by A L Hart
I wasn’t allowed to spiral. I wasn’t allowed to feel sorry for myself. Not when I had others to keep alive. Which was something else I never asked for. To have others depend on me when I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. How could I be their lifeline when nothing tethered me? How could I expect to fix them when I myself was broken?
Responsibility and I had never been enemies. I thrived on distractions. But this, losing my identity, the very aspects that made me human, felt oddly familiar to the gray. The unknown I’d been sinking into before.
But it wasn’t all bad, was it?
I’d saved a life.
The fact wasn’t a vain one. It was an oppressive one that did nothing more than get the gears turning, making way for a chain reaction.
Because I’d saved one life, I was now responsible for saving five others. Ophelia’s, Anisah’s, Kyda’s, Elise’s, and now Vincent’s. Would it stop?
I’d been convinced that once the twins were gone, the otherworldly problems would cease showing up at my doorstep, but why would they? It wasn’t the twins that drew them here. It was me. And some jerk in the shadows leading them to me.
Dictating my future.
As if I never had a say to begin with.
My temper mellowed when my door opened.
Ophelia entered, a bowl of what smelled like chicken noodle soup in her hands.
I sighed. She’d been doing this all morning. Showing up every thirty minutes, trying to get me to eat something, anything. I wasn’t sure if it was because it was her nature to nurture everything in her path or if the guilt inside of her was forcing her to make amends.
So I said for the hundredth time that day, “Thank you, Ophelia, but you know you don’t have to do this. What you did in the bathroom was what you had to do. It saved me. If anything, I should be bringing you gifts of soup.”
She smiled faintly, but it was more a grimace than anything else. “I’m bringing this because you’re not well, Peter. You have to keep up your strength even more now that you have your wings. Dark energy takes a massive toll on your body’s mundane energy, that derived from nutrients such as electrolytes and protein. If you don’t, the dark energy will start to . . . consume itself. You.” With that, she placed the bed tray down in front of me as I moved the journals aside.
But she didn’t leave like she had the previous times. Instead, she joined me, her eyes on the floor.
I barely paid a glance to the soup, no part of me craving it. “What’s wrong?”
She moved her lips a moment, hands balling into fists, before she looked at me straight and confessed, “I had a choice back then, Peter. When Jera was pressing me to do what I did, I had a choice to not shock you, to let you fight through it.”
“I don’t understand. Jera wanted you to shock me, otherwise I would have died, right?”
I waited, and then she shook her head. “There was a chance that you could have made it through the spasm without paying the steep price of going through with the transition.”
What? “The price?”
That was when the hesitant tremble in her gaze hardened. “When the Maker first began to grow his wings, it took decades for them to come in. It wasn’t until he craved the power that they came with that he chose to catalyze the process.” A grim shadow passed over her face. “Because you’re human and your lifespan is but a speck compared to his, you could have gone your entire life without having those wings come in. You would have been capable of only a fraction of your abilities, but you would have remained human and not susceptible to the changes you’re now going to inevitably encounter.”
My lips parted. There was a way I could have kept these things from ever sprouting?
“The spasm you experienced before was your body fighting the dark energy, trying to heal itself. Jera didn’t want you to heal. She wanted to tear you apart and force you into this . . . this guardian role. Even at the price of your humanity.”
My mouth remained gaped, my head growing heavier as it tried to digest what she was saying.
Ophelia didn’t seem to notice as she carried on. “In the bathtub, I’d tried to coax you through it. I tried, Peter, but with my gift, I can’t draw it out offensively. Only in defense. I thought that would save you from me as I knew you would never harm me. But Jera . . .”
“Attacked you,” I finished in a whisper, the memory coming back to me. I’d remembered the volt of electricity. I’d forgotten the fury of heat that’d come before it.
Her gaze dropped again. “I tried to stop it. I tried to hold back, but, while Jera may not be as powerful as I am, she’s strong enough. I made the mistake of underestimating her strength once before. This time I did so again.”
I was still shaken to my core, staring at Ophelia but seeing Jera.
I’d allowed that demon into my shop.
And she’d lied to me. A lie that took from me something I could never get back.
The black, veiny nebulous of dark energy inside of me contracted. In turn, my wings shuddered, pulsed, desired.
Desired her neck between my hands. To take from her just as she’d taken from me. She’d used her sister for her own gain. And would have discarded me a month later, leaving me to believe this was all one big inevitable course. When in truth, it could have been prevented.
All of this.
I could have turned every last immortal away and kicked these twins to the side and I’d have returned to normal. There was a chance my body would have gotten over what little energy had been inside of me before meeting them. But now the option was off the table. These growths were a part of me.
They were what attracted these creatures to me.
What attracted the hunters.
She was willing to put anyone in the path of death so long as it paved a nice, fallowed one for her own livelihood.
