by Aiden Bates
“Rez,” I said quietly, barely a whisper, “now maybe isn’t the time—”
“Maybe not,” he agreed. “Or, maybe, knowing it would keep you from doing something you can’t take back.”
Laleh’s solution to my problem was… unexpected. She had offered to carve off another tiny sliver of my soul and invest it in a kind of amulet. One that I would get to keep, and which would first make it harder for the djinn on my trail to track me, and then, ideally, help me recover the piece that it had if it caught up to me. On the subject of actually stopping it, she didn’t have much advice.
Rez was right. I couldn’t take something like that back. Not on my own, at least. Maybe there was a way to graft those lost pieces back onto me—I didn’t know. But I had already made my decision. I had to at least try. “It won’t,” I said.
His lips hardened, and his jaw clenched. His grip on my hand tightened, but not in anger; it felt more like he was afraid for me. “Okay. If you’re decided. Are you?”
“I am,” I told him. “I don’t know the step after that, but I know this step. It feels right, in my gut.”
He closed his eyes, and brought my hand to his lips. “Then, you may not trust me entirely. But I trust you. I’ll do whatever I need to. How long until—”
“Laleh’s getting the space ready,” I breathed.
And, as if her name had summoned her, she knocked softly on the door to the deck before opening it. “If you are ready?”
I met Rez’s eyes. There was pain there. Maybe because I was doing what I thought needed to be done, instead of following his lead. Maybe because he wasn’t sure that I trusted him. Maybe because there were things he wanted to say that he was holding inside, uncertain he would get the chance.
This wasn’t going to kill me. But it very well could change me. I just didn’t know; there was no way to predict it. Laleh had been clear—she couldn’t predict it any more than I could.
I put a hand to Rez’s cheek and tried to be more reassuring than I really felt, then gave Laleh a nod. “I’m ready.”
And at the moment… I really thought I was.
15
Rez
The room was dark, and smelled like something had recently been burned. “What’s that smell?” I asked Laleh as she led me, Daniel, and Amy into the room that was at the back of her house, around a corner that I wasn’t certain actually fit in the house—it seemed like it was too far away, like from the outside there should have been a long wing that stretched into the neighbor’s yard.
“A variety of herbs and minerals,” Laleh said. “In surgery, the operating theater must first be thoroughly cleaned, so that there is little chance of infection while the patient is on the table. This is not so different. I should know. I am a surgeon.”
“A literal surgeon?” Daniel asked.
“Best in the state,” Amy said, as if she were somehow proud of the accomplishment. “Maybe the country.”
Laleh spread her hands. “It is something that I enjoy.”
Who enjoyed surgery, I couldn’t begin to imagine. Laleh, obviously, but what did it say about her? That she enjoyed the healing arts, or that she liked cutting people open?
She was pleasant enough, but I couldn’t help worrying that it was the latter of the two. “So this is like a clean room,” I muttered. “So he doesn’t get an infection? In his soul?”
Laleh lit a candle in one corner of the room, and then traveled around it lighting others with the first one. “In essence,” she agreed. “When I perform the procedure, the patient will be temporarily vulnerable to… infestations, possession, obsession—all manner of such things. This room is prepared in such a way as to prevent them. As in the operating room, it takes only a single germ to wreak great havoc, if it arrives in an opportune place in the body.”
I looked around the room again, wary, my eyes shifting as if that might let me see these numinous ‘germs’. It didn’t, and that didn’t make me feel better. “You have a room for this? Is this something you do a lot?”
Laleh chuckled lightly. “No, of course not. This is a room I use for many different purposes related to my arts. I have performed this particular task only a few times. But have no fear—I learned from some of the greatest among my people. Harsh masters, who trained me well, and with little mercy.”
Daniel put a hand on my arm. “It’ll be fine, Rez. She knows what she’s doing.”
That was the very least of my concerns. But I locked my jaw, if for no other reason than that I didn’t want Laleh to make a mistake and somehow expose Daniel to even more risk.
