Gate Light 38: Mind Its Own Place

 

"Four and six."

 

The red pieces tripped clockwise in Alora's path along her backgammon board. One of them blotted out a black dot. She spun the silver-red dice swiftly and neatly in her hands before handing them over.

 

"One and three."

 

She giggled. "Sometimes people just aren't very lucky when they play with me."

 

"You play this with Bodhi."

 

"Yes. That's fun." The round-faced girl smiled again. "We're both the best at backgammon. She reads futures while I think of new ones. Jon sometimes--once in a long while--beats her at chess. Backgammon's more fun for me because of the dice and it's not as silly."

 

Alora had set up the game on the bed by a flashlight; I sat up on the pillow, cross-legged. Her bare feet swung in empty air. Skip the pieces in the only move I could to isolate a lone and vulnerable plastic black spot.

 

She flung her turn down in a way that seemed random. "Three and three. Double move and out goes you."

 

She read better when things were closer and more definite. Something in the way she rolled and passed on the dice also seemed skilled about turning the right numbers. I let a turn pass by with no moves left to me in the game.

 

She laughed at her next move--and I could tell she tried to make it slightly easier. Not a sign I wanted. So I moved away from the trap.

 

"I think my future is bright and happy," she said. Her red soldiers marched on toward their clockwise end. She'd taught it half an hour ago. "It's okay, though, Xavier. It's not like we're playing for anything important." Alora stuck out her bottom lip as if that upset her. "Having fun is important."

 

This is math, I thought, trying to keep to the numbers: the chances of rolling fair dice and the possibilities and odds that radiated out from that like a careful spiderweb, and then Alora's move as the red sped toward home...

 

"Gammon," Alora said. "I win again. Now play again and at least make some of your blacks fly away home from my pinks!"

 

Keep the lines and chances in your head like a maze--be careful--and it began close-fought.

 

I have lost time. Jon made me lose time.

 

I tired too easily. I scratched at unhealed needle-marks below the sleeves of the shirt Alora had brought; only fluid replacements, Helen claimed. Jon prepared them. And in my head grew a wild changing maze.

 

"What have you been seeing lately?" I asked. Her brown eyebrows above wide yellow eyes rose in interest.

 

"Very little about little Monty and his friends," she said, a careful high half-singing voice. "They change what they are and maybe that is how I can't see them. Or maybe because I've never been a puppy. Maybe you have just a drop of their blood, Xavier, because I think your father comes from here. I was just thinking, watching you..."

 

"That what?" Six and six. A tide had changed. I'd play carefully. 

 

"That Gordon knows how to grow such a nice mustache, and you're not like that." She gave an innocent smile and used her dice to begin a different gammon-trap.

 

"Nasty things can get caught in facial hair. Pickles. Egg. Tomato skins. Ham rinds." Razors were something else they had no use for: steel not sharp enough to cut out their hair, which did not grow back in any case. It would have been useful to keep a blade. Alora tried to wrinkle her stony nose.

 

"Some people keep things nicer than others."

 

"How did Jon find you?" I moved forward, escaping her trap.

 

"He had business as a doctor." Alora spoke high and quickly, suddenly. I changed it.

 

"Who put you in the asylum for seeing things?" Perhaps she'd call it a different word--madhouse or bedlam. "They put me away when I was upset."

 

I didn't start remembering again until after I was out of there. I was violent and destructive, the red boiling anger that was nothing like anything my mother had. Then I obeyed everything they said and the grey repeated days drowned me.

 

"I still have a living niece," the girl said out of nowhere, raising her head as the dice rattled against the surface of her hand. "She's old, older than the lady at the general store who uses a cane. My sister called her Daisy, which is pretty. She probably doesn't see anything that other people don't."

 

I tracked her and flung down the pieces. For me it was an impersonal and shapeless they who had not given news about my mother; but that was hardly the typical story, was it? "If it was your family who had you taken away...that is worse. They are supposed to protect you." Her cartoon-character flashlight painted her pigtails a dark red and shadowed dark lines around her face.

