How to Ride a Tibalang

"There you go. All you need now is makeup and you'd make a very pretty gal," Jinx said on a smirk to Cocoy as she adjusted the fucsia and royal blue malong she'd tied off over one of his beautifully muscled shoulders. "That's how women wear the malong. Neat, huh?"

Malongs were the ultimate versatile garment. They could be worn as dresses, used as sleeping bags or blankets, rolled into pillows or as personal changing tents where shelter was sparse. The cloth tubes could be tied over a shoulder, or "straplessly" above the breasts (sarong-style). They could be worn like skirts, by folding the excess width at chest level and rolling the top of the tube down to the waist or until the skirt was the desired length—which is how men wore it.

Jinx never went out of Manila without at least two malongs. It made traveling so much more bearable. Because malongs are usually made out of soft cotton, they also made good makeshift bedsheets or towels, in a pinch.

"I should have packed a

patadyong

," Jinx added for good measure, referring to the native peasant woman's costume. "In red and white ginham, complete with

alampay

. A scarf like that would so suit you, in red, I think, hanging over that oh-so-sexy shoulder. Oh, well, a malong draped the way a woman would wear it is okay, I guess." Her hands were out and framing Cocoy in his malong as if she were studying a scene for a photo.

"Oh, you're so funny." Cocoy said wryly, his words dripping sarcasm by the bucket. "I'm dying from laughter."

"You make a cute girl," Kidlat deadpanned at Cocoy, mirth making his dark eyes gleam like glossy chocolate ganache before his voice deepened into frank appreciation of Cocoy's now-androgynous charms. The outfit underscored the almost feminine thickness and curl of the bayot's eyelashes and the enticingly full redness of his lips. Set against the man's whipcord-lean frame and smooth café au lait skin, Cocoy's gorgeousness swung both ways—just like the rest of him did.

"Actually, you would look good either way, as a man or as a woman. That's a rare thing—and a good thing for a bayot, really."

Rolling his eyes heavenward (or, to the soaring cave ceiling, at least), Cocoy picked up the ritual jar and began stirring its contents with the

sigbinn

tail.

"Let me see that incantation in Baybayin again," he made a quick poke of the lips toward Jinx. "If I'm gonna get this right, I'll need you to hold it up beside the cave wall where I'm painting it. Kid, can you pop your phone flashlight open so I can see what I'm doing? It's pretty dark there."

That said, Cocoy swept past his lovers with chin aloft and ritual jar safely tucked into the crook of his arm. Jinx and Kidlat exchanged mirthful glances and followed him, biting their lips against the laugher that threatened to well up and spew out of their mouths at the show of outraged dignity their bayot was making.

***

The levity of the moment faded as Kidlat turned to Sinukuan, who'd kept silent as they approached the stalagmite where she'd been bound.

"Honored diwata, can you tell me which cavern leads out of this place?" Kidlat kept his head low, beneath Sinukuan's line of sight, as a gesture of respect. This was how his parents taught him to address diwatas while in their domains. He uttered a quick prayer of thanks to the Great Parents that he'd had those etiquette lessons he had once found so boring and pointless.

Bathala, I hope I got that right.

"Your parents taught you well, tikbalang," Sinukuan smiled and answered graciously before turning to walk to the mouth of the cavern on her right. "This is the shortest way to Lupa from here. Paint your incantations on either side of the passage entrance, then step back, well away from the mouth of the cavern."

Sinukuan faced Cocoy and her smile faded.

"You, young man, are going to have to get over your distaste for feminine clothing and movement," the diwata said, her tone scolding as she shot Cocoy a stern glare, her eyes lightening to molten red-gold from the calm, deep brown they had been when she spoke to Kidlat. "You are a bayot, a priest of no small power if what I perceive is true. You need to embrace the divine feminine within you: The nurturer and defender, the warrior as well as the supplicant. Femininity is not about being weaker than the male."

"Look, lady, I'm not acting as if being female is a bad thing, or less worthy than maleness..." Cocoy shot back in anger before Sinukuan cut him off with a slash of her hand.

"Yes, you are,

Taga Lupa

. Listen to me: The divine feminine is the creative force that shaped this world and holds it together—why do you think babies are formed in their mothers' wombs and not their fathers' balls?" She took in an exasperated breath and expelled it with much vehemence.

Cocoy tried to take the moment of pause and interject when Sinukuan silenced him with a glare that shriveled his balls.