When she made the rounds, she put her hand to the door and whispered something that tickled at my ears, but never became actual words. The outside world seemed suddenly distant, as if she’d taken us somewhere just outside of it. Which, for all I knew, she had. She turned, and folded her hands. “Daniel, if you’ll lie on the table.”
I hadn’t even noticed the table, and that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. But it was there, in the center of the room. Four thick wooden legs and a padded top, with a squat wooden post at one end that looked almost like it was meant to be a poor substitution for a pillow.
Daniel swallowed, squeezed my arm, and then went to the table to climb atop and lie down.
Sure enough, Laleh went to the end where Daniel’s head was, and positioned the wooden post behind his neck. Then, alarmingly, she produced a strap and used it to secure his head in place.
“Is that necessary?” I asked, taking a step toward her as my worry became sharper.
She cast me an almost dismissively serene look. “The process will be painful,” she said, as if that were supposed to not only explain it but make everything fine.
“How painful?” I pressed.
She sighed, and looked down at Daniel. “Steadfast and certain. Pain and fear do not kill, yes?”
He gave as much of a nod as he could. I shook my head. “Daniel—are you okay? If not, we can leave—”
“She told me what to expect,” he said softly, his eyes angling toward me as I came closer. “It’s okay. I know it’s going to hurt. A lot. But, it won’t kill me. So… just be here. Okay?”
“It will be helpful,” Laleh said as she fastened other straps onto Daniel’s ankles, “if you will stand fast with him and hold him down. Your strength will be of great value to this process.”
It made me sick to think of it, of just standing by and holding him down while she did whatever was supposed to happen to him. But Daniel looked at me with pleading eyes that seemed to say, Please don’t fuck this up for us.
So I kept my tongue in my head and gave a short, stiff nod as Laleh finished strapping him down. When he was secure, she went to a long, narrow table and collected a small vial, pulled the cork free, and poured some foul-smelling oil into her palm. She coated her hand in it, and then her arm, up to her elbow.
When she returned to the table, she met my eyes finally. “He will doubtless show his pain. Whatever happens, you absolutely must not stop me, do you understand?”
“He does,” Daniel said for me. I looked down, and his eyes were hard. “You understand, Rez. Right?”
“I understand,” I growled. “Just… be as quick as you can.”
“Always,” Laleh said. “Amelia, if you would be mindful of Daniel’s magic? The room will help, but be alert, all the same.”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” Amy confirmed.
“Then all that is left is to go forward,” Laleh said. She stroked Daniel’s forehead with her fingers, her brow pinching slightly. “It will be over. Hold tight to that.”
I don’t know what I expected her to do, exactly, but I certainly did not expect that she would pull Daniel’s shirt up to expose his stomach, then place her fingers around his navel and with seemingly no overt effort, press her fingers, hand, and arm through an opening that wasn’t there.
Daniel screamed.
My dragon roared up as he jerked on the table, pulling against th
e restraints as the veins on his neck and face bulged. It was all I could do to keep from shifting as I took hold of his shoulder with one hand and his chest with another to hold him down—if not to keep him from disturbing Laleh’s work, then at least to keep him from hurting himself. “Daniel,” I shouted over his screaming, “I’m here. Fuck… I’m here, okay? Daniel, you—what the fuck? Is he okay?”
“Patience,” Laleh commanded.
Amy put a hand on my shoulder. “She knows what she’s doing, Rez.”
Daniel’s wailing infected my ears. It bored into my brain. It sent a flood of panic racing through me and seemed to claw at every nerve as all my instincts raged against my rational mind, urging me to shift, to protect him, to burn Laleh on the spot and maybe Amy, too. My vision flashed from the muddy darkness of the candlelit room to everything in sharp detail as my dragon pressed against me from the inside, desperate to get out and do what I was seemingly unwilling to. Scales rippled over my arms and withdrew as the war between us played out in my body.