 

She raised her chin. "You're only pretending to be nice. I don't like that." Two of her own tokens skipped around the board. If she were human then she would be older than that--still the same height, wrinkles and white hair and glasses or hearing aids, pushing backgammon pieces around a nursing home.

 

I threw--and saw how it could trap her for a moment. I pinned two of her pieces to the center of the board.

 

"What do you see?" I asked again. "This one's mine."

 

She tilted her head to the left. "Bird eyes and blood eyes are watching us," she said, cryptically. "But Jon has a plan. Big brother Jon always has a plan."

 

Blood eyes. "Do I need to know about the Moirai?" She took her time to answer, opening her eyes wide and staring past the back of my skull as if I'd asked her to tell definitely. I waited.

 

"Maybe. The Moirai are the hand of five of the most powerful of us. They own an island nobody puts on human maps in the Mediterranean, and it's lovely." She sighed deliberately as if she wanted to remember a contented vacation. "The sands are white and the ocean so blue and it's sunny all the time. I spent years on that beautiful island learning more about how to use my gift. They love vampires with gifts--they have guards who can do so many tricks, double-jointed vampire contortionists and electric light-show vampires and two more besides Killigan who can help people be happy... Bodhi and me could join their guard any time we wanted, but we want to stay with our family." She smiled. "You know the rules they enforce, and how we're being very naughty by telling you."

 

Live humans aren't supposed to know. I indicated her to continue. She reached across and fiddled around in her lace bag, while I rolled dice again--the combinations spun away.

 

She flicked through her cards; drawing five to match. Some I had seen before. "First is Aletheia, truth for a sword. She has the power to know if you're speaking a lie."

 

It was her Queen of Candy Canes: dark-haired, majestic, armoured and carrying what would be a blade in another place.

 

"Next Anactoria, fair and lovely. And she is. She's like Bodhi, reading minds, but she touches people to do it and goes much deeper. I wonder if she'd read you? But she wants to be called only by fair and lovely, because not many vampires inspire one of the Muses to write about them."

 

A version of the Queen of Coins. A golden woman--gold all over like the burnished fire of the sun well-risen in bright morning, not the pale of Erin's or Jon's light features. She was lavish and rich in herself, all golden and overflowing with the coins she spun to the tint in her hair, but she would have blood-red eyes.

 

"Then Borea. The storm devourer. She can be very rough with people."

 

The Queen of Cups was wild and cragged like a cliff face in the wind, pouring out ill winds from her tumblers, dark and greying shaggy hair flying around an ancient, stern-cut face in polished brown. A dappled storm-coated horse flung up its hooves and had mane and tail whipped by fierce weathers in her background.

 

"Semele, of gorgon's hair. She's pretty too, and she knows a lot about how to use gifts." The Queen of Wands was slender as a willow branch and smooth-faced as liquid concrete. A cloud of mahogany around her head separated itself into a hundred limbs like the branches of a tree. Her heavy-lidded features were barely visible in the pasteboard of the tarot card: thin lines of black. Beyond the branches of her hair there was only darkness in the background.

 

The fifth card would have to be something different, and Alora shuffled them all again to draw.

 

"And Erichthonius. The rift. She's...quiet."

 

It was no person but a black tower struck by pale lines that reddened to blood. Lightning from one way of looking at it, and then becoming dug pits that sparked into deep earth. Or the lines of bloody, blue-red veins that struck into a person's skin.

 

"Even the humans on the isle seem so happy most of the time. They sing songs in their language. Why aren't you happier? It would be nicer if Killigan's gift worked on you, like it does on me." She sounded innocent as if it truly bewildered her.

 

No doubt there were drugs in Jon's collection that would accomplish the same thing. Too much like Adelaide.