"It takes a different kind of strength to access that which in females is divine, son of humans," Sinukuan explained over his attempt to manslpain at her, her scarred face tense about the eyes and mouth. "You need to put that together with that intrinsic maleness you are more than eager to assert. That aggression and brute strength makes you a man, yes, but

just

a man. You need the strengths of both male and female now—not just one set from one sex. Unless you can drop your preconceptions that male dominance is better or stronger, you will not be able to cast that incantation at all. We will all be stuck here. Which is fine by me, this is my volcano. How about you three? Did you even stop to think of your companions?"

The scarred diwata, as weak as she may have looked, seemed to expand and glow brighter with each statement that dropped from her lips. "What is it about the female way that is so abhorrent to you, anyway? You are only male by accident of birth, boy. Embrace your feminine side or don't—it is in your DNA, just waiting to be tapped. I cannot compel you and I will not push you after this, but neither can I open those passages. Only you have what it takes to do that: The strength of male and female working with each other, not at cross purposes."

"Well, if Cocoy won't do it, we may as well hunker down here and make ourselves comfortable," Jinx said as casually as she could. She turned to Sinukuan, hoping the other diwata would catch on to her ploy to kick Cocoy in the ego. "Would you let us settle here for a bit? Just until we find another way out?"

"What do you mean another way out?" Kidlat's question was pointy and pissed. The passive-aggressive stratagem Jinx took was flying high, over and past his head. "Look, ladies, if I could break us out of here, I would. If I could fly, we'd be out of that skylight in a heartbeat," he said in tense and tightly coiled words as he pointed an index finger at the sunlight streaming down the stalagmite in the middle of the cave through a hole so high they couldn't even see its top edges. "But I can't. It's up to Cocoy and we're going to have to trust him on this."

Throughout the whole set of tirades, Cocoy was kicking pebbles with his bare feet (his hiking boots were not in any way feminine attire, so he had gone barefoot) and feeling like a crappy, selfish sumbitch. It was like he was a toddler coming down from the screaming meemies of his terrible twos and finding his elders looking askance at him. Shame crept up his chest and onto his face, sticking itself somewhere in the vicinity of his cheeks and nose. He hung his head and ran both hands through his thick curlylocks before dragging them down his reddened face.

It was hard to get past that paradigm he'd set so long ago—that he was completely and utterly male, no matter if he liked both boys and girls. It was hard enough coming out of the closet as gay—that was easier to explain to the self and others than this, this pendulum where he swung both ways. His mother's weeping and his father's anger went through his mind, how they'd done everything they could to "cure" him of his "malady" of bisexuality—down to tying him down and forcing him to drink holy water taken from the font at the Manila Cathedral and calling on the friendly neighborhood deacon to exorcise the demons from their son.

What they don't know can and will hurt them

, Cocoy's thoughts were a jumble of old anger and festering angst.

But I love them. I can't just think of myself now, can I?

Surprised at using the L-word mentally again in relation to his tikbalang and his diwata—wait, his?—where did those thoughts come from?

Okay, answers will be had. But first, an incantation must be cast successfully. Complexity is such a pain in the caboose.

Sucking in air on a deep breath, Cocoy set aside his internal wrestling match with himself. There would be time enough to handle that later.

"Well?" That one syllable dripped hot from Kidlat's lips as the tikbalang turned trusting eyes on Cocoy.

"Give me a moment," Cocoy's sent his audience of three a pleading look. "This Catholic boy is about to do pagan things. I'm having a bit of difficulty shifting this paradigm across the finish line."

The three nodded, Jinx was smiling encouragingly now, and Kidlat joined hands with both Cocoy and Jinx. Sinukuan held open hands out to Cocoy, palms up as she spoke: "You have decided to do it, then? Good. Take a bit of time then, but not too much. I feel my foe near the Arayat flood plain."

***

Kidlat and Jinx moved to weaponize whatever they could: He took some lengths of slim black paracord and one of the charred bamboo stakes still stained with

sigbinn

blood and gore and the hunting knife he'd packed and fashioned a spear, chanting over it in some ancient tongue or the other. Jinx and Sinukuan held hands as they began to glow with volcanic heat. The three gathered on either side of the bayot—the diwatas to his left and Kidlat just off his right side. They were ready.

Now or never, Cocoy. Get the show on the road.