“I’m not saying this to upset you,” Ophelia said quietly, her head now bowed in a gesture all her own, fingers stuck fiddling with one another in a silent bid of uncertainty. “I just . . . I don’t want you to think ill of me. I want you to know that I would never hurt you—”
“Why is that?” I asked, the venom in my voice misguided. It wasn’t her fault. I knew this. But I couldn’t disassociate the woman with horns from all of the bizarre occurrences I’d been sentenced to as of late.
She swallowed, ink curls slipping into her face, shielding the answer from me. “Because I see you.”
I was ready to snap out a retort at anything she replied, but this one in particular stunted me, made me forget the ire riding my spine if only for a second. “See me?” Even as I asked the question, I remembered these past few days, those frequent silent looks she would cast, disguised by the rush of the day.
“You’re a kind man,” she explained. “The sort of kindness often confused with naivete. Others don’t see the war behind each of your decisions, so they describe them as foolish. But I see the battle, I see the choices you make, the things you do and the things you surround yourself with.” Her eyes flickered—just for a moment—to the sea of journals encompassing me like a ritual ground. There was no way she could know who they belonged to. “Those that are aware of such authenticity, is it not their jobs to preserve it rather than ignore or disarm it?” Her spine straightened, gaze fogging. “You and I, we’re friends and I would hate for a lie to drive a wedge between us or be your downfall.” Before I could ask what she meant, she said, “You may not see it. They may not see it. But there’s a light inside of you, Peter, and I only want to see it shine.”
I glanced away under the weight of those words, struck not by their empowerment, but the barrage of doubt and remembrance of the words dealt by those before her.
Natalie believed there was nothing but a wasteland of darkness inside of me. Even before the accident, she’d always used words like ‘odd’ and ‘depressing’ when speaking with Liz—information courtesy of my sister’s journals.
Mom and Dad, they’d always harbored concern for my state of mind, had alwa
ys pushed me to become something greater than they’d ever been; they’d tried their level best to shove embers inside of me and kindle them to flames.
Even myself, when I looked in the mirror, I saw those dead brown eyes and counted the years beneath them, asking them when the darkness would finally consume me.
It’d never occurred to me that there might be a light inside of me, silently waging battle against the opinion of the many.
Until now.
Ophelia rose to her feet and looked at me straight. A somber storm brewed in the grays. Her lips managed the faintest uplift. “My sister is a survivor. Her actions, inconsiderate as they may have been, is just her nature. We are what we are. What we do with that fact defines what we can potentially become.”
*****
And what I became was enraged. Annoyed with each minute that passed, me caged in my own bedroom, left to marinate in the news of what that audacious female had done.
Ophelia had hurried back to her tasks, telling me how busy it was below. I hadn’t stopped her. If anything, when she’d opened the door and I heard the soft purr of customer conversation drifting up the staircase, the only thing I could focus on was grounding myself.
Not stalking down those stairs, not skulking past the patrons who would for sure gape at the sight of me, and not barging into the kitchen area to demand to know if Jera had lost her mind.
No.
I waited until after closing hours to do just that.
Except, when I barged into the kitchen area, Ophelia wisely remaining in the lounge, I didn’t say a word to the woman standing at the sink.
I lunged at her.
It hadn’t been my intention.
I’d meant to delegate the situation in a calm, mature manner.
But the moment I set eyes on her nonchalant demeanor, the white hot rage that surged through my veins singed every last sensible cell inside of me. Here she was, the woman who’d stolen my life from me without an ounce of mercy. The woman who would have gladly skipped down the path of her lies so long as it benefitted her. Even at the cost of the lives around her.
We crashed to the ground, a heap of bodies and feathers, and I was rewarded with an audible ooff! as her back met the tiles.
I wasn’t sure when I’d wrapped my hands around her throat, but the wet gloves suddenly clenching my wrists began to melt under the heat of her hands.
“What’s your problem, human?!” she choked out around my hands, face turning redder by the second.
“You’re my problem!” I bellowed and another jolt rode down my spine, fueling me, firing up the rage and giving me all kinds of ideas. I squeezed tighter. “You have been since you showed up here!”
She snarled at me and I was surprised to see those perfectly white teeth traded for a deadly set of sharpened canines. “You’ve three seconds to rethink your actions, imbecile.”
I started counting for her.
On one, she jammed her hand into my chest. The force stole the wind from my lungs and the next thing I knew, I was picking myself up from a jumble of cleaning supplies, shattered glass pricking at my fingers. I bristled, dusting it off as I stalked forward.
“I guess that dark energy’s finally eaten the last of your intelligence,” Jera said coolly, popping the dish washing gloves from her hands and flinging them on the floor. “Not that it had much to feed on to begin with.”
I threw myself at her a second time and we both knocked clumsily into the prep counter, denting it. Face inches from hers, I growled, “You did this to me.”
“Did what, human?” she bit out, eyes narrowed up to me. I could tell she was trying to reign in her own anger, her temperature bordering on hot and scolding.
“These!” I was revolted when the wings actually responded to my signal, rustling, snapping open and damning us both to an ungodly shadow.
Jera gave them a stringent glance, her hands lain flat over what I now realized was my bare chest; any second, she could easily flay the beating organ behind it.