 

"The humans are there to be cattle," I said. I remembered Veronica's words of the rebels and prisoners on the cliffs. "But that's not very nice...?"

 

Humans barely allowed to know there was a rest of the world. Toiling for rulers who ate them at whim and--rarely--selected acceptable livestock to attempt to transform.

 

And despite that there were those among them who would know eleutheromania--even the parts of the word. Freedom from empusa beasts.

 

"I didn't eat anyone while I was there. Only sheep. Even when they didn't taste nice," she justified herself. "Helen and Jon already taught me how to be nice."

 

"Jon wanted to teach you other things."

 

Alora pushed the ceramic mug back at me. "It's your turn to roll the dice. Or even draw two cards to tell you where you can move. That would be just as fun."

 

And so I drew a two of wands--ivory, supple things both blown around in a wild midnight wind--and four of cups, a pink fountain flowing from four corners. The paintings on Alora's cards were beautiful and closely detailed, needing a squint to try and study them in the half-light. The vampires could see but not read in the dark, and they were blind as any human in absolute dark: low-light vision did not serve in a complete absence of light, and clever as their senses they were not whales or bats or dolphins.

 

Alora did not paint her own cards. Helen's introduction was different to the rest of her book. Antony played music that already existed. Jon's magnum opus was very old.

 

"They killed you a long time ago. It killed a lot of who you were." A pale stone statue of a girl who hadn't reached her sixteenth birthday--glittering, and perhaps hollow. She tried to echo humanity with games and happiness. Jon came to her asylum before she died. "I think important parts of you are dead and that's why you don't understand."

 

Not entirely true. Bodhi would resent being told it would be wonderful if only someone could force her to be a happy prisoner.

 

Alora pursed her mouth together. "I wish you'd be a little nicer to people. It's good that you don't think you should be one of us. Some humans are silly. I can see what would happen."

 

Again she reached for the dice.

 

"Roll a six on the first try, Xavier, and maybe you don't die. And I want you to try it."

 

I could choose; I played her game. A three, a two, a four.

 

"We forget," Alora said, deliberately slowly in her high voice, eyes golden in her light. "Almost everything that meant anything to us as a human. What grass and spring sunshine feel like to warm skin. The look of your own room at home. Or maybe I forgot those at the beginning of when they locked me up, when they used shocks and other things." She didn't stop her speech. "It's easy for a vampire to lose control and drink all the blood. Your heart breaks at the beginning. Imagine the worst pain you ever knew and multiply it by infinity. Then imagine it for three days. That's what changes you, and no wonder so many give up."

 

I'd already given up with brother Jon. Pain becomes a memory quickly and can never be recaptured while thinking about it--but fear of it remains.

 

"Three days of incredible pain. And at the end of it there is bloodlust."

 

Facing my own death, Bodhi said.

 

"Newborns awake with the red eyes of their own blood. They are stronger than anything else. They're almost unstoppable, and they can't think of anything else but blood," Alora said, and looked beyond my skull.

 

"So imagine that, Xavier. Pain as you have never known before, bloodlust, strength and swiftness beyond anyone's ability to hold you back, even Bodhi, and fragmented memories, of where you would run to seek comfort..."

 

I knew. Of course I knew. I covered my ears with my hands.

 

There was nowhere I would rather run to than that grey room in Seattle, because of who was there for me.

 

"Your mother, of course," I heard without hearing.

 

Helen's arm around me was never warm.

 

Everything.

 

--

 

They were unstoppable statues mistaken for gods.

 

Tigers with smiles on their faces.

 

All men are mortal and if I am a man then I must die.

 

Tomorrow you will die. A human life is a vapor for a little time that vanishes away. A pigeon crossing a lighted room for one shining moment before the darkness.

 

Mom. I can't tell you everything that's happened, I composed in my head. I'd like to. Everything has changed and no matter what happens nothing will ever go back to the way it was.

 

I should have known that a long time ago.

 

I didn't choose any of this.