He tore the notebook page with the Baybayin symbols he needed to paint and two strips off the roll of micropore tape. He stuck the tape to the note and taped it to his right wrist before beginning to chant in a falsetto, mimicking the female voice as best he could. He swayed his hips like a belly-dancer and drew the symbol for

'buka'

with both hands, the movements begun close together, then moving in opposite directions as he chanted and danced around the ritual jar that he'd placed smack in what would be the center line of the mouth of the cavern they sought to open.

Breathing deeply and rhythmically, Cocoy slapped the makeshift sticky note at eye level on the cave wall to the right of the entrance. He dipped the

sigbinn

tail into the ritual jar, stirring the pot contents seven times and wiping the excess liquid off the rim before painting the incantation slowly, chanting it nine times as drew and repeating the process on the opposite side. If the ancients wrote from left to right, he was going in the reverse order to underscore the fact they were on a return journey to their entry point.

The seemingly empty air of the cavern mouth flashed blue, then ash-gray, the light coalescing into the same symbols the bayot had drawn. An eerie, low hum began to resonate at the furthest end of the tunnel from Cocoy's position, progressing slowly to his feet in a vibration that felt like the rumbling of a volcano's lava making its way out of a magma chamber.

Cocoy stepped aside, just a foot shy of the wall on his right, to stand beside Kidlat. The diwatas adjusted accordingly, standing at the same distance from the left cavern wall, opposite the males.

Hoofbeats drummed on the stone floor of the cave and a whickering echo heralded the arrival of a creature of smoke and lightning that resembled Kidlat—if Kidlat had not been flesh and bone. It snorted fire and lightning at the bayot and tikbalang and rushed headlong at the males in its line of sight.

Kidlat met the strange tikbalang head-on, leading with his spear of hardened, charred bamboo tipped with the hunting knife. He parried the tackle of his assailant with a graceful sidestep as he reversed the spear and bore its bladed tip down into the creature's shoulder.

Cocoy also sidestepped, grabbing for the creature's mane and yanking on whatever he got a grip on, which was the lightning flashing through the smoky mane. The bayot felt the lightning as solidly as one would feel locks of hair, if hair could electrocute you. To Cocoy's hands, the lightning felt like slippery silk shot with enough current to stop a human heart and it nearly did stop his heart—but didn't quite do it. Fighting the pain shooting through every nerve that danced with the voltage now coursing through them, Cocoy maintained his grip and flipped his body backward, hoping his backward momentum would drag whatever it was he was holding with him.

Angry, pained whinnying from the tikbalang of shadow and lightning crackled along with a shitload of static electricity through the air. The three wrestled for position. Apparently, top was the preferred position.

Jinx and Sinukuan were almost totally molten as they approached the wrestling trio. Kidlat's jaw was shoved up by the tikbalang-thing beneath him, which was as solid as it looked intangible, and his eyes widened as he beheld Jinx break out of her human skin to become a creature of lava and hot ash, right beside Sinukuan who looked about the same, only more lava than ash.

"Oh, shit." Kidlat said on a shocked breath. "Cocoy, roll away!"

Kidlat's shove broke Cocoy's grip on the tikbalang-thing and he spared a second to look where Kidlat was looking. "Crap!" He did as Kidlat bid and, just as soon as he was clear of the creature of smoke and lightning, Sinukuan had it in a full Nelson lock and Jinx was gripping its mane of smoke and lightning, to no ill effect.

"Yield." Sinukuan uttered that one word with all the harshness of a vengeful goddess. "Yield and I will spare you. Struggle and you will die."

Jinx swept the creature to its knees and its impact cracked the stone floor beneath them with a loud series of snaps and pops.

"You can kill me, Sinukuan," the creature spoke in deep, mocking tones full of virulent malice. "But I will rise again, eventually. Then who would be the sacrifice for my resurrection, hmm? Which of your sisters will I fuck next? You're all dried up and scarred. I want a pretty one next. Maybe Adora, that slut. She'll enjoy what I'd do."

The creature's smirk drew Sinukuan's rage to its full measure and she shoved both her thumbs into its fiery red eyes.

"Then die, Bulalakaw," the wounded diwata's voice was the rumble of a temblor and the scream of pyroclastic ash rushing skyward. "I will be ready for your return. So will my sisters. Die on your knees."