My body jerked at that realization, and then I could feel it move. The dark energy at the pit of my stomach began to shift. Their black vines—I could feel them shifting, crawling up from the depths of my stomach, through my arteries, until they reached my heart, where they then coiled around it. Protecting it. The rhythmic beating no longer felt natural—human—but armored and twisted.
I knew then, if Jera dared send her flames into me, something terrible would happen to her. Something entirely out of my control.
I didn’t know why, but I released her. As if I was reluctant to harm her when she deserved it more than anything. When she deserved to have something taken away.
Just . . . not her life.
She eyed me skeptically, cautiously. “I suppose my darling sister went and told you, then.”
I lowered my head and looked at her the way Dad used to do to Liz and I when we’d done something we weren’t supposed to. “You took something from me, Jera. Something you had no right to take.”
“I gave you something. Something your pathetic life needed.”
Now I bared my teeth, but I kept my distance from her. Not trusting the substance inside of me. “I offered you a place to sleep and eat. I helped you when you needed it most. And you took advantage of that.”
Silver ruins flashed in her eyes and it was a wonder which of us was taller. “If ever the choice is my sister or anyone else, I will always choose her. And you, Peter, you knew this. You saw this from the very start. And you let a demon like me in anyway. That you are a glaring fool is no fault of mine.”
I stepped forward—
She closed the distance, smiling up at me with the beauty and peril of a thorned rose. “You were nothing but a wallowing, pathetic excuse of a man before you gained a purpose. Is that what you want to return to? The gray? That hazy place where you ask the void if you really exist at all?”
“It was my choice to make.”
“You’d have died old and undecided. Stagnated. I pushed you over the edge. You fell. These wings saved you.”
“Did you want a thank you?” I sneered.
“I want what you promised me, human. A month in this domain. And you—you to become stronger. To stop complaining and accept who you are.”
“What you made me,” I said in disgust.
“I have no regrets,” she said, and I saw that she meant it. When you speak to others, their response time is everything. From how quickly they answered, to how slow they came around to stapling those words to their tongue. The faster the retort, the more truth and value it held. Jera had always responded without hesitation, her tongue a whip. She’d never pretended to be anything other than something visceral and unapologetic, and here I stood the trusting fool.
I set my mouth, feeling used and idiotic, both of which I was.
“Now, now,” she chided. “Don’t make that face. We have but twenty-three more days.”
“I never drew up an official contract,” I whispered.
She laughed. “You wouldn’t go back on your word. That’s not the imbecilic human I’ve come to know.”
Nausea set in, and I wasn’t sure if it was the spur of dark energy begging me to do something—anything—to the thankless creature in front of me, or a sickness towards the revelation of my own pitiful nature. Because she was right. The same thing that’d sent me out into the night to bring the women in from the cold was the same thing that was setting me back from discarding them into it. Why did having a conscious have to equate to ill turnouts?
“If it makes you feel any better,” Jera continued. “I truly did have your best interest in mind, as well as my own. You’re just too naive and blind to see it yet.”
“Robbing someone of their liberty of choice is a poor way to show it.”
“I suppose that’s a matter of perspective, and as mathematics would have it, there are three hundred and sixty points to every circle—”
“Leave,” I said so softly it echoed as a thought in my mind.
>
“Where?” she asked, brows raised, an amusement dancing in her eyes that threatened my mental well being.
“Anywhere! Just. Leave. Me. Alone.”
“You mean the way I found you?” she purred.
I was on her in a blur, that sizzle of power and strength digging down into my nerves and sparking everything to the highest voltage. I wanted to shred her to pieces. I wanted to dismantle her inherent amusement at my misery. I wanted her to share my misery. Become it, so maybe then I could have my turn of entertainment.
She was right.
I was too kind.
Too naive.
Too stupid.
But one thing I wasn’t was weak. Not anymore.
She took from me; I would take back.
Hand on her throat, tumbling vines of darkness lashing around beneath my skin, cheering, revelling, encouraging—I grabbed hold of her horn.
Rip it.
I remembered how both of the twins had reacted to these things as if they were the source of their immortality. What would happen if she lost one? Would it hurt? Would she scream for me? Would she see me? See what I really was, what all humans were when you provoked them long enough, jabbed them hard enough in their sensitive corners. Would she see me then?
—Because I see you.
I shook my head, Ophelia’s words threatening to drive out my rage.
Why did this world constantly take so much from us? Why was it, when things were going well, you could almost predict a devastation? I’d come to like having these demons in my home. Had naively thought we could all find some peace in the absurd circumstance, but Jera had saw to it that the notion was destroyed. Jera was no better than the way of this world, testing them, provoking their darkest nature at every turn.
There’s a light inside of you, Peter.
Not when it came to Jera. This creature was that light, burning brighter than any star, and I’d gotten so close to it, her sister had mistaken the embers for my own.
I stared down into those gray eyes. Her body had gone rigid beneath mine, her lips parted in silent stun. If she’d been ten feet tall before, she was at risk of disappearing now.