 

If I'd known the last time I saw my mother I'd have...I'd have not wanted to do anything different. Sat by her and talked and read to her and stayed as long as it was possible.

 

It's going to change. It's going to change in a lot of ways.

 

They'd barely let me out of the room of late. Not outside with Helen. The marks of what Perdita had done were almost gone from me.

 

I sat in their windowless basement with one of Helen's books, Of the Dead and of the Resurrection--but there were more practical things to learn than Protestant theology. I was glad not to face Alora again.

 

Killigan sat and read a history book on World War I--as far as the cover said. He was the one who talked of easily snapping neckbones. None of them were good to provoke.

 

Antony wore a watch on his left wrist, below stiff-ironed white cuffs of his shirt, across the room. It was disorienting not to know day or night--hard to be with no sign of sunlight. Better not to take the attention of the two of them. Antony read--not what I would have expected--a medical textbook, nerves and signals, glaring at the pages as if he understood it. Only the two of them to avoid. I watched: they both managed to look young enough for school. Killigan's hair and beard were red-brown and curled. A shaven vampire was a defeated vampire. Once a soldier, Helen said; both of them. They killed people while they were still human. I fiddled with the edge of a page between my fingers; the paper was old and durable.

 

The essence of the soul consisting in thought and this cannot perish by annihilation, for the nature of a human soul and of God--that the principles of blood are salt and sulphur and spirit and earth and water--an intangible hope of something beyond. The words were careful and structured and offered no present help. Only a human soul.

 

"Humans make too much noise. Stop breathing." It was Killigan who spoke. A broad-planed face without a hint of red below it; it was difficult to see the color of his small, deep-set eyes, but they were more light than dark--and not scarlet.

 

"A little difficult."

 

He looked at me; and didn't need to say, I could do that for you. Sometimes they had accidents. Sometimes even Alora had accidents. She tried to make it sound like untrained pets.

 

His type didn't respond well to shows of fear. I said nothing more. They could read small changes--breath or sudden tensing or pulse. Even as a vampire--the kind who talk so readily of killing as if they enjoy it--animals.

 

"You spark a hunger. You leave your scent wherever you walk here." His voice was level. He did not seem quick-tempered like Bodhi or Antony--but certainly not calm like Helen. Antony watched and said nothing yet. "I hunt animals because they have the sense to run. I like that."

 

Still. Be very still. He must be able to sense fear.

 

I shrugged--trying to imagine it a dismissive gesture. "I'm sure you have fun."

 

Not needing to blink was a reason for an impressive unmoving stare like a skink below a kicked-up rock.

 

"Close your mouth."

 

He couldn't order me to do that.

 

"Hunting in the sunlight on your days off from school--sparkling like a glitter bomb all the while. Monty thinks that part of it's hilarious--"

 

"The puppy would say so," Killigan growled back. He sat up, the book lowered in his hands. It was the same stupidity people had--not getting up and walking away when that was simplest. Because some hate being seen as if they're backing down. He looked obviously up and down, closer to watching a piece of raw meat than any real person. "I could break each bone in your body."

 

It's less impressive when you can all do that. Then again, there are some very small ones--congratulations on your anatomy skill--

 

"You should get some fresh air," I pushed.

 

Then Antony flung down his own book. I startled. Temper flared in his yellow eyes--he was wound like a clock spring turned too far. His wires spiraled too tightly together, not quite rusting and ready to shatter. Yet his control was supposed to be stronger.

 

"The halfwit tries to provoke you. He deserves to be locked in the dark he created. You will come with me before my brother loses his temper."

 

No. This is bad. Antony took hold of my upper arm, moving so quickly across the room it was too hard to track with human eye. The stone grip was harsher than Helen's.

 

"I could be quiet. No talking while reading."

 

"You will be."