I ultimately forced myself to move around to Daniel’s head and lean down, so that I could speak in his ear. “I’m here, baby,” I told him. “You’re okay, Daniel. You’re going to be okay. I promise, I’m not going to let anything happen to you, I won’t let you get hurt.”
I looked at Laleh, whose face was a mask of intense concentration. “How much longer?”
“Hush,” Amy snapped. “She’s got to find the right bit to take. Plug it, and get a hold of your dragon.”
A flash of heat washed out from Daniel’s skin.
Amy frowned. “Well. That’s not good.”
She raised her hands, and flexed some muscle that was almost visible in the air around her. There was another wash of heat, followed by a short-lived arc of flame that was swallowed up as freezing air whooshed down and covered Daniel’s body briefly.
“Laleh,” Amy said, calm but with an edge that betrayed her nerves, “I certainly don’t intend to rush a delicate job but… that’s a lot of heat.”
“It will not be long,” Laleh assured us, as if she either trusted the two of us entirely to manage it, or it simply didn’t matter to her.
Amy didn’t seem any more reassured than I was. She twisted her hands, caught another flicker of fire as it left Daniel. Sparks crackled over his fingers. A new smell joined the others—the acrid scent of burned air, just like the night in the parking lot. Not the flowing, liquid explosion like he’d had in the motel with me then, but the crackling, combusting explosion that might have otherwise leveled the store.
I let my dragon partially emerge. Enough that my body swelled, and my scales ran along my skin, glinting in the candlelight. If he went fully nuclear, I had to be ready to cover him. “If he pops,” I warned Laleh and Amy both, “you’ll both regret being here.”
“It will not come to this,” Laleh said patiently.
Daniel’s screams died, but only the part we could hear. His jaw was still open wide, his eyes rolling to the back of his head, his veins bulging. At this rate, he might have an aneurysm, or die of a heart attack. “The hell is taking so long?” I roared.
Daniel began to shake. He was seizing, it seemed, his fingers stretched one moment and then bent into strained claws the next. His head twisted to one side. He wasn’t breathing, couldn’t suck in air after expending it all by screaming, and I cradled his head with my hands and came this close to putting a terminal end to Laleh’s work as the muscles deep in my throat began to quiver with the need to spit fire.
Before it came to that, however, Laleh exhaled a sharp breath, and straightened from the table. Her arm emerged from Daniel’s navel. Something blinding was in her hand. Like a small star, it lit the room, washed it in opalescent white that was painful to look at. Even with my dragon eyes, I winced as I felt the light lance through my slitted pupils and burn the backs of my corneas. How Laleh looked straight into it, I cannot fathom. Perhaps she saw something different, or it was just the domain of djinn to look on the naked soul of another being.
Daniel collapsed, the agony of the extraction finished, but his eyes rolled and closed as he lost consciousness.
Laleh moved quickly to her narrow table, and again I heard sounds that were just on the verge of being words as they slithered against the inside of my ears. Even in my half-form, though, I couldn’t make them out. The light faded. A noise that had come with it that I only recognized now that it was gone shut off as well. It had been a ringing that I thought was in my ears, from enduring Daniel’s shriek of pain.
I knew, as soon as it was gone and a sudden longing opened up in my chest, that it hadn’t been that. It had been, somehow, the sound of his soul. A clear, silvery bell that rang in a tone that never quieted until it was contained.
Laleh turned toward me. Her arm should have been bloody, but it was only slick and shiny with the oil she’d applied to it. She held out a dark locket of sorts, with a quietly pulsing heart in the center. “Perhaps,” she said to me as she came closer, “you are the ideal caretaker of this until he awakes.”
I glance down worriedly at Daniel. He wasn’t waking anytime soon, I thought. I took the locket, and forced my dragon down until I was human again, the knees and ass of my jeans split from my half-transformation.
“It… it’s heavy,” I muttered as I hefted it in my hand.
Laleh spread her hands. “Yes, it is. And yet, still bright.”