The shadow and lightning tikbalang jerked like a marionette in the hands of a palsied puppeteer as smoke turned to ash and lighnting to lava. When the diwatas released Bulalakaw's body, it had turned into a statue of cooling igneous rock stuck to the cave floor, frozen in a screaming posture of pure agony.

"Go to Magwayen, you aberration. We will face you as one when you return." Jinx did have to get her licks in somehow, even if it was just verbally.

***

"We are done here," Sinukuan said to her three rescuers as they walked up the tunnel to the light at its end. "Thank you for your aid." She bowed low, her forehead clasped in her interlaced fingers—a benediction of gratitude and a recognition of a debt owed.

Jinx stepped up to Sinukuan and raised her back to an upright position and hugged her. "You don't need to bow to us. You saved our bacon back there, so we're even. Now, what about taking a trip to Manila with us so you can see Adora and your sisters again?"

"Yes," Sinukuan agreed with a small nod. "We must go to my sisters and warn them of the danger that will come. We must also get you used to your new body."

"New body? But I liked the old one just fine. Heck, we were just beginning to enjoy it," Cocoy protested. "Will it work the same way? It would be fun to have a do-over, but Kidlat and I just learned how to make that old body sing...

Aray!

"

Kidlat smacked Cocoy upside the head to shut him up. "

Taga Lupa

, there are so many things you've got to learn. Jinx will respond just fine to our usual antics. The bonus is that she is now immortal. That fight with Bulalakaw was just the thing to break her out of her human skin. Now she should have more control over her... earthier... tendencies. We won't have to worry as much over 'containing' her."

"That should be more fun, then," Cocoy said as he glared at Kidlat. "But that

batok

hurt, man. You didn't have to do that. Asshole."

"Hey, you liked it just fine two days ago."

"Speaking of two days ago," Jinx said. "Once we get cellular signal, we'd better call Adora. She will want a heads up that Sinukuan is with us."

"I'll take care of it," Kidlat said. "You'll want some catch-up time with Sinukuan and Cocoy will be driving."

The four emerged in a copse of trees just a quarter of a kilometer from where Cocoy's SUV was parked. The four slung bags into the back storage of the vehicle and drove down to the nearest boutique hotel, where they got rooms for the night—one for Sinukuan and another for the coosome threesome. They may need to return to Manila, but their driver was still fully human and that human needed sleep. Well, okay, sleep and some private time for slow, leisurely sex with his two more than human bedmates. Oh, and a decent meal or two that none of them had to cook.

***

They'd bedded down for the night in style at the Arayat Royale Inn—a relatively new three star hotel with chichi accommodations (300-thread count sheets made with Egyptian cotton! Fair-trade, organic and all-natural soaps, lotions, bath gels and shampoo in packaging so lovely it was almost a shame to open them, that sort of thing).

Thank goodness Kidlat was rich and had a bottomless credit card—one that he managed to keep through all their adventures, but that's what having a special backpack that gave one what one demanded was for, right?

The perks of being a tikbalang prince, gotta love them. All Kidlat had to do was flash that little black card and they had a whole villa to themselves, away from the madding crowds that had just discovered the place with its stunning cliffside views of the distant sea on one side, and the fruit groves, farms and virgin rain forests that bounded the inn. Eco-tourism was picking up in Pampanga, adding a chic millennial twist to the already thriving food tourism in the province famed for the best and most innovative cuisine in the Philippine archipelago.

Bathed, fed well and after blessed hours of air-conditioner-cooled slumber, Jinx woke up horny, but in a very good, very normal way. For the first time in weeks, she felt in control of the fire that was her body and she felt no fear that she'd set the bed ablaze. The feeling of liberation was awesome and she wanted to celebrate.

So, which cock to feast on first, I wonder?

She smiled impishly at her reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite the foot of the bed as she cast off the duvet covering her and most of Cocoy and Kidlat.

Hard choice, that.

Cocoy was sprawled helter-skelter on his back, moving his arms and legs out to occupy the space she'd vacated to sit at the foot of the bed—all the better for ogling her men. There was a relaxed melting to the bayot's posture, as if all the tension he held while awake dissolved with boneless sleep. A shadow of bad boy stubble crept across his cheeks and jawline, making the skin of his neck and chest seem all that much more supple and soft in the incandescence of early-morning streaming through the filmy blue windows flanking the bed. Even flaccid, Cocoy's member was impressive: It's girth and length lay invitingly against the man's right quadriceps muscle, velvety in its resting state.