 

In the corridor he released me with a shove. I rubbed my arm. The wall was behind me; it wouldn't have been easy to dodge past Antony even if he were human. There was a trick to taking up space and throwing around your weight. He carried himself tall but thrust his shoulders always forward--like a performing gorilla.

 

"Helen trusted you to lock me up again?" I got out. "You'd--it's the same. You want to think of yourself as someone who wouldn't eat people. Except when Veronica suggests it--"

 

He paced closer--as if he was going to touch, and I flinched back. He spoke again. "Helen trusts me because I control myself. Because we understand the meaning of values and standards. Of which degenerates such as you are always remarkably unaware."

 

Animals might well be more interesting for them to hunt since they would never give in to their glamor and would run like sensible creatures. And from the other side--to face a mountain lion or bear instead of Antony would never be talked with.

 

"You'd be afraid of pain too if you could feel it," I reminded him, trying to look into yellow-white eyes--there was still the memory of Antony's eyes rolling and protruding from a mixing bowl like boiled eggs. I knew him at his weakest.

 

Like Bodhi he didn't enjoy insults to strength or courage, it seemed. "At your age I was a soldier," he rapped out. "I fought honorably as a human. I earned an officer's commission in battle--"

 

"A Confederate, right? Or am I guessing wrong?" I interrupted. My second guess would have been the Revolution--but that was before they came here. Or the one with Canada. "They lost..."

 

He looked annoyed. I managed to step back but still faced him.

 

"A noble cause. It was something beyond oneself--unlike your petty whining. You fight for nothing," he said, stonelike. "You might as well be nothing."

 

"Treating people like cattle." He'd fought for slavery but thought of Veronica as a queen above him, a foreign aristocrat-- I changed and slowed. He heard it. "I know all about being a parasite. I might as well admit it."

 

"So you do acknowledge it."

 

"Scamming charities. Petty shoplifting," I listed. "Picking strawberries for two dollars an hour. Never giving a true name for anything. General parasites on human society."

 

"Feeble-minded and debased. I know it." Antony paused. He was held for a moment.

 

"Avoiding discovery. Going to a lot of different schools briefly. Like going to high school eighty-six times? Like living in a house that humans built? Like reading human books and playing human music? Parasites on the edge of humanity. We both know all about that." I finished.

 

He startled forward--his thick forearms and wrists tensed. Anger in him should be frightening to a human.

 

Then his right fist slammed into the wall by my head. I felt plaster chips fall like white rain against my face. His mouth twisted and his eyes blazed and bulged in golden anger.

 

"We need nothing from you. We eat animals--act like one though you do--and nothing from you. We are stronger; our memories last; nothing you can do can harm us--"

 

Except that they burned. Napalm. Falls from heights, probably. Eyes. Physics. Slippery stuff on the ground. Dynamite. Heavy rockets. Thinking of that gave me enough to stand there and watch him still.

 

"As to you in the human world, none mourn your loss." His voice softened. He leaned too close, face close, hand rooted in the wall by my head. I felt nothing--he was cold. No body heat and only that sickly-sweet scent in his mouth. "You were a burden to your father and a misshapen monster to your peers. Nothing more," he said with satisfaction--too much satisfaction, if I'd bothered to think.

 

It rushed through me like a sudden spring of fresh blood. "That's not true. J--someone. When I was nearly run over, she asked if I was okay before saying anything else." Jenessa was brilliant and bold and brazen and very human, and she treated me like a friend, a memory strong enough to last in this place-- "That's not nothing, I..."

 

I stopped. Too cutting for him. "You're only quoting something your girlfriend said. And you think I'm pathet--"

 

"Wife. She is my wife." Antony raised his voice--anyone in the house should have heard. "We have had several human ceremonies. Veronica was an imperial princess in her own country. As far above you as the evening star." His right hand rose toward my neck.