It was. As if the little window on the face of the locket only barely contained it. I shook my head in disbelief. Distantly, I was still furious at what she’d done, how she’d hurt him even if he’d agreed to it. But the light of that tiny spark seemed to catch my attention and hold it forcefully. I couldn’t look away until my fingers closed over it, and I forced myself to pocket it. “Will he be… is he different?”
“Undeniably,” Laleh said. “But I cannot predict how. As careful as I am, and as skilled—every soul is unique. Tend that piece of his well, and carefully. For now, remain here. Until he wakes. It is not safe to leave this room until he has recovered.”
I nodded. “All right.”
With that, Laleh and Amy went to the door. Laleh unlocked it, perhaps, because Amy waited for her to open it before she cast us a worried glance and followed Laleh out.
I tried to calm myself with a long breath, and then went to work undoing the straps that held Daniel down. When that was done, I drew him off the table and onto the floor, where I rested his head in my lap, and smoothed his hair.
“I’m here,” I told him quietly, whether he heard me or not. “I’m here, Daniel. And I…”
It seemed wrong to say it when he was asleep. Especially when he didn’t particularly like to hear it when he was awake.
And because part of me, however small, however much I hated it, couldn’t help but wonder—when he woke, would he still be the man I might very well be in love with?
If he wasn’t… what then?
16
Daniel
I knew, when I woke up and saw Rez’s face above me, that I was very lucky. Not so much because I survived—I was sure that the ordeal wouldn’t kill me; whether that was just hubris or not. I was lucky because the memory of it was more or less blank.
The first, blinding moment of pain I remembered. And my hand went to my stomach as I did and gave a small gasp of worry that somehow I was going to… I don’t know, trigger it again or something. But the rest was just… not there.
Still, my hand shook, and when Rez gave a small cry of relief and gathered me to him like the ragdoll that I felt like, I shivered against him uncontrollably even though I wasn’t cold. I’d been given what I could only call a gift of forgetfulness, but my body clearly did remember. My eyes burned for seemingly no reason, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath.
“You’re okay,” Rez kept saying, murmuring it against my hair as he rocked me. “You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay.”
I let him keep it up for a little while. He was warm, and the pressure of his arm
s around me almost made me feel like there was something inside that might have otherwise begun to leak out of me, pressing through my skin. There was an old, vaguely familiar feeling deep down in some place that I couldn’t have defined if I was looking at a map to it—a crawling sort of sensation, as if there were a parade of ants following a path around and around. Not in my belly, exactly, but somewhere far beneath it. Further than there was room to reach.
I knew it, because I’d felt it before, when Ivan demanded a bit of my soul to prove my loyalty to his cause. Back when I was a fucking stupid kid who really believed he would somehow make a world where I belonged.
Rez eventually eased up on the crushing hold he had on me. He searched my eyes and face, then drew my shirt up and searched there as well. “What are you feeling?”
My mouth was dry. I swallowed, tried to work up some spit. “Tired,” I reported. “Kind of… I can’t really describe it. It worked, though. Right? She got what she needed?”
He nodded, and with a hard line to his lips took one arm away from me to reach below, into a pocket. He produced something that put off a steady glow, and held it up.
It was a brass locket, made to look almost like a starburst. But the points of the stars were twisted one way and another as they blended into the edges of the thing. Inside, behind a shallow bubble of glass, or maybe crystal… was a bit of my soul.
I knew it in a way that I knew my hand was my hand, my foot was my foot. Inside, part of me ached, pulling at the fragment, or trying to, as I took the locket in hand and stared at me. My essential self. Whatever was supposed to outlast my flesh. It made me almost unbearably sad to see it there, outside of me, where it didn’t belong, but I pushed that sadness down deep as I slipped the brass chain around my neck and tucked the locket into my shirt.
“It’s… weirdly heavy,” Rez muttered. “Isn’t it?”
If it was, I didn’t notice. But, then again, it was my soul. Maybe I was used to the weight or something. “Not to me,” I said quietly. I looked around. “We’re alone?”