-like thing. --Darling, we're going to part from reality here."

In the real world I reached the other side of the busy street and paused at the corner of the overpass. "What?"

"In the real life tonight," he said, "you go down the hill and back home uneventfully. But I'd like to take you with me instead here."

I blinked at him. In the streetlights and the soft rainfall tonight he crossed over god and ghost and angel and looked more unreal and incredible than any of them to me. "All right," I said.

He smiled and closed his eyes for a moment, those unbelievable long lashes fluttering—

--the umbrella in his hand blew up. No, that's not the right wording exactly--it's more like he exhaled a breath and the whole thing sort of expanded gently into a giant lucky-cat-shaped hot air balloon with the vestibule tucked between its back paws. It began to rise slowly off the ground. None of the passersby on the sidewalk around us batted an eye.

Finally he slid the door open and let the steps unfold to the pavement; he held out a hand. "Well?" he said. "Come and take a ride with me tonight, love."

I stared at the giant inflated calico paw gently waving, waving, waving high above the cabin, bringing its passengers good luck, no doubt. "Where are we going?"

He touched a finger to his lips. "It's a surprise, darling. Let me surprise you--let me romance you tonight." He hesitated, then looked at me earnestly. "Please? I want to."

--I couldn't answer him at first; my break was over. After work I went up to the sagging rooftop above my apartment and smoked a bowl, then returned to the chair and my laptop in my bedroom. He was still gazing hopefully at me in the light of the streetlamps and the passing cars, his wings glimmering behind him, the great airship purring softly just above us.

"Oh God, Freddie," I said, "I love you so much—" Impulsively, instead of taking his hand in mine, I knelt before him first, took his long slender fingers in both of my hands and brought them to my mouth so I could kiss his painted nails breathlessly, then his knuckles, then finally the back of his palm. I stood up again although my heart was pounding and oh, he was bleeding eros so powerfully into the air, if there had been a proper wall to pin him against his ass might have been toast right there and then-- "Yeah, let's go."

He drew me into the cabin and the door folded up quietly behind us. Down a short hall we went and I immediately realized the place was vastly bigger on the inside than it had looked from outside; I could sense a potential labyrinth around us, and something intensely personal to my god-queen—

"Oh," I said. "This is your—" I hesitated. It could be his ship, or his chariot; but all gods of his type, all gods who came, had vessels of some kind, and most of the goddesses of his type, the queens of heaven, had chariots or ships.

He waited for me to continue, and when I did not, he supplied the word, or tried to; to me it just sounded like he sang out an incomprehensible note and I instantly understood that it meant a certain part of the divine soul that moved through the cosmic sea.