 

"Nearly executed for treachery--" I supplied. There had been fragments about her. "She glamors people. Most people just think she's pretty and move on but you, you worship her, you're exactly like me but only in rev--"

 

And then I could not speak at all, because Antony punched me. I slid across Jon Cullen's white hallways, hip and shoulder scraping against the ground, and lay curled around my stomach. It hurt a lot more than I had expected. It hurt and made it impossible to breathe. Fire consumed my chest--was nothing broken? I couldn't tell. He must have pulled it in any case or the fist would have gone all the way through the spine. A curtain had fallen from a high-set window behind and bright sunlight leaked through it, dazzling and warm on the floor. Antony's footsteps rung across the ground toward me, echoing one by one, his face staring implacably down.

 

My hands twitched. The ribs burst and ached but felt together. Before he came for another try I took a breath in pain. The words ripped ragged from me.

 

"You won't...you won't do it again." It didn't halt the steps. "Because--you're strong and I'm weak. You hit me once and you won't do it again." The words wheezed out like trying to summon blood from the stomach. He heard them, whispered though they were.

 

The feet--booted--paused close to me. He looked down with stone-set features and unsparing words with them. The light caught him and he shone like a crystal statue. "I have executed guilty humans before. I saw you attempt to assault Alora in a fit of pique."

 

"Attempt...to." Legs jerked up to cover torso, head trying to move in; a human's instinct to protect even when there was nothing that could.

 

"I know it well," Antony said, and once more he was closely satisfied. "A toady to those above and bully to those you see below. Your kind is a coward and likely worse. But," he continued, standing still in his place, "I will take you to Jon."

 

I realized. "No. That's not necessary. You--" And I stopped. "Don't touch me. Don't touch me."

 

You win that one.

 

"I have to ensure that you are not injured," Antony said, and bent down.

 

--

 

"Arnica paste. Apply it to yourself."

 

Again it was the sterile white of his laboratory. He hadn't imprisoned me this time. The machines were still and worrying; the smell was antiseptic rather than blood with no sign of what had happened. The ceiling was white and stainless as ever. Needles were sheathed in a stand. Bottles waited behind glass, and white drawers were sealed shut. I stared at the magnified slide he had displayed on a screen from a microscope: a brilliant-colored animal cell grown large, red and green and electric blue, changing while something pierced the wall of it. I could tell nothing more.

 

The gel smelt crisp and soft, pine-like. There was a label over the jar. It still ached to breathe. I carefully touched the forming bruise again--better this than them. I'd had to unbutton the shirt. Antony watched from the other wall. Jon stared at his--whatever experiment it was.

 

"I own that I punished him," Antony's low voice rumbled.

 

"No doubt unprovoked," Jon answered him, his back turned.

 

"You understand."

 

"Of course I do. You may go." Jon Cullen dismissed him in a few words--Antony the military officer, standing straight-backed with folded arms--and carefully he closed the door behind him. Sounds were sealed inside this place, I noticed. Nothing echoed far. The white walls ate sound.

 

Blood vessels tightened around my ribs. Jon summoned another slide for himself, cold and careful. He was frozen and paralyzing to watch. The gel was cooler than the room, and a touch pained the red mark.

 

"You don't want to change me. Alora says it would only be an unstable monster," I said into the quiet, looking around Jon and not at him. "That makes this very finite."

 

"The mentally unstable make poor vampires. Were you foolish enough to think it would be anything else?" he asked, back turned over his experiments, cool and incisive as a scalpel. "To control the impulses in the presence of humans at all requires an initial sanity. Humans with unrestrained compulsion make poor vampires: especially if that compulsion is to kill for the sake of it. A common flaw in a certain kind of human."

 

I'm not worried about what I do. I'm concerned about being caught for it.

 

"So I imagine." Adelaide. Perdita. "Bodhi wants--I'm not sure that she's sure. Nothing pleasant."

 

There was something that penetrated and changed the cell. Perhaps it was meant to be a virus. Jon stared at the projection and saw the detail.

 

"My sister embraces her primitive past," he said, as if abstracted. "Do you have any idea what that time was like? I was obliged to invent writing for my researches. After my death other humans nourished similar ideas. The net sum of human knowledge was less than a single printed newspaper you throw unread in a garbage pail. Is it surprising that I moved to this?"

 

He didn't need to show what he meant. It was akin to time travel, unchanged and cold while the rest of the world altered itself. There weren't records of those times; cave paintings of bison dancing, scrawled in ochre and manganese. I remembered the liquid dance of the language Bodhi said he no longer recalled.

 

"You were born to this millennium and to the most advanced country in the world, child. Would you trade it for furs and flints and an early grave?"

 

I was used to cities. I waited, sitting up and folding my arms.

 

"The past two hundred years. The past twenty years. The sum of knowledge increases exponentially--and yet certain standards prohibit all possible advantages taken of it." A glint of yellow eyes was reflected back from a glass lens. Again the slide changed and he stared as if to commit it to memory. Helen and probably the human rules kept him--mostly--from human experimentation. Not nearly enough.

 

"I was ahead of my time. The bargain I struck gave me the chance to know all. The accumulated sum of all relevant knowledge is engraved in my mind: our careful, our slow-changing, our stone minds." His voice dropped to something slow and reflective--ice slopes that reflected a brilliant light, and that tried to coax a slide deeply downward. He tortured, but stone could not feel pain. "Consider what this world will become in another septmillenium."

 

"Helen wants to save the planet from itself because none of you want cattle to die off." It was only sulking; he did not trouble to reply to that. Probably for Helen it was closer to preserving the rare spotted chiming cyanea tree or the blunt-nosed pygmy iguana, but that didn't matter. "Yes. That is a temptation," I said. "I've always liked to read. My mother raised me to value it. I've liked--some classes. So to know everything and fear nothing..."

 

"To know is power. To remain a greater power," Jon said with careful logic. "My knowledge will exist long after you are dust and barely a memory. Immortality is the only power."

 

Except there are capacities to lose and capacities to gain for it. Everyone thinks he is a talented doctor and cold method works for him--but when he shaped Bodhi and her powers he was still red-filled with living blood...

 

"Death purifies the instincts. Only the essential drives of the old life remain. Mine is to acquire knowledge. You are familiar with your own, boy, or ought to be." He didn't turn back--perhaps he seemed less frightening this way--but he would be aware of every move and painful breath.

 

Instincts. Flight or fight. Everything I had was tuned to flight: flee rather than make a pointless stand. Run for it. You don't have to stay anywhere when you can choose something else.

 

If even Bodhi could not hold back newmade strength and immunity to her power then they could all be burned.

 

"Yes," I said, and my mouth slipped to bare teeth. "I know that."

 

Perhaps Jon caught the smile at the vision of a purple fire and a breath of their ashes. Enough power and no restraint to kill.

 

But that wasn't what would happen. I unrolled my hands: blood added red and blue tints to the skin and a pulse beat inside them. I'd do anything to make it stop hurting. I'd fly to her for comfort and--a monster was a monster.

 

My mother was in a place they could not reach.

 

This pain burned--it would become a dark bruise--and each breath reminded me of it. But it was a form of pain that lived. Broken flesh and spoiled roots and swollen floodwaters and a wretched ruin inside, overripe berries bleeding dark ruined juice under a blistering sun. And for all that there was something that surged below, worms wriggling and rising from the mess and feeding on the waste. I did not want to die. There were conditions which could not be lived through, but here there was living blood that seeped into the skin to paint it indigo.

 

"Instincts can be altered, in time," Jon Cullen's cold voice promised. "Time is one's servant with the power to remain."

 

Except to do that--and I looked at my hands, and remembered a warm arm about my shoulders--meant to give up something of value.

 

Life or knowledge or warmth or power or light and ice and stone.

 

"I don't know," I said, voice cracking over it, and he saw it as only a weak-minded cry.

 

--